diff --git a/.editorconfig b/.editorconfig new file mode 100644 index 00000000..d4015c6a --- /dev/null +++ b/.editorconfig @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +# EditorConfig helps maintain consistent coding styles across different editors +# https://editorconfig.org + +root = true + +# Universal settings +[*] +charset = utf-8 +end_of_line = lf +insert_final_newline = true +trim_trailing_whitespace = true +indent_style = space +indent_size = 2 + +# Markdown files - preserve trailing spaces (for line breaks) +[*.md] +trim_trailing_whitespace = false + +# YAML files +[*.{yml,yaml}] +indent_size = 2 + +# Ruby files +[*.{rb,rake}] +indent_size = 2 + +# HTML/CSS/JS files +[*.{html,css,js,json}] +indent_size = 2 + +# Makefiles require tabs +[Makefile] +indent_style = tab diff --git a/.github/copilot-instructions.md b/.github/copilot-instructions.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..0d1fd8d2 --- /dev/null +++ b/.github/copilot-instructions.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +# Copilot instructions for SRCCON + +## Big picture architecture + +- This repo is a Jekyll site, not an app server: source content + templates compile into `_site/` (`Rakefile` `build`, `.github/workflows/test.yml`). +- Page content is mostly root-level Markdown (for example `homepage.md`) with frontmatter driving layout/navigation behavior. +- Liquid composition pattern: + - Layouts in `_layouts/` (for example `_layouts/layout_hub.html`) wrap `{{ content }}`. + - Shared fragments live in `_includes/`. + - Structured content lives in `_data/*.yml`. +- Collections are configured in `_config.yml` (`transcripts`, `share`) and output to permalinked paths. +- Legacy material exists in `_archive/`; prefer editing current root pages, `_layouts/`, `_includes/`, `_data/`, and collection content unless asked to update archive files. + +## Workflow commands agents should use + +- Setup/runtime baseline: Ruby `.ruby-version` and Bundler. +- Primary local loop: `bundle exec rake default` (`build` + `check` + `serve`). +- If you need a fresh output directory first: run `bundle exec rake clean` before `build`/`default`. +- Build-only when debugging rendering: `bundle exec rake build`. +- Config/data guardrail before deeper edits: `bundle exec rake check` (depends on `validate_yaml`). +- Full local validation suite: `bundle exec rake test` (aggregate task in `tasks/test.rake`). +- `bundle exec rake test:sessions` exists but is currently a placeholder and is not included in aggregate `rake test`. +- Formatting: + - `bundle exec rake lint` for checks (StandardRB + Prettier). + - `bundle exec rake format` for autofix (StandardRB + Prettier). + +## Project-specific conventions (enforced by tasks) + +- Root markdown pages should include frontmatter `section` and `permalink` (`test:page_config`). +- In Liquid templates, prefer `page.root_url`; `site.root_url` is treated as an error except legacy `_includes/prior_events.html` (`test:templates`). +- Liquid href style matters: `href="{{variable}}"` is warned on; `{{ page.url }}`-style spacing/object references are expected (`test:templates`). +- (Template checks intentionally skip some file paths) + +## Validation nuances and CI differences + +- `test:html_proofer` checks built output in `_site/` and aborts if `_site/` does not exist. +- Local `test:html_proofer` enforces HTTPS links (`enforce_https: true` in `tasks/test.rake`). +- CI `test.yml` intentionally runs htmlproofer with `--no-enforce-https`; do not assume parity with local failures. +- YAML validation is stricter than syntax-only: `validate_yaml` also detects duplicate keys using Psych AST traversal in `Rakefile`. +- `rake check` reports configuration errors (template bucket/distribution defaults) but currently does not `abort`; use it as a guardrail signal, not a hard gate. + +## Deployment boundaries and integrations + +- Deployment settings come from `_config.yml` → `deployment.bucket`, `deployment.staging_bucket`, `deployment.cloudfront_distribution_id`. +- Branch-driven behavior in `.github/workflows/deploy.yml`: + - `staging` push syncs `_site/` to staging S3. + - `main` push syncs production S3 and invalidates CloudFront. +- Local deploy tasks in `Rakefile` default to dry runs (`deploy:staging`, `deploy:production`) and require explicit confirmation for real deploys. +- AWS auth uses GitHub OIDC with `AWS_ROLE_ARN`; avoid adding static credentials. + +## Editing guidance for agents + +- Keep edits minimal and aligned with existing Liquid/Jekyll patterns; do not introduce new frameworks/toolchains. +- For template/frontmatter/data changes, run targeted checks first (`check`, `test:templates`, `test:page_config`) before `rake test`. +- If modifying deploy logic, update both Rake deploy tasks and matching GitHub workflow behavior to keep local/CI intent consistent. diff --git a/.github/dependabot.yml b/.github/dependabot.yml new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e3564fa6 --- /dev/null +++ b/.github/dependabot.yml @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +version: 2 + +updates: + # GitHub Actions + - package-ecosystem: "github-actions" + directory: "/" + schedule: + interval: "weekly" + day: "monday" + labels: + - "dependencies" + - "github-actions" + open-pull-requests-limit: 5 + + # Ruby gems (Bundler) + - package-ecosystem: "bundler" + directory: "/" + schedule: + interval: "weekly" + day: "monday" + labels: + - "dependencies" + - "ruby" + open-pull-requests-limit: 5 + versioning-strategy: increase diff --git a/.github/workflows/deploy.yml b/.github/workflows/deploy.yml new file mode 100644 index 00000000..31d47544 --- /dev/null +++ b/.github/workflows/deploy.yml @@ -0,0 +1,78 @@ +name: Deploy to S3 + +on: + push: + branches: + - main + - staging + +permissions: + contents: read + id-token: write # Required for OIDC authentication + +jobs: + deploy: + runs-on: ubuntu-latest + + steps: + - name: Checkout repository + uses: actions/checkout@v6 + + - name: Setup Ruby + uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1 + with: + ruby-version: ".ruby-version" + bundler-cache: true + + - name: Validate YAML files + run: bundle exec rake validate_yaml + + - name: Build Jekyll site + run: bundle exec jekyll build + + - name: Extract deployment config from _config.yml + id: config + run: | + mapfile -t DEPLOYMENT_VALUES < <(ruby -ryaml -e "config = YAML.safe_load_file('_config.yml', permitted_classes: [], aliases: true); deployment = config['deployment'] || {}; puts deployment['bucket'].to_s; puts deployment['staging_bucket'].to_s; puts deployment['cloudfront_distribution_id'].to_s") + BUCKET="${DEPLOYMENT_VALUES[0]}" + if [ -z "$BUCKET" ]; then + echo "Error: S3 bucket name not configured. Please set deployment.bucket in _config.yml." >&2 + exit 1 + fi + STAGING_BUCKET="${DEPLOYMENT_VALUES[1]}" + if [ -z "$STAGING_BUCKET" ]; then + echo "Error: Staging bucket name not configured. Please set deployment.staging_bucket in _config.yml." >&2 + exit 1 + fi + CLOUDFRONT="${DEPLOYMENT_VALUES[2]}" + echo "bucket=$BUCKET" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT + echo "staging_bucket=$STAGING_BUCKET" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT + echo "cloudfront=$CLOUDFRONT" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT + + - name: Configure AWS credentials + uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v6 + with: + role-to-assume: ${{ secrets.AWS_ROLE_ARN }} + aws-region: us-east-1 + role-session-name: Deploy-${{ github.event.repository.name }}-${{ github.run_id }} + + - name: Deploy to S3 (Staging) + if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/staging' + run: | + aws s3 sync _site/ s3://${{ steps.config.outputs.staging_bucket }} \ + --delete \ + --cache-control "public, max-age=3600" + + - name: Deploy to S3 (Production) + if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main' + run: | + aws s3 sync _site/ s3://${{ steps.config.outputs.bucket }} \ + --delete \ + --cache-control "public, max-age=3600" + + - name: Invalidate CloudFront (Production) + if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main' && steps.config.outputs.cloudfront != '' + run: | + aws cloudfront create-invalidation \ + --distribution-id ${{ steps.config.outputs.cloudfront }} \ + --paths "/*" diff --git a/.github/workflows/health-check.yml b/.github/workflows/health-check.yml new file mode 100644 index 00000000..4ee1e9bc --- /dev/null +++ b/.github/workflows/health-check.yml @@ -0,0 +1,79 @@ +name: Weekly Health Check + +on: + schedule: + - cron: "0 12 * * 1" # Every Monday at noon UTC + workflow_dispatch: # Allow manual trigger + +permissions: + contents: read + issues: write + +jobs: + health-check: + runs-on: ubuntu-latest + + steps: + - name: Checkout repository + uses: actions/checkout@v6 + + - name: Setup Ruby + uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1 + with: + ruby-version: ".ruby-version" + bundler-cache: true + + - name: Check for outdated dependencies + run: | + echo "=== Checking for outdated gems ===" + bundle outdated || true + + - name: Validate YAML files + run: bundle exec rake validate_yaml + + - name: Build Jekyll site + run: bundle exec jekyll build --verbose + + - name: Validate build output + run: | + if [ ! -d "_site" ]; then + echo "ERROR: _site directory not created" + exit 1 + fi + + if [ ! -f "_site/index.html" ]; then + echo "ERROR: index.html not found in _site" + exit 1 + fi + + echo "✅ Build validation passed" + + - name: Create issue on failure + if: failure() + uses: actions/github-script@v8 + with: + script: | + const title = '🚨 Weekly health check failed'; + const body = `The scheduled template validation failed on ${new Date().toISOString()}. + + **Workflow Run:** ${context.payload.repository.html_url}/actions/runs/${context.runId} + + Please investigate the failure and update dependencies as needed.`; + + // Check if issue already exists + const issues = await github.rest.issues.listForRepo({ + owner: context.repo.owner, + repo: context.repo.repo, + state: 'open', + labels: 'automated,health-check' + }); + + if (issues.data.length === 0) { + await github.rest.issues.create({ + owner: context.repo.owner, + repo: context.repo.repo, + title: title, + body: body, + labels: ['automated', 'health-check', 'bug'] + }); + } diff --git a/.github/workflows/test.yml b/.github/workflows/test.yml new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e33c32ae --- /dev/null +++ b/.github/workflows/test.yml @@ -0,0 +1,81 @@ +name: Test Build + +on: + push: + branches-ignore: + - main + - staging + pull_request: + branches: + - main + - staging + +permissions: + contents: read + id-token: write # Required for OIDC authentication + +jobs: + test: + runs-on: ubuntu-latest + + steps: + - name: Checkout repository + uses: actions/checkout@v6 + + - name: Setup Ruby + uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1 + with: + ruby-version: ".ruby-version" + bundler-cache: true + + - name: Validate YAML files + run: bundle exec rake validate_yaml + + - name: Build Jekyll site + run: bundle exec jekyll build --verbose + + - name: Validate HTML and check links + run: | + bundle exec htmlproofer ./_site \ + --disable-external \ + --no-enforce-https \ + --ignore-urls "/^http:\/\/(127\.0\.0\.1|0\.0\.0\.0|localhost)/" \ + --allow-hash-href + + - name: Extract deployment config from _config.yml + if: github.event_name == 'pull_request' && env.AWS_ROLE_ARN != '' && github.repository != 'OpenNews/srccon-site-starterkit' + id: config + env: + AWS_ROLE_ARN: ${{ secrets.AWS_ROLE_ARN }} + run: | + STAGING_BUCKET=$(ruby -ryaml -e "config = YAML.safe_load_file('_config.yml', permitted_classes: [], aliases: true); puts config['deployment']['staging_bucket']") + echo "staging_bucket=$STAGING_BUCKET" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT + + - name: Configure AWS credentials + if: github.event_name == 'pull_request' && env.AWS_ROLE_ARN != '' && github.repository != 'OpenNews/srccon-site-starterkit' + uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v6 + env: + AWS_ROLE_ARN: ${{ secrets.AWS_ROLE_ARN }} + with: + role-to-assume: ${{ secrets.AWS_ROLE_ARN }} + aws-region: us-east-1 + role-session-name: Test-${{ github.event.repository.name }}-${{ github.run_id }} + + - name: Test deployment (dry-run) + if: github.event_name == 'pull_request' && env.AWS_ROLE_ARN != '' && github.repository != 'OpenNews/srccon-site-starterkit' + env: + AWS_ROLE_ARN: ${{ secrets.AWS_ROLE_ARN }} + run: | + echo "Testing S3 sync command (dry-run)..." + aws s3 sync _site/ s3://${{ steps.config.outputs.staging_bucket }} \ + --dryrun \ + --delete \ + --cache-control "public, max-age=3600" + + - name: Skip deployment test (no credentials or GitHub Pages repo) + if: github.event_name == 'pull_request' && (env.AWS_ROLE_ARN == '' || github.repository == 'OpenNews/srccon-site-starterkit') + env: + AWS_ROLE_ARN: ${{ secrets.AWS_ROLE_ARN }} + run: | + echo "⏭️ Skipping S3 deployment test in this build context" + echo "This is normal for Dependabot PRs and external contributions." diff --git a/.gitignore b/.gitignore index 19f98512..3a1c88c2 100644 --- a/.gitignore +++ b/.gitignore @@ -1,3 +1,26 @@ +# Jekyll build outputs +_site/ +.jekyll-cache/ +.sass-cache/ +tmp/ + +# Ruby/Bundler +.bundle/ +vendor/ + +# Node.js +node_modules/ + +# OS files .DS_Store -_site -.jekyll-cache \ No newline at end of file +Thumbs.db + +# Editor files (but allow .vscode/ and .editorconfig for team shared settings) +.idea/ +*.swp +*.swo +*~ + +# Local environment +.env +.env.local diff --git a/.prettierignore b/.prettierignore new file mode 100644 index 00000000..1d556966 --- /dev/null +++ b/.prettierignore @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +# Build outputs +_site/ +.jekyll-cache/ + +# Dependencies +vendor/ +node_modules/ +.bundle/ + +# Compiled/minified files (don't format) +*.min.js +*.min.css + +# Git metadata +.git/ + +# Generated caches +.sass-cache/ diff --git a/.prettierrc b/.prettierrc new file mode 100644 index 00000000..4a1a0c05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.prettierrc @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +{ + "printWidth": 100, + "tabWidth": 2, + "useTabs": false, + "semi": true, + "singleQuote": false, + "trailingComma": "es5", + "bracketSpacing": true, + "arrowParens": "avoid", + "proseWrap": "preserve", + "htmlWhitespaceSensitivity": "css", + "endOfLine": "lf", + "embeddedLanguageFormatting": "auto", + "plugins": ["@prettier/plugin-ruby"], + "overrides": [ + { + "files": ["*.html"], + "options": { + "parser": "html" + } + }, + { + "files": ["*.md"], + "options": { + "parser": "markdown", + "proseWrap": "preserve" + } + }, + { + "files": ["*.yml", "*.yaml"], + "options": { + "parser": "yaml", + "tabWidth": 2 + } + }, + { + "files": ["*.rb", "*.rake", "Rakefile", "Gemfile"], + "options": { + "parser": "ruby", + "tabWidth": 2 + } + } + ] +} diff --git a/.ruby-version b/.ruby-version new file mode 100644 index 00000000..34cde569 --- /dev/null +++ b/.ruby-version @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +3.2.6 diff --git a/.standard.yml b/.standard.yml new file mode 100644 index 00000000..a47ca924 --- /dev/null +++ b/.standard.yml @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +# StandardRB configuration for SRCCON site +# https://github.com/standardrb/standard + +# Ruby version +ruby_version: 3.2.6 + +# Files and directories to ignore +ignore: + - "_site/**/*" + - "vendor/**/*" + - "node_modules/**/*" + - ".bundle/**/*" + - ".jekyll-cache/**/*" + - "_data/**/*" + - ".github/**/*" # GitHub Actions workflows are not Ruby code + - "tasks/**/*" # Prettier handles formatting for these files + - "Rakefile" # Prettier handles formatting for this file + + +# Note: Rake files are formatted by Prettier with trailing commas (ES5 style) +# StandardRB is excluded from these files to avoid conflicts diff --git a/.travis.yml b/.travis.yml deleted file mode 100644 index 3023a293..00000000 --- a/.travis.yml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,19 +0,0 @@ -language: ruby -os: linux -dist: xenial -jdk: openjdk8 -rvm: -- 3.1.2 -install: gem install jekyll -v 4.1.0 && gem install jekyll-redirect-from && gem install - s3_website_revived -script: jekyll build -after_success: -- test $TRAVIS_BRANCH = "main" && s3_website push --config-dir=_config/production/ -- test $TRAVIS_BRANCH = "staging" && s3_website push --config-dir=_config/staging/ -branches: - only: - - main - - staging -notifications: - slack: - secure: 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 diff --git a/.vscode/settings.json b/.vscode/settings.json new file mode 100644 index 00000000..7a556cf2 --- /dev/null +++ b/.vscode/settings.json @@ -0,0 +1,64 @@ +{ + // Default formatter + "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode", + + // Format on save to surface issues + "editor.formatOnSave": true, + + // Enable format on paste + "editor.formatOnPaste": true, + + // Prettier configuration + "prettier.requireConfig": false, + "prettier.useEditorConfig": true, + + // Language-specific formatters + "[ruby]": { + "editor.defaultFormatter": "testdouble.vscode-standard-ruby", + "editor.formatOnSave": true + }, + "[html]": { + "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode" + }, + "[css]": { + "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode" + }, + "[javascript]": { + "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode" + }, + "[json]": { + "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode" + }, + "[markdown]": { + "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode" + }, + "[yaml]": { + "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode" + }, + + // YAML validation: flags syntax errors and duplicate keys inline as you edit + // Requires the Red Hat YAML extension (redhat.vscode-yaml) + "yaml.validate": true, + + // StandardRB configuration + "rubyLsp.formatter": "standard", + "rubyLsp.linters": ["standard"], + "standard.useWorkspaceRubyInterpreter": true, + + // File associations for Jekyll + "files.associations": { + "*.html": "html", + "*.md": "markdown" + }, + + // Files to exclude from watcher + "files.watcherExclude": { + "**/.git/objects/**": true, + "**/.git/subtree-cache/**": true, + "**/node_modules/**": true, + "**/.bundle/**": true, + "**/_site/**": true, + "**/.jekyll-cache/**": true, + "**/vendor/**": true + } +} diff --git a/Gemfile b/Gemfile new file mode 100644 index 00000000..15c18a3b --- /dev/null +++ b/Gemfile @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +source "https://rubygems.org" + +# Jekyll static site generator +gem "jekyll", "~> 4.3" + +# Jekyll plugins +gem "jekyll-redirect-from" + +# Build automation +gem "rake" + +# Code formatting and linting +group :development do + gem "standard", require: false +end + +# Testing and validation +group :test do + gem "html-proofer" +end + +gem "syntax_tree", "~> 6.3" diff --git a/Gemfile.lock b/Gemfile.lock new file mode 100644 index 00000000..fb1ad3e7 --- /dev/null +++ b/Gemfile.lock @@ -0,0 +1,259 @@ +GEM + remote: https://rubygems.org/ + specs: + Ascii85 (2.0.1) + addressable (2.8.8) + public_suffix (>= 2.0.2, < 8.0) + afm (1.0.0) + ast (2.4.3) + async (2.36.0) + console (~> 1.29) + fiber-annotation + io-event (~> 1.11) + metrics (~> 0.12) + traces (~> 0.18) + base64 (0.3.0) + benchmark (0.5.0) + bigdecimal (3.3.1) + colorator (1.1.0) + concurrent-ruby (1.3.6) + console (1.34.2) + fiber-annotation + fiber-local (~> 1.1) + json + csv (3.3.5) + em-websocket (0.5.3) + eventmachine (>= 0.12.9) + http_parser.rb (~> 0) + ethon (0.15.0) + ffi (>= 1.15.0) + eventmachine (1.2.7) + ffi (1.17.3-x86_64-linux-gnu) + fiber-annotation (0.2.0) + fiber-local (1.1.0) + fiber-storage + fiber-storage (1.0.1) + forwardable-extended (2.6.0) + google-protobuf (4.33.4) + bigdecimal + rake (>= 13) 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the website for [SRCCON](https://www.srccon.org), the yearly conference for newsroom developers, designers, data reporters, and others who work with code in and around newsrooms. ## How to update the SRCCON site + +### Local Development + +Prerequisites: + +- Ruby 3.2 or higher (see `.ruby-version`) +- Bundler 2.0 or higher + +If you need to install Ruby: + +- macOS/Linux: Use [rbenv](https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv) or [rvm](https://rvm.io/) +- macOS with Homebrew: `brew install ruby` +- Windows: Use [RubyInstaller](https://rubyinstaller.org/) + +If you need to install Bundler: `gem install bundler` + +### Working locally with live reload + +```bash +bundle exec rake default # Runs :build, :check and :serve commands with file watching +``` + +View at [https://localhost:4000](https://localhost:4000/) + +Alternatively: + +```bash +bundle exec rake serve # Simple local server with live reload +``` + +### Core Commands + +```bash +bundle exec rake clean # Clean the build directory +bundle exec rake build # 'Bake' the site to `_site/` +bundle exec rake serve # Render locally with live reload +bundle exec rake default # runs :clean, :build, :serve in a loop +``` + ### Testing changes locally -* Clone this repository to your local machine. -* For minor updates, work directly in the `staging` branch. For major updates, or if you're working on long-term changes to the site, create a new feature branch. -* To test your work locally, run `jekyll serve` or `jekyll build`, and view the site in a browser. + +- Clone this repository to your local machine. +- For minor updates, work directly in the `staging` branch. For major updates, or if you're working on long-term changes to the site, create a new feature branch. +- NOTE: You do _not_ need to commit updates to your local `_site` directory -- it is `.gitignored`. But it is what copies over to S3 when you run your selection within the `bundle exec rake deploy:*` commands. after you run `bundle exec rake build` or `bundle exec rake serve`. + +You only need to commit new or updated markdown documents and templates, and new or updated static media files. + +### Pre-Launch Validation + +```bash +bundle exec rake check # Validate _config.yml configuration +``` + +#### Available tests + +```bash +# Quick HTML validation +bundle exec rake test:html_proofer # Validate built HTML and internal links +bundle exec rake test:templates # Check template syntax + +# Content quality +bundle exec rake test:placeholders # Find unconfigured or TODO content patterns +bundle exec rake test:page_config # Validate args at top of Markdown files + +# Best practices +bundle exec rake test:a11y # Accessibility checks +bundle exec rake test:performance # File-size and performance warnings + +# Optional: External/public link review (separate namespace; slower, requires network) +bundle exec rake review:external_links # Check public/external URLs + +# Optional: Deployment audit (compare staging vs production) +bundle exec rake review:compare_deployed_sites # Compare staging and production content for differences + +# Run 'em all +bundle exec rake test # Comprehensive validation suite (excludes review:* tasks) +``` + +### Post-Deployment Review & Audit + +Use these tasks after deploys (or as part of scheduled maintenance) to audit site health and release quality: + +```bash +# External/public link audit (network-dependent, slower) +bundle exec rake review:external_links + +# Release audit: staging vs production content drift +bundle exec rake review:compare_deployed_sites + +# Include archive/legacy URLs not present in local _site +bundle exec rake review:compare_deployed_sites EXTRA_PATHS="/2014/,/2014/program/" + +# Or load extra paths from a file (one path per line) +bundle exec rake review:compare_deployed_sites EXTRA_PATHS_FILE=temp/archive_paths.txt +``` + +- `review:external_links` helps detect outbound link rot, redirects, or policy changes on third-party sites. +- `review:compare_deployed_sites` helps confirm that production reflects the intended staging state and flags unexpected content deltas. + +### Branch Strategy & Deployment + +This project uses GitHub Actions for automated deployment to AWS S3 and CloudFront: + +- `main` → Production deployment (S3 + CloudFront invalidation) +- `staging` → Staging deployment (S3 only) +- Other branches → Test builds only (no deployment) ### Pushing to staging -* When you're ready to have someone review a site update, update the `staging` branch in GitHub. If you're working in `staging` locally, you just need to push your code changes. If you're working in a separate feature branch, push that branch to GitHub and then open a pull request into `staging` and merge it. -* NOTE: You do _not_ need to commit updates to your local `_site` directory after you run `jekyll build` or `jekyll serve`. You only need to commit new or updated markdown documents and templates, and new or updated static media files. -* A commit to the `staging` branch on GitHub will trigger an automatic build of the SRCCON staging site. This runs its own `jekyll build` process before copying everything to S3. (So any changes to the repo's `_site` directory will be ignored.) -* The Travis CI process that handles this can take a minute or two to complete. Your changes will not be visible on the staging site immediately, but they'll be there quickly. + +- When you're ready to have someone review a site update, update the `staging` branch in GitHub. If you're working in `staging` locally, you just need to push your code changes. If you're working in a separate feature branch, push that branch to GitHub and then open a pull request into `staging` and merge it. +- A commit to the `staging` branch on GitHub will trigger an automatic build of the SRCCON staging site via GitHub Actions. +- The GitHub Actions workflow can take a minute or two to complete. Your changes will not be visible on the staging site immediately, but they'll be there quickly. ### Pushing to production -* Review your changes on the staging site, and if everything looks OK, come back to this repo and open a pull request from `staging` into `master`. -* Merging a pull request into `master`, or pushing any commit to the `master` branch, will trigger an automatic build of the production site at [srccon.org](https://srccon.org). Again, this runs its own `jekyll build` process before copying to S3, ignoring any changes to the repo's `_site` directory. -* The production site is delivered through Amazon CloudFront so that we can serve a secure, https-enabled [srccon.org](https://srccon.org). CloudFront also caches everything for performance. The rebuild process triggers an invalidation of the entire cache, but it still may take up to 10 minutes for site changes to be reflected on production. + +- Review your changes on the staging site, and if everything looks OK, come back to this repo and open a pull request from `staging` into `main`. +- **Optional QA step:** Run `bundle exec rake review:compare_deployed_sites` to see a detailed comparison of staging vs production content before merging. +- Merging a pull request into `main`, or pushing any commit to the `main` branch, will trigger an automatic build of the production site at [srccon.org](https://srccon.org) via GitHub Actions. +- The production site is delivered through Amazon CloudFront so that we can serve a secure, https-enabled [srccon.org](https://srccon.org). CloudFront also caches everything for performance. The rebuild process triggers an invalidation of the entire cache, but it still may take up to 10 minutes for site changes to be reflected on production. + +### GitHub Actions Workflows + +The repository includes GitHub Actions workflows in `.github/workflows/`: + +1. **Deploy Workflow** (`deploy.yml`) + - Triggers on push to `main` or `staging` branches + - Builds Jekyll site with Ruby 3.2 + - Deploys to S3 using AWS CLI with OIDC authentication + - Invalidates CloudFront cache (production only) + - Sends Slack notifications on completion + +2. **Test Workflow** (`test.yml`) + - Runs on all PRs and non-deployment branches + - Validates Jekyll build succeeds + - Checks internal links with html-proofer + - Tests deployment commands with `--dryrun` flag + +3. **Health Check Workflow** (`health-check.yml`) + - Runs weekly to validate template still builds successfully + - Reports outdated dependencies + - Creates GitHub Issue(s?) on failure + +### Deployment Configuration + +Deployment settings are configured in `_config.yml`. + +Authentication uses AWS OIDC with the github.com/OpenNews Organization-level secret `AWS_ROLE_ARN`. No repository-level AWS secrets are required. + +### Dependency Management + +```bash +bundle exec rake outdated # Check for outdated dependencies +bundle exec rake outdated:all # Chained outdated dependencies +``` + +- `bundler` manages Ruby gems (Jekyll and plugins) +- `dependabot` automatically creates PRs for dependency updates +- Weekly automated health checks catch breaking changes diff --git a/Rakefile b/Rakefile new file mode 100644 index 00000000..93b31382 --- /dev/null +++ b/Rakefile @@ -0,0 +1,254 @@ +require "jekyll" +require "yaml" +require "psych" +require "fileutils" + +# Load test:* tasks from separate file +Dir.glob("tasks/*.rake").each { |r| load r } + +# Recursively walk a Psych AST node and collect duplicate mapping keys +def collect_yaml_duplicate_keys(node, file, errors = []) + return errors unless node.respond_to?(:children) && node.children + + if node.is_a?(Psych::Nodes::Mapping) + keys = node.children.each_slice(2).map { |k, _| k.value if k.respond_to?(:value) }.compact + keys.group_by(&:itself).each do |key, hits| + errors << "#{file}: duplicate key '#{key}'" if hits.size > 1 + end + end + + node.children.each { |child| collect_yaml_duplicate_keys(child, file, errors) } + errors +end + +desc "Validate YAML files for syntax errors and duplicate keys" +task :validate_yaml do + errors = [] + + Dir.glob("{_config.yml,_data/**/*.{yml,yaml}}").sort.each do |file| + begin + node = Psych.parse_file(file) + collect_yaml_duplicate_keys(node, file, errors) + YAML.safe_load_file(file) + rescue Psych::SyntaxError => e + errors << "#{file}: syntax error — #{e.message}" + rescue Psych::DisallowedClass => e + errors << "#{file}: unsafe YAML — #{e.message}" + rescue => e + errors << "#{file}: #{e.message}" + end + end + + if errors.any? + puts "❌ YAML validation errors:" + errors.each { |e| puts " - #{e}" } + abort + else + puts "✅ YAML files are valid" + end +end + +# Load deployment vars from _config.yml +def deployment_config + return @deployment_config if @deployment_config + + unless File.exist?("_config.yml") + abort "❌ _config.yml not found. Are you in the project root directory?" + end + + begin + config = YAML.safe_load_file("_config.yml") + @deployment_config = config["deployment"] || {} + rescue => e + abort "❌ Error loading _config.yml: #{e.message}" + end +end + +# Default task +task default: [:build, :check, :serve] + +desc "Validate configuration has been updated from template defaults" +task check: :validate_yaml do + + unless File.exist?("_config.yml") + abort "\n❌ _config.yml not found. Are you in the project root directory?" + end + + begin + config = YAML.safe_load_file("_config.yml") + rescue => e + abort "\n❌ Error parsing _config.yml: #{e.message}" + end + + unless config["defaults"].is_a?(Array) + abort "\n❌ _config.yml is missing 'defaults' array" + end + + default_scope = config["defaults"].find { |d| d["scope"] && d["scope"]["path"] == "" } + unless default_scope && default_scope["values"] + abort "\n❌ _config.yml is missing default scope with empty path" + end + + # defaults = default_scope["values"] + deployments = config["deployment"] + + errors = [] + warnings = [] + + # Check for required deployment configuration + errors << "AWS buckets are still set to demo site in deployment config" if deployments["bucket"].to_s.include?("site-starterkit") || deployments["staging_bucket"].to_s.include?("site-starterkit") + if deployments["cloudfront_distribution_id"].to_s.include?("E1234ABCD5678") + errors << "AWS cloudfront_distribution_id is still set to demo site in deployment config, set to site's prd distribution ID (see README)" + end + + if errors.any? + puts "\n❌ Configuration Errors (MUST FIX):" + errors.each { |e| puts " - #{e}" } + end + + if warnings.any? + puts "\n⚠️ Configuration Warnings:" + warnings.each { |w| puts " - #{w}" } + end + + if errors.empty? + puts "✅ Configuration looks good!" + end +end + +desc "Build the Jekyll site" +task build: :validate_yaml do + options = { + "source" => ".", + "destination" => "./_site", + "config" => "_config.yml", + "quiet" => true, + } + begin + Jekyll::Site.new(Jekyll.configuration(options)).process + rescue => e + abort "\n❌ Jekyll build failed: #{e.message}" + end + + puts "✅ Built successfully!" +end + +desc "Clean the build directory" +task :clean do + begin + FileUtils.rm_rf(["_site", ".jekyll-cache", ".jekyll-metadata"]) + rescue => e + abort "\n❌ Failed to clean build directory: #{e.message}" + end + + puts "✅ Cleanup complete" +end + +desc "Build and serve the site locally" +task :serve do + puts "Starting Jekyll server..." + begin + sh "bundle exec jekyll serve" + rescue => e + abort "\n❌ Failed to start Jekyll server: #{e.message}" + end +end + +# Common S3 sync arguments in :deploy steps +S3_ARGS = "--delete --cache-control 'public, max-age=3600'" + +desc "MOSTLY used by GitHub Actions on push/merges to `main` and `staging` branches" +namespace :deploy do + desc "Run all pre-deployment checks" + task precheck: [:check, :build, :test] do + puts "\n✅ All pre-deployment checks passed!" + puts "\nDeploy with:" + puts " rake deploy:staging # Dry-run to staging" + puts " rake deploy:staging:real # Actually deploy to staging" + puts " rake deploy:production # Dry-run to production" + puts " rake deploy:production:real # Actually deploy to production" + end + + desc "Deploy to staging (dry-run by default)" + namespace :staging do + task default: :dryrun + + desc "Dry-run staging deploy" + task dryrun: :build do + config = deployment_config + staging_bucket = config["staging_bucket"] || "staging.#{config["bucket"]}" + abort "❌ Staging bucket not configured in _config.yml deployment section" unless staging_bucket + + puts "[DRY RUN] Deploying to staging bucket: #{staging_bucket}..." + sh "aws s3 sync _site/ s3://#{staging_bucket} --dryrun #{S3_ARGS}" + puts "\n✅ Dry-run complete. To deploy for real, run: rake deploy:staging:real" + end + + desc "Real staging deploy (with confirmation)" + task real: :precheck do + config = deployment_config + staging_bucket = config["staging_bucket"] || "staging.#{config["bucket"]}" + abort "❌ Staging bucket not configured in _config.yml deployment section" unless staging_bucket + + puts "⚠️ Deploying to STAGING: #{staging_bucket}" + print "Continue? (y/N) " + + response = $stdin.gets.chomp + abort "Deployment cancelled" unless response.downcase == "y" + + puts "Deploying to staging bucket: #{staging_bucket}..." + sh "aws s3 sync _site/ s3://#{staging_bucket} #{S3_ARGS}" + puts "\n✅ Successfully deployed to staging!" + end + end + + desc "Deploy to production (dry-run by default)" + namespace :production do + task default: :dryrun + + desc "Dry-run production deploy" + task dryrun: :build do + config = deployment_config + prod_bucket = config["bucket"] + cloudfront_dist = config["cloudfront_distribution_id"] + abort "❌ Production bucket not configured in _config.yml deployment section" unless prod_bucket + + puts "[DRY RUN] Deploying to production bucket: #{prod_bucket}..." + sh "aws s3 sync _site/ s3://#{prod_bucket} --dryrun #{S3_ARGS}" + + if cloudfront_dist && !cloudfront_dist.empty? + puts "\n[DRY RUN] Would invalidate CloudFront: #{cloudfront_dist}" + else + puts "\n⚠️ No CloudFront distribution configured (cache won't be invalidated)" + end + + puts "\n✅ Dry-run complete. To deploy for real, run: rake deploy:production:real" + end + + desc "Real production deploy (with confirmation)" + task real: :precheck do + config = deployment_config + prod_bucket = config["bucket"] + cloudfront_dist = config["cloudfront_distribution_id"] + abort "❌ Production bucket not configured in _config.yml deployment section" unless prod_bucket + + puts "🚨 DEPLOYING TO PRODUCTION: #{prod_bucket}" + print "Are you absolutely sure? (yes/N) " + response = $stdin.gets.chomp + abort "Deployment cancelled" unless response == "yes" + + puts "\nDeploying to production bucket: #{prod_bucket}..." + sh "aws s3 sync _site/ s3://#{prod_bucket} #{S3_ARGS}" + + if cloudfront_dist && !cloudfront_dist.empty? + puts "\nInvalidating CloudFront distribution: #{cloudfront_dist}..." + sh "aws cloudfront create-invalidation --distribution-id #{cloudfront_dist} --paths '/*'" + puts "\n✅ CloudFront cache invalidated" + else + puts "\n⚠️ Skipping CloudFront invalidation (not configured)" + end + + puts "\n🎉 Successfully deployed to production!" + end + end +end diff --git a/TROUBLESHOOTING.md b/TROUBLESHOOTING.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..27bee225 --- /dev/null +++ b/TROUBLESHOOTING.md @@ -0,0 +1,285 @@ +# Troubleshooting + +Common issues and solutions for SRCCON site development and deployment. + +> **Note:** This guide is for event organizers building their SRCCON sites. Template maintainers should see the [README.md - Troubleshooting](README.md#troubleshooting) section for template-specific issues. + +## Start Here: Quick Triage + +**Site won't build?** + +1. Read the error message carefully - it usually tells you the filename and line number +2. Check YAML syntax in the mentioned file +3. Look for unclosed Liquid tags in templates +4. Run `bundle exec rake clean && bundle exec rake build` for a fresh build + +**Site builds but looks wrong?** + +1. Hard refresh your browser (Ctrl+Shift+R or Cmd+Shift+R) +2. Check browser console (F12) for 404 errors +3. Verify file paths and case sensitivity +4. Check `_config.yml` baseurl and url settings + +**Made changes but not seeing them?** + +1. Some changes need server restart: `_config.yml`, `_data/*.yml`, new files +2. Check that Jekyll is done building (watch terminal output) +3. Hard refresh browser +4. Clear Jekyll cache: `bundle exec rake clean` + +## Quick Reference: Rake Tasks + +Most common issues can be resolved using built-in Rake tasks. See [tasks/README.md](tasks/README.md) for complete documentation. + +1. `bundle exec rake validate_yaml` - Validate YAML syntax and duplicate keys +2. `bundle exec rake build` - Build the Jekyll site +3. `bundle exec rake serve` - Build and serve the site locally at https://localhost:4000 + +- 3a. Add `--trace` to the rake command for detailed error output +- 3b. Server auto-rebuilds on file changes (except `_config.yml` and `_data/*.yml`) + +4. `bundle exec rake clean` - Clear Jekyll cache and built files +5. `bundle exec rake check` - Validate configuration has been updated from template defaults +6. `bundle exec rake test` - Run core local validation checks +7. `bundle exec rake review:external_links` - Run external/public link audit +8. `bundle exec rake review:compare_deployed_sites` - Compare deployed staging vs production content +9. `bundle exec rake format` - Auto-fix code formatting +10. `bundle exec rake lint` - Check code formatting +11. `bundle exec rake outdated` - Check for outdated gems + +## Common Error Messages + +| Error | Solution | +| -------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | +| "Could not find gem..." | `bundle install` or delete `Gemfile.lock` and retry | +| "Liquid syntax error" | Check for unclosed tags/mismatched delimiters; see error filename | +| "Could not locate included file" | Verify file exists in `_includes/` with exact case | +| "YAML Exception: mapping values not allowed" | Use spaces (not tabs), quote strings with colons | +| "Port 4000 already in use" | `lsof -ti:4000 \| xargs kill -9` or use `--port 4001` | +| "Permission denied" | Never use `sudo` with bundle/gem; use rbenv/rvm on macOS | + +## Resources + +- [SITE_README.md](SITE_README.md) - Development guide & setup checklist +- [tasks/README.md](tasks/README.md) - Complete Rake task reference +- [AWS_authentication.md](AWS_authentication.md) - OIDC and AWS setup +- [Jekyll Docs](https://jekyllrb.com/docs/) - Template language reference + +## Setup & Configuration + +### Initial repository/bootstrap issues + +- Ensure you're in the repository root with `_config.yml` present +- Run with trace for details: `bundle exec rake build --trace` +- Install dependencies first: `bundle install` and `npm install` + +### Configuration validation errors + +**Run `bundle exec rake check` to identify issues**, then: + +- Update placeholder values in `_config.yml` +- Coordinate subdomain with OpenNews team (e.g., `2026.srccon.org`) +- Follow the [Setup Checklist](SITE_README.md#setup-checklist) + +## Environment & Dependencies + +### Ruby version mismatch + +- Check versions: `cat .ruby-version` vs `ruby --version` +- Install correct version: + - rbenv: `rbenv install $(cat .ruby-version) && rbenv local $(cat .ruby-version)` + - rvm: `rvm install $(cat .ruby-version) && rvm use $(cat .ruby-version)` + +### Gem installation issues + +- Run `bundle install` after updating Ruby version +- Run `bundle exec rake outdated` to check for outdated dependencies +- Delete `Gemfile.lock` and re-run `bundle install` if errors persist +- **Never use `sudo`** - install gems in user directory or use rbenv/rvm + +### Node.js required for formatting + +- Check: `node --version` (need 14+) +- Install: macOS `brew install node`, Linux `apt install nodejs npm` +- Run `npm install` for Prettier dependencies + +### Platform-specific notes + +- **Windows:** Use WSL for better compatibility +- **Case sensitivity:** Use exact case for file paths (matters on Linux/production) +- **Permissions:** Never use `sudo` with Ruby/Bundler on macOS/Linux + +## Build & Cache Issues + +### Build fails or server won't start + +1. Run `bundle exec rake clean` to clear caches +2. Run `bundle install` to update dependencies +3. Check port 4000: `lsof -i :4000` (kill with `lsof -ti:4000 | xargs kill -9`) +4. Try with verbose output: `jekyll serve --verbose` + +### Stale or corrupted cache + +- Run `bundle exec rake clean` (clears `.jekyll-cache` and `_site`) +- Hard refresh browser: Ctrl+Shift+R (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+Shift+R (Mac) +- Use incognito/private window for testing + +## Jekyll & Template Errors + +### Liquid syntax errors + +- Check for unclosed tags: `{% if %}` needs `{% endif %}` +- Check mismatched delimiters: `{{` needs `}}`, `{%` needs `%}` +- Build locally to see specific error: `bundle exec rake build` +- Run `bundle exec rake format` to fix formatting issues + +### Include or layout not found + +- Verify file exists in `_includes/` or `_layouts/` with exact case +- Include with extension: `{% include navigation.html %}` +- Check build output for specific filename: `bundle exec rake build` + +### Variables not rendering + +- Use `default` filter: `{{ page.title | default: "No Title" }}` +- Debug with: `{{ page | jsonify }}` +- Check variable scope: `site.*` (config) vs `page.*` (front matter) + +## YAML & Data Files + +### YAML syntax errors + +- Validate at [yamllint.com](https://www.yamllint.com/) +- Use spaces (not tabs) for indentation +- Quote strings with colons: `title: "Session: Building Tools"` +- Build locally to see parsing errors: `bundle exec rake build` + +### Front matter issues + +- Must start/end with `---` (three dashes) at top of file +- Must be valid YAML (test at [yamllint.com](https://www.yamllint.com/)) +- Strings with colons need quotes: `title: "Event: SRCCON"` + +## Deployment + +### Pre-deployment QA + +Before promoting staging to production, you can compare the deployed sites: + +- Run `bundle exec rake review:compare_deployed_sites` to crawl both staging and production +- Reviews all pages for content differences +- Highlights significant changes (>10% size difference) +- Helps catch unintended content changes before they go live + +### Site shows old content after deploy + +- CloudFront cache takes 5-10 minutes to propagate +- Check GitHub Actions logs to confirm invalidation triggered +- Staging bypasses CloudFront (updates appear immediately) + +### Deployment fails + +- Verify `_config.yml` has correct S3 bucket config +- Check repository has access to `AWS_ROLE_ARN` secret +- Review GitHub Actions logs for specific errors +- See [AWS_authentication.md](AWS_authentication.md) for OIDC setup + +## Git & GitHub + +### Cannot push to branch + +- Protected branches require PRs - create feature branch: `git checkout -b feature-name` +- Check branch protection rules: Settings → Branches + +### Merge conflicts + +- Check status: `git status` +- Resolve conflicts in marked files, then: `git add && git commit` +- Or abort: `git merge --abort` + +### GitHub Actions not triggering + +- Check workflow file is in `.github/workflows/` and valid YAML +- Verify branch names match workflow triggers +- Check Actions tab and ensure Actions enabled (Settings → Actions) + +## Assets & Resources + +### Missing images or broken links + +- Verify file exists with exact case: `Logo.png` ≠ `logo.png` +- Check paths are from site root: `/media/img/logo.png` +- Load page locally and check browser console (F12) for 404 errors +- Visually inspect pages for broken images (broken icon or alt text) +- **Optional:** Check external links with `bundle exec rake review:external_links` (requires network access, slower) + +### CSS/JS not loading + +- Check browser console (F12) for 404 errors +- Hard refresh: Ctrl+Shift+R (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+Shift+R (Mac) +- Verify files exist in `media/css/` or `media/js/` +- Inspect page source (Ctrl+U) to verify correct paths in `` and ` - - - - - - - - - - - + + +
-
- -

- -

-
-

{{ page.byline }}

+
+ +

+ +

+
+

{{ page.byline }}

-
-
-
- {{ content }} -
-
-
+
+
+
{{ content }}
+
+
- + diff --git a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/layout_redirect.html b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/layout_redirect.html index fe686a68..48d2f47d 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/layout_redirect.html +++ b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/layout_redirect.html @@ -1,70 +1,65 @@ - + - - {{ page.title }} | SRCCON: July 24–25, Philadelphia - - - + + + - + - + - - - - - - - - - + +
-
- -

- -

-
-

{{ page.byline }}

+
+ +

+ +

+
+

{{ page.byline }}

-
-
-
- {{ content }} -
-
-
+
+
+
{{ content }}
+
+
- + diff --git a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/old includes/2014_footer.html b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/old includes/2014_footer.html new file mode 100755 index 00000000..531c6523 --- /dev/null +++ b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/old includes/2014_footer.html @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +
+
+

SRCCON is sponsored by

+
    +
  • + Mandrill by Mailchimp +
    • +
  • + Scholarship Sponsor, WordPress +
    + scholarship sponsor +
    • +
  • +
    + Mozilla +
    + + Knight Foundation + +
    +
    • +
+
+
+
+
+
+

More SRCCON

+ +
+
+

About SRCCON

+

+ SRCCON is a conference for developers, interactive designers, and other people who love to + code in and near newsrooms. Join us in Philadelphia July 24 and 25 for two full days of + peer-to-peer sessions built around conversation and collaboration. +

+
+
+

About OpenNews

+

+ A multi-year partnership between Mozilla and the + Knight Foundation, + Knight-Mozilla OpenNews is dedicated to creating an + ecosystem to help strengthen and build community around journalism on the web. More at + opennews.org. +

+
+
+
diff --git a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/old includes/2014_navigation.html b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/old includes/2014_navigation.html new file mode 100755 index 00000000..7fa0bc1a --- /dev/null +++ b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/old includes/2014_navigation.html @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ + diff --git a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/old includes/footer.html b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/old includes/footer.html deleted file mode 100755 index 367a3373..00000000 --- a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/old includes/footer.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,34 +0,0 @@ -
-

SRCCON is sponsored by

- -
- -
-
-
-

More SRCCON

- - -
-
-

About SRCCON

-

SRCCON is a conference for developers, interactive designers, and other people who love to code in and near newsrooms. Join us in Philadelphia July 24 and 25 for two full days of peer-to-peer sessions built around conversation and collaboration.

-
-

About OpenNews

-

A multi-year partnership between Mozilla and the Knight Foundation, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews is dedicated to creating an ecosystem to help strengthen and build community around journalism on the web. More at opennews.org. - -

-
diff --git a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/old includes/navigation.html b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/old includes/navigation.html deleted file mode 100755 index 56e3908d..00000000 --- a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/old includes/navigation.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,4 +0,0 @@ - diff --git a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/post.html b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/post.html index f2c84940..9d6d1e80 100755 --- a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/post.html +++ b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/post.html @@ -3,6 +3,4 @@ ---

{{ page.title }}

-
-{{ content }} -
\ No newline at end of file +
{{ content }}
diff --git a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/post_notitle.html b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/post_notitle.html index 025f69bc..c536baf5 100755 --- a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/post_notitle.html +++ b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/post_notitle.html @@ -2,6 +2,4 @@ layout: layout --- -
-{{ content }} -
+
{{ content }}
diff --git a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/post_redirect.html b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/post_redirect.html index 6d39e2ee..9795343c 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/post_redirect.html +++ b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_layouts/post_redirect.html @@ -3,6 +3,4 @@ ---

{{ page.title }}

-
-{{ content }} -
+
{{ content }}
diff --git a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/desktop.css b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/desktop.css index f19cb576..41a19c57 100755 --- a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/desktop.css +++ b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/desktop.css @@ -3,141 +3,138 @@ Default template CSS - if you change anything here then updating will be a bit m */ /**= Desktop only */ .columns { - margin-bottom: 50px; - float: right; - width: 350px; - margin-left: 20px; + margin-bottom: 50px; + float: right; + width: 350px; + margin-left: 20px; } .col { - float: left; - padding: 20px; + float: left; + padding: 20px; } .col img { - width: 100%; + width: 100%; } .external .col:first-child { - padding-left: 0; + padding-left: 0; } /* Masthead */ .masthead nav { - float: right; - margin-right: 130px; + float: right; + margin-right: 130px; } #nav { - margin-top: 5px; - right: 138px; - top: 8px; - position: absolute; - display: inline; + margin-top: 5px; + right: 138px; + top: 8px; + position: absolute; + display: inline; } #nav li a { - padding: 1em 15px; + padding: 1em 15px; } /**= Overrides from devices.css */ .busta { - max-width: 980px; - padding: 0 10px; - margin: 0 auto; + max-width: 980px; + padding: 0 10px; + margin: 0 auto; } .partners h2 { - line-height: 75px; - margin-bottom: 1em; + line-height: 75px; + margin-bottom: 1em; } .partners ul { - margin: 1.1125em 0 1.1125em 20px; + margin: 1.1125em 0 1.1125em 20px; } /**= And now time for your styles */ /* Template overrides */ #ONlogo { - display: block; + display: block; } .partners h2 { - line-height: 50px; + line-height: 50px; } .main_col { - max-width: 960px; - float: left; + max-width: 960px; + float: left; } .fellowsbox { - padding-bottom: 20px; - padding-right: 10px; - padding-top: 18px; - margin-top: 20px; - width: 30%; - float: right; - padding-left: 24px; - border-left: 1px solid #C6C6C6; + padding-bottom: 20px; + padding-right: 10px; + padding-top: 18px; + margin-top: 20px; + width: 30%; + float: right; + padding-left: 24px; + border-left: 1px solid #c6c6c6; } .fellowsbox .photo { - width: 40%; + width: 40%; } #brand img { - margin-top: 80px; + margin-top: 80px; } header.opengraph { - margin-bottom: 40px; + margin-bottom: 40px; } #ONlogo { -margin-right: 40px; + margin-right: 40px; } #fellowside { - border-top: none; + border-top: none; } - - .multicolumn { - -moz-column-count: 3; - -moz-column-gap: 20px; - -webkit-column-count: 3; - -webkit-column-gap: 20px; - column-count: 3; - column-gap: 20px; + -moz-column-count: 3; + -moz-column-gap: 20px; + -webkit-column-count: 3; + -webkit-column-gap: 20px; + column-count: 3; + column-gap: 20px; } -.hamburger, #fellowside select { - display: none; +.hamburger, +#fellowside select { + display: none; } #fellowside ul { -display: inline; + display: inline; } - /* SRCCON MODIFICATIONS */ #nav { - margin-top: -8px; - padding: 0px; + margin-top: -8px; + padding: 0px; } - #nav li a { - display: block; - padding-top: 10px; - padding-right: 10px; - padding-left: 10px; - padding-bottom: 10px; + display: block; + padding-top: 10px; + padding-right: 10px; + padding-left: 10px; + padding-bottom: 10px; } #nav li:first-child a { - padding-left: 10px; + padding-left: 10px; } #nav li a:hover { - background-color: rgba(189, 83, 0, 0.5); + background-color: rgba(189, 83, 0, 0.5); } span.spnsr { position: relative; top: 5px; - font-size: .8em; + font-size: 0.8em; } #partnersponsor { @@ -161,7 +158,6 @@ span.spnsr { margin-right: 20px; margin-top: 25px; width: 400; - } #sponsorpage ul.toplevel li:nth-child(3) img { @@ -170,16 +166,18 @@ span.spnsr { margin-top: 100px; } -#sponsorpage ul.toplevel li p { +#sponsorpage ul.toplevel li p { margin-left: 420px; } -#sponsorpage ul.nextlevel li, #sponsorpage ul.stationlevel li { +#sponsorpage ul.nextlevel li, +#sponsorpage ul.stationlevel li { display: inline; padding-left: 50px; } -#sponsorpage div#two, #sponsorpage div#three { +#sponsorpage div#two, +#sponsorpage div#three { text-align: center; margin-top: 50px; } @@ -189,9 +187,7 @@ span.spnsr { float: left; } -ul. - -.floatright { +ul. .floatright { float: right; margin-left: 25px; } @@ -200,13 +196,11 @@ ul.sponsorlist li img { margin-right: 20px; } - - @media screen and (max-width: 1000px) { - .busta { - padding: 0 20px; - } - #nav { - right: 20px; - } + .busta { + padding: 0 20px; + } + #nav { + right: 20px; + } } diff --git a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/devices.css b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/devices.css index 2f3ba997..9743c628 100755 --- a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/devices.css +++ b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/devices.css @@ -2,467 +2,479 @@ Default template CSS - if you change anything here then updating will be a bit more tricky than you might want */ @font-face { - font-family: MetaWebPro-Black; - src: url(../fonts/MetaWebPro-Black.woff) format('woff'); + font-family: MetaWebPro-Black; + src: url(../fonts/MetaWebPro-Black.woff) format("woff"); } body { - font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; - color: #515151 + font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; + color: #515151; } a:link, a:visited, a:focus, a:hover, a:active { - color: #ad3121; - text-decoration: none; + color: #ad3121; + text-decoration: none; } a:hover, a:focus, a:active { - text-decoration: underline; + text-decoration: underline; } aside { - position: relative; + position: relative; } .box { - -moz-box-sizing: border-box; - -webkit-box-sizing: border-box; - box-sizing: border-box;:52; + -moz-box-sizing: border-box; + -webkit-box-sizing: border-box; + box-sizing: border-box; + :52; } .busta { - margin: 0 10px; - overflow: hidden; + margin: 0 10px; + overflow: hidden; } .columns { - overflow: hidden; - padding-left: 0; - margin-top: 0; - clear: both; + overflow: hidden; + padding-left: 0; + margin-top: 0; + clear: both; } .col { - list-style-type: none; - overflow: hidden; + list-style-type: none; + overflow: hidden; } /**= Sections */ /* Masthead */ .masthead { - background-color: white; - color: #fff; + background-color: white; + color: #fff; } .tab { - position: absolute; - top: 0; - right: 20px; - display: block; - text-indent: -9999em; - background: transparent url(../img/css/icons.png) no-repeat 0 0; - width: 118px; - height: 48px; - overflow: hidden; + position: absolute; + top: 0; + right: 20px; + display: block; + text-indent: -9999em; + background: transparent url(../img/css/icons.png) no-repeat 0 0; + width: 118px; + height: 48px; + overflow: hidden; } .masthead ul { - overflow: hidden; - margin: 0; - padding-left: 0; + overflow: hidden; + margin: 0; + padding-left: 0; } .masthead ul li { - float: left; - padding: 1em; - display: block; - font-size: 12px; + float: left; + padding: 1em; + display: block; + font-size: 12px; } .masthead ul li:first-child { - border-left: none; - padding-left: 0; + border-left: none; + padding-left: 0; } .masthead ul a { - padding: 1em; - display: block; - font-size: 12px; + padding: 1em; + display: block; + font-size: 12px; } .masthead ul li:first-child a { - padding-left: 0; + padding-left: 0; } .masthead ul a:link, .masthead ul a:visited, .masthead ul a:focus, .masthead ul a:hover, .masthead ul a:active { - color: white; + color: white; } /* External links */ .external { - background-color: #FFFFFF; - font-family: Georgia; + background-color: #ffffff; + font-family: Georgia; } .external h2 { - padding-top: 40px; - font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; - color: #2e2e2d; - text-transform: uppercase; - font-size: 18px; - font-weight: 300; + padding-top: 40px; + font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; + color: #2e2e2d; + text-transform: uppercase; + font-size: 18px; + font-weight: 300; } .external .tweet h2 { - background-position: 0 -140px; + background-position: 0 -140px; } .external .mozilla h2 { - background-position: 0 -290px; + background-position: 0 -290px; } .external .learn h2 { - background-position: 0 -440px; + background-position: 0 -440px; } .external p { - font-size: 14px; - color: #454545; + font-size: 14px; + color: #454545; } .external ul { - padding-left: 0; + padding-left: 0; } .external li { - list-style-type: none; - border-top: 1px solid #D8DADC; - padding: 0.5em 0; - font-size: 14px; + list-style-type: none; + border-top: 1px solid #d8dadc; + padding: 0.5em 0; + font-size: 14px; } .external li:first-child { - border-top: none; - padding-top: 0; + border-top: none; + padding-top: 0; } /* Partners */ .partners { - background-color: #ececec; + background-color: #ececec; } .partners h2 { - float: left; - margin: 1em 0 0; /* 1em = 18px; */ - font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; - font-weight: 300; - text-transform: uppercase; - font-size: 18px; + float: left; + margin: 1em 0 0; /* 1em = 18px; */ + font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; + font-weight: 300; + text-transform: uppercase; + font-size: 18px; } .partners ul { - float: left; - margin: 0; - padding-left: 0; - + float: left; + margin: 0; + padding-left: 0; } .partners li { - float: left; - margin-right: 20px; - list-style-type: none; + float: left; + margin-right: 20px; + list-style-type: none; } /* Main content */ -div[role=main] { - background: #fff; - margin: 0 0 0.625em; +div[role="main"] { + background: #fff; + margin: 0 0 0.625em; } /**= And now time for your styles */ #brand img { - margin-top: 1em; - width: 100%; - height: auto; + margin-top: 1em; + width: 100%; + height: auto; } #ONlogo { - display: none; + display: none; } div[role="main"] a { - color: #ad3121; + color: #ad3121; } div[role="main"] h1, div[role="main"] h2 { - text-transform: capitalize; - color: #fc6e1f; - font-family: "Open Sans", Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; - font-weight: 400; + text-transform: capitalize; + color: #fc6e1f; + font-family: "Open Sans", Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; + font-weight: 400; } article p, article ul { - font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; - line-height: 1.6; - font-size: 18px; + font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; + line-height: 1.6; + font-size: 18px; } article header h2 { - font-size: 28px; + font-size: 28px; } article header p { - font-size: 23px; - line-height: 1.7; + font-size: 23px; + line-height: 1.7; } .fellowsbox h3 { - text-transform: uppercase; - margin-top: 0; - color: #676767; - font-size: 17px; - line-height: 1.1em; - font-family: "Open Sans", Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; - font-weight: 300; + text-transform: uppercase; + margin-top: 0; + color: #676767; + font-size: 17px; + line-height: 1.1em; + font-family: "Open Sans", Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; + font-weight: 300; } .fellowsbox ul { - margin-top: 0; - padding-left: 0; - list-style-type: none; + margin-top: 0; + padding-left: 0; + list-style-type: none; } .fellowsbox .vcard { - overflow: hidden; - margin-bottom: 1em; + overflow: hidden; + margin-bottom: 1em; } .fellowsbox .vcard p, .fellowsbox .vcard ul { - font-family: Arial; - font-size: 14px; - margin: 0 0 1em; + font-family: Arial; + font-size: 14px; + margin: 0 0 1em; } .fellowsbox .photo { - border: 1px solid black; - float: left; - margin-right:10px; + border: 1px solid black; + float: left; + margin-right: 10px; } .fellowsbox p.fn { - font-family: Helvetica; - font-size: 16px; - font-weight: bold; - margin-bottom: 0; + font-family: Helvetica; + font-size: 16px; + font-weight: bold; + margin-bottom: 0; } .fellows_links { - overflow: hidden; - margin-top: 5px; + overflow: hidden; + margin-top: 5px; } .fellows_links li { - float: left; + float: left; } .fellows_links li:first-child { - margin-right: 5px; + margin-right: 5px; } .fellows_links li:first-child:after { - content: "/"; - padding-left: 5px; + content: "/"; + padding-left: 5px; } .external .opennews h2 { - background-position: 0 -440px; + background-position: 0 -440px; } .external .knight h2 { - background-position: 0 -590px; + background-position: 0 -590px; } -.external p, .external ul { - line-height: 1.3em; - font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; +.external p, +.external ul { + line-height: 1.3em; + font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; } .external iframe { - display: inline-block; - vertical-align: middle; - margin: 0 0 0 10px; - border: none; + display: inline-block; + vertical-align: middle; + margin: 0 0 0 10px; + border: none; } #sponsorpage ul { - list-style-type: none; - margin-left: 0; - padding-left: 0; + list-style-type: none; + margin-left: 0; + padding-left: 0; } #sponsorpage ul.nextlevel { - text-align: center; + text-align: center; } #sponsorpage ul.stationlevel { - text-align: center; + text-align: center; } -#involved, #minifellows, #newsbox, #sourcebox { - margin-bottom: 50px; +#involved, +#minifellows, +#newsbox, +#sourcebox { + margin-bottom: 50px; } -#involved ul, #involved p, #newsbox ul, #sourcebox ul { - font-size: 1em; - font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; +#involved ul, +#involved p, +#newsbox ul, +#sourcebox ul { + font-size: 1em; + font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; } -#involved li, #newsbox li, #sourcebox li { - list-style-image: url(../img/css/arrow.png); - list-style-position: inside; - margin-bottom: 8px; +#involved li, +#newsbox li, +#sourcebox li { + list-style-image: url(../img/css/arrow.png); + list-style-position: inside; + margin-bottom: 8px; } div[role="main"] .opengraph a { - border-bottom-color: #444444; - border-bottom-style: dotted; - border-bottom-width: 1px; - color: rgb(0,0,0); + border-bottom-color: #444444; + border-bottom-style: dotted; + border-bottom-width: 1px; + color: rgb(0, 0, 0); } div[role="main"] .opengraph a:hover { - border-bottom-color: #222222; - border-bottom-width: 1px; - border-bottom-style: solid; - text-decoration: none; + border-bottom-color: #222222; + border-bottom-width: 1px; + border-bottom-style: solid; + text-decoration: none; } #ONlogo { - padding-right: 130px; - margin-right: 50px; - float: right; + padding-right: 130px; + margin-right: 50px; + float: right; } div.article_body { - margin-bottom: 50px; + margin-bottom: 50px; } #newsline { - font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; - font-size: 18px; - text-align: center; - border: 1px solid rgb(198, 198, 198); - border-width: 1px 0; - text-transform: uppercase; - font-weight: 300; - margin: 10px 0; + font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; + font-size: 18px; + text-align: center; + border: 1px solid rgb(198, 198, 198); + border-width: 1px 0; + text-transform: uppercase; + font-weight: 300; + margin: 10px 0; } #newsline a { - padding: 10px; - text-decoration: none; - color: rgb(103, 103, 103); - display: block; + padding: 10px; + text-decoration: none; + color: rgb(103, 103, 103); + display: block; } #newsline a:hover { - background-color: rgb(255, 91, 36); - color: #fff; + background-color: rgb(255, 91, 36); + color: #fff; } div.article_body { -margin-bottom: 50px; + margin-bottom: 50px; } #minifellows ul li { -display: inline; + display: inline; } #minifellows a { - margin-top: 1em; - display: block; + margin-top: 1em; + display: block; } #minifellows ul li img { -border: 1px solid #454545; + border: 1px solid #454545; } -#minifellows p, #involved p, #newsbox p, #sourcebox p { -font-size: 0.9em; -font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; +#minifellows p, +#involved p, +#newsbox p, +#sourcebox p { + font-size: 0.9em; + font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; } table.schedule { - width: 80%; + width: 80%; } -table.schedule tr td:nth-child(1) { - width: 80px; +table.schedule tr td:nth-child(1) { + width: 80px; } -table.schedule tr td:nth-child(2) { - text-align: left; - padding-left: 20px; +table.schedule tr td:nth-child(2) { + text-align: left; + padding-left: 20px; } -table { - width: 80%; - line-height: 1.6em; - font-size: 18px; - font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; +table { + width: 80%; + line-height: 1.6em; + font-size: 18px; + font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; } -table tr { - padding: 5px; - border-bottom-color: #c8c8c8; - border-bottom-style: solid; - border-bottom-width: 1px; +table tr { + padding: 5px; + border-bottom-color: #c8c8c8; + border-bottom-style: solid; + border-bottom-width: 1px; } -table tr td:nth-child(2) { - text-align: right; +table tr td:nth-child(2) { + text-align: right; } - img.meet { -float: left; -border: 1px solid black; -margin-right: 15px; + float: left; + border: 1px solid black; + margin-right: 15px; } img.meet14 { - width: 22%; - margin-top: 10px; + width: 22%; + margin-top: 10px; } .spacer { -margin-top: 50px; + margin-top: 50px; } -#newsbox li, #sourcebox li { -list-style: none; -line-height: 1.4em; -margin-bottom: 15px; +#newsbox li, +#sourcebox li { + list-style: none; + line-height: 1.4em; + margin-bottom: 15px; } .bodybig { -font-size: 23px; -line-height: 1.7; -margin-bottom: 50px; + font-size: 23px; + line-height: 1.7; + margin-bottom: 50px; } #nav { - font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; + font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; } #nav ul { - padding: 0px; - margin: 0px; - text-align: left; - display: inline; + padding: 0px; + margin: 0px; + text-align: left; + display: inline; } #nav li { + padding: 0px; - padding: 0px; + margin: 0px; - margin: 0px; + border-right-color: #bfbfbf; - border-right-color: #bfbfbf; + border-right-style: solid; - border-right-style: solid; + border-right-width: 1px; - border-right-width: 1px; + text-align: left; - text-align: left; - - display: inline; - - list-style-type: none; + display: inline; + list-style-type: none; } #nav li:first-child a { - padding-left: 0; + padding-left: 0; } - #nav li:last-child { - - border-right-width: 0px; +#nav li:last-child { + border-right-width: 0px; - text-align: left; + text-align: left; - display: inline; + display: inline; - list-style-type: none; - -} - #nav li a { -font-size: 1.3em; -padding-right: 10px; -padding-left: 10px; -text-decoration: none; -color: #999999; -display: inline; + list-style-type: none; } -#nav li a:hover, #nav li a:active, #nav li a.active, #fellowside li a:hover, #fellowside li a.active { - color: #3e3e3e; +#nav li a { + font-size: 1.3em; + padding-right: 10px; + padding-left: 10px; + text-decoration: none; + color: #999999; + display: inline; +} +#nav li a:hover, +#nav li a:active, +#nav li a.active, +#fellowside li a:hover, +#fellowside li a.active { + color: #3e3e3e; } .fellowships #fellowships a, .hackdays #hackdays a, @@ -471,814 +483,826 @@ display: inline; .getinvolved #getinvolved a, .news #news a, .codesprints #codesprints a, -.source #source a { - color: #3e3e3e; +.source #source a { + color: #3e3e3e; } - #nav li a.active, #fellowside li a.active { - cursor:default; +#nav li a.active, +#fellowside li a.active { + cursor: default; } .hide { -display: none; + display: none; } #hackcalbox { -min-height: 100px; -margin-bottom: 30px; + min-height: 100px; + margin-bottom: 30px; } #hackcalbox table { -width: 98%; + width: 98%; } -#hackcalbox table tr td:nth-child(2) { - text-align: left; +#hackcalbox table tr td:nth-child(2) { + text-align: left; } h3 { -color: #0d0d0d; -font-family: 'Open Sans', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; -font-weight: 300; -font-size: 1.1em; -margin-top: 30px; -margin-bottom: 10px; -text-transform: uppercase; + color: #0d0d0d; + font-family: "Open Sans", Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; + font-weight: 300; + font-size: 1.1em; + margin-top: 30px; + margin-bottom: 10px; + text-transform: uppercase; } .columns .col h3 { - margin-top: 0; + margin-top: 0; } #fellowside { -padding-bottom: 5px; -padding-top: 18px; -margin: 0px; -margin-bottom: 20px; -font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; -width: 100%; -margin-top: 20px; -border-top: 1px solid #C6C6C6; + padding-bottom: 5px; + padding-top: 18px; + margin: 0px; + margin-bottom: 20px; + font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; + width: 100%; + margin-top: 20px; + border-top: 1px solid #c6c6c6; } #fellowside ul { - padding: 0px; - margin: 0px; - margin-top: -10px; + padding: 0px; + margin: 0px; + margin-top: -10px; } #fellowside li { - border-right-color: #b1b1b1; - border-right-style: solid; - border-right-width: 1px; - margin-left: 0px; - margin-bottom: 0px; - margin-right: 9px; - margin-top: 0px; - padding-left: 0px; - padding-bottom: 0px; - padding-right: 9px; - padding-top: 0px; - display: inline; - font-size: 0.8em; - font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; - list-style-type: none; -} - #fellowside li:last-child { - border-right-width: 0px; + border-right-color: #b1b1b1; + border-right-style: solid; + border-right-width: 1px; + margin-left: 0px; + margin-bottom: 0px; + margin-right: 9px; + margin-top: 0px; + padding-left: 0px; + padding-bottom: 0px; + padding-right: 9px; + padding-top: 0px; + display: inline; + font-size: 0.8em; + font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; + list-style-type: none; +} +#fellowside li:last-child { + border-right-width: 0px; } #fellowside li a { -color: #999999; -text-decoration: none; - + color: #999999; + text-decoration: none; } .fellows_home #fellow_home, .fellows_apply #apply, .community #community, .fellows_faq #faq, .fellows_info #fellow_benefits { - color: #3E3E3E; + color: #3e3e3e; } iframe { } article iframe { - width: 100%; + width: 100%; } #videobox iframe { -margin-top: 8px; + margin-top: 8px; } #newsline { -display: none; + display: none; } #partnerbox { -float: right; -margin-right: 20px; -margin-left: 10px; -height: 670px; + float: right; + margin-right: 20px; + margin-left: 10px; + height: 670px; } #partnerbox h4 { -text-align: center; -color: #999999; -font-weight: normal; + text-align: center; + color: #999999; + font-weight: normal; } #partnerbox a { - display: block; - width: 220px; - height: 70px; - margin-bottom: 20px; - text-indent: -9999em; - overflow: hidden; + display: block; + width: 220px; + height: 70px; + margin-bottom: 20px; + text-indent: -9999em; + overflow: hidden; } .caption { -font-family: sans-serif; -font-size: .8em; -text-align: right; -margin-right: 12px; -margin-top: -10px; -margin-bottom: 40px; + font-family: sans-serif; + font-size: 0.8em; + text-align: right; + margin-right: 12px; + margin-top: -10px; + margin-bottom: 40px; } - .logo-nyt { -background: url("/media/img/partner_strip_gray-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px 0px transparent; + background: url("/media/img/partner_strip_gray-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px 0px transparent; } .logo-nyt:hover { -background: url("/media/img/partner_strip-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px 0px transparent; + background: url("/media/img/partner_strip-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px 0px transparent; } .logo-propublica { -background: url("/media/img/partner_strip_gray-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -70px transparent; + background: url("/media/img/partner_strip_gray-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -70px transparent; } .logo-propublica:hover { -background: url("/media/img/partner_strip-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -70px transparent; + background: url("/media/img/partner_strip-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -70px transparent; } .logo-texas { -background: url("/media/img/partner_strip_gray-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -142px transparent; + background: url("/media/img/partner_strip_gray-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -142px transparent; } .logo-texas:hover { -background: url("/media/img/partner_strip-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -142px transparent; + background: url("/media/img/partner_strip-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -142px transparent; } .logo-nacion { -background: url("/media/img/partner_strip_gray-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -223px transparent; + background: url("/media/img/partner_strip_gray-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -223px transparent; } .logo-nacion:hover { -background: url("/media/img/partner_strip-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -223px transparent; + background: url("/media/img/partner_strip-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -223px transparent; } .logo-ushahidi { -background: url("/media/img/partner_strip_gray-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -295px transparent; + background: url("/media/img/partner_strip_gray-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -295px transparent; } .logo-ushahidi:hover { -background: url("/media/img/partner_strip-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -295px transparent; + background: url("/media/img/partner_strip-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -295px transparent; } .logo-internews { -background: url("/media/img/partner_strip_gray-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -360px transparent; + background: url("/media/img/partner_strip_gray-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -360px transparent; } .logo-internews:hover { -background: url("/media/img/partner_strip-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -360px transparent; + background: url("/media/img/partner_strip-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -360px transparent; } .logo-wp { -background: url("/media/img/partner_strip_gray-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -415px transparent; + background: url("/media/img/partner_strip_gray-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -415px transparent; } .logo-wp:hover { -background: url("/media/img/partner_strip-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -415px transparent; + background: url("/media/img/partner_strip-2014.png") no-repeat scroll 0px -415px transparent; } - - - - - -ul.fellowslist, ul.fellowstats { - font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; - margin: 0; - padding: 0; +ul.fellowslist, +ul.fellowstats { + font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; + margin: 0; + padding: 0; } -ul.fellowslist li, ul.fellowstats li { -display: inline; -padding-right: 7px; -padding-left: 7px; -margin-right: 7px; -border-right: 1px solid black; -font-size: .9em; +ul.fellowslist li, +ul.fellowstats li { + display: inline; + padding-right: 7px; + padding-left: 7px; + margin-right: 7px; + border-right: 1px solid black; + font-size: 0.9em; } -ul.fellowslist li:first-child, ul.fellowstats li:first-child { -padding-left: 0px; +ul.fellowslist li:first-child, +ul.fellowstats li:first-child { + padding-left: 0px; } -ul.fellowslist li:last-child, ul.fellowstats li:last-child { -border-right: 0; +ul.fellowslist li:last-child, +ul.fellowstats li:last-child { + border-right: 0; } /* application form */ #signup { - /* + /* to cover up the empty

that markdown seems insistent to include above the form */ - margin-top: 0; + margin-top: 0; } #signup label { - font-weight: bold; - display: block; - margin-bottom: 0.5em; - width: 80%; + font-weight: bold; + display: block; + margin-bottom: 0.5em; + width: 80%; } -#signup input+label { - font-weight: normal; +#signup input + label { + font-weight: normal; } #signup input, #signup textarea { - -moz-box-sizing: border-box; - -webkit-box-sizing: border-box; - box-sizing: border-box; - width: 90%; + -moz-box-sizing: border-box; + -webkit-box-sizing: border-box; + box-sizing: border-box; + width: 90%; } #signup input[type="checkbox"] { - float: left; - width: auto; - margin-right: 10px; + float: left; + width: auto; + margin-right: 10px; } #signup input[type="checkbox"] + label { - float: left; + float: left; } #signup input[type="submit"] { - text-transform: uppercase; - color: #fff !important; - border: none; - -moz-border-radius: 4px; - -webkit-border-radius: 4px; - border-radius: 4px; - background: #EF4619; - background-image: linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(239,50,25) 30%, rgb(239,72,25) 47%); - background-image: -o-linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(239,50,25) 30%, rgb(239,72,25) 47%); - background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(239,50,25) 30%, rgb(239,72,25) 47%); - background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(239,50,25) 30%, rgb(239,72,25) 47%); - padding: 0.4em 24px; - font-size: 20px; - box-shadow: 0 0 0.3em #dbdbdb; - display: inline-block; - letter-spacing: 0.6px; - /* Using important so line-height based on containers doesnt't screw stuff up */ - line-height: 1 !important; - width: auto; + text-transform: uppercase; + color: #fff !important; + border: none; + -moz-border-radius: 4px; + -webkit-border-radius: 4px; + border-radius: 4px; + background: #ef4619; + background-image: linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(239, 50, 25) 30%, rgb(239, 72, 25) 47%); + background-image: -o-linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(239, 50, 25) 30%, rgb(239, 72, 25) 47%); + background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(239, 50, 25) 30%, rgb(239, 72, 25) 47%); + background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(239, 50, 25) 30%, rgb(239, 72, 25) 47%); + padding: 0.4em 24px; + font-size: 20px; + box-shadow: 0 0 0.3em #dbdbdb; + display: inline-block; + letter-spacing: 0.6px; + /* Using important so line-height based on containers doesnt't screw stuff up */ + line-height: 1 !important; + width: auto; } #signup input[type="submit"]:hover { - background-image: linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(239,75,35) 40%, rgb(244,136,75) 82%); - background-image: -o-linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(239,75,35) 40%, rgb(244,136,75) 82%); - background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(239,75,35) 40%, rgb(244,136,75) 82%); - background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(239,75,35) 40%, rgb(244,136,75) 82%); - text-decoration: none; + background-image: linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(239, 75, 35) 40%, rgb(244, 136, 75) 82%); + background-image: -o-linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(239, 75, 35) 40%, rgb(244, 136, 75) 82%); + background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(239, 75, 35) 40%, rgb(244, 136, 75) 82%); + background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(bottom, rgb(239, 75, 35) 40%, rgb(244, 136, 75) 82%); + text-decoration: none; } #signup input[type="submit"]:active { - box-shadow: none; - background: #e54821; - text-decoration: none; + box-shadow: none; + background: #e54821; + text-decoration: none; } .form-row { - margin-bottom: 1em; - overflow: hidden; + margin-bottom: 1em; + overflow: hidden; } fieldset { - border: 0; + border: 0; } legend span { - line-height: 1; - padding-top: 1em; - color: #FC6E1F; - text-transform: capitalize; - font-family: 'Open Sans',Helvetica,Verdana,Arial, sans-serif; - font-size: 20px; - font-weight: 300; + line-height: 1; + padding-top: 1em; + color: #fc6e1f; + text-transform: capitalize; + font-family: "Open Sans", Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; + font-size: 20px; + font-weight: 300; } .required { - color: red; + color: red; } #hackcode li { -display: block; -list-style-position: inside; -padding-left: 0px; -margin-left: 0px; -list-style-type: none; -margin-bottom: 12px; -font-size: 14px; - + display: block; + list-style-position: inside; + padding-left: 0px; + margin-left: 0px; + list-style-type: none; + margin-bottom: 12px; + font-size: 14px; } #hackcode ul { - font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; - padding: 0px; + font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; + padding: 0px; } #preload { - text-align: center; + text-align: center; } #fellowcode ul { - padding: 0px; + padding: 0px; } #fellowcode ul li { - margin-bottom: 20px; - list-style-type: none; + margin-bottom: 20px; + list-style-type: none; } .fellowhack { - font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; - font-size: 1.1em; + font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; + font-size: 1.1em; } .frontpic { - width: 31%; - height: 31%; - margin-right: 5px; - margin-bottom: 5px; - border: 1px solid black; + width: 31%; + height: 31%; + margin-right: 5px; + margin-bottom: 5px; + border: 1px solid black; } .noborder { - border: none; + border: none; } #picwrap { - width: 100%; - margin-top: 18px; + width: 100%; + margin-top: 18px; } .alert { - font-family: 'Open Sans',Helvetica,Verdana,Arial, sans-serif; - background-color: #b54f06; - color: white; - font-weight: bold; - font-size: 1.5em; - padding: 5px; - text-align: center; - margin-bottom: -10px; - border-radius: 5px; - width: 97%; + font-family: "Open Sans", Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; + background-color: #b54f06; + color: white; + font-weight: bold; + font-size: 1.5em; + padding: 5px; + text-align: center; + margin-bottom: -10px; + border-radius: 5px; + width: 97%; } img.topline { - width: 100%; - border: 1px solid black; + width: 100%; + border: 1px solid black; } ul.fellowcode { - font-size: 1em; - margin-left: 25px; + font-size: 1em; + margin-left: 25px; } .hidden { - display: none; + display: none; } .hamburger { - font-size: 1em; - display: inline; - margin-top: 10px; - margin-right: 10px; - padding-left: 20px; - position: relative; - color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.540) - } + font-size: 1em; + display: inline; + margin-top: 10px; + margin-right: 10px; + padding-left: 20px; + position: relative; + color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.54); +} .hamburger:before { - content: ""; - position: absolute; - left: 0; - top: 6px; - width: 1em; - height: 0.15em; - background:#8d8d8d; - box-shadow: - 0 0.25em 0 0 #8d8d8d, - 0 0.5em 0 0 #8d8d8d; - } + content: ""; + position: absolute; + left: 0; + top: 6px; + width: 1em; + height: 0.15em; + background: #8d8d8d; + box-shadow: + 0 0.25em 0 0 #8d8d8d, + 0 0.5em 0 0 #8d8d8d; +} .snap-drawers { - background-color: #eee; + background-color: #eee; } .snap-drawers li { - list-style: none; - margin: 0; - border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc; + list-style: none; + margin: 0; + border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc; } .snap-drawers li:last-child { - border-bottom: none; + border-bottom: none; } .snap-drawers li a { - color: #939393; - padding-left: 10px; - padding-top: 10px; - padding-bottom: 10px; - display: block; - width: 148px; + color: #939393; + padding-left: 10px; + padding-top: 10px; + padding-bottom: 10px; + display: block; + width: 148px; } .snap-drawers li a:hover { - background-color: #cdcdcd; - text-decoration: none; + background-color: #cdcdcd; + text-decoration: none; } .snap-drawers ul { - margin-left: 0px; - padding-left: 0px; + margin-left: 0px; + padding-left: 0px; } #fellowside select { - margin-left: 5px; + margin-left: 5px; } +ul#fellowmenu { + display: none; +} - ul#fellowmenu { - display: none; - } - - #fellowside select { - display: inline-block; - font-size: .9em; - padding-top: 5px; - padding-bottom: 5px; - } - - #fellowside { - border-top: none; - padding-top: none; - } +#fellowside select { + display: inline-block; + font-size: 0.9em; + padding-top: 5px; + padding-bottom: 5px; +} +#fellowside { + border-top: none; + padding-top: none; +} @media screen and (max-width: 450px) { - img.frontpic { - width: 30%; - } - .bodybig { - font-size: 18px; - line-height: 1.7; - margin-bottom: 50px; - } - - .challengebox { - display: none; - } - - h1#brand { - margin-bottom: 0px; - } + img.frontpic { + width: 30%; + } + .bodybig { + font-size: 18px; + line-height: 1.7; + margin-bottom: 50px; + } + + .challengebox { + display: none; + } + h1#brand { + margin-bottom: 0px; + } } /* SRCCON MODIFICATIONS */ div[role="main"] a.button { - color: white; + color: white; } #brand img { - width: 600px; + width: 600px; } h1.dateblast { - color: black; - font-size: 2.5em; - font-weight: bold; + color: black; + font-size: 2.5em; + font-weight: bold; } .philly { - background: url(../img/philly.jpg) no-repeat center center; - background-size: cover; - height: 500px; + background: url(../img/philly.jpg) no-repeat center center; + background-size: cover; + height: 500px; } -.philly .logo, .session .logo, .chemical .logo, .oldcity .logo { - position: absolute; - top: 260px; +.philly .logo, +.session .logo, +.chemical .logo, +.oldcity .logo { + position: absolute; + top: 260px; } .session { - background: url(../img/session.jpg) no-repeat center center; - background-size: cover; - height: 500px; + background: url(../img/session.jpg) no-repeat center center; + background-size: cover; + height: 500px; } .chemical { - background: url(../img/chemical.jpg) no-repeat center center; - background-size: cover; - height: 500px; + background: url(../img/chemical.jpg) no-repeat center center; + background-size: cover; + height: 500px; } .oldcity { - background: url(../img/oldcity.png) no-repeat center center; - background-size: cover; - height: 500px; + background: url(../img/oldcity.png) no-repeat center center; + background-size: cover; + height: 500px; } - #nav ul li { - font-size: .9em; + font-size: 0.9em; } #nav { - background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0.6); - padding-top: 10px; - margin-top: -10; + background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.6); + padding-top: 10px; + margin-top: -10; } #nav li a { - padding: 0 15; - color: #282828; + padding: 0 15; + color: #282828; } h2 { - font-size: 2em; + font-size: 2em; } .columns { - margin-right: auto; - margin-left: auto; + margin-right: auto; + margin-left: auto; } .col { - width: 200px; - float: left; + width: 200px; + float: left; } #byline { - font-size: .8em; - color: #ccc; - position: absolute; - right: 150px; - top: 460px; + font-size: 0.8em; + color: #ccc; + position: absolute; + right: 150px; + top: 460px; } #byline a { - color: white; + color: white; } .columns .col { - -moz-box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-box-sizing: border-box; box-sizing: border-box; - float: left; - padding: 20px; - margin: 0 2%; - border: 1px solid #d0d0d0; - width: 340px; - margin-bottom: 10px; -} - -a.button, .alertme, #togglebuttons #show, #togglebuttons #hide { - display: block; - background-color: #FC6E1F; - padding: 10px 0; - text-align: center; - font-family: 'Open Sans',Helvetica,Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; - color: white; - text-transform: uppercase; + -moz-box-sizing: border-box; + -webkit-box-sizing: border-box; + box-sizing: border-box; + float: left; + padding: 20px; + margin: 0 2%; + border: 1px solid #d0d0d0; + width: 340px; + margin-bottom: 10px; +} + +a.button, +.alertme, +#togglebuttons #show, +#togglebuttons #hide { + display: block; + background-color: #fc6e1f; + padding: 10px 0; + text-align: center; + font-family: "Open Sans", Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; + color: white; + text-transform: uppercase; } #togglebuttons { - float: right; - cursor: pointer; - display: none; + float: right; + cursor: pointer; + display: none; } -#togglebuttons #show, #togglebuttons #hide -{ - display: normal; - padding-right: 10px; - padding-left: 10px; - width: 85px; +#togglebuttons #show, +#togglebuttons #hide { + display: normal; + padding-right: 10px; + padding-left: 10px; + width: 85px; } #togglebuttons #hide { - display: none; + display: none; } #proposals { - clear: both; - position: relative; + clear: both; + position: relative; } .detailbox { - display: none; + display: none; } -a.button:hover, #togglebuttons #show:hover, #togglebuttons #hide:hover { - background-color: #bd5325; - text-decoration: none; +a.button:hover, +#togglebuttons #show:hover, +#togglebuttons #hide:hover { + background-color: #bd5325; + text-decoration: none; } @media screen and (max-width: 768px) { - - ul.sponsorlist li img { - margin-top: 25px; - } - - - .philly, .session, .chemical, .oldcity { - height: 400px; - } - #brand img { - width: auto; - height: 80px; - } - .philly .logo, .session .logo, .chemical .logo, .oldcity .logo { - top: 220px; - } - - #byline { - font-size: .6em; - position: absolute; - right: 10px; - top: 370px; - } + ul.sponsorlist li img { + margin-top: 25px; + } + + .philly, + .session, + .chemical, + .oldcity { + height: 400px; + } + #brand img { + width: auto; + height: 80px; + } + .philly .logo, + .session .logo, + .chemical .logo, + .oldcity .logo { + top: 220px; + } + + #byline { + font-size: 0.6em; + position: absolute; + right: 10px; + top: 370px; + } } @media screen and (max-width: 648px) { - .external .col { - float: none; - width: 100%; - padding: 0; - } - .external h2 { - padding-top: 0; - } + .external .col { + float: none; + width: 100%; + padding: 0; + } + .external h2 { + padding-top: 0; + } } @media screen and (max-width: 480px) { - #sponsorpage ul.toplevel li img { - margin-top: 25px; - width: 100%; - } - - .philly, .session, .chemical, .oldcity { - height: 200px; - margin-bottom: 25px; - } - .philly #nav, .session #nav, .chemical #nav, .oldcity #nav { - margin-top: 200px; - } - - #brand img { - width: auto; - height: 50px; - } - .philly .logo, .session .logo, .chemical .logo, .oldcity .logo { - top: 110px; - } - #nav { - font-size: 12px; - } - #nav li, - #nav li:last-child { - width: 33%; - text-align: center; - } - - #byline { - font-size: .6em; - position: absolute; - right: 10px; - top: 10px; - } - - .columns .col { - -moz-box-sizing: border-box; - -webkit-box-sizing: border-box; - box-sizing: border-box; - float: none; - padding: 10px; - border: 1px solid #d0d0d0; - width: 98%; - margin: 0 0 10px 0; - } - - h1.dateblast { - font-size: 1.8em; - } - - #proposals div.detailbox { - padding-left: 25px; - } - - #togglebuttons #hide, #togglebuttons #show { - font-size: .8em; - width: 65px; - padding: 5px; - margin-bottom: 10px; - } + #sponsorpage ul.toplevel li img { + margin-top: 25px; + width: 100%; + } + + .philly, + .session, + .chemical, + .oldcity { + height: 200px; + margin-bottom: 25px; + } + .philly #nav, + .session #nav, + .chemical #nav, + .oldcity #nav { + margin-top: 200px; + } + + #brand img { + width: auto; + height: 50px; + } + .philly .logo, + .session .logo, + .chemical .logo, + .oldcity .logo { + top: 110px; + } + #nav { + font-size: 12px; + } + #nav li, + #nav li:last-child { + width: 33%; + text-align: center; + } + + #byline { + font-size: 0.6em; + position: absolute; + right: 10px; + top: 10px; + } + + .columns .col { + -moz-box-sizing: border-box; + -webkit-box-sizing: border-box; + box-sizing: border-box; + float: none; + padding: 10px; + border: 1px solid #d0d0d0; + width: 98%; + margin: 0 0 10px 0; + } + + h1.dateblast { + font-size: 1.8em; + } + + #proposals div.detailbox { + padding-left: 25px; + } + + #togglebuttons #hide, + #togglebuttons #show { + font-size: 0.8em; + width: 65px; + padding: 5px; + margin-bottom: 10px; + } } @media screen and (max-width: 400px) { - #nav { - font-size: 9px; - } - - #nav li, - #nav li:last-child { - width: 32%; /*changed from 33%*/ - text-align: center; - } + #nav { + font-size: 9px; + } + #nav li, + #nav li:last-child { + width: 32%; /*changed from 33%*/ + text-align: center; + } } #proposals li { - list-style-type: none; - margin-bottom: 0; - margin-top: 5px; + list-style-type: none; + margin-bottom: 0; + margin-top: 5px; } #proposals li h4 { - padding: 10px; + padding: 10px; } #proposals li:nth-child(odd) h4 { - background-color: #f5f2e8; + background-color: #f5f2e8; } #proposals li:nth-child(odd) h4:hover { - background-color: #f9f0d4; + background-color: #f9f0d4; } #proposals li h4:hover { - background-color: #fdfcfa; + background-color: #fdfcfa; } #proposals h4 { - font-size: 1.2em; - margin-top: 0px; - margin-bottom: 0; - cursor: pointer; + font-size: 1.2em; + margin-top: 0px; + margin-bottom: 0; + cursor: pointer; } #proposals h4 span.proposalauthor { - font-weight: normal; + font-weight: normal; } #proposals div.detailbox { - padding-left: 55px; - border-bottom: 1px solid #e7d9af; - margin-bottom: 15px; + padding-left: 55px; + border-bottom: 1px solid #e7d9af; + margin-bottom: 15px; } #proposals li h4 img { -float: none; -margin-right: 15px; --webkit-transition: .15s; --moz-transition: .15s; --o-transition: .15s; --ms-transition: .15s; --webkit-transform: rotate(-90deg); --moz-transform: rotate(-90deg); --o-transform: rotate(-90deg); --ms-transform: rotate(-90deg); + float: none; + margin-right: 15px; + -webkit-transition: 0.15s; + -moz-transition: 0.15s; + -o-transition: 0.15s; + -ms-transition: 0.15s; + -webkit-transform: rotate(-90deg); + -moz-transform: rotate(-90deg); + -o-transform: rotate(-90deg); + -ms-transform: rotate(-90deg); } #proposals li h4 img.flipup { - --webkit-transform: rotate(0deg); --moz-transform: rotate(0deg); --o-transform: rotate(0deg); --ms-transform: rotate(0deg); + -webkit-transform: rotate(0deg); + -moz-transform: rotate(0deg); + -o-transform: rotate(0deg); + -ms-transform: rotate(0deg); } #proposals .permalink { } #apologybox { - border: 2px solid #ac0909; - background-color: #f9dfa9; - padding: 20px; - margin-top: 20px; - margin-bottom: 50px; + border: 2px solid #ac0909; + background-color: #f9dfa9; + padding: 20px; + margin-top: 20px; + margin-bottom: 50px; } #apologybox p { - font-size: 1.4em; + font-size: 1.4em; } #apologybox h2 { - margin-top: 0px; + margin-top: 0px; } - - - /*force reload FOR REAL*/ diff --git a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/form.css b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/form.css index 5982842f..95da0c72 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/form.css +++ b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/form.css @@ -1,8 +1,14 @@ -.fb-field-wrapper input, .fb-field-wrapper select, .fb-field-wrapper textarea { +.fb-field-wrapper input, +.fb-field-wrapper select, +.fb-field-wrapper textarea { width: 90%; } -.response-field-text .rf-size-small, .response-field-website .rf-size-small, .response-field-paragraph .rf-size-large, .response-field-paragraph textarea.rf-size-small, .response-field-paragraph .rf-size-small { +.response-field-text .rf-size-small, +.response-field-website .rf-size-small, +.response-field-paragraph .rf-size-large, +.response-field-paragraph textarea.rf-size-small, +.response-field-paragraph .rf-size-small { width: 90%; } @@ -10,17 +16,17 @@ width: 90%; } - .fb-field-wrapper .fb-option input[type=text] { +.fb-field-wrapper .fb-option input[type="text"] { width: 200px; } -.fb-field-wrapper input[type=checkbox] { +.fb-field-wrapper input[type="checkbox"] { width: auto; } .button.primary { - background-color: #FC6E1F; - border-color: #FC6E1F; + background-color: #fc6e1f; + border-color: #fc6e1f; } .button.primary:hover { diff --git a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/normalise.css b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/normalise.css index 4272ccb8..f01512de 100755 --- a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/normalise.css +++ b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/normalise.css @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@ -/*! normalize.css 2011-08-12T17:28 UTC http://github.com/necolas/normalize.css */ +/*! normalize.css 2011-08-12T17:28 UTC �https:///github.com/necolas/normalize.css */ /* ============================================================================= HTML5 display definitions @@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ header, hgroup, nav, section { - display: block; + display: block; } /* @@ -28,9 +28,9 @@ section { audio, canvas, video { - display: inline-block; - *display: inline; - *zoom: 1; + display: inline-block; + *display: inline; + *zoom: 1; } /* @@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ video { */ audio:not([controls]) { - display: none; + display: none; } /* @@ -47,27 +47,26 @@ audio:not([controls]) { */ [hidden] { - display: none; + display: none; } - /* ============================================================================= Base ========================================================================== */ /* * 1. Corrects text resizing oddly in IE6/7 when body font-size is set using em units -* http://clagnut.com/blog/348/#c790 +* https://clagnut.com/blog/348/#c790 * 2. Keeps page centred in all browsers regardless of content height * 3. Prevents iOS text size adjust after orientation change, without disabling user zoom * www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201012/controlling_text_size_in_safari_for_ios_without_disabling_user_zoom/ */ html { - font-size: 100%; /* 1 */ - overflow-y: scroll; /* 2 */ - -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; /* 3 */ - -ms-text-size-adjust: 100%; /* 3 */ + font-size: 100%; /* 1 */ + overflow-y: scroll; /* 2 */ + -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; /* 3 */ + -ms-text-size-adjust: 100%; /* 3 */ } /* @@ -75,7 +74,7 @@ html { */ body { - margin: 0; + margin: 0; } /* @@ -87,20 +86,19 @@ button, input, select, textarea { - font-family: sans-serif; + font-family: sans-serif; } - /* ============================================================================= Links ========================================================================== */ a { - color: #00e; + color: #00e; } a:visited { - color: #551a8b; + color: #551a8b; } /* @@ -108,7 +106,7 @@ a:visited { */ a:focus { - outline: thin dotted; + outline: thin dotted; } /* @@ -118,10 +116,9 @@ a:focus { a:hover, a:active { - outline: 0; + outline: 0; } - /* ============================================================================= Typography ========================================================================== */ @@ -131,7 +128,7 @@ Typography */ abbr[title] { - border-bottom: 1px dotted; + border-bottom: 1px dotted; } /* @@ -140,11 +137,11 @@ abbr[title] { b, strong { - font-weight: bold; + font-weight: bold; } blockquote { - margin: 1em 40px; + margin: 1em 40px; } /* @@ -152,7 +149,7 @@ blockquote { */ dfn { - font-style: italic; + font-style: italic; } /* @@ -160,8 +157,8 @@ dfn { */ mark { - background: #ff0; - color: #000; + background: #ff0; + color: #000; } /* @@ -173,9 +170,9 @@ pre, code, kbd, samp { - font-family: monospace, serif; - _font-family: 'courier new', monospace; - font-size: 1em; + font-family: monospace, serif; + _font-family: "courier new", monospace; + font-size: 1em; } /* @@ -183,9 +180,9 @@ samp { */ pre { - white-space: pre; - white-space: pre-wrap; - word-wrap: break-word; + white-space: pre; + white-space: pre-wrap; + word-wrap: break-word; } /* @@ -196,19 +193,19 @@ pre { /* 1 */ q { - quotes: none; + quotes: none; } /* 2 */ q:before, q:after { - content: ''; - content: none; + content: ""; + content: none; } small { - font-size: 75%; + font-size: 75%; } /* @@ -218,42 +215,40 @@ small { sub, sup { - font-size: 75%; - line-height: 0; - position: relative; - vertical-align: baseline; + font-size: 75%; + line-height: 0; + position: relative; + vertical-align: baseline; } sup { - top: -0.5em; + top: -0.5em; } sub { - bottom: -0.25em; + bottom: -0.25em; } - /* ============================================================================= Lists ========================================================================== */ ul, ol { - margin: 1em 0; - padding: 0 0 0 40px; + margin: 1em 0; + padding: 0 0 0 40px; } dd { - margin: 0 0 0 40px; + margin: 0 0 0 40px; } nav ul, nav ol { - list-style: none; - list-style-image: none; + list-style: none; + list-style-image: none; } - /* ============================================================================= Embedded content ========================================================================== */ @@ -265,8 +260,8 @@ Embedded content */ img { - border: 0; /* 1 */ - -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; /* 2 */ + border: 0; /* 1 */ + -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; /* 2 */ } /* @@ -274,10 +269,9 @@ img { */ svg:not(:root) { - overflow: hidden; + overflow: hidden; } - /* ============================================================================= Figures ========================================================================== */ @@ -287,10 +281,9 @@ Figures */ figure { - margin: 0; + margin: 0; } - /* ============================================================================= Forms ========================================================================== */ @@ -300,7 +293,7 @@ Forms */ form { - margin: 0; + margin: 0; } /* @@ -308,8 +301,8 @@ form { */ fieldset { - margin: 0 2px; - padding: 0.35em 0.625em 0.75em; + margin: 0 2px; + padding: 0.35em 0.625em 0.75em; } /* @@ -318,8 +311,8 @@ fieldset { */ legend { - border: 0; /* 1 */ - *margin-left: -7px; /* 2 */ + border: 0; /* 1 */ + *margin-left: -7px; /* 2 */ } /* @@ -332,10 +325,10 @@ button, input, select, textarea { - font-size: 100%; /* 1 */ - margin: 0; /* 2 */ - vertical-align: baseline; /* 3 */ - *vertical-align: middle; /* 3 */ + font-size: 100%; /* 1 */ + margin: 0; /* 2 */ + vertical-align: baseline; /* 3 */ + *vertical-align: middle; /* 3 */ } /* @@ -345,8 +338,8 @@ textarea { button, input { - line-height: normal; /* 1 */ - *overflow: visible; /* 2 */ + line-height: normal; /* 1 */ + *overflow: visible; /* 2 */ } /* @@ -356,7 +349,7 @@ input { table button, table input { - *overflow: auto; + *overflow: auto; } /* @@ -368,8 +361,8 @@ button, html input[type="button"], input[type="reset"], input[type="submit"] { - cursor: pointer; /* 1 */ - -webkit-appearance: button; /* 2 */ + cursor: pointer; /* 1 */ + -webkit-appearance: button; /* 2 */ } /* @@ -379,8 +372,8 @@ input[type="submit"] { input[type="checkbox"], input[type="radio"] { - box-sizing: border-box; /* 1 */ - padding: 0; /* 2 */ + box-sizing: border-box; /* 1 */ + padding: 0; /* 2 */ } /* @@ -389,10 +382,10 @@ input[type="radio"] { */ input[type="search"] { - -webkit-appearance: textfield; /* 1 */ - -moz-box-sizing: content-box; - -webkit-box-sizing: content-box; /* 2 */ - box-sizing: content-box; + -webkit-appearance: textfield; /* 1 */ + -moz-box-sizing: content-box; + -webkit-box-sizing: content-box; /* 2 */ + box-sizing: content-box; } /* @@ -400,7 +393,7 @@ input[type="search"] { */ input[type="search"]::-webkit-search-decoration { - -webkit-appearance: none; + -webkit-appearance: none; } /* @@ -410,8 +403,8 @@ input[type="search"]::-webkit-search-decoration { button::-moz-focus-inner, input::-moz-focus-inner { - border: 0; - padding: 0; + border: 0; + padding: 0; } /* @@ -420,11 +413,10 @@ input::-moz-focus-inner { */ textarea { - overflow: auto; /* 1 */ - vertical-align: top; /* 2 */ + overflow: auto; /* 1 */ + vertical-align: top; /* 2 */ } - /* ============================================================================= Tables ========================================================================== */ @@ -434,6 +426,6 @@ Tables */ table { - border-collapse: collapse; - border-spacing: 0; -} \ No newline at end of file + border-collapse: collapse; + border-spacing: 0; +} diff --git a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/snap.css b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/snap.css index 97e17a60..eadeb960 100755 --- a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/snap.css +++ b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/css/snap.css @@ -1,4 +1,5 @@ -html, body { +html, +body { font-family: sans-serif; margin: 0; padding: 0; @@ -19,10 +20,10 @@ html, body { overflow: auto; -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch; -webkit-transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0); - -moz-transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0); - -ms-transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0); - -o-transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0); - transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0); + -moz-transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0); + -ms-transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0); + -o-transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0); + transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0); } .snap-drawers { @@ -46,10 +47,10 @@ html, body { overflow: auto; -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch; -webkit-transition: width 0.3s ease; - -moz-transition: width 0.3s ease; - -ms-transition: width 0.3s ease; - -o-transition: width 0.3s ease; - transition: width 0.3s ease; + -moz-transition: width 0.3s ease; + -ms-transition: width 0.3s ease; + -o-transition: width 0.3s ease; + transition: width 0.3s ease; } .snap-drawer-left { diff --git a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/js/tabletop.js b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/js/tabletop.js index 5b69ed68..0817ae0a 100755 --- a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/js/tabletop.js +++ b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/old_media/js/tabletop.js @@ -1,17 +1,17 @@ -(function(global) { +(function (global) { "use strict"; var inNodeJS = false; - if (typeof module !== 'undefined' && module.exports) { + if (typeof module !== "undefined" && module.exports) { inNodeJS = true; - var request = require('request'); + var request = require("request"); } var supportsCORS = false; var inLegacyIE = false; try { var testXHR = new XMLHttpRequest(); - if (typeof testXHR.withCredentials !== 'undefined') { + if (typeof testXHR.withCredentials !== "undefined") { supportsCORS = true; } else { if ("XDomainRequest" in window) { @@ -19,7 +19,7 @@ inLegacyIE = true; } } - } catch (e) { } + } catch (e) {} // Create a simple indexOf function for support // of older browsers. Uses native indexOf if @@ -28,8 +28,9 @@ // to the prototype, we will not break bad for loops // in older browsers var indexOfProto = Array.prototype.indexOf; - var ttIndexOf = function(array, item) { - var i = 0, l = array.length; + var ttIndexOf = function (array, item) { + var i = 0, + l = array.length; if (indexOfProto && array.indexOf === indexOfProto) return array.indexOf(item); for (; i < l; i++) if (array[i] === item) return i; @@ -44,14 +45,14 @@ Initialize with Tabletop.init('0AjAPaAU9MeLFdHUxTlJiVVRYNGRJQnRmSnQwTlpoUXc') */ - var Tabletop = function(options) { + var Tabletop = function (options) { // Make sure Tabletop is being used as a constructor no matter what. - if(!this || !(this instanceof Tabletop)) { + if (!this || !(this instanceof Tabletop)) { return new Tabletop(options); } - if(typeof(options) === 'string') { - options = { key : options }; + if (typeof options === "string") { + options = { key: options }; } this.callback = options.callback; @@ -63,44 +64,44 @@ this.reverse = !!options.reverse; this.postProcess = options.postProcess; this.debug = !!options.debug; - this.query = options.query || ''; + this.query = options.query || ""; this.orderby = options.orderby; this.endpoint = options.endpoint || "https://spreadsheets.google.com"; this.singleton = !!options.singleton; this.simple_url = !!options.simple_url; this.callbackContext = options.callbackContext; - if(typeof(options.proxy) !== 'undefined') { + if (typeof options.proxy !== "undefined") { // Remove trailing slash, it will break the app - this.endpoint = options.proxy.replace(/\/$/,''); + this.endpoint = options.proxy.replace(/\/$/, ""); this.simple_url = true; this.singleton = true; // Let's only use CORS (straight JSON request) when // fetching straight from Google - supportsCORS = false + supportsCORS = false; } this.parameterize = options.parameterize || false; - if(this.singleton) { - if(typeof(Tabletop.singleton) !== 'undefined') { + if (this.singleton) { + if (typeof Tabletop.singleton !== "undefined") { this.log("WARNING! Tabletop singleton already defined"); } Tabletop.singleton = this; } /* Be friendly about what you accept */ - if(/key=/.test(this.key)) { + if (/key=/.test(this.key)) { this.log("You passed an old Google Docs url as the key! Attempting to parse."); this.key = this.key.match("key=(.*?)&")[1]; } - if(/pubhtml/.test(this.key)) { + if (/pubhtml/.test(this.key)) { this.log("You passed a new Google Spreadsheets url as the key! Attempting to parse."); this.key = this.key.match("d\\/(.*?)\\/pubhtml")[1]; } - if(!this.key) { + if (!this.key) { this.log("You need to pass Tabletop a key!"); return; } @@ -113,12 +114,12 @@ this.base_json_path = "/feeds/worksheets/" + this.key + "/public/basic?alt="; if (inNodeJS || supportsCORS) { - this.base_json_path += 'json'; + this.base_json_path += "json"; } else { - this.base_json_path += 'json-in-script'; + this.base_json_path += "json-in-script"; } - if(!this.wait) { + if (!this.wait) { this.fetch(); } }; @@ -127,18 +128,19 @@ Tabletop.callbacks = {}; // Backwards compatibility. - Tabletop.init = function(options) { + Tabletop.init = function (options) { return new Tabletop(options); }; - Tabletop.sheets = function() { - console.log("Times have changed! You'll want to use var tabletop = Tabletop.init(...); tabletop.sheets(...); instead of Tabletop.sheets(...)"); + Tabletop.sheets = function () { + console.log( + "Times have changed! You'll want to use var tabletop = Tabletop.init(...); tabletop.sheets(...); instead of Tabletop.sheets(...)" + ); }; Tabletop.prototype = { - - fetch: function(callback) { - if(typeof(callback) !== "undefined") { + fetch: function (callback) { + if (typeof callback !== "undefined") { this.callback = callback; } this.requestData(this.base_json_path, this.loadSheets); @@ -149,7 +151,7 @@ In browser it will use JSON-P, in node it will use request() */ - requestData: function(path, callback) { + requestData: function (path, callback) { if (inNodeJS) { this.serverSideFetch(path, callback); } else { @@ -167,12 +169,12 @@ /* Use Cross-Origin XMLHttpRequest to get the data in browsers that support it. */ - xhrFetch: function(path, callback) { + xhrFetch: function (path, callback) { //support IE8's separate cross-domain object var xhr = inLegacyIE ? new XDomainRequest() : new XMLHttpRequest(); xhr.open("GET", this.endpoint + path); var self = this; - xhr.onload = function() { + xhr.onload = function () { try { var json = JSON.parse(xhr.responseText); } catch (e) { @@ -186,40 +188,40 @@ /* Insert the URL into the page as a script tag. Once it's loaded the spreadsheet data it triggers the callback. This helps you avoid cross-domain errors - http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/samples/spreadsheet_sample.html + https://code.google.com/apis/gdata/samples/spreadsheet_sample.html Let's be plain-Jane and not use jQuery or anything. */ - injectScript: function(path, callback) { - var script = document.createElement('script'); + injectScript: function (path, callback) { + var script = document.createElement("script"); var callbackName; - if(this.singleton) { - if(callback === this.loadSheets) { - callbackName = 'Tabletop.singleton.loadSheets'; + if (this.singleton) { + if (callback === this.loadSheets) { + callbackName = "Tabletop.singleton.loadSheets"; } else if (callback === this.loadSheet) { - callbackName = 'Tabletop.singleton.loadSheet'; + callbackName = "Tabletop.singleton.loadSheet"; } } else { var self = this; - callbackName = 'tt' + (+new Date()) + (Math.floor(Math.random()*100000)); + callbackName = "tt" + +new Date() + Math.floor(Math.random() * 100000); // Create a temp callback which will get removed once it has executed, // this allows multiple instances of Tabletop to coexist. - Tabletop.callbacks[ callbackName ] = function () { - var args = Array.prototype.slice.call( arguments, 0 ); + Tabletop.callbacks[callbackName] = function () { + var args = Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments, 0); callback.apply(self, args); script.parentNode.removeChild(script); delete Tabletop.callbacks[callbackName]; }; - callbackName = 'Tabletop.callbacks.' + callbackName; + callbackName = "Tabletop.callbacks." + callbackName; } var url = path + "&callback=" + callbackName; - if(this.simple_url) { + if (this.simple_url) { // We've gone down a rabbit hole of passing injectScript the path, so let's // just pull the sheet_id out of the path like the least efficient worker bees - if(path.indexOf("/list/") !== -1) { + if (path.indexOf("/list/") !== -1) { script.src = this.endpoint + "/" + this.key + "-" + path.split("/")[4]; } else { script.src = this.endpoint + "/" + this.key; @@ -232,15 +234,15 @@ script.src = this.parameterize + encodeURIComponent(script.src); } - document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0].parentNode.appendChild(script); + document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0].parentNode.appendChild(script); }, /* This will only run if tabletop is being run in node.js */ - serverSideFetch: function(path, callback) { - var self = this - request({url: this.endpoint + path, json: true}, function(err, resp, body) { + serverSideFetch: function (path, callback) { + var self = this; + request({ url: this.endpoint + path, json: true }, function (err, resp, body) { if (err) { return console.error(err); } @@ -253,11 +255,11 @@ If { wanted: ["Sheet1"] } has been specified, only Sheet1 is imported Pulls all sheets if none are specified */ - isWanted: function(sheetName) { - if(this.wanted.length === 0) { + isWanted: function (sheetName) { + if (this.wanted.length === 0) { return true; } else { - return (ttIndexOf(this.wanted, sheetName) !== -1); + return ttIndexOf(this.wanted, sheetName) !== -1; } }, @@ -266,17 +268,19 @@ if simpleSheet === true, then don't return an array of Tabletop.this.models, only return the first one's elements */ - data: function() { + data: function () { // If the instance is being queried before the data's been fetched // then return undefined. - if(this.model_names.length === 0) { + if (this.model_names.length === 0) { return undefined; } - if(this.simpleSheet) { - if(this.model_names.length > 1 && this.debug) { - this.log("WARNING You have more than one sheet but are using simple sheet mode! Don't blame me when something goes wrong."); + if (this.simpleSheet) { + if (this.model_names.length > 1 && this.debug) { + this.log( + "WARNING You have more than one sheet but are using simple sheet mode! Don't blame me when something goes wrong." + ); } - return this.models[ this.model_names[0] ].all(); + return this.models[this.model_names[0]].all(); } else { return this.models; } @@ -285,8 +289,8 @@ /* Add another sheet to the wanted list */ - addWanted: function(sheet) { - if(ttIndexOf(this.wanted, sheet) === -1) { + addWanted: function (sheet) { + if (ttIndexOf(this.wanted, sheet) === -1) { this.wanted.push(sheet); } }, @@ -299,30 +303,30 @@ Used as a callback for the worksheet-based JSON */ - loadSheets: function(data) { + loadSheets: function (data) { var i, ilen; var toLoad = []; this.foundSheetNames = []; - for(i = 0, ilen = data.feed.entry.length; i < ilen ; i++) { + for (i = 0, ilen = data.feed.entry.length; i < ilen; i++) { this.foundSheetNames.push(data.feed.entry[i].title.$t); // Only pull in desired sheets to reduce loading - if( this.isWanted(data.feed.entry[i].content.$t) ) { - var linkIdx = data.feed.entry[i].link.length-1; - var sheet_id = data.feed.entry[i].link[linkIdx].href.split('/').pop(); - var json_path = "/feeds/list/" + this.key + "/" + sheet_id + "/public/values?alt=" + if (this.isWanted(data.feed.entry[i].content.$t)) { + var linkIdx = data.feed.entry[i].link.length - 1; + var sheet_id = data.feed.entry[i].link[linkIdx].href.split("/").pop(); + var json_path = "/feeds/list/" + this.key + "/" + sheet_id + "/public/values?alt="; if (inNodeJS || supportsCORS) { - json_path += 'json'; + json_path += "json"; } else { - json_path += 'json-in-script'; + json_path += "json-in-script"; } - if(this.query) { + if (this.query) { json_path += "&sq=" + this.query; } - if(this.orderby) { + if (this.orderby) { json_path += "&orderby=column:" + this.orderby.toLowerCase(); } - if(this.reverse) { + if (this.reverse) { json_path += "&reverse=true"; } toLoad.push(json_path); @@ -330,7 +334,7 @@ } this.sheetsToLoad = toLoad.length; - for(i = 0, ilen = toLoad.length; i < ilen; i++) { + for (i = 0, ilen = toLoad.length; i < ilen; i++) { this.requestData(toLoad[i], this.loadSheet); } }, @@ -340,15 +344,15 @@ .sheets() gets you all of the sheets .sheets('Sheet1') gets you the sheet named Sheet1 */ - sheets: function(sheetName) { - if(typeof sheetName === "undefined") { + sheets: function (sheetName) { + if (typeof sheetName === "undefined") { return this.models; } else { - if(typeof(this.models[ sheetName ]) === "undefined") { + if (typeof this.models[sheetName] === "undefined") { // alert( "Can't find " + sheetName ); return; } else { - return this.models[ sheetName ]; + return this.models[sheetName]; } } }, @@ -358,18 +362,19 @@ Used as a callback for the list-based JSON */ - loadSheet: function(data) { - var model = new Tabletop.Model( { data: data, - parseNumbers: this.parseNumbers, - postProcess: this.postProcess, - tabletop: this } ); - this.models[ model.name ] = model; - if(ttIndexOf(this.model_names, model.name) === -1) { + loadSheet: function (data) { + var model = new Tabletop.Model({ + data: data, + parseNumbers: this.parseNumbers, + postProcess: this.postProcess, + tabletop: this, + }); + this.models[model.name] = model; + if (ttIndexOf(this.model_names, model.name) === -1) { this.model_names.push(model.name); } this.sheetsToLoad--; - if(this.sheetsToLoad === 0) - this.doCallback(); + if (this.sheetsToLoad === 0) this.doCallback(); }, /* @@ -377,20 +382,19 @@ only request certain pieces of data (i.e. simpleSheet mode) Tests this.sheetsToLoad just in case a race condition happens to show up */ - doCallback: function() { - if(this.sheetsToLoad === 0) { + doCallback: function () { + if (this.sheetsToLoad === 0) { this.callback.apply(this.callbackContext || this, [this.data(), this]); } }, - log: function(msg) { - if(this.debug) { - if(typeof console !== "undefined" && typeof console.log !== "undefined") { + log: function (msg) { + if (this.debug) { + if (typeof console !== "undefined" && typeof console.log !== "undefined") { Function.prototype.apply.apply(console.log, [console, arguments]); } } - } - + }, }; /* @@ -399,76 +403,75 @@ Options should be in the format { data: XXX }, with XXX being the list-based worksheet */ - Tabletop.Model = function(options) { + Tabletop.Model = function (options) { var i, j, ilen, jlen; this.column_names = []; this.name = options.data.feed.title.$t; this.elements = []; this.raw = options.data; // A copy of the sheet's raw data, for accessing minutiae - if(typeof(options.data.feed.entry) === 'undefined') { - options.tabletop.log("Missing data for " + this.name + ", make sure you didn't forget column headers"); + if (typeof options.data.feed.entry === "undefined") { + options.tabletop.log( + "Missing data for " + this.name + ", make sure you didn't forget column headers" + ); this.elements = []; return; } - for(var key in options.data.feed.entry[0]){ - if(/^gsx/.test(key)) - this.column_names.push( key.replace("gsx$","") ); + for (var key in options.data.feed.entry[0]) { + if (/^gsx/.test(key)) this.column_names.push(key.replace("gsx$", "")); } - for(i = 0, ilen = options.data.feed.entry.length ; i < ilen; i++) { + for (i = 0, ilen = options.data.feed.entry.length; i < ilen; i++) { var source = options.data.feed.entry[i]; var element = {}; - for(var j = 0, jlen = this.column_names.length; j < jlen ; j++) { - var cell = source[ "gsx$" + this.column_names[j] ]; - if (typeof(cell) !== 'undefined') { - if(options.parseNumbers && cell.$t !== '' && !isNaN(cell.$t)) - element[ this.column_names[j] ] = +cell.$t; - else - element[ this.column_names[j] ] = cell.$t; + for (var j = 0, jlen = this.column_names.length; j < jlen; j++) { + var cell = source["gsx$" + this.column_names[j]]; + if (typeof cell !== "undefined") { + if (options.parseNumbers && cell.$t !== "" && !isNaN(cell.$t)) + element[this.column_names[j]] = +cell.$t; + else element[this.column_names[j]] = cell.$t; } else { - element[ this.column_names[j] ] = ''; + element[this.column_names[j]] = ""; } } - if(element.rowNumber === undefined) - element.rowNumber = i + 1; - if( options.postProcess ) - options.postProcess(element); + if (element.rowNumber === undefined) element.rowNumber = i + 1; + if (options.postProcess) options.postProcess(element); this.elements.push(element); } - }; Tabletop.Model.prototype = { /* Returns all of the elements (rows) of the worksheet as objects */ - all: function() { + all: function () { return this.elements; }, /* Return the elements as an array of arrays, instead of an array of objects */ - toArray: function() { + toArray: function () { var array = [], - i, j, ilen, jlen; - for(i = 0, ilen = this.elements.length; i < ilen; i++) { + i, + j, + ilen, + jlen; + for (i = 0, ilen = this.elements.length; i < ilen; i++) { var row = []; - for(j = 0, jlen = this.column_names.length; j < jlen ; j++) { - row.push( this.elements[i][ this.column_names[j] ] ); + for (j = 0, jlen = this.column_names.length; j < jlen; j++) { + row.push(this.elements[i][this.column_names[j]]); } array.push(row); } return array; - } + }, }; - if(inNodeJS) { + if (inNodeJS) { module.exports = Tabletop; } else { global.Tabletop = Tabletop; } - })(this); diff --git a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/oldshit/homepage.html b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/oldshit/homepage.html index 3a6ff53a..c0ed55be 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/oldshit/homepage.html +++ b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/oldshit/homepage.html @@ -1,326 +1,389 @@ - - - - - - -
-
-
- + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +
+
+ +

June 25 & 26 in Minneapolis

+

+ A hands-on event for developers, designers, and data reporters in and around newsrooms. +

+
-
- -

June 25 & 26 in Minneapolis

-

A hands-on event for developers, designers, and data reporters in and around newsrooms.

- +
+
+
+
+

+ Our annually sold-out show returns! Join 650 content strategy enthusiasts—from newbies + to old-timers—for three days of awesome workshops and sessions. More speakers, more + networking, more everything. And as they say … either you love Minneapolis, or you've + never been here. See you in May! +

+
    +
  • + +

    Location

    +

    + Here is a sentence about the location section of the site. It's pretty damn exciting + if there.s two. +

  • + +

    Registration

    +

    + Here is a sentence about the regisration section of the site. What if I wrote a + second sentence too. +

  • + +

    Sessions

    +

    + Here is the sessions sentence. It also has a second sentence. Go figure! +

    +
    • +

    + +

    + +
+
-
-
-
-
-

Our annually sold-out show returns! Join 650 content strategy enthusiasts—from newbies to old-timers—for three days of awesome workshops and sessions. More speakers, more networking, more everything. And as they say … either you love Minneapolis, or you've never been here. See you in May! -

    -

  • Location

    Here is a sentence about the location section of the site. It's pretty damn exciting if there.s two. -

  • Registration

    Here is a sentence about the regisration section of the site. What if I wrote a second sentence too. -

  • Sessions

    Here is the sessions sentence. It also has a second sentence. Go figure! -

-
+
+
+
+ our sponsors +
    +
  • + Mandrill by Mailchimp +
    • +
  • + Scholarship Sponsor, WordPress +
    • +
  • + Mozilla +
    • +
  • + Knight Foundation +
    • +
+
+
+
+

More SRCCON

+ +
+
+

About SRCCON

+

+ SRCCON is a conference for developers, interactive designers, and other people who + love to code in and near newsrooms. Join us in Philadelphia July 24 and 25 for two + full days of peer-to-peer sessions built around conversation and collaboration. +

+
+
+

About OpenNews

+

+ A multi-year partnership between Mozilla and the + Knight Foundation, + Knight-Mozilla OpenNews + is dedicated to creating an ecosystem to help strengthen and build community around + journalism on the web. More at opennews.org. +

-
-
-
- our sponsors -
    -
  • Mandrill by Mailchimp
    • -
  • Scholarship Sponsor, WordPress
    • -
  • Mozilla -
  • Knight Foundation
- -
-
-
-
-

More SRCCON

- - -
-
-

About SRCCON

-

SRCCON is a conference for developers, interactive designers, and other people who love to code in and near newsrooms. Join us in Philadelphia July 24 and 25 for two full days of peer-to-peer sessions built around conversation and collaboration.

-
-

About OpenNews

-

A multi-year partnership between Mozilla and the Knight Foundation, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews is dedicated to creating an ecosystem to help strengthen and build community around journalism on the web. More at opennews.org. - -

-
-
- - +
+ + + diff --git a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/oldshit/test_index.html b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/oldshit/test_index.html index 97bbeabf..2c01cbc0 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/oldshit/test_index.html +++ b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/oldshit/test_index.html @@ -1,258 +1,308 @@ - - - - - - -
-
-
- - + + + + + + +
+
+
+ + +
+
+

Sessions

+

+ SRCCON sessions are interactive, participatory, and conversational. Bring your + conundrums, successes, failures, and questions, and a willingness to learn by teaching. +

+
-
-

Sessions

-

SRCCON sessions are interactive, participatory, and conversational. Bring your conundrums, successes, failures, and questions, and a willingness to learn by teaching.

+
+
+
+
+

+ Our call for proposals opens MONTH DAY, and closes MONTH DAY, and in the next few weeks, + we’ll be posting more information about what we’re looking for, the + selection process, and what it’s like to lead a session at SRCCON. We’ll + also provide information about our evening programming options, which + will range from lightning talks and skillshares to tabletop games and unstructured chill + time. +

+ +

+ You can check out last year’s schedule for a taste of the + inaugural SRCCON, and a source of inspiration for your own amazing proposal. +

+ +

+ Please note: SRCCON session leaders are If you propose a session that is + selected, you will be given a chance to buy a ticket in advance of the public sell date. +

+
-
-
-
-
- -

Our call for proposals opens MONTH DAY, and closes MONTH DAY, and in the next few weeks, we’ll be posting more information about what we’re looking for, the selection process, and what it’s like to lead a session at SRCCON. We’ll also provide information about our evening programming options, which will range from lightning talks and skillshares to tabletop games and unstructured chill time. - -

You can check out last year’s schedule for a taste of the inaugural SRCCON, and a source of inspiration for your own amazing proposal. - -

Please note: SRCCON session leaders are If you propose a session that is selected, you will be given a chance to buy a ticket in advance of the public sell date. -

-
+
+
+
+ our sponsors +
    +
  • + Mandrill by Mailchimp +
    • +
  • + Scholarship Sponsor, WordPress +
    • +
  • + Mozilla +
    • +
  • + Knight Foundation +
    • +
-
-
-
- our sponsors -
    -
  • Mandrill by Mailchimp
    • -
  • Scholarship Sponsor, WordPress
    • -
  • Mozilla -
  • Knight Foundation
- -
-
-
-
-

More SRCCON

- - -
-
-

About SRCCON

-

SRCCON is a conference for developers, interactive designers, and other people who love to code in and near newsrooms. Join us in Philadelphia July 24 and 25 for two full days of peer-to-peer sessions built around conversation and collaboration.

-
-

About OpenNews

-

A multi-year partnership between Mozilla and the Knight Foundation, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews is dedicated to creating an ecosystem to help strengthen and build community around journalism on the web. More at opennews.org. - -

-
-
- - +
+
+
+

More SRCCON

+ +
+
+

About SRCCON

+

+ SRCCON is a conference for developers, interactive designers, and other people who love + to code in and near newsrooms. Join us in Philadelphia July 24 and 25 for two full days + of peer-to-peer sessions built around conversation and collaboration. +

+
+
+

About OpenNews

+

+ A multi-year partnership between Mozilla and the + Knight Foundation, + Knight-Mozilla OpenNews is dedicated to creating + an ecosystem to help strengthen and build community around journalism on the web. More + at opennews.org. +

+
+
+ + + diff --git a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/register/cancellation/index.md b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/register/cancellation/index.md index 3a3c2e61..a88b584e 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/register/cancellation/index.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/register/cancellation/index.md @@ -3,6 +3,7 @@ layout: post title: SRCCON Transfer/Cancellation Policy logo: srccon_logo.png --- +

SRCCON is a small event and we’re tuning the program to the exact attendee list we have, so please let us know as soon as you can if you’re not coming, because it may mean we’ll need to tweak our program a little. If you find that you’ll be unable to attend after all, you have two options: transfer your ticket to someone else (which is the quickest option), or get a refund (also fine but may take a little longer).

###Transfer Your Ticket diff --git a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/register/confirmation/index.md b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/register/confirmation/index.md index 18c0ab9d..c1e09a9f 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/register/confirmation/index.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/register/confirmation/index.md @@ -3,6 +3,7 @@ layout: post title: Thanks for registering for SRCCON logo: srccon_logo.png --- +

WOO! You are registered for SRCCON and should have a confirmation in your inbox. Next, you may want to check our hotel and travel recommendations and local logistics info or look over the sessions selected for SRCCON.

If you don’t see the email in the next few minutes, please check your spam folder and double-check your Eventbrite email address settings. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/sessions/index.md b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/sessions/index.md index 17fb5e99..436d3fc9 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2014oldz/sessions/index.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2014oldz/sessions/index.md @@ -16,12 +16,11 @@ logo: srcconwhite.png
- - + + diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/sessions_about.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/sessions_about.md index fbbcd86d..492442cc 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/sessions_about.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/sessions_about.md @@ -1,7 +1,7 @@ --- layout: 2015_layout title: Sessions -subtitle: SRCCON is built around two days of peer-led conversations, hands-on workshops, and skillshares. +subtitle: SRCCON is built around two days of peer-led conversations, hands-on workshops, and skillshares. section: sessions sub-section: interior background: postits @@ -11,16 +11,19 @@ permalink: /sessions/about/index.html Our proposal period has now closed, and we have accepted [this amazing list of proposed sessions](/sessions) to build the 2015 program. ## How a Pitch Becomes a Session + Session proposals closed on April 10. We spent a couple weeks reviewing proposals within the SRCCON team, with additional reviews and perspectives from across our community, in order to assemble a final list of sessions. As we did last year, we made it a priority to build a balanced program that reflects the makeup of our communities, and we actively welcomed session proposals from members of communities underrepresented in journalism and technology, and from non-coastal and small-market news organizations. ## What Makes a Great Session? + Successful sessions often emerge from a single question or problem—if you’ve been struggling with just about any aspect of your work, you can bet other folks have dealt with it, too. Last year's sessions dealt with topics including newsroom cross-training, CMSes, skillshares on specific libraries and tools, interactive design specifics, diversity in news technology teams, security, the business of news startups, and many different approaches to data-wrangling. To give you a taste, here's [a small selection of great sessions from 2014](#examples). ## What Does a Session Facilitator Do? + Session facilitators aren't expected to be the experts in the room—they design and guide sessions, share what they know, and learn from their peers. You won’t need slides, just the willingness to facilitate an engaged conversation or lead a workshop or skillshare. (Or pitch another session format entirely!) If your session is accepted, we'll provide as much help as you'd like figuring out what kind of session format will work best for your topic—we can even match you up with a co-facilitator if you're pitching solo and want some support. @@ -28,14 +31,15 @@ If your session is accepted, we'll provide as much help as you'd like figuring o **Please note:** Because SRCCON is a collaborative, peer-to-peer event, rather than a series of prepared conference talks, all participants must buy a ticket—this approach also helps us keep our ticket prices low and allows us to [offer scholarships](/scholarships) to those who need help with travel and lodging expenses. The facilitators of all accepted sessions will be given an opportunity to purchase a ticket before the public on-sale date. SRCCON tickets go on public sale April 29, and we expect them to sell out very quickly. ## Not Just Sessions… + In addition to the daytime sessions that form the core of SRCCON, we'll also host a series of informal evening talks on non-work topics, open up space for small-group collaboration, and run a hands-on tea- and coffee-hacking station. Stay tuned for more information about additional program items and related events in Minneapolis-St. Paul.
## Example Sessions from SRCCON 2014 -* [Building exoskeletons for reporters](http://2014.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-22), a wide-ranging code session -* [Wrangling live data the easy way with Streamtools](http://2014.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-25), a hands-on technical skillshare -* [How to diversify the pipeline of journo-coders](http://2014.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-26), a culture-focused conversational session -* [Art directing posts, sustainably](http://2014.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-17), a design-centric conversational session -* [Building smart newsroom tools: how a culture can make or break your internal tools](http://2014.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-24), a hands-on workshop with game elements +- [Building exoskeletons for reporters](https://2014.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-22), a wide-ranging code session +- [Wrangling live data the easy way with Streamtools](https://2014.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-25), a hands-on technical skillshare +- [How to diversify the pipeline of journo-coders](https://2014.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-26), a culture-focused conversational session +- [Art directing posts, sustainably](https://2014.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-17), a design-centric conversational session +- [Building smart newsroom tools: how a culture can make or break your internal tools](https://2014.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-24), a hands-on workshop with game elements diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/sponsor_page.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/sponsor_page.md index 24905c81..c1990b89 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/sponsor_page.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/sponsor_page.md @@ -7,56 +7,56 @@ sub-section: interior background: coffee permalink: /sponsors/2015/index.html --- +
    -
  • +

  • SRCCON Lead Sponsor

    -

    Mandrill is a scalable and affordable email infrastructure service, with all the marketing-friendly analytics tools you’ve come to expect from MailChimp. Apps can use Mandrill to send automated transactional email, like password reminders and shopping-cart receipts. Mandrill offers advanced tracking, easy-to-understand reports, and hundreds of template options. And it’s built on MailChimp’s proven email platform, which sends more than ten billion emails a month. Developers love the quick setup, webhooks support, and high delivery rates. Marketers love the beautiful interface, template options, tagging, and custom reports. And both love that you can send 12,000 emails per month absolutely free.

    • +

    Mandrill is a scalable and affordable email infrastructure service, with all the marketing-friendly analytics tools you’ve come to expect from MailChimp. Apps can use Mandrill to send automated transactional email, like password reminders and shopping-cart receipts. Mandrill offers advanced tracking, easy-to-understand reports, and hundreds of template options. And it’s built on MailChimp’s proven email platform, which sends more than ten billion emails a month. Developers love the quick setup, webhooks support, and high delivery rates. Marketers love the beautiful interface, template options, tagging, and custom reports. And both love that you can send 12,000 emails per month absolutely free.

  • SRCCON Scholarship Sponsor

    We know WordPress. WordPress.com VIP provides hosting and support for some of the biggest sites on the web, including Time.com, TechCrunch.com, QZ.com and ForeignPolicy.com. VIP provides rock-solid cloud hosting on the WordPress.com server grid, serving billions of pages every month.

    • -
  • +

  • SRCCON Transcript Sponsor

    -

    Slack is an easy to use messaging app for teams. All your communication in one place, integrating with the tools and services you use every day. It’s teamwork, but simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.

    • +

    Slack is an easy to use messaging app for teams. All your communication in one place, integrating with the tools and services you use every day. It’s teamwork, but simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.

    -
  • +

  • SRCCON Coffee & Tea Hack Station Sponsor

-

Event Sponsors

    • -
    • +

Local Media Sponsors

    -
    • +

Supporting Sponsors

    -
  • -
    • -
    • -
    • -
    • +
  • +
    • +
    • +
    • +

OpenNews Project Partners

    -
  • Mozilla
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  • Knight Foundation
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  • Mozilla
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  • Knight Foundation

Interested in sponsoring SRCCON?
View our rates and Get in touch today! diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/sponsors.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/sponsors.md index 720295e6..3e6232eb 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/sponsors.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/sponsors.md @@ -7,7 +7,8 @@ sub-section: interior background: coffee permalink: /sponsors/index.html --- -SRCCON is a conference centered on the challenges that news technology and data teams encounter every day. It attracts the best newsroom developers for two days of thinking, working, and building together. + +SRCCON is a conference centered on the challenges that news technology and data teams encounter every day. It attracts the best newsroom developers for two days of thinking, working, and building together. Our sponsors help us make SRCCON both special and accessible by keeping our ticket price well below cost, getting people to the event, and bringing in the special touches that make SRCCON… SRCCON. @@ -17,63 +18,63 @@ We offer a number of different levels of sponsorship in order to accomodate a va As Lead Sponsor of SRCCON you recieve: -* 3 free tickets to SRCCON. -* Logo on SRCCON website (in partners section) visible on every page. -* Logo and description of product/company on sponsorship page of SRCCON website (1 paragraph max). -* Logo on sponsorship signage at event. -* Named sponsor of Thursday Night Dinner. -* Special mention on stage during general session. -* Sponsor of official SRCCON Field Notes notebook. +- 3 free tickets to SRCCON. +- Logo on SRCCON website (in partners section) visible on every page. +- Logo and description of product/company on sponsorship page of SRCCON website (1 paragraph max). +- Logo on sponsorship signage at event. +- Named sponsor of Thursday Night Dinner. +- Special mention on stage during general session. +- Sponsor of official SRCCON Field Notes notebook. ## Accessibility Sponsors: $10k per Our Accessibility Sponsors help to make SRCCON welcoming to as many as possible. We have three Accessibility Sponsor slots available: - * Childcare - * Scholarships **<- SOLD OUT** - * Transcripts **<- SOLD OUT** +- Childcare +- Scholarships **<- SOLD OUT** +- Transcripts **<- SOLD OUT** Accessibility Sponsors recieve: -* 2 free tickets to SRCCON. -* Logo on SRCCON website (in partners section) visible on every page. -* Logo and description of product/company on sponsorship page of SRCCON website (1 paragraph max). -* Logo on page(s) that correspond with your accessibility sponsorship. -* Logo on sponsorship signage at event. -* Special mention on stage during general session. +- 2 free tickets to SRCCON. +- Logo on SRCCON website (in partners section) visible on every page. +- Logo and description of product/company on sponsorship page of SRCCON website (1 paragraph max). +- Logo on page(s) that correspond with your accessibility sponsorship. +- Logo on sponsorship signage at event. +- Special mention on stage during general session. ## Coffee & Tea Hack Station Sponsor: $7500 **<- SOLD OUT** Our Coffee & Tea Hacking Stations are where SRCCON attendees come together at breaks to make each other hot beverages and compare session notes. Our Coffee & Tea Hacking Station sponsor recieves: -* 1 free ticket to SRCCON. -* Recyclable coffee cups with your logo on them. -* Logo on signage at the Coffee & Tea Hacking Station. -* Logo on sponsorship page of SRCCON website. -* Logo on sponsorship signage at event. +- 1 free ticket to SRCCON. +- Recyclable coffee cups with your logo on them. +- Logo on signage at the Coffee & Tea Hacking Station. +- Logo on sponsorship page of SRCCON website. +- Logo on sponsorship signage at event. ## Event Sponsors: $3000 Becoming an event sponsor is a great way of supporting SRCCON. Event sponsors recieve: -* 1 free ticket to SRCCON. -* Logo on sponsorship page of SRCCON website. -* Logo on sponsorship signage at event. +- 1 free ticket to SRCCON. +- Logo on sponsorship page of SRCCON website. +- Logo on sponsorship signage at event. ## Local Media Sponsors: $1000 Local Media Sponsorship is open only to media companies from MPLS/St. Paul. As a local media sponsor you recieve: -* 2 free tickets to SRCCON. -* Logo on sponsorship page of SRCCON website. -* Logo on sponsorship signage at event. +- 2 free tickets to SRCCON. +- Logo on sponsorship page of SRCCON website. +- Logo on sponsorship signage at event. ## Supporting Sponsors: $1000 Want to support SRCCON on a budget? Our Supporting sponsorship level lets you help make SRCCON happen! Supporting sponsors recieve: -* 1 guaranteed ticket (purchased separately). -* Logo on sponsorship page of SRCCON website. -* Logo on sponsorship signage at event. +- 1 guaranteed ticket (purchased separately). +- Logo on sponsorship page of SRCCON website. +- Logo on sponsorship signage at event. If you would like to sponsor SRCCON with one of the above packages, or would like to talk about a custom sponsorship, please [send us a note](mailto:dan@mozillafoundation.org). diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/thanks.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/thanks.md index 28cc1606..41c131f9 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/thanks.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/thanks.md @@ -7,6 +7,7 @@ sub-section: interior background: postits permalink: /sessions/thanks/index.html --- +

Thank you for submitting a proposal to SRCCON!

We'll notify all proposers about the status of their sessions by Friday, April 24, and we expect to publish our list of accepted sessions on Tuesday, April 28. If you like, you can [submit another proposal](/sessions/pitch). If you’re all set, please consider inviting friends and colleagues to submit a proposal and join us in Minneapolis July 25-26. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/tickets.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/tickets.md index 9ba5d450..a0f49aed 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/tickets.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/tickets.md @@ -5,17 +5,20 @@ subtitle: SRCCON tickets are sold out. section: registration sub-section: interior background: tickets -byline: Alyson Hurt +byline: Alyson Hurt bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/alykat/5848722/ permalink: /tickets/index.html --- + SRCCON tickets are now sold out. Thank you to everyone who registered—we can't wait to see you in Minneapolis! And if you can't make it to the event this year, please stay tuned for information on remote participation opportunities. ## Cancellation and Transfers + SRCCON is a small event and we’re tuning the program to the exact attendee list we have, so please let us know as soon as you can if you’re not coming, because it may mean we’ll need to tweak our program a little. If you find that you’ll be unable to attend after all, you have two options: transfer your ticket to someone else (which is the quickest option), or get a refund (also fine but may take a little longer). -* You can transfer your SRCCON registration to someone else right up until June 24 with no charges or penalties. To switch the name on your ticket, just go back into your registration on Eventbrite and change the registration information to the new person. Or you can email the person’s name and contact information to [srccon@opennews.org](mailto:srccon@opennews.org), and we’ll do the rest. (We can also help you find someone who needs a ticket—email us at [srccon@opennews.org](mailto:srccon@opennews.org) and we’ll get you fixed up.) -* If you need to cancel, please contact us at [srccon@opennews.org](mailto:srccon@opennews.org) and let us know. You can cancel with no penalty up until two weeks before the conference begins (June 11). After June 11, we can’t refund your ticket, but you can still transfer it to someone else up until June 24, the day before SRCCON begins. +- You can transfer your SRCCON registration to someone else right up until June 24 with no charges or penalties. To switch the name on your ticket, just go back into your registration on Eventbrite and change the registration information to the new person. Or you can email the person’s name and contact information to [srccon@opennews.org](mailto:srccon@opennews.org), and we’ll do the rest. (We can also help you find someone who needs a ticket—email us at [srccon@opennews.org](mailto:srccon@opennews.org) and we’ll get you fixed up.) +- If you need to cancel, please contact us at [srccon@opennews.org](mailto:srccon@opennews.org) and let us know. You can cancel with no penalty up until two weeks before the conference begins (June 11). After June 11, we can’t refund your ticket, but you can still transfer it to someone else up until June 24, the day before SRCCON begins. ## Including the Community + We are continuing to work to make SRCCON accessible to people in smaller and non-coastal newsrooms, and to members of communities underrepresented in journalism and technology. We have a very small pool of reserved tickets held back for this purpose. If you know someone who should be at SRCCON and might not otherwise be able to attend, please [send them our way](mailto:srccon@opennews.org). diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015AdViewability.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015AdViewability.md index 70fffdac..0c380290 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015AdViewability.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015AdViewability.md @@ -1,269 +1,265 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/adviewability/index.html ---- - -# Ad Viewability is Coming and You Should Care - -### Session Facilitator(s): Josh Kadis - -### Day & Time: Friday, 11am-noon - -### Room: Ski-U-Mah - - - -All right, hi, everyone. - -AUDIENCE MEMBER: Morning. - -Morning. So we're going to talk about ads. I know everyone is really excited about ads. Yuri. - -[laughter] - -So before we start talking about viewability specifically, just wanted to kind of take the temperature, like who works for a site that has ads? Everybody, presumably? - -And then who among you guys works with ads and ad servers? - -OK, so do you feel like we're pretty comfortable with like knowing where ads come from, and how they get counted and all that? - -AUDIENCE MEMBER: When a mommy and daddy ... - -[laughter] - -OK, cool, and of the folks who are here, how many of you work on like what—in most organizations would be considered product versus how many work on sort of content? Like individual stories? - - -AUDIENCE MEMBER: Both, both. - -Both? Both? Everyone? Content? OK. And how—and I guess, you know, before I really get started, because you know, this is more of a discussion with you guys, how have the sites that you work on approached viewability? Does anyone have a—any back story to it? - -We're approaching it kind of crudely and we don't like the way it works, but essentially a side rail, like our primary ad on a particular page has as the page controls stay in view and eventually controls out, so ... - -OK, so that sort of in a nutshell is the, you know, the—that's the change with viewability, right? Under sort of the old way of measuring ads, essentially, you know, you—your page makes a request at the FP or whatever ad server you use, comes back with some HTML string, puts that in a cross-domain frame and within that there's a little pixel that's fired and as soon as your page makes that http with request with that pixel, that's when the ad gets paid. Without some sticky elements and things like that, the challenge is when to measure when the ad actually comes in the page, and essentially at some point in the future, that's when the advertiser will pay for it. For now, for most publishers, viewability is more of a sort of like a—more of a selling point, you know, sites that have high—that can show that they have high viewability can command higher rates, even if they're—the actual basis that those rates are charged on is the same sort of http request for that pixel. So of folks who work on the product side of sites that are sort of moving into this sort of new world of viewability, have you—or what are some tools that you guys are used to try to measure that? Have you tried anything on your own, or have you relied on vendors? - - Chartbeat has a limited sort of how far people are scrolling down. - -Chartbeat. - -Google. GTM, Analytics. - -So is that something that you—that you guys built yourselves or -- - -No, Google tag imager is a nice awesome new thing that, yeah. - -Yeah. - -It tracks—it's rad. Not only does it do that, it also takes all of your—all of your Analytics and puts it in one column so rather than doing cols and hold being your page up, just one call to Google loads all that up and fires that up for you. - -So we use Google ads so it integrates perfectly with that. - -So it seems like—well, you know, folks are familiar with how ads work, so I'm going to skip some of this stuff. But the big challenge with measuring this stuff and actually I should ask you: What method does it use to measure viewability? - -It tracks the entire page, I don't know. They have some—I just trust Google. - -All right. So if you can imagine, you know, sort of the ad sales team coming to you and saying, you know, we would like you to come up with a method for measuring when ads come into view on the page, does anyone have an idea like how you would go about doing that? - -What do you think? - -Like Google events tracking. - -OK. - -So I just have some event when the ad is actually viewed. Because the other thing that's on my mind is an even bigger problem that people don't know how to address so I ran vomit some test test experiment on my site and was really horrified with the number I came up with the number of users who use ad blockers. And if I wanted to track, that's how I'd think about going about. - -OK. we use free wheel, though, which is so far has been a total cluge to try to use it, and I guess there's other free Wheeler users in the room and if there was any system I wanted to build I'd build it independent of that. - -Yeah, and sort the basic premise of measuring viewability is there are two ways to doit. the first it sounds like it what you guys might have experimented with. Which is what the people who come up with names for this stuff call page geometry, which is basically a script that runs in the actual page of the site that you're looking at, not within the ad that, you know, tracks the position of the i frame containing the ad relative to the view port. The reason that you would have to do any of this stuff is because, you know, the resides in an I frame that has limited access to information about the page that it's in, so it can't tell where it is relative to the view port on its own. The one way of getting around that is that the page just sort of keeps track of it. Like, if you were an advertiser, though, can you think of any reasons why this might be not a great solution for you? - -Because you can crunch the numbers? - -Well, you can do that with anything, but sure. - -It could be at the bottom of your page and you never actually get your eyes down there, even though it's in the window,—also nonresponsive sites are going to have fricking nightmare with page geometry. - -Mm-hm. - -Yeah, and you know, the other thing, too, is like if you're buying ads through an ad network or an exchange and you don't know necessarily what sites they're going out to, you need to be able to just within your ad, to measure your own viewability, because you might not be aware of like—you might not even know what publishers are running the ad, where it is out on the internet. - -Also there's ten popups on top of it, so if it's in the pay geometry you can't see it because they want you to sign up for their fucking pay wall. And you close that out and you get the Google forms to fill out so you can read the rest of the article and you might see that at some point and download our mobile app. - -Sign up for our—like us on Facebook, keeps popping up. - -And are there any other -- - -[laughter] - -So if this sort of idea of page geometry is problematic for those reasons, can you guys think of any other reasons why—or any other methods that you could use to detect when the ad becomes visible in the view port of the browser window? - -You can load it on viewability, actually lazy-load it in and fire the ad call then. - -You can do that. But again, I think that would—for people whose ads just go out over the internet, then you're sort of stuck in the same problem potentially. The other way that different vendors approach it is this idea of browser optimization which is this like totally nondescriptive way that it's described, but it basically is listening for painting events on DOM elements inside the i frame, so that way, the page that's in the—the page that represents the ad, it doesn't need to know anything about the page where that ad frame is embedded. In newer browsers—and it's surprisingly widely supported, probably because advertisers are interested in it. - -A DOM element can listen for when it actually is painted on the screen, so that's not going to happen under normal circumstances under it's visible. - -Yeah, yeah, and so that way, you don't need—like the ad doesn't need to communicate at all with the page where it's sitting. It can sort of detect solely by listening for when it's painted on the screen, whether it's in view or not. - -The problem with that, I think it can end up being a little less reliable because one, I mean the browser support is limited, and also, like once—you know, for sort of newer sites that are coming in, once you start using more server-side browsers and all kinds of stuff like that, it's kind of unclear how that's going to be supported. Then there's, you know, the ability to, like, roll your own, which it sounds like Daniel you've worked on a bit, and, you know, this gives you, you know, very fine control over, you know, how you for example if you—if your page has a sticky header, how you account for that when you're trying to measure whether or not an ad might have like been scrolled underneath the header, even if the top of the i frame is still in the viewable area of the page, it might be under something. What, if anything, you know, if you—even if you build a really accurate sort of home-grown solution to measure viewability, can you guys think of any reasons why that might not fly in your organization? - -Well, it might be hard to integrate with whatever third party tool you're using to supply the ads, they might not like trust your numbers or technically speaking. - -30, 40% of all ad money is to ad networks, just robots buying and selling and throwing stuff on sites and that's a huge part of your business and if you can't integrate with that, which you're not going to be able to with a home-grown solution, that's a problem. - -Yeah, exactly. You know, the people who go out and sell the ads, like they—you know, there's rightly or wrongly, there's an expectation that a third party sort of vendor is going to be more accurate, more trustworthy, even if, you know, even if your numbers internally can indicate that, you know, that you're providing more consistent and like verifiable measurement, it's much easier to go out and sell something that's, you know, that comes from omni tour mode or a vendor that people have have heard of. - -Sorry, I came in late so I am don't know what people have already said, I've heard some murmurs of lypos being formed between these vendors and possibly some agencies because they realize there's vast differentiation and people are going to do a little bit of their own internal stuff is that my name is Joey Barber from the Washington Post, also, I forgot that. So we're testing like a bunch of stuff at the same time to see what the variance is, because an ad agency isn't going to trust your home-grown numbers, so like we're working with with a couple different vendors and our own homegrown solution to present all of it so I think we'll do that until there is a consistency out there. - -Yeah, so that for one, I—you reminded me that I totally forgot to mention, hi, I'm Josh Kadis, I work for alleyly interactive, we're a digital agency based in New York City. We design and build websites for publishers, so we work with like New York most, CNN, various properties like that, you know, so we have, you know, across our agency we can sort of see how different publishers are tackling these issues. And I think everyone is struggling with exactly the problem you described, Joey, so when you're looking at all of these different vendors and your own home-grown solution side by side, what are some of the things you're observing? Do any stand out for you? - -One thing I can say off the bat is any RFP for viewability right now is complete crap. Like we've gotten RFPs I'm not going to name the ad agencies with like 100% viewability and we're like that's not going to happen and then we've gotten some for 80% viewability and we're like, maybe, but probably not and that's still all over the place. That's what we're seeing in the market, anyway. Internally we're actually, we're doing pretty well in terms of our own viewability, and mode also represents that, but like we've still got a lot of experiments to run. And not going like 100 percent viewable across our digital products, like makes it so that it almost has to be like on demand and switch things around and that's just like a nightmare, so we don't want to do any of that until we know that it actually worked, so you know, it's a long-long-running test. - -You can't even get 100 percent viewability for the content. I wrote a one-sentence medium post and I had 80 percent viewability and it's not that hard, folks, you can just load the page and the sentence is there. - -Yeah, I think that the, you know, the goal that the IAB is sort of setting out in its like grand vision for viewability is like 80%, I think, and you know, for most sites that's like—that's kind of terrifying. Where, you know, you have a lot of sites where, you know, if that shift happened today, there would be like 50% maybe, maybe lower. So this is just a, you know, for reference, for most ads, when we're talking about viewability, we're talking about 50% of the pixels being in view for a second. For larger ads that drops, and for video the duration goes from a second to two seconds. Which doesn't sound like a lot, but you think about how slow ads are, and they're really slow, that it poses some really big design considerations, right? And that's, you know, you know, in had part like, you know, the reason that sites redesign is just because that's what you do. But viewability is, you know, a very big driver of a lot of their, you know, the design efforts, say, that we work on, I'm sure in the design departments where you all work, it's something that you know people are really grappling with, so if you were, you know, if you were tasked with a redesign right now, and you know, word comes down from on high like we need to hit 80% viewability, what are some of the things that you would look at? - -The fold. - -The fold. Yeah, the fold is back. - -But even within that you know, like it's very possible for the ad to load so slowly that you could start scrolling down the page and an ad that's like—it's like the highest thing on the page, the very top of the design, might not get counted as ever having been in view, so I've heard some rumors that—and you know, I'm not going to name any names, about sites that have actually gone through like major refactoring, sped up load times in a very admirable way, and then had to like throttle it a little bit. Which is, you know, kind of shitty to think about, but when you think about how slow ads load, it makes sense, right? And then like you were saying, I'm sorry, I didn't get your name. - -Jesse. - -Jesse, hi. Yeah, so sticky page elements, you're seeing kind of more and more, and that's another, you know, the like very obvious kind of sign that people are thinking about viewability, you know, sticky ads in the header, sticky side bars, that's just to make sure that, you know, that the ad—that the container for the ad stays in the page long enough for the slow ad to load and finally get counted. - -So, you know, so one question that I have for you all is like in the design process, if you're working on, you know, like a major interactive feature that kind of sits outside the normal templating of the site, which is, you know, which is what a lot of folks at conferences like this work on, a lot of sites are—a lot of publishers are paying more attention to those no longer sort of as experiments, but as actual, you know, like a core part of how, you know, how the news is delivered and how major stories are reported. Who should be responsible for design in those cases? - - Or rather, in the design process for a standard interactive feature, whose responsibility is it to account for viewability in ads in general? How does that work for you guys? - -Everyone is responsible. - -Yeah. The ads team. - -Well, you know, I think that the—something that kind of in a lot of ways challenges like a traditional idea of sort of a, you know, separation of advertising and content, when, you know, once design becomes part of journalism and, you know, obviously design has a huge factor on, you know, viewability in ads in general, is that something that you guys have found any tension with? - -I see a couple people nodding. Maybe not you, Yuri. - -Lucky you. - -It's not harmony, you know, it's like a little Eden over there, just a little happy place. Everybody works great together. - -[laughter] - -So you sort of expressing some—having a tension there. What was that like? - -Well it's just that we're still working to get everyone on the same page when we design a new thing and to say we need somebody for sponsorships, we're nonprofit, so they're not ads, they're sponsors, very important apparently that we say that. So the design process didn't really include anybody from advertising and hasn't, even though we were digital native, never a paper product, so that's part of the tension is that people in editorial really do want that church/state separation, and that prevents anyone from advertising having a voice early on, which then produces design conflicts. - -So then how do those get resolved? - -And ad gets stuck in at some point, usually it's, you know, not terrible, but that's kind of where we're at right now is just trying to get it to let's make it a part of the design. So actually when we're talking about stand alone news apps, we're not even to viewability yet. They're not being held to the same standard quite yet, which is probably good. - -Yeah. - -OK. So what I was thinking would be a good exercise for the, you know, the next like 15 minutes, and then we can sort of reconvene and you guys can plug in or I'll show up on my screen would be to sort of form groups, let's just say like—I don't know, per table sounds pretty good. Feel free to combine if you want. And I would say take a look, you know, among your group, just like pick a website that one of you works for and dig into the ads and try to figure out how they're measuring viewability currently, and what are—like, what are a couple, if any, like design changes that you think would help improve that? And then in, yeah, like, 15 minutes, you know, we'll come back to you guy, I'll put the websites up here, and somebody can walk through. Does that sound good? And when I say like how are ads being measured, really try to dig in if can you and essentially try to figure out what method they're using, whether when are the events firing, sort of what vendors are involved, how many vendors are involved, and then, you know, hopefully by doing that, we'll get a good kind of cross-section of all the different ways that different publishers are grappling with this. Cool? All right. - -[group activity] - - Are there any tables that do not have a computer? Oh, OK. - -[group activity] - - ... ... ... - -Hello! So at this point hopefully you all had a chance to kind of dig into some different sites and does anyone have a site that I can throw up here and you can kind of walk me through? What did you guys look at? - -Star Tribune.com. - -We also did did Star Tribune. - -We're closer. - -Apologies in advance. - -So we just spent a few moments remarking on the you know, sort of expanse of advertising available to our users, so. - -[laughter] - -A number of different techniques of -- - -That's very generous. Expansive. - -I've learned to be nice through couples counseling. - -[laughter] - -If you scroll up, we do feature some fixed, always seen adverts, the right rail fixes in position, or should, from time to time. Depending on -- - -There we go. - -So ads are fixed to the bottom of that as you scroll. - -Presumably, and I don't have much insight in sort of the pressures or the rationale behind some of that stuff, but you might be able to help speak to that, Chad? - -I mean it was a little bit less about viewability in this case rather than kind of an imbalance of the design. So the version of that came immediately preceding this had a similar kind of right rail and the promotion rail ended up too long, you ended up with a lot of gaps. We said we always wanted the right rail to be longer than the promotion rail, not have a big gap because you're going to get back to the site having unable to be seen at the bottom? - -Can you now resell that as being forward-looking for viewability. - ->> - -After this conference. - -The amazing thing is Josh said the good thing is advertising can sell this way. Advertising wasn't really there yet. - -We also have the kind of loop you see at the top that's kind of sticky to every page and that's been more of a branding play than a viewability play. So a lot of the strategies that I kind of see now, I'm the tech guy, I am not an ad guy but it still seems kind of viewability is still on the horizon and not quite here yet. - -But now you're there. - -Yeah, I me we have got two ads, right? For viewability, right? - -Was there any strategy behind having the real estate stuff in that, like, sticky fixed position, either? Because I know that's very profitable for a lot of publishers. - -There's a little bit of that. That's actually a kind of a classified module in general so it might also be automotive or classified or pet ads, things like that. But it could be bid against, we do a lot of kind of bid advertising, so we do value our own internal advertising at a certain value. We'll say, you know, there's a level of advertisement that pays too little for us to want to put on. It is actually less valuable to us than promoting something like classifieds or a content product, so we have summer camp guides, right, or you have your entertainment or apps and things like that. Those are actually put into the ad system in a way to compete with the advertising, as well. It does two things, it helps promote our kind of internal product lines, whether that be classifieds, other advertisements, you know, events we're doing in the area, but it also helps us to kind of quell the problem with having a lot of programmatic advertising which is you get to a floor and once you get to that floor, either you're serving nothing or you're serving really, really not good ads. You know, like really bad. So you know, I think that our site does a pretty decent job of not showing the really, really kind of dancing people on rooftops, you know, Obama you're going to drop your housing rate to negative 3 percent, right and you don't see those there because we've taken those actions to keep it as clean as we can. - -Do other news organizations have that way of thinking internally or -- - -Yeah, I mean I—you know, you yeah, I would assume so. - -Our membership is internal compared to ads and that's by default in our system but sometimes it just makes more sense member ship wise for us for fund raising purposes. And there are times when fundraising will actually kick out underwriting for us. - -But this is like a foreign remnant, right? - -Yeah, I mean there's certain element of we'll put a floor on not selling it too cheap so there's no requirement there. But we do have a series of different requirements, right? You can imagine the major players that go in there, and we go into a kind of auction format. Even then internally we kind of set those aside in order to control the quality of what we have there. So it's a part of the site that the advertising team takes a lot of pride in and that we kind of joke is --[inaudible] but this could be way worse, right? They have absolutely every power to make this site complete garbage if they didn't also respect and understand the value of the user experience. So all of that is really controlled by the advertising team in order to make sure that the quality of the overall product remains high. - -Can I ask a related question about this? One thing I've thought about is whether any outlets have done a good job at aggregating CPMs across units at the page level to provide an effective CPM for page field. Is that something that you guys have done any work on? - -Well, we do look at kind of the CPM as a kind of aggregate of the page view and try to balance that throughout the site. So when we went to the new site, we actually reduced kind of the overall kind of above the fold ad impressions in favor of adding some more lower. Which is totally not with the viewability question but helped us to give a little bit more air and space up there and the way that business argument was worked out was looking at the page revenue, rather than this particular unit there or this particular unit there. - -You can see that expressed if you scroll down further, you'll see the grid and content and advertising mix. - -We're sort of offered up as a means of lessening the load at the top of the page. - -So when we went through this, so you know, what's great about this is Jamie, I, Will, we just launched this site 6 weeks ago? 8 weeks ago? It's very new so a lot of the decisionmaking is still very fresh to us but all of the advertising on the site is set up on a configuration model that allows us to adjust on the fly without altering the page geometry, so the zone of where you have the idea of a zone 1, zone 2, zone 3. Zone 1 is the main content, zone 2 is that kind of fixed right rail. Zone 3 is everything that comes below. And each one of those has a set of variables which we call the X then Y advertising, so X is the first opportunity an ad will have, and Y is coming up to user after that, and so you could set an X to 3, which will say 3 content spots and you'll have your first opportunity, not a guaranteed ad, but an opportunity, and then every two, right? So two pieces of content, another opportunity two pieces of content, another opportunity until you run out of content. Which allows you to monetize the page length no matter how long it is. So it kind of takes the conversations around oh, no, no, no, just make the content what you need it to be and the page itself based on the available geometry. What makes the most sense based on the agreed-upon rules. And you can set that to home became, you know, articles of certain sections. - -Since we only have like five minutes left, I wanted -- - -No, I was just -- - -I'll catch up with you. - -I wanted to see if any other groups dug into any actual adds and looked at what, like what scripts, what vendors we're actually measuring. - -We can figure out what quartz is doing, Josh, and that didn't go too well. Reverse engineering, like we looked Javascript, nothing really there. How would you approach that? Before I was at ALLY, I was a developer at quartz, and did experiment a little bit with home-grown viewability measurement system and sort of like, you know, like we were talking about a little while ago, one of the challenges with it was that it, to the sales team, it was harder to sell. Those numbers even you know, no matter how accurate they may have been in reality, like how they were perceived in in the marketplace was very different than you know, a similar measurement coming from a third party. But the way that we approached it was, you know, with the luxury of being able to run our own Javascript in the page and inside the ad, we were able to sort of in some ways do accommodation of measuring, you know, where the ad I frame was sitting relative to the viewable area of the page, so the kind of page geometry method, but one potential drawback of that is if you're measuring, you know, the point at which this I frame, you know, let's say it was—let's say it was this thing here. This Sonos ad, it doesn't necessarily know when all of the assets inside that i frame have loaded, so that could be really slow, so you could have basically like 50 percent of an empty box in view for one second, and the way that we were able to get around that was a combination of like listening for that 50 percent in view for a second, and then sending some post messages back and forth that would sort of confirm on both sides that yes, the container is in view, and the actual assets inside the ad have loaded. It got a little complicated, but not too bad. - - So when you mention, Davis, that the sites you were using were using different vendors, what were some vendors you saw? - -Tag manager was one ... - -Cool. Anyone else have anything that they wanted to toss up on the screen before we break? Well, cool. Thank you guys so much. - -[applause] - -[session ended] - +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/adviewability/index.html +--- + +# Ad Viewability is Coming and You Should Care + +### Session Facilitator(s): Josh Kadis + +### Day & Time: Friday, 11am-noon + +### Room: Ski-U-Mah + +All right, hi, everyone. + +AUDIENCE MEMBER: Morning. + +Morning. So we're going to talk about ads. I know everyone is really excited about ads. Yuri. + +[laughter] + +So before we start talking about viewability specifically, just wanted to kind of take the temperature, like who works for a site that has ads? Everybody, presumably? + +And then who among you guys works with ads and ad servers? + +OK, so do you feel like we're pretty comfortable with like knowing where ads come from, and how they get counted and all that? + +AUDIENCE MEMBER: When a mommy and daddy ... + +[laughter] + +OK, cool, and of the folks who are here, how many of you work on like what—in most organizations would be considered product versus how many work on sort of content? Like individual stories? + +AUDIENCE MEMBER: Both, both. + +Both? Both? Everyone? Content? OK. And how—and I guess, you know, before I really get started, because you know, this is more of a discussion with you guys, how have the sites that you work on approached viewability? Does anyone have a—any back story to it? + +We're approaching it kind of crudely and we don't like the way it works, but essentially a side rail, like our primary ad on a particular page has as the page controls stay in view and eventually controls out, so ... + +OK, so that sort of in a nutshell is the, you know, the—that's the change with viewability, right? Under sort of the old way of measuring ads, essentially, you know, you—your page makes a request at the FP or whatever ad server you use, comes back with some HTML string, puts that in a cross-domain frame and within that there's a little pixel that's fired and as soon as your page makes that http with request with that pixel, that's when the ad gets paid. Without some sticky elements and things like that, the challenge is when to measure when the ad actually comes in the page, and essentially at some point in the future, that's when the advertiser will pay for it. For now, for most publishers, viewability is more of a sort of like a—more of a selling point, you know, sites that have high—that can show that they have high viewability can command higher rates, even if they're—the actual basis that those rates are charged on is the same sort of http request for that pixel. So of folks who work on the product side of sites that are sort of moving into this sort of new world of viewability, have you—or what are some tools that you guys are used to try to measure that? Have you tried anything on your own, or have you relied on vendors? + +Chartbeat has a limited sort of how far people are scrolling down. + +Chartbeat. + +Google. GTM, Analytics. + +So is that something that you—that you guys built yourselves or -- + +No, Google tag imager is a nice awesome new thing that, yeah. + +Yeah. + +It tracks—it's rad. Not only does it do that, it also takes all of your—all of your Analytics and puts it in one column so rather than doing cols and hold being your page up, just one call to Google loads all that up and fires that up for you. + +So we use Google ads so it integrates perfectly with that. + +So it seems like—well, you know, folks are familiar with how ads work, so I'm going to skip some of this stuff. But the big challenge with measuring this stuff and actually I should ask you: What method does it use to measure viewability? + +It tracks the entire page, I don't know. They have some—I just trust Google. + +All right. So if you can imagine, you know, sort of the ad sales team coming to you and saying, you know, we would like you to come up with a method for measuring when ads come into view on the page, does anyone have an idea like how you would go about doing that? + +What do you think? + +Like Google events tracking. + +OK. + +So I just have some event when the ad is actually viewed. Because the other thing that's on my mind is an even bigger problem that people don't know how to address so I ran vomit some test test experiment on my site and was really horrified with the number I came up with the number of users who use ad blockers. And if I wanted to track, that's how I'd think about going about. + +OK. we use free wheel, though, which is so far has been a total cluge to try to use it, and I guess there's other free Wheeler users in the room and if there was any system I wanted to build I'd build it independent of that. + +Yeah, and sort the basic premise of measuring viewability is there are two ways to doit. the first it sounds like it what you guys might have experimented with. Which is what the people who come up with names for this stuff call page geometry, which is basically a script that runs in the actual page of the site that you're looking at, not within the ad that, you know, tracks the position of the i frame containing the ad relative to the view port. The reason that you would have to do any of this stuff is because, you know, the resides in an I frame that has limited access to information about the page that it's in, so it can't tell where it is relative to the view port on its own. The one way of getting around that is that the page just sort of keeps track of it. Like, if you were an advertiser, though, can you think of any reasons why this might be not a great solution for you? + +Because you can crunch the numbers? + +Well, you can do that with anything, but sure. + +It could be at the bottom of your page and you never actually get your eyes down there, even though it's in the window,—also nonresponsive sites are going to have fricking nightmare with page geometry. + +Mm-hm. + +Yeah, and you know, the other thing, too, is like if you're buying ads through an ad network or an exchange and you don't know necessarily what sites they're going out to, you need to be able to just within your ad, to measure your own viewability, because you might not be aware of like—you might not even know what publishers are running the ad, where it is out on the internet. + +Also there's ten popups on top of it, so if it's in the pay geometry you can't see it because they want you to sign up for their fucking pay wall. And you close that out and you get the Google forms to fill out so you can read the rest of the article and you might see that at some point and download our mobile app. + +Sign up for our—like us on Facebook, keeps popping up. + +And are there any other -- + +[laughter] + +So if this sort of idea of page geometry is problematic for those reasons, can you guys think of any other reasons why—or any other methods that you could use to detect when the ad becomes visible in the view port of the browser window? + +You can load it on viewability, actually lazy-load it in and fire the ad call then. + +You can do that. But again, I think that would—for people whose ads just go out over the internet, then you're sort of stuck in the same problem potentially. The other way that different vendors approach it is this idea of browser optimization which is this like totally nondescriptive way that it's described, but it basically is listening for painting events on DOM elements inside the i frame, so that way, the page that's in the—the page that represents the ad, it doesn't need to know anything about the page where that ad frame is embedded. In newer browsers—and it's surprisingly widely supported, probably because advertisers are interested in it. + +A DOM element can listen for when it actually is painted on the screen, so that's not going to happen under normal circumstances under it's visible. + +Yeah, yeah, and so that way, you don't need—like the ad doesn't need to communicate at all with the page where it's sitting. It can sort of detect solely by listening for when it's painted on the screen, whether it's in view or not. + +The problem with that, I think it can end up being a little less reliable because one, I mean the browser support is limited, and also, like once—you know, for sort of newer sites that are coming in, once you start using more server-side browsers and all kinds of stuff like that, it's kind of unclear how that's going to be supported. Then there's, you know, the ability to, like, roll your own, which it sounds like Daniel you've worked on a bit, and, you know, this gives you, you know, very fine control over, you know, how you for example if you—if your page has a sticky header, how you account for that when you're trying to measure whether or not an ad might have like been scrolled underneath the header, even if the top of the i frame is still in the viewable area of the page, it might be under something. What, if anything, you know, if you—even if you build a really accurate sort of home-grown solution to measure viewability, can you guys think of any reasons why that might not fly in your organization? + +Well, it might be hard to integrate with whatever third party tool you're using to supply the ads, they might not like trust your numbers or technically speaking. + +30, 40% of all ad money is to ad networks, just robots buying and selling and throwing stuff on sites and that's a huge part of your business and if you can't integrate with that, which you're not going to be able to with a home-grown solution, that's a problem. + +Yeah, exactly. You know, the people who go out and sell the ads, like they—you know, there's rightly or wrongly, there's an expectation that a third party sort of vendor is going to be more accurate, more trustworthy, even if, you know, even if your numbers internally can indicate that, you know, that you're providing more consistent and like verifiable measurement, it's much easier to go out and sell something that's, you know, that comes from omni tour mode or a vendor that people have have heard of. + +Sorry, I came in late so I am don't know what people have already said, I've heard some murmurs of lypos being formed between these vendors and possibly some agencies because they realize there's vast differentiation and people are going to do a little bit of their own internal stuff is that my name is Joey Barber from the Washington Post, also, I forgot that. So we're testing like a bunch of stuff at the same time to see what the variance is, because an ad agency isn't going to trust your home-grown numbers, so like we're working with with a couple different vendors and our own homegrown solution to present all of it so I think we'll do that until there is a consistency out there. + +Yeah, so that for one, I—you reminded me that I totally forgot to mention, hi, I'm Josh Kadis, I work for alleyly interactive, we're a digital agency based in New York City. We design and build websites for publishers, so we work with like New York most, CNN, various properties like that, you know, so we have, you know, across our agency we can sort of see how different publishers are tackling these issues. And I think everyone is struggling with exactly the problem you described, Joey, so when you're looking at all of these different vendors and your own home-grown solution side by side, what are some of the things you're observing? Do any stand out for you? + +One thing I can say off the bat is any RFP for viewability right now is complete crap. Like we've gotten RFPs I'm not going to name the ad agencies with like 100% viewability and we're like that's not going to happen and then we've gotten some for 80% viewability and we're like, maybe, but probably not and that's still all over the place. That's what we're seeing in the market, anyway. Internally we're actually, we're doing pretty well in terms of our own viewability, and mode also represents that, but like we've still got a lot of experiments to run. And not going like 100 percent viewable across our digital products, like makes it so that it almost has to be like on demand and switch things around and that's just like a nightmare, so we don't want to do any of that until we know that it actually worked, so you know, it's a long-long-running test. + +You can't even get 100 percent viewability for the content. I wrote a one-sentence medium post and I had 80 percent viewability and it's not that hard, folks, you can just load the page and the sentence is there. + +Yeah, I think that the, you know, the goal that the IAB is sort of setting out in its like grand vision for viewability is like 80%, I think, and you know, for most sites that's like—that's kind of terrifying. Where, you know, you have a lot of sites where, you know, if that shift happened today, there would be like 50% maybe, maybe lower. So this is just a, you know, for reference, for most ads, when we're talking about viewability, we're talking about 50% of the pixels being in view for a second. For larger ads that drops, and for video the duration goes from a second to two seconds. Which doesn't sound like a lot, but you think about how slow ads are, and they're really slow, that it poses some really big design considerations, right? And that's, you know, you know, in had part like, you know, the reason that sites redesign is just because that's what you do. But viewability is, you know, a very big driver of a lot of their, you know, the design efforts, say, that we work on, I'm sure in the design departments where you all work, it's something that you know people are really grappling with, so if you were, you know, if you were tasked with a redesign right now, and you know, word comes down from on high like we need to hit 80% viewability, what are some of the things that you would look at? + +The fold. + +The fold. Yeah, the fold is back. + +But even within that you know, like it's very possible for the ad to load so slowly that you could start scrolling down the page and an ad that's like—it's like the highest thing on the page, the very top of the design, might not get counted as ever having been in view, so I've heard some rumors that—and you know, I'm not going to name any names, about sites that have actually gone through like major refactoring, sped up load times in a very admirable way, and then had to like throttle it a little bit. Which is, you know, kind of shitty to think about, but when you think about how slow ads load, it makes sense, right? And then like you were saying, I'm sorry, I didn't get your name. + +Jesse. + +Jesse, hi. Yeah, so sticky page elements, you're seeing kind of more and more, and that's another, you know, the like very obvious kind of sign that people are thinking about viewability, you know, sticky ads in the header, sticky side bars, that's just to make sure that, you know, that the ad—that the container for the ad stays in the page long enough for the slow ad to load and finally get counted. + +So, you know, so one question that I have for you all is like in the design process, if you're working on, you know, like a major interactive feature that kind of sits outside the normal templating of the site, which is, you know, which is what a lot of folks at conferences like this work on, a lot of sites are—a lot of publishers are paying more attention to those no longer sort of as experiments, but as actual, you know, like a core part of how, you know, how the news is delivered and how major stories are reported. Who should be responsible for design in those cases? + +Or rather, in the design process for a standard interactive feature, whose responsibility is it to account for viewability in ads in general? How does that work for you guys? + +Everyone is responsible. + +Yeah. The ads team. + +Well, you know, I think that the—something that kind of in a lot of ways challenges like a traditional idea of sort of a, you know, separation of advertising and content, when, you know, once design becomes part of journalism and, you know, obviously design has a huge factor on, you know, viewability in ads in general, is that something that you guys have found any tension with? + +I see a couple people nodding. Maybe not you, Yuri. + +Lucky you. + +It's not harmony, you know, it's like a little Eden over there, just a little happy place. Everybody works great together. + +[laughter] + +So you sort of expressing some—having a tension there. What was that like? + +Well it's just that we're still working to get everyone on the same page when we design a new thing and to say we need somebody for sponsorships, we're nonprofit, so they're not ads, they're sponsors, very important apparently that we say that. So the design process didn't really include anybody from advertising and hasn't, even though we were digital native, never a paper product, so that's part of the tension is that people in editorial really do want that church/state separation, and that prevents anyone from advertising having a voice early on, which then produces design conflicts. + +So then how do those get resolved? + +And ad gets stuck in at some point, usually it's, you know, not terrible, but that's kind of where we're at right now is just trying to get it to let's make it a part of the design. So actually when we're talking about stand alone news apps, we're not even to viewability yet. They're not being held to the same standard quite yet, which is probably good. + +Yeah. + +OK. So what I was thinking would be a good exercise for the, you know, the next like 15 minutes, and then we can sort of reconvene and you guys can plug in or I'll show up on my screen would be to sort of form groups, let's just say like—I don't know, per table sounds pretty good. Feel free to combine if you want. And I would say take a look, you know, among your group, just like pick a website that one of you works for and dig into the ads and try to figure out how they're measuring viewability currently, and what are—like, what are a couple, if any, like design changes that you think would help improve that? And then in, yeah, like, 15 minutes, you know, we'll come back to you guy, I'll put the websites up here, and somebody can walk through. Does that sound good? And when I say like how are ads being measured, really try to dig in if can you and essentially try to figure out what method they're using, whether when are the events firing, sort of what vendors are involved, how many vendors are involved, and then, you know, hopefully by doing that, we'll get a good kind of cross-section of all the different ways that different publishers are grappling with this. Cool? All right. + +[group activity] + +Are there any tables that do not have a computer? Oh, OK. + +[group activity] + +... ... ... + +Hello! So at this point hopefully you all had a chance to kind of dig into some different sites and does anyone have a site that I can throw up here and you can kind of walk me through? What did you guys look at? + +Star Tribune.com. + +We also did did Star Tribune. + +We're closer. + +Apologies in advance. + +So we just spent a few moments remarking on the you know, sort of expanse of advertising available to our users, so. + +[laughter] + +A number of different techniques of -- + +That's very generous. Expansive. + +I've learned to be nice through couples counseling. + +[laughter] + +If you scroll up, we do feature some fixed, always seen adverts, the right rail fixes in position, or should, from time to time. Depending on -- + +There we go. + +So ads are fixed to the bottom of that as you scroll. + +Presumably, and I don't have much insight in sort of the pressures or the rationale behind some of that stuff, but you might be able to help speak to that, Chad? + +I mean it was a little bit less about viewability in this case rather than kind of an imbalance of the design. So the version of that came immediately preceding this had a similar kind of right rail and the promotion rail ended up too long, you ended up with a lot of gaps. We said we always wanted the right rail to be longer than the promotion rail, not have a big gap because you're going to get back to the site having unable to be seen at the bottom? + +Can you now resell that as being forward-looking for viewability. + +> > + +After this conference. + +The amazing thing is Josh said the good thing is advertising can sell this way. Advertising wasn't really there yet. + +We also have the kind of loop you see at the top that's kind of sticky to every page and that's been more of a branding play than a viewability play. So a lot of the strategies that I kind of see now, I'm the tech guy, I am not an ad guy but it still seems kind of viewability is still on the horizon and not quite here yet. + +But now you're there. + +Yeah, I me we have got two ads, right? For viewability, right? + +Was there any strategy behind having the real estate stuff in that, like, sticky fixed position, either? Because I know that's very profitable for a lot of publishers. + +There's a little bit of that. That's actually a kind of a classified module in general so it might also be automotive or classified or pet ads, things like that. But it could be bid against, we do a lot of kind of bid advertising, so we do value our own internal advertising at a certain value. We'll say, you know, there's a level of advertisement that pays too little for us to want to put on. It is actually less valuable to us than promoting something like classifieds or a content product, so we have summer camp guides, right, or you have your entertainment or apps and things like that. Those are actually put into the ad system in a way to compete with the advertising, as well. It does two things, it helps promote our kind of internal product lines, whether that be classifieds, other advertisements, you know, events we're doing in the area, but it also helps us to kind of quell the problem with having a lot of programmatic advertising which is you get to a floor and once you get to that floor, either you're serving nothing or you're serving really, really not good ads. You know, like really bad. So you know, I think that our site does a pretty decent job of not showing the really, really kind of dancing people on rooftops, you know, Obama you're going to drop your housing rate to negative 3 percent, right and you don't see those there because we've taken those actions to keep it as clean as we can. + +Do other news organizations have that way of thinking internally or -- + +Yeah, I mean I—you know, you yeah, I would assume so. + +Our membership is internal compared to ads and that's by default in our system but sometimes it just makes more sense member ship wise for us for fund raising purposes. And there are times when fundraising will actually kick out underwriting for us. + +But this is like a foreign remnant, right? + +Yeah, I mean there's certain element of we'll put a floor on not selling it too cheap so there's no requirement there. But we do have a series of different requirements, right? You can imagine the major players that go in there, and we go into a kind of auction format. Even then internally we kind of set those aside in order to control the quality of what we have there. So it's a part of the site that the advertising team takes a lot of pride in and that we kind of joke is --[inaudible] but this could be way worse, right? They have absolutely every power to make this site complete garbage if they didn't also respect and understand the value of the user experience. So all of that is really controlled by the advertising team in order to make sure that the quality of the overall product remains high. + +Can I ask a related question about this? One thing I've thought about is whether any outlets have done a good job at aggregating CPMs across units at the page level to provide an effective CPM for page field. Is that something that you guys have done any work on? + +Well, we do look at kind of the CPM as a kind of aggregate of the page view and try to balance that throughout the site. So when we went to the new site, we actually reduced kind of the overall kind of above the fold ad impressions in favor of adding some more lower. Which is totally not with the viewability question but helped us to give a little bit more air and space up there and the way that business argument was worked out was looking at the page revenue, rather than this particular unit there or this particular unit there. + +You can see that expressed if you scroll down further, you'll see the grid and content and advertising mix. + +We're sort of offered up as a means of lessening the load at the top of the page. + +So when we went through this, so you know, what's great about this is Jamie, I, Will, we just launched this site 6 weeks ago? 8 weeks ago? It's very new so a lot of the decisionmaking is still very fresh to us but all of the advertising on the site is set up on a configuration model that allows us to adjust on the fly without altering the page geometry, so the zone of where you have the idea of a zone 1, zone 2, zone 3. Zone 1 is the main content, zone 2 is that kind of fixed right rail. Zone 3 is everything that comes below. And each one of those has a set of variables which we call the X then Y advertising, so X is the first opportunity an ad will have, and Y is coming up to user after that, and so you could set an X to 3, which will say 3 content spots and you'll have your first opportunity, not a guaranteed ad, but an opportunity, and then every two, right? So two pieces of content, another opportunity two pieces of content, another opportunity until you run out of content. Which allows you to monetize the page length no matter how long it is. So it kind of takes the conversations around oh, no, no, no, just make the content what you need it to be and the page itself based on the available geometry. What makes the most sense based on the agreed-upon rules. And you can set that to home became, you know, articles of certain sections. + +Since we only have like five minutes left, I wanted -- + +No, I was just -- + +I'll catch up with you. + +I wanted to see if any other groups dug into any actual adds and looked at what, like what scripts, what vendors we're actually measuring. + +We can figure out what quartz is doing, Josh, and that didn't go too well. Reverse engineering, like we looked Javascript, nothing really there. How would you approach that? Before I was at ALLY, I was a developer at quartz, and did experiment a little bit with home-grown viewability measurement system and sort of like, you know, like we were talking about a little while ago, one of the challenges with it was that it, to the sales team, it was harder to sell. Those numbers even you know, no matter how accurate they may have been in reality, like how they were perceived in in the marketplace was very different than you know, a similar measurement coming from a third party. But the way that we approached it was, you know, with the luxury of being able to run our own Javascript in the page and inside the ad, we were able to sort of in some ways do accommodation of measuring, you know, where the ad I frame was sitting relative to the viewable area of the page, so the kind of page geometry method, but one potential drawback of that is if you're measuring, you know, the point at which this I frame, you know, let's say it was—let's say it was this thing here. This Sonos ad, it doesn't necessarily know when all of the assets inside that i frame have loaded, so that could be really slow, so you could have basically like 50 percent of an empty box in view for one second, and the way that we were able to get around that was a combination of like listening for that 50 percent in view for a second, and then sending some post messages back and forth that would sort of confirm on both sides that yes, the container is in view, and the actual assets inside the ad have loaded. It got a little complicated, but not too bad. + +So when you mention, Davis, that the sites you were using were using different vendors, what were some vendors you saw? + +Tag manager was one ... + +Cool. Anyone else have anything that they wanted to toss up on the screen before we break? Well, cool. Thank you guys so much. + +[applause] + +[session ended] diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015AltarCall.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015AltarCall.md index 8f035255..f501070a 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015AltarCall.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015AltarCall.md @@ -1,321 +1,302 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/altarcall/index.html ---- - -# After the Altar Call—Maintaining Momentum, Community, and Inspiration Beyond Conferences - -### Session Facilitator(s): Kaeti Hinck, Millie Tran - -### Day & Time: Friday, 4:30-5:30pm - -### Room: Ski-U-Mah - - -Hey, everybody. How's it going? - -Last SRCCON session. Thanks for joining us. I'm Kaeti Hinck. I'm the Design Director for INN. - -And I'm Millie—oh, God this is loud. I'm Millie, I work on the BuzzFeed news app. - -So today we're talking about what happens after SRCCON. This is something that we've both thought about a lot, because we go to a lot of conferences, we get super inspired, we have all this momentum, we want to build things, we want to learn new things and then we get back to our daily lives and life happens, work happens, the projects that you wanted to collaborate on kind of fall to the bottom of the list because you've got daily deadlines or whatever. - -Or the people you said you want to keep up with, you never contact. We actually met at SRCCON last year,. - -And we're still talking. - -We're still talking. - -This is a success story right here. - -Yeah, this is a case study. - -So I think the first—we're going to do a little group work today, but before we get into that, we just want to talk about a little bit of what concrete things you want to take away from SRCCON specifically. We've been here two days, you've been to all the sessions, so what were you inspired to learn? What do you want to take with you in between like in the margins before your next big inspiring conference? What do you actually want to get done and learn? - -So this step we kind of want to build a concrete foundation to have concrete goals in mind so we can prepare to accomplish these things before we leave. So to take advantage with all of us here, like in person, so ... - -So what has been the best thing? - -For our team it's going to be the user feedback and research and involving them sooner in the process. There's been several sessions that have touched on that heavily and there's one thing coming away interest this is that type of feedback cycle with our users. - -So you want to implement more. - -Implement into our process. - - -I'll attempt to write some of this down. - -I want to keep some of the conversations going that I just had like in between sessions, with new people that I met, about like shared interests and topics that we have in common, so I met some people working on fun stuff that I'm like geeking out about that I didn't know they were working on, so just like to keep that conversation. - -Translate those hallway conversations into an ongoing kind of relationship and build on that. - -Other things? - - -So you don't have to share it, but just think about someone who you want to keep in touch with or were really inspired by. Just keep that in mind. - -I'll share something. I'd like to take home some process tools, like the responsibility assignment matrix that was the CPR team talked about, and one of the other things to take home is—sorry, come back to me. Thanks. - - -All right. - -This doesn't even have to be a work thing. This can be a personal, professional thing. - - -I got some good ideas for use ability testing and like human-centered design, just different things that people were mentioning. So definitely keep those in mind. - - -I just want to at least be more of an advocate in my organization for making accessibility questions at the forefront of like the beginning of projects. You know, whether or not I can make that difference is going to fend on other stuff, but I at least want to be someone always reminding me of that. - -I'd like to maintain the sense of perspective that I've gotten from SRCCON, because it's sometimes easy when I'm the only person tackling some of these problems to think that I am absolutely failing at figuring out what everyone else has figured out but when you come here, you realize that a lot of these problems are very common. - -We're all failing. - -Yeah, there's not a great single solution for everything, so. - - -I think I intend to use the conference a little bit as like a springboard to start some conversations in a like very pointed kind of way. Like you sent me, you want to know what I learned? Like we need to think about this thing that we have never thought about before and just use it as a way to be really forceful so it doesn't seem like it's coming out of the blue and maybe like get some leverage that way. - -Conference as leverage, I like that. - -Go ahead? - -I want a sense of what I missed in the sessions I couldn't see and I'd like be to be able to see some summaries. There's a scattering of—but to have it consolidated in such a way. - -Catch up on all the documentation. - -Yeah, and just be able to look at it. - -I just wrote down FOMO for you. - -I'd like to take tips just on like the event itself, as like like somebody who's trying to do events at work, like the way things were conducted, I thought was great. The actual conference. - -This is a solid list. - -Figuring out how to find or grow this kind of community where I live. - - -That's a good list. - -All right. So now, we've got this list and some ideas and I don't know where the cursor is. Here it is. - -So we're going to do some work in smaller groups, so how many of you know everybody you're sitting at the table with? - -You need to move tables. - -If you know someone at your table, move. And anybody at a table with just yourself or maybe one other person, you should consolidate so you have someone to work with. - - -All right, so in your groups, you can start by kind of identifying one thing as a group you're going to tackle, maybe one of the things on the list that we just talked about or something else entirely, but it would probably be good to focusing on like one specific thing, like oh, I want to figure out how to grow this community in my area, and once you've sort of identified that how might we question, talk about what obstacles are going to come up to that? Like what's going to make it hard to do that? What has stopped me from doing that in the past? - -We have some examples up there and in the Google doc. - -These are just also these are just kind of guide questions, we don't want you to be like OK, now I'm in this group and this sucks, so you kind of have guideline questions, you don't have to follow them. - -Let the conversation take you where it takes you. - -Yeah. And. - -And then start talking about solution, like what can we do to address this problem? How can we make it accessible to other people? How can we bring new people in? If it's a tool or like the news nerd slack room which already exists, but how do we make that more accessible? - - -So kind of our thinking in building this whole session was that we would go from concrete thing which were these problems or not problems but kind of these goals that we want to pursue, and then go into this theoretical and imagine problems you might face and anticipate them so we can solve them and then end with some concrete things you can do to go back there. - -So yeah, so just talk through some of the stuff in your group and then in the last about ten minutes, we'll do a report back, and just share on the next page we've got kind of a list sort of what you could share with the whole room, you know, what you hope to accomplish, obstacles and specific tactics that might help, and how we're going to hold ourselves accountable to actually make this stuff happen. - - -Yeah, go for it. - - -[group activity] - -We're going to start report backs in about 10, 12 minutes ... ... - -[group activity] - -All right, let's get started on report-backs, because we've got quite a few groups. - -Who wants to go first? - - -Call on them, they seem animated. - -All right. - -What did you talk about? - -We talked about how to go home and actually effect some change in our somewhat stubborn organizations. Not that we all have stubborn organizations, but hypothetically. So how are we actually going to go home and effect change? Obstacles? We talked about—we don't have time to effect change or to implement, you know, most of us go back to work cycles that are very full. So figuring out how to work in new stuff and new process is going to be difficult. We talked about being in like—too far along in projects where we maybe learned something that would have helped, but it's kind of like already passed so then do you wait for the next project that's going to come round, you know? And we talked about like going back and talking to coworkers who aren't really interested in what we learned, and like especially like we've probably picked up some jargon that's not going to translate well to people who are not here, and in my experience jargon often puts people off right off the bat. So those are kind of our obstacles to the goals and here is what we came up as far as potential solutions. Right off the bat, convert somebody else in your organization. Find some willing person who you can bring into your coven and get people on your side, right? And one of the ways you could think about doing that is to talk about what you learned in a way that solves one of their problems. So this is one of my things. It's like I have strategies that are going to solve a lot of my problems, but they're also probably going to solve other people's problems and if I can pitch them that way, then I can get them on board, and to start small. Like start with a small thing where you can implement something cool and then hopefully it will sort of trickle down or trickle over, or somebody else will see something that you did that's cool and be like, I want to learn more about that, and especially if you're able to actually implement saying, have metrics that you can use to report back and say hey, because we did this thing, I have these metrics that I can show you my success, right so it's a way to sort of bring people over. And sort of along that same vein, have working sessions with your coworkers that are again helping them solve their problems with what you learned, and then sort of for your own personal benefit, like how are you going to actually go home and do this stuff? We talked about like maybe every day, set aside 10 minutes where you think about SRCCON, and like idea one problem that you might be able to solve and review your notes and like think about how you could have done something different today that you didn't, but just set aside a little time. Maybe join hacks/hackers or some other organization of journo-technologists who you can talk to, like have some sort of external resource, whether it's people here you stay in touch with, or get on a Slack like news nerdery that's the one you mentioned, right? - -We should share that. OK, I'll add it. - -Or have people that you can talk with and collaborate with. Guys, how did I do? OK, go team. - -Yeah, sure, I've got the notes. So we talked about how to maintain the awesome perspective that we've all gotten from talking to people who are in similar situations and face similar problems, but that can be hard, because when you go back to your news organization, editors just don't understand. - -And you can—there's a sense of isolation for a lot of us, because we work on small teams or teams of one on those kind of—this kind of coding, slash news work and there can be a real lack of empathy in news organizations, there's just kind of a sense of, I don't know, sometimes like a lack of understanding and just get it done and we need this now. Tends to be more the culture there. - -So to kind of address this, to keep our heads clear and to keep that perspective, one idea was to sort of make a plan, like in writing, for the kinds of things we want to accomplish, and kind of check in with that plan at a certain time, but don't beat ourselves up when it is not accomplished. We also talked about kind of trying to win over colleagues or evangelize some of this stuff, because then you have someone who's going to back you up when you face resistance or you just have people that you can could he miss rate with, at least, so then there's your empathy, taking that beyond your own organization, yeah, find the local community, whatever it is. And then also taking it beyond the local community, we also talked about news nerds, Slack and perhaps there are other resources. Anything else? - -In our office, as far as like trying to win over colleagues and stuff, one thing we do is we have weekly lightning talks, and so a lot of times after conferences like this, like next week I'll probably talk a lot about what I learned or brought back and things I'm excited about trying to get the rest of my coworkers excited about the same stuff. - -Here. - -We talked about bringing things back to our news organization, and also staying involved and making a record of what we learned here. And one of the things that we thought about was making a Storify, because it will alert people who you include their tweets, so you can connect with them, reconnect with them through the Storify, you can remember things like, you put links in there, and pull quotes and remember what you've done and what you've learned at the SRCCON. - -Ours was a little bit more amorphous, we talked a little bit about being able to expand the community, and not just take things back for ourselves, but take back the things we learned for other people, and figuring out ways to do that because in some ways, the people who know this is important sign up early and the people who it could really help don't necessarily—aren't necessarily part of the conversation on Twitter in the news nerd Slack. We didn't come up with great solutions for how to do that, but that was a lot about what we talked about. - -Does anybody else have any thoughts about that? - -Anyways we can expand the community or bring people in who aren't here? - -We talked here in this group about open news and everybody can participate in them and I think they are great, because people who don't go show the others how to do it and so ... ... [inaudible] - -So in the open source communities I've been involved in, we have a saying that if there's not a user group in our area, congratulations you're the new president and it's kind of this thing—I've yet to meet someone here from Utah who works in Utahan journalism. I think I'm the only one here. We have lots of news organizations and so maybe I'm going to reach out and maybe form a you know, tech journo, whatever you want to call it, just small meetup once a month or maybe once a quarter where we get together and kind of start just that little bit of sharing from what here, and kind of trying to create that same type of culture locally. - -So congratulations you are the new Utah president. - -I know. If you guys come up with a cool name for it, let me know. - -There was one other thing that we talked about bringing back what we learned back to our newsroom instead of trying to teach people how to make graphics in D3, looking at tasks that can be automated and tasks that are taking up reporters' time or else's time at the organization and at that intersection write a script and hopefully the person who wrote that code with you would know enough to be able to like maintain that code and it would help themselves and then would be more empathetic with what you're doing and what your job is and they would understand. - -Becky? - -We talked a lot about empathy in general. The two of us had gone to both the conflict resolution talk and the talk about burnout, and just talking about how we can support our coworkers so that, you know, they're leading happy, healthy, balanced, and productive lives, and also about how we can be also empathetic to different teams, whether we're both—we're developers, I didn't grab your name, and editor. So how we can be empathetic with teams in order to build better tools so that everybody's jobs are a little bit easier and how we can be empathetic to our users, whether that's through user research so that we can build things that are more usable. We didn't get into any like solid ways of doing that, because we started chatting about, like pili forts. - -But that's going to be memorable. - -We can open that. I mean not the pili fort. Also the pili fort. I meant the excuses. - -Anybody have any other ideas how we can support to each other. - -Like what's one or two ways you can be nice to someone? - -One thing we did say is we were talking about burnout and we were saying how we feel really compelled to want to take on everything, because everything is awesome and amazing, I guess, and being that person who tells the other coworker that they're taking on too much, or just saying, no, you do not need to do this, you should go home, you should like eat more than pizza pops and like sleep for more than six hours, like a whole eight hours would be great and it would be really useful for everyone so just like trying to communicate that you want people to take care of themselves, very verbally. - -Is - -I think, too, you can't overestimate how good positive feedback is. And I have some coworkers who have—who are in spaces where there's no feedback mechanisms, so sometimes like I'll get like—I'll give them positive feedback on something that I don't even have a hand in. Just so they can hear some like constructive. It seems to me so rare, right, positive feedback and we could all give them the habit of -- - -Trying to say one nice thing to someone about something they did. - -And I will say, though, that I hate the—I hate like bland positive feedback monition. It's almost worse than no feedback, sort of like you did a great job today it's like that's sort of nice but it means nothing to me, so actual positive feedback means engaging with something that somebody is doing, right? So it does take a little bit of time. - -Today we were talking about also fostering personal relationships and I find like I'm extremely remote from my team. I'm in Canada, everybody else is on the east coast. And telling somebody that they did a great job is kind of the best like seriously because if you put it into Slack or something, I can't hear you laughing empathy. I am not that great of hearing in the first place, but even just like the little things with like, hey, your joke was funny or that email you sent was really nice, or you know, I saw an illustration you did in your spare time and it was awesome, like just like those personal things that are out side of work that make people feel good so that you can foster a relationship. - -I think another way to show empathy is especially for lots of group meetings where you have overlaps in disciplines or you have disciplines where there's not a lot of overlap, trying to frame things in lowest common denominator terms and being sensitive to the room. If you feel it being too jargoning or too down a rat hole, pulling the conversation back so that everybody thinks they're starting at the same place. And not presuming everybody in the room is caught up to speed and knows what's happening. I think a lot of times people find themselves embarrassed in meetings because they don't quite know how they got to that part of the conversation. - -I think it's—whatever the specific thing is to understand where the position is in that thing. Like if it's design, every organization has design at a certain level and there's other levels beyond it. But you can't go ten levels instantly, you have to pick one. So I think it's helpful to figure out where that thing is and then where's the next thing. - -Where's the mic? - -Fine. Should I be talking or should someone else be talk snag. - -We talked about like four different things. We have no solutions. - -Well, pick one and we can work on them. - -OK. You made me talk, so I'll talk about myself. Building community locally. I guess similar to what you were saying, like, you know, start a meetup. Let's see. What am I supposed to be talking about really quickly? - - -Oh, yeah, obstacles. Obstacles, finding people, no, I don't even really want to talk right now, but—so my obstacles specifically are running a tech community already but not being able to get journalism people involved is the challenge primarily. So figuring out how to do that, and, you know, sort of reviewing like dead hacks/hacker group in the city like come back to life or go away completely. Choose one. - -Does anyone—we're all in journalism, but does anyone on the editorial side have thoughts about being brought back in? - -What would make you want to actually attend a journalism meetup if you haven't attended one before? - -Free food. Pizza. - - -[laughter] - -Well, why don't you two connect and talk about starting something. - -Next group? -S just a suggestion like if you want the journalist to come to your hangout, but what about if you go to their hangout and try to like build a bridge either of jargon or if there's intimidation elements or it might be too techy the conversation, so ... - -OK, now, mostly we're not many so mostly talk about how to continue being connected, so we talked about an experience that we met like 13, 14 years ago at a conference, so we were talking about that experience a little on this topic came up after that, and also we talk about the community calls that people don't know that happens and is such a good way to continue with the community OpenNews. Also to see how people are doing it in other newsrooms, so mostly we talked about that. - -Did you guys say you've known each other for 13 years? Yes. - -How did you two stay connected? - -We, I mean there were several groups and organizations collectives that came out from that tech conference for acktivists and then we did projects with them, so, yeah, that's how. Yeah, we continued working in activism for all the time, so. - -I think -- - -The conference in question was sort of two weeks long. So that helped. - -And it was sort of already a fairly tight knit community but we built a bunch of effectively organizations leaving the conference, and so, yeah, so it was just that sort of ongoing work. - -Yeah. Also see that at that conference, there was no internet and no phone. - -That helps. - -Where is this conference? - -Can we go. - - -This was 2002. - -So one thing that actually since we've been talking is sort of interesting, I went to try and join the news nerds Slack and I couldn't, because it's invite only, and so I think for online communities, being open to people who aren't necessarily connected already is really important, because that was sort of—someone invited me now so I'm in -- - -Yes, barrier for entry there. For sure. - -If there was an RMC in Slack, then anybody could just join. - -There is an RMC but nobody uses it. - -How to make RMC usable. - -Out of scope. - -Yeah, OK, how are you guys? - -Yeah, so we kind of rambled a lot, but some of the obstacles, just kind of staying in touch with people after the conference was done, one of the things we talked about is tools. There are a lot of great tools that were mentioned over these two days, tools that we don't know about. - -Name some. - -Like right like I actually have a list. There was actually a talk today about just tools, so you know, marionette backbone, reactive sales, middleman, web pack, Grunt, browsify, we can go on and on but a lot of great tools and maybe there's a repository or something like that. - -Right there. - - -Cool tools for news. There's a read me file. - -I think Chris Amiko may have started exactly that repo yesterday. - -Sweet. - -And some of the other stuff, I think we talked a little bit too, about when you go to this conference before you come here, having a more—I don't know, a concentrated way or like a lens to view what you're going to come out with, so I basically was asked by my team, hey, when you come back, just be prepared you know, when you come back, just talk about what you learned. So it's always framing my context about what I remember, what I hold on to from the conference and then I wrote some reflections yesterday before the drinking happened. - -That reminds me, I've been thinking about writing this conference goals sheet, just like maybe one or two things I want to take away from, you know, any conference I go to. I haven't written it yet, but I thought about it, and that's very—it's very useful just to know, like these are the two things I want. - -Like a goals worksheet? - -Yeah. - -Yeah, that's a great idea. - -You will. - -Actually a really great idea, too, you touched on this a little bit but after these sessions having a little bit of discipline to it slow down and know that whatever is happening is going to still be happening but to really reflect on what you learned and not let the opportunity go by. - -I like what you said back there. I think he called it work. And it is, it takes time to write an email to follow up with someone and say hey, I thought what you were doing was really interesting and what you were saying was really interesting and this is how we keep in touch but it's work but it only takes a few minutes and it's worth it. Because you can be friends for 15 years. - - -I think this is a great list of both problems, frustrations, but potential solutions, and I think these people in the room can help be people that keep us accountable and this is a community and the kind of community can help us continue the momentum, inspiration and work that we want to be doing in between conferences and bringing in people to the community who, for whatever reason can't attend conferences, aren't here. - -We hope you found this useful. - - -[applause] - -[session ended] +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/altarcall/index.html +--- + +# After the Altar Call—Maintaining Momentum, Community, and Inspiration Beyond Conferences + +### Session Facilitator(s): Kaeti Hinck, Millie Tran + +### Day & Time: Friday, 4:30-5:30pm + +### Room: Ski-U-Mah + +Hey, everybody. How's it going? + +Last SRCCON session. Thanks for joining us. I'm Kaeti Hinck. I'm the Design Director for INN. + +And I'm Millie—oh, God this is loud. I'm Millie, I work on the BuzzFeed news app. + +So today we're talking about what happens after SRCCON. This is something that we've both thought about a lot, because we go to a lot of conferences, we get super inspired, we have all this momentum, we want to build things, we want to learn new things and then we get back to our daily lives and life happens, work happens, the projects that you wanted to collaborate on kind of fall to the bottom of the list because you've got daily deadlines or whatever. + +Or the people you said you want to keep up with, you never contact. We actually met at SRCCON last year,. + +And we're still talking. + +We're still talking. + +This is a success story right here. + +Yeah, this is a case study. + +So I think the first—we're going to do a little group work today, but before we get into that, we just want to talk about a little bit of what concrete things you want to take away from SRCCON specifically. We've been here two days, you've been to all the sessions, so what were you inspired to learn? What do you want to take with you in between like in the margins before your next big inspiring conference? What do you actually want to get done and learn? + +So this step we kind of want to build a concrete foundation to have concrete goals in mind so we can prepare to accomplish these things before we leave. So to take advantage with all of us here, like in person, so ... + +So what has been the best thing? + +For our team it's going to be the user feedback and research and involving them sooner in the process. There's been several sessions that have touched on that heavily and there's one thing coming away interest this is that type of feedback cycle with our users. + +So you want to implement more. + +Implement into our process. + +I'll attempt to write some of this down. + +I want to keep some of the conversations going that I just had like in between sessions, with new people that I met, about like shared interests and topics that we have in common, so I met some people working on fun stuff that I'm like geeking out about that I didn't know they were working on, so just like to keep that conversation. + +Translate those hallway conversations into an ongoing kind of relationship and build on that. + +Other things? + +So you don't have to share it, but just think about someone who you want to keep in touch with or were really inspired by. Just keep that in mind. + +I'll share something. I'd like to take home some process tools, like the responsibility assignment matrix that was the CPR team talked about, and one of the other things to take home is—sorry, come back to me. Thanks. + +All right. + +This doesn't even have to be a work thing. This can be a personal, professional thing. + +I got some good ideas for use ability testing and like human-centered design, just different things that people were mentioning. So definitely keep those in mind. + +I just want to at least be more of an advocate in my organization for making accessibility questions at the forefront of like the beginning of projects. You know, whether or not I can make that difference is going to fend on other stuff, but I at least want to be someone always reminding me of that. + +I'd like to maintain the sense of perspective that I've gotten from SRCCON, because it's sometimes easy when I'm the only person tackling some of these problems to think that I am absolutely failing at figuring out what everyone else has figured out but when you come here, you realize that a lot of these problems are very common. + +We're all failing. + +Yeah, there's not a great single solution for everything, so. + +I think I intend to use the conference a little bit as like a springboard to start some conversations in a like very pointed kind of way. Like you sent me, you want to know what I learned? Like we need to think about this thing that we have never thought about before and just use it as a way to be really forceful so it doesn't seem like it's coming out of the blue and maybe like get some leverage that way. + +Conference as leverage, I like that. + +Go ahead? + +I want a sense of what I missed in the sessions I couldn't see and I'd like be to be able to see some summaries. There's a scattering of—but to have it consolidated in such a way. + +Catch up on all the documentation. + +Yeah, and just be able to look at it. + +I just wrote down FOMO for you. + +I'd like to take tips just on like the event itself, as like like somebody who's trying to do events at work, like the way things were conducted, I thought was great. The actual conference. + +This is a solid list. + +Figuring out how to find or grow this kind of community where I live. + +That's a good list. + +All right. So now, we've got this list and some ideas and I don't know where the cursor is. Here it is. + +So we're going to do some work in smaller groups, so how many of you know everybody you're sitting at the table with? + +You need to move tables. + +If you know someone at your table, move. And anybody at a table with just yourself or maybe one other person, you should consolidate so you have someone to work with. + +All right, so in your groups, you can start by kind of identifying one thing as a group you're going to tackle, maybe one of the things on the list that we just talked about or something else entirely, but it would probably be good to focusing on like one specific thing, like oh, I want to figure out how to grow this community in my area, and once you've sort of identified that how might we question, talk about what obstacles are going to come up to that? Like what's going to make it hard to do that? What has stopped me from doing that in the past? + +We have some examples up there and in the Google doc. + +These are just also these are just kind of guide questions, we don't want you to be like OK, now I'm in this group and this sucks, so you kind of have guideline questions, you don't have to follow them. + +Let the conversation take you where it takes you. + +Yeah. And. + +And then start talking about solution, like what can we do to address this problem? How can we make it accessible to other people? How can we bring new people in? If it's a tool or like the news nerd slack room which already exists, but how do we make that more accessible? + +So kind of our thinking in building this whole session was that we would go from concrete thing which were these problems or not problems but kind of these goals that we want to pursue, and then go into this theoretical and imagine problems you might face and anticipate them so we can solve them and then end with some concrete things you can do to go back there. + +So yeah, so just talk through some of the stuff in your group and then in the last about ten minutes, we'll do a report back, and just share on the next page we've got kind of a list sort of what you could share with the whole room, you know, what you hope to accomplish, obstacles and specific tactics that might help, and how we're going to hold ourselves accountable to actually make this stuff happen. + +Yeah, go for it. + +[group activity] + +We're going to start report backs in about 10, 12 minutes ... ... + +[group activity] + +All right, let's get started on report-backs, because we've got quite a few groups. + +Who wants to go first? + +Call on them, they seem animated. + +All right. + +What did you talk about? + +We talked about how to go home and actually effect some change in our somewhat stubborn organizations. Not that we all have stubborn organizations, but hypothetically. So how are we actually going to go home and effect change? Obstacles? We talked about—we don't have time to effect change or to implement, you know, most of us go back to work cycles that are very full. So figuring out how to work in new stuff and new process is going to be difficult. We talked about being in like—too far along in projects where we maybe learned something that would have helped, but it's kind of like already passed so then do you wait for the next project that's going to come round, you know? And we talked about like going back and talking to coworkers who aren't really interested in what we learned, and like especially like we've probably picked up some jargon that's not going to translate well to people who are not here, and in my experience jargon often puts people off right off the bat. So those are kind of our obstacles to the goals and here is what we came up as far as potential solutions. Right off the bat, convert somebody else in your organization. Find some willing person who you can bring into your coven and get people on your side, right? And one of the ways you could think about doing that is to talk about what you learned in a way that solves one of their problems. So this is one of my things. It's like I have strategies that are going to solve a lot of my problems, but they're also probably going to solve other people's problems and if I can pitch them that way, then I can get them on board, and to start small. Like start with a small thing where you can implement something cool and then hopefully it will sort of trickle down or trickle over, or somebody else will see something that you did that's cool and be like, I want to learn more about that, and especially if you're able to actually implement saying, have metrics that you can use to report back and say hey, because we did this thing, I have these metrics that I can show you my success, right so it's a way to sort of bring people over. And sort of along that same vein, have working sessions with your coworkers that are again helping them solve their problems with what you learned, and then sort of for your own personal benefit, like how are you going to actually go home and do this stuff? We talked about like maybe every day, set aside 10 minutes where you think about SRCCON, and like idea one problem that you might be able to solve and review your notes and like think about how you could have done something different today that you didn't, but just set aside a little time. Maybe join hacks/hackers or some other organization of journo-technologists who you can talk to, like have some sort of external resource, whether it's people here you stay in touch with, or get on a Slack like news nerdery that's the one you mentioned, right? + +We should share that. OK, I'll add it. + +Or have people that you can talk with and collaborate with. Guys, how did I do? OK, go team. + +Yeah, sure, I've got the notes. So we talked about how to maintain the awesome perspective that we've all gotten from talking to people who are in similar situations and face similar problems, but that can be hard, because when you go back to your news organization, editors just don't understand. + +And you can—there's a sense of isolation for a lot of us, because we work on small teams or teams of one on those kind of—this kind of coding, slash news work and there can be a real lack of empathy in news organizations, there's just kind of a sense of, I don't know, sometimes like a lack of understanding and just get it done and we need this now. Tends to be more the culture there. + +So to kind of address this, to keep our heads clear and to keep that perspective, one idea was to sort of make a plan, like in writing, for the kinds of things we want to accomplish, and kind of check in with that plan at a certain time, but don't beat ourselves up when it is not accomplished. We also talked about kind of trying to win over colleagues or evangelize some of this stuff, because then you have someone who's going to back you up when you face resistance or you just have people that you can could he miss rate with, at least, so then there's your empathy, taking that beyond your own organization, yeah, find the local community, whatever it is. And then also taking it beyond the local community, we also talked about news nerds, Slack and perhaps there are other resources. Anything else? + +In our office, as far as like trying to win over colleagues and stuff, one thing we do is we have weekly lightning talks, and so a lot of times after conferences like this, like next week I'll probably talk a lot about what I learned or brought back and things I'm excited about trying to get the rest of my coworkers excited about the same stuff. + +Here. + +We talked about bringing things back to our news organization, and also staying involved and making a record of what we learned here. And one of the things that we thought about was making a Storify, because it will alert people who you include their tweets, so you can connect with them, reconnect with them through the Storify, you can remember things like, you put links in there, and pull quotes and remember what you've done and what you've learned at the SRCCON. + +Ours was a little bit more amorphous, we talked a little bit about being able to expand the community, and not just take things back for ourselves, but take back the things we learned for other people, and figuring out ways to do that because in some ways, the people who know this is important sign up early and the people who it could really help don't necessarily—aren't necessarily part of the conversation on Twitter in the news nerd Slack. We didn't come up with great solutions for how to do that, but that was a lot about what we talked about. + +Does anybody else have any thoughts about that? + +Anyways we can expand the community or bring people in who aren't here? + +We talked here in this group about open news and everybody can participate in them and I think they are great, because people who don't go show the others how to do it and so ... ... [inaudible] + +So in the open source communities I've been involved in, we have a saying that if there's not a user group in our area, congratulations you're the new president and it's kind of this thing—I've yet to meet someone here from Utah who works in Utahan journalism. I think I'm the only one here. We have lots of news organizations and so maybe I'm going to reach out and maybe form a you know, tech journo, whatever you want to call it, just small meetup once a month or maybe once a quarter where we get together and kind of start just that little bit of sharing from what here, and kind of trying to create that same type of culture locally. + +So congratulations you are the new Utah president. + +I know. If you guys come up with a cool name for it, let me know. + +There was one other thing that we talked about bringing back what we learned back to our newsroom instead of trying to teach people how to make graphics in D3, looking at tasks that can be automated and tasks that are taking up reporters' time or else's time at the organization and at that intersection write a script and hopefully the person who wrote that code with you would know enough to be able to like maintain that code and it would help themselves and then would be more empathetic with what you're doing and what your job is and they would understand. + +Becky? + +We talked a lot about empathy in general. The two of us had gone to both the conflict resolution talk and the talk about burnout, and just talking about how we can support our coworkers so that, you know, they're leading happy, healthy, balanced, and productive lives, and also about how we can be also empathetic to different teams, whether we're both—we're developers, I didn't grab your name, and editor. So how we can be empathetic with teams in order to build better tools so that everybody's jobs are a little bit easier and how we can be empathetic to our users, whether that's through user research so that we can build things that are more usable. We didn't get into any like solid ways of doing that, because we started chatting about, like pili forts. + +But that's going to be memorable. + +We can open that. I mean not the pili fort. Also the pili fort. I meant the excuses. + +Anybody have any other ideas how we can support to each other. + +Like what's one or two ways you can be nice to someone? + +One thing we did say is we were talking about burnout and we were saying how we feel really compelled to want to take on everything, because everything is awesome and amazing, I guess, and being that person who tells the other coworker that they're taking on too much, or just saying, no, you do not need to do this, you should go home, you should like eat more than pizza pops and like sleep for more than six hours, like a whole eight hours would be great and it would be really useful for everyone so just like trying to communicate that you want people to take care of themselves, very verbally. + +Is + +I think, too, you can't overestimate how good positive feedback is. And I have some coworkers who have—who are in spaces where there's no feedback mechanisms, so sometimes like I'll get like—I'll give them positive feedback on something that I don't even have a hand in. Just so they can hear some like constructive. It seems to me so rare, right, positive feedback and we could all give them the habit of -- + +Trying to say one nice thing to someone about something they did. + +And I will say, though, that I hate the—I hate like bland positive feedback monition. It's almost worse than no feedback, sort of like you did a great job today it's like that's sort of nice but it means nothing to me, so actual positive feedback means engaging with something that somebody is doing, right? So it does take a little bit of time. + +Today we were talking about also fostering personal relationships and I find like I'm extremely remote from my team. I'm in Canada, everybody else is on the east coast. And telling somebody that they did a great job is kind of the best like seriously because if you put it into Slack or something, I can't hear you laughing empathy. I am not that great of hearing in the first place, but even just like the little things with like, hey, your joke was funny or that email you sent was really nice, or you know, I saw an illustration you did in your spare time and it was awesome, like just like those personal things that are out side of work that make people feel good so that you can foster a relationship. + +I think another way to show empathy is especially for lots of group meetings where you have overlaps in disciplines or you have disciplines where there's not a lot of overlap, trying to frame things in lowest common denominator terms and being sensitive to the room. If you feel it being too jargoning or too down a rat hole, pulling the conversation back so that everybody thinks they're starting at the same place. And not presuming everybody in the room is caught up to speed and knows what's happening. I think a lot of times people find themselves embarrassed in meetings because they don't quite know how they got to that part of the conversation. + +I think it's—whatever the specific thing is to understand where the position is in that thing. Like if it's design, every organization has design at a certain level and there's other levels beyond it. But you can't go ten levels instantly, you have to pick one. So I think it's helpful to figure out where that thing is and then where's the next thing. + +Where's the mic? + +Fine. Should I be talking or should someone else be talk snag. + +We talked about like four different things. We have no solutions. + +Well, pick one and we can work on them. + +OK. You made me talk, so I'll talk about myself. Building community locally. I guess similar to what you were saying, like, you know, start a meetup. Let's see. What am I supposed to be talking about really quickly? + +Oh, yeah, obstacles. Obstacles, finding people, no, I don't even really want to talk right now, but—so my obstacles specifically are running a tech community already but not being able to get journalism people involved is the challenge primarily. So figuring out how to do that, and, you know, sort of reviewing like dead hacks/hacker group in the city like come back to life or go away completely. Choose one. + +Does anyone—we're all in journalism, but does anyone on the editorial side have thoughts about being brought back in? + +What would make you want to actually attend a journalism meetup if you haven't attended one before? + +Free food. Pizza. + +[laughter] + +Well, why don't you two connect and talk about starting something. + +Next group? +S just a suggestion like if you want the journalist to come to your hangout, but what about if you go to their hangout and try to like build a bridge either of jargon or if there's intimidation elements or it might be too techy the conversation, so ... + +OK, now, mostly we're not many so mostly talk about how to continue being connected, so we talked about an experience that we met like 13, 14 years ago at a conference, so we were talking about that experience a little on this topic came up after that, and also we talk about the community calls that people don't know that happens and is such a good way to continue with the community OpenNews. Also to see how people are doing it in other newsrooms, so mostly we talked about that. + +Did you guys say you've known each other for 13 years? Yes. + +How did you two stay connected? + +We, I mean there were several groups and organizations collectives that came out from that tech conference for acktivists and then we did projects with them, so, yeah, that's how. Yeah, we continued working in activism for all the time, so. + +I think -- + +The conference in question was sort of two weeks long. So that helped. + +And it was sort of already a fairly tight knit community but we built a bunch of effectively organizations leaving the conference, and so, yeah, so it was just that sort of ongoing work. + +Yeah. Also see that at that conference, there was no internet and no phone. + +That helps. + +Where is this conference? + +Can we go. + +This was 2002. + +So one thing that actually since we've been talking is sort of interesting, I went to try and join the news nerds Slack and I couldn't, because it's invite only, and so I think for online communities, being open to people who aren't necessarily connected already is really important, because that was sort of—someone invited me now so I'm in -- + +Yes, barrier for entry there. For sure. + +If there was an RMC in Slack, then anybody could just join. + +There is an RMC but nobody uses it. + +How to make RMC usable. + +Out of scope. + +Yeah, OK, how are you guys? + +Yeah, so we kind of rambled a lot, but some of the obstacles, just kind of staying in touch with people after the conference was done, one of the things we talked about is tools. There are a lot of great tools that were mentioned over these two days, tools that we don't know about. + +Name some. + +Like right like I actually have a list. There was actually a talk today about just tools, so you know, marionette backbone, reactive sales, middleman, web pack, Grunt, browsify, we can go on and on but a lot of great tools and maybe there's a repository or something like that. + +Right there. + +Cool tools for news. There's a read me file. + +I think Chris Amiko may have started exactly that repo yesterday. + +Sweet. + +And some of the other stuff, I think we talked a little bit too, about when you go to this conference before you come here, having a more—I don't know, a concentrated way or like a lens to view what you're going to come out with, so I basically was asked by my team, hey, when you come back, just be prepared you know, when you come back, just talk about what you learned. So it's always framing my context about what I remember, what I hold on to from the conference and then I wrote some reflections yesterday before the drinking happened. + +That reminds me, I've been thinking about writing this conference goals sheet, just like maybe one or two things I want to take away from, you know, any conference I go to. I haven't written it yet, but I thought about it, and that's very—it's very useful just to know, like these are the two things I want. + +Like a goals worksheet? + +Yeah. + +Yeah, that's a great idea. + +You will. + +Actually a really great idea, too, you touched on this a little bit but after these sessions having a little bit of discipline to it slow down and know that whatever is happening is going to still be happening but to really reflect on what you learned and not let the opportunity go by. + +I like what you said back there. I think he called it work. And it is, it takes time to write an email to follow up with someone and say hey, I thought what you were doing was really interesting and what you were saying was really interesting and this is how we keep in touch but it's work but it only takes a few minutes and it's worth it. Because you can be friends for 15 years. + +I think this is a great list of both problems, frustrations, but potential solutions, and I think these people in the room can help be people that keep us accountable and this is a community and the kind of community can help us continue the momentum, inspiration and work that we want to be doing in between conferences and bringing in people to the community who, for whatever reason can't attend conferences, aren't here. + +We hope you found this useful. + +[applause] + +[session ended] diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015BetterProgramming.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015BetterProgramming.md index b066fab6..cec02866 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015BetterProgramming.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015BetterProgramming.md @@ -1,309 +1,231 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/betterprogramming/index.html ---- - -# Become a Better Programmer Through Mundane Programming - -### Session Facilitator(s): Daniel Nguyen, Geoff Hing - -### Day & Time: Thursday, 11am-noon - -### Room: Minnesota - - - -Morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I know this is the most excitingly titled presentation. There was a purpose to that. I know I'm probably kind of boring in actuality but that's just a coincidence. I hope what we have to talk about is hopefully going to be very useful to you, or at least enlightning. But anyway, I guess we'll just introduce ourselves real quick. My name is Dan Nguyen. I'm currently a lecturer at Stanford University in their Computational Journalism Lab. Before that, I was at ProPublica working as a news application developer and then before that, I was a regular reporter at the Sacramento Bee, although they slowly moved me into multimedia. I did do computer engineering in college and I wanted to not ever do it again, but they slowly pushed me in there and, you know, it worked out well. I wouldn't have done it on my own, so I just kind of waddled my way into the field. But anyway, so that's where I come from. - - -My name is Geoff Hing. I come from Chicago where I'm a news application developer at the Chicago Tribune. This time last year I was doing development work for OpenElections. I don't know how many of y'all have to deal with elections and elections data, but it's like a treasure trove of mundane programming tasks. So that's me. - - -Okay. So the title of this talk was actually just going to be "Mundane Programming." And they were like, "That's not a very good title and people aren't going to go to that" and I said, okay, "Be a Better Programmer Through Mundane Programming," which is really, it's not me trying to dress it up; it's really the whole point of this. It's something that not everyone really realizes—that I've kind of realized late in my career that I've been lucky to work at places where programming and journalism was encouraged, especially at ProPublica. And I mean, I kind of hated it, to be honest. I like writing more than I love coding. But anyway, as some of you know who are kind of in the field, there are very exciting challenges in terms of either disseminating the production part. A lot of people think about it in terms of who's going to build the next mobile app or website to doing investigations and it's so... but it's also a very tough place to be a programmer. - -I've never worked in a real, or in an engineering company but I get that, like, there's a certain process, like, there's testing or there's other programmers to work with. And so, many newsrooms, if you're a developer, can be a little bit lonely. If you're someone who's trying to learn on your own, it can be very lonely. And so we want to do, kind of, reach out to that group of people, people who are whether you're pretty new, you've been going at it for a few years, few months, or maybe even if you're kind of an intermediate level programmer who's come out of school, and we want to just to kind of, as a group, talk about you know, barriers that you have in programming. - -Like, what you aspire to, why you didn't want to do it other than just like, it's a promising career choice compared to the other journalism positions you might find. But yeah, what makes you think you want to do it. And why do you do it when it's such a pain in the ass? So Geoff, do you have anything to add? - - -No, it's just that that's what we're trying to get at in the session. Couple of procedural points. We have ether point going, in addition to the real-time transcript that Stanley is making. The etherpad is for if you have thoughts that you maybe want to raise your hand, that you thought were relevant for links. We thought of that as more of a participatory aspect of the session and so the URL is there. I can read it out loud if it's too light. Does anybody need that? And then there's also a site that Dan put together that has a number of examples of, sort of, mundane programming tasks with source code and these slides are also on the web for future reference... - - -In a quick note, it's supposed to be more polished. I realized that it's also a lot harder to do that and also the presentation as well. My goal: It's something that I'm planning to build along because it's just useful to a lot of other people. And not just the people in this room but if you go to it now, code snippets at work for me, and actually one of the themes of this is to not give a shit about anyone else as long as your code works for exactly what you wanna do. But it's something that I'm going to polish as soon as I'm not busy coordinating, or helping with the presentation. So anyway... moving along. - - -So let's talk about, like, the zen of code or the essence of code. - - -Some of you guys may have seen this mega, 38,000 word article in that broke out in Business Week. So basically, editor the editor of the magazine asked Paul Ford who's a well known writer and programmer to tell him what code is. And to be honest, I didn't finish it because it covered too much stuff that I read about all the time. And I thought, oh, that's pretty cool. And it also didn't work on my iPad. - -[ Laughter ] - -But the great points, right away—this is near the top and this is exactly kind of what—I mean, I don't think that I could have said it any better, no matter how amazing the stuff that we see computers do today, whatever they can do, you can do with a pen and paper. The only difference why you don't do that is because by the time you've written one stroke, a computer can do it a billion times. So whatever you can do to give it to the computer, you should do. But that doesn't mean that just because computers seem—have seemed to get so advanced, or the frameworks seemed to have gotten so high that we just kind of throw up the, "The machines have taken over." There's a lot of room for us. Just as there is in chess, I know that machines in pure force can beat humans but what's gone on from there is humans against each other using computers is still a wide field. They still beat supercomputers, hands down. So that's kind of the minds that we want to bring to this. So if you're into programming because you think it's a neat thing, or there seems to be a tech bubble going and you want to jump on that, great. But it's still an incredible, intellectual pursuit and if you're in journalism, there's a lot of great, just practical opportunities. So it's we wanted to—just talk, discuss it more in the room. - - -Do you mind if I dive in? - - -Yeah, go ahead. - - -So there's sort of a difference, right, between this essential programming: Taking tasks that you can do with a pane paper and automating them, and making them do them at a grander scale than you or your colleagues could ever. and then there's the presentation of this article that this quote comes from which is beautiful and things moves around and it's very elaborate and elegant and we want to unpack the what programming looks like to you, and one way we thought of doing that is if y'all could share, sort of, programming fails. The times when it doesn't happen and so, as much as you feel comfortable, let us know, either a time—an idea that you had for a program, like, oh, I could write code to do this, and you haven't done this. Or when you started down the path and had to punt out of it early because you just either, it was above your head, or you didn't have time on the deadline that you were working on there. - -So let's get at what, like, what real talk—what programming looks like for this room. And I'll try to follow it in the notes. - - -And then we know that not all of you are—I mean, we're expecting not all of you are professional programmers. So don't—it's not the—the standard here, but we just kind of want to hear what you think programming is, what's blocked you, or what you aspire to do, what may—what you see as kind of barriers to you as you're trying to pursue it professionally. So anyone wanna... open up the floor? - - -I have an example. - - -Sure. - - -So I work with data a lot. And I actually use Excel for many things and people keep telling me, "Hey, why are you using Excel? Because it's hard for you to document everything." But I'm trying to move to doing things in Python but it's so much easier for me to clean things, sort things, building things in Excel and there's this shame in doing that. - - -That's good that you brought that up. But no, no. You're not a negative story. I mean, you're able to get the stuff that you need done and yes, that's hard to know when you jump into the next level, whatever that is. But if Excel works, it works. Anyone else? - - -It's not really a programming fail but when I first got my job as, like, a web designer I kind of did the con your way into it and then Google your ass off. - - -That's what we all do! - - [ Laughter ] - - -So... - - -That's a reality. - - -So they gave me access to some app server where I needed to save something and I logged in using files that I looked for the first time through Filezilla and I accidentally hit the header where it says like "file name" and so it reverse sorted everything. And I couldn't—it looked like I deleted everything, and I was just like crapping in my pants. I didn't know what was going on. And I really thought that I deleted everything. But that was it. - - -A great representation of a common problem that we have no matter how good you are at a certain software. It seems there's newer and newer software. It seems like things are becoming obsolete, like when Gmail put in symbols instead of text for send and stuff. Luckily, there was an option to turn it back but I didn't know what to do when they put little emoticons in there. But anyway, problems with the interface, that is a key thing. - - -Go for it. In the striped shirt and then... - - -So I have a -- - - -Oh, you both have striped shirts. - - -It's okay. Go ahead. - - -I have a pretty funny fail from the first time I wrote code for part of my job. My background is reporter, as a journalist and I always wanted to do more programming and I was kind of learning it on the side, and at the time I was working for Digital First Media, which is a newspaper chain and they had sort of—I forgot what they called it, but anyone can work on for one day any project they wanted. So I worked with another editor on working a really dumb Twitterbot. The idea behind it was that it would make any—it would scrape headlines from other news organizations and it would make them into an Upworthy-style headline and it ended up producing some very morally abhorrent... - -[ Laughter ] - -Headlines that we couldn't share with other people. Or they would think we were monsters. So yeah. - - -So I used to work for a television like a very small ABC affiliate station as a web manager and the person who I inherited the job from was far more advanced as a programmer than I was and he built a system that would take the files from the MOV files from the shows that we would film and in Python, would convert them to MP4's and then from there put them onto a shared folder and then the system would break all the time. It would just, anything could break it and I would have to be responsible for fixing it, which was, I mean, he did the right thing. He took a very mundane task. He could have done that manually every time and really programmed it, so he didn't have to, but fixing it as somebody who also started off as a reporter and did not know that much about Python and, like, the process that it would take to convert video files in an automated manner, it was just very difficult and I had to call him a few times. He had already left the company but I had to be like, "Hey, Josh, what did you do to build this?" So that was a bit of a fail but eventually, I feel like I figured it out and I left and now I don't even remember. - - -It's never a fail if it's someone else's software that you have to learn. It's always the other person's fault. Yes? - - -Um, I think my fail was not planning ahead. I decided that it was going to—that it was a great idea to learn Angular while building an interactive website for a storytelling project and I was like, "Oh, it works great. It's fine." It was fine. It was hard but the problem with that, obviously, this website wanted to share stuff, as well and as much as possible with SEO-friendly stuff. So I realized Angular really is Javascript. So an Facebook, it would be almost impossible to share any story with just share the actual website. And that was, like, at the end of six months of, like, working on it and I was, like: Oh, my God... that is... and it's super important for in terms of journalism and being on social media and it should have been a thought of what do they want. Okay, they probably want an ability to share. And Angular was probably not the best plan. It was a great plan for whatever interactive entity that was there, but the sharing was not working. But it was kind of challenging, or yet to pay for services and it was kind of a mess. So I think planning ahead was one of the fails. - - -Sure. You...? - - -So everyone's biggest problem with Angular was that they try to learn Angular in the middle of something else. It's like the Angular developer hack. My favorite programming fail that I've ever done. And it was really related to mundane programming. At the beginning of every week for a long time, it was sort of this routine database maintenance that we were doing where we were making a sanitized development database for our development staff and on a Monday morning at, like, 6:00 in the morning, I had just gotten up, okay, I'm going to find a way to strip this all out. We're going to schedule it, we don't have to worry about it anymore at me and I had working perfectly. It was going fine. I finally ran if, I looked at my local database, nothing had happened. Dropped my local database, nothing had happened and then realized about five minutes into it that I was still keyed to a production server and had dropped our production database about an hour before we hit peak traffic. So that was... there are some perils in mundane programming that are moderately terrifying if you're doing it on no sleep and without much caution. It was a good day. Real good day. - - -Along with that, I thought I was reading up on staging from scratch in the same way that I rmr.f'd the entire directory, including the databases over time. So I had 30 minutes until the Varnish cache expired in order to rebuild and re-report everything. I just stood up from my desk and stood up and said, "Oh, shit" and sat back down and realized that I had 30 minutes from that point. - - -You guys have seen Pixar clip where they were making toy story two. And this was right before it was going to be shown. And they scrapped the movie anyway and redid it. But if it happens to Pixar, it should be clue you that this is an all-too-common problem. - - -So I'm a designer and I work with developers all the time, right, trying part-time as a developer, too. I'm getting myself into some tricky situations. But I was working with a guy who would do things like you guys were talking about just about every Friday. And so, and his name was "Steve." And I was like, I got so pissed off at Steve every Friday that I had to call him something else and I ended up calling him "Teddy" because I was like, you can't get mad at a guy named Teddy. Anyway, small story. So he's known as Teddy. - - -On Monday I was showing a coworker how to deal invisible files off of thumb drives that she uses to plug into a video player and the video player plays the first file and dot files that proceed that file that she wanted to play. And so I opened up the terminal and I told her how to change the directory and rm.* and on Tuesday while I was at lunch she forgot about change directory and about dot star. Because you open up the terminal and you put in -rm.*. Luckily all her important files are on flash drives. But that was a fun day. - - -I mean, I've deleted entire websites, dropped databases. T'd off the Washington Post on election night trying to do cache invalidation. I've done it all. All of this has happened. It's fucking rad. - - -So I'm hearing, like, a couple of themes that are really related to this talk. Like, one, that a lot of programming and the time that you spend programming is spent not programming, right? It's like panicking or -- - - [ Laughter ] - - —or panicking and then typing a few things into your shell and then panicking more. Also that it can be hard, it can be really hard to learn programming when the problem that you're solving or inheriting isn't your own. It's not one that you know intimately is something that I heard in a couple of stories. We're going to get at that soon, maybe now. Let me switch to the others. Back to the slides. - - -Aww, yeah! Anyone wanna watch RuPaul's Drag Race? A common saying that she has contestants that would freak them out. If you can't love yourself, who hell can you love? And I butchered that quote but there's a lot of fighting on that show, a lot of negativity and RuPaul tries to herd them all together. And it's a great quote, and I like to put it in terms of coding because what I think—not even just being at Stanford where—not every kid but it's very much into their heads to be "let's be the next Mark Zuckerberg." and they're saying, what ideas should I build for you? And it goes nowhere, of course. And those are people that are Stanford students and we're running up into this natural brick wall of trying to build something for someone else and I think the problem is much more acute for people who are not—who don't have the time to be a student and learn it in school when you have all the time to do just dumb things and make mistakes and pull all-nighters three nights in a row. And to what I've found even as an engineer, or what has taken me almost too long of a time to learn is, is that things too so much sooner when you think about it yourself, because what you need because at the very at least you have a user of one. There's some need that's being met. Chances are, you're not the only person who thinks like you. - -What I can think of, like, an example for myself, when I went to ProPublica. They were like, we're going to do Ruby on Rails because the New York Times is doing it. That's the only reason I like New York, which is this ruby hold-out while everyone else is doing Python. And I was like, I have plenty of programming I had that background. But my problem was that I was trying to look for an apartment in New York. What I would do is write ruby scripts to look through Craigslist. But the problem is, I'm tired of opening up every page. I want to scan things. I know words that I want to look out for, or things that disqualify me. I just want something to pull down the RSS feed and then pull it into a spreadsheet where I can sort it, and that's where I built up on my Ruby skills and it was horrible code, I'm sure but I didn't have to please anyone. I knew at work, it made my life easier and that's kind of, those of I who have been in professional coding environments, you know that quick iteration is nice. It's very essential to becoming a strong programmer. - -So there's no fast iteration. You run your code. I mean, hey, this sucks, this doesn't do what I wanted it to do. So that's kind of, for me, one of the core things to think about and it's okay. I know a lot of you are in journalism 'cause you're patriots and you're fighting for the First Amendment and social justice and that's great but you can't do all that if you're struggling with deploying stuff and that's, those of I who are in production-level development, those of you who are trying to struggle with what you feel is a basic HTML and whatnot and you're getting frustrated. Obviously, doesn't help until you are able to kind of fixate on something that, that will move you along the chain. So so that's kind of one of the themes is just—a lot of people want to program 'cause they want to—they don't want to—they don't realize that programming is a pain in the ass. They want to do something exciting. But don't feel the pressure from that. Do things for yourself, and hopefully things will fall into place more for you. - - -So in addition to, like, owning the problem, let's unpack what's what are the good tasks for honing your mundane programming skills. It's not only your problem, but it's one that you can understand because you've done it in the slowest possible way, or in a way that you know how. Whether that's in a spreadsheet, or whether it's by hand on a piece of paper and pencil, you kind of know the steps that you need to replicate in the code, so you're kind of not both learning a programming language and how the standard library works and thinking through the steps of the problem. - -Again, like, doing something that saves you time so you're not both at the end of maybe spending some frustrating time making a program, you still have that, you're like, "I still saved myself two hours even though it took me two hours to write this program." So having that reward for yourself is great. - -And then finally, having an immediate, concrete goal, a simple task that you can not only validate the output for maybe a slice of it with the manual method, but just, sort of, a problem that you can fit within the time that you have to code it rather than thinking about what the most amazing, bells-and-whistles-aspirational project that you can envision. So here's a great addition to the Craigslist scraping example. Here's an example of a programming problem that really speaks to those points and to also somebody owning their problem. I'm surprised that the Jail hasn't, like, made that a service. - - -So actually, one thing, Reddit is a great resource. They have a /r/learnedprogramming subreddit. And they also have a very busy Python. although not all of you are Pythonistas, but there are a lot of great thirds like this. But this is an excellent one because actually one of the first things that I learned as a programmer in a newsroom, I still had to check the jail logs and it was a real pain that the ass. You had to go to the website and you would click each name and you had to click into who was in jail, you had to click the name, and what their bail was set at. So that was one of my PHP scripts, so pull stuff up like name, and bail, like oh, there's someone in here with a million dollar bail, and other stuff like that. But the thing is I did that just because I was tired of clicking, like, 20 links a night. And so I 20—I mean, 'cause night cops—nights can be quiet. So just do that. And I were, like, a real reporter. If I had—if I was, like, a real data journalist at the time, I would have done something more than just who's—who has the most bail. I mean, a lot of times it's like, who's the fattest prisoner? Or the fattest person, or the tallest person, or the shortest person, or the person with the most tattoos because they have stuff like tattoos. And... but that was the extent of my intrepidness. But at the very least, we didn't break any huge stories, but at least I knew who had done something bad that night and so I totally deleted this. And this is a problem that not only is it kind of something to be gained but it's also kind of personal. Like, people were kind of waiting. I think people who aren't actively seeking out programming, they're thinking, "Oh, somebody's going to make an app for what I want." This is not something that people—this is not a big scaling problem, right? This is something that this guy and his wife needs to figure out. But it's a very basic human problem. Like, I wanna know when something happens in this specific area. Really personal to me, and I need it to happen on my personal schedule. So who can do that for me, and there's not any wide-scale solution for it. - - -So let's starts at about—let's start talking about going down a path of identifying problems like that and starting to hack on them. So... one of the aspects of picking a problem that you understand is that you know what the expected output is, and you can, without doing something as rigorous as unit testing your code, you can have an idea of whether it's working or not. And that's very crucial for picking a problem where you're able to learn from your programming and learn from your mistakes in a small amount of time. So in this session we're using, sort of, like a—we're talking about programming, right? - -We think of programming as any set of technologies that you can use to get your work done faster than you could do it manually. And one really great example of that is shell commands. Command line utilities that come on your computer. I see a lot of—I think I see all Macs here. It's an Unix operating system. You have, like, a world of these little utilities that you can run and an environment that you can configure to make your life a little bit easier whether it's making your prompt, this delightful creature, or changing the background color of your terminal, or a bunch of other things. And these are small pieces, right, but they tie together. You can do some really useful work. - -And there are tools that you have. You don't have to install anything. You don't have to—there's likely in all those configuration files, something to begin with that you can sort of slightly modify to better suit your needs. - -And as I said earlier, what you learned by using a command line utility or editing script, you can kind of remix together into something that looks a lot more like capital "P" programming. And so you start small with little chunks, and move onto bigger things. - - -So that little script that he showed will—not something that I put, but it's not even my script. Like, someone has made a script, or a little suite of things called "Gifify" and it makes a gif—or jif, whatever you call it. So for me, I write a lot of online material and it's such a pain in the ass to take a movie, and do whatever I used to do to convert it to a gif copy the filepath to my text file. So this is something that I quickly wrote, I wanted to download and I wanted a certain quality level. It presets all this stuff because it's very easy to get the impression that if you're a programmer you have to remember all these archaic things and sometimes you do because you're just doing it so much. I mean, it's just natural, right? But I have to say, I don't know about the rest of you, but hate the feeling of oh, I'm spending all this time learning about this stupid little program. And I mean, this is a great program, but like, I, as some of you know who've worked with command line argument, it's like, if you use these flags for rm, you're going to get something very different. This is just—someone wrote this for him or herself, has shared it, and I was like, I really like this. So when I write Unix tutorials, I find that I don't like doing webcasts, or web videos because it's such a pain in the ass. Just ten second clips and I just throw it up like this. And this is something that I did for only even very recently and it just helps me, even if you don't feel like you're learning something, it helps you, just like looking multiplication speed tests, or speed tables just help you get familiar with numbers. This stuff used to scary the hell out of me, even at ProPublica. He wasn't pro guy. But he would help me with sysadmin stuff. He would copy stuff and paste it in Notepad and all this stuff. I had no idea like oh, this is too much beyond me, the Ruby programmer but now I'm like God, I wish I typed it. What I find when I try to learn any language is I try to take any problem where I know what it should look like, what the answer should be, sometimes I'll type it out exactly. Sometimes I'll do something to change up the variable names just so that I know that, I know that it's no really an epiphany and sometimes learning isn't like that. But if you can make it like kind of low energy, you'll be surprised, like, how quickly you'll build up that familiarity with the code. - - -So I think that's, like, really, really important is part of what makes scripting and programming useful is that it's very easy to make small changes and to experiment with what your process, in a way that might be much more difficult if you're doing a manual process and doing those experiments. But on the subject of making short, gif-based movies, let's look at some examples of mundane programming tasks and their implementations. This is Dan's, and he can talk about it. - - -I did this this morning. So you'll know how to download a file in your browser. So when we talk about programming, I don't say, give up your fancy browser. When I do something like this, I don't pull it out on the terminal. It makes everyone's life easier. I'm downloading the SRCCON logo or whatever. - - -But you could do it other ways, right? - - -And so here, and so this is how I tell my students. I'm like okay, you all know how to download a file. So let's try something a little bit different and this is tough because you're like, "Why the hell would I want to do that?" What's this curl shit? Especially if you're a slow typier, this is really bad. But but especially in school, it's like, shut up you have to learn it. But here, this is the hard part because this is something that you should get in your head because when you start programming for anything. I mean, every time I try to program for a task, it takes much longer than I would want to have done it. Which makes it something that you don't want to do on your job because you're going to piss everyone off, and you're going to piss yourself off. But okay here instead of downloading a file and curling it. I'm going to click it. With OS X, which is great, not that we're saying it's the best system but I've just learned to type "open" and it will just pick the default application to open that file type. And I don't even move my mouse for that. - - -In addition to saving mouse movements. Does anybody have another reason why you would use curl to download one or multiple image files instead of just right clicking in your browser? - - -Faster? - - -It's faster? - - -It's automatable? - - -I really want to -- - - -Tell me about your image scraper. - - -So I want to write this article, the flags ranked. 'Cause there's, like, the confederate flag—fuck them. So I want to write but it's going to be a random sort so I'm just going to Wikipedia and downloading all the flags. So everyone gets trolled when I write this. - - -And there's other reasons why you might not want to script and automate downloading images as well. - - -Okay. So you know this video. So okay the problem with any link, or especially with link shorteners while it gives you a nice, rememberable thing but it can literally point to anything, right? So whether it's just a friendly link, or you're getting phishing links. There's many reasons why you don't want to click through it. A browser is many things. It doesn't just download files. A runs a bunch of code when it runs a page. Maybe you don't want that to happen. Maybe you're at work and you're like, I don't know where the site's going to take me. So the thing about did you recall is it's the same web probable but what it's doing is downloading at that web address. I think the example that I have in the code is I want to see where it redirects if you type in curl cap, hyphen I, you'll learn that. For me, when I was learning curl, it was totally foreign to me, even as a programmer, I was like, that's not so bad. All this stuff that you see in your web inspector. And one of the things that I do in my classes, or my day journalism classes was that the government releases this massive list of gov domains. You do this you see which sites are up, which are down, which have been hacked. Well, you could do that with your browser. You would be really obsessive, but here, when you can express it as a command then you have much more flexibility to do the kind of weird, not even weird, but just easy, mundane things that are not just very exciting but they are exciting when you can have someone else, in this case, the machine do it for you. But this is obviously just one example but imagine it was in a loop. - - -So another nice thing about mundane tasks is it's a really good opportunity to try different tools. So for example, because you know what the output is supposed to be, you have some familiarity, perhaps with solving the same problem, and it's at a scale, we're doing something different. Rather than what all of y'all were talking about learning Angular to execute a bigger project, you can try something slightly smaller for a smaller project. Had so for this incidence instead of using wget to do a curl, using the command line, you can learn how its design and its intentions are different. And whether it does that task better or worse, and whether it's something useful to have in your toolkit for other problems that you have in the future. So these small, mundane tasks are really good low-risk opportunities to try one or two things different with your technology or coding practice. - -So a second example. This is mine. In Chicago coming up there's a big set of Grateful Dead concerts. Not of particular interest to me, but I'm stoked. But we have to analyze setlist data, we have to dedupe song titles. So we got this list of all song titles known by Gracenote. And what actually needed to happen was we needed to export this into a csv and transform it just a little bit to use another tool to reconcile the rows in the set list database with those canonical titles using source refine. And we've all done this. You can click in the cell, edit what you need to, do "save as" in Excel and you've solved your problem. So in many cases, like the tools you know are great. But there are also, kind of compelling reasons to do something different. - -And one of the reasons is that your data can just get really out of hand if you just start doing it in the spreadsheet and I lose sort of the history of the et cetera that you're making. And it also makes them really difficult to replicate, or to go back and replicate them. So if you want to document how you transformed that data to natural language, you can see it gets really, really kludgy really, really fast, or if you're trying to explain to a colleague how to replicate that work. When you read through this, there's a lot of things that end up being ambiguous or just confusing. - -And also, you know, we're pretty error prone and so it's really easy to make small errors that could throw out your entire analysis and I personally find those a little bit—are a little bit easier to see when you have it written out, or even when you have to write out what you're planning on doing, the code that does it, and running it versus just running it and seeing the results in real time. So one of the big advantages of programming or scripting or even just doing things through a series of command line utilities is that you really explicitly see what's happening and someone can run those same commands on the same input data and get the same results. - -And also, as that problem scales, it's easy to rerun those commands again and again and again to save yourself a ton of time instead of just a little bit. So what that looks like for my task instead of editing that Excel file, renaming the first row, clicking to add a column and using the dragdown to fill in to create sort of a surrogate primary key is, I can do it in a command line and paste that in my readme and my colleague knows how to go from that source file to the one that we're using in OpenRefine by just running this command. - -So we use an utility in csvkit to convert it to csc, we use Tail to strip out the first title row because we don't care about it. We replace it with a single cell that just says, "Title." It's like the column heading in a normal csv file, and finally we we use another utility that's part of csv kit to include the line numbers as a column and then we output the whole thing to a csv file. So really easy to do that in Excel. A little bit harder to do programmatically. And also some of the skills are transferable. The little bit of regular expressions syntax that I had to learn for that "said" command is maybe something that I can use for a similar problem in the future. We have about 15 minutes. Do you want to dive, get into this? - - -I mean, just very briefly, just don't think that oh, everything is Excel. I mean, the reason we deal with Excel so often is because the government uses it, right? And if you're in America, that is what you will run into. So the obvious question, so Excel, or at least Google spreadsheets, modern spreadsheets are an amazing thing and you cannot—don't take them for granted. If you know them, you know, there's quite a stunning ignorance of spreadsheets, even among the investigative journalism world. - -But the reason why we use them, or why you'll run into them is 'cause other people use them and that's kind of the core problem of any programming thing. You're trying to interface with other people. And the links here I have. I have a few examples. One is California's Department of Education has a lot of data, one of them being a decade's worth of vaccination rates in their kindergartens. And another is AP, ACT, and SAT scores for different schools, so that's 45 different files. There was something else in the repo, how to analyze California's academic performance in 80 steps and I got really bored of that. But the thing is, you hear that and you're like holy shit. First of all that's the reality. It's part of the bureaucracy. Part of it is things change, like, the SATs change. The Excel files. There's random notes in them. They're no spreadsheets that you can just convert into a csv but you have to do things like as Geoff said, strip out some lines. You can do that for a few files but if you do it 45 times, I think you're just going to quit life in general. - -You're definitely, unless you're a very passionate reporter about that topic, you're not going to do it. And so that, widescale analysis is only reserved to the people who have the time and the support staff to help them. But what about—I mean, there's plenty of team who would take a look at that and if you're a programmer, that's one thing even if you're not, like, super into it, this is the kind of—so this is veering off of like, "Oh, how can it help you right away, like, find you an apartment or a job?" But here, for me, extremely lazy as I am, these are things that I have to look at because I'm a reporter. But I don't really want to. And I don't want to spend too much of my life on it but I can at least incrementally go at it. So I'll write a script to just go get the links because it's a pain in the ass. I'll go and download them. One of the strategies is keep your stuff in order. You'll be surprised how much that matters in professional journalism but just make sure that you're downloading the files in the right place. And you'll never forget where everything is. That's one of the nice things about a script. And when things run in Excel, I would just leave them in Excel and go in there but now I'm like wait, there are a lot of libraries. A lot of comfortable with Excel. So you have to take a breather and say, what if there was an easier way of opening this file that didn't involve opening Excel, doing the random clicking and dragging. One example that I saw Reinhart-Rogoff was the big economics stuff that Tommy touted. And Harvard researchers—it's not like some kids in high school. But Harvard economists just didn't drag the formula far enough. So I think some Princeton guy looked at it, like a grad student finally called him out on it. But I mean, it's not because they're stupid but that's human error and that's not something that—and they have all the time to work on that stuff. They screwed it up. I don't have much passion about a lot of data things. So I don't want to take that. So some of it is just recognizing human fallibility. And it's a pain in the ass but it's better than recognizing the alternative. But that was another solution or another scenario in there. But we've got what, like, ten minutes? - - -I want to say one thing about this. I think a lot of times when you're looking at a massive set of data and you imagine, like, you imagine the software workflow to sort of go from this trove on the website to the analysis that you need. And that can be really daunting and that's not maybe going to happen. But you can break this problem into at least some chunks that you can automate and use it as an opportunity to hone your programming schools skills. So if you look at the program, Offline as an example of this. Maybe you don't want to worry about learning a program to do the downloading, you just write a script to get a nicely you outputted list of links that you can just click on and download manually. So I encourage you all, as you're thinking through your problems, break it down into little chunks. Maybe you can't code your way out of the whole solution; but you can find something in it that is a coding problem that is at your ability, or at your time level that's really useful to you and an opportunity to learn cool stuff. - -This is another example. I want to skip through this and get to... some brainstorming. So now we've seen some examples of some, like, mundane programming tasks and ways that they've been solved with scripting code, and we've heard some war stories around big projects that were difficult because they were trying to learn a new programming language, or inheriting a codebase from somebody else. Now, let's talk about some examples of mundane programming in your work, or, sort of, if you haven't written a lot of code, or you haven't done these yet, just sort of opportunities that you see to do these tasks. - - -That's true of the—who can come up with the most mundane thing. I can come up with one thing. - - -I'll send somebody something really, really boring if you have the most mundane. - - -This won't be the most mundane, but one of the things that I've done, at all the places that I've worked, Javascript thing. They can paste the spreadsheet into tabulated crap and it will post into an HTML table that can post it to whatever shitty CMS they're using. People love that. To them it's like a miracle. So that's the level of mundanity that I've been working with. - - -I've been trying to learn node.js recently. And there's this lovely Avril Lavine jacket that I've been looking at. And it's summer, and I don't need it immediately. So I wrote a node.js thing that will look at the L.L.Bean site and look for a price drop. But I've learned both node and Heroku. Both trying to save myself $25. I don't know if it will ever go down in price but we'll find out. - - -So part of must change is every morning I have to scan a variety of news wires and we have three that we use that are content partners and some of them have their own wires and some of them we have to actually check their website and it's pretty tedious. I have, like, five tabs open at all times and I have to read, you know, 50 stories to figure out, you know, what we want to use. And so, instead I could probably automate that or create some sort of automatic reader that would sort out, like, if it contains terms that we're definitely not going to use, I develop a news website for kids, it can probably start without with anything that mentions "great" or anything that mentions "not-safe-for-school" sorts of things. - - -That's mundane but it's kind of a core—I mean, really one of the core things of programming and journalism is just filtering information. So anything that involves filtering, you're kind of on track. I was just going to say, learn regular expressions. That's one thing that I wish our stupid computer science teachers would have made us done but they were like, oh, that's boring. That literally would have saved me years of my life because it's just a way of thinking in patterns. It is, and it's part of every fundamental programming thing but it sounds really boring, you know, "regular expressions" but think of it as find and replace on steroids but it helps with a lot of the mundane crap that you come across. Anyone else? - - -Scheduling system gets inputted into a third-party and then pulled down through JSON, reimported into our database, so that we can index it and build PDFs out of it. And that's how we build our scheduling system. And we do that for contractual reasons. But that is the thing that I built the tool that they could manage it with and I'm the only person who still uses that tool just by having no knowledge of housekeeping. - - -Secure job, right? You in the back? - - -So I teach. And I'm curious how much of this mundane programming is actually experiencing the suffering... - - -The agony. - - -of manually doing the mundane task because I'm actually thinking of using scraping websites as a way of teaching programming because there's so much procedural stuff that you need to do and step by step stuff that you need to go through. But I'm wondering if making them manually go into a police blotter and copy and paste information into Excel for a week as a way to drive that. They would just crave the ability to automate this. - - -As long as you make them hand-write it first and then retype it. - - -I mean, one of the other issues that we kind of touch on is people kind of have lost what it's like to do things on their own. They've forgotten what Paul Ford said, you can do this on your own. It's not that you should start doing that. But that's how you start. That's an algorithm. An algorithm is a set of steps and that web-escaping, I hate teaching that because some people have this weird conception of it, and I've done so much of it that I've maybe taken for granted but it's no different than you logging onto the website, you looking at a piece of text, copying it, highlighting it, pasting it, except a program is doing it for you. If people say, can you help me get that gets Mark Zuckerberg's direct message? I'm like what the hell, you could not do that without going to jail. Someone heard of Politowhoops. First of all I was inspired by something that came along like Andrew weiner who happened to solve the dick pic before he deleted it. But at which time shut down on Politowoops—I'm surprised that nobody's made that for celebrities and once I did that, that would really piss them off. So there's no reason to—and so there's some scripts. And there's some scripts. I've been using them to do some research on social media fakery, but yeah, I've written, first I made it really complicated and I was like screw it. I'm going to type in, "Get tweets." And it just goes and gets all the tweets for this person, and gets their friend network. And their followers. And I'm too lazy to analyze it yet. But I'm trying to analyze some of the more advanced fakery that's being done. And I would always put it off and I'm just like, all I need to do is get it before it gets deleted so I have something to work with. And I use it sometimes myself, too. When I unfollow a bunch of people at once, like whatever, people who aren't following me back or some petty shit like. I don't want to give them the dignity of hitting that button. I just want a little bad script. So it all ties into my research as well. - -[ Laughter ] - - -So we have time for one more. Does anybody else have a super mundane programming task, real or imagined? - - -I have one because it's just going to be mundane even if I figure it out. I just put up on Tuesday as a quick blog post, I, because of all the stuff going on with the confederate flag, I scraped the Wikipedia page that says, "List of federal monuments." And put it into a map. And I said if you know a federal monument, here's a Google form to fill out. And I got 800 responses but I have to go through and verify everything. The ones that were that easiest to verify were the ones that people gave me a street address which something three to 400 people did. And I would like to be able to send those to Google maps API and ask them, is this a real address? And just start with those. - - -I have a script in the repo, one of the things that we can encourage you to do is APIs are made for humans to use. So to be intimidated. Maps API is just one that I teach a lot because it just works, so instead of you doing that by hand for 400 things, you should definitely look that up. You'll be happy you did. - - -But it's still going to be mundane even if I did. - - -But on that note there is a repo of examples of mundane tasks and the code that makes them less mundane. So if you have tasks that you think of, or code snippets that you want to share with people, you can forward that repo and send pull requests or paste the idea into an issue or something and share it with the world. - -But I think we're at the hour, so thank you for spending this mundane time with us. - - -Thanks, folks. - -[ Applause ] - -Did anybody write a mundane script while sitting here? +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/betterprogramming/index.html +--- + +# Become a Better Programmer Through Mundane Programming + +### Session Facilitator(s): Daniel Nguyen, Geoff Hing + +### Day & Time: Thursday, 11am-noon + +### Room: Minnesota + +Morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I know this is the most excitingly titled presentation. There was a purpose to that. I know I'm probably kind of boring in actuality but that's just a coincidence. I hope what we have to talk about is hopefully going to be very useful to you, or at least enlightning. But anyway, I guess we'll just introduce ourselves real quick. My name is Dan Nguyen. I'm currently a lecturer at Stanford University in their Computational Journalism Lab. Before that, I was at ProPublica working as a news application developer and then before that, I was a regular reporter at the Sacramento Bee, although they slowly moved me into multimedia. I did do computer engineering in college and I wanted to not ever do it again, but they slowly pushed me in there and, you know, it worked out well. I wouldn't have done it on my own, so I just kind of waddled my way into the field. But anyway, so that's where I come from. + +My name is Geoff Hing. I come from Chicago where I'm a news application developer at the Chicago Tribune. This time last year I was doing development work for OpenElections. I don't know how many of y'all have to deal with elections and elections data, but it's like a treasure trove of mundane programming tasks. So that's me. + +Okay. So the title of this talk was actually just going to be "Mundane Programming." And they were like, "That's not a very good title and people aren't going to go to that" and I said, okay, "Be a Better Programmer Through Mundane Programming," which is really, it's not me trying to dress it up; it's really the whole point of this. It's something that not everyone really realizes—that I've kind of realized late in my career that I've been lucky to work at places where programming and journalism was encouraged, especially at ProPublica. And I mean, I kind of hated it, to be honest. I like writing more than I love coding. But anyway, as some of you know who are kind of in the field, there are very exciting challenges in terms of either disseminating the production part. A lot of people think about it in terms of who's going to build the next mobile app or website to doing investigations and it's so... but it's also a very tough place to be a programmer. + +I've never worked in a real, or in an engineering company but I get that, like, there's a certain process, like, there's testing or there's other programmers to work with. And so, many newsrooms, if you're a developer, can be a little bit lonely. If you're someone who's trying to learn on your own, it can be very lonely. And so we want to do, kind of, reach out to that group of people, people who are whether you're pretty new, you've been going at it for a few years, few months, or maybe even if you're kind of an intermediate level programmer who's come out of school, and we want to just to kind of, as a group, talk about you know, barriers that you have in programming. + +Like, what you aspire to, why you didn't want to do it other than just like, it's a promising career choice compared to the other journalism positions you might find. But yeah, what makes you think you want to do it. And why do you do it when it's such a pain in the ass? So Geoff, do you have anything to add? + +No, it's just that that's what we're trying to get at in the session. Couple of procedural points. We have ether point going, in addition to the real-time transcript that Stanley is making. The etherpad is for if you have thoughts that you maybe want to raise your hand, that you thought were relevant for links. We thought of that as more of a participatory aspect of the session and so the URL is there. I can read it out loud if it's too light. Does anybody need that? And then there's also a site that Dan put together that has a number of examples of, sort of, mundane programming tasks with source code and these slides are also on the web for future reference... + +In a quick note, it's supposed to be more polished. I realized that it's also a lot harder to do that and also the presentation as well. My goal: It's something that I'm planning to build along because it's just useful to a lot of other people. And not just the people in this room but if you go to it now, code snippets at work for me, and actually one of the themes of this is to not give a shit about anyone else as long as your code works for exactly what you wanna do. But it's something that I'm going to polish as soon as I'm not busy coordinating, or helping with the presentation. So anyway... moving along. + +So let's talk about, like, the zen of code or the essence of code. + +Some of you guys may have seen this mega, 38,000 word article in that broke out in Business Week. So basically, editor the editor of the magazine asked Paul Ford who's a well known writer and programmer to tell him what code is. And to be honest, I didn't finish it because it covered too much stuff that I read about all the time. And I thought, oh, that's pretty cool. And it also didn't work on my iPad. + +[ Laughter ] + +But the great points, right away—this is near the top and this is exactly kind of what—I mean, I don't think that I could have said it any better, no matter how amazing the stuff that we see computers do today, whatever they can do, you can do with a pen and paper. The only difference why you don't do that is because by the time you've written one stroke, a computer can do it a billion times. So whatever you can do to give it to the computer, you should do. But that doesn't mean that just because computers seem—have seemed to get so advanced, or the frameworks seemed to have gotten so high that we just kind of throw up the, "The machines have taken over." There's a lot of room for us. Just as there is in chess, I know that machines in pure force can beat humans but what's gone on from there is humans against each other using computers is still a wide field. They still beat supercomputers, hands down. So that's kind of the minds that we want to bring to this. So if you're into programming because you think it's a neat thing, or there seems to be a tech bubble going and you want to jump on that, great. But it's still an incredible, intellectual pursuit and if you're in journalism, there's a lot of great, just practical opportunities. So it's we wanted to—just talk, discuss it more in the room. + +Do you mind if I dive in? + +Yeah, go ahead. + +So there's sort of a difference, right, between this essential programming: Taking tasks that you can do with a pane paper and automating them, and making them do them at a grander scale than you or your colleagues could ever. and then there's the presentation of this article that this quote comes from which is beautiful and things moves around and it's very elaborate and elegant and we want to unpack the what programming looks like to you, and one way we thought of doing that is if y'all could share, sort of, programming fails. The times when it doesn't happen and so, as much as you feel comfortable, let us know, either a time—an idea that you had for a program, like, oh, I could write code to do this, and you haven't done this. Or when you started down the path and had to punt out of it early because you just either, it was above your head, or you didn't have time on the deadline that you were working on there. + +So let's get at what, like, what real talk—what programming looks like for this room. And I'll try to follow it in the notes. + +And then we know that not all of you are—I mean, we're expecting not all of you are professional programmers. So don't—it's not the—the standard here, but we just kind of want to hear what you think programming is, what's blocked you, or what you aspire to do, what may—what you see as kind of barriers to you as you're trying to pursue it professionally. So anyone wanna... open up the floor? + +I have an example. + +Sure. + +So I work with data a lot. And I actually use Excel for many things and people keep telling me, "Hey, why are you using Excel? Because it's hard for you to document everything." But I'm trying to move to doing things in Python but it's so much easier for me to clean things, sort things, building things in Excel and there's this shame in doing that. + +That's good that you brought that up. But no, no. You're not a negative story. I mean, you're able to get the stuff that you need done and yes, that's hard to know when you jump into the next level, whatever that is. But if Excel works, it works. Anyone else? + +It's not really a programming fail but when I first got my job as, like, a web designer I kind of did the con your way into it and then Google your ass off. + +That's what we all do! + +[ Laughter ] + +So... + +That's a reality. + +So they gave me access to some app server where I needed to save something and I logged in using files that I looked for the first time through Filezilla and I accidentally hit the header where it says like "file name" and so it reverse sorted everything. And I couldn't—it looked like I deleted everything, and I was just like crapping in my pants. I didn't know what was going on. And I really thought that I deleted everything. But that was it. + +A great representation of a common problem that we have no matter how good you are at a certain software. It seems there's newer and newer software. It seems like things are becoming obsolete, like when Gmail put in symbols instead of text for send and stuff. Luckily, there was an option to turn it back but I didn't know what to do when they put little emoticons in there. But anyway, problems with the interface, that is a key thing. + +Go for it. In the striped shirt and then... + +So I have a -- + +Oh, you both have striped shirts. + +It's okay. Go ahead. + +I have a pretty funny fail from the first time I wrote code for part of my job. My background is reporter, as a journalist and I always wanted to do more programming and I was kind of learning it on the side, and at the time I was working for Digital First Media, which is a newspaper chain and they had sort of—I forgot what they called it, but anyone can work on for one day any project they wanted. So I worked with another editor on working a really dumb Twitterbot. The idea behind it was that it would make any—it would scrape headlines from other news organizations and it would make them into an Upworthy-style headline and it ended up producing some very morally abhorrent... + +[ Laughter ] + +Headlines that we couldn't share with other people. Or they would think we were monsters. So yeah. + +So I used to work for a television like a very small ABC affiliate station as a web manager and the person who I inherited the job from was far more advanced as a programmer than I was and he built a system that would take the files from the MOV files from the shows that we would film and in Python, would convert them to MP4's and then from there put them onto a shared folder and then the system would break all the time. It would just, anything could break it and I would have to be responsible for fixing it, which was, I mean, he did the right thing. He took a very mundane task. He could have done that manually every time and really programmed it, so he didn't have to, but fixing it as somebody who also started off as a reporter and did not know that much about Python and, like, the process that it would take to convert video files in an automated manner, it was just very difficult and I had to call him a few times. He had already left the company but I had to be like, "Hey, Josh, what did you do to build this?" So that was a bit of a fail but eventually, I feel like I figured it out and I left and now I don't even remember. + +It's never a fail if it's someone else's software that you have to learn. It's always the other person's fault. Yes? + +Um, I think my fail was not planning ahead. I decided that it was going to—that it was a great idea to learn Angular while building an interactive website for a storytelling project and I was like, "Oh, it works great. It's fine." It was fine. It was hard but the problem with that, obviously, this website wanted to share stuff, as well and as much as possible with SEO-friendly stuff. So I realized Angular really is Javascript. So an Facebook, it would be almost impossible to share any story with just share the actual website. And that was, like, at the end of six months of, like, working on it and I was, like: Oh, my God... that is... and it's super important for in terms of journalism and being on social media and it should have been a thought of what do they want. Okay, they probably want an ability to share. And Angular was probably not the best plan. It was a great plan for whatever interactive entity that was there, but the sharing was not working. But it was kind of challenging, or yet to pay for services and it was kind of a mess. So I think planning ahead was one of the fails. + +Sure. You...? + +So everyone's biggest problem with Angular was that they try to learn Angular in the middle of something else. It's like the Angular developer hack. My favorite programming fail that I've ever done. And it was really related to mundane programming. At the beginning of every week for a long time, it was sort of this routine database maintenance that we were doing where we were making a sanitized development database for our development staff and on a Monday morning at, like, 6:00 in the morning, I had just gotten up, okay, I'm going to find a way to strip this all out. We're going to schedule it, we don't have to worry about it anymore at me and I had working perfectly. It was going fine. I finally ran if, I looked at my local database, nothing had happened. Dropped my local database, nothing had happened and then realized about five minutes into it that I was still keyed to a production server and had dropped our production database about an hour before we hit peak traffic. So that was... there are some perils in mundane programming that are moderately terrifying if you're doing it on no sleep and without much caution. It was a good day. Real good day. + +Along with that, I thought I was reading up on staging from scratch in the same way that I rmr.f'd the entire directory, including the databases over time. So I had 30 minutes until the Varnish cache expired in order to rebuild and re-report everything. I just stood up from my desk and stood up and said, "Oh, shit" and sat back down and realized that I had 30 minutes from that point. + +You guys have seen Pixar clip where they were making toy story two. And this was right before it was going to be shown. And they scrapped the movie anyway and redid it. But if it happens to Pixar, it should be clue you that this is an all-too-common problem. + +So I'm a designer and I work with developers all the time, right, trying part-time as a developer, too. I'm getting myself into some tricky situations. But I was working with a guy who would do things like you guys were talking about just about every Friday. And so, and his name was "Steve." And I was like, I got so pissed off at Steve every Friday that I had to call him something else and I ended up calling him "Teddy" because I was like, you can't get mad at a guy named Teddy. Anyway, small story. So he's known as Teddy. + +On Monday I was showing a coworker how to deal invisible files off of thumb drives that she uses to plug into a video player and the video player plays the first file and dot files that proceed that file that she wanted to play. And so I opened up the terminal and I told her how to change the directory and rm._ and on Tuesday while I was at lunch she forgot about change directory and about dot star. Because you open up the terminal and you put in -rm._. Luckily all her important files are on flash drives. But that was a fun day. + +I mean, I've deleted entire websites, dropped databases. T'd off the Washington Post on election night trying to do cache invalidation. I've done it all. All of this has happened. It's fucking rad. + +So I'm hearing, like, a couple of themes that are really related to this talk. Like, one, that a lot of programming and the time that you spend programming is spent not programming, right? It's like panicking or -- + +[ Laughter ] + +—or panicking and then typing a few things into your shell and then panicking more. Also that it can be hard, it can be really hard to learn programming when the problem that you're solving or inheriting isn't your own. It's not one that you know intimately is something that I heard in a couple of stories. We're going to get at that soon, maybe now. Let me switch to the others. Back to the slides. + +Aww, yeah! Anyone wanna watch RuPaul's Drag Race? A common saying that she has contestants that would freak them out. If you can't love yourself, who hell can you love? And I butchered that quote but there's a lot of fighting on that show, a lot of negativity and RuPaul tries to herd them all together. And it's a great quote, and I like to put it in terms of coding because what I think—not even just being at Stanford where—not every kid but it's very much into their heads to be "let's be the next Mark Zuckerberg." and they're saying, what ideas should I build for you? And it goes nowhere, of course. And those are people that are Stanford students and we're running up into this natural brick wall of trying to build something for someone else and I think the problem is much more acute for people who are not—who don't have the time to be a student and learn it in school when you have all the time to do just dumb things and make mistakes and pull all-nighters three nights in a row. And to what I've found even as an engineer, or what has taken me almost too long of a time to learn is, is that things too so much sooner when you think about it yourself, because what you need because at the very at least you have a user of one. There's some need that's being met. Chances are, you're not the only person who thinks like you. + +What I can think of, like, an example for myself, when I went to ProPublica. They were like, we're going to do Ruby on Rails because the New York Times is doing it. That's the only reason I like New York, which is this ruby hold-out while everyone else is doing Python. And I was like, I have plenty of programming I had that background. But my problem was that I was trying to look for an apartment in New York. What I would do is write ruby scripts to look through Craigslist. But the problem is, I'm tired of opening up every page. I want to scan things. I know words that I want to look out for, or things that disqualify me. I just want something to pull down the RSS feed and then pull it into a spreadsheet where I can sort it, and that's where I built up on my Ruby skills and it was horrible code, I'm sure but I didn't have to please anyone. I knew at work, it made my life easier and that's kind of, those of I who have been in professional coding environments, you know that quick iteration is nice. It's very essential to becoming a strong programmer. + +So there's no fast iteration. You run your code. I mean, hey, this sucks, this doesn't do what I wanted it to do. So that's kind of, for me, one of the core things to think about and it's okay. I know a lot of you are in journalism 'cause you're patriots and you're fighting for the First Amendment and social justice and that's great but you can't do all that if you're struggling with deploying stuff and that's, those of I who are in production-level development, those of you who are trying to struggle with what you feel is a basic HTML and whatnot and you're getting frustrated. Obviously, doesn't help until you are able to kind of fixate on something that, that will move you along the chain. So so that's kind of one of the themes is just—a lot of people want to program 'cause they want to—they don't want to—they don't realize that programming is a pain in the ass. They want to do something exciting. But don't feel the pressure from that. Do things for yourself, and hopefully things will fall into place more for you. + +So in addition to, like, owning the problem, let's unpack what's what are the good tasks for honing your mundane programming skills. It's not only your problem, but it's one that you can understand because you've done it in the slowest possible way, or in a way that you know how. Whether that's in a spreadsheet, or whether it's by hand on a piece of paper and pencil, you kind of know the steps that you need to replicate in the code, so you're kind of not both learning a programming language and how the standard library works and thinking through the steps of the problem. + +Again, like, doing something that saves you time so you're not both at the end of maybe spending some frustrating time making a program, you still have that, you're like, "I still saved myself two hours even though it took me two hours to write this program." So having that reward for yourself is great. + +And then finally, having an immediate, concrete goal, a simple task that you can not only validate the output for maybe a slice of it with the manual method, but just, sort of, a problem that you can fit within the time that you have to code it rather than thinking about what the most amazing, bells-and-whistles-aspirational project that you can envision. So here's a great addition to the Craigslist scraping example. Here's an example of a programming problem that really speaks to those points and to also somebody owning their problem. I'm surprised that the Jail hasn't, like, made that a service. + +So actually, one thing, Reddit is a great resource. They have a /r/learnedprogramming subreddit. And they also have a very busy Python. although not all of you are Pythonistas, but there are a lot of great thirds like this. But this is an excellent one because actually one of the first things that I learned as a programmer in a newsroom, I still had to check the jail logs and it was a real pain that the ass. You had to go to the website and you would click each name and you had to click into who was in jail, you had to click the name, and what their bail was set at. So that was one of my PHP scripts, so pull stuff up like name, and bail, like oh, there's someone in here with a million dollar bail, and other stuff like that. But the thing is I did that just because I was tired of clicking, like, 20 links a night. And so I 20—I mean, 'cause night cops—nights can be quiet. So just do that. And I were, like, a real reporter. If I had—if I was, like, a real data journalist at the time, I would have done something more than just who's—who has the most bail. I mean, a lot of times it's like, who's the fattest prisoner? Or the fattest person, or the tallest person, or the shortest person, or the person with the most tattoos because they have stuff like tattoos. And... but that was the extent of my intrepidness. But at the very least, we didn't break any huge stories, but at least I knew who had done something bad that night and so I totally deleted this. And this is a problem that not only is it kind of something to be gained but it's also kind of personal. Like, people were kind of waiting. I think people who aren't actively seeking out programming, they're thinking, "Oh, somebody's going to make an app for what I want." This is not something that people—this is not a big scaling problem, right? This is something that this guy and his wife needs to figure out. But it's a very basic human problem. Like, I wanna know when something happens in this specific area. Really personal to me, and I need it to happen on my personal schedule. So who can do that for me, and there's not any wide-scale solution for it. + +So let's starts at about—let's start talking about going down a path of identifying problems like that and starting to hack on them. So... one of the aspects of picking a problem that you understand is that you know what the expected output is, and you can, without doing something as rigorous as unit testing your code, you can have an idea of whether it's working or not. And that's very crucial for picking a problem where you're able to learn from your programming and learn from your mistakes in a small amount of time. So in this session we're using, sort of, like a—we're talking about programming, right? + +We think of programming as any set of technologies that you can use to get your work done faster than you could do it manually. And one really great example of that is shell commands. Command line utilities that come on your computer. I see a lot of—I think I see all Macs here. It's an Unix operating system. You have, like, a world of these little utilities that you can run and an environment that you can configure to make your life a little bit easier whether it's making your prompt, this delightful creature, or changing the background color of your terminal, or a bunch of other things. And these are small pieces, right, but they tie together. You can do some really useful work. + +And there are tools that you have. You don't have to install anything. You don't have to—there's likely in all those configuration files, something to begin with that you can sort of slightly modify to better suit your needs. + +And as I said earlier, what you learned by using a command line utility or editing script, you can kind of remix together into something that looks a lot more like capital "P" programming. And so you start small with little chunks, and move onto bigger things. + +So that little script that he showed will—not something that I put, but it's not even my script. Like, someone has made a script, or a little suite of things called "Gifify" and it makes a gif—or jif, whatever you call it. So for me, I write a lot of online material and it's such a pain in the ass to take a movie, and do whatever I used to do to convert it to a gif copy the filepath to my text file. So this is something that I quickly wrote, I wanted to download and I wanted a certain quality level. It presets all this stuff because it's very easy to get the impression that if you're a programmer you have to remember all these archaic things and sometimes you do because you're just doing it so much. I mean, it's just natural, right? But I have to say, I don't know about the rest of you, but hate the feeling of oh, I'm spending all this time learning about this stupid little program. And I mean, this is a great program, but like, I, as some of you know who've worked with command line argument, it's like, if you use these flags for rm, you're going to get something very different. This is just—someone wrote this for him or herself, has shared it, and I was like, I really like this. So when I write Unix tutorials, I find that I don't like doing webcasts, or web videos because it's such a pain in the ass. Just ten second clips and I just throw it up like this. And this is something that I did for only even very recently and it just helps me, even if you don't feel like you're learning something, it helps you, just like looking multiplication speed tests, or speed tables just help you get familiar with numbers. This stuff used to scary the hell out of me, even at ProPublica. He wasn't pro guy. But he would help me with sysadmin stuff. He would copy stuff and paste it in Notepad and all this stuff. I had no idea like oh, this is too much beyond me, the Ruby programmer but now I'm like God, I wish I typed it. What I find when I try to learn any language is I try to take any problem where I know what it should look like, what the answer should be, sometimes I'll type it out exactly. Sometimes I'll do something to change up the variable names just so that I know that, I know that it's no really an epiphany and sometimes learning isn't like that. But if you can make it like kind of low energy, you'll be surprised, like, how quickly you'll build up that familiarity with the code. + +So I think that's, like, really, really important is part of what makes scripting and programming useful is that it's very easy to make small changes and to experiment with what your process, in a way that might be much more difficult if you're doing a manual process and doing those experiments. But on the subject of making short, gif-based movies, let's look at some examples of mundane programming tasks and their implementations. This is Dan's, and he can talk about it. + +I did this this morning. So you'll know how to download a file in your browser. So when we talk about programming, I don't say, give up your fancy browser. When I do something like this, I don't pull it out on the terminal. It makes everyone's life easier. I'm downloading the SRCCON logo or whatever. + +But you could do it other ways, right? + +And so here, and so this is how I tell my students. I'm like okay, you all know how to download a file. So let's try something a little bit different and this is tough because you're like, "Why the hell would I want to do that?" What's this curl shit? Especially if you're a slow typier, this is really bad. But but especially in school, it's like, shut up you have to learn it. But here, this is the hard part because this is something that you should get in your head because when you start programming for anything. I mean, every time I try to program for a task, it takes much longer than I would want to have done it. Which makes it something that you don't want to do on your job because you're going to piss everyone off, and you're going to piss yourself off. But okay here instead of downloading a file and curling it. I'm going to click it. With OS X, which is great, not that we're saying it's the best system but I've just learned to type "open" and it will just pick the default application to open that file type. And I don't even move my mouse for that. + +In addition to saving mouse movements. Does anybody have another reason why you would use curl to download one or multiple image files instead of just right clicking in your browser? + +Faster? + +It's faster? + +It's automatable? + +I really want to -- + +Tell me about your image scraper. + +So I want to write this article, the flags ranked. 'Cause there's, like, the confederate flag—fuck them. So I want to write but it's going to be a random sort so I'm just going to Wikipedia and downloading all the flags. So everyone gets trolled when I write this. + +And there's other reasons why you might not want to script and automate downloading images as well. + +Okay. So you know this video. So okay the problem with any link, or especially with link shorteners while it gives you a nice, rememberable thing but it can literally point to anything, right? So whether it's just a friendly link, or you're getting phishing links. There's many reasons why you don't want to click through it. A browser is many things. It doesn't just download files. A runs a bunch of code when it runs a page. Maybe you don't want that to happen. Maybe you're at work and you're like, I don't know where the site's going to take me. So the thing about did you recall is it's the same web probable but what it's doing is downloading at that web address. I think the example that I have in the code is I want to see where it redirects if you type in curl cap, hyphen I, you'll learn that. For me, when I was learning curl, it was totally foreign to me, even as a programmer, I was like, that's not so bad. All this stuff that you see in your web inspector. And one of the things that I do in my classes, or my day journalism classes was that the government releases this massive list of gov domains. You do this you see which sites are up, which are down, which have been hacked. Well, you could do that with your browser. You would be really obsessive, but here, when you can express it as a command then you have much more flexibility to do the kind of weird, not even weird, but just easy, mundane things that are not just very exciting but they are exciting when you can have someone else, in this case, the machine do it for you. But this is obviously just one example but imagine it was in a loop. + +So another nice thing about mundane tasks is it's a really good opportunity to try different tools. So for example, because you know what the output is supposed to be, you have some familiarity, perhaps with solving the same problem, and it's at a scale, we're doing something different. Rather than what all of y'all were talking about learning Angular to execute a bigger project, you can try something slightly smaller for a smaller project. Had so for this incidence instead of using wget to do a curl, using the command line, you can learn how its design and its intentions are different. And whether it does that task better or worse, and whether it's something useful to have in your toolkit for other problems that you have in the future. So these small, mundane tasks are really good low-risk opportunities to try one or two things different with your technology or coding practice. + +So a second example. This is mine. In Chicago coming up there's a big set of Grateful Dead concerts. Not of particular interest to me, but I'm stoked. But we have to analyze setlist data, we have to dedupe song titles. So we got this list of all song titles known by Gracenote. And what actually needed to happen was we needed to export this into a csv and transform it just a little bit to use another tool to reconcile the rows in the set list database with those canonical titles using source refine. And we've all done this. You can click in the cell, edit what you need to, do "save as" in Excel and you've solved your problem. So in many cases, like the tools you know are great. But there are also, kind of compelling reasons to do something different. + +And one of the reasons is that your data can just get really out of hand if you just start doing it in the spreadsheet and I lose sort of the history of the et cetera that you're making. And it also makes them really difficult to replicate, or to go back and replicate them. So if you want to document how you transformed that data to natural language, you can see it gets really, really kludgy really, really fast, or if you're trying to explain to a colleague how to replicate that work. When you read through this, there's a lot of things that end up being ambiguous or just confusing. + +And also, you know, we're pretty error prone and so it's really easy to make small errors that could throw out your entire analysis and I personally find those a little bit—are a little bit easier to see when you have it written out, or even when you have to write out what you're planning on doing, the code that does it, and running it versus just running it and seeing the results in real time. So one of the big advantages of programming or scripting or even just doing things through a series of command line utilities is that you really explicitly see what's happening and someone can run those same commands on the same input data and get the same results. + +And also, as that problem scales, it's easy to rerun those commands again and again and again to save yourself a ton of time instead of just a little bit. So what that looks like for my task instead of editing that Excel file, renaming the first row, clicking to add a column and using the dragdown to fill in to create sort of a surrogate primary key is, I can do it in a command line and paste that in my readme and my colleague knows how to go from that source file to the one that we're using in OpenRefine by just running this command. + +So we use an utility in csvkit to convert it to csc, we use Tail to strip out the first title row because we don't care about it. We replace it with a single cell that just says, "Title." It's like the column heading in a normal csv file, and finally we we use another utility that's part of csv kit to include the line numbers as a column and then we output the whole thing to a csv file. So really easy to do that in Excel. A little bit harder to do programmatically. And also some of the skills are transferable. The little bit of regular expressions syntax that I had to learn for that "said" command is maybe something that I can use for a similar problem in the future. We have about 15 minutes. Do you want to dive, get into this? + +I mean, just very briefly, just don't think that oh, everything is Excel. I mean, the reason we deal with Excel so often is because the government uses it, right? And if you're in America, that is what you will run into. So the obvious question, so Excel, or at least Google spreadsheets, modern spreadsheets are an amazing thing and you cannot—don't take them for granted. If you know them, you know, there's quite a stunning ignorance of spreadsheets, even among the investigative journalism world. + +But the reason why we use them, or why you'll run into them is 'cause other people use them and that's kind of the core problem of any programming thing. You're trying to interface with other people. And the links here I have. I have a few examples. One is California's Department of Education has a lot of data, one of them being a decade's worth of vaccination rates in their kindergartens. And another is AP, ACT, and SAT scores for different schools, so that's 45 different files. There was something else in the repo, how to analyze California's academic performance in 80 steps and I got really bored of that. But the thing is, you hear that and you're like holy shit. First of all that's the reality. It's part of the bureaucracy. Part of it is things change, like, the SATs change. The Excel files. There's random notes in them. They're no spreadsheets that you can just convert into a csv but you have to do things like as Geoff said, strip out some lines. You can do that for a few files but if you do it 45 times, I think you're just going to quit life in general. + +You're definitely, unless you're a very passionate reporter about that topic, you're not going to do it. And so that, widescale analysis is only reserved to the people who have the time and the support staff to help them. But what about—I mean, there's plenty of team who would take a look at that and if you're a programmer, that's one thing even if you're not, like, super into it, this is the kind of—so this is veering off of like, "Oh, how can it help you right away, like, find you an apartment or a job?" But here, for me, extremely lazy as I am, these are things that I have to look at because I'm a reporter. But I don't really want to. And I don't want to spend too much of my life on it but I can at least incrementally go at it. So I'll write a script to just go get the links because it's a pain in the ass. I'll go and download them. One of the strategies is keep your stuff in order. You'll be surprised how much that matters in professional journalism but just make sure that you're downloading the files in the right place. And you'll never forget where everything is. That's one of the nice things about a script. And when things run in Excel, I would just leave them in Excel and go in there but now I'm like wait, there are a lot of libraries. A lot of comfortable with Excel. So you have to take a breather and say, what if there was an easier way of opening this file that didn't involve opening Excel, doing the random clicking and dragging. One example that I saw Reinhart-Rogoff was the big economics stuff that Tommy touted. And Harvard researchers—it's not like some kids in high school. But Harvard economists just didn't drag the formula far enough. So I think some Princeton guy looked at it, like a grad student finally called him out on it. But I mean, it's not because they're stupid but that's human error and that's not something that—and they have all the time to work on that stuff. They screwed it up. I don't have much passion about a lot of data things. So I don't want to take that. So some of it is just recognizing human fallibility. And it's a pain in the ass but it's better than recognizing the alternative. But that was another solution or another scenario in there. But we've got what, like, ten minutes? + +I want to say one thing about this. I think a lot of times when you're looking at a massive set of data and you imagine, like, you imagine the software workflow to sort of go from this trove on the website to the analysis that you need. And that can be really daunting and that's not maybe going to happen. But you can break this problem into at least some chunks that you can automate and use it as an opportunity to hone your programming schools skills. So if you look at the program, Offline as an example of this. Maybe you don't want to worry about learning a program to do the downloading, you just write a script to get a nicely you outputted list of links that you can just click on and download manually. So I encourage you all, as you're thinking through your problems, break it down into little chunks. Maybe you can't code your way out of the whole solution; but you can find something in it that is a coding problem that is at your ability, or at your time level that's really useful to you and an opportunity to learn cool stuff. + +This is another example. I want to skip through this and get to... some brainstorming. So now we've seen some examples of some, like, mundane programming tasks and ways that they've been solved with scripting code, and we've heard some war stories around big projects that were difficult because they were trying to learn a new programming language, or inheriting a codebase from somebody else. Now, let's talk about some examples of mundane programming in your work, or, sort of, if you haven't written a lot of code, or you haven't done these yet, just sort of opportunities that you see to do these tasks. + +That's true of the—who can come up with the most mundane thing. I can come up with one thing. + +I'll send somebody something really, really boring if you have the most mundane. + +This won't be the most mundane, but one of the things that I've done, at all the places that I've worked, Javascript thing. They can paste the spreadsheet into tabulated crap and it will post into an HTML table that can post it to whatever shitty CMS they're using. People love that. To them it's like a miracle. So that's the level of mundanity that I've been working with. + +I've been trying to learn node.js recently. And there's this lovely Avril Lavine jacket that I've been looking at. And it's summer, and I don't need it immediately. So I wrote a node.js thing that will look at the L.L.Bean site and look for a price drop. But I've learned both node and Heroku. Both trying to save myself $25. I don't know if it will ever go down in price but we'll find out. + +So part of must change is every morning I have to scan a variety of news wires and we have three that we use that are content partners and some of them have their own wires and some of them we have to actually check their website and it's pretty tedious. I have, like, five tabs open at all times and I have to read, you know, 50 stories to figure out, you know, what we want to use. And so, instead I could probably automate that or create some sort of automatic reader that would sort out, like, if it contains terms that we're definitely not going to use, I develop a news website for kids, it can probably start without with anything that mentions "great" or anything that mentions "not-safe-for-school" sorts of things. + +That's mundane but it's kind of a core—I mean, really one of the core things of programming and journalism is just filtering information. So anything that involves filtering, you're kind of on track. I was just going to say, learn regular expressions. That's one thing that I wish our stupid computer science teachers would have made us done but they were like, oh, that's boring. That literally would have saved me years of my life because it's just a way of thinking in patterns. It is, and it's part of every fundamental programming thing but it sounds really boring, you know, "regular expressions" but think of it as find and replace on steroids but it helps with a lot of the mundane crap that you come across. Anyone else? + +Scheduling system gets inputted into a third-party and then pulled down through JSON, reimported into our database, so that we can index it and build PDFs out of it. And that's how we build our scheduling system. And we do that for contractual reasons. But that is the thing that I built the tool that they could manage it with and I'm the only person who still uses that tool just by having no knowledge of housekeeping. + +Secure job, right? You in the back? + +So I teach. And I'm curious how much of this mundane programming is actually experiencing the suffering... + +The agony. + +of manually doing the mundane task because I'm actually thinking of using scraping websites as a way of teaching programming because there's so much procedural stuff that you need to do and step by step stuff that you need to go through. But I'm wondering if making them manually go into a police blotter and copy and paste information into Excel for a week as a way to drive that. They would just crave the ability to automate this. + +As long as you make them hand-write it first and then retype it. + +I mean, one of the other issues that we kind of touch on is people kind of have lost what it's like to do things on their own. They've forgotten what Paul Ford said, you can do this on your own. It's not that you should start doing that. But that's how you start. That's an algorithm. An algorithm is a set of steps and that web-escaping, I hate teaching that because some people have this weird conception of it, and I've done so much of it that I've maybe taken for granted but it's no different than you logging onto the website, you looking at a piece of text, copying it, highlighting it, pasting it, except a program is doing it for you. If people say, can you help me get that gets Mark Zuckerberg's direct message? I'm like what the hell, you could not do that without going to jail. Someone heard of Politowhoops. First of all I was inspired by something that came along like Andrew weiner who happened to solve the dick pic before he deleted it. But at which time shut down on Politowoops—I'm surprised that nobody's made that for celebrities and once I did that, that would really piss them off. So there's no reason to—and so there's some scripts. And there's some scripts. I've been using them to do some research on social media fakery, but yeah, I've written, first I made it really complicated and I was like screw it. I'm going to type in, "Get tweets." And it just goes and gets all the tweets for this person, and gets their friend network. And their followers. And I'm too lazy to analyze it yet. But I'm trying to analyze some of the more advanced fakery that's being done. And I would always put it off and I'm just like, all I need to do is get it before it gets deleted so I have something to work with. And I use it sometimes myself, too. When I unfollow a bunch of people at once, like whatever, people who aren't following me back or some petty shit like. I don't want to give them the dignity of hitting that button. I just want a little bad script. So it all ties into my research as well. + +[ Laughter ] + +So we have time for one more. Does anybody else have a super mundane programming task, real or imagined? + +I have one because it's just going to be mundane even if I figure it out. I just put up on Tuesday as a quick blog post, I, because of all the stuff going on with the confederate flag, I scraped the Wikipedia page that says, "List of federal monuments." And put it into a map. And I said if you know a federal monument, here's a Google form to fill out. And I got 800 responses but I have to go through and verify everything. The ones that were that easiest to verify were the ones that people gave me a street address which something three to 400 people did. And I would like to be able to send those to Google maps API and ask them, is this a real address? And just start with those. + +I have a script in the repo, one of the things that we can encourage you to do is APIs are made for humans to use. So to be intimidated. Maps API is just one that I teach a lot because it just works, so instead of you doing that by hand for 400 things, you should definitely look that up. You'll be happy you did. + +But it's still going to be mundane even if I did. + +But on that note there is a repo of examples of mundane tasks and the code that makes them less mundane. So if you have tasks that you think of, or code snippets that you want to share with people, you can forward that repo and send pull requests or paste the idea into an issue or something and share it with the world. + +But I think we're at the hour, so thank you for spending this mundane time with us. + +Thanks, folks. + +[ Applause ] + +Did anybody write a mundane script while sitting here? diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015ChatBots.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015ChatBots.md index ad9fca35..abbc0192 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015ChatBots.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015ChatBots.md @@ -1,696 +1,475 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/chatbots/index.html ---- - -# Post Hoc Justifications for Newsroom Chat Bots - -### Session Facilitator(s): Tom Nehil, Justin Myers - -### Day & Time: Thursday, 12:30-1:30pm - -### Room: Minnesota - - -All right. We're going to get started. This session we're talking about bots and all of the useful journalistic things they can do, in addition to the hilarious and fun things they can do. My name is Tom Nehil. I work at MinnPost here in Minneapolis. So I'm also happy to take Minneapolis after we talk about bots. - - -And I'm Justin Myers. I'm the automation editor at the Associated Press. So this is lots of my job. Sometimes they do journalism, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. - - -So at MinnPost, we started communicating as a team using Campfire and then switched over to Slack. And at some point decided to hook up bots into our chatrooms and we use, I don't know if you say "who-bot," or "huh-bot," but it's the node based bot and the reason a that we did this in the beginning was just for fun. So our bot is named min bot and it can tell knock-knock jokes and tell horoscopes and all sorts of useful stuff like that. So that's fine but that's not exactly, like, something that you can justify spending a lot of time at work building. So the question that I kind of had for this and this session, and I don't really have the answer, so I'm hoping you guys have good ideas, or have built good ideas is: How can we use these bots that the public is never going to see, we're never going to publish the bots necessarily. But what can we do as journalists, or as news people, better, easier, more effective. So I think I guess, ideally I think what we want to do is kind of just open up the floor, looking for both examples for stuff you've built or use that, like, do journalistic things, or also, just things that you think would be really good for a bot to do but you haven't necessarily built yet, and, you know, maybe by the end of SRCCON we'll have all that running and good to go. - - -Yeah, I feel like in general one of the things that I ask people at the AP is how do you spend your time and how would you like to spend why you time? And so, sort of, that difference between the two: What's all of the tedious crap that you spend your time doing and how can we have, you know, a bot to take care some of that load for you. So hearing -- - - -Can you give any examples of why you might use a bot? - - -So one of the scripts that I built, it's more useful in theory than it ended up being in practice, but we do a lot of work at Minn Post, following the Minnesota Legislature. So OpenStates, this great foundation, has built APIs for finding information about legislators. Implementing bills, and finding out what state they're from. So I wrote a script that works very badly. So we could be sit in a chatroom even though it's just a chatroom, do a fair amount of work and if we have a question about, for example a legislator, it's not like it's that hard to, like, open up a browser tab and search these things in Google, so that's why it ended up being more useful in theory than in practice, but you could ask, you could say, "MinnBot, who does so-and-so represent?" And it could kick back at you, their legislative district for example, and a link to a map. And that actually is useful because our districts in Minnesota are just letters and numbers but if you clicked on the map, you could figure out what towns were there, which would then give you the context that you needed to figure out what kind of—what kind of issues might be important to that person. And yeah, so that could also check, like, if we were following, like, a certain bill, we would be able to check the status of that or, like, the last thing that happened with that bill. - -One thing that I didn't do with it. It was all based on ASCII, right? So you had to have the question. You would ask the bot and the bot would go and get the information. But I think something to extend that, that would be useful is if the bot were actively looking for information on certain things and knew that certain things were interesting to you. So, like, for me, those are the two things that the bot can do well, right? So there's, like, the things that you need to ask for and then there are the things where it's like continuously monitoring and it's going to tell you. So obviously, for certain pieces of legislation, building something that that, you know, we have just like a list that says, and we can have that in Slack. We just say, MinnBot, add this to the list of bills to watch. And then it would then alert of us of certain legislative actions like, like passed in the House or something like that. So that's something that we, like, maybe next session we'll try to build in. - - -I've try to build a few of the reporter-type bots. So the last 11 that I did was I guess, for a health care team at AP. So the Department of Health and human services has this page where they list any breaches of people's health care data, right? So the anthem breach where hey, we're a big health insurance company lost a bunch of people's data. - -Basically how can we tell reporters and editors who cover those areas, or who cover health care, specifically, about these things that have happened. So we've got different thresholds and different settings for different people and they can sort of subscribe and say, "I'm interested in breaches of companies in Missouri that affect at least a million people." And I've got something that will tell them. If there's something like that. - - -Well, couldn't you just describe the tool? How does it alert them, like, Slack or email? - - -Email. Sorry, I should have mentioned that up front. So a lot of the sort of reporting bots that I've been working on, either work through email alerts, or through Panda. How many people here are familiar with Panda? So Panda is sort of this internal dataset library tool for newsrooms. So the idea is that you—all of your data reporters, for example, are putting data that they receive in this overall search server rather than just leaving it in spreadsheets on their computers where nobody else is going to find them. - -And so some of the bots that I've been writing simply populate a dataset in Panda and then Panda has its own alerting—email alerting system and notifications that people can use. - - -Doesn't the Times have an earthquake bot that publishes directly interview the CMS. It doesn't talk to reporters, it just makes a story that's like a stub like there was an earthquake of this magnitude centered here at this time. And that's just now a story that people can flesh out as... - - -For that matter... there's a lot of interest in things like that. I think sometimes they're hard to write. - - -I think earthquakes are sort of the easiest possible thing there. - - -And the core problem there like translating structured data into stories can be applied to a bunch of other domains that a bot might be useful for. So, like, for instance at Fusion, we've been highlighting a couple bots on the audience development side and the analytics side because in both instances, on the analytics, it's simple to use, like, kind of a—you use like Google analytics API to get to get the stats of the story. And maybe if you do that on an automated routine, you can detect spikes and give the writer some positive feedback like, "Hey, your story's on fire!" And give them a little dopamine burst. - - -It could be like a little NBA jam announcers. - - -The audience development example that we used was—when, so, a bunch of us are on Facebook. It shouldn't be a—a bunch of our traffic is on Facebook. That shouldn't be a surprise to this audience. But the traffic can be boosted if you post on another Facebook page, or a news blog and what we did was when content was published, we queried Clout to find—we queried a service, I think it was CrowdTangle which looks at Facebook's universe and unifies posts that have high velocity. And so we unified pages that had relevant done it from a list of relevant organizations, things like Planned Parenthood and so when there was a match, we can plant that in the growth editor and say, you might want to match these pages. There's the journalistic applications but then there's also the audience development analytics applications and they can also use structured data to their stories that they didn't. - - -Yeah, I mean, one thing that we did, we did Airbnb post. So that's got an API and that's—the thing that I said that was really simple was we just ask, but then you don't have to break out of what you're doing. But yeah. Building in something where the bot's just checking, you know, relatively frequently, you can learn about something that's spiking or whatever. And then actually take action. I don't know what it would be. Move it up on the home page, whatever's relevant. So yeah, it's super useful to people who are kind of running site. Have any of you built any—yeah, sure. - - -So I've, I'm also at Fusion and I've been with Fusion for a while—eight days now. - - -Oh, yeah? - - -A long time. - - -but I've started looking in on the editorial side, as well, well, that's currently in the process of gathering steam. We're working on a story about how all the candidates that are running for president whether they're democratic or republican they're all running against Hillary Clinton. And so we have a bot that's basically scanning all of their Twitter feeds and every time one of them talking about Hillary Clinton just makes, grabs a tweet, retweets it, and also lets us know, and hopefully like in a week or so we'll have an example to go off of for the story. Like I said, this is literally my second week so I'm just getting started. - - -How does it let you know about—does it like archive them or...? - - -It archives them, and also right now, I have it running on Heroku. I'm just checking the logs. - - -Can you talk about setting up a bot in Heroku? - - -I actually learned how to do it from Tom Mayor, who's a worry of ours at Thunderdome and is now running a part of the Marshal Project. There may be another way to do this. This is just the way that I picked up from him. It's just because my programming skills are still very basic but I know Python pretty well. You just write a basic Python command line script—any libraries that it needs, you just need to make—it's a txt file where you list all of them. And PIP installs them and you just send them to Heroku. And a proc file that just says to run the scripts, basically. Python.py. And then you send it all to Heroku, and you know, for some bots in the past, I've just used the Twitter rest API. I would schedule it so that it would basically be runbot.py once an hour, and it would do that fine and it never reached enough that it actually costed money. For the Hillary one, it uses a streaming API, so I just had it run once and then I just bought the 7-dollar hobbyist tier. So it would never go to sleep and it's been fine. - - -Yeah, Heroku is really nice for setting up bots. - - -And like I said, it's perfect for my programming ability because it doesn't involve running a server, or the indications that's over my head. - - -Yeah, MinnBot runs Heroku, too. - - -And especially because I'm back at a company that loses Slack again. I'm getting into looking at Slack bots. You guys have some cool ones running. But I've seen some Slack bots where they have right under their page "push to Heroku" button. You don't have to write any code. You just push the button, and write to the web and it sets it up in Heroku for you, and then you just have to configure the information. - - -Maybe we could, like, brainstorm bots with, like, different functions. - - -I mean, that question of what are the things that you kind of have to do sort of regularly where maybe a bot could -- - - -We have a few—I work at Dow Jones. And for there, a lot of the services that provide market data and news and whatnot to the whole of the organization. So, we have a couple of bots that we've set up. One of them is just a simple thing that lets people, in Slack, query for images. So you know, just look at our internal tool for our image databases, essentially, and post all those into Slack and that's kind of nice because Slack presents that. You can present it—the captions. You can present it, you know? - - -Is that something, like, producers use to find art for stories? - - -I think it will be—so it's a new tool that's starting to pick up a little bit. So I'm not sure exactly how it's going to—or where it's going to take off. And else have—and you can look up any stock price with simply with a bot. There's a logic for that and something that's kind of interesting, too, is we've run an IPO bot, recently. So that's basically just taken our IPO feed and whenever there's a change. So if a company withdraws their IPO, or changes their target price range, or something like that, those changes, they'll just print out a message in Slack. - - -Yeah. - - -So, you know, people who are interested in that, in tech, or whatever can... - - -Do you have, like, reporters in Slack that are watching that, kind of? - - -I think the idea's is that we will be. So that one is, like, a week old, too. So we've been using Slack for a little while but we're just starting to try to figure out how to make it more useful. - - -Yeah. - - -So, and years ago, we had a good service. It generated, it was called a data-driven headlines. And it would generate headlines based off of large blocks of stocks. So if someone traded 200 shares of something, it would produce a pretty headline and publish that out, and that would go out to gits, or various newsfeeds. You could easily implement that into something like Slack, too. - - -Yeah, and maybe use the story as a basis of a story that maybe requires and recording. - - -One of the trickier parts that we've run into with implementing into Heroku is it's that's external and it does not have access to a lot of our internal services. So that's something that we need to figure out, if you have to access a protected resource -- - - -Yeah, where is it going to run? - - -Yeah, in our case, at the AP, we've got sort of this in-house, weird—none of us who are on my team actually built it. We just all sort of inherited it, so we all don't really like the architecture of it. It's got the super creative fame of scheduled tasks, which does about what it says on the tin. It's like a web-based crog (phonetic). So I write for example, in Ruby, an example, a script, it's getting around on the server that just got mentioned about not running on a service that's outside your company network. - -Some examples that are coming in on etherpad from Jeremy Bowers at the New York Times, he's got one saying, "The Times has a bot that lets editors and reporters know when transcripts of Supreme Court decisions have come out." - - -Tiff could probably... - - -I watched this one. - - -We're working on training a bot to help us be able to diff, well not training. We're running the code. It's not like we can just give it treats or something. - - -God I wish. - - -Has anyone done like any machine learning bots? - - -There's a couple I know. That are Slack bots. Times is one of them. - - -To come, I'm sure. - - -In part, we still need humans to validate, but effectively trying to say, this would be an autosummary for something like SCOTUS. What the breakdown is why can in terms of who made the decision. They normalize it, and abstract it and put it into the bot reply, or what the bot posts, but trying to do that so that there's a little bit more information that's extracted rather than why—but I think that's one of the long-term plans. - - -And so who's looking at that Slack channel? - - -Um, anybody that -- - - -Would it be reporters that would then go -- - - -So reporters are watching, techies are watching. Anyone that's watching a project that a Supreme Court decision feeds into. - - -I'm sorry, is that bot isolated into a room. Or does that speak into a room that -- - - -It's in the room, but it's just the way the chatter goes on especially with things like today with SCOTUS. What media organizations have the tip just for—because there's a delay between when Supreme Court announces stuff and when they put stuff on the server. So there's information about what decisions are going to be decided and how fast. Sometimes there's enough of a delay where people on Twitter and SCOTUS blog knows about it well before we get the document. So we try to source all that in there, too. - - -Anybody have thoughts of other things they might want? Things that might come in handy with bots? - - -I know what I've wanted. I missed Google words when it was really powerful. It's like not the same any more, right? Is it hidden? I don't know if it was a user mistake but anyways I think it would be nice for a reporter to be able to flag a keyword search that gets piped into Slack really easily around their loop. I also think it would be nice if we have, like, a recipe cookbook for some of this stuff. Because I think a lot of this has been just common problems, and given that HUBOT is a framework that we could be sharing more code. - - -Like, what are those sort of architypes, right, of where we might write a recipe. Maybe it's not just a specific API but it's like if you have this kind of API like... - - -Well, there are the tools like this and that, or Sapier that do those sorts of things. But it seems like in a lot of cases they don't quite get to the level of bot—or like of the kind of behavior that you want from a bot. - - -Is it because, like, you want the bot to be a little smarter than maybe, like, sort of... - - -I think because you want to take, if it's—like, you want to be able to drop—drop a processing step. You kind of want Yahoo pipes inside of this if this, then that. You know, RIP Yahoo Pipes but... yeah. - - -There's a platform, well, not a platform but a Ruby project that I've seen but haven't really experimented with yet called Whogan. - - -I know that. - - -Okay, then. - - -Named after some Norse mythological crow or something. And as I understand it, it's sort of Yahoo Pipes. - - -I know one of the things that I'm investigating as a replacement for Pipes because we use a lot of Pipes for where I am. I just haven't had a chance to play around much with it yet. - - -I know what we use it for now. We use it as a corrections channel. So any channel that needs a correction, the bot takes it over, and corrects it, so that we can be collectively embarrassed in the privacy of our own user intranet. - - -What does it do, just list? - - -Yeah, we would like to eventually get the actual correction words into it. - - -There's some flag on CMS or something for corrections? - - -Yeah, that's cool. - - -Is that what powers the bot like pin when you put up a new story. - - -In my old company, we had to send an email to the entire staff whenever we published a new story. And so the best thing that I discovered at the Times was that they had a bot that said that a new bot if it was but if you were working on them and you had to grab things it was super, super helpful. - - -I was thinking about something like that because... - - -I literally know nothing about it. - - -And um, 'cause I think there's a bunch of stuff in that audience development side that bots could be doing because so often, in the newsroom, we will publish a story and then move onto the next one. But it's not until like four hours the publication happens there's the most potential room for additional velocity. - - -We have stuff watching Reddit and if there's fresh comments recently on something, we encourage the journalist to go in and the reporters to go in, and speak on the piece on the subject matter. And another that looks at the Google news One Box competition for specific topics and lets us know when our stories don't rank with the stories that we're talking about. So it alerts audience elements to go and figure out how we rerank before that turn. I don't know how that runs but I know we have to jump through hoops whenever it spits out something. - - -When we were talking about the LA Times earthquake thing. And when we talk about the Slack bot telling you a story's doing really well those are bots. But isn't all the -- - - -It's automation. - - -A bot is—the Chatter UI is the essential characteristic of a bot to me. - - -The what of UI? - - -Chat as UI. - - -This is something that I wrestle with constantly. The team I work with. Just the product team is 80 people. So the bots, you have a number of chat bots. One of the things that I am thinking about lately is when all these things are, what are the strengths and weaknesses of chat as a space for different things like, we do a lot of automation. People here are talking about a lot about different kinds of automation. But the strengths of chat being, like, low friction, constant attention, everything's in front of you and sort of the weakness of that is distraction. And, like, that's why I'm dicer where these bots speak into, channels. Do they need to speak into channels at all? Are some of the better served are filtered into a dashboard? How does attention figure into the decisions you all make about where your automation speaks to? - - -One thing I'd like to see—I have no idea how you would even accomplish this, but I would like to see a bot that I could ask for a summary of, like, the last hour of a Slack channel that I have not been paying attention to and there's, like, this giant, sort of, discussion. - - -They mentioned that like a "while you were gone" type of feature. - - -Would it be better than Twitter's while you were gone feature? It's pretty bad. No matter how many times. It's like I didn't really get this. - - -To get to your question, one of the criteria when we think of the actionability of a message, and there's, like, some bots that are set up that are like autobots. Like we like to keep our eye on our taxonomy and so we have a bot that tells us when a new tag is added. But with all these bots it has to be something it's a growth editor, when I get that message I can then do x and it makes me better at my job. I think those are worth piping into the chat. That's kind of what I think about. - - -I think one thing for us, given the user control for signal to noise. Whenever we make something, when one person is like, I want more, it makes it really noisy. And the other person is like, get that thing out of the room, it's really noisy. So the thing is, how can I let the user customize. Once it's all based in the code, it makes it really hard for a user to go in and say, I just want these ones. I just want these ones. So I've been looking at maybe we'll have all these channels where users post these things but also having an interface for a user to be able to go in and say, list all the types of alerts and say, I'll just have this one, and private message me about these ones. And I can go into a room, I can have these conversations but in order that they can control better what alerts they get. That's my pipe dream. I don't know if anyone has that dream written for me here. - - -And so we use this really rudimentary setup that I've put together with somebody's help at the AP with Sharepoint, because we use a lot of Sharepoint internally, God help us. So for a lot of these bots I've put together a basic list for some subscriptions and some settings, tweaks. So I've mentioned the health care one. So if you decided breaches that affect a million people. I don't get enough. Maybe you should turn it down to half a million. You could do that without changing the code. So I just, at the bottom of every email that sends out, have an link back to the list. I want to change. Here's a reminder of your settings. If you want to change them, go here and then they don't have to bother me at all. I don't have to push anything and, you know, it's a little more frictionless that way. - - -We have a pretty small team at Minn Post. So there's not a ton of chatroom noise. We use Slack. One thing, though is—and we only have the one bot which we kind of feed scripts into and it's not too crazy. But we set it up to DJ the music in the newsroom on Spotify. So we just created a new channel for that because there's a lot of like next, searching for music, cuing up stuff and figured that probably that doesn't need to be, like, in the newsroom channel. So yeah, I think at some point, doing channels might get unwieldy. Are you going to be a member of...? - - -It's footstep, at a certain point it's just as distracting as having a dedicated channel. It's hard for me not to pay attention. - - -I feel like the notifications problem is kind of like a superset to the specific bot problem because I mean, notifications are a friggin' pain in the ass. And I know in Slack I've had to go on, like, the soft mute for all our general channels and, I don't know, they're so noisy, and if you have the white button excessive compulsion to hit it every time, it's totally a time sink. - - -What do people do about health checks for bots, like, if you have things that are checking a feed like, the health data breach feed that's just sort of sitting there silently alerting, like, what happens if the feed goes away, or the feed changes. Like, how do you sort of, it would be kind of lake a metabot. It wouldn't be a bot. - - -I was just thinking about this on the plane yesterday. But I don't know yet but I would love to come up with something because actually one of them that I wrote, not that one, but a different one, involves a lot of scraping and one step in that scrape changed this month. It's like monthly updates. And I'm glad I caught it. - - -Right. - - -But that's just because I was paying attention, clicking around. And part of the idea is that I don't have to do that any more. - - -Well, it seems that can happen on two levels. I mean, the feed the sort of data source can change and then, something could go wrong with the bot itself, right? I don't know if it's like building in some kind of tests that are part of—I think it's at least a good practice to think about, right? I mean, some kind of error reporting, at least, into the way that you build the bot. - - -You could build, like, a proxy that it gets its data source that it, like, inserts random fire drills into it and then checks that the things come out in the right channel and then follows it up with, like, "This was a test." If it actually were a data breach we know the process would have worked. - - -There's the thing that Netflix has that completely automated it but they call it Chaosmonkey and so it just mucks with part of their infrastructure at random and sees if they handle it. - - -That's some brave stuff. - - -I am nowhere near that brave because... - - -I think our developers are just the chaos monkeys. We're just trying to get to the point where that's less of an issue. - - -Yeah, I would not want something to mess something that posts to the Wire. - - -So one thing that we do is we have use stats—almost all of our bots if I'm right, will send, you know, health check messages saying, "Hey, I ran my loop. I did this. I had a success metric and I did it." And we just have a Grifono board (phonetic) that's always small and it will change the background and say, "Silent for an amount of time." And yet it's helpful because you don't have to check it but sometimes you do get false positives. So that's something that we're still trying to solve well because it kind of works but I still have to have, like, a monitor in my room saying, yup, things are good along with the ten other monitors saying, "Yup, things are good." - - -One of the things that I was thinking of on the plane, and inevitably I couldn't get to other things was trying to come up with a different—how do I just not set up another monitor on my desk. And so part of me wants to, like, put together small, like, physical robots for each of these and have them, like, respond to login messages, right? All right. So this one fell over! I don't know how that would actually work in practice but it would be hysterical to have them running around my desk. - - -I actually designed a prototype last week. It was like a meeting reminder that blew a little bubble, like a soap bubble on your desk. It was like sort of the lightest possible reminder that something's happening. - - -That's a fairly early Internet Wave to the Cats. - - -What was that one? - - -It was really early 90s. It was this site, Wave to the Cats. You would push a button and it would say a hand somewhere was waving at a cat. - - -I had thought about giving my cat a "yo'" button and have him climb up the wall, and it yos me and my wife. - - -Not really a chat interface but it's still communication. - - -Well, that's... - - -That's the kind of attention that I like. - - -Here's one bit of information. - - -The cat says "yo." - - -I know one thing that I've set up, and I keep turning it on and off. And I'm not sure if it's helpful but we have a little red police light like a zig bee, that can control whether it's on and off. So it's kind of fun user feedback by if it kept bouncing between goal and not goal, and switching between on and off and if someone just turns it off. We're over this number! Why is it not... and so I unplugged it. So I don't know. - - -That sort of reminds me of the, like, software companies and such that has a traffic light for their build status, right? Like all the tests are passing: Green. We're running the tests right now, yellow, a test failed: Red. - - -So I've been wanting to figure out a good way to get some—to get some of that stuff in there but it would be helpful not to just, having another obnoxious thing on our desk that's going to bother us. - - -I think one company had a rather intensive light, that had a missile launcher that would figure out who had broken the build and shoot missiles at them. We could do that to pay a particular reporter. - - -It's like the ultimate get blamed. - - -Let's get punished. - - -At least it's not water balloons. - - -So it sounds like who bot is what a lot of people are using. I've got in a bots and I've got a couple in mind that I want to do. Is this only in Slack, or is this something that could be outputted different ways or...? - - -Well, Who bot, I think it mostly works with chat platforms of various kinds. And so we used it in Campfire than -- - - -Yeah, I was saying it in hipchat kind of implementation. - - -Yeah, didn't they start in IRC for that? - - -Yeah, so IRC. - - -A lot of things in Slack remind me of grade school, like IRC. - - -I think Slack was taking IRC and making it kind of current design sensibilities. - - -Mine was a chat bot that fires ASCII torpedos. - - -That could be done. I know the hacker space I belonged to back when I lived in D.C. has something that, like, whenever you post a link to something in IRC, Reddit responds with the title so that you know that you're not getting Rickrolled or something. But of course, people still have shenanigans but something to just really quickly respond. - - -We haven't really brought up Twitter bots, which of course, are regional, and evolved ways of shapes and forms. And interactive other users are just annoying. Just follow accounts overall. - -I mean, there would be a little bit of a question with the fact that we're all in news and probably working on tools to sort of augment news-gathering and reporting and you wouldn't necessarily want that to be a public Twitter feed but there's been a handful that are public that different organizations one. Like the one that comes to mind is the one that's watching Wikipedia edits within the IP address block of the capitol building. That one's occasionally irritating. But... - - -We had a story about that the other day because someone edited. - - -1802, or whatever it was? - - -Somebody edited Rick Santorum's page so that instead of Winchester, Virginia, it said fart virgin. They would edit the space so that it would push down "Rick Santorum" and for the most part, it worked. It pushed it way down the feed and I think most people who were following it, just muted it. - - -I mean, I think there's the possibility, too, a lot of our reporters, I'm not a big fan of Twitter but a lot of our reporters are on Twitter a lot. And you know, because they follow our reporters and news sources. So if you can get a useful bot in the mix there, that's going to give them—I mean, the downside is they might miss the tweet, right? Because while some people are obsessive about reading their feeds, some people are not. So that may be not mission critical but it's still useful information. I think that could be pretty helpful. Because, yeah, some of our reporters don't really want to use Slack, they don't really easy the value of it because they're not sitting at their desk all day like I am, or standing at my desk as it were. So you know, that's like on their phone and it's just like this feed of information. But that's not something that I've actually done anything with. - - -Twitter bots are actually how I first taught myself Python and it was sort of like the task that I gave myself to, sort of, do something with it and I think with a lot of journalists sort of have the thing of, you know, seeing the forest from the trees, that Twitter can feel sometimes like the whole world, it's actually very tiny slice of your world. So if you're making a Twitter bot you have to ask whether, it's going to reach the audience, that it's going to have the impact that it has, if it's worth the time building the code. - - -I was going to say, that could tell us about what it feels like to kill your bot. - - -I've had so -- - - -The SRCCON article go all on this. - - -For the ones that I just made as hobbies, I frequently had to cannibalize them because I only have so many phone numbers to get an Twitter API key. - - -If you guys, I'm sure if you have—well, if you haven't check out the bot week post on source. It came around the time that I proposed this session but one of the ones that I thought was really cool was in the New York Times election night 'cause that's always like kind of a crazy night. - - -I think Jeremy mentioned that in the etherpad. - - -Okay great. - - -So do you want to keep going? - - -Well, I just... I don't know. Did anybody use—experience what that was like? Is it useful? - - -Yes, in part because we didn't have to have someone watching. It does automate effectively some of the more tedious work of election night. You're going to know how things are polling. You're going to know when the major networks are calling when. But it's like asking someone to mind all the little uninteresting races that are not going to work. So handcuffs handy to have election bot working. Is it came to increasingly levels of closures. To remind ourselves to go and pay attention. Which we knew but we also needed a reminder to go see stuff. It didn't have a check of where you can go and ask it, follow up on these things. What's the current polling rate but I think we had plans to build that. So we didn't use this for this last, but we did use it for—but for next year we've got more things we want to do. - - -I read that. And so you have this thing that's providing ambient notifications in an open space and natural language as a way to say, this speaks to a little bit of what you're talking about: Only talk to me and I'm interested in what I want to know. You are the canonical bot that knows what the current state of Florida is with respect to elections. Like, that's the kind of bot that I'm super, super curious about, and I haven't written a lot about it. Most of the things that I write about bots is pushing. It's a censor, or talks, or response of something that happened to everybody as opposed to I want to private message the bot and say: What's the current water level in California? That's the stuff that without having to walk away from in the chat, you have this canonical source. Like are we writing more of those? Because that's—is that easier to justify to the point of the conversation—is that easier to justify than just saying saying, let's build something that's interesting to push this out but saying, wouldn't it be nice to ask the bot a question and have the bot come back with a canonical answer. Should we be writing those? - - -I'm also dealing with a team with economical data. There are a lot of sources of it. What if there were ways for reporters to ask: What was this particular rate in this? That's the kind of thing, that if it were available could be very useful. And especially, since I'm an editor of a real time economics blog, having that be in Slack, it would be really interesting. - - -We did another. Anybody familiar with rubber duck programming? We built a rubber duck bot that you just say like, "Hey, rubber duck book, I'm having a problem." And it would do like ELISA type stuff, like the old chat factor program. - - -Elisa is probably a bot, right? It's chat oriented. - - -It's the first chat bot. - - -I don't remember right now, but some group used it to go after—what was the—the gamer hashtag. - - -Gamer gate. - - -But it basically did. It would talk to people who were particularly rowdy on Twitter and they didn't realize that they were talking to a bot. - - -I had a friend who did that. - - -Elisa would be a great name for a bot company. - - -That's interesting that you say that you're more interested in the kind of the asking the questions because, like, most of my stuff, and granted most of it is really rudimentary is asking stuff from the bot versus the continuous monitoring thing but I really think that the hybrid is kind of the most interesting possibility, right? Like, you don't know you have these questions and the continuous monitoring sort of prompts a question because it says this thing happened and you're like oh, I want to know more about that. And that helps cut down on the noise. It tells you that it knows something and you're going to ask it more so I think that's a pretty good conceptual framework for useful chat bots. I think. - - -Coupling those two things. I don't want to make it sound like I'm not a librarian. I don't know. It's kind of interesting to think about it from the attention standpoint because I'm not a journalist. I don't know what it's like to be somebody on the other side of that wall. - - -That's noisy. - - -Yeah, that's noisy. - - -What if you had—what if the bot knew, like, what stories you were working on, or what stories you were working on and then when you're writing a similar story in the future, would remember what you asked it last time so that, like, if you're writing another story about a company, it would sort of know, here's the data that you might want at your fingertips. That's sort of interesting. - - -If you teach it like if I'm doing earnings. I need these stats. And it gives you back, like, a form? - - -Yeah, a sort of thing where you wouldn't sort of build this report. It would just, like, know in this particular context, here's the information that you asked for last time. So you look like you're writing a statistics story. - - -Here's all the stuff you searched for that—or like while the budget said you were working on this kind of story. - - -Right. - - -Before that it says that you're working on now. - - -Right. - - -I wonder how noisy that would get. But that does seem potentially useful. - - -Yeah, I kind of wonder about the potential for sort of like more editorial workflow bots stuff. I think about when a story is published, that's a really great example of that. I should be able to set that up—and that's like more for the social media team or person now to get the notifications but I wonder if there are, like, other parts of the workflow that could be enhanced by a bot. Like, our bot is not aware of the budget of the day. But I'm very... and I mean, what could you—could you build a useful interface for a bot that, like, actually does the budgets, sort of? - - -I was about to say that. - - -Like, what are the stories? Where are they right now and who's got what? - - -I've seen bots that automate this in kind of the same way. Like, what's everyone working on at a preset time. - - -Reminder bots, saying, I want to ping this, and ask what's their stock. And get increasingly shouty and, like, increasingly offensive gifs. - - -Slack has a little reminder command but it doesn't let you remind other people of things. You can only... - - -That's not really helpful. I guess it reminds me to harass them in a way. - - -That's the first step. - - -Our audience development team has a reminder bot every day at 3:00 p.m. that it's time for a break. It's just a series of fruit emojis. - - -If you put in an URL,ing this is a very narrow use case like someone who's managing an account. It would tell where else in our social media universe it's been posted but it's really useful if you ask it most of the time. But if we have a story that was posted to the main account and it has 8 million retweets, like, let me know first. But that's kind of like what you were saying, it goes both ways. You can apply a certain threshold at which it would talk to you. - - -I was trying to look for production stuff that a friend of mine mentioned. But I'm not finding it offhand. - - -We had another feed that if you put someone's name in, it would find a photo of them online and put a mustache on them. That was useful. - - -Ten minutes? - - -Yeah, ten minutes left. - - -Great. I think like the mustache thing, I guess everybody has a different newsroom culture but to me, it's important that the bot has to maintain some level of personality, I think just for a chat bot, especially just to kind of... I don't know. There's some aspect of Minnbot that I find very charming and the very best days are when it kind of comes with something unexpected but, like, very useful or witty or whatever. And that often happens just kind of randomly, I think. But it's always good to think about it when writing about your bots but being annoying, which, I guess is a difficult balance. - - -On that note, there was something that I saw that had the principle: Be as smart as a puppy. So the idea is that keep your bot charming but not frustrating. Don't try to have it be too smart. So the limitation is have it be smart as a puppy, so maybe people will empathize with it at sort of the same level. - - -Or just have an puppy bot. - - -Puppy bot. - - -Lots of poo poo emojis. - - -When you're sad, it's like a cute puppy to look at. - - -So like emergency cats but it's Slack. - - -Like emergency cats. - - -I've got a script for that. - - -Well, put it in the etherpad. - - -Everyone with Apple Watch can watch their stress level somehow, and when you're stressed out... - - -Yes, heart rate stress for everyone. We promise it's not going to go HR. - - -Or have a Jawbone that when it reaches a certain level, don't ask them anything. You're angry because you're high. - - -What's the next three-hour window for this person when the heart rate level drops. - - -What else? - - -What are some of the pitfalls with bots? We've mentioned noise. They get annoying. Are there any other questions that you need to be worried about when you're building a bot like, "I should not do this." - - -Well, I think for me, just in training, being aware of bots especially if there's lots of them, knowing which ones are useful and making sure that they're all running. If I have one or two bots, okay, cool, I can do this. Or even having a bot that has lots of features. There's, like, 200 commands on this thing. What—how do I train that? Well, so this one will do an emergency, you know, notification on the website, and this one will put a poo poo emoji and stuff. And there's two line items on the same chat. - -So if anyone was at the last session, I mentioned that this was one of my first big fails when I was learning programming, sort of as kind of like a completion thing. it was an idea that one of my fellows at Digital Media had, that was a bot that would scrape news headline sources and try to make them into Upworthy headlines and the results were monstrous. The results were horrifying. Things like, you know, is I ri used chemical weapons on its citizens, you won't be able what happened next. - -So you have to realize if it's as smart as a puppy, it could be very stupid. - - -Yeah, I mean like I think that's definitely a downfall when you're writing, like, supposedly funny scripts. Just always be aware of being sensitive, right, because the bot is not smart enough to know. So you have to kind of anticipate those kinds of things and that's just part of, like, I feel like making a workplace that works for everybody. So that's something that I try to be aware of. - - -Your chat bot is a coworker. - - -Yeah. - - -Your chat bot should be a coworker. - - -Like, a really great coworker. The one you like. - - -It should be the best one. - - -Yeah. So, are we going to be able to condense editors that they should definitely give us days to work on our bots? I don't know. - - -We did a Hackday for bots that was pretty successful. I mean, Hackdays are a nice opportunity to, like, prototype ideas, try them in a newsroom environment. - - -But that was focused on bots? - - -Yeah, bots, specifically. - - -And did that produce some good? - - -Yeah, trending bot, that generated stories based on different pageview thresholds to authors and then the growth hacking bot that identifies large, like, Facebook pages with relevant ideas. - - -That's cool. - - -All right. We can try and hold everybody here for another two and a half minutes but I wonder if there's any more poop out there. But thank you everybody. I think there's a lot of good stuff that's, you know, now in the etherpad. - - -Yeah, check that out. - - -If you were zoning out during the session, check that out. - - -Where is that located? - - -Right here. Bit.ly/srcconbots2015. - - -That was cool. +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/chatbots/index.html +--- + +# Post Hoc Justifications for Newsroom Chat Bots + +### Session Facilitator(s): Tom Nehil, Justin Myers + +### Day & Time: Thursday, 12:30-1:30pm + +### Room: Minnesota + +All right. We're going to get started. This session we're talking about bots and all of the useful journalistic things they can do, in addition to the hilarious and fun things they can do. My name is Tom Nehil. I work at MinnPost here in Minneapolis. So I'm also happy to take Minneapolis after we talk about bots. + +And I'm Justin Myers. I'm the automation editor at the Associated Press. So this is lots of my job. Sometimes they do journalism, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. + +So at MinnPost, we started communicating as a team using Campfire and then switched over to Slack. And at some point decided to hook up bots into our chatrooms and we use, I don't know if you say "who-bot," or "huh-bot," but it's the node based bot and the reason a that we did this in the beginning was just for fun. So our bot is named min bot and it can tell knock-knock jokes and tell horoscopes and all sorts of useful stuff like that. So that's fine but that's not exactly, like, something that you can justify spending a lot of time at work building. So the question that I kind of had for this and this session, and I don't really have the answer, so I'm hoping you guys have good ideas, or have built good ideas is: How can we use these bots that the public is never going to see, we're never going to publish the bots necessarily. But what can we do as journalists, or as news people, better, easier, more effective. So I think I guess, ideally I think what we want to do is kind of just open up the floor, looking for both examples for stuff you've built or use that, like, do journalistic things, or also, just things that you think would be really good for a bot to do but you haven't necessarily built yet, and, you know, maybe by the end of SRCCON we'll have all that running and good to go. + +Yeah, I feel like in general one of the things that I ask people at the AP is how do you spend your time and how would you like to spend why you time? And so, sort of, that difference between the two: What's all of the tedious crap that you spend your time doing and how can we have, you know, a bot to take care some of that load for you. So hearing -- + +Can you give any examples of why you might use a bot? + +So one of the scripts that I built, it's more useful in theory than it ended up being in practice, but we do a lot of work at Minn Post, following the Minnesota Legislature. So OpenStates, this great foundation, has built APIs for finding information about legislators. Implementing bills, and finding out what state they're from. So I wrote a script that works very badly. So we could be sit in a chatroom even though it's just a chatroom, do a fair amount of work and if we have a question about, for example a legislator, it's not like it's that hard to, like, open up a browser tab and search these things in Google, so that's why it ended up being more useful in theory than in practice, but you could ask, you could say, "MinnBot, who does so-and-so represent?" And it could kick back at you, their legislative district for example, and a link to a map. And that actually is useful because our districts in Minnesota are just letters and numbers but if you clicked on the map, you could figure out what towns were there, which would then give you the context that you needed to figure out what kind of—what kind of issues might be important to that person. And yeah, so that could also check, like, if we were following, like, a certain bill, we would be able to check the status of that or, like, the last thing that happened with that bill. + +One thing that I didn't do with it. It was all based on ASCII, right? So you had to have the question. You would ask the bot and the bot would go and get the information. But I think something to extend that, that would be useful is if the bot were actively looking for information on certain things and knew that certain things were interesting to you. So, like, for me, those are the two things that the bot can do well, right? So there's, like, the things that you need to ask for and then there are the things where it's like continuously monitoring and it's going to tell you. So obviously, for certain pieces of legislation, building something that that, you know, we have just like a list that says, and we can have that in Slack. We just say, MinnBot, add this to the list of bills to watch. And then it would then alert of us of certain legislative actions like, like passed in the House or something like that. So that's something that we, like, maybe next session we'll try to build in. + +I've try to build a few of the reporter-type bots. So the last 11 that I did was I guess, for a health care team at AP. So the Department of Health and human services has this page where they list any breaches of people's health care data, right? So the anthem breach where hey, we're a big health insurance company lost a bunch of people's data. + +Basically how can we tell reporters and editors who cover those areas, or who cover health care, specifically, about these things that have happened. So we've got different thresholds and different settings for different people and they can sort of subscribe and say, "I'm interested in breaches of companies in Missouri that affect at least a million people." And I've got something that will tell them. If there's something like that. + +Well, couldn't you just describe the tool? How does it alert them, like, Slack or email? + +Email. Sorry, I should have mentioned that up front. So a lot of the sort of reporting bots that I've been working on, either work through email alerts, or through Panda. How many people here are familiar with Panda? So Panda is sort of this internal dataset library tool for newsrooms. So the idea is that you—all of your data reporters, for example, are putting data that they receive in this overall search server rather than just leaving it in spreadsheets on their computers where nobody else is going to find them. + +And so some of the bots that I've been writing simply populate a dataset in Panda and then Panda has its own alerting—email alerting system and notifications that people can use. + +Doesn't the Times have an earthquake bot that publishes directly interview the CMS. It doesn't talk to reporters, it just makes a story that's like a stub like there was an earthquake of this magnitude centered here at this time. And that's just now a story that people can flesh out as... + +For that matter... there's a lot of interest in things like that. I think sometimes they're hard to write. + +I think earthquakes are sort of the easiest possible thing there. + +And the core problem there like translating structured data into stories can be applied to a bunch of other domains that a bot might be useful for. So, like, for instance at Fusion, we've been highlighting a couple bots on the audience development side and the analytics side because in both instances, on the analytics, it's simple to use, like, kind of a—you use like Google analytics API to get to get the stats of the story. And maybe if you do that on an automated routine, you can detect spikes and give the writer some positive feedback like, "Hey, your story's on fire!" And give them a little dopamine burst. + +It could be like a little NBA jam announcers. + +The audience development example that we used was—when, so, a bunch of us are on Facebook. It shouldn't be a—a bunch of our traffic is on Facebook. That shouldn't be a surprise to this audience. But the traffic can be boosted if you post on another Facebook page, or a news blog and what we did was when content was published, we queried Clout to find—we queried a service, I think it was CrowdTangle which looks at Facebook's universe and unifies posts that have high velocity. And so we unified pages that had relevant done it from a list of relevant organizations, things like Planned Parenthood and so when there was a match, we can plant that in the growth editor and say, you might want to match these pages. There's the journalistic applications but then there's also the audience development analytics applications and they can also use structured data to their stories that they didn't. + +Yeah, I mean, one thing that we did, we did Airbnb post. So that's got an API and that's—the thing that I said that was really simple was we just ask, but then you don't have to break out of what you're doing. But yeah. Building in something where the bot's just checking, you know, relatively frequently, you can learn about something that's spiking or whatever. And then actually take action. I don't know what it would be. Move it up on the home page, whatever's relevant. So yeah, it's super useful to people who are kind of running site. Have any of you built any—yeah, sure. + +So I've, I'm also at Fusion and I've been with Fusion for a while—eight days now. + +Oh, yeah? + +A long time. + +but I've started looking in on the editorial side, as well, well, that's currently in the process of gathering steam. We're working on a story about how all the candidates that are running for president whether they're democratic or republican they're all running against Hillary Clinton. And so we have a bot that's basically scanning all of their Twitter feeds and every time one of them talking about Hillary Clinton just makes, grabs a tweet, retweets it, and also lets us know, and hopefully like in a week or so we'll have an example to go off of for the story. Like I said, this is literally my second week so I'm just getting started. + +How does it let you know about—does it like archive them or...? + +It archives them, and also right now, I have it running on Heroku. I'm just checking the logs. + +Can you talk about setting up a bot in Heroku? + +I actually learned how to do it from Tom Mayor, who's a worry of ours at Thunderdome and is now running a part of the Marshal Project. There may be another way to do this. This is just the way that I picked up from him. It's just because my programming skills are still very basic but I know Python pretty well. You just write a basic Python command line script—any libraries that it needs, you just need to make—it's a txt file where you list all of them. And PIP installs them and you just send them to Heroku. And a proc file that just says to run the scripts, basically. Python.py. And then you send it all to Heroku, and you know, for some bots in the past, I've just used the Twitter rest API. I would schedule it so that it would basically be runbot.py once an hour, and it would do that fine and it never reached enough that it actually costed money. For the Hillary one, it uses a streaming API, so I just had it run once and then I just bought the 7-dollar hobbyist tier. So it would never go to sleep and it's been fine. + +Yeah, Heroku is really nice for setting up bots. + +And like I said, it's perfect for my programming ability because it doesn't involve running a server, or the indications that's over my head. + +Yeah, MinnBot runs Heroku, too. + +And especially because I'm back at a company that loses Slack again. I'm getting into looking at Slack bots. You guys have some cool ones running. But I've seen some Slack bots where they have right under their page "push to Heroku" button. You don't have to write any code. You just push the button, and write to the web and it sets it up in Heroku for you, and then you just have to configure the information. + +Maybe we could, like, brainstorm bots with, like, different functions. + +I mean, that question of what are the things that you kind of have to do sort of regularly where maybe a bot could -- + +We have a few—I work at Dow Jones. And for there, a lot of the services that provide market data and news and whatnot to the whole of the organization. So, we have a couple of bots that we've set up. One of them is just a simple thing that lets people, in Slack, query for images. So you know, just look at our internal tool for our image databases, essentially, and post all those into Slack and that's kind of nice because Slack presents that. You can present it—the captions. You can present it, you know? + +Is that something, like, producers use to find art for stories? + +I think it will be—so it's a new tool that's starting to pick up a little bit. So I'm not sure exactly how it's going to—or where it's going to take off. And else have—and you can look up any stock price with simply with a bot. There's a logic for that and something that's kind of interesting, too, is we've run an IPO bot, recently. So that's basically just taken our IPO feed and whenever there's a change. So if a company withdraws their IPO, or changes their target price range, or something like that, those changes, they'll just print out a message in Slack. + +Yeah. + +So, you know, people who are interested in that, in tech, or whatever can... + +Do you have, like, reporters in Slack that are watching that, kind of? + +I think the idea's is that we will be. So that one is, like, a week old, too. So we've been using Slack for a little while but we're just starting to try to figure out how to make it more useful. + +Yeah. + +So, and years ago, we had a good service. It generated, it was called a data-driven headlines. And it would generate headlines based off of large blocks of stocks. So if someone traded 200 shares of something, it would produce a pretty headline and publish that out, and that would go out to gits, or various newsfeeds. You could easily implement that into something like Slack, too. + +Yeah, and maybe use the story as a basis of a story that maybe requires and recording. + +One of the trickier parts that we've run into with implementing into Heroku is it's that's external and it does not have access to a lot of our internal services. So that's something that we need to figure out, if you have to access a protected resource -- + +Yeah, where is it going to run? + +Yeah, in our case, at the AP, we've got sort of this in-house, weird—none of us who are on my team actually built it. We just all sort of inherited it, so we all don't really like the architecture of it. It's got the super creative fame of scheduled tasks, which does about what it says on the tin. It's like a web-based crog (phonetic). So I write for example, in Ruby, an example, a script, it's getting around on the server that just got mentioned about not running on a service that's outside your company network. + +Some examples that are coming in on etherpad from Jeremy Bowers at the New York Times, he's got one saying, "The Times has a bot that lets editors and reporters know when transcripts of Supreme Court decisions have come out." + +Tiff could probably... + +I watched this one. + +We're working on training a bot to help us be able to diff, well not training. We're running the code. It's not like we can just give it treats or something. + +God I wish. + +Has anyone done like any machine learning bots? + +There's a couple I know. That are Slack bots. Times is one of them. + +To come, I'm sure. + +In part, we still need humans to validate, but effectively trying to say, this would be an autosummary for something like SCOTUS. What the breakdown is why can in terms of who made the decision. They normalize it, and abstract it and put it into the bot reply, or what the bot posts, but trying to do that so that there's a little bit more information that's extracted rather than why—but I think that's one of the long-term plans. + +And so who's looking at that Slack channel? + +Um, anybody that -- + +Would it be reporters that would then go -- + +So reporters are watching, techies are watching. Anyone that's watching a project that a Supreme Court decision feeds into. + +I'm sorry, is that bot isolated into a room. Or does that speak into a room that -- + +It's in the room, but it's just the way the chatter goes on especially with things like today with SCOTUS. What media organizations have the tip just for—because there's a delay between when Supreme Court announces stuff and when they put stuff on the server. So there's information about what decisions are going to be decided and how fast. Sometimes there's enough of a delay where people on Twitter and SCOTUS blog knows about it well before we get the document. So we try to source all that in there, too. + +Anybody have thoughts of other things they might want? Things that might come in handy with bots? + +I know what I've wanted. I missed Google words when it was really powerful. It's like not the same any more, right? Is it hidden? I don't know if it was a user mistake but anyways I think it would be nice for a reporter to be able to flag a keyword search that gets piped into Slack really easily around their loop. I also think it would be nice if we have, like, a recipe cookbook for some of this stuff. Because I think a lot of this has been just common problems, and given that HUBOT is a framework that we could be sharing more code. + +Like, what are those sort of architypes, right, of where we might write a recipe. Maybe it's not just a specific API but it's like if you have this kind of API like... + +Well, there are the tools like this and that, or Sapier that do those sorts of things. But it seems like in a lot of cases they don't quite get to the level of bot—or like of the kind of behavior that you want from a bot. + +Is it because, like, you want the bot to be a little smarter than maybe, like, sort of... + +I think because you want to take, if it's—like, you want to be able to drop—drop a processing step. You kind of want Yahoo pipes inside of this if this, then that. You know, RIP Yahoo Pipes but... yeah. + +There's a platform, well, not a platform but a Ruby project that I've seen but haven't really experimented with yet called Whogan. + +I know that. + +Okay, then. + +Named after some Norse mythological crow or something. And as I understand it, it's sort of Yahoo Pipes. + +I know one of the things that I'm investigating as a replacement for Pipes because we use a lot of Pipes for where I am. I just haven't had a chance to play around much with it yet. + +I know what we use it for now. We use it as a corrections channel. So any channel that needs a correction, the bot takes it over, and corrects it, so that we can be collectively embarrassed in the privacy of our own user intranet. + +What does it do, just list? + +Yeah, we would like to eventually get the actual correction words into it. + +There's some flag on CMS or something for corrections? + +Yeah, that's cool. + +Is that what powers the bot like pin when you put up a new story. + +In my old company, we had to send an email to the entire staff whenever we published a new story. And so the best thing that I discovered at the Times was that they had a bot that said that a new bot if it was but if you were working on them and you had to grab things it was super, super helpful. + +I was thinking about something like that because... + +I literally know nothing about it. + +And um, 'cause I think there's a bunch of stuff in that audience development side that bots could be doing because so often, in the newsroom, we will publish a story and then move onto the next one. But it's not until like four hours the publication happens there's the most potential room for additional velocity. + +We have stuff watching Reddit and if there's fresh comments recently on something, we encourage the journalist to go in and the reporters to go in, and speak on the piece on the subject matter. And another that looks at the Google news One Box competition for specific topics and lets us know when our stories don't rank with the stories that we're talking about. So it alerts audience elements to go and figure out how we rerank before that turn. I don't know how that runs but I know we have to jump through hoops whenever it spits out something. + +When we were talking about the LA Times earthquake thing. And when we talk about the Slack bot telling you a story's doing really well those are bots. But isn't all the -- + +It's automation. + +A bot is—the Chatter UI is the essential characteristic of a bot to me. + +The what of UI? + +Chat as UI. + +This is something that I wrestle with constantly. The team I work with. Just the product team is 80 people. So the bots, you have a number of chat bots. One of the things that I am thinking about lately is when all these things are, what are the strengths and weaknesses of chat as a space for different things like, we do a lot of automation. People here are talking about a lot about different kinds of automation. But the strengths of chat being, like, low friction, constant attention, everything's in front of you and sort of the weakness of that is distraction. And, like, that's why I'm dicer where these bots speak into, channels. Do they need to speak into channels at all? Are some of the better served are filtered into a dashboard? How does attention figure into the decisions you all make about where your automation speaks to? + +One thing I'd like to see—I have no idea how you would even accomplish this, but I would like to see a bot that I could ask for a summary of, like, the last hour of a Slack channel that I have not been paying attention to and there's, like, this giant, sort of, discussion. + +They mentioned that like a "while you were gone" type of feature. + +Would it be better than Twitter's while you were gone feature? It's pretty bad. No matter how many times. It's like I didn't really get this. + +To get to your question, one of the criteria when we think of the actionability of a message, and there's, like, some bots that are set up that are like autobots. Like we like to keep our eye on our taxonomy and so we have a bot that tells us when a new tag is added. But with all these bots it has to be something it's a growth editor, when I get that message I can then do x and it makes me better at my job. I think those are worth piping into the chat. That's kind of what I think about. + +I think one thing for us, given the user control for signal to noise. Whenever we make something, when one person is like, I want more, it makes it really noisy. And the other person is like, get that thing out of the room, it's really noisy. So the thing is, how can I let the user customize. Once it's all based in the code, it makes it really hard for a user to go in and say, I just want these ones. I just want these ones. So I've been looking at maybe we'll have all these channels where users post these things but also having an interface for a user to be able to go in and say, list all the types of alerts and say, I'll just have this one, and private message me about these ones. And I can go into a room, I can have these conversations but in order that they can control better what alerts they get. That's my pipe dream. I don't know if anyone has that dream written for me here. + +And so we use this really rudimentary setup that I've put together with somebody's help at the AP with Sharepoint, because we use a lot of Sharepoint internally, God help us. So for a lot of these bots I've put together a basic list for some subscriptions and some settings, tweaks. So I've mentioned the health care one. So if you decided breaches that affect a million people. I don't get enough. Maybe you should turn it down to half a million. You could do that without changing the code. So I just, at the bottom of every email that sends out, have an link back to the list. I want to change. Here's a reminder of your settings. If you want to change them, go here and then they don't have to bother me at all. I don't have to push anything and, you know, it's a little more frictionless that way. + +We have a pretty small team at Minn Post. So there's not a ton of chatroom noise. We use Slack. One thing, though is—and we only have the one bot which we kind of feed scripts into and it's not too crazy. But we set it up to DJ the music in the newsroom on Spotify. So we just created a new channel for that because there's a lot of like next, searching for music, cuing up stuff and figured that probably that doesn't need to be, like, in the newsroom channel. So yeah, I think at some point, doing channels might get unwieldy. Are you going to be a member of...? + +It's footstep, at a certain point it's just as distracting as having a dedicated channel. It's hard for me not to pay attention. + +I feel like the notifications problem is kind of like a superset to the specific bot problem because I mean, notifications are a friggin' pain in the ass. And I know in Slack I've had to go on, like, the soft mute for all our general channels and, I don't know, they're so noisy, and if you have the white button excessive compulsion to hit it every time, it's totally a time sink. + +What do people do about health checks for bots, like, if you have things that are checking a feed like, the health data breach feed that's just sort of sitting there silently alerting, like, what happens if the feed goes away, or the feed changes. Like, how do you sort of, it would be kind of lake a metabot. It wouldn't be a bot. + +I was just thinking about this on the plane yesterday. But I don't know yet but I would love to come up with something because actually one of them that I wrote, not that one, but a different one, involves a lot of scraping and one step in that scrape changed this month. It's like monthly updates. And I'm glad I caught it. + +Right. + +But that's just because I was paying attention, clicking around. And part of the idea is that I don't have to do that any more. + +Well, it seems that can happen on two levels. I mean, the feed the sort of data source can change and then, something could go wrong with the bot itself, right? I don't know if it's like building in some kind of tests that are part of—I think it's at least a good practice to think about, right? I mean, some kind of error reporting, at least, into the way that you build the bot. + +You could build, like, a proxy that it gets its data source that it, like, inserts random fire drills into it and then checks that the things come out in the right channel and then follows it up with, like, "This was a test." If it actually were a data breach we know the process would have worked. + +There's the thing that Netflix has that completely automated it but they call it Chaosmonkey and so it just mucks with part of their infrastructure at random and sees if they handle it. + +That's some brave stuff. + +I am nowhere near that brave because... + +I think our developers are just the chaos monkeys. We're just trying to get to the point where that's less of an issue. + +Yeah, I would not want something to mess something that posts to the Wire. + +So one thing that we do is we have use stats—almost all of our bots if I'm right, will send, you know, health check messages saying, "Hey, I ran my loop. I did this. I had a success metric and I did it." And we just have a Grifono board (phonetic) that's always small and it will change the background and say, "Silent for an amount of time." And yet it's helpful because you don't have to check it but sometimes you do get false positives. So that's something that we're still trying to solve well because it kind of works but I still have to have, like, a monitor in my room saying, yup, things are good along with the ten other monitors saying, "Yup, things are good." + +One of the things that I was thinking of on the plane, and inevitably I couldn't get to other things was trying to come up with a different—how do I just not set up another monitor on my desk. And so part of me wants to, like, put together small, like, physical robots for each of these and have them, like, respond to login messages, right? All right. So this one fell over! I don't know how that would actually work in practice but it would be hysterical to have them running around my desk. + +I actually designed a prototype last week. It was like a meeting reminder that blew a little bubble, like a soap bubble on your desk. It was like sort of the lightest possible reminder that something's happening. + +That's a fairly early Internet Wave to the Cats. + +What was that one? + +It was really early 90s. It was this site, Wave to the Cats. You would push a button and it would say a hand somewhere was waving at a cat. + +I had thought about giving my cat a "yo'" button and have him climb up the wall, and it yos me and my wife. + +Not really a chat interface but it's still communication. + +Well, that's... + +That's the kind of attention that I like. + +Here's one bit of information. + +The cat says "yo." + +I know one thing that I've set up, and I keep turning it on and off. And I'm not sure if it's helpful but we have a little red police light like a zig bee, that can control whether it's on and off. So it's kind of fun user feedback by if it kept bouncing between goal and not goal, and switching between on and off and if someone just turns it off. We're over this number! Why is it not... and so I unplugged it. So I don't know. + +That sort of reminds me of the, like, software companies and such that has a traffic light for their build status, right? Like all the tests are passing: Green. We're running the tests right now, yellow, a test failed: Red. + +So I've been wanting to figure out a good way to get some—to get some of that stuff in there but it would be helpful not to just, having another obnoxious thing on our desk that's going to bother us. + +I think one company had a rather intensive light, that had a missile launcher that would figure out who had broken the build and shoot missiles at them. We could do that to pay a particular reporter. + +It's like the ultimate get blamed. + +Let's get punished. + +At least it's not water balloons. + +So it sounds like who bot is what a lot of people are using. I've got in a bots and I've got a couple in mind that I want to do. Is this only in Slack, or is this something that could be outputted different ways or...? + +Well, Who bot, I think it mostly works with chat platforms of various kinds. And so we used it in Campfire than -- + +Yeah, I was saying it in hipchat kind of implementation. + +Yeah, didn't they start in IRC for that? + +Yeah, so IRC. + +A lot of things in Slack remind me of grade school, like IRC. + +I think Slack was taking IRC and making it kind of current design sensibilities. + +Mine was a chat bot that fires ASCII torpedos. + +That could be done. I know the hacker space I belonged to back when I lived in D.C. has something that, like, whenever you post a link to something in IRC, Reddit responds with the title so that you know that you're not getting Rickrolled or something. But of course, people still have shenanigans but something to just really quickly respond. + +We haven't really brought up Twitter bots, which of course, are regional, and evolved ways of shapes and forms. And interactive other users are just annoying. Just follow accounts overall. + +I mean, there would be a little bit of a question with the fact that we're all in news and probably working on tools to sort of augment news-gathering and reporting and you wouldn't necessarily want that to be a public Twitter feed but there's been a handful that are public that different organizations one. Like the one that comes to mind is the one that's watching Wikipedia edits within the IP address block of the capitol building. That one's occasionally irritating. But... + +We had a story about that the other day because someone edited. + +1802, or whatever it was? + +Somebody edited Rick Santorum's page so that instead of Winchester, Virginia, it said fart virgin. They would edit the space so that it would push down "Rick Santorum" and for the most part, it worked. It pushed it way down the feed and I think most people who were following it, just muted it. + +I mean, I think there's the possibility, too, a lot of our reporters, I'm not a big fan of Twitter but a lot of our reporters are on Twitter a lot. And you know, because they follow our reporters and news sources. So if you can get a useful bot in the mix there, that's going to give them—I mean, the downside is they might miss the tweet, right? Because while some people are obsessive about reading their feeds, some people are not. So that may be not mission critical but it's still useful information. I think that could be pretty helpful. Because, yeah, some of our reporters don't really want to use Slack, they don't really easy the value of it because they're not sitting at their desk all day like I am, or standing at my desk as it were. So you know, that's like on their phone and it's just like this feed of information. But that's not something that I've actually done anything with. + +Twitter bots are actually how I first taught myself Python and it was sort of like the task that I gave myself to, sort of, do something with it and I think with a lot of journalists sort of have the thing of, you know, seeing the forest from the trees, that Twitter can feel sometimes like the whole world, it's actually very tiny slice of your world. So if you're making a Twitter bot you have to ask whether, it's going to reach the audience, that it's going to have the impact that it has, if it's worth the time building the code. + +I was going to say, that could tell us about what it feels like to kill your bot. + +I've had so -- + +The SRCCON article go all on this. + +For the ones that I just made as hobbies, I frequently had to cannibalize them because I only have so many phone numbers to get an Twitter API key. + +If you guys, I'm sure if you have—well, if you haven't check out the bot week post on source. It came around the time that I proposed this session but one of the ones that I thought was really cool was in the New York Times election night 'cause that's always like kind of a crazy night. + +I think Jeremy mentioned that in the etherpad. + +Okay great. + +So do you want to keep going? + +Well, I just... I don't know. Did anybody use—experience what that was like? Is it useful? + +Yes, in part because we didn't have to have someone watching. It does automate effectively some of the more tedious work of election night. You're going to know how things are polling. You're going to know when the major networks are calling when. But it's like asking someone to mind all the little uninteresting races that are not going to work. So handcuffs handy to have election bot working. Is it came to increasingly levels of closures. To remind ourselves to go and pay attention. Which we knew but we also needed a reminder to go see stuff. It didn't have a check of where you can go and ask it, follow up on these things. What's the current polling rate but I think we had plans to build that. So we didn't use this for this last, but we did use it for—but for next year we've got more things we want to do. + +I read that. And so you have this thing that's providing ambient notifications in an open space and natural language as a way to say, this speaks to a little bit of what you're talking about: Only talk to me and I'm interested in what I want to know. You are the canonical bot that knows what the current state of Florida is with respect to elections. Like, that's the kind of bot that I'm super, super curious about, and I haven't written a lot about it. Most of the things that I write about bots is pushing. It's a censor, or talks, or response of something that happened to everybody as opposed to I want to private message the bot and say: What's the current water level in California? That's the stuff that without having to walk away from in the chat, you have this canonical source. Like are we writing more of those? Because that's—is that easier to justify to the point of the conversation—is that easier to justify than just saying saying, let's build something that's interesting to push this out but saying, wouldn't it be nice to ask the bot a question and have the bot come back with a canonical answer. Should we be writing those? + +I'm also dealing with a team with economical data. There are a lot of sources of it. What if there were ways for reporters to ask: What was this particular rate in this? That's the kind of thing, that if it were available could be very useful. And especially, since I'm an editor of a real time economics blog, having that be in Slack, it would be really interesting. + +We did another. Anybody familiar with rubber duck programming? We built a rubber duck bot that you just say like, "Hey, rubber duck book, I'm having a problem." And it would do like ELISA type stuff, like the old chat factor program. + +Elisa is probably a bot, right? It's chat oriented. + +It's the first chat bot. + +I don't remember right now, but some group used it to go after—what was the—the gamer hashtag. + +Gamer gate. + +But it basically did. It would talk to people who were particularly rowdy on Twitter and they didn't realize that they were talking to a bot. + +I had a friend who did that. + +Elisa would be a great name for a bot company. + +That's interesting that you say that you're more interested in the kind of the asking the questions because, like, most of my stuff, and granted most of it is really rudimentary is asking stuff from the bot versus the continuous monitoring thing but I really think that the hybrid is kind of the most interesting possibility, right? Like, you don't know you have these questions and the continuous monitoring sort of prompts a question because it says this thing happened and you're like oh, I want to know more about that. And that helps cut down on the noise. It tells you that it knows something and you're going to ask it more so I think that's a pretty good conceptual framework for useful chat bots. I think. + +Coupling those two things. I don't want to make it sound like I'm not a librarian. I don't know. It's kind of interesting to think about it from the attention standpoint because I'm not a journalist. I don't know what it's like to be somebody on the other side of that wall. + +That's noisy. + +Yeah, that's noisy. + +What if you had—what if the bot knew, like, what stories you were working on, or what stories you were working on and then when you're writing a similar story in the future, would remember what you asked it last time so that, like, if you're writing another story about a company, it would sort of know, here's the data that you might want at your fingertips. That's sort of interesting. + +If you teach it like if I'm doing earnings. I need these stats. And it gives you back, like, a form? + +Yeah, a sort of thing where you wouldn't sort of build this report. It would just, like, know in this particular context, here's the information that you asked for last time. So you look like you're writing a statistics story. + +Here's all the stuff you searched for that—or like while the budget said you were working on this kind of story. + +Right. + +Before that it says that you're working on now. + +Right. + +I wonder how noisy that would get. But that does seem potentially useful. + +Yeah, I kind of wonder about the potential for sort of like more editorial workflow bots stuff. I think about when a story is published, that's a really great example of that. I should be able to set that up—and that's like more for the social media team or person now to get the notifications but I wonder if there are, like, other parts of the workflow that could be enhanced by a bot. Like, our bot is not aware of the budget of the day. But I'm very... and I mean, what could you—could you build a useful interface for a bot that, like, actually does the budgets, sort of? + +I was about to say that. + +Like, what are the stories? Where are they right now and who's got what? + +I've seen bots that automate this in kind of the same way. Like, what's everyone working on at a preset time. + +Reminder bots, saying, I want to ping this, and ask what's their stock. And get increasingly shouty and, like, increasingly offensive gifs. + +Slack has a little reminder command but it doesn't let you remind other people of things. You can only... + +That's not really helpful. I guess it reminds me to harass them in a way. + +That's the first step. + +Our audience development team has a reminder bot every day at 3:00 p.m. that it's time for a break. It's just a series of fruit emojis. + +If you put in an URL,ing this is a very narrow use case like someone who's managing an account. It would tell where else in our social media universe it's been posted but it's really useful if you ask it most of the time. But if we have a story that was posted to the main account and it has 8 million retweets, like, let me know first. But that's kind of like what you were saying, it goes both ways. You can apply a certain threshold at which it would talk to you. + +I was trying to look for production stuff that a friend of mine mentioned. But I'm not finding it offhand. + +We had another feed that if you put someone's name in, it would find a photo of them online and put a mustache on them. That was useful. + +Ten minutes? + +Yeah, ten minutes left. + +Great. I think like the mustache thing, I guess everybody has a different newsroom culture but to me, it's important that the bot has to maintain some level of personality, I think just for a chat bot, especially just to kind of... I don't know. There's some aspect of Minnbot that I find very charming and the very best days are when it kind of comes with something unexpected but, like, very useful or witty or whatever. And that often happens just kind of randomly, I think. But it's always good to think about it when writing about your bots but being annoying, which, I guess is a difficult balance. + +On that note, there was something that I saw that had the principle: Be as smart as a puppy. So the idea is that keep your bot charming but not frustrating. Don't try to have it be too smart. So the limitation is have it be smart as a puppy, so maybe people will empathize with it at sort of the same level. + +Or just have an puppy bot. + +Puppy bot. + +Lots of poo poo emojis. + +When you're sad, it's like a cute puppy to look at. + +So like emergency cats but it's Slack. + +Like emergency cats. + +I've got a script for that. + +Well, put it in the etherpad. + +Everyone with Apple Watch can watch their stress level somehow, and when you're stressed out... + +Yes, heart rate stress for everyone. We promise it's not going to go HR. + +Or have a Jawbone that when it reaches a certain level, don't ask them anything. You're angry because you're high. + +What's the next three-hour window for this person when the heart rate level drops. + +What else? + +What are some of the pitfalls with bots? We've mentioned noise. They get annoying. Are there any other questions that you need to be worried about when you're building a bot like, "I should not do this." + +Well, I think for me, just in training, being aware of bots especially if there's lots of them, knowing which ones are useful and making sure that they're all running. If I have one or two bots, okay, cool, I can do this. Or even having a bot that has lots of features. There's, like, 200 commands on this thing. What—how do I train that? Well, so this one will do an emergency, you know, notification on the website, and this one will put a poo poo emoji and stuff. And there's two line items on the same chat. + +So if anyone was at the last session, I mentioned that this was one of my first big fails when I was learning programming, sort of as kind of like a completion thing. it was an idea that one of my fellows at Digital Media had, that was a bot that would scrape news headline sources and try to make them into Upworthy headlines and the results were monstrous. The results were horrifying. Things like, you know, is I ri used chemical weapons on its citizens, you won't be able what happened next. + +So you have to realize if it's as smart as a puppy, it could be very stupid. + +Yeah, I mean like I think that's definitely a downfall when you're writing, like, supposedly funny scripts. Just always be aware of being sensitive, right, because the bot is not smart enough to know. So you have to kind of anticipate those kinds of things and that's just part of, like, I feel like making a workplace that works for everybody. So that's something that I try to be aware of. + +Your chat bot is a coworker. + +Yeah. + +Your chat bot should be a coworker. + +Like, a really great coworker. The one you like. + +It should be the best one. + +Yeah. So, are we going to be able to condense editors that they should definitely give us days to work on our bots? I don't know. + +We did a Hackday for bots that was pretty successful. I mean, Hackdays are a nice opportunity to, like, prototype ideas, try them in a newsroom environment. + +But that was focused on bots? + +Yeah, bots, specifically. + +And did that produce some good? + +Yeah, trending bot, that generated stories based on different pageview thresholds to authors and then the growth hacking bot that identifies large, like, Facebook pages with relevant ideas. + +That's cool. + +All right. We can try and hold everybody here for another two and a half minutes but I wonder if there's any more poop out there. But thank you everybody. I think there's a lot of good stuff that's, you know, now in the etherpad. + +Yeah, check that out. + +If you were zoning out during the session, check that out. + +Where is that located? + +Right here. Bit.ly/srcconbots2015. + +That was cool. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015ClosingPlenary.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015ClosingPlenary.md index fa8412a0..e928ee21 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015ClosingPlenary.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015ClosingPlenary.md @@ -1,42 +1,37 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/closingplenary/index.html ---- - -# Closing Session - -### Day & Time: Friday, 5:30-6pm - -### Room: Memorial - - -Thanks, Marty. He's on it. Thanks, everyone. SRCCON is over. I'm sorry. - -Boo! - -Thank you all for sticking it through and for doing amazing stuff. We have just a couple of final thoughts here and then we'll send you out into a beautiful midwestern summer night. First off, just a couple of thanks here. A-1, thank you so much to the volunteers who have worked incredibly hard for the last couple of days to make all of this come together as seamlessly and as smoothly as they have. Many of whom who flew here on their own dime. Thank you to the amazing staff here at the McNamara Center who have worked really hard and welcomed us into not only what's an incredibly beautiful space but also a working space. There are people who we've been in the middle of their walk to and from their offices in the last couple of days. So really, thank you to all of them. Thanks, of course to the people that make OpenNews possible, which makes SRCCON possible, the Knight Foundation and Mozilla, they have been tireless supporters of the work that we do. And most importantly, thanks to all of you for participating and for sharing and for really bringing it for the last two days. One note on sharing. Many of I brought coffees and teas and other things, and swag, and Magic Cards, and D&D dice but there's sort of the swag table where you picked up your lanyards originally, some leftovers but also the coffees and teas. So if you brought something, take something home. We have a couple of final thoughts about how to keep this going throughout the year. And I want to grab Erika to talk a lot more about that. - - -Hello. So one of the ways that we're excited to keep in touch throughout the year is through community calls, which are these biweekly, collaborative conference calls that OpenNews hosts and many of you have been involved with them over the year. And it's a place for people to talk about projects, events, opportunities, things going on in this space. A lot of the same kinds of discussions, and tools, and demos and talk topics that we've had over the last couple of days. We talk for about 45 minutes every other week on a conference call line. So it's a great way for you all to share and to stay in the know-Ohio in the community and it's also a way for put OpenNews to stay in the community throughout the year and one of the things that's going on right now is we have the open application for the fellowship program. You may have met some of our current fellows, and there are numerous alumni in the room. And we're excited to hear from our applicants. The application is open until August 21st. You get to work with great news organizations, many of those news organizations, who have hosted fellows in the past and who are planning to host them in the future are in this room as well. So you should also check out. And community calls to learn more about the fellowship, so you can get more of the details straight from the fellows, as well. So the next call is coming up on July 8th. We'll send more information in the follow-up emails but it's a great way to keep sort of these conversations going over the year. And also, looking ahead to what you'll be doing after we all leave this room or after we're ushered out of this room, we just want to take a couple of minutes and if you want to think about what's one thing you're walking out of here today thinking about and how you want to share it? So if you want to think about that, turn to the person next to you, we just wanted to give you two minutes so kind of share what that one thing that you're really walking away with is, and how you're thinking about sharing it outside of this room. - - -[ Group Discussion ] - -All right. I'm going to ask you to focus back up here for just a second. So back in what kind of feels like another lifetime, I actually taught in a journalism department at a college. And one of the things that you have to do when you're a tenure track professor is teach not only the classes they hired you for, but also the ones that you're grossly unqualified to teach like introduction to journalism. And one day we were doing an intro to journalism class and it was a day that was about journalism ethics and I had brought in a bunch of speakers and it—it was one of those classes that you do and you walk out and you're like, "I nailed this. Like, these kids are going to be the best journalists that they can possibly be. I did this." And I did this in one of those big journalism departments that has a big-screened TV with CNN playing on it. And we walk out of this class and everyone is glowing in this haze of how wonderful journalism is and on the screen is wall-to-wall coverage of the Balloon Boy and it was this moment where I just, like, I really did feel like we had lost. - -Everything that I—there was this huge crowd of kids around it, you know. They were just soaking it all in, and it just, everything that they had just heard fell out of their heads. And I was thinking about that moment today, which has been a pretty remarkable day. Just, one news story after another has rolled and rolled like waves cresting on each other and here we all have been together on what is an incredibly momentous day, you know? And we're all here helping to reshape and revitalize journalism on a day that you couldn't ask for more reasons for why what we do is so important. - - -You know, today doesn't feel like we've lost. You know, today, feels like anything is possible. And that's because the work that you do is vital. And the way that you do it together is the thing that is going to truly make it survive and surpass the journalism that has come before. - -So really, and truly, you know, we—there was a great moment when Erika asked everyone to share with their neighbor where, there was total dead silence in the room and then you realized, like, oh, wait, they're serious. Okay. And then you started talking and then you wouldn't stop. And we are serious. We really do want you this sharing to continue. We know that this work that we do only works when we share it. You know, only works when we go far outside this room with what we've learned from each other and we support each other and we open source our code and we make sure that all of this stuff gets out as far as it can, the same way that we want the news that we're reporting reach the people that need it the most. We want this work as well and so we really want you to share. We want you to keep the connections that you've made over the last couple of days. We want you to keep going, to keep building and and to keep being amazing. So thank you all for just an incredible two days. There are celebrations as we speak, across the Twin Cities and across America. Go and enjoy them and just have a wonderful evening and safe travels everywhere. And we'll see you next year in a city that we don't yet, but absolutely in the summertime and we'll have another amazing SRCCON. Thank you all. - -[ Applause ] - +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/closingplenary/index.html +--- + +# Closing Session + +### Day & Time: Friday, 5:30-6pm + +### Room: Memorial + +Thanks, Marty. He's on it. Thanks, everyone. SRCCON is over. I'm sorry. + +Boo! + +Thank you all for sticking it through and for doing amazing stuff. We have just a couple of final thoughts here and then we'll send you out into a beautiful midwestern summer night. First off, just a couple of thanks here. A-1, thank you so much to the volunteers who have worked incredibly hard for the last couple of days to make all of this come together as seamlessly and as smoothly as they have. Many of whom who flew here on their own dime. Thank you to the amazing staff here at the McNamara Center who have worked really hard and welcomed us into not only what's an incredibly beautiful space but also a working space. There are people who we've been in the middle of their walk to and from their offices in the last couple of days. So really, thank you to all of them. Thanks, of course to the people that make OpenNews possible, which makes SRCCON possible, the Knight Foundation and Mozilla, they have been tireless supporters of the work that we do. And most importantly, thanks to all of you for participating and for sharing and for really bringing it for the last two days. One note on sharing. Many of I brought coffees and teas and other things, and swag, and Magic Cards, and D&D dice but there's sort of the swag table where you picked up your lanyards originally, some leftovers but also the coffees and teas. So if you brought something, take something home. We have a couple of final thoughts about how to keep this going throughout the year. And I want to grab Erika to talk a lot more about that. + +Hello. So one of the ways that we're excited to keep in touch throughout the year is through community calls, which are these biweekly, collaborative conference calls that OpenNews hosts and many of you have been involved with them over the year. And it's a place for people to talk about projects, events, opportunities, things going on in this space. A lot of the same kinds of discussions, and tools, and demos and talk topics that we've had over the last couple of days. We talk for about 45 minutes every other week on a conference call line. So it's a great way for you all to share and to stay in the know-Ohio in the community and it's also a way for put OpenNews to stay in the community throughout the year and one of the things that's going on right now is we have the open application for the fellowship program. You may have met some of our current fellows, and there are numerous alumni in the room. And we're excited to hear from our applicants. The application is open until August 21st. You get to work with great news organizations, many of those news organizations, who have hosted fellows in the past and who are planning to host them in the future are in this room as well. So you should also check out. And community calls to learn more about the fellowship, so you can get more of the details straight from the fellows, as well. So the next call is coming up on July 8th. We'll send more information in the follow-up emails but it's a great way to keep sort of these conversations going over the year. And also, looking ahead to what you'll be doing after we all leave this room or after we're ushered out of this room, we just want to take a couple of minutes and if you want to think about what's one thing you're walking out of here today thinking about and how you want to share it? So if you want to think about that, turn to the person next to you, we just wanted to give you two minutes so kind of share what that one thing that you're really walking away with is, and how you're thinking about sharing it outside of this room. + +[ Group Discussion ] + +All right. I'm going to ask you to focus back up here for just a second. So back in what kind of feels like another lifetime, I actually taught in a journalism department at a college. And one of the things that you have to do when you're a tenure track professor is teach not only the classes they hired you for, but also the ones that you're grossly unqualified to teach like introduction to journalism. And one day we were doing an intro to journalism class and it was a day that was about journalism ethics and I had brought in a bunch of speakers and it—it was one of those classes that you do and you walk out and you're like, "I nailed this. Like, these kids are going to be the best journalists that they can possibly be. I did this." And I did this in one of those big journalism departments that has a big-screened TV with CNN playing on it. And we walk out of this class and everyone is glowing in this haze of how wonderful journalism is and on the screen is wall-to-wall coverage of the Balloon Boy and it was this moment where I just, like, I really did feel like we had lost. + +Everything that I—there was this huge crowd of kids around it, you know. They were just soaking it all in, and it just, everything that they had just heard fell out of their heads. And I was thinking about that moment today, which has been a pretty remarkable day. Just, one news story after another has rolled and rolled like waves cresting on each other and here we all have been together on what is an incredibly momentous day, you know? And we're all here helping to reshape and revitalize journalism on a day that you couldn't ask for more reasons for why what we do is so important. + +You know, today doesn't feel like we've lost. You know, today, feels like anything is possible. And that's because the work that you do is vital. And the way that you do it together is the thing that is going to truly make it survive and surpass the journalism that has come before. + +So really, and truly, you know, we—there was a great moment when Erika asked everyone to share with their neighbor where, there was total dead silence in the room and then you realized, like, oh, wait, they're serious. Okay. And then you started talking and then you wouldn't stop. And we are serious. We really do want you this sharing to continue. We know that this work that we do only works when we share it. You know, only works when we go far outside this room with what we've learned from each other and we support each other and we open source our code and we make sure that all of this stuff gets out as far as it can, the same way that we want the news that we're reporting reach the people that need it the most. We want this work as well and so we really want you to share. We want you to keep the connections that you've made over the last couple of days. We want you to keep going, to keep building and and to keep being amazing. So thank you all for just an incredible two days. There are celebrations as we speak, across the Twin Cities and across America. Go and enjoy them and just have a wonderful evening and safe travels everywhere. And we'll see you next year in a city that we don't yet, but absolutely in the summertime and we'll have another amazing SRCCON. Thank you all. + +[ Applause ] diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015DatFlatsheet.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015DatFlatsheet.md index 725f73b6..c9a0125e 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015DatFlatsheet.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015DatFlatsheet.md @@ -1,175 +1,125 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/datflatsheet/index.html ---- - -# Fork and Merge Some Data with Dat and Flatsheet - -### Session Facilitator(s): Max Ogden, Seth Vincent - -### Day & Time: Thursday, 12:30-1:30pm - -### Room: Ski-U-Mah - - -The session will start in 15 minutes! - - -The session will start in 15 minutes! - - -So our format is going to be a little weird. But we're going to do, like, some quick introduction of the concepts. And that'll be the main speaking portion. - - -And then we have a workshop people can do on their computer. And so there'll be kind of intermittent periods where we—when we think people are at a certain point, we'll do a reference demonstration. So it won't be a continuous block. And then we're hoping to have some discussion at the end. So for probably half an hour, there will be discussions. - - -Hello? Okay, cool. Just testing. Carry on. Carry on. - - -Just making sure you guys are well taken care of. Need anything? Everything good? All right. - - -Can you have three more people check on us? - - -I guarantee at least one more person will come in and ask. - - -The session will start in ten minutes! - - -The session will start in five minutes! - - -So if you want to get started... Or actually... Talk in the mic. If you want to get started five minutes early, you can go to the URL, on the top there's two options, but to get started early—the requirement, if you want to run it on your own machine, which is one of the options, I think it's the more fun and ambitious option, and I encourage it—the only requirement is that you install the latest—you have to have the latest version of either node.js or a fork of it called io.js. And there's instructions in the guide, but I'll add the URL right now. I recommend going to http://iojs.org and then just downloading the installer for your operating system, and get that installed now. If you want to do it on your own machine. If you don't want to install anything on your machine, we have an option for that too, but if you're feeling ambitious, and if you succumb to peer pressure—I'm looking at all of you right now. You should install the latest version of io.js on your machine, and then you'll be ready to run everything. - - -Is it the latest major of io? - - -Whatever the download link gives you. I forget. It's like two point something. - - -We need some music. - - -I know. It's pretty quiet now. I love transcription. - -MIRABAI: Transcription loves you. - -(Remix of Believe playing) - - -Okay. That was a remix of the Space Jam soundtrack with Cher's Believe. So let's get started! My name is Max. Thanks for coming, everybody! This is Seth. We came from the cold Northwest of the United States. It's cold and the rent is really high. And the infrastructure is terrible. And it's... Nobody should move there. So... I work on a project called Dat, and Seth works on a project called Flatsheet, and we're both funded Open Source projects, and our goal is to kind of build data tools. So we've been working on some data tools, so hopefully we have a room full of some data geeks to test out our data tools. And a little bit of background—I wanted to give the context—has anybody ever put a dataset into git before? Like a CSV or anything like that? That's a thing that a lot of people do, but there's a lot of use cases where it breaks down. Like, git doesn't talk to databases, git can't talk to your MySQL database, or export an XML file, so I've been writing a tool called Dat for the last year. We mostly work with scientific dataset publishers so they can publish their data and other scientists can install their data, and we want to support a lot of different file formats and support a lot of really cool automation work flows, but what we have out now is basically a basic version of our tools for downloading datasets and working with them and it's a version control tool for datasets. So the status of it is very alpha. We're about to publish the beta version very soon. So don't expect to take this back and deploy it into production right away. It's more like an early preview, and we're really, really excited to hear use cases and get feedback and know what we can continue working on, to make it relevant to you in the future. And like I mentioned, the whole thing is Open Source. And we have a team of three on Dat, three full-time Open Source developers on it, and we are on IRC every day, and we don't want it to just be a scientific dataset tool. It started out as a project working with open data, in cities. I think cities, science, and newsrooms are the three big frontiers for open data or at least collaborative data. So I want to make sure we can hit all three of those use cases really well. So with Flatsheet, I want to let Seth describe kind of the background of Flatsheet for a moment. - - -Sassy Flatsheet background is... I kept using Google spreadsheets and getting the JSON from it and hating it. And the additional goal was just like—hey, I wonder how long it would take me to build a prototype that does something similar but a lot simpler and the API is better and easier to use. And that's what Flatsheet turned into. Sort of the end goal now is to provide something a little bit like Google Fusion Tables, only better. I'm not quite there yet. Getting closer and closer. It's simpler than Google Fusion Tables, currently. It'll let you do the basic things you need to do. Editing values. Adding and deleting rows. API. To get it the data. And the version that we have today is an even more stripped down version that's sort of representative of—it's like a sneak peek at the new version that's going to come out. So you'll see that it's really limited. But it'll let you do some basic functionality of, like, bringing in a CSV, making edits, and then getting a new CSV back. What am I missing? I don't know if I'm missing anything. - - -That's probably good. - - -That's probably good. - - -So... Yeah. Both of our projects are kind of—our goal is to make tools that solve problems that data people have. So again, we're going to have some time at the end to talk about frustrations with existing tools or frustrations with our tools that you found out today. So the two ways to do the workshop—it's the same content. It's just either you're doing it on your computer or you're going to do it on a web environment that we have. And let me show the guide first. So there's this URL here. Which is for the transcription—maxogden.Github.io/get-dat/guide. And it's the same URL for the online version. You just take guide off of the end. So it's just maxogden/get-dat. And it's a tutorial—kind of a choose your own adventure style tutorial, that has 7 or 8 different sections, and each section is pretty lightweight. So it's not going to take the whole hour, hopefully. And it kind of just walks you through from the beginning, and the only requirement, if you're doing it on your computer, is to have the latest version of either node.js or io.js installed. That's the dependency that both of our projects require. And we—so I want to take a couple minutes to just get set up and make sure everybody can get to the content. And if you can't get it on your computer, at the same couple of minutes, your table is now your team. So there's a couple people solo tabling. Or actually... No, you're the only solo tabler. So if you have any issues, I'll be on your team. I'm also on everybody else's team. And Seth is on everybody's team. If your team gets stuck, raise your hands, and we will come help you. And so for the team, just take a minute and introduce yourselves, and then—well, actually, I want to show you the version that's on our servers. So this is a thing that we've built, a tool for running the workshop, and apologies if it's a little small. But... When you go to the URL, without guide on it, it will give you this, hopefully. And this is logged into a server—it's a real server—we're using a technology called Docker to give you a little sand box that you can play around with Dat in. Has anybody used the command line terminal before on Linux? See a show of hands? So it's one of those Linux terminals. You're logged in, and it comes in pre-installed with Dat and this tool called Data Editor, which is the version of Flatsheet that's going to be used today. It has everything installed already that you need to run the workshop. So when you run dat -v to get the version, you should see something like this. 7.0. And what's cool about this also is that down here at the bottom is a basic, basic text editor. So there's this welcome.txt file that comes with it, and I can go into there and I can type a bunch of gobbledygook, and then if I go back to the terminal and I cat that file, then I see my gobbledygook at the end. Hopefully. So this is dependent—yeah, here it is. So it kind of syncs the files that you're working with, with the files in this editor. So if you need to edit a file, you can do it really easily. So that's two parts of this. The third part is on the right. And this is just the guide from the /guide URL. In this pane on the right. Feel free to run the workshop in either one, using this web tool or on your own machine. When you get to step 5, it actually has you install it on your own machine, so you can replicate a dataset from here onto your own machine. So even if you do it on the web, you'll eventually have to install io.js to do the entire thing, or node.js. So I would recommend doing it on your own machine if you want to get a sense of what it's like to install the tools, so you'll have them when you leave. But if you have any issues with that or you can't get them installed, feel free to use the web version. So for the next three minutes, introduce yourself to your team. You don't have to have a team name. But it's optional. And then let's just have an install fest, really quick, for three minutes, and if anybody has issues, we can help them. And you can start going if you're ready. - -(breakout sessions) - - - - -Is anybody stuck at the moment, that I can help out with? Wow. Okay. - - -So some people have had an issue with getting the wrong version of Dat when they install. And I think... I'm not sure what's going on. It might be a weird NPM thing. But this highlighted yellow command will definitely get you the latest Dat. It should work without the @ sign, but if you don't get the 7.0, just run this. And you'll get the latest one. Thank you, thank you. - -(breakout sessions) - - - - -I swear I updated this yesterday! I don't know what happened. - - -Merge conflict. - - -Yeah, probably, actually. That's probably what happened. Live rebase. Okay. So if it says dat cat, that's wrong. It should be dat export. - - -Ohhhhh. - - -Thought I fixed that yesterday. Sorry. I just pushed a fix, so if you refresh in... Maybe now, maybe in, like, 30 seconds, it should fix it. But dat cat is my favorite command, but we renamed it to export. We're going to put dat cat back, because cats are awesome, but it's just not there right now. - - -Isn't there a song about that? - - -A song about... - - -Like, dat cat came back the very next day? - - -Oh my gosh. I think that's a slow clap. - -(slow clapping) - - -If you put that data in there, if you had data on cat droppings, dat scat data, dat cat... Dat cat dat scat... Let's not go there. I think I just did. - - -If you get an error on picture tubing, here's a fix right here. I just pushed that up. Picture tube didn't work. But if you split it into two commands, then it should work. - -(breakout sessions) - - -So I want to take a moment and show the actual forking and merging flow on the screen. We don't have it in the docs yet but I want to walk through—it's kind of complicated, because first you have to create a conflict. Which is like—it's hard to make non-contrived real world examples. Most examples are contrived. So I'm about to make a contrived example. So... I'll just say... Make a new empty folder. And if I clone... So first I'll clone the one from the server. And then I will make a second clone of it locally. So then I can have, like, an A and a B version, kind of. So imagine that this is happening between two people, and each person owns one of the folders. But it's all on one computer right now. So I can say—dat clone the testing folder into testing-2. And so that'll just make a copy of the first repo into the second one. So now I have two copies of the same thing. So I can go into testing, and I have a status, and it has the data in it. I can go into testing-2, I can do the dat status, that also has the same inits, so... I have the same version of the same thing. So now to create a conflict—and this happens in git all the time—is two people edit the same thing independently, and then when they go to push, then there's conflict. So I'll just do that really quick. I'll basically go into testing, and I'll export the first thing from the organisms dataset. So you can add a limit if you don't want to get everything. I'll just say get the first thing from the organisms dataset and it just gives me this piece of JSON, and I'll just save that as... Or, like, 1.JSON. And then I'll edit that file, so I could edit with Flatsheet. I'll just open up this file, and I'll change the organism's name from its nice Latin name into... What's a name that people like? I'll say Kanye. So now Kanye West is now in the... Somewhere in this genus. So I'll save that onto the disc. But now I have to import it back into dat. And I will import this one row back into Dat. And so you'll notice now when I do dat status in here, it has a different version, and instead of one version of the dataset, it has a new version of the dataset, and it has the same number of keys. There's... Well, that's wrong. It should be the same number of keys. But I just added a new version of the dataset, so I'll do actually the same thing in testing-2, but I'll do a different name. So I'll do the same exports. I'll call this 2.JSON, and then I'll name this one to... Let's name it Bob. And if I import that, back into this... Remember, this is the second copy of it. I'll import Bob in, so now we have a conflict, where one person updated the name to be Kanye, the other person updated it to be Bob, and so if I'm testing the original repository, I can pull. I can do a dat pull from testing-2. And the pull takes either an SSH URL, an HTTP URL, or a file URL, if you're local. And we have a bunch of other transports we want to do. One is bittorrents, the other is from S3. But for now, it's just HTTP or SSH or just local. So if I pull in the changes from testing2, it is... I think a dash. Then... Now it says that I have some forks. And I can view dat forks. So—right now it's these really long ugly things. But we're going to add pretty names. My fork is the F one. Theirs is the 4 one. So if I do a diff against the 4 one, which is the one that I pulled in, you can see a diff here that it gives you. So it says for the row that's called 1, there was an edit here. So they changed Kanye to Bob. And that's the conflict. So this is like our human readable diff format. And you can also get it out as JSON and feed it into a tool to do your merging. So this JSON we pretty print it. It's kind of hard to read. This basically just has the two versions. So you have the version... Don't write that. You have for this key—there's two versions of the thing. My version and their version. And so you can write a merge tool, kind of—our API for merging data is: You get given two versions, and then you either do an automated merge or you have a UI pop up to the user so the user picks the version they want. So use cases I'm really excited about are things like geographic data merging, you could have a little map pop up. Since we're built on the NPM ecosystem, you could have people install your virtual from NPM and have a really domain-specific merge tool. Or if it's a file where you're importing the Bob.png, you could even merge the file, so you could have dat read the binary files and put those into some sort of merge tool. So we're excited about people writing merge tools for non-text so we can stream large files into merging. So actually, let me just take this... If I wanted to merge it, it'll be a little bit cumbersome, because there's adaptive format JSON. I'm not going to do that right now. But to resolve the fork, you just write the version from here that wins, and then there won't be any forks anymore. So it's similar to git. You can have two versions of the same row, have dat show you diffs and then you can merge them, but the merging is all streaming and designed for data. And it's designed for custom merge utilities. So that's the forking and merging part. So Flatsheet is one example of a merge tool. We want to add in the future, like, a thing that Flatsheet can read your diffs for you and kind of show you the diffs nicely. And be able to have them be a visual diff tool for a spreadsheet. But... So yeah, that was the quick merge demo. And... Do we have 15 more minutes? Right? Is that the time? Okay, cool. So does anybody have questions at this point? Or need help? Yes? - - -How do you get started writing a merge tool for Dat? - - -So that's a good question. It was: How do you get started writing a merge tool? We're working on the beta release, which will have a bunch of docs for that. They're in the works. But it can be written in any language. It just has to take JSON in and do something and spit JSON out. We have a couple built-in merge tools. One is called right, one is called left, and one is called random. So you can look how we wrote those. They're built into the Dat (inaudible) tool. The random will pick one randomly. Right always does right, left always does left. I want to do some crazy ones too. I want to have one where—when you merge, it creates a Mechanical Turk thing, and whatever the Mechanical Turk people decide should be merged is what gets merged, or it posts to Twitter and whoever favorites the version they like more, that's the one that's merged, after a 24-hour period. Crazy stuff like that, just to be demos. Other questions from the crowd? - - -Can you talk about sort of the work flow that somebody might go through, to import their data into Dat and how they would update it and just maybe a use case or something? - - -Oh yeah. So kind of a work flow and use case for Dat. The main kinds of use cases that we're working with are data sets that—they don't have a nice change feed. And Dat is really designed to add a change feed to a data source, so that you can get diffs of the data. Mostly just because it's annoying to download the entire dataset every time a dataset changes. One of the use cases we're working on is the full Wikipedia history dataset, and it's like a terabyte of XML every month. So this month it's about 950 gigabytes, next month it'll be 955 gigabytes, the month after that, it'll be 960 gigabytes. To have to download that every month is really annoying and it takes a really long time, because they host it on one server and the server gets kind of pummeled. So one of the work flows that we have is somebody on the internet can write a thing that puts Wikipedia into Dat as metadata. You can clone the history down, and then you can figure out where to go to get the files separately if you want. So you can kind of use Dat to just track changes to data and you can also use it to literally store the data. But one of the cool things about it is that you can separate those if you want. And that's something that git doesn't let you do easily. You usually have to put your files into git and there's a thing called git lfs that they wrote recently that—you can put your files on S3 and Github will host it for you. But we want to write a bunch of modules for making databases talk to each other, or we want to have one that's like bittorrent, so anybody that clones data and has the bittorrent plugin installed, they can host the data for everyone else. So the use case for Wikipedia would be—if you go to download it, you should be able to download it from everybody else who has a copy, so you get really fast download speeds, but with Dat you also don't have to download the 950 gigabytes every time. You just get the difference. So we want to encourage people to write data changes streams on top of data sources. Sometimes that has to be really brute forced. With an he Excel file, every time the Excel file gets saved, you just have to read every row in a file and check if it's in Dat. But the cool thing is you only have to do that one time. Because when it's in Dat, Dat can figure out the efficient diff to transport that data. So datasets that update that are super annoying to download new versions of is our use case. You can get data efficiently but also download really fast. Because you're not downloading the entire dataset every time, it should be really fast. And something we're working on for scientists—I don't know if it's interesting in this context, but the reproducability angle. You can put the exact version of the data and other people can get the exact version and know they have the same version you did your experiments on. That's similar to what things like Docker are doing. So one of the use cases we want to do is—you can have your code and your data at the exact versions and somebody can download and run them and know that they're running the exact same thing as you, because in science, at least, it's super difficult to get somebody else's code to run. They'll publish the paper and they're on to the next grant and they don't respond to emails and never put their data online. So that's kind of what our main focus is, is that problem. But I think it's also a problem with Open Source in general and I think it can be a problem in any organization where somebody didn't document something enough. So if the tool can just lock the version down when you publish the thing and somebody else can run it, that's kind of another angle to it. We're going to have docs on writing changes too in the beta release. Examples of data change. It's like a side project to Dat. It's going to be like—if you have Wikipedia and you want to expose it as a change feed, we're going to have an example of how to do that. So you could wrap postgres or PostGIS in a change feed, or Google Drive, and once you have the same kinds of change feeds, you could imagine Dat pulling or pushing directly to or from any of them and doing diffs on any of them and using the appropriate back end for wherever the data lives, and moving things around. That's the philosophy—you're not going to be querying the data in that. It's like your data sherpa that moves it between all the things. - - -I have a question I'm trying to wrap my head around. Where is the data—like, who else is doing what you're doing? Is there any other way out there? Is it just that it's super expensive because you have to get a proprietary—what's the state of data auditing? - - -The question was what is the state of data auditing or versioning out there? There's not a ton of tools that are focused on data version control, from what I've seen in the research. There's a lot of tools for hosting data. Like FTP sites is very popular still in science. And there's APIs and put your stuff up on S3, but the problem with a lot of those is that they're not very archive oriented. They're very brittle. If you get a 404 and everything breaks—one of the philosophies we take is what we call content addressable data, where you don't just have a URL that if the file goes away, you can't find the file anymore. The URL in it actually has this long hash which represents what the file is. So then if it disappears from your university's server, you can at least take that identifier and ask other places on the internet—do you have this copy? Because whenever you have a version of a file, the version string is unique. So places like Internet Archive are really interested in this kind of thing, because they want to be able to host every version of every website. But it's also kind of— Internet Archive, if they go down, it would be really cool to ask other people—hey, do you have this version of the file I'm looking for? So it's not a centralized point of failure. So our project is pretty unique, because we're trying to focus specifically on dataset management. There are people that are trying to make git work with larger datasets, and the best one is the git lfs tool that I mentioned, and there's another one called git annex, and that's been around longer, but there are limitations tied to git which have limitations with realtime datasets or integration with different kinds of databases. So that's the closest thing. And the other thing we're interested in is peer-to-peer file sharing, but for legal data. Which is also a very small community. But it does exist. There's a lot of use cases for sharing data amongst peers that don't involve hiring (inaudible). And we hope to be one of them. Because it's really cool. If somebody has Wikipedia on their laptop in this room, why would you have to go to the conference Wi-Fi and download it? So we have a bunch of crazy stuff. We have plans to make—just moving data around smarter. And peer-to-peer is one of those things. But I would check out—if you want to critique Dat, I would try out the git lfs tool and see if that works. But right now the state of Dat is kind of like—we want to be able to not be encumbered by the limitations of git and really try it build something that feels really natural to work with datasets and that also is very Open Source friendly so people can write these change feed adapters or database adapters and file format support. Actually, the last session was about—can we use Github as a database? And it was a really cool talk. And there were a lot of ideas about using Google docs or Google spreadsheets as a database sort of thing or using Github as a database. So that's an area we're really interested in, is being able to move data around between different services and not be locked into just one thing. So hopefully that helps. - - -Yeah, very much so. - - -So any... Scathing feedback? Any reviews? Or ideas for us, for me and Seth, to take forward with our project? - - -Yeah. I have a question. So datasets are plain data, right? Is there a way to add metadata to the dataset? - - -So the question was: They have the datasets in Dat, but what about metadata for datasets? And we had in the alpha version a metadata file that would literally get written into the Dat folder, and you could kind of put your metadata in there. And we were trying to figure out the best way to do that. So we added this, like, datasets feature, and so you could create as many datasets as you want and have one dataset—the idea behind datasets is you have a repository, which is everything, and it's organized into datasets. So we were working on this one project, which was a bunch of astronomy data. And they have a bunch of pictures of stars and a bunch of measurements they did on the stars. So they wanted to have the ability to just download the pictures or just download the measurements or both, so they wanted to have two different datasets in the same repository. But we were thinking we could have a metadata dataset. Maybe that would be a use case. A dataset for the metadata, or maybe we can make that easier from a User Experience standpoint. But also in there we have a commit message like git has, where you do an import—anything you do that touches the data, you can add a message that gets stored. So that's a human readable message. And so there's also the potential to put metadata. If you have a tool that's generating the change you could put where the change came from in the version of the data. But I'd be interested later in what kind of metadata you have. Because we're interested in supporting that. In the back? - - -So one of the features of git is that you know who made changes and when and you can, like, call them up and blame them for making mistakes. Is that something that you guys have? It seems like one of the things that might be kind of interesting, especially with scientific data is—if you don't understand why the change was made, maybe having some kind of way of contacting the person that made the change. - - -So the question was about tying an identity to the change in the database. Or, like, when somebody makes a change, you want to know who did it. And scientists are also very interested in proving that the data came from a reputable source. So that they're making sure they're not getting hacked and getting fake data and that it was actually published by real people. So we don't have that in the beta, but the plan is—you can associate, like, essentially a key with your user. And then everything you do can be signed. Which basically means everything can be kind of—your signature is on the data that you put into the database, and that gets synced, so that people can verify this data that I got actually came from, you know, my key. Like, for instance... This is a cool feature that, like, Github does. Is... You can go to anybody's account, and you just add the .keys to the end of their user name and it shows you public keys. We had a couple demos—they're not in the beta, but we have demos where you can sync to people and they can only receive your synchronization over Dat if you're a user that they're using the key of. So it's kind of like encryption, sort of, but just signing. So we definitely want to figure out, like, the right way to do it. And there's lots of ways to do keys and signing and everything. But I think the very first thing we'll do is you'll just be able to type in your own name. Just like with git. You can put it in an email. But later on we're more interested in trust and auditing. All right, cool. We're right on time for the end. Feel free to continue to use this at home. The URL at the top is unique to you. The ID and URL at the top. And that will persist for at least a few days. So any of the files you have in your session you can continue working on, if you want to just remember that URL and open it up later. And you can also, like, on step five, it has you clone down a copy of your data down to your laptop, if you want to do it at home later. And keep an eye on our projects. We're both working on refining these tools and continuing to support the use cases, and both going to be doing kind of releases, like, formal releases with better docs and everything soon. But I just want to thank you so much for your time and being guinea pigs. I learned a lot about User Experience of our tools in this very brief session. So just... Thanks, everybody. - -(applause) \ No newline at end of file +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/datflatsheet/index.html +--- + +# Fork and Merge Some Data with Dat and Flatsheet + +### Session Facilitator(s): Max Ogden, Seth Vincent + +### Day & Time: Thursday, 12:30-1:30pm + +### Room: Ski-U-Mah + +The session will start in 15 minutes! + +The session will start in 15 minutes! + +So our format is going to be a little weird. But we're going to do, like, some quick introduction of the concepts. And that'll be the main speaking portion. + +And then we have a workshop people can do on their computer. And so there'll be kind of intermittent periods where we—when we think people are at a certain point, we'll do a reference demonstration. So it won't be a continuous block. And then we're hoping to have some discussion at the end. So for probably half an hour, there will be discussions. + +Hello? Okay, cool. Just testing. Carry on. Carry on. + +Just making sure you guys are well taken care of. Need anything? Everything good? All right. + +Can you have three more people check on us? + +I guarantee at least one more person will come in and ask. + +The session will start in ten minutes! + +The session will start in five minutes! + +So if you want to get started... Or actually... Talk in the mic. If you want to get started five minutes early, you can go to the URL, on the top there's two options, but to get started early—the requirement, if you want to run it on your own machine, which is one of the options, I think it's the more fun and ambitious option, and I encourage it—the only requirement is that you install the latest—you have to have the latest version of either node.js or a fork of it called io.js. And there's instructions in the guide, but I'll add the URL right now. I recommend going to https://iojs.org and then just downloading the installer for your operating system, and get that installed now. If you want to do it on your own machine. If you don't want to install anything on your machine, we have an option for that too, but if you're feeling ambitious, and if you succumb to peer pressure—I'm looking at all of you right now. You should install the latest version of io.js on your machine, and then you'll be ready to run everything. + +Is it the latest major of io? + +Whatever the download link gives you. I forget. It's like two point something. + +We need some music. + +I know. It's pretty quiet now. I love transcription. + +MIRABAI: Transcription loves you. + +(Remix of Believe playing) + +Okay. That was a remix of the Space Jam soundtrack with Cher's Believe. So let's get started! My name is Max. Thanks for coming, everybody! This is Seth. We came from the cold Northwest of the United States. It's cold and the rent is really high. And the infrastructure is terrible. And it's... Nobody should move there. So... I work on a project called Dat, and Seth works on a project called Flatsheet, and we're both funded Open Source projects, and our goal is to kind of build data tools. So we've been working on some data tools, so hopefully we have a room full of some data geeks to test out our data tools. And a little bit of background—I wanted to give the context—has anybody ever put a dataset into git before? Like a CSV or anything like that? That's a thing that a lot of people do, but there's a lot of use cases where it breaks down. Like, git doesn't talk to databases, git can't talk to your MySQL database, or export an XML file, so I've been writing a tool called Dat for the last year. We mostly work with scientific dataset publishers so they can publish their data and other scientists can install their data, and we want to support a lot of different file formats and support a lot of really cool automation work flows, but what we have out now is basically a basic version of our tools for downloading datasets and working with them and it's a version control tool for datasets. So the status of it is very alpha. We're about to publish the beta version very soon. So don't expect to take this back and deploy it into production right away. It's more like an early preview, and we're really, really excited to hear use cases and get feedback and know what we can continue working on, to make it relevant to you in the future. And like I mentioned, the whole thing is Open Source. And we have a team of three on Dat, three full-time Open Source developers on it, and we are on IRC every day, and we don't want it to just be a scientific dataset tool. It started out as a project working with open data, in cities. I think cities, science, and newsrooms are the three big frontiers for open data or at least collaborative data. So I want to make sure we can hit all three of those use cases really well. So with Flatsheet, I want to let Seth describe kind of the background of Flatsheet for a moment. + +Sassy Flatsheet background is... I kept using Google spreadsheets and getting the JSON from it and hating it. And the additional goal was just like—hey, I wonder how long it would take me to build a prototype that does something similar but a lot simpler and the API is better and easier to use. And that's what Flatsheet turned into. Sort of the end goal now is to provide something a little bit like Google Fusion Tables, only better. I'm not quite there yet. Getting closer and closer. It's simpler than Google Fusion Tables, currently. It'll let you do the basic things you need to do. Editing values. Adding and deleting rows. API. To get it the data. And the version that we have today is an even more stripped down version that's sort of representative of—it's like a sneak peek at the new version that's going to come out. So you'll see that it's really limited. But it'll let you do some basic functionality of, like, bringing in a CSV, making edits, and then getting a new CSV back. What am I missing? I don't know if I'm missing anything. + +That's probably good. + +That's probably good. + +So... Yeah. Both of our projects are kind of—our goal is to make tools that solve problems that data people have. So again, we're going to have some time at the end to talk about frustrations with existing tools or frustrations with our tools that you found out today. So the two ways to do the workshop—it's the same content. It's just either you're doing it on your computer or you're going to do it on a web environment that we have. And let me show the guide first. So there's this URL here. Which is for the transcription—maxogden.Github.io/get-dat/guide. And it's the same URL for the online version. You just take guide off of the end. So it's just maxogden/get-dat. And it's a tutorial—kind of a choose your own adventure style tutorial, that has 7 or 8 different sections, and each section is pretty lightweight. So it's not going to take the whole hour, hopefully. And it kind of just walks you through from the beginning, and the only requirement, if you're doing it on your computer, is to have the latest version of either node.js or io.js installed. That's the dependency that both of our projects require. And we—so I want to take a couple minutes to just get set up and make sure everybody can get to the content. And if you can't get it on your computer, at the same couple of minutes, your table is now your team. So there's a couple people solo tabling. Or actually... No, you're the only solo tabler. So if you have any issues, I'll be on your team. I'm also on everybody else's team. And Seth is on everybody's team. If your team gets stuck, raise your hands, and we will come help you. And so for the team, just take a minute and introduce yourselves, and then—well, actually, I want to show you the version that's on our servers. So this is a thing that we've built, a tool for running the workshop, and apologies if it's a little small. But... When you go to the URL, without guide on it, it will give you this, hopefully. And this is logged into a server—it's a real server—we're using a technology called Docker to give you a little sand box that you can play around with Dat in. Has anybody used the command line terminal before on Linux? See a show of hands? So it's one of those Linux terminals. You're logged in, and it comes in pre-installed with Dat and this tool called Data Editor, which is the version of Flatsheet that's going to be used today. It has everything installed already that you need to run the workshop. So when you run dat -v to get the version, you should see something like this. 7.0. And what's cool about this also is that down here at the bottom is a basic, basic text editor. So there's this welcome.txt file that comes with it, and I can go into there and I can type a bunch of gobbledygook, and then if I go back to the terminal and I cat that file, then I see my gobbledygook at the end. Hopefully. So this is dependent—yeah, here it is. So it kind of syncs the files that you're working with, with the files in this editor. So if you need to edit a file, you can do it really easily. So that's two parts of this. The third part is on the right. And this is just the guide from the /guide URL. In this pane on the right. Feel free to run the workshop in either one, using this web tool or on your own machine. When you get to step 5, it actually has you install it on your own machine, so you can replicate a dataset from here onto your own machine. So even if you do it on the web, you'll eventually have to install io.js to do the entire thing, or node.js. So I would recommend doing it on your own machine if you want to get a sense of what it's like to install the tools, so you'll have them when you leave. But if you have any issues with that or you can't get them installed, feel free to use the web version. So for the next three minutes, introduce yourself to your team. You don't have to have a team name. But it's optional. And then let's just have an install fest, really quick, for three minutes, and if anybody has issues, we can help them. And you can start going if you're ready. + +(breakout sessions) + +Is anybody stuck at the moment, that I can help out with? Wow. Okay. + +So some people have had an issue with getting the wrong version of Dat when they install. And I think... I'm not sure what's going on. It might be a weird NPM thing. But this highlighted yellow command will definitely get you the latest Dat. It should work without the @ sign, but if you don't get the 7.0, just run this. And you'll get the latest one. Thank you, thank you. + +(breakout sessions) + +I swear I updated this yesterday! I don't know what happened. + +Merge conflict. + +Yeah, probably, actually. That's probably what happened. Live rebase. Okay. So if it says dat cat, that's wrong. It should be dat export. + +Ohhhhh. + +Thought I fixed that yesterday. Sorry. I just pushed a fix, so if you refresh in... Maybe now, maybe in, like, 30 seconds, it should fix it. But dat cat is my favorite command, but we renamed it to export. We're going to put dat cat back, because cats are awesome, but it's just not there right now. + +Isn't there a song about that? + +A song about... + +Like, dat cat came back the very next day? + +Oh my gosh. I think that's a slow clap. + +(slow clapping) + +If you put that data in there, if you had data on cat droppings, dat scat data, dat cat... Dat cat dat scat... Let's not go there. I think I just did. + +If you get an error on picture tubing, here's a fix right here. I just pushed that up. Picture tube didn't work. But if you split it into two commands, then it should work. + +(breakout sessions) + +So I want to take a moment and show the actual forking and merging flow on the screen. We don't have it in the docs yet but I want to walk through—it's kind of complicated, because first you have to create a conflict. Which is like—it's hard to make non-contrived real world examples. Most examples are contrived. So I'm about to make a contrived example. So... I'll just say... Make a new empty folder. And if I clone... So first I'll clone the one from the server. And then I will make a second clone of it locally. So then I can have, like, an A and a B version, kind of. So imagine that this is happening between two people, and each person owns one of the folders. But it's all on one computer right now. So I can say—dat clone the testing folder into testing-2. And so that'll just make a copy of the first repo into the second one. So now I have two copies of the same thing. So I can go into testing, and I have a status, and it has the data in it. I can go into testing-2, I can do the dat status, that also has the same inits, so... I have the same version of the same thing. So now to create a conflict—and this happens in git all the time—is two people edit the same thing independently, and then when they go to push, then there's conflict. So I'll just do that really quick. I'll basically go into testing, and I'll export the first thing from the organisms dataset. So you can add a limit if you don't want to get everything. I'll just say get the first thing from the organisms dataset and it just gives me this piece of JSON, and I'll just save that as... Or, like, 1.JSON. And then I'll edit that file, so I could edit with Flatsheet. I'll just open up this file, and I'll change the organism's name from its nice Latin name into... What's a name that people like? I'll say Kanye. So now Kanye West is now in the... Somewhere in this genus. So I'll save that onto the disc. But now I have to import it back into dat. And I will import this one row back into Dat. And so you'll notice now when I do dat status in here, it has a different version, and instead of one version of the dataset, it has a new version of the dataset, and it has the same number of keys. There's... Well, that's wrong. It should be the same number of keys. But I just added a new version of the dataset, so I'll do actually the same thing in testing-2, but I'll do a different name. So I'll do the same exports. I'll call this 2.JSON, and then I'll name this one to... Let's name it Bob. And if I import that, back into this... Remember, this is the second copy of it. I'll import Bob in, so now we have a conflict, where one person updated the name to be Kanye, the other person updated it to be Bob, and so if I'm testing the original repository, I can pull. I can do a dat pull from testing-2. And the pull takes either an SSH URL, an HTTP URL, or a file URL, if you're local. And we have a bunch of other transports we want to do. One is bittorrents, the other is from S3. But for now, it's just HTTP or SSH or just local. So if I pull in the changes from testing2, it is... I think a dash. Then... Now it says that I have some forks. And I can view dat forks. So—right now it's these really long ugly things. But we're going to add pretty names. My fork is the F one. Theirs is the 4 one. So if I do a diff against the 4 one, which is the one that I pulled in, you can see a diff here that it gives you. So it says for the row that's called 1, there was an edit here. So they changed Kanye to Bob. And that's the conflict. So this is like our human readable diff format. And you can also get it out as JSON and feed it into a tool to do your merging. So this JSON we pretty print it. It's kind of hard to read. This basically just has the two versions. So you have the version... Don't write that. You have for this key—there's two versions of the thing. My version and their version. And so you can write a merge tool, kind of—our API for merging data is: You get given two versions, and then you either do an automated merge or you have a UI pop up to the user so the user picks the version they want. So use cases I'm really excited about are things like geographic data merging, you could have a little map pop up. Since we're built on the NPM ecosystem, you could have people install your virtual from NPM and have a really domain-specific merge tool. Or if it's a file where you're importing the Bob.png, you could even merge the file, so you could have dat read the binary files and put those into some sort of merge tool. So we're excited about people writing merge tools for non-text so we can stream large files into merging. So actually, let me just take this... If I wanted to merge it, it'll be a little bit cumbersome, because there's adaptive format JSON. I'm not going to do that right now. But to resolve the fork, you just write the version from here that wins, and then there won't be any forks anymore. So it's similar to git. You can have two versions of the same row, have dat show you diffs and then you can merge them, but the merging is all streaming and designed for data. And it's designed for custom merge utilities. So that's the forking and merging part. So Flatsheet is one example of a merge tool. We want to add in the future, like, a thing that Flatsheet can read your diffs for you and kind of show you the diffs nicely. And be able to have them be a visual diff tool for a spreadsheet. But... So yeah, that was the quick merge demo. And... Do we have 15 more minutes? Right? Is that the time? Okay, cool. So does anybody have questions at this point? Or need help? Yes? + +How do you get started writing a merge tool for Dat? + +So that's a good question. It was: How do you get started writing a merge tool? We're working on the beta release, which will have a bunch of docs for that. They're in the works. But it can be written in any language. It just has to take JSON in and do something and spit JSON out. We have a couple built-in merge tools. One is called right, one is called left, and one is called random. So you can look how we wrote those. They're built into the Dat (inaudible) tool. The random will pick one randomly. Right always does right, left always does left. I want to do some crazy ones too. I want to have one where—when you merge, it creates a Mechanical Turk thing, and whatever the Mechanical Turk people decide should be merged is what gets merged, or it posts to Twitter and whoever favorites the version they like more, that's the one that's merged, after a 24-hour period. Crazy stuff like that, just to be demos. Other questions from the crowd? + +Can you talk about sort of the work flow that somebody might go through, to import their data into Dat and how they would update it and just maybe a use case or something? + +Oh yeah. So kind of a work flow and use case for Dat. The main kinds of use cases that we're working with are data sets that—they don't have a nice change feed. And Dat is really designed to add a change feed to a data source, so that you can get diffs of the data. Mostly just because it's annoying to download the entire dataset every time a dataset changes. One of the use cases we're working on is the full Wikipedia history dataset, and it's like a terabyte of XML every month. So this month it's about 950 gigabytes, next month it'll be 955 gigabytes, the month after that, it'll be 960 gigabytes. To have to download that every month is really annoying and it takes a really long time, because they host it on one server and the server gets kind of pummeled. So one of the work flows that we have is somebody on the internet can write a thing that puts Wikipedia into Dat as metadata. You can clone the history down, and then you can figure out where to go to get the files separately if you want. So you can kind of use Dat to just track changes to data and you can also use it to literally store the data. But one of the cool things about it is that you can separate those if you want. And that's something that git doesn't let you do easily. You usually have to put your files into git and there's a thing called git lfs that they wrote recently that—you can put your files on S3 and Github will host it for you. But we want to write a bunch of modules for making databases talk to each other, or we want to have one that's like bittorrent, so anybody that clones data and has the bittorrent plugin installed, they can host the data for everyone else. So the use case for Wikipedia would be—if you go to download it, you should be able to download it from everybody else who has a copy, so you get really fast download speeds, but with Dat you also don't have to download the 950 gigabytes every time. You just get the difference. So we want to encourage people to write data changes streams on top of data sources. Sometimes that has to be really brute forced. With an he Excel file, every time the Excel file gets saved, you just have to read every row in a file and check if it's in Dat. But the cool thing is you only have to do that one time. Because when it's in Dat, Dat can figure out the efficient diff to transport that data. So datasets that update that are super annoying to download new versions of is our use case. You can get data efficiently but also download really fast. Because you're not downloading the entire dataset every time, it should be really fast. And something we're working on for scientists—I don't know if it's interesting in this context, but the reproducability angle. You can put the exact version of the data and other people can get the exact version and know they have the same version you did your experiments on. That's similar to what things like Docker are doing. So one of the use cases we want to do is—you can have your code and your data at the exact versions and somebody can download and run them and know that they're running the exact same thing as you, because in science, at least, it's super difficult to get somebody else's code to run. They'll publish the paper and they're on to the next grant and they don't respond to emails and never put their data online. So that's kind of what our main focus is, is that problem. But I think it's also a problem with Open Source in general and I think it can be a problem in any organization where somebody didn't document something enough. So if the tool can just lock the version down when you publish the thing and somebody else can run it, that's kind of another angle to it. We're going to have docs on writing changes too in the beta release. Examples of data change. It's like a side project to Dat. It's going to be like—if you have Wikipedia and you want to expose it as a change feed, we're going to have an example of how to do that. So you could wrap postgres or PostGIS in a change feed, or Google Drive, and once you have the same kinds of change feeds, you could imagine Dat pulling or pushing directly to or from any of them and doing diffs on any of them and using the appropriate back end for wherever the data lives, and moving things around. That's the philosophy—you're not going to be querying the data in that. It's like your data sherpa that moves it between all the things. + +I have a question I'm trying to wrap my head around. Where is the data—like, who else is doing what you're doing? Is there any other way out there? Is it just that it's super expensive because you have to get a proprietary—what's the state of data auditing? + +The question was what is the state of data auditing or versioning out there? There's not a ton of tools that are focused on data version control, from what I've seen in the research. There's a lot of tools for hosting data. Like FTP sites is very popular still in science. And there's APIs and put your stuff up on S3, but the problem with a lot of those is that they're not very archive oriented. They're very brittle. If you get a 404 and everything breaks—one of the philosophies we take is what we call content addressable data, where you don't just have a URL that if the file goes away, you can't find the file anymore. The URL in it actually has this long hash which represents what the file is. So then if it disappears from your university's server, you can at least take that identifier and ask other places on the internet—do you have this copy? Because whenever you have a version of a file, the version string is unique. So places like Internet Archive are really interested in this kind of thing, because they want to be able to host every version of every website. But it's also kind of— Internet Archive, if they go down, it would be really cool to ask other people—hey, do you have this version of the file I'm looking for? So it's not a centralized point of failure. So our project is pretty unique, because we're trying to focus specifically on dataset management. There are people that are trying to make git work with larger datasets, and the best one is the git lfs tool that I mentioned, and there's another one called git annex, and that's been around longer, but there are limitations tied to git which have limitations with realtime datasets or integration with different kinds of databases. So that's the closest thing. And the other thing we're interested in is peer-to-peer file sharing, but for legal data. Which is also a very small community. But it does exist. There's a lot of use cases for sharing data amongst peers that don't involve hiring (inaudible). And we hope to be one of them. Because it's really cool. If somebody has Wikipedia on their laptop in this room, why would you have to go to the conference Wi-Fi and download it? So we have a bunch of crazy stuff. We have plans to make—just moving data around smarter. And peer-to-peer is one of those things. But I would check out—if you want to critique Dat, I would try out the git lfs tool and see if that works. But right now the state of Dat is kind of like—we want to be able to not be encumbered by the limitations of git and really try it build something that feels really natural to work with datasets and that also is very Open Source friendly so people can write these change feed adapters or database adapters and file format support. Actually, the last session was about—can we use Github as a database? And it was a really cool talk. And there were a lot of ideas about using Google docs or Google spreadsheets as a database sort of thing or using Github as a database. So that's an area we're really interested in, is being able to move data around between different services and not be locked into just one thing. So hopefully that helps. + +Yeah, very much so. + +So any... Scathing feedback? Any reviews? Or ideas for us, for me and Seth, to take forward with our project? + +Yeah. I have a question. So datasets are plain data, right? Is there a way to add metadata to the dataset? + +So the question was: They have the datasets in Dat, but what about metadata for datasets? And we had in the alpha version a metadata file that would literally get written into the Dat folder, and you could kind of put your metadata in there. And we were trying to figure out the best way to do that. So we added this, like, datasets feature, and so you could create as many datasets as you want and have one dataset—the idea behind datasets is you have a repository, which is everything, and it's organized into datasets. So we were working on this one project, which was a bunch of astronomy data. And they have a bunch of pictures of stars and a bunch of measurements they did on the stars. So they wanted to have the ability to just download the pictures or just download the measurements or both, so they wanted to have two different datasets in the same repository. But we were thinking we could have a metadata dataset. Maybe that would be a use case. A dataset for the metadata, or maybe we can make that easier from a User Experience standpoint. But also in there we have a commit message like git has, where you do an import—anything you do that touches the data, you can add a message that gets stored. So that's a human readable message. And so there's also the potential to put metadata. If you have a tool that's generating the change you could put where the change came from in the version of the data. But I'd be interested later in what kind of metadata you have. Because we're interested in supporting that. In the back? + +So one of the features of git is that you know who made changes and when and you can, like, call them up and blame them for making mistakes. Is that something that you guys have? It seems like one of the things that might be kind of interesting, especially with scientific data is—if you don't understand why the change was made, maybe having some kind of way of contacting the person that made the change. + +So the question was about tying an identity to the change in the database. Or, like, when somebody makes a change, you want to know who did it. And scientists are also very interested in proving that the data came from a reputable source. So that they're making sure they're not getting hacked and getting fake data and that it was actually published by real people. So we don't have that in the beta, but the plan is—you can associate, like, essentially a key with your user. And then everything you do can be signed. Which basically means everything can be kind of—your signature is on the data that you put into the database, and that gets synced, so that people can verify this data that I got actually came from, you know, my key. Like, for instance... This is a cool feature that, like, Github does. Is... You can go to anybody's account, and you just add the .keys to the end of their user name and it shows you public keys. We had a couple demos—they're not in the beta, but we have demos where you can sync to people and they can only receive your synchronization over Dat if you're a user that they're using the key of. So it's kind of like encryption, sort of, but just signing. So we definitely want to figure out, like, the right way to do it. And there's lots of ways to do keys and signing and everything. But I think the very first thing we'll do is you'll just be able to type in your own name. Just like with git. You can put it in an email. But later on we're more interested in trust and auditing. All right, cool. We're right on time for the end. Feel free to continue to use this at home. The URL at the top is unique to you. The ID and URL at the top. And that will persist for at least a few days. So any of the files you have in your session you can continue working on, if you want to just remember that URL and open it up later. And you can also, like, on step five, it has you clone down a copy of your data down to your laptop, if you want to do it at home later. And keep an eye on our projects. We're both working on refining these tools and continuing to support the use cases, and both going to be doing kind of releases, like, formal releases with better docs and everything soon. But I just want to thank you so much for your time and being guinea pigs. I learned a lot about User Experience of our tools in this very brief session. So just... Thanks, everybody. + +(applause) diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015DataDrivenDecisions.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015DataDrivenDecisions.md index 9f650c8c..aa58f1a5 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015DataDrivenDecisions.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015DataDrivenDecisions.md @@ -1,359 +1,249 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/datadrivendecisions/index.html ---- - -# Data Driving Decision-making—What We Learned from Audiosear.ch - -### Session Facilitator(s): Anne Wootton, Peter Karman - -### Day & Time: Friday, 3-4pm - -### Room: Minnesota - - -Testing testing testing. - - -Okay. - - -How are we doing for time? It's after 3:00. We should start. Thanks for being patient while we solve our technical problems. - - -And maybe I'll leave it on this slide for now, because we're going to talk about the hypothesis for a second. But first we should introduce ourselves. I'm Anne. - - -And I'm Peter. - - -And we work together at Pop Up Archive. So I'll tell you first a little bit about what Pop Up Archive does and what led us to start this new project and series of experiments. Which is where our—the experience that we want to share with you about how we use data to drive our decisions and run various tests came from. Pop Up Archive—I started with my co-founder, Bailey, who unfortunately is not here, in 2012, through a night news challenge data grant. And we work with sound. Specifically spoken word. To make sound searchable. And what that means is we work with radio producers and stations, media companies, archives, universities, to index audio. Whether it's a single file that gets dragged and dropped onto our website or a vast quantity of, say, thousands of hours of Studs Turkel's broadcasts when he was on WNT for 40 years, every day of the week for an hour a day. And so journalists use Pop Up Archive to help them log their raw tape, and produce material more quickly. Whether it's a story or an audio piece, or some combination of both. What we do is work with a variety of software. So speech-to-text in the first place, to create machine transcriptions, and then some semantic analysis software to identify topics. Things like locations and people in audio. And so that can be useful for finished work, whether it's an archival collection or a radio story or a podcast that came out yesterday. To help it be searchable to audiences, indexable, by search engines, and so we've been at that for, you know, going on three years now. As our team grew last year, and the buzz around podcasts was sort of exploding, probably because of the podcast that shall not be named, Serial, we saw this opportunity—and you know, we can talk offline about this all you want, but I think podcasts as an industry are a thing that have been around for over a decade now and have been growing slowly and steadily all along, regardless of the journalistic buzz that may crop up around it or the echo chambers that we in particular have been privy to. So we wanted to take an opportunity to go out and where Pop Up Archive is very much a push model, and we have partners and customers who elect to have us index sound for them or provide a workspace for their reporters to edit transcripts and embed transcripts and that kind of thing. We wanted to go out and look at the—for starters, at least—the most popular, high performing podcasts, and use our software, use the sort of platform that we already had, to index all that material, and start to look at patterns in that data and see how basically creating a full text search engine and various other functionality or capabilities around that could be useful for podcasting as an industry, for podcasters as producers, for their listeners, as an audience. And I think even before we got to that point, we had a sort of an offsite meeting. There are five of us. Four of us work in Oakland, California. Peter is in Kansas. So we all got together at the end of last year, and spent a week sort of consolidating all of our ideas around what the mission of Pop Up Archive was, making sure we're all on the same page, doing some team building stuff, playing guitar, and as part of that, we had sort of started to project out end goals for Pop Up Archive, or what has since become Audiosear.ch, the new thing we're working on. Looking really far into the future, and making all kinds of assumptions, and bringing all sorts of pre-conceived notions and preferences and biases into it. So we sort of slowed ourselves down at that point and said—how could we come up with some very basic questions or hypotheses? And the simplest ways possible of testing those. And ultimately, having metrics or parameters for testing them that will enable us to be sort of objective about the way we go about this. And take ego out of the process, for one thing, but really be as sort of methodical and scientific about it as possible. So I'll let Peter talk a little bit more about hypothesis-driven decision making, data-driven decision making, and then we can show you sort of what the progression of our hypotheses and tests and data looked like, and then we're gonna turn it over to you guys to do some stuff too. - - -Yeah. So I want to preface talking about hypotheses by saying—even though the language is, like, from science, that this is not science. This is art and science kind of commingled and often blurred, and just like a lot of things that we do in software design, and so forth, there's a certain amount of science approach and methodology and sort of rigor that we want to have, but reality is often far more messy, and so we make sort of calls about things, and decisions that sometimes don't have data behind them, or have more intuitive data behind them, that sometimes we struggle to articulate. So hypothesis decision making for us was sort of a way of deciding on a common language to use, when we were talking about where we wanted to place our time and energy. And so these three statements on this slide—we believe—fill in the blank. This is like Mad Libs for decision making. We believe this capability will result in this outcome, and we will know we have succeeded when... Fill in the blank. And this was like a little game we decided we were going to play, just to see how it would go. What this allowed us to do was to sort of surface what our first principles or sort of basic assumptions were about things, because instead of coming with—I want to build a widget—we came with—I think if... I believe that if we had a widget, it would result in making a lot of money. And I would know that, because my bank account would get higher. Right? The process of playing that game allowed us to sort of zero in on what each of the five members of our team were sort of bringing to the table, in terms of what our own hopes and aspirations were for what we were going to do. And also allowed us to see that there were some commonalities around those. And to talk about them in a way that we could share in common. My own experience of it was that it felt very awkward at first. It sort of felt like we were playing dressup or something. In terms of talking this way. But pretty soon after we'd done it for, you know, that initial meeting and then in the weeks subsequent to that, it allowed us to—it became a shorthand for a lot of our process, and that actually saved us some time in the long run, I think, because we were able to frame things in a common way. - - -You could ask a question like—so what's the hypothesis here? Instead of, like, I'm not so sure that what you're saying makes sense, or, you know, raising issues with something that a person had brought up. In what felt like a way more subjective manner, inevitably, because we're all people, at the end of the day. So I don't know—you started talking about some of the assumptions. And these are the initial hypotheses. Assumptions and hypotheses that we came up with in December. And there's—I mean, like Peter said, it felt kind of awkward at first. There are also sort of two aspects to this for us. One is the framework of working within these hypotheses and tests to begin with, and to my mind, the other piece of it was figuring out which data to track, to actually evaluate the hypotheses successfully. So I'm going to run you through a sort of—the progression of metric spreadsheets that we've had over the months since then, which have sort of adapted to, we think, better reflect what we need them to, to assess these things and make decisions. So... I don't know. Peter, do you want to, like, start just sort of talking through—I can do this too, but I feel like they're going to hear from me a lot on the other metric spreadsheets. - - -Sure. One of the ones that just caught my eye, looking at this, that I remember quite clearly, was number five there, which says—Google includes an audio tab. That was shorthand for—when you go to Google, you can search the web. You can search images. You can search products. But there's no audio tab. And I think—I might have been the one that brought this one. I was like—that would be my goal. That Google would have an audio tab. That you could go and search all the internet's audio. So then when I... But in order to... That was my end goal. Then I had to sort of think about, like, how would I frame that as a hypothesis? I believe that... - - -And just to quickly interject, in coming up with these assumptions, you have to scope where the assumptions are too. Being like—I assume that a lot of corn grows in Iowa. It was like... Fundamentally... Coming out in part of our talks about mission and I think the way this could be applied to some of what you guys are doing—what the goal for a particular project or story or coverage is going to be. So for us, it was society is missing valuable information from recorded voices, and if we have solved this problem, here are some assumptions about the way the world will work, like Peter just said. Also just to clarify—in the column where you see the assumptions on the far left, they don't directly correlate to everything to the right of it. So the hypotheses are sort of separately listed out there. It's not like a one to one correlation. And then the tests definitely relate to the hypotheses. - - -Yeah. So what we did is we sort of sat down and wrote all these out. We wanted—we had some assumptions about things like... People would pay us some money if they could do X. And we wanted to unpack that a little bit more and get more granular with it. People actually—so we'd take a step back and say—people are missing the ability to do X. And whether they know it or not. And we think if we could supply X, that would end up profiting us. So we went through the process of doing these. And I'm not going to go into too much detail here, unless people are very interested in our particular hypotheses. - - -You can ask questions at any time. - - -Feel free to interrupt at any time. But at the end of this sort of initial period, we walked away with—I don't know how many. A dozen? - - -A dozen. And we ranked them, in terms of how hard they would be on a scale of one to five, and we went through—and everything that's highlighted in green are what we decided we really wanted to do. And I remember Peter having the idea that we would like to knock off all the easy ones because they were easy, and then we got into deeper discussion about the 3s and the 4s and the 5s, and you can see on the bottom we've left some of these out. Which is cool, to come back to this, because we've totally done all these things. So we have our hypotheses chosen, then we had to write tests for them. So it sort of moves us to the next side of this. - - -Right. And so... Writing tests—or maybe that's too technical a phrase, although it is kind of what we did in some ways—it's been impressed upon us as an industry, I think, for the last ten plus years or so that data is good. Right? We should collect lots of data. Whether it's Google Analytics, or whatever—your tool du jour. We want to be able to make data-driven decisions, because that's a good thing. There's a certain art, though. Because there's so much data that you could collect from a website, for example. How much time are people spending there, what do they click on when they're there, where do they enter, where do they leave—that you could spend a lot of time trying to drink from the fire hose. But it's sometimes helpful to sort of think about what are the data points that would help me answer my question? And so that for us... Led us down the path of saying—well, we could... We're going to collect as much data as we can, but we're only going to pay attention to a few key metrics. Because those are the things that we've sort of decided amongst ourselves are going to be the important ones for helping us to determine whether this hypothesis can be proven or not. And we had a variety of tools at our disposal to do that. One of the tools we used a lot early on—even before this process—was a product called Mixpanel, which allows you to register events that happen on your website. Like if somebody clicked on this, or somebody submitted that form or that kind of a thing. And what it also allowed you to do was to define work flows or pipelines... - - -Funnels. - - -Funnels through which you could say... Someone came to my site and clicked on something. What I was interested in next was—were they going to sign up and give me their email address, or were they going to abandon the site? And if they signed up and gave me their email address, were they then willing to also give me their credit card information? So you could sort of pre-define that as a funnel or pipeline that you were interested in. And Mixpanel then let us track the progression of those activities. That I think was really helpful for us, especially when we weren't exactly sure what data we wanted to pay attention to. Because we had some specific use cases that were tied to these hypotheses, that we could then make real in the tool, and then see. Did people in fact follow through on this progression of steps that we thought they would? At a certain point, we reached some limits around what we could do with Mixpanel. I think primarily because we were interested in collecting more data than could fit neatly into any given particular pipeline. And so we started experimenting with another product called Optimizely, which basically lets you do A/B testing on your site. And started to collect some data from that. What text should we put on the button? Well I think it should say foobar, and I think it should say I love Minneapolis. Well, what's the action? What do we want people to do? The only way to really know what it should say is to try both things, and see who clicks on it more. Right? So Optimizely was a really helpful way to be able to do that. Because it allowed us to pre-define a certain set of options and it would rotate through those and you could gather data about that. And then of course Google Analytics. We were using that already to sort of get basic usage on the site. What you're able to do now—I'm sure many of you do this—is that you can actually fire events from the server rather than on the client side with JavaScript, so we started pushing lots of data into Google Analytics that wasn't necessarily a result of somebody clicking on something, but it was background events or API calls that there was no JavaScript to execute, for example. But we wanted to funnel all that data into a single place so that we could start to use some of the nifty reporting tools that that offered us, and see all that activity in a single place. - - -So, I mean, this is our first month's worth of metrics, and it sort of illustrates the fire hose that Peter was talking about. We're getting data from all these different places. Someone has to make sense. This was just a dump of Mixpanel events, basically. And then we were forced pretty quickly, given the wide range of things we could track, to figure out which ones we needed to put the most energy into tracking. And I think one of the reasons that tools like Mixpanel and Optimizely had been valuable at some points but not as valuable for us as they could have been in other situations was that—they were really great at testing and fine tuning User Experience components of a website, or UI elements of a website. And that was interesting to us for certain hypotheses, but we were asking way broader and more overarching questions about parts of it. And in fact, being forced to phrase things in terms of hypotheses led us to some necessary conversations and gave us a helpful foundation for talking about things, like—we're running all these tests. A lot of them are really UI focused. Are we trying to build a destination site for podcasts? Is that actually a thing that we want to do? Is that... Is the assumption that there's a need for that something that we really want to follow through on and be devoting our energy to? Or... Which... To like... Spoiler alert, given Pop Up Archive's background and where most of our interests and, frankly, expertise lay... Do we want to focus more on something that's an API service, that is intended primarily for enterprises, that could be used as sort of a white label data source? And by developer communities, right? You'll see... So just to root this in some form of reality, Audiosear.ch today looks like this. It changes all the time. We've added all sorts of different stuff to it, as we've been testing out these hypotheses. And you know, short of the fact that we put API on the homepage, this is a work in progress, right? It's a place where we're sort of showcasing some of the capabilities that we've been able to develop, and then we use that in turn as a measurement for some of our tests as well. Like, is this generating buzz or interest? Are people contacting us, because they've seen what we've shown through this website? And it's not about how many unique visitors we have or how much the traffic is growing or how much monthly active users we have, but it's more about, in some cases, the more qualitative output that we're seeing from it, or results that we're seeing from it, and it's still fundamentally a place where we can learn things about user behavior too that we think are helpful to answer our hypotheses, but to then inform our decision about where we go with this project and how it can ultimately be used by the people we want it to be used by or who we see having a need for it. - - -So, for example, we had a hypothesis early on that... We think that if people are offered suggestions about what they should listen to, that that would increase the amount of time that they spend on our website. Rather than just sort of passively letting them discover us through organic search, we want to now proactively encourage them to continue to spend time on it. Well, part of the original—I mean, as Anne was just alluding to—what that led us to talk about was—do we really care if people spend a lot of time on our website? Is that important to us? Maybe it's not important to us, because we're a destination—we want to be a destination site. Maybe it's important to us because then we can go to potential customers and say—if you use us as a recommendation service, to help keep people on your site, that would be a good product to have. Right? We can help increase the amount of time that people spend on your website. Not necessarily on our website. So what we did was we put together a hypothesis that just simply said—we think showing related audio will increase time on site. Not necessarily because we're interested in keeping eyeballs on our site, but we can use that as evidence to say—you should buy our product. That'll help keep eyeballs on your site. And we put together some basic algorithms to identify—what is a piece of related audio? How can I suggest something that's similar? How can I determine whether A is similar to B? And we came up with just some basic tests around that, that we could run for ourselves, and then we put it out in the wild and kept track of what people clicked on. Did time on site go up or down? Did the presence or absence of related audio suggestions on a particular place in the page make a difference in anything? And we, I think, answered that—yes. Making suggestions about related things does help keep people interested in things. But then we started to be—so we answered that hypothesis in the affirmative. Then we want one step further. We said—let's create a second one out of that. We think that if we put... If we change our algorithm for how we determine what's similar, that will increase the chances that someone will click on something. And so now we can—now we're in the process of testing that out. If we tweak the knob this way, people will spend more time. If we tweak the knob that way, people will spend more time. And use the tools we've already got established to help measure that. - - -To get high level for one more quick moment, you may notice—I've had you on our February metrics page and our March metrics page and it's this big old data dump and you see all the tabs below. Here are the tags that people are clicking on our website, one by one. Here are the different things getting played on the site, the different categories people tend to click on. Go to Google Analytics for that information. Here are... I think this is, like, where we were still waiting for some of the Mixpanel data to get seeded, and in March, we're very much in a similar place. Here are the search terms that are dragging people to the site. All this to say—this was our experience of the firehose. And our metrics checkins would be really lengthy and it was hard to know what to latch onto in all of that. So over time—first of all, fundamentally, we started couching all of our metrics checkins in the hypotheses themselves. So we were like—created this separate tab, we have some of the hypotheses that Peter has also mentioned. Like related audio improves engagement on the site. Here's the test for that. Here's the way that we're going to track it. And then increasingly, we've built out—like, who's responsible when we assess it and what we do with that. Putting the hypotheses, like, at the top of each page, and this really—it's been a work in progress, right? So you slowly start to see them appear. Okay. One hypothesis. Does organic search traffic increase when you have transcripts for audio on the website? And the site is relatively new. That's going to take some time. Doing that helped the sort of executive summary of our metrics checkins, which we do weekly—get a lot of shorter. And then all this data is still here. And people who are curious about something can go poke around with it if they want. It may actually end up being valuable to us down the road, but we're really focused on three or four questions that are valuable to us, and their priority may change over time. One challenge we also faced was—what's a good threshold for action? If we have a hypothesis that people want to share segments from within audio, and I think I can probably find this from, like, May's... All right. - -I'll touch on Optimizely one more time in a second, but if we look at this hypothesis like—people want to share transcript lines. This is specifically about sharing transcript lines, but we found you've got to start somewhere. Rather than sort of—people want to share segments from within audio. But anyway, this—track percent of sessions with snippet—any non-zero tweet results. So if two people do the thing, what are you supposed to do with that? It's non-zero. But then what? And I think what we've learned in our learning is that—by starting somewhere with a hypothesis like this, and getting some sort of result, it forces you to then move on from that hypothesis. And in this particular case, for example, we were able to sort of reassess it, and the hypothesis matured and sort of blossomed into a few others, which were not just like beating a dead horse, like we were able to do it—maybe Twitter isn't the best way to do this, and maybe transcript lines aren't the thing people want to share. So we got two more hypothesis lines to test as a result of this one. And if we don't see a significant change from baseline that we've established, we know to junk it and move on. It's also tough with tools like Optimizely and these more sort of fundamental questions about behaviors that are developing or nonexistent to test everything at once. Because you've got this matrix of possibilities, and the more you add, the more the permutations just sort of grow exponentially. So we really just try to break it down to one thing and do it as quickly and as efficiently as we can so we can take what we learned from that and apply it back into it. - -We could be A/B testing this too. Share this line? Share this segment? I don't know. But fundamentally, there's a bigger question that we're asking there. And so then I think you'll see—by the time we get over to this month, Emily is our colleague who works on this the most. And so she's come up with ways of categorizing our hypotheses, which can also be helpful, and then when we look at—I think probably behaviors is best. She's just like—okay, related audio improves engagement on the site. People want to share transcript lines. And she'll say—this week is the deadline for this hypothesis. So, like, let's go over it right now. And then we can look and see—you know, here are... In orange, related audio clicks, as compared to tweets, as a percentage of traffic on the site. And back to the firehose question—are you looking at total visits, unique visits, non-bounce visits, which—we usually err towards the latter, because those engage the most meaningful visitors to the site—are you looking at this stuff as a percentage of total behavior, are you looking at it as raw numbers, which—for organic search, for example, the raw numbers may be steadily growing, marching along, but then we write a blog post that's popular, and so as a percentage of our traffic it goes down a lot because there's been a ton of referrals that week. So these are questions we all had to answer as we went along. - - -And none of us are statisticians. Sometimes we kind of shrug and go—I don't know. What's the more meaningful thing here? So to echo back to what I said in the beginning about art versus science, there's a certain interpretative art that has to go into this data. That says—does it feel like I should do something with this? Does it feel like this is important or not? - - -A quick example of that and the way we've started augmenting the metrics themselves, because there's so much information here, so people—we can look at this and quickly grab the takeaways—you'll notice in blue Emily's made notes next to this chart, of all the behaviors of this site. These are all the Mixpanel events that we're tracking. The taste maker grid is something that we had just deployed, it had just been released, so Peter—feel free to disagree with me on this if you want, but to look at the taste maker grid and see it come in—none of us has huge numbers, but we defined our statistical significance to be like—as long as it's in the hundreds, we're willing to pull certain conclusions from it—the fact that it sort of came in at this place, where we have other behaviors that have been on the site for weeks or months, that aren't seeing the same type of interaction, like, that's the type of thing where you're like—huh, that's interesting. That's significant. And boy, the taste maker stuff you can only get to if you click an arrow to expand it and then scroll down past the fold of the homepage. How does that affect this? Maybe we should A/B test the homepage now. We've had a search bar up there forever. So that's how it's like—it's definitely more of an art than a science, because we're sort of feeling our way through it, but using this data to ground ourselves as much as we can. - - -So yeah. - - -This is a quick question. Or maybe two questions. The first question—is sounds like you do a lot of passive data collection. And maybe you were about to just say this, but... Do you ever just ask people what they think and what they do on the site? - - -All the time, yeah. All the time. - - -But, like, in a uniform, analyzable way? - - -Putting surveys out and that kind of thing? We have not done any official surveys. - - -We have, actually. - - -When we started, you mean? When we started? Yeah. - - -Well, they were in March. - - -For the Audiosear.ch tool? - - -So we've put surveys out that aren't necessarily explicitly directed at behaviors on the Audiosear.ch site, for the reason I kind of said earlier, which is—we're not trying to perfect it as a destination site per se, but we're more interested in the behaviors underlying it. We had a social sharing survey. How do you discover new podcasts? And how do you discuss podcasts with other people, for example. And so from there, we're able—the top three responses were—word of mouth, other podcasts, and Twitter. Which is, I think, partly where some of our bias towards Twitter has come in. A lot of the taste maker information and the sharing stuff is a little Twitter-focused. But we're also revisiting that, as we question what shape sharing behavior actually works for most people. The other survey we did was around listening. How do you listen to podcasts? Where do you get them? What apps do you use? That kind of thing. - - -So does that, like, I don't know... It sounds like you did it once and maybe... Are you planning on doing it again in light of all this other passive data collection? I mean, would you tend to value an actual person's response more than, like, a passive behavioral inference? Or would you... - - -That's a great question. I'm interested in what Anne's going to answer. And I'm going to start. - - -Yeah, please, please. - - -My wife is a university researcher. So we have this—you can imagine, like, the dinner topic conversation around this kind of stuff. I actually trust, personally, the passive stuff more. And that's because I pay attention to cowpads. And I think people, when they fill out surveys, can be unconscious in how they answer sometimes. They can lie. They can give aspirational answers, rather than real answers. I'm actually interested in what you actually click on, not what you think you might like to click on. But that's my bias. And my wife actually disagrees with me. So this is what makes it fun to be married to her. So how would you answer that question? - - -It also seems like it's... You keep mentioning—it's an art. There's an art to writing surveys. - - -Yes, there is. - - -There definitely is. And my answer is: It's both. So I don't share quite the bias that Peter does against survey data. But the way that the survey data has been most valuable to me is that it will give us a sense for general trends that we might not be able to pick up on without building out a lot of tests on the website. Like, for example, everybody said they look for podcasts on Twitter. Nobody said Facebook. I have no idea why, and I wouldn't have guessed that, necessarily. So those kinds of general preferences, I guess, I find myself internalizing as I'm coming up with these. And then on an even more qualitative level, depending on who we're talking to and what they're saying, if there's a big podcasting network or audio distributor saying—I saw that latest beta testing email and the stuff you're doing is really interesting. We should talk about it. Okay. That's significant. That's one person, but speaking on behalf of arguably a larger organization that could do meaningful work with us. So that type of qualitative feedback is helpful. And some of our hypotheses get evaluated that way. Okay, this related audio hypothesis has been validated in some ways because people are noticing, and people who could really take it to the next step with us are talking about it. - - -And it also seems like if you had a hypothesis, like this taste maker grid thing—people want to find audio picked by people. You could ask—are you trying to find audio picked by people? And if people say... Yes... Then your hypothesis might be confirmed. It might not be. - - -Yeah. Yeah. - - -I mean, I don't know how that would work functionally on the site. - - -No, but those are... Yeah, no. I think they're good questions. - - -Just a one question... Yes/no kind of thing. - - -I think it's worth asking the question. - - -And can circumvent a lot of—because a lot of these—like Optimizely lets you test things without building them out. We have dummy things on the site, that say feature coming soon, just to see what people will click on. And we'll talk about this really quickly, because we want you guys to do stuff for a while—is that it will tell you when your data has reached its statistical significance. So that's really helpful. Because we're like—I don't know. Five people clicked on it. What is that supposed to mean? And sometimes they'll say—okay, you're trying to figure out if people are more interested, to get deeper into the audio, if they'll click on transcript or full player or search. Even with just dozens of responses to this prompt, we have statistically significant results, and as a matter of fact, transcript is the winner. On the other hand, looking at engagement, as measured by that, they're like—good luck. You need another 55,000 visitors before you know if this is statistically significant. So I found that to be super helpful. But it's a great point. To be able to ask people—to supplement this—would you rather get audio picked by taste makers in the industry that you care about or your friends? Those would be things that might be hard to build... Or could be hard to build. There are ways we could build it in a simple test. Yeah. - - -I'm curious what your mechanism is for deciding if the hypothesis was fault or if the test wasn't exactly the right test to be using to confirm or deny. Are you looking at the wrong stats, or were you wrong about the... And sort of how you guys in your conversations when you check back in... How do you figure that out, and how does it change with time? - - -So this happened yesterday. For us. In our meeting that we had over there. Calling to our folks— - - -Underneath the airplane. - - -When we called our folks in Oakland. We were talking specifically about... Oh, the sharing of transcripts. - - -I showed you guys this one. - - -We heard qualitatively in the conversation and in the survey that Anne mentioned earlier—we heard qualitatively that people really wanted the ability to share their experience with audio. And we... When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail kind of thing. So we had a hammer called full text search. And we thought—what if we hit the problem of sharing with that hammer? What if people... And in many ways, that allowed us to take the problem of audio out of the equation. Because we turned it into a text problem, not an audio problem. So we made the ability to click on a button next to a line of text, as you were listening to audio or reading it on the page—you could click on the line and tweet it. Tweet the line, tweet a link to the page. Right? We thought—oh, this is a great way to share things, we think. Right? It got... Not a lot of usage. So then we started to ask ourselves—this is the conversation we had yesterday. - - -Yeah, I'm just going to show you. So we have—you know, 299 bounced sessions, here are the various things people are doing, they're searching within the transcript, clicking on our link for the API, and then tweet is all the way down here. - - -So it's 7 out of however many hundred it was. That's not many. Was it worth all the time we put into developing it? Was there a return on investment there? So I think, to summarize the conversation, which was your question... I think we all agreed... Yeah, that's not a very big number. And then we asked ourselves... Somebody said... Well, is it that we just did it the wrong way? Could we have solved the problem of sharing in some other way? Could we improve upon what we did and make that experiment better? Reduce the number of clicks? Or whatever? Or could we even approach it at a 90-degree shift, and maybe it's really more about audio. Maybe people want to be able to—when they hear something and they're listening to it, they want to be able to talk back to it. Share that with my friend. You know? Siri or whoever. That would be a totally different hammer to approach—which then makes it look like a different nail too, right? But that, I think, is what the process would look like. Were we to keep iterating on that. Does that help? - - -Yeah. - - -So we have a little thing we want people to help us with. If you get into a group, we want to practice making hypotheses. And you can... Please. You can pick any problem you want. If you can't think of one, think of something you might want to improve about SRCCON. All right? So we'll do this for, like, say five, six minutes. And then gather back and share them with each other. So just play the game with us. - - -Yeah, and you really don't have to be serious. One hypothesis we found ourselves coming up with yesterday was like—ooh yeah, we could use Optimizely to test this thing. And Peter was like... Do we really need to? And maybe the hypothesis was—Optimizely is a helpful tool. We kind of already know that. Optimizely continues to be a helpful tool. - - -And it's a fun tool. - - -So do whatever you want. - - -Talk amongst yourselves. - -(breakout sessions) - - -All right. We gave you more time because you were having so much fun talking. Let's go around the room and share hypotheses. - - -You're starting with me? - - -Tony, you've been elected by a table of your peers. - - -By your maniacal peer of one. - - -So we took your SRCCON suggestion. We believe that the increased availability of a selection of high quality teas in the break room will result in fewer SRCCON attendees leaving the conference to go to Starbucks or some other place. - - -I like this. Yes. - - -To obtain tea. We will know we have succeeded when more SRCCON attendees are staying put on campus with their tea. - - -And how would you measure it? - - -We would measure the number of people observed... - - -Plant a person in each room. - - -You basically have to do that. Measure the number of people returning with a big tea thing. - - -Excellent. Here's another suggestion for how you could evaluate it. Go around the trash cans at the end of the day and count the number of Starbucks cups. - - -I already do that. - -(laughter) - - -We've got it in SPSS. We're doing multi-linear projections. - - -I like it. - - -We can't afford SPSS. - - -We're ruling out multi-co-linearity. - - -You should always count all the things. Yes. Figure that out. How about you guys? What did you come up with? - - -You want to talk? - - -Go ahead. - - -We take this challenge of improve SRCCON. So we believe SRCCON can double its size and still be intimate. - - -Okay. - - -It will result in more knowledge sharing and more (inaudible). And we will know it has succeeded when it takes two minutes to sell out. - - -Two minutes instead of 46 seconds to sell out. - - -The number of smaller newsrooms increase. - - -In terms of representation? - - -Yeah. - - -The increase of the number of international participants. I'm alone. - - -Aww. - - -There are those two dudes from Argentina. - - -Yeah. I mean... [making a soccer joke] We hate them over in Brazil. We hate them. We have a wider variety of sessions going on simultaneously. So that they don't overcrowd. Right? That's it. - - -That's great. That was lovely. All right. - - -One question I would ask—I know we're going to go a tiny bit over, but... How do you evaluate the quality of the experience of people? That seems like one thing that might be hard. It stays intimate. How do you gauge that intimacy or test that intimacy? - - -Did you talk about that at all? - - -Not really, no. - - -This is the common thing that we will do in our team, is someone will say—da-da-da. And we'll say—yeah, but how would you measure that? - - -Instead of saying—Peter, why aren't you thinking about the fact that we'll have no way of knowing whether or not it's still intimate. Well, to properly evaluate that hypothesis... Everybody is kind of happy and it feels like playing dressup. What? - - -All right. This table. - - -Sure. Okay. We actually did something different. We actually looked at a real life project that I happened to have done for work. And in, like, early June, and we've actually gotten metrics back on it. And so we started talking about things that we possibly could have done differently or better to have gotten a different outcome. So the project I was talking about—that we were talking about—was—one is like a visual storytelling snowfall-ish representation of a 200-page research report. I work for Pew Research, so we make a lot of those. Versus a single interactive, which sort of took a chunk of information from the snowfall-ish thing and was a single thing that you could interact with. So some of the things that we came up with were the fact that the single interactive was a little bit more, like, bite-sized, and easily consumable. And something that reporters and other people who wanted to pick this particular story up could easily refer to, we also talked about embedability, as far as the single interactive, versus some of the interactive components that were part of the snowfall thing. And then as far as exposure, we talked about how the single interactive got picked up by Vox, which probably vastly contributed to more clicks, more page impressions, more everything. It got about 50% more traffic than the snowfall thing. But the snowfall thing, in contrast, got picked up by the AP, and was written about by 200 different news outlets. So we talked about the fact that the mediums were different. So wire service versus an online presence. - - -Interesting. I love the real world stuff. That's great. - - -All right. We're out of time. So... I want to hear, though, from the last table here. - - -Ours is not dissimilar from the first one. - - -Counting cups? - - -Okay. Well, we had also said basically that there were two things—the easier to measure thing and the harder to measure thing. One of which was more interesting. The harder to measure thing was... Does believing that having coffee and lunch will facilitate better conversations by making sure that everybody stays around the conference... And that's harder to measure, because that's sort of an all-day sort of thing. But we figured there would be ways to track it, like what's the head count in and out of the doors, for example. And the easier to measure thing is whether lunch onsite specifically facilitates better contact and conversation between participants, and that's one of those things that you can just stand out there and do a head count. - - -And also watch people that seem to be having conversations as opposed to sitting there on their laptop or something. - - -And counting the number of people who are eating alone or not talking. Yeah, yeah, interesting. - - -And start by counting the number of lunches that got eaten versus the number of people who were here today. - - -And since this is a restricted domain, you can count the number of people compared to the number of attendees. - - -That's great. So we're out of time. I will leave you just with one thing, unless there's anything you want to say. The one topic of conversation I really wanted to have, that we ran out of time for, which probably deserves its whole other thing, is cultural. Which is: What's attractive to you about this idea? What's unattractive to you about this idea? And what would prevent you from trying to implement this kind of a thing in your own organization? So I'll just leave you with those questions, and if you come up with an answer, tweet it at me. Thanks very much. - - -Yeah. Thanks. - -(applause) \ No newline at end of file +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/datadrivendecisions/index.html +--- + +# Data Driving Decision-making—What We Learned from Audiosear.ch + +### Session Facilitator(s): Anne Wootton, Peter Karman + +### Day & Time: Friday, 3-4pm + +### Room: Minnesota + +Testing testing testing. + +Okay. + +How are we doing for time? It's after 3:00. We should start. Thanks for being patient while we solve our technical problems. + +And maybe I'll leave it on this slide for now, because we're going to talk about the hypothesis for a second. But first we should introduce ourselves. I'm Anne. + +And I'm Peter. + +And we work together at Pop Up Archive. So I'll tell you first a little bit about what Pop Up Archive does and what led us to start this new project and series of experiments. Which is where our—the experience that we want to share with you about how we use data to drive our decisions and run various tests came from. Pop Up Archive—I started with my co-founder, Bailey, who unfortunately is not here, in 2012, through a night news challenge data grant. And we work with sound. Specifically spoken word. To make sound searchable. And what that means is we work with radio producers and stations, media companies, archives, universities, to index audio. Whether it's a single file that gets dragged and dropped onto our website or a vast quantity of, say, thousands of hours of Studs Turkel's broadcasts when he was on WNT for 40 years, every day of the week for an hour a day. And so journalists use Pop Up Archive to help them log their raw tape, and produce material more quickly. Whether it's a story or an audio piece, or some combination of both. What we do is work with a variety of software. So speech-to-text in the first place, to create machine transcriptions, and then some semantic analysis software to identify topics. Things like locations and people in audio. And so that can be useful for finished work, whether it's an archival collection or a radio story or a podcast that came out yesterday. To help it be searchable to audiences, indexable, by search engines, and so we've been at that for, you know, going on three years now. As our team grew last year, and the buzz around podcasts was sort of exploding, probably because of the podcast that shall not be named, Serial, we saw this opportunity—and you know, we can talk offline about this all you want, but I think podcasts as an industry are a thing that have been around for over a decade now and have been growing slowly and steadily all along, regardless of the journalistic buzz that may crop up around it or the echo chambers that we in particular have been privy to. So we wanted to take an opportunity to go out and where Pop Up Archive is very much a push model, and we have partners and customers who elect to have us index sound for them or provide a workspace for their reporters to edit transcripts and embed transcripts and that kind of thing. We wanted to go out and look at the—for starters, at least—the most popular, high performing podcasts, and use our software, use the sort of platform that we already had, to index all that material, and start to look at patterns in that data and see how basically creating a full text search engine and various other functionality or capabilities around that could be useful for podcasting as an industry, for podcasters as producers, for their listeners, as an audience. And I think even before we got to that point, we had a sort of an offsite meeting. There are five of us. Four of us work in Oakland, California. Peter is in Kansas. So we all got together at the end of last year, and spent a week sort of consolidating all of our ideas around what the mission of Pop Up Archive was, making sure we're all on the same page, doing some team building stuff, playing guitar, and as part of that, we had sort of started to project out end goals for Pop Up Archive, or what has since become Audiosear.ch, the new thing we're working on. Looking really far into the future, and making all kinds of assumptions, and bringing all sorts of pre-conceived notions and preferences and biases into it. So we sort of slowed ourselves down at that point and said—how could we come up with some very basic questions or hypotheses? And the simplest ways possible of testing those. And ultimately, having metrics or parameters for testing them that will enable us to be sort of objective about the way we go about this. And take ego out of the process, for one thing, but really be as sort of methodical and scientific about it as possible. So I'll let Peter talk a little bit more about hypothesis-driven decision making, data-driven decision making, and then we can show you sort of what the progression of our hypotheses and tests and data looked like, and then we're gonna turn it over to you guys to do some stuff too. + +Yeah. So I want to preface talking about hypotheses by saying—even though the language is, like, from science, that this is not science. This is art and science kind of commingled and often blurred, and just like a lot of things that we do in software design, and so forth, there's a certain amount of science approach and methodology and sort of rigor that we want to have, but reality is often far more messy, and so we make sort of calls about things, and decisions that sometimes don't have data behind them, or have more intuitive data behind them, that sometimes we struggle to articulate. So hypothesis decision making for us was sort of a way of deciding on a common language to use, when we were talking about where we wanted to place our time and energy. And so these three statements on this slide—we believe—fill in the blank. This is like Mad Libs for decision making. We believe this capability will result in this outcome, and we will know we have succeeded when... Fill in the blank. And this was like a little game we decided we were going to play, just to see how it would go. What this allowed us to do was to sort of surface what our first principles or sort of basic assumptions were about things, because instead of coming with—I want to build a widget—we came with—I think if... I believe that if we had a widget, it would result in making a lot of money. And I would know that, because my bank account would get higher. Right? The process of playing that game allowed us to sort of zero in on what each of the five members of our team were sort of bringing to the table, in terms of what our own hopes and aspirations were for what we were going to do. And also allowed us to see that there were some commonalities around those. And to talk about them in a way that we could share in common. My own experience of it was that it felt very awkward at first. It sort of felt like we were playing dressup or something. In terms of talking this way. But pretty soon after we'd done it for, you know, that initial meeting and then in the weeks subsequent to that, it allowed us to—it became a shorthand for a lot of our process, and that actually saved us some time in the long run, I think, because we were able to frame things in a common way. + +You could ask a question like—so what's the hypothesis here? Instead of, like, I'm not so sure that what you're saying makes sense, or, you know, raising issues with something that a person had brought up. In what felt like a way more subjective manner, inevitably, because we're all people, at the end of the day. So I don't know—you started talking about some of the assumptions. And these are the initial hypotheses. Assumptions and hypotheses that we came up with in December. And there's—I mean, like Peter said, it felt kind of awkward at first. There are also sort of two aspects to this for us. One is the framework of working within these hypotheses and tests to begin with, and to my mind, the other piece of it was figuring out which data to track, to actually evaluate the hypotheses successfully. So I'm going to run you through a sort of—the progression of metric spreadsheets that we've had over the months since then, which have sort of adapted to, we think, better reflect what we need them to, to assess these things and make decisions. So... I don't know. Peter, do you want to, like, start just sort of talking through—I can do this too, but I feel like they're going to hear from me a lot on the other metric spreadsheets. + +Sure. One of the ones that just caught my eye, looking at this, that I remember quite clearly, was number five there, which says—Google includes an audio tab. That was shorthand for—when you go to Google, you can search the web. You can search images. You can search products. But there's no audio tab. And I think—I might have been the one that brought this one. I was like—that would be my goal. That Google would have an audio tab. That you could go and search all the internet's audio. So then when I... But in order to... That was my end goal. Then I had to sort of think about, like, how would I frame that as a hypothesis? I believe that... + +And just to quickly interject, in coming up with these assumptions, you have to scope where the assumptions are too. Being like—I assume that a lot of corn grows in Iowa. It was like... Fundamentally... Coming out in part of our talks about mission and I think the way this could be applied to some of what you guys are doing—what the goal for a particular project or story or coverage is going to be. So for us, it was society is missing valuable information from recorded voices, and if we have solved this problem, here are some assumptions about the way the world will work, like Peter just said. Also just to clarify—in the column where you see the assumptions on the far left, they don't directly correlate to everything to the right of it. So the hypotheses are sort of separately listed out there. It's not like a one to one correlation. And then the tests definitely relate to the hypotheses. + +Yeah. So what we did is we sort of sat down and wrote all these out. We wanted—we had some assumptions about things like... People would pay us some money if they could do X. And we wanted to unpack that a little bit more and get more granular with it. People actually—so we'd take a step back and say—people are missing the ability to do X. And whether they know it or not. And we think if we could supply X, that would end up profiting us. So we went through the process of doing these. And I'm not going to go into too much detail here, unless people are very interested in our particular hypotheses. + +You can ask questions at any time. + +Feel free to interrupt at any time. But at the end of this sort of initial period, we walked away with—I don't know how many. A dozen? + +A dozen. And we ranked them, in terms of how hard they would be on a scale of one to five, and we went through—and everything that's highlighted in green are what we decided we really wanted to do. And I remember Peter having the idea that we would like to knock off all the easy ones because they were easy, and then we got into deeper discussion about the 3s and the 4s and the 5s, and you can see on the bottom we've left some of these out. Which is cool, to come back to this, because we've totally done all these things. So we have our hypotheses chosen, then we had to write tests for them. So it sort of moves us to the next side of this. + +Right. And so... Writing tests—or maybe that's too technical a phrase, although it is kind of what we did in some ways—it's been impressed upon us as an industry, I think, for the last ten plus years or so that data is good. Right? We should collect lots of data. Whether it's Google Analytics, or whatever—your tool du jour. We want to be able to make data-driven decisions, because that's a good thing. There's a certain art, though. Because there's so much data that you could collect from a website, for example. How much time are people spending there, what do they click on when they're there, where do they enter, where do they leave—that you could spend a lot of time trying to drink from the fire hose. But it's sometimes helpful to sort of think about what are the data points that would help me answer my question? And so that for us... Led us down the path of saying—well, we could... We're going to collect as much data as we can, but we're only going to pay attention to a few key metrics. Because those are the things that we've sort of decided amongst ourselves are going to be the important ones for helping us to determine whether this hypothesis can be proven or not. And we had a variety of tools at our disposal to do that. One of the tools we used a lot early on—even before this process—was a product called Mixpanel, which allows you to register events that happen on your website. Like if somebody clicked on this, or somebody submitted that form or that kind of a thing. And what it also allowed you to do was to define work flows or pipelines... + +Funnels. + +Funnels through which you could say... Someone came to my site and clicked on something. What I was interested in next was—were they going to sign up and give me their email address, or were they going to abandon the site? And if they signed up and gave me their email address, were they then willing to also give me their credit card information? So you could sort of pre-define that as a funnel or pipeline that you were interested in. And Mixpanel then let us track the progression of those activities. That I think was really helpful for us, especially when we weren't exactly sure what data we wanted to pay attention to. Because we had some specific use cases that were tied to these hypotheses, that we could then make real in the tool, and then see. Did people in fact follow through on this progression of steps that we thought they would? At a certain point, we reached some limits around what we could do with Mixpanel. I think primarily because we were interested in collecting more data than could fit neatly into any given particular pipeline. And so we started experimenting with another product called Optimizely, which basically lets you do A/B testing on your site. And started to collect some data from that. What text should we put on the button? Well I think it should say foobar, and I think it should say I love Minneapolis. Well, what's the action? What do we want people to do? The only way to really know what it should say is to try both things, and see who clicks on it more. Right? So Optimizely was a really helpful way to be able to do that. Because it allowed us to pre-define a certain set of options and it would rotate through those and you could gather data about that. And then of course Google Analytics. We were using that already to sort of get basic usage on the site. What you're able to do now—I'm sure many of you do this—is that you can actually fire events from the server rather than on the client side with JavaScript, so we started pushing lots of data into Google Analytics that wasn't necessarily a result of somebody clicking on something, but it was background events or API calls that there was no JavaScript to execute, for example. But we wanted to funnel all that data into a single place so that we could start to use some of the nifty reporting tools that that offered us, and see all that activity in a single place. + +So, I mean, this is our first month's worth of metrics, and it sort of illustrates the fire hose that Peter was talking about. We're getting data from all these different places. Someone has to make sense. This was just a dump of Mixpanel events, basically. And then we were forced pretty quickly, given the wide range of things we could track, to figure out which ones we needed to put the most energy into tracking. And I think one of the reasons that tools like Mixpanel and Optimizely had been valuable at some points but not as valuable for us as they could have been in other situations was that—they were really great at testing and fine tuning User Experience components of a website, or UI elements of a website. And that was interesting to us for certain hypotheses, but we were asking way broader and more overarching questions about parts of it. And in fact, being forced to phrase things in terms of hypotheses led us to some necessary conversations and gave us a helpful foundation for talking about things, like—we're running all these tests. A lot of them are really UI focused. Are we trying to build a destination site for podcasts? Is that actually a thing that we want to do? Is that... Is the assumption that there's a need for that something that we really want to follow through on and be devoting our energy to? Or... Which... To like... Spoiler alert, given Pop Up Archive's background and where most of our interests and, frankly, expertise lay... Do we want to focus more on something that's an API service, that is intended primarily for enterprises, that could be used as sort of a white label data source? And by developer communities, right? You'll see... So just to root this in some form of reality, Audiosear.ch today looks like this. It changes all the time. We've added all sorts of different stuff to it, as we've been testing out these hypotheses. And you know, short of the fact that we put API on the homepage, this is a work in progress, right? It's a place where we're sort of showcasing some of the capabilities that we've been able to develop, and then we use that in turn as a measurement for some of our tests as well. Like, is this generating buzz or interest? Are people contacting us, because they've seen what we've shown through this website? And it's not about how many unique visitors we have or how much the traffic is growing or how much monthly active users we have, but it's more about, in some cases, the more qualitative output that we're seeing from it, or results that we're seeing from it, and it's still fundamentally a place where we can learn things about user behavior too that we think are helpful to answer our hypotheses, but to then inform our decision about where we go with this project and how it can ultimately be used by the people we want it to be used by or who we see having a need for it. + +So, for example, we had a hypothesis early on that... We think that if people are offered suggestions about what they should listen to, that that would increase the amount of time that they spend on our website. Rather than just sort of passively letting them discover us through organic search, we want to now proactively encourage them to continue to spend time on it. Well, part of the original—I mean, as Anne was just alluding to—what that led us to talk about was—do we really care if people spend a lot of time on our website? Is that important to us? Maybe it's not important to us, because we're a destination—we want to be a destination site. Maybe it's important to us because then we can go to potential customers and say—if you use us as a recommendation service, to help keep people on your site, that would be a good product to have. Right? We can help increase the amount of time that people spend on your website. Not necessarily on our website. So what we did was we put together a hypothesis that just simply said—we think showing related audio will increase time on site. Not necessarily because we're interested in keeping eyeballs on our site, but we can use that as evidence to say—you should buy our product. That'll help keep eyeballs on your site. And we put together some basic algorithms to identify—what is a piece of related audio? How can I suggest something that's similar? How can I determine whether A is similar to B? And we came up with just some basic tests around that, that we could run for ourselves, and then we put it out in the wild and kept track of what people clicked on. Did time on site go up or down? Did the presence or absence of related audio suggestions on a particular place in the page make a difference in anything? And we, I think, answered that—yes. Making suggestions about related things does help keep people interested in things. But then we started to be—so we answered that hypothesis in the affirmative. Then we want one step further. We said—let's create a second one out of that. We think that if we put... If we change our algorithm for how we determine what's similar, that will increase the chances that someone will click on something. And so now we can—now we're in the process of testing that out. If we tweak the knob this way, people will spend more time. If we tweak the knob that way, people will spend more time. And use the tools we've already got established to help measure that. + +To get high level for one more quick moment, you may notice—I've had you on our February metrics page and our March metrics page and it's this big old data dump and you see all the tabs below. Here are the tags that people are clicking on our website, one by one. Here are the different things getting played on the site, the different categories people tend to click on. Go to Google Analytics for that information. Here are... I think this is, like, where we were still waiting for some of the Mixpanel data to get seeded, and in March, we're very much in a similar place. Here are the search terms that are dragging people to the site. All this to say—this was our experience of the firehose. And our metrics checkins would be really lengthy and it was hard to know what to latch onto in all of that. So over time—first of all, fundamentally, we started couching all of our metrics checkins in the hypotheses themselves. So we were like—created this separate tab, we have some of the hypotheses that Peter has also mentioned. Like related audio improves engagement on the site. Here's the test for that. Here's the way that we're going to track it. And then increasingly, we've built out—like, who's responsible when we assess it and what we do with that. Putting the hypotheses, like, at the top of each page, and this really—it's been a work in progress, right? So you slowly start to see them appear. Okay. One hypothesis. Does organic search traffic increase when you have transcripts for audio on the website? And the site is relatively new. That's going to take some time. Doing that helped the sort of executive summary of our metrics checkins, which we do weekly—get a lot of shorter. And then all this data is still here. And people who are curious about something can go poke around with it if they want. It may actually end up being valuable to us down the road, but we're really focused on three or four questions that are valuable to us, and their priority may change over time. One challenge we also faced was—what's a good threshold for action? If we have a hypothesis that people want to share segments from within audio, and I think I can probably find this from, like, May's... All right. + +I'll touch on Optimizely one more time in a second, but if we look at this hypothesis like—people want to share transcript lines. This is specifically about sharing transcript lines, but we found you've got to start somewhere. Rather than sort of—people want to share segments from within audio. But anyway, this—track percent of sessions with snippet—any non-zero tweet results. So if two people do the thing, what are you supposed to do with that? It's non-zero. But then what? And I think what we've learned in our learning is that—by starting somewhere with a hypothesis like this, and getting some sort of result, it forces you to then move on from that hypothesis. And in this particular case, for example, we were able to sort of reassess it, and the hypothesis matured and sort of blossomed into a few others, which were not just like beating a dead horse, like we were able to do it—maybe Twitter isn't the best way to do this, and maybe transcript lines aren't the thing people want to share. So we got two more hypothesis lines to test as a result of this one. And if we don't see a significant change from baseline that we've established, we know to junk it and move on. It's also tough with tools like Optimizely and these more sort of fundamental questions about behaviors that are developing or nonexistent to test everything at once. Because you've got this matrix of possibilities, and the more you add, the more the permutations just sort of grow exponentially. So we really just try to break it down to one thing and do it as quickly and as efficiently as we can so we can take what we learned from that and apply it back into it. + +We could be A/B testing this too. Share this line? Share this segment? I don't know. But fundamentally, there's a bigger question that we're asking there. And so then I think you'll see—by the time we get over to this month, Emily is our colleague who works on this the most. And so she's come up with ways of categorizing our hypotheses, which can also be helpful, and then when we look at—I think probably behaviors is best. She's just like—okay, related audio improves engagement on the site. People want to share transcript lines. And she'll say—this week is the deadline for this hypothesis. So, like, let's go over it right now. And then we can look and see—you know, here are... In orange, related audio clicks, as compared to tweets, as a percentage of traffic on the site. And back to the firehose question—are you looking at total visits, unique visits, non-bounce visits, which—we usually err towards the latter, because those engage the most meaningful visitors to the site—are you looking at this stuff as a percentage of total behavior, are you looking at it as raw numbers, which—for organic search, for example, the raw numbers may be steadily growing, marching along, but then we write a blog post that's popular, and so as a percentage of our traffic it goes down a lot because there's been a ton of referrals that week. So these are questions we all had to answer as we went along. + +And none of us are statisticians. Sometimes we kind of shrug and go—I don't know. What's the more meaningful thing here? So to echo back to what I said in the beginning about art versus science, there's a certain interpretative art that has to go into this data. That says—does it feel like I should do something with this? Does it feel like this is important or not? + +A quick example of that and the way we've started augmenting the metrics themselves, because there's so much information here, so people—we can look at this and quickly grab the takeaways—you'll notice in blue Emily's made notes next to this chart, of all the behaviors of this site. These are all the Mixpanel events that we're tracking. The taste maker grid is something that we had just deployed, it had just been released, so Peter—feel free to disagree with me on this if you want, but to look at the taste maker grid and see it come in—none of us has huge numbers, but we defined our statistical significance to be like—as long as it's in the hundreds, we're willing to pull certain conclusions from it—the fact that it sort of came in at this place, where we have other behaviors that have been on the site for weeks or months, that aren't seeing the same type of interaction, like, that's the type of thing where you're like—huh, that's interesting. That's significant. And boy, the taste maker stuff you can only get to if you click an arrow to expand it and then scroll down past the fold of the homepage. How does that affect this? Maybe we should A/B test the homepage now. We've had a search bar up there forever. So that's how it's like—it's definitely more of an art than a science, because we're sort of feeling our way through it, but using this data to ground ourselves as much as we can. + +So yeah. + +This is a quick question. Or maybe two questions. The first question—is sounds like you do a lot of passive data collection. And maybe you were about to just say this, but... Do you ever just ask people what they think and what they do on the site? + +All the time, yeah. All the time. + +But, like, in a uniform, analyzable way? + +Putting surveys out and that kind of thing? We have not done any official surveys. + +We have, actually. + +When we started, you mean? When we started? Yeah. + +Well, they were in March. + +For the Audiosear.ch tool? + +So we've put surveys out that aren't necessarily explicitly directed at behaviors on the Audiosear.ch site, for the reason I kind of said earlier, which is—we're not trying to perfect it as a destination site per se, but we're more interested in the behaviors underlying it. We had a social sharing survey. How do you discover new podcasts? And how do you discuss podcasts with other people, for example. And so from there, we're able—the top three responses were—word of mouth, other podcasts, and Twitter. Which is, I think, partly where some of our bias towards Twitter has come in. A lot of the taste maker information and the sharing stuff is a little Twitter-focused. But we're also revisiting that, as we question what shape sharing behavior actually works for most people. The other survey we did was around listening. How do you listen to podcasts? Where do you get them? What apps do you use? That kind of thing. + +So does that, like, I don't know... It sounds like you did it once and maybe... Are you planning on doing it again in light of all this other passive data collection? I mean, would you tend to value an actual person's response more than, like, a passive behavioral inference? Or would you... + +That's a great question. I'm interested in what Anne's going to answer. And I'm going to start. + +Yeah, please, please. + +My wife is a university researcher. So we have this—you can imagine, like, the dinner topic conversation around this kind of stuff. I actually trust, personally, the passive stuff more. And that's because I pay attention to cowpads. And I think people, when they fill out surveys, can be unconscious in how they answer sometimes. They can lie. They can give aspirational answers, rather than real answers. I'm actually interested in what you actually click on, not what you think you might like to click on. But that's my bias. And my wife actually disagrees with me. So this is what makes it fun to be married to her. So how would you answer that question? + +It also seems like it's... You keep mentioning—it's an art. There's an art to writing surveys. + +Yes, there is. + +There definitely is. And my answer is: It's both. So I don't share quite the bias that Peter does against survey data. But the way that the survey data has been most valuable to me is that it will give us a sense for general trends that we might not be able to pick up on without building out a lot of tests on the website. Like, for example, everybody said they look for podcasts on Twitter. Nobody said Facebook. I have no idea why, and I wouldn't have guessed that, necessarily. So those kinds of general preferences, I guess, I find myself internalizing as I'm coming up with these. And then on an even more qualitative level, depending on who we're talking to and what they're saying, if there's a big podcasting network or audio distributor saying—I saw that latest beta testing email and the stuff you're doing is really interesting. We should talk about it. Okay. That's significant. That's one person, but speaking on behalf of arguably a larger organization that could do meaningful work with us. So that type of qualitative feedback is helpful. And some of our hypotheses get evaluated that way. Okay, this related audio hypothesis has been validated in some ways because people are noticing, and people who could really take it to the next step with us are talking about it. + +And it also seems like if you had a hypothesis, like this taste maker grid thing—people want to find audio picked by people. You could ask—are you trying to find audio picked by people? And if people say... Yes... Then your hypothesis might be confirmed. It might not be. + +Yeah. Yeah. + +I mean, I don't know how that would work functionally on the site. + +No, but those are... Yeah, no. I think they're good questions. + +Just a one question... Yes/no kind of thing. + +I think it's worth asking the question. + +And can circumvent a lot of—because a lot of these—like Optimizely lets you test things without building them out. We have dummy things on the site, that say feature coming soon, just to see what people will click on. And we'll talk about this really quickly, because we want you guys to do stuff for a while—is that it will tell you when your data has reached its statistical significance. So that's really helpful. Because we're like—I don't know. Five people clicked on it. What is that supposed to mean? And sometimes they'll say—okay, you're trying to figure out if people are more interested, to get deeper into the audio, if they'll click on transcript or full player or search. Even with just dozens of responses to this prompt, we have statistically significant results, and as a matter of fact, transcript is the winner. On the other hand, looking at engagement, as measured by that, they're like—good luck. You need another 55,000 visitors before you know if this is statistically significant. So I found that to be super helpful. But it's a great point. To be able to ask people—to supplement this—would you rather get audio picked by taste makers in the industry that you care about or your friends? Those would be things that might be hard to build... Or could be hard to build. There are ways we could build it in a simple test. Yeah. + +I'm curious what your mechanism is for deciding if the hypothesis was fault or if the test wasn't exactly the right test to be using to confirm or deny. Are you looking at the wrong stats, or were you wrong about the... And sort of how you guys in your conversations when you check back in... How do you figure that out, and how does it change with time? + +So this happened yesterday. For us. In our meeting that we had over there. Calling to our folks— + +Underneath the airplane. + +When we called our folks in Oakland. We were talking specifically about... Oh, the sharing of transcripts. + +I showed you guys this one. + +We heard qualitatively in the conversation and in the survey that Anne mentioned earlier—we heard qualitatively that people really wanted the ability to share their experience with audio. And we... When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail kind of thing. So we had a hammer called full text search. And we thought—what if we hit the problem of sharing with that hammer? What if people... And in many ways, that allowed us to take the problem of audio out of the equation. Because we turned it into a text problem, not an audio problem. So we made the ability to click on a button next to a line of text, as you were listening to audio or reading it on the page—you could click on the line and tweet it. Tweet the line, tweet a link to the page. Right? We thought—oh, this is a great way to share things, we think. Right? It got... Not a lot of usage. So then we started to ask ourselves—this is the conversation we had yesterday. + +Yeah, I'm just going to show you. So we have—you know, 299 bounced sessions, here are the various things people are doing, they're searching within the transcript, clicking on our link for the API, and then tweet is all the way down here. + +So it's 7 out of however many hundred it was. That's not many. Was it worth all the time we put into developing it? Was there a return on investment there? So I think, to summarize the conversation, which was your question... I think we all agreed... Yeah, that's not a very big number. And then we asked ourselves... Somebody said... Well, is it that we just did it the wrong way? Could we have solved the problem of sharing in some other way? Could we improve upon what we did and make that experiment better? Reduce the number of clicks? Or whatever? Or could we even approach it at a 90-degree shift, and maybe it's really more about audio. Maybe people want to be able to—when they hear something and they're listening to it, they want to be able to talk back to it. Share that with my friend. You know? Siri or whoever. That would be a totally different hammer to approach—which then makes it look like a different nail too, right? But that, I think, is what the process would look like. Were we to keep iterating on that. Does that help? + +Yeah. + +So we have a little thing we want people to help us with. If you get into a group, we want to practice making hypotheses. And you can... Please. You can pick any problem you want. If you can't think of one, think of something you might want to improve about SRCCON. All right? So we'll do this for, like, say five, six minutes. And then gather back and share them with each other. So just play the game with us. + +Yeah, and you really don't have to be serious. One hypothesis we found ourselves coming up with yesterday was like—ooh yeah, we could use Optimizely to test this thing. And Peter was like... Do we really need to? And maybe the hypothesis was—Optimizely is a helpful tool. We kind of already know that. Optimizely continues to be a helpful tool. + +And it's a fun tool. + +So do whatever you want. + +Talk amongst yourselves. + +(breakout sessions) + +All right. We gave you more time because you were having so much fun talking. Let's go around the room and share hypotheses. + +You're starting with me? + +Tony, you've been elected by a table of your peers. + +By your maniacal peer of one. + +So we took your SRCCON suggestion. We believe that the increased availability of a selection of high quality teas in the break room will result in fewer SRCCON attendees leaving the conference to go to Starbucks or some other place. + +I like this. Yes. + +To obtain tea. We will know we have succeeded when more SRCCON attendees are staying put on campus with their tea. + +And how would you measure it? + +We would measure the number of people observed... + +Plant a person in each room. + +You basically have to do that. Measure the number of people returning with a big tea thing. + +Excellent. Here's another suggestion for how you could evaluate it. Go around the trash cans at the end of the day and count the number of Starbucks cups. + +I already do that. + +(laughter) + +We've got it in SPSS. We're doing multi-linear projections. + +I like it. + +We can't afford SPSS. + +We're ruling out multi-co-linearity. + +You should always count all the things. Yes. Figure that out. How about you guys? What did you come up with? + +You want to talk? + +Go ahead. + +We take this challenge of improve SRCCON. So we believe SRCCON can double its size and still be intimate. + +Okay. + +It will result in more knowledge sharing and more (inaudible). And we will know it has succeeded when it takes two minutes to sell out. + +Two minutes instead of 46 seconds to sell out. + +The number of smaller newsrooms increase. + +In terms of representation? + +Yeah. + +The increase of the number of international participants. I'm alone. + +Aww. + +There are those two dudes from Argentina. + +Yeah. I mean... [making a soccer joke] We hate them over in Brazil. We hate them. We have a wider variety of sessions going on simultaneously. So that they don't overcrowd. Right? That's it. + +That's great. That was lovely. All right. + +One question I would ask—I know we're going to go a tiny bit over, but... How do you evaluate the quality of the experience of people? That seems like one thing that might be hard. It stays intimate. How do you gauge that intimacy or test that intimacy? + +Did you talk about that at all? + +Not really, no. + +This is the common thing that we will do in our team, is someone will say—da-da-da. And we'll say—yeah, but how would you measure that? + +Instead of saying—Peter, why aren't you thinking about the fact that we'll have no way of knowing whether or not it's still intimate. Well, to properly evaluate that hypothesis... Everybody is kind of happy and it feels like playing dressup. What? + +All right. This table. + +Sure. Okay. We actually did something different. We actually looked at a real life project that I happened to have done for work. And in, like, early June, and we've actually gotten metrics back on it. And so we started talking about things that we possibly could have done differently or better to have gotten a different outcome. So the project I was talking about—that we were talking about—was—one is like a visual storytelling snowfall-ish representation of a 200-page research report. I work for Pew Research, so we make a lot of those. Versus a single interactive, which sort of took a chunk of information from the snowfall-ish thing and was a single thing that you could interact with. So some of the things that we came up with were the fact that the single interactive was a little bit more, like, bite-sized, and easily consumable. And something that reporters and other people who wanted to pick this particular story up could easily refer to, we also talked about embedability, as far as the single interactive, versus some of the interactive components that were part of the snowfall thing. And then as far as exposure, we talked about how the single interactive got picked up by Vox, which probably vastly contributed to more clicks, more page impressions, more everything. It got about 50% more traffic than the snowfall thing. But the snowfall thing, in contrast, got picked up by the AP, and was written about by 200 different news outlets. So we talked about the fact that the mediums were different. So wire service versus an online presence. + +Interesting. I love the real world stuff. That's great. + +All right. We're out of time. So... I want to hear, though, from the last table here. + +Ours is not dissimilar from the first one. + +Counting cups? + +Okay. Well, we had also said basically that there were two things—the easier to measure thing and the harder to measure thing. One of which was more interesting. The harder to measure thing was... Does believing that having coffee and lunch will facilitate better conversations by making sure that everybody stays around the conference... And that's harder to measure, because that's sort of an all-day sort of thing. But we figured there would be ways to track it, like what's the head count in and out of the doors, for example. And the easier to measure thing is whether lunch onsite specifically facilitates better contact and conversation between participants, and that's one of those things that you can just stand out there and do a head count. + +And also watch people that seem to be having conversations as opposed to sitting there on their laptop or something. + +And counting the number of people who are eating alone or not talking. Yeah, yeah, interesting. + +And start by counting the number of lunches that got eaten versus the number of people who were here today. + +And since this is a restricted domain, you can count the number of people compared to the number of attendees. + +That's great. So we're out of time. I will leave you just with one thing, unless there's anything you want to say. The one topic of conversation I really wanted to have, that we ran out of time for, which probably deserves its whole other thing, is cultural. Which is: What's attractive to you about this idea? What's unattractive to you about this idea? And what would prevent you from trying to implement this kind of a thing in your own organization? So I'll just leave you with those questions, and if you come up with an answer, tweet it at me. Thanks very much. + +Yeah. Thanks. + +(applause) diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015DatabaseDifferences.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015DatabaseDifferences.md index 9d27c2a1..e7b490e3 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015DatabaseDifferences.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015DatabaseDifferences.md @@ -1,362 +1,249 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/databasedifferences/index.html ---- - -# Wrong on INFILE, Wrong for America—What Do You Really Know about Your Database Software? - -### Session Facilitator(s): Michael Corey, Jennifer LaFleur - -### Day & Time: Friday, 11am-noon - -### Room: Minnesota - - -Good morning! - - -Good morning. - - -How is everybody? - - -Great. - - -Coffee? - - -Yes. - - -Oh, no. I scared people already. This is not good. Okay. Well, this is understanding your databases through political advertising. I'm Jennifer LaFleur. I work at the center for investigative reporting/reveal. - - -I also work at the center for investigative reporting/reveal. - - -Most of the session will be you creating things, but we have a little bit of an intro to explain what our plan is, and then some video by our director, Michael Corey. So I just want to go through kind of why we did this. Oftentimes we'll be arguing about which database is best for what. And, you know, what we found out when we were talking about this is—we learned a lot about how different database programs allocate memory in your machine, how they index things. Just kind of the inner workings of each database program and why one might be better than the other for certain reasons. So there's a lot of them out there. That's FoxPro. Yeah. And ILENE is probably the top database program. What do you really know about your database software? So that's why we dug into this. I will admit I use SQLServer quite often for our newsroom database archive. But one thing SQLServer does is track your every move. I wasn't as creative as Michael. - - -I'll translate. Did you log onto the server at 10:23 a.m. on June 2nd and fail? - - -So we decided to look deeper and compare them. You know, and what better way to make any kind of comparison—is through political ads. That way we can dig up information and dirt on all of the different databases. - - -And the great thing about political ads is they don't really have to be fair. So we can just have fun. They can be based in some kind of half-truth. And I come into it from the postgres world, which is sort of the opposite end of the spectrum from the SQLServer world. I was doing pesticide data, millions and millions of rows, and running it on a small SSD drive because I wanted it to be fast, and I would run an update query and the query would fill up my hard drive and fail. I couldn't figure it out. I kept looking around and found that postgres has transaction management, which is good, because you don't lose data when the query fails, but if you do an update, it makes a copy of all of the data, finishes, and substitutes out the data that it did. I was used to thinking of a database as a CSV that lives somewhere deep in my computer and that's not how databases work. But I didn't really know that. So we have two pre-made ads that we're going to show you. Microsoft Access and postgres. And then we're going to turn it into you guys and you're going to storyboard ads using your own expertise. Because I don't know much about MySQL or SQLite but I know a lot of you do. - - -Microsoft Access. He says he's the everyman database, but who is he really looking out for? Is your database bigger than 2 gigabytes? Nope, not you. Do you use a Mac? Nope, not you. Linux? Nope. Not you either. And did you actually want to deploy your data in production? Sorry. Access isn't for you either. So who is it for? If you follow the money, and you'll be paying some money, it's clear who Access works for. Don't get penned in to a proprietary GUI mess. Vote no on Microsoft Access. - - -Classic. - - -Okay. The next one is targeting postgres. If you're sensitive to flashing lights and things, I just wanted to warn you. Shield your eyes. - - -Not joking. - - -There's a lot of psychedelic business going on in this. - - -Is postgres ready to lead your news app? Let's look at the record. Postgres was created in Berkeley at the University of California. It's an Open Source project that's free to the public. Cut your hair and get a job, postgres! Sure, transaction management sounds great. But if your database is big enough, running a simple update query can fill up your hard drive. And if you cancel, postgres will save a copy of everything, leaving millions of deadbeat tuples in its wake. Vacuum? Who wants a database you have to clean up after? Call postgres and tell them we don't need a Berkeley socialist on our servers. - - -Okay. So your job is to pick a database. Gather in groups where you might have a common interest. Pick it apart. And storyboard your ad. You can do whatever you want. We tried to find play dough this morning. If you want to do claymation ads, we can't do that. Sorry. But we do have paper. And post its and markers. You can do video or audio. Whatever you want to do. But somebody be a leader. Pick a database. And recruit folks to your political committee. - - -And we're going to have some kind of presentation at the end. Either a pitch for an ad or a live action acting out of the ad. Just throwing it out there. - - -And there will be fabulous prizes. - - -There will? Bacon and muffins! - - -I just like to say fabulous prizes. - - -But yeah, we've got lots of markers. Who has MySQL? All right. There's MySQL team. Who wants to do SQLite? There was a lot of chatter about it. I know you're out there. All right. Sweet. FoxPro? Anyone? Anyone? I don't know. It's up to you guys how you want to break it up. - - -Just relational? - - -No, you can do crazy NoSQL leftist craziness if you want. - - -You can even go non-technical database and do QuattroPro. They look at me like I'm... - - -FileMakerPro? - - -Oh, I forgot about FileMakerPro. It doesn't have to be... It has to be something you can target. Not something you love. - - -Yeah, that's the other rule. It has to be a negative ad. It can't be a positive ad. - - -Mongo? - - -This is the SQLite table. - - -Who's doing Mongo? - - -Come on! Mongo! He might need creative genius behind it. - - -I'll do Mongo with you. - - -Political ads are always negative. - - -I've never used it. - - -This is how you learn. - - -You can bring your ad skills to bear on MongoDB. - -(breakout sessions) - - -If you have questions, just yell medic. You probably don't need us. - - -Don't forget you have to have a committee name too. Your ad committee has to have a name. - - -So you have about 15 minutes, just so you know. - - - - -You've got, like, three minutes left. - - -Will you be offended by any derogatory reference towards Sweden? - - -No. - - -And if you want to do anything on the monitor, you can plug in too. - - -You are in Minnesota, so that's risky. - - -True. Although I think there are more Norwegians here. - - -Right over there! - - -There was a name that had an umlaut in its name, and the department of transportation didn't put the umlaut on when they put the sign up! - - -The governor said—if I have to go paint them on myself! That would have been such a wonderful sight. - - -Okay. 30 second warning. - - -Okay. Time! I have put all of your team databases on these cards, which Michael has not seen. So he's going to pick first. - - -Up first... Mango? Mongo! - - -MangoDB! - - -MongoDB, you're up. - - -Who's holding the paper? I'll hold the computer. We have to do a theatric version. - - -Are we recording any of this? - - -I don't want this to leave this room. - - -Respect the team's wishes. - - -Can we dim the lights? Seriously. - - -Let's see what we can do. - - -Wait, we'll do a cue when we want the lights back up. All right, all right. We're ready. - -(thrash metal) - - -Terrorism. MongoDB. There's a new problem with this country. It's a new database invaded our school with our kids. Teenagers aren't going to church anymore, because they're using Mongo. They live by no schemas. They're writing JavaScript, the language of communism! They're using BSON, like BS! No transactions? More like terrorism. It's web scale we don't want our kids using the internet, because it's evil. Vote for a company that you can trust, like Oracle! - - -I love "they live by no schema!" - - -All right. Since you guys already went, pick one. - - -MySQL. - - -What was your committee name? Sorry. - - -It was the Data Purity Coalition. - - -Do you guys need lighting? - - -No, we're not that fancy. - - -Hey, don't you worry about the kids? - - -Do we have a name? - - -ByeSQL. - - -Like bye, SQL! - - -This is all good. - - -Awesome. - -(imitating ominous music) - - -ByeSQL. Do you want a database that was born in Sweden? Sweden is cold. Do you want a database that lacks empathy? Of course not! You want something that's community driven. Not controlled by a man named Larry Ellison, who's more interested in sailing his boat than attending his own company's keynote address that he was supposed to deliver! Do you want a guy like that controlling your future? He may not even allow MySQL to be Open Source past 2015! Then what happens to your data? Does that look like the face of a community you want to uphold? We say no! We think things should be about...(cracking up) kids pulling wagons? It reminds me of that William Carlos Williams poem about the wagon and the chicken or something. - - -Now it's gotten weird. - - -Kids love pulling wagons! - - -Say ByeSQL! - -(applause) - - -You guys are creative. - - -Extra credit for that William Carlos Williams reference. - - -That came out of nowhere! - - -I'll do the refrains. - - -All right.... Got to get in my voice. Chris Amico once said that SQLite was the honey badger of databases, but is it really? The honey badger is loyal to Africa, Southwest Africa, and India. SQLite has no such loyalties. - - -It looks like SQLite just don't care. - - -Yeah, it's public domain. They support free and Open Source software, but ask. Dusnax. It's not associated. It's a criminal! - - -Looks like SQLite just don't care. - - -Cracks under pressure. Yeah. Big data for SQLite? One user. No multi-users. No network access to the database. It's self-centered, like its fellow snake people. Created in 2000. - - -Looks like SQLite just do care. - - -It's everywhere. You didn't ask for SQLite. It's in your phone. It's in your browser. It's everywhere. It was this innocent app you installed. Basically we all have it. Like herpes. - - -The database you think you needed, not the one you deserve. - - -Brought to you by real databases for real Americans. - - -That's about it. Thank you so much! That went way better than we thought it would. - - -Yeah, you guys are fantastic! Any burning questions, issues, things you need to discuss? Tony? - - -No. Not publicly. - - -What was your company name again? - - -Real Databases for Real Americans. - - -You haven't heard of us? - - -Expect us! - - -So where is the land of the wagon children? - - -Yeah, where did that come from? - - -There was a lot going on, guys! We had some girls playing volleyball too. - - -It's over the rainbow. - - -We cannot award a prize, because you are all winners. These are all fantastic. But we will buy you coffee if we see you in that room later. - - -Free coffee over this way. - - -Wow. - - -Thanks, guys! - - -Thank you. If anyone knows how to draw a fox... - - -We were trying really hard. We were going to do FoxPro but we couldn't draw a fox. \ No newline at end of file +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/databasedifferences/index.html +--- + +# Wrong on INFILE, Wrong for America—What Do You Really Know about Your Database Software? + +### Session Facilitator(s): Michael Corey, Jennifer LaFleur + +### Day & Time: Friday, 11am-noon + +### Room: Minnesota + +Good morning! + +Good morning. + +How is everybody? + +Great. + +Coffee? + +Yes. + +Oh, no. I scared people already. This is not good. Okay. Well, this is understanding your databases through political advertising. I'm Jennifer LaFleur. I work at the center for investigative reporting/reveal. + +I also work at the center for investigative reporting/reveal. + +Most of the session will be you creating things, but we have a little bit of an intro to explain what our plan is, and then some video by our director, Michael Corey. So I just want to go through kind of why we did this. Oftentimes we'll be arguing about which database is best for what. And, you know, what we found out when we were talking about this is—we learned a lot about how different database programs allocate memory in your machine, how they index things. Just kind of the inner workings of each database program and why one might be better than the other for certain reasons. So there's a lot of them out there. That's FoxPro. Yeah. And ILENE is probably the top database program. What do you really know about your database software? So that's why we dug into this. I will admit I use SQLServer quite often for our newsroom database archive. But one thing SQLServer does is track your every move. I wasn't as creative as Michael. + +I'll translate. Did you log onto the server at 10:23 a.m. on June 2nd and fail? + +So we decided to look deeper and compare them. You know, and what better way to make any kind of comparison—is through political ads. That way we can dig up information and dirt on all of the different databases. + +And the great thing about political ads is they don't really have to be fair. So we can just have fun. They can be based in some kind of half-truth. And I come into it from the postgres world, which is sort of the opposite end of the spectrum from the SQLServer world. I was doing pesticide data, millions and millions of rows, and running it on a small SSD drive because I wanted it to be fast, and I would run an update query and the query would fill up my hard drive and fail. I couldn't figure it out. I kept looking around and found that postgres has transaction management, which is good, because you don't lose data when the query fails, but if you do an update, it makes a copy of all of the data, finishes, and substitutes out the data that it did. I was used to thinking of a database as a CSV that lives somewhere deep in my computer and that's not how databases work. But I didn't really know that. So we have two pre-made ads that we're going to show you. Microsoft Access and postgres. And then we're going to turn it into you guys and you're going to storyboard ads using your own expertise. Because I don't know much about MySQL or SQLite but I know a lot of you do. + +Microsoft Access. He says he's the everyman database, but who is he really looking out for? Is your database bigger than 2 gigabytes? Nope, not you. Do you use a Mac? Nope, not you. Linux? Nope. Not you either. And did you actually want to deploy your data in production? Sorry. Access isn't for you either. So who is it for? If you follow the money, and you'll be paying some money, it's clear who Access works for. Don't get penned in to a proprietary GUI mess. Vote no on Microsoft Access. + +Classic. + +Okay. The next one is targeting postgres. If you're sensitive to flashing lights and things, I just wanted to warn you. Shield your eyes. + +Not joking. + +There's a lot of psychedelic business going on in this. + +Is postgres ready to lead your news app? Let's look at the record. Postgres was created in Berkeley at the University of California. It's an Open Source project that's free to the public. Cut your hair and get a job, postgres! Sure, transaction management sounds great. But if your database is big enough, running a simple update query can fill up your hard drive. And if you cancel, postgres will save a copy of everything, leaving millions of deadbeat tuples in its wake. Vacuum? Who wants a database you have to clean up after? Call postgres and tell them we don't need a Berkeley socialist on our servers. + +Okay. So your job is to pick a database. Gather in groups where you might have a common interest. Pick it apart. And storyboard your ad. You can do whatever you want. We tried to find play dough this morning. If you want to do claymation ads, we can't do that. Sorry. But we do have paper. And post its and markers. You can do video or audio. Whatever you want to do. But somebody be a leader. Pick a database. And recruit folks to your political committee. + +And we're going to have some kind of presentation at the end. Either a pitch for an ad or a live action acting out of the ad. Just throwing it out there. + +And there will be fabulous prizes. + +There will? Bacon and muffins! + +I just like to say fabulous prizes. + +But yeah, we've got lots of markers. Who has MySQL? All right. There's MySQL team. Who wants to do SQLite? There was a lot of chatter about it. I know you're out there. All right. Sweet. FoxPro? Anyone? Anyone? I don't know. It's up to you guys how you want to break it up. + +Just relational? + +No, you can do crazy NoSQL leftist craziness if you want. + +You can even go non-technical database and do QuattroPro. They look at me like I'm... + +FileMakerPro? + +Oh, I forgot about FileMakerPro. It doesn't have to be... It has to be something you can target. Not something you love. + +Yeah, that's the other rule. It has to be a negative ad. It can't be a positive ad. + +Mongo? + +This is the SQLite table. + +Who's doing Mongo? + +Come on! Mongo! He might need creative genius behind it. + +I'll do Mongo with you. + +Political ads are always negative. + +I've never used it. + +This is how you learn. + +You can bring your ad skills to bear on MongoDB. + +(breakout sessions) + +If you have questions, just yell medic. You probably don't need us. + +Don't forget you have to have a committee name too. Your ad committee has to have a name. + +So you have about 15 minutes, just so you know. + +You've got, like, three minutes left. + +Will you be offended by any derogatory reference towards Sweden? + +No. + +And if you want to do anything on the monitor, you can plug in too. + +You are in Minnesota, so that's risky. + +True. Although I think there are more Norwegians here. + +Right over there! + +There was a name that had an umlaut in its name, and the department of transportation didn't put the umlaut on when they put the sign up! + +The governor said—if I have to go paint them on myself! That would have been such a wonderful sight. + +Okay. 30 second warning. + +Okay. Time! I have put all of your team databases on these cards, which Michael has not seen. So he's going to pick first. + +Up first... Mango? Mongo! + +MangoDB! + +MongoDB, you're up. + +Who's holding the paper? I'll hold the computer. We have to do a theatric version. + +Are we recording any of this? + +I don't want this to leave this room. + +Respect the team's wishes. + +Can we dim the lights? Seriously. + +Let's see what we can do. + +Wait, we'll do a cue when we want the lights back up. All right, all right. We're ready. + +(thrash metal) + +Terrorism. MongoDB. There's a new problem with this country. It's a new database invaded our school with our kids. Teenagers aren't going to church anymore, because they're using Mongo. They live by no schemas. They're writing JavaScript, the language of communism! They're using BSON, like BS! No transactions? More like terrorism. It's web scale we don't want our kids using the internet, because it's evil. Vote for a company that you can trust, like Oracle! + +I love "they live by no schema!" + +All right. Since you guys already went, pick one. + +MySQL. + +What was your committee name? Sorry. + +It was the Data Purity Coalition. + +Do you guys need lighting? + +No, we're not that fancy. + +Hey, don't you worry about the kids? + +Do we have a name? + +ByeSQL. + +Like bye, SQL! + +This is all good. + +Awesome. + +(imitating ominous music) + +ByeSQL. Do you want a database that was born in Sweden? Sweden is cold. Do you want a database that lacks empathy? Of course not! You want something that's community driven. Not controlled by a man named Larry Ellison, who's more interested in sailing his boat than attending his own company's keynote address that he was supposed to deliver! Do you want a guy like that controlling your future? He may not even allow MySQL to be Open Source past 2015! Then what happens to your data? Does that look like the face of a community you want to uphold? We say no! We think things should be about...(cracking up) kids pulling wagons? It reminds me of that William Carlos Williams poem about the wagon and the chicken or something. + +Now it's gotten weird. + +Kids love pulling wagons! + +Say ByeSQL! + +(applause) + +You guys are creative. + +Extra credit for that William Carlos Williams reference. + +That came out of nowhere! + +I'll do the refrains. + +All right.... Got to get in my voice. Chris Amico once said that SQLite was the honey badger of databases, but is it really? The honey badger is loyal to Africa, Southwest Africa, and India. SQLite has no such loyalties. + +It looks like SQLite just don't care. + +Yeah, it's public domain. They support free and Open Source software, but ask. Dusnax. It's not associated. It's a criminal! + +Looks like SQLite just don't care. + +Cracks under pressure. Yeah. Big data for SQLite? One user. No multi-users. No network access to the database. It's self-centered, like its fellow snake people. Created in 2000. + +Looks like SQLite just do care. + +It's everywhere. You didn't ask for SQLite. It's in your phone. It's in your browser. It's everywhere. It was this innocent app you installed. Basically we all have it. Like herpes. + +The database you think you needed, not the one you deserve. + +Brought to you by real databases for real Americans. + +That's about it. Thank you so much! That went way better than we thought it would. + +Yeah, you guys are fantastic! Any burning questions, issues, things you need to discuss? Tony? + +No. Not publicly. + +What was your company name again? + +Real Databases for Real Americans. + +You haven't heard of us? + +Expect us! + +So where is the land of the wagon children? + +Yeah, where did that come from? + +There was a lot going on, guys! We had some girls playing volleyball too. + +It's over the rainbow. + +We cannot award a prize, because you are all winners. These are all fantastic. But we will buy you coffee if we see you in that room later. + +Free coffee over this way. + +Wow. + +Thanks, guys! + +Thank you. If anyone knows how to draw a fox... + +We were trying really hard. We were going to do FoxPro but we couldn't draw a fox. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015FrontEndTools.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015FrontEndTools.md index dcfa1857..18cffc12 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015FrontEndTools.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015FrontEndTools.md @@ -1,382 +1,381 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/frontendtools/index.html ---- - -# What (Front-End) Tools Do You Use? - -### Session Facilitator(s): Alan Palazzolo, Justin Heideman - -### Day & Time: Friday, 2-2:45pm - -### Room: Thomas Swain - - -Hey, everyone. My name is Allan, I work at WNYC. - -And I'm Justin and I work at NPR. - -NPR, Minnesota. So we wanted to gather people together and just sort of talk in small groups about the front end tools that you use. So since we mostly build stuff that's on the web, we all have experiences using different tools and we all have opinions about that, and why we do those things. - -So a few things to keep in mind: Please respect each other. This can be a very touchy subject for some people. Some people have very strong opinions about tools. We want to keep that to a minimum. It's not really about what's better; it's about sharing your experiences some of those decisions that go into those experiences. And speak one at a time, which you've probably heard in other sessions which means make sure that everyone shares their opinions. - -So we're going to do a series of discussions. We've got a timer, so it's going to be short discussions about topics of tools. So you're going to talk in your small groups. We're going to report back. There's an etherpad over there. If you want to take notes, that would be awesome. I'm going to try to take notes as well be when we report back. But more help is better. That's it. - -That's it. Yeah. So we're going to cover six different topics so it's going to be definitely a bit of a lightning round and we have a list of main questions that we'll sort of come up with. What tools do you use for category, and why, what I was would you be scratching by other tools that you didn't choose. Why? And what do you want to know if other people have experiences to use a tool that somebody in your group can know about. We would like, to hear about that, too. So some general questions that are a little bit more specific. So some of the things that you might think about about a tool like how do you get started. You can see them all listed there. So all right, are you ready? The first one, I think we're going to talk about CSS pre-processors. So you two people over there, you might want to join that table over to get kind of a critical mass so you have a four equally sized groups there. So the way this is going to work, we're going to give you five minutes so discuss CSS pre-processors. We have some of the more common ones here. Maybe you don't use any pre-processor and you might want to talk about that. - -Also if you don't know what something is, that's a perfectly fine opinion/thing to talk about, right? You can be like what are these things. Hopefully someone in the groups knows what they are. So talk about why they exist. Why do people use them, why you might use them, that sort of thing. - -All right. So I'm going to start the timer, five minutes, and we're going to lightning through this stuff. So start. -[ Group Work ] -One more minute. - -Five seconds. All right. So we're going going to lightning this guy up. So can I just go around to each group and can each group talk about one thing that they learned? So I'm going to start with this group over here because it's closest to me. So what was the takeaway from your discussion? - -We wanted to use LESS or SASS. We don't want to write raw CSS. - -What does that mean? - -We want to recommend a compiler. - -We don't want to go nuts with the programming that you can do with SASS or...? - -So keep it simple in the SASS? Fix some of the syntactical stuff in CSS but not necessarily write a whole new, you know, Turing complete language? - -Never mix them up. - -What about you guys over there? I'm pointing in the middle. - -We're kind of a SASS table over here and we just kind of can were talking about taking it one step further and taking out the middleman and building a template that can use SASS integration and all those other things but SASS. - -And Compass. - -And Compass, I I can't actually remember. It's sort of a mix-in for SASS, right? - -It's actually an import library. It's a Bootstrap grid, you can import transitions library and get really granular transitions. You can import mix-ins. Under it's just for importing stylesheets to get you off the ground really quickly. So if you didn't want to screw around with forms, you can just export compass forms and have a really nice compass form style. And it's all modular, too. So you can import lots of modular scale and get a lot of great import on your site. - -It's kind of like a standard library per language. - -How about you guys over there? - -I think we decided that we had to use SASS. - -SASS? - -A lot of us, we don't use anything. We just do straight CSS but... that's pretty much... - -We're launching a redesign where we're using SASS but it's not on our site yet. - -Any pros, cons with or without SASS? - -I think for us, the tool chain up, the scratch was overall a pain in the projects, but some questions about the deployment for us. - -And let's go to our final group over here. - -We're kind of a SASS table, too. - -Oh. - -I love all of you. - -Sounds like some experience with Bourbon. - -Anybody have experience SASS versus -- - -Don't fuck around with language syntax. Things need to be opened and closed, you need periods at the end of your sentences. Let's just do this right. - -And you can kind of then, it's easier to learn 'cause it's, like, it feels like we're doing CSS and you can just do straight CSS and it's fine. So you don't have to change. - -So most people are talking about SASS. - -All right. We're obviously not going to, like, fully get into these topics in five minutes. So please feel free to take those discussions further. - -All right, so the next one is I don't think either of us have a ton of experience with and we're hoping that some of you might be able to help with that. Front-end testing. - -So this is where everyone gets to admit they don't test, right? -[ Laughter ] - -And then we can talk about why we don't test. And what, sort of, tools you've looked at, or possibly have thought about in doing those things, or not doing those things. And also, if you want to try designate someone as a notetaker, that will help to report back, just to be a little bit more concise. - -PhantomJS, or PhantomCSS? - -PhantomJS, sorry. - -I was just doing this off the top of my head. All right, so go. - -Five minutes. -[ Group Work ] -30 seconds. All right. Time. So can I get a show of hands: How many of you are doing any kind of front-end testing at all. I'm just kind of curious. - -Automated front-end testing? - -Yeah, automated. With computers. Not visual. - -So not clicking on my browser and adjusting the windows? - -How many of you, like, do browser testing, essentially go through a bunch of browsers? Okay. That's good. Let's go the other way around. Let's start with this group over here. - -I haven't done a whole lot of automated browser testing but we have a new project—it's an open source project called Five By. So it uses a lot of those things up there, like selenium web driver JS, and you can use mocha type driver, and you can pick which browsers and you can kind of script it out like click on this, and scroll on there and validate where that's at. So our team's using that now it's relatively new. - -What was it called again? - -Five By. - -Like the word... - -Yeah, there's a space. But other than that, I think mocha testing type functions for me. - -We do unit testing, but mostly for regressions, so we don't accidentally wipe out some functionality that we chain. We don't do—we do the thing where we look at the site in browsers but we don't do it automatically. - -Who was using in-browser testing, or automated in-browser testing? There were some hands over here. Can we hear from some of you? Yeah. - -Dang it. So we use Casper JS with PhantomJS and we just do it for core functionality to make sure it can run. So somebody would log in, post a comment. We have a special story written about a tree or something. But we have 9,000 comments now because it's a comment every day or something. But I would say it probably covers maybe 5% of our code base technology it's super important that it works, the codebase, but the vast majority of the stuff, we just leave up to our, like, API unit testing on the backend to make sure that we get the correct data across. - -I have one. - -One more comment, maybe. - -Tape plus Browserify. - -Browserify is dead in the water. - -Tape plus something else. - -Tape is amazing. - -That's a whole nother discussion. We'll get to that one. Test ling. Testling is dead in the water, which I spent a lot of time, big time. So let's just go over that group, any awesome stuff? - -I like Leave Require, JSS a lot. So I like Squire, so you can combine that with many of the runners, but I'm huge with Tape, also. - -We talked about the team that didn't have the technical know-how to stay on top of their tests where the team would fall behind not necessarily because they want to, but because they have members where it's not their priority or it's hard to make it a priority. - -Probably our most-tested stuff are our CMS tools that are written front-end client stuff. We have a lot of testing for those but the user-end stuff is not very tested a lot because it changes so much and you just build it one month and you're like, I want something different and you're just like, ugh, you throw that away. - -We test for style on some projects, also that we know that are going to long-living. So like pipe it is—pie flakes on our window apps. - -I don't know if this applies to this room but if there's any audience that isn't the general public, we anti-test and we support this, this will work in Chrome, and if you don't have Chrome open and install it, then it will work. And that saves a ton of time in that group and we would rather go to bat with a company's IT department and their restrictions and we have gotten Chrome to the people in these giant, immobile institutions and that feels really good. Way better than testing. Hah! - -I love it. - -All right. You guys over here? - -Anything to add? - -Nothing to add. - -One thing that was interesting that you were saying, like doing manual testing. - -Yeah, we do manual regression testing. We actually do testing. We set aside the data for the push. So two days before the release, the data we want to push. We set aside in a room, 30 minutes to an hour. - -You run scripts? Yeah, we run a script and we just check it off on a spreadsheet. We'll do it two days in a row. Two days before the sprint and then we'll push on Wednesday night, just to fix what we've found. And if we don't find anything to fix we don't test on Wednesday. - -We do selenium for pages that we don't work too much. Yeah, I don't know. Some pages we're not developing on. So like—so we're never going to speak with a developer. We're never going to see them. So we're going to see if there's a 500 there at some point. So it's never going to be an issue. - -Let's just skip it and we'll come back. - -We're going to skip interface frameworks because I think we've touched on that. But I think we're going to go to build systems because I think that's one where people can have a little more... so Ron Rockily, makefiles. What do you got? - -And if there's people in the group that don't know what these are, that should be your first question: Why are they good? Why do people use them? -[ Group Work ] -All right. I don't want to keep talking about this probably for the next 20 minutes at least. We're going to cut it off and say we want to talk about other stuff, too. Let's start with the middle table because that's where I was just talking to people. - -So, I mean, give me a highlight. - -Uh... - -Automation is great. We don't care what it is. -[ Laughter ] - -Honestly we don't care. Some Grunt, and Gulp, some MPM scripts. - -Bower. - -Whatever works. Whatever works for you. - -Sales.js. - -Sails—SAILS. That's a good way to start a project. - -Hey, trying to make the Chaos Monkey for the browser. - -That's fuck JS, isn't it? - -Any other thoughts? - -Mimed? - -It's kind of all of those things. - -What's Middleman? - -It's front-end based on Rails. - -It's a static site generator but it doesn't have to be a static site generator, you can do other stuff as well. But it scaffolds out your code. It does all the automation shit for you. It comes with compass and SASS. And if you want to do LESS, you can do LESS, it can handle any templating language. All the Javascript compilation. - -So we shouldn't use anything else. - -If you're building static sites, yeah. If you're a fucking, long-form feature that's not Snowfall, I would definitely use that. Integrates with spreadsheets, APIs, it's rad. - -How much more do you get -- - -It's like Jekyll if you don't like blah. - -It sounded like our overall thing was that Grunt is a pain in the ass to write, so we prefer Gulp. - -I agree with what you're saying, anything you're using is, is good. Whatever works for you is the right answer. That's my personal thought. I prefer Gulp to Grunt but I have no judgment for anything anybody says. - -I never—we never used collaborative before -- - -Fabric is Python—deployment stuff. Python based. - -I heard somebody say that it's whatever you picked first. - -Yeah. - -It's sort of true, right? - -But somebody else picked first. And then you're scrambling. - -How about y'all? - -We like to write—it's a lot nicer to write Gulp than it is to write Grunt, we haven't used fat files or broccoli. (phonetic) it's kind of like we love Travis to run—to do deployments for us. Just because we do everything on GitHub. And Travis is great for that. And it's also free if you're doing that. - -I've also started using Web pack. You can use it in Gulp, too, if you just use Gulp for compiling and building, you can do that but it's kind of got a nice, if you're doing—not static, but a React, or an Angular app, it has a dev server that's nice. And react has a hotloader, so you can change your JSX stuff and it would compile it and just load it right in the browser. And so it keeps your state if you have a search and you have search results, just change the search result templates without having to load. It's kind of nice. - -It is somewhat picky about what it will hotload into the configuration of webpack is not simple but the dev server is pretty nice. - -What about you all? - -We use Forman and pack files. Although we are a Python share. - -All right. Should we move onto the next thing? We're going to talk about client-side Javascript frameworks, which again, would be one that we can—probably had a lot of reaction to. And there's probably been a new framework that's come out during this conference. - -Right now. - -During this talk. - -So five minutes. - -All right. Time. All right. I think we'll start over there. What do you got? - -We've got two React fans and I like Marionette/Backbone. So yeah, I would say that we've all played with all of them in some capacity and I think that some of the—there were some Angular nuances that led some people to React and I just moved from Backbone to marionette because I was tired of bringing. - -And React, more specifically is more flexible, as well. - -What's that? - -Flexible. Which is another. - -It's like a he pattern, more or less. - -There's like 30 flex libraries and within, like, a three month span you'll go from experimental to four versions to be deprecated. - -Flux. - -They're in flux? - -Oh, it sucked. We had a bad—we called it the "lost sprint." So you save yourself time. - -Was flux the one that -- - -So don't use flexible, is that the takeaway? Was the consensus to not use flexible? - -No, flexible was the one that met our needs for routing. - -Flummox. That was the one. - -What about the middle group over here? - -One React, one Angular and one I love Backbone and underscore. - -But the Angular one, I use it, it's fine. It's just fine. It's not great. It's a lot of magic and really hard to debug but, you know, when you want something quick it's nice. - -I mean, so yeah, Backbone and Underscore are so much of what I do is with data. So having a model and then you write a controller for it and then you attach it to a view and then you've got a really beautiful—that's how you're supposed to write Javascript so it forces you to write really, really nice Javascript and it gets people away from doing just a shitton of jQuery selectors and really actually thinking about how those things interact. - -How about you guys over here? - -Angular makes me feel dirty. - -Plus one to marionette. - -I mean, for me, I'm also like, in 192 Backbone camp. But for a lot of things that I do, or at least—we don't lean them if we don't have to lean on them. We generate HTML, not having to loop through things. And put them together in a way that's very similar to Javascript. So unless it has to be a really dynamic app we try to cut out the mimed in this case. And not pull those in unless we have to and that helps us performance wise. - -Because I would love to use ember. Because ember is pure fucking magic but it's also a fucking huge performance hit. - -But not anymore. - -But the question is, is ember fast yet? - -One? - -What for what? - -Ember fans? - -I love it. It's fucking pure magic but I can't justify it. - -It looks like they're hiring. - -How about you guys over here? Some Angular fans, right? Or users? - -More React now. - -Yeah. - -So, and at the new Wall Street Journal home page uses React. We're using it for the Market Watch home page project that we've put up. - -We use it are reflux—another "flux" in conjunction with React router which was not too bad but probably there's a better one out already. - -There's a new version of React Router that's coming out next week. - -Done, boom. - -And then the second version in two months, it's changed everything. - -I know the guy who writes it. He lives in Utah. - -And it's a great framework that works but they're still figuring everything out. It's kind of ridiculous. - -Also, I will add that I'll still write Backbone occasionally and I write it because I never have to worry about not knowing something about it that would throw me off like in Angular or React. And so you can be sure of Backbone. - -And just Underscore gives you so many tools. It's almost like jQuery. JQuery is the best regex tool ever invented. Just don't write some fucking regex function, use jQuery. And handlebars with underscore, it's just so... beautiful. - -All right. How much time do we have? - -What time do we go to? We can squeeze it in probably, if you don't mind going late. Go right up until 3:00. You can bail if you want but we're going to talk about module loaders. - -So we're going to go through module loaders, maybe not the same as architecture stuff. But so, five minutes. Go. - -I've never been able to get one of those fucking things to work in a CMS. -[ Group Work ] -All right. We're going to call this right now because looks like people are leaving for the next session. Any other thoughts about module loaders? - -Browserify. But once modules get to browsers natively, that's when we're going to use them then. Provided that it's good. I don't know. It could be awful. - -We have some Require stuff in production right now. Babelify, I guess. - -Thoughts over here? - -Require. The ease of shimming things is my favorite. Mapping, and doing other shims and stuff I think is very intuitive. It works with my brain. Yeah. - -Anyone using Webpack? I heard you guys were talking, or were excited about it. Has anybody put that into use? - -I've used it and I've used Browserify before and I really like the Browserify system better and I'm worried that everyone is starting to use Webpack and Browserify is going to not, sort of, have a huge userbase. - -Also, like, the big dig on Require that I would have is that it has the slowest builds off all of those things because every other one of those has a thing where it can sort of smart-build the pieces that have been changed and Require, it's all or nothing if you're actually building it. - -Any other thoughts? - -All right. Well, I guess that's it. I think that wraps it up. - -We'll have the notes on the etherpad, if you want to see, hopefully you learned some good things or, you know, have vindicated some of your decisions, probably. - -Cool. - -Thanks for coming, everybody and having your lunch with us. +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/frontendtools/index.html +--- + +# What (Front-End) Tools Do You Use? + +### Session Facilitator(s): Alan Palazzolo, Justin Heideman + +### Day & Time: Friday, 2-2:45pm + +### Room: Thomas Swain + +Hey, everyone. My name is Allan, I work at WNYC. + +And I'm Justin and I work at NPR. + +NPR, Minnesota. So we wanted to gather people together and just sort of talk in small groups about the front end tools that you use. So since we mostly build stuff that's on the web, we all have experiences using different tools and we all have opinions about that, and why we do those things. + +So a few things to keep in mind: Please respect each other. This can be a very touchy subject for some people. Some people have very strong opinions about tools. We want to keep that to a minimum. It's not really about what's better; it's about sharing your experiences some of those decisions that go into those experiences. And speak one at a time, which you've probably heard in other sessions which means make sure that everyone shares their opinions. + +So we're going to do a series of discussions. We've got a timer, so it's going to be short discussions about topics of tools. So you're going to talk in your small groups. We're going to report back. There's an etherpad over there. If you want to take notes, that would be awesome. I'm going to try to take notes as well be when we report back. But more help is better. That's it. + +That's it. Yeah. So we're going to cover six different topics so it's going to be definitely a bit of a lightning round and we have a list of main questions that we'll sort of come up with. What tools do you use for category, and why, what I was would you be scratching by other tools that you didn't choose. Why? And what do you want to know if other people have experiences to use a tool that somebody in your group can know about. We would like, to hear about that, too. So some general questions that are a little bit more specific. So some of the things that you might think about about a tool like how do you get started. You can see them all listed there. So all right, are you ready? The first one, I think we're going to talk about CSS pre-processors. So you two people over there, you might want to join that table over to get kind of a critical mass so you have a four equally sized groups there. So the way this is going to work, we're going to give you five minutes so discuss CSS pre-processors. We have some of the more common ones here. Maybe you don't use any pre-processor and you might want to talk about that. + +Also if you don't know what something is, that's a perfectly fine opinion/thing to talk about, right? You can be like what are these things. Hopefully someone in the groups knows what they are. So talk about why they exist. Why do people use them, why you might use them, that sort of thing. + +All right. So I'm going to start the timer, five minutes, and we're going to lightning through this stuff. So start. +[ Group Work ] +One more minute. + +Five seconds. All right. So we're going going to lightning this guy up. So can I just go around to each group and can each group talk about one thing that they learned? So I'm going to start with this group over here because it's closest to me. So what was the takeaway from your discussion? + +We wanted to use LESS or SASS. We don't want to write raw CSS. + +What does that mean? + +We want to recommend a compiler. + +We don't want to go nuts with the programming that you can do with SASS or...? + +So keep it simple in the SASS? Fix some of the syntactical stuff in CSS but not necessarily write a whole new, you know, Turing complete language? + +Never mix them up. + +What about you guys over there? I'm pointing in the middle. + +We're kind of a SASS table over here and we just kind of can were talking about taking it one step further and taking out the middleman and building a template that can use SASS integration and all those other things but SASS. + +And Compass. + +And Compass, I I can't actually remember. It's sort of a mix-in for SASS, right? + +It's actually an import library. It's a Bootstrap grid, you can import transitions library and get really granular transitions. You can import mix-ins. Under it's just for importing stylesheets to get you off the ground really quickly. So if you didn't want to screw around with forms, you can just export compass forms and have a really nice compass form style. And it's all modular, too. So you can import lots of modular scale and get a lot of great import on your site. + +It's kind of like a standard library per language. + +How about you guys over there? + +I think we decided that we had to use SASS. + +SASS? + +A lot of us, we don't use anything. We just do straight CSS but... that's pretty much... + +We're launching a redesign where we're using SASS but it's not on our site yet. + +Any pros, cons with or without SASS? + +I think for us, the tool chain up, the scratch was overall a pain in the projects, but some questions about the deployment for us. + +And let's go to our final group over here. + +We're kind of a SASS table, too. + +Oh. + +I love all of you. + +Sounds like some experience with Bourbon. + +Anybody have experience SASS versus -- + +Don't fuck around with language syntax. Things need to be opened and closed, you need periods at the end of your sentences. Let's just do this right. + +And you can kind of then, it's easier to learn 'cause it's, like, it feels like we're doing CSS and you can just do straight CSS and it's fine. So you don't have to change. + +So most people are talking about SASS. + +All right. We're obviously not going to, like, fully get into these topics in five minutes. So please feel free to take those discussions further. + +All right, so the next one is I don't think either of us have a ton of experience with and we're hoping that some of you might be able to help with that. Front-end testing. + +So this is where everyone gets to admit they don't test, right? +[ Laughter ] + +And then we can talk about why we don't test. And what, sort of, tools you've looked at, or possibly have thought about in doing those things, or not doing those things. And also, if you want to try designate someone as a notetaker, that will help to report back, just to be a little bit more concise. + +PhantomJS, or PhantomCSS? + +PhantomJS, sorry. + +I was just doing this off the top of my head. All right, so go. + +Five minutes. +[ Group Work ] +30 seconds. All right. Time. So can I get a show of hands: How many of you are doing any kind of front-end testing at all. I'm just kind of curious. + +Automated front-end testing? + +Yeah, automated. With computers. Not visual. + +So not clicking on my browser and adjusting the windows? + +How many of you, like, do browser testing, essentially go through a bunch of browsers? Okay. That's good. Let's go the other way around. Let's start with this group over here. + +I haven't done a whole lot of automated browser testing but we have a new project—it's an open source project called Five By. So it uses a lot of those things up there, like selenium web driver JS, and you can use mocha type driver, and you can pick which browsers and you can kind of script it out like click on this, and scroll on there and validate where that's at. So our team's using that now it's relatively new. + +What was it called again? + +Five By. + +Like the word... + +Yeah, there's a space. But other than that, I think mocha testing type functions for me. + +We do unit testing, but mostly for regressions, so we don't accidentally wipe out some functionality that we chain. We don't do—we do the thing where we look at the site in browsers but we don't do it automatically. + +Who was using in-browser testing, or automated in-browser testing? There were some hands over here. Can we hear from some of you? Yeah. + +Dang it. So we use Casper JS with PhantomJS and we just do it for core functionality to make sure it can run. So somebody would log in, post a comment. We have a special story written about a tree or something. But we have 9,000 comments now because it's a comment every day or something. But I would say it probably covers maybe 5% of our code base technology it's super important that it works, the codebase, but the vast majority of the stuff, we just leave up to our, like, API unit testing on the backend to make sure that we get the correct data across. + +I have one. + +One more comment, maybe. + +Tape plus Browserify. + +Browserify is dead in the water. + +Tape plus something else. + +Tape is amazing. + +That's a whole nother discussion. We'll get to that one. Test ling. Testling is dead in the water, which I spent a lot of time, big time. So let's just go over that group, any awesome stuff? + +I like Leave Require, JSS a lot. So I like Squire, so you can combine that with many of the runners, but I'm huge with Tape, also. + +We talked about the team that didn't have the technical know-how to stay on top of their tests where the team would fall behind not necessarily because they want to, but because they have members where it's not their priority or it's hard to make it a priority. + +Probably our most-tested stuff are our CMS tools that are written front-end client stuff. We have a lot of testing for those but the user-end stuff is not very tested a lot because it changes so much and you just build it one month and you're like, I want something different and you're just like, ugh, you throw that away. + +We test for style on some projects, also that we know that are going to long-living. So like pipe it is—pie flakes on our window apps. + +I don't know if this applies to this room but if there's any audience that isn't the general public, we anti-test and we support this, this will work in Chrome, and if you don't have Chrome open and install it, then it will work. And that saves a ton of time in that group and we would rather go to bat with a company's IT department and their restrictions and we have gotten Chrome to the people in these giant, immobile institutions and that feels really good. Way better than testing. Hah! + +I love it. + +All right. You guys over here? + +Anything to add? + +Nothing to add. + +One thing that was interesting that you were saying, like doing manual testing. + +Yeah, we do manual regression testing. We actually do testing. We set aside the data for the push. So two days before the release, the data we want to push. We set aside in a room, 30 minutes to an hour. + +You run scripts? Yeah, we run a script and we just check it off on a spreadsheet. We'll do it two days in a row. Two days before the sprint and then we'll push on Wednesday night, just to fix what we've found. And if we don't find anything to fix we don't test on Wednesday. + +We do selenium for pages that we don't work too much. Yeah, I don't know. Some pages we're not developing on. So like—so we're never going to speak with a developer. We're never going to see them. So we're going to see if there's a 500 there at some point. So it's never going to be an issue. + +Let's just skip it and we'll come back. + +We're going to skip interface frameworks because I think we've touched on that. But I think we're going to go to build systems because I think that's one where people can have a little more... so Ron Rockily, makefiles. What do you got? + +And if there's people in the group that don't know what these are, that should be your first question: Why are they good? Why do people use them? +[ Group Work ] +All right. I don't want to keep talking about this probably for the next 20 minutes at least. We're going to cut it off and say we want to talk about other stuff, too. Let's start with the middle table because that's where I was just talking to people. + +So, I mean, give me a highlight. + +Uh... + +Automation is great. We don't care what it is. +[ Laughter ] + +Honestly we don't care. Some Grunt, and Gulp, some MPM scripts. + +Bower. + +Whatever works. Whatever works for you. + +Sales.js. + +Sails—SAILS. That's a good way to start a project. + +Hey, trying to make the Chaos Monkey for the browser. + +That's fuck JS, isn't it? + +Any other thoughts? + +Mimed? + +It's kind of all of those things. + +What's Middleman? + +It's front-end based on Rails. + +It's a static site generator but it doesn't have to be a static site generator, you can do other stuff as well. But it scaffolds out your code. It does all the automation shit for you. It comes with compass and SASS. And if you want to do LESS, you can do LESS, it can handle any templating language. All the Javascript compilation. + +So we shouldn't use anything else. + +If you're building static sites, yeah. If you're a fucking, long-form feature that's not Snowfall, I would definitely use that. Integrates with spreadsheets, APIs, it's rad. + +How much more do you get -- + +It's like Jekyll if you don't like blah. + +It sounded like our overall thing was that Grunt is a pain in the ass to write, so we prefer Gulp. + +I agree with what you're saying, anything you're using is, is good. Whatever works for you is the right answer. That's my personal thought. I prefer Gulp to Grunt but I have no judgment for anything anybody says. + +I never—we never used collaborative before -- + +Fabric is Python—deployment stuff. Python based. + +I heard somebody say that it's whatever you picked first. + +Yeah. + +It's sort of true, right? + +But somebody else picked first. And then you're scrambling. + +How about y'all? + +We like to write—it's a lot nicer to write Gulp than it is to write Grunt, we haven't used fat files or broccoli. (phonetic) it's kind of like we love Travis to run—to do deployments for us. Just because we do everything on GitHub. And Travis is great for that. And it's also free if you're doing that. + +I've also started using Web pack. You can use it in Gulp, too, if you just use Gulp for compiling and building, you can do that but it's kind of got a nice, if you're doing—not static, but a React, or an Angular app, it has a dev server that's nice. And react has a hotloader, so you can change your JSX stuff and it would compile it and just load it right in the browser. And so it keeps your state if you have a search and you have search results, just change the search result templates without having to load. It's kind of nice. + +It is somewhat picky about what it will hotload into the configuration of webpack is not simple but the dev server is pretty nice. + +What about you all? + +We use Forman and pack files. Although we are a Python share. + +All right. Should we move onto the next thing? We're going to talk about client-side Javascript frameworks, which again, would be one that we can—probably had a lot of reaction to. And there's probably been a new framework that's come out during this conference. + +Right now. + +During this talk. + +So five minutes. + +All right. Time. All right. I think we'll start over there. What do you got? + +We've got two React fans and I like Marionette/Backbone. So yeah, I would say that we've all played with all of them in some capacity and I think that some of the—there were some Angular nuances that led some people to React and I just moved from Backbone to marionette because I was tired of bringing. + +And React, more specifically is more flexible, as well. + +What's that? + +Flexible. Which is another. + +It's like a he pattern, more or less. + +There's like 30 flex libraries and within, like, a three month span you'll go from experimental to four versions to be deprecated. + +Flux. + +They're in flux? + +Oh, it sucked. We had a bad—we called it the "lost sprint." So you save yourself time. + +Was flux the one that -- + +So don't use flexible, is that the takeaway? Was the consensus to not use flexible? + +No, flexible was the one that met our needs for routing. + +Flummox. That was the one. + +What about the middle group over here? + +One React, one Angular and one I love Backbone and underscore. + +But the Angular one, I use it, it's fine. It's just fine. It's not great. It's a lot of magic and really hard to debug but, you know, when you want something quick it's nice. + +I mean, so yeah, Backbone and Underscore are so much of what I do is with data. So having a model and then you write a controller for it and then you attach it to a view and then you've got a really beautiful—that's how you're supposed to write Javascript so it forces you to write really, really nice Javascript and it gets people away from doing just a shitton of jQuery selectors and really actually thinking about how those things interact. + +How about you guys over here? + +Angular makes me feel dirty. + +Plus one to marionette. + +I mean, for me, I'm also like, in 192 Backbone camp. But for a lot of things that I do, or at least—we don't lean them if we don't have to lean on them. We generate HTML, not having to loop through things. And put them together in a way that's very similar to Javascript. So unless it has to be a really dynamic app we try to cut out the mimed in this case. And not pull those in unless we have to and that helps us performance wise. + +Because I would love to use ember. Because ember is pure fucking magic but it's also a fucking huge performance hit. + +But not anymore. + +But the question is, is ember fast yet? + +One? + +What for what? + +Ember fans? + +I love it. It's fucking pure magic but I can't justify it. + +It looks like they're hiring. + +How about you guys over here? Some Angular fans, right? Or users? + +More React now. + +Yeah. + +So, and at the new Wall Street Journal home page uses React. We're using it for the Market Watch home page project that we've put up. + +We use it are reflux—another "flux" in conjunction with React router which was not too bad but probably there's a better one out already. + +There's a new version of React Router that's coming out next week. + +Done, boom. + +And then the second version in two months, it's changed everything. + +I know the guy who writes it. He lives in Utah. + +And it's a great framework that works but they're still figuring everything out. It's kind of ridiculous. + +Also, I will add that I'll still write Backbone occasionally and I write it because I never have to worry about not knowing something about it that would throw me off like in Angular or React. And so you can be sure of Backbone. + +And just Underscore gives you so many tools. It's almost like jQuery. JQuery is the best regex tool ever invented. Just don't write some fucking regex function, use jQuery. And handlebars with underscore, it's just so... beautiful. + +All right. How much time do we have? + +What time do we go to? We can squeeze it in probably, if you don't mind going late. Go right up until 3:00. You can bail if you want but we're going to talk about module loaders. + +So we're going to go through module loaders, maybe not the same as architecture stuff. But so, five minutes. Go. + +I've never been able to get one of those fucking things to work in a CMS. +[ Group Work ] +All right. We're going to call this right now because looks like people are leaving for the next session. Any other thoughts about module loaders? + +Browserify. But once modules get to browsers natively, that's when we're going to use them then. Provided that it's good. I don't know. It could be awful. + +We have some Require stuff in production right now. Babelify, I guess. + +Thoughts over here? + +Require. The ease of shimming things is my favorite. Mapping, and doing other shims and stuff I think is very intuitive. It works with my brain. Yeah. + +Anyone using Webpack? I heard you guys were talking, or were excited about it. Has anybody put that into use? + +I've used it and I've used Browserify before and I really like the Browserify system better and I'm worried that everyone is starting to use Webpack and Browserify is going to not, sort of, have a huge userbase. + +Also, like, the big dig on Require that I would have is that it has the slowest builds off all of those things because every other one of those has a thing where it can sort of smart-build the pieces that have been changed and Require, it's all or nothing if you're actually building it. + +Any other thoughts? + +All right. Well, I guess that's it. I think that wraps it up. + +We'll have the notes on the etherpad, if you want to see, hopefully you learned some good things or, you know, have vindicated some of your decisions, probably. + +Cool. + +Thanks for coming, everybody and having your lunch with us. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015Hiring.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015Hiring.md index 9952dbf7..714a50b7 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015Hiring.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015Hiring.md @@ -1,360 +1,343 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/hiring/index.html ---- - -# Recruiting and Hiring People, Not Wishlists - -### Session Facilitator(s): Erika Owens, Helga Salinas, Ted Han - -### Day & Time: Thursday, 4:30-5:30pm - -### Room: Thomas Swain - - -So I think there are still folks grabbing their caffeine and snacks, so we'll probably wait a couple more minutes and then get started. - -Hi everybody: There are—we've got enough people that we could actually like feasibly form a circle and actually talk in a group, so we're thinking about doing that. Would you guys mind coming over this way with some chairs? - -Well, I think we could stand, maybe. Yeah, yeah, we'll stand just for the start and so we're like moving and awake a little bit. And then you'll be able to sit again, promise. - -The promise is sitting later. - -Yeah, circle, we can bring it over here. - -Oh, we're doing a circle of trust? - -Just a circle. - -Duck duck goose? Sure. - -And dodgeball. - -I don't think I've been in a circle since freshman year of college. I'm excited. - -Why don't we get started? - -Well, welcome, three of us convened this discussion and we're really happy for you to join us. So I'm Erika. - -I'm Helga. - -And I'm Ted and so a lot of this discussion kind of came around like a lot of—hiring is sort of a fraught discussion from basically any angle you want to take it, and especially given the way that like news and tech are often approached ostensibly from very different angles, and so there have been a lot of different discussions that have cropped around right around the SRCCON pitches were going a and this session ended up getting put together so we can discuss this from a different angles and from my perspective, DocumentCloud has been hiring over the past year, and trying to figure out how to get that stuff right, especially since we operate as a remote organization, too, it's been an interesting and challenging thing from my perspective, you know, having also been an applicant in the past, and of course we've gone through a bunch of discussion of this from the applicant angle, too. - -I've been job-searching for the past year and I've been going through the sphere of how to present myself as a journalist or as a person who has a lot of experience with tech since it's been like a balance about how do I pitch for myself, who do I reach out to, how do I reach out to this person and how do I cover all of my different passions you know, using buzzwords and key words. - -Yeah, and I have come at this from a few different angles, we have a fellowship program and have done a lot of work in thinking about how to do outreach and make that process inclusive, and so really excited to talk more about all the of different angles of this process. There was also a session earlier today in newsroom Nadsat that was talking about language used in job postings, in interviews, in different parts of this process, so we're really excited to dive in a little bit more on the hiring piece and so, just to give you an overview of what we're going to be doing in the next hour or so, we're going to start with this activity where you are all standing. Just to get ta little bit of a sense about the perps of where we're all coming from in terms of being and applicant or someone being in a hiring role. We're then going to move to a small group activity to talk about some of the things that have made it easier or more difficult to interview for a position, or recruit people for a position, and then we're going to come together with some recommendations of things that we can do to improve this process, both from the perspective of an applicant and of a hiring manager, so there are some ambitious plans for this hour but we hope you're up for it and we're really excited to have you in the room, so to start, we were going to do an activity that is meant to visualize the perspectives that we're coming from, so we're going to shout out some questions, and if that question applies to you, you can step into the circle. And then we'll be able to visualize who all this has applied to, so we have a couple of questions in mind, and then we're also really excited to hear questions that might arise to you that you might be interested in getting a read on in the room. - -So I think we can start with the first question, which would be have you ever been a job applicant? - -OK. Great. So we can step back out. And then to the next kind of perspective on things, have you ever been in a hiring role? - -OK. - -You want the list? - -Oh, sure, yeah, if you want to read off the list. - -And then we had a bunch of other questions, too, like have you ever read through a job description that you thought was interesting, but the bullet point requirements didn't make any expense? - -15 years experience. - -Five years-plus Node.js. - -And likewise have you read through job descriptions that you thought were interesting but you didn't fit all the bullet points they had listed? Now, how many people applied anyway? - -OK, cool. - -Now, how many people here have actually had to write a job description? - -OK. And if you guys have things that you'd want to throw out, too, if you have any questions that you want to ask a group of other people who have been applicants or we can keep on going through these, but keep in mind we'll be going back. Have you ever hired a person who actually fit all of the bulletins that you put in the job post? - -Wow. - -Cool. - -Have you hired—have you ever hired for those who have hired, have you ever hired a person who didn't fit all of the bullets in your job posting? - -OK. - -If you've had to write a job posting, did HR have to approve it? - - -Not now. - -OK. So does anybody else have anything they'd want to throw out and ask at this point? - -Have you ever read a job description and at the end of it had no idea what the person was to be doing day to day? - -OK, anybody else? - -Who currently hires by trial? - -What do you mean by trial? - -Like application project, some sort of work experience project. - - -Yeah, right, paid. - -We do like a test. We contract work and then hire. - -Yeah, that's probably the same idea. - -Who's like not gotten the kinds of job applicants they wanted from an application they put into the world? - -OK. - -OK. Now I've got a question then. Who has posted a job like a job description on a service that you had to pay for? - -What service? - -Any of them. Like. - -I'm just curious. - -Authentic Jobs, journalismjobs.com. - -We work remotely. - -Yeah, that's the best one. - -Stack overflow careers. - -Beehive. - -How many people have actually hired somebody off of one of those lists? - -OK. - -How many people have hired somebody off of a mailing list or sort of community group that you're part of? - -How many people have hired someone from a conference? - -Hey, guys, how's it going? Helga. - -I was going to ask how many people are here more or less explicitly for that purpose? - -To hire or to be hired? - -How many people have been hired from a conference like this? - -Huh. - -For people who are trying to hire for diverse applicants how many people have contacted cultural affinity groups or cultural organizations to do the hiring? - -To do the hiring or to. - -To help, yeah. - -Yeah, I did that. - -What does that look like? I'm very curious? So if you are looking to diversify your engineers, did you contact the national society of black or Latino engineers, if you are looking to hire more queer journalists, did you contact—how many people have hired from those places? - -Hm. - -Sometimes I ask them to tell me. I don't know in all cases. - -Who has shared their interview questions with applicants ahead of time? - -We kind of, yeah. - -That one's complicated, because I mean like what I've done is gone through a couple of rounds and one of them I actually want very explicitly to say that I'm I want to have a conversation about this specific thing. - -Who's lost a good candidate because the interview process was horrible? - -Oh, my God. - -Who's now satisfied with their hiring process? - - -They're all in the other sessions. - - -Yeah, this is the self-help group. Who's had a satisfying experience as an applicant? - - -Can I step back? You haven't had a single satisfying experience? - - -No. - -That's sad. I want to hug you right now. - -Any final questions? - -I have a reverse of a question that was asked which is as an applicant, who has begun to look on that company with sort of like a bad overshadow because of the hiring process? - - -For people who have been hired or hiring, how many of you have gotten your employment through one to two degrees of personal friends relationships? I know someone who knows someone. - - -I was going to ask you how many have hired without an actual job posting because you knew someone? - -So how many of you have had to give advice to somebody else about either hiring or being an applicant? - -How many people have hired someone from a competitor? - - - -The flip side: How many have hired from outside the industry? - -Which industry? - - -All right, anybody else have questions? How many people have found a job through an affinity job based on diversity, like some diversity that you identify with has a specific group that encourages members' postings to spread them wider among each other. - -That's upsetting. - -The other question I have is how many of you could belong to an affinity group who don't actually belong to one? - -Right, like I'm not part of AJAM, for example, I could be, and that's I guess a thing for me. More than anything else. - - -How many people have been hired cold without any like personal relationship by an organization? - -How many of you have come out of an interview not knowing what they were looking for? - -How many people have been hired and still not figured out why you were hired? - -OK, how many people have been hired for a job and ended up doing something different than what they thought they were being hired for? - -Oh, all of us. - -How many people have worked in a place where the job listing they saw was different than what they felt their team needed? - - -How many people could recite their current job description? - - -I wrote mine. - -I mean I -- - -So. - -I think it would take a while. - -Like you know it off the top of my head and -- - -How many people have a job description? - -How many people's reviews match their job description? Oh, awesome. - -I'd say mine does. - -Yeah? Yeah? Everyone that works for ProPublica, you know what you're getting. Cool. - -That's actually a good transition point, yeah. - -Yeah, yeah, so if everyone wants to take a seat again we'll transition into the next activity. Thank you so much for getting up, moving around a little bit and sharing those questions which also had within them some great tips. OK, all right, so there's a mic and it's very loud. So the next half hour, the basically the bulk of the rest of the session is going to be time for you to chat with the other people in the room. We really want to hear what your experiences have been. So those questions kind of came from the applicant perspective and the hiring manager perspective, so it would be great if you could get into groups to represent one of those perspectives. So you can either like move into different groups or just like collectively as a table decide which perspective you want to like speak from in this next activity. - -But we should explain why, too. - -Yeah, so what we want to surface is things that make hiring more challenging from a hiring manager's perspective, and things that make hiring easier from a hiring manager's perspective and on the flip side, things that make an application process more difficult for an applicant or things that make an application process easier for an applicant, so we kind of like want to branch those out, so the so if you can either pick for your table or move into groups, I don't know -- - -Do you want to just say one side is one and one -- - -Yeah, yeah, that's probably the simplest route. - -Y, of course there's a grid of 3X3. So we'll see people interested in the hiring manager's perspective over here and people are interested from the manager's perspective over here, and what we're looking for is what are things in the process that you've gone through that have made the experience considerably poorer or better when working with like an applicant from the perspective of a hiring manager or vice versa. Like we talked about things like job descriptions being unclear, right, that's obviously a thing that makes being an applicant hard, versus things that have been good experience for you from the perspective of you understood what the job posting was about and you had a good interviewing experience or things like that. - -So if anyone wants to move, if there's anyone who wants to talk from the applicant perspective that wants to move over to this side or move over to this side, or is everyone is pretty good where they are, and it's not it's not meant to be a strict divide, just for like the purposes of where your head space is. Just for the purposes of this activity. So just to—just to frame the activity a little bit, first we're going to give you about 10 minutes to talk about things that maximize your experience. So if you're a hiring manager, things that improve the experience of being a hiring manager, things that improve the experience of posting jobs, doing outreach, focus on things that improve the experience and just brainstorm them. There's big post-its on each table, talk about things that improve that experience, same thing from the applicant point of view. After ten minutes we're going to switch over and brainstorm things that minimize that experience, things that make it more difficult as an applicant, but we're going to try to spend separate time on those things so you can really flesh out those thoughts. For right now, what makes your life easier as a hiring manager, what makes your life easier as an applicant, brainstorm time. - -[group activity] - -So just to give everybody a heads up, we've got about two minutes before we switch to the mic. So we're going to pass out another piece of paper where we talk about things that make it easier to be a hiring manager, and we're coming around for another ten minutes or so to talk about it. - -[group activity] - -Hi, everyone, thank you for researching, we have the last part of the exercise. So from your brainstorming of maximizing and minimizing whatever the experience is, narrow down two things that you can recommend to change this to. Two recommendations to change the experience, either on the employer side and on the applicant side, and each group is going to report back to a group as a whole, so you can provide a list that you could actually put in practice as an applicant or as an employer looking to fill a job. OK, so two things. - -You can just pick two. - -[group activity] - -OK, guys, one minute. - -[group activity] - -OK, everybody: So this is the show and tell part. So we're going to write down everybody's recommendations and I think we're actually going to start with folks from the stage left side of the room. So what did you guys end up discussing and coming up with? Feel free to you know -- - -Anyone! - -A clear concise jargonless empathetic process, you have to put all those adjectives in there. so one of the things we talked about a lot is a process for applicants being a process that you wouldn't want to go through but why are you putting other people through it? So there was no outreach. One things to talk about in terms of jargon is there are bad dating terms abound in applications so it's someone we want someone who's chill, we want a coding ninja, what the hell do you mean by that? What is the actual thing you want to do? Someone to contact? So when you are—like you will be speaking to a hiring manager or things about someone you're definitely trying to give that to. You have lovely description of like a really good user interface trying to apply a website that doesn't make sense, and if you're going to hire for things like fit and descriptions and culture, actually say what those are. - -That's a great suggestion. - -What is your culture that you are trying to. - -What is your culture? - - -And how often is that not there? - -Actual stuff about percentages and preferred that you had to make a point that women will not apply if they don't meet two out of 20, but descriptions if there are two things that they don't, they're not going to apply, whereas they should apply if they hit half. Personal experience, be clear about the duties and the things you actually want done and what you can teach, so sometimes they hire somebody who had a great degree and they were great on paper where actually what they needed was drill sergeant or people who are restaurants. - -So we were talking about networks and you can have two challenges where you were trying to hire within your network and you get the same kinds of candidates over and again or you don't get any candidates at all who were suitable for that, so you you have to be out actively recruiting, building trust, making sure people know who you are and if you are saying you are looking for diverse candidates you are actually walking the walk and not just talking the talk. - -What was our second one? - -predictability. - -Sure, so talking about creating a for the people hiring, especially if it's really important I think to create some form of predictability, so everything is documented, the questions you get, that you're going to ask are documented, you repeat that process over and over again, we have a person who actually shepherds the whole process and schedules the interviews so you don't have to be thinking about that all the time, so as the person is interviewing, it can disrupt your whole day, so instead, if you have a process, if you have documentation, it makes it really easy, you know what to expect, you know what you're getting into, and so just creating that ability makes it really, really easy to interview, it's a lot less stressful. - -Cool, thank you. And -- - -We talked about process, too, and one of the things we were talking about was having that documentation. Also make sure that you're evaluating more fairly than just like oh, this dude was cool, I want to have a beer with him, right? Like but one of the other things that I thought was great was interview like you work. So there are a lot of people in distributed teams over here and folks who've dealt with this sort of issue of culture fit in different ways, so I felt that was like a super-awesome suggestion. You guys are doing group interviews on the sly, they're doing trial projects, like there's a lot of cool ideas about that. Other stuff? - - -Cool, thanks. - -Just my own personal curiosity, now, one of the things that I always hear from like devs who end up going into places who have really tightly put together places like interviewing at Google is supposed to be hell, right, and that's partially because they have a really rigorous process and one part of the process you will end up with a person who's just like I'm just going to nit-pick everything you say, right so how would you avoid something like that where you've got a really well documented process but everybody is intentional in each of the steps when you actually go through it. - -Don't have people like that on your staff? - -Oh, right, culture problem fixed. - -Yeah, no assholes in our -- - -one thing we did that we have one person doing the interview and one person creating the interviewer. So we actually have just doing this, but it seems to be getting interesting, as well, so we're actually starting to borrow some of the Google process, where at the end of it you fill out a thing with like clear questions and answers so there's documentation of how the interview went but the second person is actually rating the interviewer whether they asked the questions the fair way, whether they brought in the own bias. - -You shouldn't be doing interviews one-on-one. It should be a group thing. - -We've always done it as groups but the second person now specifically is rating the interviewer. - -That's really cool. - -Yeah. So let's throw this open, does anybody have any questions? One of the things that kind of surprised me was that everybody agreed that this is like about process and improving process, which is kind of cool. - -I think one thing everybody said is cultural fit and I can't remember who tweeted it but it was such a great tweet, is that you want culture add and not culture fit and when you start thinking about that, that changes how you write your job descriptions, what you should be looking for and the weirder and the crazier are the ones that you want and then you start building your company, you get more of those people and then your networks grow and it all gets better. - -I'll say as a thank you, two things that I made myself notes I'm going to go back and change my job description as soon as I get home. One is I'm going to put in a sentence explicitly for building new products having teams that are diverse in a lot of perspectives is really important and just saying that we are trying to hire for diverse teams and we're looking for that and value that. And the other thing is going to be real clear is what is going to be the first step in the process, like if you reply you'll get a phone call. Whatever that next step is so that it's clear like what the thing is. - -Something we didn't talk about is the follow-up of like you send in your resume and fucking no reply or you do an interview and nobody ever calls you back. - -And one of the things is every single person gets a reply. - -It sucks when you just like click the button, though, and it sends out 300 dings all at once. - -I would love it if anyone sees great job descriptions or has a great experience if they would like be like hey, I interviewed here, it was awesome, or this is an awesome job description, I would love to see more examples of like right things. - -So if you guys wanted to email us, especially if you're like uncomfortable with being like, yeah, I saw this really awesome job posting. - -Yeah, right. If you see awesome things, I would love to see it. - -Feedback would be great, too. The competitiveness thing is one thing you always forget. It's like you need 10 years' experience, like kill that line and it tells you all of that right away and it's really great. - -It's called—text. - -No, I use a different one. It's a command line tool. - -That's a great transition, so what we were hoping for coming out of this is being able to like compile these resources and share them in a way that people can use them and reference them. Either in writing or in like follow-up presentations at other conferences, so if there's anyone who is interested in helping with that, like if you want to reach out to us, I mean I think the example of having job descriptions that people like is really good and that also makes me think about the other points in the process, like good rejection emails are like so critical to the point about maintaining relationships and building relationships with people, and so that might even be the kind of thing, like at each step in the process, like a good notification email or those types of things, so people have references that they can call upon in updating the processes that they're using. Cool. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. - -[session ended] +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/hiring/index.html +--- + +# Recruiting and Hiring People, Not Wishlists + +### Session Facilitator(s): Erika Owens, Helga Salinas, Ted Han + +### Day & Time: Thursday, 4:30-5:30pm + +### Room: Thomas Swain + +So I think there are still folks grabbing their caffeine and snacks, so we'll probably wait a couple more minutes and then get started. + +Hi everybody: There are—we've got enough people that we could actually like feasibly form a circle and actually talk in a group, so we're thinking about doing that. Would you guys mind coming over this way with some chairs? + +Well, I think we could stand, maybe. Yeah, yeah, we'll stand just for the start and so we're like moving and awake a little bit. And then you'll be able to sit again, promise. + +The promise is sitting later. + +Yeah, circle, we can bring it over here. + +Oh, we're doing a circle of trust? + +Just a circle. + +Duck duck goose? Sure. + +And dodgeball. + +I don't think I've been in a circle since freshman year of college. I'm excited. + +Why don't we get started? + +Well, welcome, three of us convened this discussion and we're really happy for you to join us. So I'm Erika. + +I'm Helga. + +And I'm Ted and so a lot of this discussion kind of came around like a lot of—hiring is sort of a fraught discussion from basically any angle you want to take it, and especially given the way that like news and tech are often approached ostensibly from very different angles, and so there have been a lot of different discussions that have cropped around right around the SRCCON pitches were going a and this session ended up getting put together so we can discuss this from a different angles and from my perspective, DocumentCloud has been hiring over the past year, and trying to figure out how to get that stuff right, especially since we operate as a remote organization, too, it's been an interesting and challenging thing from my perspective, you know, having also been an applicant in the past, and of course we've gone through a bunch of discussion of this from the applicant angle, too. + +I've been job-searching for the past year and I've been going through the sphere of how to present myself as a journalist or as a person who has a lot of experience with tech since it's been like a balance about how do I pitch for myself, who do I reach out to, how do I reach out to this person and how do I cover all of my different passions you know, using buzzwords and key words. + +Yeah, and I have come at this from a few different angles, we have a fellowship program and have done a lot of work in thinking about how to do outreach and make that process inclusive, and so really excited to talk more about all the of different angles of this process. There was also a session earlier today in newsroom Nadsat that was talking about language used in job postings, in interviews, in different parts of this process, so we're really excited to dive in a little bit more on the hiring piece and so, just to give you an overview of what we're going to be doing in the next hour or so, we're going to start with this activity where you are all standing. Just to get ta little bit of a sense about the perps of where we're all coming from in terms of being and applicant or someone being in a hiring role. We're then going to move to a small group activity to talk about some of the things that have made it easier or more difficult to interview for a position, or recruit people for a position, and then we're going to come together with some recommendations of things that we can do to improve this process, both from the perspective of an applicant and of a hiring manager, so there are some ambitious plans for this hour but we hope you're up for it and we're really excited to have you in the room, so to start, we were going to do an activity that is meant to visualize the perspectives that we're coming from, so we're going to shout out some questions, and if that question applies to you, you can step into the circle. And then we'll be able to visualize who all this has applied to, so we have a couple of questions in mind, and then we're also really excited to hear questions that might arise to you that you might be interested in getting a read on in the room. + +So I think we can start with the first question, which would be have you ever been a job applicant? + +OK. Great. So we can step back out. And then to the next kind of perspective on things, have you ever been in a hiring role? + +OK. + +You want the list? + +Oh, sure, yeah, if you want to read off the list. + +And then we had a bunch of other questions, too, like have you ever read through a job description that you thought was interesting, but the bullet point requirements didn't make any expense? + +15 years experience. + +Five years-plus Node.js. + +And likewise have you read through job descriptions that you thought were interesting but you didn't fit all the bullet points they had listed? Now, how many people applied anyway? + +OK, cool. + +Now, how many people here have actually had to write a job description? + +OK. And if you guys have things that you'd want to throw out, too, if you have any questions that you want to ask a group of other people who have been applicants or we can keep on going through these, but keep in mind we'll be going back. Have you ever hired a person who actually fit all of the bulletins that you put in the job post? + +Wow. + +Cool. + +Have you hired—have you ever hired for those who have hired, have you ever hired a person who didn't fit all of the bullets in your job posting? + +OK. + +If you've had to write a job posting, did HR have to approve it? + +Not now. + +OK. So does anybody else have anything they'd want to throw out and ask at this point? + +Have you ever read a job description and at the end of it had no idea what the person was to be doing day to day? + +OK, anybody else? + +Who currently hires by trial? + +What do you mean by trial? + +Like application project, some sort of work experience project. + +Yeah, right, paid. + +We do like a test. We contract work and then hire. + +Yeah, that's probably the same idea. + +Who's like not gotten the kinds of job applicants they wanted from an application they put into the world? + +OK. + +OK. Now I've got a question then. Who has posted a job like a job description on a service that you had to pay for? + +What service? + +Any of them. Like. + +I'm just curious. + +Authentic Jobs, journalismjobs.com. + +We work remotely. + +Yeah, that's the best one. + +Stack overflow careers. + +Beehive. + +How many people have actually hired somebody off of one of those lists? + +OK. + +How many people have hired somebody off of a mailing list or sort of community group that you're part of? + +How many people have hired someone from a conference? + +Hey, guys, how's it going? Helga. + +I was going to ask how many people are here more or less explicitly for that purpose? + +To hire or to be hired? + +How many people have been hired from a conference like this? + +Huh. + +For people who are trying to hire for diverse applicants how many people have contacted cultural affinity groups or cultural organizations to do the hiring? + +To do the hiring or to. + +To help, yeah. + +Yeah, I did that. + +What does that look like? I'm very curious? So if you are looking to diversify your engineers, did you contact the national society of black or Latino engineers, if you are looking to hire more queer journalists, did you contact—how many people have hired from those places? + +Hm. + +Sometimes I ask them to tell me. I don't know in all cases. + +Who has shared their interview questions with applicants ahead of time? + +We kind of, yeah. + +That one's complicated, because I mean like what I've done is gone through a couple of rounds and one of them I actually want very explicitly to say that I'm I want to have a conversation about this specific thing. + +Who's lost a good candidate because the interview process was horrible? + +Oh, my God. + +Who's now satisfied with their hiring process? + +They're all in the other sessions. + +Yeah, this is the self-help group. Who's had a satisfying experience as an applicant? + +Can I step back? You haven't had a single satisfying experience? + +No. + +That's sad. I want to hug you right now. + +Any final questions? + +I have a reverse of a question that was asked which is as an applicant, who has begun to look on that company with sort of like a bad overshadow because of the hiring process? + +For people who have been hired or hiring, how many of you have gotten your employment through one to two degrees of personal friends relationships? I know someone who knows someone. + +I was going to ask you how many have hired without an actual job posting because you knew someone? + +So how many of you have had to give advice to somebody else about either hiring or being an applicant? + +How many people have hired someone from a competitor? + +The flip side: How many have hired from outside the industry? + +Which industry? + +All right, anybody else have questions? How many people have found a job through an affinity job based on diversity, like some diversity that you identify with has a specific group that encourages members' postings to spread them wider among each other. + +That's upsetting. + +The other question I have is how many of you could belong to an affinity group who don't actually belong to one? + +Right, like I'm not part of AJAM, for example, I could be, and that's I guess a thing for me. More than anything else. + +How many people have been hired cold without any like personal relationship by an organization? + +How many of you have come out of an interview not knowing what they were looking for? + +How many people have been hired and still not figured out why you were hired? + +OK, how many people have been hired for a job and ended up doing something different than what they thought they were being hired for? + +Oh, all of us. + +How many people have worked in a place where the job listing they saw was different than what they felt their team needed? + +How many people could recite their current job description? + +I wrote mine. + +I mean I -- + +So. + +I think it would take a while. + +Like you know it off the top of my head and -- + +How many people have a job description? + +How many people's reviews match their job description? Oh, awesome. + +I'd say mine does. + +Yeah? Yeah? Everyone that works for ProPublica, you know what you're getting. Cool. + +That's actually a good transition point, yeah. + +Yeah, yeah, so if everyone wants to take a seat again we'll transition into the next activity. Thank you so much for getting up, moving around a little bit and sharing those questions which also had within them some great tips. OK, all right, so there's a mic and it's very loud. So the next half hour, the basically the bulk of the rest of the session is going to be time for you to chat with the other people in the room. We really want to hear what your experiences have been. So those questions kind of came from the applicant perspective and the hiring manager perspective, so it would be great if you could get into groups to represent one of those perspectives. So you can either like move into different groups or just like collectively as a table decide which perspective you want to like speak from in this next activity. + +But we should explain why, too. + +Yeah, so what we want to surface is things that make hiring more challenging from a hiring manager's perspective, and things that make hiring easier from a hiring manager's perspective and on the flip side, things that make an application process more difficult for an applicant or things that make an application process easier for an applicant, so we kind of like want to branch those out, so the so if you can either pick for your table or move into groups, I don't know -- + +Do you want to just say one side is one and one -- + +Yeah, yeah, that's probably the simplest route. + +Y, of course there's a grid of 3X3. So we'll see people interested in the hiring manager's perspective over here and people are interested from the manager's perspective over here, and what we're looking for is what are things in the process that you've gone through that have made the experience considerably poorer or better when working with like an applicant from the perspective of a hiring manager or vice versa. Like we talked about things like job descriptions being unclear, right, that's obviously a thing that makes being an applicant hard, versus things that have been good experience for you from the perspective of you understood what the job posting was about and you had a good interviewing experience or things like that. + +So if anyone wants to move, if there's anyone who wants to talk from the applicant perspective that wants to move over to this side or move over to this side, or is everyone is pretty good where they are, and it's not it's not meant to be a strict divide, just for like the purposes of where your head space is. Just for the purposes of this activity. So just to—just to frame the activity a little bit, first we're going to give you about 10 minutes to talk about things that maximize your experience. So if you're a hiring manager, things that improve the experience of being a hiring manager, things that improve the experience of posting jobs, doing outreach, focus on things that improve the experience and just brainstorm them. There's big post-its on each table, talk about things that improve that experience, same thing from the applicant point of view. After ten minutes we're going to switch over and brainstorm things that minimize that experience, things that make it more difficult as an applicant, but we're going to try to spend separate time on those things so you can really flesh out those thoughts. For right now, what makes your life easier as a hiring manager, what makes your life easier as an applicant, brainstorm time. + +[group activity] + +So just to give everybody a heads up, we've got about two minutes before we switch to the mic. So we're going to pass out another piece of paper where we talk about things that make it easier to be a hiring manager, and we're coming around for another ten minutes or so to talk about it. + +[group activity] + +Hi, everyone, thank you for researching, we have the last part of the exercise. So from your brainstorming of maximizing and minimizing whatever the experience is, narrow down two things that you can recommend to change this to. Two recommendations to change the experience, either on the employer side and on the applicant side, and each group is going to report back to a group as a whole, so you can provide a list that you could actually put in practice as an applicant or as an employer looking to fill a job. OK, so two things. + +You can just pick two. + +[group activity] + +OK, guys, one minute. + +[group activity] + +OK, everybody: So this is the show and tell part. So we're going to write down everybody's recommendations and I think we're actually going to start with folks from the stage left side of the room. So what did you guys end up discussing and coming up with? Feel free to you know -- + +Anyone! + +A clear concise jargonless empathetic process, you have to put all those adjectives in there. so one of the things we talked about a lot is a process for applicants being a process that you wouldn't want to go through but why are you putting other people through it? So there was no outreach. One things to talk about in terms of jargon is there are bad dating terms abound in applications so it's someone we want someone who's chill, we want a coding ninja, what the hell do you mean by that? What is the actual thing you want to do? Someone to contact? So when you are—like you will be speaking to a hiring manager or things about someone you're definitely trying to give that to. You have lovely description of like a really good user interface trying to apply a website that doesn't make sense, and if you're going to hire for things like fit and descriptions and culture, actually say what those are. + +That's a great suggestion. + +What is your culture that you are trying to. + +What is your culture? + +And how often is that not there? + +Actual stuff about percentages and preferred that you had to make a point that women will not apply if they don't meet two out of 20, but descriptions if there are two things that they don't, they're not going to apply, whereas they should apply if they hit half. Personal experience, be clear about the duties and the things you actually want done and what you can teach, so sometimes they hire somebody who had a great degree and they were great on paper where actually what they needed was drill sergeant or people who are restaurants. + +So we were talking about networks and you can have two challenges where you were trying to hire within your network and you get the same kinds of candidates over and again or you don't get any candidates at all who were suitable for that, so you you have to be out actively recruiting, building trust, making sure people know who you are and if you are saying you are looking for diverse candidates you are actually walking the walk and not just talking the talk. + +What was our second one? + +predictability. + +Sure, so talking about creating a for the people hiring, especially if it's really important I think to create some form of predictability, so everything is documented, the questions you get, that you're going to ask are documented, you repeat that process over and over again, we have a person who actually shepherds the whole process and schedules the interviews so you don't have to be thinking about that all the time, so as the person is interviewing, it can disrupt your whole day, so instead, if you have a process, if you have documentation, it makes it really easy, you know what to expect, you know what you're getting into, and so just creating that ability makes it really, really easy to interview, it's a lot less stressful. + +Cool, thank you. And -- + +We talked about process, too, and one of the things we were talking about was having that documentation. Also make sure that you're evaluating more fairly than just like oh, this dude was cool, I want to have a beer with him, right? Like but one of the other things that I thought was great was interview like you work. So there are a lot of people in distributed teams over here and folks who've dealt with this sort of issue of culture fit in different ways, so I felt that was like a super-awesome suggestion. You guys are doing group interviews on the sly, they're doing trial projects, like there's a lot of cool ideas about that. Other stuff? + +Cool, thanks. + +Just my own personal curiosity, now, one of the things that I always hear from like devs who end up going into places who have really tightly put together places like interviewing at Google is supposed to be hell, right, and that's partially because they have a really rigorous process and one part of the process you will end up with a person who's just like I'm just going to nit-pick everything you say, right so how would you avoid something like that where you've got a really well documented process but everybody is intentional in each of the steps when you actually go through it. + +Don't have people like that on your staff? + +Oh, right, culture problem fixed. + +Yeah, no assholes in our -- + +one thing we did that we have one person doing the interview and one person creating the interviewer. So we actually have just doing this, but it seems to be getting interesting, as well, so we're actually starting to borrow some of the Google process, where at the end of it you fill out a thing with like clear questions and answers so there's documentation of how the interview went but the second person is actually rating the interviewer whether they asked the questions the fair way, whether they brought in the own bias. + +You shouldn't be doing interviews one-on-one. It should be a group thing. + +We've always done it as groups but the second person now specifically is rating the interviewer. + +That's really cool. + +Yeah. So let's throw this open, does anybody have any questions? One of the things that kind of surprised me was that everybody agreed that this is like about process and improving process, which is kind of cool. + +I think one thing everybody said is cultural fit and I can't remember who tweeted it but it was such a great tweet, is that you want culture add and not culture fit and when you start thinking about that, that changes how you write your job descriptions, what you should be looking for and the weirder and the crazier are the ones that you want and then you start building your company, you get more of those people and then your networks grow and it all gets better. + +I'll say as a thank you, two things that I made myself notes I'm going to go back and change my job description as soon as I get home. One is I'm going to put in a sentence explicitly for building new products having teams that are diverse in a lot of perspectives is really important and just saying that we are trying to hire for diverse teams and we're looking for that and value that. And the other thing is going to be real clear is what is going to be the first step in the process, like if you reply you'll get a phone call. Whatever that next step is so that it's clear like what the thing is. + +Something we didn't talk about is the follow-up of like you send in your resume and fucking no reply or you do an interview and nobody ever calls you back. + +And one of the things is every single person gets a reply. + +It sucks when you just like click the button, though, and it sends out 300 dings all at once. + +I would love it if anyone sees great job descriptions or has a great experience if they would like be like hey, I interviewed here, it was awesome, or this is an awesome job description, I would love to see more examples of like right things. + +So if you guys wanted to email us, especially if you're like uncomfortable with being like, yeah, I saw this really awesome job posting. + +Yeah, right. If you see awesome things, I would love to see it. + +Feedback would be great, too. The competitiveness thing is one thing you always forget. It's like you need 10 years' experience, like kill that line and it tells you all of that right away and it's really great. + +It's called—text. + +No, I use a different one. It's a command line tool. + +That's a great transition, so what we were hoping for coming out of this is being able to like compile these resources and share them in a way that people can use them and reference them. Either in writing or in like follow-up presentations at other conferences, so if there's anyone who is interested in helping with that, like if you want to reach out to us, I mean I think the example of having job descriptions that people like is really good and that also makes me think about the other points in the process, like good rejection emails are like so critical to the point about maintaining relationships and building relationships with people, and so that might even be the kind of thing, like at each step in the process, like a good notification email or those types of things, so people have references that they can call upon in updating the processes that they're using. Cool. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. + +[session ended] diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015InterviewingMap.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015InterviewingMap.md index 76918fa1..84f7cbcd 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015InterviewingMap.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015InterviewingMap.md @@ -1,301 +1,209 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/interviewingmap/index.html ---- - -# Interviewing the Map: Simple Analysis for Web Maps - -### Session Facilitator(s): Gerald Rich, Jue Yang - -### Day & Time: Thursday, 4:30-5:30pm - -### Room: Ski-U-Mah - - -The session will start in 20 minutes. - - -The session will start in five minutes. - - -The session will start in five minutes. - - -The session will start in five minutes - - -The session will start in five minutes. - - -We will be getting started very shortly. If you just hang on. We're getting set up. - - -Testing testing. - - -All right, guys. I think we're going to go ahead and get started. This is the... Let me just pull back. Yeah. This is the interviewing the map session. I'm Jue. I'm the technologist at CUNY Journalism School. - - -And my name is Gerald. I'm an interactive graphics producer at Vocative. I had the—we kind of talked about this after NICAR this year. Lots of sessions have this idea of interviewing data, doing regressions, things like that. And so we wanted to kind of have a bit of an open session discussion about how can you do analysis, but instead of doing it with spreadsheets, doing this with maps, and what are the cool kinds of things that you can do to go beyond just making a map and making it look pretty. But really telling a good story with it. We wanted to get first a quick poll here. And see, like, where everyone's at with their mapping and everything. How many of you have created a map? Good. - - -Awesome. - - -How many of you have done some kind of GIS work too, on that map? Okay, okay, that's a good level and everything. That's good. - - -Yeah, so... We have prepared some examples, but I think it'll be best if some of you start talking about, like, your work flows, the tools that you use for analysis, type of maps... Who would like to share their experience? If you have any project in mind, we can pull up the URL as well. - - -And just kind of for reference, for those of you who are, like, not really sure where we're going with this, so here's sort of a few things that we were kind of liking, that people have already done, using GIS. So this is Jessica's law. Which is basically—sex offenders cannot be within a certain... Oh, it's not loading. Within a certain radius of schools or playgrounds. So basically getting a listing of all schools and playgrounds, drawing a big circle around them, and figuring out from these sex offender registries how many people actually fall within them. I think the Wi-Fi is a little slow, so I'm just going to talk you through two of these. The other one I really liked was done by the daily news, recently. Mayor DiBlasio in New Yorks that been trying to reduce traffic deaths, so on certain streets he's reduced the speed limit. So in this case, the Daily News actually took all these streets where there have been reduced speed limits and plotted out where there have been accidents and you can see—even though this was reduced by 20 miles per hour or however many miles per hour, there's still a lot of accidents on this street. And so that was a really, really interesting use case for it. - - -Is that working? - - -Let's see. Yeah. That one is a good one. Yay. And this one was very simple. You can see... - - -The developer for this is here. She built it. - - -Hey, yeah! I went to college with (inaudible). Yeah. I love this one. I thought this was a really, really cool way to sort of do something that's a map, but also kind of really tell a story with that map. So you can then filter by location, to see that even though there's some streets that are still accident-prone, that they're still... And have been policies enacted to change it, it really hasn't affected the overall safety on that street. So I wanted to kind of... - - -Are these just magnitude? Or are they zeroed out for total traffic as well? - - -We have the developer here, so... - - -Are these just straight up numbers of accidents? Or numbers of accidents— - - -That's the straight up just number of accidents. Yeah. - - -Yeah. So have you guys come across any sort of similar—these were just two that we wanted to see, that we wanted to sort of get a sense of. If you've worked with GIS, some of the fun things you've done, some of the hard things you've done, and then we can dive more into it. - - -Sure. Go to QZ.com/400606. So this was two maps that I didn't—I kind of made, but it was basically taking—this is another thing to consider—it was basically taking people at NASA and people at European Space Agencies' maps and making them better. Annotating them and making them more useful and less technical, to talk about how the earthquake in Nepal affected the land, the land shape in Nepal. So this was... The colored regions that you'll see in these are raster GIS files that were provided to me by scientists that I got in touch with, at the German Space Agency and the Jet Propulsion Lab, and I recolored them, put them on the map, added the cities, and on the first one added the contour lines as well. And this was a bunch of work that was in QGIS, which was Open Source GIS software. - - -Anyone else want to share? - - -Mine isn't really that complicated, but I mapped rat sightings in New York City. It's kind of a long URL. It's MeredithMMeyers.com/ratmap. - - -I love it. - - -That part is great. - - -Going down 10,000 sightings, so it might take a little while. It's usually pretty fast. So it gets the 10,000 latest sightings. There's a one-day lag on the database. - - -Who collects this? - - -311. You can phone in your latest rat sighting or use the app. If you so desire. - - -A rat heat map, if you will. There are a lot of rats in New York, if you guys did not realize. - - -So yeah, you can come around and see the sighting, where it is. - - -Very cool. - - -So... I guess can you tell us a little bit about the tools you used to build this? We also want to share the work flow and the pipeline. And the kind of work that goes into making a more analyzed map, if you will. - - -So this is built using Angular JS. You can use any framework or no framework, actually. It's hitting Socrata's open date API, for the rat sightings. It's hosted on there, so that's pretty nice. And then I use leaflet for the map and a couple of leaflet plugins for the markers and heat map. - - -What about for the traffic map? What tool did you use? - - -That's CartoDB. So we started the project in CartoDB. And customized other features that we didn't want to use from CartoDB. - - -We also have a few other ones that we wanted to sort of talk about. The toxic spills one in Brooklyn that's kind of interesting, which was using toxic data that Jue found. - - -I came across this site because it got picked up by CityLab and DNAInfo in New York, and I looked around the map and I thought—first of all, it's built on—she scraped the data from the DEC database, and then made the map with D3. And Leaflet. Oh, just D3, actually. No Leaflet. But I was looking at it and I thought... This was interesting. Because she's basically just symbolizing different points with... Or marking different points with different symbols, and sort of scale the symbols, based on the gallons of spill. But as I was going through it, I thought it was a little bit misleading, because then you could have a 32 gallon spill, but since it's overlapping the geographic ground, people might confuse it with distance, or the extent of its effect. So I was wondering if there's a better way of presenting this information without misleading. And one GIS tool that you can use on the front end—so if you're using JavaScript already—is a tool called turf.js. It's another Open Source JS library built by Mapbox, and I was... So I basically used the same dataset, so as... These are just the points. The same dataset that we showed on the other map. And I did a few little aggregations, based on neighborhoods. So rather than seeing... This is a bad one, because it has an error. So, for example, you can see this particular—in Bedford, there's three spills, and the known spill amount is 105 gallons. So I also did—so neighborhood is good when you're talking to neighborhood associations, when you're trying to connect with local agencies. You can give them these concrete numbers. And in the back end, this is just the turf.aggregate, which is a method it has. And then also on census tract, you can get a better sense of how many... Yeah. Just, like, a more granular level of demographic level. And then I also tried out the buffer one. But somehow the algorithm has holes in it, so you see it's not—I'm buffering this by 50 meters, I believe. But it's not buffering all the points. And I checked the Github issue queue of this project, of turf, and he think he's still working on it. Why are these ellipses rather than Euclidean circles? It's pretty complicated. So I'm just throwing out turf.js as a possibility for you to play around when you do GIS analysis. But it's definitely not perfect. - - -And then... So I also have some data here. It looks like we have a nice big crowd, and a lot of you have laptops. So if you guys want to play with your own GIS analysis, I'm going to introduce a few other tools, just... Because this next one is going to be a little bit bigger. Pardon me, while I switch out this for a second. So... I don't know how many of you guys play video games, but there is a big announcement for the next Fallout game. Which takes place in Boston. Basically it's set in a post-nuclear world, and so it sort of got me thinking about nuclear activity that's been going on and what-not. And so let's see. Where is it? And also it is the election season. So I sort of wanted to pull a couple of interesting datasets related to nuclear activity and sort of ways that you could kind of double check this. This is kind of a funny perennial political ad that I always sort of think of, when everyone says political ads are terrible this year. If you haven't seen this, this is LBJ's ad. - - -Four, five, six, six, eight, nine... Nine. - - -Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero. - -(blast noise) - - -These are the stakes. - - -So as you see, LBJ has unfortunately nuked a small child. So if you actually go into this Github repo, we have done a lot of interesting—gone through a lot of interesting data that you can start playing with. I'm just going to quickly walk you through what I've done with it. So if you go to Github.com/JueYang/interviewing-the-map, you can pull that down. There's a data and a shape file repository that I'm just going to quickly step you through what I it. And I'm going to sort of point out a few interesting datasets and data sources that you can use, if you want to tell your own story. So the operating reactors is actually an interesting case, wherein I was able to locate them. Let's see. When I was looking through this really, really crappy website. That's built by the government. As most of them are crappy. And it has all of this—that has this map over here that you see. And everything is hidden behind some XML data. If you go into the JavaScript for it, you see data file is this variable, and it pulls operating reactors.xml, and here it is. Facility, latitude, longitude, and what-not. I have included a really rough Python script, depending on—if you are uncomfortable with XML or comfortable with XML, you can parse it yourself. And then I also pulled in... Where did it go? Okay. Also pulled in some schools data from enigma.io. Up here. And so that gave me all primary and secondary public schools. And so from there, I was able to do... Is use a few... I think the Google Streets one is a little slow on this. But you see it's a lot of schools. If it loads. Pinwheel of death. Is everyone able to clone that repo? How is the Wi-Fi in here? Eh? Eh? Eh? - - -It's coming at about 400 kilobytes a second for me. - - -Not bad. So you see it's a lot of points on the map that I sort of zipped up. And then you can go in, you can also view—a tool, if you have QGIS, if not, you also have these options in turf.js that you can then sort of see... Agh! I'm trying to get a sense of this. This is very weird, to crane my neck. - - -You can do the mirror. - - -Oh, okay. Yeah. So you can create all kinds of interesting things here that will help you combine with the spatial join, which is basically—I'll show you that in one quick second. But what I did was created a buffer of five miles around each of these. So you go in, have a fixed radius of five miles, and this is all in QGIS, and there's a plugin, and there's links in the repo too, if you're able to clone it, that sort of points you in the right direction. You can see when we zoom in, everything has a nice little radius around it. - - -Can you talk about how you knew that was five miles and not five something else? - - -Yeah, actually. This was sort of why I was—I love—I wanted to point out the symbol tools. In the repo, I started pointing out about PostGIS and a lot of other nerdier things. The point of this is that there's a couple of different tools that you can use, and really it just sort of depends on how many points you have on a map. As you saw the pinwheel with the schools data—this is one that you definitely—it might be painful to load into a browser and do in JavaScript. QGIS is really nice for this. And then if you're really doing this at kind of a national level, I was very tempted to write a quick SQL script for this too. Yes, sorry? - - -Finish what you were saying. - - -Yeah, go for it. - - -I was going to say... So for dealing with some of the things that you were saying that were a problem before, like zooming and not being able to control the size or the zoom of whatever you're plotting, you can do conditional zooms in CartoCSS, which means you can set a rule which is like—if it's the C level, adjust the thickness of your lines and those sorts of things. - - -But I think if you're doing tiled maps, then you can create those based on CartoCSS. But if you're doing it directly in GIS, you have to write those directly in the JavaScript. - - -You can write an HTML template in your JavaScript that says when you hit this button or when you get to this level, you can trigger that CSS custom template to trigger. So you can totally do it in JavaScript. And I'm sure you can do it in turf too. But for the PostGIS functions and the cool things you can do in QGIS—because QGIS has awesome dropdowns for that, which is rad. But in CartoDB, we have a little SQL tray where you can write your SQL statements and use all those PostGIS functions. But we also have a button now for buttons and for convex hull, which draws a polygon loop around points, so if you want to create a polygon of several points and you don't want to write the SQL query, you can do it with dropdowns now. - - -So I think it's really—when I was hearing about the New York Daily News project, it was sort of like—and I've had this same problem too—oftentimes you'll find this head scratcher of—how do I go from map degrees to sensible units? And this sort of—before we sort of let you out in the wild and hopefully you guys can download some of this—if not, let us know and you can figure it out. It looks like there's a good mix of people here. Some of you may already have QGIS, some of you maybe not, and you can download and put turf.js onto your laptop, which is much smaller than trying to worry about QGIS or anything like that, but I encourage everybody to sort of mingle in the next few minutes when we do a little bit of a break here, if everyone at your table is a complete Carto nerd, please spread out a little bit to those who might have a bad connection. But anyway, so I wanted to quickly show—so did the buffer. So you can draw a line around it. And then once you also go into it, you can do a combine, which is a spatial join. And so you say—the output shape file, this nuke zone, contains the 2011 public primary and secondary schools, and then you can join on these fields in it. So much like a data join, if you guys aren't sort of familiar—you take two spreadsheets. You have one similar column in both of them. Let's say that is state names. And you have populations in one table and it's like... Texas, TX, Arkansas, et cetera, et cetera, and maybe an ID for each state. You don't really want to join on a string. That's not great. And then you have another one that has let's say... Income, or let's say voting percentage for the 2012 election. You can then take those two and throw them together, so then you have a big column of state, population, and then what was their voting percentages. So in that kind of sense, you take the buffer, which has gotten all this information about the particular nuclear reactor, you join that to then the school, which has everything from school name—it has all these kind of cryptic things—you see phone, ZIP code, streets, types, is it unionized, all kinds of interesting bits of information here that you might be interested in. Please be advised—the more stuff you select, the slower it will run. So especially if you're on a deadline, you do not want to select everything and then hope for the best. That is a bad, bad idea. There is another kind of—a few other things I just want to kind of briefly go over, since I know we're bucking up against the cutoff point to break up—but you can say how many schools that are near reactors, the average number of schools near a certain place. And this is a sort of general idea. Toxic sites, all these things—you can really do these buffers not only in circles for points, but in the Daily News case, you're taking lines and you're expanding the line out, so it's more of like a full polygon. So you're just sort of saying what is near the intersection. I think with your particular dataset, it was like traffic accidents were sometimes in the median of the street. Sometimes a few yards away. And so this is sort of really trying to capture some of that information that is a little more complicated, or a little—is sometimes bad data. Proportional sum. Which I'm blanking on at the moment. But five points for Gryffindor, whoever remembers proportional sum. Going once, going twice? - - -That's a point for Google. - - -Point for Google. We'll get back to that actually when we reconvene. We do that and then we get a lovely set of points that have been joined together, and you can do schools within five miles that have the name of the reactor near it, as well as phone numbers and all the tools that you need to go to work, if you are giving this off to a reporter, or you are reporting it on yourself, to basically then go and contact some more people. So I think that sort of wraps it up. I wanted to give you guys some time. Is everyone sort of able—are there enough people to sort of clone that repository, know Github, able to grab that? Or are we negative on the Wi-Fi connection here? - - -I was able to grab it. - - -Grab it? Grab it? Grab it? Okay. All right, then. In that case, I will say break for 15, 20 minutes. And then, you know, I encourage you to sort of play with this dataset. Maybe grab anything else that you might find interesting on enigma.io. They have everything from US prison facilities with latitudes and longitudes, which is really fascinating, you can work with that, you can show what prisoners are near nuclear facilities, and who are really close to them, or anything like that. Is there any questions... - - -Can I raise a concern about that? With national datasets? I can tell you for a fact that the California schools data is very wrong. Because there is no good map of California school locations. So you have to be really careful about doing that at a national level. And it just depends on how high of a resolution you want. When we did data projects before, we had schools in the wrong county. It's a big problem in California. They don't know where the schools are. - - -Yeah. The idea is to let you guys go off, explore, discuss it, poke around the data, and at the end, we want to come back and talk about war stories and where this has gone really, really wrong. So this is sort of the fun stage, and then we're going to go to the sadness and we're all going to cry and drink together and have a good time. All right. Break for 15, 20 minutes. Just gauge and see how quickly you guys are doing. If you feel like you want to jump into it sooner, that's absolutely possible. But yeah. I'll get back to you. - - -I just have one thing to add to turf. Because most of the analysis—all of the analysis you can do with turf can be done in QGIS. It's nothing different. The GIS concept is the same. But there might be occasions that you want to use turf over processing your dataset on the desktop, which would be if you want to emphasize interactivity. Like, you know your dataset really well. Maybe you only have 10, 15 points, for example, that you really want to let a user dig—like, click around, for example. I think if you go to... There is just a very basic example on the turf introduction, and it gives you... It was using a very, very small dataset. But it sort of gives you the sense of... So basically it's showing the relationship between hospitals—the distance between hospitals and the libraries. Oh. Whoops. Okay. Perfect. Yeah. So... If you go to the... It walks you through how it's made. But basically if you... This is using turf nearest, I believe. So if you click around the library, it shows you which hospital it is. So in this way, it's a pretty effective way to show this information. But of course, it's not great for doing batch analysis. - - -Yeah. It's turfjs.org, if you are interested. All right. Have it. And we'll reconvene shortly. We'll mill about and see how you guys are doing. - -(breakout sessions) - - -How is everybody doing so far? Are you getting close to maybe sharing anything or talking about things? - - -Or problems. The knowledge pools—because I realize that we just threw a bunch of names on you, and you might not actually... It might not actually make any sense. So I would like to see if there's more things that need to be included. We might add to the repo later. So cool things you've made too. - - -Anyone feel brave enough that they want to sort of talk about what they've done in this very brief amount of time? Or have any kind of interesting ideas about, like, what they could do to go beyond just, like, a simple mapping of points or anything like that? - - -You have a question? - - -I have a question. So what are the use cases for tile maps over SVG maps? I feel like SVG maps are better displayed on the phone. If you have a tile map, it's hard to do navigation with your fingers and it's a longer loading time. So I don't know if it's true or just my assumptions. - - -Tile maps might be faster than... Tile maps might be faster than SVG maps, just because SVG maps are rendered in the browser and tile maps are rendered by the server. But there are different—like the way sometimes I would prefer SVG maps because they have better interactivities. But if I can batch process everything and make them into tile maps, I might do that. - - -But it just depends on how complex your tiles are. If they're just doing state boundaries, that can be really small. - - -SVG maps for boundaries is also fast too. - - -Yeah. It just depends on the size and how much interaction do you want. Do you want somebody to zoom into a street level? And see their very particular street and everything? And then you would have vectors for, like, every road in the United States? Or are you doing this like—you could go to Canvas, and that might be a little bit different. And you'll still have a lot of the—same moveto, lineto, arcs, and paths that you would have with SVG, but just on a canvas. And then if anyone wants to talk about WebGL, go with God. You should talk about that. - - -There's an Open Source JavaScript library called VecNik that does vector maps instead of raster maps, and it's based on HTML5, and that means you can do interactivity and edit the geometries, and it's very fast and you can have click events and highlighting and that kind of stuff. So it's pretty cool. And super fast. If you want to not do raster and want to do vector maps. - - -What's that called again? - - -VecNik. It's like MapNik. But it's vectors. - - -Would you like to talk about stuff you could do or cautionary war stories right now? Quick straw poll. Show stuff? Anyone, anyone? War stories? Okay. Michael, you want to kick this off? You were saying about California and the school system? - - -This is a problem we run into all the time. Is that like—there are datasets that have latitude and longitude for schools but they are basically all very wrong. We did a project a couple of years ago on how many schools are near earthquake hazards. So we have to be relatively precise. Especially if you want to say they're inside this—what's called an AP fault zone. Like they're within a quarter mile of a fault. You don't have a lot of margin for error. We just found—we just did a quick comparison—is this school in this county? We found tons of cases where they weren't even in the right county. And we found out that schools move all the time. One year the school will be here, the next year the school will have moved to another building or they've shut this building down, there's temporary buildings now, and especially in California we know it's really bad. I think in other states it's better. - - -I included that Google street layer in the QGIS file. There's open layers—to MMQGIS—there's links in the readmes. But that one is really good. You can pull in a satellite layer, so sometimes I'll just spot check it. Is this school in the middle of a lake? I don't think it's an Atlantean school, so there's something wrong with this data, probably. Any other... Yeah. - - -A while ago, Colin and I were trying to map food deserts in LA, so we were trying to find all the grocery stores in LA. So we went to the county assessors data and tried to find the filings for all the grocery stores and threw them into QGIS. And it looked like a lot of grocery stores, so then to spot check it, we put the Google street layer on it, and I realized that the grocery store I go to every week wasn't there and Colin's grocery store that he goes to every week was not there and we kept trying to find various grocery stores that we knew and we found, like, half of them. Half of them were just clearly—the assessor's data—it wasn't on there. So we're still looking. - - -Yeah, that's my favorite thing to do. Stuff that I know is there. That should be there. That's the first thing that I go and look for. - - -So I get this map—series of maps about all the Starbucks around the world, and I did do this spot checking, which was really—that's a fun use of Google street view. There's supposed to be a Starbucks here, and oh my God, there's a Starbucks in Google street view. And it's somewhere in Japan. Whoa. But speaking of Japan, the problem that—the thing that I ran into—was I did this analysis on the cities that have the most Starbucks in them. So I knew—okay, in this database that I had, it was Starbucks by address. Okay. I know New York City is going to have addresses that are Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island and Manhattan. If I do a New York City analysis, I can combine all those things. And I knew that was the case for a couple of other cities. But I didn't know that was the case for Tokyo. Because Tokyo addresses... Tokyo listed address in Tokyo is very small. It's a very small part of Tokyo, but there's all these other places that are part of what everyone knows is Tokyo, so I missed that, and it screwed up—I made a chart that was like—these are the top Starbucks cities around the world and Tokyo was supposed to be in the top five, and it wasn't in the list. So... Things like... Make sure you check your assumptions about what you're using to qualify these things. The way around that, which is—I had another thing, which was—these are all the Starbucks—this is just a map of, like, 50 miles around city centers. Tokyo was full of Starbucks in that. - - -It's kind of interesting that Google street views kind of got me thinking about the interactive developer at Firstlook, who's got this really neat script to fire off and basically capture images from Google Street View, and it would be really cool. Pie in the sky thinking right now, but just checking your data by running a scraper and seeing all these street views and looking at them on a page or something like that. Rob? How are we doing on time? I think we have... - - -A few minutes. - - -A few minutes. Anyone... Questions? Things we didn't cover? Comments? Concerns? - - -When you're working with turf, what's the best way to, like, visualize your data? Step by step, working with turf? - - -I would say... So I would actually put the data in QGIS first. Or onto CartoDB. That's actually how I did my... How I processed my census tract data, for example. So I would always use some other tools before I pull things into turf.js. Because I know that's the— - - -That's the last step? - - -For interactivity. And if the dataset is really big, I wouldn't use turf on it. - - -I think that gets us... Are we close to time? - - -Yeah, I think we're... - - -You have drink tickets and everything. I don't want to stand between journalists and a bar. I understand. But thank you guys for turning up and everything. It's awesome. - -(applause) \ No newline at end of file +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/interviewingmap/index.html +--- + +# Interviewing the Map: Simple Analysis for Web Maps + +### Session Facilitator(s): Gerald Rich, Jue Yang + +### Day & Time: Thursday, 4:30-5:30pm + +### Room: Ski-U-Mah + +The session will start in 20 minutes. + +The session will start in five minutes. + +The session will start in five minutes. + +The session will start in five minutes + +The session will start in five minutes. + +We will be getting started very shortly. If you just hang on. We're getting set up. + +Testing testing. + +All right, guys. I think we're going to go ahead and get started. This is the... Let me just pull back. Yeah. This is the interviewing the map session. I'm Jue. I'm the technologist at CUNY Journalism School. + +And my name is Gerald. I'm an interactive graphics producer at Vocative. I had the—we kind of talked about this after NICAR this year. Lots of sessions have this idea of interviewing data, doing regressions, things like that. And so we wanted to kind of have a bit of an open session discussion about how can you do analysis, but instead of doing it with spreadsheets, doing this with maps, and what are the cool kinds of things that you can do to go beyond just making a map and making it look pretty. But really telling a good story with it. We wanted to get first a quick poll here. And see, like, where everyone's at with their mapping and everything. How many of you have created a map? Good. + +Awesome. + +How many of you have done some kind of GIS work too, on that map? Okay, okay, that's a good level and everything. That's good. + +Yeah, so... We have prepared some examples, but I think it'll be best if some of you start talking about, like, your work flows, the tools that you use for analysis, type of maps... Who would like to share their experience? If you have any project in mind, we can pull up the URL as well. + +And just kind of for reference, for those of you who are, like, not really sure where we're going with this, so here's sort of a few things that we were kind of liking, that people have already done, using GIS. So this is Jessica's law. Which is basically—sex offenders cannot be within a certain... Oh, it's not loading. Within a certain radius of schools or playgrounds. So basically getting a listing of all schools and playgrounds, drawing a big circle around them, and figuring out from these sex offender registries how many people actually fall within them. I think the Wi-Fi is a little slow, so I'm just going to talk you through two of these. The other one I really liked was done by the daily news, recently. Mayor DiBlasio in New Yorks that been trying to reduce traffic deaths, so on certain streets he's reduced the speed limit. So in this case, the Daily News actually took all these streets where there have been reduced speed limits and plotted out where there have been accidents and you can see—even though this was reduced by 20 miles per hour or however many miles per hour, there's still a lot of accidents on this street. And so that was a really, really interesting use case for it. + +Is that working? + +Let's see. Yeah. That one is a good one. Yay. And this one was very simple. You can see... + +The developer for this is here. She built it. + +Hey, yeah! I went to college with (inaudible). Yeah. I love this one. I thought this was a really, really cool way to sort of do something that's a map, but also kind of really tell a story with that map. So you can then filter by location, to see that even though there's some streets that are still accident-prone, that they're still... And have been policies enacted to change it, it really hasn't affected the overall safety on that street. So I wanted to kind of... + +Are these just magnitude? Or are they zeroed out for total traffic as well? + +We have the developer here, so... + +Are these just straight up numbers of accidents? Or numbers of accidents— + +That's the straight up just number of accidents. Yeah. + +Yeah. So have you guys come across any sort of similar—these were just two that we wanted to see, that we wanted to sort of get a sense of. If you've worked with GIS, some of the fun things you've done, some of the hard things you've done, and then we can dive more into it. + +Sure. Go to QZ.com/400606. So this was two maps that I didn't—I kind of made, but it was basically taking—this is another thing to consider—it was basically taking people at NASA and people at European Space Agencies' maps and making them better. Annotating them and making them more useful and less technical, to talk about how the earthquake in Nepal affected the land, the land shape in Nepal. So this was... The colored regions that you'll see in these are raster GIS files that were provided to me by scientists that I got in touch with, at the German Space Agency and the Jet Propulsion Lab, and I recolored them, put them on the map, added the cities, and on the first one added the contour lines as well. And this was a bunch of work that was in QGIS, which was Open Source GIS software. + +Anyone else want to share? + +Mine isn't really that complicated, but I mapped rat sightings in New York City. It's kind of a long URL. It's MeredithMMeyers.com/ratmap. + +I love it. + +That part is great. + +Going down 10,000 sightings, so it might take a little while. It's usually pretty fast. So it gets the 10,000 latest sightings. There's a one-day lag on the database. + +Who collects this? + +311. You can phone in your latest rat sighting or use the app. If you so desire. + +A rat heat map, if you will. There are a lot of rats in New York, if you guys did not realize. + +So yeah, you can come around and see the sighting, where it is. + +Very cool. + +So... I guess can you tell us a little bit about the tools you used to build this? We also want to share the work flow and the pipeline. And the kind of work that goes into making a more analyzed map, if you will. + +So this is built using Angular JS. You can use any framework or no framework, actually. It's hitting Socrata's open date API, for the rat sightings. It's hosted on there, so that's pretty nice. And then I use leaflet for the map and a couple of leaflet plugins for the markers and heat map. + +What about for the traffic map? What tool did you use? + +That's CartoDB. So we started the project in CartoDB. And customized other features that we didn't want to use from CartoDB. + +We also have a few other ones that we wanted to sort of talk about. The toxic spills one in Brooklyn that's kind of interesting, which was using toxic data that Jue found. + +I came across this site because it got picked up by CityLab and DNAInfo in New York, and I looked around the map and I thought—first of all, it's built on—she scraped the data from the DEC database, and then made the map with D3. And Leaflet. Oh, just D3, actually. No Leaflet. But I was looking at it and I thought... This was interesting. Because she's basically just symbolizing different points with... Or marking different points with different symbols, and sort of scale the symbols, based on the gallons of spill. But as I was going through it, I thought it was a little bit misleading, because then you could have a 32 gallon spill, but since it's overlapping the geographic ground, people might confuse it with distance, or the extent of its effect. So I was wondering if there's a better way of presenting this information without misleading. And one GIS tool that you can use on the front end—so if you're using JavaScript already—is a tool called turf.js. It's another Open Source JS library built by Mapbox, and I was... So I basically used the same dataset, so as... These are just the points. The same dataset that we showed on the other map. And I did a few little aggregations, based on neighborhoods. So rather than seeing... This is a bad one, because it has an error. So, for example, you can see this particular—in Bedford, there's three spills, and the known spill amount is 105 gallons. So I also did—so neighborhood is good when you're talking to neighborhood associations, when you're trying to connect with local agencies. You can give them these concrete numbers. And in the back end, this is just the turf.aggregate, which is a method it has. And then also on census tract, you can get a better sense of how many... Yeah. Just, like, a more granular level of demographic level. And then I also tried out the buffer one. But somehow the algorithm has holes in it, so you see it's not—I'm buffering this by 50 meters, I believe. But it's not buffering all the points. And I checked the Github issue queue of this project, of turf, and he think he's still working on it. Why are these ellipses rather than Euclidean circles? It's pretty complicated. So I'm just throwing out turf.js as a possibility for you to play around when you do GIS analysis. But it's definitely not perfect. + +And then... So I also have some data here. It looks like we have a nice big crowd, and a lot of you have laptops. So if you guys want to play with your own GIS analysis, I'm going to introduce a few other tools, just... Because this next one is going to be a little bit bigger. Pardon me, while I switch out this for a second. So... I don't know how many of you guys play video games, but there is a big announcement for the next Fallout game. Which takes place in Boston. Basically it's set in a post-nuclear world, and so it sort of got me thinking about nuclear activity that's been going on and what-not. And so let's see. Where is it? And also it is the election season. So I sort of wanted to pull a couple of interesting datasets related to nuclear activity and sort of ways that you could kind of double check this. This is kind of a funny perennial political ad that I always sort of think of, when everyone says political ads are terrible this year. If you haven't seen this, this is LBJ's ad. + +Four, five, six, six, eight, nine... Nine. + +Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero. + +(blast noise) + +These are the stakes. + +So as you see, LBJ has unfortunately nuked a small child. So if you actually go into this Github repo, we have done a lot of interesting—gone through a lot of interesting data that you can start playing with. I'm just going to quickly walk you through what I've done with it. So if you go to Github.com/JueYang/interviewing-the-map, you can pull that down. There's a data and a shape file repository that I'm just going to quickly step you through what I it. And I'm going to sort of point out a few interesting datasets and data sources that you can use, if you want to tell your own story. So the operating reactors is actually an interesting case, wherein I was able to locate them. Let's see. When I was looking through this really, really crappy website. That's built by the government. As most of them are crappy. And it has all of this—that has this map over here that you see. And everything is hidden behind some XML data. If you go into the JavaScript for it, you see data file is this variable, and it pulls operating reactors.xml, and here it is. Facility, latitude, longitude, and what-not. I have included a really rough Python script, depending on—if you are uncomfortable with XML or comfortable with XML, you can parse it yourself. And then I also pulled in... Where did it go? Okay. Also pulled in some schools data from enigma.io. Up here. And so that gave me all primary and secondary public schools. And so from there, I was able to do... Is use a few... I think the Google Streets one is a little slow on this. But you see it's a lot of schools. If it loads. Pinwheel of death. Is everyone able to clone that repo? How is the Wi-Fi in here? Eh? Eh? Eh? + +It's coming at about 400 kilobytes a second for me. + +Not bad. So you see it's a lot of points on the map that I sort of zipped up. And then you can go in, you can also view—a tool, if you have QGIS, if not, you also have these options in turf.js that you can then sort of see... Agh! I'm trying to get a sense of this. This is very weird, to crane my neck. + +You can do the mirror. + +Oh, okay. Yeah. So you can create all kinds of interesting things here that will help you combine with the spatial join, which is basically—I'll show you that in one quick second. But what I did was created a buffer of five miles around each of these. So you go in, have a fixed radius of five miles, and this is all in QGIS, and there's a plugin, and there's links in the repo too, if you're able to clone it, that sort of points you in the right direction. You can see when we zoom in, everything has a nice little radius around it. + +Can you talk about how you knew that was five miles and not five something else? + +Yeah, actually. This was sort of why I was—I love—I wanted to point out the symbol tools. In the repo, I started pointing out about PostGIS and a lot of other nerdier things. The point of this is that there's a couple of different tools that you can use, and really it just sort of depends on how many points you have on a map. As you saw the pinwheel with the schools data—this is one that you definitely—it might be painful to load into a browser and do in JavaScript. QGIS is really nice for this. And then if you're really doing this at kind of a national level, I was very tempted to write a quick SQL script for this too. Yes, sorry? + +Finish what you were saying. + +Yeah, go for it. + +I was going to say... So for dealing with some of the things that you were saying that were a problem before, like zooming and not being able to control the size or the zoom of whatever you're plotting, you can do conditional zooms in CartoCSS, which means you can set a rule which is like—if it's the C level, adjust the thickness of your lines and those sorts of things. + +But I think if you're doing tiled maps, then you can create those based on CartoCSS. But if you're doing it directly in GIS, you have to write those directly in the JavaScript. + +You can write an HTML template in your JavaScript that says when you hit this button or when you get to this level, you can trigger that CSS custom template to trigger. So you can totally do it in JavaScript. And I'm sure you can do it in turf too. But for the PostGIS functions and the cool things you can do in QGIS—because QGIS has awesome dropdowns for that, which is rad. But in CartoDB, we have a little SQL tray where you can write your SQL statements and use all those PostGIS functions. But we also have a button now for buttons and for convex hull, which draws a polygon loop around points, so if you want to create a polygon of several points and you don't want to write the SQL query, you can do it with dropdowns now. + +So I think it's really—when I was hearing about the New York Daily News project, it was sort of like—and I've had this same problem too—oftentimes you'll find this head scratcher of—how do I go from map degrees to sensible units? And this sort of—before we sort of let you out in the wild and hopefully you guys can download some of this—if not, let us know and you can figure it out. It looks like there's a good mix of people here. Some of you may already have QGIS, some of you maybe not, and you can download and put turf.js onto your laptop, which is much smaller than trying to worry about QGIS or anything like that, but I encourage everybody to sort of mingle in the next few minutes when we do a little bit of a break here, if everyone at your table is a complete Carto nerd, please spread out a little bit to those who might have a bad connection. But anyway, so I wanted to quickly show—so did the buffer. So you can draw a line around it. And then once you also go into it, you can do a combine, which is a spatial join. And so you say—the output shape file, this nuke zone, contains the 2011 public primary and secondary schools, and then you can join on these fields in it. So much like a data join, if you guys aren't sort of familiar—you take two spreadsheets. You have one similar column in both of them. Let's say that is state names. And you have populations in one table and it's like... Texas, TX, Arkansas, et cetera, et cetera, and maybe an ID for each state. You don't really want to join on a string. That's not great. And then you have another one that has let's say... Income, or let's say voting percentage for the 2012 election. You can then take those two and throw them together, so then you have a big column of state, population, and then what was their voting percentages. So in that kind of sense, you take the buffer, which has gotten all this information about the particular nuclear reactor, you join that to then the school, which has everything from school name—it has all these kind of cryptic things—you see phone, ZIP code, streets, types, is it unionized, all kinds of interesting bits of information here that you might be interested in. Please be advised—the more stuff you select, the slower it will run. So especially if you're on a deadline, you do not want to select everything and then hope for the best. That is a bad, bad idea. There is another kind of—a few other things I just want to kind of briefly go over, since I know we're bucking up against the cutoff point to break up—but you can say how many schools that are near reactors, the average number of schools near a certain place. And this is a sort of general idea. Toxic sites, all these things—you can really do these buffers not only in circles for points, but in the Daily News case, you're taking lines and you're expanding the line out, so it's more of like a full polygon. So you're just sort of saying what is near the intersection. I think with your particular dataset, it was like traffic accidents were sometimes in the median of the street. Sometimes a few yards away. And so this is sort of really trying to capture some of that information that is a little more complicated, or a little—is sometimes bad data. Proportional sum. Which I'm blanking on at the moment. But five points for Gryffindor, whoever remembers proportional sum. Going once, going twice? + +That's a point for Google. + +Point for Google. We'll get back to that actually when we reconvene. We do that and then we get a lovely set of points that have been joined together, and you can do schools within five miles that have the name of the reactor near it, as well as phone numbers and all the tools that you need to go to work, if you are giving this off to a reporter, or you are reporting it on yourself, to basically then go and contact some more people. So I think that sort of wraps it up. I wanted to give you guys some time. Is everyone sort of able—are there enough people to sort of clone that repository, know Github, able to grab that? Or are we negative on the Wi-Fi connection here? + +I was able to grab it. + +Grab it? Grab it? Grab it? Okay. All right, then. In that case, I will say break for 15, 20 minutes. And then, you know, I encourage you to sort of play with this dataset. Maybe grab anything else that you might find interesting on enigma.io. They have everything from US prison facilities with latitudes and longitudes, which is really fascinating, you can work with that, you can show what prisoners are near nuclear facilities, and who are really close to them, or anything like that. Is there any questions... + +Can I raise a concern about that? With national datasets? I can tell you for a fact that the California schools data is very wrong. Because there is no good map of California school locations. So you have to be really careful about doing that at a national level. And it just depends on how high of a resolution you want. When we did data projects before, we had schools in the wrong county. It's a big problem in California. They don't know where the schools are. + +Yeah. The idea is to let you guys go off, explore, discuss it, poke around the data, and at the end, we want to come back and talk about war stories and where this has gone really, really wrong. So this is sort of the fun stage, and then we're going to go to the sadness and we're all going to cry and drink together and have a good time. All right. Break for 15, 20 minutes. Just gauge and see how quickly you guys are doing. If you feel like you want to jump into it sooner, that's absolutely possible. But yeah. I'll get back to you. + +I just have one thing to add to turf. Because most of the analysis—all of the analysis you can do with turf can be done in QGIS. It's nothing different. The GIS concept is the same. But there might be occasions that you want to use turf over processing your dataset on the desktop, which would be if you want to emphasize interactivity. Like, you know your dataset really well. Maybe you only have 10, 15 points, for example, that you really want to let a user dig—like, click around, for example. I think if you go to... There is just a very basic example on the turf introduction, and it gives you... It was using a very, very small dataset. But it sort of gives you the sense of... So basically it's showing the relationship between hospitals—the distance between hospitals and the libraries. Oh. Whoops. Okay. Perfect. Yeah. So... If you go to the... It walks you through how it's made. But basically if you... This is using turf nearest, I believe. So if you click around the library, it shows you which hospital it is. So in this way, it's a pretty effective way to show this information. But of course, it's not great for doing batch analysis. + +Yeah. It's turfjs.org, if you are interested. All right. Have it. And we'll reconvene shortly. We'll mill about and see how you guys are doing. + +(breakout sessions) + +How is everybody doing so far? Are you getting close to maybe sharing anything or talking about things? + +Or problems. The knowledge pools—because I realize that we just threw a bunch of names on you, and you might not actually... It might not actually make any sense. So I would like to see if there's more things that need to be included. We might add to the repo later. So cool things you've made too. + +Anyone feel brave enough that they want to sort of talk about what they've done in this very brief amount of time? Or have any kind of interesting ideas about, like, what they could do to go beyond just, like, a simple mapping of points or anything like that? + +You have a question? + +I have a question. So what are the use cases for tile maps over SVG maps? I feel like SVG maps are better displayed on the phone. If you have a tile map, it's hard to do navigation with your fingers and it's a longer loading time. So I don't know if it's true or just my assumptions. + +Tile maps might be faster than... Tile maps might be faster than SVG maps, just because SVG maps are rendered in the browser and tile maps are rendered by the server. But there are different—like the way sometimes I would prefer SVG maps because they have better interactivities. But if I can batch process everything and make them into tile maps, I might do that. + +But it just depends on how complex your tiles are. If they're just doing state boundaries, that can be really small. + +SVG maps for boundaries is also fast too. + +Yeah. It just depends on the size and how much interaction do you want. Do you want somebody to zoom into a street level? And see their very particular street and everything? And then you would have vectors for, like, every road in the United States? Or are you doing this like—you could go to Canvas, and that might be a little bit different. And you'll still have a lot of the—same moveto, lineto, arcs, and paths that you would have with SVG, but just on a canvas. And then if anyone wants to talk about WebGL, go with God. You should talk about that. + +There's an Open Source JavaScript library called VecNik that does vector maps instead of raster maps, and it's based on HTML5, and that means you can do interactivity and edit the geometries, and it's very fast and you can have click events and highlighting and that kind of stuff. So it's pretty cool. And super fast. If you want to not do raster and want to do vector maps. + +What's that called again? + +VecNik. It's like MapNik. But it's vectors. + +Would you like to talk about stuff you could do or cautionary war stories right now? Quick straw poll. Show stuff? Anyone, anyone? War stories? Okay. Michael, you want to kick this off? You were saying about California and the school system? + +This is a problem we run into all the time. Is that like—there are datasets that have latitude and longitude for schools but they are basically all very wrong. We did a project a couple of years ago on how many schools are near earthquake hazards. So we have to be relatively precise. Especially if you want to say they're inside this—what's called an AP fault zone. Like they're within a quarter mile of a fault. You don't have a lot of margin for error. We just found—we just did a quick comparison—is this school in this county? We found tons of cases where they weren't even in the right county. And we found out that schools move all the time. One year the school will be here, the next year the school will have moved to another building or they've shut this building down, there's temporary buildings now, and especially in California we know it's really bad. I think in other states it's better. + +I included that Google street layer in the QGIS file. There's open layers—to MMQGIS—there's links in the readmes. But that one is really good. You can pull in a satellite layer, so sometimes I'll just spot check it. Is this school in the middle of a lake? I don't think it's an Atlantean school, so there's something wrong with this data, probably. Any other... Yeah. + +A while ago, Colin and I were trying to map food deserts in LA, so we were trying to find all the grocery stores in LA. So we went to the county assessors data and tried to find the filings for all the grocery stores and threw them into QGIS. And it looked like a lot of grocery stores, so then to spot check it, we put the Google street layer on it, and I realized that the grocery store I go to every week wasn't there and Colin's grocery store that he goes to every week was not there and we kept trying to find various grocery stores that we knew and we found, like, half of them. Half of them were just clearly—the assessor's data—it wasn't on there. So we're still looking. + +Yeah, that's my favorite thing to do. Stuff that I know is there. That should be there. That's the first thing that I go and look for. + +So I get this map—series of maps about all the Starbucks around the world, and I did do this spot checking, which was really—that's a fun use of Google street view. There's supposed to be a Starbucks here, and oh my God, there's a Starbucks in Google street view. And it's somewhere in Japan. Whoa. But speaking of Japan, the problem that—the thing that I ran into—was I did this analysis on the cities that have the most Starbucks in them. So I knew—okay, in this database that I had, it was Starbucks by address. Okay. I know New York City is going to have addresses that are Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island and Manhattan. If I do a New York City analysis, I can combine all those things. And I knew that was the case for a couple of other cities. But I didn't know that was the case for Tokyo. Because Tokyo addresses... Tokyo listed address in Tokyo is very small. It's a very small part of Tokyo, but there's all these other places that are part of what everyone knows is Tokyo, so I missed that, and it screwed up—I made a chart that was like—these are the top Starbucks cities around the world and Tokyo was supposed to be in the top five, and it wasn't in the list. So... Things like... Make sure you check your assumptions about what you're using to qualify these things. The way around that, which is—I had another thing, which was—these are all the Starbucks—this is just a map of, like, 50 miles around city centers. Tokyo was full of Starbucks in that. + +It's kind of interesting that Google street views kind of got me thinking about the interactive developer at Firstlook, who's got this really neat script to fire off and basically capture images from Google Street View, and it would be really cool. Pie in the sky thinking right now, but just checking your data by running a scraper and seeing all these street views and looking at them on a page or something like that. Rob? How are we doing on time? I think we have... + +A few minutes. + +A few minutes. Anyone... Questions? Things we didn't cover? Comments? Concerns? + +When you're working with turf, what's the best way to, like, visualize your data? Step by step, working with turf? + +I would say... So I would actually put the data in QGIS first. Or onto CartoDB. That's actually how I did my... How I processed my census tract data, for example. So I would always use some other tools before I pull things into turf.js. Because I know that's the— + +That's the last step? + +For interactivity. And if the dataset is really big, I wouldn't use turf on it. + +I think that gets us... Are we close to time? + +Yeah, I think we're... + +You have drink tickets and everything. I don't want to stand between journalists and a bar. I understand. But thank you guys for turning up and everything. It's awesome. + +(applause) diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015IntlNetworks.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015IntlNetworks.md index 08c96ab8..e949fddd 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015IntlNetworks.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015IntlNetworks.md @@ -1,194 +1,147 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/intlnetworks/index.html ---- - -# Building Strong Journo-Tech Networks—Internationally - -### Session Facilitator(s): Anika Gupta, Gabriela Rodriguez - -### Day & Time: Thursday, 2-2:45pm - -### Room: Minnesota - - -Testing. - - -Oh, are you the transcriber? This is fantastic! - - -I wanted to see what you guys want for lunch. You already grabbed it? - - -Let me rewrite something, so you can see. - - -The session will start in ten minutes! - - -The session will start in five minutes! - - -The session is starting now! - - -Hey, guys! Thank you so much for joining our session/discussion on building journalism tech networks internationally. Especially over lunch. And actually, Gabriela and I were going to say—it would be great if people could maybe move forward and fill two tables, because there aren't that many of us. It will help get good discussions going later on. Welcome! So we're making two groups at these two tables. Great. - - -Perfect. - - -Are we roughly even? Should we move one person here? All right. So I am Anika. - - -I am Gabriela. - - -We're going to be co-facilitating. Since it's a small group, I think we should all feel free to ask questions and talk to everybody. And we were thinking that the way we're going to break it down is—we'll ask everyone to introduce themselves. Then Gabriela will talk a little bit about her experience with building an international journalism and technology network very briefly, and then I will talk a little bit about what I have done, and some of the challenges I've faced, and then we were hoping to have you guys in your two individual groups address a couple of questions, and then we're going to all come back and talk together. So that was the idea. And I guess we can just start with the introductions. If you want to start? And just mention your name and what you're hoping to get out of the session or why you were interested in this. - - -Okay. I'm Matt Perry. I hope to... I think I just hope to learn a lot from this. I work with developers at news organizations around the world as part of my job. So I sort of feel like I see people doing good work all over the place. And I would just love to know more about how... What networks exist and how I can help with those. - - -Hi. I'm Evie Gu. For my job, we don't really do international cooperation and stuff. But me, myself, I have an international background. And I don't know much—like, how the journalism thing is going on in my country. So I would love to know more how people can operate and what we can actually really bring back or work with people in my home country. - - -Great. My name is Seth Lewis. I'm a professor here in the school of journalism/mass communication here at the University of Minnesota. So I teach and research about journalism and technology. And from about 2011 to 2013, 2014 or so, I did some research on hacks and hackers. Grassroots sort of international network of journalists and coders. So I talked to a lot of people involved in the group, but I haven't kind of stayed up with it as much in the past couple of years, but I'm also interested in other networks that have emerged. So I'm just sort of curious about what people are doing and thinking about with regard to these types of networks. - - -My name is (inaudible). I work at an international center for journalists, we're a non-profit organization based in DC. We work with a lot of journalists and developers from all over the world. We actually try to build international networks. And I'm also the co-organizer of hacks hackers DC, that local chapter, so I'm very much interested in learning useful tools and tips for how to make a stronger network. - - -Hi. I'm Yo-Yo. I work at the AP in New York. I'm interested in this session because I'm from China, and I know the Chinese data journalism community is growing rapidly, and there's lots of interest in collaborating internationally. And also how to do, like, open data in China. So there are networks developing in China, and I really want to help and I don't know whether the existing ones also... The channels online... And I have many friends working in data journalism... In China and also in the US. - - -Hi, everyone. I'm Jue. I'm the technologist at CUNY Journalism School in New York. I'm interested, because I've had good encounters with people from different hacks/hackers chapters. So somebody from Germany, I believe, someone from Madrid—so I just feel there's a huge amount of resources out there, and I want to see, like, what's even—what's a better way to sort of make it even more easy to explore. - - -Hi. I'm Emily Goligoski from the New York Times. And I'm interested in how we can best share what we're learning about readers all over the world with people in our different bureaus, as well as independent correspondents. - - -I'm Carlos. I'm from Brazil. I work for a sports site. And I came here because I want to know how I can share the knowledge beyond my borders, I guess. - - -I'm Russ. From Boston. At NPR. And I kind of—a designer and illustrator. And I don't know too much about the journalism just in general. So I'm really trying to just dive in a little bit and get a deeper understanding of how this works. The language that we're using around it. - - -I'm Francis. I'm an open news fellow at (inaudible) in the New York Times. I'm just curious, and I've also lived abroad for a bit, and have some friends and stuff. Doing this kind of work elsewhere. So I'm just kind of curious about learning how to better work with them. - - -I'm Kabya, I'm an OpenNews fellow with Vox Media. I grew up in India and have a technology background, but ever since I started working in this, people have started contacting me about how to get started in journalism. Especially from journalism schools in India. So I thought that would be an interesting conversation to have, how you translate ideas like (inaudible) and stuff when you talk about journalism communities internationally. - - -My name is (inaudible). I'm from the (inaudible), which I guess is similar to ICFJ. We're a media development organization, and we are always trying to help the journalism around the world in countries where it's not really journalism. And what I'm actually working right now on is trying to create some kind of a digital initiative, which is about finding and kind of building a bridge between the knowledge that's being built after experimenting and dealing with the current changes in the West, and with places where there are still—they don't even have a responsive website or don't even really... Don't know where to start. So trying to kind of—but also to involve the local journalists, and the amateur journalists as well. - - -And if you want to mention just name and what made you interested in the session. - - -So I'm (inaudible). I'm from Desert Digital Media. I have a software background, almost no journalism background. I've been learning more for about three years. And we do have certain websites that are run internationally and we have lots of contributors from different countries and different languages. So I thought this would be a good exchange and conversation—lots of things that I could learn. - - -Great. So I think we'll start with Gabriela, and she's going to introduce herself and tell you a little bit about some of the networks and the work that she's done. - - -Okay. I'm Gabriela. I was a fellow with OpenNews last year, at (inaudible). And I want to talk a little about the experience of building a network around journalism. My experience around a network of independent media. That is still on. It's called IndyMedia, but it had its best success around mid-2000. Indy Media was a network around collaborative network. It started as a network documenting the antiworld trade protests in Seattle. From that website, documenting what the mainstream media was not showing, came up around the mid-2000s almost a hundred collectives around the world that were documenting or showing what was happening outside of the mainstream media. There were protests or social movements. It was related with activists that wanted to show what was happening. Each collective had a website, with open publishing, that was quite a lot of technology innovation. We were all people that were doing Open Source in the 1990s. We wanted to have a way for everybody to publish on the internet. So it was a promise of, like, the open web and the promise of you owning your own infrastructure, your own machines. So we developed our own code. We owned our own servers. So it was a lot of innovation around technology. So you had a website and there were collectives that had, like, video, printing, different ways of doing media that we were already related to. I did a lot of community radio before that. So some collectives were doing more radio, some collectives were doing more photojournalism, but everything was on the web. We shared resources through the network. - -And so we had collectives around technology, policy, legal, to manage all the stuff around the network. We were activists. Not journalists. And we had the motto of—be your own media. So one important aspect of this network is that we own it. We felt part of it, and it was not something that came from outside. And the decisions were made in a consensus-based collective, and also through the network. Each collective—we communicate through mailing lists, through IRC, we had a very good documentation system with the wikis, that was the technology that we had at the moment. So it was very clear, how to get into the network. What things needed to be done. And, like, there were representatives of each collective in this global collective, doing technology, development, and all this stuff. It was a lot of experimentation. So that made it like... I'm sorry. That was a way for us to own what we were doing. Because we were doing our own structures, how we wanted to manage the network. There was a lot of technology innovation, and as I said, not dependent on one single person. So there was these collectives taking decisions. So the information was easily to pass from one person to the other. So it was not depending on one person for organizing. We mobilized around different local issues. And it was a decentralized network media. The challenges... It was that most of the media we were doing as activists—it was around protests. - -So when everything was more active was when something was happening. Otherwise, it was just like... Very slow pace. Then the verification—it was a challenge too. We had open publishing, but we had teams in each collective that were curating all the information and the articles that people were publishing or the social movements were publishing, and curating that and refining that... It was a little reproducing the filters of the traditional media. The English was another challenge, because it was collectives in Latin America, the US, Europe, Asia. So the people that were able to get all the information and communicate in the global network were the people that were more fluent in English. So there was some issues of power or informal hierarchies, because we tried to be horizontal, but in that context, there was a lot of informal hierarchies. So English was a challenge. It was hard to take decisions. Because we were based on consensus. So sometimes one person blocking or one collective blocking—we had a lot of discussion about financing, because we were not financed by foundations, or we didn't take big grants. Just by donations and local donations. So it was hard many times to make decisions, and I think that's one of the things that slowed down the network. That's... - - -Awesome. So I think that was—Gabriela—her background is as a coder. So she has some interesting challenges related to issues like language and power. And I think I also encountered a lot of those. - - -Also, about technology. That's something that I forgot to say. Because it was so hard to make decisions for us. The people that were making most of the decisions were people that speak in English and people that were, like, managing the technology collectives. - - -Yeah. - - -Were making the final decisions and things. - - -So I think my story is similar but also a little bit different. I'm actually just going to pop that website up here, so we can take a look at it. So essentially, I had... I studied journalism in the United States and grew up here, and then around 2009 I had been really interested in moving and working abroad. And outside of the US, I should say. And part of that was because I had always been interested in international stories, as well as how you develop... I was very interested in being immersed in the daily reality of news in a context outside what I had grown up with. So that was what led me to move to New Delhi in India. I started working there as a science correspondent. And around this time, the conversation around journalism and technology in the United States was already pretty advanced, but it was something that was just starting out in India. So I got hired, and I was the digital person for a very large business magazine. And this is—if anyone—some people are smiling in frustration. Because if you've ever done this job, it's basically like you are a mix of tech support and everyone... People would come to me and handwrite things and say—can you tweet that for me? So that was kind of... And that was after what they learned what Twitter was. So I was doing that. I was looking at podcasts and trying to figure out—okay, can we do this? - -One of the highlights of my career was when someone referred to one of these podcasts as "annoying", so you can see there's a lot of experimentation. But I was working for a very large Indian media conglomerate, and I was really the only person whose daily job was to look at how to adapt the new tools available online. And so I was in this position where, A, I was unfamiliar with a lot of this material, I was experimenting and learning, and B, when I was looking for people who I can turn to for guidance within my organization, I didn't really know many people who were interested in those same questions on a daily basis. So that's when I first thought—and so the question kind of becomes why do you start these networks and what do you hope they will do? So my—I had a couple of different interests. I thought... Okay. I want to access other people who are interested in this intersection of journalism and technology in India. And I want to—if there aren't people who are currently doing that, I want to create a space where we can start having conversations about these things, and hopefully I can bring that expertise back into my organization. At the time, we were looking at growing teams, so it was also for us potentially—people were interested in using that as a hiring mechanism, which, you know, is not always the case, but that was true there. And I also wanted to connect with people who were doing a lot of thought leadership on these issues outside of India and kind of say—what are you doing, and how can we learn from that and how can we not? And there are pros and cons to that method, and some of the challenges. - -So what I decided to do is to start a hacks/hackers chapter in Delhi, and this was in late 2012. So we started, and I would say that initially it was quite difficult. And everyone has faced different challenges who's tried to do this. So I've talked to various different organizers now in other parts of the world, because I'm really curious about what challenges they face. And so for us, for example, we had great face-to-face events and face-to-face interaction. It was not—the organization was not as vibrant online in between. But we did... We had a whole bunch of technologists who were interested, because there's a ton of—you were talking about that. The engineering students in India, and engineers who are interested in this. It was a little harder to get journalists to get out of bed and come to events like this, when they did not have a story to cover. And that was one of the ongoing challenges that we faced. So I think it became a lot of—for us, how to ask questions that would be interesting to a community we could build in Delhi. And then how to take the work that we were doing and find ways to kind of link that with what was happening internationally around the conversation related to these topics. - -So the example I have... Actually... On the site... Is an event that I think was successful in some ways and not in others. And this was Hack for Change. So I'm sure everybody remembers—there was this horrible attack of a young woman on a bus in Delhi. It made headlines around the world. She died. That started a conversation not just in India but internationally about the rights of women in India. So we became interested as a potential hacks/hackers event, why don't we take this as a starting point, this issue that's globally relevant but at the same time locally incredibly urgent, and find new ways to access this story? And we were very interested in addressing a couple of things. One is that we wanted to bring in somehow—bring in voices of people who weren't English speaking and also who weren't regularly on the internet. Internet penetration was very low in India. - -So we ended up partnering with an organization that was doing audio journalism, and we said—you've done this campaign around child marriage in rural parts of India. You have all of these clips where women and men have dialed in and talked about it. Can we work with that at our hackathon? Can we have a team that works with this information? And they said yeah, we're interested in doing that. We had another organization that had done a lot of work with—they had used the Ushaidi platform for crowd sourcing, so they had asked women all over Delhi to talk about—they had put out this campaign and said—have you been harassed on the streets of Delhi? If you have, write in, and tell us what happened and where you were. So they had this map and they had this information. And some of you may have worked with similar datasets before. And again, the idea was to say—we want to get out of the space of just speaking English. We want to get out of the space of just being online. And so we had that dataset. - -And then we formed different groups, and we started putting those groups together, and at this hackathon, we had—if you want to show the picture again... Yeah. It's... So I think a couple of things worked really well. One is that we had—we brought together—because it was a question that was—like I said, globally relevant and locally urgent, we got journalists, we got technologists, we also got a lot of entrepreneurs. Because, again, we have a lot of entrepreneurs in our local community who are very interested in this. And we got a lot of researchers. And activists. So it was really—in that sense, it was an unusual community. And people came together, and they created various projects. And one of the things that worked really well is that we had—so the team that was looking at the audio data actually said—okay, we've got this great audio data. How can we make this into a product or a story that can be consumed across multiple platforms? So they actually had a multi-lingual team, people from the United States, from India, working together, to go through these local language audio files, to translate them, and then to create a digital magazine around them. - -And then we had another team that they are come from a company that worked on—that worked with Twitter analytics. So several of them worked on a project where they actually tracked online abuse on Twitter. And derogatory terms for women. And they said—okay. So they created a website where that was displayed in realtime. This is the number of tweets that are mentioning these kinds of terms. And then they actually created a little autoresponder that would go back and respond to some of these tweets and say—hey, by the way, please don't use this term. It's offensive. And they demoed that. So I think what it was really good at was talking to people they wouldn't have talked to, getting people to exchange skills and knowledge with a vibrant group and starting this conversation about how these groups can work together in a locally relevant way around questions that are really important in India and represent voices that are often not heard, even within the world of Indian media, because the English language publications were focused... Yes. So... Okay. So that works. - -I think the challenge that I continue to face and that people can talk about as we move on is that we struggled to figure out how to get this work—how to link this with what was happening internationally. So the OpenNews guys were great. I remember we had several conversations. I would dial into their calls. But it was never an ongoing conversation. And I think that was one of the things that I struggled with and couldn't find a regular solution for. So... With that said... Those are kind of some examples of... And we wanted to share these stories, because we thought—these are some entry points. But we have... So at the various tables—and I notice we've had more people come in. So we can have four tables. We have paper in the middle, but we thought it would be interesting if people can talk about, in the group, share examples of—we have prompt questions up top. And you can talk about those questions. So, for example, this one is—what links your network together? Or what would also work really well is if we had people share an example of a successful communication they had within an international network, as well as a failed communication. And people can kind of talk about what worked and what didn't. In those examples. And... - - -Yes. You have on the table—like, a question for each table. To discuss about... The most successful international network you have been working on. Or you think about. And what makes that network successful. What it means. This one is what links your network together. The other is what it means to be a local community. Here. Yes, what it means... What we are meaning, when we say we want to involve more local community. What that means. This one is like... Challenges of tech networks. That you may think about. So we want to have 20 minutes of discussion around these topics. And then come back and think about... Share what we discussed. - - -And we're going to go around. So if you have questions about the questions in the middle, or anything like that, we can definitely address those too. - -(breakout sessions) - -(breakout sessions) - -(breakout sessions) - -(breakout sessions) - -(breakout sessions) - -(breakout sessions) - -(breakout sessions) - - -Okay. So... So we need to... We didn't have much time for this session. I'm sorry. Now we are going to go back to, like, sharing what—we are not going to go table by table. But I want people to bring and share with everybody what—if there's something interesting or something you think you can show or share or what you discussed—and if there's anything you think now that you didn't discuss, and you think it's relevant to this discussion, please bring it too. We had questions about successful networks and what makes the network successful or failed. - - -So we sort of discussed on different characteristics that a successful network might look like... And might have. And there are different networks on different levels. Even though the question was—what's the most successful. Because national networks—we also talked about locality. So we all agreed that experience is local and tech can be global. So a lot of networks that's leveraging technology... Like, say, there was an example of having this translation bot, where your content can be localized. That can... That is, like, a successful—or that sort of... Can somebody help me out? - - -Making it more personal, almost. - - -And get the language out of the way. And some other important characteristics are good connect person—so this person serves as somebody who was very good at networking, and has really strong organizing skills on the ground. And for a local network to succeed, there needs to be shared interest, and some unsuccessful examples would be networks where there's just distance from... There's mismarketing and just not... For the participants to not know their goals. Anything to add? - - -I think you got most of it. - - -Okay. Anybody else wants to... Something about... No? Okay. Then we had—what does it mean to be a local community? - - -Okay. I... Silent. Silently tried to find consensus. So... We kind of all talked about various places where we've done this. So shoutouts to Seattle, hacks/hackers Costa Rica, and (inaudible) a couple highlights were being flexible about participation, and open to the frustration of people leaving, being open when people are sort of ready to return, a really interesting point was maybe the name. Code for Seattle put people off. And so now it's become an Open Seattle, because they need more skills than just code. They need design and User Experience, and just kind of defining that project more broadly. And we talked a lot about kind of the difficulties of sustaining this kind of a project, especially when you have kind of a—not a huge amount of critical mass behind it. And so it's not always easy. Sometimes projects fail, and it's okay. - - -So... Then we have, like, challenges for journo-tech networks. - - -Yes. So... Some of the challenges that we talked about were... That sometimes there are separations within the news organizations themselves, within the technical teams, based on anything from language, both technical language and spoken language. But also topics, or those sorts of things. So bridging gaps where those kinds of divisions might pop up were a challenge. Challenges of time zones and maintaining regular contact. So if you've got a team that's really widely distributed, you've got somebody in San Francisco and you've got somebody in Eastern Europe, for example, you're working on very different sides of the globe. So how do you get—times for meetups, when no one has to stay up in the middle of the night? Cultural differences, especially where the focus is diffuse. And this also, again, goes—you know, not just to culture, as in the person's personal culture, but also news culture. And so how different organizations gather stories. You know, different types of work flows. So... And also actually... Personal experience. Differences in life experience. Which is obviously... Can be a challenge if somebody is used to working in a particular way, but obviously is also a real benefit. Because everyone can learn from each other and hopefully grow as people and as a team. - - -Thank you. Then we have what links your network together. - - -Well, we talked about... I think we kind of deviated from the question a little bit, I think. But generally we started off by discussing how... Having broad goals around sort of publicly oriented or civically minded kinds of problems or issues are ones that can be attractive both to journalists as well as technologists. And that... So that certainly can link them together. We actually talked a lot about—so having kind of common interests, similar types of needs, one... We also talked about how the logistical types of issues need to be considered. So from our own experience and from the research that I've done, we talked about how just the space, funding, other types of logistical support is really critical, and often gets kind of lost or at least... That's when things start to break down, is when those parts are missing. So thinking about what connects the networks, I think, keeping in mind those... That type of infrastructure... Is as important as anything else. - - -Does anybody else have to add any thoughts about... No? Okay. Well... Thank you. I'm sorry that we didn't have the time. Thank you. - -(applause) \ No newline at end of file +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/intlnetworks/index.html +--- + +# Building Strong Journo-Tech Networks—Internationally + +### Session Facilitator(s): Anika Gupta, Gabriela Rodriguez + +### Day & Time: Thursday, 2-2:45pm + +### Room: Minnesota + +Testing. + +Oh, are you the transcriber? This is fantastic! + +I wanted to see what you guys want for lunch. You already grabbed it? + +Let me rewrite something, so you can see. + +The session will start in ten minutes! + +The session will start in five minutes! + +The session is starting now! + +Hey, guys! Thank you so much for joining our session/discussion on building journalism tech networks internationally. Especially over lunch. And actually, Gabriela and I were going to say—it would be great if people could maybe move forward and fill two tables, because there aren't that many of us. It will help get good discussions going later on. Welcome! So we're making two groups at these two tables. Great. + +Perfect. + +Are we roughly even? Should we move one person here? All right. So I am Anika. + +I am Gabriela. + +We're going to be co-facilitating. Since it's a small group, I think we should all feel free to ask questions and talk to everybody. And we were thinking that the way we're going to break it down is—we'll ask everyone to introduce themselves. Then Gabriela will talk a little bit about her experience with building an international journalism and technology network very briefly, and then I will talk a little bit about what I have done, and some of the challenges I've faced, and then we were hoping to have you guys in your two individual groups address a couple of questions, and then we're going to all come back and talk together. So that was the idea. And I guess we can just start with the introductions. If you want to start? And just mention your name and what you're hoping to get out of the session or why you were interested in this. + +Okay. I'm Matt Perry. I hope to... I think I just hope to learn a lot from this. I work with developers at news organizations around the world as part of my job. So I sort of feel like I see people doing good work all over the place. And I would just love to know more about how... What networks exist and how I can help with those. + +Hi. I'm Evie Gu. For my job, we don't really do international cooperation and stuff. But me, myself, I have an international background. And I don't know much—like, how the journalism thing is going on in my country. So I would love to know more how people can operate and what we can actually really bring back or work with people in my home country. + +Great. My name is Seth Lewis. I'm a professor here in the school of journalism/mass communication here at the University of Minnesota. So I teach and research about journalism and technology. And from about 2011 to 2013, 2014 or so, I did some research on hacks and hackers. Grassroots sort of international network of journalists and coders. So I talked to a lot of people involved in the group, but I haven't kind of stayed up with it as much in the past couple of years, but I'm also interested in other networks that have emerged. So I'm just sort of curious about what people are doing and thinking about with regard to these types of networks. + +My name is (inaudible). I work at an international center for journalists, we're a non-profit organization based in DC. We work with a lot of journalists and developers from all over the world. We actually try to build international networks. And I'm also the co-organizer of hacks hackers DC, that local chapter, so I'm very much interested in learning useful tools and tips for how to make a stronger network. + +Hi. I'm Yo-Yo. I work at the AP in New York. I'm interested in this session because I'm from China, and I know the Chinese data journalism community is growing rapidly, and there's lots of interest in collaborating internationally. And also how to do, like, open data in China. So there are networks developing in China, and I really want to help and I don't know whether the existing ones also... The channels online... And I have many friends working in data journalism... In China and also in the US. + +Hi, everyone. I'm Jue. I'm the technologist at CUNY Journalism School in New York. I'm interested, because I've had good encounters with people from different hacks/hackers chapters. So somebody from Germany, I believe, someone from Madrid—so I just feel there's a huge amount of resources out there, and I want to see, like, what's even—what's a better way to sort of make it even more easy to explore. + +Hi. I'm Emily Goligoski from the New York Times. And I'm interested in how we can best share what we're learning about readers all over the world with people in our different bureaus, as well as independent correspondents. + +I'm Carlos. I'm from Brazil. I work for a sports site. And I came here because I want to know how I can share the knowledge beyond my borders, I guess. + +I'm Russ. From Boston. At NPR. And I kind of—a designer and illustrator. And I don't know too much about the journalism just in general. So I'm really trying to just dive in a little bit and get a deeper understanding of how this works. The language that we're using around it. + +I'm Francis. I'm an open news fellow at (inaudible) in the New York Times. I'm just curious, and I've also lived abroad for a bit, and have some friends and stuff. Doing this kind of work elsewhere. So I'm just kind of curious about learning how to better work with them. + +I'm Kabya, I'm an OpenNews fellow with Vox Media. I grew up in India and have a technology background, but ever since I started working in this, people have started contacting me about how to get started in journalism. Especially from journalism schools in India. So I thought that would be an interesting conversation to have, how you translate ideas like (inaudible) and stuff when you talk about journalism communities internationally. + +My name is (inaudible). I'm from the (inaudible), which I guess is similar to ICFJ. We're a media development organization, and we are always trying to help the journalism around the world in countries where it's not really journalism. And what I'm actually working right now on is trying to create some kind of a digital initiative, which is about finding and kind of building a bridge between the knowledge that's being built after experimenting and dealing with the current changes in the West, and with places where there are still—they don't even have a responsive website or don't even really... Don't know where to start. So trying to kind of—but also to involve the local journalists, and the amateur journalists as well. + +And if you want to mention just name and what made you interested in the session. + +So I'm (inaudible). I'm from Desert Digital Media. I have a software background, almost no journalism background. I've been learning more for about three years. And we do have certain websites that are run internationally and we have lots of contributors from different countries and different languages. So I thought this would be a good exchange and conversation—lots of things that I could learn. + +Great. So I think we'll start with Gabriela, and she's going to introduce herself and tell you a little bit about some of the networks and the work that she's done. + +Okay. I'm Gabriela. I was a fellow with OpenNews last year, at (inaudible). And I want to talk a little about the experience of building a network around journalism. My experience around a network of independent media. That is still on. It's called IndyMedia, but it had its best success around mid-2000. Indy Media was a network around collaborative network. It started as a network documenting the antiworld trade protests in Seattle. From that website, documenting what the mainstream media was not showing, came up around the mid-2000s almost a hundred collectives around the world that were documenting or showing what was happening outside of the mainstream media. There were protests or social movements. It was related with activists that wanted to show what was happening. Each collective had a website, with open publishing, that was quite a lot of technology innovation. We were all people that were doing Open Source in the 1990s. We wanted to have a way for everybody to publish on the internet. So it was a promise of, like, the open web and the promise of you owning your own infrastructure, your own machines. So we developed our own code. We owned our own servers. So it was a lot of innovation around technology. So you had a website and there were collectives that had, like, video, printing, different ways of doing media that we were already related to. I did a lot of community radio before that. So some collectives were doing more radio, some collectives were doing more photojournalism, but everything was on the web. We shared resources through the network. + +And so we had collectives around technology, policy, legal, to manage all the stuff around the network. We were activists. Not journalists. And we had the motto of—be your own media. So one important aspect of this network is that we own it. We felt part of it, and it was not something that came from outside. And the decisions were made in a consensus-based collective, and also through the network. Each collective—we communicate through mailing lists, through IRC, we had a very good documentation system with the wikis, that was the technology that we had at the moment. So it was very clear, how to get into the network. What things needed to be done. And, like, there were representatives of each collective in this global collective, doing technology, development, and all this stuff. It was a lot of experimentation. So that made it like... I'm sorry. That was a way for us to own what we were doing. Because we were doing our own structures, how we wanted to manage the network. There was a lot of technology innovation, and as I said, not dependent on one single person. So there was these collectives taking decisions. So the information was easily to pass from one person to the other. So it was not depending on one person for organizing. We mobilized around different local issues. And it was a decentralized network media. The challenges... It was that most of the media we were doing as activists—it was around protests. + +So when everything was more active was when something was happening. Otherwise, it was just like... Very slow pace. Then the verification—it was a challenge too. We had open publishing, but we had teams in each collective that were curating all the information and the articles that people were publishing or the social movements were publishing, and curating that and refining that... It was a little reproducing the filters of the traditional media. The English was another challenge, because it was collectives in Latin America, the US, Europe, Asia. So the people that were able to get all the information and communicate in the global network were the people that were more fluent in English. So there was some issues of power or informal hierarchies, because we tried to be horizontal, but in that context, there was a lot of informal hierarchies. So English was a challenge. It was hard to take decisions. Because we were based on consensus. So sometimes one person blocking or one collective blocking—we had a lot of discussion about financing, because we were not financed by foundations, or we didn't take big grants. Just by donations and local donations. So it was hard many times to make decisions, and I think that's one of the things that slowed down the network. That's... + +Awesome. So I think that was—Gabriela—her background is as a coder. So she has some interesting challenges related to issues like language and power. And I think I also encountered a lot of those. + +Also, about technology. That's something that I forgot to say. Because it was so hard to make decisions for us. The people that were making most of the decisions were people that speak in English and people that were, like, managing the technology collectives. + +Yeah. + +Were making the final decisions and things. + +So I think my story is similar but also a little bit different. I'm actually just going to pop that website up here, so we can take a look at it. So essentially, I had... I studied journalism in the United States and grew up here, and then around 2009 I had been really interested in moving and working abroad. And outside of the US, I should say. And part of that was because I had always been interested in international stories, as well as how you develop... I was very interested in being immersed in the daily reality of news in a context outside what I had grown up with. So that was what led me to move to New Delhi in India. I started working there as a science correspondent. And around this time, the conversation around journalism and technology in the United States was already pretty advanced, but it was something that was just starting out in India. So I got hired, and I was the digital person for a very large business magazine. And this is—if anyone—some people are smiling in frustration. Because if you've ever done this job, it's basically like you are a mix of tech support and everyone... People would come to me and handwrite things and say—can you tweet that for me? So that was kind of... And that was after what they learned what Twitter was. So I was doing that. I was looking at podcasts and trying to figure out—okay, can we do this? + +One of the highlights of my career was when someone referred to one of these podcasts as "annoying", so you can see there's a lot of experimentation. But I was working for a very large Indian media conglomerate, and I was really the only person whose daily job was to look at how to adapt the new tools available online. And so I was in this position where, A, I was unfamiliar with a lot of this material, I was experimenting and learning, and B, when I was looking for people who I can turn to for guidance within my organization, I didn't really know many people who were interested in those same questions on a daily basis. So that's when I first thought—and so the question kind of becomes why do you start these networks and what do you hope they will do? So my—I had a couple of different interests. I thought... Okay. I want to access other people who are interested in this intersection of journalism and technology in India. And I want to—if there aren't people who are currently doing that, I want to create a space where we can start having conversations about these things, and hopefully I can bring that expertise back into my organization. At the time, we were looking at growing teams, so it was also for us potentially—people were interested in using that as a hiring mechanism, which, you know, is not always the case, but that was true there. And I also wanted to connect with people who were doing a lot of thought leadership on these issues outside of India and kind of say—what are you doing, and how can we learn from that and how can we not? And there are pros and cons to that method, and some of the challenges. + +So what I decided to do is to start a hacks/hackers chapter in Delhi, and this was in late 2012. So we started, and I would say that initially it was quite difficult. And everyone has faced different challenges who's tried to do this. So I've talked to various different organizers now in other parts of the world, because I'm really curious about what challenges they face. And so for us, for example, we had great face-to-face events and face-to-face interaction. It was not—the organization was not as vibrant online in between. But we did... We had a whole bunch of technologists who were interested, because there's a ton of—you were talking about that. The engineering students in India, and engineers who are interested in this. It was a little harder to get journalists to get out of bed and come to events like this, when they did not have a story to cover. And that was one of the ongoing challenges that we faced. So I think it became a lot of—for us, how to ask questions that would be interesting to a community we could build in Delhi. And then how to take the work that we were doing and find ways to kind of link that with what was happening internationally around the conversation related to these topics. + +So the example I have... Actually... On the site... Is an event that I think was successful in some ways and not in others. And this was Hack for Change. So I'm sure everybody remembers—there was this horrible attack of a young woman on a bus in Delhi. It made headlines around the world. She died. That started a conversation not just in India but internationally about the rights of women in India. So we became interested as a potential hacks/hackers event, why don't we take this as a starting point, this issue that's globally relevant but at the same time locally incredibly urgent, and find new ways to access this story? And we were very interested in addressing a couple of things. One is that we wanted to bring in somehow—bring in voices of people who weren't English speaking and also who weren't regularly on the internet. Internet penetration was very low in India. + +So we ended up partnering with an organization that was doing audio journalism, and we said—you've done this campaign around child marriage in rural parts of India. You have all of these clips where women and men have dialed in and talked about it. Can we work with that at our hackathon? Can we have a team that works with this information? And they said yeah, we're interested in doing that. We had another organization that had done a lot of work with—they had used the Ushaidi platform for crowd sourcing, so they had asked women all over Delhi to talk about—they had put out this campaign and said—have you been harassed on the streets of Delhi? If you have, write in, and tell us what happened and where you were. So they had this map and they had this information. And some of you may have worked with similar datasets before. And again, the idea was to say—we want to get out of the space of just speaking English. We want to get out of the space of just being online. And so we had that dataset. + +And then we formed different groups, and we started putting those groups together, and at this hackathon, we had—if you want to show the picture again... Yeah. It's... So I think a couple of things worked really well. One is that we had—we brought together—because it was a question that was—like I said, globally relevant and locally urgent, we got journalists, we got technologists, we also got a lot of entrepreneurs. Because, again, we have a lot of entrepreneurs in our local community who are very interested in this. And we got a lot of researchers. And activists. So it was really—in that sense, it was an unusual community. And people came together, and they created various projects. And one of the things that worked really well is that we had—so the team that was looking at the audio data actually said—okay, we've got this great audio data. How can we make this into a product or a story that can be consumed across multiple platforms? So they actually had a multi-lingual team, people from the United States, from India, working together, to go through these local language audio files, to translate them, and then to create a digital magazine around them. + +And then we had another team that they are come from a company that worked on—that worked with Twitter analytics. So several of them worked on a project where they actually tracked online abuse on Twitter. And derogatory terms for women. And they said—okay. So they created a website where that was displayed in realtime. This is the number of tweets that are mentioning these kinds of terms. And then they actually created a little autoresponder that would go back and respond to some of these tweets and say—hey, by the way, please don't use this term. It's offensive. And they demoed that. So I think what it was really good at was talking to people they wouldn't have talked to, getting people to exchange skills and knowledge with a vibrant group and starting this conversation about how these groups can work together in a locally relevant way around questions that are really important in India and represent voices that are often not heard, even within the world of Indian media, because the English language publications were focused... Yes. So... Okay. So that works. + +I think the challenge that I continue to face and that people can talk about as we move on is that we struggled to figure out how to get this work—how to link this with what was happening internationally. So the OpenNews guys were great. I remember we had several conversations. I would dial into their calls. But it was never an ongoing conversation. And I think that was one of the things that I struggled with and couldn't find a regular solution for. So... With that said... Those are kind of some examples of... And we wanted to share these stories, because we thought—these are some entry points. But we have... So at the various tables—and I notice we've had more people come in. So we can have four tables. We have paper in the middle, but we thought it would be interesting if people can talk about, in the group, share examples of—we have prompt questions up top. And you can talk about those questions. So, for example, this one is—what links your network together? Or what would also work really well is if we had people share an example of a successful communication they had within an international network, as well as a failed communication. And people can kind of talk about what worked and what didn't. In those examples. And... + +Yes. You have on the table—like, a question for each table. To discuss about... The most successful international network you have been working on. Or you think about. And what makes that network successful. What it means. This one is what links your network together. The other is what it means to be a local community. Here. Yes, what it means... What we are meaning, when we say we want to involve more local community. What that means. This one is like... Challenges of tech networks. That you may think about. So we want to have 20 minutes of discussion around these topics. And then come back and think about... Share what we discussed. + +And we're going to go around. So if you have questions about the questions in the middle, or anything like that, we can definitely address those too. + +(breakout sessions) + +(breakout sessions) + +(breakout sessions) + +(breakout sessions) + +(breakout sessions) + +(breakout sessions) + +(breakout sessions) + +Okay. So... So we need to... We didn't have much time for this session. I'm sorry. Now we are going to go back to, like, sharing what—we are not going to go table by table. But I want people to bring and share with everybody what—if there's something interesting or something you think you can show or share or what you discussed—and if there's anything you think now that you didn't discuss, and you think it's relevant to this discussion, please bring it too. We had questions about successful networks and what makes the network successful or failed. + +So we sort of discussed on different characteristics that a successful network might look like... And might have. And there are different networks on different levels. Even though the question was—what's the most successful. Because national networks—we also talked about locality. So we all agreed that experience is local and tech can be global. So a lot of networks that's leveraging technology... Like, say, there was an example of having this translation bot, where your content can be localized. That can... That is, like, a successful—or that sort of... Can somebody help me out? + +Making it more personal, almost. + +And get the language out of the way. And some other important characteristics are good connect person—so this person serves as somebody who was very good at networking, and has really strong organizing skills on the ground. And for a local network to succeed, there needs to be shared interest, and some unsuccessful examples would be networks where there's just distance from... There's mismarketing and just not... For the participants to not know their goals. Anything to add? + +I think you got most of it. + +Okay. Anybody else wants to... Something about... No? Okay. Then we had—what does it mean to be a local community? + +Okay. I... Silent. Silently tried to find consensus. So... We kind of all talked about various places where we've done this. So shoutouts to Seattle, hacks/hackers Costa Rica, and (inaudible) a couple highlights were being flexible about participation, and open to the frustration of people leaving, being open when people are sort of ready to return, a really interesting point was maybe the name. Code for Seattle put people off. And so now it's become an Open Seattle, because they need more skills than just code. They need design and User Experience, and just kind of defining that project more broadly. And we talked a lot about kind of the difficulties of sustaining this kind of a project, especially when you have kind of a—not a huge amount of critical mass behind it. And so it's not always easy. Sometimes projects fail, and it's okay. + +So... Then we have, like, challenges for journo-tech networks. + +Yes. So... Some of the challenges that we talked about were... That sometimes there are separations within the news organizations themselves, within the technical teams, based on anything from language, both technical language and spoken language. But also topics, or those sorts of things. So bridging gaps where those kinds of divisions might pop up were a challenge. Challenges of time zones and maintaining regular contact. So if you've got a team that's really widely distributed, you've got somebody in San Francisco and you've got somebody in Eastern Europe, for example, you're working on very different sides of the globe. So how do you get—times for meetups, when no one has to stay up in the middle of the night? Cultural differences, especially where the focus is diffuse. And this also, again, goes—you know, not just to culture, as in the person's personal culture, but also news culture. And so how different organizations gather stories. You know, different types of work flows. So... And also actually... Personal experience. Differences in life experience. Which is obviously... Can be a challenge if somebody is used to working in a particular way, but obviously is also a real benefit. Because everyone can learn from each other and hopefully grow as people and as a team. + +Thank you. Then we have what links your network together. + +Well, we talked about... I think we kind of deviated from the question a little bit, I think. But generally we started off by discussing how... Having broad goals around sort of publicly oriented or civically minded kinds of problems or issues are ones that can be attractive both to journalists as well as technologists. And that... So that certainly can link them together. We actually talked a lot about—so having kind of common interests, similar types of needs, one... We also talked about how the logistical types of issues need to be considered. So from our own experience and from the research that I've done, we talked about how just the space, funding, other types of logistical support is really critical, and often gets kind of lost or at least... That's when things start to break down, is when those parts are missing. So thinking about what connects the networks, I think, keeping in mind those... That type of infrastructure... Is as important as anything else. + +Does anybody else have to add any thoughts about... No? Okay. Well... Thank you. I'm sorry that we didn't have the time. Thank you. + +(applause) diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015LightningTalks.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015LightningTalks.md index f50f5c51..658d2254 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015LightningTalks.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015LightningTalks.md @@ -1,281 +1,277 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/lightningtalks/index.html ---- - -# Lightning Talks - -### Session Facilitator(s): Kaeti Hinck, Alan Palazzolo - -### Day & Time: Thursday, 7-8pm - -### Room: Johnson - - -Hello? - - -Hi, everybody! Whoo. Welcome to lightning talks. It's the most categorically supportive talk you'll ever attend. No pressure. Just have fun. So first up tonight we've got Steven. - -This is all thrown together very quickly, so please bear with us. So for those who did propose a lightning talk you're on the list. But for now this will be the order. This is the site where you proposed your thing. - -Zero? - -Yes, we are an array based thing. Yeah, that's it. - -And we will give you a one-minute warning, which you're one minute away from five minutes and then at five minutes, we will cut you off.... in a gentle but firm way. So first we have artisanal data from—is that Rich? Yeah. Leer we go. - -Hi, everybody. So, I wanted to talk about creating ordered data because fortunately and unfortunately I've been spending the past several months doing this, and it is very exciting, it is very fun and it is also very tedious and it sucks a lot. But the end product is something that I am very proud of. I think a lot of the people that I work with are proud of. So I basically want to talk about the Washington Post data collection on 2015 fatal police shootings. So we started collecting this data at the beginning of this year. And I think the biggest challenge was determining what our universe would be. So obviously, you look at a case like Fredy Gray, the guy dies in police custody. He's not in our database. We created our database largely because police shootings are—we're in the cleanest universe we thought we could get. And on-duty police, I should note. So we looked at all the cases, including the ones that did not fall in our universe and we had cases where police—an off-duty police officer shouted at a guy at a barfight, should we count that as a police shooting? We had to answer that and we had to answer that for a lot of different scenarios. Did we have to count the one who went off shooting a guy at the scene? So I think the one big takeaway that I think you should take out of this is you need to define your universe early and you need to stick with it. It's probably the hardest thing in the world to do. USA Today did a mass killings database. I was involved very early with that but not for a long time, and the hardest thing that they had to do was define what a "mass killing" was. I mean, is it more than one person gets killed at a single incidence? Is it five, is it ten? - -And originally, when looking at mass shootings, I had argued that we should—anyone where four or more people were shot, not necessarily killed should be considered a mass shooting because there were some cases where there were ten people shot and no one died but why is that not a mass shooting? - -So in creating your data, that is going to be your biggest point. Another area that you're going to want to focus on is how much you want to collect on each of these cases because—so we're already close to 500 fatal police shootings this year. And the hardest thing for us to at this point would be to go back and add a field for all of them. So what we had to do at the very beginning is defining what columns we wanted to collect and that's not as easy as it sounds. Part of it was finding what we could get. If we were to track whether or not these things were justified. I think that most of them we won't find out until next year. And a lot of them we won't find out. But there were a lot of factors. Where did this happen? Did it happen in the street? Did it happen in someone's home? Those were the things that we started collecting. And obviously, we started we could start collecting data on mental illness. The police tend to indicate when a person is mentally ill, family members, especially if someone is suffering from mental illness, maybe that's the genesis of the shooting. So there are a lot of factors that are out there that we would have loved to collect but we would have gotten them on 10% of the cases and in reality, that is not a good amount for us. So you have to define your universe both what's going to be in there, and what columns you want. There's, I think those are the two most important things. On top of that, we have to vet all of this information repeatedly. Police shootings, especially, change from the initial shooting. So somebody might be armed when it's first reported, a week later they're not armed. Two weeks later, they might be armed, and they may not be armed. And so, we've had to continuously update various elements ever this database because it is an ever-changing world. So we—we focused on getting things right. If there's a dispute we wanted to note that there was a dispute. We wanted to do follow-up reporting. We wanted to find out what was right. And the hardest thing about collecting this data is being accurate because we cannot vet 500 police shootings. It's just—it's impossible. And so we have to pick and choose and a lot of cases are clear cut and so we decided that we would stick with them and we would follow up if necessary, but a lot of these cases, you know, pretty early on. - -That's most of what I had to say. I'm going to note that I can't tell you exactly when this is going to happen. But in the coming, probably week or so, we intend to release a large portion of our data. Not everything. A lot of our—we have a lot of flags in the data that are being used internally for reporting. That might not be as reliable. But at least points us in the right direction... - -[Phone Ringing ] - -That's time. - -[Applause ] - -Is that someone's ringtone? - -The end. - -Did you guys hear that on that one? - -I didn't. All right. Next up is Becky Bowers doing 20 or more signs within a news-nerd household. - -It is slightly more than 20. The more obsessive amount you can count or try. I'm having such an amazing day today and the way that I know is that I have more than 600 on red work emails. It's amazing. Unread work emails. so you're all going to have things to contribute, feel free to keep it going on Twitter. So in our house, I'm Becky Bowers, by the way. I'm a—at the New York Times. The only reason he's not here this year is 'cause it's Supreme Court season. Doing some cool stuff right now. But in our house, much more contentious than housework or spending time on those marital issues. It's like web metrics. This is how Jeremy feels about pageviews and I don't agree. I find them useful. It also doesn't matter how awful hackers is, because someone could be me. Like wants to watch it at least twice a year. You know, also, like, the papers. I tend to learn about dinner plans on dinner for about 5,000. In the Jones' household, relationship bonding occurs over mutual R code debugging. But the language of Agile sneaks into everything like birthday party planning is getting a little crazy so we had to kill some features. And at least one conversation a week starts with, "Did you see that thing in my LYCRA?" So this thing came from one of you, the first thing that happens, right, it's not that—it's awesome. It's like wait. I see this in a mirror. Who else has recipe on GitHub? - -No, that's only a Bowers thing. - -Also that's true. It could be only in our house. Also recipe on GitHub. Psych, recipe.com. Subreddit. You don't know whose phone is going. When news breaks everyone has news orders but the dinner conversation that you're having is probably going to show up on someone's website soon, or in five years in the case of the SCOTUS stuff that happened today. This might have come from that guy over there whose kids knows how to fly drones and they do tech support with those grandparents. Mapping. In our household there's always more laptops than people. Devices, maybe not so many. Well, many, many. This also came from someone else in the room, background check all the things, right? Yes. And if there are at least public records that is related to a public decision that is being pulled. And a lot of meaningful conversations happen via chat even if you both happen to be sitting on a couch side by side. It happens. It's happened. - -And... - -[Laughter ] - -That would be my now 3-year-old. Her name is Amelia, by the way. - -Oh. - -Yeah. - -Good for you. - -[We're not really into Rose right now]. Give her a break because this is not responsive, which was my first complaint. - -Maggie told me that this is the case in your house too, right? We also have, like, all of NICAR T-shirts. Also I love the one that Scott Klein was rocking today. Totally retro. - -It was three years ago. - -Uh, what—exactly. There are apparently other households where there are knockout-dragdowns over charts. - -One minute. - -Including maps that should be charts. This is a common conversation. Also human journalism should not be journalism. Please more bots. But also just how to make them more awesome. Yay! Thanks, everybody. - -[Applause ] - -Thank you, Becky. - -So up next we have Derek. Are you here today? - -I'm here. - -Do you need...? - -He's running. - -So you all need to get your computers out if you have OS X or Linux. Get them out. All right. Quiet down. This is serious business. - -Probably going to the command line. - -So we are going to learn as I. Vim is an editor we're going to don't it in five minutes. You might say I'm crazy. You're crazy. First thing you need to do is open up your terminal. Second thing that you need to do is type what I type. Type and press enter. Type my name, D-E-R-E-K, nothing happens, that's pretty weird. Now type Yvonne's name. Y-V-O-N-N-E. You don't see anything, that's weird. Now type Millie's name. M-I-L-L-I-E, what happened there? So Vim has something called insertion mode and it's different from the normal kind of mode, which is movie mode, or normal mode. But insertion mode is like a text editor. So now type insert twice. And now type, "When I was a boy, I wanted to be a train." Dash Max Barry, Machine Man. Now type insert. Now this is movement mode. This is default mode movement mode is like Vim because movement mode is like learning a great piece of music for the tenth time. Every time you learn something new. - -Think about back when you listened to Taylor Swift. And you need an O, H. In Vim, H is back. Now hold L. In Vim, L is forward. Now press K, that's up. And press J, that's down. Now, press O, and that's—on the next line, start typing, and now press enter. And now type, "Why listen to Nickelback when you can listen to Taylor Swift," period, escape. Now, there are a few other ways you can move around in Vim. You can move by the word by pressing B, back, back, back, back, back, or forward by words by pressing W, forward, forward, forward, back, back, back. You can go forward by typing A, and now I want you to type brussels sprouts, all in caps. Period and escape. Now press U, undo that. No one likes brussels sprouts. Now I want you to type O again and I want you to type, "I will not bribe Principal Skinner." Now press escape, now type 20, period. Now I want you again to type dash NOT. Now that it's search. What that does it searches for that term inside of your text editor, or you can call it a buffer, that's what Vim calls it. You type N again, and it goes down to the next word. And you type capital N and it will go back to the preview. Now the thing that it doesn't do is it doesn't highlight anything. That's weird. But we can change that. Just type colon, set, space, hlsearch, just like that and now you can see the highlights. Pretty cool, right? Pretty cool! Now even if you want to save this text because we've done a lot of work today. So you hit save, colon, w, and you put desktop, so you can find it really easily next time you want to use this text file. And now, you can quit. That's how you use Vim, guys. - -[Applause ] - -Awesome. Next unis Matt White talking about all he's learned from flying airplanes, I believe. You need the whiteboard or anything? - -Nope. I'm good. It's sort of appropriate that I'm following a determination of Vim because I want to talk about death. - -[Laughter ] - -So a lot of you I know, I'm Matt Waite. I'm a professor at the University of Nebraska and a lot of you I have met have said, "Oh, oh—you're the drone guy!" So I do have a passive little fascination with small flying robots. That has led me to some really weird places lately and I started a drone lab in 2011 to try to figure out how journalists can use, small drones, UAS's, UAB's, whatever shit you want to call them—"flying" work for me. Because I believe they have a value. I believe they have a First Amendment value. I believe as journalists we can do a lot with them. But in order to do that. In order to teach students to do that and in order to teach them as a part of my job, I had to go through regulatory hell. It started us with having having the—to go do a story about the drought and we get a nasty letter from the FAA. You need permission from us. Go get what's called a certificate of authorization. I said okay, can we please get one? And they said no. Okay, why? Because the government only gives permission to people who are doing aeronautics research or fulfilling a government function. They did not think that journalism or journalism fingers were aeronautics research were fulfilling a government function. Which part of me was like okay, fair. The First Amendment says yeah, okay, take care o take your government and here you go. But the other part of me went, "Shit, that means that we have one other option. The one other option is let's get a commercial license." I can bore you to death about the details of a commercial license, if you wish if anyone is having trouble sleeping, please come find me, illustrate put you out. But that commercial license, though, requires yes to be a manned pilot. I have to learn how to drive a Cessna, in order to learn how to drive a 3-pound hunk of plastic that any one of you can fly around your yard right now. So that's what I'm doing this summer, I'm learning how to fly a Cessna, a 152 and a skycatcher. I have an instructor in that probably has stared death in the face she probably doesn't know what it is anymore. We get out than runway and she says okay you're going to take the airplane off. And I say, "What?" And she floored the throttle. And I learned then, while I'm completely freaking out that once you get up to a certain speed if you just pull ever so gently, a Cessna will just fly off the runway and you're gone and you're in the air I'm freaking out all the time and I'm scared to freakin' death. And we come back and she says you're going to land the airplane and I say, no, you're going to land the airplane and I'm going to watch. We'll do this again. Fast forward, I have about ten, 11 hours in the airplane. And we do our first cross-country flight. And that means I had flied to another airport, like, 15 miles away. Don't get a little crazy with the cross-country. We went to a making sure down. It's small, it's narrow, it's short. You gotta get to the end of the runway, or stop or get to the end of it or end up in a cornfield. That's bad but the problem with landing on a narrow runway you learn because it's narrow, your field of vision is kind of messed with. Your depth permission is messed with. When you're landing an airplane, you're trying to bring it down as slowly and gently as possible but you're trying to point at the runway. Your flight instructor just says, just aim it at the runway and just fly into it. And I say, no, we're not doing that many we're just going to gently kiss it at the top. So I'm aiming at it. We're—which go down and what happens when you're death perception is messed with, you pull up a little early. You're supposed to flare up right at the end and you land and it's nice and pretty when you do it back like this, too high, you drop like a stone, you hit the runway and you bounce... and if things are bad, like, you really hit hard, you bounce again. And again, and again, and again. And when that happens your flight instructor goes, go round, go round go around. Knew I've watched an online video about how to go "around" at this point, which does not prepare you to go around. What you do to go around is you floor it. You're supposed to keep your rudders controlled. So your plane doesn't start veering all over the runway. You pull back on the stick and you get out of there. You're supposed to gently let down the flaps as you're going up and you'll get away. What did I do? I floored it, I forgot the rudders, I dropped the therapies completely down, the plane starts flying this way and I'm not ashamed to admit, I mean I started going, help me, help me, help me, help me. I'm listening to the tail of the airplane dragging on the ground... and I'm freaking the fuck out! And we get in the air and she says, "That wasn't bad." What does this have to do with flying drones? Absolutely nothing! Thank you. - -[Applause ] - -Thanks for that. Next up we have Brian talking about Charles and mobile stuff. - -Yay. - -And awesomeness. - -So I'm not going to talk about death but I'm going to do something equally stupid and show you how to hack our apps. Please, please don't tell people I just doing this. And I'm also going to call this running at the conference with scissors. We all know the world in the web that if you open up the network thing, you can see what's kind of happening under the hood between you and the server. So for example, if I refresh this page, I can see that this simple removal page has a lot going on back and forth with the serve and it's a way that, like, the data nerds have long learned we can go to map sites and scrape the sites, find out what JSON proxies and what data's actually there that we can then scrape and pull and do fun thing on our own. In the world of mobile apps, you can't just open up the inspector to see what's happening. So you have to get in the middle of it and find out what's happening with the apps so that's where the Charles proxy comes in place. It's a freeish thing in that it's free if you don't mind the harassment every 30 days to remind you to pay for it. But otherwise you can spend the 60 bucks and get the thing and what it is, it's a little proxy you can put on your laptop and you then connect your laptop and you essentially are now doing what's called a manual rolling attack where you're now intercepting everything that's coming in the web app so we use it, if you're hitting the ad server correctly or using your analytics correctly. But you can also find out to see if somebody else has the app. What data are they getting, where are they getting that data? So if I open up Charles proxy, I'm recording everything that's happening on my phone and here's where the live demo's coming into place. So I'm going to open up my cooking app and you can see everything that it is trying to do. Hopefully this will work. One bar. C'mon little buddy. Right over there, it was just like, "Yes!" It was just cruising. So now you can see, this is the embarrassing part so please don't go to this. We should be using HSTS, and so you should be able to see the data. And so you can see a lot of our data here. Here are our images. And you can get the and I am saying play with them. There's some booze down here somewhere. I think we'll probably have one of my recipes. So here's some recipes coming in from CloudFront and everything else. I can open up the BuzzFeed app and look at what they're doing. I can open up any app and see what's going on so just like the inspector, Charles proxy, it's a way to find out what's going on under the hood. That's it. - -Cool! - -[Applause ] - -Or for airing out your laundry. - -Next up is Emma. Is Emma here? Yes. - -This might be tonight's most important lightning talk. It's about snacks. - -These are old slides also. Ignore. - -This is good? Okay. So I like food and I don't like being at the office for a really long time and I like to eat while I'm at the office and not eat shitty food so that's kind of my game plan for that. Most of us eat like there is this. This is pretty standard. There's, like, your beer food group, your coffee, your pizza, and down at the end, your hard liquor. Birthday party leftovers. Free booze in the office. Coworker's baking experiments. This is actually one of mine. Election night pizza. This also might be mine. These are all, like, real food from real places over the last few years. So I know it's real. So I was at FP, he found free bacon and I totally ate some because it was free. We didn't know where it came from and we didn't really care where it came from because it was really nicely cut and free. So, like, that's not great for us to be living on. So I have three kinds of, like, main things, right? Put a lot of food in your desk. We don't need to put, like, folders in your drawers. There should be food in your drawers. Pack like actual lunches and probably some shit to put in your desk to make it a little bit easier if you actually don't have access to a kitchen or a cafeteria. - -Vending machines. Bad and sad. So these are things that I sometimes have come in the past come to my desk. Soup, not the ramen noodles like you get from white people grocery stores. Like Shin Ramyun, it comes in a red package. But like, it—it's like—it's in the drawer. And no one's ever going to eat this and emergency chocolate. If you give that person a chocolate, it's so much better. Okay, so if you have access to a clean, clean office freezer, that does not have weird things in it. Potstickers, frozen lasagna or edamame, just put your name on it so your coworkers don't eat them. So this is what I have in my desk—like, the dorm-style kitchen I made. A large bowl that you can put in the microwave, a mug, a small one of those plastic strainers, a good knife that's not, like, super, super nice but also not super, super shitty. We bought one from this weird grocery store in Hawaii that we cut fruit with and I keep that in my desk. Spoon, fork, chopsticks. These are all dollar store type of things, right? French press. At the office I used to have a Keurig and it was awful. Then they ran out of Keurig cups. Which is the lowest part of awful—like, subawful. So you should just buy a French press or something other means of like whatever for coffee. - -So I also have purchased a, like, an actual water heater for this. I conned an editor at my old job to get a panini press for us and also making sure that we always have bread and cheese so that, like, you could always, at the very minimum, have a grilled cheese sandwich, you cannot, however, try an egg on a George Foreman grill because they are slanted and you will just watch your egg slide to that floor. So that's like a pro tip. No eggs on sliding heating elements. So tiny lunch sized Crock-Pot for your desk and the really cheap single-smoothie blender but don't put a lot of difficult things in to blend in them because it's a friggin' 12-dollar blender. So are the things. So if you do eat meat, roast a chicken because you can do a lot of things with chickens. Chop up your vegetables, blah, blah, blah, make large amounts of things. You can make rice, quinoa, whatever the hell. Pack your lunch. And the worst thing is pack your lunch in the morning. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, lazy kid lunches is what I call them. - -Bring vegetables and you put them on the panini press and you have lunch. It's amazing. Grilled cheese. Who's had a grilled cheese when they were sad, dead, and hate their coworkers? And desk ramen is way cooler if you have an egg and you have the boiler thing and you have a strainer. Use your hot water to make some edamame. That's the thing. You can blend. And then, seriously, the power of emergency chocolate, right? Like, most of us are in jobs where we're asked to do things that we don't want to do. If you give them chocolate they're way more likely to do things that they're not likely to do when hungover. So that's it. - -I might want to put some of those recipes on GitHub. - -Next up we have Jordan. - -My clock hasn't started yet. - -I think I should be able to run back and forth. - -Well, I might be just dropping, throwing things all over the place. So I'm going to be talking to you about how I got suckered into an 888 kilometer race. That's really fucking far even for an ultra runner like me. If you don't know the metric system well, that's about 552 miles and the reason that I'm calling this "Infinitus" is because that—is because I failed. I got injured at 377 miles. For everyone that wants to do a math, that's about a 68%. That's about a D+. Not that bad, but that's as much I got in Infinitus as well. But I know what you're thinking. This shit is bananas! It's totally bananas. Yes, it is. And that is totally the point. If you know anything about running, you know that there's a lot of those two things involved in running, especially the longer that you go and the reason that I did this and the reason I got suckered into this was because I was trying to find limits, my personal limit. So I started doing marathons and then doing 100 miles which sounds totally batshit crazy, right? And I didn't fail at that. And I said, why not go farther but the for a thing about this distance is it's so out-there-batshit-crazy that failure is the expectation. I didn't have a reason to expect failure. But the failure was the expectation so you know what? It's cool. So here's what I learned. My approach to doing this. This is a jar. A pretty ugly jar. Here's a fly trapped inside the jar and it's, "How do I get out of this friggin' jar?" I can just fly against the glass again and again and again until I break the glass and I get out. So, is that going to work? - -No. - -No. Hell no. The fly's going to end up dead and, like, shaking on the bottom of the jar, which is what happened to me. So basically, here's what happened. So every day I would go out. I would have to run about 55 miles a day to make my goal which is what I would do for about a week but something would break. Either I would not be eating enough or I would totally fail and come in, like, broken and hobbling into the home base of the race and I would figure out how to fix this problem because you have to go again the next day so without eating. It was like chugging dance of Ensure. Okay, solved that problem. Wash, rinse, and repeat. Except there was no washing because we got really, really smelly. And then the next day we would go out and another major, major problem would arise. I would come in bordering on heatstroke. Eat and ice cream until you can run again at night. So you do that over and over. Until finally I broke for good, which is okay. I got an injury at about mile 377, which is great. It was actually the best thing that ever happened to me, let me tell you. Because I was so stupid and so focused on this number that I missed the big picture. I didn't realize that that wasn't at all what the race was about. It was actually about these ten crazy people who somehow were stupid enough to toe the start line with me. So it wasn't me alone in this jar. It was it was like there were a bunch of other crazy flies in here and once we actually realized that, we could do, you know, the Finding Nemo thing—"swim together!" We can all start going against the jar at the same time and knock it over and break it and fly forever. That did not happen. One of us actually finished the race out of ten but this thing that was previously impossible somehow became now probable. Not likely, still unlikely but still within the realm of possibility. So my challenge to you is pick something crazy impossible that you will know that you will fail at and do it because it will be liberating. For the first, you know, seven days, it may be like The Hunger Games, there's someone back there like, "Cue the storm!" Launching lightning and thunder at you at your darkest moment but suddenly it will become an episode of Dr. Who and you'll realize that everyone is brilliant and can help each other in their own way even if you don't all survive until the very end. Thank you. - -Thank you. - -Next up is Heather. - -Hey, I like your ringtone. - -Here you go. - -Thank you. So it's no secret that we news nerds like our food, as Becky Bowers pointed out earlier that we get to a point where we have entire spreadsheets of wine that we drink. I want to talk about one very specific revered food and that is pie. Pie charts are bad, pie is good. You should know how to make pie crust, okay? This is not a hard thing so I'm here to demystify this for you. - -So what is the secret ingredient to successful pie crust? There are a couple of them. People will tell you that it is love. The secret to any baked good is love—aww! These people are liars! This is not the secret. Love is warm and fuzzy, and warmth is the enemy of your pie crusts! Do you know what the secret is? The secret ingredient is? It's attitude! This is why this is every time I make pie crust, I start out like this. You have this. And if you have this, you have already won. You can taste the victory, I know you can. - -So step one: You have your attitude. Step two: You need your recipe. And then you need your ingredients. So what is the best recipe out there. There's a lot of debate about this? Some people swear by vodka pie crust recipes because vodka evaporates and it creates air bubbles and that's a bunch of bullshit. - - - -Some people swear by rolling out the dough a certain way, or preparing out the dough a certain way. The point of the matter is it doesn't really matter what your recipe is; your successful pie crust recipe is the one that you learned how to make pie crust with. This is the one that I use from Submitten Kitchen. I've been using this for years and it comes out perfect every time. And so I think this is the ultimate pry crust recipe but like I said, any recipe that works for you will work. Now, there is a very important point here where it says "very cold." Your butter must be ice cold. You need the ice water in your veins to make good pie crust. If it's not cold, it's not going to be flaky. And you want your pie crust to be flaky. - -This picture is a lie. You do not put your butter on the counter. When you assemble your ingredients, this is not how you do it. You'll see a number of recipes that tell you to get all your ingredients together—don't believe them! You also have to measure correctly. This is very, very important. If you get your cups out, I will smack you. You use a scale, damn it! - -Do it right and you won't be sorry. This is a scale. Buy one. Now, the reason for that is flour and sugar and things like that compact over time. So one cup of flour can be a different number of grams depending on how you measure it. If you have too much flour in your dough, bad things will happen. You're going to end up with a thick, deep-dish pie and nobody wants that. Mix your dry ingredients together and then find a place in your freezer to stick it for a few minutes in between the 12 pounds of cheddar cheese I have and the stalagmites of humidity on the top of my freezer. - -One minute. - -Oh, my gosh. Watering two. Let's talk about fat! I like butter! Some people will swear by lard. It doesn't matter! Lard scares me. One more secret weapon. Your butter must be frozen. You want one of these things. You will grate your butter. People will tell you to cube it, and refrigerator it, that's no good. For comparison there's frozen butter versus—put it all together. Mix it up. You want it to be kind of lumpy because visible butter chunks means you will have visible flakiness. If your hands get greasy, your dough is too warm. Put it back in the fridge. If your hands get sticky, your dough is too wet, you screwed up. Throw it out, try again. It should look something like this. Wrap it in saran wrap, throw it in your fridge for at least an hour—better two. Wait, wait. Roll it out, don't overflour it don't underflour it. Every two times you roll it out, turn it around, this will keep it from sticking. And if you need to, roll it around the pin. Stick it in this fridge, make it cold. Then bake it, eat it, make pie, go forth! - -That was very animated. Sarah, you are up next. - -Whoo! - -Hello. So I'm talking about the map in the middle, the square map. Now I know very little about maps. I decided to call this an equal area dammer's map. I think that's how you pronounce it. So that's what I'm calling it now. This is a normal map of the United States. This is an equal area dammersers map. - -a business used this map. It's The Guardian. Look at it fall! Look—many of them! More maps! So fun. Best of all, thanks to our buddies at Corks and David. We have a bunch of them in different shapes. I got a little jealous and I was like, I want one. And so I made one. No, that's not it. So I made one using data that's a little iffy, it's fun about it's about exercise. California exercises, that's no surprise there. And then we got an email from our cartographers, saying, let's talk about these maps. We started out with these maps. And so I get out and had a conversation with them. And later I came down to my desk and wanted to bash my head against the desk. It was a rough conversation. It took a while: Two hours. So let's see what we have here. So I went to them, and I said, "Hey, you're making a map but it's not really a map so don't do that. Bad idea." I said okay, it's a table. Think of it as a table, except that it's just a visual presentation. That's good. A table. Well, it's hard to find your state in this map. And I said that's okay 'cause it's hard to find your state in a table. - -[Laughter ] - -But this particular idea, well, I said, okay, it's misleading, and I said, "Have you looked at a map?" It's misleading too! It's huge. So two different colors, you can count them both. Don't use it for data, we're ducting, you know, based on our minimum wage it's below $7, and below $9 and do that, you can't do that because you can't count the colors so once you put it in colors, aren't you bucketing? Isn't that the same thing? It's like no, you can do that but you can't do that in a normal map. I don't know. It's the same thing. Either way, you're doing it in buckets so that didn't work out so well. So again we did this on a graph. This might be a better way of doing it if you have actual data. Nice bar chart, two lose any detail, you don't lose anything. Except... let's just try something here. Wait I can't find my state. Oh, wait, oh, look, I can see all my states now. Local, it's so great. I can mouse over, I can put it on a table. I like that one. Okay, so I want a table. Lots of categories... right, mobile. Also, widgets. You put these into an article and look, a little map with a nice little review. Also good. Okay. So they said well, if there is something to a map, let's just map it., you know, a real map. I said no. I think you guys know what that means. It's not. Okay. Where do we go? They want me to go next. I need to skip ahead. So all states are equal, I said. Use these when you don't care that one state has more people in it. You don't care that one state is bigger. All states are equal. In the congress and Senate, all states are equal, two people per state, that should work. Okay, they agreed on that one a little bit. But then they said, it's hard to find your state. So I said, too bad. Then they said it's inconsistent, it's unfamiliar and I said that's too bad because people will get familiar with it and eventually, we'll get consistent because well, right now, it's kind of hard to find your state. They said keep moving around. - -Florida? - -Florida. Okay, yeah, so here's the other thing. It's not really geography. You're noticing a pattern here. It's not really geography. What is Florida doing, what is Texas doing? A lot of states are going there. It's not a map; it's a table. So you get the point of it also we should put the data wherever it matches and they said you shouldn't put it here, they said no you shouldn't do it, just put it in a real map. And I said no, we're not doing that. I said we're putting it in a table and I said no table is stupid because you can't use it on mobile. And this thing on for two hours. So I have no idea what to do now. So you guys have any ideas, let me know, but in the meantime, we should all agree on one layout to begin with. So that I need to figure out. - -Yes, we are at the last one. - -Oh, my God. Here we go. - -Definitely not the least. So Norma. Yes, you were here last year. - -I'm going to move this around a little bit. This is Vim, by the way. - -She always wants brownie points from Derek. - -Browny points given. - -I just gotta make it a little bit smaller. - -You're not taking my time away, are you? - -I think we're... scroll down. Okay. - -No biggie. So look. - -Hold on. - -Okay. - -Okay, you're sitting way over there. - -All right, so I know the whole reason you guys came here and sat through all those boring talks is because you wanted to learn some steno, right? - -[Applause ] - -I'm going to give you a little bit of a crash course. Five minute crash course on steno. So yeah, so you know, in a nutshell. System of phonetics—system of shorthand based on phonetics, it's another whole language. We're writing in code. The first question everybody always asks is: Where are the letters on the keys? Here they are for you. It really doesn't help to know that they're there. After the first month when you're learning steno, it's good to know that there's an S and a K and a W and an R. But it really doesn't matter because you're writing them in chords and you're writing them—Derek knows what we're talking about. - -I really don't. I really don't. - -Anyways. So... yeah. On the bottom—I'll just tell you what, you know, on the bottom row you've got an S, and a K, and a W, and an R, those are some consonants on the left-hand side. In the middle we have some vowels. A, O, E, and U. Notice there's no I. So how do you write an I? Show them, Mirabai. Do you see it in the steno? - -I don't know if you can watch the patterns as she's writing. But anyway. So we stroke them together to make things, you know, when you're first learning on the right-hand side, you have an R and a B, and a G, and an S so you can, in the beginning, you write words like "sob" and "swab" and "war" and you can make a J out of all those letters on the left. And you can make—you can spell "jar," and "jaw," and "jaws," and "Jews" and "juice." And hang onto your seats now, we're getting advanced now, a two stroke word, Jarvis. Oh, I caught her! - -Sorry! - -Watch this, Warsaw. - -Here's when it starts to get tricky, homonyms. Sore and soar. - -Nice. - -Now that you know how to do steno, just pay attention. I bet you can see the patterns as Mirabai's writing, not typing. Please don't say typing. So there's a whole bunch of frequently asked questions. How long does it take to learn? - -I don't know. Like 18 months if you're supernatural brilliant like Stan who taught himself steno from the start, which just blows my mind, I don't know. And then it's like the outer edge is apparently infinity. The person is making a post that says, "I've been doing this for six years and I can't pass a test at 140 words a minute." My response, not very encouraging is, "Go home, you're drunk. This is not the thing for you." Which leads to the question: How fast do we write? Fast. I'm certified for 240. Most days in medical school I'm writing 250 to 300 words a minute for four hours straight. Mirabai is certified for what? Stan is like 3 million or something. You know... - -He's—he's training right now for a competition that's coming up at the end of July, Mirabai's also going to be taking part in that competition. I'm going to be, like, happy to be the cheerleader, rah-rah things. So yesterday we were walking around the sculpture garden at the Walker and it came to mind—a depressed realization that I finished steno school before those two were born. Like, I just can't even. Hey, you know, and like fax machines. Were coming into vogue. -S -TAN: And yet you still say, "Instagram that shit!" - -So I'm still cool. I still got it. A little bit longer anyway. So that's what I'm talking and they're working tonight. Anyway, I think I'm sort of out of time, so yeah, wanted to make a plug for Mirabai's project, which is the Open Steno Project. - -The Open Steno Project. - -Openstenoproject.org, please. Go look at it. It's very cool. She's amazing. - -STAN: Anyone can learn it for free. - - So come talk to us more if you want to know more about this fun stuff. It's really great. - -[ Applause ] - -[Well Deserved Accolades] - -Let's give one more hand for all of our presenters today. - -[ Applause ] - -And especially it's awesome because none of them had time prepare. - -Thanks for hanging around for the lightning talks! - -[ Applause ] - - Now you can explore some other room. +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/lightningtalks/index.html +--- + +# Lightning Talks + +### Session Facilitator(s): Kaeti Hinck, Alan Palazzolo + +### Day & Time: Thursday, 7-8pm + +### Room: Johnson + +Hello? + +Hi, everybody! Whoo. Welcome to lightning talks. It's the most categorically supportive talk you'll ever attend. No pressure. Just have fun. So first up tonight we've got Steven. + +This is all thrown together very quickly, so please bear with us. So for those who did propose a lightning talk you're on the list. But for now this will be the order. This is the site where you proposed your thing. + +Zero? + +Yes, we are an array based thing. Yeah, that's it. + +And we will give you a one-minute warning, which you're one minute away from five minutes and then at five minutes, we will cut you off.... in a gentle but firm way. So first we have artisanal data from—is that Rich? Yeah. Leer we go. + +Hi, everybody. So, I wanted to talk about creating ordered data because fortunately and unfortunately I've been spending the past several months doing this, and it is very exciting, it is very fun and it is also very tedious and it sucks a lot. But the end product is something that I am very proud of. I think a lot of the people that I work with are proud of. So I basically want to talk about the Washington Post data collection on 2015 fatal police shootings. So we started collecting this data at the beginning of this year. And I think the biggest challenge was determining what our universe would be. So obviously, you look at a case like Fredy Gray, the guy dies in police custody. He's not in our database. We created our database largely because police shootings are—we're in the cleanest universe we thought we could get. And on-duty police, I should note. So we looked at all the cases, including the ones that did not fall in our universe and we had cases where police—an off-duty police officer shouted at a guy at a barfight, should we count that as a police shooting? We had to answer that and we had to answer that for a lot of different scenarios. Did we have to count the one who went off shooting a guy at the scene? So I think the one big takeaway that I think you should take out of this is you need to define your universe early and you need to stick with it. It's probably the hardest thing in the world to do. USA Today did a mass killings database. I was involved very early with that but not for a long time, and the hardest thing that they had to do was define what a "mass killing" was. I mean, is it more than one person gets killed at a single incidence? Is it five, is it ten? + +And originally, when looking at mass shootings, I had argued that we should—anyone where four or more people were shot, not necessarily killed should be considered a mass shooting because there were some cases where there were ten people shot and no one died but why is that not a mass shooting? + +So in creating your data, that is going to be your biggest point. Another area that you're going to want to focus on is how much you want to collect on each of these cases because—so we're already close to 500 fatal police shootings this year. And the hardest thing for us to at this point would be to go back and add a field for all of them. So what we had to do at the very beginning is defining what columns we wanted to collect and that's not as easy as it sounds. Part of it was finding what we could get. If we were to track whether or not these things were justified. I think that most of them we won't find out until next year. And a lot of them we won't find out. But there were a lot of factors. Where did this happen? Did it happen in the street? Did it happen in someone's home? Those were the things that we started collecting. And obviously, we started we could start collecting data on mental illness. The police tend to indicate when a person is mentally ill, family members, especially if someone is suffering from mental illness, maybe that's the genesis of the shooting. So there are a lot of factors that are out there that we would have loved to collect but we would have gotten them on 10% of the cases and in reality, that is not a good amount for us. So you have to define your universe both what's going to be in there, and what columns you want. There's, I think those are the two most important things. On top of that, we have to vet all of this information repeatedly. Police shootings, especially, change from the initial shooting. So somebody might be armed when it's first reported, a week later they're not armed. Two weeks later, they might be armed, and they may not be armed. And so, we've had to continuously update various elements ever this database because it is an ever-changing world. So we—we focused on getting things right. If there's a dispute we wanted to note that there was a dispute. We wanted to do follow-up reporting. We wanted to find out what was right. And the hardest thing about collecting this data is being accurate because we cannot vet 500 police shootings. It's just—it's impossible. And so we have to pick and choose and a lot of cases are clear cut and so we decided that we would stick with them and we would follow up if necessary, but a lot of these cases, you know, pretty early on. + +That's most of what I had to say. I'm going to note that I can't tell you exactly when this is going to happen. But in the coming, probably week or so, we intend to release a large portion of our data. Not everything. A lot of our—we have a lot of flags in the data that are being used internally for reporting. That might not be as reliable. But at least points us in the right direction... + +[Phone Ringing ] + +That's time. + +[Applause ] + +Is that someone's ringtone? + +The end. + +Did you guys hear that on that one? + +I didn't. All right. Next up is Becky Bowers doing 20 or more signs within a news-nerd household. + +It is slightly more than 20. The more obsessive amount you can count or try. I'm having such an amazing day today and the way that I know is that I have more than 600 on red work emails. It's amazing. Unread work emails. so you're all going to have things to contribute, feel free to keep it going on Twitter. So in our house, I'm Becky Bowers, by the way. I'm a—at the New York Times. The only reason he's not here this year is 'cause it's Supreme Court season. Doing some cool stuff right now. But in our house, much more contentious than housework or spending time on those marital issues. It's like web metrics. This is how Jeremy feels about pageviews and I don't agree. I find them useful. It also doesn't matter how awful hackers is, because someone could be me. Like wants to watch it at least twice a year. You know, also, like, the papers. I tend to learn about dinner plans on dinner for about 5,000. In the Jones' household, relationship bonding occurs over mutual R code debugging. But the language of Agile sneaks into everything like birthday party planning is getting a little crazy so we had to kill some features. And at least one conversation a week starts with, "Did you see that thing in my LYCRA?" So this thing came from one of you, the first thing that happens, right, it's not that—it's awesome. It's like wait. I see this in a mirror. Who else has recipe on GitHub? + +No, that's only a Bowers thing. + +Also that's true. It could be only in our house. Also recipe on GitHub. Psych, recipe.com. Subreddit. You don't know whose phone is going. When news breaks everyone has news orders but the dinner conversation that you're having is probably going to show up on someone's website soon, or in five years in the case of the SCOTUS stuff that happened today. This might have come from that guy over there whose kids knows how to fly drones and they do tech support with those grandparents. Mapping. In our household there's always more laptops than people. Devices, maybe not so many. Well, many, many. This also came from someone else in the room, background check all the things, right? Yes. And if there are at least public records that is related to a public decision that is being pulled. And a lot of meaningful conversations happen via chat even if you both happen to be sitting on a couch side by side. It happens. It's happened. + +And... + +[Laughter ] + +That would be my now 3-year-old. Her name is Amelia, by the way. + +Oh. + +Yeah. + +Good for you. + +[We're not really into Rose right now]. Give her a break because this is not responsive, which was my first complaint. + +Maggie told me that this is the case in your house too, right? We also have, like, all of NICAR T-shirts. Also I love the one that Scott Klein was rocking today. Totally retro. + +It was three years ago. + +Uh, what—exactly. There are apparently other households where there are knockout-dragdowns over charts. + +One minute. + +Including maps that should be charts. This is a common conversation. Also human journalism should not be journalism. Please more bots. But also just how to make them more awesome. Yay! Thanks, everybody. + +[Applause ] + +Thank you, Becky. + +So up next we have Derek. Are you here today? + +I'm here. + +Do you need...? + +He's running. + +So you all need to get your computers out if you have OS X or Linux. Get them out. All right. Quiet down. This is serious business. + +Probably going to the command line. + +So we are going to learn as I. Vim is an editor we're going to don't it in five minutes. You might say I'm crazy. You're crazy. First thing you need to do is open up your terminal. Second thing that you need to do is type what I type. Type and press enter. Type my name, D-E-R-E-K, nothing happens, that's pretty weird. Now type Yvonne's name. Y-V-O-N-N-E. You don't see anything, that's weird. Now type Millie's name. M-I-L-L-I-E, what happened there? So Vim has something called insertion mode and it's different from the normal kind of mode, which is movie mode, or normal mode. But insertion mode is like a text editor. So now type insert twice. And now type, "When I was a boy, I wanted to be a train." Dash Max Barry, Machine Man. Now type insert. Now this is movement mode. This is default mode movement mode is like Vim because movement mode is like learning a great piece of music for the tenth time. Every time you learn something new. + +Think about back when you listened to Taylor Swift. And you need an O, H. In Vim, H is back. Now hold L. In Vim, L is forward. Now press K, that's up. And press J, that's down. Now, press O, and that's—on the next line, start typing, and now press enter. And now type, "Why listen to Nickelback when you can listen to Taylor Swift," period, escape. Now, there are a few other ways you can move around in Vim. You can move by the word by pressing B, back, back, back, back, back, or forward by words by pressing W, forward, forward, forward, back, back, back. You can go forward by typing A, and now I want you to type brussels sprouts, all in caps. Period and escape. Now press U, undo that. No one likes brussels sprouts. Now I want you to type O again and I want you to type, "I will not bribe Principal Skinner." Now press escape, now type 20, period. Now I want you again to type dash NOT. Now that it's search. What that does it searches for that term inside of your text editor, or you can call it a buffer, that's what Vim calls it. You type N again, and it goes down to the next word. And you type capital N and it will go back to the preview. Now the thing that it doesn't do is it doesn't highlight anything. That's weird. But we can change that. Just type colon, set, space, hlsearch, just like that and now you can see the highlights. Pretty cool, right? Pretty cool! Now even if you want to save this text because we've done a lot of work today. So you hit save, colon, w, and you put desktop, so you can find it really easily next time you want to use this text file. And now, you can quit. That's how you use Vim, guys. + +[Applause ] + +Awesome. Next unis Matt White talking about all he's learned from flying airplanes, I believe. You need the whiteboard or anything? + +Nope. I'm good. It's sort of appropriate that I'm following a determination of Vim because I want to talk about death. + +[Laughter ] + +So a lot of you I know, I'm Matt Waite. I'm a professor at the University of Nebraska and a lot of you I have met have said, "Oh, oh—you're the drone guy!" So I do have a passive little fascination with small flying robots. That has led me to some really weird places lately and I started a drone lab in 2011 to try to figure out how journalists can use, small drones, UAS's, UAB's, whatever shit you want to call them—"flying" work for me. Because I believe they have a value. I believe they have a First Amendment value. I believe as journalists we can do a lot with them. But in order to do that. In order to teach students to do that and in order to teach them as a part of my job, I had to go through regulatory hell. It started us with having having the—to go do a story about the drought and we get a nasty letter from the FAA. You need permission from us. Go get what's called a certificate of authorization. I said okay, can we please get one? And they said no. Okay, why? Because the government only gives permission to people who are doing aeronautics research or fulfilling a government function. They did not think that journalism or journalism fingers were aeronautics research were fulfilling a government function. Which part of me was like okay, fair. The First Amendment says yeah, okay, take care o take your government and here you go. But the other part of me went, "Shit, that means that we have one other option. The one other option is let's get a commercial license." I can bore you to death about the details of a commercial license, if you wish if anyone is having trouble sleeping, please come find me, illustrate put you out. But that commercial license, though, requires yes to be a manned pilot. I have to learn how to drive a Cessna, in order to learn how to drive a 3-pound hunk of plastic that any one of you can fly around your yard right now. So that's what I'm doing this summer, I'm learning how to fly a Cessna, a 152 and a skycatcher. I have an instructor in that probably has stared death in the face she probably doesn't know what it is anymore. We get out than runway and she says okay you're going to take the airplane off. And I say, "What?" And she floored the throttle. And I learned then, while I'm completely freaking out that once you get up to a certain speed if you just pull ever so gently, a Cessna will just fly off the runway and you're gone and you're in the air I'm freaking out all the time and I'm scared to freakin' death. And we come back and she says you're going to land the airplane and I say, no, you're going to land the airplane and I'm going to watch. We'll do this again. Fast forward, I have about ten, 11 hours in the airplane. And we do our first cross-country flight. And that means I had flied to another airport, like, 15 miles away. Don't get a little crazy with the cross-country. We went to a making sure down. It's small, it's narrow, it's short. You gotta get to the end of the runway, or stop or get to the end of it or end up in a cornfield. That's bad but the problem with landing on a narrow runway you learn because it's narrow, your field of vision is kind of messed with. Your depth permission is messed with. When you're landing an airplane, you're trying to bring it down as slowly and gently as possible but you're trying to point at the runway. Your flight instructor just says, just aim it at the runway and just fly into it. And I say, no, we're not doing that many we're just going to gently kiss it at the top. So I'm aiming at it. We're—which go down and what happens when you're death perception is messed with, you pull up a little early. You're supposed to flare up right at the end and you land and it's nice and pretty when you do it back like this, too high, you drop like a stone, you hit the runway and you bounce... and if things are bad, like, you really hit hard, you bounce again. And again, and again, and again. And when that happens your flight instructor goes, go round, go round go around. Knew I've watched an online video about how to go "around" at this point, which does not prepare you to go around. What you do to go around is you floor it. You're supposed to keep your rudders controlled. So your plane doesn't start veering all over the runway. You pull back on the stick and you get out of there. You're supposed to gently let down the flaps as you're going up and you'll get away. What did I do? I floored it, I forgot the rudders, I dropped the therapies completely down, the plane starts flying this way and I'm not ashamed to admit, I mean I started going, help me, help me, help me, help me. I'm listening to the tail of the airplane dragging on the ground... and I'm freaking the fuck out! And we get in the air and she says, "That wasn't bad." What does this have to do with flying drones? Absolutely nothing! Thank you. + +[Applause ] + +Thanks for that. Next up we have Brian talking about Charles and mobile stuff. + +Yay. + +And awesomeness. + +So I'm not going to talk about death but I'm going to do something equally stupid and show you how to hack our apps. Please, please don't tell people I just doing this. And I'm also going to call this running at the conference with scissors. We all know the world in the web that if you open up the network thing, you can see what's kind of happening under the hood between you and the server. So for example, if I refresh this page, I can see that this simple removal page has a lot going on back and forth with the serve and it's a way that, like, the data nerds have long learned we can go to map sites and scrape the sites, find out what JSON proxies and what data's actually there that we can then scrape and pull and do fun thing on our own. In the world of mobile apps, you can't just open up the inspector to see what's happening. So you have to get in the middle of it and find out what's happening with the apps so that's where the Charles proxy comes in place. It's a freeish thing in that it's free if you don't mind the harassment every 30 days to remind you to pay for it. But otherwise you can spend the 60 bucks and get the thing and what it is, it's a little proxy you can put on your laptop and you then connect your laptop and you essentially are now doing what's called a manual rolling attack where you're now intercepting everything that's coming in the web app so we use it, if you're hitting the ad server correctly or using your analytics correctly. But you can also find out to see if somebody else has the app. What data are they getting, where are they getting that data? So if I open up Charles proxy, I'm recording everything that's happening on my phone and here's where the live demo's coming into place. So I'm going to open up my cooking app and you can see everything that it is trying to do. Hopefully this will work. One bar. C'mon little buddy. Right over there, it was just like, "Yes!" It was just cruising. So now you can see, this is the embarrassing part so please don't go to this. We should be using HSTS, and so you should be able to see the data. And so you can see a lot of our data here. Here are our images. And you can get the and I am saying play with them. There's some booze down here somewhere. I think we'll probably have one of my recipes. So here's some recipes coming in from CloudFront and everything else. I can open up the BuzzFeed app and look at what they're doing. I can open up any app and see what's going on so just like the inspector, Charles proxy, it's a way to find out what's going on under the hood. That's it. + +Cool! + +[Applause ] + +Or for airing out your laundry. + +Next up is Emma. Is Emma here? Yes. + +This might be tonight's most important lightning talk. It's about snacks. + +These are old slides also. Ignore. + +This is good? Okay. So I like food and I don't like being at the office for a really long time and I like to eat while I'm at the office and not eat shitty food so that's kind of my game plan for that. Most of us eat like there is this. This is pretty standard. There's, like, your beer food group, your coffee, your pizza, and down at the end, your hard liquor. Birthday party leftovers. Free booze in the office. Coworker's baking experiments. This is actually one of mine. Election night pizza. This also might be mine. These are all, like, real food from real places over the last few years. So I know it's real. So I was at FP, he found free bacon and I totally ate some because it was free. We didn't know where it came from and we didn't really care where it came from because it was really nicely cut and free. So, like, that's not great for us to be living on. So I have three kinds of, like, main things, right? Put a lot of food in your desk. We don't need to put, like, folders in your drawers. There should be food in your drawers. Pack like actual lunches and probably some shit to put in your desk to make it a little bit easier if you actually don't have access to a kitchen or a cafeteria. + +Vending machines. Bad and sad. So these are things that I sometimes have come in the past come to my desk. Soup, not the ramen noodles like you get from white people grocery stores. Like Shin Ramyun, it comes in a red package. But like, it—it's like—it's in the drawer. And no one's ever going to eat this and emergency chocolate. If you give that person a chocolate, it's so much better. Okay, so if you have access to a clean, clean office freezer, that does not have weird things in it. Potstickers, frozen lasagna or edamame, just put your name on it so your coworkers don't eat them. So this is what I have in my desk—like, the dorm-style kitchen I made. A large bowl that you can put in the microwave, a mug, a small one of those plastic strainers, a good knife that's not, like, super, super nice but also not super, super shitty. We bought one from this weird grocery store in Hawaii that we cut fruit with and I keep that in my desk. Spoon, fork, chopsticks. These are all dollar store type of things, right? French press. At the office I used to have a Keurig and it was awful. Then they ran out of Keurig cups. Which is the lowest part of awful—like, subawful. So you should just buy a French press or something other means of like whatever for coffee. + +So I also have purchased a, like, an actual water heater for this. I conned an editor at my old job to get a panini press for us and also making sure that we always have bread and cheese so that, like, you could always, at the very minimum, have a grilled cheese sandwich, you cannot, however, try an egg on a George Foreman grill because they are slanted and you will just watch your egg slide to that floor. So that's like a pro tip. No eggs on sliding heating elements. So tiny lunch sized Crock-Pot for your desk and the really cheap single-smoothie blender but don't put a lot of difficult things in to blend in them because it's a friggin' 12-dollar blender. So are the things. So if you do eat meat, roast a chicken because you can do a lot of things with chickens. Chop up your vegetables, blah, blah, blah, make large amounts of things. You can make rice, quinoa, whatever the hell. Pack your lunch. And the worst thing is pack your lunch in the morning. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, lazy kid lunches is what I call them. + +Bring vegetables and you put them on the panini press and you have lunch. It's amazing. Grilled cheese. Who's had a grilled cheese when they were sad, dead, and hate their coworkers? And desk ramen is way cooler if you have an egg and you have the boiler thing and you have a strainer. Use your hot water to make some edamame. That's the thing. You can blend. And then, seriously, the power of emergency chocolate, right? Like, most of us are in jobs where we're asked to do things that we don't want to do. If you give them chocolate they're way more likely to do things that they're not likely to do when hungover. So that's it. + +I might want to put some of those recipes on GitHub. + +Next up we have Jordan. + +My clock hasn't started yet. + +I think I should be able to run back and forth. + +Well, I might be just dropping, throwing things all over the place. So I'm going to be talking to you about how I got suckered into an 888 kilometer race. That's really fucking far even for an ultra runner like me. If you don't know the metric system well, that's about 552 miles and the reason that I'm calling this "Infinitus" is because that—is because I failed. I got injured at 377 miles. For everyone that wants to do a math, that's about a 68%. That's about a D+. Not that bad, but that's as much I got in Infinitus as well. But I know what you're thinking. This shit is bananas! It's totally bananas. Yes, it is. And that is totally the point. If you know anything about running, you know that there's a lot of those two things involved in running, especially the longer that you go and the reason that I did this and the reason I got suckered into this was because I was trying to find limits, my personal limit. So I started doing marathons and then doing 100 miles which sounds totally batshit crazy, right? And I didn't fail at that. And I said, why not go farther but the for a thing about this distance is it's so out-there-batshit-crazy that failure is the expectation. I didn't have a reason to expect failure. But the failure was the expectation so you know what? It's cool. So here's what I learned. My approach to doing this. This is a jar. A pretty ugly jar. Here's a fly trapped inside the jar and it's, "How do I get out of this friggin' jar?" I can just fly against the glass again and again and again until I break the glass and I get out. So, is that going to work? + +No. + +No. Hell no. The fly's going to end up dead and, like, shaking on the bottom of the jar, which is what happened to me. So basically, here's what happened. So every day I would go out. I would have to run about 55 miles a day to make my goal which is what I would do for about a week but something would break. Either I would not be eating enough or I would totally fail and come in, like, broken and hobbling into the home base of the race and I would figure out how to fix this problem because you have to go again the next day so without eating. It was like chugging dance of Ensure. Okay, solved that problem. Wash, rinse, and repeat. Except there was no washing because we got really, really smelly. And then the next day we would go out and another major, major problem would arise. I would come in bordering on heatstroke. Eat and ice cream until you can run again at night. So you do that over and over. Until finally I broke for good, which is okay. I got an injury at about mile 377, which is great. It was actually the best thing that ever happened to me, let me tell you. Because I was so stupid and so focused on this number that I missed the big picture. I didn't realize that that wasn't at all what the race was about. It was actually about these ten crazy people who somehow were stupid enough to toe the start line with me. So it wasn't me alone in this jar. It was it was like there were a bunch of other crazy flies in here and once we actually realized that, we could do, you know, the Finding Nemo thing—"swim together!" We can all start going against the jar at the same time and knock it over and break it and fly forever. That did not happen. One of us actually finished the race out of ten but this thing that was previously impossible somehow became now probable. Not likely, still unlikely but still within the realm of possibility. So my challenge to you is pick something crazy impossible that you will know that you will fail at and do it because it will be liberating. For the first, you know, seven days, it may be like The Hunger Games, there's someone back there like, "Cue the storm!" Launching lightning and thunder at you at your darkest moment but suddenly it will become an episode of Dr. Who and you'll realize that everyone is brilliant and can help each other in their own way even if you don't all survive until the very end. Thank you. + +Thank you. + +Next up is Heather. + +Hey, I like your ringtone. + +Here you go. + +Thank you. So it's no secret that we news nerds like our food, as Becky Bowers pointed out earlier that we get to a point where we have entire spreadsheets of wine that we drink. I want to talk about one very specific revered food and that is pie. Pie charts are bad, pie is good. You should know how to make pie crust, okay? This is not a hard thing so I'm here to demystify this for you. + +So what is the secret ingredient to successful pie crust? There are a couple of them. People will tell you that it is love. The secret to any baked good is love—aww! These people are liars! This is not the secret. Love is warm and fuzzy, and warmth is the enemy of your pie crusts! Do you know what the secret is? The secret ingredient is? It's attitude! This is why this is every time I make pie crust, I start out like this. You have this. And if you have this, you have already won. You can taste the victory, I know you can. + +So step one: You have your attitude. Step two: You need your recipe. And then you need your ingredients. So what is the best recipe out there. There's a lot of debate about this? Some people swear by vodka pie crust recipes because vodka evaporates and it creates air bubbles and that's a bunch of bullshit. + +Some people swear by rolling out the dough a certain way, or preparing out the dough a certain way. The point of the matter is it doesn't really matter what your recipe is; your successful pie crust recipe is the one that you learned how to make pie crust with. This is the one that I use from Submitten Kitchen. I've been using this for years and it comes out perfect every time. And so I think this is the ultimate pry crust recipe but like I said, any recipe that works for you will work. Now, there is a very important point here where it says "very cold." Your butter must be ice cold. You need the ice water in your veins to make good pie crust. If it's not cold, it's not going to be flaky. And you want your pie crust to be flaky. + +This picture is a lie. You do not put your butter on the counter. When you assemble your ingredients, this is not how you do it. You'll see a number of recipes that tell you to get all your ingredients together—don't believe them! You also have to measure correctly. This is very, very important. If you get your cups out, I will smack you. You use a scale, damn it! + +Do it right and you won't be sorry. This is a scale. Buy one. Now, the reason for that is flour and sugar and things like that compact over time. So one cup of flour can be a different number of grams depending on how you measure it. If you have too much flour in your dough, bad things will happen. You're going to end up with a thick, deep-dish pie and nobody wants that. Mix your dry ingredients together and then find a place in your freezer to stick it for a few minutes in between the 12 pounds of cheddar cheese I have and the stalagmites of humidity on the top of my freezer. + +One minute. + +Oh, my gosh. Watering two. Let's talk about fat! I like butter! Some people will swear by lard. It doesn't matter! Lard scares me. One more secret weapon. Your butter must be frozen. You want one of these things. You will grate your butter. People will tell you to cube it, and refrigerator it, that's no good. For comparison there's frozen butter versus—put it all together. Mix it up. You want it to be kind of lumpy because visible butter chunks means you will have visible flakiness. If your hands get greasy, your dough is too warm. Put it back in the fridge. If your hands get sticky, your dough is too wet, you screwed up. Throw it out, try again. It should look something like this. Wrap it in saran wrap, throw it in your fridge for at least an hour—better two. Wait, wait. Roll it out, don't overflour it don't underflour it. Every two times you roll it out, turn it around, this will keep it from sticking. And if you need to, roll it around the pin. Stick it in this fridge, make it cold. Then bake it, eat it, make pie, go forth! + +That was very animated. Sarah, you are up next. + +Whoo! + +Hello. So I'm talking about the map in the middle, the square map. Now I know very little about maps. I decided to call this an equal area dammer's map. I think that's how you pronounce it. So that's what I'm calling it now. This is a normal map of the United States. This is an equal area dammersers map. + +a business used this map. It's The Guardian. Look at it fall! Look—many of them! More maps! So fun. Best of all, thanks to our buddies at Corks and David. We have a bunch of them in different shapes. I got a little jealous and I was like, I want one. And so I made one. No, that's not it. So I made one using data that's a little iffy, it's fun about it's about exercise. California exercises, that's no surprise there. And then we got an email from our cartographers, saying, let's talk about these maps. We started out with these maps. And so I get out and had a conversation with them. And later I came down to my desk and wanted to bash my head against the desk. It was a rough conversation. It took a while: Two hours. So let's see what we have here. So I went to them, and I said, "Hey, you're making a map but it's not really a map so don't do that. Bad idea." I said okay, it's a table. Think of it as a table, except that it's just a visual presentation. That's good. A table. Well, it's hard to find your state in this map. And I said that's okay 'cause it's hard to find your state in a table. + +[Laughter ] + +But this particular idea, well, I said, okay, it's misleading, and I said, "Have you looked at a map?" It's misleading too! It's huge. So two different colors, you can count them both. Don't use it for data, we're ducting, you know, based on our minimum wage it's below $7, and below $9 and do that, you can't do that because you can't count the colors so once you put it in colors, aren't you bucketing? Isn't that the same thing? It's like no, you can do that but you can't do that in a normal map. I don't know. It's the same thing. Either way, you're doing it in buckets so that didn't work out so well. So again we did this on a graph. This might be a better way of doing it if you have actual data. Nice bar chart, two lose any detail, you don't lose anything. Except... let's just try something here. Wait I can't find my state. Oh, wait, oh, look, I can see all my states now. Local, it's so great. I can mouse over, I can put it on a table. I like that one. Okay, so I want a table. Lots of categories... right, mobile. Also, widgets. You put these into an article and look, a little map with a nice little review. Also good. Okay. So they said well, if there is something to a map, let's just map it., you know, a real map. I said no. I think you guys know what that means. It's not. Okay. Where do we go? They want me to go next. I need to skip ahead. So all states are equal, I said. Use these when you don't care that one state has more people in it. You don't care that one state is bigger. All states are equal. In the congress and Senate, all states are equal, two people per state, that should work. Okay, they agreed on that one a little bit. But then they said, it's hard to find your state. So I said, too bad. Then they said it's inconsistent, it's unfamiliar and I said that's too bad because people will get familiar with it and eventually, we'll get consistent because well, right now, it's kind of hard to find your state. They said keep moving around. + +Florida? + +Florida. Okay, yeah, so here's the other thing. It's not really geography. You're noticing a pattern here. It's not really geography. What is Florida doing, what is Texas doing? A lot of states are going there. It's not a map; it's a table. So you get the point of it also we should put the data wherever it matches and they said you shouldn't put it here, they said no you shouldn't do it, just put it in a real map. And I said no, we're not doing that. I said we're putting it in a table and I said no table is stupid because you can't use it on mobile. And this thing on for two hours. So I have no idea what to do now. So you guys have any ideas, let me know, but in the meantime, we should all agree on one layout to begin with. So that I need to figure out. + +Yes, we are at the last one. + +Oh, my God. Here we go. + +Definitely not the least. So Norma. Yes, you were here last year. + +I'm going to move this around a little bit. This is Vim, by the way. + +She always wants brownie points from Derek. + +Browny points given. + +I just gotta make it a little bit smaller. + +You're not taking my time away, are you? + +I think we're... scroll down. Okay. + +No biggie. So look. + +Hold on. + +Okay. + +Okay, you're sitting way over there. + +All right, so I know the whole reason you guys came here and sat through all those boring talks is because you wanted to learn some steno, right? + +[Applause ] + +I'm going to give you a little bit of a crash course. Five minute crash course on steno. So yeah, so you know, in a nutshell. System of phonetics—system of shorthand based on phonetics, it's another whole language. We're writing in code. The first question everybody always asks is: Where are the letters on the keys? Here they are for you. It really doesn't help to know that they're there. After the first month when you're learning steno, it's good to know that there's an S and a K and a W and an R. But it really doesn't matter because you're writing them in chords and you're writing them—Derek knows what we're talking about. + +I really don't. I really don't. + +Anyways. So... yeah. On the bottom—I'll just tell you what, you know, on the bottom row you've got an S, and a K, and a W, and an R, those are some consonants on the left-hand side. In the middle we have some vowels. A, O, E, and U. Notice there's no I. So how do you write an I? Show them, Mirabai. Do you see it in the steno? + +I don't know if you can watch the patterns as she's writing. But anyway. So we stroke them together to make things, you know, when you're first learning on the right-hand side, you have an R and a B, and a G, and an S so you can, in the beginning, you write words like "sob" and "swab" and "war" and you can make a J out of all those letters on the left. And you can make—you can spell "jar," and "jaw," and "jaws," and "Jews" and "juice." And hang onto your seats now, we're getting advanced now, a two stroke word, Jarvis. Oh, I caught her! + +Sorry! + +Watch this, Warsaw. + +Here's when it starts to get tricky, homonyms. Sore and soar. + +Nice. + +Now that you know how to do steno, just pay attention. I bet you can see the patterns as Mirabai's writing, not typing. Please don't say typing. So there's a whole bunch of frequently asked questions. How long does it take to learn? + +I don't know. Like 18 months if you're supernatural brilliant like Stan who taught himself steno from the start, which just blows my mind, I don't know. And then it's like the outer edge is apparently infinity. The person is making a post that says, "I've been doing this for six years and I can't pass a test at 140 words a minute." My response, not very encouraging is, "Go home, you're drunk. This is not the thing for you." Which leads to the question: How fast do we write? Fast. I'm certified for 240. Most days in medical school I'm writing 250 to 300 words a minute for four hours straight. Mirabai is certified for what? Stan is like 3 million or something. You know... + +He's—he's training right now for a competition that's coming up at the end of July, Mirabai's also going to be taking part in that competition. I'm going to be, like, happy to be the cheerleader, rah-rah things. So yesterday we were walking around the sculpture garden at the Walker and it came to mind—a depressed realization that I finished steno school before those two were born. Like, I just can't even. Hey, you know, and like fax machines. Were coming into vogue. +S +TAN: And yet you still say, "Instagram that shit!" + +So I'm still cool. I still got it. A little bit longer anyway. So that's what I'm talking and they're working tonight. Anyway, I think I'm sort of out of time, so yeah, wanted to make a plug for Mirabai's project, which is the Open Steno Project. + +The Open Steno Project. + +Openstenoproject.org, please. Go look at it. It's very cool. She's amazing. + +STAN: Anyone can learn it for free. + +So come talk to us more if you want to know more about this fun stuff. It's really great. + +[ Applause ] + +[Well Deserved Accolades] + +Let's give one more hand for all of our presenters today. + +[ Applause ] + +And especially it's awesome because none of them had time prepare. + +Thanks for hanging around for the lightning talks! + +[ Applause ] + +Now you can explore some other room. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015MachineLearning.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015MachineLearning.md index 56a1fdcf..08ab7400 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015MachineLearning.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015MachineLearning.md @@ -1,152 +1,151 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/machinelearning/index.html ---- - -# Machine Learning—How Useful Is it for Journalism? - -### Session Facilitator(s): Steven Rich - -### Day & Time: Friday, 11am-noon - -### Room: Thomas Swain - - -We're just going to give it another minute or two, let people get breakfast, sorry. - -All right. We'll go ahead and get started. Hi, everybody. My name is Steven Rich. I am the Database Editor for Investigations for the Washington Post. If you were expecting a heavily technical session on machine learning today, I'm sorry so disappoint you. The focus of this session, I think, is something that I've been talking a lot with people this community and then the NICAR community a lot that I feel that people see machine learning as this great hope and they have no idea of what it actually is, what it's useful for and that we're going to see a story that just straight-up puts machine learning analysis in that shouldn't be. - -And so, my hope is to share with you a few things that I've done, share a few things that have been done. And also share a few things that I've seen that are awful and should never will repeated, namely Twitter sentiment analysis, but I'll get to that later. So I will start this off by saying that I am by no means an expert on machine learning. I have made myself an expert in the few types of machine learning that I've done for stories but I always consult with experts, which I think is going to be your best bet in any case to figure out what algorithms are going to be the best, what's the best approach, and all these things. And there are people out there that can help you. - -So just briefly, if you don't really know what machine learning is, at a really basic level, it's teaching a computer to be a human in some ways. I mean, you're not going to teach it to emote, but you can teach it to do extraordinarily tedious tasks that require—that generally require the eyes of a human. So you need to fix names in, like, a database where there are a hundred, a thousand names and you want to watch people and so like, "Mike" is "Michael." You know that, but a computer doesn't know that. Dan is Daniel, but not Danielle. You know that, but a computer doesn't know that. So the idea of machine learning is to train a computer to understand that, to recognize that and be able to to do it. My favorite analogy of what machine learning is comes from which a Chase Davidson, from the New York Times. Machine learning is like teaching a drunk 5-year-old to do a task for you repeatedly. I think better put, I think it's more of a team of drunk 5-year-olds. But I'll leave that debate for another time. - -So I'll just jump in and talk about the big one that I worked on last year. It's not one that I think is particularly replicable, and I will get into why. So last year we were approached by whistleblowers at The Agency for International Development. Not in the agency, but in the Inspector General's office of the agency. And they were telling us that the AG was watering down their reports. How do we prove that? - -That was the thing that we wrestled with for a long time and so what we ended up getting in the first place is we got we had 12 audits, and we had all of the drafts of the audits. I should note that the drafts of the audits are not public. We had to go them through whistleblowers and we ended up compiling somewhere in the area of 60 audits total. So there were 12 audits and 60 drafts. So what we wanted to do determine at the end of the day was were they taking out negative references to either the agency, or their missions abroad. - -And so we originally tackled that in that, like, oh, we'll just look for a few phrases that were really negative in the audits and then just, you know, put a few lines in there that says, well, one audit it said this, and then they took this out. - -But anecdotally, we knew what their argument was going to be. Their argument was going to be, well, of course, things get changed now and again, and you only highlighted three or four things. Even if we had a pile of them on the cutting room. So eventually we settled on sentiment analysis. So the reason why this is not replicable is because language is a funny thing. It's in most forms of writing, there is a certain—you might be able to read something and understand that may be it's sarcastic, or maybe it's not reading exactly what it's saying, but a computer can't. So doing sentiment analysis on a very large scale like we were trying to do was proving to be impossible saying here are positive words and here are negative words. And so with what I ended up doing is writing a script that essentially, would comb through and tell us whether there were negative references, whether there were positive references and total them up, and let us know what it was. - -But when I got that back, I started to realize other problems. The word "poor" can mean a number of things. You could be talking about work being poor. You could talk about a poor country. And just because it says poor country, it doesn't mean that it is in negative reference to that country. And so, a essentially what we had to do, and this is we had to do a lot in machine learning is you create a training set, which is basically a set of words that it singles out and it will know, and it can learn that these words are good, these words are bad, these words are neutral. And it will bring them back and score them probabilistically, this is likely that this is a negative word, this is unlikely. But what we had to do for this one, though is we had to—I had to write the script in such a way that it would understand context which is a very difficult thing. I mean, it's difficult enough for humans to understand context sometimes but you're training a computer how a word is being used. Basically I wrote the script in such a way to understand when "poor" was an adjective, like, some words can be nouns and verbs and it would definitely change what it would be. So the verb would be negative, and the noun as neutral, et cetera. Or vice versa. So the biggest thing that you'll find no matter how often you do machine learning is that it's a constant tweaking process. Things change, you don't anticipate things. And I think you're going to fail 500 times before you get it right once and that's just the nature of things. - -Another case that we use this on was the Sony email hack. So I will note that the most common use of machine learning that you see on a day to day basis is your spam filter. Essentially what people did was they created a program that said, "This is very likely to be spam" and they sent it there. And so what I wanted to do there was with the Sony emails was two-fold. After I downloaded them off, I wanted to filter out the spam and the things like just straight-up press releases or shared articles via email because none of those were going to get at anything that we might want to see in the emails. But on the flip side of the coin, I also wanted to find phishing attacks which are generally spam. If I created a general spam filter it's going to scoop them up and find them amongst them. And so I had to write a program to essentially separate out the spammiest of the spam, which were phishing attacks and I will tell you the one that rose to the top of the list was very clearly a phishing attack. And it was a very successful one and we wrote it in the story. We didn't know what it did. We didn't know if it was "the" attack. It took almost no time to find. I mean we found the email. It was basically one of those things where the headline was, like, "important document." And then, in it was like a, "Hi, please open this secured document and enter your password." And then my favorite part of it was the final line was, "PS, this is not spam." - -I think you can basically filter—if you look at any emails that says, "This is not spam," it probably is. So that's how we used it in that case. But thing at the end of the day, the ultimate use for machine learning is probably the least sexy use for it, which is data learning. Machine learning is the perfect thing for data cleaning. I'm going to use the New York Times as an example here. They are working very hard to match people in the FEC database with themselves. - -I mean, there are so many variations of people's names in there and there are so many variations of addresses, and occupations, and so what they are doing is, they are doing that, like, Mike is Michael and you know, if the address is pretty similar, maybe batch that and they're scoring them on a something basis and it's—I can tell you that they are putting a lot of effort into it because it is not very easy. - -But I mean, at the end of the day, it's kind of the perfect task for machine learning because essentially what you're doing is, you're just going record-by-record and saying, is this person this person? Okay. And so what you can do, and how they're creating their training set is they are doing that. They are taking a subset of the data and they're manually doing that. And they're saying, "Okay, if you notice this thing you're going to want to match these people." And they're doing that and making life easy. I know one of my colleagues came to me about standardizing the database ourselves and I want to use machine learning, not yet. I'm hoping at some point that New York Times is just going to open source their code. But there's really no other way to do it. I mean, data cleaning of small and medium-sized datasets is simple. I mean it's really not that bad. By when you have literally a hundred thousand different names and you're trying to figure out if one is another, it's very hard. I mean, there are a lot of Mike Smiths. And how do you know this Mike Smith is this Mike Smith. Or maybe this Mike Smith moved. There's never going to be, unless the FEC goes back and creates ID numbers for people, we're screwed. We'll never know if one Mike Smith is another. We can say probabilistic long, there's a very high chance but we can never say they are. Which brings me to my next point which is when not to use it. For the love of God, Twitter's sentiment analysis is awful. If you're sitting on your computer right now and you're on Twitter, I want you to type in the search bar: I love... and search for it. I want you to read the first one and I want you to tell me whether or not it is a sarcastic tweet. Or you're sure that it's not a sarcastic tweet. So one of the things that—there was an organization a couple years ago when, in the last election cycle that tried to do divert sentiment analysis for Obama and Romney. But just try to imagine the tweets that people send out about these people. I mean, somebody's going to say, "I love that Obama sucks." And it's going to break it because it's going to say, "I love Obama," basically. So it may classify that as a positive tweet. So because humans often write as they speak but can't necessarily get across that they are being sarcastic, it can be a major, major issue with Twitter sentiment analysis. It's the reason why my use case sort of ended up working. I mean, think about audits. Audits are literally just straightforward language that conveys the point that it's trying to make. And we created our training sets specifically for those audits. The training set on my program will not and cannot be used on basically any other set of data that you want to do sentiment analysis on. That's the important thing about training sets. They have to be very specific for what you are working on. It's probably our biggest issue in machine learning is that it's not, you know, one program is probably not going to be replicable on something else. If anybody puts out a program that says, that it's your essentially 1-size-fits-all program, they're selling snake oil. If they say it's one-size-fits-most. There are some of those and there are some really great ones out there that you can for data cleaning, you can order or identify entities within a set of data or documents that you want to identify. - -But they don't work on everything. They're just—there are always unknown scenarios. And so it's very important when you're using these programs that there might be shortcomings and maybe try and talk to an expert and say, like, if I put this in here, is it going to work? If I use this, is it going to help me? And that should help get you on the right track. So I'm kind of hoping that this session can be way more talkative than me just standing up here and spewing crap. And so, has anybody in the room used machine learning, tried to use machine learning, done it well, done it poorly? Do you want to talk a little bit about that? - -Uh, sure. I work for Mac&Company, and we do data integration for data providers and so we recently had a partnership with TrueDelt which is the global database on tones and aggregates. And they source from global media from like BBC and then subclassifies it so that you can search by, like, who's posting about ISIS right now. And so we want to put this all on a map because we want to geolocate as to where they were published and we had a few journalists who wanted to do themed maps. So kind of parsing through, looking for one was doing a story on wildlife crime. And so she was, like, look up poaching. See how poaching is featured in these articles but then you get all these things like people poaching someone for a hire, or poached eggs also come up, like, in cooking articles and what we ended up doing was just making the maps with the poaching information and kind of whittling it down as best we could but then explaining those disclaimers in the posts and saying you're going to find some poached eggs because there were a lot of edge cases that we didn't control for. So I don't know what the best way is for those errors, or to just not use it at all. - -I mean, from experience, I think transparency is going to be your best case scenario. You say, look, this is hard. I mean, this is not—I mean, there's 99.999% of your readers are going to look at that and not say, "I could do that better." Or they might say it, and they can't. - -And so, I think if you're going to use machine learning in a way like that, it's very, very good to say, like, here's what we attempted to do. Here are some of the downfalls of that that are very difficult to weed out, but you know the majority of it is going to be what you want. So I think that being as straightforward as possible about where it fails is great. I think trying to tweak it as you go is also good. Some things are just not tweakable. - -But yeah, there are a very few use cases where you do forward-facing machine learning. I think a lot of it ends up being suffix. Because it is probabilistic in most ways, it's helpful to point you in the light direction in reporting, I think but that is a very good use case for, "Hey, look at what we're doing." And I think it's also very fun. Anybody else? - -Sorry. Another problem that I don't really know how to solve for is that it has articles from in 65 different languages, right? So what you write is something that looks up the translation for what you're looking for because I don't speak 65 languages but there's no way to control for the errors that come from I not understanding how poaching so interpreted contextually in all those other languages. So that's fun. - -It should be noted that translation software edits, at its heart is machine learning. It's not the greatest because you can't program it to get every phrase as it would be said in that language. You pretty much have to tell it that if you see this word in this language it is this other word in this other along and not necessarily get it contextually accurate. So there's that. I mean, you pretty much—there's really no good way to create a translator that's going to work accurately in that setting. It's unfortunate but I cannot imagine a scenario where you're going to through multiple languages where you're able to accurately pull context out of—I mean pulling context of our own language is tough. Translating something with context to our language that has that same context is virtually impossible unless the sentence is very, very straightforward. The translators get things wrong all the time and that's because machine tells you, like, this is sort of right. This is more right than nothing. And so, I think the major thing that you need to know about machine learning is that it—you're never going to do anything with 100 percent accuracy. There's always going to be—there's probabilities, you're always going to be tweak it to try and be as accurate as possible but it's not something that's 100 percent accurate. You can get it very close, but unless you have a data set that's, like, 100 items and you literally created a training set for every one of those items, it's not going to be 100 percent accurate. And if you're doing that for one that has 100 items, you shouldn't be doing that. It's much easier to just clean it and change things and do it like that. - -If you don't have examples of machine learning, I'm happy to field questions on issues you're having if you want—if we want—if you want to talk about a potential use case where you think it might be useful but you're still not sure. I'm happy to answer those. I want this to be a conversation if anybody's got anything. - -So how easily have you found it to convince other people—people who will say they were either skeptics of anything machine related, how—can you talk about your process of getting them onboard with your statistical assumptions and whatnot? - -Yeah, I mean, it's very tough. I mean, I think the biggest problem doing any amount of statistics at any level in journalism is that people aren't going to trust me because I'm a journalist. They say like, "Oh, that's guy's a journalist, he can't do math." Or he can't do stats, he can't do any of those things. So the assumption going in, at least if I'm public facing is that I can't do this. Internally it's not that bad but there are still people out there that are like I'm skeptical of statistics. Are you sure this is good? And so it's tough. I mean, one of the big ways that I do it is by bringing in experts and saying look, I'm consulting with some of the best people in the field on this and let them explain it in their own words to editors, to other reporters and let them say, like, this is the best method for doing this. And have there be an understanding that there's sort of this backstop for me because I'm not an expert in machine learning and I'm not an expert in the various fields of—in some various fields of statistics. But other people are, and there's literally no reason for me not to ask them. And I've found more often than not, that people are very open to helping you. I mean, if you go to a statistical expert and you're like, "Hi, I work at a news publication and I need your help." They're just like, "Awesome, how can I help?" So you can't be afraid to ask experts. But I would make it very clear from the get-go with my editors that this is what I want to do. I think it's the most appropriate. A lot of people trust me now that I've gotten it right once or twice. But in the initial stages, it's sort of like a you're just going to have to trust me on this. If it goes wrong, it goes wrong and we won't use it but I always make the promise that I will consider not using it if I don't think it's good. If an expert says, like, at the end of the day, "Oh, well, I thought this would work but we failed." I always make sure that people understand that I am not married to the idea of using it. But I still it's the best option if we can use it. - -When you're consulting, what are—or who are the types of experts that you're talking to? Are they people in industry, are they people in academia? Is it depend on the story specifically in terms of how to model your machine learning. - -So I have a few friends and colleagues in academia that are doing some of this work and usually my first step is to sit down with a few of them and talk them through my problem. And they are the ones that—like, they are so interconnected to a lot of other people so they are the ones that are saying, this is the that's doing something similar to what you're doing, they're going to be the one that you want to talk to. A lot of these a lot of these people are in the computer science world. Some of these are in the linguistics world. I mean, a lot of these experts are just people who understand language, which is really, really necessary if you're going to do machine learning. So I can—I mean, I'd like to consult technical and non-technical experts. And honestly, the best way is to find one or two people out there that you can sort of make friends with and they're the ones that can get you connected with the right people. They might be the right people. But they are the ones that are going to tell you that you can find somebody. They're also the people that are going to tell you: You should not—this is not a perfect use case for this; don't do it. Which I've had in certain instances where I thought like, "Oh,, this might be an interesting use case for this." And they would say, "That's interesting in that it's not good." So I think it's always good to consult experts or people who know this sphere before you really dive into something like this. 'Cause it can get complicated quickly. And lots gonna depend on—I mean, there are too many variables for every one of these situations to be able to say like, yes, you can do it there, or no, you can't do it there. I mean, there are some we know yes, you can do it there, no, you can't do it there but that's because we've tried. But I think most use cases we haven't tried yet so we don't know. - -So, I was actually talking with a colleague of mine this morning about some statistical modeling that he's doing with some police report—police abuse reports. And he's kind of like a very intelligent person who knows a lot about math. And as he's kind of walking me through this stuff, it became very clear to both of us that—to attempt to explain exactly how he came up with this conclusion, it's very opaque and it just becomes kind of—it's kind of like a blackbox, you put the numbers on one side and this thing comes out on the other side. So I'm wondering, so question one: I'm wondering to what extent in journalism, generally speaking, do you feel like, or does anybody feel like I should like be fully transparent about what's happening inside the blackbox because it's very complicated and it's hard to explain? And then the wow, I lost question two. Damn it. Anyways. I might ask it later. On you yeah, I mean the fact that these machine learning and doing statistical analysis and some things. - -I've always argued that the biggest story killer of all time is to insert the words, "Logistic regression" into a story and people are like I don't care anymore. It doesn't matter if the subject matter is rivetting or not. So my goal with this and statistics in general and let's be honest, machine learning is kind of statistics on steroids in a lot of ways, is if you can use it, and as, like, a—as a reporting tool to, like, point you in the right direction or something, that ends up being easier because you never have to explain how you got to, like—how you found—if you're looking for something in particular, you never have to say how you got there. It's only when you come to the putting your analysis into the story that comes out of that, is where you need to be entirely transparent. The Post does—we do what, what we call "did-boxes" which are basically methodology boxes. Which is if you really really want to know I did this, one, here's how I did it. It might not be the most obvious thing to most people but it's a starting point. It's a "here's how I did it." If people want to talk to me about further details, I always email them back, I always call them. I want to be as open and transparent about this because, at the end of the day, you can't just, like, make this pie-in-the-sky claim and not tell people how you got it. And so especially with machine learning, you have to be open and honest about it. And how you want to do that is a different story. - -If you say, like, I used machine learning to get this analysis in a story, no one who reads it is going to understand that. I mean, we're not writing for a technical community but if you put it in a methodology box, those people who really want to know are going to figure it out. - -So I guess I remember the second question: To what extent do we feel like some kind of a complicated analysis should be reproducible. You mentioned this thing that you did as not reproducible. - -I mean, I'm not—it's reproducible on the same dataset. It's just not reproducible on other datasets because it's not one size fits all. My training set—you can use the algorithm that I did and everything around it, but my training set is very, very specific for the audits that we used. So you couldn't just—if you had another group of audits, it might work. But even then, you would probably still have to do your tweaking. I could give you everything including my training set with this giant note that says, "You're going to need to change this." Because there are words in audits that are, like—like "recommendation" in an audit is a very bad thing. But "recommendation" in reel life can be good, or it can be neutral. And so I want things to be reproducible and I want to share my code when people want my code but I always want to put a note on there if you're going to use this for a different purpose or for a different dataset specifically, you need to change it. It's not a one size fits all. - -I'm curious if you've seen any examples of combining crowdsourcing to clean up or otherwise inform machine learning output, particularly around journalism. I work at Popup Archive and we index a lot of sound for journalists, producers, media, radio, universities, archives. And so we work with a combination of tools, a lot of them third-party, some of them done I've done experimentation and research with, some of them include speech-to-text software that's trained to certain news media and history. And semantic extraction. We won't go as far as cent analysis for reasons that you've just argued and described. And then we look at things more into now speech and audio analysis. There's now one called "Hipstas" which started with bird calls and poetry, and just analyzing different qualities of waveforms related to the sound. But anyway, there's a project called Metadata Games that's come out of academia out of Dartmouth to clean up messy OCR transcripts or other, like, more machine learning type academia projects and I'm always looking for—we're thinking about ways of augmenting. - -So I actually had this thought very recently when Hillary's Benghazi emails came out, the Washington Post did something great, they would ask readers to randomly describes this. They had tags that you could put on it, or you could make up your own tag but what if I showed 500 emails and used 50 thousands. You could use the tags they gave them as your training set and then try to extrapolate it. Things with similar language would get tagged in a similar way and it might be a really great way of finding out without having to go through it yourself, in the larger context, like, what—so people see the small set and then it extrapolates to the large set and then you might find the really interesting emails in the large set by understanding what people think about the small set. As long as you think the small set is representative, I mean, Hillary's Ben gaze emails are not going to be representative over her emails as a whole because they were very specific to one subject but that's how you great a training set, you take a small group from a large group and you go through it by hand and you learn what the intricacies are going to be and then you learn from that and then you go through another group and learn if it's working or breaking. - -Do you know what the Wall Street Journal's end goal for that was? - -Let's say that you have 10,000 people read that in a span of 30 minutes and everybody tags one. Then you probably have somewhere in the area of 12 tags. I probably didn't do that math correctly for each one. Now every 30 minutes in 500 emails, without having to read all of them, they know which ones are the interesting emails are, they know which ones the controversial emails are. They know where the spam emails are in there. So for their purposes I think it was a great reporting tool that sort of skipped the step of having a reporter read and confide through your emails. They were able to figure out things quickly in a breaking-news scenario like that, machine learning's just not going to do it because you're not going to have time to train something if you're hoping to get it out that day. But if you're—I love the idea of crowdsourcing your training set because I see things through one lens and a lot of other people see things other ways and I think it's really great to bring in people who are a little more detached than you to help. - -I'll check it out, too, do you know if they had controlled jobs for the people to use? - -I can't remember. - -Okay. Cool. Thanks. - -Along those lines, have you ever—or has anyone ever done anything with Mechanical Turk with some other kind of piecemeal—paying people to small amounts to ask to qualify things. Are there any kind of journalistic issues that can arise from going about it that way? - -That's a good question. I mean, I like to do as much of what I can do in-house, or with experts that I'm not paying because if we pay an expert, then people think that I—it's very easy for someone to come back and say, "I think you paid him to say your analysis was good." Even though that was completely not the case. So in that way, it ends up being about what we talk about for investigative subjects all the time. It doesn't matter if you're doing something wrong or unethical. If it appears to be wrong, or it appears to be unethical, it's just as bad. So I'm okay with paying people to create my training sets. I mean, I will tweet them. But I don't necessarily know of somebody who has done that yet. I mean, machine learning is still very, very new in journalism. There's still very few people doing it. So the examples are obviously not everywhere. But it's starting to be in more places and I just don't know. I know that BuzzFeed is partnering with—I cannot remember who it is—they're doing machine learning, which, this is—and I'll just give you a little bit of background, because I think this is one of the coolest uses of machine learning that I've ever seen: Taking previously redacted documents that have now been released publicly, things that they released ages ago that are now being released without redactions. And it's a predictive tool for seeing what are the redactions in the document. It's obviously you can't say with any certainty that oh, yeah, now I know this name, or I know exactly the words under this. But it might point us in the right direction. And it starts to—it actually helps us to understand what the government does and does not want us to see in the specific context of national security documents. And so, they—BuzzFeed is not doing any of the analysis themselves; it's happening from this third-party. I'm relatively certain, it's a group of academics. There's no issue with that because they're not saying it's theirs. They just have some rights-based claim on what they're doing. And I think that's fine if you're straightforward about the fact that you're not the one that it's doing it. It's coming from another source and you have no way of knowing that it's accurate. That's the scariest thing about taking somebody else's algorithm at its word; is you are just assuming that they know what they're doing. - -And I think in some cases that's good, but in a lot of cases, it ends up being the same problem that some of us have in journalism when we're doing some of this stuff, is that there's not anyone in my newsroom who can check my algorithm. And so I have to go elsewhere and basically if I want anyone to trust me on this, I have to get experts to say that it's good, or that it's bad, or whatever. And I think it is very, very, very important that there—that we are—that we hold algorithms accountable. I just don't know how we do that, and I don't know how we do that in a way that is very out in the open. - -And so, I've tried to be as open about some of the things that I'm doing, but I would imagine that there are still a lot of skeptics for what I do and who think the things that I'm doing are not above board, even if I'm not paying anybody or anything like that. Anybody got add idea about what we might use it on? - -For those of us who have not gotten do machine learning at all, no experience with it, is there any suggestion for how to get in the ground and start digging into it a little more? - -I like—I'm mostly self-taught on this. One of my goals, I set it for myself to meet by this conference but I didn't meet it because I just got swamped with stuff over the past couple of months. I'm working on creating interactive courses on both R and Python on the basics of machine learning at some point. I will release those. And I'm hoping that they will be geared—or no, they will be geared more towards journalists' uses of machine learning. They'll teach you how to do certain things. They'll teach you the very, very, very, very basics. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that you need to know before you can really get off the ground. But yeah, I mean there's a lot of great resources out there. I mean Stanford does some fantastic online programs that you don't have to pay for. So, I mean, I highly recommend going and finding them and they are very good at just hitting the ground running but not, like, you don't have to have a CS degree to be able to understand the basics of that course. We had a lot of tags that are added to content by people. Sometimes it's - -Sometimes it's like DEA, and Drug Enforcement Agency. Sometimes there's a hierarchy that aren't expressed. Do you have any suggestion for resolving those entities and trying to understand structure within them if they're not in that already? - -So I mean, that's sort of a great use case for this, is depending how many you have, I mean, if you—if we're only talking about a hundred tags then -- - -It's like 2,000... - -So you could theoretically go through that on your own and do it. It's not going to be fun. I mean, essentially what you would do is pick out some random ones and you would essentially want to define what you wanna do. So between DEA, and Drug Enforcement Agency, you need to decide which one you want, and you want to keep that consistent and so if you're going to pick DEA, you also need to have FBI, or vice versa, Federal Bureau of Investigations. You have Drug Enforcement Administration. So basically, the first thing that you just wanna do is set out how you want your tags to work and how you want them structured. And so what you say is: I know that if you take the first letter of these—of each word, look for that. So like, "Drug Enforcement Administration," it would take D, E, A, and it would look for all tags with DEA, and just DEA, and you can say, "If it looks like that, just take that and change it." So this is essentially data cleaning. You're trying to get everything uniform. You're trying to do that. For 2,000 you're just going to have to eyeball a good portion of it. You're just going to understand what some of your major issues are before you tackle them. It's same thing with anything that you're going to do in machine learning, is if you don't understand the data that you're working with, you cannot write a program for it. And so, it is very, very important that you just sit there and take, like, 30 minutes to an hour and understand the issues and then you can write the program that either changes it, or tells you what it most likely is, which is probably your best bet because you don't want it changing a tag to something else and then—but it was a screw-up and it should have never changed that. - -So is it worth looking at an external source like Wikipedia or something to try to resolve similar entities versus doing actual parsing of? - -Looking for what? I mean, it's possible for some of those Wikipedia pages to—so resolve some entity. Would you use some third-party service rather than just training on the text? - -I think you can do whatever you want. At the end of the day it's your decision: Whatever you think is best for your for you is going to be best for you. So you can use a third party one. You just want to understand what they're doing. - -Sure. - -And so, yeah, I mean my best piece of advice there is just know thy data. - -Thanks. - -I'm just going to talk real quickly about the one that I'm working on, that is I have no idea whether it will ever work but I'm hoping to God that it will, and it is super timely, and I'm sort of mad at myself that I haven't gotten it to work yet but I am working on a program to download the SCOTUS opinions and tell me exactly what happened in basically five seconds after they're posted. I want it to tell me what the margin was. I want it to tell me who's dissenting. Or I want it to tell me the concurrent opinions of the case. I want it to tell me the basics of what they've decided but it's very difficult because it's very difficult to write programs that summarize because you can find keywords and say oh, yeah, that's going to be important but it doesn't know how to structure a sentence around that. - -And so, you can find key sentences and say look, just take these key sentences but you might have five key sentences in a row and it's this disjointed thing. So that's one of the issues that I'm trying to tackle is understanding how to do summarization, how to do extracting. The positive thing about these is they're generally pretty similar. You're going to have very similar structure from one opinion to the next. You're going to have some consistency there. The biggest, biggest issue is having a computer understand the full text of something that might use colloquialisms. I mean, read any dissent by Scalia, and my summary might say that California's not a western state because it thought that that was important. So it's a very difficult thing. I cannot imagine that I'm the only person working in this sphere to do something similar to that. But it is one of the ultimate goals of machine learning, I think is teaching a computer to do everything that I can do, just way faster. And, you know, some of that stuff is impossible. I hate to say it. I mean, there are some things in journalism that we will have to do over and over and over and over and over and over again. And it will be tedious and it will suck, and there's nothing that we can do about it. But I mean, machine learning is this great unknown. It can help us with a lot of things but it can fuck us on a lot of things, too. - -And I think it's really important to note, more than anything, that machine learning is not a magic bullet. It's not something that you're going to be able to pull out of your toolbelt and say, "I can apply it to this situation." I like to think of, especially data journalists as Swiss army knives. We have very skill sets that we can employ at a given time, but you don't want to use the saw when the knife is going to work. - -And so it is important that we understand what tools we need to be using and machine learning is just one of those tools in your belt. It is probably going to be one of the most unused tools in your belt because it does not have practical applications across the spectrum. But it has some. I mean, it's not an useless tool. It's just—you need to, if you really want to use it, you have to understand it. And I think the best way to understand it is just to talk to people who are using it and understand the various use cases for it and then try. I mean, there are ones that I'm not going to get into now that I've tried and miserably failed. And some of it was stuff that I ended up—I mean, the audit one. I just gave you an abridged version, but that was—I think I gave you like two or three failures before I ultimately succeeded but it's probably closer to two or 300 failures before I ultimately succeeded and that's just life. And I feel like the best learning that I've ever done was saying, "I think this tool is cool. I think it could be applicable in this case, and I think I'm going to learn how to do it in this context." And I think that's how you learned to do a lot of that stuff. I think that's one of the best tools that we have. I see a problem. I can see how the tool can fix it, I don't know how to use the tool but I'm trying. And you're going to fail here. You're going to fail. Even if you're an expert at this you're not going to succeed on your first try unless you've literally already done it on a dataset that's almost identical. You're not just going to be able to say, "Oh, yeah, I've got this old code in my closet and I'm going to pull it out and it's going to work perfectly the first time." That's just not how it's going to work. So it's just going to be, this more than any other discipline of journalism, it requires you to have patience and to understand that you're going to fail and you may never succeed on something because it's not possible. But that should be taken as a learning experience and that we should—it will at the very least help you understand how things work. - -Five minute warning, that's all. - -Any final questions while we're staying in here? - -Oh. Can you tell me what tools are you using in projects? The Supreme Court thing? - -So I write most of my code in r. I've been teaching myself how to do this in Python mostly taking my r code and modifying some things. So I'm rewriting all of my r code for the Artis project in Python because that's how I feel I can learn to do it best. And so there are some great packages and modules in both worlds in r, and Python, I'm sure there's Ruby stuff, I just am not familiar with that world. I'm sure there is—there are modules or packages in every language that you could possibly think of. - -I don't know what they are off the top of my head. If you want to contact me after, I'm happy to provide you with the ones that I'm working with, the ones that are really good. Yeah, so I pretty sure just—yeah, you don't have to create your own packages and modules; people have done that for you. They're always looking to get better because this is still a very new area. And well, maybe not super new, but in the open source world, there's still not a massive amount of code because it's not very reusable. But it's just basically an extension of writing in Python, or r, or whatever it is that you want to do. I mean, I like r because it's a statistical program first and that's sort of what this is. And I always tell people—I mean, how many people in this room know r or have used it? Okay. So you will understand this. So I think the best thing about r is that it was written by statisticians who understand statistics intimately, and they can—and so basically any use case that you have is covered and the worst thing about r was that it was written by statisticians because it has the steepest learning curve of any language that I've ever worked in. But once you know it, it's incredibly useful. It's incredibly powerful. It's incredibly easy. But it's not easy to go from zero to 100 on that in a couple days. It is something that you're going to have to learn. You're going to have to dedicate time to. But I think—I know that there are people out there that would argue with me that it is not the best language for this but I think it is. I think r is the best language for machine learning. I think you can do it in all languages. But I just think that using a language that is grounded in statistics for a—for something that is very much statistical and very much probabilistic is your best bet. I mean, I'm not going out there and saying, "Learn r tomorrow!" But I am saying that I think it has some of the best packages and if you want to talk about that with me, I mean, I'm—not right now because I'm sort of new to machine learning now, but I'm happy to talk after the conference and give you some of my—a talk about some of the packages I'm working with. Some of the good things that I've found, some of the bad things that I've found and really, trying to help you get off the ground. And again, I think the best way to get off the ground with this is Vanidea in mind. It doesn't have to be an idea that you ever want to publish. But I think you should go into with a dataset that you want to do, too. And you think that machine learning, that's really the best way. - -I just had a quick comment. I don't know how common it is for—you mentioned one thing that you often do is talk to somebody who has, like, grounding in, you know, whatever field it is that you're trying to learn more about using machine learning. And, you know, having some friends and colleagues that kind of work in academia, it seems a lot of the problems that are at the heart of building the little bits of functionality that you need to do to do any kind of, like, machine learning at scale. A lot of those problems have already been solved and they're just bur ed in these, like, ridiculous academia papers with big formulas. And so, like what technique, like, one of the projects I work on latent within it are a lot of these kind of mathematical formulas that work very deep within these kind of academic papers and what it took was calling these people up and saying, "Hey, what did you learn?" I mean, one guy was in Russia, so we couldn't really call him up. But we got in touch with him online and he has, like, code that he used to write his paper. And it was really terrible because it was academic code. It was written in Java, so none of us knew what to do with it. But anyways, so patience and asking a lot of questions. You can yield work that's already been done. I know it's hard to know what to search for, but I know some people can speak academese, and normal. - -You have a good point. There's probably people who have already made it. You know, there are so many algorithms out there, and none of them are one size fits all, but all you need is one size fits one to have that one. So again if you talk to the experts, someone is going to say, someone's done something extraordinarily similar to what you did, you're basically to use a lot of that with tweaks. That's machine learning now. Is that there's a much larger userbase. All right. Thank you. - -[ Applause ] - -Thank you for bringing questions. I wanted this to be a conversation. And I think that we got pretty close to that so... +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/machinelearning/index.html +--- + +# Machine Learning—How Useful Is it for Journalism? + +### Session Facilitator(s): Steven Rich + +### Day & Time: Friday, 11am-noon + +### Room: Thomas Swain + +We're just going to give it another minute or two, let people get breakfast, sorry. + +All right. We'll go ahead and get started. Hi, everybody. My name is Steven Rich. I am the Database Editor for Investigations for the Washington Post. If you were expecting a heavily technical session on machine learning today, I'm sorry so disappoint you. The focus of this session, I think, is something that I've been talking a lot with people this community and then the NICAR community a lot that I feel that people see machine learning as this great hope and they have no idea of what it actually is, what it's useful for and that we're going to see a story that just straight-up puts machine learning analysis in that shouldn't be. + +And so, my hope is to share with you a few things that I've done, share a few things that have been done. And also share a few things that I've seen that are awful and should never will repeated, namely Twitter sentiment analysis, but I'll get to that later. So I will start this off by saying that I am by no means an expert on machine learning. I have made myself an expert in the few types of machine learning that I've done for stories but I always consult with experts, which I think is going to be your best bet in any case to figure out what algorithms are going to be the best, what's the best approach, and all these things. And there are people out there that can help you. + +So just briefly, if you don't really know what machine learning is, at a really basic level, it's teaching a computer to be a human in some ways. I mean, you're not going to teach it to emote, but you can teach it to do extraordinarily tedious tasks that require—that generally require the eyes of a human. So you need to fix names in, like, a database where there are a hundred, a thousand names and you want to watch people and so like, "Mike" is "Michael." You know that, but a computer doesn't know that. Dan is Daniel, but not Danielle. You know that, but a computer doesn't know that. So the idea of machine learning is to train a computer to understand that, to recognize that and be able to to do it. My favorite analogy of what machine learning is comes from which a Chase Davidson, from the New York Times. Machine learning is like teaching a drunk 5-year-old to do a task for you repeatedly. I think better put, I think it's more of a team of drunk 5-year-olds. But I'll leave that debate for another time. + +So I'll just jump in and talk about the big one that I worked on last year. It's not one that I think is particularly replicable, and I will get into why. So last year we were approached by whistleblowers at The Agency for International Development. Not in the agency, but in the Inspector General's office of the agency. And they were telling us that the AG was watering down their reports. How do we prove that? + +That was the thing that we wrestled with for a long time and so what we ended up getting in the first place is we got we had 12 audits, and we had all of the drafts of the audits. I should note that the drafts of the audits are not public. We had to go them through whistleblowers and we ended up compiling somewhere in the area of 60 audits total. So there were 12 audits and 60 drafts. So what we wanted to do determine at the end of the day was were they taking out negative references to either the agency, or their missions abroad. + +And so we originally tackled that in that, like, oh, we'll just look for a few phrases that were really negative in the audits and then just, you know, put a few lines in there that says, well, one audit it said this, and then they took this out. + +But anecdotally, we knew what their argument was going to be. Their argument was going to be, well, of course, things get changed now and again, and you only highlighted three or four things. Even if we had a pile of them on the cutting room. So eventually we settled on sentiment analysis. So the reason why this is not replicable is because language is a funny thing. It's in most forms of writing, there is a certain—you might be able to read something and understand that may be it's sarcastic, or maybe it's not reading exactly what it's saying, but a computer can't. So doing sentiment analysis on a very large scale like we were trying to do was proving to be impossible saying here are positive words and here are negative words. And so with what I ended up doing is writing a script that essentially, would comb through and tell us whether there were negative references, whether there were positive references and total them up, and let us know what it was. + +But when I got that back, I started to realize other problems. The word "poor" can mean a number of things. You could be talking about work being poor. You could talk about a poor country. And just because it says poor country, it doesn't mean that it is in negative reference to that country. And so, a essentially what we had to do, and this is we had to do a lot in machine learning is you create a training set, which is basically a set of words that it singles out and it will know, and it can learn that these words are good, these words are bad, these words are neutral. And it will bring them back and score them probabilistically, this is likely that this is a negative word, this is unlikely. But what we had to do for this one, though is we had to—I had to write the script in such a way that it would understand context which is a very difficult thing. I mean, it's difficult enough for humans to understand context sometimes but you're training a computer how a word is being used. Basically I wrote the script in such a way to understand when "poor" was an adjective, like, some words can be nouns and verbs and it would definitely change what it would be. So the verb would be negative, and the noun as neutral, et cetera. Or vice versa. So the biggest thing that you'll find no matter how often you do machine learning is that it's a constant tweaking process. Things change, you don't anticipate things. And I think you're going to fail 500 times before you get it right once and that's just the nature of things. + +Another case that we use this on was the Sony email hack. So I will note that the most common use of machine learning that you see on a day to day basis is your spam filter. Essentially what people did was they created a program that said, "This is very likely to be spam" and they sent it there. And so what I wanted to do there was with the Sony emails was two-fold. After I downloaded them off, I wanted to filter out the spam and the things like just straight-up press releases or shared articles via email because none of those were going to get at anything that we might want to see in the emails. But on the flip side of the coin, I also wanted to find phishing attacks which are generally spam. If I created a general spam filter it's going to scoop them up and find them amongst them. And so I had to write a program to essentially separate out the spammiest of the spam, which were phishing attacks and I will tell you the one that rose to the top of the list was very clearly a phishing attack. And it was a very successful one and we wrote it in the story. We didn't know what it did. We didn't know if it was "the" attack. It took almost no time to find. I mean we found the email. It was basically one of those things where the headline was, like, "important document." And then, in it was like a, "Hi, please open this secured document and enter your password." And then my favorite part of it was the final line was, "PS, this is not spam." + +I think you can basically filter—if you look at any emails that says, "This is not spam," it probably is. So that's how we used it in that case. But thing at the end of the day, the ultimate use for machine learning is probably the least sexy use for it, which is data learning. Machine learning is the perfect thing for data cleaning. I'm going to use the New York Times as an example here. They are working very hard to match people in the FEC database with themselves. + +I mean, there are so many variations of people's names in there and there are so many variations of addresses, and occupations, and so what they are doing is, they are doing that, like, Mike is Michael and you know, if the address is pretty similar, maybe batch that and they're scoring them on a something basis and it's—I can tell you that they are putting a lot of effort into it because it is not very easy. + +But I mean, at the end of the day, it's kind of the perfect task for machine learning because essentially what you're doing is, you're just going record-by-record and saying, is this person this person? Okay. And so what you can do, and how they're creating their training set is they are doing that. They are taking a subset of the data and they're manually doing that. And they're saying, "Okay, if you notice this thing you're going to want to match these people." And they're doing that and making life easy. I know one of my colleagues came to me about standardizing the database ourselves and I want to use machine learning, not yet. I'm hoping at some point that New York Times is just going to open source their code. But there's really no other way to do it. I mean, data cleaning of small and medium-sized datasets is simple. I mean it's really not that bad. By when you have literally a hundred thousand different names and you're trying to figure out if one is another, it's very hard. I mean, there are a lot of Mike Smiths. And how do you know this Mike Smith is this Mike Smith. Or maybe this Mike Smith moved. There's never going to be, unless the FEC goes back and creates ID numbers for people, we're screwed. We'll never know if one Mike Smith is another. We can say probabilistic long, there's a very high chance but we can never say they are. Which brings me to my next point which is when not to use it. For the love of God, Twitter's sentiment analysis is awful. If you're sitting on your computer right now and you're on Twitter, I want you to type in the search bar: I love... and search for it. I want you to read the first one and I want you to tell me whether or not it is a sarcastic tweet. Or you're sure that it's not a sarcastic tweet. So one of the things that—there was an organization a couple years ago when, in the last election cycle that tried to do divert sentiment analysis for Obama and Romney. But just try to imagine the tweets that people send out about these people. I mean, somebody's going to say, "I love that Obama sucks." And it's going to break it because it's going to say, "I love Obama," basically. So it may classify that as a positive tweet. So because humans often write as they speak but can't necessarily get across that they are being sarcastic, it can be a major, major issue with Twitter sentiment analysis. It's the reason why my use case sort of ended up working. I mean, think about audits. Audits are literally just straightforward language that conveys the point that it's trying to make. And we created our training sets specifically for those audits. The training set on my program will not and cannot be used on basically any other set of data that you want to do sentiment analysis on. That's the important thing about training sets. They have to be very specific for what you are working on. It's probably our biggest issue in machine learning is that it's not, you know, one program is probably not going to be replicable on something else. If anybody puts out a program that says, that it's your essentially 1-size-fits-all program, they're selling snake oil. If they say it's one-size-fits-most. There are some of those and there are some really great ones out there that you can for data cleaning, you can order or identify entities within a set of data or documents that you want to identify. + +But they don't work on everything. They're just—there are always unknown scenarios. And so it's very important when you're using these programs that there might be shortcomings and maybe try and talk to an expert and say, like, if I put this in here, is it going to work? If I use this, is it going to help me? And that should help get you on the right track. So I'm kind of hoping that this session can be way more talkative than me just standing up here and spewing crap. And so, has anybody in the room used machine learning, tried to use machine learning, done it well, done it poorly? Do you want to talk a little bit about that? + +Uh, sure. I work for Mac&Company, and we do data integration for data providers and so we recently had a partnership with TrueDelt which is the global database on tones and aggregates. And they source from global media from like BBC and then subclassifies it so that you can search by, like, who's posting about ISIS right now. And so we want to put this all on a map because we want to geolocate as to where they were published and we had a few journalists who wanted to do themed maps. So kind of parsing through, looking for one was doing a story on wildlife crime. And so she was, like, look up poaching. See how poaching is featured in these articles but then you get all these things like people poaching someone for a hire, or poached eggs also come up, like, in cooking articles and what we ended up doing was just making the maps with the poaching information and kind of whittling it down as best we could but then explaining those disclaimers in the posts and saying you're going to find some poached eggs because there were a lot of edge cases that we didn't control for. So I don't know what the best way is for those errors, or to just not use it at all. + +I mean, from experience, I think transparency is going to be your best case scenario. You say, look, this is hard. I mean, this is not—I mean, there's 99.999% of your readers are going to look at that and not say, "I could do that better." Or they might say it, and they can't. + +And so, I think if you're going to use machine learning in a way like that, it's very, very good to say, like, here's what we attempted to do. Here are some of the downfalls of that that are very difficult to weed out, but you know the majority of it is going to be what you want. So I think that being as straightforward as possible about where it fails is great. I think trying to tweak it as you go is also good. Some things are just not tweakable. + +But yeah, there are a very few use cases where you do forward-facing machine learning. I think a lot of it ends up being suffix. Because it is probabilistic in most ways, it's helpful to point you in the light direction in reporting, I think but that is a very good use case for, "Hey, look at what we're doing." And I think it's also very fun. Anybody else? + +Sorry. Another problem that I don't really know how to solve for is that it has articles from in 65 different languages, right? So what you write is something that looks up the translation for what you're looking for because I don't speak 65 languages but there's no way to control for the errors that come from I not understanding how poaching so interpreted contextually in all those other languages. So that's fun. + +It should be noted that translation software edits, at its heart is machine learning. It's not the greatest because you can't program it to get every phrase as it would be said in that language. You pretty much have to tell it that if you see this word in this language it is this other word in this other along and not necessarily get it contextually accurate. So there's that. I mean, you pretty much—there's really no good way to create a translator that's going to work accurately in that setting. It's unfortunate but I cannot imagine a scenario where you're going to through multiple languages where you're able to accurately pull context out of—I mean pulling context of our own language is tough. Translating something with context to our language that has that same context is virtually impossible unless the sentence is very, very straightforward. The translators get things wrong all the time and that's because machine tells you, like, this is sort of right. This is more right than nothing. And so, I think the major thing that you need to know about machine learning is that it—you're never going to do anything with 100 percent accuracy. There's always going to be—there's probabilities, you're always going to be tweak it to try and be as accurate as possible but it's not something that's 100 percent accurate. You can get it very close, but unless you have a data set that's, like, 100 items and you literally created a training set for every one of those items, it's not going to be 100 percent accurate. And if you're doing that for one that has 100 items, you shouldn't be doing that. It's much easier to just clean it and change things and do it like that. + +If you don't have examples of machine learning, I'm happy to field questions on issues you're having if you want—if we want—if you want to talk about a potential use case where you think it might be useful but you're still not sure. I'm happy to answer those. I want this to be a conversation if anybody's got anything. + +So how easily have you found it to convince other people—people who will say they were either skeptics of anything machine related, how—can you talk about your process of getting them onboard with your statistical assumptions and whatnot? + +Yeah, I mean, it's very tough. I mean, I think the biggest problem doing any amount of statistics at any level in journalism is that people aren't going to trust me because I'm a journalist. They say like, "Oh, that's guy's a journalist, he can't do math." Or he can't do stats, he can't do any of those things. So the assumption going in, at least if I'm public facing is that I can't do this. Internally it's not that bad but there are still people out there that are like I'm skeptical of statistics. Are you sure this is good? And so it's tough. I mean, one of the big ways that I do it is by bringing in experts and saying look, I'm consulting with some of the best people in the field on this and let them explain it in their own words to editors, to other reporters and let them say, like, this is the best method for doing this. And have there be an understanding that there's sort of this backstop for me because I'm not an expert in machine learning and I'm not an expert in the various fields of—in some various fields of statistics. But other people are, and there's literally no reason for me not to ask them. And I've found more often than not, that people are very open to helping you. I mean, if you go to a statistical expert and you're like, "Hi, I work at a news publication and I need your help." They're just like, "Awesome, how can I help?" So you can't be afraid to ask experts. But I would make it very clear from the get-go with my editors that this is what I want to do. I think it's the most appropriate. A lot of people trust me now that I've gotten it right once or twice. But in the initial stages, it's sort of like a you're just going to have to trust me on this. If it goes wrong, it goes wrong and we won't use it but I always make the promise that I will consider not using it if I don't think it's good. If an expert says, like, at the end of the day, "Oh, well, I thought this would work but we failed." I always make sure that people understand that I am not married to the idea of using it. But I still it's the best option if we can use it. + +When you're consulting, what are—or who are the types of experts that you're talking to? Are they people in industry, are they people in academia? Is it depend on the story specifically in terms of how to model your machine learning. + +So I have a few friends and colleagues in academia that are doing some of this work and usually my first step is to sit down with a few of them and talk them through my problem. And they are the ones that—like, they are so interconnected to a lot of other people so they are the ones that are saying, this is the that's doing something similar to what you're doing, they're going to be the one that you want to talk to. A lot of these a lot of these people are in the computer science world. Some of these are in the linguistics world. I mean, a lot of these experts are just people who understand language, which is really, really necessary if you're going to do machine learning. So I can—I mean, I'd like to consult technical and non-technical experts. And honestly, the best way is to find one or two people out there that you can sort of make friends with and they're the ones that can get you connected with the right people. They might be the right people. But they are the ones that are going to tell you that you can find somebody. They're also the people that are going to tell you: You should not—this is not a perfect use case for this; don't do it. Which I've had in certain instances where I thought like, "Oh,, this might be an interesting use case for this." And they would say, "That's interesting in that it's not good." So I think it's always good to consult experts or people who know this sphere before you really dive into something like this. 'Cause it can get complicated quickly. And lots gonna depend on—I mean, there are too many variables for every one of these situations to be able to say like, yes, you can do it there, or no, you can't do it there. I mean, there are some we know yes, you can do it there, no, you can't do it there but that's because we've tried. But I think most use cases we haven't tried yet so we don't know. + +So, I was actually talking with a colleague of mine this morning about some statistical modeling that he's doing with some police report—police abuse reports. And he's kind of like a very intelligent person who knows a lot about math. And as he's kind of walking me through this stuff, it became very clear to both of us that—to attempt to explain exactly how he came up with this conclusion, it's very opaque and it just becomes kind of—it's kind of like a blackbox, you put the numbers on one side and this thing comes out on the other side. So I'm wondering, so question one: I'm wondering to what extent in journalism, generally speaking, do you feel like, or does anybody feel like I should like be fully transparent about what's happening inside the blackbox because it's very complicated and it's hard to explain? And then the wow, I lost question two. Damn it. Anyways. I might ask it later. On you yeah, I mean the fact that these machine learning and doing statistical analysis and some things. + +I've always argued that the biggest story killer of all time is to insert the words, "Logistic regression" into a story and people are like I don't care anymore. It doesn't matter if the subject matter is rivetting or not. So my goal with this and statistics in general and let's be honest, machine learning is kind of statistics on steroids in a lot of ways, is if you can use it, and as, like, a—as a reporting tool to, like, point you in the right direction or something, that ends up being easier because you never have to explain how you got to, like—how you found—if you're looking for something in particular, you never have to say how you got there. It's only when you come to the putting your analysis into the story that comes out of that, is where you need to be entirely transparent. The Post does—we do what, what we call "did-boxes" which are basically methodology boxes. Which is if you really really want to know I did this, one, here's how I did it. It might not be the most obvious thing to most people but it's a starting point. It's a "here's how I did it." If people want to talk to me about further details, I always email them back, I always call them. I want to be as open and transparent about this because, at the end of the day, you can't just, like, make this pie-in-the-sky claim and not tell people how you got it. And so especially with machine learning, you have to be open and honest about it. And how you want to do that is a different story. + +If you say, like, I used machine learning to get this analysis in a story, no one who reads it is going to understand that. I mean, we're not writing for a technical community but if you put it in a methodology box, those people who really want to know are going to figure it out. + +So I guess I remember the second question: To what extent do we feel like some kind of a complicated analysis should be reproducible. You mentioned this thing that you did as not reproducible. + +I mean, I'm not—it's reproducible on the same dataset. It's just not reproducible on other datasets because it's not one size fits all. My training set—you can use the algorithm that I did and everything around it, but my training set is very, very specific for the audits that we used. So you couldn't just—if you had another group of audits, it might work. But even then, you would probably still have to do your tweaking. I could give you everything including my training set with this giant note that says, "You're going to need to change this." Because there are words in audits that are, like—like "recommendation" in an audit is a very bad thing. But "recommendation" in reel life can be good, or it can be neutral. And so I want things to be reproducible and I want to share my code when people want my code but I always want to put a note on there if you're going to use this for a different purpose or for a different dataset specifically, you need to change it. It's not a one size fits all. + +I'm curious if you've seen any examples of combining crowdsourcing to clean up or otherwise inform machine learning output, particularly around journalism. I work at Popup Archive and we index a lot of sound for journalists, producers, media, radio, universities, archives. And so we work with a combination of tools, a lot of them third-party, some of them done I've done experimentation and research with, some of them include speech-to-text software that's trained to certain news media and history. And semantic extraction. We won't go as far as cent analysis for reasons that you've just argued and described. And then we look at things more into now speech and audio analysis. There's now one called "Hipstas" which started with bird calls and poetry, and just analyzing different qualities of waveforms related to the sound. But anyway, there's a project called Metadata Games that's come out of academia out of Dartmouth to clean up messy OCR transcripts or other, like, more machine learning type academia projects and I'm always looking for—we're thinking about ways of augmenting. + +So I actually had this thought very recently when Hillary's Benghazi emails came out, the Washington Post did something great, they would ask readers to randomly describes this. They had tags that you could put on it, or you could make up your own tag but what if I showed 500 emails and used 50 thousands. You could use the tags they gave them as your training set and then try to extrapolate it. Things with similar language would get tagged in a similar way and it might be a really great way of finding out without having to go through it yourself, in the larger context, like, what—so people see the small set and then it extrapolates to the large set and then you might find the really interesting emails in the large set by understanding what people think about the small set. As long as you think the small set is representative, I mean, Hillary's Ben gaze emails are not going to be representative over her emails as a whole because they were very specific to one subject but that's how you great a training set, you take a small group from a large group and you go through it by hand and you learn what the intricacies are going to be and then you learn from that and then you go through another group and learn if it's working or breaking. + +Do you know what the Wall Street Journal's end goal for that was? + +Let's say that you have 10,000 people read that in a span of 30 minutes and everybody tags one. Then you probably have somewhere in the area of 12 tags. I probably didn't do that math correctly for each one. Now every 30 minutes in 500 emails, without having to read all of them, they know which ones are the interesting emails are, they know which ones the controversial emails are. They know where the spam emails are in there. So for their purposes I think it was a great reporting tool that sort of skipped the step of having a reporter read and confide through your emails. They were able to figure out things quickly in a breaking-news scenario like that, machine learning's just not going to do it because you're not going to have time to train something if you're hoping to get it out that day. But if you're—I love the idea of crowdsourcing your training set because I see things through one lens and a lot of other people see things other ways and I think it's really great to bring in people who are a little more detached than you to help. + +I'll check it out, too, do you know if they had controlled jobs for the people to use? + +I can't remember. + +Okay. Cool. Thanks. + +Along those lines, have you ever—or has anyone ever done anything with Mechanical Turk with some other kind of piecemeal—paying people to small amounts to ask to qualify things. Are there any kind of journalistic issues that can arise from going about it that way? + +That's a good question. I mean, I like to do as much of what I can do in-house, or with experts that I'm not paying because if we pay an expert, then people think that I—it's very easy for someone to come back and say, "I think you paid him to say your analysis was good." Even though that was completely not the case. So in that way, it ends up being about what we talk about for investigative subjects all the time. It doesn't matter if you're doing something wrong or unethical. If it appears to be wrong, or it appears to be unethical, it's just as bad. So I'm okay with paying people to create my training sets. I mean, I will tweet them. But I don't necessarily know of somebody who has done that yet. I mean, machine learning is still very, very new in journalism. There's still very few people doing it. So the examples are obviously not everywhere. But it's starting to be in more places and I just don't know. I know that BuzzFeed is partnering with—I cannot remember who it is—they're doing machine learning, which, this is—and I'll just give you a little bit of background, because I think this is one of the coolest uses of machine learning that I've ever seen: Taking previously redacted documents that have now been released publicly, things that they released ages ago that are now being released without redactions. And it's a predictive tool for seeing what are the redactions in the document. It's obviously you can't say with any certainty that oh, yeah, now I know this name, or I know exactly the words under this. But it might point us in the right direction. And it starts to—it actually helps us to understand what the government does and does not want us to see in the specific context of national security documents. And so, they—BuzzFeed is not doing any of the analysis themselves; it's happening from this third-party. I'm relatively certain, it's a group of academics. There's no issue with that because they're not saying it's theirs. They just have some rights-based claim on what they're doing. And I think that's fine if you're straightforward about the fact that you're not the one that it's doing it. It's coming from another source and you have no way of knowing that it's accurate. That's the scariest thing about taking somebody else's algorithm at its word; is you are just assuming that they know what they're doing. + +And I think in some cases that's good, but in a lot of cases, it ends up being the same problem that some of us have in journalism when we're doing some of this stuff, is that there's not anyone in my newsroom who can check my algorithm. And so I have to go elsewhere and basically if I want anyone to trust me on this, I have to get experts to say that it's good, or that it's bad, or whatever. And I think it is very, very, very important that there—that we are—that we hold algorithms accountable. I just don't know how we do that, and I don't know how we do that in a way that is very out in the open. + +And so, I've tried to be as open about some of the things that I'm doing, but I would imagine that there are still a lot of skeptics for what I do and who think the things that I'm doing are not above board, even if I'm not paying anybody or anything like that. Anybody got add idea about what we might use it on? + +For those of us who have not gotten do machine learning at all, no experience with it, is there any suggestion for how to get in the ground and start digging into it a little more? + +I like—I'm mostly self-taught on this. One of my goals, I set it for myself to meet by this conference but I didn't meet it because I just got swamped with stuff over the past couple of months. I'm working on creating interactive courses on both R and Python on the basics of machine learning at some point. I will release those. And I'm hoping that they will be geared—or no, they will be geared more towards journalists' uses of machine learning. They'll teach you how to do certain things. They'll teach you the very, very, very, very basics. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that you need to know before you can really get off the ground. But yeah, I mean there's a lot of great resources out there. I mean Stanford does some fantastic online programs that you don't have to pay for. So, I mean, I highly recommend going and finding them and they are very good at just hitting the ground running but not, like, you don't have to have a CS degree to be able to understand the basics of that course. We had a lot of tags that are added to content by people. Sometimes it's + +Sometimes it's like DEA, and Drug Enforcement Agency. Sometimes there's a hierarchy that aren't expressed. Do you have any suggestion for resolving those entities and trying to understand structure within them if they're not in that already? + +So I mean, that's sort of a great use case for this, is depending how many you have, I mean, if you—if we're only talking about a hundred tags then -- + +It's like 2,000... + +So you could theoretically go through that on your own and do it. It's not going to be fun. I mean, essentially what you would do is pick out some random ones and you would essentially want to define what you wanna do. So between DEA, and Drug Enforcement Agency, you need to decide which one you want, and you want to keep that consistent and so if you're going to pick DEA, you also need to have FBI, or vice versa, Federal Bureau of Investigations. You have Drug Enforcement Administration. So basically, the first thing that you just wanna do is set out how you want your tags to work and how you want them structured. And so what you say is: I know that if you take the first letter of these—of each word, look for that. So like, "Drug Enforcement Administration," it would take D, E, A, and it would look for all tags with DEA, and just DEA, and you can say, "If it looks like that, just take that and change it." So this is essentially data cleaning. You're trying to get everything uniform. You're trying to do that. For 2,000 you're just going to have to eyeball a good portion of it. You're just going to understand what some of your major issues are before you tackle them. It's same thing with anything that you're going to do in machine learning, is if you don't understand the data that you're working with, you cannot write a program for it. And so, it is very, very important that you just sit there and take, like, 30 minutes to an hour and understand the issues and then you can write the program that either changes it, or tells you what it most likely is, which is probably your best bet because you don't want it changing a tag to something else and then—but it was a screw-up and it should have never changed that. + +So is it worth looking at an external source like Wikipedia or something to try to resolve similar entities versus doing actual parsing of? + +Looking for what? I mean, it's possible for some of those Wikipedia pages to—so resolve some entity. Would you use some third-party service rather than just training on the text? + +I think you can do whatever you want. At the end of the day it's your decision: Whatever you think is best for your for you is going to be best for you. So you can use a third party one. You just want to understand what they're doing. + +Sure. + +And so, yeah, I mean my best piece of advice there is just know thy data. + +Thanks. + +I'm just going to talk real quickly about the one that I'm working on, that is I have no idea whether it will ever work but I'm hoping to God that it will, and it is super timely, and I'm sort of mad at myself that I haven't gotten it to work yet but I am working on a program to download the SCOTUS opinions and tell me exactly what happened in basically five seconds after they're posted. I want it to tell me what the margin was. I want it to tell me who's dissenting. Or I want it to tell me the concurrent opinions of the case. I want it to tell me the basics of what they've decided but it's very difficult because it's very difficult to write programs that summarize because you can find keywords and say oh, yeah, that's going to be important but it doesn't know how to structure a sentence around that. + +And so, you can find key sentences and say look, just take these key sentences but you might have five key sentences in a row and it's this disjointed thing. So that's one of the issues that I'm trying to tackle is understanding how to do summarization, how to do extracting. The positive thing about these is they're generally pretty similar. You're going to have very similar structure from one opinion to the next. You're going to have some consistency there. The biggest, biggest issue is having a computer understand the full text of something that might use colloquialisms. I mean, read any dissent by Scalia, and my summary might say that California's not a western state because it thought that that was important. So it's a very difficult thing. I cannot imagine that I'm the only person working in this sphere to do something similar to that. But it is one of the ultimate goals of machine learning, I think is teaching a computer to do everything that I can do, just way faster. And, you know, some of that stuff is impossible. I hate to say it. I mean, there are some things in journalism that we will have to do over and over and over and over and over and over again. And it will be tedious and it will suck, and there's nothing that we can do about it. But I mean, machine learning is this great unknown. It can help us with a lot of things but it can fuck us on a lot of things, too. + +And I think it's really important to note, more than anything, that machine learning is not a magic bullet. It's not something that you're going to be able to pull out of your toolbelt and say, "I can apply it to this situation." I like to think of, especially data journalists as Swiss army knives. We have very skill sets that we can employ at a given time, but you don't want to use the saw when the knife is going to work. + +And so it is important that we understand what tools we need to be using and machine learning is just one of those tools in your belt. It is probably going to be one of the most unused tools in your belt because it does not have practical applications across the spectrum. But it has some. I mean, it's not an useless tool. It's just—you need to, if you really want to use it, you have to understand it. And I think the best way to understand it is just to talk to people who are using it and understand the various use cases for it and then try. I mean, there are ones that I'm not going to get into now that I've tried and miserably failed. And some of it was stuff that I ended up—I mean, the audit one. I just gave you an abridged version, but that was—I think I gave you like two or three failures before I ultimately succeeded but it's probably closer to two or 300 failures before I ultimately succeeded and that's just life. And I feel like the best learning that I've ever done was saying, "I think this tool is cool. I think it could be applicable in this case, and I think I'm going to learn how to do it in this context." And I think that's how you learned to do a lot of that stuff. I think that's one of the best tools that we have. I see a problem. I can see how the tool can fix it, I don't know how to use the tool but I'm trying. And you're going to fail here. You're going to fail. Even if you're an expert at this you're not going to succeed on your first try unless you've literally already done it on a dataset that's almost identical. You're not just going to be able to say, "Oh, yeah, I've got this old code in my closet and I'm going to pull it out and it's going to work perfectly the first time." That's just not how it's going to work. So it's just going to be, this more than any other discipline of journalism, it requires you to have patience and to understand that you're going to fail and you may never succeed on something because it's not possible. But that should be taken as a learning experience and that we should—it will at the very least help you understand how things work. + +Five minute warning, that's all. + +Any final questions while we're staying in here? + +Oh. Can you tell me what tools are you using in projects? The Supreme Court thing? + +So I write most of my code in r. I've been teaching myself how to do this in Python mostly taking my r code and modifying some things. So I'm rewriting all of my r code for the Artis project in Python because that's how I feel I can learn to do it best. And so there are some great packages and modules in both worlds in r, and Python, I'm sure there's Ruby stuff, I just am not familiar with that world. I'm sure there is—there are modules or packages in every language that you could possibly think of. + +I don't know what they are off the top of my head. If you want to contact me after, I'm happy to provide you with the ones that I'm working with, the ones that are really good. Yeah, so I pretty sure just—yeah, you don't have to create your own packages and modules; people have done that for you. They're always looking to get better because this is still a very new area. And well, maybe not super new, but in the open source world, there's still not a massive amount of code because it's not very reusable. But it's just basically an extension of writing in Python, or r, or whatever it is that you want to do. I mean, I like r because it's a statistical program first and that's sort of what this is. And I always tell people—I mean, how many people in this room know r or have used it? Okay. So you will understand this. So I think the best thing about r is that it was written by statisticians who understand statistics intimately, and they can—and so basically any use case that you have is covered and the worst thing about r was that it was written by statisticians because it has the steepest learning curve of any language that I've ever worked in. But once you know it, it's incredibly useful. It's incredibly powerful. It's incredibly easy. But it's not easy to go from zero to 100 on that in a couple days. It is something that you're going to have to learn. You're going to have to dedicate time to. But I think—I know that there are people out there that would argue with me that it is not the best language for this but I think it is. I think r is the best language for machine learning. I think you can do it in all languages. But I just think that using a language that is grounded in statistics for a—for something that is very much statistical and very much probabilistic is your best bet. I mean, I'm not going out there and saying, "Learn r tomorrow!" But I am saying that I think it has some of the best packages and if you want to talk about that with me, I mean, I'm—not right now because I'm sort of new to machine learning now, but I'm happy to talk after the conference and give you some of my—a talk about some of the packages I'm working with. Some of the good things that I've found, some of the bad things that I've found and really, trying to help you get off the ground. And again, I think the best way to get off the ground with this is Vanidea in mind. It doesn't have to be an idea that you ever want to publish. But I think you should go into with a dataset that you want to do, too. And you think that machine learning, that's really the best way. + +I just had a quick comment. I don't know how common it is for—you mentioned one thing that you often do is talk to somebody who has, like, grounding in, you know, whatever field it is that you're trying to learn more about using machine learning. And, you know, having some friends and colleagues that kind of work in academia, it seems a lot of the problems that are at the heart of building the little bits of functionality that you need to do to do any kind of, like, machine learning at scale. A lot of those problems have already been solved and they're just bur ed in these, like, ridiculous academia papers with big formulas. And so, like what technique, like, one of the projects I work on latent within it are a lot of these kind of mathematical formulas that work very deep within these kind of academic papers and what it took was calling these people up and saying, "Hey, what did you learn?" I mean, one guy was in Russia, so we couldn't really call him up. But we got in touch with him online and he has, like, code that he used to write his paper. And it was really terrible because it was academic code. It was written in Java, so none of us knew what to do with it. But anyways, so patience and asking a lot of questions. You can yield work that's already been done. I know it's hard to know what to search for, but I know some people can speak academese, and normal. + +You have a good point. There's probably people who have already made it. You know, there are so many algorithms out there, and none of them are one size fits all, but all you need is one size fits one to have that one. So again if you talk to the experts, someone is going to say, someone's done something extraordinarily similar to what you did, you're basically to use a lot of that with tweaks. That's machine learning now. Is that there's a much larger userbase. All right. Thank you. + +[ Applause ] + +Thank you for bringing questions. I wanted this to be a conversation. And I think that we got pretty close to that so... diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015Messaging.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015Messaging.md index 433e6cd8..37ccc1d5 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015Messaging.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015Messaging.md @@ -1,156 +1,154 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/messaging/index.html ---- - -# Messaging is the New Browser—Telling Stories and Building Audience One Sentence at a Time - -### Session Facilitator(s): Yvonne Leow, Michael Morisy - -### Day & Time: Friday, 3-4pm - -### Room: Thomas Swain - - -So everyone's here for advanced emacs tips, right? Wars have been started. So everybody, this is, sort of, the new title is, "Messaging is the New Browser: Telling Stories and Building Audience One Sentence at a Time." Hopefully that's what everybody's interested in. And so one of the things that Yvonne and I've been exploring in the past few months is sort of how can messaging be used in newsrooms so, sort of, better tell stories. How can we think if all you had was 140 characters texted directly, or all you had was WhatsApp, how could you sort of change the way that we communicate with our audiences. And so we sort of talk about how you can cover serious stories with a messaging app, how you can sort of crowdsource stuff and kind of what we settled on is a lot of stuff that's being done in the browser today is sort of being pushed to being smaller and more direct communications in messaging. And you see this a little bit in news but you also see this in e-commerce. Who's heard of the startup, Magic which is just sort of you text them, and you say, I want a burrito, and it will say, it's $40, is that okay? And you say, yeah, I work in Silicon Valley and I don't know the concept of money. And so the burrito comes, and they handle that. You don't have to download a browser, you don't have to download an app, and so this is a way for interrupters to come in and flow over other people's platforms and kind of build a business in really interesting ways. - -And we've seen this in other industries, too. Banking, finance, you get airplane alerts, you get alerts about sometimes we get alerts on campus. If you're a student has university, if there's an intruder or any type of thing like that. And so you see it being used and applied in not only that kind of thing but in travel, and finance types of industries. - -And in news, you're starting to develop a direct relationship with your reader. You don't have to worry about directly going to an app store. You can go to WhatsApp, bow you can float through Facebook, or text messaging, there's lots of interesting possibilities there. And so we've tried to use SRCCON as a test bed for the sort of things that we've been developing. You might have seen this little sign for this little dude or dudette, Jojo, and that was our ongoing experiment for the weekend. And so we got posters everywhere, and we got people to say, they want to save Jojo, a little robot that crash-landed in the area. And so you have this question of how do you increase engagement in text messaging? We've seen the sort of traditional startup funnel where you have a lot of people engage a little bit and then slowly they engage more and more. And so we wanted to test how do you build these types of engagement through a mobile device when all you have is messaging service. So the first thing that we wanted to was sort of after people signed up, we just wanted to broadcast a little bit of data. To Jojo is saying, help, I've crashed, I don't know what's going on. What's going on? - -And then we wanted the—the first thing that you want to know about your audience is who the heck is your audience and so we asked for a little bit of demographic data, just what's your name and are you a robot? And then there was a variety of responses to that. And then one of the things that you can do very easily, and this is nothing new but it was really huge dancing with the stars and what's that music show where people sing and become Kelly Clarkson? - -American Idol? - -American Idol used text messaging calls to full effect. And sort of as we're going on we're doing more and more complex things. Eventually we wanted to crowdsource, getting together a bunch of scary images, and sort of eventually doing outright actions either in real life or on other social platforms. So here was the first, sort of, poll. Jojos was sort of lost and you didn't know where he should go. Most people picked the right answer, which was SRCCON. Yay! - -And then but some people said Jojo should go to 612 brew. And so who actually did the Jojo experiment over the past few days? - -Not bad. All right. - -So some people sent Jojo 612 Brew, and Jojo was like, hey, should I pour some beer on myself at 612 Brew? And 100 percent people that told Jojo to go to 612 Brew told Jojo to pour beer all over himself which probably wouldn't be a good idea for a robot. And one of the things was sort of after that, Jojo made its way to SRCCON and Dan Nguyen said that he would plug Jojo in if he could show them an image as well. And a lot of people sent Dan and tweeted at Dan and met him in real life which you can see there. So it was kind of cool kind of seeing people taking sort of like, "Hey, this is the inside of the app, inside the messaging experience," and broadening that outside. And then we see the crowdsourcing of scary pictures which we got a lot of amusing ones. Who sent a subsidiary picture in here? Awesome. This one was actually one of my favorites. - -That's from me! - -Nice. - -Well done. A bunch of other scary pictures that are really good. I like the little hand-drawn one. - -That was me. - -You know... some of these pictures are scary for people and I just got a couple that just confused me. People sending their puppies, which I don't know. - -How ironic. - -Maybe Dan doesn't like dogs, I don't know. And so we have all the text messages. So if you participated and I lost you somewhere along the way or you didn't get a chance to see what we were sending out. We have jojothebot.tumblr.com. And we have a link to the etherpad as well as a whole train of messages. - -So the whole idea behind the messaging thing is audience engagement in real time. And there's so many different ways that we can be engaging with the audience and crowdsourcing content and actually getting data from them and actually having that conversation dynamic that we don't usually get in comments, or even in social media sometimes. It's a very intimate experience and that's what we're going to do today. Just to go over some of our goals, if you go to our etherpad, feel free to add your ideas and additional resources at the bottom as well but our goal was to really sign up people, gather their information, and see what they could get and so we asked people what's your name? People told us their name for the most part. And are you a robot, and people responded accordingly. But that was real time responses which is similar to who Michael was talking about when it comes to the polling and my link to demonstrate real-life user engagement, will people actually do things that we ask them to do when this is just like a made-up thing with no reputation or any type of credibility whatsoever? And the answer is: Yes. And granted it's a very specific audience. Like, everyone is just game for trying out different things but the idea is that that's just testing out the potential when you actually have a brand and an audience and you're interacting with them through messaging. And finally, yeah, crowdsourcing content. You can look at our narrative. So we actually wrote out a script to kind of have an idea of, like, what we wanted to do before so that's what we're going to be having you guys do today is actually, what would that look like in terms of creating content specifically for messaging, because it's a very different medium. It's not the web. It's not notifications. It's actually having a conversation. But you can kind of craft a narrative to see how you respond as Jojo or any type of organization to people as they're engaging with you. Especially as you guys are making requests for things like, you're actually telling, creating a narrative because they could answer one or two ways, or maybe you can just answer the same thing depending on how they respond. If that makes any sense. So I'll move onto the exercise. - -Sure. So what we would like—we're going to break into five different groups and we're each going to pick—you'll be assigned sort of one of five major stories and think about sort of how can you go through the sort of chain of messaging to address those stories online. We're not going to worry about the acquisition, we're not going to worry about the marketing, we're not going to worry about the technical logistics of what a technical challenge it is so send and receive messages without actually CCing everybody so that you're leaking a bunch of private information. We're just talked about this pyramid of sort of engagement from sort of how do you address using message people who just want to receive information all the way to people who want to really engage with your media organization around, like, sharing their thoughts, sharing breaking-news pictures and stuff. - -And just have fun with it. I think the best part of messaging is actually having a personality. People aren't trying to engage with news organizations. They're trying to engage with people. Those are the types of people that you engage with via text and SMS. So use emojis. Be casual. Have pictures, brainstorm. How you would be communicating as a news organization while delivering information and yeah, see how it goes. So if he can break into five groups. I think we have six, seven, eight tables but if you want to merge into five groups for those who are at two at a table, converge into one, maybe this is one group...? Okay. Two, three, four, five. If that works... and kind of just see how would you guys talk about NBA finals or Fourth of July celebration if you were a news organization and you were trying to talk to them via messaging. And just write very similar, if you can pull up our Tumblr what that script would look like. And we'll just do that for the next 30 minutes and just kind of share ideas at the end. Does anyone have questions or anything? No? All right. - -Yeah, for each—yeah, here it is. And so for each different story, we'll come around and kind of set up a story, each different group. You just want to sort of break it up into four stages. How would you—are what kind of information would you broadcast via just messaging. What kind of information about your users would you want as you're developing that story? What kind of polling could you do and then what kind of crowdsourcing could you do as well as maybe what kind of in-real-life interactions could you sort of generate. So how would you take it beyond messaging? So does that make sense? So can we get into five tables? - -Yay! - -So do you guys want to take on the SCOTUS decision on same-sex marriage? - -Sure. - -Group one. - -Group two? California drought? Is anyone from California. All right! - -I'll join that if that's... - -Do you want to take on that? The drought? All right you guys are California drought. You guys have the drought. - -Three. 2016 presidential election. -[ Group Work ] - -All right, guys. Just five more minutes and then we're going to present everyone's ideas. Just five more minutes. -[ Group Work ] -All right. Brainstorm session's over. Let's go over the groups and kind of hear what everyone brainstormed and then all the ideas when it comes to messaging phone number guys, SCOTUS decision do you want to kick us off? Group one? - -Sure. - -Great. We talked about many things. I think they varied from talking about how to use text to crowdsource media reactions on reports of marriages in the wake of the decision because a lot of action is happening today and there are a lot of strong reactions right at the moment. We've talked about, sort of, longer term uses of collecting and polling by text. So, sort of, how to tell the longer-term story of even stuff that happened before the decisions since people have been thinking about this while the arguments were happening and there's a pause and then the decision suddenly comes out. And then how to continue to pull after, you know, like, how does—how do people's opinions change about this over over a longer period of time. Like, one impact of this decision might be, people might think vastly differently about this subject two years from now. And then talked about using text to build apps that solve practical problems or provide information like more same-sex couples will want to get married and it's sometimes difficult to find safe places to go get married. If you guys want to add. But that's just a selection of some of the things that we talked about. But... - -I mean, we just talked a little bit about how this is an interesting story and there's activity during the arguments and then there's a dead period, and then you know the story is coming and then the story drops from the sky. You kind of know it's coming and I mean, you could segment based on people's specific political interests, not necessarily sending content they would agree with, but if somebody's tracking a particular presidential candidate, you can track that candidate's official statement when it comes out, and then crowdsourcing people who are having specific trouble getting married, even though it's federal law may not be necessarily cooperating. - -Did you feel any specific challenges that you felt when you were talking about this problem with messaging, or things that you were worried about? - -I just felt in that it's history. It's basically a history of our country and so it's a bit omnipresent right now. So just, I personally kind of had a bit of trouble sort of narrowing my focus like, what can we do with messaging since it's pretty much everywhere. - -Right. It's a little different thinking. - -What's the most interesting thing you guys, like, brainstormed when it comes to messaging like, "Oh, I didn't think about that." - -Personally I kind of like the idea of using texting to let people report violations of the new law. Like, those with actually the most interesting incidents, arguably that you want to report on. You try to get married somewhere and you can't. That's now illegal. So that's the kind of stuff people may be hearing about. - -Cool. Thank you. - -Drought. Hit us. - -So we kept circling around the idea of it's a big sort of amorphous issue and there's lots of little things that people can do to help, but they help in various ways and it's hard to figure out, both what actually matters and also, make it sort of acute, personal and relevant. So one of the ideas that we settled on was some kind of a game, could you cut your water usage by 20%, and what would you do given your choices. Would you tear out your lawn, or would you take a shorter shower, or take your car to a carwash instead of washing it at home. I could definitely do that. I saved 20 gallons, you only need to save 2,000 more. - -Just to put it into perspective. - -What are you going to do next. The easy thing may not always be the thing that makes the difference. But maybe if everybody else is. It and that got us thinking about, sort of, what are your neighbors doing? What are you—how is it how do you compare—how do your water situation compare to other places, or how are your sacrifices different from other people's sacrifices and who is not actually—who's keeping their lawns green? Who's keeping their facilitates clean or whatever. - -Yeah, a game is a really great way to get data really easily if we're talking about just A, B, or C. But A, B, or C, could require a lot of information, but it might require a lot of information on the user's part to require to type that in and send it back to you. Awesome. Presidential elections. That was a huge topic, also. - -Right, so we focused on what happened during election day. And we started out thinking about just exit polling but we sort of branched out to the rest of the actual act of going to the poll and you go and say, "All right, I'm at the poll." And when you test that, you can get sort of like a voter guide on all the things you have to vote on in your district or in your particular precinct. And then you might be able to say, "I'm here at the poll, I'm waiting at the poll and this is how I voted." So you can, one, give people, give everyone else an idea of how long you have to wait at the poll at that particular poll. And then, also get exit polling data, which can be used for analysis of—for reporting and by telling the system, like, "I voted republican." Or "I voted Green." You can also come back and give you actual data. Yes, you're voting for a third party, but actually in your district there is a slight chance that you might be able to have an showing. So get your friends to go out and vote as well, and, sort of, a "get up and vote" sort of action beyond just saying, "Hey, I voted." - -And telling people the impact, like, their relative impact. Same thing with the drought, too. What's your relative impact with taking this action, whether it's voting or saving water? - -And personalizing data. I think there's so much data and I think it's so hard to make that actually meaningful for people even though we have more data on them than ever before. I think that's really cool. - -Hey...! Fourth of July? - -Nope. NBA finals. - -NBA finals. - -Anybody wanna kickoff with the finals? - -Yeah, so we—we were sort of thinking about how we could, the various audiences that we would be addressing, whether they were people who are very into the sports game they're watching or people whether or not really don't want to watch sports but feel like they should have some idea of what's going on. Yeah. - -And the various ways that we might address those, you know, people in both of those groups and everywhere in between. And so we talked about a couple of different ways to do that, doing alerts about, kind of, the improbable goings on at any moment, that if you, even if you don't care, you might care that this record is about to be broken or something like that. If you're kind of a low-engagement person. If you're a high-engagement person, you might be interested in when there's a kind of high-stakes situation coming up. We could ask you, you know, do you think this batter's going to get a hit or is going to strike out and we can kind of get, you know, it's both interesting for you to make that decision and we also kind of get crowdsourcing of what are people's—what are people thinking about here. - -One thing that we kind of struggled with was we can come up with these various use cases looking at it that way, but how do we—how do we open the conversation with people? How do we, kind of, make that first connection to get, you know, to make it worth people's while to invite us into their message app. - -Anybody else have anything that they want to highlight? - -I really like one of the things that we discussed in this group is this idea of, like, how would you figure out how would you bring in A, compulsive gambling, or B, like a kiss cam from a stadium into your living room. So what's, like, the equivalent of the kiss cam but brought into somebody's house. So you're having a party -- - -Don't make it creepy. - -It's not going to be creepy, but sort of like, "Hey, you know, it's the commercial break, so show us—we wanted to find the house party with the best guacamole. Send us the best guacamole." And so if your house has the best guacamole, they'll send it out to tens of thousands of people. Or people who have the best costumes for celebrating the team or something like that because I think playing into the strengths of sports is identity and community. And so kind of merging that and so I think there's lots of interesting things that could be done with a filter. And so if you is ask people, send in a picture of a lucky jersey, or your lucky object, you can get a lot of people rooting for the same team, which creates a really cool second screening experience that you don't have to worry about brands crashing the party like they tend to do on Twitter and that sort of thing. - -Unless they're getting a cut. - -Unless they're getting paid. - -Awesome. - -Great. - -Thank you so much for coming, you guys. I mean, you are biggest takeaway is that there's so much potential when it comes to messaging. I don't think many people are thinking about it beyond notifications. - -And I think that's scale and I think there's so many possibilities and I think there are a lot of opportunities. And I think it kind of opens it up once you stop thinking about, "I can't do this and this." But we can do this and this. We can run a game, we can run a kiss cam, we can find out illegal activities. It gets to be a lot more freeing. And so rather than looking at what you can't do just in messaging, think about all the things that you can discuss that we can do. - -Thanks. - -Thanks so much. - -[ Applause ] - +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/messaging/index.html +--- + +# Messaging is the New Browser—Telling Stories and Building Audience One Sentence at a Time + +### Session Facilitator(s): Yvonne Leow, Michael Morisy + +### Day & Time: Friday, 3-4pm + +### Room: Thomas Swain + +So everyone's here for advanced emacs tips, right? Wars have been started. So everybody, this is, sort of, the new title is, "Messaging is the New Browser: Telling Stories and Building Audience One Sentence at a Time." Hopefully that's what everybody's interested in. And so one of the things that Yvonne and I've been exploring in the past few months is sort of how can messaging be used in newsrooms so, sort of, better tell stories. How can we think if all you had was 140 characters texted directly, or all you had was WhatsApp, how could you sort of change the way that we communicate with our audiences. And so we sort of talk about how you can cover serious stories with a messaging app, how you can sort of crowdsource stuff and kind of what we settled on is a lot of stuff that's being done in the browser today is sort of being pushed to being smaller and more direct communications in messaging. And you see this a little bit in news but you also see this in e-commerce. Who's heard of the startup, Magic which is just sort of you text them, and you say, I want a burrito, and it will say, it's $40, is that okay? And you say, yeah, I work in Silicon Valley and I don't know the concept of money. And so the burrito comes, and they handle that. You don't have to download a browser, you don't have to download an app, and so this is a way for interrupters to come in and flow over other people's platforms and kind of build a business in really interesting ways. + +And we've seen this in other industries, too. Banking, finance, you get airplane alerts, you get alerts about sometimes we get alerts on campus. If you're a student has university, if there's an intruder or any type of thing like that. And so you see it being used and applied in not only that kind of thing but in travel, and finance types of industries. + +And in news, you're starting to develop a direct relationship with your reader. You don't have to worry about directly going to an app store. You can go to WhatsApp, bow you can float through Facebook, or text messaging, there's lots of interesting possibilities there. And so we've tried to use SRCCON as a test bed for the sort of things that we've been developing. You might have seen this little sign for this little dude or dudette, Jojo, and that was our ongoing experiment for the weekend. And so we got posters everywhere, and we got people to say, they want to save Jojo, a little robot that crash-landed in the area. And so you have this question of how do you increase engagement in text messaging? We've seen the sort of traditional startup funnel where you have a lot of people engage a little bit and then slowly they engage more and more. And so we wanted to test how do you build these types of engagement through a mobile device when all you have is messaging service. So the first thing that we wanted to was sort of after people signed up, we just wanted to broadcast a little bit of data. To Jojo is saying, help, I've crashed, I don't know what's going on. What's going on? + +And then we wanted the—the first thing that you want to know about your audience is who the heck is your audience and so we asked for a little bit of demographic data, just what's your name and are you a robot? And then there was a variety of responses to that. And then one of the things that you can do very easily, and this is nothing new but it was really huge dancing with the stars and what's that music show where people sing and become Kelly Clarkson? + +American Idol? + +American Idol used text messaging calls to full effect. And sort of as we're going on we're doing more and more complex things. Eventually we wanted to crowdsource, getting together a bunch of scary images, and sort of eventually doing outright actions either in real life or on other social platforms. So here was the first, sort of, poll. Jojos was sort of lost and you didn't know where he should go. Most people picked the right answer, which was SRCCON. Yay! + +And then but some people said Jojo should go to 612 brew. And so who actually did the Jojo experiment over the past few days? + +Not bad. All right. + +So some people sent Jojo 612 Brew, and Jojo was like, hey, should I pour some beer on myself at 612 Brew? And 100 percent people that told Jojo to go to 612 Brew told Jojo to pour beer all over himself which probably wouldn't be a good idea for a robot. And one of the things was sort of after that, Jojo made its way to SRCCON and Dan Nguyen said that he would plug Jojo in if he could show them an image as well. And a lot of people sent Dan and tweeted at Dan and met him in real life which you can see there. So it was kind of cool kind of seeing people taking sort of like, "Hey, this is the inside of the app, inside the messaging experience," and broadening that outside. And then we see the crowdsourcing of scary pictures which we got a lot of amusing ones. Who sent a subsidiary picture in here? Awesome. This one was actually one of my favorites. + +That's from me! + +Nice. + +Well done. A bunch of other scary pictures that are really good. I like the little hand-drawn one. + +That was me. + +You know... some of these pictures are scary for people and I just got a couple that just confused me. People sending their puppies, which I don't know. + +How ironic. + +Maybe Dan doesn't like dogs, I don't know. And so we have all the text messages. So if you participated and I lost you somewhere along the way or you didn't get a chance to see what we were sending out. We have jojothebot.tumblr.com. And we have a link to the etherpad as well as a whole train of messages. + +So the whole idea behind the messaging thing is audience engagement in real time. And there's so many different ways that we can be engaging with the audience and crowdsourcing content and actually getting data from them and actually having that conversation dynamic that we don't usually get in comments, or even in social media sometimes. It's a very intimate experience and that's what we're going to do today. Just to go over some of our goals, if you go to our etherpad, feel free to add your ideas and additional resources at the bottom as well but our goal was to really sign up people, gather their information, and see what they could get and so we asked people what's your name? People told us their name for the most part. And are you a robot, and people responded accordingly. But that was real time responses which is similar to who Michael was talking about when it comes to the polling and my link to demonstrate real-life user engagement, will people actually do things that we ask them to do when this is just like a made-up thing with no reputation or any type of credibility whatsoever? And the answer is: Yes. And granted it's a very specific audience. Like, everyone is just game for trying out different things but the idea is that that's just testing out the potential when you actually have a brand and an audience and you're interacting with them through messaging. And finally, yeah, crowdsourcing content. You can look at our narrative. So we actually wrote out a script to kind of have an idea of, like, what we wanted to do before so that's what we're going to be having you guys do today is actually, what would that look like in terms of creating content specifically for messaging, because it's a very different medium. It's not the web. It's not notifications. It's actually having a conversation. But you can kind of craft a narrative to see how you respond as Jojo or any type of organization to people as they're engaging with you. Especially as you guys are making requests for things like, you're actually telling, creating a narrative because they could answer one or two ways, or maybe you can just answer the same thing depending on how they respond. If that makes any sense. So I'll move onto the exercise. + +Sure. So what we would like—we're going to break into five different groups and we're each going to pick—you'll be assigned sort of one of five major stories and think about sort of how can you go through the sort of chain of messaging to address those stories online. We're not going to worry about the acquisition, we're not going to worry about the marketing, we're not going to worry about the technical logistics of what a technical challenge it is so send and receive messages without actually CCing everybody so that you're leaking a bunch of private information. We're just talked about this pyramid of sort of engagement from sort of how do you address using message people who just want to receive information all the way to people who want to really engage with your media organization around, like, sharing their thoughts, sharing breaking-news pictures and stuff. + +And just have fun with it. I think the best part of messaging is actually having a personality. People aren't trying to engage with news organizations. They're trying to engage with people. Those are the types of people that you engage with via text and SMS. So use emojis. Be casual. Have pictures, brainstorm. How you would be communicating as a news organization while delivering information and yeah, see how it goes. So if he can break into five groups. I think we have six, seven, eight tables but if you want to merge into five groups for those who are at two at a table, converge into one, maybe this is one group...? Okay. Two, three, four, five. If that works... and kind of just see how would you guys talk about NBA finals or Fourth of July celebration if you were a news organization and you were trying to talk to them via messaging. And just write very similar, if you can pull up our Tumblr what that script would look like. And we'll just do that for the next 30 minutes and just kind of share ideas at the end. Does anyone have questions or anything? No? All right. + +Yeah, for each—yeah, here it is. And so for each different story, we'll come around and kind of set up a story, each different group. You just want to sort of break it up into four stages. How would you—are what kind of information would you broadcast via just messaging. What kind of information about your users would you want as you're developing that story? What kind of polling could you do and then what kind of crowdsourcing could you do as well as maybe what kind of in-real-life interactions could you sort of generate. So how would you take it beyond messaging? So does that make sense? So can we get into five tables? + +Yay! + +So do you guys want to take on the SCOTUS decision on same-sex marriage? + +Sure. + +Group one. + +Group two? California drought? Is anyone from California. All right! + +I'll join that if that's... + +Do you want to take on that? The drought? All right you guys are California drought. You guys have the drought. + +Three. 2016 presidential election. +[ Group Work ] + +All right, guys. Just five more minutes and then we're going to present everyone's ideas. Just five more minutes. +[ Group Work ] +All right. Brainstorm session's over. Let's go over the groups and kind of hear what everyone brainstormed and then all the ideas when it comes to messaging phone number guys, SCOTUS decision do you want to kick us off? Group one? + +Sure. + +Great. We talked about many things. I think they varied from talking about how to use text to crowdsource media reactions on reports of marriages in the wake of the decision because a lot of action is happening today and there are a lot of strong reactions right at the moment. We've talked about, sort of, longer term uses of collecting and polling by text. So, sort of, how to tell the longer-term story of even stuff that happened before the decisions since people have been thinking about this while the arguments were happening and there's a pause and then the decision suddenly comes out. And then how to continue to pull after, you know, like, how does—how do people's opinions change about this over over a longer period of time. Like, one impact of this decision might be, people might think vastly differently about this subject two years from now. And then talked about using text to build apps that solve practical problems or provide information like more same-sex couples will want to get married and it's sometimes difficult to find safe places to go get married. If you guys want to add. But that's just a selection of some of the things that we talked about. But... + +I mean, we just talked a little bit about how this is an interesting story and there's activity during the arguments and then there's a dead period, and then you know the story is coming and then the story drops from the sky. You kind of know it's coming and I mean, you could segment based on people's specific political interests, not necessarily sending content they would agree with, but if somebody's tracking a particular presidential candidate, you can track that candidate's official statement when it comes out, and then crowdsourcing people who are having specific trouble getting married, even though it's federal law may not be necessarily cooperating. + +Did you feel any specific challenges that you felt when you were talking about this problem with messaging, or things that you were worried about? + +I just felt in that it's history. It's basically a history of our country and so it's a bit omnipresent right now. So just, I personally kind of had a bit of trouble sort of narrowing my focus like, what can we do with messaging since it's pretty much everywhere. + +Right. It's a little different thinking. + +What's the most interesting thing you guys, like, brainstormed when it comes to messaging like, "Oh, I didn't think about that." + +Personally I kind of like the idea of using texting to let people report violations of the new law. Like, those with actually the most interesting incidents, arguably that you want to report on. You try to get married somewhere and you can't. That's now illegal. So that's the kind of stuff people may be hearing about. + +Cool. Thank you. + +Drought. Hit us. + +So we kept circling around the idea of it's a big sort of amorphous issue and there's lots of little things that people can do to help, but they help in various ways and it's hard to figure out, both what actually matters and also, make it sort of acute, personal and relevant. So one of the ideas that we settled on was some kind of a game, could you cut your water usage by 20%, and what would you do given your choices. Would you tear out your lawn, or would you take a shorter shower, or take your car to a carwash instead of washing it at home. I could definitely do that. I saved 20 gallons, you only need to save 2,000 more. + +Just to put it into perspective. + +What are you going to do next. The easy thing may not always be the thing that makes the difference. But maybe if everybody else is. It and that got us thinking about, sort of, what are your neighbors doing? What are you—how is it how do you compare—how do your water situation compare to other places, or how are your sacrifices different from other people's sacrifices and who is not actually—who's keeping their lawns green? Who's keeping their facilitates clean or whatever. + +Yeah, a game is a really great way to get data really easily if we're talking about just A, B, or C. But A, B, or C, could require a lot of information, but it might require a lot of information on the user's part to require to type that in and send it back to you. Awesome. Presidential elections. That was a huge topic, also. + +Right, so we focused on what happened during election day. And we started out thinking about just exit polling but we sort of branched out to the rest of the actual act of going to the poll and you go and say, "All right, I'm at the poll." And when you test that, you can get sort of like a voter guide on all the things you have to vote on in your district or in your particular precinct. And then you might be able to say, "I'm here at the poll, I'm waiting at the poll and this is how I voted." So you can, one, give people, give everyone else an idea of how long you have to wait at the poll at that particular poll. And then, also get exit polling data, which can be used for analysis of—for reporting and by telling the system, like, "I voted republican." Or "I voted Green." You can also come back and give you actual data. Yes, you're voting for a third party, but actually in your district there is a slight chance that you might be able to have an showing. So get your friends to go out and vote as well, and, sort of, a "get up and vote" sort of action beyond just saying, "Hey, I voted." + +And telling people the impact, like, their relative impact. Same thing with the drought, too. What's your relative impact with taking this action, whether it's voting or saving water? + +And personalizing data. I think there's so much data and I think it's so hard to make that actually meaningful for people even though we have more data on them than ever before. I think that's really cool. + +Hey...! Fourth of July? + +Nope. NBA finals. + +NBA finals. + +Anybody wanna kickoff with the finals? + +Yeah, so we—we were sort of thinking about how we could, the various audiences that we would be addressing, whether they were people who are very into the sports game they're watching or people whether or not really don't want to watch sports but feel like they should have some idea of what's going on. Yeah. + +And the various ways that we might address those, you know, people in both of those groups and everywhere in between. And so we talked about a couple of different ways to do that, doing alerts about, kind of, the improbable goings on at any moment, that if you, even if you don't care, you might care that this record is about to be broken or something like that. If you're kind of a low-engagement person. If you're a high-engagement person, you might be interested in when there's a kind of high-stakes situation coming up. We could ask you, you know, do you think this batter's going to get a hit or is going to strike out and we can kind of get, you know, it's both interesting for you to make that decision and we also kind of get crowdsourcing of what are people's—what are people thinking about here. + +One thing that we kind of struggled with was we can come up with these various use cases looking at it that way, but how do we—how do we open the conversation with people? How do we, kind of, make that first connection to get, you know, to make it worth people's while to invite us into their message app. + +Anybody else have anything that they want to highlight? + +I really like one of the things that we discussed in this group is this idea of, like, how would you figure out how would you bring in A, compulsive gambling, or B, like a kiss cam from a stadium into your living room. So what's, like, the equivalent of the kiss cam but brought into somebody's house. So you're having a party -- + +Don't make it creepy. + +It's not going to be creepy, but sort of like, "Hey, you know, it's the commercial break, so show us—we wanted to find the house party with the best guacamole. Send us the best guacamole." And so if your house has the best guacamole, they'll send it out to tens of thousands of people. Or people who have the best costumes for celebrating the team or something like that because I think playing into the strengths of sports is identity and community. And so kind of merging that and so I think there's lots of interesting things that could be done with a filter. And so if you is ask people, send in a picture of a lucky jersey, or your lucky object, you can get a lot of people rooting for the same team, which creates a really cool second screening experience that you don't have to worry about brands crashing the party like they tend to do on Twitter and that sort of thing. + +Unless they're getting a cut. + +Unless they're getting paid. + +Awesome. + +Great. + +Thank you so much for coming, you guys. I mean, you are biggest takeaway is that there's so much potential when it comes to messaging. I don't think many people are thinking about it beyond notifications. + +And I think that's scale and I think there's so many possibilities and I think there are a lot of opportunities. And I think it kind of opens it up once you stop thinking about, "I can't do this and this." But we can do this and this. We can run a game, we can run a kiss cam, we can find out illegal activities. It gets to be a lot more freeing. And so rather than looking at what you can't do just in messaging, think about all the things that you can discuss that we can do. + +Thanks. + +Thanks so much. + +[ Applause ] diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015ModernizingProjects.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015ModernizingProjects.md index bff74fbd..4d66adf8 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015ModernizingProjects.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015ModernizingProjects.md @@ -1,441 +1,309 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/modernizingprojects/index.html ---- - -# Bringing Modern Development Processes to Monolithic Projects - -### Session Facilitator(s): Andrew Nacin, Adam Schweigert - -### Day & Time: Friday, 12:30-1:30pm - -### Room: Minnesota - - -The session will start in 20 minutes. - - -The session will start in five minutes. - - -Are we okay to start? Is it about time? - - -Yeah. - - -Okay, cool. - - -Someone want to shut that door? - - -Awesome. All right. Thanks, everyone. So I'm Adam. Andrew. We're here to, like, lead a conversation about monolithic tech projects. I'll kind of do a quick introduction of who I am. I work at INN, which is a network of about a hundred non-profit news outlets around the US. I have... I've been there for two and a half years now. We do a lot of platform and I guess CMS work. So when I joined, a lot of the problem I inherited was lots of sites and lots of different platforms, like CMSes, just a lot of them very, very small, often not having tech resources at all. At the organization. So we've been in that time working on a WordPress-powered platform for them. So that's kind of my main monolithic project at the moment, is sort of trying to solve, at that scale, the CMS problem, and also stabilize the entire network. I think I'm just going to throw it to Andrew, to kind of talk a little bit about his... - - -Sure. So my name is Andrew Nacin. - - -Nacin! Nacin! - - -Strange man. So... Let's see here. I am—many of you probably know me as one of the lead developers for WordPress. I ran WordPress for about five years. Still do. It is, however, no longer my—or not currently my full-time job. And I'm currently an engineer at the US Digital Service at the White House, which is this kind of really cool group that's designed to bring modern digital services and help transform the federal government as much as possible. So what's actually really interesting about this is that, when it comes to monolithic projects, it's not just what I experienced with government but also what I did previously, where in many cases WordPress is used in newsrooms to replace pieces of a giant, monolithic thing. Very often it's a random blog that gets launched, which is kind of interesting. It uses this light tool that can very easily bootstrap the project. - -At the same time, WordPress is a 13-year-old monolith. It has been around for a very long time. It is an old code base. There is a lot that happens there. There's a lot of really cool stuff that happens there, but ultimately it is a very old, basically legacy piece of software, and what has been many cases if not for WordPress and Drupal and many others a legacy stack, that... That ends up still having a really great User Experience. - -So when I was asked to join US Digital Service, I realized—actually, I already have a lot of this training. To help apply some of the lessons that I had learned and kind of worked with for about five years, of how can we take this big, monolithic piece of software or whatever it might be, and turn it into a great experience, or at least not prevent it from, in many cases, failing, or whatever it might be. So the US Digital Service was born out of this failure of healthcare.gov. And I am indeed allowed to say that it was a failure for the technology side of things. Of course, it works now, which is... The goal. It is a functioning website. But at the time, you probably heard all the stories, where it cost a few hundred million dollars and on day one just didn't work. And it took until the end of the open enrollment cycle for them to finally hit not only the goals that they scaled back but beat the original goal and even beyond that. That is really good, and what ended up happening is that out of that failure, it was a perfect catalyst for new investment interest in people working in government to help transform these projects. - -So this group called 18F, which does—you probably heard of them—they do some really great stuff throughout government. Then there's us, and we're one big happy US Digital Service family, and we just work on different kinds of projects. So I think today what I would love to kind of talk about is, like, not only how we can prevent monolithic projects, but also then how can we solve them, and I would love to hear a little bit from some of you, whoever has a good example, of a monolithic thing that they have stumbled into, and how, ideally, like the best path forward. I'm assuming that some of you struggle with this. Just taking a wild guess. And I want to start by kind of explaining a little bit the project that I currently work on, with US Digital Service. - -So it started, like, seven years ago, or so, and they hired this very well known tech company on this giant multi-... Hundreds of millions of dollars in this contract, ultimately, and it ended up being this commercial off the shelf software, or rather like a string of commercial off the shelf software, kind of strung together, and I don't know if you've ever heard the term systems integrator. Oh, yes. So they integrate all these pieces and put it together and they tried shipping it, and it didn't really work. It worked, but not close to expectations. It was only one piece of a very large pie that they had ended up handling, and there were a lot of issues with it. Ultimately to the point where the agency decided to scrap it entirely and start over. - -So now we have LS2 instead of LS1, and it doesn't really show how much the shift is, and in reality, what ended up happening is that they did a lot of things really well in this rewrite. They borrowed all the stuff from the old code base that was actually useful, they switched to a primarily Open Source stack, rather than stuff that was just off the shelf, bought in many cases for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, and they switched to a lot of modern processes. So when we showed up about a year ago, they were like—all trying, they were moving in the right direction, but they still needed a lot of help. And this is actually, I think, fairly common to a lot of these projects, where some of them are truly crashing and burning and they're never going to work with the people and the resources and the companies that are on them, but in other cases they're actually trying to do the right thing, but they're simply missing deadlines or not really shipping the software the way it should be done. - -So we went in and we worked on probably five major areas. One, we moved them out of a government data center and into a public cloud, so now they're in AWS, which is pretty cool. Things like monitoring and analytics and data, which sounds really important, but a lot of times, how is healthcare.gov? I don't know. And they went and checked the computer and refreshed the page to see if it was up. Of course, sticking to deadlines and regulatory releases—this was a massive project with this waterfall thing, over five years, there were schedule things and everything else, and it finally came together, so to speak, and it just failed to live up to expectations, so switching to this more Agile model, a release every week, which is pretty unknown even in some newsrooms, forget government. Trying to conduct full end to end user research, and then overall reimagining the experience. So if you haven't heard of the system, which is totally fine, it is ELLIS, named after Ellis Island, the electronic immigration system, very catchy. - -So I work primarily on modernizing technology on the immigration system. And this is in some cases very painful. Because if you are an immigrant, you have to renew your green card every few years. It comes up for renewal. Costs $400 and six months to wait. If you lose it, $400 and six months to wait. That can be painful if you're trying to apply for a job, you might have to travel to an office to get biometrics done. It makes the DMV look pretty amazing. You shouldn't complain about renewing your license until you've gone through this process. - -So how can we fix this from an end to end basis and just make it better? So this is... It's been a really cool experience to kind of sit in and work on—basically we're like a team of ten advisors, essentially, bolted onto more than 200 people on this project. Just trying to help them out and move them further in the right direction, which is where they were already headed. And finally, I kind of want to talk a little bit about the internet journalism big bang. I don't know. I just came up with this term five minutes ago. But 20 years ago, tell me if this sounds familiar to you—20 years ago, there was this organization, and the internet came around, and they were like—we should have one of those things. So what ended up happening is—they said you guys, you run the computers. Make us a website. So you have this IT organization building you a website. - -Jump forward maybe about ten years, and suddenly they're realizing actually the website is the primary way that we interact with a lot of the people who work with us now. And again, I could be talking about readers at a newspaper, I could be talking about constituents working with government agencies, and it's still kind of stuck in this old process. So a lot of newsrooms say—I'm going to do my own thing. I'm going to spin up a WordPress blog. I'm going to work outside the box to try to do this. And what ended up happening is interestingly enough the IT in a lot of news organizations has floated away from business and now it straddles in many cases both editorial and business. Which is not exactly common in, like, news. Just because you always have that news/opinion split, the general editorial/business operations split, but a lot of great people hired in newsrooms, passionate about newsrooms, everybody here, basically, plus many thousands, they were able to bring modern processes and modern software delivery to news organizations that ended up flowing into the larger things, like the entire CMS or whatever else it might be. Now, I was essentially describing what happened in news, but this is also very similar to what happened in government. So a lot of what we're trying to do—and this is the last I'm even going to talk about government in this session, except for some random horror stories—this is the good story. I only spent a billion dollars! So just kind of like... It's just interesting. See, if I lose my train of thought, I get to look at the prompter. - - -There's a feedback loop happening. - - -You're going to stop talking about government. - - -Yeah. But, like, it's really interesting how trying to invest modern services into these projects can actually help. I posted here—this might frame discussions. It might not. We did a really cool thing called the US Digital Services playbook at http://playbook.cio.gov. It's got 13 plays. My favorite is the last one, defaulting to open, which depends on how much of the stack you're able to build in the open. And then there's number 7, bring in experienced teams. Which might not be a possibility in many cases. It might not be a play you can execute on. So how can you fix that? So that said, I would love to hear about crazy projects that you've worked on. This can be a little bit of group therapy. But we would then like to kind of bring it back and maybe help try and talk through some of these. And if no one volunteers, I'm volunteering Yuri. - - -Oh, man, that's just a sad story. - - -Who has a monolithic project? Let's go. Yeah. Go. - - -Okay. I work at the Texas Tribune, and we're only five years old, but we have a 9,000-file Django project that is a result of building and building and building without any content strategy, long story short. So a lot of what we've been trying to do is make it serve our users better because it's not something the reporters want to use necessarily to compose, it didn't make publishing news letters or managing our events easy, so I would say... Right now we're wrestling with it, but I would say in the last year, we have managed to go to some of these things, in terms of continuous deployment, and better tech processes, because it's exactly as you were describing. Just... There wasn't a process. There wasn't a—we need to do this correctly. It was a little bit of build and build and build and build. - - -That's way too happy. Does anyone have... - - -Sorry. I was going to say—the one lesson I would just share is—I had to say no a lot. In the last two years, to finally... We just... I have to brag about this. In the last couple of weeks, we deleted 15,000 lines of code, and they needed to be deleted, but a lot of it was a payoff for a year of saying no. A year of being like no, can't build. No, no, no. Sorry it's not a sob story. It's a success story. - - -Work in progress. - - -We're sort of through the woods, I think, now, but it's like a three year Django project where—frustratingly, we told them up front—like, there's two problems. There's a technology problem and a getting the data problem. We told them up front that getting the data is going to take at least two years and they didn't believe us, so concurrently, we were also trying to build the software that ran it, and our biggest problem was the assumption about how it was going to get used was completely different from how it ended up being. So we spent half of our time building an admin interface for regular people that was never going to get used because they didn't end up using that part of it. The technology side would have taken half the side if we had not changed our assumptions about what the project was going to be early on. But we're through the woods. We've gotten the release out, and it's mostly in a position—it's probably going to stay. The takeaways that we had is—I don't know if we learned anything, honestly, but we were supposed to—the lesson we were supposed to learn was kill your babies sooner than we do. But also, I think it is... Yeah. The other mistake we made is we announced very early on what we were going to do with the project, and then we basically, to keep ourselves honest—and then we realized that the demand for what we wanted to do with the project was not what people actually wanted to do with the project and we had to go back on these things that we had announced publicly. I thought we were keeping ourselves honest, but we were locking it down in the end. - - -So what are some ways that that could have been avoided? - - -Well, one thing is—this is sort of not in my control, but you've got to believe your people when they tell you these are the reasons this is going to take this amount of time, and you've got to lay those out really forcefully. We did say no to a lot, but you're probably going to have to say no ten times. - - -Saying no and killing your babies and admitting when it's not working is really hard. Because you want to keep developing sometimes. - - -It sounds like a lot of this too is one giant waterfall project. A thing was built that either wasn't needed, or maybe was needed at one time, or could have been built in a smaller manner to see how people would have used it. I prefer agile with a small a because I'm not beholden to any particular methodology, just something that works and makes sense. And so in that case, maybe it wouldn't have been built at all, but if it was something that was iteratively shipped, it wouldn't be for the user, whatever it might be. - - -And with monolithic projects, building small is a good idea. Shipping all the time and improving things and not being afraid if something is not working, to just kill it. And also, plan for doing larger refactoring of major features and things. Because that's where actually we're at now. We've built a lot of prototype stuff and kind of built fairly fast, added features, as users ask for them, or just kind of needed them, and now we're back at a point where we want to think more about framework and architecture and kind of step back and build more of that stuff. So I think there's—it's always better to sort of—you built fast, learn a lot, and then kind of dial it back and then just start over again. And kind of that kind of process works well for us. It has worked well. Who else has one? Yuri? - - -So the reason why Yuri doesn't want to speak up is because—you've all heard of the amazing chorus at Vox, but in reality, it is also like this monolith. And there are things they're doing that I would love for Yuri to share that is helping to work through this, but it's obviously not a problem, because everyone sings the praises of it. It's clearly a good piece of software. I mean, like WordPress, it is—maybe it's a monolith, but people like it, and they use it, and they're able to do really great things with it. So this is one of those, like, non-horror stories, but it's still an interesting—it's like going to AA. Like... I'll admit. We have a monolith. - - -I mean, I spent 15 years in journalism, working with monolithic horrible CMSes that people spent millions and millions of dollars on, that you had to, like, do the code inside of it, and, like, the file uploading and run the servers from the same CMS that you write your stories in. Those were all nightmares. The great thing about it is it's a monolith in that it covers everything. So we have integration with YouTube, we have integration with all social networks, we have integration with ad serving so you know what ads are going to be served with your story, you know everything scheduled, video plays, analytics, all the social stuff is integrated while you're writing your story. So it's a lot of things. And it's the integration of all those things that really makes it that big, because in the end, a CMS is really just a fucking big box that you type shit in. Which is not what I believe CMSes should be. But that's what they are. It's a big fucking box. But we just build shit all the time. The chorus today is not what it will be tomorrow, and it's a reflection of what our staff needs now. And just keep constantly building and iterating on that. Testing in the open—we test everything in the open. We just build it and test it and shit, if it works, it works great, if not, we'll iterate. We always push forward. On the first day, I got actually—deployed an entire website on my first day. That was fun. - - -In WordPress? - - -No, WordPress was... We were using WordPress... My API plug-in for the WordPress to serve it because I didn't have time to actually build out an API service. But I had come from the Post, worked on WordPress, we had built that around the other system, because we had a monolithic system, and we just started building small stuff and finding a way to connect them in the middle. - - -You're referring to Méthode? - - -Can you talk a little bit more about that? I think in a lot of our organizations, perhaps not the digital (inaudible), but it's a monolithic culture we're fighting against and not as much a particular monolithic system, though indeed that's part of the landscape. But at Thunderdome, it was trying to lobby IT to give us servers, which was a huge pain in the ass and took our data team months. It was having to use Newscred at our CMS because we didn't have an Agile enough product team to deliver verticals we needed on business deadlines. And that's the reality for a lot of metro newspapers. - - -We solved that. - - -How? - - -We solved it in small group. - - -It seems like the best strategy is the fringe innovation move, where you get them out of small business onto the sides. - - -There's a huge problem with that, though. - - -Small teams outside of the main organization is a way to work around it. - - -That's what a lot of people do, because you end up getting so frustrated. That's what we ended up doing. Bought our own servers, started a group called beta and started building shit and people were like—holy crap, it's cool you can actually do this. Why don't you join this huge organization and now you can't actually build anything because you have to go to all these fucking meetings? - - -No bitterness there. - - -But the problem is, when you take the people out of the day-to-day, they lose the ability to understand and meet and match what is actually happening. And so I think that... I mean, it's all just fucking communication. You've got to have people that you trust, that are around you. You've got to have groups that are building you up, and you've got to be working with these people on a daily basis. We're all required to write stories on a regular basis, so that we know the CMS we're building is actually easy to use, and whenever we need a tool, we actually have to use that tool. And so it's—we have to use our own products, and we're forced to do that. But I think that pulling people out is a really naturally easy reaction, but I think that every time I've seen that, you end up not matching where the newsroom is going, and that's why the shitty CMS was there in the first place, because some crappy vendor in another fucking country will go and build the CMS without ever talking to newsrooms or finding out what they need and you put in 50 change requests and by the time those change requests get done in two years, you're already all the way over here. So it's constant iteration. - - -I worked with Yuri on one of those monolithic CMSes, and I'm still there. But yeah, I've also been a part of a group that was supposed to be the splinter group that was then going to come back and inform the other group, and sometimes you can wind up with... And certainly this never happens at the Post... But it happens in other places. Thank God that's just a text transcript. - -(laughter) - - -That... That... Um... Uh... It really does come down to the communication. Because you can get a healthy dose of not creative here syndrome and all that works for nothing. So as Yuri was saying, it's a matter of trust. It's a matter of—whoever you've got working on that new solution—at the Post, one of the things we're working on is a new CMS we're building ourselves, in a much more Agile manner than the initial CMS we're using now was built. It's built in-house with our own needs in the center, and I hope it will be successful. But one of the main things we have going for it is that the people working on it understand the needs of the business and are working to meet those needs. It's not like looking on a shelf and going eh, this is close enough. - - -You can have a fringe group that is still part of the group. We develop news apps because our CMS is so terrible we can't build good stories in it. We need good people who can build stories in an Agile manner. They did start to make different CMSes as they went, did a better job, and it pricked up the ears of people in our monolithic organization and moved us closer to where we needed to be. So if you do it right, you can have a little bit of—oh, this is experimental, but the communication was still there. It wasn't like they were doing something crazy and the reporters were part of it as well, which is really important. - - -So I think the three different ways we can kind of pursue this discussion—one is how to build things for users, which I think we probably all have down well enough. One is the last thing that you were saying—is... Like, how do you have an experimental thing that you can then bring back into the fold, without causing a major problem. The third one that I actually find really interesting too is—how do you actually shift culture? Because a lot of this can bring culture along with it, but how do you then push through it? We have some interesting ways to do this, and every one of our engagements with different agencies is different. Like, I'm wearing jeans and an untucked Gingham shirt, sleeves rolled up, I go to an office every day with this, and sometimes I'm wandering around the executive office building like this. And what's funny... This was before I was there, but everyone was in a suit. Within two months, the dress code started changing, and now the only people who are still wearing suits are the people who really like to dress up in a suit. They look snazzy. That's their thing. But otherwise we successfully changed a bit of the way it works. This is a really weird engagement in the sense that unlike most projects you might see in government, there are multiple contractors, all involved in the same project, every single person, whether us, the federal employees, the contractors, they're all on the exact same floor in the same building. That's very rare. I also came from a culture of remote work, so it's been very odd to suddenly switch to this very much not remote. - - -Put on clothes? - - -Put on, like, pants. But how do you then push culture forward? And sometimes it means that if we sit through the same meeting two weeks in a row and it is terrible, we try and secretly get... We talk to the people... We don't need to have this, do we? And try to get it canceled. Because we know it's not useful. There are little things that you can do there, that you can... Not undermine, but how can you help push things forward? So I wonder... Is that something we can talk about? How do you actually deal with fixing culture? - - -So one of the... I have a little phrase in my mind, when I think about changing culture. The bridge game. And I think it's (inaudible). Anybody ever read him? Great books. He's got a blog. A column. But he talked about that changing culture started not—it was an indirect thing. It was—he started a bridge game with people in his group, and outside his group. And he would just invite sort of a rotating cast of characters over lunch on Thursdays and Fridays and they would play this bridge game. And that time became a time of fostering trust and communication with people and a not-work thing, but at work. And that's where the shit actually happened. That's where the deals got made. That's where the shift occurred. And so that's why I always think of—in whatever org I'm in, what's my bridge game? Where am I going to establish that kind of trust relationship? - - -And even within work, our marketing person calls it socializing. She just stops by everybody's office. If you have a small office, that's easier. But just stop in. Talk a little bit. And mention the new thing you want to try at some point, but don't start with that. Don't make it the center of the conversation. That's definitely been something that's happened in our organization as we've brought in people that have a better sense of digital. To just kind of make that social thing happen. - - -Especially when you're working across different departments and divisions and things like that. One thing we try and do is prop up and empower the people that we know can get things done. And there are different ways to do this. Like in government versus out. In our case we just try and always go to them and they are like—I would love to solve this problem. Let's try and fix this. In other cases, if a supervisor receives a really nice note about an employee, that can be a trigger for a raise in government. And things like that. So there's all sorts of different tricks, but a lot of times... Obviously people want to be doing the right thing. So how can we help them? And especially if you're not in your CIO organization, at your company, or wherever it is, and you need something from them, how do you get the servers? How do you actually do that? Who do you ask at the bridge game to... Can I please have this... No one needs to know. Just give me a spot on the server. - - -Identifying who writes the checks in the org is always important. And I can't... I'm Peter, by the way. I work now for a company—a little tiny startup, but I worked for Minnesota Public Radio for several years across the river here. You described initially our whole CMS. Peeloff things, WordPress, da-da-da. I can't understate how important it was to have the key advocates at the C level who got it, and were willing to sort of write the checks, say in meetings to their peers how important this is, provide sort of political cover when you want to do something that's sort of outside the mainstream. In our case, specifically, at NPR, I worked initially on a project called the Public Insight Network, and that's what brought me into the company. Didn't have a background in journalism at all. And what was nice about that is that even though it was a legacy project that we were sort of writing version 2.0 of the software, we were allowed to start from scratch and bring in a lot of cultural and best practice stuff that the company didn't have. And that sort of infected the rest of the company in a good way, I hope, to not be afraid to take on some other big monolithic projects that they had. Bridge games and having your eye open... - - -(inaudible) people who are not familiar with the product or the tool. So if I'm an old school reporter and I've never used Tumblr or WordPress before, it can be really scary. And helping to introduce people to these tools in a non-threatening way can be really important. Not just—I'm a cool kid with a new tool, you've got to use this, be part of the cool kids club—it's not how it works. I used to work at a news organization where I had to show people how to use things like WordPress, and it was totally a one on one thing. Hey, how is it going? You want to see something cool that I'm doing? Slow, steady, small introductions along the way. Because otherwise, they will reject you, if you don't earn their trust or show them that in a personal way. - - -You've got to bring them in from the beginning. If you just drop the tool on them, but they're part of the process and they're helping you make informed decisions, it changes the entire dynamic of—they feel ownership of this and become evangelists for it. You can do that with almost everyone. Bringing them in, showing them the design and the build process. They feel ownership. They get excited when that thing launches and they get that email that goes out with thanks to so and so, it's really powerful. You make them part of this. We do that with everything. We bring people in throughout the whole project. Reporters, designers, editors—the whole thing. - - -You've got to do the C level, the ground level work, sending out emails, saying hey supervisor, this person is doing an awesome job. It's a multi-prong approach. - - -Bribery helps. Because... Well, right. No, the good kind. Because there are very simple things that people in a lot of newsrooms and elsewhere need that would take you pretty much no time to do, but it would make a big impact on them, and suddenly they are your best buddy. That would certainly work with me. There's tons of stuff I need in my newsroom that's simple to build but I can't get anybody to do it for me. If somebody would do it for me, I would go to the mat for them for their next project because they've proven we can do something together that can really make an impact. So I think that's a really easy entree, because everybody wants stuff that people can do. So that's a way to get a day or two, building something kind of lame, that will help somebody toward a goal that's really simple—can help get you the buy-in for something that's much more interesting. - - -Anyone who hasn't said anything yet—any struggles or solutions? - - -I have a very real world struggle I'm dealing with right now. It's like the tension between... Distributed team and co-located, with the rest of the company. And there's just a lot of cultural clash that arises from that naturally. And to be honest, I don't know how to avoid it, sort of thing. And so I feel like I'm in this struggle to prove the distributed model, as an effective model. Like, something that the executive team should actually champion, and not on its way to being pushed out... Sort of thing. And, you know, two things top of mind, always, is—one, just the effectiveness of our team. Like, you make a request. You follow up on whatever it is. We actually get it done really quick. Like, it doesn't require three weeks of delays in asking where is that at. It's, like, done in 20 minutes sort of thing. And the second thing, which is... A little bit difficult, because text loses a lot of resolution... But just making every interaction a positive one. And really, like, constructive and helpful, and like, happy. Like, I made a request, and it was just like... Taken care of for me. And people followed up and that sort of thing. So... But I don't know what the ultimate answer is, to solving the distributed versus co-located version. - - -In our case, we would like to get co-located working first. - -(laughter) - - -And then start to think about distributed. Anyone else work in a remote or distributed environment? A lot of people. How do you generally solve this? I saw some hands over here. - - -I think it's about kind of the bridge game ideas. We have to try and create opportunities to interact with each other outside of project meetings and that sort of stuff. So spend a lot of time in front of a webcam, just kind of... You have to be deliberate about creating those opportunities. It can be tough. - - -We talked about this a little bit in a session yesterday about distributed work. And when it's distributed, it can be hard to make sure that everyone is marching on the same path. So being in front of a webcam or just that face-to-face interaction is really important. I manage a team of 18 people that's distributed, and I do a video one on one video call with every member of my team every two weeks. And I can't skip those. Because otherwise... I wouldn't have the opportunity to make sure that everyone is walking the same path and checking in. - - -I worked in a distributed team where there were actually two offices. There was the Midwest office and there was the West Coast office. And the impression was that the West Coast office got to do all the fun projects. The Midwest office was out baling hay all the time. So one of the things we did all the time was in many ways trying to facilitate cultural change—at a larger scale, 10% time, where people could devote time to their own projects. And that actually allowed people from both offices to work together on things of their own interest. In small time frames, small teams that were motivated by a personal itch they wanted to scratch. That ended up being the bridge game for those two teams. That those people who participated in that actually ended up fostering a lot better sort of sympathy between the two groups. - - -Anyone else have a really good horror story? I kind of now want to hear some horror stories. No? No one? Yeah. - - -I've been reluctant to talk about this, because I feel a bit naive. I've never worked in a newsroom or government. - - -Neither have I. On the first one, neither have I. - - -But I know the startup scene pretty well, and I was always the last job... The last startup I was at, it wasn't too big. It was about 30 people. And I always found it remarkable how often... I guess it goes back to something Yuri was saying earlier. There was a kind of... Ostensibly, everybody was in on the decisions. But then there would be... You know, they would often come back with the real decision. Which was, like, nothing to do with what happened in the room. And there's no quicker way to lose any goodwill that you've built that that room, than to do that. So avoid that. - - -Yeah, some of this is like—are decisions really made in meetings, and something of that nature. I would love to point to play number six, which is assign one leader and hold that person accountable. Very often—it could be the senior executive on the project. It could be the CTO or whoever it winds up being, but more often than not, it's the product owner. Even if they don't have the ultimate authority, they're delegated to really take ownership and they're held accountable, both—not only people above them, but also ideally people below them. So, like, if something is going wrong or going off the rails, there is, like, a single person who is ultimately accountable for—why did this decision randomly change? Especially if you're not doing things in a particularly iterative manner, one decision at one point could just completely derail months' worth of work or effort or whatever it might be. I mean, I don't know. We were talking about this yesterday, in another session, a little bit, about how if you have this major digital project that you're trying to ship at a newsroom, whether it's like a snowfall or something like that, how do you actually have someone in charge? Because often the person who is truly accountable is the editor on the project. But in reality, if you want someone who is invested in the project, who understands digital, who understands that level of product, you realistically need some kind of a product manager. Not even necessarily a project manager, who's ultimately accountable for the success of that large chunk, even if, again, they're not the main person on that project. I don't know how often this happens in newsrooms. Project manager... How many newsrooms have... You do, and a few others do, but in many cases it's a role that someone else has to wear a hat for, which is also fine, frankly, but a lot of times it requires someone to step up and take over and push that forward. - - -We call them champions. So it's the person that really wants this done. That could be the developer, it could be the designer, and we all could be champions of different projects. And we do sort of 10% time but more like 95% time, so we're mostly championing our own projects. You might have three or four champions on a project, and it's great. It changes all the stuff that you work on. - - -Decisions will always be made outside of meetings. Ultimately. - - -And I mean... Even that terminology can be helpful too. I mean, you can assign a product owner. You can't assign a champion. - - -I had... My main job is to essentially process data, so that at the end, take federal datasets, do stuff to them, make them easy to use for journalists, and I came into my job with... We have an IT guy who was building this elaborate framework for processing data. All by himself. He was sort of set down this path by my boss. And for two years, he built this thing without talking to anybody. - - -Oh, no! - - -We know how this story ends. - - -So I spent two years trying to figure out how it works. Because there's no documentation. And he has a difficulty in communicating. And his main... He's one of those... I think it's sort of an old IT way of thinking, is like... This is how it works. Figure it out. Here it is. So I've had to kind of come to this point where I'm like... I can't use this. So I'm going to have to start doing what he did, essentially, from scratch, in a way that I can use it, and maybe help other people in the future use it. But I also have to make that call to my boss to be like... Look, this guy did two years of work that I'm essentially throwing out. So it's been, like, really difficult, because I keep going back—oh, I'll try harder. To figure out how it works. To make it work for me. Oh, I can't. I can't do it. Just do my own thing. But there's just no concept of collaboration or... I'm the user. You know, and he's the person who built it, and we should maybe, like, work on making it better. But it's... I don't know. - - -I think one and two on the playlist. Just tell your boss that. - - -So this is actually really interesting. Projects will always need to be thrown out. No matter how perfect everything is, they will always need to be thrown out. You need to do that before it's too late, for both time and money. And which one is more important is in the eye of the beholder. Which one... Like, at what point are they intolerable—is very different. The federal government spends 80-something-billion dollars a year in IT. That is larger than the New York Times by quite a bit. So how does... At this point, in many cases, it's a time thing. And so this could be really interesting. Like, in your case, that was two years. Of someone else's time spent. And now you're spending two years doing that, and then the person after you, hopefully they like yours better than they like the person beforehand. So that can be really tough too, and a lot of this is sometimes like... I don't know. In our case, we try to make sure there's no—no one ever has the bus factor, of—if you get hit by a bus tomorrow. Which is kind of sad. If you win the lottery tomorrow, is a better way to say it. - - -Put a positive spin on it! - - -What happens to the thing that you were working on? - - -Well, you love your job so much that you would just stay, even if you had all that money. - - -I don't work in government for the money at all. - - -I think what sort of gets at like... It's always really scary to talk cost/benefit, at least for me, it has been, to talk cost/benefit, because you always worry if people who don't understand what you do actually understood how much time it takes to do this stuff, you wouldn't get to do what you want to do. Stuff takes a long time. It's pretty expensive. The amount of money we spent on things I don't really want my bosses to know about, but we can't do that. We can't kill projects if we haven't had that conversation earlier, to say—here's how long the really good things took us and how long that took us. And you got seven good points out of that for whatever it cost. This... You're going to get no good points for, and it's going to cost more. - - -If you get an iterative model, you're constantly throwing stuff out all the time. If you're documenting, the bus factor shouldn't be a worry. Anybody can pick it up anywhere. We document process, we check everything, we document days and weeks where we sit and check everything, and every new employee has to fill out the new employee documentation. Everything is written and you can find it somewhat easily. Depends. It's a project we're working on right now. But yeah. Documentation. Everything. Document everything. It's amazing. - - -How do you justify the time for that? Because usually... It's not something that hits the bottom line, right? Documentation or internal tool building. - - -You could save two years of her time. - - -If you have breaking news and you can't do something, because the documentation doesn't exist, and the person has left or been hit by a bus... That's a really good argument right there. - - -Lottery. - - -Lottery. - - -You're going to be paying eventually. You don't want to pay ahead. - - -That was a turning point for us. We had enough moments. No one knows how to do this. No one wrote anything. - - -Any time anyone asks a question in Slack, we're like—it's in the Binder. Search for it. - - -A lot of things I've heard in government where there's thousands of people on this project but there's one guy who knows exactly how this things works and that's it. And one day he no longer works there and you're like... Uh-oh... What's wrong? And we get called into these a lot. Because we don't know what this thing is. We have no... Like, this office had 19 people and now it has 2, and they weren't the people who worked on this and we don't know how to produce a report or generate this data or whatever it is. But going back a little bit to this point about... With decisions, because this kind of came up--how do you make sure that the right people are in the room who are knowledgeable enough to be able to actually help inform decisions? And so if you often have decisions being made at the senior level, how often is there an engineer in that conversation? - - -Not often enough. - - -Not often enough. And we don't really address this so much in the playbook, because the playbook is way more about shipping the particular thing itself. And actually, it applies so well to non-government projects. It's great. Except for maybe some of the procurement stuff. But even then, it actually does apply pretty well, because in a lot of cases you're procuring stuff from contractors and vendors and things like that. How do you make sure that engineers are represented in a meeting? - - -And also if you're having engineering meetings and there's no one there from editorial, that's a problem. - - -In that case, it's kind of like the cross... The stakeholder, like the... You have an editor, versus that. But if there's a meeting being made at the board level or anywhere up above that level, where you have—the only person who's even close to technical in that meeting is the CTO, who may or may not be technical, may not have any idea who you even are, your project—how do you make sure it's being represented adequately? In our case, we're actually—we're really good about making sure that we can get included in things, just because—it's kind of like the mandate from literally the top of—they must be included in these things. To the point where until 12:28, I was on a phone call. I was on a conference call, and I was the only engineer on the call. The reason I was on that call was because I was an engineer. Specifically to try and contribute to that conversation. Do you guys have these problems? Do you all have these problems? - - -We had it a little bit, but it's part of the culture shift, I would say. It's part of getting everybody to think we should have that. So you don't—sometimes we just start inviting ourselves to meetings. Things like that. Nicely. But what we want is a sense, though, like you're saying, of community, and of—you know what? We want tech here now. Because we know we're going to have to build it or whatever. So—but I think I would build that into culture shift. - - -Yeah, it's also being super open too. That helps a lot too. Document process and culture and all that stuff. Treat it like a product. That you continuously improve. And you're just communicating both ways, up and down, all across the organization. - - -And in news organizations, it's important to understand, from a technical background, how the newsroom is used to working too. A lot of these are the exact same conversations that have been happening for decades, about when do we include design? When do we include a top editor? When do we include all of these people who are going to need to understand the same material in different ways but still at a fundamental level to be able to contribute so that everybody is pulling toward the same endpoint on a project. - - -Do you have a checklist of everybody who needs to be there? If you're making decisions, you need all those people there. There's a checklist of who to go and find and grab. - - -How did you arrive at a place where everybody can agree that there's a checklist? - - -Trei. Anybody here who knows Trei... Just a southern tech dude. - - -But what I'm hearing then—it was a charismatic person who had the power to make decisions. - - -Yeah. And when we started Vox, that was part of the hiring process. We told every single person—every reporter, every data person, every programmer, every designer, we said you are a designer, you are a developer, and you are a reporter. And we are all journalists. And when we set that expectation, then it doesn't—you don't have to go and tell people that later on. You set that expectation from day one. It's part of your goals and it's part of how you do everything. - - -And it's baked into the DNA of your org. - - -I sit next to the managing editor and the executive editors, so we just communicate all the time. - - -So we have a little under ten minutes. Has anyone who would love to say something not had the chance yet? Anything? Any good ideas? Any struggles? Any horror stories? - - -One thing—I just wanted to build on Yuri's champions. I've got some friends who work for Google, and probably you guys do too. And one of the things that's been fascinating, talking to them, is—they're never assigned to anything. You know? They have to volunteer for every project they're involved in, with very rare exceptions. And it's a big enough company that there's always someone to do that. But it also means that everybody has buy-in. Everybody is committed to that being a successful project, and everyone owns some piece of it, and ultimately, whoever is the decision maker owns the whole thing. And that is something that almost never happens in a newsroom. - - -Yeah. It happens in federal government now. At the very least, for our group, where pretty much everyone is coming from Google, Twitter, Facebook, the New York Times, in some cases, Jacob Harris recently joined, which is cool. We all are there because we want to be there, and what ends up happening is that we're all able to join the different projects that we want to work on. Right now I'm working on—how can we modernize the immigration system? Where I was in Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska, studying the entire process. Which is—I never mentioned. Almost entirely paper. I'm guessing it's tens of millions of dollars a year in postage and shipping costs alone, that could hypothetically be solved with technology and be sped up and made more efficient with technology. But yeah. Not to, like, do the whole hiring pitch in front of all of you, but if you're interested, you should talk to me. Otherwise, you should go back to your own organizations and make cool stuff happen. - - -One of the things I think I heard a lot of people say is that you can't get engineers to do shit for you. That would be a nice thing, if people have advice... I'll build whatever you want. But if people have advice of how to get your organization... Because I think that's a huge problem. And I see that over and over again. That's a huge complaint from reporters. I want to do this great shit. And I can't get anybody to help me. - - -I think, like, in newsrooms I've been in, one of the obstacles we have faced is that—if reporters or editors are coming in with the traditional news mentality and they're coming to me like I'm the graphics desk, and I say that pejoratively, because they shouldn't treat the graphics desk that way either—but I'm a journalist. I want to be involved in your process. And a lot of reporters do come to you or editors come to you and say—here's this thing I want. They have no idea how it's going to be built but they made a lot of assumptions they haven't thought about, and I don't have the opportunity to be involved in that process. - - -They treat you like a support desk. - - -So I tell people—what I want you to come with me is—I want to do something about this. That should be the basis of the conversation. Let's figure out the rest together. - - -Come with a problem, not a solution. - - -Exactly. Problem, not a solution. - - -It's good to encourage people who want to be forward thinking to come with a full package. Sometimes it's going to be great. Sometimes you might want to pivot. But how even before they have the idea can you get involved? Those conversations yesterday about shipping digital projects. Sneak into the editorial meeting. To be able to feel like—early on, that sounds cool, we can do cool things with that, and then trying to engage. Yeah. But a lot of this is like—in many cases, I think this is a lot of the smaller bite-sized projects. Not like the massive, big projects. - - -Also, people are usually really unacustomed to people asking to be in their meetings. Sometimes that by itself begins sort of a transformative process. I want to be included in this. You weren't assigned to it. I know. I'm just really interested in it and I think I can help. - - -In some places, where it's a meeting-heavy culture, some organizations might be fine with people randomly joining meetings. Other times they're not. We show up to whatever meetings that we see on the calendar sometimes. That sounds interesting. Let's go into it. But one of my favorite stories is like—early on, when they did a very early assessment about a year ago, at this agency, where they knew that some guy from Google was going to be there, and they didn't know who he was, and it's like... Is it the guy in the suit? No, he wouldn't be wearing a suit. But the suit is too big for him. Yeah, it's probably him. - -(laughter) - - -I just heard that story recently. Yeah. I don't know. It's kind of interesting. If you can get—if you can wiggle your way into meetings or wiggle your way into an email thread or a distribution list or whatever it might be, that can go a long way to just being able to have helpful input at different stages, and it can also provide a lot more visibility as well. So if you are someone who's ultimately accountable for everything, and there's a lot of things happening that you just can't see, that's obviously like a major flag as to this whole thing is in danger of collapsing. - - -Also Slack. Who's a sponsor. - - -And even if they answer and the first request is no, chances are, you'll be remembered as the person who expressed interest in case something pivots or goes in a different direction or just next time. Oh, right, who was that guy? Let's get him in here. - - -So we have a completely open—you can join any room in Slack, and we have an ideas room, so people can drop their ideas in there, and every single one of those ideas gets put in Trello, so every single one of those gets evaluated. Sometimes it's like—we don't have time. There's no champions for this. Or it's going to be—you want me to build Facebook and I can't fucking build Facebook. So you're going to need to cut down on those features or something. But a lot of times we'll just talk to them for five minutes, even, and get some more ideas. I'm working on a project now that somebody pitched last year and I didn't have time last year, but now we're bringing it back up, because it's still on the board. - - -There's only a few people who haven't said anything. Does anyone have anything else to add? - - -Okay. I have a slightly different challenge. I'm a User Experience designer at a data analysis company. I'm the first designer they've hired, so it's a culture gap. And I'm trying to learn as much as I can about what everyone else is doing. And what all their processes are and what their goals and work flow are, so I can recommend things that I can contribute that will be on their terms. And I'm wondering if that's a strategy that anyone else—not just being at the table in a meeting, but actually understanding the other person's vantage point, as well as your own. - - -Empathy. That's great. Yeah. It's one of the reasons that—there's a movement I think to embed coders in the newsroom. Cheek by jowl with people. Yeah. I think it's a really good strategy. - - -I wish I had particular advice for this, but we do this all the time. Like, we're not just a bunch of engineers. We have five or six people who specialize in UX, specifically. We also have procurement people, which is really helpful as well. So we can drop into an agency and not only evaluate their code but also look at their contracts. But also from a design perspective, we try and use UX researchers as early as possible in the process because they're able to inform so much that we do. I think the key thing that we generally try to do is that when we are pitching it to people, of like—we would love to get involved in this, from a UX perspective—we try not to use big, scary words. Like... We try not to say... We want to see if we need to redo this. Like, that is ago we don't say. We would love if we could have a better understanding of all of this, because we would love to see if there's anything we can do to help. Sometimes it just requires a different delivery where someone could be like... Oh, sure. Versus we're kind of concerned about X to the point where... - - -So when you go into the immigration processing, you don't start with the concern about the paper. - - -Well, they already have a concern about the paper, so that makes it a lot easier. But yeah, absolutely not. A lot of time it's just like—we would love to understand how the visa process should work most efficiently. Or even then—how could we embed a researcher in with the state department to understand how all of this works? And then they will produce, like, a cool feel-good report at the end that you may or may not like. But the point is... It can go a really long way into understanding that, but again, I think the only advice that I have for this, in part because I just don't do it myself, is... Trying to pick the right words that don't make it sound like you're trying to go in and evaluate or assess, as much as just understand. And empathize. - - -I think a lot of it is... I guess pain points are not just for users. Right? They're for—everyone's got pain points. So it's identifying those and being as open and I think helpful as you can. I mean, there's possibly—like, the positive language instead of negative language makes a really big difference there. And just kind of identifying potential opportunities to help. It's a big thing. - - -Anyone else have anything? - - -Anyone else? We're just about... - - -Final thoughts? I think it's lunchtime. - - -Lunch? All right. - - -Thank you, everyone, for coming. - -(applause) +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/modernizingprojects/index.html +--- + +# Bringing Modern Development Processes to Monolithic Projects + +### Session Facilitator(s): Andrew Nacin, Adam Schweigert + +### Day & Time: Friday, 12:30-1:30pm + +### Room: Minnesota + +The session will start in 20 minutes. + +The session will start in five minutes. + +Are we okay to start? Is it about time? + +Yeah. + +Okay, cool. + +Someone want to shut that door? + +Awesome. All right. Thanks, everyone. So I'm Adam. Andrew. We're here to, like, lead a conversation about monolithic tech projects. I'll kind of do a quick introduction of who I am. I work at INN, which is a network of about a hundred non-profit news outlets around the US. I have... I've been there for two and a half years now. We do a lot of platform and I guess CMS work. So when I joined, a lot of the problem I inherited was lots of sites and lots of different platforms, like CMSes, just a lot of them very, very small, often not having tech resources at all. At the organization. So we've been in that time working on a WordPress-powered platform for them. So that's kind of my main monolithic project at the moment, is sort of trying to solve, at that scale, the CMS problem, and also stabilize the entire network. I think I'm just going to throw it to Andrew, to kind of talk a little bit about his... + +Sure. So my name is Andrew Nacin. + +Nacin! Nacin! + +Strange man. So... Let's see here. I am—many of you probably know me as one of the lead developers for WordPress. I ran WordPress for about five years. Still do. It is, however, no longer my—or not currently my full-time job. And I'm currently an engineer at the US Digital Service at the White House, which is this kind of really cool group that's designed to bring modern digital services and help transform the federal government as much as possible. So what's actually really interesting about this is that, when it comes to monolithic projects, it's not just what I experienced with government but also what I did previously, where in many cases WordPress is used in newsrooms to replace pieces of a giant, monolithic thing. Very often it's a random blog that gets launched, which is kind of interesting. It uses this light tool that can very easily bootstrap the project. + +At the same time, WordPress is a 13-year-old monolith. It has been around for a very long time. It is an old code base. There is a lot that happens there. There's a lot of really cool stuff that happens there, but ultimately it is a very old, basically legacy piece of software, and what has been many cases if not for WordPress and Drupal and many others a legacy stack, that... That ends up still having a really great User Experience. + +So when I was asked to join US Digital Service, I realized—actually, I already have a lot of this training. To help apply some of the lessons that I had learned and kind of worked with for about five years, of how can we take this big, monolithic piece of software or whatever it might be, and turn it into a great experience, or at least not prevent it from, in many cases, failing, or whatever it might be. So the US Digital Service was born out of this failure of healthcare.gov. And I am indeed allowed to say that it was a failure for the technology side of things. Of course, it works now, which is... The goal. It is a functioning website. But at the time, you probably heard all the stories, where it cost a few hundred million dollars and on day one just didn't work. And it took until the end of the open enrollment cycle for them to finally hit not only the goals that they scaled back but beat the original goal and even beyond that. That is really good, and what ended up happening is that out of that failure, it was a perfect catalyst for new investment interest in people working in government to help transform these projects. + +So this group called 18F, which does—you probably heard of them—they do some really great stuff throughout government. Then there's us, and we're one big happy US Digital Service family, and we just work on different kinds of projects. So I think today what I would love to kind of talk about is, like, not only how we can prevent monolithic projects, but also then how can we solve them, and I would love to hear a little bit from some of you, whoever has a good example, of a monolithic thing that they have stumbled into, and how, ideally, like the best path forward. I'm assuming that some of you struggle with this. Just taking a wild guess. And I want to start by kind of explaining a little bit the project that I currently work on, with US Digital Service. + +So it started, like, seven years ago, or so, and they hired this very well known tech company on this giant multi-... Hundreds of millions of dollars in this contract, ultimately, and it ended up being this commercial off the shelf software, or rather like a string of commercial off the shelf software, kind of strung together, and I don't know if you've ever heard the term systems integrator. Oh, yes. So they integrate all these pieces and put it together and they tried shipping it, and it didn't really work. It worked, but not close to expectations. It was only one piece of a very large pie that they had ended up handling, and there were a lot of issues with it. Ultimately to the point where the agency decided to scrap it entirely and start over. + +So now we have LS2 instead of LS1, and it doesn't really show how much the shift is, and in reality, what ended up happening is that they did a lot of things really well in this rewrite. They borrowed all the stuff from the old code base that was actually useful, they switched to a primarily Open Source stack, rather than stuff that was just off the shelf, bought in many cases for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, and they switched to a lot of modern processes. So when we showed up about a year ago, they were like—all trying, they were moving in the right direction, but they still needed a lot of help. And this is actually, I think, fairly common to a lot of these projects, where some of them are truly crashing and burning and they're never going to work with the people and the resources and the companies that are on them, but in other cases they're actually trying to do the right thing, but they're simply missing deadlines or not really shipping the software the way it should be done. + +So we went in and we worked on probably five major areas. One, we moved them out of a government data center and into a public cloud, so now they're in AWS, which is pretty cool. Things like monitoring and analytics and data, which sounds really important, but a lot of times, how is healthcare.gov? I don't know. And they went and checked the computer and refreshed the page to see if it was up. Of course, sticking to deadlines and regulatory releases—this was a massive project with this waterfall thing, over five years, there were schedule things and everything else, and it finally came together, so to speak, and it just failed to live up to expectations, so switching to this more Agile model, a release every week, which is pretty unknown even in some newsrooms, forget government. Trying to conduct full end to end user research, and then overall reimagining the experience. So if you haven't heard of the system, which is totally fine, it is ELLIS, named after Ellis Island, the electronic immigration system, very catchy. + +So I work primarily on modernizing technology on the immigration system. And this is in some cases very painful. Because if you are an immigrant, you have to renew your green card every few years. It comes up for renewal. Costs $400 and six months to wait. If you lose it, $400 and six months to wait. That can be painful if you're trying to apply for a job, you might have to travel to an office to get biometrics done. It makes the DMV look pretty amazing. You shouldn't complain about renewing your license until you've gone through this process. + +So how can we fix this from an end to end basis and just make it better? So this is... It's been a really cool experience to kind of sit in and work on—basically we're like a team of ten advisors, essentially, bolted onto more than 200 people on this project. Just trying to help them out and move them further in the right direction, which is where they were already headed. And finally, I kind of want to talk a little bit about the internet journalism big bang. I don't know. I just came up with this term five minutes ago. But 20 years ago, tell me if this sounds familiar to you—20 years ago, there was this organization, and the internet came around, and they were like—we should have one of those things. So what ended up happening is—they said you guys, you run the computers. Make us a website. So you have this IT organization building you a website. + +Jump forward maybe about ten years, and suddenly they're realizing actually the website is the primary way that we interact with a lot of the people who work with us now. And again, I could be talking about readers at a newspaper, I could be talking about constituents working with government agencies, and it's still kind of stuck in this old process. So a lot of newsrooms say—I'm going to do my own thing. I'm going to spin up a WordPress blog. I'm going to work outside the box to try to do this. And what ended up happening is interestingly enough the IT in a lot of news organizations has floated away from business and now it straddles in many cases both editorial and business. Which is not exactly common in, like, news. Just because you always have that news/opinion split, the general editorial/business operations split, but a lot of great people hired in newsrooms, passionate about newsrooms, everybody here, basically, plus many thousands, they were able to bring modern processes and modern software delivery to news organizations that ended up flowing into the larger things, like the entire CMS or whatever else it might be. Now, I was essentially describing what happened in news, but this is also very similar to what happened in government. So a lot of what we're trying to do—and this is the last I'm even going to talk about government in this session, except for some random horror stories—this is the good story. I only spent a billion dollars! So just kind of like... It's just interesting. See, if I lose my train of thought, I get to look at the prompter. + +There's a feedback loop happening. + +You're going to stop talking about government. + +Yeah. But, like, it's really interesting how trying to invest modern services into these projects can actually help. I posted here—this might frame discussions. It might not. We did a really cool thing called the US Digital Services playbook at https://playbook.cio.gov. It's got 13 plays. My favorite is the last one, defaulting to open, which depends on how much of the stack you're able to build in the open. And then there's number 7, bring in experienced teams. Which might not be a possibility in many cases. It might not be a play you can execute on. So how can you fix that? So that said, I would love to hear about crazy projects that you've worked on. This can be a little bit of group therapy. But we would then like to kind of bring it back and maybe help try and talk through some of these. And if no one volunteers, I'm volunteering Yuri. + +Oh, man, that's just a sad story. + +Who has a monolithic project? Let's go. Yeah. Go. + +Okay. I work at the Texas Tribune, and we're only five years old, but we have a 9,000-file Django project that is a result of building and building and building without any content strategy, long story short. So a lot of what we've been trying to do is make it serve our users better because it's not something the reporters want to use necessarily to compose, it didn't make publishing news letters or managing our events easy, so I would say... Right now we're wrestling with it, but I would say in the last year, we have managed to go to some of these things, in terms of continuous deployment, and better tech processes, because it's exactly as you were describing. Just... There wasn't a process. There wasn't a—we need to do this correctly. It was a little bit of build and build and build and build. + +That's way too happy. Does anyone have... + +Sorry. I was going to say—the one lesson I would just share is—I had to say no a lot. In the last two years, to finally... We just... I have to brag about this. In the last couple of weeks, we deleted 15,000 lines of code, and they needed to be deleted, but a lot of it was a payoff for a year of saying no. A year of being like no, can't build. No, no, no. Sorry it's not a sob story. It's a success story. + +Work in progress. + +We're sort of through the woods, I think, now, but it's like a three year Django project where—frustratingly, we told them up front—like, there's two problems. There's a technology problem and a getting the data problem. We told them up front that getting the data is going to take at least two years and they didn't believe us, so concurrently, we were also trying to build the software that ran it, and our biggest problem was the assumption about how it was going to get used was completely different from how it ended up being. So we spent half of our time building an admin interface for regular people that was never going to get used because they didn't end up using that part of it. The technology side would have taken half the side if we had not changed our assumptions about what the project was going to be early on. But we're through the woods. We've gotten the release out, and it's mostly in a position—it's probably going to stay. The takeaways that we had is—I don't know if we learned anything, honestly, but we were supposed to—the lesson we were supposed to learn was kill your babies sooner than we do. But also, I think it is... Yeah. The other mistake we made is we announced very early on what we were going to do with the project, and then we basically, to keep ourselves honest—and then we realized that the demand for what we wanted to do with the project was not what people actually wanted to do with the project and we had to go back on these things that we had announced publicly. I thought we were keeping ourselves honest, but we were locking it down in the end. + +So what are some ways that that could have been avoided? + +Well, one thing is—this is sort of not in my control, but you've got to believe your people when they tell you these are the reasons this is going to take this amount of time, and you've got to lay those out really forcefully. We did say no to a lot, but you're probably going to have to say no ten times. + +Saying no and killing your babies and admitting when it's not working is really hard. Because you want to keep developing sometimes. + +It sounds like a lot of this too is one giant waterfall project. A thing was built that either wasn't needed, or maybe was needed at one time, or could have been built in a smaller manner to see how people would have used it. I prefer agile with a small a because I'm not beholden to any particular methodology, just something that works and makes sense. And so in that case, maybe it wouldn't have been built at all, but if it was something that was iteratively shipped, it wouldn't be for the user, whatever it might be. + +And with monolithic projects, building small is a good idea. Shipping all the time and improving things and not being afraid if something is not working, to just kill it. And also, plan for doing larger refactoring of major features and things. Because that's where actually we're at now. We've built a lot of prototype stuff and kind of built fairly fast, added features, as users ask for them, or just kind of needed them, and now we're back at a point where we want to think more about framework and architecture and kind of step back and build more of that stuff. So I think there's—it's always better to sort of—you built fast, learn a lot, and then kind of dial it back and then just start over again. And kind of that kind of process works well for us. It has worked well. Who else has one? Yuri? + +So the reason why Yuri doesn't want to speak up is because—you've all heard of the amazing chorus at Vox, but in reality, it is also like this monolith. And there are things they're doing that I would love for Yuri to share that is helping to work through this, but it's obviously not a problem, because everyone sings the praises of it. It's clearly a good piece of software. I mean, like WordPress, it is—maybe it's a monolith, but people like it, and they use it, and they're able to do really great things with it. So this is one of those, like, non-horror stories, but it's still an interesting—it's like going to AA. Like... I'll admit. We have a monolith. + +I mean, I spent 15 years in journalism, working with monolithic horrible CMSes that people spent millions and millions of dollars on, that you had to, like, do the code inside of it, and, like, the file uploading and run the servers from the same CMS that you write your stories in. Those were all nightmares. The great thing about it is it's a monolith in that it covers everything. So we have integration with YouTube, we have integration with all social networks, we have integration with ad serving so you know what ads are going to be served with your story, you know everything scheduled, video plays, analytics, all the social stuff is integrated while you're writing your story. So it's a lot of things. And it's the integration of all those things that really makes it that big, because in the end, a CMS is really just a fucking big box that you type shit in. Which is not what I believe CMSes should be. But that's what they are. It's a big fucking box. But we just build shit all the time. The chorus today is not what it will be tomorrow, and it's a reflection of what our staff needs now. And just keep constantly building and iterating on that. Testing in the open—we test everything in the open. We just build it and test it and shit, if it works, it works great, if not, we'll iterate. We always push forward. On the first day, I got actually—deployed an entire website on my first day. That was fun. + +In WordPress? + +No, WordPress was... We were using WordPress... My API plug-in for the WordPress to serve it because I didn't have time to actually build out an API service. But I had come from the Post, worked on WordPress, we had built that around the other system, because we had a monolithic system, and we just started building small stuff and finding a way to connect them in the middle. + +You're referring to Méthode? + +Can you talk a little bit more about that? I think in a lot of our organizations, perhaps not the digital (inaudible), but it's a monolithic culture we're fighting against and not as much a particular monolithic system, though indeed that's part of the landscape. But at Thunderdome, it was trying to lobby IT to give us servers, which was a huge pain in the ass and took our data team months. It was having to use Newscred at our CMS because we didn't have an Agile enough product team to deliver verticals we needed on business deadlines. And that's the reality for a lot of metro newspapers. + +We solved that. + +How? + +We solved it in small group. + +It seems like the best strategy is the fringe innovation move, where you get them out of small business onto the sides. + +There's a huge problem with that, though. + +Small teams outside of the main organization is a way to work around it. + +That's what a lot of people do, because you end up getting so frustrated. That's what we ended up doing. Bought our own servers, started a group called beta and started building shit and people were like—holy crap, it's cool you can actually do this. Why don't you join this huge organization and now you can't actually build anything because you have to go to all these fucking meetings? + +No bitterness there. + +But the problem is, when you take the people out of the day-to-day, they lose the ability to understand and meet and match what is actually happening. And so I think that... I mean, it's all just fucking communication. You've got to have people that you trust, that are around you. You've got to have groups that are building you up, and you've got to be working with these people on a daily basis. We're all required to write stories on a regular basis, so that we know the CMS we're building is actually easy to use, and whenever we need a tool, we actually have to use that tool. And so it's—we have to use our own products, and we're forced to do that. But I think that pulling people out is a really naturally easy reaction, but I think that every time I've seen that, you end up not matching where the newsroom is going, and that's why the shitty CMS was there in the first place, because some crappy vendor in another fucking country will go and build the CMS without ever talking to newsrooms or finding out what they need and you put in 50 change requests and by the time those change requests get done in two years, you're already all the way over here. So it's constant iteration. + +I worked with Yuri on one of those monolithic CMSes, and I'm still there. But yeah, I've also been a part of a group that was supposed to be the splinter group that was then going to come back and inform the other group, and sometimes you can wind up with... And certainly this never happens at the Post... But it happens in other places. Thank God that's just a text transcript. + +(laughter) + +That... That... Um... Uh... It really does come down to the communication. Because you can get a healthy dose of not creative here syndrome and all that works for nothing. So as Yuri was saying, it's a matter of trust. It's a matter of—whoever you've got working on that new solution—at the Post, one of the things we're working on is a new CMS we're building ourselves, in a much more Agile manner than the initial CMS we're using now was built. It's built in-house with our own needs in the center, and I hope it will be successful. But one of the main things we have going for it is that the people working on it understand the needs of the business and are working to meet those needs. It's not like looking on a shelf and going eh, this is close enough. + +You can have a fringe group that is still part of the group. We develop news apps because our CMS is so terrible we can't build good stories in it. We need good people who can build stories in an Agile manner. They did start to make different CMSes as they went, did a better job, and it pricked up the ears of people in our monolithic organization and moved us closer to where we needed to be. So if you do it right, you can have a little bit of—oh, this is experimental, but the communication was still there. It wasn't like they were doing something crazy and the reporters were part of it as well, which is really important. + +So I think the three different ways we can kind of pursue this discussion—one is how to build things for users, which I think we probably all have down well enough. One is the last thing that you were saying—is... Like, how do you have an experimental thing that you can then bring back into the fold, without causing a major problem. The third one that I actually find really interesting too is—how do you actually shift culture? Because a lot of this can bring culture along with it, but how do you then push through it? We have some interesting ways to do this, and every one of our engagements with different agencies is different. Like, I'm wearing jeans and an untucked Gingham shirt, sleeves rolled up, I go to an office every day with this, and sometimes I'm wandering around the executive office building like this. And what's funny... This was before I was there, but everyone was in a suit. Within two months, the dress code started changing, and now the only people who are still wearing suits are the people who really like to dress up in a suit. They look snazzy. That's their thing. But otherwise we successfully changed a bit of the way it works. This is a really weird engagement in the sense that unlike most projects you might see in government, there are multiple contractors, all involved in the same project, every single person, whether us, the federal employees, the contractors, they're all on the exact same floor in the same building. That's very rare. I also came from a culture of remote work, so it's been very odd to suddenly switch to this very much not remote. + +Put on clothes? + +Put on, like, pants. But how do you then push culture forward? And sometimes it means that if we sit through the same meeting two weeks in a row and it is terrible, we try and secretly get... We talk to the people... We don't need to have this, do we? And try to get it canceled. Because we know it's not useful. There are little things that you can do there, that you can... Not undermine, but how can you help push things forward? So I wonder... Is that something we can talk about? How do you actually deal with fixing culture? + +So one of the... I have a little phrase in my mind, when I think about changing culture. The bridge game. And I think it's (inaudible). Anybody ever read him? Great books. He's got a blog. A column. But he talked about that changing culture started not—it was an indirect thing. It was—he started a bridge game with people in his group, and outside his group. And he would just invite sort of a rotating cast of characters over lunch on Thursdays and Fridays and they would play this bridge game. And that time became a time of fostering trust and communication with people and a not-work thing, but at work. And that's where the shit actually happened. That's where the deals got made. That's where the shift occurred. And so that's why I always think of—in whatever org I'm in, what's my bridge game? Where am I going to establish that kind of trust relationship? + +And even within work, our marketing person calls it socializing. She just stops by everybody's office. If you have a small office, that's easier. But just stop in. Talk a little bit. And mention the new thing you want to try at some point, but don't start with that. Don't make it the center of the conversation. That's definitely been something that's happened in our organization as we've brought in people that have a better sense of digital. To just kind of make that social thing happen. + +Especially when you're working across different departments and divisions and things like that. One thing we try and do is prop up and empower the people that we know can get things done. And there are different ways to do this. Like in government versus out. In our case we just try and always go to them and they are like—I would love to solve this problem. Let's try and fix this. In other cases, if a supervisor receives a really nice note about an employee, that can be a trigger for a raise in government. And things like that. So there's all sorts of different tricks, but a lot of times... Obviously people want to be doing the right thing. So how can we help them? And especially if you're not in your CIO organization, at your company, or wherever it is, and you need something from them, how do you get the servers? How do you actually do that? Who do you ask at the bridge game to... Can I please have this... No one needs to know. Just give me a spot on the server. + +Identifying who writes the checks in the org is always important. And I can't... I'm Peter, by the way. I work now for a company—a little tiny startup, but I worked for Minnesota Public Radio for several years across the river here. You described initially our whole CMS. Peeloff things, WordPress, da-da-da. I can't understate how important it was to have the key advocates at the C level who got it, and were willing to sort of write the checks, say in meetings to their peers how important this is, provide sort of political cover when you want to do something that's sort of outside the mainstream. In our case, specifically, at NPR, I worked initially on a project called the Public Insight Network, and that's what brought me into the company. Didn't have a background in journalism at all. And what was nice about that is that even though it was a legacy project that we were sort of writing version 2.0 of the software, we were allowed to start from scratch and bring in a lot of cultural and best practice stuff that the company didn't have. And that sort of infected the rest of the company in a good way, I hope, to not be afraid to take on some other big monolithic projects that they had. Bridge games and having your eye open... + +(inaudible) people who are not familiar with the product or the tool. So if I'm an old school reporter and I've never used Tumblr or WordPress before, it can be really scary. And helping to introduce people to these tools in a non-threatening way can be really important. Not just—I'm a cool kid with a new tool, you've got to use this, be part of the cool kids club—it's not how it works. I used to work at a news organization where I had to show people how to use things like WordPress, and it was totally a one on one thing. Hey, how is it going? You want to see something cool that I'm doing? Slow, steady, small introductions along the way. Because otherwise, they will reject you, if you don't earn their trust or show them that in a personal way. + +You've got to bring them in from the beginning. If you just drop the tool on them, but they're part of the process and they're helping you make informed decisions, it changes the entire dynamic of—they feel ownership of this and become evangelists for it. You can do that with almost everyone. Bringing them in, showing them the design and the build process. They feel ownership. They get excited when that thing launches and they get that email that goes out with thanks to so and so, it's really powerful. You make them part of this. We do that with everything. We bring people in throughout the whole project. Reporters, designers, editors—the whole thing. + +You've got to do the C level, the ground level work, sending out emails, saying hey supervisor, this person is doing an awesome job. It's a multi-prong approach. + +Bribery helps. Because... Well, right. No, the good kind. Because there are very simple things that people in a lot of newsrooms and elsewhere need that would take you pretty much no time to do, but it would make a big impact on them, and suddenly they are your best buddy. That would certainly work with me. There's tons of stuff I need in my newsroom that's simple to build but I can't get anybody to do it for me. If somebody would do it for me, I would go to the mat for them for their next project because they've proven we can do something together that can really make an impact. So I think that's a really easy entree, because everybody wants stuff that people can do. So that's a way to get a day or two, building something kind of lame, that will help somebody toward a goal that's really simple—can help get you the buy-in for something that's much more interesting. + +Anyone who hasn't said anything yet—any struggles or solutions? + +I have a very real world struggle I'm dealing with right now. It's like the tension between... Distributed team and co-located, with the rest of the company. And there's just a lot of cultural clash that arises from that naturally. And to be honest, I don't know how to avoid it, sort of thing. And so I feel like I'm in this struggle to prove the distributed model, as an effective model. Like, something that the executive team should actually champion, and not on its way to being pushed out... Sort of thing. And, you know, two things top of mind, always, is—one, just the effectiveness of our team. Like, you make a request. You follow up on whatever it is. We actually get it done really quick. Like, it doesn't require three weeks of delays in asking where is that at. It's, like, done in 20 minutes sort of thing. And the second thing, which is... A little bit difficult, because text loses a lot of resolution... But just making every interaction a positive one. And really, like, constructive and helpful, and like, happy. Like, I made a request, and it was just like... Taken care of for me. And people followed up and that sort of thing. So... But I don't know what the ultimate answer is, to solving the distributed versus co-located version. + +In our case, we would like to get co-located working first. + +(laughter) + +And then start to think about distributed. Anyone else work in a remote or distributed environment? A lot of people. How do you generally solve this? I saw some hands over here. + +I think it's about kind of the bridge game ideas. We have to try and create opportunities to interact with each other outside of project meetings and that sort of stuff. So spend a lot of time in front of a webcam, just kind of... You have to be deliberate about creating those opportunities. It can be tough. + +We talked about this a little bit in a session yesterday about distributed work. And when it's distributed, it can be hard to make sure that everyone is marching on the same path. So being in front of a webcam or just that face-to-face interaction is really important. I manage a team of 18 people that's distributed, and I do a video one on one video call with every member of my team every two weeks. And I can't skip those. Because otherwise... I wouldn't have the opportunity to make sure that everyone is walking the same path and checking in. + +I worked in a distributed team where there were actually two offices. There was the Midwest office and there was the West Coast office. And the impression was that the West Coast office got to do all the fun projects. The Midwest office was out baling hay all the time. So one of the things we did all the time was in many ways trying to facilitate cultural change—at a larger scale, 10% time, where people could devote time to their own projects. And that actually allowed people from both offices to work together on things of their own interest. In small time frames, small teams that were motivated by a personal itch they wanted to scratch. That ended up being the bridge game for those two teams. That those people who participated in that actually ended up fostering a lot better sort of sympathy between the two groups. + +Anyone else have a really good horror story? I kind of now want to hear some horror stories. No? No one? Yeah. + +I've been reluctant to talk about this, because I feel a bit naive. I've never worked in a newsroom or government. + +Neither have I. On the first one, neither have I. + +But I know the startup scene pretty well, and I was always the last job... The last startup I was at, it wasn't too big. It was about 30 people. And I always found it remarkable how often... I guess it goes back to something Yuri was saying earlier. There was a kind of... Ostensibly, everybody was in on the decisions. But then there would be... You know, they would often come back with the real decision. Which was, like, nothing to do with what happened in the room. And there's no quicker way to lose any goodwill that you've built that that room, than to do that. So avoid that. + +Yeah, some of this is like—are decisions really made in meetings, and something of that nature. I would love to point to play number six, which is assign one leader and hold that person accountable. Very often—it could be the senior executive on the project. It could be the CTO or whoever it winds up being, but more often than not, it's the product owner. Even if they don't have the ultimate authority, they're delegated to really take ownership and they're held accountable, both—not only people above them, but also ideally people below them. So, like, if something is going wrong or going off the rails, there is, like, a single person who is ultimately accountable for—why did this decision randomly change? Especially if you're not doing things in a particularly iterative manner, one decision at one point could just completely derail months' worth of work or effort or whatever it might be. I mean, I don't know. We were talking about this yesterday, in another session, a little bit, about how if you have this major digital project that you're trying to ship at a newsroom, whether it's like a snowfall or something like that, how do you actually have someone in charge? Because often the person who is truly accountable is the editor on the project. But in reality, if you want someone who is invested in the project, who understands digital, who understands that level of product, you realistically need some kind of a product manager. Not even necessarily a project manager, who's ultimately accountable for the success of that large chunk, even if, again, they're not the main person on that project. I don't know how often this happens in newsrooms. Project manager... How many newsrooms have... You do, and a few others do, but in many cases it's a role that someone else has to wear a hat for, which is also fine, frankly, but a lot of times it requires someone to step up and take over and push that forward. + +We call them champions. So it's the person that really wants this done. That could be the developer, it could be the designer, and we all could be champions of different projects. And we do sort of 10% time but more like 95% time, so we're mostly championing our own projects. You might have three or four champions on a project, and it's great. It changes all the stuff that you work on. + +Decisions will always be made outside of meetings. Ultimately. + +And I mean... Even that terminology can be helpful too. I mean, you can assign a product owner. You can't assign a champion. + +I had... My main job is to essentially process data, so that at the end, take federal datasets, do stuff to them, make them easy to use for journalists, and I came into my job with... We have an IT guy who was building this elaborate framework for processing data. All by himself. He was sort of set down this path by my boss. And for two years, he built this thing without talking to anybody. + +Oh, no! + +We know how this story ends. + +So I spent two years trying to figure out how it works. Because there's no documentation. And he has a difficulty in communicating. And his main... He's one of those... I think it's sort of an old IT way of thinking, is like... This is how it works. Figure it out. Here it is. So I've had to kind of come to this point where I'm like... I can't use this. So I'm going to have to start doing what he did, essentially, from scratch, in a way that I can use it, and maybe help other people in the future use it. But I also have to make that call to my boss to be like... Look, this guy did two years of work that I'm essentially throwing out. So it's been, like, really difficult, because I keep going back—oh, I'll try harder. To figure out how it works. To make it work for me. Oh, I can't. I can't do it. Just do my own thing. But there's just no concept of collaboration or... I'm the user. You know, and he's the person who built it, and we should maybe, like, work on making it better. But it's... I don't know. + +I think one and two on the playlist. Just tell your boss that. + +So this is actually really interesting. Projects will always need to be thrown out. No matter how perfect everything is, they will always need to be thrown out. You need to do that before it's too late, for both time and money. And which one is more important is in the eye of the beholder. Which one... Like, at what point are they intolerable—is very different. The federal government spends 80-something-billion dollars a year in IT. That is larger than the New York Times by quite a bit. So how does... At this point, in many cases, it's a time thing. And so this could be really interesting. Like, in your case, that was two years. Of someone else's time spent. And now you're spending two years doing that, and then the person after you, hopefully they like yours better than they like the person beforehand. So that can be really tough too, and a lot of this is sometimes like... I don't know. In our case, we try to make sure there's no—no one ever has the bus factor, of—if you get hit by a bus tomorrow. Which is kind of sad. If you win the lottery tomorrow, is a better way to say it. + +Put a positive spin on it! + +What happens to the thing that you were working on? + +Well, you love your job so much that you would just stay, even if you had all that money. + +I don't work in government for the money at all. + +I think what sort of gets at like... It's always really scary to talk cost/benefit, at least for me, it has been, to talk cost/benefit, because you always worry if people who don't understand what you do actually understood how much time it takes to do this stuff, you wouldn't get to do what you want to do. Stuff takes a long time. It's pretty expensive. The amount of money we spent on things I don't really want my bosses to know about, but we can't do that. We can't kill projects if we haven't had that conversation earlier, to say—here's how long the really good things took us and how long that took us. And you got seven good points out of that for whatever it cost. This... You're going to get no good points for, and it's going to cost more. + +If you get an iterative model, you're constantly throwing stuff out all the time. If you're documenting, the bus factor shouldn't be a worry. Anybody can pick it up anywhere. We document process, we check everything, we document days and weeks where we sit and check everything, and every new employee has to fill out the new employee documentation. Everything is written and you can find it somewhat easily. Depends. It's a project we're working on right now. But yeah. Documentation. Everything. Document everything. It's amazing. + +How do you justify the time for that? Because usually... It's not something that hits the bottom line, right? Documentation or internal tool building. + +You could save two years of her time. + +If you have breaking news and you can't do something, because the documentation doesn't exist, and the person has left or been hit by a bus... That's a really good argument right there. + +Lottery. + +Lottery. + +You're going to be paying eventually. You don't want to pay ahead. + +That was a turning point for us. We had enough moments. No one knows how to do this. No one wrote anything. + +Any time anyone asks a question in Slack, we're like—it's in the Binder. Search for it. + +A lot of things I've heard in government where there's thousands of people on this project but there's one guy who knows exactly how this things works and that's it. And one day he no longer works there and you're like... Uh-oh... What's wrong? And we get called into these a lot. Because we don't know what this thing is. We have no... Like, this office had 19 people and now it has 2, and they weren't the people who worked on this and we don't know how to produce a report or generate this data or whatever it is. But going back a little bit to this point about... With decisions, because this kind of came up--how do you make sure that the right people are in the room who are knowledgeable enough to be able to actually help inform decisions? And so if you often have decisions being made at the senior level, how often is there an engineer in that conversation? + +Not often enough. + +Not often enough. And we don't really address this so much in the playbook, because the playbook is way more about shipping the particular thing itself. And actually, it applies so well to non-government projects. It's great. Except for maybe some of the procurement stuff. But even then, it actually does apply pretty well, because in a lot of cases you're procuring stuff from contractors and vendors and things like that. How do you make sure that engineers are represented in a meeting? + +And also if you're having engineering meetings and there's no one there from editorial, that's a problem. + +In that case, it's kind of like the cross... The stakeholder, like the... You have an editor, versus that. But if there's a meeting being made at the board level or anywhere up above that level, where you have—the only person who's even close to technical in that meeting is the CTO, who may or may not be technical, may not have any idea who you even are, your project—how do you make sure it's being represented adequately? In our case, we're actually—we're really good about making sure that we can get included in things, just because—it's kind of like the mandate from literally the top of—they must be included in these things. To the point where until 12:28, I was on a phone call. I was on a conference call, and I was the only engineer on the call. The reason I was on that call was because I was an engineer. Specifically to try and contribute to that conversation. Do you guys have these problems? Do you all have these problems? + +We had it a little bit, but it's part of the culture shift, I would say. It's part of getting everybody to think we should have that. So you don't—sometimes we just start inviting ourselves to meetings. Things like that. Nicely. But what we want is a sense, though, like you're saying, of community, and of—you know what? We want tech here now. Because we know we're going to have to build it or whatever. So—but I think I would build that into culture shift. + +Yeah, it's also being super open too. That helps a lot too. Document process and culture and all that stuff. Treat it like a product. That you continuously improve. And you're just communicating both ways, up and down, all across the organization. + +And in news organizations, it's important to understand, from a technical background, how the newsroom is used to working too. A lot of these are the exact same conversations that have been happening for decades, about when do we include design? When do we include a top editor? When do we include all of these people who are going to need to understand the same material in different ways but still at a fundamental level to be able to contribute so that everybody is pulling toward the same endpoint on a project. + +Do you have a checklist of everybody who needs to be there? If you're making decisions, you need all those people there. There's a checklist of who to go and find and grab. + +How did you arrive at a place where everybody can agree that there's a checklist? + +Trei. Anybody here who knows Trei... Just a southern tech dude. + +But what I'm hearing then—it was a charismatic person who had the power to make decisions. + +Yeah. And when we started Vox, that was part of the hiring process. We told every single person—every reporter, every data person, every programmer, every designer, we said you are a designer, you are a developer, and you are a reporter. And we are all journalists. And when we set that expectation, then it doesn't—you don't have to go and tell people that later on. You set that expectation from day one. It's part of your goals and it's part of how you do everything. + +And it's baked into the DNA of your org. + +I sit next to the managing editor and the executive editors, so we just communicate all the time. + +So we have a little under ten minutes. Has anyone who would love to say something not had the chance yet? Anything? Any good ideas? Any struggles? Any horror stories? + +One thing—I just wanted to build on Yuri's champions. I've got some friends who work for Google, and probably you guys do too. And one of the things that's been fascinating, talking to them, is—they're never assigned to anything. You know? They have to volunteer for every project they're involved in, with very rare exceptions. And it's a big enough company that there's always someone to do that. But it also means that everybody has buy-in. Everybody is committed to that being a successful project, and everyone owns some piece of it, and ultimately, whoever is the decision maker owns the whole thing. And that is something that almost never happens in a newsroom. + +Yeah. It happens in federal government now. At the very least, for our group, where pretty much everyone is coming from Google, Twitter, Facebook, the New York Times, in some cases, Jacob Harris recently joined, which is cool. We all are there because we want to be there, and what ends up happening is that we're all able to join the different projects that we want to work on. Right now I'm working on—how can we modernize the immigration system? Where I was in Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska, studying the entire process. Which is—I never mentioned. Almost entirely paper. I'm guessing it's tens of millions of dollars a year in postage and shipping costs alone, that could hypothetically be solved with technology and be sped up and made more efficient with technology. But yeah. Not to, like, do the whole hiring pitch in front of all of you, but if you're interested, you should talk to me. Otherwise, you should go back to your own organizations and make cool stuff happen. + +One of the things I think I heard a lot of people say is that you can't get engineers to do shit for you. That would be a nice thing, if people have advice... I'll build whatever you want. But if people have advice of how to get your organization... Because I think that's a huge problem. And I see that over and over again. That's a huge complaint from reporters. I want to do this great shit. And I can't get anybody to help me. + +I think, like, in newsrooms I've been in, one of the obstacles we have faced is that—if reporters or editors are coming in with the traditional news mentality and they're coming to me like I'm the graphics desk, and I say that pejoratively, because they shouldn't treat the graphics desk that way either—but I'm a journalist. I want to be involved in your process. And a lot of reporters do come to you or editors come to you and say—here's this thing I want. They have no idea how it's going to be built but they made a lot of assumptions they haven't thought about, and I don't have the opportunity to be involved in that process. + +They treat you like a support desk. + +So I tell people—what I want you to come with me is—I want to do something about this. That should be the basis of the conversation. Let's figure out the rest together. + +Come with a problem, not a solution. + +Exactly. Problem, not a solution. + +It's good to encourage people who want to be forward thinking to come with a full package. Sometimes it's going to be great. Sometimes you might want to pivot. But how even before they have the idea can you get involved? Those conversations yesterday about shipping digital projects. Sneak into the editorial meeting. To be able to feel like—early on, that sounds cool, we can do cool things with that, and then trying to engage. Yeah. But a lot of this is like—in many cases, I think this is a lot of the smaller bite-sized projects. Not like the massive, big projects. + +Also, people are usually really unacustomed to people asking to be in their meetings. Sometimes that by itself begins sort of a transformative process. I want to be included in this. You weren't assigned to it. I know. I'm just really interested in it and I think I can help. + +In some places, where it's a meeting-heavy culture, some organizations might be fine with people randomly joining meetings. Other times they're not. We show up to whatever meetings that we see on the calendar sometimes. That sounds interesting. Let's go into it. But one of my favorite stories is like—early on, when they did a very early assessment about a year ago, at this agency, where they knew that some guy from Google was going to be there, and they didn't know who he was, and it's like... Is it the guy in the suit? No, he wouldn't be wearing a suit. But the suit is too big for him. Yeah, it's probably him. + +(laughter) + +I just heard that story recently. Yeah. I don't know. It's kind of interesting. If you can get—if you can wiggle your way into meetings or wiggle your way into an email thread or a distribution list or whatever it might be, that can go a long way to just being able to have helpful input at different stages, and it can also provide a lot more visibility as well. So if you are someone who's ultimately accountable for everything, and there's a lot of things happening that you just can't see, that's obviously like a major flag as to this whole thing is in danger of collapsing. + +Also Slack. Who's a sponsor. + +And even if they answer and the first request is no, chances are, you'll be remembered as the person who expressed interest in case something pivots or goes in a different direction or just next time. Oh, right, who was that guy? Let's get him in here. + +So we have a completely open—you can join any room in Slack, and we have an ideas room, so people can drop their ideas in there, and every single one of those ideas gets put in Trello, so every single one of those gets evaluated. Sometimes it's like—we don't have time. There's no champions for this. Or it's going to be—you want me to build Facebook and I can't fucking build Facebook. So you're going to need to cut down on those features or something. But a lot of times we'll just talk to them for five minutes, even, and get some more ideas. I'm working on a project now that somebody pitched last year and I didn't have time last year, but now we're bringing it back up, because it's still on the board. + +There's only a few people who haven't said anything. Does anyone have anything else to add? + +Okay. I have a slightly different challenge. I'm a User Experience designer at a data analysis company. I'm the first designer they've hired, so it's a culture gap. And I'm trying to learn as much as I can about what everyone else is doing. And what all their processes are and what their goals and work flow are, so I can recommend things that I can contribute that will be on their terms. And I'm wondering if that's a strategy that anyone else—not just being at the table in a meeting, but actually understanding the other person's vantage point, as well as your own. + +Empathy. That's great. Yeah. It's one of the reasons that—there's a movement I think to embed coders in the newsroom. Cheek by jowl with people. Yeah. I think it's a really good strategy. + +I wish I had particular advice for this, but we do this all the time. Like, we're not just a bunch of engineers. We have five or six people who specialize in UX, specifically. We also have procurement people, which is really helpful as well. So we can drop into an agency and not only evaluate their code but also look at their contracts. But also from a design perspective, we try and use UX researchers as early as possible in the process because they're able to inform so much that we do. I think the key thing that we generally try to do is that when we are pitching it to people, of like—we would love to get involved in this, from a UX perspective—we try not to use big, scary words. Like... We try not to say... We want to see if we need to redo this. Like, that is ago we don't say. We would love if we could have a better understanding of all of this, because we would love to see if there's anything we can do to help. Sometimes it just requires a different delivery where someone could be like... Oh, sure. Versus we're kind of concerned about X to the point where... + +So when you go into the immigration processing, you don't start with the concern about the paper. + +Well, they already have a concern about the paper, so that makes it a lot easier. But yeah, absolutely not. A lot of time it's just like—we would love to understand how the visa process should work most efficiently. Or even then—how could we embed a researcher in with the state department to understand how all of this works? And then they will produce, like, a cool feel-good report at the end that you may or may not like. But the point is... It can go a really long way into understanding that, but again, I think the only advice that I have for this, in part because I just don't do it myself, is... Trying to pick the right words that don't make it sound like you're trying to go in and evaluate or assess, as much as just understand. And empathize. + +I think a lot of it is... I guess pain points are not just for users. Right? They're for—everyone's got pain points. So it's identifying those and being as open and I think helpful as you can. I mean, there's possibly—like, the positive language instead of negative language makes a really big difference there. And just kind of identifying potential opportunities to help. It's a big thing. + +Anyone else have anything? + +Anyone else? We're just about... + +Final thoughts? I think it's lunchtime. + +Lunch? All right. + +Thank you, everyone, for coming. + +(applause) diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015MonetizeData.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015MonetizeData.md index beb7bf29..00111d70 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015MonetizeData.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015MonetizeData.md @@ -1,270 +1,258 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/monetizedata/index.html ---- - -# How Can We Best Monetize Data—And Do So Responsibly, Ethically and Without Sacrificing Journalistic Standards? - -### Session Facilitator(s): AmyJo Brown, Ryann Grochowski Jones - -### Day & Time: Friday, 3-4pm - -### Room: Ski-U-Mah - - -Hi everyone, welcome to the session, How Can We Best Monetize Data Responsibly, Ethically, And Without Sacrificing Journalistic Standards? My name is Ryann Grochowski Jones, I'm a data recorder at ProPublica in New York. - -And my name is AmyJo Brown and I work at War Streets Media. We are building a news publication in Pittsburgh from scratch. - -So Amy Jo and I both have an interest in monetizing data at ProPublica last February, February 2014, we opened a data store, which had been a long time—in the works for a long time basically at our organization it's a place where we both put up for free download any datasets that we received through FOIA or right to know requests, and then we also versions of those datasets that we have cleaned, combined, verified, and all of that good stuff. - -And we have been cleaning and working a lot with campaign finance data, locally, and some other voter registration records and other records like that, so we are actually just starting to work through a lot of these questions about what do we want people to allow download in bulk for free, what do we want to license possibly through, you know, an NPI and when should we be charging for the data, considering that it is public data, so where those lines are. So what we were hoping to do during this session is we're going to kind of cover and discuss a lot of the topics that we have found ourselves sort of working through and we want to have everybody kind of brainstorm how they might solve some of these problems. So the first thing that we wanted to do, on all of your tables are post-it notes and sharpies, and for the next five minutes, we wanted you to brainstorm with your group a bit about what public datasets you would put in a data store. And we want to do it, we've got city data, county data, and state data, so we want you to think about it in that context, so if the two tables over in the far left here can consider city data, so what public data at the city level do you think you might want to put in a data store and if the middle section can think about at the county level, what county data might be available that you think should go into a data store and you guys can think of it at the state level. So if you guys just want to do that for a few minutes and as you gather your post-its, feel free to put them up there and put them on the appropriate poster. - - [group activity] - -One more minute. - [group activity] - - -OK, so we're going to have each group come up and put their post-its on the right poster and we want you to come and just share with the group the list that you came up with. So who wants to go first? - -Gina, I'm going to give you the mic and -- - -Thank you. OK, well we just started brainstorming, we found that county data is a little bit squishy, because there's often city limits, but you want to be inclusive of population for land areas for coverage for public services like fire or police or what have you, so that's kind of what this list is based on. County election results, county employee salaries, emergency response times for like fire, law enforcement, you know, arrest records if the Sheriff's Department is what oversees that area. Water usage, school data, enrollment, performance, dropout rates, liquor and business licenses, property values, and county records like vaccination. So that's what we came up with. - -Thank you. You guys need us? - -It's actually interesting, there's a lot of overlap, it's probably going to be true. There's a lot of fuzziness between all these different things. So same things, license, crime incidence, we tried to think about things like weather not necessarily on a climatological level, but also effects, like in New York City, the flood maps and things like that. Taxi data, municipal calendar data. We just totally brainstormed, public geodata. Municipal government voter data. Neighborhood graphics, nobody else knows what a neighborhood is especially the city and of course the demographics of those neighbors, so those shapes and demographics. Geodata on parks and then things like restaurant inspection, things like that. - -Thank you, and this group over here? - -Again, a lot of overlap. let's see, school test scores, good to look at that on a state level. Inspections of many different kinds. We talked about infrastructure inspections and day care inspections. Oh, yeah, so lots of different kinds of inspections, it would be nice if we could get health stats on state level, right, like CDC for the whole state instead of the whole country, election results, state budget, stuff on weather would be interesting. Highway accidents, workplace safety inspections and accidents, personnel information about various state agencies, legislative voting record, bill tracking on legislative level, crime stats which I think was mentioned in both other categories, but you know, crime stats on a state level, good, because then you can do some compare and contrast. Pension fund and other financials there, pension payments. Illegal drug data. Welfare data, who does the state pay to pay out social worker payments. - -We barely scratched the surface. - -Yeah, give us like another day or so. - -I was going to say five minutes wasn't enough? - -[laughter] - -So the next exercise that we are going to do is to, on your tables you all should see some dot stickers, green and yellow, and you should each get three of each, so if anyone needs an extra, raise their hand, we can come around. But what we're going to do with those, so now you have to prioritize what you're going to put in your data store, because you have limited resources and limited people to get these datasets and clean them for you. So we have two ways that you're going to prioritize, the first way is with the green sticker. Which data would you consider to be most valuable to have on hand for the newsroom? So you're going to clean a dataset, so maybe what would a newsroom really want to have on hand during a breaking news event or during election coverage, so examples, use of force was one that has come up where, you know, a reporter may want to be able to check those records during a breaking news event, so it would be great to have those on hand, so there's a good example. And then the yellow is, what do you think is going to be the most marketable to an outside party? So this could be research, businesses, anybody like where would you place the highest value? So you get three stickers there, as well. - -And the stickers are not mutually exclusive. You can, for the same dataset, if you believe that it is both very valuable to a newsroom and for marketing purposes, just all to a third party, you can use both a green and a yellow sticker. So we'll give you another five minutes or so, feel free to get up and go over to the list and sticker the post-it notes in -- - -I have a question, is it in any category or just your category? - -Not necessarily one per category? Yeah, you just have three stickers. - -Yes, you can use your stickers however you'd like. - [group activity] - -As we're finishing up putting our stickers on our datasets, does anybody want to share with us which datasets they chose for which categories and why? - -Raise your hand and we'll come to you. - - -I—well, my yellow stickers, I feel like I have more experience with, and I chose—I chose like the contracts and procurement at city and state levels. I do a lot of industries that want contracts and to learn about like what they should spend their resources on going after is very valuable to them. so I did that, and what was the second one I did? At the county level. No, wait, whatever. Those are the most important things, because I think the other one I did, everyone agreed with me. - -Anyone else want to share why they chose what they did? - -One of the ones I put a yellow on is restaurant inspections because I think that's one of the things that is not out there well enough and yet everybody would love to see it. Of course there's the one flaw that this data is not always super—it's got a lot of hiccups to it, but still the concept, I think people would buy it, so I think they'd spend money on it. - -Yeah, the green ones, I think of mine matched a lot of other folks like on the county level the school enrollment data because I think that has value to realtors and businesses you know, knowing where kids are. - -I thought that climate and weather data at the state level would be useful for companies that wanted to do sort of like broader forecasting for agriculture, things like that. - -Did anybody put a green and yellow stick or on the same dataset? - -Nobody? Really? That is interesting to me. - -I think that was more out of like a vague sense of like trying to spread things out. - -True. Yeah, when you only have six total stickers, you can't be blowing them all on one dataset, I suppose. - -I think inspections deserves both. - -Well, Amy Jo, why don't you say what the consensus was. - -So I grabbed the ones that had the most stickers and the one I found was property values and it's mostly yellow to one green. So I know we just kind of talked a little bit but in terms of the property values, because there's so much yellow there, if you put one of your yellow stickers here, can you tell us a bit of who would be interested in that data? Who would be the audience that you think would buy it? - -You can just shout it out. - -Zillow. - -Zillow? They're already getting it from somebody else. - -Well, the question would be what would be most valuable. What is most valuable. So it's like already proven. - -There's all kinds of people that want to aggregate and show you like—I mean even more house hunting for like an apartment or something, seeing the comps around the area for like how much an apartment would be or something, I don't know. - -So individuals might be interested in that data, as well? - -Yeah. - -Do you think that an individual might pay to download that? - -Yeah, maybe as part of a service or something. - -Depends on how much it costs. As a home buyer, you know, it's a moment where you're a little bit sensitive and you'd be willing willing to do it. I think there's maybe—I don't want to necessarily be necessarily cynical is if you can correlate if you have address data, correlate it to identity, then you can correlate it back to property value, I think there are a lot of interests there that would pay a lot of money for that. - -Throw out some examples? I was thinking maybe insurance? Might be interested in knowing how much your house is worth? Credit companies? Who else? - -I mean marketers in general could use that as a proxy for your overall economic status. - -I mean they already kind of do at a neighborhood level, but -- - -I mean this data is already available for free. I mean I own a house and the amount of stuff that I get in my mailbox that is only there because can got scraped off of property rolls is kind of staggering, and very varied in what people are actually trying to sell me. I think to make it something that has sort of market value, it's less about making the data available than about the format in which it is available. Making sort of like—if companies that want to use it are struggling to get data from the sort of official source and transform it into an API that's actually useful to them, then being the service that is that API could be valuable. - -Expanding on that, if we layered on census data and some other things to add some value to it that's not already in there, I think that's the only way that—just the value so I'm the one who put the green up there, and I—I've been thinking a lot about this data, because here in Minnesota, this data was under essentially lock and key for a long, long time, they charged a penny a parcel, which you're talking a thousand dollars for one county so we never got it. This past year somebody convinced all the counties to unlock it and now it's free. You download the whole twin cities in one swoop so we're starting to think, you know, what can we do with this and I think it's got a lot of newsroom value and probably more than the commercial right now, because the people who would use it commercially or pay for it are already doing it through they're just getting it directly. - -What about state contracts? A lot of yellow dots on that one, as well. Who would be the market or who do you think would buy state contracts if you offer that in a database or be interested in it. - -Companies that want to get state contracts. - -Or subcontracts with somebody who already has a state contract? - -[laughter] - -Yes. People who consult to help companies get subcontracts. - -Even businesses who want to contract out something, they want to see how much state pays. - -Market analysis? - -Yeah. - -There was specifically mentioned that welfare contracts might be of interest. Who would be interested in the welfare contracts, perhaps commercially? - - -I think that was a green sticker thought that didn't win a green sticker race in the end. - -Would there be academics that might be interested in that dataset? - -I'm thinking like watchdog groups, there's a lot of—you know recently looking at how the Red Cross behaved in Haiti, and kind of, I think the last decade or so there's been a lot of consciousness about how groups are carrying out missions with money. - -The next two are all green. - -I know they are. So tell us the crime incident data, this is all green. Anyone want to kind of talk a little bit about how in a now room, why that might be of a high value to a newsroom? - -It's fascinating. It's a timeline page generator, it's about me. I can compare myself to my neighbors and be afraid or be less afraid. So it's both useful and fascinating, so I think a newsroom likes things like that 2002 so much of what we write about is crime, the stories that we write is crime, so having that data gives us a chance to put all that in context and give the readers the broader context rather than you know, somebody just killed their neighbor yesterday, you know, right? - - -Several major stories in New York have emerged from analysis of arrest data of course in the last couple of years. I think it's become a pretty reliable source of actual investigative news. - -It's also a great way to measure how well you feel your local government is doing at one of the most basic things it's supposed to do. - -We have election data, which I think came from the state page, but I'm pretty sure there's interest in city, county, state, and we decided not to do national, but obviously national. However that one is all green. - -So what similar to what we just did with crime data, what do you think are the major reasons why it would be more valuable for a newsroom to have access to this dataset, versus perhaps some of the others? - -Because we have to pay for it now and we shouldn't. - -So true. - -But kind of like with crime, so much journalistic coverage is about political activity and the horse race and having access to that data allows you to sort of make analysis conjecture, you know, look for where things are changing or put that into—put that story in context. - -Are things like a requirement at this point? Like of the things that people and data come together, it's like, where is your up to the minute election coverage? More than like it's the best thing to have, it's kind of like you are forced to have it. - -What about city budget and contracts? We've got a good mix there, so where are the commercial audiences do you feel like for that, and what would be the primary news room interest? - -Well, the newsroom interest is just, you know, watching the power and making sure that nothing untoward is happening, that people aren't making deals with their—your brother-in-law, or that kind of thing. kickbacks or other undue relationships. - -Wait, you live in Chicago? - -Yeah. - -[laughter] - -What do you know about kickbacks, being from Chicago? - -Whose brother-in-law are you? - -What about the commercial aspects? Who do you think outside of the newsroom might be interested in that data? - -I would say I think in general with budgets, you know, in most cases those are public things, but but then commercial and news search scenarios, understanding what they mean is kind of a key thing. I do think from a business standpoint, anticipating, you know, new opportunities that contract with cities, but you know, if a budget line item significantly increased year after year, you know, you might want to start putting some resources into, say, like waste management, because you know that your city is going to spend more money on waste management. - - -OK, so now that we have kind of done our exercise about what datasets are potentially out there for both newsrooms and for general audience and how we might prioritize or assign value to them, we have come up with three different topics that I know Amy Jo and I have, when we met to talk about this session, things that she and I both have either struggled with or discussed or just honestly don't have answers for, and you know, we wanted to open up a greater discussion for some of these, so we have three broad topics with some questions here. Liability is one. What liability concerns might come up? What if somebody downloads your data for free, or you sell them your clean data and you screwed up the cleaning and they reported on it or used it for something? Should you as the news organization and the seller of the data be liable? Privacy and redaction concerns, Amy Jo, you want to talk about that? - -Yeah, so this is the idea of you know, considering are you going to put all of your raw data up for download or are you going to hold some back? - -Under what situations might you do that? Home addresses for example? - -A lot of people would be commercially interested in getting a dataset, say campaign finance or something like that that have home addresses in it. Are you as a news organization comfortable in releasing that information and if you are, what would be the guidelines for that? So the idea here is when we break up into groups, we want you guys to kind of think through where some of these problems come and how you if you were a news organization might put some boundaries or guidelines around those decisions. - -And then our last question is to charge or not to charge. Obviously our session is called monetizing data, so clearly people see some value in it, but I know when my editors came to me at ProPublica saying that they wanted to start a data store, I was at first very wary that of. I understood the value of what we were doing and that we've spend a lot of time and a lot of man and woman hours cleaning these datasets, but I was like also open data is good, and we eventually came to kind of a compromise that I think worked out but we'll talk about that when we go back to our discussions but I'd love to hear other thoughts. You know, if you do have data that you want to sell, how do you decide to put a price tag on it? - -So do we want to -- - -Yeah, and I was just going to say, part of this exercise with a list of datasets and how we prioritize, think of those as you're talking at your table, so it kind of will ground you in some of the questions that you might have to ask. You can look at the data that you've already sort of said, oh, we're going to consider this, so if there are fields or things in the property databases that you think shouldn't be released, you can use those in how you think they inform your overall strategy. But we aren't really thinking about it per dataset, but you have to do some guidelines overall for how you're going to run your data store. Does that make sense? - -All right, so why don't we have this side of the room take the liability issue. The middle section take the privacy and redaction issue, and you guys over there take the to charge or not to charge, and we'll present thoughts here in the end. We'll give you about ten minutes or so to kind of discuss these. - [group activity] - -OK, we're going to come back together as a larger group. I'm going to pass the mic to each group. If the people in each smaller group wants to pick a speaker and kind of just tell us what you discussed and all the solutions to the problems that we've put up here that we can, you know, all take advantage of your smart and intelligent minds. So this group talked about liability issues. I'm going to give the mic to Joe. - -So I don't think there's any order to this, but, we talked about things like computational and editorial errors, like if you're aggregating data, and you mishandle, missing values or if you're doing sort of cleanup and maybe leads to normalization, if you're just manually doing stuff with the data to make it easier for people to use, and you just make errors that are problematic. We talk about the right to release data, maybe and some of the data you have you're' aallowed to release it in some places European Union different than America, for example. Of course, personally identifying information. Libel, I know for example republic cans have challenges for dollars for docs where they have the wrong data and whether or not they are right. Emergent errors, remind me what? Is that like the New York taxi thing? It's the idea that you might, by releasing your data release New York City taxi data was released without the data of the drivers but it was possible to sort of reverse engineer who was driving the cabs by linking cab drivers to Instagram photos and things like that. I think I got all the things, right? Yeah. - -Thanks. That actually dovetails great into privacy and redactions team. - - -Our topic did dovetail a little bit with some of the liability issues, although I think what we discussed is there are sort of two categories, there are sort of legal concerns and then there's ethical and editorial decisionmaking that may, you know, you could—there are things that you can dough that are perfectly legal but that you might not want to do from an ethical or editorial standpoint. I think we discussed at the beginning, depending on where you get the information from to begin with, so if you're getting it from a public records request or a right to information request, there may be redactions already or there should be, in some cases things should have been redacted and are not so we discussed that a little bit and how you would handle that from an editorial standpoint. I think we discussed data that otherwise be individualized or pertain to specific people, perhaps redacting addresses and things like that, one of the important points that was raised is to just know your data and to know whether or not—how large the set was, I think if there is only two or three people in a specific area, then that data can be used to identify those people, even though on its face it doesn't, is that problematic, and knowing whether or not that's an issue and being sort of consistent about how you decide what information, private personal individual private information you sort of release. - - -Thanks, and our cash money team? Who would like to -- - - -Jump in if I miss something. I guess we—I'm not sure we came to any major conclusions, but we talked about a couple things that we all seem to agree that if you have data that's not easily available somewhere else and/or if you've added some value to it that really raises the ante in terms of whether you could charge for it or not, we also talked about the idea of having different prices for journalists versus nonjournallists, you know, trying to make money off the commercial people so you could give it away free to the others. We also kind of got into, you know, if you did want to go down this route, one of the problems you might encounter is that, OK, so let's say you have some data and somebody wants it and you say, oh, it's, you know, we're going to charge that company for it or whatever, one-off kind of deal, but then what if you want to do this on a regular basis and you want to market it and they need billing and marketing and do you have that kind of infrastructure set up and most of us probably do not. And then the kind of last thing we raised was, you know, we wondered could we add a data consulting piece on top of the selling it, that you offer consultation to people who are buying it as a way to maybe add a little more to the price or something. Did I miss anything? - - -Does anyone from any of the tables have something they want to add to another group's topic or a question that they have about running a data store or using data that they would like the group to kind of discuss? - -With both liability and privacy and redactions, it seems like a lot of the anecdotes I heard in the summaries came from kind of processed and interpreted uses of data, and less from just I got this, I cleaned it, if someone else wants it, here. And like just wondering if people thought the liability or kind of, I don't know, I got in your face kind of consequences might be less in the just pass-through of unprocessed or cleaned data, rather than, you know, making a piece and putting it out there that has unintended consequences. - -So do you mean like how the data is actually used by a third party? - -Whether it applies the same for like say the taxis if you made the pretty taxi thing and people were like I know where he lives, versus just saying I cleaned up this taxi thing, if anyone wants it, you know, 200 bucks, do you think there's a liability or consequences are as bad in the second case? - - -Anyone want to?. - -Thank you. About the monetization whether to charge or not, so different basis of providing the data, right, so can give the data, is it raw data, so as a service, if you ser of it, it adds some value, I don't know do you have an API with different end points with different pieces, maybe it adds a value to the service so you can charge for those. - -So in that case, what would be the questions or issues that you might have about how to structure that API or that licensing agreement? - -I mean depends upon how ites used like what kind of application you want to use it and also what difference upon the data is structured, right? So if you have a—housing data, you don't want to—it's millions of records, and you want to provide an easy way to get to a specific geographic boundary or something like that, so you structure the data accordingly, like state, county, city, and then you coordinate with these parameters and it gives you a subdataset for you to consume. That way you don't have to work on the huge dataset. I mean your client whoever uses the data may not have all the resources that you have to handle this huge dataset, so we are giving something in short little bits for them to consume. - -And to go with what Mary Jo had said about different prices for different consumers, that was one of the conclusions/compromises we came to with our data store. The idea of it really came out of a lot of commercial entities coming to ProPublica, and asking for access to more of our proprietary databases like dollars for docs, where it only exists because we made it. And so if you go to our data store, actually, there are no prices for commercial use. Instead, if you want to buy a news data commercially, you end up getting in contact with our president who works out a pricing structure, because—one of my main concerns was I don't want to make journalists pay for this data, you know, we are all journalists here, and also like I said before, open data, I want to make sure that everybody has access to this. So if we get FOIA data and we end up cleaning it, we will sell the clean data at a smaller price for journalists, a higher price for researchers, and then depending on the commercial usage, we work out a kind of price thing there, but then any of that data that isn't proprietary that we didn't make ourselves, that we have an actual raw dataset, we have it available for download and that I think actually has been our greatest success, because I don't really have updated numbers but I think as of last year, we had about upwards of 80,000 downloads of free data, which for me, and again, we ask for information, we're kind of curious who's using our data, but we don't require it and it's a lot of journalists, but it's a lot of other, you know, random researchers, commercial things, so my worries about kind of tamping down open data really were assuaged by seeing how great that was that we had so many free downloads. - -So pot point of charging, one of the first cases was a nursing home resource and one of the things I learned pretty quickly was that my newsroom was not prepared to be a data manager. Editors don't care. Like I mean you guys have clearly put a lot of energy into developing practice and a processer on it, but a lot of newsrooms just are not constituted right now to see the value and go to the kind of work it would take to be a legitimate value-added reseller of data, because it's usually not sexy. I mean it I think it can be done but I think right now there's a lot to learn to be good at it. - -And it is time consuming as kind of the point person for data store at ProPublica, and I mean it varies from week to week but I do have to spend at least an hour or two a week answering questions, if people have downloading our data, if they have questions on our data, you know, it's great to start a data store like this, but you also have to keep in mind, somebody is going to have to do the work and it is going to take time out of, you know, doing journalism certainly. - -So I work at the chronicle for higher education. We also sell some of our data, specifically the data that I've been working on most recently was sold, and so I many very interested to hear that obviously about ProPublica's selling of the data, but the way that it works for us is I work on the data, will make a data dictionary and have a record layout and I specifically ask that if any journalists wants to look at the data, has to come and talk to me and I will walk them through the data source and then we also have like our advertising and marketing folks are the person that handles it and she has a written email and how much it's going to cost and the explanation to also reach out to me if they have specific questions and we also have that pricing that way, so -- - -Right, yeah, the writing of the read me and data dictionaries takes a lot of time. - -Yeah and I do have one internally and also externally, so the formulas that I used I do make sure that's open to everyone but I also wonder like you guys' thoughts on how much transparency in those documents do you put? Like I give the exact column names that I used and the exact columns that I summed to do it and the exact queries that I ran to get that exact column. It's—I mean in some cases the documentation is really long and I really don't know if journalists are also reading this documentation and I wonder about that. - -Well, are people calling you with questions? - -Sometimes, but not a lot. - -Then your documentation is great. - - -Yeah, that's a great question. Unfortunately we are out of time. That hour went by very quickly. But I loved our conversation. It was great. If you can -- - -Yeah, thank you all very much. We're going to have the photos of these, so we'll have the list and the priorities posted—we'll work with SRCCON to make sure if anybody wants to look through that list and how people prioritized and those will be available in addition to the transcript. And if you'd like to continue the conversation with either of us, we have our contact information on the etherpad that SRCCON has put out, so we love talking about data and data stores, so we're happy to continue the conversation. Thank you: - -[applause] - -[session ended] +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/monetizedata/index.html +--- + +# How Can We Best Monetize Data—And Do So Responsibly, Ethically and Without Sacrificing Journalistic Standards? + +### Session Facilitator(s): AmyJo Brown, Ryann Grochowski Jones + +### Day & Time: Friday, 3-4pm + +### Room: Ski-U-Mah + +Hi everyone, welcome to the session, How Can We Best Monetize Data Responsibly, Ethically, And Without Sacrificing Journalistic Standards? My name is Ryann Grochowski Jones, I'm a data recorder at ProPublica in New York. + +And my name is AmyJo Brown and I work at War Streets Media. We are building a news publication in Pittsburgh from scratch. + +So Amy Jo and I both have an interest in monetizing data at ProPublica last February, February 2014, we opened a data store, which had been a long time—in the works for a long time basically at our organization it's a place where we both put up for free download any datasets that we received through FOIA or right to know requests, and then we also versions of those datasets that we have cleaned, combined, verified, and all of that good stuff. + +And we have been cleaning and working a lot with campaign finance data, locally, and some other voter registration records and other records like that, so we are actually just starting to work through a lot of these questions about what do we want people to allow download in bulk for free, what do we want to license possibly through, you know, an NPI and when should we be charging for the data, considering that it is public data, so where those lines are. So what we were hoping to do during this session is we're going to kind of cover and discuss a lot of the topics that we have found ourselves sort of working through and we want to have everybody kind of brainstorm how they might solve some of these problems. So the first thing that we wanted to do, on all of your tables are post-it notes and sharpies, and for the next five minutes, we wanted you to brainstorm with your group a bit about what public datasets you would put in a data store. And we want to do it, we've got city data, county data, and state data, so we want you to think about it in that context, so if the two tables over in the far left here can consider city data, so what public data at the city level do you think you might want to put in a data store and if the middle section can think about at the county level, what county data might be available that you think should go into a data store and you guys can think of it at the state level. So if you guys just want to do that for a few minutes and as you gather your post-its, feel free to put them up there and put them on the appropriate poster. + +[group activity] + +One more minute. +[group activity] + +OK, so we're going to have each group come up and put their post-its on the right poster and we want you to come and just share with the group the list that you came up with. So who wants to go first? + +Gina, I'm going to give you the mic and -- + +Thank you. OK, well we just started brainstorming, we found that county data is a little bit squishy, because there's often city limits, but you want to be inclusive of population for land areas for coverage for public services like fire or police or what have you, so that's kind of what this list is based on. County election results, county employee salaries, emergency response times for like fire, law enforcement, you know, arrest records if the Sheriff's Department is what oversees that area. Water usage, school data, enrollment, performance, dropout rates, liquor and business licenses, property values, and county records like vaccination. So that's what we came up with. + +Thank you. You guys need us? + +It's actually interesting, there's a lot of overlap, it's probably going to be true. There's a lot of fuzziness between all these different things. So same things, license, crime incidence, we tried to think about things like weather not necessarily on a climatological level, but also effects, like in New York City, the flood maps and things like that. Taxi data, municipal calendar data. We just totally brainstormed, public geodata. Municipal government voter data. Neighborhood graphics, nobody else knows what a neighborhood is especially the city and of course the demographics of those neighbors, so those shapes and demographics. Geodata on parks and then things like restaurant inspection, things like that. + +Thank you, and this group over here? + +Again, a lot of overlap. let's see, school test scores, good to look at that on a state level. Inspections of many different kinds. We talked about infrastructure inspections and day care inspections. Oh, yeah, so lots of different kinds of inspections, it would be nice if we could get health stats on state level, right, like CDC for the whole state instead of the whole country, election results, state budget, stuff on weather would be interesting. Highway accidents, workplace safety inspections and accidents, personnel information about various state agencies, legislative voting record, bill tracking on legislative level, crime stats which I think was mentioned in both other categories, but you know, crime stats on a state level, good, because then you can do some compare and contrast. Pension fund and other financials there, pension payments. Illegal drug data. Welfare data, who does the state pay to pay out social worker payments. + +We barely scratched the surface. + +Yeah, give us like another day or so. + +I was going to say five minutes wasn't enough? + +[laughter] + +So the next exercise that we are going to do is to, on your tables you all should see some dot stickers, green and yellow, and you should each get three of each, so if anyone needs an extra, raise their hand, we can come around. But what we're going to do with those, so now you have to prioritize what you're going to put in your data store, because you have limited resources and limited people to get these datasets and clean them for you. So we have two ways that you're going to prioritize, the first way is with the green sticker. Which data would you consider to be most valuable to have on hand for the newsroom? So you're going to clean a dataset, so maybe what would a newsroom really want to have on hand during a breaking news event or during election coverage, so examples, use of force was one that has come up where, you know, a reporter may want to be able to check those records during a breaking news event, so it would be great to have those on hand, so there's a good example. And then the yellow is, what do you think is going to be the most marketable to an outside party? So this could be research, businesses, anybody like where would you place the highest value? So you get three stickers there, as well. + +And the stickers are not mutually exclusive. You can, for the same dataset, if you believe that it is both very valuable to a newsroom and for marketing purposes, just all to a third party, you can use both a green and a yellow sticker. So we'll give you another five minutes or so, feel free to get up and go over to the list and sticker the post-it notes in -- + +I have a question, is it in any category or just your category? + +Not necessarily one per category? Yeah, you just have three stickers. + +Yes, you can use your stickers however you'd like. +[group activity] + +As we're finishing up putting our stickers on our datasets, does anybody want to share with us which datasets they chose for which categories and why? + +Raise your hand and we'll come to you. + +I—well, my yellow stickers, I feel like I have more experience with, and I chose—I chose like the contracts and procurement at city and state levels. I do a lot of industries that want contracts and to learn about like what they should spend their resources on going after is very valuable to them. so I did that, and what was the second one I did? At the county level. No, wait, whatever. Those are the most important things, because I think the other one I did, everyone agreed with me. + +Anyone else want to share why they chose what they did? + +One of the ones I put a yellow on is restaurant inspections because I think that's one of the things that is not out there well enough and yet everybody would love to see it. Of course there's the one flaw that this data is not always super—it's got a lot of hiccups to it, but still the concept, I think people would buy it, so I think they'd spend money on it. + +Yeah, the green ones, I think of mine matched a lot of other folks like on the county level the school enrollment data because I think that has value to realtors and businesses you know, knowing where kids are. + +I thought that climate and weather data at the state level would be useful for companies that wanted to do sort of like broader forecasting for agriculture, things like that. + +Did anybody put a green and yellow stick or on the same dataset? + +Nobody? Really? That is interesting to me. + +I think that was more out of like a vague sense of like trying to spread things out. + +True. Yeah, when you only have six total stickers, you can't be blowing them all on one dataset, I suppose. + +I think inspections deserves both. + +Well, Amy Jo, why don't you say what the consensus was. + +So I grabbed the ones that had the most stickers and the one I found was property values and it's mostly yellow to one green. So I know we just kind of talked a little bit but in terms of the property values, because there's so much yellow there, if you put one of your yellow stickers here, can you tell us a bit of who would be interested in that data? Who would be the audience that you think would buy it? + +You can just shout it out. + +Zillow. + +Zillow? They're already getting it from somebody else. + +Well, the question would be what would be most valuable. What is most valuable. So it's like already proven. + +There's all kinds of people that want to aggregate and show you like—I mean even more house hunting for like an apartment or something, seeing the comps around the area for like how much an apartment would be or something, I don't know. + +So individuals might be interested in that data, as well? + +Yeah. + +Do you think that an individual might pay to download that? + +Yeah, maybe as part of a service or something. + +Depends on how much it costs. As a home buyer, you know, it's a moment where you're a little bit sensitive and you'd be willing willing to do it. I think there's maybe—I don't want to necessarily be necessarily cynical is if you can correlate if you have address data, correlate it to identity, then you can correlate it back to property value, I think there are a lot of interests there that would pay a lot of money for that. + +Throw out some examples? I was thinking maybe insurance? Might be interested in knowing how much your house is worth? Credit companies? Who else? + +I mean marketers in general could use that as a proxy for your overall economic status. + +I mean they already kind of do at a neighborhood level, but -- + +I mean this data is already available for free. I mean I own a house and the amount of stuff that I get in my mailbox that is only there because can got scraped off of property rolls is kind of staggering, and very varied in what people are actually trying to sell me. I think to make it something that has sort of market value, it's less about making the data available than about the format in which it is available. Making sort of like—if companies that want to use it are struggling to get data from the sort of official source and transform it into an API that's actually useful to them, then being the service that is that API could be valuable. + +Expanding on that, if we layered on census data and some other things to add some value to it that's not already in there, I think that's the only way that—just the value so I'm the one who put the green up there, and I—I've been thinking a lot about this data, because here in Minnesota, this data was under essentially lock and key for a long, long time, they charged a penny a parcel, which you're talking a thousand dollars for one county so we never got it. This past year somebody convinced all the counties to unlock it and now it's free. You download the whole twin cities in one swoop so we're starting to think, you know, what can we do with this and I think it's got a lot of newsroom value and probably more than the commercial right now, because the people who would use it commercially or pay for it are already doing it through they're just getting it directly. + +What about state contracts? A lot of yellow dots on that one, as well. Who would be the market or who do you think would buy state contracts if you offer that in a database or be interested in it. + +Companies that want to get state contracts. + +Or subcontracts with somebody who already has a state contract? + +[laughter] + +Yes. People who consult to help companies get subcontracts. + +Even businesses who want to contract out something, they want to see how much state pays. + +Market analysis? + +Yeah. + +There was specifically mentioned that welfare contracts might be of interest. Who would be interested in the welfare contracts, perhaps commercially? + +I think that was a green sticker thought that didn't win a green sticker race in the end. + +Would there be academics that might be interested in that dataset? + +I'm thinking like watchdog groups, there's a lot of—you know recently looking at how the Red Cross behaved in Haiti, and kind of, I think the last decade or so there's been a lot of consciousness about how groups are carrying out missions with money. + +The next two are all green. + +I know they are. So tell us the crime incident data, this is all green. Anyone want to kind of talk a little bit about how in a now room, why that might be of a high value to a newsroom? + +It's fascinating. It's a timeline page generator, it's about me. I can compare myself to my neighbors and be afraid or be less afraid. So it's both useful and fascinating, so I think a newsroom likes things like that 2002 so much of what we write about is crime, the stories that we write is crime, so having that data gives us a chance to put all that in context and give the readers the broader context rather than you know, somebody just killed their neighbor yesterday, you know, right? + +Several major stories in New York have emerged from analysis of arrest data of course in the last couple of years. I think it's become a pretty reliable source of actual investigative news. + +It's also a great way to measure how well you feel your local government is doing at one of the most basic things it's supposed to do. + +We have election data, which I think came from the state page, but I'm pretty sure there's interest in city, county, state, and we decided not to do national, but obviously national. However that one is all green. + +So what similar to what we just did with crime data, what do you think are the major reasons why it would be more valuable for a newsroom to have access to this dataset, versus perhaps some of the others? + +Because we have to pay for it now and we shouldn't. + +So true. + +But kind of like with crime, so much journalistic coverage is about political activity and the horse race and having access to that data allows you to sort of make analysis conjecture, you know, look for where things are changing or put that into—put that story in context. + +Are things like a requirement at this point? Like of the things that people and data come together, it's like, where is your up to the minute election coverage? More than like it's the best thing to have, it's kind of like you are forced to have it. + +What about city budget and contracts? We've got a good mix there, so where are the commercial audiences do you feel like for that, and what would be the primary news room interest? + +Well, the newsroom interest is just, you know, watching the power and making sure that nothing untoward is happening, that people aren't making deals with their—your brother-in-law, or that kind of thing. kickbacks or other undue relationships. + +Wait, you live in Chicago? + +Yeah. + +[laughter] + +What do you know about kickbacks, being from Chicago? + +Whose brother-in-law are you? + +What about the commercial aspects? Who do you think outside of the newsroom might be interested in that data? + +I would say I think in general with budgets, you know, in most cases those are public things, but but then commercial and news search scenarios, understanding what they mean is kind of a key thing. I do think from a business standpoint, anticipating, you know, new opportunities that contract with cities, but you know, if a budget line item significantly increased year after year, you know, you might want to start putting some resources into, say, like waste management, because you know that your city is going to spend more money on waste management. + +OK, so now that we have kind of done our exercise about what datasets are potentially out there for both newsrooms and for general audience and how we might prioritize or assign value to them, we have come up with three different topics that I know Amy Jo and I have, when we met to talk about this session, things that she and I both have either struggled with or discussed or just honestly don't have answers for, and you know, we wanted to open up a greater discussion for some of these, so we have three broad topics with some questions here. Liability is one. What liability concerns might come up? What if somebody downloads your data for free, or you sell them your clean data and you screwed up the cleaning and they reported on it or used it for something? Should you as the news organization and the seller of the data be liable? Privacy and redaction concerns, Amy Jo, you want to talk about that? + +Yeah, so this is the idea of you know, considering are you going to put all of your raw data up for download or are you going to hold some back? + +Under what situations might you do that? Home addresses for example? + +A lot of people would be commercially interested in getting a dataset, say campaign finance or something like that that have home addresses in it. Are you as a news organization comfortable in releasing that information and if you are, what would be the guidelines for that? So the idea here is when we break up into groups, we want you guys to kind of think through where some of these problems come and how you if you were a news organization might put some boundaries or guidelines around those decisions. + +And then our last question is to charge or not to charge. Obviously our session is called monetizing data, so clearly people see some value in it, but I know when my editors came to me at ProPublica saying that they wanted to start a data store, I was at first very wary that of. I understood the value of what we were doing and that we've spend a lot of time and a lot of man and woman hours cleaning these datasets, but I was like also open data is good, and we eventually came to kind of a compromise that I think worked out but we'll talk about that when we go back to our discussions but I'd love to hear other thoughts. You know, if you do have data that you want to sell, how do you decide to put a price tag on it? + +So do we want to -- + +Yeah, and I was just going to say, part of this exercise with a list of datasets and how we prioritize, think of those as you're talking at your table, so it kind of will ground you in some of the questions that you might have to ask. You can look at the data that you've already sort of said, oh, we're going to consider this, so if there are fields or things in the property databases that you think shouldn't be released, you can use those in how you think they inform your overall strategy. But we aren't really thinking about it per dataset, but you have to do some guidelines overall for how you're going to run your data store. Does that make sense? + +All right, so why don't we have this side of the room take the liability issue. The middle section take the privacy and redaction issue, and you guys over there take the to charge or not to charge, and we'll present thoughts here in the end. We'll give you about ten minutes or so to kind of discuss these. +[group activity] + +OK, we're going to come back together as a larger group. I'm going to pass the mic to each group. If the people in each smaller group wants to pick a speaker and kind of just tell us what you discussed and all the solutions to the problems that we've put up here that we can, you know, all take advantage of your smart and intelligent minds. So this group talked about liability issues. I'm going to give the mic to Joe. + +So I don't think there's any order to this, but, we talked about things like computational and editorial errors, like if you're aggregating data, and you mishandle, missing values or if you're doing sort of cleanup and maybe leads to normalization, if you're just manually doing stuff with the data to make it easier for people to use, and you just make errors that are problematic. We talk about the right to release data, maybe and some of the data you have you're' aallowed to release it in some places European Union different than America, for example. Of course, personally identifying information. Libel, I know for example republic cans have challenges for dollars for docs where they have the wrong data and whether or not they are right. Emergent errors, remind me what? Is that like the New York taxi thing? It's the idea that you might, by releasing your data release New York City taxi data was released without the data of the drivers but it was possible to sort of reverse engineer who was driving the cabs by linking cab drivers to Instagram photos and things like that. I think I got all the things, right? Yeah. + +Thanks. That actually dovetails great into privacy and redactions team. + +Our topic did dovetail a little bit with some of the liability issues, although I think what we discussed is there are sort of two categories, there are sort of legal concerns and then there's ethical and editorial decisionmaking that may, you know, you could—there are things that you can dough that are perfectly legal but that you might not want to do from an ethical or editorial standpoint. I think we discussed at the beginning, depending on where you get the information from to begin with, so if you're getting it from a public records request or a right to information request, there may be redactions already or there should be, in some cases things should have been redacted and are not so we discussed that a little bit and how you would handle that from an editorial standpoint. I think we discussed data that otherwise be individualized or pertain to specific people, perhaps redacting addresses and things like that, one of the important points that was raised is to just know your data and to know whether or not—how large the set was, I think if there is only two or three people in a specific area, then that data can be used to identify those people, even though on its face it doesn't, is that problematic, and knowing whether or not that's an issue and being sort of consistent about how you decide what information, private personal individual private information you sort of release. + +Thanks, and our cash money team? Who would like to -- + +Jump in if I miss something. I guess we—I'm not sure we came to any major conclusions, but we talked about a couple things that we all seem to agree that if you have data that's not easily available somewhere else and/or if you've added some value to it that really raises the ante in terms of whether you could charge for it or not, we also talked about the idea of having different prices for journalists versus nonjournallists, you know, trying to make money off the commercial people so you could give it away free to the others. We also kind of got into, you know, if you did want to go down this route, one of the problems you might encounter is that, OK, so let's say you have some data and somebody wants it and you say, oh, it's, you know, we're going to charge that company for it or whatever, one-off kind of deal, but then what if you want to do this on a regular basis and you want to market it and they need billing and marketing and do you have that kind of infrastructure set up and most of us probably do not. And then the kind of last thing we raised was, you know, we wondered could we add a data consulting piece on top of the selling it, that you offer consultation to people who are buying it as a way to maybe add a little more to the price or something. Did I miss anything? + +Does anyone from any of the tables have something they want to add to another group's topic or a question that they have about running a data store or using data that they would like the group to kind of discuss? + +With both liability and privacy and redactions, it seems like a lot of the anecdotes I heard in the summaries came from kind of processed and interpreted uses of data, and less from just I got this, I cleaned it, if someone else wants it, here. And like just wondering if people thought the liability or kind of, I don't know, I got in your face kind of consequences might be less in the just pass-through of unprocessed or cleaned data, rather than, you know, making a piece and putting it out there that has unintended consequences. + +So do you mean like how the data is actually used by a third party? + +Whether it applies the same for like say the taxis if you made the pretty taxi thing and people were like I know where he lives, versus just saying I cleaned up this taxi thing, if anyone wants it, you know, 200 bucks, do you think there's a liability or consequences are as bad in the second case? + +Anyone want to?. + +Thank you. About the monetization whether to charge or not, so different basis of providing the data, right, so can give the data, is it raw data, so as a service, if you ser of it, it adds some value, I don't know do you have an API with different end points with different pieces, maybe it adds a value to the service so you can charge for those. + +So in that case, what would be the questions or issues that you might have about how to structure that API or that licensing agreement? + +I mean depends upon how ites used like what kind of application you want to use it and also what difference upon the data is structured, right? So if you have a—housing data, you don't want to—it's millions of records, and you want to provide an easy way to get to a specific geographic boundary or something like that, so you structure the data accordingly, like state, county, city, and then you coordinate with these parameters and it gives you a subdataset for you to consume. That way you don't have to work on the huge dataset. I mean your client whoever uses the data may not have all the resources that you have to handle this huge dataset, so we are giving something in short little bits for them to consume. + +And to go with what Mary Jo had said about different prices for different consumers, that was one of the conclusions/compromises we came to with our data store. The idea of it really came out of a lot of commercial entities coming to ProPublica, and asking for access to more of our proprietary databases like dollars for docs, where it only exists because we made it. And so if you go to our data store, actually, there are no prices for commercial use. Instead, if you want to buy a news data commercially, you end up getting in contact with our president who works out a pricing structure, because—one of my main concerns was I don't want to make journalists pay for this data, you know, we are all journalists here, and also like I said before, open data, I want to make sure that everybody has access to this. So if we get FOIA data and we end up cleaning it, we will sell the clean data at a smaller price for journalists, a higher price for researchers, and then depending on the commercial usage, we work out a kind of price thing there, but then any of that data that isn't proprietary that we didn't make ourselves, that we have an actual raw dataset, we have it available for download and that I think actually has been our greatest success, because I don't really have updated numbers but I think as of last year, we had about upwards of 80,000 downloads of free data, which for me, and again, we ask for information, we're kind of curious who's using our data, but we don't require it and it's a lot of journalists, but it's a lot of other, you know, random researchers, commercial things, so my worries about kind of tamping down open data really were assuaged by seeing how great that was that we had so many free downloads. + +So pot point of charging, one of the first cases was a nursing home resource and one of the things I learned pretty quickly was that my newsroom was not prepared to be a data manager. Editors don't care. Like I mean you guys have clearly put a lot of energy into developing practice and a processer on it, but a lot of newsrooms just are not constituted right now to see the value and go to the kind of work it would take to be a legitimate value-added reseller of data, because it's usually not sexy. I mean it I think it can be done but I think right now there's a lot to learn to be good at it. + +And it is time consuming as kind of the point person for data store at ProPublica, and I mean it varies from week to week but I do have to spend at least an hour or two a week answering questions, if people have downloading our data, if they have questions on our data, you know, it's great to start a data store like this, but you also have to keep in mind, somebody is going to have to do the work and it is going to take time out of, you know, doing journalism certainly. + +So I work at the chronicle for higher education. We also sell some of our data, specifically the data that I've been working on most recently was sold, and so I many very interested to hear that obviously about ProPublica's selling of the data, but the way that it works for us is I work on the data, will make a data dictionary and have a record layout and I specifically ask that if any journalists wants to look at the data, has to come and talk to me and I will walk them through the data source and then we also have like our advertising and marketing folks are the person that handles it and she has a written email and how much it's going to cost and the explanation to also reach out to me if they have specific questions and we also have that pricing that way, so -- + +Right, yeah, the writing of the read me and data dictionaries takes a lot of time. + +Yeah and I do have one internally and also externally, so the formulas that I used I do make sure that's open to everyone but I also wonder like you guys' thoughts on how much transparency in those documents do you put? Like I give the exact column names that I used and the exact columns that I summed to do it and the exact queries that I ran to get that exact column. It's—I mean in some cases the documentation is really long and I really don't know if journalists are also reading this documentation and I wonder about that. + +Well, are people calling you with questions? + +Sometimes, but not a lot. + +Then your documentation is great. + +Yeah, that's a great question. Unfortunately we are out of time. That hour went by very quickly. But I loved our conversation. It was great. If you can -- + +Yeah, thank you all very much. We're going to have the photos of these, so we'll have the list and the priorities posted—we'll work with SRCCON to make sure if anybody wants to look through that list and how people prioritized and those will be available in addition to the transcript. And if you'd like to continue the conversation with either of us, we have our contact information on the etherpad that SRCCON has put out, so we love talking about data and data stores, so we're happy to continue the conversation. Thank you: + +[applause] + +[session ended] diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015NewsOverHTTPS.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015NewsOverHTTPS.md index 4ca9cf87..fce176d0 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015NewsOverHTTPS.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015NewsOverHTTPS.md @@ -1,529 +1,529 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/newsoverhttps/index.html ---- - -# Meeting The New York Times Challenge—Delivering the News Over HTTPS - -### Session Facilitator(s): Paul Schreiber, Mike Tigas - -### Day & Time: Thursday, 3-4:30pm - -### Room: Minnesota - -Welcome, everyone. Stand up. Hi, I'm Paul. - -And I'm Mike Tigas. - -And we're going to talk about delivering the those over https. And we're—there's a lot of links and acronyms we're going to give out. You don't have to scribble furious notes. And we're trying to give you a shorter URL so you don't have a horrible Google Docs URL. Sweet. - -So last November, the New York Times posted this on their blog, it said, if you're on a news site or any site at all, we'd like to issue a friendly challenge to you. Make a commitment to have your site fully on https by the end of 2015 and pledge your support with the hashtag, #https2015. So Mike works at ProPublica and I work at FiveThirtyEight. And we've been working hard to make our sites work with HTTPS. And I'm going to give a quick overview of what this means. What we want this to be is we want this to be a hands on session and we want to help you solve particular problems that you run into. So we're going to talk for about 15 minutes, talk through the problems that we've solved, talk about what is, and whatnots available and then we'll get you all involved in answering questions and solving problems together - -So part of the way the Internet works is your computer has to go to a website and actually ask for the page that it's looking for, right? And the way that websites and HTTP work, HTTP is the protocol that websites are served under. And your browser just sort of sends your request out in the clear and the response is sent back in the clear. So your service provider can just sit on the line and sort of look at what web pages you're requesting and all the data that you've sent out, and all the data that's sent back - -Like a roommate, or anybody that's in the coffeeshop that you are in - -With HTTPS, the requests look like that. They're encrypted so that only the website at the very end can, you know, see what you want—they're the only ones that can respond to your request and see what your request was to begin with. So normal HTTP website, you not only, does HTTPS get you encryption. But with a normal HTTP website, you click on, like, the address bar, you'll see something like this, where it tells you, "The identity of this website hasn't been verified and the connection is not encrypted." So this is like standard browsing the if you have an HTTP connection, there's varying levels. So the very main one is. FiveThirtyEight.com, you're definitely talking to FiveThirtyEight.com, that's what the first part says. HTTPS sort of helps to verify the identity of the website that you're talking to - -Making sure that there's nobody else pretending to be FiveThirtyEight and gives you fake stories - -And the other part is that it's encrypted with a cipher suite. Note here it says that no transparency is applied. And there's -- - -All kinds of details - -All kinds of details that can be attached to HTTPS. So if you go to a bank, for example, you might get the full organization name inside the address bar and that's because they paid for a certificate and they went through extra background checks. So not only do you know that this is stcu.org, but also the website is operated by this company and we've seen the paperwork. So these are called extended validation certificates - -So what do you want to do all this? There are four reasons, four benefits that you get from using HTTPS instead of HTTP. One is you get privacy for your readers. So they, right now, anyone on their network, or anyone in between, can know, not only the name of the site, but what specific page they're reading, and see all that content. - -And whether it's because you have sensitive information, or whether it's because you just belief in protecting people's privacy as a principle, HTTPS gets you that. The next thing is improved security. When I send you a web page, I'm not just sending you the content of the page; I'm sending you a whole bunch of other stuff. I'm sending you fonts, I'm sending you pictures, I'm sending you Javascript and any of those individual items can be replaced and sometimes, what people will do is they can use that to attack your own site. So they can replace the Javascript with some malicious Javascript, and then run a denial of service on your own server so that you can take your site down by running some sort of hack or something in the middle and HTTPS says that I'm going to make sure that the Javascript is actually coming from your server. And the other thing is it's good for SEO, Google wants to reward you for using HTTPS so they will boost your rankings in the search engines. And lastly, this is good for site performance. That's weird because I always thought HTTPS was slow but with HTTPS, and Chrome, and SPDY, you can get so much more done with one connection than before and Mike has a good example of how this helped him on a high-traffic day - -There was one day. I wish I had a screenshot to put in here but one article that ProPublica got on the front page of Reddit. And we only have one server and it's not the beefiest server. And so there's this protocol called SPDY that I think all modern browsers support and if you're using Nginx, you can get it for free if you just turn on a flag in your configuration. What this does it makes is so that the images on the page, and all the Javascript, and all the scripts that come from the same server sort of get thrown down the same pipe instead of your browser making different requests to different ports to the website and so we were able to handle pretty significant traffic on the website because the day that we had that article on Reddit, I made it so that everybody who was looking at that article was redirected to HTTPS and our website did not buckle under the load - -So we're going to—there's five things that we're going to cover. We're going to talk about setting up your server, and configuring it. We're going to talk about the content on the page and on the site. We're going to talk about how much this is going to be cost you, we're going to talk a little bit about performance is and then we're going to talk a little bit about some problems we ran into making our sites HTTPS and how we were able to solve them. First bit is configuration and part one of configuration is certificates. So the way HTTPS works is your server has a certificate that says, I really am ProPublica, I really am FiveThirtyEight, I'm really SRCCON. And you have to buy these. Someone has to really assert that you have ownership of that. And they cost money. You can buy them for a little amount of money. You can buy them for a a big amount of money. There's no advantage. They start at five bucks. A certificate there will work just fine. - -You don't have to spend $250 to get the same certificate. Another way of doing this, which is really neat is a tool called SSLmate and it's a command line tool and you install it if you have a Linux server and it will buy the cert for you, and you install it, and it will configure Apache, or Nginx and it's going to remember when the certificate is going to expire and it can get a new one every year for you. So it can handle this and automate it with your other system tools. They charge you about 15 bucks a year so it's still a pretty good deal. And lastly there's a project that the EFF, and other organizations have made and it's called Let's Encrypt. And it's available to everyone, not just people with newsrooms and sysadmins. People to manage this, but your person with a blog, or pictures of kittens or whatever you need, where you don't have to go through all this half. It's really interesting. I can't tell you how to do it step by step because it doesn't exist yet but this is going to make HTTPS this tool for a few people to a tool for everyone. So what about money? So I talked about this. I said they're about five bucks on the low end. Free in September, hopefully. And you can, the extended validation certificates, the thing with the green bar that Mike talked about, those cost more because a human has to go through a bunch of paperwork and they they can cost a hundred bucks, which if you're a big company like you're this bank, or you're Apple or you're the Washington Post, you can totally afford. And then the other important thing is, these certificates are only good for a year. You have to remember to renew them. If you don't renew them a big warning will pop up, this certificate's expired, do you really want to do this and you'll scare your readers. You want to set a counter or reminder in Google calendar or whatever to say, renew my certificate or else your angry boss will call and say, "Why isn't this site working? - -Raise your hand if you fucked that one up - -Yeah, so if I buy a certificate, you can buy four different types. Mike will talk about some of the different types of certificates that you can buy - -So the regular one is the one that I showed you where it's basically the domain name in the address bar is guaranteed to be the domain name of the server that you're talking to and the data is encrypted. It's sort of the base level of a certificate. There's SAN certificate, which is subject alternate name. It's just a way that you pay a certificate of authority and if you run a few brands but you run them all on the same web server you can just run one certificate and run all the domain names through it. And it will cost you the same as one certificate per name. But.. - -There's less stuff - -You know what...? - -There it is. Hey. Yeah. Sweet - -And yeah, there's wildcard certificates so you could have, like, all of your subdomains, an infinite number of subdomains have SSL and look okay to a browser. These cost usually a little bit more because I think the break-even point is five or more or something like that. - -And then SNI is just—what is that? That's just a way for multiple -- - -It's like virtual hosting when you have one IP address and you have a bunch of sites with different domains, and you don't want to give them all IP addresses because they don't normally need that. It used to be you were fine for HTTP and if you wanted to do HTTPS, you had to get new IP addresses but they fixed that and this thing's called server name indication. And it says, "Hey, I'm looking for this site. I'm looking for srccon.org, or kittens.io, or whatever." And there are a couple of really old browsers that don't support this. So if you need 100 percent compatibility, you cannot use this. But if you have a—if you are worried mostly about convenience then go ahead and use SNI. It's pretty safe for most people. - -So certificates are signed with, like, cryptographic algorithm that you know, it's basically proof that this certificate is legit and was purchased from an actual certificate authority and not, like, one that the Libyan government randomly made, right? - -Sweet. sha1 is sort of like the old hashing-out algorithm and it's effing easy to make. So a lot of browsers have been phasing out support for certificates that are generated with this. Usually you don't need to worry about it but if you're using a new version of Chrome, you might see a warning lock appearing and I think next year you'll start seeing that websites will look like they're insecure and give you the big red warning even if you have the valid certificate. So basically if you have SSL and you're renewing certificates, you might encounter this and you might just need to renew my way through the year when your SSL provider allows sha certificates - -So if you're making a certificate today, don't make a sha certificate. Again there are some weird exceptions when you have people with Windows XP P with service pack one, but they can't have service pack three. There are some very strange edge cases and that's mostly applicable with people in indicate or educational institutions where they have a userbase where they know the people with a strange thing. If you're using a website, you know, most of your readers are not going to have this problem. So if you have a sha1 signed certificate on your site today, you should replace it with a sha2. You don't have to pay for it, again, if you pay for it, they'll just reissue it - -Basically we talked about extended validation where inside the certificate is, like, a thing that says we've looked at this thing's paperwork and it's actually this company - -So the thing that we talked about, sha2, we talked about SNI, all these things, they all work with the new versions of all your browsers. If you go to buy a certificate, sometimes they'll say, this works with 99.9%, or 99.999% of browsers out there. Again, anything that's recent and modern will work with pretty much any of these certificates that you buy. This is not something that you need to worry about - -And I just want to jump in also. If you're, like, an organization that creates APIs that other people can ingest you should also, like, make sure you look at, like, what Java supports and what versions of Ruby supports, and just sort of make sure the people who use your APIs know that you're making these changes. Yeah - -And so, which is a good segue into our talk about cryptography and the server. So this is cryptography. It's messy, it's hard. People in cryptography have an saying that you should not write your own crypto. Because there are a ga zillion cipher suites and what changes as people find new vulnerabilities and say you should turn stuff off. So instead there are other ways to do this. There are great tools. If you have sslmate you can run the mate config command. Even if you don't use it to buy certificates, you can install it and generate stuff. The other thing is Mozilla has a configurer that not only does email configuration but any other kind of server that uses a certificate. It knows the denies between Apache 2.2 and 2.4 and things like that - -All these are in the document, in the link and we'll go through and show you this configuration generate and a few other things sort of after we're done - -So again, the links are all there for you. And you can—when you say HTTPS is on, it can mean four things: It can be enabled. So it's just optional for readers that want it, they get it, if they don't, they don't. You can say, it's on for default. So it's on for everybody. And so you are there, and then you get redirected to the HTTPS version. There's a header called HSTS which stands for hypertext strict transport security, which sends the browser, hey, this site is HTTPS. Don't get tricked into anything else. If you see it, ignore it. It's always HTTPS. And it forces, it prevents things from being hijacked or redirected to the non-secure version of your site and then lastly there's something called the preload list and modern browsers will have a list of sites, it's just a big list, it's a text file this long of thousands and thousands of websites that says, these are always HTTPS, even if the user types HTTP, ignore that and always go there. So once you're sure your site's working, you can submit it to this list list and that way you don't have to worry of someone accidentally going to the non-secure version of your site. So now, here is the fun part. We 'eff talked about the server and all that. Now you have to look at what's on your site and how that works - -This is usually like the roadblock when people are trying to set up HTTPS on their news site. They set up their server. Now it's listening on HTTPS, right? It's listening on that port. And you try to go to it and you get the yellow padlock warning - -Has anyone seen the yellow triangle? We get some hands. Everyone's seen the yellow triangle - -So this page is encrypted but it has some stuff like images that might not, you know, that were not sent encrypted. So somebody on your, eavesdropping on your connection or modifying data can change the way those look - -And that would be bad - -So you'll get two kinds of things that will happen. You can get things, your browser will generate a warning so if you get audio, or video, or pictures it's like ugh, I'll show you them anyway. But you should know that I can't authenticate it. Whereas other things like Javascript, or CSS, or websockets, or SHRs, they say, I can't trust that. So if you're on a HTTPS page and there's Javascript that tries to load HTTP, your browser will block it saying, "Not happening." So you know, for most news websites you're not just dealing with the stuff that you generated, right? One of the big problems with operating a news website and trying to move to SSL is we embed content from other sources all the time, right? We're not 100 percent in control of, like, where the stuff is, you know? But luckily all these organizations, all these, like, embedded content providers from DocumentCloud to YouTube, to whatever, all support HTTPS in their embeds. Unfortunately, if you have a New York Times video, and you embed it into your story or if you have a story from NPR and you try to embed it into your story and you're on a HTTPS version of your web page, these two providers don't support HTTPS in their embeds. So you'll see, like, a blank rectangle in the middle of the page where the video used to be embedded. So if you work at the Times or NPR, we would love for you to make this available to not just you, but your readers. It would be super awesome and we'll buy you a beer. That's great - -Comments. All the comment systems. Same thing. Ads. Odessa are usually one of the problems that news providers say, I can't switch to SSL because we run a lot of ads and they don't support it, but honestly, Google, DoubleClick actually do support SSL now. It's getting more and more nowadays, what it now? IEB? - -The IAB, in Internet advertising bureau. They wrote a blog post saying, you should all use HTTPS. Soon their own organization is telling them to do it. It's great - -So most ad platforms support it. Your code doesn't need to change at all normally. Most social widgets are the same way. So there are, like, very few excuses in terms of embedded content. All the analytics. All the A/B testing - -All the analytics stuff, all the A/B testing works already. All of these providers have it out of the box. If you use CDM, they use HTTPS. They sometimes ask for more money for it. But it totally works. Your fonts, if you have web fonts that you use, all the web font providers they all support HTTPS. Those totally work - -So as we said earlier, you know, you have to pay for certificates, obviously. And that ranges from, well, it—Let's Encrypt will come out in September, and then certificates will be free, and you can get it through them but normally they cost between five and several hundred dollars depending on what you're doing. and then there's the cost of infrastructure. We use Fastly for some of the content on ProPublica's website. And there's a several hundred dollar charge to set it up - -And 100 bucks a month - -To have an SSL certificate with them. So like yeah. Using any hosting provider sort of has some implications - -And you have to pay, you know, someone is configuring your server every now and then and that's a little bit of their time, and lastly you have journalists and when they're putting together stories you have to make sure that the images and the video and the audio they put together are available over HTTPS, or it will cost some money to train them and check all of that stuff - -So as I said before, the historic view of SSL is that it's slow because there's encryption. There's the sort of CPU time. So you're doing less than heavy math for every piece of content that goes through the site. In reality, it's actually not that bad because the connections are multiplexed with SPDY - -And computers are faster than they were years ago - -And the fact that we have SPDY and HTTP two. Means that even if you're doings fewer encryptions, you end up doing less server work - -So both of us have been working over the past six months or so to make our sites work over HTTPS. And we ran into some bumps. It didn't just all work on day one, or else we would have done this talk in January and so we talk about some problems that we ran into and how we solved them - -As we sort of like—as we sort of listed previously, like, it turns out that most of the providers that, you know, we have embedded content for most scripts. You know, they all support it. A lot of the problems are solvable, you know, from, like, configuration to -- - -Redoing - -To content - -A lot of times when this was set up, these were the non-HTTPS version but it got added when we were not looking. But sometimes it's just there. What happens if I have a provider and it doesn't have HTTPS. Placehold.it did it the same day - -Knight Lab. They just did it a month ago - -And Outbrain had a product called Visual Revenue. And one of the customers there, they found the right person at the company who agreed to it and five months later it's done. So even big corporate entities will do this if you ask them sometimes. So it's great. Mixed content is, this will typically take most of your time is going through and finding where you're getting these warnings and where you're getting these errors and tracking them down because as soon as you have an embed and an iframe inside another iframe, that's when the complexity comes in - -There's this tool called mixed-content that crawls your website and looks for links that are just HTTP. And it will generate a report of all the links that it's found. It's a little slow because it has to crawl your website. An alternative is, you can defeat sort of the yellow triangle warning with this head with upgraded secure requests. It's only supported in the newest version of Chrome right now, but Firefox, they're working on it and I think, like, Internet Explorer is working on doing it. Basically, what this does is it makes image tags and scripts within your page. If they're on the same domain name if I'm on Pro publica.org and I'm looking at it and there's also another image that's to propublic.org, it will just upgrade, and it will upgrade implicitly - -So if you have hundreds of old pages and you haven't had time to go through all of them, this helps - -This crazy header I think the only important parts are like the content security policy reform only and the part where it says HTTPS and the part where report says URI. This is a header that both Chrome and Safari support and if you as an user visit a website and you get a mixed content warning, your browser if it sees this, it will actually post a JSON data thing that says, here's the web page I'm on. Here's the resource that was blocked and here's the rule that it, here's the rule of this list that it didn't abide by - -So you can start collecting all these errors sort of proactively and not waiting for people to write to you saying, this video on this page isn't playing. You've already got that on your airlock and you can jump on and fix it. And this is super handy. Mike just told me about this this week - -Yup. So there's HTTPS everywhere browser extension that EFF makes. If you're in your browser, it will try to redirect you tot secure version of a website. If you're using Chrome, it also has these dev tools that tells you which things in the page were blocked by it, or redirected. So this is another way for you to go sort of into the web page and see what's being loaded securely - -And it's super handy because as we said, a lot of these scripts are hard to track down and this will go down and follow the links and tell you what's going on, which is really neat. If you use Akamais, and you end up with your host name and then if you tried to go to HTTPS://hostname. And the search result is really, a248.e.akamai.net. You can just stick the path the it end of it and most of the time that works. So if you haven't paid them for a certificate, you can use their certificate which is great. So these are some of the credits for some of the cool art that we have. Excellent. So what we'd love to do now is one, answer questions, and two, if anyone has problems that they're working on right now -- - -Who here is sort of in a position where they are either like the developer or the decision maker who's trying to make their website secure or, like, at least you've considered it or something like that? - -Let's go around the room and say who you are and what site you're working on and if you don't want to tell us that's okay, too - -I'm Joey of the Washington Post, we're about to go 100 percent HTTPS. And I don't want to say exact date but in the next few weeks - -Some day - -But the actual development build out of it. We're very close - -That's awesome. Next? - -My name is Luigi, and I work with Upworthy. We've actually been HTTPS since the beginning. But a lot of the problems that we have is around embedded content with third-party video providers that are not so popular. So Bright Cove and stuff like that. And also when we do ad pixels for clients, if they have or the own answer, that's not DoubleClick, we have to support it and that's just—and if it's not SSL, that's a problem. And we've also had problems with, kind of, our click stream, our custom click stream where we enabled HTTPS on it a couple of months couple months ago. That goes to our own custom data warehouse and when we enable SSL on it we actually dropped, like, 5% of our events and we can't figure out why, what browser was causing that and there was just a big headache of where that compatibility was, and so we had to go back to regular HTTP - -Okay - -I'm Mile, and I work at Twitter and a plug for SSL Labs so if you use that against your website, it will give you a grade and it will tell you what you're doing wrong and it can tell you what that thing is, and how to fix it - -Yeah, we have this list of tools including SSL Labs. Right there and they give you a letter grade and you can go from F to A+ - -And it changes over time, you could have been an A plus in January, and you're a B now - -You can check recently - -So one thing we did recently was dropped our C first. And we had a lot of things that were backed up for data. So we had a lot of people that were not C4 compliant and we had to deal with that and each individual handset. And one thing that we're doing now mixed content will be a new issue for sha256, so even if you're a sha1 not mixed content, you'll throw a mixed content if you're sha1, so looking at your embedded content and throwing sha256 - -Chrome's already doing that now - -One thing that's interesting is that you're such a huge provider that you have tens of millions of people calling your APIs and you probably don't know who everyone is. But for—but when you make that decision to turn up RC4, you have to, I guess put a lot more thought, or look at a lot more data than smaller people who are just like.. - -We actually looked at our logs and saw who was supported. And serving different search incomes. So you can just and sometimes we can just ship a cert chain. It could be just for an API purpose. When I was at Facebook we did the same thing. So we would just give a CRT that you would bind into your calls and say, that's the trusted chain and we just didn't have an way of changing or updating that chain when switching providers - -My name is Cory, I work for Reveal, The Center of Investigative Reporting. Our new site is there. Most of our problems were around getting our S3 buckets set up and mixed content and stuff like that. But most of it was taking dots out of your names - -Taking the what? - -Taking the periods out of our subdomains, in S3. But we're mostly there. Cool - -I'm Geoff from—the thing that's really driving it for us is our Twitter cards - -Thank you Twitter! - -Yeah, so Twitter forcing us to -- - -Mixed content talking about. So that's been a - -That's how I got the ESPN video to work. They didn't listen to me, but they totally listened to you. Who else? - -Scott, I work at Dow Jones, and marchago.com (phonetic). And we're just starting a new redesign of our home page now - -Is that sounds like a great opportunity - -So that's an opportunity where we can focus on the biggest part - -I'm for BBR Boston, Forrest. I just really wanted to lock down WordPress logins but where we struggle is NPR content - -Yeah, I work at the Marshall Project and we actually launched with TLS, we just submitted to TLS load and stuff like that which has great loads for information. But we have the same problem with NPR and other providers that don't support it. So I was interested to see the conversation on that - -Excellent anyone else working on this? One of the things that's really good about HTTPS is that it also helps you defeat some censorship systems like some countries, which use naive Turing software actually won't understand HTTPS. So I mean, only the domain name is set and there'll they would be filtering the content rather than the domain name, so your website will start to work in countries where it's normally censored. And that's something we've experienced where I work - -Penguin Daily News. And we've had HTTPS for admin purposes and we're trying to get the rest of the site compatible. The big thing for us is ads. And we use DFP which is great but none of the ad providers are HTTPS. They're all HTTP - -So when I showed them the Akamai trick, we were able to solve two-thirds of the problems that we ran into. But they're so used to typing in HTTPS and we were the only people that asked them for this. So I'm hoping they would switch soon. Google made an announcement that starting the 30th they'll make an announcement. It looks like Mike gets a good report card. He was showing us a minute ago - -I got it. I found it - -I was going to say, bring your report card back up. Did you show your mom? Is she happy? There you go. Mike got an A, everyone. Good job - -When are you turning on HSTS? - -It will be a little while. We're not only yet HTTPS only. We're not only just redirecting all traffic to HTTPS. But I'm about to make the switch, too - -And on the FiveThirtyEight side we're waiting on a few of the ad folks. As soon as they can guarantee it works, everything else is ready. Like, all of our own content is ready. Our database team made all the interactives work on HTTPS. As we've talked about, we've made all the analytics and all the A/B testing, all of that stuff works. So if you go to FiveThirtyEight.com right now with HTTPS you'll see the same things. Some of the ads might disappear. Yeah - -Is that something that you can control in DoubleClick, like, only serve these ads, not HTTPS - -I've never actually seen that side of the UI. So I don't know - -So it's technically... I don't know how it all works it's somewhat a black box but it's sometimes not really DoubleClick's fault. It's the person providing the ad and that's the last thing that we're scrubbing right now. Because we can't get a guarantee but it's just that there would be no Adobe Digital Additions. It's not going to make anything or cause alerts. But for us, it means that we can't make any revenue off of something that was playing, obviously. But we're figuring that out with them now - -Is there anybody here who's got a problem they're stuck on and they want to open up on their computer and help them with - -What kind of strategies are there for metroing a bunch of old content - -There's a bunch of things. One we talked about the request that's really handy. It's not 100 percent compatible yet but it saves you from going to pages and updating them. And the other is using a tool like mixed content scan and identifying where the problems are. We're just trying to do them one at a time. We wouldn't waste hours. But as you can either, find the tool to go through all of your content before or Mike had the reporting thing which is only in Chrome. Or you can—so you can again force the browser to try and create new things. But there isn't, like, a magic sort of wand that you can wave. I mean, if you have, if you're CMS and you write a script to look through your database and replace HTTP to HTTPS in all the places but there's no sort of you one way that works - -So here's an example of what you would get if you turned on that content security policy log. It tells you you know, the document URI. The article that the person's reading. And then what object was blocked. Unfortunately, Chrome won't send you the whole URI if the whole domain isn't the same, including the protocol. So it just actually tells me that I had something on this article that was linking to ProPublica.org. Safari will actually tell me that this article will link to this specific image so you can actually, it helps a lot in terms of, like, finding and replacing a thing that caused that warning - -One thing that you hear with this Amazon URL from S3, you can do the same kind of thing I did with Akamai, which is if you don't have a certificate, you can go to https://Amazon, and then slash - -And you use the path version - -You just use the path version of the URL and again, you can make your S3 stuff sort of just work and at some point, like sort of as a hack, you can do a string replace, like, in your CMS if you have this really large database that's not kind of manageable. So that's another example of where it's kind of—you've got it there - -You guys are forcing them with HTTPS. What we did was a stepover approach where we have relatives - -Protocol relatives - -Because we can't name it because we work with NPR but if you want to force it - -That's the same thing that we're doing - -ProPublica is currently actually in that phase where you can hit our website via HTTP - -Does anyone—or anyone want me to explain what a protocol route URL is? - -You can explain it. Let me see if I can find an example - -Normally URLs, you think of them as starting with http://, like this. But, you know, sometimes you put HTTPS, like Mike was showing you, you actually don't need this anymore. You can just start with the slash slash. And this has been supported for way longer than people have been using it. We've been using it for four years but browsers started using it a long time ago. But people just didn't use it. So if I'm on a HTTPS page, give me the HTTPS version. If I'm on a http page, give me the HTTP version. What this is most useful for is for iframes. Where if there's communication between the iframe and the parent, it has to match. That stops them from using. Normally it's best to use HTTPS URLs for everything so even if you have an HTTP page if you can load your Javascript over HTTPS, or some of your images over HTTPS, that's still a good thing to do because at least you're insuring nourishing the integrity of those requests even if the overall page itself isn't protected - -We're starting to switch over to that now - -Let me tell you, the protocolless URLs don't work with email clients so if you get lazy and you are, like, writing a template for something that you can just do that - -They also don't work locally, either - -Yeah, so if you have—that will not work—if you have a file URL if you're opening up a file in your browser and you see a file, colon, slash, slash, slash. It will try to do a file URL and that will totally not work and you can spend a few minutes chasing that one down - -Someone needs to make a browser extension to handle that - -All right. Any volunteers? You can maybe put that into Dev Tools or something. We have this document put together. And you'll just scroll through a little bit here. So we talk a little bit about what HTTP does. So HTTP is deprecated. Both Chrome and Mozilla said we're going to stop supporting this. We're going to start flagging this insecure in a couple years and we're going to—Mozilla said, we'll bring content for HTTPS sites only. And Brian Miller who works for the government he was one of the people who helped mandate HTTPS and wrote this nice little essay on it. This is where we talked about buying certificates from. These are different things that we talked about certificate types. SNI. Renewing, HSTS, we talked about the cryptographic hashes. We talked about how you can generate server configurations so you don't have to generate that by hand - -I'll show this one off. Slowly. Slowly. Conference Wi-Fi - -Yeah, make the font a little bit bigger. So you can pick all kinds of things. H, open, SSL - -So just enter in what you have. What server, what version of that do you have? What version of SSL do you have? And it will give you the appropriate, sort of, best practice, sort of most secure with what you have configuration. So if you have an ancient version of Apache, it will probably generate some.. - -If you click, and watch as you change... wow they even have the tag. Click the older modern things that you can see you can see that stuff change on you - -Yeah, this option. Old, modern, intermediate basically changes what browsers you need support on your website - -And old is insecure, so I wouldn't use it - -So you really shouldn't use it unless you're stacked with - -Isn't DH deprecated, too? - -DH is fine as long as you actually update the params. In particular it's not turning off the old one is it turning off SSL3? Under and it also keeps a bunch of ciphers that are still not—that are ultimately insecure. I think it's also recommending sha1 as well - -Yeah, so that's if you have, like, weird people with IE6 and stuff that you can't fix. So click on modern. There you go - -Right - -Yeah, so this is super handy. It generates all kinds of stuff. And the SSL make config will not only do your web servers but also your email clients and so on. So go back to the document real quick. Scroll. That's cool, too. You can see more stuff. We talk about content. We talk about so many things that work, things that don't work. Ads. This is the blog posts where Google commits to HTTPS. The IEB call to action. This is a good resource for people in your organization who need to be convinced. And if Google says you need to be able to don't it to do it, you can go back to your ad team and say, your ad overload suggestion, we should listen to them. - -And your font, A/B testing providers, protocol-relative URLs, we talk about passive versus active content so what'll get a warning, and what will get blocked. We talked about different CDN's. We mentioned the mixed content scan. HTTPS everywhere Chrome extension. They have what's called an Atlas which is a list of all providers and and what their HTTPS equivalents are under the hood. There's SSL Labs. There's a site called shaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com and this will tell you if it's using sha1 or sha2, which is super handy and we talked about the content security policy. Stuff about costs. Stuff about performance. Oh, someone found a typo, excellent. Thanks, Daniel. And Netflix decided—they told, like, you're going to be like, we're never going to move to HTTPS. It will cost way too much money. We are, like, the third of the Internet. Forget it. And then they sent someone smarter than me, and they rewrote part of the Linux kernel and it's like now, it workings. It's great. So now you don't not need to rewrite the Linux kernel because they did that for you. Awesome, yes! Huzzah! So you can go back to the—did you have sha open? I really want someone who's stuck to help you. So we can, you know, sit down at your table - -Does anybody have any particular pain points that you want us to talk about? - -If you have a page that you're stuck on we can look at it, whatever - -I think NPR's issue is the cost for CDN for audio assets. I don't have this problem, but—I don't have -- - -Images as well - -A lot of stuff the solution is to switch vendors - -I think that's part of it. I don't know how much—in doing researching, in doing research for this talk I wanted to see how much Akamai charges, from my understanding, they're way, way expensive and that's part of the problem. Fastly, it looks like they no longer charge a premium for that. CloudFlare doesn't charge a premium up front which is the Amazon one. It charges a third more. So even some of the big providers like CloudFlare and Fastly won't charge you extra. Or maybe they're locked into this long contract and they just can't. But I don't know, shop around. I think Fastly used to charge and in the past couple months it changed the policy - -If you do use Akamai, someone from Akamai, specifically said, HTTPS is a relatively cheap way to get good but not perfect privacy it's not that expensive for what you get out of it. So just forward them that - -So that is like someone in the business development side is—or whoever handles your contracts. But yeah, it's great to start working on this now because in a year or two when the browsers start flashing red warnings for just an HTTP site, you don't want to just fix it all the week before the next version of the Chrome autoupdate comes out and you also have angry people. So do this now. Start today. Start yesterday. And be ahead of the game - -And just try to reach out to—have you tried to reach out to NPR? - -I was emailing this guy from NPR a while ago. He asked some questions. He said you guys are great. I totally want to help you - -What's the name of the guy? - -His name is Jonathan Upsteen. He's not here or else I would try to buy him beers or whatever to fix it sooner. Or whatever he wants. But yeah, I'm a big fan. I'm not trying to bash them - -It sounds like everybody wants this - -We totally want -- - -If I can't facilitate that then I want to help - -So if they need—if they want anyone to come there and help them, I will type things into their computer, do whatever you need - -As far as we were told, it's strictly a money thing - -Just get on the pledge drive. Say hi, this is Peter Segal, we would like to—please give me money - -Rat out all your friends for not using SSL like they ratted out people who don't pledge, you have to rat out people who don't SSL. Somehow it's your job to get it on the radio - -Find someone on the news team to cover a story about HTTPS being deprecated and then forward that to, like, someone to the director, and then they're like our own site isn't compliant. We're going to be turned off by the Internet - -So this is not a concrete problem but I'm just interested more in the pace of how quickly the deprecation is actually going to happen - -Years - -So there seems to be some barriers still - -Yeah. I think the idea isn't that—they don't even have a timeframe for depricating HTTP - -But they say they're not—new features and browsers won't support HTTP - -That's Mozilla yeah. Newer things in HTML, newer things in CSS - -Not even ten - -What they have announced is the sha1 deprecation timeframe. So right now if you go into Chrome today, and there's a sha1 certificate and it expires this year, you will get a yellow warning triangle. If it expires in 2017 you get a red line through it. It doesn't give you the, "Whoa this site is insecure, are you sure you want to proceed?" Whatever. But it gives you a little red warning and the links to those timetables are in the document. Yeah - -So the bigger problem seems to be there's a certain number of people online who know how to buy a domain and point it at something but there's a very smaller portion of those people who know anything about certificates at all - -Yeah, and we were talking about this earlier, if you're just a person with a personal blog, it shouldn't really be up to you to learn about this. You should learn about your CMS and how do you post an made the gif of cats and not—you shouldn't be configuring servers. And so, having big providers—like, one of the things that WordPress did, right, if you have something.wordpress.com, you get HTTPS already. And you didn't have to make people opt into it. You didn't have to tell them what cipher suite you need. It just kind of worked. So that's the right thing to do. And that's also something that happens with Let's Encrypt where it's free, and so having this become sort of automatic and free, and built in, as opposed to having to opt in every site. That worked for the first million sites. It's not going to work for the next 98 million or whatever - -It seems like the automatic part is just as important as the free part - -Even if it's just a dollar. The automatic -- - -A lot of shared companies make absolutely a ton of money on certs, and there are a lot of it that are public companies. So a lot of this will happen in building pressure. Let's Encrypt comes in September will help. And another thing is, you mentioned how fast things were moving. There was one week a few weeks ago, where Reddit, the federal government, all announced HTTPS all at once. And a lot of those actually were influenced by each other - -Yeah - -Um.. - -And the same thing about the Wikipedia one. Their problem was not a technical problem. Like, they had the server stuff sorted and even the mixed content stuff sorted. So it was a community discussion of like, are we leaving anybody out? We're Wikipedia. We want to be super universal. Is there somebody with a phone in a developing country that we're going to block by doing this versus how much more privacy are we guaranteeing everyone else by doing this? So it took them a long time to sort that out - -For companies and services that support, like, user content like contents and whatever that have images in them, do you have to, like, proxy those, or just reject things that link out to non-https sites? - -Yeah, that's an interesting question. Like Gmail, one of the things is they proxy. Gmail images are all now transparently HTTPS. So the content—so that's something that I think the content provider should fix at their level. It doesn't make sense for any HTTPS site to do that. And I haven't talked to any folks from Discus. Or—is there anyone from Livefire? - -I wanted to comment on that. GitHub has this problem because GitHub is all SSL, TLS, and they have issues where people can upload their cat gifs or just send a link to the cat gifs and the cat gifs will show up on the issue. And so they have actually an image proxy called Camo. That's open source - -Can you spell that? - -CAMO. So it's github.com/atmos/camo. So they solve this for -- - -So we should add that - -So they solve this for images. It's a little server that proxies images. I've thought about if that can be done for Javascript for, like, ad servers - -Mm-hmm - -That seems weird and definitely weird for audio and video - -Well, it would seem more weird for Javascript because you don't know what's going on with Javascript. You don't want to run that off your domain because someone might come steal your cookies - -What terminator are you using for your SSL? - -So our SSL is all controlled by the these lovely folks here. Since we're WordPress VIP, I don't control that structure - -Pro pub can a's main website, www.propublica.org are all served via Fastly. So we're using them all that stuff - -As well as static content - -Everything on orbitz.com is all served by -- - -And the proxy thing is sort of an interesting strategy as sort of a last resort - -We tried to because we tried to turn ours on and tried to do NPR content and it ended up severely impacting performance. Yeah - -Does anything have to do with APIs? - -We talked a little bit about that earlier - -We've published a few APIs just based on news apps. We have these databases projects where you can query on the website and look at your stuff but you also allow access via an API that we built. And we've had people, sort of, ask us to—configure the H parameter up to something insanely high that doesn't allow old versions of Java to access our website and I had sort of a back and forth with someone who was using our API. So it's a very interesting space to be in - -When I wrote an API for turboboat, a few years ago, there wasn't even an on the to do it the another way. So that's the other thing. If you have your own APIs, make sure that they will support HTTPS and they should be—and if you're building new one, you should start today on HTTPS. You have authentication. You've got all kinds of stuff. And that seems like a really important thing to be doing securely - -So I can offer a resource for that possibly. If you are doing—if you need to migrate an API, it's a lot different than migrating a website. You don't want to let's say, do redirects or something like that. So when the federal government made this, like, big push one of the things that we did was wrote up a set of guidelines and specifically we couldn't find anywhere else on the Internet that documented how to do this well, and so we wrote one - -Excellent - -I can say the URL - -Yeah, Mike can you type it in? - -Sure - -So https.cio.gov/apis - -So the whole https.cio.gov site is helpful - -How many.. - -We'll add that to the document. Yeah. So any particular thing that you want to highlight from here? - -Um, the main one is probably, just the—it's not something that you should simply redirect depending on your API because you're very likely to just break everyone that's using it and you might have to announce deprecation like Twitter was doing. And in this document there's practices as well. But there are a lot of other finicky things that you might want to know - -And another thing about APIs that are different from web browsers are things like SNI support. Like I had Python and it didn't work, and I had to install some extra library for some reason and this was on a reason running 10.10. It was running new stuff. So you're more likely to get some weird client than you are—as an API content than as a reader - -And some servers don't support communication over TLS, so you can check if it doesn't and you can tell the end user about that. So this API call failed because it's your server's futility; not our fault - -Only 95% of self-hosted WordPress sites have open SSL on their server so that doesn't help when it comes no communication. And that 5% is still a big number. So.. - -Do you guys have the .org stats back on who the hosts are? So you can tell who—them to fucking hurry up - -There's a call within WordPress that you can test for HTTPS support and you can relay a message if it doesn't support it. So you can admin notice saying, I didn't turn on this feature I can't do it - -But that long tail is ultimately way longer than user customizations. Hopefully everyone here is on a server that has basic stuff along those lines - -And somebody is managing and updating it regularly. Like, the open SSL library seems to get updated every three weeks for some new patch. They find a new vulnerability and say, don't use IRC 4, don't use this stuff. So keeping up to date with whatever SSL allows, and Mozilla folks say, whoever the SSL main folks say this is the current recommendation, recommended configuration because as I said, if you run SSL Labs, and it gives you an A, it will not be that six months from now. There's going to be change - -And you might have to understand your certs across your organization. So like in Twitter weed periscope.tb. So if you didn't have an understanding of how many domains that you run, or how many fully qualified domains that you're running, this sha upgrade is a good way to figure out. And with each of those, with the outreach, you can figure out who has who can go now and who has to wait and because of that if you can't move now, the warnings will only trigger based on the expiration dates. You can always set a shorter expiration date. That can help you out. There's just kind of multiple ways to stage it and figure out where you want together - -So if you have sha1 in 2015, you can make it expire sooner. but in this case, it makes weird sense to have a shorter expiry window - -We're working on it - -See, every time I click on a link - -So the other thing that you can do and this came up in the conversation for us, is you can look in your log to see what percentage of this is going to fail if you do this, so the Windows XP P, and the—so if someone says this will break something, you can quantify what that something is - -So one of the things a lot security reasons, we developed to propietr9. You're readers, you probably have more than 1% on 99. But we were comfortable that that was a small enough number for us - -You're talking about design wise, right? Not TLS - -We did this for a totally different reason that we stopped. It wasn't part of our supported test cases. But having to locate your analytics on a regular basis matters. Android 2.3, if you have a bunch of Android 2.3, they have a bunch of problems with SNI, do they have sha support, or is it just SNI that's broken? So you have to check. There'll always be somebody using a weird browser. So you want to make a firm decision about what your decision is so you don't have to make an ad hoc decision every time. I have a posse to support more than an x number of users in the database - -What kind of benchmarks of timeline should you use to go from HTTPS only to enabling HSTS because it seems like the sort of thing that once you're there, you might as well do it but you also are kind of burning your boats - -Once you switch, you can't go back. Once you've crossed a certain threshold you can't go back - -You can but not easily - -Well, it depends on the age of your HSTS - -I guess I'm just sort of wondering like what could go wrong, like, once it sort of seems to be working - -Well, for instance Google started search results started coming in as HTTPS for a time. And there's no way for us to back that out currently - -That's a good thing to mention. Google Webmaster Central if you have an account there you need to make a separate site entry for the HTTPS version of your site. You do. It's weird. So you need one for www, one for without the www, one for HTTPS so you can end up with a bunch of entries all for the same site. Which I would argue is a bug. But that's just the way it is. And for now, so make sure when you do, and you might end up with a different, you know, unique set ID which you put through the verification process again. But when you're switching that, that's something else. You should write that down - -And set your canonicals to one scheme or another - -So the real tag is canonical - -Or the other HTTP. However you do it - -But getting back to your point. It's just like depricating support for anything. Even if the HTTPS is your default, the day you decide that you're doing HSTS is the day that you look at your analytics and you're sure that there's no reason that you would ever go back, right? It's sort of a moving target. It's probably a different target for everyone - -So even if you're forcing HTTPS, there are some subtle differences between that and HSTS that could cause things to break. Like, form that gets redirected somewhere else. Like, things could actually go wrong. These are really rare and you're not little to find them, nor is it, like, easy to identify a pattern of them. But what I would suggest turning on HSTS for ten minutes, max age. And then if you haven't had any problems for two or three, bump it you mean. And if you don't have problems for a few weeks, kick it up to a year. If you need to go back, set max age to zero. And even if you have this catastrophic issue, max age zero will kill it for any clients that kill it - -So any clients that caught the year - -Well, you're already forcing HTTPS anyway. So like the site ideally works over HTTPS so if you set it back to zero and then go to that site again then the header will immediately will dropped and then whatever they were trying to do will start working if we know - -And once you're on the preload list, that would be, that's even harder - -But at that point, you're already max age year and you're never going back - -That's an accident. So I really like Andrew's point by testing it get you gradually increasing the max age, we should write that down. What was the other thing? The webmaster central thing. Had - -The other thing thing too about preloading is that it has to include all subdomains and a lot of people might not think about that especially if you have a random subdomain that's a c name to some other service like a follow up, or something that you don't control and you forget that you have, like, 20 subdomains that your business department has added over the years. They all have to be HTTPS in order for Chrome to put it in the preload list - -So in that header, there's an include subdomain option and preload requires that flag - -And that has to be admitted from the apex, not www - -The other thing about search and this is—I didn't even write down but someone mentioned that they had multiple dots in the Amazon bin. So if you have wildcard it will go to *.FiveThirtyEight.com. So www.projects, whatever. But if you have something like beta.projects, it would not work. You have to get a second certificate of a star dot beta. So if you have multiple levels of subdomains...—it might not work for you - -S3.amazon - -There we go. So there. Sweet. Because we have a bucket called cdn.pro pub can a.net and the problem is there you only have a single wildcard, so CDN, Amazon.com so an alternative is to use the path name version. So I'm going to do s3.amazonaws.com. And I'm blanking. That's not working for some reason. What did I do? I don't know - -Anyway. Yeah - -You're writing to some directory - -I think it's the ups - -What's the workflow for generating a self-signed cert for a local developer? - -You use the OpenSSL command line tool. Does Erik have stuff on that material? - -He should - -So there's—so one of the things to watch out for is a lot of the tutorials are super old and if you have a super old tutorial and a super old version of SSL, you'll get a sha1 cert, and you don't want that. If you have a Mac, you can drag yourself into a keychain. There's probably a Windows equivalent but I don't know what that is. They generally don't take self-cert because then your browser will start treating those as valid - -That was the camo thing - -That's the animated under the sea thing. But yeah. Okay. So... that sounds like the majority of the questions. We'll stick around and answer more questions. And if there are people who weren't in this room and want to ask, like, flag either of any time throughout the rest of the conference and I'm happy to sit down in front of a computer and answer questions - -We're both very reachable on the Internet - -Especially talk about this, if this helps with a news website, go to HTTPS even if it's a Sunday afternoon I'll totally talk about work. Okay? - -Cool - -Thanks, everybody. +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/newsoverhttps/index.html +--- + +# Meeting The New York Times Challenge—Delivering the News Over HTTPS + +### Session Facilitator(s): Paul Schreiber, Mike Tigas + +### Day & Time: Thursday, 3-4:30pm + +### Room: Minnesota + +Welcome, everyone. Stand up. Hi, I'm Paul. + +And I'm Mike Tigas. + +And we're going to talk about delivering the those over https. And we're—there's a lot of links and acronyms we're going to give out. You don't have to scribble furious notes. And we're trying to give you a shorter URL so you don't have a horrible Google Docs URL. Sweet. + +So last November, the New York Times posted this on their blog, it said, if you're on a news site or any site at all, we'd like to issue a friendly challenge to you. Make a commitment to have your site fully on https by the end of 2015 and pledge your support with the hashtag, #https2015. So Mike works at ProPublica and I work at FiveThirtyEight. And we've been working hard to make our sites work with HTTPS. And I'm going to give a quick overview of what this means. What we want this to be is we want this to be a hands on session and we want to help you solve particular problems that you run into. So we're going to talk for about 15 minutes, talk through the problems that we've solved, talk about what is, and whatnots available and then we'll get you all involved in answering questions and solving problems together + +So part of the way the Internet works is your computer has to go to a website and actually ask for the page that it's looking for, right? And the way that websites and HTTP work, HTTP is the protocol that websites are served under. And your browser just sort of sends your request out in the clear and the response is sent back in the clear. So your service provider can just sit on the line and sort of look at what web pages you're requesting and all the data that you've sent out, and all the data that's sent back + +Like a roommate, or anybody that's in the coffeeshop that you are in + +With HTTPS, the requests look like that. They're encrypted so that only the website at the very end can, you know, see what you want—they're the only ones that can respond to your request and see what your request was to begin with. So normal HTTP website, you not only, does HTTPS get you encryption. But with a normal HTTP website, you click on, like, the address bar, you'll see something like this, where it tells you, "The identity of this website hasn't been verified and the connection is not encrypted." So this is like standard browsing the if you have an HTTP connection, there's varying levels. So the very main one is. FiveThirtyEight.com, you're definitely talking to FiveThirtyEight.com, that's what the first part says. HTTPS sort of helps to verify the identity of the website that you're talking to + +Making sure that there's nobody else pretending to be FiveThirtyEight and gives you fake stories + +And the other part is that it's encrypted with a cipher suite. Note here it says that no transparency is applied. And there's -- + +All kinds of details + +All kinds of details that can be attached to HTTPS. So if you go to a bank, for example, you might get the full organization name inside the address bar and that's because they paid for a certificate and they went through extra background checks. So not only do you know that this is stcu.org, but also the website is operated by this company and we've seen the paperwork. So these are called extended validation certificates + +So what do you want to do all this? There are four reasons, four benefits that you get from using HTTPS instead of HTTP. One is you get privacy for your readers. So they, right now, anyone on their network, or anyone in between, can know, not only the name of the site, but what specific page they're reading, and see all that content. + +And whether it's because you have sensitive information, or whether it's because you just belief in protecting people's privacy as a principle, HTTPS gets you that. The next thing is improved security. When I send you a web page, I'm not just sending you the content of the page; I'm sending you a whole bunch of other stuff. I'm sending you fonts, I'm sending you pictures, I'm sending you Javascript and any of those individual items can be replaced and sometimes, what people will do is they can use that to attack your own site. So they can replace the Javascript with some malicious Javascript, and then run a denial of service on your own server so that you can take your site down by running some sort of hack or something in the middle and HTTPS says that I'm going to make sure that the Javascript is actually coming from your server. And the other thing is it's good for SEO, Google wants to reward you for using HTTPS so they will boost your rankings in the search engines. And lastly, this is good for site performance. That's weird because I always thought HTTPS was slow but with HTTPS, and Chrome, and SPDY, you can get so much more done with one connection than before and Mike has a good example of how this helped him on a high-traffic day + +There was one day. I wish I had a screenshot to put in here but one article that ProPublica got on the front page of Reddit. And we only have one server and it's not the beefiest server. And so there's this protocol called SPDY that I think all modern browsers support and if you're using Nginx, you can get it for free if you just turn on a flag in your configuration. What this does it makes is so that the images on the page, and all the Javascript, and all the scripts that come from the same server sort of get thrown down the same pipe instead of your browser making different requests to different ports to the website and so we were able to handle pretty significant traffic on the website because the day that we had that article on Reddit, I made it so that everybody who was looking at that article was redirected to HTTPS and our website did not buckle under the load + +So we're going to—there's five things that we're going to cover. We're going to talk about setting up your server, and configuring it. We're going to talk about the content on the page and on the site. We're going to talk about how much this is going to be cost you, we're going to talk a little bit about performance is and then we're going to talk a little bit about some problems we ran into making our sites HTTPS and how we were able to solve them. First bit is configuration and part one of configuration is certificates. So the way HTTPS works is your server has a certificate that says, I really am ProPublica, I really am FiveThirtyEight, I'm really SRCCON. And you have to buy these. Someone has to really assert that you have ownership of that. And they cost money. You can buy them for a little amount of money. You can buy them for a a big amount of money. There's no advantage. They start at five bucks. A certificate there will work just fine. + +You don't have to spend $250 to get the same certificate. Another way of doing this, which is really neat is a tool called SSLmate and it's a command line tool and you install it if you have a Linux server and it will buy the cert for you, and you install it, and it will configure Apache, or Nginx and it's going to remember when the certificate is going to expire and it can get a new one every year for you. So it can handle this and automate it with your other system tools. They charge you about 15 bucks a year so it's still a pretty good deal. And lastly there's a project that the EFF, and other organizations have made and it's called Let's Encrypt. And it's available to everyone, not just people with newsrooms and sysadmins. People to manage this, but your person with a blog, or pictures of kittens or whatever you need, where you don't have to go through all this half. It's really interesting. I can't tell you how to do it step by step because it doesn't exist yet but this is going to make HTTPS this tool for a few people to a tool for everyone. So what about money? So I talked about this. I said they're about five bucks on the low end. Free in September, hopefully. And you can, the extended validation certificates, the thing with the green bar that Mike talked about, those cost more because a human has to go through a bunch of paperwork and they they can cost a hundred bucks, which if you're a big company like you're this bank, or you're Apple or you're the Washington Post, you can totally afford. And then the other important thing is, these certificates are only good for a year. You have to remember to renew them. If you don't renew them a big warning will pop up, this certificate's expired, do you really want to do this and you'll scare your readers. You want to set a counter or reminder in Google calendar or whatever to say, renew my certificate or else your angry boss will call and say, "Why isn't this site working? + +Raise your hand if you fucked that one up + +Yeah, so if I buy a certificate, you can buy four different types. Mike will talk about some of the different types of certificates that you can buy + +So the regular one is the one that I showed you where it's basically the domain name in the address bar is guaranteed to be the domain name of the server that you're talking to and the data is encrypted. It's sort of the base level of a certificate. There's SAN certificate, which is subject alternate name. It's just a way that you pay a certificate of authority and if you run a few brands but you run them all on the same web server you can just run one certificate and run all the domain names through it. And it will cost you the same as one certificate per name. But.. + +There's less stuff + +You know what...? + +There it is. Hey. Yeah. Sweet + +And yeah, there's wildcard certificates so you could have, like, all of your subdomains, an infinite number of subdomains have SSL and look okay to a browser. These cost usually a little bit more because I think the break-even point is five or more or something like that. + +And then SNI is just—what is that? That's just a way for multiple -- + +It's like virtual hosting when you have one IP address and you have a bunch of sites with different domains, and you don't want to give them all IP addresses because they don't normally need that. It used to be you were fine for HTTP and if you wanted to do HTTPS, you had to get new IP addresses but they fixed that and this thing's called server name indication. And it says, "Hey, I'm looking for this site. I'm looking for srccon.org, or kittens.io, or whatever." And there are a couple of really old browsers that don't support this. So if you need 100 percent compatibility, you cannot use this. But if you have a—if you are worried mostly about convenience then go ahead and use SNI. It's pretty safe for most people. + +So certificates are signed with, like, cryptographic algorithm that you know, it's basically proof that this certificate is legit and was purchased from an actual certificate authority and not, like, one that the Libyan government randomly made, right? + +Sweet. sha1 is sort of like the old hashing-out algorithm and it's effing easy to make. So a lot of browsers have been phasing out support for certificates that are generated with this. Usually you don't need to worry about it but if you're using a new version of Chrome, you might see a warning lock appearing and I think next year you'll start seeing that websites will look like they're insecure and give you the big red warning even if you have the valid certificate. So basically if you have SSL and you're renewing certificates, you might encounter this and you might just need to renew my way through the year when your SSL provider allows sha certificates + +So if you're making a certificate today, don't make a sha certificate. Again there are some weird exceptions when you have people with Windows XP P with service pack one, but they can't have service pack three. There are some very strange edge cases and that's mostly applicable with people in indicate or educational institutions where they have a userbase where they know the people with a strange thing. If you're using a website, you know, most of your readers are not going to have this problem. So if you have a sha1 signed certificate on your site today, you should replace it with a sha2. You don't have to pay for it, again, if you pay for it, they'll just reissue it + +Basically we talked about extended validation where inside the certificate is, like, a thing that says we've looked at this thing's paperwork and it's actually this company + +So the thing that we talked about, sha2, we talked about SNI, all these things, they all work with the new versions of all your browsers. If you go to buy a certificate, sometimes they'll say, this works with 99.9%, or 99.999% of browsers out there. Again, anything that's recent and modern will work with pretty much any of these certificates that you buy. This is not something that you need to worry about + +And I just want to jump in also. If you're, like, an organization that creates APIs that other people can ingest you should also, like, make sure you look at, like, what Java supports and what versions of Ruby supports, and just sort of make sure the people who use your APIs know that you're making these changes. Yeah + +And so, which is a good segue into our talk about cryptography and the server. So this is cryptography. It's messy, it's hard. People in cryptography have an saying that you should not write your own crypto. Because there are a ga zillion cipher suites and what changes as people find new vulnerabilities and say you should turn stuff off. So instead there are other ways to do this. There are great tools. If you have sslmate you can run the mate config command. Even if you don't use it to buy certificates, you can install it and generate stuff. The other thing is Mozilla has a configurer that not only does email configuration but any other kind of server that uses a certificate. It knows the denies between Apache 2.2 and 2.4 and things like that + +All these are in the document, in the link and we'll go through and show you this configuration generate and a few other things sort of after we're done + +So again, the links are all there for you. And you can—when you say HTTPS is on, it can mean four things: It can be enabled. So it's just optional for readers that want it, they get it, if they don't, they don't. You can say, it's on for default. So it's on for everybody. And so you are there, and then you get redirected to the HTTPS version. There's a header called HSTS which stands for hypertext strict transport security, which sends the browser, hey, this site is HTTPS. Don't get tricked into anything else. If you see it, ignore it. It's always HTTPS. And it forces, it prevents things from being hijacked or redirected to the non-secure version of your site and then lastly there's something called the preload list and modern browsers will have a list of sites, it's just a big list, it's a text file this long of thousands and thousands of websites that says, these are always HTTPS, even if the user types HTTP, ignore that and always go there. So once you're sure your site's working, you can submit it to this list list and that way you don't have to worry of someone accidentally going to the non-secure version of your site. So now, here is the fun part. We 'eff talked about the server and all that. Now you have to look at what's on your site and how that works + +This is usually like the roadblock when people are trying to set up HTTPS on their news site. They set up their server. Now it's listening on HTTPS, right? It's listening on that port. And you try to go to it and you get the yellow padlock warning + +Has anyone seen the yellow triangle? We get some hands. Everyone's seen the yellow triangle + +So this page is encrypted but it has some stuff like images that might not, you know, that were not sent encrypted. So somebody on your, eavesdropping on your connection or modifying data can change the way those look + +And that would be bad + +So you'll get two kinds of things that will happen. You can get things, your browser will generate a warning so if you get audio, or video, or pictures it's like ugh, I'll show you them anyway. But you should know that I can't authenticate it. Whereas other things like Javascript, or CSS, or websockets, or SHRs, they say, I can't trust that. So if you're on a HTTPS page and there's Javascript that tries to load HTTP, your browser will block it saying, "Not happening." So you know, for most news websites you're not just dealing with the stuff that you generated, right? One of the big problems with operating a news website and trying to move to SSL is we embed content from other sources all the time, right? We're not 100 percent in control of, like, where the stuff is, you know? But luckily all these organizations, all these, like, embedded content providers from DocumentCloud to YouTube, to whatever, all support HTTPS in their embeds. Unfortunately, if you have a New York Times video, and you embed it into your story or if you have a story from NPR and you try to embed it into your story and you're on a HTTPS version of your web page, these two providers don't support HTTPS in their embeds. So you'll see, like, a blank rectangle in the middle of the page where the video used to be embedded. So if you work at the Times or NPR, we would love for you to make this available to not just you, but your readers. It would be super awesome and we'll buy you a beer. That's great + +Comments. All the comment systems. Same thing. Ads. Odessa are usually one of the problems that news providers say, I can't switch to SSL because we run a lot of ads and they don't support it, but honestly, Google, DoubleClick actually do support SSL now. It's getting more and more nowadays, what it now? IEB? + +The IAB, in Internet advertising bureau. They wrote a blog post saying, you should all use HTTPS. Soon their own organization is telling them to do it. It's great + +So most ad platforms support it. Your code doesn't need to change at all normally. Most social widgets are the same way. So there are, like, very few excuses in terms of embedded content. All the analytics. All the A/B testing + +All the analytics stuff, all the A/B testing works already. All of these providers have it out of the box. If you use CDM, they use HTTPS. They sometimes ask for more money for it. But it totally works. Your fonts, if you have web fonts that you use, all the web font providers they all support HTTPS. Those totally work + +So as we said earlier, you know, you have to pay for certificates, obviously. And that ranges from, well, it—Let's Encrypt will come out in September, and then certificates will be free, and you can get it through them but normally they cost between five and several hundred dollars depending on what you're doing. and then there's the cost of infrastructure. We use Fastly for some of the content on ProPublica's website. And there's a several hundred dollar charge to set it up + +And 100 bucks a month + +To have an SSL certificate with them. So like yeah. Using any hosting provider sort of has some implications + +And you have to pay, you know, someone is configuring your server every now and then and that's a little bit of their time, and lastly you have journalists and when they're putting together stories you have to make sure that the images and the video and the audio they put together are available over HTTPS, or it will cost some money to train them and check all of that stuff + +So as I said before, the historic view of SSL is that it's slow because there's encryption. There's the sort of CPU time. So you're doing less than heavy math for every piece of content that goes through the site. In reality, it's actually not that bad because the connections are multiplexed with SPDY + +And computers are faster than they were years ago + +And the fact that we have SPDY and HTTP two. Means that even if you're doings fewer encryptions, you end up doing less server work + +So both of us have been working over the past six months or so to make our sites work over HTTPS. And we ran into some bumps. It didn't just all work on day one, or else we would have done this talk in January and so we talk about some problems that we ran into and how we solved them + +As we sort of like—as we sort of listed previously, like, it turns out that most of the providers that, you know, we have embedded content for most scripts. You know, they all support it. A lot of the problems are solvable, you know, from, like, configuration to -- + +Redoing + +To content + +A lot of times when this was set up, these were the non-HTTPS version but it got added when we were not looking. But sometimes it's just there. What happens if I have a provider and it doesn't have HTTPS. Placehold.it did it the same day + +Knight Lab. They just did it a month ago + +And Outbrain had a product called Visual Revenue. And one of the customers there, they found the right person at the company who agreed to it and five months later it's done. So even big corporate entities will do this if you ask them sometimes. So it's great. Mixed content is, this will typically take most of your time is going through and finding where you're getting these warnings and where you're getting these errors and tracking them down because as soon as you have an embed and an iframe inside another iframe, that's when the complexity comes in + +There's this tool called mixed-content that crawls your website and looks for links that are just HTTP. And it will generate a report of all the links that it's found. It's a little slow because it has to crawl your website. An alternative is, you can defeat sort of the yellow triangle warning with this head with upgraded secure requests. It's only supported in the newest version of Chrome right now, but Firefox, they're working on it and I think, like, Internet Explorer is working on doing it. Basically, what this does is it makes image tags and scripts within your page. If they're on the same domain name if I'm on Pro publica.org and I'm looking at it and there's also another image that's to propublic.org, it will just upgrade, and it will upgrade implicitly + +So if you have hundreds of old pages and you haven't had time to go through all of them, this helps + +This crazy header I think the only important parts are like the content security policy reform only and the part where it says HTTPS and the part where report says URI. This is a header that both Chrome and Safari support and if you as an user visit a website and you get a mixed content warning, your browser if it sees this, it will actually post a JSON data thing that says, here's the web page I'm on. Here's the resource that was blocked and here's the rule that it, here's the rule of this list that it didn't abide by + +So you can start collecting all these errors sort of proactively and not waiting for people to write to you saying, this video on this page isn't playing. You've already got that on your airlock and you can jump on and fix it. And this is super handy. Mike just told me about this this week + +Yup. So there's HTTPS everywhere browser extension that EFF makes. If you're in your browser, it will try to redirect you tot secure version of a website. If you're using Chrome, it also has these dev tools that tells you which things in the page were blocked by it, or redirected. So this is another way for you to go sort of into the web page and see what's being loaded securely + +And it's super handy because as we said, a lot of these scripts are hard to track down and this will go down and follow the links and tell you what's going on, which is really neat. If you use Akamais, and you end up with your host name and then if you tried to go to HTTPS://hostname. And the search result is really, a248.e.akamai.net. You can just stick the path the it end of it and most of the time that works. So if you haven't paid them for a certificate, you can use their certificate which is great. So these are some of the credits for some of the cool art that we have. Excellent. So what we'd love to do now is one, answer questions, and two, if anyone has problems that they're working on right now -- + +Who here is sort of in a position where they are either like the developer or the decision maker who's trying to make their website secure or, like, at least you've considered it or something like that? + +Let's go around the room and say who you are and what site you're working on and if you don't want to tell us that's okay, too + +I'm Joey of the Washington Post, we're about to go 100 percent HTTPS. And I don't want to say exact date but in the next few weeks + +Some day + +But the actual development build out of it. We're very close + +That's awesome. Next? + +My name is Luigi, and I work with Upworthy. We've actually been HTTPS since the beginning. But a lot of the problems that we have is around embedded content with third-party video providers that are not so popular. So Bright Cove and stuff like that. And also when we do ad pixels for clients, if they have or the own answer, that's not DoubleClick, we have to support it and that's just—and if it's not SSL, that's a problem. And we've also had problems with, kind of, our click stream, our custom click stream where we enabled HTTPS on it a couple of months couple months ago. That goes to our own custom data warehouse and when we enable SSL on it we actually dropped, like, 5% of our events and we can't figure out why, what browser was causing that and there was just a big headache of where that compatibility was, and so we had to go back to regular HTTP + +Okay + +I'm Mile, and I work at Twitter and a plug for SSL Labs so if you use that against your website, it will give you a grade and it will tell you what you're doing wrong and it can tell you what that thing is, and how to fix it + +Yeah, we have this list of tools including SSL Labs. Right there and they give you a letter grade and you can go from F to A+ + +And it changes over time, you could have been an A plus in January, and you're a B now + +You can check recently + +So one thing we did recently was dropped our C first. And we had a lot of things that were backed up for data. So we had a lot of people that were not C4 compliant and we had to deal with that and each individual handset. And one thing that we're doing now mixed content will be a new issue for sha256, so even if you're a sha1 not mixed content, you'll throw a mixed content if you're sha1, so looking at your embedded content and throwing sha256 + +Chrome's already doing that now + +One thing that's interesting is that you're such a huge provider that you have tens of millions of people calling your APIs and you probably don't know who everyone is. But for—but when you make that decision to turn up RC4, you have to, I guess put a lot more thought, or look at a lot more data than smaller people who are just like.. + +We actually looked at our logs and saw who was supported. And serving different search incomes. So you can just and sometimes we can just ship a cert chain. It could be just for an API purpose. When I was at Facebook we did the same thing. So we would just give a CRT that you would bind into your calls and say, that's the trusted chain and we just didn't have an way of changing or updating that chain when switching providers + +My name is Cory, I work for Reveal, The Center of Investigative Reporting. Our new site is there. Most of our problems were around getting our S3 buckets set up and mixed content and stuff like that. But most of it was taking dots out of your names + +Taking the what? + +Taking the periods out of our subdomains, in S3. But we're mostly there. Cool + +I'm Geoff from—the thing that's really driving it for us is our Twitter cards + +Thank you Twitter! + +Yeah, so Twitter forcing us to -- + +Mixed content talking about. So that's been a + +That's how I got the ESPN video to work. They didn't listen to me, but they totally listened to you. Who else? + +Scott, I work at Dow Jones, and marchago.com (phonetic). And we're just starting a new redesign of our home page now + +Is that sounds like a great opportunity + +So that's an opportunity where we can focus on the biggest part + +I'm for BBR Boston, Forrest. I just really wanted to lock down WordPress logins but where we struggle is NPR content + +Yeah, I work at the Marshall Project and we actually launched with TLS, we just submitted to TLS load and stuff like that which has great loads for information. But we have the same problem with NPR and other providers that don't support it. So I was interested to see the conversation on that + +Excellent anyone else working on this? One of the things that's really good about HTTPS is that it also helps you defeat some censorship systems like some countries, which use naive Turing software actually won't understand HTTPS. So I mean, only the domain name is set and there'll they would be filtering the content rather than the domain name, so your website will start to work in countries where it's normally censored. And that's something we've experienced where I work + +Penguin Daily News. And we've had HTTPS for admin purposes and we're trying to get the rest of the site compatible. The big thing for us is ads. And we use DFP which is great but none of the ad providers are HTTPS. They're all HTTP + +So when I showed them the Akamai trick, we were able to solve two-thirds of the problems that we ran into. But they're so used to typing in HTTPS and we were the only people that asked them for this. So I'm hoping they would switch soon. Google made an announcement that starting the 30th they'll make an announcement. It looks like Mike gets a good report card. He was showing us a minute ago + +I got it. I found it + +I was going to say, bring your report card back up. Did you show your mom? Is she happy? There you go. Mike got an A, everyone. Good job + +When are you turning on HSTS? + +It will be a little while. We're not only yet HTTPS only. We're not only just redirecting all traffic to HTTPS. But I'm about to make the switch, too + +And on the FiveThirtyEight side we're waiting on a few of the ad folks. As soon as they can guarantee it works, everything else is ready. Like, all of our own content is ready. Our database team made all the interactives work on HTTPS. As we've talked about, we've made all the analytics and all the A/B testing, all of that stuff works. So if you go to FiveThirtyEight.com right now with HTTPS you'll see the same things. Some of the ads might disappear. Yeah + +Is that something that you can control in DoubleClick, like, only serve these ads, not HTTPS + +I've never actually seen that side of the UI. So I don't know + +So it's technically... I don't know how it all works it's somewhat a black box but it's sometimes not really DoubleClick's fault. It's the person providing the ad and that's the last thing that we're scrubbing right now. Because we can't get a guarantee but it's just that there would be no Adobe Digital Additions. It's not going to make anything or cause alerts. But for us, it means that we can't make any revenue off of something that was playing, obviously. But we're figuring that out with them now + +Is there anybody here who's got a problem they're stuck on and they want to open up on their computer and help them with + +What kind of strategies are there for metroing a bunch of old content + +There's a bunch of things. One we talked about the request that's really handy. It's not 100 percent compatible yet but it saves you from going to pages and updating them. And the other is using a tool like mixed content scan and identifying where the problems are. We're just trying to do them one at a time. We wouldn't waste hours. But as you can either, find the tool to go through all of your content before or Mike had the reporting thing which is only in Chrome. Or you can—so you can again force the browser to try and create new things. But there isn't, like, a magic sort of wand that you can wave. I mean, if you have, if you're CMS and you write a script to look through your database and replace HTTP to HTTPS in all the places but there's no sort of you one way that works + +So here's an example of what you would get if you turned on that content security policy log. It tells you you know, the document URI. The article that the person's reading. And then what object was blocked. Unfortunately, Chrome won't send you the whole URI if the whole domain isn't the same, including the protocol. So it just actually tells me that I had something on this article that was linking to ProPublica.org. Safari will actually tell me that this article will link to this specific image so you can actually, it helps a lot in terms of, like, finding and replacing a thing that caused that warning + +One thing that you hear with this Amazon URL from S3, you can do the same kind of thing I did with Akamai, which is if you don't have a certificate, you can go to https://Amazon, and then slash + +And you use the path version + +You just use the path version of the URL and again, you can make your S3 stuff sort of just work and at some point, like sort of as a hack, you can do a string replace, like, in your CMS if you have this really large database that's not kind of manageable. So that's another example of where it's kind of—you've got it there + +You guys are forcing them with HTTPS. What we did was a stepover approach where we have relatives + +Protocol relatives + +Because we can't name it because we work with NPR but if you want to force it + +That's the same thing that we're doing + +ProPublica is currently actually in that phase where you can hit our website via HTTP + +Does anyone—or anyone want me to explain what a protocol route URL is? + +You can explain it. Let me see if I can find an example + +Normally URLs, you think of them as starting with https://, like this. But, you know, sometimes you put HTTPS, like Mike was showing you, you actually don't need this anymore. You can just start with the slash slash. And this has been supported for way longer than people have been using it. We've been using it for four years but browsers started using it a long time ago. But people just didn't use it. So if I'm on a HTTPS page, give me the HTTPS version. If I'm on a http page, give me the HTTP version. What this is most useful for is for iframes. Where if there's communication between the iframe and the parent, it has to match. That stops them from using. Normally it's best to use HTTPS URLs for everything so even if you have an HTTP page if you can load your Javascript over HTTPS, or some of your images over HTTPS, that's still a good thing to do because at least you're insuring nourishing the integrity of those requests even if the overall page itself isn't protected + +We're starting to switch over to that now + +Let me tell you, the protocolless URLs don't work with email clients so if you get lazy and you are, like, writing a template for something that you can just do that + +They also don't work locally, either + +Yeah, so if you have—that will not work—if you have a file URL if you're opening up a file in your browser and you see a file, colon, slash, slash, slash. It will try to do a file URL and that will totally not work and you can spend a few minutes chasing that one down + +Someone needs to make a browser extension to handle that + +All right. Any volunteers? You can maybe put that into Dev Tools or something. We have this document put together. And you'll just scroll through a little bit here. So we talk a little bit about what HTTP does. So HTTP is deprecated. Both Chrome and Mozilla said we're going to stop supporting this. We're going to start flagging this insecure in a couple years and we're going to—Mozilla said, we'll bring content for HTTPS sites only. And Brian Miller who works for the government he was one of the people who helped mandate HTTPS and wrote this nice little essay on it. This is where we talked about buying certificates from. These are different things that we talked about certificate types. SNI. Renewing, HSTS, we talked about the cryptographic hashes. We talked about how you can generate server configurations so you don't have to generate that by hand + +I'll show this one off. Slowly. Slowly. Conference Wi-Fi + +Yeah, make the font a little bit bigger. So you can pick all kinds of things. H, open, SSL + +So just enter in what you have. What server, what version of that do you have? What version of SSL do you have? And it will give you the appropriate, sort of, best practice, sort of most secure with what you have configuration. So if you have an ancient version of Apache, it will probably generate some.. + +If you click, and watch as you change... wow they even have the tag. Click the older modern things that you can see you can see that stuff change on you + +Yeah, this option. Old, modern, intermediate basically changes what browsers you need support on your website + +And old is insecure, so I wouldn't use it + +So you really shouldn't use it unless you're stacked with + +Isn't DH deprecated, too? + +DH is fine as long as you actually update the params. In particular it's not turning off the old one is it turning off SSL3? Under and it also keeps a bunch of ciphers that are still not—that are ultimately insecure. I think it's also recommending sha1 as well + +Yeah, so that's if you have, like, weird people with IE6 and stuff that you can't fix. So click on modern. There you go + +Right + +Yeah, so this is super handy. It generates all kinds of stuff. And the SSL make config will not only do your web servers but also your email clients and so on. So go back to the document real quick. Scroll. That's cool, too. You can see more stuff. We talk about content. We talk about so many things that work, things that don't work. Ads. This is the blog posts where Google commits to HTTPS. The IEB call to action. This is a good resource for people in your organization who need to be convinced. And if Google says you need to be able to don't it to do it, you can go back to your ad team and say, your ad overload suggestion, we should listen to them. + +And your font, A/B testing providers, protocol-relative URLs, we talk about passive versus active content so what'll get a warning, and what will get blocked. We talked about different CDN's. We mentioned the mixed content scan. HTTPS everywhere Chrome extension. They have what's called an Atlas which is a list of all providers and and what their HTTPS equivalents are under the hood. There's SSL Labs. There's a site called shaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com and this will tell you if it's using sha1 or sha2, which is super handy and we talked about the content security policy. Stuff about costs. Stuff about performance. Oh, someone found a typo, excellent. Thanks, Daniel. And Netflix decided—they told, like, you're going to be like, we're never going to move to HTTPS. It will cost way too much money. We are, like, the third of the Internet. Forget it. And then they sent someone smarter than me, and they rewrote part of the Linux kernel and it's like now, it workings. It's great. So now you don't not need to rewrite the Linux kernel because they did that for you. Awesome, yes! Huzzah! So you can go back to the—did you have sha open? I really want someone who's stuck to help you. So we can, you know, sit down at your table + +Does anybody have any particular pain points that you want us to talk about? + +If you have a page that you're stuck on we can look at it, whatever + +I think NPR's issue is the cost for CDN for audio assets. I don't have this problem, but—I don't have -- + +Images as well + +A lot of stuff the solution is to switch vendors + +I think that's part of it. I don't know how much—in doing researching, in doing research for this talk I wanted to see how much Akamai charges, from my understanding, they're way, way expensive and that's part of the problem. Fastly, it looks like they no longer charge a premium for that. CloudFlare doesn't charge a premium up front which is the Amazon one. It charges a third more. So even some of the big providers like CloudFlare and Fastly won't charge you extra. Or maybe they're locked into this long contract and they just can't. But I don't know, shop around. I think Fastly used to charge and in the past couple months it changed the policy + +If you do use Akamai, someone from Akamai, specifically said, HTTPS is a relatively cheap way to get good but not perfect privacy it's not that expensive for what you get out of it. So just forward them that + +So that is like someone in the business development side is—or whoever handles your contracts. But yeah, it's great to start working on this now because in a year or two when the browsers start flashing red warnings for just an HTTP site, you don't want to just fix it all the week before the next version of the Chrome autoupdate comes out and you also have angry people. So do this now. Start today. Start yesterday. And be ahead of the game + +And just try to reach out to—have you tried to reach out to NPR? + +I was emailing this guy from NPR a while ago. He asked some questions. He said you guys are great. I totally want to help you + +What's the name of the guy? + +His name is Jonathan Upsteen. He's not here or else I would try to buy him beers or whatever to fix it sooner. Or whatever he wants. But yeah, I'm a big fan. I'm not trying to bash them + +It sounds like everybody wants this + +We totally want -- + +If I can't facilitate that then I want to help + +So if they need—if they want anyone to come there and help them, I will type things into their computer, do whatever you need + +As far as we were told, it's strictly a money thing + +Just get on the pledge drive. Say hi, this is Peter Segal, we would like to—please give me money + +Rat out all your friends for not using SSL like they ratted out people who don't pledge, you have to rat out people who don't SSL. Somehow it's your job to get it on the radio + +Find someone on the news team to cover a story about HTTPS being deprecated and then forward that to, like, someone to the director, and then they're like our own site isn't compliant. We're going to be turned off by the Internet + +So this is not a concrete problem but I'm just interested more in the pace of how quickly the deprecation is actually going to happen + +Years + +So there seems to be some barriers still + +Yeah. I think the idea isn't that—they don't even have a timeframe for depricating HTTP + +But they say they're not—new features and browsers won't support HTTP + +That's Mozilla yeah. Newer things in HTML, newer things in CSS + +Not even ten + +What they have announced is the sha1 deprecation timeframe. So right now if you go into Chrome today, and there's a sha1 certificate and it expires this year, you will get a yellow warning triangle. If it expires in 2017 you get a red line through it. It doesn't give you the, "Whoa this site is insecure, are you sure you want to proceed?" Whatever. But it gives you a little red warning and the links to those timetables are in the document. Yeah + +So the bigger problem seems to be there's a certain number of people online who know how to buy a domain and point it at something but there's a very smaller portion of those people who know anything about certificates at all + +Yeah, and we were talking about this earlier, if you're just a person with a personal blog, it shouldn't really be up to you to learn about this. You should learn about your CMS and how do you post an made the gif of cats and not—you shouldn't be configuring servers. And so, having big providers—like, one of the things that WordPress did, right, if you have something.wordpress.com, you get HTTPS already. And you didn't have to make people opt into it. You didn't have to tell them what cipher suite you need. It just kind of worked. So that's the right thing to do. And that's also something that happens with Let's Encrypt where it's free, and so having this become sort of automatic and free, and built in, as opposed to having to opt in every site. That worked for the first million sites. It's not going to work for the next 98 million or whatever + +It seems like the automatic part is just as important as the free part + +Even if it's just a dollar. The automatic -- + +A lot of shared companies make absolutely a ton of money on certs, and there are a lot of it that are public companies. So a lot of this will happen in building pressure. Let's Encrypt comes in September will help. And another thing is, you mentioned how fast things were moving. There was one week a few weeks ago, where Reddit, the federal government, all announced HTTPS all at once. And a lot of those actually were influenced by each other + +Yeah + +Um.. + +And the same thing about the Wikipedia one. Their problem was not a technical problem. Like, they had the server stuff sorted and even the mixed content stuff sorted. So it was a community discussion of like, are we leaving anybody out? We're Wikipedia. We want to be super universal. Is there somebody with a phone in a developing country that we're going to block by doing this versus how much more privacy are we guaranteeing everyone else by doing this? So it took them a long time to sort that out + +For companies and services that support, like, user content like contents and whatever that have images in them, do you have to, like, proxy those, or just reject things that link out to non-https sites? + +Yeah, that's an interesting question. Like Gmail, one of the things is they proxy. Gmail images are all now transparently HTTPS. So the content—so that's something that I think the content provider should fix at their level. It doesn't make sense for any HTTPS site to do that. And I haven't talked to any folks from Discus. Or—is there anyone from Livefire? + +I wanted to comment on that. GitHub has this problem because GitHub is all SSL, TLS, and they have issues where people can upload their cat gifs or just send a link to the cat gifs and the cat gifs will show up on the issue. And so they have actually an image proxy called Camo. That's open source + +Can you spell that? + +CAMO. So it's github.com/atmos/camo. So they solve this for -- + +So we should add that + +So they solve this for images. It's a little server that proxies images. I've thought about if that can be done for Javascript for, like, ad servers + +Mm-hmm + +That seems weird and definitely weird for audio and video + +Well, it would seem more weird for Javascript because you don't know what's going on with Javascript. You don't want to run that off your domain because someone might come steal your cookies + +What terminator are you using for your SSL? + +So our SSL is all controlled by the these lovely folks here. Since we're WordPress VIP, I don't control that structure + +Pro pub can a's main website, www.propublica.org are all served via Fastly. So we're using them all that stuff + +As well as static content + +Everything on orbitz.com is all served by -- + +And the proxy thing is sort of an interesting strategy as sort of a last resort + +We tried to because we tried to turn ours on and tried to do NPR content and it ended up severely impacting performance. Yeah + +Does anything have to do with APIs? + +We talked a little bit about that earlier + +We've published a few APIs just based on news apps. We have these databases projects where you can query on the website and look at your stuff but you also allow access via an API that we built. And we've had people, sort of, ask us to—configure the H parameter up to something insanely high that doesn't allow old versions of Java to access our website and I had sort of a back and forth with someone who was using our API. So it's a very interesting space to be in + +When I wrote an API for turboboat, a few years ago, there wasn't even an on the to do it the another way. So that's the other thing. If you have your own APIs, make sure that they will support HTTPS and they should be—and if you're building new one, you should start today on HTTPS. You have authentication. You've got all kinds of stuff. And that seems like a really important thing to be doing securely + +So I can offer a resource for that possibly. If you are doing—if you need to migrate an API, it's a lot different than migrating a website. You don't want to let's say, do redirects or something like that. So when the federal government made this, like, big push one of the things that we did was wrote up a set of guidelines and specifically we couldn't find anywhere else on the Internet that documented how to do this well, and so we wrote one + +Excellent + +I can say the URL + +Yeah, Mike can you type it in? + +Sure + +So https.cio.gov/apis + +So the whole https.cio.gov site is helpful + +How many.. + +We'll add that to the document. Yeah. So any particular thing that you want to highlight from here? + +Um, the main one is probably, just the—it's not something that you should simply redirect depending on your API because you're very likely to just break everyone that's using it and you might have to announce deprecation like Twitter was doing. And in this document there's practices as well. But there are a lot of other finicky things that you might want to know + +And another thing about APIs that are different from web browsers are things like SNI support. Like I had Python and it didn't work, and I had to install some extra library for some reason and this was on a reason running 10.10. It was running new stuff. So you're more likely to get some weird client than you are—as an API content than as a reader + +And some servers don't support communication over TLS, so you can check if it doesn't and you can tell the end user about that. So this API call failed because it's your server's futility; not our fault + +Only 95% of self-hosted WordPress sites have open SSL on their server so that doesn't help when it comes no communication. And that 5% is still a big number. So.. + +Do you guys have the .org stats back on who the hosts are? So you can tell who—them to fucking hurry up + +There's a call within WordPress that you can test for HTTPS support and you can relay a message if it doesn't support it. So you can admin notice saying, I didn't turn on this feature I can't do it + +But that long tail is ultimately way longer than user customizations. Hopefully everyone here is on a server that has basic stuff along those lines + +And somebody is managing and updating it regularly. Like, the open SSL library seems to get updated every three weeks for some new patch. They find a new vulnerability and say, don't use IRC 4, don't use this stuff. So keeping up to date with whatever SSL allows, and Mozilla folks say, whoever the SSL main folks say this is the current recommendation, recommended configuration because as I said, if you run SSL Labs, and it gives you an A, it will not be that six months from now. There's going to be change + +And you might have to understand your certs across your organization. So like in Twitter weed periscope.tb. So if you didn't have an understanding of how many domains that you run, or how many fully qualified domains that you're running, this sha upgrade is a good way to figure out. And with each of those, with the outreach, you can figure out who has who can go now and who has to wait and because of that if you can't move now, the warnings will only trigger based on the expiration dates. You can always set a shorter expiration date. That can help you out. There's just kind of multiple ways to stage it and figure out where you want together + +So if you have sha1 in 2015, you can make it expire sooner. but in this case, it makes weird sense to have a shorter expiry window + +We're working on it + +See, every time I click on a link + +So the other thing that you can do and this came up in the conversation for us, is you can look in your log to see what percentage of this is going to fail if you do this, so the Windows XP P, and the—so if someone says this will break something, you can quantify what that something is + +So one of the things a lot security reasons, we developed to propietr9. You're readers, you probably have more than 1% on 99. But we were comfortable that that was a small enough number for us + +You're talking about design wise, right? Not TLS + +We did this for a totally different reason that we stopped. It wasn't part of our supported test cases. But having to locate your analytics on a regular basis matters. Android 2.3, if you have a bunch of Android 2.3, they have a bunch of problems with SNI, do they have sha support, or is it just SNI that's broken? So you have to check. There'll always be somebody using a weird browser. So you want to make a firm decision about what your decision is so you don't have to make an ad hoc decision every time. I have a posse to support more than an x number of users in the database + +What kind of benchmarks of timeline should you use to go from HTTPS only to enabling HSTS because it seems like the sort of thing that once you're there, you might as well do it but you also are kind of burning your boats + +Once you switch, you can't go back. Once you've crossed a certain threshold you can't go back + +You can but not easily + +Well, it depends on the age of your HSTS + +I guess I'm just sort of wondering like what could go wrong, like, once it sort of seems to be working + +Well, for instance Google started search results started coming in as HTTPS for a time. And there's no way for us to back that out currently + +That's a good thing to mention. Google Webmaster Central if you have an account there you need to make a separate site entry for the HTTPS version of your site. You do. It's weird. So you need one for www, one for without the www, one for HTTPS so you can end up with a bunch of entries all for the same site. Which I would argue is a bug. But that's just the way it is. And for now, so make sure when you do, and you might end up with a different, you know, unique set ID which you put through the verification process again. But when you're switching that, that's something else. You should write that down + +And set your canonicals to one scheme or another + +So the real tag is canonical + +Or the other HTTP. However you do it + +But getting back to your point. It's just like depricating support for anything. Even if the HTTPS is your default, the day you decide that you're doing HSTS is the day that you look at your analytics and you're sure that there's no reason that you would ever go back, right? It's sort of a moving target. It's probably a different target for everyone + +So even if you're forcing HTTPS, there are some subtle differences between that and HSTS that could cause things to break. Like, form that gets redirected somewhere else. Like, things could actually go wrong. These are really rare and you're not little to find them, nor is it, like, easy to identify a pattern of them. But what I would suggest turning on HSTS for ten minutes, max age. And then if you haven't had any problems for two or three, bump it you mean. And if you don't have problems for a few weeks, kick it up to a year. If you need to go back, set max age to zero. And even if you have this catastrophic issue, max age zero will kill it for any clients that kill it + +So any clients that caught the year + +Well, you're already forcing HTTPS anyway. So like the site ideally works over HTTPS so if you set it back to zero and then go to that site again then the header will immediately will dropped and then whatever they were trying to do will start working if we know + +And once you're on the preload list, that would be, that's even harder + +But at that point, you're already max age year and you're never going back + +That's an accident. So I really like Andrew's point by testing it get you gradually increasing the max age, we should write that down. What was the other thing? The webmaster central thing. Had + +The other thing thing too about preloading is that it has to include all subdomains and a lot of people might not think about that especially if you have a random subdomain that's a c name to some other service like a follow up, or something that you don't control and you forget that you have, like, 20 subdomains that your business department has added over the years. They all have to be HTTPS in order for Chrome to put it in the preload list + +So in that header, there's an include subdomain option and preload requires that flag + +And that has to be admitted from the apex, not www + +The other thing about search and this is—I didn't even write down but someone mentioned that they had multiple dots in the Amazon bin. So if you have wildcard it will go to \*.FiveThirtyEight.com. So www.projects, whatever. But if you have something like beta.projects, it would not work. You have to get a second certificate of a star dot beta. So if you have multiple levels of subdomains...—it might not work for you + +S3.amazon + +There we go. So there. Sweet. Because we have a bucket called cdn.pro pub can a.net and the problem is there you only have a single wildcard, so CDN, Amazon.com so an alternative is to use the path name version. So I'm going to do s3.amazonaws.com. And I'm blanking. That's not working for some reason. What did I do? I don't know + +Anyway. Yeah + +You're writing to some directory + +I think it's the ups + +What's the workflow for generating a self-signed cert for a local developer? + +You use the OpenSSL command line tool. Does Erik have stuff on that material? + +He should + +So there's—so one of the things to watch out for is a lot of the tutorials are super old and if you have a super old tutorial and a super old version of SSL, you'll get a sha1 cert, and you don't want that. If you have a Mac, you can drag yourself into a keychain. There's probably a Windows equivalent but I don't know what that is. They generally don't take self-cert because then your browser will start treating those as valid + +That was the camo thing + +That's the animated under the sea thing. But yeah. Okay. So... that sounds like the majority of the questions. We'll stick around and answer more questions. And if there are people who weren't in this room and want to ask, like, flag either of any time throughout the rest of the conference and I'm happy to sit down in front of a computer and answer questions + +We're both very reachable on the Internet + +Especially talk about this, if this helps with a news website, go to HTTPS even if it's a Sunday afternoon I'll totally talk about work. Okay? + +Cool + +Thanks, everybody. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015NewsroomNadsat.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015NewsroomNadsat.md index 255e8822..8f4ed9d5 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015NewsroomNadsat.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015NewsroomNadsat.md @@ -1,243 +1,169 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/newsroomnadsat/index.html ---- - -# A Newsroom Nadsat—How to Build Better Newsrooms with Better Language - -### Session Facilitator(s): Lena Groeger, Aurelia Moser - -### Day & Time: Thursday, 11am-noon - -### Room: Ski-U-Mah - - -The session will start in 20 minutes! - - -The session will start in ten minutes! - - -The session will start in five minutes! - - -So if you want to put up the live transcript, you can make it any size you want. And you can increase the font size as well. Just so it's more visible. Awesome. - - -We will wait until... - - -We also have these mics! So many mics. Jeez! - - -The Etherpad will be how we will be conducting the whole thing. - - -So I should get out a computer. - - -Please take out your computers. - - -There will be less markers, unfortunately. But feel free to use the markers. - - -The cool thing about Etherpad is that it's all in the same place. Post its are fun, but someone has to transcribe that. Plus we get to know all your names. There's a roll call section in the center where you can add your handle and your name. - - -And we have the live stream up, so we can be very... Meta about this session. - - -Woo-hoo! - -(laughter) - - -Awesome! - - -That will be distracting for a little bit. So yeah, this is the Etherpad, if everybody wants to go there. We've added a bunch of notes and stuff already that we will hopefully be fleshing out today. I'm not sure if everyone is familiar with Etherpad. If you've been on the OpenNews calls, they conduct those via Etherpad. It's great because everybody has a color when you log on, so all the text that you add will be colored and related to you. But you can also use a fake name if you feel uncomfortable submitting things. It's just nice to know, to see how collaborative documents are built in realtime. So there's a section in the center, if you just joined, where you can put your name and your affiliation and your Twitter handle. So that we have, like, a little record of who wrote what. You can also change your color, too, if you click on the... If you don't like the brown default that they gave you. I know there's a lot of brown. So I'm just saying that. But you can also like brown. You're allowed to like brown. But you can change it by clicking on a square and clicking on the color on the rainbow, or adding a hex, I think. - - -Cool. So while people are doing that, I guess we'll introduce ourselves. My name is Lena Groeger, I'm a news app developer at Pro Publica. We make news apps and things. I'm interested in this topic because at Pro Publica, and in the news nerd community, this issue of diversity in the newsroom comes up a lot, and it's a huge topic, and we definitely cannot do everything in an hour, but focusing in on kind of language and written standards is something that I think seems like a sort of SRCCON-esque feasible kind of topic. We can create some guidelines. We can create something tangible here that we leave with that can be useful in this small kind of area of building inclusive newsrooms, both kind of in newsroom practices and hiring and that kind of stuff, and also in stories, and what that looks like. So that's what I'm here for. - - -Totes. And my name is Aurelia Moser. I work at Carto DB, so I do a lot of mapping software development stuff, but before that, I worked in journalism. So I was at SRCCON last year because I was a news fellow. We know each other from a lot of things but also from news. One of my favorite things about Etherpad, just to make a comment, when people correct each other's grammatical errors, it's kind of hilarious, because the color changes. So you can change teh to the. So CeCe capitalized Pro Publica. So you should totally feel free to let loose with your grammatical constructive criticism. So the name you might have been wondering about. Newsroom Nadsat. Hopefully we attracted some people with the weird name. Nadsat is the fake slang language in Anthony Burgess's Clockwork Orange. It's a language used by a group of people who aren't the greatest, if you've ever read the story. But the point is that vocabularies are kind of mutable, and there's a lot of words that people feel uncomfortable using. Not just in the newsroom but outside in different spaces that we need to get comfortable using and get comfortable talking about and conversing about intelligently. So we set up a little—we actually set up quite a bit of text, because we're pretty—like typing kind of gals. So there's a lot going on in this Etherpad. But we have an introduction and the basic outline for what we're going to talk about, and then we have bucketed sections for typical situations you might encounter in the newsroom, like when you're posting a job or you're interviewing people and you have to deal with... You want to deal with the maximally inclusive language that you could use. And you want to attract a diverse group of people, and then there's also other sections for what you do in the workplace, and how do you develop stories that are sensitive to that same kind of vocabulary. And our hope was that we would walk away with a lot of resources contributed by everybody in the room, from stories much read or places where you've seen that this is done quite successfully, or not successfully, and then we can make, like, a little website that would be a resource for newsrooms, so that they could look at this when they're hiring and constructing their job offers and that kind of thing. - - -Yeah. And so for each of these—I guess we'll kind of quickly go through these four—we kind of broke it up into four tackle-able sections. So we'll kind of briefly describe what we mean by each one and then break up into four groups, and we'll I think randomly assign, like, count off—people can be in random groups. But if you feel very strongly about being in a particular group, you are allowed to switch. We just want to make sure that all of these four kind of sections get covered kind of equally. So do you want to do the first one? - - -Sure. So posting and recruiting. I included some links, and there's a little general introduction you can skim there. I included a reference to a DefCon posting which was really inappropriate. There's a site called Geek Feminism, that talks about feminism but also inclusive language in general. And they have a lot of examples of Reddit posts and places where people are particularly insensitive to inclusive language and welcoming diverse communities. So structuring your job post to be attractive to females, trans, and people who require accessibility accommodations—it's important to know how to do that and to know how to do it gracefully. So I have a couple of sections there, and then some suggestions from an article. I included a bunch of references at the end to articles that have already discussed this. So if you want to learn more—but it includes both language that's used in job postings, languages, when reaching out to people specifically—so often you'll see tweets, for example, where they'll be like—females welcome. Here's a link to a job posting. And there are different ways to do that. And ways that don't feel like you just are trying to meet your girl quota. So yeah. That's part of what this is about. And then how to respond to emails. One of my favorite life hacks or something that I just started doing last year—I had this new year's resolution to make every interaction online maximally productive. So every time you send an email there should be a reason or some way that you can transform even robot emails into something productive. So when I get recruiter emails, I'm usually pretty happy at my job. I wouldn't be there if I wasn't. When I got recruiter emails, I used to just delete them. I think a lot of people do that by default. But I like to respond now with something that I want changed in the system. Because if you ask a recruiter to ask their boss about something—I ask what is their policy on transgender health, because it doesn't lose me anything. And if they go back and talk to their boss and they don't have that, and enough people ask about that, they'll develop one. That's a cool sort of life hack. - - -I do something similar with recruiter emails. I write back and ask them about the diversity of their team and their senior leadership and if they have people who are not white or Asian men. And I had someone who sent it to a women in tech list and there was general approval. I do that a bunch. Sometimes I get a serious reply, where they actually get into it, and sometimes they just don't care. But I really like your idea of taking this thing that would otherwise go in the trash and at least forcing them to think for 30 seconds about the issue. - - -Please add that. - - -Put it in a sample email. What we want to have at the end for each of these sections, for posting—are here are specific sentences you could include. Here are a list of words like ninja or... Wizard that you should maybe not include in your postings. We want to have very tangible kind of examples. And even cards or something that people can look at. So definitely add that if you have specific language that you've used in an email that could be helpful. - - -Yeah. And it's different for diverse teams that expand beyond the domestic US, for example. Our team is half in Madrid and half here, and sometimes things that are totally okay to say in Spain are, like, totally not okay to say in the States. And we always do a collaborative proofread of everything that goes up online, on our website or in a job posting, just to make sure that everybody is okay both from a diversity but also a cultural diversity perspective. Right. So that's that section. That's section one. - - -So section two is sort of switching to less written words and more verbal words. Talking about—interview questions. And the hiring process. So this one article that I would definitely recommend—it's written by a recruiter at Google—she kind of talks about a lot of studies and stuff that is basically—when we do these very unstructured interviews, we make judgments about people within the first ten seconds and then basically the rest of the interview is trying to confirm what we had already decided in the first ten seconds. So in order to conduct interviews where you're giving somebody a fair chance to demonstrate their skills and qualifications for the job and you haven't sort of decided beforehand, this article is very explicit about a structured interview and not—like, basically asking the same questions to everyone. And not leaving it up to these sort of vague, like, tell me about yourself—or like these brain teaser types of questions, which basically tell you nothing about a candidate's ability to do the job. And it ends up being like—oh, you're from Chicago? Like, cool. My Grandma—and that kind of stuff is not at all relevant to actual—to jobs and just basically enforces—we like people like us and are familiar and remind us of ourselves. So to kind of get out of that, I've put in a bunch of—kind of some sample questions of what this person at Google thinks are good questions, that would get relevant responses, or relevant to how they would actually do their job. But I'm curious too—like, this is for Google, but in terms of—in a journalistic context, what are those sorts of questions that we should—that should be asked? If you guys can think of those. And other kinds of things that are sort of related to interviews. Like who does the interview. Is it always the same person? Is it maybe a team of people? And if you're interviewing a woman, do you want to also have a woman interviewer? That kind of thing is sort of in this section. And so yeah—so those we've kind of put in already. Got started with some suggestions. That's number two. I think it's more self-explanatory. - - -Number three is workplace and conferences. Which is kind of meta, because we're in a conference, talking about conferences. But Erin talked a lot about the code of conduct at SRCCON, and everybody is developing codes of conduct for their website, and for Girl Development, we have it for our curriculum, curriculum share online, and conferences usually have a section for code of conduct. But how do you write one when you're planning a conference or you're planning an event? There are templates there with some examples of particularly good ones, but I would love to have more. A better little library of codes of conduct examples. So if you know of any, just put in the links. And there's also just general management and maintenance of a team. Maintaining a safe space for everybody, even after they're hired and they're onboarded, and how do you ideally construct that? Flat structure is pretty popular now, in terms of how development teams are run. The idea that there is no management or hierarchy, until you grow to a certain size and then there has to be management and hierarchy and everybody feels like the company is breaking down. But flat management can be very cagey for diverse teams, because of differences in terms of competence and where they fall and where their peers treat them is an important thing to consider. So I have some examples there too at the end. From The Ada Initiative. And different codes of conduct. JSConf actually has a pretty cool template one that they let you kind of fork and share in your codes... And alter for whatever your conference situation might be. But I would love to have more. So if you know of any really cool ones, that would be awesome. - - -Cool. And then the last one—this one is a little sort of more broad, in terms of—it's not necessarily specific words or specific terms or language. But more about having kind. A written standard process or guidelines or a checklist or something for things to do before you publish a story. So the one kind of example I think that got a lot of journalists talking about this sort of thing was the Grantland piece about Dr. V. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that, but basically the reporter in reporting out this story found out that this was actually a transsexual person, that he was covering and writing about, and revealed that to someone else in the course of his reporting, without really consulting at all, and later that... Dr. V committed suicide. Anyway, it was a big scandal, but kind of got people thinking—what if there had been a transgender person on the staff? Would that have made a difference? - - -They had a transgender person on the staff but didn't consult with them. - - -Okay. So in all these cases—sure. We can't necessarily know that—right, if they had consulted it would have all turned out differently and there are many things that went wrong in the course of that story that may or may not have been fixable. However... I do think it got a lot of people thinking about—okay, what are the kind of check points we have in place before publishing a story that may be... In terms of you're covering worker's compensation, and it turns out that actually a lot of workers who get injured happen to be minorities. Are we going to try to include an example in our story? Or are we only going to cover white men? Right? So things like that, when you're covering certain populations, I think there's a sort of empty space that we could probably fill with—like, here are the people you should consult. The questions you should ask. And that could be standard for any story, but it's specifically targeted to protecting underrepresented groups and that kind of thing. So what would that look like? And so I've put in a bunch of sort of topics that this could include, sort of people to consult. What examples—thinking about, like, how are you going to represent a topic in your story? In terms of who you interview, and that kind of thing. Sources, also, for a story. Like, do you call up the male scientist every time, or try to get different perspectives? So in this case, it's not specific words, but it's more of a checklist. And I actually think this wouldn't be too difficult to put together. Here are the top ten things you should do before publishing any story, keeping these considerations in mind. We have some other things about, like, accessibility and color and icons and stuff like that. So yeah. Those are our four sections. Does anybody have any questions about each one? One of them super confusing? No? - - -Feel free to raise your hand whenever. Or just add it to the chat. - - -I don't know what this means. - - -I don't have Twitter open, so don't tweet anything. But the chat is there and it's awesome. And there's also a section at the end of some examples we pulled together of what to do, and what not to do. There's some Github repos that were recently released as scandalous, because their readmes were particularly inappropriate for welcoming contributors from diverse communities. And it's something to think about too, just outside of your stories and publications. A lot of newsrooms are Open Sourcing code, and the way they construct their contribute markdown or the way they talk about the people they want to contribute to their community, which is ideally everybody—that might come across in your repo. You should also think about how this vocabulary kind of transitions to those different spaces. And then there's a bunch of reference examples. And look. Someone added one. Yay! Yay, someone! And then at the end, like I said, we kind of want to make something productive out of this. We want to make a little website that summarizes all of these findings and things and checklists and advice. So we have some ideas, some kind of designy examples of just reference sources for different projects that I've used, for my work stuff. Not really the airport codes one, but it's still a really cool site. But we'd like to make something that builds on top of these, or has, like, a similar simplicity and look and feel. So if you have other examples of resources and reference sources that you go to often, because they are so well designed, please put those there. Right. So we can do the countoff, maybe. - - -All right. Or do we want to do just tables? Is that easier? So people don't move around, or what? - - -Yeah, sure. Let's do tables. - - -If you're at a large table and want to move to a less populated table, feel free to do that. Maybe let's make four tables and go like... One, two, three, four, in terms of the different sections? Does that sound good? If anybody feels very strongly, you're allowed to switch tables. But also you are allowed to put resources to any of these groups. We just want to have at least people thinking about each section. Enough people. So... Yeah. That's what the rest of our time will be. - - -Can you go over which table is which topic? - - -Number one, you guys are... Is number one on here. So posting and recruiting. Number two is hiring interviews, number three is workplace conferences, and number four is content work stories. - - -Is there anything we're missing too? A splinter group that wants to go rogue and do its own thing? - - -Feel free to add something. And we'll just wander around and chat with you guys. Okay. - - -We turned into three groups. - - -I was at the table all by myself. - - -Wait. So what are you guys... So it's two, three, four? - - -I think one and two can be a topic. - - -Okay. - - -If you want to add stuff... And anyone feel free to add stuff to anyone. - - -Hiring/interviews. It could be one thing. - - -We are open to change. That is okay. - -(breakout sessions) - - - - -Okay. Hey, everybody! So thanks so much for your great conversation. We're going to reconvene and have everyone report back to the group. And I would like to remind you that there is a roll call in the Etherpad. And if you have not mentioned your name, Francis, it would be great if you could do that, so we have a record of your attendance and contributions. There's also a beautiful rainbow going on in there and it would be great if you could pick something that matches the rainbow. An attractive color. Just for my own sanity. That would be great. - - -Right. So first group, who wants to stand up and say what you guys worked on? Or what you maybe added to the Etherpad of interest in particular? - - -We won't make you stand. We can still hear you. - - -You can shout. We also have all these mics, if you want a mic. - - -I'm Peter. I have been asked to represent our group. We talked about both topics, all related to inviting people to work with us. And so this was about posting and recruiting and interviewing. I enjoyed our conversation. I would just like to go on the record as saying that. - - -It's official. - - -We talked quite a bit about what feels good about reading a post, a job posting, and what doesn't. The words HR and boilerplate came up quite a bit. We talked about some of the intricacies and difficulties of dealing with the lack of or presence of HR folks in a company. Depending on the size of the company and how long it's been around and whether there's HR folks or not. I had said specifically that having worked in a larger company, where I hired people, that it would have been super helpful for me, as a new manager, to have had resources about how to write job—how to do all the things that we talked about. And almost more importantly, some resource for how do I talk to my HR department about ways that they could do their jobs differently, to help me help them? What am I forgetting? - - -We talked a bit about how the job ad isn't the only problem, of course. And that it needs to connect with everything else in the other discussions that we're having. And also that you can't walk into a community that is—has a different range of people to that which you are normally part of and say give me your best people. Which I feel happens sometimes. Oh, here's a group of people of color who code. Great. Come in and give me the top coders and take them out. Because if you're not an active part of that community and you're not contributing to it, there's no reason to expect any success and you're not helping that community and you're not helping solve the problem for anybody else in the future. - - -Can I just piggyback on that? Just as a general peeve? Because I'm involved with AJA and we get that a lot. Who are some really good Asian-American whatever. Broadcasters, whatever. Because we have a Facebook group. You can be posting those job postings on there. You don't have to send it to me. I'm happy to be a rep, but there are so many ways for people to be actually engaged in those communities that they don't need to always be passing... I guess making me the messenger. - - -Giving you the labor to do. - - -It's just so interesting. I don't know what the hurdle is. Maybe it's just time to be engaged in those communities. And it's just easier that way sometimes to kind of spread it out like that. But I think that's a valid point. - - -Yeah, it's work. - - -At the bottom of the post—the disingenuous slide? - - -Sometimes job postings have a boilerplate feel and you're reading through something that's dry and boilerplate and you get is to that line that's like—minorities encouraged to apply. It's tacked on as an afterthought. It's not the most inviting thing. A lot of companies fall back on that boilerplate. - - -So hopefully we'll have enough resources to have a bunch of examples of what should—what that language should look like and how it cannot be totally boilerplate. So that's kind of one idea to come out of this. Is that we'll have a lot of good examples of ways to phrase that. Okay. Cool. Table number two or topic number two? Do you guys want to... - - -Okay. So... - - -We're number three, actually. - - -That's right. Table two, topic three. - - -We had some interesting discussions about conferences and workshops and workplaces, generally. One interesting thought was just... I mean, for a lot of us who have gone conference hoping, SRCCON seems to be the first one to really explicitly lay out the codes of conduct right off the bat. And then also stated that this is something that goes on 24/7. So conferences usually run 9:00 to 5:00. What happens afterwards at the bar, whose jurisdiction is that under, and SRCCON has owned it, by making that hotline available and things like that. So I thought that was really interesting. Making codes of conduct more effective—even from conferences, there's also the workplace. I think it was mentioned that there aren't a lot of slogans for saying how to treat co-workers as taking care of one another, which is something that SRCCON has stated. That there's probably not something like that in the workplace. While there are training programs for onboarding, we discovered at various companies, like ESPN, Dow Jones, it's never digestible in a way that's written for humans. People just check the box and move on. So I think making that much more relatable and colloquial is an easy way of getting people to really internalize it. We kind of talked about job descriptions too. To be honest. And how that does matter. Not even just saying minorities should apply, but seeing... You know, Asian-American, women, transgender, actually seeing those terms being laid out explicitly makes you just connect and identify with it. And also—in technology, just job descriptions too. Not putting unicorn, wizard, magical powers, or any type of... Maybe you can talk a little bit about that too. It just kind of deters people from all backgrounds. - - -I told a story. My previous employer was a non-profit. And we had a tech job description out and it was written by someone who was a woman and semi-technical and they described it as—we want a tech ninja. I had to speak against it. So it's not always the stereotypical frat boy who's putting this language in. You need to watch out for it. And I don't see anybody who actually likes this stuff. It doesn't benefit anyone. So don't put the ninja rock star language in. It's dumb. Just excise it. - - -Am I missing anything? - - -I don't think so. I think that the larger the cooperation you are, the more that there's lawyers involved, and there's boilerplate, as they said, but it makes you maybe want to go back to your place and have an employee type of safe conduct built around and then approach, maybe, the HR department and say—we'd like to rewrite this in ways that are just more welcoming to people. - - -Cool. All right. And with our three minutes left... Last table? - - -Um... So yeah. So we were talking about content work and stories. And we talked about stories themselves, but we also talked about sort of—how does the newsroom get to a place where you are putting out stuff like Dr. V and how can you improve it? So we talked about some specific pieces, which are linked to in the Etherpad, where, like, we felt that more diverse voices was obviously going to result in a different story than what was published. But we came up with sort of like—I think three major things. The first one is, like, measure the voices that your publication is highlighting. So who are the anecdotes that are being used? And because news is so deadline-driven, oftentimes the excuse is always—I had this time frame. I found these people. They demonstrated the point, so I used them. And that's fine in the day-to-day. But if we take stock of actually who we are using, year after year, and as they all look identical, in any type of demographic, then we can all be aware of that going forward. But you don't have to constantly be worrying about it all the time, which seems very unapproachable when you're trying to sell it to someone. The other thing is the demographics of your reporting and editing staff will affect the demographic of your sources. And we had a discussion about the benefits and the cons of—if specific stories are being funneled or asked of specific reporters of a demographic. So do you have to represent your demographic all the time, are you the one doing stories in that community or when anybody else does stories about your community in the newsroom do they always consult you? And it becomes your second job at work as well. Even if your job has nothing to do with that. So pros and cons there. And then finally we were trying to brainstorm ways to help sell, increase diversity in sources to reporters without making them feel defensive about it. Which basically resulted in one idea so far. So if you guys have more ideas, please add. Which was to help with them with some tools and suggestions and not to point out stories in the past that had been done that had a lack of voices but to say in the future if you want even better sources or if you want to reach more sources, start early. Reach out to people who aren't on Twitter, or reach out to communities right away. So that you can plant that seed and then maybe later on you can sort of get a bigger harvest of sources. Yeah. - - -Okay. Cool. Awesome. This is all super great. So we're going to try to take all of this and feel free to keep adding it, and maybe we should share it with the rest of SRCCON. Or tweet it. I don't know how big we want to get this. But keep adding stuff, and our goal is to take this and if it's not in the next, like, couple days, then in the next week or so. Have at least bare bones kind of website that will be full of resources and quotes and links and stuff. So that this can be kind of a go-to place on language inclusivity in the newsroom kind of thing. And then hopefully we'll make it beautiful and awesome in the coming months. So yeah. This was super great. I hope you guys all got something out of this, and that this will be a tangible resource to be used in the future. So... - - -Thank you. - -(applause) \ No newline at end of file +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/newsroomnadsat/index.html +--- + +# A Newsroom Nadsat—How to Build Better Newsrooms with Better Language + +### Session Facilitator(s): Lena Groeger, Aurelia Moser + +### Day & Time: Thursday, 11am-noon + +### Room: Ski-U-Mah + +The session will start in 20 minutes! + +The session will start in ten minutes! + +The session will start in five minutes! + +So if you want to put up the live transcript, you can make it any size you want. And you can increase the font size as well. Just so it's more visible. Awesome. + +We will wait until... + +We also have these mics! So many mics. Jeez! + +The Etherpad will be how we will be conducting the whole thing. + +So I should get out a computer. + +Please take out your computers. + +There will be less markers, unfortunately. But feel free to use the markers. + +The cool thing about Etherpad is that it's all in the same place. Post its are fun, but someone has to transcribe that. Plus we get to know all your names. There's a roll call section in the center where you can add your handle and your name. + +And we have the live stream up, so we can be very... Meta about this session. + +Woo-hoo! + +(laughter) + +Awesome! + +That will be distracting for a little bit. So yeah, this is the Etherpad, if everybody wants to go there. We've added a bunch of notes and stuff already that we will hopefully be fleshing out today. I'm not sure if everyone is familiar with Etherpad. If you've been on the OpenNews calls, they conduct those via Etherpad. It's great because everybody has a color when you log on, so all the text that you add will be colored and related to you. But you can also use a fake name if you feel uncomfortable submitting things. It's just nice to know, to see how collaborative documents are built in realtime. So there's a section in the center, if you just joined, where you can put your name and your affiliation and your Twitter handle. So that we have, like, a little record of who wrote what. You can also change your color, too, if you click on the... If you don't like the brown default that they gave you. I know there's a lot of brown. So I'm just saying that. But you can also like brown. You're allowed to like brown. But you can change it by clicking on a square and clicking on the color on the rainbow, or adding a hex, I think. + +Cool. So while people are doing that, I guess we'll introduce ourselves. My name is Lena Groeger, I'm a news app developer at Pro Publica. We make news apps and things. I'm interested in this topic because at Pro Publica, and in the news nerd community, this issue of diversity in the newsroom comes up a lot, and it's a huge topic, and we definitely cannot do everything in an hour, but focusing in on kind of language and written standards is something that I think seems like a sort of SRCCON-esque feasible kind of topic. We can create some guidelines. We can create something tangible here that we leave with that can be useful in this small kind of area of building inclusive newsrooms, both kind of in newsroom practices and hiring and that kind of stuff, and also in stories, and what that looks like. So that's what I'm here for. + +Totes. And my name is Aurelia Moser. I work at Carto DB, so I do a lot of mapping software development stuff, but before that, I worked in journalism. So I was at SRCCON last year because I was a news fellow. We know each other from a lot of things but also from news. One of my favorite things about Etherpad, just to make a comment, when people correct each other's grammatical errors, it's kind of hilarious, because the color changes. So you can change teh to the. So CeCe capitalized Pro Publica. So you should totally feel free to let loose with your grammatical constructive criticism. So the name you might have been wondering about. Newsroom Nadsat. Hopefully we attracted some people with the weird name. Nadsat is the fake slang language in Anthony Burgess's Clockwork Orange. It's a language used by a group of people who aren't the greatest, if you've ever read the story. But the point is that vocabularies are kind of mutable, and there's a lot of words that people feel uncomfortable using. Not just in the newsroom but outside in different spaces that we need to get comfortable using and get comfortable talking about and conversing about intelligently. So we set up a little—we actually set up quite a bit of text, because we're pretty—like typing kind of gals. So there's a lot going on in this Etherpad. But we have an introduction and the basic outline for what we're going to talk about, and then we have bucketed sections for typical situations you might encounter in the newsroom, like when you're posting a job or you're interviewing people and you have to deal with... You want to deal with the maximally inclusive language that you could use. And you want to attract a diverse group of people, and then there's also other sections for what you do in the workplace, and how do you develop stories that are sensitive to that same kind of vocabulary. And our hope was that we would walk away with a lot of resources contributed by everybody in the room, from stories much read or places where you've seen that this is done quite successfully, or not successfully, and then we can make, like, a little website that would be a resource for newsrooms, so that they could look at this when they're hiring and constructing their job offers and that kind of thing. + +Yeah. And so for each of these—I guess we'll kind of quickly go through these four—we kind of broke it up into four tackle-able sections. So we'll kind of briefly describe what we mean by each one and then break up into four groups, and we'll I think randomly assign, like, count off—people can be in random groups. But if you feel very strongly about being in a particular group, you are allowed to switch. We just want to make sure that all of these four kind of sections get covered kind of equally. So do you want to do the first one? + +Sure. So posting and recruiting. I included some links, and there's a little general introduction you can skim there. I included a reference to a DefCon posting which was really inappropriate. There's a site called Geek Feminism, that talks about feminism but also inclusive language in general. And they have a lot of examples of Reddit posts and places where people are particularly insensitive to inclusive language and welcoming diverse communities. So structuring your job post to be attractive to females, trans, and people who require accessibility accommodations—it's important to know how to do that and to know how to do it gracefully. So I have a couple of sections there, and then some suggestions from an article. I included a bunch of references at the end to articles that have already discussed this. So if you want to learn more—but it includes both language that's used in job postings, languages, when reaching out to people specifically—so often you'll see tweets, for example, where they'll be like—females welcome. Here's a link to a job posting. And there are different ways to do that. And ways that don't feel like you just are trying to meet your girl quota. So yeah. That's part of what this is about. And then how to respond to emails. One of my favorite life hacks or something that I just started doing last year—I had this new year's resolution to make every interaction online maximally productive. So every time you send an email there should be a reason or some way that you can transform even robot emails into something productive. So when I get recruiter emails, I'm usually pretty happy at my job. I wouldn't be there if I wasn't. When I got recruiter emails, I used to just delete them. I think a lot of people do that by default. But I like to respond now with something that I want changed in the system. Because if you ask a recruiter to ask their boss about something—I ask what is their policy on transgender health, because it doesn't lose me anything. And if they go back and talk to their boss and they don't have that, and enough people ask about that, they'll develop one. That's a cool sort of life hack. + +I do something similar with recruiter emails. I write back and ask them about the diversity of their team and their senior leadership and if they have people who are not white or Asian men. And I had someone who sent it to a women in tech list and there was general approval. I do that a bunch. Sometimes I get a serious reply, where they actually get into it, and sometimes they just don't care. But I really like your idea of taking this thing that would otherwise go in the trash and at least forcing them to think for 30 seconds about the issue. + +Please add that. + +Put it in a sample email. What we want to have at the end for each of these sections, for posting—are here are specific sentences you could include. Here are a list of words like ninja or... Wizard that you should maybe not include in your postings. We want to have very tangible kind of examples. And even cards or something that people can look at. So definitely add that if you have specific language that you've used in an email that could be helpful. + +Yeah. And it's different for diverse teams that expand beyond the domestic US, for example. Our team is half in Madrid and half here, and sometimes things that are totally okay to say in Spain are, like, totally not okay to say in the States. And we always do a collaborative proofread of everything that goes up online, on our website or in a job posting, just to make sure that everybody is okay both from a diversity but also a cultural diversity perspective. Right. So that's that section. That's section one. + +So section two is sort of switching to less written words and more verbal words. Talking about—interview questions. And the hiring process. So this one article that I would definitely recommend—it's written by a recruiter at Google—she kind of talks about a lot of studies and stuff that is basically—when we do these very unstructured interviews, we make judgments about people within the first ten seconds and then basically the rest of the interview is trying to confirm what we had already decided in the first ten seconds. So in order to conduct interviews where you're giving somebody a fair chance to demonstrate their skills and qualifications for the job and you haven't sort of decided beforehand, this article is very explicit about a structured interview and not—like, basically asking the same questions to everyone. And not leaving it up to these sort of vague, like, tell me about yourself—or like these brain teaser types of questions, which basically tell you nothing about a candidate's ability to do the job. And it ends up being like—oh, you're from Chicago? Like, cool. My Grandma—and that kind of stuff is not at all relevant to actual—to jobs and just basically enforces—we like people like us and are familiar and remind us of ourselves. So to kind of get out of that, I've put in a bunch of—kind of some sample questions of what this person at Google thinks are good questions, that would get relevant responses, or relevant to how they would actually do their job. But I'm curious too—like, this is for Google, but in terms of—in a journalistic context, what are those sorts of questions that we should—that should be asked? If you guys can think of those. And other kinds of things that are sort of related to interviews. Like who does the interview. Is it always the same person? Is it maybe a team of people? And if you're interviewing a woman, do you want to also have a woman interviewer? That kind of thing is sort of in this section. And so yeah—so those we've kind of put in already. Got started with some suggestions. That's number two. I think it's more self-explanatory. + +Number three is workplace and conferences. Which is kind of meta, because we're in a conference, talking about conferences. But Erin talked a lot about the code of conduct at SRCCON, and everybody is developing codes of conduct for their website, and for Girl Development, we have it for our curriculum, curriculum share online, and conferences usually have a section for code of conduct. But how do you write one when you're planning a conference or you're planning an event? There are templates there with some examples of particularly good ones, but I would love to have more. A better little library of codes of conduct examples. So if you know of any, just put in the links. And there's also just general management and maintenance of a team. Maintaining a safe space for everybody, even after they're hired and they're onboarded, and how do you ideally construct that? Flat structure is pretty popular now, in terms of how development teams are run. The idea that there is no management or hierarchy, until you grow to a certain size and then there has to be management and hierarchy and everybody feels like the company is breaking down. But flat management can be very cagey for diverse teams, because of differences in terms of competence and where they fall and where their peers treat them is an important thing to consider. So I have some examples there too at the end. From The Ada Initiative. And different codes of conduct. JSConf actually has a pretty cool template one that they let you kind of fork and share in your codes... And alter for whatever your conference situation might be. But I would love to have more. So if you know of any really cool ones, that would be awesome. + +Cool. And then the last one—this one is a little sort of more broad, in terms of—it's not necessarily specific words or specific terms or language. But more about having kind. A written standard process or guidelines or a checklist or something for things to do before you publish a story. So the one kind of example I think that got a lot of journalists talking about this sort of thing was the Grantland piece about Dr. V. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that, but basically the reporter in reporting out this story found out that this was actually a transsexual person, that he was covering and writing about, and revealed that to someone else in the course of his reporting, without really consulting at all, and later that... Dr. V committed suicide. Anyway, it was a big scandal, but kind of got people thinking—what if there had been a transgender person on the staff? Would that have made a difference? + +They had a transgender person on the staff but didn't consult with them. + +Okay. So in all these cases—sure. We can't necessarily know that—right, if they had consulted it would have all turned out differently and there are many things that went wrong in the course of that story that may or may not have been fixable. However... I do think it got a lot of people thinking about—okay, what are the kind of check points we have in place before publishing a story that may be... In terms of you're covering worker's compensation, and it turns out that actually a lot of workers who get injured happen to be minorities. Are we going to try to include an example in our story? Or are we only going to cover white men? Right? So things like that, when you're covering certain populations, I think there's a sort of empty space that we could probably fill with—like, here are the people you should consult. The questions you should ask. And that could be standard for any story, but it's specifically targeted to protecting underrepresented groups and that kind of thing. So what would that look like? And so I've put in a bunch of sort of topics that this could include, sort of people to consult. What examples—thinking about, like, how are you going to represent a topic in your story? In terms of who you interview, and that kind of thing. Sources, also, for a story. Like, do you call up the male scientist every time, or try to get different perspectives? So in this case, it's not specific words, but it's more of a checklist. And I actually think this wouldn't be too difficult to put together. Here are the top ten things you should do before publishing any story, keeping these considerations in mind. We have some other things about, like, accessibility and color and icons and stuff like that. So yeah. Those are our four sections. Does anybody have any questions about each one? One of them super confusing? No? + +Feel free to raise your hand whenever. Or just add it to the chat. + +I don't know what this means. + +I don't have Twitter open, so don't tweet anything. But the chat is there and it's awesome. And there's also a section at the end of some examples we pulled together of what to do, and what not to do. There's some Github repos that were recently released as scandalous, because their readmes were particularly inappropriate for welcoming contributors from diverse communities. And it's something to think about too, just outside of your stories and publications. A lot of newsrooms are Open Sourcing code, and the way they construct their contribute markdown or the way they talk about the people they want to contribute to their community, which is ideally everybody—that might come across in your repo. You should also think about how this vocabulary kind of transitions to those different spaces. And then there's a bunch of reference examples. And look. Someone added one. Yay! Yay, someone! And then at the end, like I said, we kind of want to make something productive out of this. We want to make a little website that summarizes all of these findings and things and checklists and advice. So we have some ideas, some kind of designy examples of just reference sources for different projects that I've used, for my work stuff. Not really the airport codes one, but it's still a really cool site. But we'd like to make something that builds on top of these, or has, like, a similar simplicity and look and feel. So if you have other examples of resources and reference sources that you go to often, because they are so well designed, please put those there. Right. So we can do the countoff, maybe. + +All right. Or do we want to do just tables? Is that easier? So people don't move around, or what? + +Yeah, sure. Let's do tables. + +If you're at a large table and want to move to a less populated table, feel free to do that. Maybe let's make four tables and go like... One, two, three, four, in terms of the different sections? Does that sound good? If anybody feels very strongly, you're allowed to switch tables. But also you are allowed to put resources to any of these groups. We just want to have at least people thinking about each section. Enough people. So... Yeah. That's what the rest of our time will be. + +Can you go over which table is which topic? + +Number one, you guys are... Is number one on here. So posting and recruiting. Number two is hiring interviews, number three is workplace conferences, and number four is content work stories. + +Is there anything we're missing too? A splinter group that wants to go rogue and do its own thing? + +Feel free to add something. And we'll just wander around and chat with you guys. Okay. + +We turned into three groups. + +I was at the table all by myself. + +Wait. So what are you guys... So it's two, three, four? + +I think one and two can be a topic. + +Okay. + +If you want to add stuff... And anyone feel free to add stuff to anyone. + +Hiring/interviews. It could be one thing. + +We are open to change. That is okay. + +(breakout sessions) + +Okay. Hey, everybody! So thanks so much for your great conversation. We're going to reconvene and have everyone report back to the group. And I would like to remind you that there is a roll call in the Etherpad. And if you have not mentioned your name, Francis, it would be great if you could do that, so we have a record of your attendance and contributions. There's also a beautiful rainbow going on in there and it would be great if you could pick something that matches the rainbow. An attractive color. Just for my own sanity. That would be great. + +Right. So first group, who wants to stand up and say what you guys worked on? Or what you maybe added to the Etherpad of interest in particular? + +We won't make you stand. We can still hear you. + +You can shout. We also have all these mics, if you want a mic. + +I'm Peter. I have been asked to represent our group. We talked about both topics, all related to inviting people to work with us. And so this was about posting and recruiting and interviewing. I enjoyed our conversation. I would just like to go on the record as saying that. + +It's official. + +We talked quite a bit about what feels good about reading a post, a job posting, and what doesn't. The words HR and boilerplate came up quite a bit. We talked about some of the intricacies and difficulties of dealing with the lack of or presence of HR folks in a company. Depending on the size of the company and how long it's been around and whether there's HR folks or not. I had said specifically that having worked in a larger company, where I hired people, that it would have been super helpful for me, as a new manager, to have had resources about how to write job—how to do all the things that we talked about. And almost more importantly, some resource for how do I talk to my HR department about ways that they could do their jobs differently, to help me help them? What am I forgetting? + +We talked a bit about how the job ad isn't the only problem, of course. And that it needs to connect with everything else in the other discussions that we're having. And also that you can't walk into a community that is—has a different range of people to that which you are normally part of and say give me your best people. Which I feel happens sometimes. Oh, here's a group of people of color who code. Great. Come in and give me the top coders and take them out. Because if you're not an active part of that community and you're not contributing to it, there's no reason to expect any success and you're not helping that community and you're not helping solve the problem for anybody else in the future. + +Can I just piggyback on that? Just as a general peeve? Because I'm involved with AJA and we get that a lot. Who are some really good Asian-American whatever. Broadcasters, whatever. Because we have a Facebook group. You can be posting those job postings on there. You don't have to send it to me. I'm happy to be a rep, but there are so many ways for people to be actually engaged in those communities that they don't need to always be passing... I guess making me the messenger. + +Giving you the labor to do. + +It's just so interesting. I don't know what the hurdle is. Maybe it's just time to be engaged in those communities. And it's just easier that way sometimes to kind of spread it out like that. But I think that's a valid point. + +Yeah, it's work. + +At the bottom of the post—the disingenuous slide? + +Sometimes job postings have a boilerplate feel and you're reading through something that's dry and boilerplate and you get is to that line that's like—minorities encouraged to apply. It's tacked on as an afterthought. It's not the most inviting thing. A lot of companies fall back on that boilerplate. + +So hopefully we'll have enough resources to have a bunch of examples of what should—what that language should look like and how it cannot be totally boilerplate. So that's kind of one idea to come out of this. Is that we'll have a lot of good examples of ways to phrase that. Okay. Cool. Table number two or topic number two? Do you guys want to... + +Okay. So... + +We're number three, actually. + +That's right. Table two, topic three. + +We had some interesting discussions about conferences and workshops and workplaces, generally. One interesting thought was just... I mean, for a lot of us who have gone conference hoping, SRCCON seems to be the first one to really explicitly lay out the codes of conduct right off the bat. And then also stated that this is something that goes on 24/7. So conferences usually run 9:00 to 5:00. What happens afterwards at the bar, whose jurisdiction is that under, and SRCCON has owned it, by making that hotline available and things like that. So I thought that was really interesting. Making codes of conduct more effective—even from conferences, there's also the workplace. I think it was mentioned that there aren't a lot of slogans for saying how to treat co-workers as taking care of one another, which is something that SRCCON has stated. That there's probably not something like that in the workplace. While there are training programs for onboarding, we discovered at various companies, like ESPN, Dow Jones, it's never digestible in a way that's written for humans. People just check the box and move on. So I think making that much more relatable and colloquial is an easy way of getting people to really internalize it. We kind of talked about job descriptions too. To be honest. And how that does matter. Not even just saying minorities should apply, but seeing... You know, Asian-American, women, transgender, actually seeing those terms being laid out explicitly makes you just connect and identify with it. And also—in technology, just job descriptions too. Not putting unicorn, wizard, magical powers, or any type of... Maybe you can talk a little bit about that too. It just kind of deters people from all backgrounds. + +I told a story. My previous employer was a non-profit. And we had a tech job description out and it was written by someone who was a woman and semi-technical and they described it as—we want a tech ninja. I had to speak against it. So it's not always the stereotypical frat boy who's putting this language in. You need to watch out for it. And I don't see anybody who actually likes this stuff. It doesn't benefit anyone. So don't put the ninja rock star language in. It's dumb. Just excise it. + +Am I missing anything? + +I don't think so. I think that the larger the cooperation you are, the more that there's lawyers involved, and there's boilerplate, as they said, but it makes you maybe want to go back to your place and have an employee type of safe conduct built around and then approach, maybe, the HR department and say—we'd like to rewrite this in ways that are just more welcoming to people. + +Cool. All right. And with our three minutes left... Last table? + +Um... So yeah. So we were talking about content work and stories. And we talked about stories themselves, but we also talked about sort of—how does the newsroom get to a place where you are putting out stuff like Dr. V and how can you improve it? So we talked about some specific pieces, which are linked to in the Etherpad, where, like, we felt that more diverse voices was obviously going to result in a different story than what was published. But we came up with sort of like—I think three major things. The first one is, like, measure the voices that your publication is highlighting. So who are the anecdotes that are being used? And because news is so deadline-driven, oftentimes the excuse is always—I had this time frame. I found these people. They demonstrated the point, so I used them. And that's fine in the day-to-day. But if we take stock of actually who we are using, year after year, and as they all look identical, in any type of demographic, then we can all be aware of that going forward. But you don't have to constantly be worrying about it all the time, which seems very unapproachable when you're trying to sell it to someone. The other thing is the demographics of your reporting and editing staff will affect the demographic of your sources. And we had a discussion about the benefits and the cons of—if specific stories are being funneled or asked of specific reporters of a demographic. So do you have to represent your demographic all the time, are you the one doing stories in that community or when anybody else does stories about your community in the newsroom do they always consult you? And it becomes your second job at work as well. Even if your job has nothing to do with that. So pros and cons there. And then finally we were trying to brainstorm ways to help sell, increase diversity in sources to reporters without making them feel defensive about it. Which basically resulted in one idea so far. So if you guys have more ideas, please add. Which was to help with them with some tools and suggestions and not to point out stories in the past that had been done that had a lack of voices but to say in the future if you want even better sources or if you want to reach more sources, start early. Reach out to people who aren't on Twitter, or reach out to communities right away. So that you can plant that seed and then maybe later on you can sort of get a bigger harvest of sources. Yeah. + +Okay. Cool. Awesome. This is all super great. So we're going to try to take all of this and feel free to keep adding it, and maybe we should share it with the rest of SRCCON. Or tweet it. I don't know how big we want to get this. But keep adding stuff, and our goal is to take this and if it's not in the next, like, couple days, then in the next week or so. Have at least bare bones kind of website that will be full of resources and quotes and links and stuff. So that this can be kind of a go-to place on language inclusivity in the newsroom kind of thing. And then hopefully we'll make it beautiful and awesome in the coming months. So yeah. This was super great. I hope you guys all got something out of this, and that this will be a tangible resource to be used in the future. So... + +Thank you. + +(applause) diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015OpeningPlenary.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015OpeningPlenary.md index ac9029b5..58a5be7a 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015OpeningPlenary.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015OpeningPlenary.md @@ -1,97 +1,92 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/openingplenary/index.html ---- - -# Welcome to SRCCON! - -### Day & Time: Thursday, 10-10:30am - -### Room: Memorial - - - -Dan Sinker: Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life. Electric word "life" means forever, and that's a mighty long time, but I'm here to tell you there's something else: SRCCON. - -[ Applause ] - - -Welcome to Minneapolis. It seems like the only way to start something like this is with a little bit of Prince and welcome to SRCCON. We are—I'm Dan Sinker, I should introduce myself first. I'm the director of OpenNews. You're going to meet all my colleagues from OpenNews in just a second, but I wanted to really personally thank all of you for making the trip to Minneapolis and coming inside on what is an absolutely gorgeous, Midwestern, early summer day. We have two really incredible days ahead of us here at SRCCON. They are days that are filled from start to finish with discussion and participation, with collaboration and sharing. There's going to be days that fill your head with new ideas and with new plans but I hope that first and foremost, they are days that introduce you to new people because people are really the core of SRCCON. The things each of you bring with you today, the solutions to problems that you've had, the approaches you've taken to building and running teams, even the coffee and tea that many of you brought for the Coffee & Tea Hack Stations in the back, you know, these are the things that are going to make this SRCCON amazing and I, personally, am really glad to be here. A quick confession: I literally almost didn't come. My wife is literally days away from delivering our second child and... - -Whoo! - -Thank you. We found out the due date a week after we signed the contract for this space, so we couldn't really move that and thankfully, all the folks that I've worked with on this, just said, "You know what, do what you need to do." And then finally, Janna said, "Get out. You're making me too nervous for two days." So I'm A, really glad to be here, and B, really been thinking a lot about family. And kind of seeing everyone here in front of tables, sitting around, we are a kind of family. We've all chosen to work in an intersection of news and technology. It's an intersection that becomes more vital and more important and more exciting by the day. Frankly, I'm surprised that none of you had to go out to jump and cover the Supreme Court ruling today. Thank you for being here and present even as news breaks. It's an exciting intersection but we know it's not an easy one. The work is demanding. The pay doesn't line up. Diversity is a struggle. - -Yet we choose to be here, we choose to do the very best work that this industry sees. And we do that, every day, on a deadline, no matter what because we're a family. We work and we build, and we create together. And that, really, is what the next two days are about: You're going to learn new technologies. You're going to come up with great new solutions, but ultimately, we're going to strengthen these familial bonds. We're going to grow together and we're going to just kick some real ass. So to talk about how we're going to do that over the next couple of days, I want to introduce two of my amazing colleagues, Erika Owens and Ryan Pitts. - -[ Applause ] - -Erika Owens: Hello. So as Dan mentioned, we have a lot of great stuff planned for you, and we've put a lot of intentionality into that planning to make sure that the needs and interests of this community were present in this event and that we were able to include all participants in what we're working on. - -So some of the things that we did to support that were, we did a lot of outreach to ensure that people were able to get tickets—the limited supply of tickets, which Erin also wrote a little bit about. And we also did a lot of outreach to encourage many of you—a third of you, to be our session facilitators. So we really wanted to support the folks that are bringing the questions and issues and the projects that you've been working on here to collaborate with the rest of the room. We also wanted to make sure you were supported in taking on that role of facilitation. So we did a couple of short-call trainings with session facilitators. We also had a session buddy for each session facilitator so you could ask questions, bounce ideas off that person of that session and that was really the aim of the facilitators but also of supporting all the participants so you all can know that you're working together in your sessions and having the space to build really good connections. - -We also made sure to document that work. As I mentioned, Erin wrote about tickets. We've written a lot of documentation and the decisions that we've made for the event and we're going to post more about that during and after the event as well. Accessibility is also a key value that we hold at OpenNews and we wanted to see embodied in this event. One part of that is the actual physical space we're in. It's an accessible space. The city we chose also being an accessible city from many parts of the country and being more of an affordable city, being a city that we may have connections to, or for others, it might be our first time but we wanted to pick a place that was easy for folks to get to. We also wanted to make sure that people were able to come. - -So we have a scholarship program that was supported by WordPress VIP that allowed us to give scholarships to participants which we were really excited about, using that as a way to help people access the space and the event. We also have childcare this year. It's over at the hotel and you can go get info sheets. If you have a little stowaway in a bag that you would like to take to childcare, we have registration already. And we still have the space. We're really excited about that as a way for parents to participate fully and be able to bring their kids along and know that they're being taken care of. - -We also have transcription happening throughout SRCCON. Transcription is supported by Slack. And just wanted to let you know a little bit about the transcription program. We have three wonderful stenographers, Stan's over here typing away our opening plenary. Norma and Mirabai are also going to be in two of the rooms doing stenography for sessions during SRCCON. So we picked sessions that fit the needs of the spaces that we're in as well as we thought would benefit from having a stenographer in the room, and the format would work well for having someone taking notes—live notes the whole time. - -It's also a way for us to support remote participation. So there's, like, links on our site where you'll be able to find the feeds and folks outside of the room will be able to participate as well. And we've also made it clear that if you want to go off the record at any point in the session it's also possible to indicate that because sometimes conversations need to be private but we can bring it back on the record. And we'll have that automatic record of the session to share with participants who aren't here and to refer back to later. So we're really excited about that as another way of increasing accessibility for people in the room and outside of SRCCON. So for more about how we thought about sessions and scheduling, Ryan's going to come in and chat about that. - -Ryan Pitts: Hello! - -[ Applause ] - -It is so cool to look out and see all of you here. Thank you for being here and for helping us make SRCCON possible. I mean, SRCCON is absolutely about all of you and it's been amazing over the past couple of weeks while we've been looking at the schedule, just how many sessions people were bringing here. Hopefully, you've found the schedule app by now. If you have not, it's schedule.srccon.org. And I just wanted to talk to you about how we think about participating in SRCCON sessions and how we structure the days and how we think you can get the most out of being here with us. So you probably picked up as Erika was describing SRCCON, our sessions are really designed to be interactive and participatory. There's a reason we refer to them as "session facilitators" rather than as "speakers." It's because we want you to participate. They know, and we know that SRCCON is great when every single one of you brings what you know into the room and into that conversation. Everyone is a peer here, there's an amazing amount of expertise in all these rooms and these sessions work best when you are willing to share what you know. - -So please, speak up and do that. One thing that we noticed last year early on during SRCCON was how little tweeting there was going on during sessions and as we kind of walked around and looked in rooms. It totally clicked. People had heads up. They were actually engaged in conversation. Nobody had heads down, looking at laptops. Participate. These sessions will be great when you are engaged. We're not saying, don't tweet. Talk about the amazing things that you're learning. But we really think that you'll really think that you'll get most out of SRCCON if you are present. How do you choose which ones to go to? Obviously, some will reach out and grab you. Obviously, these are things that I want to bring back to home, that are in this room. But I will say, if you go to a session and if it doesn't turn out exactly to be what you were expecting, it's totally okay to quietly pack up, and switch to another session and look for another session that you want to be a part of. If you just can't decide which session you want to go to, one of my favorite pieces of advice that I've heard is to look at that list and to go to the last session that you think you want to be in. You're going to get outside your comfort zone, you're going to bring a new set of experiences to that conversation and really add something to the room that you're in. - -Another thing that we think that makes your SRCCON experience better is taking a little bit of the stress out of getting spaces on time. That's why we start our sessions a little bit later. First session are at 11:00 a.m. today and at 11:00 a.m. tomorrow. We also built 30 minute breaks between sessions and so if you're engaged in conversation, we do understand that you might have to check emails, so we built in enough time for you to do that. - -Visit the awesome coffee and tea station back there and continue having the conversations. Those are some of the best parts about being at a conference like this with so many amazing people around you. Most of our sessions here at SRCCON are one hour. There were a few that needed more time. Those are in blue on the schedule app. So those should be easy to identify. You might also notice that we have a few sessions planned during lunch this year. So this is something new that we're trying. We tried to identify a few topics that could be talked as a group over a meal. I want to give special thanks to the facilitators who are helping to try this out this year. You'll find the rooms and the times on the schedule. And so when we hit mealtime, feel free to grab food, hang out here, go out, get some sun, or head into one of those rooms to focus on one of those topical conversations. I will refer you to the easel in the back. There are a few blank spots on that easel. We have two lunchtime sessions today and one already planned for tomorrow. So that leaves a few open spots. If you would like to host a conversation, there's an empty spot, there's a pen, put it on the board. We would love to have you part of SRCCON in that way. One last way that we want you to get involved with SRCCON is spending time that's not so intensely focused on digging into big topics and just enjoying yourself and spending some downtime around all these amazing people. So we had fun last year dividing into four rooms into themes. We still love the idea of hanging out together, playing games, showing what you're working on, having conversation. - -One thing that we loved this year, we loved the hometown beer and wine, that was fun. Another thing that's a little bit different this year is we found last year's schedule made it sort of hard to bounce around and participate in more than one thing. So we've structured it a little bit differently. There are things that run all evening. And there are a few pop-ups that let you go try something else. All of that is laid out in the schedule. What's going on, where it will be. We have some very generous members of the community who are helping us to run those rooms. I want to take just a quick second to introduce you to them. So you know who to talk to if you have an idea, so Tiff, Joe, and Sisi, could you stand up? Thank you. These folks. These—there's Joe. These folks will be helping in the game room that will be running all night. They brought some board games. If you brought a board game, if you have a game you want to teach people to play, there'll be fun stuff going on all night. Katie, are you here? Allan and Katie are running our lightning talks. Those will go from 6:00 to 8:00. There is a website where if you have not pitched a lightning talk and you have an idea. I think there are submissions still being accepted. You can always check with Allan or Kaeti about that. That will be a super cool room. - -We have an evening walk. Will, are you here? All right. You see Will? He's got his hand up. Will is from the area and he will be leading a walk this evening. If you've been inside all day and you want to get out and get a little fresh air, that will be a time to do so. That will also be from 6:00 to 8:00. We have a hack space demo fair room. Justin—Justin. There's Justin. That room will be open all night for people who want to play around with hardware stuff. From 8:00 to 9:00, there'll be a demo fair if you have a project that you want to get some feedback on that will be a great time for that. Finally, we have a bookshare. Adam? We have a room set aside to talk about books. I don't see Adam but Adam will be here and Adam will have some books. Talk, take some away with you. Share with somebody, talk about books. So thank you to those community organizers. Thank you for all our session facilitators for helping us put together this year's schedule. That's kind of how we think about participating in SRCCON, how the days are structured. So now, to talk about how we make a more about how we make all these ideas concrete, talk a little bit about the safety plan and the logistics we're going to bring up Erin and Erik. - -[ Applause ] - -Erin Kissane: Hi, it really is so great to see all of you in this space. I've only seen photographs of this amazing building until we got here, and now we're here, and you're all here, and it's amazing. You all look amazing today, by the way. You look so lovely. - -So I just want to talk a little bit about some things that we tend to take for granted—which can be good. But I want to spend a little bit of time on them this morning while you're all here. The first is we have a code of conduct. It's on the website at srccon.org/conduct. We also have paper copies over by the lanyards if you want to read them on paper. It's short. And it is a small piece of a big plan. It is the outwardly visible sign of an invisible, big thing which includes all of the safety work that's going on backstage. - -I want to situate that by saying that the things that are really important—some things that we've been talking about that are really important to us is that SRCCON be welcoming and safe and inclusive. And that's what we see this work as. It's not about policing. It's about making the space really genuinely good for all of us humans. And the most important part of it, you know, I trust that you'll take a look at it if you haven't already, if I were to summarize the code of conduct in a sentence, it's: Take care of each other. So I want to say you can talk to any one of us in a green shirt. There are two colors of green or gray, anything that says "SRCCON." I'm from New York and as they have on our horrible subway signs: "If you see something, say something," which is to say, if you see something, or experience something that makes you feel weird or uncomfortable, or you're just not sure, totally talk to us. It's okay. You don't have to wait for it to, like, rise to the level of an emergency. - -If you turn over your badge, the safety help line is on the back. That, you can send texts or voice. That rings the whole safety crew. You can call it at any time. And by "any time" I mean any time through SRCCON. Tonight after midnight we're probably going to let it go to voice mail and check in at 7:00 in the morning but it covers all of SRCCON from now until at the end of the sessions and so that means you're covered at the bar, you're covered on campus, wherever you are if you need help. That said, if someone incurs a head injury particularly after 9:00 tonight, please call 911. Don't hesitate to do that. It's super important. - -I also want to say, like, there's a lot more going on behind the scenes with this stuff. Our interface with security here on campus and otherwise. If any of you would like to know more about that work, about any of our accessibility stuff, about the catering, any of those things. Please come talk to us, we're very happy to go into detail with you. Or if you have specific concerns about harassment, or anything. Again, find a person in a green shirt. And I'm just going to say it one more time: (772)266-2909. You'll find pretty much any of us, pretty much day or night, around the clock. So that's it on the safety talk. So now to talk about all the wonderful ways in which you will be fed and caffeinated and Wi-Fied, is Erik. - -Erik Westra: Hi. Hello. Yeah, so I'm Erik and I'm, as everyone else has said, I'm also really excited that you're all here but I'm even more excited because this is my city. I live in Minneapolis and it's really great to have all of you here. What I would love to do is have anybody who's from Minneapolis-St. Paul or nearby to stand up. I know there's a bunch of us. So I'm volunteering all of you to be helpful. So if you guys have any questions about the city or, you know, a place to go, or something to do, those are the people that you want to talk to. But welcome on behalf of all of us to SRCCON in Minneapolis. - -I'm going to talk through a couple of the, sort of, logistic situation. On your badge, which, some people have said, "It's upside down!" But really, the whole idea is if you twist, instead of, like, flip, you twist and then you just get to look at it. There's a map. There's also a Wi-Fi username and password, which you've probably already discovered. Every single one of you has your own username and password. It's going to help keep the system robust, running well, and, you know, that it's an added little piece that I think is going to keep everything running smoothly. That being said, if you could turn off your Dropboxes and your boxes and your True Detective torrents and all those things for the sake of those things, that would be fantastic. - - I want to talk about the lanyard color. And it's something that you may have heard at registration. Basically if you're taking pictures, a lot of people like to tie and post pictures. We're going to be taking pictures. If you see someone wearing a green lanyard, that means that they're coal with you taking their picture. If you see a yellow lanyard, you have to talk to them about it., and if you see a red lanyard, don't ask, they're not interested in being in photos which is totally awesome and cool. So if that wasn't super clear to you, feel free to trade lanyards, or if you switch way back through, and you decide, "I kind of don't want to be in pictures," just switch. There's wooden nickels that you were given. Those wooden nickels magically turn into beverages this evening. And there's also non-alcoholic beverages people to use those nickels for. My hope is that at the end of this, after they've all been counted, get them back so you can take them home with you, if that's something that seems you would like to have in your junk drawer. Bathrooms. They're back there. There's lots of signs. There's two sets and they're all sort of back there in that area. I'm not going to walk back there right now, but over there. Food. We want to keep you well fed and happy because we think that's a big part of being able to really take part of this. So there was some breakfast food this morning. Everything is labeled as far as dietary restrictions go. The goal is you don't have to ask, we wanted everything to be set out. So there's going to be specific numbers of things that are going to be out for people who have specific allergies. So there's going to be specific stuff that's marked vegan, there's going to be specific stuff that's marked gluten free, just to make sure that people have what they need, please don't take something that you, sort of, said you needed. That said, if you've missed sort of that question, or missed that process of giving us that information, please come talk to me or somebody at the registration desk and we'll make it work and we will give you that list. Also, if you're celebrating Ramadan, and this is the second year that SRCCON has occurred during Ramadan, we have special food for that, so come see and talk to us about that as well. Tonight we're having family dinner and we would like to thank Mandrill for serving that dinner. Ryan talked to the things that are going on at the same time so I'm going to get into that right now. And then the Coffee & Tea Hack Station is back in that hallway. That lovely gentleman, he's a coffee pro, that guy. He's a lovely, lovely human being. And he also brought coffee makers called manual coffee makers. So you should check out that. The whole idea there is learn how to, sort of, make your own coffee. And we have a lot of apparati—apparatuses for doing just that. Also if you're in a hurry and you just want coffee that's hot and wet, they're up in the back over there. So you don't have to wait to, like, grind your own coffee. So let's see... on that same note... the cups that we have back there for the coffee station are compostable so please put them in the correct bin for that. - -Also, I gotta jump back really quick. On the food, this is the second year in a row we've been able to do this. But all the food that's left over is going to be donated by the venue so that's something that's very important to us and we're really excited to be able to do that again. That kind of covers it for me and I'm going to bring Mr. Dan Sinker back up one more time. Thank you. - -[ Applause ] - -Dan Sinker: Thanks, everyone. I have a lengthy list of additional things that I have to tell you—I don't really. Thanks, everyone for being here. You know, there's a lot of logistics to go over but we do that at the start so you don't have to really think about that stuff any more. So, you know, we're trying to make it as possible as we can to make the next two days be focused on you and on the things that you can share with each other. The things that you bring today and the things that you leave with in a couple of days are the things that we want to really be able to focus on. - -So you've just met all of us. Last year we went around the room and had the room introduce themselves. There are a few too many of you this year. But what we do want to do is very quickly introduce yourselves to the people next to you at the table. So go ahead and do that. If you're at a table yourself, you there, you can just turn around and say hello to in the people behind you. - -[ Introductions ] - -All right. I'm going to refocus it back up here for just a second. The beauty is that there are ample opportunities to continue these conversations throughout the rest of the two days. As Erin said, we'll all be sitting down at lunch. Though it's going to be boxed and I would encourage visiting outside or taking part in a lunch session. We'll all be sitting down again for dinner. There'll be breakfast again in the morning tomorrow and lunch again. And one thing that I would ask: Some of you managed to beat the system and get a number of colleagues into SRCCON as well, and good for you for doing it. But don't just sit with your colleagues. You know, really do make sure that over the next couple of days that you're placing yourselves at tables with people that you don't know so that you leave knowing them. - -You know, I started saying that people were the most important part of SRCCON and I will end saying that same thing, too, you know? This is why we do the work we do. We want to help people. We wanna help people understand the world around them. You know, we wanna make things that are difficult to comprehend a little bit easier and we only do it because of each other. You know, we only are able to do it because all the rest of us are doing it as well. So really do appreciate the people here. Share as much as you can. Have a great time. Have good fun tonight and get a lot of work done over the next couple of days and sessions will start in 20 minutes. So there's still time to grab little more coffee, a little more food, and visit. But thanks y'all, and such a great SRCCON! - -[ Applause ] - - +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/openingplenary/index.html +--- + +# Welcome to SRCCON! + +### Day & Time: Thursday, 10-10:30am + +### Room: Memorial + +Dan Sinker: Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life. Electric word "life" means forever, and that's a mighty long time, but I'm here to tell you there's something else: SRCCON. + +[ Applause ] + +Welcome to Minneapolis. It seems like the only way to start something like this is with a little bit of Prince and welcome to SRCCON. We are—I'm Dan Sinker, I should introduce myself first. I'm the director of OpenNews. You're going to meet all my colleagues from OpenNews in just a second, but I wanted to really personally thank all of you for making the trip to Minneapolis and coming inside on what is an absolutely gorgeous, Midwestern, early summer day. We have two really incredible days ahead of us here at SRCCON. They are days that are filled from start to finish with discussion and participation, with collaboration and sharing. There's going to be days that fill your head with new ideas and with new plans but I hope that first and foremost, they are days that introduce you to new people because people are really the core of SRCCON. The things each of you bring with you today, the solutions to problems that you've had, the approaches you've taken to building and running teams, even the coffee and tea that many of you brought for the Coffee & Tea Hack Stations in the back, you know, these are the things that are going to make this SRCCON amazing and I, personally, am really glad to be here. A quick confession: I literally almost didn't come. My wife is literally days away from delivering our second child and... + +Whoo! + +Thank you. We found out the due date a week after we signed the contract for this space, so we couldn't really move that and thankfully, all the folks that I've worked with on this, just said, "You know what, do what you need to do." And then finally, Janna said, "Get out. You're making me too nervous for two days." So I'm A, really glad to be here, and B, really been thinking a lot about family. And kind of seeing everyone here in front of tables, sitting around, we are a kind of family. We've all chosen to work in an intersection of news and technology. It's an intersection that becomes more vital and more important and more exciting by the day. Frankly, I'm surprised that none of you had to go out to jump and cover the Supreme Court ruling today. Thank you for being here and present even as news breaks. It's an exciting intersection but we know it's not an easy one. The work is demanding. The pay doesn't line up. Diversity is a struggle. + +Yet we choose to be here, we choose to do the very best work that this industry sees. And we do that, every day, on a deadline, no matter what because we're a family. We work and we build, and we create together. And that, really, is what the next two days are about: You're going to learn new technologies. You're going to come up with great new solutions, but ultimately, we're going to strengthen these familial bonds. We're going to grow together and we're going to just kick some real ass. So to talk about how we're going to do that over the next couple of days, I want to introduce two of my amazing colleagues, Erika Owens and Ryan Pitts. + +[ Applause ] + +Erika Owens: Hello. So as Dan mentioned, we have a lot of great stuff planned for you, and we've put a lot of intentionality into that planning to make sure that the needs and interests of this community were present in this event and that we were able to include all participants in what we're working on. + +So some of the things that we did to support that were, we did a lot of outreach to ensure that people were able to get tickets—the limited supply of tickets, which Erin also wrote a little bit about. And we also did a lot of outreach to encourage many of you—a third of you, to be our session facilitators. So we really wanted to support the folks that are bringing the questions and issues and the projects that you've been working on here to collaborate with the rest of the room. We also wanted to make sure you were supported in taking on that role of facilitation. So we did a couple of short-call trainings with session facilitators. We also had a session buddy for each session facilitator so you could ask questions, bounce ideas off that person of that session and that was really the aim of the facilitators but also of supporting all the participants so you all can know that you're working together in your sessions and having the space to build really good connections. + +We also made sure to document that work. As I mentioned, Erin wrote about tickets. We've written a lot of documentation and the decisions that we've made for the event and we're going to post more about that during and after the event as well. Accessibility is also a key value that we hold at OpenNews and we wanted to see embodied in this event. One part of that is the actual physical space we're in. It's an accessible space. The city we chose also being an accessible city from many parts of the country and being more of an affordable city, being a city that we may have connections to, or for others, it might be our first time but we wanted to pick a place that was easy for folks to get to. We also wanted to make sure that people were able to come. + +So we have a scholarship program that was supported by WordPress VIP that allowed us to give scholarships to participants which we were really excited about, using that as a way to help people access the space and the event. We also have childcare this year. It's over at the hotel and you can go get info sheets. If you have a little stowaway in a bag that you would like to take to childcare, we have registration already. And we still have the space. We're really excited about that as a way for parents to participate fully and be able to bring their kids along and know that they're being taken care of. + +We also have transcription happening throughout SRCCON. Transcription is supported by Slack. And just wanted to let you know a little bit about the transcription program. We have three wonderful stenographers, Stan's over here typing away our opening plenary. Norma and Mirabai are also going to be in two of the rooms doing stenography for sessions during SRCCON. So we picked sessions that fit the needs of the spaces that we're in as well as we thought would benefit from having a stenographer in the room, and the format would work well for having someone taking notes—live notes the whole time. + +It's also a way for us to support remote participation. So there's, like, links on our site where you'll be able to find the feeds and folks outside of the room will be able to participate as well. And we've also made it clear that if you want to go off the record at any point in the session it's also possible to indicate that because sometimes conversations need to be private but we can bring it back on the record. And we'll have that automatic record of the session to share with participants who aren't here and to refer back to later. So we're really excited about that as another way of increasing accessibility for people in the room and outside of SRCCON. So for more about how we thought about sessions and scheduling, Ryan's going to come in and chat about that. + +Ryan Pitts: Hello! + +[ Applause ] + +It is so cool to look out and see all of you here. Thank you for being here and for helping us make SRCCON possible. I mean, SRCCON is absolutely about all of you and it's been amazing over the past couple of weeks while we've been looking at the schedule, just how many sessions people were bringing here. Hopefully, you've found the schedule app by now. If you have not, it's schedule.srccon.org. And I just wanted to talk to you about how we think about participating in SRCCON sessions and how we structure the days and how we think you can get the most out of being here with us. So you probably picked up as Erika was describing SRCCON, our sessions are really designed to be interactive and participatory. There's a reason we refer to them as "session facilitators" rather than as "speakers." It's because we want you to participate. They know, and we know that SRCCON is great when every single one of you brings what you know into the room and into that conversation. Everyone is a peer here, there's an amazing amount of expertise in all these rooms and these sessions work best when you are willing to share what you know. + +So please, speak up and do that. One thing that we noticed last year early on during SRCCON was how little tweeting there was going on during sessions and as we kind of walked around and looked in rooms. It totally clicked. People had heads up. They were actually engaged in conversation. Nobody had heads down, looking at laptops. Participate. These sessions will be great when you are engaged. We're not saying, don't tweet. Talk about the amazing things that you're learning. But we really think that you'll really think that you'll get most out of SRCCON if you are present. How do you choose which ones to go to? Obviously, some will reach out and grab you. Obviously, these are things that I want to bring back to home, that are in this room. But I will say, if you go to a session and if it doesn't turn out exactly to be what you were expecting, it's totally okay to quietly pack up, and switch to another session and look for another session that you want to be a part of. If you just can't decide which session you want to go to, one of my favorite pieces of advice that I've heard is to look at that list and to go to the last session that you think you want to be in. You're going to get outside your comfort zone, you're going to bring a new set of experiences to that conversation and really add something to the room that you're in. + +Another thing that we think that makes your SRCCON experience better is taking a little bit of the stress out of getting spaces on time. That's why we start our sessions a little bit later. First session are at 11:00 a.m. today and at 11:00 a.m. tomorrow. We also built 30 minute breaks between sessions and so if you're engaged in conversation, we do understand that you might have to check emails, so we built in enough time for you to do that. + +Visit the awesome coffee and tea station back there and continue having the conversations. Those are some of the best parts about being at a conference like this with so many amazing people around you. Most of our sessions here at SRCCON are one hour. There were a few that needed more time. Those are in blue on the schedule app. So those should be easy to identify. You might also notice that we have a few sessions planned during lunch this year. So this is something new that we're trying. We tried to identify a few topics that could be talked as a group over a meal. I want to give special thanks to the facilitators who are helping to try this out this year. You'll find the rooms and the times on the schedule. And so when we hit mealtime, feel free to grab food, hang out here, go out, get some sun, or head into one of those rooms to focus on one of those topical conversations. I will refer you to the easel in the back. There are a few blank spots on that easel. We have two lunchtime sessions today and one already planned for tomorrow. So that leaves a few open spots. If you would like to host a conversation, there's an empty spot, there's a pen, put it on the board. We would love to have you part of SRCCON in that way. One last way that we want you to get involved with SRCCON is spending time that's not so intensely focused on digging into big topics and just enjoying yourself and spending some downtime around all these amazing people. So we had fun last year dividing into four rooms into themes. We still love the idea of hanging out together, playing games, showing what you're working on, having conversation. + +One thing that we loved this year, we loved the hometown beer and wine, that was fun. Another thing that's a little bit different this year is we found last year's schedule made it sort of hard to bounce around and participate in more than one thing. So we've structured it a little bit differently. There are things that run all evening. And there are a few pop-ups that let you go try something else. All of that is laid out in the schedule. What's going on, where it will be. We have some very generous members of the community who are helping us to run those rooms. I want to take just a quick second to introduce you to them. So you know who to talk to if you have an idea, so Tiff, Joe, and Sisi, could you stand up? Thank you. These folks. These—there's Joe. These folks will be helping in the game room that will be running all night. They brought some board games. If you brought a board game, if you have a game you want to teach people to play, there'll be fun stuff going on all night. Katie, are you here? Allan and Katie are running our lightning talks. Those will go from 6:00 to 8:00. There is a website where if you have not pitched a lightning talk and you have an idea. I think there are submissions still being accepted. You can always check with Allan or Kaeti about that. That will be a super cool room. + +We have an evening walk. Will, are you here? All right. You see Will? He's got his hand up. Will is from the area and he will be leading a walk this evening. If you've been inside all day and you want to get out and get a little fresh air, that will be a time to do so. That will also be from 6:00 to 8:00. We have a hack space demo fair room. Justin—Justin. There's Justin. That room will be open all night for people who want to play around with hardware stuff. From 8:00 to 9:00, there'll be a demo fair if you have a project that you want to get some feedback on that will be a great time for that. Finally, we have a bookshare. Adam? We have a room set aside to talk about books. I don't see Adam but Adam will be here and Adam will have some books. Talk, take some away with you. Share with somebody, talk about books. So thank you to those community organizers. Thank you for all our session facilitators for helping us put together this year's schedule. That's kind of how we think about participating in SRCCON, how the days are structured. So now, to talk about how we make a more about how we make all these ideas concrete, talk a little bit about the safety plan and the logistics we're going to bring up Erin and Erik. + +[ Applause ] + +Erin Kissane: Hi, it really is so great to see all of you in this space. I've only seen photographs of this amazing building until we got here, and now we're here, and you're all here, and it's amazing. You all look amazing today, by the way. You look so lovely. + +So I just want to talk a little bit about some things that we tend to take for granted—which can be good. But I want to spend a little bit of time on them this morning while you're all here. The first is we have a code of conduct. It's on the website at srccon.org/conduct. We also have paper copies over by the lanyards if you want to read them on paper. It's short. And it is a small piece of a big plan. It is the outwardly visible sign of an invisible, big thing which includes all of the safety work that's going on backstage. + +I want to situate that by saying that the things that are really important—some things that we've been talking about that are really important to us is that SRCCON be welcoming and safe and inclusive. And that's what we see this work as. It's not about policing. It's about making the space really genuinely good for all of us humans. And the most important part of it, you know, I trust that you'll take a look at it if you haven't already, if I were to summarize the code of conduct in a sentence, it's: Take care of each other. So I want to say you can talk to any one of us in a green shirt. There are two colors of green or gray, anything that says "SRCCON." I'm from New York and as they have on our horrible subway signs: "If you see something, say something," which is to say, if you see something, or experience something that makes you feel weird or uncomfortable, or you're just not sure, totally talk to us. It's okay. You don't have to wait for it to, like, rise to the level of an emergency. + +If you turn over your badge, the safety help line is on the back. That, you can send texts or voice. That rings the whole safety crew. You can call it at any time. And by "any time" I mean any time through SRCCON. Tonight after midnight we're probably going to let it go to voice mail and check in at 7:00 in the morning but it covers all of SRCCON from now until at the end of the sessions and so that means you're covered at the bar, you're covered on campus, wherever you are if you need help. That said, if someone incurs a head injury particularly after 9:00 tonight, please call 911. Don't hesitate to do that. It's super important. + +I also want to say, like, there's a lot more going on behind the scenes with this stuff. Our interface with security here on campus and otherwise. If any of you would like to know more about that work, about any of our accessibility stuff, about the catering, any of those things. Please come talk to us, we're very happy to go into detail with you. Or if you have specific concerns about harassment, or anything. Again, find a person in a green shirt. And I'm just going to say it one more time: (772)266-2909. You'll find pretty much any of us, pretty much day or night, around the clock. So that's it on the safety talk. So now to talk about all the wonderful ways in which you will be fed and caffeinated and Wi-Fied, is Erik. + +Erik Westra: Hi. Hello. Yeah, so I'm Erik and I'm, as everyone else has said, I'm also really excited that you're all here but I'm even more excited because this is my city. I live in Minneapolis and it's really great to have all of you here. What I would love to do is have anybody who's from Minneapolis-St. Paul or nearby to stand up. I know there's a bunch of us. So I'm volunteering all of you to be helpful. So if you guys have any questions about the city or, you know, a place to go, or something to do, those are the people that you want to talk to. But welcome on behalf of all of us to SRCCON in Minneapolis. + +I'm going to talk through a couple of the, sort of, logistic situation. On your badge, which, some people have said, "It's upside down!" But really, the whole idea is if you twist, instead of, like, flip, you twist and then you just get to look at it. There's a map. There's also a Wi-Fi username and password, which you've probably already discovered. Every single one of you has your own username and password. It's going to help keep the system robust, running well, and, you know, that it's an added little piece that I think is going to keep everything running smoothly. That being said, if you could turn off your Dropboxes and your boxes and your True Detective torrents and all those things for the sake of those things, that would be fantastic. + +I want to talk about the lanyard color. And it's something that you may have heard at registration. Basically if you're taking pictures, a lot of people like to tie and post pictures. We're going to be taking pictures. If you see someone wearing a green lanyard, that means that they're coal with you taking their picture. If you see a yellow lanyard, you have to talk to them about it., and if you see a red lanyard, don't ask, they're not interested in being in photos which is totally awesome and cool. So if that wasn't super clear to you, feel free to trade lanyards, or if you switch way back through, and you decide, "I kind of don't want to be in pictures," just switch. There's wooden nickels that you were given. Those wooden nickels magically turn into beverages this evening. And there's also non-alcoholic beverages people to use those nickels for. My hope is that at the end of this, after they've all been counted, get them back so you can take them home with you, if that's something that seems you would like to have in your junk drawer. Bathrooms. They're back there. There's lots of signs. There's two sets and they're all sort of back there in that area. I'm not going to walk back there right now, but over there. Food. We want to keep you well fed and happy because we think that's a big part of being able to really take part of this. So there was some breakfast food this morning. Everything is labeled as far as dietary restrictions go. The goal is you don't have to ask, we wanted everything to be set out. So there's going to be specific numbers of things that are going to be out for people who have specific allergies. So there's going to be specific stuff that's marked vegan, there's going to be specific stuff that's marked gluten free, just to make sure that people have what they need, please don't take something that you, sort of, said you needed. That said, if you've missed sort of that question, or missed that process of giving us that information, please come talk to me or somebody at the registration desk and we'll make it work and we will give you that list. Also, if you're celebrating Ramadan, and this is the second year that SRCCON has occurred during Ramadan, we have special food for that, so come see and talk to us about that as well. Tonight we're having family dinner and we would like to thank Mandrill for serving that dinner. Ryan talked to the things that are going on at the same time so I'm going to get into that right now. And then the Coffee & Tea Hack Station is back in that hallway. That lovely gentleman, he's a coffee pro, that guy. He's a lovely, lovely human being. And he also brought coffee makers called manual coffee makers. So you should check out that. The whole idea there is learn how to, sort of, make your own coffee. And we have a lot of apparati—apparatuses for doing just that. Also if you're in a hurry and you just want coffee that's hot and wet, they're up in the back over there. So you don't have to wait to, like, grind your own coffee. So let's see... on that same note... the cups that we have back there for the coffee station are compostable so please put them in the correct bin for that. + +Also, I gotta jump back really quick. On the food, this is the second year in a row we've been able to do this. But all the food that's left over is going to be donated by the venue so that's something that's very important to us and we're really excited to be able to do that again. That kind of covers it for me and I'm going to bring Mr. Dan Sinker back up one more time. Thank you. + +[ Applause ] + +Dan Sinker: Thanks, everyone. I have a lengthy list of additional things that I have to tell you—I don't really. Thanks, everyone for being here. You know, there's a lot of logistics to go over but we do that at the start so you don't have to really think about that stuff any more. So, you know, we're trying to make it as possible as we can to make the next two days be focused on you and on the things that you can share with each other. The things that you bring today and the things that you leave with in a couple of days are the things that we want to really be able to focus on. + +So you've just met all of us. Last year we went around the room and had the room introduce themselves. There are a few too many of you this year. But what we do want to do is very quickly introduce yourselves to the people next to you at the table. So go ahead and do that. If you're at a table yourself, you there, you can just turn around and say hello to in the people behind you. + +[ Introductions ] + +All right. I'm going to refocus it back up here for just a second. The beauty is that there are ample opportunities to continue these conversations throughout the rest of the two days. As Erin said, we'll all be sitting down at lunch. Though it's going to be boxed and I would encourage visiting outside or taking part in a lunch session. We'll all be sitting down again for dinner. There'll be breakfast again in the morning tomorrow and lunch again. And one thing that I would ask: Some of you managed to beat the system and get a number of colleagues into SRCCON as well, and good for you for doing it. But don't just sit with your colleagues. You know, really do make sure that over the next couple of days that you're placing yourselves at tables with people that you don't know so that you leave knowing them. + +You know, I started saying that people were the most important part of SRCCON and I will end saying that same thing, too, you know? This is why we do the work we do. We want to help people. We wanna help people understand the world around them. You know, we wanna make things that are difficult to comprehend a little bit easier and we only do it because of each other. You know, we only are able to do it because all the rest of us are doing it as well. So really do appreciate the people here. Share as much as you can. Have a great time. Have good fun tonight and get a lot of work done over the next couple of days and sessions will start in 20 minutes. So there's still time to grab little more coffee, a little more food, and visit. But thanks y'all, and such a great SRCCON! + +[ Applause ] diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015RemoteCommunication.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015RemoteCommunication.md index 646b4b99..95a83f80 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015RemoteCommunication.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015RemoteCommunication.md @@ -1,281 +1,272 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/remotecommunication/index.html ---- - -# Figuring It Out—Remote Communication - -### Session Facilitator(s): Stephanie Yiu, Davis Shaver - -### Day & Time: Thursday, 11am-noon - -### Room: Thomas Swain - - -Hi, guys. Hi friends. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Steph Yiu. I work at WordPress.com. - -I'm Davis Shaver, I work at Fusion. - -And both of us work remotely/distributed, which is why we wanted to do the session with you today. My company is a hundred percent distributed and we're 350ish people at this point and my team that I work on is 34, and of the 34 people, I manage 15 of them, so it's a tough—it's a tough adjustment, I've been working remotely for three years. My first year was really, really hard, it was super-rough, and I didn't really realize how hard it was until I finished the year and I realized how much I had learned about myself in working remotely. So that's sort of the thinking behind why Davis and I wanted to do the session together. - -And so I joined Fusion as our second remote hire this October. Daniel being our first remote hire as director of engineering, and I had to start thinking about being remote in an intentional way that I hadn't really before. So I'm one of the co-organizers of hacks/hackers Philly with Erika Owens, and she's in a similar boat being remote with Open News, and she said Steph was putting together a session on the topic and encouraged me to get involved and I came aboard. - -And so the way that we're breaking down our session today is we actually have two exercises we're going to run with you guys and the whole concept is that we want you to think about remote communication in terms of your role, so meaning what you spend the majority of your time doing and working on, and then the second exercise will be focused on remote communication as part of your personality. I think that one of the toughest things about working remotely is that you may not realize that everyone you work you may have different goals. We're going to jump right in because it have you exercise. - -So the prompts on the screen, my biggest message here is don't overthink it. We've broken our world into 3 major roles. Which do you spend 50% of your time doing? Is it organizing and managing your internal team? Is it collaborating on the actual work, doing code, design, code review? Or are you primarily working with our teams or clients to do external communications? - - -Each of the roles has a color. On the tables, you will find on one of the table post-it note pack that corresponds to that color. Find your color and you'll be with your group. So let's break. - -[group activity] - -All the builders? Should we break builders down to two groups? Would that be helpful? How many of you do code? And how many of you do design products type of stuff? Let's break down to code and design product, is that OK? Just to keep the groups a little smaller. - -[group activity] - -So I'm glad you guys are all introducing yourselves. I'm going to explain the exercise real quick. It's actually all on the slide so I don't need to explain much. What tools do you use to do your work? - -Talk amongst yourselves. Write them down on post-it notes and follow the directions to populate our wall appropriately marked wall. - -[laughter] - -Any kind of tool? - -Any kind of tools, whatever. GitHub, Asana, any tool you use, turn them out on your post-it notes and throw them up on the wall. - -OK, folks, we have three minutes left in this breakout. - - -We'll type this up, by the way, at the end: - - -OK, guys, we're going to move into the next part of the exercise. Anyone want to share any observations or surprises that you heard during your individual breakouts? - -I am going to put my copresenter on the spot, to give us an explanation of why did you write privacy screen? - -Oh, so this group a lot of us manage people or work like basically managing teams and team members, and so a lot of what we do is actually not public, we can't share it with our team, so we talked about a lot of tools that we use a that is not publicly available. So for me I use an app called lighthouse to track all my one on one chats with team members because that's not public information and so we just talked a little bit about privacy, and so I have like, if you can see a privacy screen on my phone, just the stuff I do, it also just client information is sensitive, too. - -Cool, yeah. Well, we're going to type this up and put it on the GIST after the fact. But it's cool to see the overlap. GitHub Skype, big winners. - -OK, part 2. Challenges. What's the biggest challenge you have doing your role remotely? What do you do about about it? Talk about some strategies with your group and we're going to come back as a group and share them together: ... ... - [group activity] - -OK, guy, thanks, that was ten minutes. We'd like to go around to each group and hear what your biggest pinpoint is and maybe an idea for how you've been addressing it in your own organization. So let's start with Daniel and Will and Steph. - -So we're the organizers, but I think our by far biggest pain point is communication. And being organized is hard enough but there's a lot of tools out there. We talked about specifically when you're making decisions how to keep everybody informed was a big one the. - -Yeah, if you're managing a team of people and they're all working remotely from you and you're a core lead of the team, it's hard to make sure that everyone in your team is marching in the same path towards something and if you're not seeing them every single day and you can't go hey, Daniel, what are you working on, you only see them on Slack or whatever, and also you don't see how they're feeling. Like in my old job, I could know if my colleague was having a bad day or a good day, and as team leads who are managing other people, that kind of context does not exist, and so talking about ways to mitigate that. So might do a check-in with every team member every two weeks on video, but, you know, everybody does it differently. - -Great, thanks. - -Our code builders? - -So we have not one, but a whole bunch of challenges and I didn't write down the solutions at all. So here they are. So if you're a remote employee and you work on an otherwise not remote team, it can be easy to miss out on those in-person interactions and we talked a lot in general about the fact that working remotely comes at the expense of all that stuff you get from working in a group of people. We talked about lunch, how important it is in that way. Just being there with people not working but in a work context. - -Any tactics that you guys discussed for simulating the benefits of colleague lunches and that kind of thing? - -The beer thing. - -Oh, yeah, sometimes when we lunch. We described several things but one was we'll sometimes meet in a giant video chat with a beer. It's kind of like having a beer, but -- - -Yeah, well, you know, you are having a beer, I hope. - -Most of them just came down to having a meeting with no purpose, other than to—not even like oh, let's have a meeting to catch up, let's have a meeting, let's just get on a video chat and -- - -Play YouTube videos. - -Yeah, and hang out. - -Yeah, I don't know if anybody is from Vox. - -I know you guys do that. - -Yeah, like we started doing that, so on a like Thursdays, we have happy hours, like within the office, so sometimes we'll just hop a hang-out chat open and whoever wants to talk can talk and sometimes we just do them like randomly throughout the day, where people just want to hang out towards the end of the day to talk about whatever. Like an open thing. - -Cool. What other—any other pain points come out that seemed pretty chronic? - -We just talked about the mechanics of remote working and how organizations can be better or worse at setting having sufficient infrastructure of having decent quality via conferences and sharing screen, things like that. It sucks to have to solve those problems every single time there's an interaction. - -Sometimes in particular partially remote and not remote meetings when there's some combination, too, like ten people in the room and ten people remote can be horrible. Also two other things. - -So what's your tactic? - -Not have the meeting? - -I don't have a tactic for that one. That's a device that doesn't really work. - -There are like these remote presence devices,. - -Robots. - -Double robotics, yeah. - -But I kind of felt like I don't want to get a telepresence robot that wanders the hall, that's just weird. I want something that says don't forget to take Martin to the meeting. - -Cool. Anything else? - - -Yeah, two other quick ones. We talked about misunderstandings and conflicts. How it's a challenge to resolve when not in person, but also the fact that you're not necessarily forced to be right next to someone that you may be having a conflict with can be a good thing, too, and then we talked about distractions. - -Cool. - -How it being—what's the distraction? Because I can see you both sides having distractive -- - -Yeah, we mostly talked about working remotely as an occasion for more distraction, but I can also see for many working in an office setting there might also be distractions. - -One thing that didn't—I'm kind of interested from hearing from the more the sort of design side is the mechanics of actually building code and doing software development didn't seem to be a problem for anyone. Yeah, kind of like—seems to work pretty well. - -Hey, guys, Millie? Romley? - -I think one of the biggest problems we identified was exactly kind of what you touched on, that initial brainstorming kind of white-boarding, how else can I call it? Just that initial like place where you really need—yeah, where you really need kind of fluid feedback, and I don't think there is—there's no one solution that provides that seamless kind of back and forth. And -- - -There's also feedback sort of like you know, once the project kind of completed to a point, just like how can we kind of effectively talk about something, just not within a scheduled time without a hangout, but if you like come up with something, or you just want to bounce ideas off one another sometimes that's harder to do without coworkers. One kind of interesting thing was that was brought up was culture and with language barriers, especially with those—I'm sorry? - -Matthew, he works out of Costa Rica, but his team is like all over the world, so just sort of figuring out how do you tackle those barriers. - -Yeah. - -We have for -- - -It would be more difficult if you're communicating primarily in text. Because you don't have the other bandwidth from the face and gestures. - -Yeah, that's another problem. I mean one way we get around the feedback problem is we have just a 15-minute video meeting every single morning at exactly the same time. The problem for that is because the teams is dispersed all over the world, while it's 9 a.m. for me, it's 6 p.m. for the other person in Europe, so that can be a problem for them, but I mean eventually we will get used to it. I would say most people hate those meetings, but they're really useful. Like, they're necessary, we just wouldn't be able to communicate without them. - -I'm interested. The other—did the organizers or the coders, did you talk about standups in particular at all? - -No. - -Interesting. OK, thanks, Matthew. - -Could I ask a question? Because we're some remote and some onsite, and one of the things that we get is that the onsite people we have a big projector, Chromecast, really low barrier of entry for doing collaborate coding, especially. Do the people working who work remotely, the hangout is saying, oh, it's fucking up, and it's horrible to use, do you still get that experience or does that higher barrier— - -I heard you guys talking about Screenhero a little bit. - -We use Screenhero, but it's great. It's definitely much better than Google hangouts. - -But there's no video. There's no every face. So in terms of oh, like I'm having a problem with this, something or other, or what do you think of this thing that's running on my local machine, it's helpful and the audio is really good. That's the thing that really gets me, it sounds like the person is inside your head. - -Another one? - -Yeah. - -We use zoom. Zoom.US, which has been very, very stable and lets you expand. - -That's the one you use for like the all-team? - -Yeah, we have 25 people on zoom all the time, and it never crashes. You see screen and face. - -Do you find with those tools as good as they are, that you are being as collaborative with your team as you would be in person? - -I mean we have bunch of strategies to collaborate on code. That's something we do more asynchronously. If you have somebody you want to look at code, you put it up there and over the next day take a look at it. For me personally that works better. - -Thanks, man. OK, our communicators communicate? - -We talked about daily standups, too, just you know, I think as a partial solution to solving the problem that has already been stated. To make sure people, especially remote people, are all kind of marching on a similar path to a similar goal. Time zones being the challenge there. I find it to be really helpful. I work at a small company, five people, so I mean the time zone thing isn't killing us yet and another challenge that I'll touch on is that there's just so many tools. - -Too many tools. - -Yeah. - -So in our case, I mean I think to like answer this most directly, coming up with some of the rules for documentation that like, if nothing else, comments always get added to like the tickets, for example, has worked well for us, but I also see that being a challenge on scale especially when there are multiple teams working on multiple projects and you can probably speak a little bit more to that. Also, Slack has been helpful to sort of being the caulk to fill in the cracks gaps in that so it's not the exhaustive formalized solution necessarily but it smooths things over. Quick way to be in conversation whereas for us our tickets at GitHub and wikis at us have been more more like the authoritative formal record. - -Yeah, I think most of what we talked about is problems with information management and having too much information and not knowing where to go to find something, or do you need to go like 8 places to figure out what's going on with the project or oh, I left you, you know, an issue in you know, lighthouse, but I was looking at GitHub and that's a big problem. Especially as like teams and projects grow and things get more complicated and you're working remotely, so you may be doing things in interim ways and not even knowing about it, because it's not something that gets passed around in the office. So we talked a lot about documentation, you know, internal, external, as a way to solve—not solve, but address that, if you have really good documentation that's searchable that you could find, like that's how you film gits, because everyone is reading off the same page if you do your documentation well, but it's really hard to actually pull off and maintain continually and to make time for that, like no one wants to make time for writing down your process and what you're doing. - -Would you say that the internal blogs are helping that or are the most helpful thing. - -I don't know how we would survive without the internal blogs and having them searchable and we have like a meta search, so you can search all of them at once, but then still like, you get like a ton of information and you have like, I mean not like a Google-scale problem, but it's hard to—another thing working remote is you can be calling two people in different cities can be calling something the same thing some totally different word and like you don't even know the search word because you're not in an office where it just gets shouted around at the lunch table. So I mean we talked a lot about documentation. - -Awesome. Well, I'm going to turn it over to Steph for the second half of this little session. - -Yeah, so thank you very much for sharing your challenges with your different role types. The next exercise that we're going to work on is actually about your personality. And the reason why I bring this up is from personal experience, I think I told you guys in the beginning of the session that my first year working remotely was really difficult. I think it was because I didn't have a lot of awareness about sort of my personality and my needs in terms of communication, and so one thing that I found about myself was just managing my own energy levels when working remotely. So I'm an extrovert and I draw energy from being and around people so when I am not near people, my energy decreases so over time I need to figure out a way to manage my energy level so that can I can be happy and consistent of work. And the way I solve that is I work out of a coworking space every day. I don't work from home at all because I discovered that about myself. What motivates me and satisfies me about my job is working with my teammates. That's for me, what drives me, what makes me happy at work, so I started to hone in and focus on that at work and trying to do more one-on-one conversations or chat with my teammates to try to like drive that. - -That got noisy. I'll move closer. So I think it's really important to sort of understand what motivates you at work, and sort of what drives you and how to manage your energy levels. So for the next exercise, we're actually going to do a little bit of a breakdown into groups ever personal types, and there's so many ways to skin this cat, but this particular personality grouping is the NBI and it's sort of based off left brain, right brain and how socially effectual you are and things like that. So L1s, as you're reading this, I'm hoping that you're starting to see yourself in a couple of them. L1s tend to be focused on the clear objective concrete, they'll usually ask what is the point, what does this mean, and they value performance, results, and they're kind of goal-oriented. - -L2s are orderly reliable, methodical, systematic, they'll usually ask how should we do this, what is the plan, what should be done first and they're focused on process and details and routine. R1s tend to be curious, intuitive and creative and they'll ask why not, what if, and can we try and they are focused or oriented towards future big ideas, and big picture. - -And R2s are sociable, they have a lot of empathy and they will ask, how does everyone feel about that? Who will be involved and who will be affected? And they're oriented towards relationships and people and feelings. Most people will kind of straddle two of these, and they'll be like 75% 1 and 25% the other. I'll ask you and see what you're a majority of and we're going to break out into these groups and so I think L1s will be here. L2s will be back there. - -With the colors. How to use the colors. - -OK, L1 colors. We we can do the colors. Yeah. L2, L1, and R2. Perfect. - -[break] - -And then once you're in a group, we're going to spend five minutes. - -I'll go back. So you're going to spend five minutes talking about your—where do you get your energy from and what motivates you in work and then I'll go back to that. - -[group activity] - -All right, guys. Hopefully you've taken this time to learn a little bit about what motivates you or what drives you at work, and hopefully understanding the core values of sort of what gives you energy at work or what excites you about your work, helps you march towards that so that you're more excited about what you're working on. The next exercise, we're actually going to have your different personality types work together as a team. And what we're going to do is you're going to—you're part of a nine-person team, this little group, each of your personality groups, and you guys are launching a big feature this fall. And you need to figure out, using the communication tools that we have shared earlier, how to brainstorm a marketing plan and then how to facilitate the execution across your team. So it's how would you facilitate the brainstorming process, how would you put that process together, and then how would you disseminate that process across your team so that people actually follow the marketing plan that you guys put together, and then think about some of the stuff that we had talked about earlier about how difficult it is to make sure that everyone is marching towards the goal together. And then we'll talk about your different personality types in terms of how we game up with a communication plan. - -[group activity] - -All right, we're going to wrap up, because we're at the hour. So we're going to go around and quickly share some plans before we head out. - - -What group are you guys? - - -L1. R1. - -All right, guys, we're going to wrap up. R1, how do you brainstorm a marketing plan't? - -So we said why not have an unlimited budget and so I mean not unlimited budget. - -Big picture? What? - - -We thought—we think it's really important to have empathy built across the team so kind of the things we are big together and also we thought it was cool to have a big end. - -All about those big pictures. - -All about TR1s. - -Big pictures, big dollars, so the other thing was kind of like how do you build the empathy required for the remote, to day to day work, right? And great idea that we came up with was to have the managerial power of this particular project not in the hands of someone who's in the main office. - -Oh, but actually remote, OK. - -So one of the other five, so in a satellite or fully remote, but then another idea was potentially to have not the same person, but people constantly moving between these three locations or whatever to build empathy and realize that oh, when you have that personal conversation at work that devolves into what are we going to do about this project, no one else is part of that and that kind of sucks. So those of kind of the big ideas that we had. I don't know that those successfully lead us to a project but -- - -It was interesting to hear you guys talking about the big picture and the empathy of your team. Process friends? You guys are L1s, right? How does your team brainstorm? - -your project or your marketing plan. - -We decided that brainstorming was evil and shouldn't be done. - -We all hate brainstorming. - - -And then how do you guys come up with a plan, then. - -So in direct response to that, we thought that, you know, have someone and it doesn't really matter who, come up with an initial sort of draft an give that out to people to give feedback to and propose edits to and it can completely change from the beginning of the end and I think go through a process of brainstorming, but we called it something else. - -And who did you ensure that your team marching towards the seem rhythm? - -We were debating the tools in sort of the structure and forcing people to be concise through something like a doc, you know, Google docs, which is collaborative to a degree, Slack for sort of continuous communication, and I think, I don't know, we're in mid conversation on this one, but maybe actually using GitHub for something that's not code-based but just to be able to track as like the document changes what the and the comments around that, and I think it would be searchable and time based in a way that Google docs and Slack are but present sort of challenges that GitHub might do the best job circumventing. - -Social friends? R2s, how did you guys brainstorm and -- - -Despite being the big-picture idea types, we actually kind of echoed a lot of what Angie said about it's important that there's clearly defined parameters and beyond that, two smaller digestible chunks because if you try to brainstorm with nine different people in different locations, it can be difficult for someone who's either remote or junior to the project to get their ideas heard, but if you break that up into more digestible chunks, that can help. - -Last group? You guys were L2s, right? - -How did you guys brainstorm and come up with a plan? - -We were going to do a hangout with some sort of in-person real time communication with a decent brainstorming. Ever some initial requirement-gathering, so that it's not just from scratch brainstorming. Use some actual white boards to draw things while brainstorming, assign some tasks, and use Jira, maybe, I guess this is not as much of a code project, maybe, but get others to record those tasks and use Slack a lot. - -Yeah, sure. - -Awesome. Well, I think that wraps up our session today. So as a quick recap, just want to talk about a couple things that we discussed today. Amongst your roles, whether it's organizer or builder or communicator, we have a slew of tools that we all use, some of them are the same, but some of them are very, very different. And within each role, you face different challenges, whether you're a builder or you're a communicator or organizer, there are different challenges that you face in terms of how do you collaborate in code review, how do you make sure the team is moving in the same direction? How do you talk to people externally who don't understand how your team works internally and also we talked about personality types and motivations at work. You think about the people that you work with on a day-to-day basis, they are not all like you, they don't communicate like you, they may communicate very differently from you. Some people may love video calls and brainstorming, some people may hate it, some people may love having regular check-ins, some people may not need that at all and want to work solo and for you personally you may need to have lots of in-person communication time to recharge yourself or may not need that, and I think it was interesting to hear about sort of how you guys set up your communication plans, some of you were really empathetic to your team members, some people wanted to kind of start with a brainstorming plan, with one person starting that and have other folks add on to it, I think the most important thing that we wanted to make sure that you left the session with is just communicate thoughtfully. Think about who you're working with, since they may not have the same goals and drives and roles as you. - -Yeah, I totally echo Steph. What stood out to me is that there isn't a panacea, and there isn't a right solution for running distributed efforts. Even as we were working through our own plan, we probably could have revised that a few more times, even, as we talked about the pros, cons of different strategies and. I guess we don't really have time for this. But check out our links on bit.ly, or on both of our Twitter accounts, and thank you for coming. - -[session ended] +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/remotecommunication/index.html +--- + +# Figuring It Out—Remote Communication + +### Session Facilitator(s): Stephanie Yiu, Davis Shaver + +### Day & Time: Thursday, 11am-noon + +### Room: Thomas Swain + +Hi, guys. Hi friends. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Steph Yiu. I work at WordPress.com. + +I'm Davis Shaver, I work at Fusion. + +And both of us work remotely/distributed, which is why we wanted to do the session with you today. My company is a hundred percent distributed and we're 350ish people at this point and my team that I work on is 34, and of the 34 people, I manage 15 of them, so it's a tough—it's a tough adjustment, I've been working remotely for three years. My first year was really, really hard, it was super-rough, and I didn't really realize how hard it was until I finished the year and I realized how much I had learned about myself in working remotely. So that's sort of the thinking behind why Davis and I wanted to do the session together. + +And so I joined Fusion as our second remote hire this October. Daniel being our first remote hire as director of engineering, and I had to start thinking about being remote in an intentional way that I hadn't really before. So I'm one of the co-organizers of hacks/hackers Philly with Erika Owens, and she's in a similar boat being remote with Open News, and she said Steph was putting together a session on the topic and encouraged me to get involved and I came aboard. + +And so the way that we're breaking down our session today is we actually have two exercises we're going to run with you guys and the whole concept is that we want you to think about remote communication in terms of your role, so meaning what you spend the majority of your time doing and working on, and then the second exercise will be focused on remote communication as part of your personality. I think that one of the toughest things about working remotely is that you may not realize that everyone you work you may have different goals. We're going to jump right in because it have you exercise. + +So the prompts on the screen, my biggest message here is don't overthink it. We've broken our world into 3 major roles. Which do you spend 50% of your time doing? Is it organizing and managing your internal team? Is it collaborating on the actual work, doing code, design, code review? Or are you primarily working with our teams or clients to do external communications? + +Each of the roles has a color. On the tables, you will find on one of the table post-it note pack that corresponds to that color. Find your color and you'll be with your group. So let's break. + +[group activity] + +All the builders? Should we break builders down to two groups? Would that be helpful? How many of you do code? And how many of you do design products type of stuff? Let's break down to code and design product, is that OK? Just to keep the groups a little smaller. + +[group activity] + +So I'm glad you guys are all introducing yourselves. I'm going to explain the exercise real quick. It's actually all on the slide so I don't need to explain much. What tools do you use to do your work? + +Talk amongst yourselves. Write them down on post-it notes and follow the directions to populate our wall appropriately marked wall. + +[laughter] + +Any kind of tool? + +Any kind of tools, whatever. GitHub, Asana, any tool you use, turn them out on your post-it notes and throw them up on the wall. + +OK, folks, we have three minutes left in this breakout. + +We'll type this up, by the way, at the end: + +OK, guys, we're going to move into the next part of the exercise. Anyone want to share any observations or surprises that you heard during your individual breakouts? + +I am going to put my copresenter on the spot, to give us an explanation of why did you write privacy screen? + +Oh, so this group a lot of us manage people or work like basically managing teams and team members, and so a lot of what we do is actually not public, we can't share it with our team, so we talked about a lot of tools that we use a that is not publicly available. So for me I use an app called lighthouse to track all my one on one chats with team members because that's not public information and so we just talked a little bit about privacy, and so I have like, if you can see a privacy screen on my phone, just the stuff I do, it also just client information is sensitive, too. + +Cool, yeah. Well, we're going to type this up and put it on the GIST after the fact. But it's cool to see the overlap. GitHub Skype, big winners. + +OK, part 2. Challenges. What's the biggest challenge you have doing your role remotely? What do you do about about it? Talk about some strategies with your group and we're going to come back as a group and share them together: ... ... +[group activity] + +OK, guy, thanks, that was ten minutes. We'd like to go around to each group and hear what your biggest pinpoint is and maybe an idea for how you've been addressing it in your own organization. So let's start with Daniel and Will and Steph. + +So we're the organizers, but I think our by far biggest pain point is communication. And being organized is hard enough but there's a lot of tools out there. We talked about specifically when you're making decisions how to keep everybody informed was a big one the. + +Yeah, if you're managing a team of people and they're all working remotely from you and you're a core lead of the team, it's hard to make sure that everyone in your team is marching in the same path towards something and if you're not seeing them every single day and you can't go hey, Daniel, what are you working on, you only see them on Slack or whatever, and also you don't see how they're feeling. Like in my old job, I could know if my colleague was having a bad day or a good day, and as team leads who are managing other people, that kind of context does not exist, and so talking about ways to mitigate that. So might do a check-in with every team member every two weeks on video, but, you know, everybody does it differently. + +Great, thanks. + +Our code builders? + +So we have not one, but a whole bunch of challenges and I didn't write down the solutions at all. So here they are. So if you're a remote employee and you work on an otherwise not remote team, it can be easy to miss out on those in-person interactions and we talked a lot in general about the fact that working remotely comes at the expense of all that stuff you get from working in a group of people. We talked about lunch, how important it is in that way. Just being there with people not working but in a work context. + +Any tactics that you guys discussed for simulating the benefits of colleague lunches and that kind of thing? + +The beer thing. + +Oh, yeah, sometimes when we lunch. We described several things but one was we'll sometimes meet in a giant video chat with a beer. It's kind of like having a beer, but -- + +Yeah, well, you know, you are having a beer, I hope. + +Most of them just came down to having a meeting with no purpose, other than to—not even like oh, let's have a meeting to catch up, let's have a meeting, let's just get on a video chat and -- + +Play YouTube videos. + +Yeah, and hang out. + +Yeah, I don't know if anybody is from Vox. + +I know you guys do that. + +Yeah, like we started doing that, so on a like Thursdays, we have happy hours, like within the office, so sometimes we'll just hop a hang-out chat open and whoever wants to talk can talk and sometimes we just do them like randomly throughout the day, where people just want to hang out towards the end of the day to talk about whatever. Like an open thing. + +Cool. What other—any other pain points come out that seemed pretty chronic? + +We just talked about the mechanics of remote working and how organizations can be better or worse at setting having sufficient infrastructure of having decent quality via conferences and sharing screen, things like that. It sucks to have to solve those problems every single time there's an interaction. + +Sometimes in particular partially remote and not remote meetings when there's some combination, too, like ten people in the room and ten people remote can be horrible. Also two other things. + +So what's your tactic? + +Not have the meeting? + +I don't have a tactic for that one. That's a device that doesn't really work. + +There are like these remote presence devices,. + +Robots. + +Double robotics, yeah. + +But I kind of felt like I don't want to get a telepresence robot that wanders the hall, that's just weird. I want something that says don't forget to take Martin to the meeting. + +Cool. Anything else? + +Yeah, two other quick ones. We talked about misunderstandings and conflicts. How it's a challenge to resolve when not in person, but also the fact that you're not necessarily forced to be right next to someone that you may be having a conflict with can be a good thing, too, and then we talked about distractions. + +Cool. + +How it being—what's the distraction? Because I can see you both sides having distractive -- + +Yeah, we mostly talked about working remotely as an occasion for more distraction, but I can also see for many working in an office setting there might also be distractions. + +One thing that didn't—I'm kind of interested from hearing from the more the sort of design side is the mechanics of actually building code and doing software development didn't seem to be a problem for anyone. Yeah, kind of like—seems to work pretty well. + +Hey, guys, Millie? Romley? + +I think one of the biggest problems we identified was exactly kind of what you touched on, that initial brainstorming kind of white-boarding, how else can I call it? Just that initial like place where you really need—yeah, where you really need kind of fluid feedback, and I don't think there is—there's no one solution that provides that seamless kind of back and forth. And -- + +There's also feedback sort of like you know, once the project kind of completed to a point, just like how can we kind of effectively talk about something, just not within a scheduled time without a hangout, but if you like come up with something, or you just want to bounce ideas off one another sometimes that's harder to do without coworkers. One kind of interesting thing was that was brought up was culture and with language barriers, especially with those—I'm sorry? + +Matthew, he works out of Costa Rica, but his team is like all over the world, so just sort of figuring out how do you tackle those barriers. + +Yeah. + +We have for -- + +It would be more difficult if you're communicating primarily in text. Because you don't have the other bandwidth from the face and gestures. + +Yeah, that's another problem. I mean one way we get around the feedback problem is we have just a 15-minute video meeting every single morning at exactly the same time. The problem for that is because the teams is dispersed all over the world, while it's 9 a.m. for me, it's 6 p.m. for the other person in Europe, so that can be a problem for them, but I mean eventually we will get used to it. I would say most people hate those meetings, but they're really useful. Like, they're necessary, we just wouldn't be able to communicate without them. + +I'm interested. The other—did the organizers or the coders, did you talk about standups in particular at all? + +No. + +Interesting. OK, thanks, Matthew. + +Could I ask a question? Because we're some remote and some onsite, and one of the things that we get is that the onsite people we have a big projector, Chromecast, really low barrier of entry for doing collaborate coding, especially. Do the people working who work remotely, the hangout is saying, oh, it's fucking up, and it's horrible to use, do you still get that experience or does that higher barrier— + +I heard you guys talking about Screenhero a little bit. + +We use Screenhero, but it's great. It's definitely much better than Google hangouts. + +But there's no video. There's no every face. So in terms of oh, like I'm having a problem with this, something or other, or what do you think of this thing that's running on my local machine, it's helpful and the audio is really good. That's the thing that really gets me, it sounds like the person is inside your head. + +Another one? + +Yeah. + +We use zoom. Zoom.US, which has been very, very stable and lets you expand. + +That's the one you use for like the all-team? + +Yeah, we have 25 people on zoom all the time, and it never crashes. You see screen and face. + +Do you find with those tools as good as they are, that you are being as collaborative with your team as you would be in person? + +I mean we have bunch of strategies to collaborate on code. That's something we do more asynchronously. If you have somebody you want to look at code, you put it up there and over the next day take a look at it. For me personally that works better. + +Thanks, man. OK, our communicators communicate? + +We talked about daily standups, too, just you know, I think as a partial solution to solving the problem that has already been stated. To make sure people, especially remote people, are all kind of marching on a similar path to a similar goal. Time zones being the challenge there. I find it to be really helpful. I work at a small company, five people, so I mean the time zone thing isn't killing us yet and another challenge that I'll touch on is that there's just so many tools. + +Too many tools. + +Yeah. + +So in our case, I mean I think to like answer this most directly, coming up with some of the rules for documentation that like, if nothing else, comments always get added to like the tickets, for example, has worked well for us, but I also see that being a challenge on scale especially when there are multiple teams working on multiple projects and you can probably speak a little bit more to that. Also, Slack has been helpful to sort of being the caulk to fill in the cracks gaps in that so it's not the exhaustive formalized solution necessarily but it smooths things over. Quick way to be in conversation whereas for us our tickets at GitHub and wikis at us have been more more like the authoritative formal record. + +Yeah, I think most of what we talked about is problems with information management and having too much information and not knowing where to go to find something, or do you need to go like 8 places to figure out what's going on with the project or oh, I left you, you know, an issue in you know, lighthouse, but I was looking at GitHub and that's a big problem. Especially as like teams and projects grow and things get more complicated and you're working remotely, so you may be doing things in interim ways and not even knowing about it, because it's not something that gets passed around in the office. So we talked a lot about documentation, you know, internal, external, as a way to solve—not solve, but address that, if you have really good documentation that's searchable that you could find, like that's how you film gits, because everyone is reading off the same page if you do your documentation well, but it's really hard to actually pull off and maintain continually and to make time for that, like no one wants to make time for writing down your process and what you're doing. + +Would you say that the internal blogs are helping that or are the most helpful thing. + +I don't know how we would survive without the internal blogs and having them searchable and we have like a meta search, so you can search all of them at once, but then still like, you get like a ton of information and you have like, I mean not like a Google-scale problem, but it's hard to—another thing working remote is you can be calling two people in different cities can be calling something the same thing some totally different word and like you don't even know the search word because you're not in an office where it just gets shouted around at the lunch table. So I mean we talked a lot about documentation. + +Awesome. Well, I'm going to turn it over to Steph for the second half of this little session. + +Yeah, so thank you very much for sharing your challenges with your different role types. The next exercise that we're going to work on is actually about your personality. And the reason why I bring this up is from personal experience, I think I told you guys in the beginning of the session that my first year working remotely was really difficult. I think it was because I didn't have a lot of awareness about sort of my personality and my needs in terms of communication, and so one thing that I found about myself was just managing my own energy levels when working remotely. So I'm an extrovert and I draw energy from being and around people so when I am not near people, my energy decreases so over time I need to figure out a way to manage my energy level so that can I can be happy and consistent of work. And the way I solve that is I work out of a coworking space every day. I don't work from home at all because I discovered that about myself. What motivates me and satisfies me about my job is working with my teammates. That's for me, what drives me, what makes me happy at work, so I started to hone in and focus on that at work and trying to do more one-on-one conversations or chat with my teammates to try to like drive that. + +That got noisy. I'll move closer. So I think it's really important to sort of understand what motivates you at work, and sort of what drives you and how to manage your energy levels. So for the next exercise, we're actually going to do a little bit of a breakdown into groups ever personal types, and there's so many ways to skin this cat, but this particular personality grouping is the NBI and it's sort of based off left brain, right brain and how socially effectual you are and things like that. So L1s, as you're reading this, I'm hoping that you're starting to see yourself in a couple of them. L1s tend to be focused on the clear objective concrete, they'll usually ask what is the point, what does this mean, and they value performance, results, and they're kind of goal-oriented. + +L2s are orderly reliable, methodical, systematic, they'll usually ask how should we do this, what is the plan, what should be done first and they're focused on process and details and routine. R1s tend to be curious, intuitive and creative and they'll ask why not, what if, and can we try and they are focused or oriented towards future big ideas, and big picture. + +And R2s are sociable, they have a lot of empathy and they will ask, how does everyone feel about that? Who will be involved and who will be affected? And they're oriented towards relationships and people and feelings. Most people will kind of straddle two of these, and they'll be like 75% 1 and 25% the other. I'll ask you and see what you're a majority of and we're going to break out into these groups and so I think L1s will be here. L2s will be back there. + +With the colors. How to use the colors. + +OK, L1 colors. We we can do the colors. Yeah. L2, L1, and R2. Perfect. + +[break] + +And then once you're in a group, we're going to spend five minutes. + +I'll go back. So you're going to spend five minutes talking about your—where do you get your energy from and what motivates you in work and then I'll go back to that. + +[group activity] + +All right, guys. Hopefully you've taken this time to learn a little bit about what motivates you or what drives you at work, and hopefully understanding the core values of sort of what gives you energy at work or what excites you about your work, helps you march towards that so that you're more excited about what you're working on. The next exercise, we're actually going to have your different personality types work together as a team. And what we're going to do is you're going to—you're part of a nine-person team, this little group, each of your personality groups, and you guys are launching a big feature this fall. And you need to figure out, using the communication tools that we have shared earlier, how to brainstorm a marketing plan and then how to facilitate the execution across your team. So it's how would you facilitate the brainstorming process, how would you put that process together, and then how would you disseminate that process across your team so that people actually follow the marketing plan that you guys put together, and then think about some of the stuff that we had talked about earlier about how difficult it is to make sure that everyone is marching towards the goal together. And then we'll talk about your different personality types in terms of how we game up with a communication plan. + +[group activity] + +All right, we're going to wrap up, because we're at the hour. So we're going to go around and quickly share some plans before we head out. + +What group are you guys? + +L1. R1. + +All right, guys, we're going to wrap up. R1, how do you brainstorm a marketing plan't? + +So we said why not have an unlimited budget and so I mean not unlimited budget. + +Big picture? What? + +We thought—we think it's really important to have empathy built across the team so kind of the things we are big together and also we thought it was cool to have a big end. + +All about those big pictures. + +All about TR1s. + +Big pictures, big dollars, so the other thing was kind of like how do you build the empathy required for the remote, to day to day work, right? And great idea that we came up with was to have the managerial power of this particular project not in the hands of someone who's in the main office. + +Oh, but actually remote, OK. + +So one of the other five, so in a satellite or fully remote, but then another idea was potentially to have not the same person, but people constantly moving between these three locations or whatever to build empathy and realize that oh, when you have that personal conversation at work that devolves into what are we going to do about this project, no one else is part of that and that kind of sucks. So those of kind of the big ideas that we had. I don't know that those successfully lead us to a project but -- + +It was interesting to hear you guys talking about the big picture and the empathy of your team. Process friends? You guys are L1s, right? How does your team brainstorm? + +your project or your marketing plan. + +We decided that brainstorming was evil and shouldn't be done. + +We all hate brainstorming. + +And then how do you guys come up with a plan, then. + +So in direct response to that, we thought that, you know, have someone and it doesn't really matter who, come up with an initial sort of draft an give that out to people to give feedback to and propose edits to and it can completely change from the beginning of the end and I think go through a process of brainstorming, but we called it something else. + +And who did you ensure that your team marching towards the seem rhythm? + +We were debating the tools in sort of the structure and forcing people to be concise through something like a doc, you know, Google docs, which is collaborative to a degree, Slack for sort of continuous communication, and I think, I don't know, we're in mid conversation on this one, but maybe actually using GitHub for something that's not code-based but just to be able to track as like the document changes what the and the comments around that, and I think it would be searchable and time based in a way that Google docs and Slack are but present sort of challenges that GitHub might do the best job circumventing. + +Social friends? R2s, how did you guys brainstorm and -- + +Despite being the big-picture idea types, we actually kind of echoed a lot of what Angie said about it's important that there's clearly defined parameters and beyond that, two smaller digestible chunks because if you try to brainstorm with nine different people in different locations, it can be difficult for someone who's either remote or junior to the project to get their ideas heard, but if you break that up into more digestible chunks, that can help. + +Last group? You guys were L2s, right? + +How did you guys brainstorm and come up with a plan? + +We were going to do a hangout with some sort of in-person real time communication with a decent brainstorming. Ever some initial requirement-gathering, so that it's not just from scratch brainstorming. Use some actual white boards to draw things while brainstorming, assign some tasks, and use Jira, maybe, I guess this is not as much of a code project, maybe, but get others to record those tasks and use Slack a lot. + +Yeah, sure. + +Awesome. Well, I think that wraps up our session today. So as a quick recap, just want to talk about a couple things that we discussed today. Amongst your roles, whether it's organizer or builder or communicator, we have a slew of tools that we all use, some of them are the same, but some of them are very, very different. And within each role, you face different challenges, whether you're a builder or you're a communicator or organizer, there are different challenges that you face in terms of how do you collaborate in code review, how do you make sure the team is moving in the same direction? How do you talk to people externally who don't understand how your team works internally and also we talked about personality types and motivations at work. You think about the people that you work with on a day-to-day basis, they are not all like you, they don't communicate like you, they may communicate very differently from you. Some people may love video calls and brainstorming, some people may hate it, some people may love having regular check-ins, some people may not need that at all and want to work solo and for you personally you may need to have lots of in-person communication time to recharge yourself or may not need that, and I think it was interesting to hear about sort of how you guys set up your communication plans, some of you were really empathetic to your team members, some people wanted to kind of start with a brainstorming plan, with one person starting that and have other folks add on to it, I think the most important thing that we wanted to make sure that you left the session with is just communicate thoughtfully. Think about who you're working with, since they may not have the same goals and drives and roles as you. + +Yeah, I totally echo Steph. What stood out to me is that there isn't a panacea, and there isn't a right solution for running distributed efforts. Even as we were working through our own plan, we probably could have revised that a few more times, even, as we talked about the pros, cons of different strategies and. I guess we don't really have time for this. But check out our links on bit.ly, or on both of our Twitter accounts, and thank you for coming. + +[session ended] diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015ReporterGraphics.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015ReporterGraphics.md index bb4ab335..73cf3da8 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015ReporterGraphics.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015ReporterGraphics.md @@ -1,403 +1,402 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/reportergraphics/index.html ---- - -# Let's Stop Worrying and Let Our Reporters Make Their Own Graphics - -### Session Facilitator(s): David Yanofsky, Becky Bowers - -### Day & Time: Friday, 12:30-1:30pm - -### Room: Thomas Swain - - -Hello. I'm David Yanofsky. I'm a reporter at Quartz. - -I'm Becky Bowers, and I'm an economics editor at the Wall Street Journal. - -And we wanted to talk and have a conversation about today about what your newsrooms are doing around making charts and graphics outside of specialized teams. And you know, share what we're doing and have a hopefully very fruitful conversation about what works, what doesn't, and how to get over the various spheres that we have in giving away control of these things. - -Exactly. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about what Quartz does. - -So Quartz—and by the way, we have an etherpad at that link if you want to take collaborative notes. There's also some links in there that you might want to refer back to later. So at Quartz, we have the power—everyone in the newsroom has the power to make their own charts in a tool called Chartbuilder that's made specifically for this purpose and it lets people make line charts, it lets people make bar charts. And that's about it. Limited color palettes. It fits our specified color design and as developers we've been able to train certain heavy users of it in, kind of, like, one step beyond that is something Graphics Desk might be doing more of, which is adding these charts in Illustrator, and adding annotations and modifying them, and taking them out of this constrained tool and into this open environment. - -And first I have to say that I'm a huge fan of Chartbuilder, when I was with PolitiFact, we used Quartz' copy. And at the Journal even if we have huge specialized teams that make nothing of wonderful graphics for print and for web, it turns out that it's incredibly useful for us to use even the most basic tools to make very quick charts. The most common tool used by our team of economics reporters at the Journal is simply a macro in Excel. We have a variety of chart templates that already have color palettes for line charts, bar charts. There is a pie chart option and this is a macro that our reporters use frequently. They just put together their simple Excel line chart or bar chart and they are minutes away from exporting, uploading, and copying it into a blog post. And some of our posts like on big indicator days, jobs days will do ten charts, 13 charts, everything that you need to know about anything. They are insanely popular with readers. We throw those on the wsj.com home page, yes—little reporter-made charts. They lead to the charts roundups. But readers love them and they are a way for so many more of our blog posts and other quick-turn items to have charts that are then easy to share. They do very well on Twitter and Facebook. - -And it's been a very important part of the reporting process for a lot of our reporters who tell me, it actually helps them to come up with the story that they might be writing to throw data into a very simple visualization tool. - -So we—well, first let's just talk about who is you guys who's here. How many of you work at newspapers? And how many—and how many in public media/broadcast, television? Anyone in television? One person in television? How many of you work at organizations that allow people outside of a typical or traditional graphics desk to make graphics? Cool. Cool. So we took this—we have been collecting responses in a survey, which you can see, you can see the responses up on etherpad, and it pretty much showed that. And one last question: How many of you work in newsrooms that have that have less than 15 people in them. How many, 15-30? 30-100? More than 100? - -I love the diversity in this group. - -So our survey seemed to reflect that, where people of all sizes, all different types of organizations and the thing that I found really great is that at all of these organizations, when you look, you know, deeper into this data, there are at every size and at every type, there are examples of organizations that are letting non-specialists make, you know, what is traditionally irresponsible has been a specialist work, activity maps, graphs and charts. So if you're not in one of those organizations and you want to be a part of them, you can look around in this room, and you can look at the server results and you can say, this is not typical anymore. There's people that are doing this all around the country and all around the world. - -So, I guess, in getting through this, in getting, you know, non-specialists to making charts, there is this fear. I know that I encountered it. - -I still have it. - -She still has it. And I still have it... mostly that people making these charts are going to do things poorly. That they're going to do things wrong, incorrect. - -Or just hideous. We do that, too. - -Or just hideous. So I guess we want to hear: What have been your guys' fears in either allowing if you don't allow other people to do it, allowing people to do this, or in just your everyday thinking of non-specialists making charts? - -Um, people using tools that aren't configurable, or can't bend to a house style. That's a fear. - -So your fear is that people are using a tool that doesn't fit house style. - -Or is incapable of adhering. It's not configurable. We can't adjust the styles. - -Sure. And you have—and do you have a tool that can? Do you have tools that can do that? - -No. - -No. Anyone else? Anyone else suffer from that? - -I have a question, though. - -Sure. - -Can I just ask, out of the people whose newsrooms do allow non-specialists to make charts, how many of those newsrooms allow those charts to be published out review by specialists at all? - -So that's a question we haven't asked and I think it's an important one to ask. And I hope that we'll have—we will have a chance to have a more detailed discussion about what the process is in your newsroom. At the Journal both things happen. And the way that that's happening is that a reporter might give a chart to an editor who's not medical a visual editor and that will get published to a blog. So it's not to the primary platform. It's not in print. And so there's a sense that there's a streamlined process where a specialized visual editor isn't necessarily part of that process. - -What I discovered is that the more we get specialists involved, at least in the—well, yes. I'll stop there and we'll continue that conversation. Josh, you had a question? - -No, I had another thing similar to the house style, which was tools that can potentially introduce security vulnerabilities if they have, like, Javascript in that you don't know very much about. - -Mm-hmm. Okay. - -Mobile—that they won't work there. - -I think before even thinking about any of the tools or anything like that, the establishment of the editorial process for, you know, 'cause nothing, really, I work for Minnesota Public Radio, and, you know, nothing goes out without, whether it's reporter-done or otherwise, without having an editor look at it, somebody check the math, we treat it like any other journalistic thing. Wouldn't imagine anybody getting anything out, you know, without that editorial process. - -But that's no different than your words, right? - -Well, yeah, and we shouldn't be treating any of this differently. And besides when do we get Atlas? - -You get Chartbuilder. You get version two, now. Atlas as an open thing is to be determined. - -I had a terrible data literacy issue in my newsroom and so we started let's talk about why this is a bad chart because there's a lot of confusion around that. - -Um, and did you—what did you do to try and improve the data literacy? - -I mean, we had a brownbag and I just walked through 30 really, really awful charts. Andered my grievances with each one and kind of just—half of the people weren't paying attention and never revisited the charts issue again, but at least half the people, I'm telling you this is a boo'd chart and you know why I think it's a bad chart because, you know, seeing all these sad excuses for charts, and it kind of worked, you know, it could o it got to a place where some people were other charts and stuff. - -Has anybody else held a brownbag or training at their organization? - -Do you still publish the ones that don't need mustard? - -Not usually. I actually don't work there anymore. So I'm not clear what they're doing. - -So that seems like the perfect segue to our activity here. We want to make sure that we get as specific as possible in our conversation about what just might happen if we put tools in the hands of non-specialists. This is an activity called Run, Fix Kill. The following are real examples from our that you did. Some haven't been published. I'm not really sure. We're going to put up these one of 12. One at a time. Each table should have three colors: Green, yellow, red. The key is here if you can read it. But green, run, yellow, fix. - -Approximation of a stoplight. So green and blue, even around the yellow, you're going to send pack and fix yourself, and then the pink you're going to say, "No." - -So for each chart when we put them up, you're going to have a brief conversation at your table, would you run, would you fix, would you kill, come to some degree of consensus. - -Basically consider—things to consider are the style, how it's hard that these aren't part of your organization, but consider how well these charts were matched. What the style's supposed to be, whether it's legible, whether it's appropriately representing the data, whether it's representing the data as best as it could. And anything else you need. - -So after a brief conversation on this first chart, we'll just ask an representative from each table to run up, throw the appropriate color on chart one here. And we can have a conversation. - -That says chart three. Let's... - -We can count. - -Well, there's another chart three. - -So we're already winning at this demonstration. - -Kill! - -So this is chart one. This is chart—well, we'll edit it as we go. Chart one. - -All right. Run, fix, or kill? Go. - -We should point out that all of these charts are charts that were made in—by non-specialists in our newsrooms. These were not—none of these were made by specialists. - -We'll try to do this in about 60 seconds so talk fast. - -Deadline is fast approaching. - -You're the first! Go, go, go! - -Cici wins! Just kidding. This would be an excellent time for you to share your consensus with us. - -They aren't running! - -You don't have a yellow pad. - -We just have a hot orange pad. - -Oh, sorry. - -You know what? You should run and steal... - -We don't have that much of a change that qualifies that as a kill. - -That's true, to a point do off to change it that it's not worth it. That's a good question. - -Okay. Next one. - -Oh, geez... - -Everyone read this okay? Should I make it bigger? - -Get rid of two of the lines. - -Kill. Kill. Anyone else? All right. Chart three! Are we done? All right. With ten seconds to spare. Oh, no? - -Ooh... - -Wow. That's the 5% outside of the confidence range. Chart four. Wow. Is that everyone? Cool. That took longer than a minute. It took, like, you gotta wait on that one group. Chart five. - -I don't know that this one actually ran. No consensus! Chart six. Kill it and start over is fixing. You know the reality of this, if you kill something, does it come back to life? All right. That's a minute. We're over a minute and we have one person missing... - -Run! Run! Run! - -Don't fall, though. - -It's like the running of the interns. - -It's funny because he was almost my intern! - -Perfect! - -Almost... - -Chart seven! - -[ Group Work ] - -That's a minute! Decision time. All right. Got them all. Chart eight. Data from Standard & Poor's. Otherwise known as S&P. Fifteen seconds. All right. Chart nine. We're unclear if we've just broken your will or it's actually... - -It's fine. No trick question. - -You can do it? - -Consensus. Wow we have our first winner. - -There's a real estate reporter right now who just feels so happy. - -Chart ten. One more? One more. We're waiting on one? - -Back table, let's go. All right. Last two. Chart 11. We have five seconds left. There are three up there. Is that everyone? We're missing one. Aren't there seven? - -All right. Dig deep. One more. - -The last chart. I don't even know what it is. Do you know what it is? - -I do, actually. - -Holy shit. -[ Group Work ] - -Five seconds. Cool. So that was fun. We have fixed one, two, three, four, five, six, charts. We're going to run two of them. And we're going to kill one, two, three -- - -We're running three. - -We're running. Okay. So let's go around. Let's go back to chart one and quickly, if anyone is inspired to say why they wanted to fix or kill this, really quickly. One thing. - -Label the y-axis. - -Millions of what. - -Millions of what? - -Seasonally adjusted non-farm payrolls. - -Would it change anyone's mind that this ran in the Wall Street Journal next to one story about job numbers. - -This was one of our ten charts—that many jobs are important. - -Ambiguous gray. - -Oh, yeah, recessions should be labeled there. Absolutely. - -Oh, is that what's happening. That's why those parts are blue. - -All right. Chart two. Chart two now that we know what that gray means. Other than the unlabeled gray anyone have any reasons why they wanted to kill this chart? - -These things shouldn't are on the same, like—hours and earnings. - -These things shouldn't be on the same chart. - -We don't know what compared to what? Plus or minus compared to yesterday? - -Change from a year earlier. - -You did make this -- - -All right. Clarity. - -In a good chart, you should be able to extract that information without the reader having to spend—it's a fully reasonable. - -It took more than a minute. - -If you're looking at a chart and you have a minute to discuss it, and you weren't able to explain, I would say that's a chart failure. - -I want to know who wanted to fix the chart. - -Stacking data like that can be misleading to the reader. We just felt like it would be more clear if it would perhaps—what did we say? - -Inflation or if the numbers were adjusted for inflation. - -Oh, yeah. - -Sure. All right. I didn't make this. I didn't make this. - -Good minute of passive-aggressiveness. - -Just like clearly shows the correct trend that is there, right? Like, streaming is increasing out of total market share that's physical. - -You just need to take a quick look at it once. - -Yeah, it was quick. - -Chart four. Not—no real consensus. I mean and... mostly physicians but not by much. Anybody want to say anything about this? - -We killed it. - -We didn't think it was a good—like, the boxes—it was just like we weren't... - -It didn't seem like the right representation up there. - -Like the binary up or down flag. - -It made it difficult to figure out year-to-year, but also, it's up, down, flat from what? - -Although to be fair it's very clear that Italy and Spain, right, that's where it's going, I think that's where it was at, it's like, well, yeah, I think it could have been said a little bit better but you know... - -So saying a little bit more about the context. - -I think our point was that I think we want to know the margins of up, down, and flat, but it's all right, that we don't have to think about the -- - -This is a very one-message chart—Germany good, Spain, bad! - -Did you pick out anything design wise about this? - -My brain was first trying to make sense of the trend like, if there was some upward movement or I guess it would be downward movement. - -I would have -- - -You wanna go? - -Sorry, imto interrupt. - -My brain was trying to make this comparison into how Spain is turning into Italy, and France is turning into Germany but it's not really. - -My issue when this came across my desk, or really when I saw it published on a site because the person who made this is based in Europe and that means that it was made when I was sleeping. The color issue, the color green is not in our color palette, and also the spaces between the boxes aren't consistent. - -Oh, yeah. - -Oh, yeah. - -Things that only a specialist would notice. - -But on the other hand, do our readers know? None of you noticed that in the minute that you were scrutinizing this chart. So I was like, I think it's still on the site like there is this. I think I might have made them change the colors to not be colorblind and I had a busy day so I didn't have them fix the gaps between the boxes because it didn't really matter. - -So I would say we've had enough time with these series of charts and discussion to get a sense of the kinds of conversations you were having and I wanted to make sure that we had plenty of time to talk about what we're doing to make the best possible charts. - -If anybody wants to put notes—if you feel strongly about this, you can put a link to the slides in there and you can reference the charts. - -So I feel like that was representative of the kinds of conversations that you'll have to have with your user when you start soliciting a lot of reporter-generated charts. And I would like to you all to turn to your groups now and talk about what you're doing in your newsroom that works—that gets publishable, interesting charts quickly from reporters and to readers, or viewers. And what you think you could be doing to do an even better job. Spend a couple of minutes talking about that. Please somebody in the etherpad taking notes so that we can collect, and we don't have the chance to report back to the full group. What works? What could we be doing better? - -[ Group Work ] - -Getting last words now. We'll wrap up shortly. - -All right. Take a moment to wrap up now. All right. So let's go around the room and go table-by-table. Have each table give the most salient tip that they had for how to make all of this work better. We'll start over here. - -This is our idea. - -#charts. - -I'm going to share your example. - -What example is that? - -Channel. - -I think a big struggle that we have at ProPublica is we want to review public charts because we want to review stories about things that are like so-and-so is terrible. Such and such town is racist. So the charts are wrong and it's a real big problem and we've been trying to figure out a good way for us to do that thing. So Ryan had suggested what they did in Mary's room which is in Slack, there are already newsrooms in Slack, there's a channel, and whoever needs to review it, super fast, you don't need to go underneath the glass radar and then have politics wars about it so that was your suggestion. - -This is fantastic. We're increasingly using Slack for this purpose and it's been awesome. - -So we generally talked about it being an editorial process and making sure that the tools that we provide our newsroom staff with conform to a well established, consensual guideline. - -Who creates those guidelines? - -Well, for me, personally, I, as of this Monday I am developing for NPR News, our visual language kit for what our visuals are going to look like. So it has to be part of an editorial process. Someone has to make a choice. - -Absolutely, this is an incredibly valuable process and it makes all the difference in results. - -I'll just say we sat here and chatted about, sort of, where we were at in our respective newsrooms and there's a wide variety of experience. We have different sizes of staff. We have colleagues who are excited about it, and want to participate but we don't have tools for them and we have colleagues who are excited about it, had tools, but need watching. We didn't really come up with any tips or helpful advice for us. - -Nothing works? - -Well... that's not what I'm saying but we just didn't discuss it. - -So you had a very therapeutic session? - -Yeah. - -All right. Group therapy's cool too. - -The—I think the one thing that I took away was that people are reluctant to sort of end up in a position where you're really reliant on the builder because who is knows what's going to happen. - -Also adding to that point, if you skip the buider route, you're using off-the-shelf tools. And you're using custom parts. Guess what, you're going to be using the Chart Editor, and that's a huge burden especially in newsrooms when we're all on one to two person teams. So having to editorialize parts on top of figuring out workflow, so it's a lot of stuff so that's kind of just like a pain point and we need to figure that out. - -Can I add one? Yeah, we talked about a lot of things. The other thing that we kind of touched on too, is I think in some newsrooms, too, there's no one who really owns this. So there's a lot of people who can do it but there's no one who's really in a role that's the editor role and the editing process is probably not one that benefits preparing your graphic and then trying to kind of navigate that is something that some of us are still trying to figure out. - -That's a great one. - -And coming up with a workflow is critical because it's amazing when you don't have it, all of the things that happen that you might not expect that are beneficial. We are about to embed a member of the visuals team with the economics desk in D.C., so someone who normally might have been in New York is now with reporters in D.C. and we're very much looking forward to having a workflow that is—that includes taking advantage of this visual expertise more routinely and having them share standards. So trying to open up bottlenecks is one of our major goals here. This shouldn't be a single point where things can clog. The teammate is to open it up. So figuring out opening standards whether it's having a standard set of rules that are shared widely, or having a free flow of information, having a Slack channel open, are all ways to make this happen. - -Quartz has an Illustrator document that any time you're trying to do something in Illustrator, you go to this document. It has everything spelled out in it, but it's really for people to be able to copy and paste a label and they don't have to worry about what font size, what gets bolded. It's just copy-paste. - -We weren't maybe more on the group therapy side. That's what we were discussing, right? We're learning, guys! Constraints. Constraints are key. But constraints need to speak. So at Bloomberg, our chart builder tool has probably decreased the average quality of our graphics and by unbridling graphics editors increase the quality of their graphics and has, overall been a great thing. - -You're here. That's exciting. Now, if we could just pull up the bottom, right? - -Uh... I don't know like, maybe it's something—some things but yeah. As much as possible. Or at least tradeoffs. - -And our last table? - -Second-to-last table. - -Second-to-last. I'm so sorry. - -Um, I guess what we talked about is what's key to the process is having somebody who hasn't looked at the data just have an quick look and say, I get this or I don't get this. So that little added perspective or little time, we all thought was pretty critical to the process, whether it's a copy editor or whatever. - -Last but not least? - -Um, so one of—at least my concern—maybe the rest of the team will look at it was wanting to look at that bar and not killing their charts but not wanting to kill their enthusiasm for doing it. And came up with a great the idea for actually doing this exercise, doing a monthly or a bimonthly brownbag, having those people make those charts and doing a group critique, so that a there's not one person, one editor doing the critiques, but that they're critiquing each other and learning. - -That's a fantastic idea that frankly I'm going to now go implement in my team. Had. - -One thing that I heard a number of tables but didn't come up in the whole room is this, this fresh eyes thing. When you have reporters that are really close to their data and they go and make their chart and it makes complete and entire sense to them and then you show them to some fresh eyes and they have no idea what it means. So trying to encourage—and having that Slack channel or whatever, chat, some way to share charts when people make them to say, "You gotta check on it." - -So one last thing that—how many of you actually make tools in your newsroom that help empower this kind of work? A bunch of you, that is awesome. So one of the things that I hope that happens is that you're additional inspired to make tools that makes it easier for reporters to contribute. Because one thing that I put out, a conversation starter in our econ channel in our Slack channel was hey, on reporters, what would make this easier for you, and it was this resounding, "We need better tools!" They wanted things that would let them make more attractive graphics more quickly and would give them options but the right options and increasingly at the Journal we've been, luckily we have teams that think this is very important and have been pushing. And so we've got something that a lot of you guys also have. Thoughts? - -Refresh. - -Refresh. - -Yeah, I don't have that option. - -Anyway, The Journal has a whole suite of tools they can use. - -And if we continue if you see the first one, there's a chart building tool that's actually market stated, and actually autofills with a lot of market data. There's a new sortable chart tool that's embeddable in pages and responsive, something that we use multiple times a week. The developer of that is here at this conference. I'm so grateful for her. And there's an entire page here and what you can't see and I'm so sad is that under each of these descriptions. So it's a name of the tool, a description of the tool, a link to the tool, a link to the documentation, and a link to the examples. All three of those things. So what this means that if I'm a reporter that hasn't used this page before, I literally just send them a link to this page and send them a link to the documentation and say, "Hey, try it out." And this has been incredible in terms of our ability for expanding and I'm excited about possibilities as we move forward. - -One last, last thing. - -Last-last. - -If you're still interested in talking about this, especially the kind of the more technical side of implementing something like Chartbuilder in your newsroom, we're having a lunch conversation in Ski-U-Mah. Other than that, thanks, guys. Have fun. +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/reportergraphics/index.html +--- + +# Let's Stop Worrying and Let Our Reporters Make Their Own Graphics + +### Session Facilitator(s): David Yanofsky, Becky Bowers + +### Day & Time: Friday, 12:30-1:30pm + +### Room: Thomas Swain + +Hello. I'm David Yanofsky. I'm a reporter at Quartz. + +I'm Becky Bowers, and I'm an economics editor at the Wall Street Journal. + +And we wanted to talk and have a conversation about today about what your newsrooms are doing around making charts and graphics outside of specialized teams. And you know, share what we're doing and have a hopefully very fruitful conversation about what works, what doesn't, and how to get over the various spheres that we have in giving away control of these things. + +Exactly. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about what Quartz does. + +So Quartz—and by the way, we have an etherpad at that link if you want to take collaborative notes. There's also some links in there that you might want to refer back to later. So at Quartz, we have the power—everyone in the newsroom has the power to make their own charts in a tool called Chartbuilder that's made specifically for this purpose and it lets people make line charts, it lets people make bar charts. And that's about it. Limited color palettes. It fits our specified color design and as developers we've been able to train certain heavy users of it in, kind of, like, one step beyond that is something Graphics Desk might be doing more of, which is adding these charts in Illustrator, and adding annotations and modifying them, and taking them out of this constrained tool and into this open environment. + +And first I have to say that I'm a huge fan of Chartbuilder, when I was with PolitiFact, we used Quartz' copy. And at the Journal even if we have huge specialized teams that make nothing of wonderful graphics for print and for web, it turns out that it's incredibly useful for us to use even the most basic tools to make very quick charts. The most common tool used by our team of economics reporters at the Journal is simply a macro in Excel. We have a variety of chart templates that already have color palettes for line charts, bar charts. There is a pie chart option and this is a macro that our reporters use frequently. They just put together their simple Excel line chart or bar chart and they are minutes away from exporting, uploading, and copying it into a blog post. And some of our posts like on big indicator days, jobs days will do ten charts, 13 charts, everything that you need to know about anything. They are insanely popular with readers. We throw those on the wsj.com home page, yes—little reporter-made charts. They lead to the charts roundups. But readers love them and they are a way for so many more of our blog posts and other quick-turn items to have charts that are then easy to share. They do very well on Twitter and Facebook. + +And it's been a very important part of the reporting process for a lot of our reporters who tell me, it actually helps them to come up with the story that they might be writing to throw data into a very simple visualization tool. + +So we—well, first let's just talk about who is you guys who's here. How many of you work at newspapers? And how many—and how many in public media/broadcast, television? Anyone in television? One person in television? How many of you work at organizations that allow people outside of a typical or traditional graphics desk to make graphics? Cool. Cool. So we took this—we have been collecting responses in a survey, which you can see, you can see the responses up on etherpad, and it pretty much showed that. And one last question: How many of you work in newsrooms that have that have less than 15 people in them. How many, 15-30? 30-100? More than 100? + +I love the diversity in this group. + +So our survey seemed to reflect that, where people of all sizes, all different types of organizations and the thing that I found really great is that at all of these organizations, when you look, you know, deeper into this data, there are at every size and at every type, there are examples of organizations that are letting non-specialists make, you know, what is traditionally irresponsible has been a specialist work, activity maps, graphs and charts. So if you're not in one of those organizations and you want to be a part of them, you can look around in this room, and you can look at the server results and you can say, this is not typical anymore. There's people that are doing this all around the country and all around the world. + +So, I guess, in getting through this, in getting, you know, non-specialists to making charts, there is this fear. I know that I encountered it. + +I still have it. + +She still has it. And I still have it... mostly that people making these charts are going to do things poorly. That they're going to do things wrong, incorrect. + +Or just hideous. We do that, too. + +Or just hideous. So I guess we want to hear: What have been your guys' fears in either allowing if you don't allow other people to do it, allowing people to do this, or in just your everyday thinking of non-specialists making charts? + +Um, people using tools that aren't configurable, or can't bend to a house style. That's a fear. + +So your fear is that people are using a tool that doesn't fit house style. + +Or is incapable of adhering. It's not configurable. We can't adjust the styles. + +Sure. And you have—and do you have a tool that can? Do you have tools that can do that? + +No. + +No. Anyone else? Anyone else suffer from that? + +I have a question, though. + +Sure. + +Can I just ask, out of the people whose newsrooms do allow non-specialists to make charts, how many of those newsrooms allow those charts to be published out review by specialists at all? + +So that's a question we haven't asked and I think it's an important one to ask. And I hope that we'll have—we will have a chance to have a more detailed discussion about what the process is in your newsroom. At the Journal both things happen. And the way that that's happening is that a reporter might give a chart to an editor who's not medical a visual editor and that will get published to a blog. So it's not to the primary platform. It's not in print. And so there's a sense that there's a streamlined process where a specialized visual editor isn't necessarily part of that process. + +What I discovered is that the more we get specialists involved, at least in the—well, yes. I'll stop there and we'll continue that conversation. Josh, you had a question? + +No, I had another thing similar to the house style, which was tools that can potentially introduce security vulnerabilities if they have, like, Javascript in that you don't know very much about. + +Mm-hmm. Okay. + +Mobile—that they won't work there. + +I think before even thinking about any of the tools or anything like that, the establishment of the editorial process for, you know, 'cause nothing, really, I work for Minnesota Public Radio, and, you know, nothing goes out without, whether it's reporter-done or otherwise, without having an editor look at it, somebody check the math, we treat it like any other journalistic thing. Wouldn't imagine anybody getting anything out, you know, without that editorial process. + +But that's no different than your words, right? + +Well, yeah, and we shouldn't be treating any of this differently. And besides when do we get Atlas? + +You get Chartbuilder. You get version two, now. Atlas as an open thing is to be determined. + +I had a terrible data literacy issue in my newsroom and so we started let's talk about why this is a bad chart because there's a lot of confusion around that. + +Um, and did you—what did you do to try and improve the data literacy? + +I mean, we had a brownbag and I just walked through 30 really, really awful charts. Andered my grievances with each one and kind of just—half of the people weren't paying attention and never revisited the charts issue again, but at least half the people, I'm telling you this is a boo'd chart and you know why I think it's a bad chart because, you know, seeing all these sad excuses for charts, and it kind of worked, you know, it could o it got to a place where some people were other charts and stuff. + +Has anybody else held a brownbag or training at their organization? + +Do you still publish the ones that don't need mustard? + +Not usually. I actually don't work there anymore. So I'm not clear what they're doing. + +So that seems like the perfect segue to our activity here. We want to make sure that we get as specific as possible in our conversation about what just might happen if we put tools in the hands of non-specialists. This is an activity called Run, Fix Kill. The following are real examples from our that you did. Some haven't been published. I'm not really sure. We're going to put up these one of 12. One at a time. Each table should have three colors: Green, yellow, red. The key is here if you can read it. But green, run, yellow, fix. + +Approximation of a stoplight. So green and blue, even around the yellow, you're going to send pack and fix yourself, and then the pink you're going to say, "No." + +So for each chart when we put them up, you're going to have a brief conversation at your table, would you run, would you fix, would you kill, come to some degree of consensus. + +Basically consider—things to consider are the style, how it's hard that these aren't part of your organization, but consider how well these charts were matched. What the style's supposed to be, whether it's legible, whether it's appropriately representing the data, whether it's representing the data as best as it could. And anything else you need. + +So after a brief conversation on this first chart, we'll just ask an representative from each table to run up, throw the appropriate color on chart one here. And we can have a conversation. + +That says chart three. Let's... + +We can count. + +Well, there's another chart three. + +So we're already winning at this demonstration. + +Kill! + +So this is chart one. This is chart—well, we'll edit it as we go. Chart one. + +All right. Run, fix, or kill? Go. + +We should point out that all of these charts are charts that were made in—by non-specialists in our newsrooms. These were not—none of these were made by specialists. + +We'll try to do this in about 60 seconds so talk fast. + +Deadline is fast approaching. + +You're the first! Go, go, go! + +Cici wins! Just kidding. This would be an excellent time for you to share your consensus with us. + +They aren't running! + +You don't have a yellow pad. + +We just have a hot orange pad. + +Oh, sorry. + +You know what? You should run and steal... + +We don't have that much of a change that qualifies that as a kill. + +That's true, to a point do off to change it that it's not worth it. That's a good question. + +Okay. Next one. + +Oh, geez... + +Everyone read this okay? Should I make it bigger? + +Get rid of two of the lines. + +Kill. Kill. Anyone else? All right. Chart three! Are we done? All right. With ten seconds to spare. Oh, no? + +Ooh... + +Wow. That's the 5% outside of the confidence range. Chart four. Wow. Is that everyone? Cool. That took longer than a minute. It took, like, you gotta wait on that one group. Chart five. + +I don't know that this one actually ran. No consensus! Chart six. Kill it and start over is fixing. You know the reality of this, if you kill something, does it come back to life? All right. That's a minute. We're over a minute and we have one person missing... + +Run! Run! Run! + +Don't fall, though. + +It's like the running of the interns. + +It's funny because he was almost my intern! + +Perfect! + +Almost... + +Chart seven! + +[ Group Work ] + +That's a minute! Decision time. All right. Got them all. Chart eight. Data from Standard & Poor's. Otherwise known as S&P. Fifteen seconds. All right. Chart nine. We're unclear if we've just broken your will or it's actually... + +It's fine. No trick question. + +You can do it? + +Consensus. Wow we have our first winner. + +There's a real estate reporter right now who just feels so happy. + +Chart ten. One more? One more. We're waiting on one? + +Back table, let's go. All right. Last two. Chart 11. We have five seconds left. There are three up there. Is that everyone? We're missing one. Aren't there seven? + +All right. Dig deep. One more. + +The last chart. I don't even know what it is. Do you know what it is? + +I do, actually. + +Holy shit. +[ Group Work ] + +Five seconds. Cool. So that was fun. We have fixed one, two, three, four, five, six, charts. We're going to run two of them. And we're going to kill one, two, three -- + +We're running three. + +We're running. Okay. So let's go around. Let's go back to chart one and quickly, if anyone is inspired to say why they wanted to fix or kill this, really quickly. One thing. + +Label the y-axis. + +Millions of what. + +Millions of what? + +Seasonally adjusted non-farm payrolls. + +Would it change anyone's mind that this ran in the Wall Street Journal next to one story about job numbers. + +This was one of our ten charts—that many jobs are important. + +Ambiguous gray. + +Oh, yeah, recessions should be labeled there. Absolutely. + +Oh, is that what's happening. That's why those parts are blue. + +All right. Chart two. Chart two now that we know what that gray means. Other than the unlabeled gray anyone have any reasons why they wanted to kill this chart? + +These things shouldn't are on the same, like—hours and earnings. + +These things shouldn't be on the same chart. + +We don't know what compared to what? Plus or minus compared to yesterday? + +Change from a year earlier. + +You did make this -- + +All right. Clarity. + +In a good chart, you should be able to extract that information without the reader having to spend—it's a fully reasonable. + +It took more than a minute. + +If you're looking at a chart and you have a minute to discuss it, and you weren't able to explain, I would say that's a chart failure. + +I want to know who wanted to fix the chart. + +Stacking data like that can be misleading to the reader. We just felt like it would be more clear if it would perhaps—what did we say? + +Inflation or if the numbers were adjusted for inflation. + +Oh, yeah. + +Sure. All right. I didn't make this. I didn't make this. + +Good minute of passive-aggressiveness. + +Just like clearly shows the correct trend that is there, right? Like, streaming is increasing out of total market share that's physical. + +You just need to take a quick look at it once. + +Yeah, it was quick. + +Chart four. Not—no real consensus. I mean and... mostly physicians but not by much. Anybody want to say anything about this? + +We killed it. + +We didn't think it was a good—like, the boxes—it was just like we weren't... + +It didn't seem like the right representation up there. + +Like the binary up or down flag. + +It made it difficult to figure out year-to-year, but also, it's up, down, flat from what? + +Although to be fair it's very clear that Italy and Spain, right, that's where it's going, I think that's where it was at, it's like, well, yeah, I think it could have been said a little bit better but you know... + +So saying a little bit more about the context. + +I think our point was that I think we want to know the margins of up, down, and flat, but it's all right, that we don't have to think about the -- + +This is a very one-message chart—Germany good, Spain, bad! + +Did you pick out anything design wise about this? + +My brain was first trying to make sense of the trend like, if there was some upward movement or I guess it would be downward movement. + +I would have -- + +You wanna go? + +Sorry, imto interrupt. + +My brain was trying to make this comparison into how Spain is turning into Italy, and France is turning into Germany but it's not really. + +My issue when this came across my desk, or really when I saw it published on a site because the person who made this is based in Europe and that means that it was made when I was sleeping. The color issue, the color green is not in our color palette, and also the spaces between the boxes aren't consistent. + +Oh, yeah. + +Oh, yeah. + +Things that only a specialist would notice. + +But on the other hand, do our readers know? None of you noticed that in the minute that you were scrutinizing this chart. So I was like, I think it's still on the site like there is this. I think I might have made them change the colors to not be colorblind and I had a busy day so I didn't have them fix the gaps between the boxes because it didn't really matter. + +So I would say we've had enough time with these series of charts and discussion to get a sense of the kinds of conversations you were having and I wanted to make sure that we had plenty of time to talk about what we're doing to make the best possible charts. + +If anybody wants to put notes—if you feel strongly about this, you can put a link to the slides in there and you can reference the charts. + +So I feel like that was representative of the kinds of conversations that you'll have to have with your user when you start soliciting a lot of reporter-generated charts. And I would like to you all to turn to your groups now and talk about what you're doing in your newsroom that works—that gets publishable, interesting charts quickly from reporters and to readers, or viewers. And what you think you could be doing to do an even better job. Spend a couple of minutes talking about that. Please somebody in the etherpad taking notes so that we can collect, and we don't have the chance to report back to the full group. What works? What could we be doing better? + +[ Group Work ] + +Getting last words now. We'll wrap up shortly. + +All right. Take a moment to wrap up now. All right. So let's go around the room and go table-by-table. Have each table give the most salient tip that they had for how to make all of this work better. We'll start over here. + +This is our idea. + +#charts. + +I'm going to share your example. + +What example is that? + +Channel. + +I think a big struggle that we have at ProPublica is we want to review public charts because we want to review stories about things that are like so-and-so is terrible. Such and such town is racist. So the charts are wrong and it's a real big problem and we've been trying to figure out a good way for us to do that thing. So Ryan had suggested what they did in Mary's room which is in Slack, there are already newsrooms in Slack, there's a channel, and whoever needs to review it, super fast, you don't need to go underneath the glass radar and then have politics wars about it so that was your suggestion. + +This is fantastic. We're increasingly using Slack for this purpose and it's been awesome. + +So we generally talked about it being an editorial process and making sure that the tools that we provide our newsroom staff with conform to a well established, consensual guideline. + +Who creates those guidelines? + +Well, for me, personally, I, as of this Monday I am developing for NPR News, our visual language kit for what our visuals are going to look like. So it has to be part of an editorial process. Someone has to make a choice. + +Absolutely, this is an incredibly valuable process and it makes all the difference in results. + +I'll just say we sat here and chatted about, sort of, where we were at in our respective newsrooms and there's a wide variety of experience. We have different sizes of staff. We have colleagues who are excited about it, and want to participate but we don't have tools for them and we have colleagues who are excited about it, had tools, but need watching. We didn't really come up with any tips or helpful advice for us. + +Nothing works? + +Well... that's not what I'm saying but we just didn't discuss it. + +So you had a very therapeutic session? + +Yeah. + +All right. Group therapy's cool too. + +The—I think the one thing that I took away was that people are reluctant to sort of end up in a position where you're really reliant on the builder because who is knows what's going to happen. + +Also adding to that point, if you skip the buider route, you're using off-the-shelf tools. And you're using custom parts. Guess what, you're going to be using the Chart Editor, and that's a huge burden especially in newsrooms when we're all on one to two person teams. So having to editorialize parts on top of figuring out workflow, so it's a lot of stuff so that's kind of just like a pain point and we need to figure that out. + +Can I add one? Yeah, we talked about a lot of things. The other thing that we kind of touched on too, is I think in some newsrooms, too, there's no one who really owns this. So there's a lot of people who can do it but there's no one who's really in a role that's the editor role and the editing process is probably not one that benefits preparing your graphic and then trying to kind of navigate that is something that some of us are still trying to figure out. + +That's a great one. + +And coming up with a workflow is critical because it's amazing when you don't have it, all of the things that happen that you might not expect that are beneficial. We are about to embed a member of the visuals team with the economics desk in D.C., so someone who normally might have been in New York is now with reporters in D.C. and we're very much looking forward to having a workflow that is—that includes taking advantage of this visual expertise more routinely and having them share standards. So trying to open up bottlenecks is one of our major goals here. This shouldn't be a single point where things can clog. The teammate is to open it up. So figuring out opening standards whether it's having a standard set of rules that are shared widely, or having a free flow of information, having a Slack channel open, are all ways to make this happen. + +Quartz has an Illustrator document that any time you're trying to do something in Illustrator, you go to this document. It has everything spelled out in it, but it's really for people to be able to copy and paste a label and they don't have to worry about what font size, what gets bolded. It's just copy-paste. + +We weren't maybe more on the group therapy side. That's what we were discussing, right? We're learning, guys! Constraints. Constraints are key. But constraints need to speak. So at Bloomberg, our chart builder tool has probably decreased the average quality of our graphics and by unbridling graphics editors increase the quality of their graphics and has, overall been a great thing. + +You're here. That's exciting. Now, if we could just pull up the bottom, right? + +Uh... I don't know like, maybe it's something—some things but yeah. As much as possible. Or at least tradeoffs. + +And our last table? + +Second-to-last table. + +Second-to-last. I'm so sorry. + +Um, I guess what we talked about is what's key to the process is having somebody who hasn't looked at the data just have an quick look and say, I get this or I don't get this. So that little added perspective or little time, we all thought was pretty critical to the process, whether it's a copy editor or whatever. + +Last but not least? + +Um, so one of—at least my concern—maybe the rest of the team will look at it was wanting to look at that bar and not killing their charts but not wanting to kill their enthusiasm for doing it. And came up with a great the idea for actually doing this exercise, doing a monthly or a bimonthly brownbag, having those people make those charts and doing a group critique, so that a there's not one person, one editor doing the critiques, but that they're critiquing each other and learning. + +That's a fantastic idea that frankly I'm going to now go implement in my team. Had. + +One thing that I heard a number of tables but didn't come up in the whole room is this, this fresh eyes thing. When you have reporters that are really close to their data and they go and make their chart and it makes complete and entire sense to them and then you show them to some fresh eyes and they have no idea what it means. So trying to encourage—and having that Slack channel or whatever, chat, some way to share charts when people make them to say, "You gotta check on it." + +So one last thing that—how many of you actually make tools in your newsroom that help empower this kind of work? A bunch of you, that is awesome. So one of the things that I hope that happens is that you're additional inspired to make tools that makes it easier for reporters to contribute. Because one thing that I put out, a conversation starter in our econ channel in our Slack channel was hey, on reporters, what would make this easier for you, and it was this resounding, "We need better tools!" They wanted things that would let them make more attractive graphics more quickly and would give them options but the right options and increasingly at the Journal we've been, luckily we have teams that think this is very important and have been pushing. And so we've got something that a lot of you guys also have. Thoughts? + +Refresh. + +Refresh. + +Yeah, I don't have that option. + +Anyway, The Journal has a whole suite of tools they can use. + +And if we continue if you see the first one, there's a chart building tool that's actually market stated, and actually autofills with a lot of market data. There's a new sortable chart tool that's embeddable in pages and responsive, something that we use multiple times a week. The developer of that is here at this conference. I'm so grateful for her. And there's an entire page here and what you can't see and I'm so sad is that under each of these descriptions. So it's a name of the tool, a description of the tool, a link to the tool, a link to the documentation, and a link to the examples. All three of those things. So what this means that if I'm a reporter that hasn't used this page before, I literally just send them a link to this page and send them a link to the documentation and say, "Hey, try it out." And this has been incredible in terms of our ability for expanding and I'm excited about possibilities as we move forward. + +One last, last thing. + +Last-last. + +If you're still interested in talking about this, especially the kind of the more technical side of implementing something like Chartbuilder in your newsroom, we're having a lunch conversation in Ski-U-Mah. Other than that, thanks, guys. Have fun. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015SmallTeam.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015SmallTeam.md index f1477a4c..43c49134 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015SmallTeam.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015SmallTeam.md @@ -1,294 +1,283 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/smallteam/index.html ---- - -# Big Ambition, Small Staff, How the F*** Do I Prioritize? - -### Session Facilitator(s): Rachel Schallom, Tyler Machado - -### Day & Time: Thursday, 12:30-1:30pm - -### Room: Thomas Swain - - -All right, guys, if you could take your seats. - -OK, while you're getting settled, I'll go ahead and introduce us. My name is Rachel Schallom, I'm the interactive editor at the Sun Sentinel, which is in south Florida, and we are doing a session because about two years ago we started doing what we would call digital storytelling which is basically where we said maybe we shouldn't throw everything in the CMS, and over the last two years in the beginning, you know, we were like begging people to work with us, and then it kind of blossomed and then we started getting a lot of ideas and we needed some sort of processing/managing all of these expectations, but up until two weeks ago, the interactive department, which is what I refer to in memos to sound important, was actually just me. - -[laughter] - -So I've learned a lot in the last two years. I basically started this department and have watched it grow and need a lot of love and so we want to talk about the issues that come with being really small and working by yourself. -Yeah, I'm Tyler Machado, I work at Harvard Business Review in Boston. I am the only coder on my team. I'm part of the editorial team, but my title is web developer. So I work on, yeah, interactives and dataviz, and that kind of stuff. We have a separate design desk and a separate tech staff that actually makes the website work and so I can grab them on an ad hoc base basis, but most of the time I'm the center of that particular universe, and Rachel is going to go first, but I'm going to go second, talking about kind of managing my own projects, and learning stuff when you have no one to learn off of and you don't have much of a community in your newsroom on a tech perspective. So yeah, go for it. - -Yeah, so we've gone over all of the rules in all the other session, be kind, be courteous, don't use jargon. The only thing I'd like to remind you is that in this session we're going to talk a lot about managing other people, managing expectations and I want to remind you that this is a live transcription, so let's not try to talk shit on our bosses. Just use someone I know. Like "someone I know." But this is on the internet. -Norma: Oh, the pressure! - -It's all right, Norma. They're not Googling themselves yet. - -Basically the way we're going to do this is we have a bunch of questions, we want to then open it up for discussion so feel free to cut us off and feel free to raise hands. I'm a pretty loud person, everyone can hear me, right? How do you communicate with our others who don't share our jargon. So this was a really big problem when I needed to estimate time or talk about my ideas, with—I work for a legacy newspaper, so a lot of those people are older and they don't understand the internet and they've been doing what they've been doing for a very, very long time so when you need someone on your side but they don't speak the same language, it can be very difficult. So my biggest tip is finding common ground through analogies, like what do they do on the internet. And an example I have is there are some open source tools that are really easy to use and they became less scary when I told people that they were just as ease as uploading pictures to Facebook, and they're like, OK, I know how do do that, so if you can find common ground, that usually helps. Don't make assumptions about what people know, especially young people. I am blown away by people in their 20s when I am talking and they don't know understand what I'm saying and so that has been a really big epiphany for me, and that age really has nothing do with digital literacy. - -Sorry they don't know what you're talking about techwise or conceptwise or? - -Pretty much techwise, I end up having to explain a lot more than I thought I would. Whether that's just explaining terms like open source. 20-year-old reporters did not know what that meant and so that was a really big eye opener had in digital literacy that you can't really look at someone and say yeah, they'll know what I mean and then there are older reporters who have attended hackathon and know exactly what I mean. So don't make assumptions. Teach jargon whenever possible, so I try and take opportunities instead of just dumbing everything down, to teach them and learn as we go. So right now we are having a 404 contest. Our 404 page is really boring, and living in south Florida is a very not-boring place, so we wanted it to reflect our community a little bit so it was a really good opportunity for me to teach the entire newsroom, what is a 404 page, so whenever you can, without being condescending, those opportunities, because now I'll be able to use the 404 jargon moving forward. - -And then my last point is help them give feedback, so we do these things called project reviews. I don't know why I acted like that was a fancy name. Where we're very project- and investigation-based, so we do a ton of long-term stuff, so about 48 hours, 36 to 48 hours before publication, we send the finished digital link to the team for feedback and in the beginning I was just getting typos or I'm having second thoughts about this lede, and then I would finally get to sleep, and right after publication they'd be like oh, yeah, this link doesn't work and that doesn't work and we were like why weren't you doing that during the review period and so we started coming up with a checklist of things that I wanted them to look for, so broken links, usability, open it on your phone, trying to share it on social, we found that if helped guide people, they gave us much better feedback. So those are my points about communicating about jargon. Who else has experienced this? I'm sure all of you have been in a meeting where it hasn't gone well or that there's a barrier there. Does anyone want to give an example? - -We echoing analogies, I'm pretty sure that's the only way we communicate, to the point where it's become kind of an internal joke for us. We just simplifying it down to even core concepts, we talk about, we have 19 websites, but we talk about them like sheds in our backyard and how we want to take all those sheds and build like an aircraft hangar instead and that's just some of the things we do because it does become so crazy when you're—for us, we have radio, as well as 19 visual sites, so trying to bring that all together because I don't understand how the radio works. So the digital site. So I think analogy is the best way to deal with it. - -I have the problem a lot of time where I—oh, and please introduce yourself. - -I'm Allie Kanik. I work for Public Source in Pittsburgh, PA. I have a problem where I'll go through a whole spiel and I'll get to the end and that makes sense right? And the person will be like no. And OK, what don't you ever understand and they're like, no. So I've found that it's helpful to stop often in your spiel, and be right? You good? Questions? That helps to not take twice looks it ought to. - -Absolutely. - -Alex; I work for Newsela. Being super-patient is really, really key. You really the risk of souring communication if you're abrupt or rude or how do you not know this? You've worked in this field forever. It's really important to keep your head, because otherwise you're never going to get your point across. - -And I think with that, there are a lot of what we could view as opportunities, so I once—we have the system where when something is ready, you email the home page and you can put it on the home page and I did that with a map and the guy running the home page said why would I put this the home page. This isn't a story. And we were having this huge debate and I was like really frustrated because we've been over this so many times but we were in the middle of the newsroom and I was like OK, this is your opportunity, man, like make your pitch and so with other people staring on that's an opportunity to be like no, this is why we do this, this is our core principles, and so even individually taking those opportunities to kind of get people on your side can really help. - -I just want to point out, Michael Grant, San Francisco Chronicle, I've noticed that on projects that I'm developing, you know, editorial will come up with a name for, you know, maybe like a drop-down, or you know, but the naming conventions are different than you know of something that I'm building versus what they refer to them as, and it just becomes a bunch of emails and things that Slack is getting rid of thank God, but it really kind of slows down the whole process because we're talking about sometimes two different things or something that we thought we were talking about, and it's just horrible. So I think outlining, you know, instilling that we should refer to certain areas as this and defining what we're calling things makes a huge difference. - -Screen shots help with that, too. It's just describing what you mean is sometimes like, well, what thing that drops down from where but if you're like screenshot, this thing, then that helps, I've found. - -We once had a 30-minute spiel of why we wanted to get rid of the drop-down and just going to a hamburger icon, we realized after 30 minutes that no one knew what a hamburger icon was, so prototypes, sketch, screenshots, all helpful things. - -Kate; I'm with the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and I really like that you made the point kind of don't assume to know what people's knowledge and skills are. One thing that I've found really helpful just with managing teams is creating a culture where questions are encouraged and they don't feel stupid for asking and kind of leading by example, and even larger infrastructure projects that we do, where I go what's a CDN you know or something like that, even as the project manager, I think can open that up and definitely those projects have been the most successful where people feel like they can ask questions, ask why do you recommend that we do it this way and offer suggestions. So. - - -The one thing that I also noticed was post mortems, you often don't really have time to to do them but when we did, we were able to say why couldn't we have approached it this way and that's led to a number of projects that never would have happened otherwise. So once we started to do that for major projects, we found that producers and reporters were like, oh, well, this is possible now and we can do this next time and it will make it easier and faster. I think that was a big thing for us, as well. - -Absolutely, we do post-mortems on the process, as well, because each project usually has a different editor or this is a reporter's first time doing something long-form and so it can be a struggle and one of the things that I do in my process reporting as, you know, the project manager and the designer who gets things at the very end you experience some of the most frustration in the process is that I write some of my notes to myself while I'm still mad. So I'm remembering everyone who didn't make deadline, so you know, this terrible meeting that was two hours and nothing came out of it and then I'll sleep on it for a couple of days and then I'll write my post-mortem notes and my boss suggested that because after a while you start to forgive and you like the project that came out of it and that doesn't do us any good moving forward. So sometimes make notes that made you really, really angry and use them later once you've had time to sleep on it a little bit. - - -So this is a huge one for us. How do we temper editors' expectations. We started our interactive department the year we won our first Pulitzer prize, which made people really, really hungry for more prizes and really hungry to do things that were cool and innovative and got our name out there and when you're a department of one and people have huge expectations. I kept getting asked why I couldn't fill Snow Fall, like seriously, over and again. This became a huge problem for us. A couple of notes is don't finish early, at least in the beginning. So time estimates are huge for us and them taking our time estimates seriously meant sticking to what we had. So maybe you give yourself a couple of extra days just to make sure because with development you never know what's going to go wrong and then for them to take you seriously, you have to hit in about that amount of time and I don't just mean hit your deadlines, I mean don't finish early, because if I'm on a project and I say it's going to take me five days but I get done in three, and the next time I say I need five days, they're going to be like, she only really needs three, and we found until you have this process a well oiled machine, stick to your deadlines and just hold it, you know, just pretend you're still working on it or QA or ask for feedback, but don't make it harder on yourself in the future by finishing earlier. - -This is on the internet, remember, so the secret is out. - -[laughter] - -My bosses won't be here. - -Don't commit to something you're unsure about. So in meetings when someone's like, I have this grand idea and I want to do this, even if it's a really bad idea, you know, sometimes I use phrases like I'll look into that. I try to avoid committing to anything I'm not totally sure about. - -And use data whenever possible to make decisions, so I review all of our project's analytics and we try to learn as much from them as possible and then I try to use them to make my arguments stronger. So if we told a story a certain way and it had really low engagement, and I think that's not the way to go in a future project I'll bring that up so instead of it just being my opinion it's the data speaking, as well, which can strengthen. So data is your friend. So I was wondering if anyone wanted to share a story about work everything with editors and expectation, because the point of the session is, you don't have a lot of resources, so this is a pretty big one for us. - -Sarah Squire, Wall Street Journal, but small, I work by myself. One thing I found is actually sometimes editor's expectations, they think something is really big but it's really easy. Sometimes I don't pitch projects because they think it will take a month and sometimes it will take two days to do, and then you get to the point that you want them to pitch everything. Explain that they don't know how long something will take. - - -Where we used toing often this thing where it's like OK, on this date we'll have this done and then on this date we'll have this done. I have started switching to a this part of the project will take this many days, which has helped a lot with the editors' expectations because whenever something doesn't get done on time, they can be like, well, why isn't this done on time and I could be like well, I told you it would take 4 days at this time, John Schmoe, you know, Joe Schmoe? Didn't have his data to me until a week like he said he was going to, I'm still taking four days here, but it's just being pushed back. So that's helped. - -One. Bernard, I'm content strategist at a place called green America. I got really good at doing hourly estimates and I pad my estimates 20% for the holy shit, everything is falling apart, and at the beginning of the project, I give an hourly breakdown or actually a weekly breakdown of what I estimate it to be, and I the deadline and people go oh, he hit his deadline and that's really rare at my organization. But it teaches them like at the beginning I have them pitch everything they want to me and I now get to say yes and no to things, and I get everything, I get an estimate, I do essentially an RPF and it seems to work relatively well. Like, people learn how hard things are, and people learn how easy other things are. It's wonderful. - -There's a doc that helps with all this stuff that I'm going to share later. So we're all coming sort of full circle, which is nice. - -Hi, New York Daily News. I had a question, wanted to get some advice from people here. Sometimes when your editors ask you to do something that's completely are R. new for me, I know I can probably learn it and do it, but just because I have never done it before, I don't know how long it would take, so what would you tell your editor? How would you phrase that? - -I think it depends on the frame of the project. For me I find out does the story absolutely have to run this week or can we push it back if something were to happen and then I'll use noncommittal phrases like I'll look into that, give me the afternoon to research it an once I have a better idea of the technology I'll let you know. If I needed to to research it, let's regroup tomorrow, and give a better estimate, what are some other strategies? - - -It's really important that your editors or anyone requesting a project from you knows your expectations, as well, so I expect that I'm going to have time for discovery to understand what I'm going to do hoo, I expect that I'm going to have the data from this person to be able to implement it, so it's almost like making a contingent estimate so you don't know exactly how long it's going to take, but you can guess that it's going to take this amount of time if so-and-so is going to be done. Does that make sense is. - -Yeah, sometimes I feel the pressure because there will be a larger project based on when I finish that so if I say maybe two weeks we're going to schedule others for the home page and so that we can launch it on that day, but I feel like intimidated because I'm not exactly sure if I can hit the deadline. - -I would try—go ahead, go ahead. - -Have you ever tried throwing out something like real and just being like if they are—because I find most of the time that they're depending on you like that, and you give them a high ball estimate they'll be like, OK, I mean, how can they tell if you're the one that -- - -That's true, too. - -If someone is asking you to do something that you've never done before, it's new it would be worth asking them like what are their objectives, because maybe they're saying can you do it this way because it's the only thing they know. Because the editors probably don't know that there's a whole range of ways you can build something. If if you say what are you trying to get out of this maybe there's a way that you can build that you do already know. Sometimes there won't be, but it would be good to get it, you know, what is it that they really truly want from you? - -Hi I'm Peter from public archive. My experience is that I'm always building trust relationships with people and that the way they're going to trust me is that I'm very up front when I say I don't know how to do this. So it's going to take me some time to figure that out, and I will also refuse to give them a time estimate unless I'm comfortable committing to it. And my experience has been that people, even though they would like me sometimes to give them a time estimate on things, will respect me more and trust me more if I don't give them one, because I'm not comfortable committing to it. And will trust me more if having given a time estimate, I do stick to it. So I have to trust my own sense of can I really meet the time estimate before I'm willing to say it out loud and then I always give them the retail cost, not the wholesale cost. - - -Absolutely. - -And we have to keep in mind, too, sorry, Jamie hut from the Star Tribune, that we don't always get to tell them how long something's going to take. They're going to tell us when it's going to run, so you know, being able to talk them through what some of the constraints are going to mean for their expectations is important. - -Right, so like I was saying, I try to find out, does it have to run, you know, for instance this weekend? And if the answer is yes, because it's tied to an event or it's an exclusive or something, we make lists of OK, this is my wish list and then we make that more realistic. Well, in three days I can give you five of these. Pick which five you want. Or you know, and it's almost like a bartering system and I find that involving them in that process, you know, like saying, OK, you asked for 10 things, I think I can do these five and then having them have the opportunity to say, yeah, but actually item 7 is really important to us us helps, because then it's not like well, she couldn't do the whole thing. They were actively deciding what the project was going to be in the end. - -My team has a running joke, we're often asked to do snow fall, as well, and we can could snowflake. Perhaps snow ball flurry, but -- - -But mostly one flake. - -I found it useful, too, like if there's something new and you've got to kick the tires around a little bit to see if you can execute it in a certain amount of time, to like put your code in you know, JS or code pin or something about it and show them a version of it kind of work everything and then measuring how long it would take but I think they can generally see that, oh, yeah, this does work, I would like it to do this, I see there's a bunch of code here, I respect what you're telling me that this is a solid deadline or you need more time to figure it out. - -Put it in test mode. - -Yeah. - -Absolutely. - -How do we choose the best ideas? This is something that I think is really, really important in a small team. We have about 160 people that work for Sun Sentinel. About 100 of those are reporters, and up until two weeks ago there was just me. And is so there came a time where in the beginning I was doing all these workshops, I was begging people to pitch interactive ideas and then they started doing that, and we didn't have the resources to handle the capacity. So how can you say no without, like ruining their enthusiasm because we want them to pitch again in the future. You know, maybe in a month when you pitch again I won't have anything on my plate and it will be perfect, so that was really important. So how do we choose the best ideas? For me it's all about return on investment. How long is it going to take me versus what can we get out of this project. So questions I can ask is what is the shelf life. If it's for an event that is two days away that might not be as good as something that is you know, a guide to beaches which can be used all year round. Sorry. - -[laughter] - -Rub it in. - -[laughter] - -That was not the nicest example. How much work does this take and are there open source tools available? - -Can the code be repurposed? So sometimes so we're working on something for restaurant week this year that we easily can see could be repurposed for other events. So basically we're taking something for restaurant week where there's like 125 restaurants that are participating and we're picking our 12 favorites so it's essentially like our picks or something, well, I can easily see that being used for like a dozen projects throughout the year so for that it's worth putting in the time to create it because it can be used over and over again. Has something similar worked in the past so there are things that I know have not worked so that's easy for me to know. And if there are things that I know have worked even if we're short on deadline that may be something that I push forward and then finally. My tips are you should give everyone a fair shot in the beginning, because we're big and we do a lot of projects, you know, for someone this might be the first time doing a project or first time doing an interactive and I like to give everyone a fair shot in the beginning and then if you are slammed, it's more likely to turn away those who have proven not to deliver on time, so I know of an editor who never meets deadline. And so—and it's never turned in in the format we agreed and it's just typically a mess, so no matter who interesting it is, we actually had this earlier this week, they pitched and interactive graphic and we needed it in 24 hours and I knew it was going to be a mess and I didn't want to do that to my intern, so we said no to that we because we knew we didn't have the time right now. So what are things that -- - -This is not taking on a project or not, but getting back to what you said about how do you say no without ruining their enthusiasm is sometimes it would be useful to let people in on the prioritizing, rather than you having to sit by yourself going do I pick A or B tell the second person that comes along, I can do your project if I stop doing this, and you know, maybe the two requesters can talk together and say, well, this one is more important or this one can move back, and make it more of a group debate, assuming that the merits of them are, you know,. - -Right, right, I actually realized that that's my next slide so I don't know why I brought that up so we're going to table that for about about 10 minutes. - -Gina from Spokane, Washington. We're still in the cultivation stage, so when I try to prioritize or not prioritize, choose best ideas, I choose something what is something that can be an easy win to get this person to adopt the next time they have an idea. - -Yeah and I try really hard to do a diverse amount of projects and so I try to do one per department or per team as often as possible. So I found that, you know, we win people over one by one, but it's also a little bit contagious, so if we do a really good one with someone on our politics team, I have found that the other politics reporters are OK, I want in on that and it's really easy to stick with things like the data team or the investigative team but we try really hard to branch out so that every so often we're doing something with the business department and the features department, because I do think that spirit is somewhat contagious. - -Dan from Stanford, I've—I'm not someone who's easy to work with, but normally I—my sole criteria is that that person has an idea of how they're going to actually do it even if I get hit by a bus tomorrow. Like it's not—they have something going, maybe they have a spreadsheet of information that they're putting—I mean at last resort, they can put it out by hand and I mean like we put information in kind of tabular format and you've taken the time to record that, that's big deal in itself and they're not expecting me to magically come up with something that, you know, like it's not like a magic box where their dumb idea suddenly is great, so and I find that when they can explain step by step what they expect to see and what their plan is, that they've done their research, which is usually the stumbling block, and to me, that kind of a project I can jump on in a heartbeat, it's like no, I don't want to be the magician. - -And I think I don't believe that we should put things on the internet just because we can. I think that they should look and they should feel like the mission of the Sun Sentinel and you know, would you write a story about this? No? Then why would you do an interactive? And so sometimes we have to say no to things that don't just meet our standards, you know, you're mapping something just to map it, or you're putting out a quiz because you think it would be good click bait. You know, when users come to the Sun Sentinel, I want them to know that it's a value and it's worth their time and so we also say no to ideas for those reasons, as well. - - -Now, we can talk about killing enthusiasm. - -[laughter] - -So my biggest tip is to explain why you are saying no. So normally I'm saying no for a journalistic reason which is much easier for them to get on board with, and respect that decision. You don't want them to go back and say, well, Rachel says no to all my ideas, I'm never pitching again, so explain why you're saying no, so if you don't have time, sometimes we'll talk about well, we have these other priorities, if this is an evergreen, can we table it for X amount of time and if it's a bad idea, saying what would improve it? So last week, we had—how many of you have heard of flakka? So Florida has its own drug right now. South Florida specifically, which is surprising to no one. It's a bath salt combination and it's $5 and you can buy it on the internet and people keep dying. Miami. We had an editor pitch that we should map these deaths. Well, we did and they don't tell us anything. There are no clusters, there's not really enough of them to draw any sort of conclusions or patterns and we went back and forth debating this for a long time, but it was really important for us to say why we were saying, no, we don't think this is publishable, because maybe next time he's going to pitch another idea that's more in line with our goals, so I try to take the time no matter how slammed I am, no, this is how we could improve it because sometimes they just need to pivot it and then it will work. And hearing reporters repeat you come back to you and say things that like, OK, I know you're looking for X, Y, and Z and I have this new story that meets that criteria, that's been really fulfilling to us. If you explain your reasoning and you're not just saying no, I'm slammed or things like that? - -Forest, WBUR Boston, one thing I noticed is the first question I always ask is what's the story? What's your hypothesis? What are you looking for? And I find a lot of times that that will stop a project because I don't have the time to look into something. I'd love to do that kind of thing, but there's two of us and we also run the website. So I think it's just very interesting and that's the one thing we always ask is what's your hypothesis? You never do an experiment without doing that, you don't just set things on fire. So I think that was—it's not necessarily killing enthusiasm, but it helps them develop their story, as well, is oh, there isn't this data, maybe I can see [inaudible] - -Absolutely and I think with that too sometimes I think we get really excited about the hypothesis, you know, you'll have a really great set of data, and it's about like motorcycle crashes and you're like oh, my gosh this is going to be so great and being able to say no or like when it doesn't meet your hypothesis? Being able to say, OK, this isn't what we thought it was going to be, let's not publish and not being like super-super tied to like this is going to be so amazing, oh, my gosh, we can't stop this train, really helps. And that's a lot harder for people to do than people give it credit for because people are so excited you know, they have this kick-ass budget line and they can't wait and then it doesn't meet the budget line and we have to say you know what, this one isn't great enough. - -I actually had a similar—I'm sorry, I'm CJ. I work at the Star Tribune. I had a similar experience with a reporter. She said, can we do something with the data and I said where is the data? Turns out it's very nice tabular rows and columns and I said, sure, why don't you come over and we can hook through this a little bit and we narrowed it down and I made up a few mockup charts and she came and looked at them and she said, wow, I wish I would have talked to you before we did this big story and I said, me too. But do you think these charts fit the follow-up story? Eh, not really. They are cool, but it doesn't really fit. We had this really nice, you know, she understood what I was getting at in that the way we have them now don't really fit the story you're trying to tell and even though they're cool doesn't necessarily mean you need to publish them and she said, well, were you going to be disappointed if we just don't publish them and I said no, will you and she said not really and I said honestly this is sort of just learning experience for both of us, now I know the data exists, this is the story we're probably going to come back to and now you know that when you build these things, you can just come back. That was kind of a long story, sorry, but trying to be open about our process and the way we think about what makes something good to publish and how that matches the story that they're trying to tell I think that can help foster the enthusiasm for return customers so to speak. - -I'm Mary Jo Webster also from the Star Tribune. I think related to this is the idea of are we a service bureau or are we a partner and we really want to be the partner, right, so one of the things we've been tossing around is the idea of how can you have a request process of getting on this line and I threw out the idea of maybe we should have the reporter and/or editor sit down with you in the meeting, talk about it, talk about your hypothesis, your theory, whatever, instead of just like filling out a form and asking them to do something, to make it and that would give you that time to determine, is this feasible? You know, not promise anything, but we need to have a meeting, sit down and talk about it. - -Yeah, we specifically don't have a form for that exact reason. Because I think when you fill out a form such as like a photo request, you kind of assume, OK, that's going to happen. And that's not—that doesn't—it's not really conducive to being a partner. I have often say I work with you, not for you, and so we encourage people to come over and talk with us, you know, I say if it's going to be five minutes, just stop at my desk. If you need longer than that, find a spot on my calendar and throw it on there and I think some of that comes from, which doesn't always come naturally to me, is being really upbeat and smiling. And I want people to feel like they can come to my desk. You know, I am not too busy to hear your idea. I'd rather hear it now and then be like, OK, I need two more weeks to research and I'm like great, I'm glad it's in my brain now and I can think about it and so I fairly recently in the last year or so have been really cognizant of like the aura I'm giving off. Like. - -[laughter] - -Like is there a sarcastic thing you can put in your transcription for that? - -[sarcasm!] - -So people feel that we do want to talk to you, so that can play a really big role. Anybody else? - -I'm wondering if—I know we all don't really have time, but should we actually be going to the editorial planning meetings? - -I do. - -I do. - -Yeah. - -You can go to some of them. - -And ones that are talking long term stuff, not the daily stuff. - -The long term stuff, and sitting in and capturing ideas and saying, oh, now that I know this is coming up in X months, maybe you should come talk to me later. - -Yeah, and we are strategic about which meetings we go to. Like we don't go to the dailies because we think it gives the idea of I could turn this around really quickly and sometimes you totally can, but we are more long-term focused. We go to the long-term meetings and my boss reads through all the budgets with the idea of is there an interactive that nobody has thought of. Because we can't rely on people just to pitch to us because sometimes there are things they aren't seeing and we're a very small team but we still split it up. I do more of the in-person stuff, and I think you'll find your balance. You know, it took us a little bit to figure out which meetings to go to, how often to go, which editors to really build rapport with, but you find something that works for you. - - -I'm Sarah with Frontline. On our digital team like we make our own editorial meetings, actually and we invite people to come to us and that is also a great opportunity. We didn't have a lot of formal structure at Frontline, so one it was introducing that, but also kind of getting people invested, and that also helps them think about potential projects. So we advocate, hey, there's this new tool we want to use. - -So is the purpose of your meeting to talk about what you have coming up? - -Yeah, we talk about what we have coming up and we talk about ideas that we want to do, like short term and then long-term ideas. - -I just want to have riff off of that. I think that's a beautiful concept. Because—you know, if you come up with an original story and then assign it, similar to what editorial departments, I think development and design desks should totally be doing something like that. I never thought to actually have our own editorial meeting, but that's a great concept. - -Yeah, and we -- - -OK, for the last 15 minutes we're going to kind of switch gears and we call this section getting shit done. - -And so this is about how to—after you've talked to people and you have the perfect process ever and everyone is so collaborative and kind, this is how you actually do things. - -Tyler: So I had kind of pitched this because I'm a self-taught programmer, and I've never worked in, you know, a web shop, I've only worked for print publications on the web side and so and I've always been a team of one, so I'm always paranoid or terrified that I actually have no idea what I'm doing or at the that my process is completely poor. So this kind of lingers over my head at basically all times, so I have these three remaining questions that kind of go off of that. I'm going to open this here, but first just put this bit.ly up here. [bit.ly/smallstaff] This links to our GitHub repo in which we have a bunch more links for tools that will hopefully be useful for kind of the stuff we're talking about, and if you have stuff it's GitHub so just fork it and do a pull request and if you're new to this this is a good way to start. So I can put a little thing in that about that. This is from Harvard Business Review's 20 Minute Manager book on managing projects. I put other links up there. I don't mean to suck up to my employer but it just so happens that it's all about management which is grea,t including managing yourself, so I've got better at that because because of where I work which is great. But this is a work breakdown structure and it comes from project management. The idea is you define your project, you define what goes into the project and you define what goes into that and generally the idea is that a project manager is coming up with this, and you can use it like that, or you can also just use it for yourself. So when someone pitches a project, here's your restaurant week guide or some kind of data dive, you don't have to say, OK an interactive guide to local restaurants, that will take me, I don't know, a week, instead of doing that, you can say, OK what are the features here and even in your little programmer head things that other people wouldn't know, OK, I'll need some kind of Javascript library to filter that, I'll need some sort of hookup with Google Maps so people will be able to see where these things are. So the text here doesn't really matter but just the general structure is you'll start out with the general gist of everything, overall project. The number doesn't really matter. 3 is a great place to start, I guess. Say what is the major task and then what are the subtasks that go into that. Sorry about the pagination here because this is from a print book. But say what are the subtasks that would accomplish this particular task and best of all you can figure out how long that particular project would take. So this goes back to what we were saying earlier about estimating projects. So from there, so that's just a cool thing I saw that I like to use a method that I like to use in terms of giving estimates. From there, though, your work is not done. You need to track your own time. Just imagine if you were a freelancer, I'm sure some of you were at some point, and you were billing people and of course, you know, you're going to track your billable hours. Even if you're on salary and you're not doing that, it's important to know how long a given part of a project would take, how long you expected it to take and whether you were spot on or you were under or you were over. I use a tool called Toggl. It's just like a toggle switch except without the E on the end. It's free, it lets you define several projects and every time you log for a time period, you can say what you did in that particular time period, which is nice. But there are any number of other ones and your employers might have harvest or something like that, there are a lot of tools you can use there. - -From there, I like to set deadlines, check-in meetings are great. You might not want to do a daily standup, depending on the project. That might be overkill. But if it's a longer-term project and you want to meet with your team every week or maybe every Tuesday and Thursday, and update people, if it's a thing where you're getting stuff from your design desk or you're getting stuff from a reporter or something like that, then you can say OK, by this time next week you'll have this spreadsheet for me, I'll have this part of the project done, that's that and when you're doing these meetings. Obviously you want to stay on task but it's a great way to impose a deadline on yourself because once you say you're going to do something, you have to do it. - -Rachel mentioned the angry post-it notes and I don't do post-it notes but I tend to just write a reflection paper like high school style in my Google drive and I started doing that as a thing to give to my supervisor so they could see what I'm doing but they didn't really care so I just started doing it myself and it does seem kind of silly to let out all your feelings on the page. But it does help, it's a nice war foe moo to just writing stuff down is good for memory, but being able to refer back to that, to know how the people parts of that project went, how the technical parts of the project went, what I did to solve certain things, I find very helpful. So that's my part in terms of this kind of thing. So if anyone has ideas on keeping yourself on track? - -I keep myself a daily diary. I've Google drive page that I just put in, you know, June 5th and here's what I did today and I even find it's useful so that Monday I come back and I look at what I did the previous week, and then that helps jump start me for Monday, I feel like I'm right back, you know, it's 5 p.m. on Friday and I've jumped right back into it. - -Yeah, Dan? - -I just like using Google spreadsheets whether it's with someone else or if I'm just by myself, like if I have some half-assed idea I'll make a row that's title and then maybe URL and if you do command enter in a cell in Google docs it will automatically time stamp the cell and I'll fill it out casually and a lot of stuff never gets done and it eventually disappears down the drive but at least I'm not spending a lot of time entering my thoughts and it is a good data thing and I've basically structured data basically. - -I use Trello for things like that. - -Oh, yes, we use Trello all the time. - -We can notify a person if it's ready to. The problem we suffer is we have too many projects at one time and organizing time and you know, kind of setting expectations is we're constantly jumping in a given day, two interactives and something else that sucks time, so for me I don't know how I would—I think I would kill myself managing myself if I started writing everything down, so I wonder if anyone else has that kind of struggle or? - -Managing yourself is a struggle. - -Well, writing stuff down and be like today I worked on this project but I worked on three other ones. - -It doesn't have to be detailed, though, I mean even just noting that today you worked on this and I find myself as I'm writing it thinking you know, someday I might need this if I need to prove to my boss what I've been doing all this time, right? It doesn't have to be complicated. It could just be I worked on this and hit this one roadblock and I'm still stuck at it, right? - - -I do have to say, like the more detailed, like I'm doing a project right now that's like wicked dirty data and it's just taking forever because I'm documenting really detailedly, but I've had things crash and die on me, and it's fine, because I have this like super detailed record of what's going on and then the next project I go to, like probably not going to go back to these notes, because there are like tens and tens and tens of pages long, but like that's in there, you know, that's in your head and it makes you slow down and think about like, why am I doing this? I'm writing this down, like, why am I doing this one process that I'm doing, so you'll just slow down enough to see that maybe what you're doing is mildly self-indulgent or unnecessary. - -So I want to move on so we have enough time to get through the rest real quick. Making it easier on yourself is, needless to say, hugely important. - -Templates, obviously, I don't think that's a secret. But if you're doing the same types of projects over and over, having templates is so key. If you're doing a lot of interactive map types of things. If you're doing quizzes. Those are fantastic, and we tend to do wildly different things from one project to the next, which is maybe not the greatest idea in the world, but—and on that subject, going back to when we were talking about when—whether or not you should decide to do a project, if you can look at a project and say, this not only seems like great for this project, but it seems like something we could repurpose for other stuff, that's a big bonus point in my book. - -And then going off of that, style guides are huge, not only do you want your visual style guide just for you know, your branding and all that for the user, but when you can take as many decisions out of the process as possible, that will really speed things along. If you know when you're going in, OK, my H3 is going to look like this, my subhead is going to look like that, that's just fewer decisions you have to make which obviously makes things much easier. - -I also mentioned in my notes that I keep a personal code library for like—I almost exclusively use JavaScript so I have a lot of JavaScript functions I'm doing over and over and after Googling how to generate a random number a thousand times I realized I can just keep it in a text file somewhere and refer back to it whenever I have to do that particular thing. So that's extremely helpful. In the GitHub, there's a list of tools for doing these sorts of things. If you have any, add those, as well. - -Administrative work is an important part of our gigs and I've found when I'm really in the weeds at the end of a project, I'm very fond of telling my team, people I'm working with I'm going to check email at 10 and 3 today, that's it. Outlook is going to be closed out the rest of the day. Obviously you want to remain accessible to your team but you also have to know, OK if I'm going to get this done and make it easy on myself, I really have to know that I have this time that I can dedicate and I'm going to cut all the other stuff out of my life. So I'm really good at scheduling before lunch I'm going to work on project A, after lunch I'm going to work on project B. I'm good at that kind of thing. - -Especially as a developer, killing your ego is huge, so when you're stuck in the weeds on a problem, either I mean if you're lucky. I mean if you're able to ask other developers for help or delegate. And just not like getting in your head and thinking, oh, man I should know how to do this, I'm going to figure it out and then four hours later having nothing to explain for it. - -Try explaining it to a nape technical person. - -Yeah, rubber ducking on a nontechnical person is huge. - -I'm part of this Slack group called the lonely coder's club if anything is interested? In joining, you can go on, you can ask questions of other lone coders. There are some legacy lone coders who aren't lonely anymore but they're still there to help, like Alan who was at MinnPost now he's WNYC but yeah, hit me up later and if you want to. - - -Do you accept friends and allies of lone coders? - -[laughter] - - -We'll see. - -We're all owned by media conglomerates and so I find it really helpful to reach out to people who are using the same systems. So like the Sun Sentinel is owned by Tribune Publishing and so I've built relationships with the coders in Chicago and Orlando and Baltimore, because they're under the same restriction, so like for instance, our advertising script is really hard and it competes with a lot of other scripts and so they're such a great resource for things like that because they have the same exact advertising script and since we're so small it has been really great to have other teams to say I just need a second set of eyes and it's usually like a missed comma and you feel ridiculous, but sometimes you just need that second set of eyes. - -And even if it's not pa corporate parent, even like groups. When I was in alt-weekly land, I reached out to the other alt-weeklies. - -Andrea use works where I used to work in Burlington, Vermont. Even if it's not exactly the same systems, it's the same problems. It's great to find a shoulder to cry on. - -So sometimes it's about making it easier for yourself. So look if there's open source code already that does what you want to do, but sometimes also about not making it harder for yourself. Check the documentation first, if it's not good, don't touch it. You don't have time for that, and it's not worth it so in that sense just be careful. - -I still like try to do as much as I possibly can with JavaScript almost like to MacGuyver levels. I should probably move on to Python or something. But you know, this is the last question, we're almost out of time. But when we're lonely coders, I love that phrase and I'm going to use it all the time now, it can be tough to learn new things and to know what you need to learn more likely. - -Fortunately we all work on the internet which I think helps in this regard, but a thing that's helped me a lot is knowing your learning style and for me, I really like to have someone there to talk me through things. And that's, you know, like if you were still in college or something, but even if I'm not taking a class I've found Lynda.com is extremely helpful for that. Dan's presentation before this one about mundane programming was fantastic—I wish we all had a time turner and we could go back and take that before we were here but in terms of figuring out mundane tasks that like your side project tasks to help you learn new things, like you had mentioned what was it a ruby script to help find an apartment on Craigslist? - -Yes, which Craig doesn't like, but as long as you don't commercially do it, but yeah, when you really need something to to be done you're not going to bullcrap around with the code, like you find that you're much more motivated to learn it because not only are you going to learn something hopefully, but you'll also get whatever you were going towards, too. - -Right, and I recently—I wanted to learn Node.js and I found a lot of tutorials that were towards scraping the web with Node.js and so a thing I've been doing, up where we live where the beaches are only open one month a year, last winter pretty much killed my winter jacket so I needed a new winter jacket and I found the one I wanted but obviously a good winter jacket is pricey so I set up a Node.js thing to scrape the L.L. Bean website and it will send me an email when the price of the jacket I want will drop. So just this little silly thing, I had to learn Node somehow, so and I learned Heroku, as well. So the first time I ever used D3 which is now a thing I used a lot for charting stuff, I had downloaded my data from Untappd, the social app that lets you log your beers and I figured out what I was rating my beers at and I made a scatter plot but that's how I learned D3. That was my sample D3 code. - -I would just recommend to everyone that when you do learn something new, share it with everybody else. Because one of the best ways to solidify your knowledge is actually to teach somebody else, so create a tutorial or something and put it out there for all of the rest of us to share and I think you're going to probably be able to learn something else that somebody else learned and if you do it right away as soon as you've learned it, I find when I go to write it all down, I'm like I remember that, you know, that thing that I had so much trouble figuring out that the tutorial I tried to learn from totally failed, I'm going to put that in my tutorial, right? - -If you do post a question and then figure it out later, please don't just put never mind. - -Yeah, and yeah, I just answered my first stack overflow question a few weeks ago and boy did I feel like a million bucks for doing that. - -People who work at other places where you admire their work, don't be afraid to email someone personally whom you've never met in the community and ask them questions. I've done that a couple of times. Email someone like someone you met here like in five months randomly like how did you do that can you walk me through this they will most likely be like, yeah, I can get you on the phone. I've received a couple of those emails and I will immediately, like I'll just stop, working on everything else and spend three hours and try and share everything with them because it feels like sharing something I've worked on. - -And I think a lot of that comes from there can sometimes be a lack of appreciation within your own newsroom because no one knows how you do it. I use Twitter a lot for that, I'll ask questions and it works I would say more than 50% of the time. When I did my first D3, it doesn't doing well and I posted a question and a developer from the Oregonian was like I've done that exact same thing let me send you my source code and I expensed a Starbucks gift card because you can send those via email address which is a really nice thing and he was like blown away because for him just sharing it he was happier sharing it than I think I was getting it and so yeah, totally people want to help you. - -Yeah, I think we're lucky that the news developer community is unfortunately not perfect but better than other communities and it might be because I'm a white dude, I can say that but I it's a safe place to say hey, can I pick your brain on this, and I think we all 250 people here are kind of all in on that mission. - -So we are over our time so if you like to leave, feel free to, but if you would like to stick around and talk more, please feel free to. - -7 minutes, so yeah, that's our bit.ly and totally find us around today and tomorrow. - -[session ended] +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/smallteam/index.html +--- + +# Big Ambition, Small Staff, How the F\*\*\* Do I Prioritize? + +### Session Facilitator(s): Rachel Schallom, Tyler Machado + +### Day & Time: Thursday, 12:30-1:30pm + +### Room: Thomas Swain + +All right, guys, if you could take your seats. + +OK, while you're getting settled, I'll go ahead and introduce us. My name is Rachel Schallom, I'm the interactive editor at the Sun Sentinel, which is in south Florida, and we are doing a session because about two years ago we started doing what we would call digital storytelling which is basically where we said maybe we shouldn't throw everything in the CMS, and over the last two years in the beginning, you know, we were like begging people to work with us, and then it kind of blossomed and then we started getting a lot of ideas and we needed some sort of processing/managing all of these expectations, but up until two weeks ago, the interactive department, which is what I refer to in memos to sound important, was actually just me. + +[laughter] + +So I've learned a lot in the last two years. I basically started this department and have watched it grow and need a lot of love and so we want to talk about the issues that come with being really small and working by yourself. +Yeah, I'm Tyler Machado, I work at Harvard Business Review in Boston. I am the only coder on my team. I'm part of the editorial team, but my title is web developer. So I work on, yeah, interactives and dataviz, and that kind of stuff. We have a separate design desk and a separate tech staff that actually makes the website work and so I can grab them on an ad hoc base basis, but most of the time I'm the center of that particular universe, and Rachel is going to go first, but I'm going to go second, talking about kind of managing my own projects, and learning stuff when you have no one to learn off of and you don't have much of a community in your newsroom on a tech perspective. So yeah, go for it. + +Yeah, so we've gone over all of the rules in all the other session, be kind, be courteous, don't use jargon. The only thing I'd like to remind you is that in this session we're going to talk a lot about managing other people, managing expectations and I want to remind you that this is a live transcription, so let's not try to talk shit on our bosses. Just use someone I know. Like "someone I know." But this is on the internet. +Norma: Oh, the pressure! + +It's all right, Norma. They're not Googling themselves yet. + +Basically the way we're going to do this is we have a bunch of questions, we want to then open it up for discussion so feel free to cut us off and feel free to raise hands. I'm a pretty loud person, everyone can hear me, right? How do you communicate with our others who don't share our jargon. So this was a really big problem when I needed to estimate time or talk about my ideas, with—I work for a legacy newspaper, so a lot of those people are older and they don't understand the internet and they've been doing what they've been doing for a very, very long time so when you need someone on your side but they don't speak the same language, it can be very difficult. So my biggest tip is finding common ground through analogies, like what do they do on the internet. And an example I have is there are some open source tools that are really easy to use and they became less scary when I told people that they were just as ease as uploading pictures to Facebook, and they're like, OK, I know how do do that, so if you can find common ground, that usually helps. Don't make assumptions about what people know, especially young people. I am blown away by people in their 20s when I am talking and they don't know understand what I'm saying and so that has been a really big epiphany for me, and that age really has nothing do with digital literacy. + +Sorry they don't know what you're talking about techwise or conceptwise or? + +Pretty much techwise, I end up having to explain a lot more than I thought I would. Whether that's just explaining terms like open source. 20-year-old reporters did not know what that meant and so that was a really big eye opener had in digital literacy that you can't really look at someone and say yeah, they'll know what I mean and then there are older reporters who have attended hackathon and know exactly what I mean. So don't make assumptions. Teach jargon whenever possible, so I try and take opportunities instead of just dumbing everything down, to teach them and learn as we go. So right now we are having a 404 contest. Our 404 page is really boring, and living in south Florida is a very not-boring place, so we wanted it to reflect our community a little bit so it was a really good opportunity for me to teach the entire newsroom, what is a 404 page, so whenever you can, without being condescending, those opportunities, because now I'll be able to use the 404 jargon moving forward. + +And then my last point is help them give feedback, so we do these things called project reviews. I don't know why I acted like that was a fancy name. Where we're very project- and investigation-based, so we do a ton of long-term stuff, so about 48 hours, 36 to 48 hours before publication, we send the finished digital link to the team for feedback and in the beginning I was just getting typos or I'm having second thoughts about this lede, and then I would finally get to sleep, and right after publication they'd be like oh, yeah, this link doesn't work and that doesn't work and we were like why weren't you doing that during the review period and so we started coming up with a checklist of things that I wanted them to look for, so broken links, usability, open it on your phone, trying to share it on social, we found that if helped guide people, they gave us much better feedback. So those are my points about communicating about jargon. Who else has experienced this? I'm sure all of you have been in a meeting where it hasn't gone well or that there's a barrier there. Does anyone want to give an example? + +We echoing analogies, I'm pretty sure that's the only way we communicate, to the point where it's become kind of an internal joke for us. We just simplifying it down to even core concepts, we talk about, we have 19 websites, but we talk about them like sheds in our backyard and how we want to take all those sheds and build like an aircraft hangar instead and that's just some of the things we do because it does become so crazy when you're—for us, we have radio, as well as 19 visual sites, so trying to bring that all together because I don't understand how the radio works. So the digital site. So I think analogy is the best way to deal with it. + +I have the problem a lot of time where I—oh, and please introduce yourself. + +I'm Allie Kanik. I work for Public Source in Pittsburgh, PA. I have a problem where I'll go through a whole spiel and I'll get to the end and that makes sense right? And the person will be like no. And OK, what don't you ever understand and they're like, no. So I've found that it's helpful to stop often in your spiel, and be right? You good? Questions? That helps to not take twice looks it ought to. + +Absolutely. + +Alex; I work for Newsela. Being super-patient is really, really key. You really the risk of souring communication if you're abrupt or rude or how do you not know this? You've worked in this field forever. It's really important to keep your head, because otherwise you're never going to get your point across. + +And I think with that, there are a lot of what we could view as opportunities, so I once—we have the system where when something is ready, you email the home page and you can put it on the home page and I did that with a map and the guy running the home page said why would I put this the home page. This isn't a story. And we were having this huge debate and I was like really frustrated because we've been over this so many times but we were in the middle of the newsroom and I was like OK, this is your opportunity, man, like make your pitch and so with other people staring on that's an opportunity to be like no, this is why we do this, this is our core principles, and so even individually taking those opportunities to kind of get people on your side can really help. + +I just want to point out, Michael Grant, San Francisco Chronicle, I've noticed that on projects that I'm developing, you know, editorial will come up with a name for, you know, maybe like a drop-down, or you know, but the naming conventions are different than you know of something that I'm building versus what they refer to them as, and it just becomes a bunch of emails and things that Slack is getting rid of thank God, but it really kind of slows down the whole process because we're talking about sometimes two different things or something that we thought we were talking about, and it's just horrible. So I think outlining, you know, instilling that we should refer to certain areas as this and defining what we're calling things makes a huge difference. + +Screen shots help with that, too. It's just describing what you mean is sometimes like, well, what thing that drops down from where but if you're like screenshot, this thing, then that helps, I've found. + +We once had a 30-minute spiel of why we wanted to get rid of the drop-down and just going to a hamburger icon, we realized after 30 minutes that no one knew what a hamburger icon was, so prototypes, sketch, screenshots, all helpful things. + +Kate; I'm with the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and I really like that you made the point kind of don't assume to know what people's knowledge and skills are. One thing that I've found really helpful just with managing teams is creating a culture where questions are encouraged and they don't feel stupid for asking and kind of leading by example, and even larger infrastructure projects that we do, where I go what's a CDN you know or something like that, even as the project manager, I think can open that up and definitely those projects have been the most successful where people feel like they can ask questions, ask why do you recommend that we do it this way and offer suggestions. So. + +The one thing that I also noticed was post mortems, you often don't really have time to to do them but when we did, we were able to say why couldn't we have approached it this way and that's led to a number of projects that never would have happened otherwise. So once we started to do that for major projects, we found that producers and reporters were like, oh, well, this is possible now and we can do this next time and it will make it easier and faster. I think that was a big thing for us, as well. + +Absolutely, we do post-mortems on the process, as well, because each project usually has a different editor or this is a reporter's first time doing something long-form and so it can be a struggle and one of the things that I do in my process reporting as, you know, the project manager and the designer who gets things at the very end you experience some of the most frustration in the process is that I write some of my notes to myself while I'm still mad. So I'm remembering everyone who didn't make deadline, so you know, this terrible meeting that was two hours and nothing came out of it and then I'll sleep on it for a couple of days and then I'll write my post-mortem notes and my boss suggested that because after a while you start to forgive and you like the project that came out of it and that doesn't do us any good moving forward. So sometimes make notes that made you really, really angry and use them later once you've had time to sleep on it a little bit. + +So this is a huge one for us. How do we temper editors' expectations. We started our interactive department the year we won our first Pulitzer prize, which made people really, really hungry for more prizes and really hungry to do things that were cool and innovative and got our name out there and when you're a department of one and people have huge expectations. I kept getting asked why I couldn't fill Snow Fall, like seriously, over and again. This became a huge problem for us. A couple of notes is don't finish early, at least in the beginning. So time estimates are huge for us and them taking our time estimates seriously meant sticking to what we had. So maybe you give yourself a couple of extra days just to make sure because with development you never know what's going to go wrong and then for them to take you seriously, you have to hit in about that amount of time and I don't just mean hit your deadlines, I mean don't finish early, because if I'm on a project and I say it's going to take me five days but I get done in three, and the next time I say I need five days, they're going to be like, she only really needs three, and we found until you have this process a well oiled machine, stick to your deadlines and just hold it, you know, just pretend you're still working on it or QA or ask for feedback, but don't make it harder on yourself in the future by finishing earlier. + +This is on the internet, remember, so the secret is out. + +[laughter] + +My bosses won't be here. + +Don't commit to something you're unsure about. So in meetings when someone's like, I have this grand idea and I want to do this, even if it's a really bad idea, you know, sometimes I use phrases like I'll look into that. I try to avoid committing to anything I'm not totally sure about. + +And use data whenever possible to make decisions, so I review all of our project's analytics and we try to learn as much from them as possible and then I try to use them to make my arguments stronger. So if we told a story a certain way and it had really low engagement, and I think that's not the way to go in a future project I'll bring that up so instead of it just being my opinion it's the data speaking, as well, which can strengthen. So data is your friend. So I was wondering if anyone wanted to share a story about work everything with editors and expectation, because the point of the session is, you don't have a lot of resources, so this is a pretty big one for us. + +Sarah Squire, Wall Street Journal, but small, I work by myself. One thing I found is actually sometimes editor's expectations, they think something is really big but it's really easy. Sometimes I don't pitch projects because they think it will take a month and sometimes it will take two days to do, and then you get to the point that you want them to pitch everything. Explain that they don't know how long something will take. + +Where we used toing often this thing where it's like OK, on this date we'll have this done and then on this date we'll have this done. I have started switching to a this part of the project will take this many days, which has helped a lot with the editors' expectations because whenever something doesn't get done on time, they can be like, well, why isn't this done on time and I could be like well, I told you it would take 4 days at this time, John Schmoe, you know, Joe Schmoe? Didn't have his data to me until a week like he said he was going to, I'm still taking four days here, but it's just being pushed back. So that's helped. + +One. Bernard, I'm content strategist at a place called green America. I got really good at doing hourly estimates and I pad my estimates 20% for the holy shit, everything is falling apart, and at the beginning of the project, I give an hourly breakdown or actually a weekly breakdown of what I estimate it to be, and I the deadline and people go oh, he hit his deadline and that's really rare at my organization. But it teaches them like at the beginning I have them pitch everything they want to me and I now get to say yes and no to things, and I get everything, I get an estimate, I do essentially an RPF and it seems to work relatively well. Like, people learn how hard things are, and people learn how easy other things are. It's wonderful. + +There's a doc that helps with all this stuff that I'm going to share later. So we're all coming sort of full circle, which is nice. + +Hi, New York Daily News. I had a question, wanted to get some advice from people here. Sometimes when your editors ask you to do something that's completely are R. new for me, I know I can probably learn it and do it, but just because I have never done it before, I don't know how long it would take, so what would you tell your editor? How would you phrase that? + +I think it depends on the frame of the project. For me I find out does the story absolutely have to run this week or can we push it back if something were to happen and then I'll use noncommittal phrases like I'll look into that, give me the afternoon to research it an once I have a better idea of the technology I'll let you know. If I needed to to research it, let's regroup tomorrow, and give a better estimate, what are some other strategies? + +It's really important that your editors or anyone requesting a project from you knows your expectations, as well, so I expect that I'm going to have time for discovery to understand what I'm going to do hoo, I expect that I'm going to have the data from this person to be able to implement it, so it's almost like making a contingent estimate so you don't know exactly how long it's going to take, but you can guess that it's going to take this amount of time if so-and-so is going to be done. Does that make sense is. + +Yeah, sometimes I feel the pressure because there will be a larger project based on when I finish that so if I say maybe two weeks we're going to schedule others for the home page and so that we can launch it on that day, but I feel like intimidated because I'm not exactly sure if I can hit the deadline. + +I would try—go ahead, go ahead. + +Have you ever tried throwing out something like real and just being like if they are—because I find most of the time that they're depending on you like that, and you give them a high ball estimate they'll be like, OK, I mean, how can they tell if you're the one that -- + +That's true, too. + +If someone is asking you to do something that you've never done before, it's new it would be worth asking them like what are their objectives, because maybe they're saying can you do it this way because it's the only thing they know. Because the editors probably don't know that there's a whole range of ways you can build something. If if you say what are you trying to get out of this maybe there's a way that you can build that you do already know. Sometimes there won't be, but it would be good to get it, you know, what is it that they really truly want from you? + +Hi I'm Peter from public archive. My experience is that I'm always building trust relationships with people and that the way they're going to trust me is that I'm very up front when I say I don't know how to do this. So it's going to take me some time to figure that out, and I will also refuse to give them a time estimate unless I'm comfortable committing to it. And my experience has been that people, even though they would like me sometimes to give them a time estimate on things, will respect me more and trust me more if I don't give them one, because I'm not comfortable committing to it. And will trust me more if having given a time estimate, I do stick to it. So I have to trust my own sense of can I really meet the time estimate before I'm willing to say it out loud and then I always give them the retail cost, not the wholesale cost. + +Absolutely. + +And we have to keep in mind, too, sorry, Jamie hut from the Star Tribune, that we don't always get to tell them how long something's going to take. They're going to tell us when it's going to run, so you know, being able to talk them through what some of the constraints are going to mean for their expectations is important. + +Right, so like I was saying, I try to find out, does it have to run, you know, for instance this weekend? And if the answer is yes, because it's tied to an event or it's an exclusive or something, we make lists of OK, this is my wish list and then we make that more realistic. Well, in three days I can give you five of these. Pick which five you want. Or you know, and it's almost like a bartering system and I find that involving them in that process, you know, like saying, OK, you asked for 10 things, I think I can do these five and then having them have the opportunity to say, yeah, but actually item 7 is really important to us us helps, because then it's not like well, she couldn't do the whole thing. They were actively deciding what the project was going to be in the end. + +My team has a running joke, we're often asked to do snow fall, as well, and we can could snowflake. Perhaps snow ball flurry, but -- + +But mostly one flake. + +I found it useful, too, like if there's something new and you've got to kick the tires around a little bit to see if you can execute it in a certain amount of time, to like put your code in you know, JS or code pin or something about it and show them a version of it kind of work everything and then measuring how long it would take but I think they can generally see that, oh, yeah, this does work, I would like it to do this, I see there's a bunch of code here, I respect what you're telling me that this is a solid deadline or you need more time to figure it out. + +Put it in test mode. + +Yeah. + +Absolutely. + +How do we choose the best ideas? This is something that I think is really, really important in a small team. We have about 160 people that work for Sun Sentinel. About 100 of those are reporters, and up until two weeks ago there was just me. And is so there came a time where in the beginning I was doing all these workshops, I was begging people to pitch interactive ideas and then they started doing that, and we didn't have the resources to handle the capacity. So how can you say no without, like ruining their enthusiasm because we want them to pitch again in the future. You know, maybe in a month when you pitch again I won't have anything on my plate and it will be perfect, so that was really important. So how do we choose the best ideas? For me it's all about return on investment. How long is it going to take me versus what can we get out of this project. So questions I can ask is what is the shelf life. If it's for an event that is two days away that might not be as good as something that is you know, a guide to beaches which can be used all year round. Sorry. + +[laughter] + +Rub it in. + +[laughter] + +That was not the nicest example. How much work does this take and are there open source tools available? + +Can the code be repurposed? So sometimes so we're working on something for restaurant week this year that we easily can see could be repurposed for other events. So basically we're taking something for restaurant week where there's like 125 restaurants that are participating and we're picking our 12 favorites so it's essentially like our picks or something, well, I can easily see that being used for like a dozen projects throughout the year so for that it's worth putting in the time to create it because it can be used over and over again. Has something similar worked in the past so there are things that I know have not worked so that's easy for me to know. And if there are things that I know have worked even if we're short on deadline that may be something that I push forward and then finally. My tips are you should give everyone a fair shot in the beginning, because we're big and we do a lot of projects, you know, for someone this might be the first time doing a project or first time doing an interactive and I like to give everyone a fair shot in the beginning and then if you are slammed, it's more likely to turn away those who have proven not to deliver on time, so I know of an editor who never meets deadline. And so—and it's never turned in in the format we agreed and it's just typically a mess, so no matter who interesting it is, we actually had this earlier this week, they pitched and interactive graphic and we needed it in 24 hours and I knew it was going to be a mess and I didn't want to do that to my intern, so we said no to that we because we knew we didn't have the time right now. So what are things that -- + +This is not taking on a project or not, but getting back to what you said about how do you say no without ruining their enthusiasm is sometimes it would be useful to let people in on the prioritizing, rather than you having to sit by yourself going do I pick A or B tell the second person that comes along, I can do your project if I stop doing this, and you know, maybe the two requesters can talk together and say, well, this one is more important or this one can move back, and make it more of a group debate, assuming that the merits of them are, you know,. + +Right, right, I actually realized that that's my next slide so I don't know why I brought that up so we're going to table that for about about 10 minutes. + +Gina from Spokane, Washington. We're still in the cultivation stage, so when I try to prioritize or not prioritize, choose best ideas, I choose something what is something that can be an easy win to get this person to adopt the next time they have an idea. + +Yeah and I try really hard to do a diverse amount of projects and so I try to do one per department or per team as often as possible. So I found that, you know, we win people over one by one, but it's also a little bit contagious, so if we do a really good one with someone on our politics team, I have found that the other politics reporters are OK, I want in on that and it's really easy to stick with things like the data team or the investigative team but we try really hard to branch out so that every so often we're doing something with the business department and the features department, because I do think that spirit is somewhat contagious. + +Dan from Stanford, I've—I'm not someone who's easy to work with, but normally I—my sole criteria is that that person has an idea of how they're going to actually do it even if I get hit by a bus tomorrow. Like it's not—they have something going, maybe they have a spreadsheet of information that they're putting—I mean at last resort, they can put it out by hand and I mean like we put information in kind of tabular format and you've taken the time to record that, that's big deal in itself and they're not expecting me to magically come up with something that, you know, like it's not like a magic box where their dumb idea suddenly is great, so and I find that when they can explain step by step what they expect to see and what their plan is, that they've done their research, which is usually the stumbling block, and to me, that kind of a project I can jump on in a heartbeat, it's like no, I don't want to be the magician. + +And I think I don't believe that we should put things on the internet just because we can. I think that they should look and they should feel like the mission of the Sun Sentinel and you know, would you write a story about this? No? Then why would you do an interactive? And so sometimes we have to say no to things that don't just meet our standards, you know, you're mapping something just to map it, or you're putting out a quiz because you think it would be good click bait. You know, when users come to the Sun Sentinel, I want them to know that it's a value and it's worth their time and so we also say no to ideas for those reasons, as well. + +Now, we can talk about killing enthusiasm. + +[laughter] + +So my biggest tip is to explain why you are saying no. So normally I'm saying no for a journalistic reason which is much easier for them to get on board with, and respect that decision. You don't want them to go back and say, well, Rachel says no to all my ideas, I'm never pitching again, so explain why you're saying no, so if you don't have time, sometimes we'll talk about well, we have these other priorities, if this is an evergreen, can we table it for X amount of time and if it's a bad idea, saying what would improve it? So last week, we had—how many of you have heard of flakka? So Florida has its own drug right now. South Florida specifically, which is surprising to no one. It's a bath salt combination and it's $5 and you can buy it on the internet and people keep dying. Miami. We had an editor pitch that we should map these deaths. Well, we did and they don't tell us anything. There are no clusters, there's not really enough of them to draw any sort of conclusions or patterns and we went back and forth debating this for a long time, but it was really important for us to say why we were saying, no, we don't think this is publishable, because maybe next time he's going to pitch another idea that's more in line with our goals, so I try to take the time no matter how slammed I am, no, this is how we could improve it because sometimes they just need to pivot it and then it will work. And hearing reporters repeat you come back to you and say things that like, OK, I know you're looking for X, Y, and Z and I have this new story that meets that criteria, that's been really fulfilling to us. If you explain your reasoning and you're not just saying no, I'm slammed or things like that? + +Forest, WBUR Boston, one thing I noticed is the first question I always ask is what's the story? What's your hypothesis? What are you looking for? And I find a lot of times that that will stop a project because I don't have the time to look into something. I'd love to do that kind of thing, but there's two of us and we also run the website. So I think it's just very interesting and that's the one thing we always ask is what's your hypothesis? You never do an experiment without doing that, you don't just set things on fire. So I think that was—it's not necessarily killing enthusiasm, but it helps them develop their story, as well, is oh, there isn't this data, maybe I can see [inaudible] + +Absolutely and I think with that too sometimes I think we get really excited about the hypothesis, you know, you'll have a really great set of data, and it's about like motorcycle crashes and you're like oh, my gosh this is going to be so great and being able to say no or like when it doesn't meet your hypothesis? Being able to say, OK, this isn't what we thought it was going to be, let's not publish and not being like super-super tied to like this is going to be so amazing, oh, my gosh, we can't stop this train, really helps. And that's a lot harder for people to do than people give it credit for because people are so excited you know, they have this kick-ass budget line and they can't wait and then it doesn't meet the budget line and we have to say you know what, this one isn't great enough. + +I actually had a similar—I'm sorry, I'm CJ. I work at the Star Tribune. I had a similar experience with a reporter. She said, can we do something with the data and I said where is the data? Turns out it's very nice tabular rows and columns and I said, sure, why don't you come over and we can hook through this a little bit and we narrowed it down and I made up a few mockup charts and she came and looked at them and she said, wow, I wish I would have talked to you before we did this big story and I said, me too. But do you think these charts fit the follow-up story? Eh, not really. They are cool, but it doesn't really fit. We had this really nice, you know, she understood what I was getting at in that the way we have them now don't really fit the story you're trying to tell and even though they're cool doesn't necessarily mean you need to publish them and she said, well, were you going to be disappointed if we just don't publish them and I said no, will you and she said not really and I said honestly this is sort of just learning experience for both of us, now I know the data exists, this is the story we're probably going to come back to and now you know that when you build these things, you can just come back. That was kind of a long story, sorry, but trying to be open about our process and the way we think about what makes something good to publish and how that matches the story that they're trying to tell I think that can help foster the enthusiasm for return customers so to speak. + +I'm Mary Jo Webster also from the Star Tribune. I think related to this is the idea of are we a service bureau or are we a partner and we really want to be the partner, right, so one of the things we've been tossing around is the idea of how can you have a request process of getting on this line and I threw out the idea of maybe we should have the reporter and/or editor sit down with you in the meeting, talk about it, talk about your hypothesis, your theory, whatever, instead of just like filling out a form and asking them to do something, to make it and that would give you that time to determine, is this feasible? You know, not promise anything, but we need to have a meeting, sit down and talk about it. + +Yeah, we specifically don't have a form for that exact reason. Because I think when you fill out a form such as like a photo request, you kind of assume, OK, that's going to happen. And that's not—that doesn't—it's not really conducive to being a partner. I have often say I work with you, not for you, and so we encourage people to come over and talk with us, you know, I say if it's going to be five minutes, just stop at my desk. If you need longer than that, find a spot on my calendar and throw it on there and I think some of that comes from, which doesn't always come naturally to me, is being really upbeat and smiling. And I want people to feel like they can come to my desk. You know, I am not too busy to hear your idea. I'd rather hear it now and then be like, OK, I need two more weeks to research and I'm like great, I'm glad it's in my brain now and I can think about it and so I fairly recently in the last year or so have been really cognizant of like the aura I'm giving off. Like. + +[laughter] + +Like is there a sarcastic thing you can put in your transcription for that? + +[sarcasm!] + +So people feel that we do want to talk to you, so that can play a really big role. Anybody else? + +I'm wondering if—I know we all don't really have time, but should we actually be going to the editorial planning meetings? + +I do. + +I do. + +Yeah. + +You can go to some of them. + +And ones that are talking long term stuff, not the daily stuff. + +The long term stuff, and sitting in and capturing ideas and saying, oh, now that I know this is coming up in X months, maybe you should come talk to me later. + +Yeah, and we are strategic about which meetings we go to. Like we don't go to the dailies because we think it gives the idea of I could turn this around really quickly and sometimes you totally can, but we are more long-term focused. We go to the long-term meetings and my boss reads through all the budgets with the idea of is there an interactive that nobody has thought of. Because we can't rely on people just to pitch to us because sometimes there are things they aren't seeing and we're a very small team but we still split it up. I do more of the in-person stuff, and I think you'll find your balance. You know, it took us a little bit to figure out which meetings to go to, how often to go, which editors to really build rapport with, but you find something that works for you. + +I'm Sarah with Frontline. On our digital team like we make our own editorial meetings, actually and we invite people to come to us and that is also a great opportunity. We didn't have a lot of formal structure at Frontline, so one it was introducing that, but also kind of getting people invested, and that also helps them think about potential projects. So we advocate, hey, there's this new tool we want to use. + +So is the purpose of your meeting to talk about what you have coming up? + +Yeah, we talk about what we have coming up and we talk about ideas that we want to do, like short term and then long-term ideas. + +I just want to have riff off of that. I think that's a beautiful concept. Because—you know, if you come up with an original story and then assign it, similar to what editorial departments, I think development and design desks should totally be doing something like that. I never thought to actually have our own editorial meeting, but that's a great concept. + +Yeah, and we -- + +OK, for the last 15 minutes we're going to kind of switch gears and we call this section getting shit done. + +And so this is about how to—after you've talked to people and you have the perfect process ever and everyone is so collaborative and kind, this is how you actually do things. + +Tyler: So I had kind of pitched this because I'm a self-taught programmer, and I've never worked in, you know, a web shop, I've only worked for print publications on the web side and so and I've always been a team of one, so I'm always paranoid or terrified that I actually have no idea what I'm doing or at the that my process is completely poor. So this kind of lingers over my head at basically all times, so I have these three remaining questions that kind of go off of that. I'm going to open this here, but first just put this bit.ly up here. [bit.ly/smallstaff] This links to our GitHub repo in which we have a bunch more links for tools that will hopefully be useful for kind of the stuff we're talking about, and if you have stuff it's GitHub so just fork it and do a pull request and if you're new to this this is a good way to start. So I can put a little thing in that about that. This is from Harvard Business Review's 20 Minute Manager book on managing projects. I put other links up there. I don't mean to suck up to my employer but it just so happens that it's all about management which is grea,t including managing yourself, so I've got better at that because because of where I work which is great. But this is a work breakdown structure and it comes from project management. The idea is you define your project, you define what goes into the project and you define what goes into that and generally the idea is that a project manager is coming up with this, and you can use it like that, or you can also just use it for yourself. So when someone pitches a project, here's your restaurant week guide or some kind of data dive, you don't have to say, OK an interactive guide to local restaurants, that will take me, I don't know, a week, instead of doing that, you can say, OK what are the features here and even in your little programmer head things that other people wouldn't know, OK, I'll need some kind of Javascript library to filter that, I'll need some sort of hookup with Google Maps so people will be able to see where these things are. So the text here doesn't really matter but just the general structure is you'll start out with the general gist of everything, overall project. The number doesn't really matter. 3 is a great place to start, I guess. Say what is the major task and then what are the subtasks that go into that. Sorry about the pagination here because this is from a print book. But say what are the subtasks that would accomplish this particular task and best of all you can figure out how long that particular project would take. So this goes back to what we were saying earlier about estimating projects. So from there, so that's just a cool thing I saw that I like to use a method that I like to use in terms of giving estimates. From there, though, your work is not done. You need to track your own time. Just imagine if you were a freelancer, I'm sure some of you were at some point, and you were billing people and of course, you know, you're going to track your billable hours. Even if you're on salary and you're not doing that, it's important to know how long a given part of a project would take, how long you expected it to take and whether you were spot on or you were under or you were over. I use a tool called Toggl. It's just like a toggle switch except without the E on the end. It's free, it lets you define several projects and every time you log for a time period, you can say what you did in that particular time period, which is nice. But there are any number of other ones and your employers might have harvest or something like that, there are a lot of tools you can use there. + +From there, I like to set deadlines, check-in meetings are great. You might not want to do a daily standup, depending on the project. That might be overkill. But if it's a longer-term project and you want to meet with your team every week or maybe every Tuesday and Thursday, and update people, if it's a thing where you're getting stuff from your design desk or you're getting stuff from a reporter or something like that, then you can say OK, by this time next week you'll have this spreadsheet for me, I'll have this part of the project done, that's that and when you're doing these meetings. Obviously you want to stay on task but it's a great way to impose a deadline on yourself because once you say you're going to do something, you have to do it. + +Rachel mentioned the angry post-it notes and I don't do post-it notes but I tend to just write a reflection paper like high school style in my Google drive and I started doing that as a thing to give to my supervisor so they could see what I'm doing but they didn't really care so I just started doing it myself and it does seem kind of silly to let out all your feelings on the page. But it does help, it's a nice war foe moo to just writing stuff down is good for memory, but being able to refer back to that, to know how the people parts of that project went, how the technical parts of the project went, what I did to solve certain things, I find very helpful. So that's my part in terms of this kind of thing. So if anyone has ideas on keeping yourself on track? + +I keep myself a daily diary. I've Google drive page that I just put in, you know, June 5th and here's what I did today and I even find it's useful so that Monday I come back and I look at what I did the previous week, and then that helps jump start me for Monday, I feel like I'm right back, you know, it's 5 p.m. on Friday and I've jumped right back into it. + +Yeah, Dan? + +I just like using Google spreadsheets whether it's with someone else or if I'm just by myself, like if I have some half-assed idea I'll make a row that's title and then maybe URL and if you do command enter in a cell in Google docs it will automatically time stamp the cell and I'll fill it out casually and a lot of stuff never gets done and it eventually disappears down the drive but at least I'm not spending a lot of time entering my thoughts and it is a good data thing and I've basically structured data basically. + +I use Trello for things like that. + +Oh, yes, we use Trello all the time. + +We can notify a person if it's ready to. The problem we suffer is we have too many projects at one time and organizing time and you know, kind of setting expectations is we're constantly jumping in a given day, two interactives and something else that sucks time, so for me I don't know how I would—I think I would kill myself managing myself if I started writing everything down, so I wonder if anyone else has that kind of struggle or? + +Managing yourself is a struggle. + +Well, writing stuff down and be like today I worked on this project but I worked on three other ones. + +It doesn't have to be detailed, though, I mean even just noting that today you worked on this and I find myself as I'm writing it thinking you know, someday I might need this if I need to prove to my boss what I've been doing all this time, right? It doesn't have to be complicated. It could just be I worked on this and hit this one roadblock and I'm still stuck at it, right? + +I do have to say, like the more detailed, like I'm doing a project right now that's like wicked dirty data and it's just taking forever because I'm documenting really detailedly, but I've had things crash and die on me, and it's fine, because I have this like super detailed record of what's going on and then the next project I go to, like probably not going to go back to these notes, because there are like tens and tens and tens of pages long, but like that's in there, you know, that's in your head and it makes you slow down and think about like, why am I doing this? I'm writing this down, like, why am I doing this one process that I'm doing, so you'll just slow down enough to see that maybe what you're doing is mildly self-indulgent or unnecessary. + +So I want to move on so we have enough time to get through the rest real quick. Making it easier on yourself is, needless to say, hugely important. + +Templates, obviously, I don't think that's a secret. But if you're doing the same types of projects over and over, having templates is so key. If you're doing a lot of interactive map types of things. If you're doing quizzes. Those are fantastic, and we tend to do wildly different things from one project to the next, which is maybe not the greatest idea in the world, but—and on that subject, going back to when we were talking about when—whether or not you should decide to do a project, if you can look at a project and say, this not only seems like great for this project, but it seems like something we could repurpose for other stuff, that's a big bonus point in my book. + +And then going off of that, style guides are huge, not only do you want your visual style guide just for you know, your branding and all that for the user, but when you can take as many decisions out of the process as possible, that will really speed things along. If you know when you're going in, OK, my H3 is going to look like this, my subhead is going to look like that, that's just fewer decisions you have to make which obviously makes things much easier. + +I also mentioned in my notes that I keep a personal code library for like—I almost exclusively use JavaScript so I have a lot of JavaScript functions I'm doing over and over and after Googling how to generate a random number a thousand times I realized I can just keep it in a text file somewhere and refer back to it whenever I have to do that particular thing. So that's extremely helpful. In the GitHub, there's a list of tools for doing these sorts of things. If you have any, add those, as well. + +Administrative work is an important part of our gigs and I've found when I'm really in the weeds at the end of a project, I'm very fond of telling my team, people I'm working with I'm going to check email at 10 and 3 today, that's it. Outlook is going to be closed out the rest of the day. Obviously you want to remain accessible to your team but you also have to know, OK if I'm going to get this done and make it easy on myself, I really have to know that I have this time that I can dedicate and I'm going to cut all the other stuff out of my life. So I'm really good at scheduling before lunch I'm going to work on project A, after lunch I'm going to work on project B. I'm good at that kind of thing. + +Especially as a developer, killing your ego is huge, so when you're stuck in the weeds on a problem, either I mean if you're lucky. I mean if you're able to ask other developers for help or delegate. And just not like getting in your head and thinking, oh, man I should know how to do this, I'm going to figure it out and then four hours later having nothing to explain for it. + +Try explaining it to a nape technical person. + +Yeah, rubber ducking on a nontechnical person is huge. + +I'm part of this Slack group called the lonely coder's club if anything is interested? In joining, you can go on, you can ask questions of other lone coders. There are some legacy lone coders who aren't lonely anymore but they're still there to help, like Alan who was at MinnPost now he's WNYC but yeah, hit me up later and if you want to. + +Do you accept friends and allies of lone coders? + +[laughter] + +We'll see. + +We're all owned by media conglomerates and so I find it really helpful to reach out to people who are using the same systems. So like the Sun Sentinel is owned by Tribune Publishing and so I've built relationships with the coders in Chicago and Orlando and Baltimore, because they're under the same restriction, so like for instance, our advertising script is really hard and it competes with a lot of other scripts and so they're such a great resource for things like that because they have the same exact advertising script and since we're so small it has been really great to have other teams to say I just need a second set of eyes and it's usually like a missed comma and you feel ridiculous, but sometimes you just need that second set of eyes. + +And even if it's not pa corporate parent, even like groups. When I was in alt-weekly land, I reached out to the other alt-weeklies. + +Andrea use works where I used to work in Burlington, Vermont. Even if it's not exactly the same systems, it's the same problems. It's great to find a shoulder to cry on. + +So sometimes it's about making it easier for yourself. So look if there's open source code already that does what you want to do, but sometimes also about not making it harder for yourself. Check the documentation first, if it's not good, don't touch it. You don't have time for that, and it's not worth it so in that sense just be careful. + +I still like try to do as much as I possibly can with JavaScript almost like to MacGuyver levels. I should probably move on to Python or something. But you know, this is the last question, we're almost out of time. But when we're lonely coders, I love that phrase and I'm going to use it all the time now, it can be tough to learn new things and to know what you need to learn more likely. + +Fortunately we all work on the internet which I think helps in this regard, but a thing that's helped me a lot is knowing your learning style and for me, I really like to have someone there to talk me through things. And that's, you know, like if you were still in college or something, but even if I'm not taking a class I've found Lynda.com is extremely helpful for that. Dan's presentation before this one about mundane programming was fantastic—I wish we all had a time turner and we could go back and take that before we were here but in terms of figuring out mundane tasks that like your side project tasks to help you learn new things, like you had mentioned what was it a ruby script to help find an apartment on Craigslist? + +Yes, which Craig doesn't like, but as long as you don't commercially do it, but yeah, when you really need something to to be done you're not going to bullcrap around with the code, like you find that you're much more motivated to learn it because not only are you going to learn something hopefully, but you'll also get whatever you were going towards, too. + +Right, and I recently—I wanted to learn Node.js and I found a lot of tutorials that were towards scraping the web with Node.js and so a thing I've been doing, up where we live where the beaches are only open one month a year, last winter pretty much killed my winter jacket so I needed a new winter jacket and I found the one I wanted but obviously a good winter jacket is pricey so I set up a Node.js thing to scrape the L.L. Bean website and it will send me an email when the price of the jacket I want will drop. So just this little silly thing, I had to learn Node somehow, so and I learned Heroku, as well. So the first time I ever used D3 which is now a thing I used a lot for charting stuff, I had downloaded my data from Untappd, the social app that lets you log your beers and I figured out what I was rating my beers at and I made a scatter plot but that's how I learned D3. That was my sample D3 code. + +I would just recommend to everyone that when you do learn something new, share it with everybody else. Because one of the best ways to solidify your knowledge is actually to teach somebody else, so create a tutorial or something and put it out there for all of the rest of us to share and I think you're going to probably be able to learn something else that somebody else learned and if you do it right away as soon as you've learned it, I find when I go to write it all down, I'm like I remember that, you know, that thing that I had so much trouble figuring out that the tutorial I tried to learn from totally failed, I'm going to put that in my tutorial, right? + +If you do post a question and then figure it out later, please don't just put never mind. + +Yeah, and yeah, I just answered my first stack overflow question a few weeks ago and boy did I feel like a million bucks for doing that. + +People who work at other places where you admire their work, don't be afraid to email someone personally whom you've never met in the community and ask them questions. I've done that a couple of times. Email someone like someone you met here like in five months randomly like how did you do that can you walk me through this they will most likely be like, yeah, I can get you on the phone. I've received a couple of those emails and I will immediately, like I'll just stop, working on everything else and spend three hours and try and share everything with them because it feels like sharing something I've worked on. + +And I think a lot of that comes from there can sometimes be a lack of appreciation within your own newsroom because no one knows how you do it. I use Twitter a lot for that, I'll ask questions and it works I would say more than 50% of the time. When I did my first D3, it doesn't doing well and I posted a question and a developer from the Oregonian was like I've done that exact same thing let me send you my source code and I expensed a Starbucks gift card because you can send those via email address which is a really nice thing and he was like blown away because for him just sharing it he was happier sharing it than I think I was getting it and so yeah, totally people want to help you. + +Yeah, I think we're lucky that the news developer community is unfortunately not perfect but better than other communities and it might be because I'm a white dude, I can say that but I it's a safe place to say hey, can I pick your brain on this, and I think we all 250 people here are kind of all in on that mission. + +So we are over our time so if you like to leave, feel free to, but if you would like to stick around and talk more, please feel free to. + +7 minutes, so yeah, that's our bit.ly and totally find us around today and tomorrow. + +[session ended] diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015StructuredReporting.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015StructuredReporting.md index 1812af8f..006d4762 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015StructuredReporting.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015StructuredReporting.md @@ -1,297 +1,213 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/structuredreporting/index.html ---- - -# Every Part of the Pig—How Can We Make Better Use of Reporting in Long Investigations? - -### Session Facilitator(s): Chris Amico - -### Day & Time: Thursday, 3-4pm - -### Room: Ski-U-Mah - - -The session will start in five minutes. - - -The session is starting shortly. - - -The session is starting shortly. - - -The secret history of the CIA's interrogation program. - - -An almost unlimited role of dark operations. - - -Chapter and verse of what happened. - - -I will come back to that. I wanted to make sure that worked. All right. Everybody ready? Does somebody want to close the door? That's a lot of noise. All right. Welcome, everybody. This is talking about every part of the pig. Let me explain that phrase a little bit. Anybody familiar with that phrase? Know what it means? Use everything you have. Use everything that's available. So I've highlighted a couple key phrases in this session description here. Just because that's what we're going to end up talking about. There's a lot of us in here, so I think we'll do breakout groups. And we're going to be talking about tools, practices, culture, in the context of open notebook reporting and structured journalism. Is everybody okay with the live transcription happening right in front of you? Is that super distracting to anybody? - - -Yeah, but it's awesome. - -(laughter) - - -Fair enough. - -(laughter) - - -All right. Where is my mouse here? There we go. So... Some definitions to start with. We talk about open notebook reporting—it's the idea of—it's really about a goal. It's the goal of trying to put as much of the raw material of your reporting out into the public. Whether you do this for transparency, you do it because it's a way of creating more content, maybe you have other reasons. Whatever your reasons are, it's the practice. And then structured journalism—some of you may have heard me talk about structured journalism before. Some of you may have heard me talk about structured journalism incessantly. It's the idea of taking your reporting and organizing into a logical structure so you can reuse it later, rebuild it, things like Homicide Watch. Like... Give me some other projects. Now I'm a blank. Fire Tracker out in LA, if any of you are familiar with that. - - -Would any of the Vox stuff fit? - - -Yeah, I think of Vox that way. I actually think of Vox as having two structured journalism projects sort of at the same time. Their card stacks and their story streams. If you think about how... What's their sports site called? SB Nation is organized around teams and players and sports. That's a way of structuring content. So I think of it that way too. So this is... This session is not totally structured journalism, but it's within that universe, and that's where I'm coming from, when I'm talking about it. So these are points of focus. Tools, practices, and culture. And this is really going in order of what I think of as easiest to hardest. There are a lot of good tools out there. We make lots of tools. I make tools. Some of us in this room are just—we're constantly making new tools and new ways to do journalism. That is in abundance. Practices are a little harder. Practices are about habits. And then culture is the hardest one. I forgot I wrote definitions for these. So practice is about habit. It's what we do by default, in a lot of ways. And then culture is the bigger stuff. The more amorphous things. The—what do we want? What do we actually believe as organizations? As individual journalists? What are the things we're striving towards, and what are the things we repel against? Or what are the things we—that make us uncomfortable? All those are culture. And so we'll talk about that last. So I want to set this up with an example that I'm thinking of, but I'm going to have you all do your own examples. So this is a trailer for a film that Frontline did a month ago. And from one of our filmmakers, called Kirk Documentary group, that does a lot of our politics films. So I'm just going to play this so you can all get a sense of what a—when I talk about a big media investigation, this is a lot of what I have in my head, when I'm thinking of it. - - -I scribbled down after the name interrogator - - -The secret history of the CIA's interrogation program - - -An almost unlimited role in terms of dark operations. - - -They called it torture. - - -Chapter and verse of what happened. - - -In other words, the CIA was lying. - - -The CIA said it was necessary. - - -We were at war. Bad things happen in wars. - - -Frontline investigates secrets, politics, and torture. Tuesday at 9 p.m. on most PBS stations. - - -So heavy stuff, right? So... I want you to put yourself in the head space of... You have some role on an investigative team. You are a reporter, you're an editor, you're a programmer, you're a designer, you're a web producer, whatever role you feel most comfortable in. And I want you to be thinking about a project that you've worked on, that is roughly this scale. Or something big. Something that is significant to you. And I want you to use that as sort of an example project, as we go through a couple exercises and a couple breakouts. And ideally, I'd like to have somebody in each group who is—knows the reporting of a project well enough to actually talk about the pieces of it. So let me just check the room real quick. How many of you are reporters? How many of you are editors? How many of you are programmers? How many designers? Wow, we have a really mixed group. Great. How many of you have done something recently in the past six months or a year that is, like, big, major investigation, throw all of your institutional weight behind it? - - -Our newsrooms or us personally? - - -Either way. Something that you were like... This really better be big, because I have just put, like, a good chunk of my life and soul and blood into this. All right. Actually, show of hands one more time so I can see. Oh, wow. So... Most of you. How many of you are beat reporters? Think of yourselves as you do... Iterative... And I'm in that category too. By sort of default nature, culture, whatever. Even though I tend to work on these things more now. So that's good too. A lot of my thinking about this comes from beat reporting and thinking about more iterative processes than, like, the throw everything at one project. So just so you all know where I'm coming from. - -So Frontline does these. These are—every film takes about six months. And costs lots of money. And there's a ton of reporting that goes into these. Like this much. So this is... It's hard to see how much this is. This is the CIA timeline. That is the working document from Kirk Documentary group. I'm not going to show you anything that's inside it. But to get a sense of what it looks like when they produce... This is what they work from, as they put their film together. This is Mike Wiser, sitting behind one of these. He's one of the producers who works on these. The CIA one is about 700 pages thick. So... There's a lot of stuff. And a lot of it never sees the light of day. Sometimes for good reasons. Sometimes just for other reasons. And when I was thinking about this session, my big question going into it is: How can we use more of what's in that? How can we use more of those 700 pages as content? As something that our audience can consume and interact with, tell us we're wrong about, tell us we're right about? How can we use every part of the pig? So... That came out more pink than I expected. - -I'm going to have you all work in groups. And this is gonna be something of a group brainstorm. And we're going to go through tools, we're going to go through practices, we're going to go through culture. I want you all to break into groups and figure out an investigation—sort of an example project that you can work from. Have somebody in the group think about a project they've done recently that they can really talk about the process of it. They can talk about the reporting. Because I want you all to be thinking about, like, the stuff that you—that didn't work. That didn't fit, or that you didn't know what to do—that you had, that was good, but you didn't know what to do with it. So ideally I'd like somebody in each group who can talk about those and talk about the investigation in detail. If that makes you uncomfortable, to talk about stuff that your organization didn't publish, either find a different example or... Find an example where you actually feel like you did use a lot of that stuff, and you made more use than you otherwise would have. Does that make sense to everybody? If that doesn't make sense, that's okay. Because... I'm used to talking about things that don't make any sense. - -So this is our first exercise. Assume that we're going to talk about tools first. As you're going through this, assume that no one will say no. Assume whatever cultural barriers there are, assume they weren't there. Assume that any time anybody says—well, that's hard—assume that would go away. These are assumptions you can't make every day, but I want—for the sake of this exercise, I want all the nos to go away. But take a note of it. Take a note of where—in your organization, where you've worked, somebody would say—no, we can't do that. We don't have enough people for that. We don't have enough money for that. Because we'll come back to those. But for just this, think about the yeses and make everything a yes. So... We're going to do color coded sticky notes. Are you all comfortable in the tables that you're in as groups? Any group not have... Does every group have somebody who can talk about an investigation in detail? I realize none of you know each other, probably. So... We're going to do sticky notes. Because I always like to brainstorm on sticky notes. Somebody from each table, come up and get just a wad of sticky notes. Just yellow for this group. - - -How is everything going? Good? Take, like, three more minutes to write down just your ideas, blast out any last, like, any of the things you've been circling around. Discrete tools. And then we'll come back up and stick them on the board. - -(tapping microphone) - - -Okay. Who's ready to report back on tools? So for each group what I'd like you to do is have one person come up and very quickly give us, like, a one sentence synopsis of the story you're talking about, and pick a tool that you talked about, and stick it up on the board. One or two. Anybody want to go first? I don't know if the mic is working. - - -So I'm actually using an ongoing project, just because I thought we could get something out of it. So just to be quick and careful, are there any Canadians in here, besides... Oh, okay. Just because I work for a Canadian news organization... Cool. If you don't tweet or talk about this project. - -(going off the record) - - -We can go on the record for tools. So talk about how to tell stories with maps, using sort of... Timelines. Whether that's literally over time, or age or whatever. So you can see sort of some of the trends, longer term. Because as much as we want to dig into the individuals, and we'll allow for that, but also... I forgot one. But one of them was sort of in the dream world—a database that is really easy to update. Because we're going to keep getting more information after this project launches. We want to it to be easy enough to encourage all these reporters to get into it and keep it growing. So sort of on that—continuing with story mapping. Building a narrative around it. So there's the night lab tool, but what other tools we can use to build a narrative around it. Sound sites and other audio tools because we want to focus on the storytelling from the communities themselves and let them speak for themselves as opposed to always being that voice in between. So we want to come up with some cool audio tools. - - -Who's next? Try to do... - - -Yeah. We talked about this in the context of a project where we looked at a whole bunch of reports about child deaths. So putting them online with document cloud was a big one. And then we also talked about this concept of normalizing formats, often through manual labor, so taking email files or whatever it is, putting it in a format that's text that can be put online or searched by people. - - -Awesome. There's that. Who's next? Justin and then... - - -So a project that I worked on last fall at my last job... Was looking at alcohol on college campuses and around college campuses all over the country. And part of that was gathering data on every liquor licensee in the country. Or that was the goal. We didn't actually get to all of the states. And we ended up not using a lot of that data, mostly because we had trouble matching it to data about the locations and size of college campuses. So we ended up scaling down the project quite a bit. But that meant we had a lot more data that we wanted to get out there, in case other people could use it. So ideally there would have been some tool or process to help distribute that, document it, and send out updates to it, as we understood more of what we were dealing with and received more of that data. - - -Let's do one more, and then we'll move on to the next round. - - -Oh, sorry. I'm sorry. - - -No, no. - - -Great. Briefly going off the record. - -(going off the record) - -(going back on the record) - - -So it's a lot of audio transcripts, and some photos that were taken by reporters. But it's a lot of audio. So what we talked about were—and reporting notes too. So it's a large—we talked about a... Large, persistent, secure structured storage place for text, for typed notes that could be shared across a news room, something hopefully more structured and more share-friendly than Dropbox. Also more secure. Doing presentation and visualization of text and audio combined, which I think falls into soundsite-related stuff. Since it's a whole bunch of interviews, natural language processing tools, and that ties into corpus analysis, which ties back into presentation and visualization. Thank you. - - -All right. So... Everybody else who didn't come up... Come up real quickly and I just want you to stick your cards on here, and then we'll have you present your story in the next round. So the next thing is... If I can get to it... Practices. So this is more about—assuming you have the tools. What would you want to be doing? What are your habits? What are your processes? And get a blue... Teal... Set of sticky notes when you come up. Does every table have some blue sticky notes? Or teal? All right. Go to it. - -(breakout sessions) - - - - -So one more thing. As you all do this, as with the last time, assume that everyone will say yes, but keep in mind where people will say no. Where people will say—oh, that's too hard. Oh, we don't have people. Oh, we don't do that. What are the roadblocks? Keep in mind impediments and then set them aside in your notes. And we'll come back to them. - -(breakout sessions) - -(tapping microphone) - - -All right. Who's ready to report back? I want to take the tables that didn't get to report last time. One of y'all... Who wants to tell us what story you're working on, as your example, and then give us some practices that you want to incorporate into your reporting process? You look like you're ready. - - -We can go. - - -So one sentence description of the story. - - -Um... So ours is the undue force Baltimore Sun story. You guys may know about it. - - -Awesome story. - - -So a couple of things about the data—they got a lot of documents back. So a couple things that we suggested are things that we can do is—just have a general timeline of when you want things done. Do your research as a reporter—you should be doing your own research, but also do your research on what others have done, so you're not repeating the same thing, but also you can either use that as supplemental information down the line if you need it... Also keep notes while you're reporting, and share your internal knowledge with others. So reporters should share that knowledge with editors and editors should share that with producers, and with the developers, and so on and so forth. So communication. And annotating documents before you publish. Don't wait until the last day to say—oh, we have to upload 500 pages to DocumentCloud. Can we annotate them and put them on the website today? Or, like, two hours ago. - - -You can totally do that, right? - - -Yeah. And that's it. - - -Excellent. Who's next? Who has not presented yet? Yeah, you guys were next up. - - -So at my last job, I worked—I was at the Washington Post and I worked on the Edward Snowden NSA documents, and one of the issues we encountered was there was a real lack of communication even within the team. It was kind of highly secretive, for obvious reasons, but it also hindered our ability to work efficiently. Especially on my end, where I was, like, working on the digital presentation of a lot of the documents. And I think we were talking, and some way of, like--some kind of tool that allowed a reporter to structure notes, interviews, and research, and, like, share them with editors and the other people who were working directly on the project—while they're in the reporting process—would have been helpful to give us a bit more time, because we were always scrambling at the end. And redacting the documents before handing them off to us. In terms of something like... That a reporter should have been doing... Would have saved a little bit of a headache at the end, when something went online that should not have. So... - - -Thank you. - - -Yeah. - - -All right. Who else has not presented yet? Yeah. - - -I'll just talk while I'm walking to the board. But we're kind of piggybacking on two different stories, but pulling out the best of what works for the workshop. But in this case—the Chronicle did a long-term project on gentrification in the Mission. So there are a couple of practices that we used, and also referred to other media companies that might have used similar things. But long-term analysis is a key kind of thing. Partnership and collaboration can extend your news report. So you have, like, limited resources in your newsroom, but through partnerships, you can really continue yours news report long-term. So that was kind of cool. And immersion—so, like, there's an example in LA where they set up shop in the neighborhood for, like, two weeks, and interviewed townspeople and stuff. So that's, like, a really good example of a practice, I guess, to extend the news report. - - -Cool. Does anybody else not... You all. - - -So I work for an alt weekly in Vermont. Called 7 days. And we just recently did a story about... So our state runs hard alcohol sales. So we were able to get all of the data. Like, the quantities of every single—you would be shocked how many stores sell a ton of Fireball and 5 o'clock vodka. So we got all of this data. All of this state salary data. All sorts of things. And we had meetings—several months in advance—and then a month in advance and kind of gradually over the course of the project. And then a reporter a couple weeks before the story ran jumped in. And started doing the reporting. So we had this cool map. We had a bunch of charts about alcohol sales. And then he had this whole story about whether it makes sense for the state to be running this. But the charts and the data didn't talk to the story at all. And a lot of people really liked the map. Because they wanted to know what their hometown liquor store was selling. But it didn't add to the story. They were cool. In kind of... Separately. But they... So I think as the digital editor... Being in more constant communication with our reporter, who's not all that used to working with data stuff, he doesn't do a whole lot of, like, Excel crunching or whatever—being in more constant communication about kind of what he was looking at, and what we could do to kind of add to that, and sitting down with him. Because he was the one who knew how the story was being crafted. So larger meetings weren't necessarily effective, because he wasn't quite—he wasn't at the point where he was even crafting the story when we were meeting. So constant communication. Maybe via email. And finding some comparable stories in advance, I think. And sharing our expectations and hopes for the project overall might have helped to steer the project. - - -Okay. Thank you. - - -Is there anybody else who hasn't—any groups who haven't presented yet? I can't tell what you're pointing at. Is this is the last one? Good. - - -So I used to work for an investigative team for the Palm Beach Post, for my last job. So we did this project on police shootings. The reporter started working on it a year or two ago. Long before the Ferguson shooting happened. But the problem was—and I think it's kind of a common theme—the reporter was going at it alone. The team was not involved. And he had all sorts of written notes, which we—the tool we really wanted to collect was convert all these reports into some sort of structured data that was query-able and can be easily understood and shared across the team. So some things that we came up with was—to have sort of a quality checkpoint, milestones to make sure our data assumptions were right and have a more directed public records request than get all that we can find. Have better organization. And have some sort of structured notes system to share across the teams. That was about it. Oh yeah, and of course involve all the people required up front. - - -I'm sensing a theme here. Okay. So everybody has somewhat presented? You all haven't? Okay. Do yours real quick and then we'll get to what's next. Where we're going. - - -So we went a bit meta. And one of the things we wanted was a sort of metadata editor who sat between the people doing the writing and the people doing all the research. To collect all the reporting that was being done, and sort of catalog it in a standardized and structured way. So when everyone else is going through and using the same research, maybe producing a new story off of older research, that all the metaconsiderations around whether or not—say, someone decided not to use this source, because they thought it was iffy—that the second reporter goes—oh, maybe I should take a different look at this, or find another source. And stuff like that. - - -Awesome. I love the idea of a metadata editor. All right. Come to the end. The really hard part. So a friend of mine likes to say that culture eats strategy for breakfast. Culture is—strategy is what we mean to do. Culture is what we do without thinking about it. It is deeper than habit. It is, you know, what's in your gut. It's the stories we tell in our groups. So... For this last exercise, I want you to think about all of the impediments for tools and practices that you've kind of set aside. And I want you to think about... As you're starting this story that you've been talking about, whatever story it is, how you would frame the mission of that story internally and externally to overcome some of those obstacles. Your goal is to use every part of the pig. Your goal is to use as much of your reporting as is reasonable or as you can. And I want you to write one or more mission statements. You can write it in bullet points. You can write it in (inaudible) language. How many of you have written a mission statement for a story or a reporting project before? It's a weird thing, but it's... Any of you read Peter Clarke's Writing Tools? He talks about this a lot and I borrow from it a lot. It's the idea of... Before you start, set aside... This is what I want this story to accomplish. This is what—or what I want to do with this. So I mentioned one of the projects I mentioned— Homicide Watch. That was a site that I helped run for a long time. So we had a big grand mission for the site. Right? Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case. We also had this other mission that we talked about a lot. It was part of our open notebook approach. And my wife, Laura, who was the main reporter on this in DC, would say—everything that I would have on my desk, in my notebook—should find a way onto the site. And that's really what informed our approach. In terms of what we—how we built the site. And some of the tools we made available. So we had a courts calendar because we kept a courts calendar. We had to know when we showed up in court and made our calendar public so other people could see when we were likely to have stories coming. And the (inaudible) scheduled their stories. We kept a documents library so that people could read those and we could go back and find—I think this was in a charging document a while ago. Let's go back. It's already searchable because it's in Document Cloud. Thanks, DocumentCloud people. And we kept a structured database. It allowed us to make more of our content public. So anything on my desk or in my notebook should be on the site. That's not going to work for everybody. It's not going to work for the Snowden files, obviously. Probably not going to work for secrets, politics, and torture. It might not work for police shootings or some of the stuff in Baltimore. But there is a standard that you can find. And what I want you to try and do is think about what you would tell the reporter, the editors, the designers, the programmers, the web producers, at the beginning of the project—like, let's make this our goal. And try to articulate that in something that will fit on a sticky note. Or many sticky notes. - - -Just as a response to what you were just saying about—that approach wouldn't fit for all these projects. You can always make that your goal after the launch. Especially if it's something like—a couple of people have done these police-involved shooting databases. So until you launch it, it's not public. But you prepare it in a way that it can become public and be a sustained resource—it's a great— - - -Yeah. And that's a really good point. And that's actually a good way to think about it. Are you putting all of this online at once? Are you trickling it out before you launch or after you launch? Is your main thing going to be in the middle of your releasing things? Think about time. Think about what you release. Think about how you release it. Is it processed? Is it like... Are you releasing... Are you writing stories based on all your data, all your notes that you have? Or are you just dumping things on the web and putting things on Github, like the (inaudible) project does. Or 538 does? So think about that. So we don't have much time left. So I want to let you get to it. Write your mission statements. Be bold. And if you have... If you need help, let me know. - -(breakout sessions) - - -And if you want to put your practices up on the board, do that too. - -(breakout sessions) - - -All right. Who's done? Who's still working? - - -So... I don't want to keep you too long, because we're actually five minutes over time. But it sounds like there's great conversations happening. So if you want to keep going with this, please do. We have 25 minutes until the next session. So... There might be beer outside, though, so I don't want to keep you from that. Priorities are important. If anybody, real quick, wants to share part of their mission statement, just stand up and do it where you are. And if you are feeling really bold, you can maybe tweet something. I did say to keep it short for a reason. - - -I'll do one. Okay. So we came up with three bullet points, two of which are closely related. First one is to assume that anything you do may be used in the future. If you're a reporter, you should not assume that once you're done with the story all this reporting is going to be thrown in the trash. And if you're a developer, you should write documentations that tell you how to redo what you already have figured out once and are likely to forget. And then the other thing was to establish some sort of work flow for everybody at the outset of the project. Which enables, like, some sort of searchability and structure throughout. So if you're a developer, you can tell... - - -Forget the so if, if you don't mind. - - -No so if. - - -Appreciate it. Because we're out of time. Go through real quick—mission statement. - - -Help reporters finish the sentences the data started. - - -What else? - - -Just wanted to—know the victim, know the perpetrator, know the cause. - - -Okay. Who else? - - -Publish as much as you can. Do it with care. - - -Who else? - - -Treat every part of reporting as if it was going to be published. - - -I like it. Who else? - - -Edit well, honor the story, only use content that's germane, but be relevant to all your audiences. - - -Everything published and push the story forward. - - -Cool. Do you have something? Anybody else? All right. Thank you, all. - -(applause) - - -Go forth and have beer! \ No newline at end of file +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/structuredreporting/index.html +--- + +# Every Part of the Pig—How Can We Make Better Use of Reporting in Long Investigations? + +### Session Facilitator(s): Chris Amico + +### Day & Time: Thursday, 3-4pm + +### Room: Ski-U-Mah + +The session will start in five minutes. + +The session is starting shortly. + +The session is starting shortly. + +The secret history of the CIA's interrogation program. + +An almost unlimited role of dark operations. + +Chapter and verse of what happened. + +I will come back to that. I wanted to make sure that worked. All right. Everybody ready? Does somebody want to close the door? That's a lot of noise. All right. Welcome, everybody. This is talking about every part of the pig. Let me explain that phrase a little bit. Anybody familiar with that phrase? Know what it means? Use everything you have. Use everything that's available. So I've highlighted a couple key phrases in this session description here. Just because that's what we're going to end up talking about. There's a lot of us in here, so I think we'll do breakout groups. And we're going to be talking about tools, practices, culture, in the context of open notebook reporting and structured journalism. Is everybody okay with the live transcription happening right in front of you? Is that super distracting to anybody? + +Yeah, but it's awesome. + +(laughter) + +Fair enough. + +(laughter) + +All right. Where is my mouse here? There we go. So... Some definitions to start with. We talk about open notebook reporting—it's the idea of—it's really about a goal. It's the goal of trying to put as much of the raw material of your reporting out into the public. Whether you do this for transparency, you do it because it's a way of creating more content, maybe you have other reasons. Whatever your reasons are, it's the practice. And then structured journalism—some of you may have heard me talk about structured journalism before. Some of you may have heard me talk about structured journalism incessantly. It's the idea of taking your reporting and organizing into a logical structure so you can reuse it later, rebuild it, things like Homicide Watch. Like... Give me some other projects. Now I'm a blank. Fire Tracker out in LA, if any of you are familiar with that. + +Would any of the Vox stuff fit? + +Yeah, I think of Vox that way. I actually think of Vox as having two structured journalism projects sort of at the same time. Their card stacks and their story streams. If you think about how... What's their sports site called? SB Nation is organized around teams and players and sports. That's a way of structuring content. So I think of it that way too. So this is... This session is not totally structured journalism, but it's within that universe, and that's where I'm coming from, when I'm talking about it. So these are points of focus. Tools, practices, and culture. And this is really going in order of what I think of as easiest to hardest. There are a lot of good tools out there. We make lots of tools. I make tools. Some of us in this room are just—we're constantly making new tools and new ways to do journalism. That is in abundance. Practices are a little harder. Practices are about habits. And then culture is the hardest one. I forgot I wrote definitions for these. So practice is about habit. It's what we do by default, in a lot of ways. And then culture is the bigger stuff. The more amorphous things. The—what do we want? What do we actually believe as organizations? As individual journalists? What are the things we're striving towards, and what are the things we repel against? Or what are the things we—that make us uncomfortable? All those are culture. And so we'll talk about that last. So I want to set this up with an example that I'm thinking of, but I'm going to have you all do your own examples. So this is a trailer for a film that Frontline did a month ago. And from one of our filmmakers, called Kirk Documentary group, that does a lot of our politics films. So I'm just going to play this so you can all get a sense of what a—when I talk about a big media investigation, this is a lot of what I have in my head, when I'm thinking of it. + +I scribbled down after the name interrogator + +The secret history of the CIA's interrogation program + +An almost unlimited role in terms of dark operations. + +They called it torture. + +Chapter and verse of what happened. + +In other words, the CIA was lying. + +The CIA said it was necessary. + +We were at war. Bad things happen in wars. + +Frontline investigates secrets, politics, and torture. Tuesday at 9 p.m. on most PBS stations. + +So heavy stuff, right? So... I want you to put yourself in the head space of... You have some role on an investigative team. You are a reporter, you're an editor, you're a programmer, you're a designer, you're a web producer, whatever role you feel most comfortable in. And I want you to be thinking about a project that you've worked on, that is roughly this scale. Or something big. Something that is significant to you. And I want you to use that as sort of an example project, as we go through a couple exercises and a couple breakouts. And ideally, I'd like to have somebody in each group who is—knows the reporting of a project well enough to actually talk about the pieces of it. So let me just check the room real quick. How many of you are reporters? How many of you are editors? How many of you are programmers? How many designers? Wow, we have a really mixed group. Great. How many of you have done something recently in the past six months or a year that is, like, big, major investigation, throw all of your institutional weight behind it? + +Our newsrooms or us personally? + +Either way. Something that you were like... This really better be big, because I have just put, like, a good chunk of my life and soul and blood into this. All right. Actually, show of hands one more time so I can see. Oh, wow. So... Most of you. How many of you are beat reporters? Think of yourselves as you do... Iterative... And I'm in that category too. By sort of default nature, culture, whatever. Even though I tend to work on these things more now. So that's good too. A lot of my thinking about this comes from beat reporting and thinking about more iterative processes than, like, the throw everything at one project. So just so you all know where I'm coming from. + +So Frontline does these. These are—every film takes about six months. And costs lots of money. And there's a ton of reporting that goes into these. Like this much. So this is... It's hard to see how much this is. This is the CIA timeline. That is the working document from Kirk Documentary group. I'm not going to show you anything that's inside it. But to get a sense of what it looks like when they produce... This is what they work from, as they put their film together. This is Mike Wiser, sitting behind one of these. He's one of the producers who works on these. The CIA one is about 700 pages thick. So... There's a lot of stuff. And a lot of it never sees the light of day. Sometimes for good reasons. Sometimes just for other reasons. And when I was thinking about this session, my big question going into it is: How can we use more of what's in that? How can we use more of those 700 pages as content? As something that our audience can consume and interact with, tell us we're wrong about, tell us we're right about? How can we use every part of the pig? So... That came out more pink than I expected. + +I'm going to have you all work in groups. And this is gonna be something of a group brainstorm. And we're going to go through tools, we're going to go through practices, we're going to go through culture. I want you all to break into groups and figure out an investigation—sort of an example project that you can work from. Have somebody in the group think about a project they've done recently that they can really talk about the process of it. They can talk about the reporting. Because I want you all to be thinking about, like, the stuff that you—that didn't work. That didn't fit, or that you didn't know what to do—that you had, that was good, but you didn't know what to do with it. So ideally I'd like somebody in each group who can talk about those and talk about the investigation in detail. If that makes you uncomfortable, to talk about stuff that your organization didn't publish, either find a different example or... Find an example where you actually feel like you did use a lot of that stuff, and you made more use than you otherwise would have. Does that make sense to everybody? If that doesn't make sense, that's okay. Because... I'm used to talking about things that don't make any sense. + +So this is our first exercise. Assume that we're going to talk about tools first. As you're going through this, assume that no one will say no. Assume whatever cultural barriers there are, assume they weren't there. Assume that any time anybody says—well, that's hard—assume that would go away. These are assumptions you can't make every day, but I want—for the sake of this exercise, I want all the nos to go away. But take a note of it. Take a note of where—in your organization, where you've worked, somebody would say—no, we can't do that. We don't have enough people for that. We don't have enough money for that. Because we'll come back to those. But for just this, think about the yeses and make everything a yes. So... We're going to do color coded sticky notes. Are you all comfortable in the tables that you're in as groups? Any group not have... Does every group have somebody who can talk about an investigation in detail? I realize none of you know each other, probably. So... We're going to do sticky notes. Because I always like to brainstorm on sticky notes. Somebody from each table, come up and get just a wad of sticky notes. Just yellow for this group. + +How is everything going? Good? Take, like, three more minutes to write down just your ideas, blast out any last, like, any of the things you've been circling around. Discrete tools. And then we'll come back up and stick them on the board. + +(tapping microphone) + +Okay. Who's ready to report back on tools? So for each group what I'd like you to do is have one person come up and very quickly give us, like, a one sentence synopsis of the story you're talking about, and pick a tool that you talked about, and stick it up on the board. One or two. Anybody want to go first? I don't know if the mic is working. + +So I'm actually using an ongoing project, just because I thought we could get something out of it. So just to be quick and careful, are there any Canadians in here, besides... Oh, okay. Just because I work for a Canadian news organization... Cool. If you don't tweet or talk about this project. + +(going off the record) + +We can go on the record for tools. So talk about how to tell stories with maps, using sort of... Timelines. Whether that's literally over time, or age or whatever. So you can see sort of some of the trends, longer term. Because as much as we want to dig into the individuals, and we'll allow for that, but also... I forgot one. But one of them was sort of in the dream world—a database that is really easy to update. Because we're going to keep getting more information after this project launches. We want to it to be easy enough to encourage all these reporters to get into it and keep it growing. So sort of on that—continuing with story mapping. Building a narrative around it. So there's the night lab tool, but what other tools we can use to build a narrative around it. Sound sites and other audio tools because we want to focus on the storytelling from the communities themselves and let them speak for themselves as opposed to always being that voice in between. So we want to come up with some cool audio tools. + +Who's next? Try to do... + +Yeah. We talked about this in the context of a project where we looked at a whole bunch of reports about child deaths. So putting them online with document cloud was a big one. And then we also talked about this concept of normalizing formats, often through manual labor, so taking email files or whatever it is, putting it in a format that's text that can be put online or searched by people. + +Awesome. There's that. Who's next? Justin and then... + +So a project that I worked on last fall at my last job... Was looking at alcohol on college campuses and around college campuses all over the country. And part of that was gathering data on every liquor licensee in the country. Or that was the goal. We didn't actually get to all of the states. And we ended up not using a lot of that data, mostly because we had trouble matching it to data about the locations and size of college campuses. So we ended up scaling down the project quite a bit. But that meant we had a lot more data that we wanted to get out there, in case other people could use it. So ideally there would have been some tool or process to help distribute that, document it, and send out updates to it, as we understood more of what we were dealing with and received more of that data. + +Let's do one more, and then we'll move on to the next round. + +Oh, sorry. I'm sorry. + +No, no. + +Great. Briefly going off the record. + +(going off the record) + +(going back on the record) + +So it's a lot of audio transcripts, and some photos that were taken by reporters. But it's a lot of audio. So what we talked about were—and reporting notes too. So it's a large—we talked about a... Large, persistent, secure structured storage place for text, for typed notes that could be shared across a news room, something hopefully more structured and more share-friendly than Dropbox. Also more secure. Doing presentation and visualization of text and audio combined, which I think falls into soundsite-related stuff. Since it's a whole bunch of interviews, natural language processing tools, and that ties into corpus analysis, which ties back into presentation and visualization. Thank you. + +All right. So... Everybody else who didn't come up... Come up real quickly and I just want you to stick your cards on here, and then we'll have you present your story in the next round. So the next thing is... If I can get to it... Practices. So this is more about—assuming you have the tools. What would you want to be doing? What are your habits? What are your processes? And get a blue... Teal... Set of sticky notes when you come up. Does every table have some blue sticky notes? Or teal? All right. Go to it. + +(breakout sessions) + +So one more thing. As you all do this, as with the last time, assume that everyone will say yes, but keep in mind where people will say no. Where people will say—oh, that's too hard. Oh, we don't have people. Oh, we don't do that. What are the roadblocks? Keep in mind impediments and then set them aside in your notes. And we'll come back to them. + +(breakout sessions) + +(tapping microphone) + +All right. Who's ready to report back? I want to take the tables that didn't get to report last time. One of y'all... Who wants to tell us what story you're working on, as your example, and then give us some practices that you want to incorporate into your reporting process? You look like you're ready. + +We can go. + +So one sentence description of the story. + +Um... So ours is the undue force Baltimore Sun story. You guys may know about it. + +Awesome story. + +So a couple of things about the data—they got a lot of documents back. So a couple things that we suggested are things that we can do is—just have a general timeline of when you want things done. Do your research as a reporter—you should be doing your own research, but also do your research on what others have done, so you're not repeating the same thing, but also you can either use that as supplemental information down the line if you need it... Also keep notes while you're reporting, and share your internal knowledge with others. So reporters should share that knowledge with editors and editors should share that with producers, and with the developers, and so on and so forth. So communication. And annotating documents before you publish. Don't wait until the last day to say—oh, we have to upload 500 pages to DocumentCloud. Can we annotate them and put them on the website today? Or, like, two hours ago. + +You can totally do that, right? + +Yeah. And that's it. + +Excellent. Who's next? Who has not presented yet? Yeah, you guys were next up. + +So at my last job, I worked—I was at the Washington Post and I worked on the Edward Snowden NSA documents, and one of the issues we encountered was there was a real lack of communication even within the team. It was kind of highly secretive, for obvious reasons, but it also hindered our ability to work efficiently. Especially on my end, where I was, like, working on the digital presentation of a lot of the documents. And I think we were talking, and some way of, like--some kind of tool that allowed a reporter to structure notes, interviews, and research, and, like, share them with editors and the other people who were working directly on the project—while they're in the reporting process—would have been helpful to give us a bit more time, because we were always scrambling at the end. And redacting the documents before handing them off to us. In terms of something like... That a reporter should have been doing... Would have saved a little bit of a headache at the end, when something went online that should not have. So... + +Thank you. + +Yeah. + +All right. Who else has not presented yet? Yeah. + +I'll just talk while I'm walking to the board. But we're kind of piggybacking on two different stories, but pulling out the best of what works for the workshop. But in this case—the Chronicle did a long-term project on gentrification in the Mission. So there are a couple of practices that we used, and also referred to other media companies that might have used similar things. But long-term analysis is a key kind of thing. Partnership and collaboration can extend your news report. So you have, like, limited resources in your newsroom, but through partnerships, you can really continue yours news report long-term. So that was kind of cool. And immersion—so, like, there's an example in LA where they set up shop in the neighborhood for, like, two weeks, and interviewed townspeople and stuff. So that's, like, a really good example of a practice, I guess, to extend the news report. + +Cool. Does anybody else not... You all. + +So I work for an alt weekly in Vermont. Called 7 days. And we just recently did a story about... So our state runs hard alcohol sales. So we were able to get all of the data. Like, the quantities of every single—you would be shocked how many stores sell a ton of Fireball and 5 o'clock vodka. So we got all of this data. All of this state salary data. All sorts of things. And we had meetings—several months in advance—and then a month in advance and kind of gradually over the course of the project. And then a reporter a couple weeks before the story ran jumped in. And started doing the reporting. So we had this cool map. We had a bunch of charts about alcohol sales. And then he had this whole story about whether it makes sense for the state to be running this. But the charts and the data didn't talk to the story at all. And a lot of people really liked the map. Because they wanted to know what their hometown liquor store was selling. But it didn't add to the story. They were cool. In kind of... Separately. But they... So I think as the digital editor... Being in more constant communication with our reporter, who's not all that used to working with data stuff, he doesn't do a whole lot of, like, Excel crunching or whatever—being in more constant communication about kind of what he was looking at, and what we could do to kind of add to that, and sitting down with him. Because he was the one who knew how the story was being crafted. So larger meetings weren't necessarily effective, because he wasn't quite—he wasn't at the point where he was even crafting the story when we were meeting. So constant communication. Maybe via email. And finding some comparable stories in advance, I think. And sharing our expectations and hopes for the project overall might have helped to steer the project. + +Okay. Thank you. + +Is there anybody else who hasn't—any groups who haven't presented yet? I can't tell what you're pointing at. Is this is the last one? Good. + +So I used to work for an investigative team for the Palm Beach Post, for my last job. So we did this project on police shootings. The reporter started working on it a year or two ago. Long before the Ferguson shooting happened. But the problem was—and I think it's kind of a common theme—the reporter was going at it alone. The team was not involved. And he had all sorts of written notes, which we—the tool we really wanted to collect was convert all these reports into some sort of structured data that was query-able and can be easily understood and shared across the team. So some things that we came up with was—to have sort of a quality checkpoint, milestones to make sure our data assumptions were right and have a more directed public records request than get all that we can find. Have better organization. And have some sort of structured notes system to share across the teams. That was about it. Oh yeah, and of course involve all the people required up front. + +I'm sensing a theme here. Okay. So everybody has somewhat presented? You all haven't? Okay. Do yours real quick and then we'll get to what's next. Where we're going. + +So we went a bit meta. And one of the things we wanted was a sort of metadata editor who sat between the people doing the writing and the people doing all the research. To collect all the reporting that was being done, and sort of catalog it in a standardized and structured way. So when everyone else is going through and using the same research, maybe producing a new story off of older research, that all the metaconsiderations around whether or not—say, someone decided not to use this source, because they thought it was iffy—that the second reporter goes—oh, maybe I should take a different look at this, or find another source. And stuff like that. + +Awesome. I love the idea of a metadata editor. All right. Come to the end. The really hard part. So a friend of mine likes to say that culture eats strategy for breakfast. Culture is—strategy is what we mean to do. Culture is what we do without thinking about it. It is deeper than habit. It is, you know, what's in your gut. It's the stories we tell in our groups. So... For this last exercise, I want you to think about all of the impediments for tools and practices that you've kind of set aside. And I want you to think about... As you're starting this story that you've been talking about, whatever story it is, how you would frame the mission of that story internally and externally to overcome some of those obstacles. Your goal is to use every part of the pig. Your goal is to use as much of your reporting as is reasonable or as you can. And I want you to write one or more mission statements. You can write it in bullet points. You can write it in (inaudible) language. How many of you have written a mission statement for a story or a reporting project before? It's a weird thing, but it's... Any of you read Peter Clarke's Writing Tools? He talks about this a lot and I borrow from it a lot. It's the idea of... Before you start, set aside... This is what I want this story to accomplish. This is what—or what I want to do with this. So I mentioned one of the projects I mentioned— Homicide Watch. That was a site that I helped run for a long time. So we had a big grand mission for the site. Right? Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case. We also had this other mission that we talked about a lot. It was part of our open notebook approach. And my wife, Laura, who was the main reporter on this in DC, would say—everything that I would have on my desk, in my notebook—should find a way onto the site. And that's really what informed our approach. In terms of what we—how we built the site. And some of the tools we made available. So we had a courts calendar because we kept a courts calendar. We had to know when we showed up in court and made our calendar public so other people could see when we were likely to have stories coming. And the (inaudible) scheduled their stories. We kept a documents library so that people could read those and we could go back and find—I think this was in a charging document a while ago. Let's go back. It's already searchable because it's in Document Cloud. Thanks, DocumentCloud people. And we kept a structured database. It allowed us to make more of our content public. So anything on my desk or in my notebook should be on the site. That's not going to work for everybody. It's not going to work for the Snowden files, obviously. Probably not going to work for secrets, politics, and torture. It might not work for police shootings or some of the stuff in Baltimore. But there is a standard that you can find. And what I want you to try and do is think about what you would tell the reporter, the editors, the designers, the programmers, the web producers, at the beginning of the project—like, let's make this our goal. And try to articulate that in something that will fit on a sticky note. Or many sticky notes. + +Just as a response to what you were just saying about—that approach wouldn't fit for all these projects. You can always make that your goal after the launch. Especially if it's something like—a couple of people have done these police-involved shooting databases. So until you launch it, it's not public. But you prepare it in a way that it can become public and be a sustained resource—it's a great— + +Yeah. And that's a really good point. And that's actually a good way to think about it. Are you putting all of this online at once? Are you trickling it out before you launch or after you launch? Is your main thing going to be in the middle of your releasing things? Think about time. Think about what you release. Think about how you release it. Is it processed? Is it like... Are you releasing... Are you writing stories based on all your data, all your notes that you have? Or are you just dumping things on the web and putting things on Github, like the (inaudible) project does. Or 538 does? So think about that. So we don't have much time left. So I want to let you get to it. Write your mission statements. Be bold. And if you have... If you need help, let me know. + +(breakout sessions) + +And if you want to put your practices up on the board, do that too. + +(breakout sessions) + +All right. Who's done? Who's still working? + +So... I don't want to keep you too long, because we're actually five minutes over time. But it sounds like there's great conversations happening. So if you want to keep going with this, please do. We have 25 minutes until the next session. So... There might be beer outside, though, so I don't want to keep you from that. Priorities are important. If anybody, real quick, wants to share part of their mission statement, just stand up and do it where you are. And if you are feeling really bold, you can maybe tweet something. I did say to keep it short for a reason. + +I'll do one. Okay. So we came up with three bullet points, two of which are closely related. First one is to assume that anything you do may be used in the future. If you're a reporter, you should not assume that once you're done with the story all this reporting is going to be thrown in the trash. And if you're a developer, you should write documentations that tell you how to redo what you already have figured out once and are likely to forget. And then the other thing was to establish some sort of work flow for everybody at the outset of the project. Which enables, like, some sort of searchability and structure throughout. So if you're a developer, you can tell... + +Forget the so if, if you don't mind. + +No so if. + +Appreciate it. Because we're out of time. Go through real quick—mission statement. + +Help reporters finish the sentences the data started. + +What else? + +Just wanted to—know the victim, know the perpetrator, know the cause. + +Okay. Who else? + +Publish as much as you can. Do it with care. + +Who else? + +Treat every part of reporting as if it was going to be published. + +I like it. Who else? + +Edit well, honor the story, only use content that's germane, but be relevant to all your audiences. + +Everything published and push the story forward. + +Cool. Do you have something? Anybody else? All right. Thank you, all. + +(applause) + +Go forth and have beer! diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015Survey.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015Survey.md index 067da59d..389a38b5 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015Survey.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015Survey.md @@ -1,772 +1,771 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/survey/index.html ---- - -# The Journo-Nerd Survey—Help Us Ask Good Questions - -### Session Facilitator(s): Brian Hamman, Scott Klein - -### Day & Time: Friday, 4:30-5:30pm - -### Room: Memorial - - -We're going to go ahead and get started. - -We're going to start thinking about getting started. It's almost 4:30. - -Please don't go. - -But please stay in the room. This is where the fun is. It's okay if you stay standing. That's the plan, anyway. - -All right. I think we're going to get started. Hi, everybody. I'm Scott. I work at ProPublica. - -Hi, Scott. - -And I'm Brian. I'm at the New York Times. - -And we've got questions and hopefully—and I suspect you have questions, too. So we're going to talk a little bit about this session so Brian and I, and a bunch of people in this room including the folks from OpenNews, and the folks from the Online News Association, some folks that have yet to be revealed are working on a survey, hopefully one of the first surveys of its kind, trying to get a census of whatever we call the community that we're in, the sort of news nerds of people who do code for news, who build products, who are coder, designers, coder-developers, coder-editors, designer-reporters, all of these sort of hybrid roles that are new to the newsrooms in the last sort of 15 years and we want to get a sense of who we are, how many of us there are, whether a we do, how we do it, and other questions that I hope to get to hopefully today. So I'm going to talk a little bit about how today's session is going to go. The intro is what I'm doing right now. So number one is half checked off. And then we're going to talk a little bit about who everybody here is and I think we're going to get people standing and maybe, moving around in clusters to try to figure out who we are, and what kind of subcultures and what kinds of subcommunities we have. We're going to talk a little bit about the newsrooms or the not-newsrooms in which we work, and then we're going to do something that I'm 98% sure will work, which is we're going to try to solicit people's questions, what kinds of questions might unto answered in a national survey of this community? And then finally we're going to actually try to test those questions and see if we can get people to see if they can answer them in a sufficient way, and therefore, we think there are kind of strong questions, ones that would survive ones in a big, national poll kind of online survey. - -So just to set the stage a little bit of again, why we're doing this. Just like, personal example for me. I used to be in the newsroom. Two years ago, I left and now I'm doing product development. I kind of have, like, no idea how many people like me are out there. This is just taken from the etherpad of what people said they did from Apple from this conference. We have people all over the map, dataviz, development, storytelling, systems. and as far as you know, we have individual connections to each other, but there's no sense of what is this community? What are the organizations that we belong to? What are the support structures? How do we find more people like us? How do those people get jobs, all the questions that we get all the time, like how do I get a job? So Scott and I have been talking about this, we got a lot of ideas from O&A, and OpenNews. We're hoping to think about how to help our organizations to grow. Basically what does the survey put out, and what are the questions that we want to ask so that we can figure out who we are. So we're going to do that. - -Yes, we're going to do that. Okay. Please, stand up if you are not already standing up. We're going to ask you to move around the room. So grab your cohesive, grab your bags, grab any of your valuables, grab any of your service items and give it to your flight attendant. So we originally had a plan to move everybody in into corners of the room. But here in the McNamara center we're actually in some non-geometry space with water hazards. But this is actually pretty good because whatever kind of rhombus there is, actually gives us space for another answer. So we're going to put up—so Brian's going to do this because I have no sense of direction, in which corner is the letter. - -So we're going to ask questions, there's going to be five categories. We're going to ask you to try to go into each of these categories. So A is over here by this wooden thing. B is not in the water hazard but just shy of the water hazard. - -C is actually on this side. That's where it's all confusing is over by the food. D in the middle, E to the left. Everybody got it? A, B, C, D, E. - -So we're going to show two questions and we're going to break for—we're going to have a discussion but the questions include multiple choice answers as surveys need to. We are sort of thoughtful about what we should do if you are not subscribed by these. And I think -- - -I had one quick we know before we start. I don't see any red bands. We have an aerial photographer up there who's going to take a photo. So unless anybody objects, we're going to take a high-def photo. - -We are going to take a photo so we can later sort of go and see how well these questions did. So if these questions do not describe you at all—come up to the stage because you're actually particularly interesting to us. So come up to the stage if these questions do not describe you at all. - -So go to the first one. - -So the first one is: Who are you? And A is coder. A is here. - -That's all of them! - -It's okay. Just wait. Just wait. - -Right, if you are multiples of these, stand in between the positions. If you are a coder, you're sitting and coding all day, you go into as far into A as possible. If you ever a product person, go in between, or stand as close as you can to the right place. - -This is why doing a survey is hard. - -So Ivan Tower, we know about you. University professors... and students all here, please. Tony DeBarras (phonetic) is a product person. So we have product persons over here. No other product people? You're in the middle of what? Really? You're all these things? E, D, and E, Stacy is B, D, and E. Interesting. You should be keeping notes. I'm holding up money. - -Who's firmly in a group that they're angry that they're in that group? - -So you're also, what are you? - -I'm a manager -- - -So you're all of them. We have the dead center of people... fascinating. Fascinating. A, B, and E. And so we've got a cluster of A, B, and E's. Stacy's all of them. I've got the university folks over here. Okay, this is good. Lindsey are we getting shots? - -I think over in the corner, no. That's okay. - -People need to scoot into the corners. - -Stricter corners. - -Stricter corners. So move closer to the corners. - -Is that because you guys are hybrids? You just don't want to get by the food. - -There are a lot of A, C, Ds. - -A, B, and C? - -A, C, and D, this triangle over here. - -A, C, D. Coder, designer, reporter, a lot of ProPublicans over here. But you're also an academic, right? But that's not even one of the things so that really stinks. And you're dead in the middle? You're literally all of the things? That's fantastic. All right. So I'm seeing that, "Check all that apply" I think is going to be. - -So this question clearly doesn't work. - -Wait, and you're all folks? - -We're committing to code. - -Coders. - -Over here, university folks. Okay, it's a little bit of everything. - -So you need to be between A and B, but a little bit closer to E. - -Ted needs to be closer to A and B, but—or this is awesome, so this precision clearly points him to one of these categories. - -Maybe an easier one? - -All right. Let's try and do this. - -Okay. Let's see if this y'all angry or happy with this. What kind of organization -- - -Yes, this is about your organization. Where do you work. If you don't work in any of these kinds of organizations, stand on the stage and we finally have universities now. I can't read maps upside down so... Max is a contract Open source employee. Wow, web and mobile, look at that. - -TV! - -Tiff, you work in the New York Times. - -All right. I gotta change my battery. - -Half, mother fuckers! Half! - -People in the web. Washington Post here and the Times. - -They're in the center! - -This is not how you see yourself within your organization. - -What's the end goal? - -I can't read maps upside down. - -I see IR. I see IR. - -Print is over there. - -So wait, so this is web, so clearly, this is not web. - -I never felt closer to academics. - -[ Laughter ] - -Oh, wow. Wow okay. All right, Lindsey, you got some shots? - -[Inaudible] - -I can't hear you. Just thumbs up. - -All right. All right. That's Lindsey, everybody. Hi, Lindsey. Hi, Lindsey. - -So I think this was a slightly more successful question. People could answer that. I'll make a note on that. So now, we're going to do and a little bit different. So one of the important things that we have to figure out, we had a conversation with a very prestigious polling firm that told us how polls work which is something that Brian and I didn't know. - -We thought we would have this entire survey done by SRCCON. - -Our palabra was to have it done by SRCCON and the people didn't even laugh at us. So they said, well, really, the most important thing to do is to—what are the five things that you want to know? Not five questions. What are the five things that you want to know about the community? It could be what do we all eat for breakfast? It could be how do we all code. Do they have standing desks? Are we on the edit side, are we on the IT side? Whatever you need to know about this community. So at each desk our sticky notes and at each desk there are pens, but some of them don't have them. I assume that you all brought pens. So what we're going to do, take a sticky note and write one thing that you want to know. And then you're going to come and stick it to this wooden board. We have proctors. Serious ontologists who are going to take each one and cluster them where there are, in fact duplicate type questions. And I may join one of these. But Cody Pitts and Erika Owens are going to be ontologists and I may dabble in ontology. - -More than one question is also. - -Up to five questions. - -But one per person, though. - -What do you want to know about the community. What do we all eat for breakfast? Average pay? All right. So what's up? Yuri wants to know what's up. how long do you work? Do you work every day? That's a good question. How big is your team? These are great questions. Don't be shy about asking questions others have asked. That's sort of the point. Red. Good. Something about smoking? Show you smoke? Well, C, cluster yours around someone else and if no one has, stick it somewhere else. How often do you eat? Edible API? There's discussion. Good to see. I see wheels turning. Very smart people. Where are my ontologists? Here you are. Cody. What does that team need? What is the workflow? I'm going to call a "what's up" on that same question. Python language, Ruby. Open source, excellent. Are there requirements for your job? Excellent. Excellent question. - -Oh, excellent. Sure. We're going to put... what's up—and next to hate everyone, that's a cluster. Do you have a budget? Where's Cody? Do we have a spot for does the team have an budget? Money? Money? Job descriptions, do people really care? How often do you tweet? I think how often do you tweet has crossover with are you happy? Do you hate everyone? Are you having an identity crisis...? It says more psychology than my—I only took two years of psychology. Oh... how long has your job description existed? That's great. We've got some time so people... Erik what did you ask? Did you ask a question? - -I asked a question. - -Sure. Sure. My witty banter is being transcribed. Saved forever on the Internet. Immutable. How do you shrink print successfully and hire more workers? Oh, is that a multiple choice question? Excellent. Why aren't there more remote positions? Remote positions... why isn't there more remote positions. What's the range of salary? We've got a lot of salary questions. - -All right. Ready? There's plenty of time. Plenty of time. Anybody have any more questions? Any more really thoughtful reporters? Another 30 seconds. How's our clustering going? We're going to cluster that over with "what's up." We should ask that one. Have you no at long last... - -All right. You guys ready to move around a little more? - -Yeah! - -Scott, you wanna pick one off of there? - -All right. You ready? So... - -So why don't we start with an easy yes/no. - -This is like voting in parliament. You're going to sort of stand where your answer is. So let's pick a couple of example questions and see if we can kind of improvise the answers. Let's start with—this might be a touchy one. Let me make sure it's okay with Brian. - -"How much do you make?" - -Do it! - -The question is: Do you get enough support from your organization/your newsroom? Do you get enough support from your newsroom and if you work for me, the answer is, "Yes." So the answer is no. If you work for me, just stand right there. If the answer is yes, stand by the water, if the answer is no, stand by the wall that is leaning. And if you're somewhere in between, stand somewhere in between. The exercise is to figure out how easy these questions are. How sort of not fuzzy these questions are. How sharp these questions are. So OpenNews is in some kind of crisis. - -So there is—there's a little bit of a self-selection bias because you're at a conference and your company. But we've got some people in the middle. OpenNews seems to be some kind of a nightmare workplace. -[ Laughter ] - -Which one's yes again? - -This is the no? - -Yeah, no, no one really knows. - -I thought we were in the no. - -Erika, everyone's here on the expense account. You got enough support to—did you type it in. You were supposed to type it in? - -No. I didn't. - -I like that question. That was a good question. We'll get another. Brian, do you wanna pick one? - -One that's on there a couple of times. Do you work remotely, or do members of your team work remotely,. - -Did anybody work remotely? Yes, over by the water, and no over by the wall. - -Do you...? - -Physically? - -Yes, physically. Do you or anybody on your team work remotely. So if your team is always in the office and never remote, you are next to the water. If your team is very flexible about where you are, you may be a remote organization, you are over by the leaning tower of victims. - -If you are working remotely from the conference, it doesn't count. - -This is the remote side, right? - -Yeah, remote. - -I see ProPublica is going, "Where's Sisi?" they're doing—not what they say to you. But if you work remotely or if your team works remotely. Wait, Dan has a question. - -How do you interpret this question? - -Yeah, Si as I, you're on the remote side. This is remote. This is everyone works out of the office. - -That was everyone works out of the office. - -Always—not always in the office, which is also, has very potential to be unhealthy. - -I screwed up. I told you I can't read maps upside down. - -Yes, remote? - -You are -- - -Your team -- - -Or the team work remotely. If you have a boss who says that he doesn't like you working remotely, you're over there. All right. - -My old job, I would be over there. - -That's a pretty sharp set of answers. - -Well, I'm curious, the people who answered this question, are you satisfied with the answer? - -How do you want to—where do we stand? - -Should we do pay? - -That's funny. - -Do you have a catapult? - -Who the fuck has a catapult? - -We do! - -What! - -Best job, wait to go! - -Why do you have a catapult? - -Why? Why do you not? - -Sometimes you need to throw things across the office. - -I was going to say is it a catapult or is it a slingshot? Let's be honest. - -Where can I get a catapult? - -Amazon. - -Internet. - -Yeah. - -All right. Let's ask this one. I think this is a decent one. So, uh, okay. If anyone's uncomfortable answering this, just like give me the finger and I'll cancel it. Okay, so the question is: Are you a full-time employee or, on this, so full-time employee is at the water. - -No. No. - -It's okay. I can... - -Sorry. - -Full-time employees over by the water. And a freelancer, all the way against the wood. And if you're sort of a part-time employee or if you're a full-time contractor, somewhere in the middle. Freelance. We have freelance on this side. We got the full-time employees over here. And this is the middle. - -Middle? - -I guess if you're an intern or a fellow or something, I guess somewhere in the middle. So I guess full-time employee would also mean an indefinite employee, I guess it would be said. So somewhere in the middle? You're both? Oh, well, that's great. - -I'm just following the crowd, I have no idea. - -That's a nice middle ground. All right. I know which one we're going to do next. This one's going to be really easy. This is all about personal preference and not what they make you use at work. We've got Python on the water side because as far as I know, a Python is a water animal. And then we've got Ruby on this side, where, we'll have Ted and Elena. Where else is Javascript. But if you're only in Javascript, here. - -If you're a WordPress person! - -We have five corners. - -Javascript. - -Do Javascript in the back corner. - -People who don't know. - -Non-coders! - -Wait, Yuri, what is Yuri. I can't read maps upside down. You're a non-coder? - -That is Python/Javascript. - -No one's just Ruby. - -Yeah, a little Python. - -Sisi, like, what are you doing? - -That's good. Wait, what are you guys? - -Agnostic. - -Oh, languages are tools. That's very tool. But we like some tools better than other tools. - -Not these tools. - -Not these tools. Haha, I like that one. - -Ruby/Javascript. - -Ruby/Javascript, no one just does Ruby anymore. - -Not PHP? - -Isn't that Ruby? - -Ruby, Javascript... - -I like that. - -Python and Javascript? - -Javascript everyone—Javascript is an everyone thing. Wait, is there a PHP? Wow. All right. Full Stack. So that's what I was saying. - -All right. Are we ready for the next one? - -Brian has one. - -Are you self-taught? - -What does that even mean? - -Are you what? - -Yes! - -Did you go to college for what you are currently doing? So these people over here... - -Just in coding. - -People over here, majored in college in the work that they currently do. So if you were a journalism major and you do journalism as a coder, you belong on this side because you learned journalism on there. - -What? - -What? - -I studied -- - -Do you want us to be over there? - -If you are majoring... - -That's too boring. It has to know a continuum. - -Hold on. He keeps doing that. I can't see that. So where you are standing is people who went to college for what they currently do. - -No! - -There is not a degree program in journalism bots. It ain't a thing! - -Wait, so what's in here? - -I studied journalism, I did not study software development. - -That's fine. If you went to college for what you currently do, you come to the water. - -What if you have other degrees? - -If you are anything. If you're a computer science major and you're coding, go over there. If you're a journalism major and you're doing journalism, go over there. Let me tell you, for instance, I studied 19th century British religious poetry, and I don't do any of those things. And so I'm all the way over there. - -But that says you're in the yes. - -That's good. That's good. That's all right. No. Mary-Jo has a wrinkle to this question. Hold on, Mary-Jo has a wrinkle. - -I think this needs to be specific to data coding and all the very specific things that we do. For example, I went to journalism school, I actually have two journalism degrees, did not learn a damn thing about data in either one. - -You went to Missouri! - -In my classes.I had to major in investigative reporting as my track but I learned data in INB. - -Help us out. - -So if you went to school for data, or coding, then you're in the yes group. - -No, you're in the no group. - -The question is: Are you self-taught. - -This is embarrassing. Did you go to school for coding, data, or something, then go there. - -How about journalism in the back? - -If you went to journalism school, maybe go in the middle. - -So code—so computer science or data science, or statistics, or anything like quantitative, any of the sciences that are quantitative can go near the water. If you went to journalism school, go in the back, again. And if you are a 19th century religious poetry major, come up here with me. Journalism school in the back. Data/science/computer science over here. We have completely unrelated, kind of self-taught over here. That's fantastic. What did you major in? - -Performance art. - -Visual art. Visual arts and a lot of art. - -Communication design. - -Communication design. That's related. That's semirelated. - -Stacy... - -International relations. - -Oh, that's fancy. Who else has an useless major like me? All right. Hold on. David, what did you major in? - -Opera. - -Opera! That is amazing! Whoa! You gotta warm up. - -Jue? - -Architecture. - -Architecture! That's great! - -Comparative literature. - -That's right! - -Political science and history. - -Political science. - -Economics. - -Economics. That's a great one. - -Philosophy? - -Philosophy. Another great one. We have other people. - -Politics with a minor in journalism? - -You get away from here. - -Come back here. - -What did you study? - -Political science. - -A bunch of political science. - -Urban planning? - -That's crazy. - -Political science. - -Political science. Maybe we should have a political science section. Yeah, political science, go stand by over by the food. Economics and political science, sort of related. - -International relations? - -Social sciences. Social scientists come over here so this is the social science slash OpenNews, slash not participating. If you majored in poetry, you belong over here with me. - -Oh, snap, stand in the middle. So we have journalism over here. We have—should we do like... no? - -How old are you? - -And then how much do you make? Brian likes getting me with that one. Lindsey, are you taking a picture? This is good. And Brian you wrote it up? - -Not yet. - -So write this down. So we have the humanities, my peeps over there. We have the computer science over here around the water physical we've got the social science—journalism in the back, and social science over by the wall. And what are you guys? They don't go to this conference. - -You are A. - -That's totally fine. - -I can't spell. - -All right. - -What's C? Social science? we have another yes/no/maybe. Brian likes handing me the controversial ones. Do you want to do it? - -Sure. My role is respected by my organization. Should we do yes by the water? - -Yes, my role is respected in my organization over by the water. - -Define, "Respected." - -My role is respected by my organization. - -By your organization or your peers? - -By your organization so they know what you do. If you consider yourself a journalist, they consider you a journalist, too. Saddest group. No one respects them. That's not bad. That's pretty good. Again, you are sent to a conference for what you do, so it's a self-selection bias but still, I think a pretty decent one. I am not going to interview. I'll ask Matt Waite. Tell us what's wrong? - -I am the only one. - -I am the bus problem in the worst way. - -You are the sort of token nerd. - -I'm sorry. - -I just didn't want Kevin to feel bad. - -Someone come up and help me pick one. - -Millenial. - -Millenial? What does that mean? Millenials. - -Do you have the snake people self-extension installed? Yes or no? - -All right. I might need help from the person who created this question let me see if I get this right. Millenials are people, I believe born before—or after—sorry, born after 1980, 1985, 1990, oh, sorry. - -What about in between... - -1995... - -We're supposed to guess? - -Snake people. I don't know what's snake people. What is snake people. Tiff, is this your question? - -There are some people here that are older. - -Is this before or after? - -It is A. - -This is not what you arely. This is what you think millenials are. - -So I asked this one because it's a very contentious topic amongst my team and my company overall, where do you define the starting line for millenials. - -Just like millenials to not like the factual answer. - -I do not believe millenials are people. - -God damn it. I don't want to be a millenial. - -I think typically it's categorized... - -I graduated high school in 1999. Core millenial. This is when it comes to be. - -So you guys have the youngest? I don't think so. - -Next question? - -I'm just pretty sure. I mean, it seems to me that most of the people I know who get super psyched when the word millenial comes up are 25. So I'm going to go ahead and do the right math and say that we're here. I am never going to think they're the oldest. - -All right. I have proof. I was born in 1986 and I'm squarely a millenial. My sister was born in 1980 and she is not a millenial. Anyone who's born... - -Sounds like an anecdote to me. - -Anec-data is the new data. - -To prom, I popped my collar. My favorite movie was Ferris Bueller's Day Off and I was of child-bearing age for most of this. So we're going to talk about the time you spend at work. So the multiple choice that we're ad libbing right now are, do you spend most of your time at work and you can stand in the middle if you have a hybrid role. Do you spend most of your time, coding, designing... - -Emailing. - -Oh! - -Meetings gotta go? Meetings gotta stay. - -On a bad week, it's... - -So coding. Coding is here. Coding is over here. Reporting is over here. Designing is over here. All on the record. - -Wait, there's no E anymore? Email, I guess, email counts. - -Put meeting in. Hold on. Take emailing out because that's, like, everybody. Oh, we're making a change. Am I missing anybody? We've got another spot. - -They're not mutually exclusive. - -If you're doing both, then it counts. - -Writing. Writing. - -Then it counts for both categories. - -So you end up in the middle. Writing and reporting. I think reporting/writing. - -Oh, what! - -That's contentious. - -Where are you? - -I'm in State Line right now. - -Oh, that's fantastic. Oh, that's great. So we have a pure reporter, he's wearing a fedora and a trenchcoat. - -When writing is there. I think I should be more -- - -It's more like reporting/writing, right? 'Cause there aren't people who are like I just interview and then I tell some other person what I said. - -If I send VRA's, and -- - -This is a good question because we don't have that many people in the middle. What do you do? - -I do coding and designing. - -I feel like it's half and half? What are you, in between? - -Yeah, coding, designing, and reporting. - -That's fantastic. These are great jobs. These are terrific. You're also doing all of these things? - -I'm storytelling. - -Storyteller? - -I think I would be in meeting. That's why I'm sad all the time. We're in the sad group. Are we a mix of meeting and not participating? 'Cause you're having meetings. - -They're in a meeting. Sisi, how many meetings do you go to? Are you literally in a meeting right now? - -Yes. -[ Laughter ] - -She's in a Slack meeting right now. - -We have somebody—we have somebody emailing currently as we speak. He's emailing. - -Well, I didn't know because I spend most of my time analyzing data. - -Oh, my God, how did we forget that one? - -What is it? - -Analyzing data. - -That's reporting. - -That's reporting. - -Let's put that one over here. - -No, over here. Over here with singer, right? - -Analyzing data's over here. Any shuffles? No shuffles. - -I'm on Twitter. - -Oh, so you're—meaning you're just like on Twitter all day? if I follow you, I'm screwed. I suppose. - -Oh, wait, Jen. Wait. Oh, sorry. - -Who are the people in the middle? - -Who are the people in the middle? - -Storytellers. - -All the things. - -All the things. - -You spend most of your time doing. - -Always win, Sisi. Coding? - -This is what you spend most of your time doing. - -Excellent point, Sisi. - -Ah... couple of shuffles now. Wait, so these are hybrids in the middle, Lindsey. - -All right. - -And these over here are the meeters. These are the meeters/not paying attention people. These are the people who they are currently having a hackathon over here. They're coding. But wait, is that where you're supposed to be sitting? You're also not paying attention. - -Yeah, I think they're not paying attention. - -These are—they're having a hackathon. Where are the designers? - -No, you should get over there, too. - -Whoo! Sarah! - -All right. Everybody have that? That's a good question. I like that. We just beta tested a question. - -Should we do team size? - -All right. So now, we want to do team size. Brian's going to organize this one. - -All right. We're going to do how big is your team? - -Which team? - -Define, "Team." - -The team you work on. - -That I report? - -That you feel like you're part of the same team. You report to the same boss. You have lunch with them. - -Some people aren't team normative. - -If you work all by yourself, you're going to A, which is over here, I believe. - -What do you think the cutoff should be? - -What's the cut-off? Help us. - -Five? - -2-5. - -And there are five. - -2-5. - -Five to ten? - -6-10. - -Ten to 20? - -10-20, more than 20. - -I think 10+. So it just means the solo operators. These are the "just mes." Where do you work? - -I'm a freelancer. - -So of course, just me by definition. But Jue is sort of like a hybrid. - -It's like project group like my—do you see what I'm saying? - -No, no. Hold on. Say it again. We have a flaw in our question. This is important. - -It's just kind of weird because project teams versus whole company's like this, like, what do you mean, do you mean like people who do the same function? - -Yeah, yeah. People you would consider in your department. People who do the same things you do. Interns count. - -Wait. Interns count. - -Interns count! So D, I guess. - -2-5. - -Rebekah's... nobody's in the middle. So this is -- - -I think this is the only question where this worked. - -I'm going to stand over here by ProPublica. This is write work. I'm glad that finally all my coworkers agree on one question. Stacy where are you? You're in between? So you're in 11-20? - -That's awesome. - -Wait, so this is Team Giant? You're from Boxer? No we have New York Times. So you're from Boxer and New York Times. And this is the hackathon again? We have the hackathon. Awesome. Team two. That's a great question. Are we going to wrap up? I think that's all the time we got. You know, we are kind of taking this show on the road a little bit and we are doing exactly this and we are kind of testing these questions. So Brian and I completely overdid the assignment and tried to write a survey all on our own even though we have absolutely no idea what we're doing. So we've put a GitHub repository with our incredibly embarrassing, way, way too long surveys. - -So if you go to that Bitly URL you will see the GitHub repository where all the questions are. I really encourage, and in fact, beg you to read the questions, to send us pull requests. To send us issues, to send us emails. To tell us the ways in which we the way that we can ask these questions better. But hopefully somebody at a major reporting firm who asked not to be named, and start this early next year, but I think the plan is to actually do this. - -So thank you everybody very much for helping come up with new questions and for honing the ones that we already have. Thanks, everybody. +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/survey/index.html +--- + +# The Journo-Nerd Survey—Help Us Ask Good Questions + +### Session Facilitator(s): Brian Hamman, Scott Klein + +### Day & Time: Friday, 4:30-5:30pm + +### Room: Memorial + +We're going to go ahead and get started. + +We're going to start thinking about getting started. It's almost 4:30. + +Please don't go. + +But please stay in the room. This is where the fun is. It's okay if you stay standing. That's the plan, anyway. + +All right. I think we're going to get started. Hi, everybody. I'm Scott. I work at ProPublica. + +Hi, Scott. + +And I'm Brian. I'm at the New York Times. + +And we've got questions and hopefully—and I suspect you have questions, too. So we're going to talk a little bit about this session so Brian and I, and a bunch of people in this room including the folks from OpenNews, and the folks from the Online News Association, some folks that have yet to be revealed are working on a survey, hopefully one of the first surveys of its kind, trying to get a census of whatever we call the community that we're in, the sort of news nerds of people who do code for news, who build products, who are coder, designers, coder-developers, coder-editors, designer-reporters, all of these sort of hybrid roles that are new to the newsrooms in the last sort of 15 years and we want to get a sense of who we are, how many of us there are, whether a we do, how we do it, and other questions that I hope to get to hopefully today. So I'm going to talk a little bit about how today's session is going to go. The intro is what I'm doing right now. So number one is half checked off. And then we're going to talk a little bit about who everybody here is and I think we're going to get people standing and maybe, moving around in clusters to try to figure out who we are, and what kind of subcultures and what kinds of subcommunities we have. We're going to talk a little bit about the newsrooms or the not-newsrooms in which we work, and then we're going to do something that I'm 98% sure will work, which is we're going to try to solicit people's questions, what kinds of questions might unto answered in a national survey of this community? And then finally we're going to actually try to test those questions and see if we can get people to see if they can answer them in a sufficient way, and therefore, we think there are kind of strong questions, ones that would survive ones in a big, national poll kind of online survey. + +So just to set the stage a little bit of again, why we're doing this. Just like, personal example for me. I used to be in the newsroom. Two years ago, I left and now I'm doing product development. I kind of have, like, no idea how many people like me are out there. This is just taken from the etherpad of what people said they did from Apple from this conference. We have people all over the map, dataviz, development, storytelling, systems. and as far as you know, we have individual connections to each other, but there's no sense of what is this community? What are the organizations that we belong to? What are the support structures? How do we find more people like us? How do those people get jobs, all the questions that we get all the time, like how do I get a job? So Scott and I have been talking about this, we got a lot of ideas from O&A, and OpenNews. We're hoping to think about how to help our organizations to grow. Basically what does the survey put out, and what are the questions that we want to ask so that we can figure out who we are. So we're going to do that. + +Yes, we're going to do that. Okay. Please, stand up if you are not already standing up. We're going to ask you to move around the room. So grab your cohesive, grab your bags, grab any of your valuables, grab any of your service items and give it to your flight attendant. So we originally had a plan to move everybody in into corners of the room. But here in the McNamara center we're actually in some non-geometry space with water hazards. But this is actually pretty good because whatever kind of rhombus there is, actually gives us space for another answer. So we're going to put up—so Brian's going to do this because I have no sense of direction, in which corner is the letter. + +So we're going to ask questions, there's going to be five categories. We're going to ask you to try to go into each of these categories. So A is over here by this wooden thing. B is not in the water hazard but just shy of the water hazard. + +C is actually on this side. That's where it's all confusing is over by the food. D in the middle, E to the left. Everybody got it? A, B, C, D, E. + +So we're going to show two questions and we're going to break for—we're going to have a discussion but the questions include multiple choice answers as surveys need to. We are sort of thoughtful about what we should do if you are not subscribed by these. And I think -- + +I had one quick we know before we start. I don't see any red bands. We have an aerial photographer up there who's going to take a photo. So unless anybody objects, we're going to take a high-def photo. + +We are going to take a photo so we can later sort of go and see how well these questions did. So if these questions do not describe you at all—come up to the stage because you're actually particularly interesting to us. So come up to the stage if these questions do not describe you at all. + +So go to the first one. + +So the first one is: Who are you? And A is coder. A is here. + +That's all of them! + +It's okay. Just wait. Just wait. + +Right, if you are multiples of these, stand in between the positions. If you are a coder, you're sitting and coding all day, you go into as far into A as possible. If you ever a product person, go in between, or stand as close as you can to the right place. + +This is why doing a survey is hard. + +So Ivan Tower, we know about you. University professors... and students all here, please. Tony DeBarras (phonetic) is a product person. So we have product persons over here. No other product people? You're in the middle of what? Really? You're all these things? E, D, and E, Stacy is B, D, and E. Interesting. You should be keeping notes. I'm holding up money. + +Who's firmly in a group that they're angry that they're in that group? + +So you're also, what are you? + +I'm a manager -- + +So you're all of them. We have the dead center of people... fascinating. Fascinating. A, B, and E. And so we've got a cluster of A, B, and E's. Stacy's all of them. I've got the university folks over here. Okay, this is good. Lindsey are we getting shots? + +I think over in the corner, no. That's okay. + +People need to scoot into the corners. + +Stricter corners. + +Stricter corners. So move closer to the corners. + +Is that because you guys are hybrids? You just don't want to get by the food. + +There are a lot of A, C, Ds. + +A, B, and C? + +A, C, and D, this triangle over here. + +A, C, D. Coder, designer, reporter, a lot of ProPublicans over here. But you're also an academic, right? But that's not even one of the things so that really stinks. And you're dead in the middle? You're literally all of the things? That's fantastic. All right. So I'm seeing that, "Check all that apply" I think is going to be. + +So this question clearly doesn't work. + +Wait, and you're all folks? + +We're committing to code. + +Coders. + +Over here, university folks. Okay, it's a little bit of everything. + +So you need to be between A and B, but a little bit closer to E. + +Ted needs to be closer to A and B, but—or this is awesome, so this precision clearly points him to one of these categories. + +Maybe an easier one? + +All right. Let's try and do this. + +Okay. Let's see if this y'all angry or happy with this. What kind of organization -- + +Yes, this is about your organization. Where do you work. If you don't work in any of these kinds of organizations, stand on the stage and we finally have universities now. I can't read maps upside down so... Max is a contract Open source employee. Wow, web and mobile, look at that. + +TV! + +Tiff, you work in the New York Times. + +All right. I gotta change my battery. + +Half, mother fuckers! Half! + +People in the web. Washington Post here and the Times. + +They're in the center! + +This is not how you see yourself within your organization. + +What's the end goal? + +I can't read maps upside down. + +I see IR. I see IR. + +Print is over there. + +So wait, so this is web, so clearly, this is not web. + +I never felt closer to academics. + +[ Laughter ] + +Oh, wow. Wow okay. All right, Lindsey, you got some shots? + +[Inaudible] + +I can't hear you. Just thumbs up. + +All right. All right. That's Lindsey, everybody. Hi, Lindsey. Hi, Lindsey. + +So I think this was a slightly more successful question. People could answer that. I'll make a note on that. So now, we're going to do and a little bit different. So one of the important things that we have to figure out, we had a conversation with a very prestigious polling firm that told us how polls work which is something that Brian and I didn't know. + +We thought we would have this entire survey done by SRCCON. + +Our palabra was to have it done by SRCCON and the people didn't even laugh at us. So they said, well, really, the most important thing to do is to—what are the five things that you want to know? Not five questions. What are the five things that you want to know about the community? It could be what do we all eat for breakfast? It could be how do we all code. Do they have standing desks? Are we on the edit side, are we on the IT side? Whatever you need to know about this community. So at each desk our sticky notes and at each desk there are pens, but some of them don't have them. I assume that you all brought pens. So what we're going to do, take a sticky note and write one thing that you want to know. And then you're going to come and stick it to this wooden board. We have proctors. Serious ontologists who are going to take each one and cluster them where there are, in fact duplicate type questions. And I may join one of these. But Cody Pitts and Erika Owens are going to be ontologists and I may dabble in ontology. + +More than one question is also. + +Up to five questions. + +But one per person, though. + +What do you want to know about the community. What do we all eat for breakfast? Average pay? All right. So what's up? Yuri wants to know what's up. how long do you work? Do you work every day? That's a good question. How big is your team? These are great questions. Don't be shy about asking questions others have asked. That's sort of the point. Red. Good. Something about smoking? Show you smoke? Well, C, cluster yours around someone else and if no one has, stick it somewhere else. How often do you eat? Edible API? There's discussion. Good to see. I see wheels turning. Very smart people. Where are my ontologists? Here you are. Cody. What does that team need? What is the workflow? I'm going to call a "what's up" on that same question. Python language, Ruby. Open source, excellent. Are there requirements for your job? Excellent. Excellent question. + +Oh, excellent. Sure. We're going to put... what's up—and next to hate everyone, that's a cluster. Do you have a budget? Where's Cody? Do we have a spot for does the team have an budget? Money? Money? Job descriptions, do people really care? How often do you tweet? I think how often do you tweet has crossover with are you happy? Do you hate everyone? Are you having an identity crisis...? It says more psychology than my—I only took two years of psychology. Oh... how long has your job description existed? That's great. We've got some time so people... Erik what did you ask? Did you ask a question? + +I asked a question. + +Sure. Sure. My witty banter is being transcribed. Saved forever on the Internet. Immutable. How do you shrink print successfully and hire more workers? Oh, is that a multiple choice question? Excellent. Why aren't there more remote positions? Remote positions... why isn't there more remote positions. What's the range of salary? We've got a lot of salary questions. + +All right. Ready? There's plenty of time. Plenty of time. Anybody have any more questions? Any more really thoughtful reporters? Another 30 seconds. How's our clustering going? We're going to cluster that over with "what's up." We should ask that one. Have you no at long last... + +All right. You guys ready to move around a little more? + +Yeah! + +Scott, you wanna pick one off of there? + +All right. You ready? So... + +So why don't we start with an easy yes/no. + +This is like voting in parliament. You're going to sort of stand where your answer is. So let's pick a couple of example questions and see if we can kind of improvise the answers. Let's start with—this might be a touchy one. Let me make sure it's okay with Brian. + +"How much do you make?" + +Do it! + +The question is: Do you get enough support from your organization/your newsroom? Do you get enough support from your newsroom and if you work for me, the answer is, "Yes." So the answer is no. If you work for me, just stand right there. If the answer is yes, stand by the water, if the answer is no, stand by the wall that is leaning. And if you're somewhere in between, stand somewhere in between. The exercise is to figure out how easy these questions are. How sort of not fuzzy these questions are. How sharp these questions are. So OpenNews is in some kind of crisis. + +So there is—there's a little bit of a self-selection bias because you're at a conference and your company. But we've got some people in the middle. OpenNews seems to be some kind of a nightmare workplace. +[ Laughter ] + +Which one's yes again? + +This is the no? + +Yeah, no, no one really knows. + +I thought we were in the no. + +Erika, everyone's here on the expense account. You got enough support to—did you type it in. You were supposed to type it in? + +No. I didn't. + +I like that question. That was a good question. We'll get another. Brian, do you wanna pick one? + +One that's on there a couple of times. Do you work remotely, or do members of your team work remotely,. + +Did anybody work remotely? Yes, over by the water, and no over by the wall. + +Do you...? + +Physically? + +Yes, physically. Do you or anybody on your team work remotely. So if your team is always in the office and never remote, you are next to the water. If your team is very flexible about where you are, you may be a remote organization, you are over by the leaning tower of victims. + +If you are working remotely from the conference, it doesn't count. + +This is the remote side, right? + +Yeah, remote. + +I see ProPublica is going, "Where's Sisi?" they're doing—not what they say to you. But if you work remotely or if your team works remotely. Wait, Dan has a question. + +How do you interpret this question? + +Yeah, Si as I, you're on the remote side. This is remote. This is everyone works out of the office. + +That was everyone works out of the office. + +Always—not always in the office, which is also, has very potential to be unhealthy. + +I screwed up. I told you I can't read maps upside down. + +Yes, remote? + +You are -- + +Your team -- + +Or the team work remotely. If you have a boss who says that he doesn't like you working remotely, you're over there. All right. + +My old job, I would be over there. + +That's a pretty sharp set of answers. + +Well, I'm curious, the people who answered this question, are you satisfied with the answer? + +How do you want to—where do we stand? + +Should we do pay? + +That's funny. + +Do you have a catapult? + +Who the fuck has a catapult? + +We do! + +What! + +Best job, wait to go! + +Why do you have a catapult? + +Why? Why do you not? + +Sometimes you need to throw things across the office. + +I was going to say is it a catapult or is it a slingshot? Let's be honest. + +Where can I get a catapult? + +Amazon. + +Internet. + +Yeah. + +All right. Let's ask this one. I think this is a decent one. So, uh, okay. If anyone's uncomfortable answering this, just like give me the finger and I'll cancel it. Okay, so the question is: Are you a full-time employee or, on this, so full-time employee is at the water. + +No. No. + +It's okay. I can... + +Sorry. + +Full-time employees over by the water. And a freelancer, all the way against the wood. And if you're sort of a part-time employee or if you're a full-time contractor, somewhere in the middle. Freelance. We have freelance on this side. We got the full-time employees over here. And this is the middle. + +Middle? + +I guess if you're an intern or a fellow or something, I guess somewhere in the middle. So I guess full-time employee would also mean an indefinite employee, I guess it would be said. So somewhere in the middle? You're both? Oh, well, that's great. + +I'm just following the crowd, I have no idea. + +That's a nice middle ground. All right. I know which one we're going to do next. This one's going to be really easy. This is all about personal preference and not what they make you use at work. We've got Python on the water side because as far as I know, a Python is a water animal. And then we've got Ruby on this side, where, we'll have Ted and Elena. Where else is Javascript. But if you're only in Javascript, here. + +If you're a WordPress person! + +We have five corners. + +Javascript. + +Do Javascript in the back corner. + +People who don't know. + +Non-coders! + +Wait, Yuri, what is Yuri. I can't read maps upside down. You're a non-coder? + +That is Python/Javascript. + +No one's just Ruby. + +Yeah, a little Python. + +Sisi, like, what are you doing? + +That's good. Wait, what are you guys? + +Agnostic. + +Oh, languages are tools. That's very tool. But we like some tools better than other tools. + +Not these tools. + +Not these tools. Haha, I like that one. + +Ruby/Javascript. + +Ruby/Javascript, no one just does Ruby anymore. + +Not PHP? + +Isn't that Ruby? + +Ruby, Javascript... + +I like that. + +Python and Javascript? + +Javascript everyone—Javascript is an everyone thing. Wait, is there a PHP? Wow. All right. Full Stack. So that's what I was saying. + +All right. Are we ready for the next one? + +Brian has one. + +Are you self-taught? + +What does that even mean? + +Are you what? + +Yes! + +Did you go to college for what you are currently doing? So these people over here... + +Just in coding. + +People over here, majored in college in the work that they currently do. So if you were a journalism major and you do journalism as a coder, you belong on this side because you learned journalism on there. + +What? + +What? + +I studied -- + +Do you want us to be over there? + +If you are majoring... + +That's too boring. It has to know a continuum. + +Hold on. He keeps doing that. I can't see that. So where you are standing is people who went to college for what they currently do. + +No! + +There is not a degree program in journalism bots. It ain't a thing! + +Wait, so what's in here? + +I studied journalism, I did not study software development. + +That's fine. If you went to college for what you currently do, you come to the water. + +What if you have other degrees? + +If you are anything. If you're a computer science major and you're coding, go over there. If you're a journalism major and you're doing journalism, go over there. Let me tell you, for instance, I studied 19th century British religious poetry, and I don't do any of those things. And so I'm all the way over there. + +But that says you're in the yes. + +That's good. That's good. That's all right. No. Mary-Jo has a wrinkle to this question. Hold on, Mary-Jo has a wrinkle. + +I think this needs to be specific to data coding and all the very specific things that we do. For example, I went to journalism school, I actually have two journalism degrees, did not learn a damn thing about data in either one. + +You went to Missouri! + +In my classes.I had to major in investigative reporting as my track but I learned data in INB. + +Help us out. + +So if you went to school for data, or coding, then you're in the yes group. + +No, you're in the no group. + +The question is: Are you self-taught. + +This is embarrassing. Did you go to school for coding, data, or something, then go there. + +How about journalism in the back? + +If you went to journalism school, maybe go in the middle. + +So code—so computer science or data science, or statistics, or anything like quantitative, any of the sciences that are quantitative can go near the water. If you went to journalism school, go in the back, again. And if you are a 19th century religious poetry major, come up here with me. Journalism school in the back. Data/science/computer science over here. We have completely unrelated, kind of self-taught over here. That's fantastic. What did you major in? + +Performance art. + +Visual art. Visual arts and a lot of art. + +Communication design. + +Communication design. That's related. That's semirelated. + +Stacy... + +International relations. + +Oh, that's fancy. Who else has an useless major like me? All right. Hold on. David, what did you major in? + +Opera. + +Opera! That is amazing! Whoa! You gotta warm up. + +Jue? + +Architecture. + +Architecture! That's great! + +Comparative literature. + +That's right! + +Political science and history. + +Political science. + +Economics. + +Economics. That's a great one. + +Philosophy? + +Philosophy. Another great one. We have other people. + +Politics with a minor in journalism? + +You get away from here. + +Come back here. + +What did you study? + +Political science. + +A bunch of political science. + +Urban planning? + +That's crazy. + +Political science. + +Political science. Maybe we should have a political science section. Yeah, political science, go stand by over by the food. Economics and political science, sort of related. + +International relations? + +Social sciences. Social scientists come over here so this is the social science slash OpenNews, slash not participating. If you majored in poetry, you belong over here with me. + +Oh, snap, stand in the middle. So we have journalism over here. We have—should we do like... no? + +How old are you? + +And then how much do you make? Brian likes getting me with that one. Lindsey, are you taking a picture? This is good. And Brian you wrote it up? + +Not yet. + +So write this down. So we have the humanities, my peeps over there. We have the computer science over here around the water physical we've got the social science—journalism in the back, and social science over by the wall. And what are you guys? They don't go to this conference. + +You are A. + +That's totally fine. + +I can't spell. + +All right. + +What's C? Social science? we have another yes/no/maybe. Brian likes handing me the controversial ones. Do you want to do it? + +Sure. My role is respected by my organization. Should we do yes by the water? + +Yes, my role is respected in my organization over by the water. + +Define, "Respected." + +My role is respected by my organization. + +By your organization or your peers? + +By your organization so they know what you do. If you consider yourself a journalist, they consider you a journalist, too. Saddest group. No one respects them. That's not bad. That's pretty good. Again, you are sent to a conference for what you do, so it's a self-selection bias but still, I think a pretty decent one. I am not going to interview. I'll ask Matt Waite. Tell us what's wrong? + +I am the only one. + +I am the bus problem in the worst way. + +You are the sort of token nerd. + +I'm sorry. + +I just didn't want Kevin to feel bad. + +Someone come up and help me pick one. + +Millenial. + +Millenial? What does that mean? Millenials. + +Do you have the snake people self-extension installed? Yes or no? + +All right. I might need help from the person who created this question let me see if I get this right. Millenials are people, I believe born before—or after—sorry, born after 1980, 1985, 1990, oh, sorry. + +What about in between... + +1995... + +We're supposed to guess? + +Snake people. I don't know what's snake people. What is snake people. Tiff, is this your question? + +There are some people here that are older. + +Is this before or after? + +It is A. + +This is not what you arely. This is what you think millenials are. + +So I asked this one because it's a very contentious topic amongst my team and my company overall, where do you define the starting line for millenials. + +Just like millenials to not like the factual answer. + +I do not believe millenials are people. + +God damn it. I don't want to be a millenial. + +I think typically it's categorized... + +I graduated high school in 1999. Core millenial. This is when it comes to be. + +So you guys have the youngest? I don't think so. + +Next question? + +I'm just pretty sure. I mean, it seems to me that most of the people I know who get super psyched when the word millenial comes up are 25. So I'm going to go ahead and do the right math and say that we're here. I am never going to think they're the oldest. + +All right. I have proof. I was born in 1986 and I'm squarely a millenial. My sister was born in 1980 and she is not a millenial. Anyone who's born... + +Sounds like an anecdote to me. + +Anec-data is the new data. + +To prom, I popped my collar. My favorite movie was Ferris Bueller's Day Off and I was of child-bearing age for most of this. So we're going to talk about the time you spend at work. So the multiple choice that we're ad libbing right now are, do you spend most of your time at work and you can stand in the middle if you have a hybrid role. Do you spend most of your time, coding, designing... + +Emailing. + +Oh! + +Meetings gotta go? Meetings gotta stay. + +On a bad week, it's... + +So coding. Coding is here. Coding is over here. Reporting is over here. Designing is over here. All on the record. + +Wait, there's no E anymore? Email, I guess, email counts. + +Put meeting in. Hold on. Take emailing out because that's, like, everybody. Oh, we're making a change. Am I missing anybody? We've got another spot. + +They're not mutually exclusive. + +If you're doing both, then it counts. + +Writing. Writing. + +Then it counts for both categories. + +So you end up in the middle. Writing and reporting. I think reporting/writing. + +Oh, what! + +That's contentious. + +Where are you? + +I'm in State Line right now. + +Oh, that's fantastic. Oh, that's great. So we have a pure reporter, he's wearing a fedora and a trenchcoat. + +When writing is there. I think I should be more -- + +It's more like reporting/writing, right? 'Cause there aren't people who are like I just interview and then I tell some other person what I said. + +If I send VRA's, and -- + +This is a good question because we don't have that many people in the middle. What do you do? + +I do coding and designing. + +I feel like it's half and half? What are you, in between? + +Yeah, coding, designing, and reporting. + +That's fantastic. These are great jobs. These are terrific. You're also doing all of these things? + +I'm storytelling. + +Storyteller? + +I think I would be in meeting. That's why I'm sad all the time. We're in the sad group. Are we a mix of meeting and not participating? 'Cause you're having meetings. + +They're in a meeting. Sisi, how many meetings do you go to? Are you literally in a meeting right now? + +Yes. +[ Laughter ] + +She's in a Slack meeting right now. + +We have somebody—we have somebody emailing currently as we speak. He's emailing. + +Well, I didn't know because I spend most of my time analyzing data. + +Oh, my God, how did we forget that one? + +What is it? + +Analyzing data. + +That's reporting. + +That's reporting. + +Let's put that one over here. + +No, over here. Over here with singer, right? + +Analyzing data's over here. Any shuffles? No shuffles. + +I'm on Twitter. + +Oh, so you're—meaning you're just like on Twitter all day? if I follow you, I'm screwed. I suppose. + +Oh, wait, Jen. Wait. Oh, sorry. + +Who are the people in the middle? + +Who are the people in the middle? + +Storytellers. + +All the things. + +All the things. + +You spend most of your time doing. + +Always win, Sisi. Coding? + +This is what you spend most of your time doing. + +Excellent point, Sisi. + +Ah... couple of shuffles now. Wait, so these are hybrids in the middle, Lindsey. + +All right. + +And these over here are the meeters. These are the meeters/not paying attention people. These are the people who they are currently having a hackathon over here. They're coding. But wait, is that where you're supposed to be sitting? You're also not paying attention. + +Yeah, I think they're not paying attention. + +These are—they're having a hackathon. Where are the designers? + +No, you should get over there, too. + +Whoo! Sarah! + +All right. Everybody have that? That's a good question. I like that. We just beta tested a question. + +Should we do team size? + +All right. So now, we want to do team size. Brian's going to organize this one. + +All right. We're going to do how big is your team? + +Which team? + +Define, "Team." + +The team you work on. + +That I report? + +That you feel like you're part of the same team. You report to the same boss. You have lunch with them. + +Some people aren't team normative. + +If you work all by yourself, you're going to A, which is over here, I believe. + +What do you think the cutoff should be? + +What's the cut-off? Help us. + +Five? + +2-5. + +And there are five. + +2-5. + +Five to ten? + +6-10. + +Ten to 20? + +10-20, more than 20. + +I think 10+. So it just means the solo operators. These are the "just mes." Where do you work? + +I'm a freelancer. + +So of course, just me by definition. But Jue is sort of like a hybrid. + +It's like project group like my—do you see what I'm saying? + +No, no. Hold on. Say it again. We have a flaw in our question. This is important. + +It's just kind of weird because project teams versus whole company's like this, like, what do you mean, do you mean like people who do the same function? + +Yeah, yeah. People you would consider in your department. People who do the same things you do. Interns count. + +Wait. Interns count. + +Interns count! So D, I guess. + +2-5. + +Rebekah's... nobody's in the middle. So this is -- + +I think this is the only question where this worked. + +I'm going to stand over here by ProPublica. This is write work. I'm glad that finally all my coworkers agree on one question. Stacy where are you? You're in between? So you're in 11-20? + +That's awesome. + +Wait, so this is Team Giant? You're from Boxer? No we have New York Times. So you're from Boxer and New York Times. And this is the hackathon again? We have the hackathon. Awesome. Team two. That's a great question. Are we going to wrap up? I think that's all the time we got. You know, we are kind of taking this show on the road a little bit and we are doing exactly this and we are kind of testing these questions. So Brian and I completely overdid the assignment and tried to write a survey all on our own even though we have absolutely no idea what we're doing. So we've put a GitHub repository with our incredibly embarrassing, way, way too long surveys. + +So if you go to that Bitly URL you will see the GitHub repository where all the questions are. I really encourage, and in fact, beg you to read the questions, to send us pull requests. To send us issues, to send us emails. To tell us the ways in which we the way that we can ask these questions better. But hopefully somebody at a major reporting firm who asked not to be named, and start this early next year, but I think the plan is to actually do this. + +So thank you everybody very much for helping come up with new questions and for honing the ones that we already have. Thanks, everybody. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015WebAccessibility.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015WebAccessibility.md index 37ba7470..7519f07a 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015WebAccessibility.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015WebAccessibility.md @@ -1,212 +1,213 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/webaccessibility/index.html ---- - -# Taking Web Accessibility Beyond Assumptions - -### Session Facilitator(s): Ryan Murphy - -### Day & Time: Thursday, 3-4pm - -### Room: Thomas Swain - - -Hello, everyone, thank you for coming to our little chat today. My name is Ryan Murphy, I'm a developer at the Texas Tribune, and I originally pitched this because it's something that—accessibility—that is increasingly become kind of a bigger focus for me personally. I will point out that I am very new to this myself, and so it's important, you know, as all of the SRCCON kind of discussions that we're having, that this is a conversation. And, you know, I think that the goal for this is to kind of just encourage more mindfulness in what we're doing, and, you know, be sure that, you know we have something that we can kind of take away from our conversation to take back to our newsrooms and to the work that we're doing. - -So you know, for me, I've—this past weekend, I actually spent—went home for father's day, which is also my dad's birthday and so I got the one-two there of a father just asking for things, and it wasn't like "it's my birthday," but it's like, oh, you know, tomorrow is father's day. But it wasn't the kickoff for this, but looking at as my father gets older, kind of watching his interactions with devices and things that he's using. One of the things that I noticed is kind of he is a new iPhone user, and just kind of noticing how he had ramped up the zoom like everything was super big on it, and it was kind of an eye-opening kind of moment, because I had always thought of my dad is he had glasses, but it had never registered as kind of a thing, and I never realized. I asked, "What is it like using your phone like that?" - -But it was surprising the number of, like, when people sent him links, he had to walk away because they weren't really made for him to interact with them in that way, and things that were proportionally zoomed, or not proportionally zoomed that led to a page or a kind of experience that was entirely different than what those of you who are creating those kind of experiences expected someone to interact with. - -And you know, I imagine, you know, a lot of us have—probably kind of know of people or, you know, have family members that are kind of in their own varying ways in these kind of worlds, you know, of trying to kind of work with, or kind of trying to find a way to make a lot of the things that they interact with work for them. - -So this kind of set, you know, as we're doing for all of these ground rules, we do want this to be a safe space. Accessibility is—by no means are we going to end this conversation with we've got it all figured out. It's tough, and you know, we often end up in situations where we're having the kind of, you know, remind ourselves that these are the things that we need to consider, all of the different elements of understanding how people consume the work that we're producing. And definitely as we're going through this conversation, please, any professional and personal experiences that you would like to bring up, please bring them forward, you know, learning more—the more we learn about kind of what we experienced and kind of singular instances are kind of informing in helping other people think about things in a different way. - -So before we kind of pivot into that sort of stuff, I did want to kind of at least do a kind of general overview of kind of the different kind of categories of accessibility. I will stress, by no means are these the only ones, or, you know, none can go beyond having to fit in these four categories. Again, just kind of setting the tone here, and we definitely can branch out from there as we go. - -So another kind of side part of this was that, you know, I think a common, and you see it, I think a lot on the web itself, but at least I know in our organization, it is a challenge when we're trying to kind of be more mindful of accessibility, is that oftentimes it becomes a "oh, well, did you check that for color blindness?" or, "oh, is this screenreader friendly?" Which a lot of times we say that without even fully understanding what that means, but it's kind of like oh, we finished the project and did we label some things, and it's probably good to go. - -And I would think one of the things we would kind of bring out with this as well is broadening that understanding of different kind of capacities and abilities and spectrum of abilities that would go into talking about accessibility. So with visual there's the ones that we think of, the nonsighted users, color blindness, but this also includes people who have low vision or obstructed vision like cataracts. Near- and farsightedness, so their own versions of visual, those of us that wear glasses or contacts, those fall in those categories, as well. Things like depth perception, which, you know, can often come up in a lot of our fascination with kind of adding parallax loading and depth of experiences, these are things that people who struggle with depth perception can sometimes have challenges with. - -Auditory. There's, you know, deafness, being tone deaf, being just kind of generally hard of hearing. There's all kind of conditional situations, where I think that it's kind of an interesting element where people being in situations where they just can't listen to something. Where they don't have headphones, you know, there are these elements to it that play a role that aren't necessarily disability-based, but still are factors of being mindful when you're designing an experience that you want people to have in various situations. - -Motor. So these are—these are some examples here of cerebral palsy, Parkinson's disease, these are situations that would make our typical expectation of how someone would interact with a site or with our experience that may not be as straightforward as we're assuming, so this includes that, you know, some individuals may be navigating solely with keyboard because that's the easiest way to navigate, or they special kind of just like keyboard devices that are meant for kind of assisting in these situations. And then there's cognitive. I mean this includes things such as autism, dyslexia, people who have survived strokes and are kind of getting back into kind of the swing of things. These are some of the kind of approaches that, you know, things to keep in mind in terms of when you're labeling things left and right, and when you are—you know, have text that's very kind of tightly woven, that sometimes there's the comprehensive level that has to be kind of accounted for. - -So those of you that hopefully you got to see with the schedule listing where hopefully I was prompting people to kind of bring their, if they had some, kind of accessibility guidelines for their organizations, and kind of use those to springboard kind of talk about how we are approaching those sort of things. So, you know, kind of start with that very first one. You know, how do we—how your organization defines accessibility. - -I can speak to an organization that doesn't dozen a great job of defining that, where we're just sort of catching up with being behind and doing the not necessarily doing more important things, but not doing a good job with accessibility. - -What do you think has played a role in that being a challenge? - -Sort of, underpowered and still depending on things that were built when there wasn't adequate developer positions to do a good job, and depending on things that are old and accessibility wasn't necessarily a benchmark five years the way it is today. - -Yeah. - -I think one thing that I've struggled with in the organizations I've been in has been, you want, you know, especially depending on who—you know, the higher-ups you have in your—sorry in your news organization, they want to see basically do all these amazing things. They want maps, they want interactive things, they want hover states and you are pressured both on deadline and from your management staff to do some really great visual work but then in that kind of process of trying to do the new cool thing, accessibility, like you said, often it's left out. You know, we installed a color blind chrome strength extension, run that real quick and we're like OK, you know, I've never in my time actually gone out and tested that, like went to an actual like people who have possible impairments and try to say, hey, like, look at my work and tell me, do you understand what you're looking at? You know, none of that has been done. And that's I think the hard thing. Especially in a lot of newsrooms we have deadlines and other things that we're trying to keep up with that this is just such a bottom thing for us which is unfortunate because our job is to educate people and help them learn about the world around them and if we just assume a whole population doesn't have to, that's really problematic. - -Although there was—I work at a museum, not a news organization, there was a story we got where a mother brought her Down syndrome to a museum and he gravitated towards an iPad and it made his visit possible, so we don't do much with screen accessibility, but we're not leaving it all on the floor. - -Is anyone from an organization that has kind of more formal kind of guideline for this? That has it within their workflow when projects come up? - -Not anymore, but I worked at the U.S. Department of energy. But it was so funny about it, was that like we had accessibility guidelines but really it was what we've already discussed. You know, you run it include the color blindness checker, you you put some priority rules in your HTML tags and you say we're accessible and there's no verification that people could actually interact with this thing you were creating who had a variety of disabilities, so you know, there was a stringent requirement, but it was in name only, and that was pretty disappointing. - -Does anyone work at an organization that has a screen reader that they can test their stuff with? - -So I used to work for -- - -For the stenographer, can people be introducing themselves and—continue, sort of... - -Tchad Blair, I'm from DC working for the American Chemical Society. I used to work for the EPA as a contractor, so we had a lot of checkpoints that we would go through but we really didn't have anybody that tested. We did have a screen reader, we put it through, it worked, but you know, that was it. We never really got much feedback on whether stuff was working or not. - -I work at an organization where we have interns and I have to teach young people, you know, basically HTML, right? And often they ask me what the ALT attribute is and what's interesting to me is the fact that it's optional, right? Without it it works, with it works, so I catch them sometimes not putting it, I catch myself not putting it. I try to make sure they actually put it, but I think what's interesting to me is accessibility do you care about it is a complete option, especially when it comes down to the code itself. You know? - -That's very true. I think it's interesting, you said it was the US -- - -You said Department of Energy. - -EPA. - -And are the kind of—are the departments different in that situation? Like there are some in those situations is an ALT tag optional? - -Well, in my experience, so working for the EPA, it was a requirement. But the metrics for determining that requirement weren't really that stringent. It was like oh, is it accessible? Yeah, yeah, but you know, it was a few years ago, but still. - -Yeah, there's an accessibility officer who kind of gave it the code a once over and made sure you had all tags and that was kind of it. - >> - -So we kind of drifted into all three of the questions at the same time, but you know, I think that to kind of pitch it to the next one to some degree like what, you know, you know, what do you feel—and this is an open-ended question to everybody kind of feel like your organization is doing well in these regards, is I've been hoping it's not "Not much" but -- - ->>My current organization, that the first step is having a plan to put it in place. So that's where we're at now. Beyond that, I don't know. - -One thing I've tried to do is just try to educate myself. Like things like REL roles, I put them in but I didn't know what it was or why it mattered or who used it so I actually tried to learn a little bit and I think that's an easy first step a lot of people could do is just educator self to see what these roles do, and an interactive project that I recently finished, I just had discovered a tab indexes, so being able to navigate part parts of the interactive with the tab key, right? And that actually really changed what I thought about layout. If someone was browsing this completely from the keyboard instead of using a mouse and clicking, what kind of adjustments would you make and that really blew my mind. By reading some literature and actually just playing around it really changed how I kind of wanted to approach my next projects. So that's something I've tried to personally do, but the organization that I'm in, both the one I was at and now the one I'm at now, there's no standard for doing that you know, again, kind of the standard does give to me is do cool stuff and how you achieve that is on you, but accessibility has been kind of secondary. Well, it's absolutely secondary. - >> - -I have a different sort of question that goes along with all of this, and that's at your organizations, you know, how easy is it really to kind of manage up with this stuff, to be able to go to management and say this is more than a check box that we do at the very end? You know, how did we include this more as a fundamental part of the workload from you 0 know conceptualization through design, through all of that? Are your organizations good at doing that for other things, just not this, or sort of kind of everything? - >> - -I think one approach to this is the fact that accessibility the guidelines it's almost due diligence. A lot of these things are going through dotting your Is and crossing your Ts, so I think you can start to have an implementation where you just establish those things as part of the requirements. It's really just to deal with this you do this, this, this and that, a lot of times things get forgotten or skipped because it was just, you know, you just don't do them. But -- - -I guess what I'm wondering is how to make it also more of a management priority so that if there are other developers, people who get hired after you, that it stays you know, sort of a legacy part of the organization. - -Yeah, go ahead. - -Management why should they care and so the why should they care part is if depending on the industry you are in, there are legal requirements, you know, that require closed captioning, European standards are if any of your is something subject to the European Union, anything that involves you can get sued if you don't do this tends to make management listen. And then from the basis of how to make this as easy as possible, it's also when people here accessibility, they think this is going to be expensive, this is going to be hard and so you need to establish what is the baseline that we can start doing, who's going to be responsible for that and how you build that into different kinds of workloads, and we started in our organization the accessibility by—[inaudible] that was like a very easy thing for us, to tell people hey, this is why we're doing it, and now we have people asking us, like hey, we want to do the same and how do we make it accessible? Like they no longer feel it's going to be too hard. Because we've made it lots of different levels, we make all tags a natural part of the image. And so if you are in a position where you're a developer, think about how you structure your tools to incorporate accessibility rather than something that has to be added on after. - -I have something along with that, I work for a video organization, and we had never thought about doing video descriptive services until a funder's daughter was blind. And when we went to the web developers, we pay them as a fair contractor and so in their budget they included a line item for a specific area of the content management system that would be responsible for all this and aggregating it and all these kinds of things, so going forward after that project they always had that in the budget so it's always there. So everyone we work with in our organization we say do you want this because we've done it before. - -Yeah. Could the three of you identify yourselves, sorry? I I'm doing a poor job of reminding. - -My name is Stacy, BuzzFeed news. - -Sanders, I'm an independents journalist. - -And yeah, I think that that is kind of is you're all kind of touching on there's certainly kind of a threshold of, you know, you're kind of speaking to the video transcriptions like there's almost these triggers that kind of come across that suddenly make that a thing that's kind of kept in mind for kind of future projects. I think to your point, at least again we're at the Tribune we're trying to really catch up on this, as well, and one of the things that we've been trying and I cannot take credit for this, this is definitely a lot of things that we've been trying. I've picked up from an article, it was in a list apart by Ann Gibson, that kind of working these scenarios into when your projects would lend themselves to kind of having user stories or personas, they kind of work those kind of things in there, so we're doing it on a very basic level but kind of trying to keep those things as variables that play a role in those user stories, so it's not just this person wants to do this, it's this person wants to do this, and they, you know, they have trouble with bright scripts or something that, you know, things that kind of intertwine that mindfulness through that process to kind of try to make it be less of a as you were kind of making a point of an oh, by the way, did we do this? And so far it's OK, but it's been kind of our swing at trying to kind of keep that going. - -I have a question for everyone is like how do you see accessibility faring in a world where, you know, journalism is working more and more towards interactive. A lot of it is challenging I mean if you're color blind and you have to see a data visualization, I mean turning that into something that even a screen reader could read, where do you see it going moving forward? Especially since I don't think interactives are going to stop any time soon. - -Along those things a thing that I struggle with—David Yanofsky—is, you know, how before you even get to the interactives, how do you get to the things that are just inherently visual? How do you—how do you write a sentence in han article that is maybe in something of a BuzzFeed style where I can't believe this has happened and you put a GIF and you have to put the ALT tag of animation I can't believe this happened face. I mean it's—is this me—as someone who doesn't have these impairments I find it very hard at times to understand how to best describe the things for people -- - -But I think that's an issue with diversity in the world we live in. Like we don't have, you know, like my job, even where we're very diverse like you know, in terms of like gender identity and like racially interestingly enough, we don't have anyone who's like either deaf or blind or might have some sort of impairments that could help us in that they could probably do a lot of the jobs that we do, right? So then that comes from, I think that question comes back around to like a core problem of how do we integrate, you know, people who may have some of the impairments and users, right? - -I think—Justin. One thing that changed me is this is a safe place. I used to play online games, old school I guess but I actually found out I made a lot of friends through that and a lot of blind people can play text-based games but you can't see World of Warcraft or anything like that. And I asked them like hey, can you check on my site and they'd say sure and I could ask them, is this helpful or this or this, and just getting some user feedback and I know we have users out there who have accessibility problems and so taking the time to find those users and establish a relationship and they could probably help signal to you like yeah, these ALT tags in this single context might be important. Or this is ha good way to craft those ALT tag. One thing I never thought about about using colors. This is a blue this, I don't know what the concept of blue is. They know it exists. And sometimes things we wouldn't even realize are—that are difficult so I think going to the user and finding some users that you could ask questions to and incorporate that feedback. - -Greg from the Washington Post, and I piggyback right on that. I mean I think that user testing is something we don't do enough of in the newsrooms. I think maybe it comes from the fact that we, you know, make a lot of decisions all day about what's, where to place this or you know, where to highlight that and so we do a lot of shooting from the hip and I think when it comes to, you know, when it comes to UX, there's a lot that you can learn from you know, talking to users, different users, people who have different sets of eyes than yours who can see things threw different perspectives, so you know, in thinking about that, this is a really important—a really important thing to also include when you're thinking about that, not just people who can, you know, see things from different—at different perspectives in the world, but also from different perspectives of experiencing your content. How does that work and how can you create something that works for the widest swath of people possible that you're able to communicate. How do you communicate your story that the maximum number of people in your audience can experience it and experience it well? - -And how do you build that into a system so that when you are working on tight deadlines that is still something that you do. It's as simple as you or one of your coworkers listening to the ALT tags after taking your glasses off. I would probably have a very different experience with a very different understanding especially knowing what I was supposed to get out of it, but it might just be running down the hall, grabbing somebody, saying sit down in front of this machine and take your glasses off and tell me how this works for you. - -One of the things that's interesting about this conversation one is I'm old enough to have been in a newsroom that were trying to transition to this to online. They were having exactly the same conversation, I don't know how it's possible to tell the story in less than 750 words. - -Like the New York Times for turning off the ability to see its home page internally. Like yes, these are things we should be doing, we should also be doing that for accessibility testing. That goes back to the fact that there aren't enough people in the newsrooms that care. so it's not even to the point that we've made this interactive, now what do we do for color blind people, it's now how are we specifying it and are we even aware that there are color palettes that you can use by default that are friendlier to people who are color blind. - -And just you know to kind of point out, too, a lot of these conversations we're having are still very kind of visually focused and so there's even you know taking these things into account, there's, you know, we're kind of basing it on an interactive experience that uses color, but there's audio in that slideshow. If there's, you know, if there's a specific interaction that's expected to, you know, progress through this process, is that something also that we're being mindful about? - -You know, that's funny, because I'm thinking about the design perspective. You know, when I build for a front end and I want to make sure it's accessible in all browsers and all devices I built for mobile first and I was thinking about that concept. And I think that could also be something, like you build for thinking whatever impairments, you build that first and then you work from there. You know, that's something that's one, entirely doable, because you'd have a skeleton for something that works for everybody and you can build up from there and have different versions or whatever, but again, it's not the same issue, but we did it for mobile, because mobiles now are everywhere, but you know, everyone still has a laptop, right, so you can—we also kind of think about it that way, as like a design thing, right? - -So I was thinking that same thing, that of the mobile we do something different. My problem I'm having now is I know like with mobile I can maybe I can close my eyes but we're' not going to explain every interactive to someone who's blind so I don't know how to find out what's the best way. Like you have your user base. I want to see interviews of people explaining that, what do they need, how can we reenact it, what should we focus on? I need more context and I need to talk to people or find out more. - -I have a hashtag, it's ALLY. People share a tons of resources on there. Make guidelines for sort of accessibility for dummies is the way I've seen some of these things phrased, just an introduction to the conversation. You're not going to solve every single case in every single story or every single interactive. But how could you serve your existing audience better. - -Could you repeat the hashtag? Oh, #ally? - -a-eleven-y. - -A11Y, yes. And I think this is kind of one of the things in journalism school that we concentrate on hard problems and easy problems and that's an easy. - -Thank you. - -And I think there is, you know, tock back to kind of the comment about building interactives, there's also ways to do this that sort of serve all your audiences, so I used to work at the Chicago Tribune and we redesigned our site, instead of having—we showed some graphs but one of the things that we added was sentences based on the data, so writing these little bits of sentence. Crime is up X amount since last month, and so that sort of an accessibility one and then somebody from our editorial board, a lady in her 70s came and said I would like to show my friends on church—there's another kind of different accessibility issue—but she said the damn thing won't print out properly. But it turned out that it was really easy to write a print style sheet especially because we've taken out some of the interactive elements and turn them to text, so once we did add a print style sheet we were able to add it to something. It didn't work in Internet Explorer still, because of the style sheet. So I don't know, there's ways to think about your interactives that aren't necessarily interactive that can broaden accessibility and serve your audience better generally. - -Is there a way to think about it that's, you know, like a news organization that does an important story about a non-English-speaking community, they might do a publish in that language, is there a way to start with how do we make this experience the best for someone with any sort of disability, has anyone seen anything that has been made, especially in the news context, especially for someone with an impairment, and then from there taken it to people without impairments? - -Next year in Jerusalem! - -I think that's a great question. I think that, you know, we've kind of touched on a couple of elements on it. But, you know, I think that in some capacities there is a kind of a due diligence kind of part to it, that, you know, we know, in some newsrooms we need to test this on an Android phone because everyone has an iPhone in our office. And we never look at that. We know we should look if it works on an iPad. And you know, I think extension of that, you know, could be, you know, I think a lot of, our approaches are—and then again giving this kind of credit to Ann Gibson in her article, because she kind of mentioned this, as well, you know, approaching these things from a kind of input-output kind of approach, so kind of like what you were saying about the—you know, you happened to turn a tab around, you were essentially testing the keyboard friendliness of your site. And kind of thinking of these things in terms of, you know, what are the different ways that someone can interact with this? What are the different ways that someone can get feedback from this, and how can we serve all those needs? - -I have a question. Does anyone know? Can you specify like, you know how like you can do browser snipping, so if someone goes to your site on IE8 you're like whoa, download Chrome, please? Is there a way that if you know someone is coming to the site on a screen reader, is there a way to do that? Because I'd love to say hey, I don't know how to design for accessibility, contact me. - -I mean don't make them do work for you. - -I mean some way to know your audience. We shouldn't expect them to come to us, you're right, and do the hard stuff for us, but I'm curious about some way to say, hey, at least we're trying. - -That's an interesting challenge. I know in my situation, I've had that conversation and like, well, are people, are people who are blind even looking at this? And like, well, we may not be making it for them, so probably not. Totally believable that they're not coming to it, because it's not suited there. - -To Aaron's point, so it is possible to visually hide it, but still have the screen reader read it. I've seen that done. - -Alan WSE. Yeah, I think it's a visibility property CSS thing you can do it with. I'm curious, is there numbers or Analytics as far as like does Google Analytics have screen reader? How many people are seeing my site through these impairments, how many potential people are going to come to my site with these impairments, and then can I make that tradeoff of how much to invest? You know because at some point we say we don't want to support this browser, IE (clears throat). - -But we give some amount of effort to make sure they have the experience that may not be perfect, right, but will hopefully let them get some information from it, so I don't think it's like a binary thing, like a person that is blind can totally read this article. You know, it may be that somewhere along the spectrum and having numbers to be able to make those decisions would be awesome. - -I think Analytics brings up an interesting point, too, because you can measure, you know, behavior and where they came from, but you can't measure their experience without their direct feedback in some way, so how do you do that without, you know, being intrusive and having them sort of do too much? How do you avoid asking them too much and where in the process do you try to do that to account for, you know, that future experience if you want to be clean and work for everybody? - - -Lauren Liberty from the New York times. I think we haven't done user testing with the blind community for a long time but the last time that we did it, we had a general site survey up on our site, and one of the questions was something along the lines is do you identify as a person who has visual impairment and then we asked for visual acuity and we did one-on-one interviews with them to talk about their experience, so. - -Russ Gossett, NPR and we're testing a player, an audio player, and we grabbed a guy, a very general screener, didn't even ask that question, do you have any impairments. He came in, we gave 15 minutes to each participant. Certain amount of time, it was a very simple test, but he spent about 10 minutes trying to get his browser right, to the right level of zoom, to the right level of this, and we're like no, no, we're not testing that, we're testing that player and he's like no, but this is what I do at home. And it wasn't until the end of the interview that we asked do you have any impairments and he was yes, I actually do, I'm quite blind. That's why you know, he was wearing thick glasses, we couldn't really tell. But asking a bit more about who you're actually testing. But maybe this guy wouldn't identify himself as an accessibility reader. - -Yeah, and I think that that is kind of what you brought up, I think it is an interesting, you know, you know, there's kind of different approaches there in terms of, you know, kind of as a question to kind of pose, like should there be a threshold of a visitor, in a you know, makes it so that that is something that needs to be accounted for, or is that, you know, or is that kind of, you know, running the risk of, you know, like do we want people in a position where they kind of are proving their, you know, access to your content? - -Yeah, I wonder, too, though, I mean there's like my name is Tom Meele from MinnPost. There's this principle of universal designs. After the ADA they started putting more ramps in buildings and that helps people with wheelchairs but it also helps people with handcarts and bikes and --. Is there a sense that building sites with accessibility as kind of a base standard makes you design better? - -Yes, basically. - -Yeah, so like cleaner, and so I don't know. So that's part of the selling it to management, right? Are you just building better? Does it force you to not sort of take shortcuts, I guess, with design? - -I mean we're talking about people, right? We're not talking about browsers or—these are people who, and if we're in journalism we're supposed to be serving people, however like highfalutin' you want to get. So when we're saying things like tough luck people with X that is a conscious or an unconscious decision that you're making so I think at a minimum level we have to think about either a random sampling of there are publicly available stats in general you are serving this community, this percentage of X community is going to be visually impaired or deaf and if you are deciding not to do anything about that you're deciding not to serve that part of the community and we can't sugar coat it. Either we're doing it or not. - -One point is I think to find users that have some of these use ability issues. I was at a conference last week forage isle and one person said you will never prioritize your backlog the same once you meet your user in the eye. And once you talk with someone and experience them trying to use your website and navigate with a screen reader or something like that, that will change you and you'll say OK, you'll want to say OK, I know I can't solve every problem under the sun but I think it would mean a lot to users where they can tell that they can tell that they put thought into the usability to the site and it may not be a hundred percent but it makes a big difference. You'll get other benefits, as well, from it, and that's where I think you know, finding users, because they're definitely out there, they're not one in a billion or you know, they're like one in 2,000 and if you have, I'm sure most of us have websites that we all, I'm confident we all have users who have these issues, and so it's just keeping them you know, aware of their experience and accommodating for that. - -I have a question sort of another accessibility category, do we consider really slow data connection as part of accessibility like on a phone because that's more than anything else we hear performance is part of that. Just wondering, add it to my list. - -Facebook considers it that. - -I no Facebook, they do it on old blackberry phones, web browsers? - -I was at a conference a year and a half ago or something, and one Facebook was talking about. They made some conscious decisions to make the top of their page load more slowly so that people with slow browsers could see more sooner. If it's something that all has to live on one screen that's different anything for scrolling, they reprioritized even at a time they were trying to increase page load across all their products, to serve the first pixels faster even if it meant page load time went up. - -Did they even, recently I read that they have an alternative page or something for if you're in certain connection area, like they load an entire different version of Facebook, which is lighter, basically and lighter to load for everyone to have access to it. - -I think that came out of the same project. - -There was a really interesting YouTube blog post where they made their site faster and they found their numbers skyrocketed from page load times because so many people could now get to the site from countries where internet access was almost nonexistent, but they lowered the barrier so so many people could get to the site and the page load time went from 2 seconds to 8 seconds people were getting to it from Kenya. - -Is this a problem that specifically page load times for people with very slow connections, it's kind of under the assumption that all of these people speak English? Like when it's Facebook or it's YouTube, these are platforms that are designed for people that speak many languages, I think most people in this room work for English-language publications. - -So you're essentially discriminating against anybody like one of those -- - -I'm not saying that, but I'm saying there's a certain—the primary user of many of our sites is not as disadvantaged as I think this conversation has just turned towards. - -I was going to mention that. Sorry. - -And which also brings up the point of like this does come a threshold where you need to decide where you don't support things. You don't support IE6, right? You don't support people who don't speak English, I mean—and I don't know where that line is. - -Well, there's a difference between, you know, not supporting it, and accommodate it go in some way, you know. You know, if you're getting those first pixels will served faster but page load time is longer you're doing something that affects all of your users potentially in a positive way but you're happening to also by doing that accommodate these people who, you know, have dialup or just really slow data connections. - -I think it's important, too, and kind of goes to the question that you brought up, Sarah, that you know, and we had brought up earlier about these are all people. And you know, like for example the kind of like internet speed, that's a metric that—that's a technical metric. That's not a metric that's, you know,—it's tied to the individual, but it's not tied to you know, a you know, up to the spectrum of their ability to access something. Or to understand or to see or hear something. So you know, I think that one, you know, pass we kind of with almost three minutes left here, kind of an encouragement to kind of think about as we take some of this stuff back to our newsrooms is really kind of thinking about, you know, again, kind of this statement of always kind of remember that these are people that, you know, are wanting to interact with what you're doing and what you're creating, and, you know, that, if we're—we're willing to kind of take that approach of, oh, we're going to slow handle the slow internet connection or we're going to handle the Android tablet, but you know, kind of also be mindful of you know, handling the, you know, the person that can only use their keyboard, and handling the person that can only consume a site with their computer speaking it to them. Because you know, I have no stats to cite, but I think that it would be interesting to kind of find out, that, you know, the of people that fall in some of those categories may be higher than these people who own Apple watches, for example, so that's a very easy one to pick, but so thank you, everyone. I think this was a good kind of conversation. So appreciate it. - -[session ended] +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/webaccessibility/index.html +--- + +# Taking Web Accessibility Beyond Assumptions + +### Session Facilitator(s): Ryan Murphy + +### Day & Time: Thursday, 3-4pm + +### Room: Thomas Swain + +Hello, everyone, thank you for coming to our little chat today. My name is Ryan Murphy, I'm a developer at the Texas Tribune, and I originally pitched this because it's something that—accessibility—that is increasingly become kind of a bigger focus for me personally. I will point out that I am very new to this myself, and so it's important, you know, as all of the SRCCON kind of discussions that we're having, that this is a conversation. And, you know, I think that the goal for this is to kind of just encourage more mindfulness in what we're doing, and, you know, be sure that, you know we have something that we can kind of take away from our conversation to take back to our newsrooms and to the work that we're doing. + +So you know, for me, I've—this past weekend, I actually spent—went home for father's day, which is also my dad's birthday and so I got the one-two there of a father just asking for things, and it wasn't like "it's my birthday," but it's like, oh, you know, tomorrow is father's day. But it wasn't the kickoff for this, but looking at as my father gets older, kind of watching his interactions with devices and things that he's using. One of the things that I noticed is kind of he is a new iPhone user, and just kind of noticing how he had ramped up the zoom like everything was super big on it, and it was kind of an eye-opening kind of moment, because I had always thought of my dad is he had glasses, but it had never registered as kind of a thing, and I never realized. I asked, "What is it like using your phone like that?" + +But it was surprising the number of, like, when people sent him links, he had to walk away because they weren't really made for him to interact with them in that way, and things that were proportionally zoomed, or not proportionally zoomed that led to a page or a kind of experience that was entirely different than what those of you who are creating those kind of experiences expected someone to interact with. + +And you know, I imagine, you know, a lot of us have—probably kind of know of people or, you know, have family members that are kind of in their own varying ways in these kind of worlds, you know, of trying to kind of work with, or kind of trying to find a way to make a lot of the things that they interact with work for them. + +So this kind of set, you know, as we're doing for all of these ground rules, we do want this to be a safe space. Accessibility is—by no means are we going to end this conversation with we've got it all figured out. It's tough, and you know, we often end up in situations where we're having the kind of, you know, remind ourselves that these are the things that we need to consider, all of the different elements of understanding how people consume the work that we're producing. And definitely as we're going through this conversation, please, any professional and personal experiences that you would like to bring up, please bring them forward, you know, learning more—the more we learn about kind of what we experienced and kind of singular instances are kind of informing in helping other people think about things in a different way. + +So before we kind of pivot into that sort of stuff, I did want to kind of at least do a kind of general overview of kind of the different kind of categories of accessibility. I will stress, by no means are these the only ones, or, you know, none can go beyond having to fit in these four categories. Again, just kind of setting the tone here, and we definitely can branch out from there as we go. + +So another kind of side part of this was that, you know, I think a common, and you see it, I think a lot on the web itself, but at least I know in our organization, it is a challenge when we're trying to kind of be more mindful of accessibility, is that oftentimes it becomes a "oh, well, did you check that for color blindness?" or, "oh, is this screenreader friendly?" Which a lot of times we say that without even fully understanding what that means, but it's kind of like oh, we finished the project and did we label some things, and it's probably good to go. + +And I would think one of the things we would kind of bring out with this as well is broadening that understanding of different kind of capacities and abilities and spectrum of abilities that would go into talking about accessibility. So with visual there's the ones that we think of, the nonsighted users, color blindness, but this also includes people who have low vision or obstructed vision like cataracts. Near- and farsightedness, so their own versions of visual, those of us that wear glasses or contacts, those fall in those categories, as well. Things like depth perception, which, you know, can often come up in a lot of our fascination with kind of adding parallax loading and depth of experiences, these are things that people who struggle with depth perception can sometimes have challenges with. + +Auditory. There's, you know, deafness, being tone deaf, being just kind of generally hard of hearing. There's all kind of conditional situations, where I think that it's kind of an interesting element where people being in situations where they just can't listen to something. Where they don't have headphones, you know, there are these elements to it that play a role that aren't necessarily disability-based, but still are factors of being mindful when you're designing an experience that you want people to have in various situations. + +Motor. So these are—these are some examples here of cerebral palsy, Parkinson's disease, these are situations that would make our typical expectation of how someone would interact with a site or with our experience that may not be as straightforward as we're assuming, so this includes that, you know, some individuals may be navigating solely with keyboard because that's the easiest way to navigate, or they special kind of just like keyboard devices that are meant for kind of assisting in these situations. And then there's cognitive. I mean this includes things such as autism, dyslexia, people who have survived strokes and are kind of getting back into kind of the swing of things. These are some of the kind of approaches that, you know, things to keep in mind in terms of when you're labeling things left and right, and when you are—you know, have text that's very kind of tightly woven, that sometimes there's the comprehensive level that has to be kind of accounted for. + +So those of you that hopefully you got to see with the schedule listing where hopefully I was prompting people to kind of bring their, if they had some, kind of accessibility guidelines for their organizations, and kind of use those to springboard kind of talk about how we are approaching those sort of things. So, you know, kind of start with that very first one. You know, how do we—how your organization defines accessibility. + +I can speak to an organization that doesn't dozen a great job of defining that, where we're just sort of catching up with being behind and doing the not necessarily doing more important things, but not doing a good job with accessibility. + +What do you think has played a role in that being a challenge? + +Sort of, underpowered and still depending on things that were built when there wasn't adequate developer positions to do a good job, and depending on things that are old and accessibility wasn't necessarily a benchmark five years the way it is today. + +Yeah. + +I think one thing that I've struggled with in the organizations I've been in has been, you want, you know, especially depending on who—you know, the higher-ups you have in your—sorry in your news organization, they want to see basically do all these amazing things. They want maps, they want interactive things, they want hover states and you are pressured both on deadline and from your management staff to do some really great visual work but then in that kind of process of trying to do the new cool thing, accessibility, like you said, often it's left out. You know, we installed a color blind chrome strength extension, run that real quick and we're like OK, you know, I've never in my time actually gone out and tested that, like went to an actual like people who have possible impairments and try to say, hey, like, look at my work and tell me, do you understand what you're looking at? You know, none of that has been done. And that's I think the hard thing. Especially in a lot of newsrooms we have deadlines and other things that we're trying to keep up with that this is just such a bottom thing for us which is unfortunate because our job is to educate people and help them learn about the world around them and if we just assume a whole population doesn't have to, that's really problematic. + +Although there was—I work at a museum, not a news organization, there was a story we got where a mother brought her Down syndrome to a museum and he gravitated towards an iPad and it made his visit possible, so we don't do much with screen accessibility, but we're not leaving it all on the floor. + +Is anyone from an organization that has kind of more formal kind of guideline for this? That has it within their workflow when projects come up? + +Not anymore, but I worked at the U.S. Department of energy. But it was so funny about it, was that like we had accessibility guidelines but really it was what we've already discussed. You know, you run it include the color blindness checker, you you put some priority rules in your HTML tags and you say we're accessible and there's no verification that people could actually interact with this thing you were creating who had a variety of disabilities, so you know, there was a stringent requirement, but it was in name only, and that was pretty disappointing. + +Does anyone work at an organization that has a screen reader that they can test their stuff with? + +So I used to work for -- + +For the stenographer, can people be introducing themselves and—continue, sort of... + +Tchad Blair, I'm from DC working for the American Chemical Society. I used to work for the EPA as a contractor, so we had a lot of checkpoints that we would go through but we really didn't have anybody that tested. We did have a screen reader, we put it through, it worked, but you know, that was it. We never really got much feedback on whether stuff was working or not. + +I work at an organization where we have interns and I have to teach young people, you know, basically HTML, right? And often they ask me what the ALT attribute is and what's interesting to me is the fact that it's optional, right? Without it it works, with it works, so I catch them sometimes not putting it, I catch myself not putting it. I try to make sure they actually put it, but I think what's interesting to me is accessibility do you care about it is a complete option, especially when it comes down to the code itself. You know? + +That's very true. I think it's interesting, you said it was the US -- + +You said Department of Energy. + +EPA. + +And are the kind of—are the departments different in that situation? Like there are some in those situations is an ALT tag optional? + +Well, in my experience, so working for the EPA, it was a requirement. But the metrics for determining that requirement weren't really that stringent. It was like oh, is it accessible? Yeah, yeah, but you know, it was a few years ago, but still. + +Yeah, there's an accessibility officer who kind of gave it the code a once over and made sure you had all tags and that was kind of it. + +> > + +So we kind of drifted into all three of the questions at the same time, but you know, I think that to kind of pitch it to the next one to some degree like what, you know, you know, what do you feel—and this is an open-ended question to everybody kind of feel like your organization is doing well in these regards, is I've been hoping it's not "Not much" but -- + +> > My current organization, that the first step is having a plan to put it in place. So that's where we're at now. Beyond that, I don't know. + +One thing I've tried to do is just try to educate myself. Like things like REL roles, I put them in but I didn't know what it was or why it mattered or who used it so I actually tried to learn a little bit and I think that's an easy first step a lot of people could do is just educator self to see what these roles do, and an interactive project that I recently finished, I just had discovered a tab indexes, so being able to navigate part parts of the interactive with the tab key, right? And that actually really changed what I thought about layout. If someone was browsing this completely from the keyboard instead of using a mouse and clicking, what kind of adjustments would you make and that really blew my mind. By reading some literature and actually just playing around it really changed how I kind of wanted to approach my next projects. So that's something I've tried to personally do, but the organization that I'm in, both the one I was at and now the one I'm at now, there's no standard for doing that you know, again, kind of the standard does give to me is do cool stuff and how you achieve that is on you, but accessibility has been kind of secondary. Well, it's absolutely secondary. + +> > + +I have a different sort of question that goes along with all of this, and that's at your organizations, you know, how easy is it really to kind of manage up with this stuff, to be able to go to management and say this is more than a check box that we do at the very end? You know, how did we include this more as a fundamental part of the workload from you 0 know conceptualization through design, through all of that? Are your organizations good at doing that for other things, just not this, or sort of kind of everything? + +> > + +I think one approach to this is the fact that accessibility the guidelines it's almost due diligence. A lot of these things are going through dotting your Is and crossing your Ts, so I think you can start to have an implementation where you just establish those things as part of the requirements. It's really just to deal with this you do this, this, this and that, a lot of times things get forgotten or skipped because it was just, you know, you just don't do them. But -- + +I guess what I'm wondering is how to make it also more of a management priority so that if there are other developers, people who get hired after you, that it stays you know, sort of a legacy part of the organization. + +Yeah, go ahead. + +Management why should they care and so the why should they care part is if depending on the industry you are in, there are legal requirements, you know, that require closed captioning, European standards are if any of your is something subject to the European Union, anything that involves you can get sued if you don't do this tends to make management listen. And then from the basis of how to make this as easy as possible, it's also when people here accessibility, they think this is going to be expensive, this is going to be hard and so you need to establish what is the baseline that we can start doing, who's going to be responsible for that and how you build that into different kinds of workloads, and we started in our organization the accessibility by—[inaudible] that was like a very easy thing for us, to tell people hey, this is why we're doing it, and now we have people asking us, like hey, we want to do the same and how do we make it accessible? Like they no longer feel it's going to be too hard. Because we've made it lots of different levels, we make all tags a natural part of the image. And so if you are in a position where you're a developer, think about how you structure your tools to incorporate accessibility rather than something that has to be added on after. + +I have something along with that, I work for a video organization, and we had never thought about doing video descriptive services until a funder's daughter was blind. And when we went to the web developers, we pay them as a fair contractor and so in their budget they included a line item for a specific area of the content management system that would be responsible for all this and aggregating it and all these kinds of things, so going forward after that project they always had that in the budget so it's always there. So everyone we work with in our organization we say do you want this because we've done it before. + +Yeah. Could the three of you identify yourselves, sorry? I I'm doing a poor job of reminding. + +My name is Stacy, BuzzFeed news. + +Sanders, I'm an independents journalist. + +And yeah, I think that that is kind of is you're all kind of touching on there's certainly kind of a threshold of, you know, you're kind of speaking to the video transcriptions like there's almost these triggers that kind of come across that suddenly make that a thing that's kind of kept in mind for kind of future projects. I think to your point, at least again we're at the Tribune we're trying to really catch up on this, as well, and one of the things that we've been trying and I cannot take credit for this, this is definitely a lot of things that we've been trying. I've picked up from an article, it was in a list apart by Ann Gibson, that kind of working these scenarios into when your projects would lend themselves to kind of having user stories or personas, they kind of work those kind of things in there, so we're doing it on a very basic level but kind of trying to keep those things as variables that play a role in those user stories, so it's not just this person wants to do this, it's this person wants to do this, and they, you know, they have trouble with bright scripts or something that, you know, things that kind of intertwine that mindfulness through that process to kind of try to make it be less of a as you were kind of making a point of an oh, by the way, did we do this? And so far it's OK, but it's been kind of our swing at trying to kind of keep that going. + +I have a question for everyone is like how do you see accessibility faring in a world where, you know, journalism is working more and more towards interactive. A lot of it is challenging I mean if you're color blind and you have to see a data visualization, I mean turning that into something that even a screen reader could read, where do you see it going moving forward? Especially since I don't think interactives are going to stop any time soon. + +Along those things a thing that I struggle with—David Yanofsky—is, you know, how before you even get to the interactives, how do you get to the things that are just inherently visual? How do you—how do you write a sentence in han article that is maybe in something of a BuzzFeed style where I can't believe this has happened and you put a GIF and you have to put the ALT tag of animation I can't believe this happened face. I mean it's—is this me—as someone who doesn't have these impairments I find it very hard at times to understand how to best describe the things for people -- + +But I think that's an issue with diversity in the world we live in. Like we don't have, you know, like my job, even where we're very diverse like you know, in terms of like gender identity and like racially interestingly enough, we don't have anyone who's like either deaf or blind or might have some sort of impairments that could help us in that they could probably do a lot of the jobs that we do, right? So then that comes from, I think that question comes back around to like a core problem of how do we integrate, you know, people who may have some of the impairments and users, right? + +I think—Justin. One thing that changed me is this is a safe place. I used to play online games, old school I guess but I actually found out I made a lot of friends through that and a lot of blind people can play text-based games but you can't see World of Warcraft or anything like that. And I asked them like hey, can you check on my site and they'd say sure and I could ask them, is this helpful or this or this, and just getting some user feedback and I know we have users out there who have accessibility problems and so taking the time to find those users and establish a relationship and they could probably help signal to you like yeah, these ALT tags in this single context might be important. Or this is ha good way to craft those ALT tag. One thing I never thought about about using colors. This is a blue this, I don't know what the concept of blue is. They know it exists. And sometimes things we wouldn't even realize are—that are difficult so I think going to the user and finding some users that you could ask questions to and incorporate that feedback. + +Greg from the Washington Post, and I piggyback right on that. I mean I think that user testing is something we don't do enough of in the newsrooms. I think maybe it comes from the fact that we, you know, make a lot of decisions all day about what's, where to place this or you know, where to highlight that and so we do a lot of shooting from the hip and I think when it comes to, you know, when it comes to UX, there's a lot that you can learn from you know, talking to users, different users, people who have different sets of eyes than yours who can see things threw different perspectives, so you know, in thinking about that, this is a really important—a really important thing to also include when you're thinking about that, not just people who can, you know, see things from different—at different perspectives in the world, but also from different perspectives of experiencing your content. How does that work and how can you create something that works for the widest swath of people possible that you're able to communicate. How do you communicate your story that the maximum number of people in your audience can experience it and experience it well? + +And how do you build that into a system so that when you are working on tight deadlines that is still something that you do. It's as simple as you or one of your coworkers listening to the ALT tags after taking your glasses off. I would probably have a very different experience with a very different understanding especially knowing what I was supposed to get out of it, but it might just be running down the hall, grabbing somebody, saying sit down in front of this machine and take your glasses off and tell me how this works for you. + +One of the things that's interesting about this conversation one is I'm old enough to have been in a newsroom that were trying to transition to this to online. They were having exactly the same conversation, I don't know how it's possible to tell the story in less than 750 words. + +Like the New York Times for turning off the ability to see its home page internally. Like yes, these are things we should be doing, we should also be doing that for accessibility testing. That goes back to the fact that there aren't enough people in the newsrooms that care. so it's not even to the point that we've made this interactive, now what do we do for color blind people, it's now how are we specifying it and are we even aware that there are color palettes that you can use by default that are friendlier to people who are color blind. + +And just you know to kind of point out, too, a lot of these conversations we're having are still very kind of visually focused and so there's even you know taking these things into account, there's, you know, we're kind of basing it on an interactive experience that uses color, but there's audio in that slideshow. If there's, you know, if there's a specific interaction that's expected to, you know, progress through this process, is that something also that we're being mindful about? + +You know, that's funny, because I'm thinking about the design perspective. You know, when I build for a front end and I want to make sure it's accessible in all browsers and all devices I built for mobile first and I was thinking about that concept. And I think that could also be something, like you build for thinking whatever impairments, you build that first and then you work from there. You know, that's something that's one, entirely doable, because you'd have a skeleton for something that works for everybody and you can build up from there and have different versions or whatever, but again, it's not the same issue, but we did it for mobile, because mobiles now are everywhere, but you know, everyone still has a laptop, right, so you can—we also kind of think about it that way, as like a design thing, right? + +So I was thinking that same thing, that of the mobile we do something different. My problem I'm having now is I know like with mobile I can maybe I can close my eyes but we're' not going to explain every interactive to someone who's blind so I don't know how to find out what's the best way. Like you have your user base. I want to see interviews of people explaining that, what do they need, how can we reenact it, what should we focus on? I need more context and I need to talk to people or find out more. + +I have a hashtag, it's ALLY. People share a tons of resources on there. Make guidelines for sort of accessibility for dummies is the way I've seen some of these things phrased, just an introduction to the conversation. You're not going to solve every single case in every single story or every single interactive. But how could you serve your existing audience better. + +Could you repeat the hashtag? Oh, #ally? + +a-eleven-y. + +A11Y, yes. And I think this is kind of one of the things in journalism school that we concentrate on hard problems and easy problems and that's an easy. + +Thank you. + +And I think there is, you know, tock back to kind of the comment about building interactives, there's also ways to do this that sort of serve all your audiences, so I used to work at the Chicago Tribune and we redesigned our site, instead of having—we showed some graphs but one of the things that we added was sentences based on the data, so writing these little bits of sentence. Crime is up X amount since last month, and so that sort of an accessibility one and then somebody from our editorial board, a lady in her 70s came and said I would like to show my friends on church—there's another kind of different accessibility issue—but she said the damn thing won't print out properly. But it turned out that it was really easy to write a print style sheet especially because we've taken out some of the interactive elements and turn them to text, so once we did add a print style sheet we were able to add it to something. It didn't work in Internet Explorer still, because of the style sheet. So I don't know, there's ways to think about your interactives that aren't necessarily interactive that can broaden accessibility and serve your audience better generally. + +Is there a way to think about it that's, you know, like a news organization that does an important story about a non-English-speaking community, they might do a publish in that language, is there a way to start with how do we make this experience the best for someone with any sort of disability, has anyone seen anything that has been made, especially in the news context, especially for someone with an impairment, and then from there taken it to people without impairments? + +Next year in Jerusalem! + +I think that's a great question. I think that, you know, we've kind of touched on a couple of elements on it. But, you know, I think that in some capacities there is a kind of a due diligence kind of part to it, that, you know, we know, in some newsrooms we need to test this on an Android phone because everyone has an iPhone in our office. And we never look at that. We know we should look if it works on an iPad. And you know, I think extension of that, you know, could be, you know, I think a lot of, our approaches are—and then again giving this kind of credit to Ann Gibson in her article, because she kind of mentioned this, as well, you know, approaching these things from a kind of input-output kind of approach, so kind of like what you were saying about the—you know, you happened to turn a tab around, you were essentially testing the keyboard friendliness of your site. And kind of thinking of these things in terms of, you know, what are the different ways that someone can interact with this? What are the different ways that someone can get feedback from this, and how can we serve all those needs? + +I have a question. Does anyone know? Can you specify like, you know how like you can do browser snipping, so if someone goes to your site on IE8 you're like whoa, download Chrome, please? Is there a way that if you know someone is coming to the site on a screen reader, is there a way to do that? Because I'd love to say hey, I don't know how to design for accessibility, contact me. + +I mean don't make them do work for you. + +I mean some way to know your audience. We shouldn't expect them to come to us, you're right, and do the hard stuff for us, but I'm curious about some way to say, hey, at least we're trying. + +That's an interesting challenge. I know in my situation, I've had that conversation and like, well, are people, are people who are blind even looking at this? And like, well, we may not be making it for them, so probably not. Totally believable that they're not coming to it, because it's not suited there. + +To Aaron's point, so it is possible to visually hide it, but still have the screen reader read it. I've seen that done. + +Alan WSE. Yeah, I think it's a visibility property CSS thing you can do it with. I'm curious, is there numbers or Analytics as far as like does Google Analytics have screen reader? How many people are seeing my site through these impairments, how many potential people are going to come to my site with these impairments, and then can I make that tradeoff of how much to invest? You know because at some point we say we don't want to support this browser, IE (clears throat). + +But we give some amount of effort to make sure they have the experience that may not be perfect, right, but will hopefully let them get some information from it, so I don't think it's like a binary thing, like a person that is blind can totally read this article. You know, it may be that somewhere along the spectrum and having numbers to be able to make those decisions would be awesome. + +I think Analytics brings up an interesting point, too, because you can measure, you know, behavior and where they came from, but you can't measure their experience without their direct feedback in some way, so how do you do that without, you know, being intrusive and having them sort of do too much? How do you avoid asking them too much and where in the process do you try to do that to account for, you know, that future experience if you want to be clean and work for everybody? + +Lauren Liberty from the New York times. I think we haven't done user testing with the blind community for a long time but the last time that we did it, we had a general site survey up on our site, and one of the questions was something along the lines is do you identify as a person who has visual impairment and then we asked for visual acuity and we did one-on-one interviews with them to talk about their experience, so. + +Russ Gossett, NPR and we're testing a player, an audio player, and we grabbed a guy, a very general screener, didn't even ask that question, do you have any impairments. He came in, we gave 15 minutes to each participant. Certain amount of time, it was a very simple test, but he spent about 10 minutes trying to get his browser right, to the right level of zoom, to the right level of this, and we're like no, no, we're not testing that, we're testing that player and he's like no, but this is what I do at home. And it wasn't until the end of the interview that we asked do you have any impairments and he was yes, I actually do, I'm quite blind. That's why you know, he was wearing thick glasses, we couldn't really tell. But asking a bit more about who you're actually testing. But maybe this guy wouldn't identify himself as an accessibility reader. + +Yeah, and I think that that is kind of what you brought up, I think it is an interesting, you know, you know, there's kind of different approaches there in terms of, you know, kind of as a question to kind of pose, like should there be a threshold of a visitor, in a you know, makes it so that that is something that needs to be accounted for, or is that, you know, or is that kind of, you know, running the risk of, you know, like do we want people in a position where they kind of are proving their, you know, access to your content? + +Yeah, I wonder, too, though, I mean there's like my name is Tom Meele from MinnPost. There's this principle of universal designs. After the ADA they started putting more ramps in buildings and that helps people with wheelchairs but it also helps people with handcarts and bikes and --. Is there a sense that building sites with accessibility as kind of a base standard makes you design better? + +Yes, basically. + +Yeah, so like cleaner, and so I don't know. So that's part of the selling it to management, right? Are you just building better? Does it force you to not sort of take shortcuts, I guess, with design? + +I mean we're talking about people, right? We're not talking about browsers or—these are people who, and if we're in journalism we're supposed to be serving people, however like highfalutin' you want to get. So when we're saying things like tough luck people with X that is a conscious or an unconscious decision that you're making so I think at a minimum level we have to think about either a random sampling of there are publicly available stats in general you are serving this community, this percentage of X community is going to be visually impaired or deaf and if you are deciding not to do anything about that you're deciding not to serve that part of the community and we can't sugar coat it. Either we're doing it or not. + +One point is I think to find users that have some of these use ability issues. I was at a conference last week forage isle and one person said you will never prioritize your backlog the same once you meet your user in the eye. And once you talk with someone and experience them trying to use your website and navigate with a screen reader or something like that, that will change you and you'll say OK, you'll want to say OK, I know I can't solve every problem under the sun but I think it would mean a lot to users where they can tell that they can tell that they put thought into the usability to the site and it may not be a hundred percent but it makes a big difference. You'll get other benefits, as well, from it, and that's where I think you know, finding users, because they're definitely out there, they're not one in a billion or you know, they're like one in 2,000 and if you have, I'm sure most of us have websites that we all, I'm confident we all have users who have these issues, and so it's just keeping them you know, aware of their experience and accommodating for that. + +I have a question sort of another accessibility category, do we consider really slow data connection as part of accessibility like on a phone because that's more than anything else we hear performance is part of that. Just wondering, add it to my list. + +Facebook considers it that. + +I no Facebook, they do it on old blackberry phones, web browsers? + +I was at a conference a year and a half ago or something, and one Facebook was talking about. They made some conscious decisions to make the top of their page load more slowly so that people with slow browsers could see more sooner. If it's something that all has to live on one screen that's different anything for scrolling, they reprioritized even at a time they were trying to increase page load across all their products, to serve the first pixels faster even if it meant page load time went up. + +Did they even, recently I read that they have an alternative page or something for if you're in certain connection area, like they load an entire different version of Facebook, which is lighter, basically and lighter to load for everyone to have access to it. + +I think that came out of the same project. + +There was a really interesting YouTube blog post where they made their site faster and they found their numbers skyrocketed from page load times because so many people could now get to the site from countries where internet access was almost nonexistent, but they lowered the barrier so so many people could get to the site and the page load time went from 2 seconds to 8 seconds people were getting to it from Kenya. + +Is this a problem that specifically page load times for people with very slow connections, it's kind of under the assumption that all of these people speak English? Like when it's Facebook or it's YouTube, these are platforms that are designed for people that speak many languages, I think most people in this room work for English-language publications. + +So you're essentially discriminating against anybody like one of those -- + +I'm not saying that, but I'm saying there's a certain—the primary user of many of our sites is not as disadvantaged as I think this conversation has just turned towards. + +I was going to mention that. Sorry. + +And which also brings up the point of like this does come a threshold where you need to decide where you don't support things. You don't support IE6, right? You don't support people who don't speak English, I mean—and I don't know where that line is. + +Well, there's a difference between, you know, not supporting it, and accommodate it go in some way, you know. You know, if you're getting those first pixels will served faster but page load time is longer you're doing something that affects all of your users potentially in a positive way but you're happening to also by doing that accommodate these people who, you know, have dialup or just really slow data connections. + +I think it's important, too, and kind of goes to the question that you brought up, Sarah, that you know, and we had brought up earlier about these are all people. And you know, like for example the kind of like internet speed, that's a metric that—that's a technical metric. That's not a metric that's, you know,—it's tied to the individual, but it's not tied to you know, a you know, up to the spectrum of their ability to access something. Or to understand or to see or hear something. So you know, I think that one, you know, pass we kind of with almost three minutes left here, kind of an encouragement to kind of think about as we take some of this stuff back to our newsrooms is really kind of thinking about, you know, again, kind of this statement of always kind of remember that these are people that, you know, are wanting to interact with what you're doing and what you're creating, and, you know, that, if we're—we're willing to kind of take that approach of, oh, we're going to slow handle the slow internet connection or we're going to handle the Android tablet, but you know, kind of also be mindful of you know, handling the, you know, the person that can only use their keyboard, and handling the person that can only consume a site with their computer speaking it to them. Because you know, I have no stats to cite, but I think that it would be interesting to kind of find out, that, you know, the of people that fall in some of those categories may be higher than these people who own Apple watches, for example, so that's a very easy one to pick, but so thank you, everyone. I think this was a good kind of conversation. So appreciate it. + +[session ended] diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015WebArchiving.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015WebArchiving.md index c1b1b1a6..043a8eb8 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015WebArchiving.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015WebArchiving.md @@ -1,480 +1,333 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/webarchiving/index.html ---- - -# The Past of the Future, Today - -### Session Facilitator(s): Daniel McLaughlin - -### Day & Time: Friday, 4:30-5:30pm - -### Room: Minnesota - - -The session will begin in ten minutes. - - -The session will begin in five minutes. - - -The last session of the conference. Boy, you're full of Etherpad tricks that I had no idea about. - - -The Rastafarian button does that. - - -Oh, cool. That one? Cool. So it looks like it's about 4:30. And we have about... All of our chairs filled. So I'll kind of go ahead and start it up. We have a pile of chairs here, if more people are coming in, and need a place to sit. We have a couple more chairs over in a pile here. If you want them. Yeah. - - -Cool. So welcome to the past of the future today. If you want to be talking about archives, you've come to the right place. If you don't, I'm sorry, but we're talking about archives. So I'm Daniel McLaughlin, I work at the Boston Globe. I would say when it comes to archives, I'm an enthusiastic amateur. I see many people in here that I know probably know more than me about archives, so I'm looking forward to sharing knowledge. I kind of want to start out by showing some links that I found that are interesting. Maybe that are interesting, kind of orient the discussion towards my preferred hobby horses, but then we can kind of open it up, talk about ideas you had for ways of dealing with archives, archives of content that your organizations have, ways of orienting current work flows to support the archives of the future, challenges you've encountered in either of those, and cool things we can do. - -So when I think of media archives, my kind of main point of reference are microfilm and newspapers. Scanned, there's days. But sort of facsimile. Facsimile reproductions of newspapers, put out over a long period of time. And what's interesting to me about this kind of... This type of archive... Is that it captures a very complete picture of... You can imagine what it was like to read that newspaper as a full thing. You're not just looking at a particular article or a particular item. But you're seeing the full range of juxtapositions between different types of stories, the stories and the advertisements, and the whole thing. So, for instance, these are all linked from the Etherpad, which is Etherpad.Mozilla.org/SRCCON2015-archives. I don't know what the best way to keep that on the screen, but I'll come back to that. For instance, this is an article that is using the archives of the New York Times to sort of do this deep dive into advertising design in the '40s and the '50s, and it's not necessarily... You know, in this case, he's in fact, like, entirely blanked out the news. So it's sort of just looking at only the kind of auxiliary matter in the newspaper. But it's still—you know, this kind of primary resource. - -Here's an example from the Boston Globe. I like to call this snowfall circa 1960. This sort of just playing with editorial design here. That... This front page that's this sequence of things, and I don't think there's even... I don't think there's even a story attached to this on the front page. It jumps into the sports section. But just like... I don't know how you kind of capture this without looking at the whole page. But at the same time, you have this sense of seeing the whole thing, but you also see... You can also see how that abstraction starts to leak. How it starts to be... You get hints of the stuff that isn't being captured here. - -This whole kind of ecosystem of different editions, during the course of the day and the night, that is not archived. You only normally see, like, one final edition. This is the front page of the Boston Globe that came out on election day, 1918, and it has these notices on the front page. Notices that the Globe will not issue election extras, due to paper rationing. That they won't give you the returns by telephone, because between the war and the influenza epidemic, they don't have people to answer the phones. The past was a terrifying place. But these sorts of things that are... That were kind of so part of what—of how the newspapers interacted with their readers, how they provided the news, that only show up when they're temporarily disrupted. There's no archives of people calling for election results, which presumably they did around there. I don't even know how you would archive that. But it's sort of—we think like—oh, how do we archive our Twitter bots? Well, I mean... News organizations have always been providing stuff in these auxiliary special ways that have been challenging. - -And that sort of—this, I think, is a kind of good place to pivot, to think about... How can we archive what we're making now? We're all experimenting with different ways of telling stories. Different ways of using new technologies. And often what that means is kind of poking around the edges of how we define news and how we define media. And so that sort of presents a challenge, if your archival schema relies on a fairly stable notion of what you're archiving. - -This is not necessarily news or media, but this is a catalog record from the Getty Institution for a book that they have in their collection. The title of this book is: what is wrong with this book? You may notice the physical description here—one plastic sphere in paste board box. Note. Text stamped on white ball. Initials, copyright date, and edition size inscribed in pen and ink. Said to have been created by artists to expand catalogers' understanding of the potential range of artists' books. And I think that many of the things that we're producing are sort of like... They're sort of like an article in the same way that this is a book. And so the question is: How do we think about archiving these things? Do we think in... What is it that we're trying to preserve? Are we trying to preserve the experience of reading or interacting with this thing in the moment? Are we trying to preserve it like the information in a sort of presentation-agnostic format? - -This is the digital package that was produced for the Boston Globe's investigation of the Catholic church in 2002-2003, and this is—I'm actually not really sure how this is still as functional as it is. Because it's... Boston.com has undergone a lot of changes in that time, but somehow this still all pretty much works. Like, all the Flash works. There's a little bit of rust around the edges. But it's still... It's pretty much functional. But at the same time, it is very much a time capsule of a particular moment in web design, where we make it exactly this wide. We make everything in Flash. But... You know, is there a better way? Should we be trying for more than this? Is this about as good as we can get? And maybe it is. - -This is another publication in Boston, the Boston Phoenix, which was a long-running alternative weekly. When they ceased publication, it became... It's sort of a kind of day by day thing. Is the Phoenix's website up? Can people who wrote for it over the years get their stuff? In their robots.txt file, they've basically stopped everybody from scraping it, which means it doesn't show up in the Wayback Machine. It doesn't show up in any of these places, because they've set it up this way. And so these things that are... It's not even at this point really a technical problem. It's a kind of organizational and... How do we... There's this whole entire kind of cultural legacy that's just sort of disappearing here. This is, again, talking about—what does it mean to preserve something in context? - -This is a project that a couple of artists did to produce screenshots of archived Geocities pages, using a virtual machines that loaded kind of a contemporary web browser. So you're looking at these sites that presumably look quite a bit different in a modern web browser, but here they've been screenshotted, and so you see the combination of both the chrome of the browser, and the actual rendering engine, kind of... It's less interactive, but it's maybe perhaps more faithful to how these things existed in the first place. - -And finally, one example that I can't really show, because it involves listening to 24 hours of audio... This is probably one of my favorite artifacts on the internet. This is the complete broadcast day of CBS News from D Day, 1944. And it's essentially the sort of newspaper scan facsimiles, but an audio version. You get to see this whole event unfolding in realtime, and definitely if you have 24 hours, listen to it. So yeah. I don't know. I hope some of this discussion is getting you thinking about things that you've thought about before, or projects that you've worked on or wish you could do. So let's open it up. Does anybody want to talk archives? - - -We've got half a decade of Realmedia files. - - -Who are you and where are you from? - - -WGBR Boston, NPR station. So we have half a decade or so of Realmedia files that we can never do anything with again. And there are interviews and stuff in there, that we have looked for, but I don't think we have a way of... Because we can't play Realmedia anymore. - - -Are those the canonical version that you have? - - -Everything else is on tape, apparently. Do you have any idea how to start with that? Reel-to-reel. That's one thing about the archiving process. Audio becomes seemingly harder to deal with. Especially proprietary formats. Dead formats. - - -Yeah. - - -I guess this is the first set of questions about how to kind of bring archives into the present. I work at The Atlantic, and a lot of the archives are sitting in the middle of the office in bound books. And I would say everyone thinks they're cool and everyone on their first day is like... Whoa, the archives! They're right there! I'm going to spend so much time with them. And you never do. And one way we kind of endeavored to just make time for them is to have an archive party. And we just all hung out, and the staff all got pizza and beer, and went through the physical archives we had. Which was easier than setting up a microfiche machine. But that would be within the realm of plannable, if everyone has made time for it some night. And that wound up leading to a lot of interesting actual story ideas and ways to adopt the archives. Because I think like a lot of magazines, we can kind of reuse archival material if we find a way to frame it under a fair use context. And so that was a good way for us to kind of... That was a good social event for us to bring them into our kind of current day practice. - - -Yeah. The question of magazines, where a lot of... Especially The Atlantic. Where most of that stuff is longer pieces. It's harder to kind of dip in and be like—oh, here's a cool snippet. Like... Yeah. - - -It is, and it's also—I think it's also—the ads are awesome. Old ads—the Madison Project. Old ads are super cool, and in some ways revealed the decade's ideology way better than some long, ruminative piece does. So if you look at a book and you're like—oh, that's how they marketed Minivans in 1990s? Which is not as far back as it goes—that could be the shock of the old that could bring that all by itself. - - -Yeah. I work at Harvard Business Review, and we've done the same archive party type of thing with our... We've got, like, a library with a hundred years' worth of bound things, magazines, that is. But one thing we found a lot of success in, that I just had to Google to remember exactly how it worked out, but we find stuff in the archives that has kind of boomeranged back around in the cultural landscape. Like there was an episode of Mad Men that had some then-high-tech IBM computer, and it turned out an IBM engineer had written an article for HBR in 1969 about that computer, and I guess Mad Men is a very historically accurate show, such that... It dovetailed so perfectly with this story from this 1969... - - -How did you find that? - - -Fortunately, HBR is the kind of place that a lot of people have been around for a long time and just carry that kind of institutional knowledge. Which, I mean... There's really no real accounting for that. Like, the archive party thing surfaces a lot. Especially with graphics. Not so much ads for us, because we're more of an academic thing, but a lot of very old school data viz type of things. We can kind of find—like, those of us who are much newer—but some of the real old school editors, who have been there since the '70s, just have that archival knowledge that none of the rest of us can really fake. - - -When we had a hack day at the Globe and we did a project that basically took—we have, like, OCR of the scans for all of these old things, which is... It's not clean enough to read, but it's kind of good enough to search, and so I loaded it into Solar, which is a platform for, like, full text search and stuff, and one thing that Solar does is you can send it the text of a document, and it'll send back the ten most similar documents to that. So I made, like, a thing that would sit in the right rail of our article template and take the current—like, published today Boston Globe article you've read, find the ten most similar stories from our archives, and it's kind of amazing, how daily newspapers write the same story over and over again. Like, this was this January, where we've been getting a whole lot of snow. It turns out that Boston has had miserable winters before. And you can sort of quickly find like—here are all... Here's this same story, written in 1960, and that's what it looks like then. Here it is in 1930, and it's a kind of interesting entry point to, like, suddenly... You're reading a similar article, but in a kind of entirely different editorial context. - - -Yeah. I work at the Wall Street Journal, and we added a hack to our graphics server about a year ago, and in response to that, IT wiped our entire server and we lost years of projects. So we're trying to figure out how to resurrect those. And our strategy is to respond to requests. If a reader sees it, we'll put it back online, and if someone is not the creator of that and they're doing a portfolio piece, we'll privatize that. Because of the security concerns, it's such a time-consuming process, and our official directive has been to not resurrect them, because no one is going to see them and people don't go to them, but that doesn't seem like a great strategy. We don't have a good solution for doing that, aside from spending a lot of weekends trying to do it. I don't know if anybody has any suggestions or ideas. - - -Is it like... I guess we probably don't want to dive too deep into exactly how the server configuration... So they still exist, but they're not online? But you need to sort of, like, convert them? Like, change all of the URLs and stuff? - - -Yeah, we have a new security system, and when we submit the project, it'll flag a bunch of problems that we have to solve. A lot of the people left and we're not familiar with their code and it's all old. - - -Can you not just sand box that stuff? So it's totally isolated? Different server, different domain? Put them up somewhere so you don't... It's sitting basically in an emulator, so you don't have to do that? - - -Yeah, maybe. We did talk about that. I think there were concerns that it could be vulnerable again, because it's connected to databases. - - -If it's totally isolated, on a different network, different host, different domain name, whatever... Because there was a talk I saw a few years ago where they were talking about—how do you preserve software on floppy discs? You can get it off the floppy disc, but the machine doesn't exist. What if you're 20 years or 200 years in the future and you can't get 110 volts anymore to turn the machine on? Does that work? You're basically emulating things, and you might be nesting emulators. So you don't have that extreme a problem. That might be one way to look at it. It's just like... On a read-only... Have the thing boot off a CD-ROM so it couldn't be infected if it wanted. I have a question as well. So our archives aren't even that old. They're only 7 years old. And we imported all the ESPN stuff, and if you look at some of the articles you'll see broken images, and the reason for that is because images used to be hosted on this other domain called 538image.com, which is long gone, off the internet. The Wayback Machine has got most of this stuff, but there's some random site where you can pay them $15 and they'll do it for you. So someone ran it and archived it for me. And got a bunch of stuff. But getting those back into our current CMS in WordPress is... Slow. Because you have to figure out what the file name is, find it in my directory, upload it into WordPress, and edit that HTML and then pop it back in. So it's like... Write a really clever script or find some Mechanical Turk-like service. Right now it's on request. Where readers are like—hey, this page is missing. We'll dig it up and stick it back in for them. But I would love to get it on so it's as quick as possible. We just don't have a good way of doing that, without hours of people time, which is not realistic. - - -Speaking of people time, has anyone in the room ever done a crowd sourced project, where you get your readers to help you tag and categorize large sections of your archive? No? I'm the only one who's ever thought of this? That can't possibly be the case. - - -Readers? - - -Readers. I think the first major one was the Guardian. Probably six or seven years ago, now. Doing regular documents. But you could easily do that for archives, in creating the kind of metadata structure. - - -The New York Times did that with their Madison— - - -So Madison was their version. - - -And I know the New York Public Library has done a couple of really cool things with their building inspector, and their menus. Yes. The menus. Which is this sort of fascinating—I think people get excited because it's so weird. To sort of read these old menus. And it's also like this kind of highly structured data that suddenly becomes really a lot more interesting once you have it all in. Yeah. - - -Sorry for coming in late. So document labeling is, like, a huge thing. And topic analysis and things like that. And from a machine learning perspective, it just makes me tingle to think about what's at your fingertips. Just the monetizing data session. And all we talked about was getting government data from somewhere else and messing with it and then selling it to someone else. And I thought we were going to talk about what you're all sitting on, and how to, like, do good, find out amazing things with it. One problem that comes to mind is kind of like labeling. How we talk about something. So if I'm going to talk about a topic—so I've been talking about racism today. The words they use are going to be completely different than what they would have been 30 years ago. But what we have in the archives of various newspapers is a rolling history of the words that make up the topics, that are just like... Insanely valuable... From an academic standpoint, to just like in the world of machine learning, how we find out what we're talking about, we need labels, and those are valuable. So if anyone is like—I love like—oh, look, this is cool. The vintage ad, and seriously a lot—not to belittle it at all. But there's this whole other aspect to it, and if anyone thinks that's really interesting, like I do, let's talk. - - -Yeah. The New York Times has a kind of Google Engram sort of tool... I saw this in the Globe archive. - - -Space. - - -Space. Okay. Never mind. I have to... Sorry. No, I don't want Yuppie, beatnik, and all of these. - - -Can you just edit the URL? - - -All right. Cool. Okay. Yeah. So you see kind of transitions like this. Where some of this is driven by... I think in the case of newspapers, like a lot of usage is more constrained by their specific style books. But you do see these sorts of shifts happen. Yeah. I should probably put this in the Etherpad. Because it's awesome. - - -That only covers things you can think of too, though. - - -Yeah, that's sort of the thing. There are a whole bunch of ways you could cover that data that would let you find... Would let you find interesting things, rather than just trying things until you find something interesting. - - -Right. - - -Although I suspect that the access to the actual electronic text, for most major news organizations, is not the challenge, but rather the presentation that sort of puts it into context, maybe associates—especially images, like, are much less well archived. ProQuest and things have been doing full text index of news for a long time, but I'm interested in things that achieve what you were showing, with PDF renditions of pages in context with ads and other stories. I'm sad that that's getting lost. Even just down to the level of, like, what were the other stories that were news when this was news? When everybody is running their pages on sites that have the dynamic read this, and all the other links are today's stories, not the stories that were relevant when that story was news. - - -Right. - - -I was just going to say—this isn't a solution with the digital archive, but I do a lot of family research and historical research, and I have been finding newspapers.com, the UI, and some of the features that they're building in there, is really slick. I'm able to search for obits. They've got a fairly robust search. It finds it on the page, and then it lets you do a clip, so I have a feeling that the more and more people that are using it—we're actually tagging and doing that for them in the background, but we're clipping it, and then it saves it—you can save it directly to Ancestry.com and link it to the person that you're researching, or you can clip it and save it as a PDF or download it, and it retains the context and the sourcing for it, as if you had cut it out and written the whole thing. So I would say the last two years, especially, they really seem to be doing a lot with how that works. - - -And their scans are much, much higher quality than what Google was doing even a year or two ago. - - -Interesting. That's an interesting point too. Why can't we kind of crowdsource this tagging and stuff? But the question is where do we find a group of people who are really into this, sort of enough to dig in and commit to finding things? - - -Genealogists. - - -Yeah. And it turns out that there are these communities out there, that are interested. They're interested in doing this. - - -How newspapers.com gets their content, by the way— - - -They usually contract directly with the organization. - - -Yeah, a lot of the older ones, they seem to be getting—the Post has a separate login. So now you put in their archives, and you get a separate pay for it. You can pay one fee and access a lot of the older papers under that fee, and then there's a premium for some publications. - - -Interesting. - - -In terms of things not to do, that story up on— Digital First Media (inaudible) gave their papers to— - - -Wait, what? - - -They contracted this company to scan all their old photos and stuff, and they sent them material and then he went bankrupt and didn't send them back. - - -Yikes. - - -Actually, sort of on that note—there was a newspaper I used to work at, the Toronto Star, donated all their archival photos to the library. Which could be interesting if, like, there was a way to maybe do that with some of our technology. Like, donate all of our Flash interactives. - - -For someone else to maintain. - - -Well, yeah. It's like... Can we split the work here, of figuring out how... I mean, there's tools now, or whatever, to convert... There's like Swiffy or whatever, which converts it to HTML, and stuff, but, like, these are, like, interactives that for a long time were how we told stories, that have just disappeared. And I don't know if there are organizations or whatever that would be interested in taking that content and converting it, but trying to split that load. - - -That is an interesting thing, though. So we just did the same thing. We had photos and every paper we ever produced was microfilm, and we just donated it all to the library. But it wasn't altruistic. It was—get this shit out of our building. - - -You take it! - - -Which is too bad. - - -But it doesn't have to be a bad thing. Some organizations are set up to archive and to maintain. And newspapers aren't necessarily that. - - -Depends on how the rights are negotiated too. If it is just a—get this the hell out of our building and use it for whatever you want and license it back to us, that creates other problems down the line too. Where you don't then have the opportunity to monetize that, even if you still have access to putting your own stuff up. - - -Do you think that the newspaper powers that be that are selling off those archives realize the potential for monetization or research or whatever in giving them away? - - -More now than two years ago. - - -When I worked at the (inaudible), which is a small daily deep in the southern Delta of Arkansas... And they had filing cabinets in the back full of microfilm of that paper, going back into the 1850s. It was in pristine condition. Because no one had ever gone in and actually opened up the microfilm. And so I was going through and looking, and the history that they have there, through a lot of the Civil Rights era, and a lot of... Just the amount of stuff there, that an academic or a school would just love to have... We talked about at the time. I tried to push them to monetize, and looked at a few options, and the cost at that time was just so, so high to convert all of that, that even though they might have seen the value, it was not... That wasn't going to work. - - -If it's a project that you're going to be able to monetize, it's going to be years and years and years before you monetize it. - - -Yeah, that's a large up-front investment. - - -I think the economics of how you monetize the archive, of like—along the lines of format and what it would take to digitize certain types of formats—certainly born digital stuff, and maybe this encompasses other stuff too, but the journalism Institute at the University of Missouri has a guy who's heading up the news archives there. His name is Edward McCain, and one of his areas of inquiry, he's done some federal grants to work on this stuff—is how small newsrooms can be better equipped with a basic framework for archiving, as they produce—hence the born-digital focus—but he's also looking into monetization models, particularly if he were to, for example, try to collectively gather a bunch of newsrooms together to have more sort of—even bartering power, leverage, with some of the aggregators, so they could then sell their archives against, collectively. I don't know. It seems like something that people in this room might be interested in keeping tabs on. Because I'm not sure where it'll go. It's pretty young. - - -Yeah, it seems like part of the issue with these things is that if you have microfilm conversion or any of the expenses associated with this, the expenses are sort of very front loaded, and then the monetization is a kind of long process. And that's not something that a lot of news organizations, like, can accommodate with their capital structure. And by capital structure, I mean... You know, like... It's hard to come by a giant pile of money. Especially if you're a small newspaper. And so it is... Yeah. It's like... The question is like... How do you do that without giving away the farm? - - -Yeah. And I was going to ask—we're talking a lot about how to get stuff unlocked. But I mean—I don't know how other people—we have 25 years of just text digital archives. Like, not OCR. Just actual text. Tagged, organized by... We're not really sure what to do with it. We've got it all. It's all on our CMS. It's all there by day. But other than throwing up surveys around it, we're not sure how to actually monetize it. - - -I kind of wonder, for that stuff that's... That does exist as text, if there's some way to try to replicate the experience of the page facsimile, to sort of go from one article to—here's everything else that was published on that day, here are the similar things, and the advertising isn't being done in the same way, and the layout isn't preserved, necessarily, but you do want to figure out a way to maintain that serendipity there. Because otherwise it's just like one article. - - -And some text archives—I don't know if yours is one of them—but some of the ones I've seen in a few different newsrooms do include, like, page number. Not necessarily position on page, but you can look at everything that was on A1 or everything that was in the local section or everything that was... If you know sort of the indexing structure, you can sort of turn it into tags, by searching responsively for it, I guess. - - -And we've done all that. It's just... It's there. Some people are reading it. We're making a little bit of money off of it. But we're not ProQuest. We're not distributors.com. We're not a destination for anything archive-related, really. And we would need to do something really special in order to make that case. Oh, if I want to know what happened in the last 25 years, we might have to do research and dig into it. I'm not really sure what that is. - - -Are there partnerships with local historical societies or things like that? At least just to increase knowledge in a community that's already intensely interested in that stuff, that you have all of this? And people aren't using it enough. So how can we do it... How can you use it? What are you going to think of, that we haven't at all, and likely won't, because we can't prioritize it? - - -Yeah. - - -I guess, like, moving away from, like, how do we preserve stuff, and more to, like, what we do with all this old stuff that we have... The guy... Ryan? I'm curious—how did you do the crowdsourcing your archives? - - -I haven't done any. I was trying to ask. Because it's such a huge undertaking. You need a really strong community. You need, like, a lot of different things to fall into place in that way. - - -So my company, DataMake, we actually have been working on an Open Source tool. It's not ready and Open Source yet. But it will be soon. But it's... Right now what it is—we're working with the national democratic institute to transcribe election results. But we made this tool that's kind of, like, really easily adaptable, to the point where you could make it serve up any images, and create any tasks. And I know—like Propublica has done stuff like that. Like, crowd sourcing ad spending. But I guess how our thing is a little different from that is—it's really flexible in creating tasks. Anyone can create a task on the fly. And I think, like, that could be of interest to journalists who are interested in, like, tagging, labeling, like, those kinds of tasks, that do need to be crowd sourced. Like, you probably can't pay for someone to just sit there and do that all day long. But I mean, if you're interested in that, you should come talk to me. - - -Now that we're sort of talking about it, I'm kind of thinking about how things like Flash interactives can be similar to scanned newspapers, and that maybe kind of transcribing and tagging is a layer that can be built on top of these things that are sort of digital, but not as open as web stuff. - - -Has anyone really made an effort to archive the Flash interactives? What did you do? - - -Some of the simpler stuff. There's a lot of, like, facial grid and that kind of stuff—we built a quick HTML template, powered by JSON or something. I think it was RSS. (inaudible) some of the harder stuff, like happens... They just kind of died. They're hosted there. (inaudible) they're going to be gone eventually. But simpler stuff that we wrote and everything else... If it's worth it, we'll redo it. - - -I wonder if for some of that stuff—if the best you can do is republish the data that underlies it, so that... Because ultimately, it's like a render. And what's important is the analysis, which probably exists in the copy that accompanies it, and the actual data—someone can reconstruct it. So maybe... You know, just being intentional about retaining, keeping metadata on your datasets, and then publishing those whenever possible—is the path forward. Instead of being... You know, trying to rerender that data. - - -Or even if you're kind of not comfortable with publishing it directly, kind of time capsulizing the source material for something in a form that at some point in the future, if you want to reconstitute this, you kind of know where to go. I don't know. - - -Carrying that forward, I think, for us, stripping out all formatting is kind of what we did before. Keeping the data at its most pure level. So if nothing else, we can just render and stylize a text file. And I think that's what we're just trying to do, for our future archiving, as we redesign, redesign, and redesign. Hopefully it's plain enough that we can carry through on those redesigns. As we plan to move forward. I think we've definitely decided and a lot of people have—that you can no longer cut to old archive sites anymore. Those are just another mess to maintain. So if we can carry the data forward into every redesign, I think that's the goal. We finally may have the technology and the structures in place to finally do that. - - -Do you run into problems there, where there's some stuff that's maybe trying to do something ambitious, interactive, just doesn't make sense? When it's stripped to text? - - -It depends. It all depends on whether people would like to see it again. And resources. - - -Yeah. Anybody else? Yeah? - - -What happens for database maps? Is there any reasonable way of integrating all the possibilities? Something that's attached to something that you can't really enumerate? We had this conversation last night about—what if you froze not just the page, not just all the assets, but the actual machine and the browser that it's loaded on. But at some point you can't spider it, because it's not... You can't enumerate all those paths. - - -I think some people have taken the approach of—if you can figure out how to serve it statically, with just piles and piles of JSON files for every sort of possible—every possible configuration, or kind of break it up into small enough chunks that you can figure out which file the data you want is, and do the processing in the browser—if you're serving that statically anyway, which has the advantage... It gets you all the performance and what-not advantages... Then part of that work is done for you. But yeah. I think if it's... If what you're doing is necessarily dynamic, then that's much harder to do. - - -But in the spirit of memory and archives, we should remember that Open Source convened a hack day on digital news apps after NICAR in Baltimore, and I think there's been a couple—Ben Walsh has been to a couple of different summits on this topic. So people are thinking about this. I don't know what the best practices are. But there's work on this happening. - - -Yeah. I worked on the news archiving thing after NICAR in Baltimore, and there was a blog post that (inaudible) wrote, around a conceptual framework for archiving news apps specifically. But it would totally apply to what people are talking about here today. And that's totally—how do we keep this thing going? The stuff coming from, like, academia that's federally funded too, I think can only help. Because any one news organization is so strapped when it comes to solving this. Someone from the internet archive was talking about running virtual boxes to preserve some of this stuff. - - -And I think at some point part of the strategy has to involve thinking more in a documentation mode than a kind of continuous operation mode. That, like, you are—there are always going to be aspects of—if you're doing something that involves user interaction and hitting APIs and stuff, you're not... Eventually the universe is going to become so large and so contingent that there's no way to stuff it all in a box and treat it as a kind of archival object. And so you need to start thinking of—how can we document this as a performance? I mean, in ways that will provide some sense of what was going on. I mean, in the same way that you would document any other sort of performance, where you acknowledge that we could never put this back together, but we can capture it on film or capture it with photo or audio. And so those... Maybe not those direct same media, but that same kind of strategy can address some of that. - - -Some of it too sounds like... Sort of to go back to your 1918 example, we can't reproduce phone calls that did or didn't happen. We can't reproduce some of those conditions, but we still sort of see the form of it, and can understand that. So maybe the thing isn't for interactions in particular, preserving a way to interact with them. It's a way to step through the experience of being able to have done that at the time. It doesn't need to go in a database. We just need to see a representation of how it worked. - - -Sometimes that representation can be closer to what the desired operation was than the actual final... - - -And you can make GIFs. That's pretty awesome. - - -Screencasts. - - -GIFs, the cockroach of archival format. - - -We take a screenshot of our homepage every day as A1. - - -The Internet Archive is doing that for you. - - -Ben has... It's called Past Pages. It takes pictures every hour. - - -I run a service called Freezit. And it does on-demand point in time captures of web pages. It has an HTTP API that isn't publicized, but if you go to me, and find me, you can use it. We do that on our web page every hour, actually. It doesn't do assets. It just does the HTML. I developed it for (inaudible). Somebody published something and wanted to be able to refer back to. They knew they were going to change it. - - -Yeah, that's a sort of aspect too, that's interesting. Is when stories are published, and then edited, and kind of maintained as a thing, there's always the kind of tension between a particular version of a story as being an object, and that story as a kind of continually updated thing. And I know there are tools like news diffs that will let you see the evolution of a story over time. After years have gone by and it's harder to track those things, how do you figure out... How do you figure out how this story came to be in the state that you see it? Like, was this an early draft that was... Was this kind of a quick story, that then was superseded by another story that exists as a separate object? Or was this a story that was started, and then edited and edited as new facts came to light? And it can be hard to do that without kind of either scraping constantly or having special insight into the CMS. Any other stuff? Any other projects you've seen or things that we should put in this document? - - -I just have a question. I'm curious how you guys are doing—you talked about enterprise-level, publication-level archiving. How are you guys doing personal archiving? If you get a byline somewhere? That's the only problem I have not solved for myself. - - -That's a really good question, and one that's really kind of... This discussion of the Boston Phoenix. That's the constituency that is kind of in some ways most directly noticing this, is—I wrote all of this stuff. Like, how do you maintain your personal archives? Does anybody... - - -This isn't... I can't point to a project and I can't point to a successful personal archive, but I wonder... As a reporter, in a room with tech people, it would be cool if—you know, we're at the point now where it's kind of expected you'll be able to get all your data from a service before you leave. And actually, I wonder if there would be a way for users in a CMS to be able to pull all their bylines. I realize that might also be done best externally. Just through a scraping. - - -So our stuff is in WordPress. And WordPress has a RSS feed for everything, including by author. So I don't know about "scrape", but you sort of get it. Yeah, I think pulling bylines in general seems like a really useful service. Someone should make a byline version of whatever you do. Fetch all of your shit. So when the Phoenix goes under, you're just like—I only lost the last two articles, which I'll grab off the rack. - - -A really simple practical solution is Evernote with a Chrome plugin to scrape the page. It does a good job of getting the page. You don't have to deal with links and stuff. As long as you trust them as a resource, it's a great thing to just grab it every time it runs. - - -And it has a sort of import/export functionality which gives you a file, and you can assert that by the author. Not that I've tried this, but I think the likelihood, as a freelancer, if you ask the publication to export all your things for you, their willingness to do that and their knowledge of it... Whatever ownership issues might be... I think... I haven't tried it, but I imagine there would be a lot of hangups, getting the publication to do that. - - -Right. It seems like the sort of thing that... That would be the kind of thing that would benefit from some sort of standardization. Like, it's a thing that's built into a CMS, that this publication can say—yes, we're freelancer friendly in this particular way. We may not get you your checks on time, but we can give you a complete XML dump of everything— - - -It seems like somebody needs to do a Yelp for freelancers for publications. You can rate them like the Department of Health. A, B, C, D. - - -It would be really interesting. Everybody here—I'm sure all their publications send their papers to the Library of Congress. But they don't really have a similar thing for websites. And even if they did, it's still sort of locked into the Library of Congress. It would be really interesting to do basically a community—we're all just going to syndicate all of our shit. A save action when you get published in CMS is going to send to this thing. And you can limit by rights and that sort of stuff, but make it easy. - - -The Flash Museum? - - -Yeah, pretty much. - - -Yeah. - - -That would be a great place to do it. - - -Data exchange. This is my question, actually. This is my day-to-day obsession and/or nightmare. How many folks here are, like, using any sort of standardized... For your digital representation of your articles—like, down into the even going to the article metadata level, but go further—paragraphs, images, that sort of stuff. Is this outside of most folks' work area? I'm sort of dealing with this sort of thing. Because let's say you do have a digital archive, going back. And let's say you do want to send it to the Library of Congress or you want to share it with someone else. - - -Are you looking for SGML again? - - -Maybe. But you've got XML, you've got JSON, there's no guarantee that your head line is the same as someone else's title. - - -There's an industry news format, which is an XML format... I don't know if it's something that anyone has implemented. - - -This is where I'm going. - - -When I was a university student, I wrote for my college paper, and there was a Yahoo group mailing list where people talked about it. - - -That's my curiosity. Is anybody using any of this stuff? - - -I've been really fascinated by this project that came out of the New York Times interactive news team. Maybe four or five months ago, called RTML, structured metadata. The idea is that you can inject it right into the article. I haven't solved this problem myself, but I have these delusions that I might be able to RTML all my text documents if they have metadata inquiries. - - -There are structured formats for people and places. - - -The experience I've had is that getting people to adopt structured data is very, very difficult, until the moment that Google or Facebook needs that data or... Google, Facebook, Twitter. If they need that data to show up for your things to draw traffic from their platforms, then boy howdy. That data gets built and tested, and it flows like water. - - -So schema.org. - - -Yeah. - - -(inaudible). - - -To the personal archiving, I think that's a really interesting question, on a bunch of levels. And it's like... What would have happened before the digital age? You would have written a story, bought the paper it came out of, used scissors to cut it out and paste it in a book that you had for the purpose. I think we're spoiled. I have a Xanga from my late adolescence. And there's a couple of things in there that are really angsty and embarrassing, but I really like them, and so I have not brought myself to either shut it down, which I should really, really, really do, or they want $5 for the whole thing with the comments. You know? But I know that... It's on me to... If I'm... And the easiest way to do it is as you're producing. The simplest way is as you're making stuff, think about it as you go forward. Which I should do. So they keep reminding me again. It's my responsibility. It's nobody's responsibility to dump me the stuff I made and gave to them. - - -I'm actually really great about it. I have versions of alternate edits and all that, and I save all that. But there's a point at which, as a freelancer, you lose control, and you send it in, and it's in the editor's hands, and then it goes to copy editing and production. That last little step—what I'm really bad about is going back and archiving the version that is actually published. Because at some point, it's out of your hands. - - -The clipping analogy. - - -That was a five-minute warning. - - -Yeah. The Xanga example that you mentioned—there are some things that are kind of embarrassing. - - -I didn't say that. - - -I hesitate to bring this up right after we get our five-minute warning, but there's also the question—maybe the ethical question—of: What if our archives are too good? If most papers run police blotters that record arrests, we don't necessarily then print... It doesn't make news every time those arrests don't actually lead to any criminal prosecution, but to the extent that those are published as news and then put on the web and exist forever, that may be the number one Google result for somebody's name, pretty much, sort of indefinitely. - - -Preserving versions, and you're preserving errors. - - -Right, right. And how do you contextualize all this data? - - -Google and the EU are having fun with this right now. - - -This sort of thing is like... It's very difficult to sort of add that context at scale. Because you're always going to miss stuff. - - -Yeah. I was just going to say... I had two sort of perspectives on this. A good friend of mine, who's a prosecutor, and one of the things she said is—you shouldn't take that stuff down. That's part of getting arrested, is your fucking name goes in the newspaper. But that's one of the things that you get stuck with. Which I thought was sort of interesting. - - -But at the point that people are falsely arrested— - - -Yeah. So the New York Times's policy, which I think is a pretty good one, I emailed them about this, because we went through this a while back—if it's a misdemeanor, forget about it. You got caught with a dime bag of weed. Nobody gives a shit. Any reasonable circumstance—who cares. Felonies, basically it's on the person to provide an actual official documentation that that charge was dropped, and if so, they'll note it. - - -Which is where expungements get a little bit weird too. There are legal processes for entire classes of crime where you can go back five, ten years later, and say—I'm a better person. I fulfilled all this stuff. And I want to get my record expunged. This never happened, basically. And from the legal system's perspective, it literally never happened. It can never be brought up in future charges, future crimes, anything like that. It literally gets wiped it way. But there it is, on the internet. You got arrested, convicted, whatever, and it got covered. Some newspapers are okay about—if you can document that, we will take it down. We will sort of respect that process and say it never happened. But not everybody does that. Some of them will add a note, like you said, saying—I mean, it sort of never happened, but it kind of did. - - -I mean, in some ways, the difficulty of archive access... Allowed us to not have to confront these issues, because you end up with a situation where, like, it still does exist. We're not removing things from the archive. But there's a difference between existing on pristine, never-reviewed microfilm, and being sort of instantly accessible. And as we consider moving things from that microfilm to the instant accessibility, like... You know. Things change. - - -So the one that we started writing to lately, which is even harder, is paid notices. Things like marriage announcements, birth announcements, obituaries, that sort of stuff. We weren't really clear—it wasn't actually a problem if you put an obituary in the news ten years ago. But now some of them are coming out and saying—I got divorced or I got whatever—and there wasn't a clear policy at that time. It's easy now. We can put up a TOS that this is it. Put it in. It's archived. But... It wasn't back then. These people paid us hundreds of dollars. We're going to turn around and give them the middle finger? - - -Cool. Well, I think we're just about done here. Thanks, everybody, for coming and sharing, and I know you could have been taking a nap in your hotel room, and I appreciate you coming here and being part of this. - -(applause) \ No newline at end of file +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/webarchiving/index.html +--- + +# The Past of the Future, Today + +### Session Facilitator(s): Daniel McLaughlin + +### Day & Time: Friday, 4:30-5:30pm + +### Room: Minnesota + +The session will begin in ten minutes. + +The session will begin in five minutes. + +The last session of the conference. Boy, you're full of Etherpad tricks that I had no idea about. + +The Rastafarian button does that. + +Oh, cool. That one? Cool. So it looks like it's about 4:30. And we have about... All of our chairs filled. So I'll kind of go ahead and start it up. We have a pile of chairs here, if more people are coming in, and need a place to sit. We have a couple more chairs over in a pile here. If you want them. Yeah. + +Cool. So welcome to the past of the future today. If you want to be talking about archives, you've come to the right place. If you don't, I'm sorry, but we're talking about archives. So I'm Daniel McLaughlin, I work at the Boston Globe. I would say when it comes to archives, I'm an enthusiastic amateur. I see many people in here that I know probably know more than me about archives, so I'm looking forward to sharing knowledge. I kind of want to start out by showing some links that I found that are interesting. Maybe that are interesting, kind of orient the discussion towards my preferred hobby horses, but then we can kind of open it up, talk about ideas you had for ways of dealing with archives, archives of content that your organizations have, ways of orienting current work flows to support the archives of the future, challenges you've encountered in either of those, and cool things we can do. + +So when I think of media archives, my kind of main point of reference are microfilm and newspapers. Scanned, there's days. But sort of facsimile. Facsimile reproductions of newspapers, put out over a long period of time. And what's interesting to me about this kind of... This type of archive... Is that it captures a very complete picture of... You can imagine what it was like to read that newspaper as a full thing. You're not just looking at a particular article or a particular item. But you're seeing the full range of juxtapositions between different types of stories, the stories and the advertisements, and the whole thing. So, for instance, these are all linked from the Etherpad, which is Etherpad.Mozilla.org/SRCCON2015-archives. I don't know what the best way to keep that on the screen, but I'll come back to that. For instance, this is an article that is using the archives of the New York Times to sort of do this deep dive into advertising design in the '40s and the '50s, and it's not necessarily... You know, in this case, he's in fact, like, entirely blanked out the news. So it's sort of just looking at only the kind of auxiliary matter in the newspaper. But it's still—you know, this kind of primary resource. + +Here's an example from the Boston Globe. I like to call this snowfall circa 1960. This sort of just playing with editorial design here. That... This front page that's this sequence of things, and I don't think there's even... I don't think there's even a story attached to this on the front page. It jumps into the sports section. But just like... I don't know how you kind of capture this without looking at the whole page. But at the same time, you have this sense of seeing the whole thing, but you also see... You can also see how that abstraction starts to leak. How it starts to be... You get hints of the stuff that isn't being captured here. + +This whole kind of ecosystem of different editions, during the course of the day and the night, that is not archived. You only normally see, like, one final edition. This is the front page of the Boston Globe that came out on election day, 1918, and it has these notices on the front page. Notices that the Globe will not issue election extras, due to paper rationing. That they won't give you the returns by telephone, because between the war and the influenza epidemic, they don't have people to answer the phones. The past was a terrifying place. But these sorts of things that are... That were kind of so part of what—of how the newspapers interacted with their readers, how they provided the news, that only show up when they're temporarily disrupted. There's no archives of people calling for election results, which presumably they did around there. I don't even know how you would archive that. But it's sort of—we think like—oh, how do we archive our Twitter bots? Well, I mean... News organizations have always been providing stuff in these auxiliary special ways that have been challenging. + +And that sort of—this, I think, is a kind of good place to pivot, to think about... How can we archive what we're making now? We're all experimenting with different ways of telling stories. Different ways of using new technologies. And often what that means is kind of poking around the edges of how we define news and how we define media. And so that sort of presents a challenge, if your archival schema relies on a fairly stable notion of what you're archiving. + +This is not necessarily news or media, but this is a catalog record from the Getty Institution for a book that they have in their collection. The title of this book is: what is wrong with this book? You may notice the physical description here—one plastic sphere in paste board box. Note. Text stamped on white ball. Initials, copyright date, and edition size inscribed in pen and ink. Said to have been created by artists to expand catalogers' understanding of the potential range of artists' books. And I think that many of the things that we're producing are sort of like... They're sort of like an article in the same way that this is a book. And so the question is: How do we think about archiving these things? Do we think in... What is it that we're trying to preserve? Are we trying to preserve the experience of reading or interacting with this thing in the moment? Are we trying to preserve it like the information in a sort of presentation-agnostic format? + +This is the digital package that was produced for the Boston Globe's investigation of the Catholic church in 2002-2003, and this is—I'm actually not really sure how this is still as functional as it is. Because it's... Boston.com has undergone a lot of changes in that time, but somehow this still all pretty much works. Like, all the Flash works. There's a little bit of rust around the edges. But it's still... It's pretty much functional. But at the same time, it is very much a time capsule of a particular moment in web design, where we make it exactly this wide. We make everything in Flash. But... You know, is there a better way? Should we be trying for more than this? Is this about as good as we can get? And maybe it is. + +This is another publication in Boston, the Boston Phoenix, which was a long-running alternative weekly. When they ceased publication, it became... It's sort of a kind of day by day thing. Is the Phoenix's website up? Can people who wrote for it over the years get their stuff? In their robots.txt file, they've basically stopped everybody from scraping it, which means it doesn't show up in the Wayback Machine. It doesn't show up in any of these places, because they've set it up this way. And so these things that are... It's not even at this point really a technical problem. It's a kind of organizational and... How do we... There's this whole entire kind of cultural legacy that's just sort of disappearing here. This is, again, talking about—what does it mean to preserve something in context? + +This is a project that a couple of artists did to produce screenshots of archived Geocities pages, using a virtual machines that loaded kind of a contemporary web browser. So you're looking at these sites that presumably look quite a bit different in a modern web browser, but here they've been screenshotted, and so you see the combination of both the chrome of the browser, and the actual rendering engine, kind of... It's less interactive, but it's maybe perhaps more faithful to how these things existed in the first place. + +And finally, one example that I can't really show, because it involves listening to 24 hours of audio... This is probably one of my favorite artifacts on the internet. This is the complete broadcast day of CBS News from D Day, 1944. And it's essentially the sort of newspaper scan facsimiles, but an audio version. You get to see this whole event unfolding in realtime, and definitely if you have 24 hours, listen to it. So yeah. I don't know. I hope some of this discussion is getting you thinking about things that you've thought about before, or projects that you've worked on or wish you could do. So let's open it up. Does anybody want to talk archives? + +We've got half a decade of Realmedia files. + +Who are you and where are you from? + +WGBR Boston, NPR station. So we have half a decade or so of Realmedia files that we can never do anything with again. And there are interviews and stuff in there, that we have looked for, but I don't think we have a way of... Because we can't play Realmedia anymore. + +Are those the canonical version that you have? + +Everything else is on tape, apparently. Do you have any idea how to start with that? Reel-to-reel. That's one thing about the archiving process. Audio becomes seemingly harder to deal with. Especially proprietary formats. Dead formats. + +Yeah. + +I guess this is the first set of questions about how to kind of bring archives into the present. I work at The Atlantic, and a lot of the archives are sitting in the middle of the office in bound books. And I would say everyone thinks they're cool and everyone on their first day is like... Whoa, the archives! They're right there! I'm going to spend so much time with them. And you never do. And one way we kind of endeavored to just make time for them is to have an archive party. And we just all hung out, and the staff all got pizza and beer, and went through the physical archives we had. Which was easier than setting up a microfiche machine. But that would be within the realm of plannable, if everyone has made time for it some night. And that wound up leading to a lot of interesting actual story ideas and ways to adopt the archives. Because I think like a lot of magazines, we can kind of reuse archival material if we find a way to frame it under a fair use context. And so that was a good way for us to kind of... That was a good social event for us to bring them into our kind of current day practice. + +Yeah. The question of magazines, where a lot of... Especially The Atlantic. Where most of that stuff is longer pieces. It's harder to kind of dip in and be like—oh, here's a cool snippet. Like... Yeah. + +It is, and it's also—I think it's also—the ads are awesome. Old ads—the Madison Project. Old ads are super cool, and in some ways revealed the decade's ideology way better than some long, ruminative piece does. So if you look at a book and you're like—oh, that's how they marketed Minivans in 1990s? Which is not as far back as it goes—that could be the shock of the old that could bring that all by itself. + +Yeah. I work at Harvard Business Review, and we've done the same archive party type of thing with our... We've got, like, a library with a hundred years' worth of bound things, magazines, that is. But one thing we found a lot of success in, that I just had to Google to remember exactly how it worked out, but we find stuff in the archives that has kind of boomeranged back around in the cultural landscape. Like there was an episode of Mad Men that had some then-high-tech IBM computer, and it turned out an IBM engineer had written an article for HBR in 1969 about that computer, and I guess Mad Men is a very historically accurate show, such that... It dovetailed so perfectly with this story from this 1969... + +How did you find that? + +Fortunately, HBR is the kind of place that a lot of people have been around for a long time and just carry that kind of institutional knowledge. Which, I mean... There's really no real accounting for that. Like, the archive party thing surfaces a lot. Especially with graphics. Not so much ads for us, because we're more of an academic thing, but a lot of very old school data viz type of things. We can kind of find—like, those of us who are much newer—but some of the real old school editors, who have been there since the '70s, just have that archival knowledge that none of the rest of us can really fake. + +When we had a hack day at the Globe and we did a project that basically took—we have, like, OCR of the scans for all of these old things, which is... It's not clean enough to read, but it's kind of good enough to search, and so I loaded it into Solar, which is a platform for, like, full text search and stuff, and one thing that Solar does is you can send it the text of a document, and it'll send back the ten most similar documents to that. So I made, like, a thing that would sit in the right rail of our article template and take the current—like, published today Boston Globe article you've read, find the ten most similar stories from our archives, and it's kind of amazing, how daily newspapers write the same story over and over again. Like, this was this January, where we've been getting a whole lot of snow. It turns out that Boston has had miserable winters before. And you can sort of quickly find like—here are all... Here's this same story, written in 1960, and that's what it looks like then. Here it is in 1930, and it's a kind of interesting entry point to, like, suddenly... You're reading a similar article, but in a kind of entirely different editorial context. + +Yeah. I work at the Wall Street Journal, and we added a hack to our graphics server about a year ago, and in response to that, IT wiped our entire server and we lost years of projects. So we're trying to figure out how to resurrect those. And our strategy is to respond to requests. If a reader sees it, we'll put it back online, and if someone is not the creator of that and they're doing a portfolio piece, we'll privatize that. Because of the security concerns, it's such a time-consuming process, and our official directive has been to not resurrect them, because no one is going to see them and people don't go to them, but that doesn't seem like a great strategy. We don't have a good solution for doing that, aside from spending a lot of weekends trying to do it. I don't know if anybody has any suggestions or ideas. + +Is it like... I guess we probably don't want to dive too deep into exactly how the server configuration... So they still exist, but they're not online? But you need to sort of, like, convert them? Like, change all of the URLs and stuff? + +Yeah, we have a new security system, and when we submit the project, it'll flag a bunch of problems that we have to solve. A lot of the people left and we're not familiar with their code and it's all old. + +Can you not just sand box that stuff? So it's totally isolated? Different server, different domain? Put them up somewhere so you don't... It's sitting basically in an emulator, so you don't have to do that? + +Yeah, maybe. We did talk about that. I think there were concerns that it could be vulnerable again, because it's connected to databases. + +If it's totally isolated, on a different network, different host, different domain name, whatever... Because there was a talk I saw a few years ago where they were talking about—how do you preserve software on floppy discs? You can get it off the floppy disc, but the machine doesn't exist. What if you're 20 years or 200 years in the future and you can't get 110 volts anymore to turn the machine on? Does that work? You're basically emulating things, and you might be nesting emulators. So you don't have that extreme a problem. That might be one way to look at it. It's just like... On a read-only... Have the thing boot off a CD-ROM so it couldn't be infected if it wanted. I have a question as well. So our archives aren't even that old. They're only 7 years old. And we imported all the ESPN stuff, and if you look at some of the articles you'll see broken images, and the reason for that is because images used to be hosted on this other domain called 538image.com, which is long gone, off the internet. The Wayback Machine has got most of this stuff, but there's some random site where you can pay them $15 and they'll do it for you. So someone ran it and archived it for me. And got a bunch of stuff. But getting those back into our current CMS in WordPress is... Slow. Because you have to figure out what the file name is, find it in my directory, upload it into WordPress, and edit that HTML and then pop it back in. So it's like... Write a really clever script or find some Mechanical Turk-like service. Right now it's on request. Where readers are like—hey, this page is missing. We'll dig it up and stick it back in for them. But I would love to get it on so it's as quick as possible. We just don't have a good way of doing that, without hours of people time, which is not realistic. + +Speaking of people time, has anyone in the room ever done a crowd sourced project, where you get your readers to help you tag and categorize large sections of your archive? No? I'm the only one who's ever thought of this? That can't possibly be the case. + +Readers? + +Readers. I think the first major one was the Guardian. Probably six or seven years ago, now. Doing regular documents. But you could easily do that for archives, in creating the kind of metadata structure. + +The New York Times did that with their Madison— + +So Madison was their version. + +And I know the New York Public Library has done a couple of really cool things with their building inspector, and their menus. Yes. The menus. Which is this sort of fascinating—I think people get excited because it's so weird. To sort of read these old menus. And it's also like this kind of highly structured data that suddenly becomes really a lot more interesting once you have it all in. Yeah. + +Sorry for coming in late. So document labeling is, like, a huge thing. And topic analysis and things like that. And from a machine learning perspective, it just makes me tingle to think about what's at your fingertips. Just the monetizing data session. And all we talked about was getting government data from somewhere else and messing with it and then selling it to someone else. And I thought we were going to talk about what you're all sitting on, and how to, like, do good, find out amazing things with it. One problem that comes to mind is kind of like labeling. How we talk about something. So if I'm going to talk about a topic—so I've been talking about racism today. The words they use are going to be completely different than what they would have been 30 years ago. But what we have in the archives of various newspapers is a rolling history of the words that make up the topics, that are just like... Insanely valuable... From an academic standpoint, to just like in the world of machine learning, how we find out what we're talking about, we need labels, and those are valuable. So if anyone is like—I love like—oh, look, this is cool. The vintage ad, and seriously a lot—not to belittle it at all. But there's this whole other aspect to it, and if anyone thinks that's really interesting, like I do, let's talk. + +Yeah. The New York Times has a kind of Google Engram sort of tool... I saw this in the Globe archive. + +Space. + +Space. Okay. Never mind. I have to... Sorry. No, I don't want Yuppie, beatnik, and all of these. + +Can you just edit the URL? + +All right. Cool. Okay. Yeah. So you see kind of transitions like this. Where some of this is driven by... I think in the case of newspapers, like a lot of usage is more constrained by their specific style books. But you do see these sorts of shifts happen. Yeah. I should probably put this in the Etherpad. Because it's awesome. + +That only covers things you can think of too, though. + +Yeah, that's sort of the thing. There are a whole bunch of ways you could cover that data that would let you find... Would let you find interesting things, rather than just trying things until you find something interesting. + +Right. + +Although I suspect that the access to the actual electronic text, for most major news organizations, is not the challenge, but rather the presentation that sort of puts it into context, maybe associates—especially images, like, are much less well archived. ProQuest and things have been doing full text index of news for a long time, but I'm interested in things that achieve what you were showing, with PDF renditions of pages in context with ads and other stories. I'm sad that that's getting lost. Even just down to the level of, like, what were the other stories that were news when this was news? When everybody is running their pages on sites that have the dynamic read this, and all the other links are today's stories, not the stories that were relevant when that story was news. + +Right. + +I was just going to say—this isn't a solution with the digital archive, but I do a lot of family research and historical research, and I have been finding newspapers.com, the UI, and some of the features that they're building in there, is really slick. I'm able to search for obits. They've got a fairly robust search. It finds it on the page, and then it lets you do a clip, so I have a feeling that the more and more people that are using it—we're actually tagging and doing that for them in the background, but we're clipping it, and then it saves it—you can save it directly to Ancestry.com and link it to the person that you're researching, or you can clip it and save it as a PDF or download it, and it retains the context and the sourcing for it, as if you had cut it out and written the whole thing. So I would say the last two years, especially, they really seem to be doing a lot with how that works. + +And their scans are much, much higher quality than what Google was doing even a year or two ago. + +Interesting. That's an interesting point too. Why can't we kind of crowdsource this tagging and stuff? But the question is where do we find a group of people who are really into this, sort of enough to dig in and commit to finding things? + +Genealogists. + +Yeah. And it turns out that there are these communities out there, that are interested. They're interested in doing this. + +How newspapers.com gets their content, by the way— + +They usually contract directly with the organization. + +Yeah, a lot of the older ones, they seem to be getting—the Post has a separate login. So now you put in their archives, and you get a separate pay for it. You can pay one fee and access a lot of the older papers under that fee, and then there's a premium for some publications. + +Interesting. + +In terms of things not to do, that story up on— Digital First Media (inaudible) gave their papers to— + +Wait, what? + +They contracted this company to scan all their old photos and stuff, and they sent them material and then he went bankrupt and didn't send them back. + +Yikes. + +Actually, sort of on that note—there was a newspaper I used to work at, the Toronto Star, donated all their archival photos to the library. Which could be interesting if, like, there was a way to maybe do that with some of our technology. Like, donate all of our Flash interactives. + +For someone else to maintain. + +Well, yeah. It's like... Can we split the work here, of figuring out how... I mean, there's tools now, or whatever, to convert... There's like Swiffy or whatever, which converts it to HTML, and stuff, but, like, these are, like, interactives that for a long time were how we told stories, that have just disappeared. And I don't know if there are organizations or whatever that would be interested in taking that content and converting it, but trying to split that load. + +That is an interesting thing, though. So we just did the same thing. We had photos and every paper we ever produced was microfilm, and we just donated it all to the library. But it wasn't altruistic. It was—get this shit out of our building. + +You take it! + +Which is too bad. + +But it doesn't have to be a bad thing. Some organizations are set up to archive and to maintain. And newspapers aren't necessarily that. + +Depends on how the rights are negotiated too. If it is just a—get this the hell out of our building and use it for whatever you want and license it back to us, that creates other problems down the line too. Where you don't then have the opportunity to monetize that, even if you still have access to putting your own stuff up. + +Do you think that the newspaper powers that be that are selling off those archives realize the potential for monetization or research or whatever in giving them away? + +More now than two years ago. + +When I worked at the (inaudible), which is a small daily deep in the southern Delta of Arkansas... And they had filing cabinets in the back full of microfilm of that paper, going back into the 1850s. It was in pristine condition. Because no one had ever gone in and actually opened up the microfilm. And so I was going through and looking, and the history that they have there, through a lot of the Civil Rights era, and a lot of... Just the amount of stuff there, that an academic or a school would just love to have... We talked about at the time. I tried to push them to monetize, and looked at a few options, and the cost at that time was just so, so high to convert all of that, that even though they might have seen the value, it was not... That wasn't going to work. + +If it's a project that you're going to be able to monetize, it's going to be years and years and years before you monetize it. + +Yeah, that's a large up-front investment. + +I think the economics of how you monetize the archive, of like—along the lines of format and what it would take to digitize certain types of formats—certainly born digital stuff, and maybe this encompasses other stuff too, but the journalism Institute at the University of Missouri has a guy who's heading up the news archives there. His name is Edward McCain, and one of his areas of inquiry, he's done some federal grants to work on this stuff—is how small newsrooms can be better equipped with a basic framework for archiving, as they produce—hence the born-digital focus—but he's also looking into monetization models, particularly if he were to, for example, try to collectively gather a bunch of newsrooms together to have more sort of—even bartering power, leverage, with some of the aggregators, so they could then sell their archives against, collectively. I don't know. It seems like something that people in this room might be interested in keeping tabs on. Because I'm not sure where it'll go. It's pretty young. + +Yeah, it seems like part of the issue with these things is that if you have microfilm conversion or any of the expenses associated with this, the expenses are sort of very front loaded, and then the monetization is a kind of long process. And that's not something that a lot of news organizations, like, can accommodate with their capital structure. And by capital structure, I mean... You know, like... It's hard to come by a giant pile of money. Especially if you're a small newspaper. And so it is... Yeah. It's like... The question is like... How do you do that without giving away the farm? + +Yeah. And I was going to ask—we're talking a lot about how to get stuff unlocked. But I mean—I don't know how other people—we have 25 years of just text digital archives. Like, not OCR. Just actual text. Tagged, organized by... We're not really sure what to do with it. We've got it all. It's all on our CMS. It's all there by day. But other than throwing up surveys around it, we're not sure how to actually monetize it. + +I kind of wonder, for that stuff that's... That does exist as text, if there's some way to try to replicate the experience of the page facsimile, to sort of go from one article to—here's everything else that was published on that day, here are the similar things, and the advertising isn't being done in the same way, and the layout isn't preserved, necessarily, but you do want to figure out a way to maintain that serendipity there. Because otherwise it's just like one article. + +And some text archives—I don't know if yours is one of them—but some of the ones I've seen in a few different newsrooms do include, like, page number. Not necessarily position on page, but you can look at everything that was on A1 or everything that was in the local section or everything that was... If you know sort of the indexing structure, you can sort of turn it into tags, by searching responsively for it, I guess. + +And we've done all that. It's just... It's there. Some people are reading it. We're making a little bit of money off of it. But we're not ProQuest. We're not distributors.com. We're not a destination for anything archive-related, really. And we would need to do something really special in order to make that case. Oh, if I want to know what happened in the last 25 years, we might have to do research and dig into it. I'm not really sure what that is. + +Are there partnerships with local historical societies or things like that? At least just to increase knowledge in a community that's already intensely interested in that stuff, that you have all of this? And people aren't using it enough. So how can we do it... How can you use it? What are you going to think of, that we haven't at all, and likely won't, because we can't prioritize it? + +Yeah. + +I guess, like, moving away from, like, how do we preserve stuff, and more to, like, what we do with all this old stuff that we have... The guy... Ryan? I'm curious—how did you do the crowdsourcing your archives? + +I haven't done any. I was trying to ask. Because it's such a huge undertaking. You need a really strong community. You need, like, a lot of different things to fall into place in that way. + +So my company, DataMake, we actually have been working on an Open Source tool. It's not ready and Open Source yet. But it will be soon. But it's... Right now what it is—we're working with the national democratic institute to transcribe election results. But we made this tool that's kind of, like, really easily adaptable, to the point where you could make it serve up any images, and create any tasks. And I know—like Propublica has done stuff like that. Like, crowd sourcing ad spending. But I guess how our thing is a little different from that is—it's really flexible in creating tasks. Anyone can create a task on the fly. And I think, like, that could be of interest to journalists who are interested in, like, tagging, labeling, like, those kinds of tasks, that do need to be crowd sourced. Like, you probably can't pay for someone to just sit there and do that all day long. But I mean, if you're interested in that, you should come talk to me. + +Now that we're sort of talking about it, I'm kind of thinking about how things like Flash interactives can be similar to scanned newspapers, and that maybe kind of transcribing and tagging is a layer that can be built on top of these things that are sort of digital, but not as open as web stuff. + +Has anyone really made an effort to archive the Flash interactives? What did you do? + +Some of the simpler stuff. There's a lot of, like, facial grid and that kind of stuff—we built a quick HTML template, powered by JSON or something. I think it was RSS. (inaudible) some of the harder stuff, like happens... They just kind of died. They're hosted there. (inaudible) they're going to be gone eventually. But simpler stuff that we wrote and everything else... If it's worth it, we'll redo it. + +I wonder if for some of that stuff—if the best you can do is republish the data that underlies it, so that... Because ultimately, it's like a render. And what's important is the analysis, which probably exists in the copy that accompanies it, and the actual data—someone can reconstruct it. So maybe... You know, just being intentional about retaining, keeping metadata on your datasets, and then publishing those whenever possible—is the path forward. Instead of being... You know, trying to rerender that data. + +Or even if you're kind of not comfortable with publishing it directly, kind of time capsulizing the source material for something in a form that at some point in the future, if you want to reconstitute this, you kind of know where to go. I don't know. + +Carrying that forward, I think, for us, stripping out all formatting is kind of what we did before. Keeping the data at its most pure level. So if nothing else, we can just render and stylize a text file. And I think that's what we're just trying to do, for our future archiving, as we redesign, redesign, and redesign. Hopefully it's plain enough that we can carry through on those redesigns. As we plan to move forward. I think we've definitely decided and a lot of people have—that you can no longer cut to old archive sites anymore. Those are just another mess to maintain. So if we can carry the data forward into every redesign, I think that's the goal. We finally may have the technology and the structures in place to finally do that. + +Do you run into problems there, where there's some stuff that's maybe trying to do something ambitious, interactive, just doesn't make sense? When it's stripped to text? + +It depends. It all depends on whether people would like to see it again. And resources. + +Yeah. Anybody else? Yeah? + +What happens for database maps? Is there any reasonable way of integrating all the possibilities? Something that's attached to something that you can't really enumerate? We had this conversation last night about—what if you froze not just the page, not just all the assets, but the actual machine and the browser that it's loaded on. But at some point you can't spider it, because it's not... You can't enumerate all those paths. + +I think some people have taken the approach of—if you can figure out how to serve it statically, with just piles and piles of JSON files for every sort of possible—every possible configuration, or kind of break it up into small enough chunks that you can figure out which file the data you want is, and do the processing in the browser—if you're serving that statically anyway, which has the advantage... It gets you all the performance and what-not advantages... Then part of that work is done for you. But yeah. I think if it's... If what you're doing is necessarily dynamic, then that's much harder to do. + +But in the spirit of memory and archives, we should remember that Open Source convened a hack day on digital news apps after NICAR in Baltimore, and I think there's been a couple—Ben Walsh has been to a couple of different summits on this topic. So people are thinking about this. I don't know what the best practices are. But there's work on this happening. + +Yeah. I worked on the news archiving thing after NICAR in Baltimore, and there was a blog post that (inaudible) wrote, around a conceptual framework for archiving news apps specifically. But it would totally apply to what people are talking about here today. And that's totally—how do we keep this thing going? The stuff coming from, like, academia that's federally funded too, I think can only help. Because any one news organization is so strapped when it comes to solving this. Someone from the internet archive was talking about running virtual boxes to preserve some of this stuff. + +And I think at some point part of the strategy has to involve thinking more in a documentation mode than a kind of continuous operation mode. That, like, you are—there are always going to be aspects of—if you're doing something that involves user interaction and hitting APIs and stuff, you're not... Eventually the universe is going to become so large and so contingent that there's no way to stuff it all in a box and treat it as a kind of archival object. And so you need to start thinking of—how can we document this as a performance? I mean, in ways that will provide some sense of what was going on. I mean, in the same way that you would document any other sort of performance, where you acknowledge that we could never put this back together, but we can capture it on film or capture it with photo or audio. And so those... Maybe not those direct same media, but that same kind of strategy can address some of that. + +Some of it too sounds like... Sort of to go back to your 1918 example, we can't reproduce phone calls that did or didn't happen. We can't reproduce some of those conditions, but we still sort of see the form of it, and can understand that. So maybe the thing isn't for interactions in particular, preserving a way to interact with them. It's a way to step through the experience of being able to have done that at the time. It doesn't need to go in a database. We just need to see a representation of how it worked. + +Sometimes that representation can be closer to what the desired operation was than the actual final... + +And you can make GIFs. That's pretty awesome. + +Screencasts. + +GIFs, the cockroach of archival format. + +We take a screenshot of our homepage every day as A1. + +The Internet Archive is doing that for you. + +Ben has... It's called Past Pages. It takes pictures every hour. + +I run a service called Freezit. And it does on-demand point in time captures of web pages. It has an HTTP API that isn't publicized, but if you go to me, and find me, you can use it. We do that on our web page every hour, actually. It doesn't do assets. It just does the HTML. I developed it for (inaudible). Somebody published something and wanted to be able to refer back to. They knew they were going to change it. + +Yeah, that's a sort of aspect too, that's interesting. Is when stories are published, and then edited, and kind of maintained as a thing, there's always the kind of tension between a particular version of a story as being an object, and that story as a kind of continually updated thing. And I know there are tools like news diffs that will let you see the evolution of a story over time. After years have gone by and it's harder to track those things, how do you figure out... How do you figure out how this story came to be in the state that you see it? Like, was this an early draft that was... Was this kind of a quick story, that then was superseded by another story that exists as a separate object? Or was this a story that was started, and then edited and edited as new facts came to light? And it can be hard to do that without kind of either scraping constantly or having special insight into the CMS. Any other stuff? Any other projects you've seen or things that we should put in this document? + +I just have a question. I'm curious how you guys are doing—you talked about enterprise-level, publication-level archiving. How are you guys doing personal archiving? If you get a byline somewhere? That's the only problem I have not solved for myself. + +That's a really good question, and one that's really kind of... This discussion of the Boston Phoenix. That's the constituency that is kind of in some ways most directly noticing this, is—I wrote all of this stuff. Like, how do you maintain your personal archives? Does anybody... + +This isn't... I can't point to a project and I can't point to a successful personal archive, but I wonder... As a reporter, in a room with tech people, it would be cool if—you know, we're at the point now where it's kind of expected you'll be able to get all your data from a service before you leave. And actually, I wonder if there would be a way for users in a CMS to be able to pull all their bylines. I realize that might also be done best externally. Just through a scraping. + +So our stuff is in WordPress. And WordPress has a RSS feed for everything, including by author. So I don't know about "scrape", but you sort of get it. Yeah, I think pulling bylines in general seems like a really useful service. Someone should make a byline version of whatever you do. Fetch all of your shit. So when the Phoenix goes under, you're just like—I only lost the last two articles, which I'll grab off the rack. + +A really simple practical solution is Evernote with a Chrome plugin to scrape the page. It does a good job of getting the page. You don't have to deal with links and stuff. As long as you trust them as a resource, it's a great thing to just grab it every time it runs. + +And it has a sort of import/export functionality which gives you a file, and you can assert that by the author. Not that I've tried this, but I think the likelihood, as a freelancer, if you ask the publication to export all your things for you, their willingness to do that and their knowledge of it... Whatever ownership issues might be... I think... I haven't tried it, but I imagine there would be a lot of hangups, getting the publication to do that. + +Right. It seems like the sort of thing that... That would be the kind of thing that would benefit from some sort of standardization. Like, it's a thing that's built into a CMS, that this publication can say—yes, we're freelancer friendly in this particular way. We may not get you your checks on time, but we can give you a complete XML dump of everything— + +It seems like somebody needs to do a Yelp for freelancers for publications. You can rate them like the Department of Health. A, B, C, D. + +It would be really interesting. Everybody here—I'm sure all their publications send their papers to the Library of Congress. But they don't really have a similar thing for websites. And even if they did, it's still sort of locked into the Library of Congress. It would be really interesting to do basically a community—we're all just going to syndicate all of our shit. A save action when you get published in CMS is going to send to this thing. And you can limit by rights and that sort of stuff, but make it easy. + +The Flash Museum? + +Yeah, pretty much. + +Yeah. + +That would be a great place to do it. + +Data exchange. This is my question, actually. This is my day-to-day obsession and/or nightmare. How many folks here are, like, using any sort of standardized... For your digital representation of your articles—like, down into the even going to the article metadata level, but go further—paragraphs, images, that sort of stuff. Is this outside of most folks' work area? I'm sort of dealing with this sort of thing. Because let's say you do have a digital archive, going back. And let's say you do want to send it to the Library of Congress or you want to share it with someone else. + +Are you looking for SGML again? + +Maybe. But you've got XML, you've got JSON, there's no guarantee that your head line is the same as someone else's title. + +There's an industry news format, which is an XML format... I don't know if it's something that anyone has implemented. + +This is where I'm going. + +When I was a university student, I wrote for my college paper, and there was a Yahoo group mailing list where people talked about it. + +That's my curiosity. Is anybody using any of this stuff? + +I've been really fascinated by this project that came out of the New York Times interactive news team. Maybe four or five months ago, called RTML, structured metadata. The idea is that you can inject it right into the article. I haven't solved this problem myself, but I have these delusions that I might be able to RTML all my text documents if they have metadata inquiries. + +There are structured formats for people and places. + +The experience I've had is that getting people to adopt structured data is very, very difficult, until the moment that Google or Facebook needs that data or... Google, Facebook, Twitter. If they need that data to show up for your things to draw traffic from their platforms, then boy howdy. That data gets built and tested, and it flows like water. + +So schema.org. + +Yeah. + +(inaudible). + +To the personal archiving, I think that's a really interesting question, on a bunch of levels. And it's like... What would have happened before the digital age? You would have written a story, bought the paper it came out of, used scissors to cut it out and paste it in a book that you had for the purpose. I think we're spoiled. I have a Xanga from my late adolescence. And there's a couple of things in there that are really angsty and embarrassing, but I really like them, and so I have not brought myself to either shut it down, which I should really, really, really do, or they want $5 for the whole thing with the comments. You know? But I know that... It's on me to... If I'm... And the easiest way to do it is as you're producing. The simplest way is as you're making stuff, think about it as you go forward. Which I should do. So they keep reminding me again. It's my responsibility. It's nobody's responsibility to dump me the stuff I made and gave to them. + +I'm actually really great about it. I have versions of alternate edits and all that, and I save all that. But there's a point at which, as a freelancer, you lose control, and you send it in, and it's in the editor's hands, and then it goes to copy editing and production. That last little step—what I'm really bad about is going back and archiving the version that is actually published. Because at some point, it's out of your hands. + +The clipping analogy. + +That was a five-minute warning. + +Yeah. The Xanga example that you mentioned—there are some things that are kind of embarrassing. + +I didn't say that. + +I hesitate to bring this up right after we get our five-minute warning, but there's also the question—maybe the ethical question—of: What if our archives are too good? If most papers run police blotters that record arrests, we don't necessarily then print... It doesn't make news every time those arrests don't actually lead to any criminal prosecution, but to the extent that those are published as news and then put on the web and exist forever, that may be the number one Google result for somebody's name, pretty much, sort of indefinitely. + +Preserving versions, and you're preserving errors. + +Right, right. And how do you contextualize all this data? + +Google and the EU are having fun with this right now. + +This sort of thing is like... It's very difficult to sort of add that context at scale. Because you're always going to miss stuff. + +Yeah. I was just going to say... I had two sort of perspectives on this. A good friend of mine, who's a prosecutor, and one of the things she said is—you shouldn't take that stuff down. That's part of getting arrested, is your fucking name goes in the newspaper. But that's one of the things that you get stuck with. Which I thought was sort of interesting. + +But at the point that people are falsely arrested— + +Yeah. So the New York Times's policy, which I think is a pretty good one, I emailed them about this, because we went through this a while back—if it's a misdemeanor, forget about it. You got caught with a dime bag of weed. Nobody gives a shit. Any reasonable circumstance—who cares. Felonies, basically it's on the person to provide an actual official documentation that that charge was dropped, and if so, they'll note it. + +Which is where expungements get a little bit weird too. There are legal processes for entire classes of crime where you can go back five, ten years later, and say—I'm a better person. I fulfilled all this stuff. And I want to get my record expunged. This never happened, basically. And from the legal system's perspective, it literally never happened. It can never be brought up in future charges, future crimes, anything like that. It literally gets wiped it way. But there it is, on the internet. You got arrested, convicted, whatever, and it got covered. Some newspapers are okay about—if you can document that, we will take it down. We will sort of respect that process and say it never happened. But not everybody does that. Some of them will add a note, like you said, saying—I mean, it sort of never happened, but it kind of did. + +I mean, in some ways, the difficulty of archive access... Allowed us to not have to confront these issues, because you end up with a situation where, like, it still does exist. We're not removing things from the archive. But there's a difference between existing on pristine, never-reviewed microfilm, and being sort of instantly accessible. And as we consider moving things from that microfilm to the instant accessibility, like... You know. Things change. + +So the one that we started writing to lately, which is even harder, is paid notices. Things like marriage announcements, birth announcements, obituaries, that sort of stuff. We weren't really clear—it wasn't actually a problem if you put an obituary in the news ten years ago. But now some of them are coming out and saying—I got divorced or I got whatever—and there wasn't a clear policy at that time. It's easy now. We can put up a TOS that this is it. Put it in. It's archived. But... It wasn't back then. These people paid us hundreds of dollars. We're going to turn around and give them the middle finger? + +Cool. Well, I think we're just about done here. Thanks, everybody, for coming and sharing, and I know you could have been taking a nap in your hotel room, and I appreciate you coming here and being part of this. + +(applause) diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015WritersVersionControl.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015WritersVersionControl.md index afb3ce63..3ce81169 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015WritersVersionControl.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/transcriptions/SRCCON2015WritersVersionControl.md @@ -1,266 +1,251 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Session Transcripts -subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/transcripts/writersversioncontrol/index.html ---- - -# Merge Branch—Imagining New Version-Control Systems for Writers and Editors - -### Session Facilitator(s): David Yee, Blaine Cook - -### Day & Time: Friday, 12:30-1:30pm - -### Room: Ski-U-Mah - - - -We're going to pretend to start. I've been late to every session so far, so I'm just kind of letting other people be late, but then I realized, like, we have a lot of work to do. So OK, first just so we introduce ourselves: I am David Yee, that's my Twitter handle (@tangentialism). I work at Vox Media, but before that, I did the engineering for a product called Editorially, which was a collaborative writing application for writers and editors. It was the only one of its kind except for ... - -Hi, I'm Blaine (@blaine), and I work on Poetica, which is a collaborative writing and editing environment for editors. - -Yeah. - -So we've done a lot of thinking about this, but I want to find out what you guys have done a lot of thinking about, so I'm going to do sort of standard SRCCON role call, so everybody who's a reporter, could you raise your hand? Editors, raise your hand? Developers. Oh, my. - -Designers? - -Legal people? - -Anybody who did not raise their hand? Response? - -Oh, Bernard, yes. Bernard. Bernard is an asset. You will all want Bernard on your game. OK. - -And who among you uses version control on a day-to-day basis? Raise your hand. Who among you has used git in the past. Put your hands down. Who among you understands git. Um, OK, all right. - -And who doesn't use version control on a day-to-day basis? - -And who doesn't—sorry, what was I going to ask? Who doesn't know what git is or understand git? - -OK, cool. - -That's good. Sweet. - -OK, the first in the spirit of telling you what you're about to do, before you do it, we're going to start with an almost comically high level review of version control systems and then we're going to break into a couple of sprints where you guys are going to do some imagineering, and hopefully we're going to get out of here in time for lunch. - -So this is not an inaccurate representation of source controls. So the thing, I mean I think the place that David and I are coming from in common is—this introduction can be shorter, because we've got a lot of knowledge in the room—but basically version control systems are super, super new. We just looked it up and sort of the first modern control system was RCS and that was created in 1982, so you know, they're brand new technologies, and I think Word's track changes was something like '92, so you know, they're a relatively recent convention, and, you for example the ability to reason about you how a document has changed in sort of a computational way has been really, really developer-driven, so I'm going to see that there are some designers in the room. - -It's something that, you know, you take an algorithm and you say, "hey, I can tell what's changed between these two pieces of text," and you kind of run with it and you just use the software, what the software gives you, and there's not a lot of design that's been applied to that. - -So, yeah, it enables a bunch of things, like we can, you know, fast-forward to now, sort of since 2005, so ten years we've had git and now things that ten years ago you would verge on getting fired for suggesting, like "hey, everyone, let's operate on different branches in our code base." You know, that was insanity, and now we do it all the time. - -So there's, you know, there's this massive change that's happened in code bases. But we haven't seen that same sort of change happen with writing. - -And this chart is important for today's talk, and for your experiences, because Blaine and I and one of the members here who is going to be to be a secret asset to whoever gets her, were sitting around last night talking about version control and how mind-bending it is, and those of you who have actually implemented version control systems will understand. Blaine and I realized yesterday that each of us, for the last four years of our life, have really only thought about version control. As a developer, I stopped thinking about anything else. You end up getting into a hole very quickly. So the conversations that we're going to have are going to be very high level and you shouldn't be bogged down in details. Look at what happened to Marty. - -And despite having only thought about version control for the last four years, I certainly still suck at it. - -Yeah, it's yeah, I don't even want to talk about it. If you used Editorially, you know. - -All right, so just a reminder of why we need version control as writers. Obviously the resilience of your work, so being able to say, "I did this, and even though I deleted this text, it's still around, I can still go back to it," it kind of speaks to invertibility, being able to do and undo changes. Being able to track changes, to collaborate, all of these things came in really handy for coders in the course of the last 30 years. But they are probably even better suited to writers. Blaine already talked about where they came from, so, you know, RCS, Subversion, git, a lot of stuff that's all for software, it might be interesting to talk about why these things—let me see what time it is, why these things came into existence when they did. I have a theory that all these pieces of version control software came into existence to reflect a change in the way that we work. Git reflects sort of a much more remote open source culture, git exists because of open source, there was no reason for subversion to be able to work on multiple repositories with multiple people working on it because everybody was just working on, you know, they were working on Windows, they were like, oh, I have to develop Windows with the 5,000 other Microsoft engineers. - -And similarly, so that there's—I think that the version control system that we use for text a lot of the time is called operational transforms, it's different from git, because git has a very sort of developer, again, a very developer-centric view on the world and it makes a bunch of assumptions that you're working essentially in a world that is friendly to developers and not so friendly to writing. Operational transforms works on text much more easily. It's really complicated. The first academic papers came out '89, but we didn't see the first software that sort of took advantage of that until basically subethaedit basically around 2003 and I remember at the same time a friend saying to me, when Google maps came out and the first ajax stuff started happening, he was like I bet you could build a basic subethaedit and now we've got Google docs and that sort of thing but it was that collaboration on the web made collaboration on the web possible so we're starting to see the fruits of all of that. - -And most of the collaborative text editors, I'm assuming that fewer of you are familiar with operational transforms than with git. Most of the cloud based editors use some form of this and it simply says, the client says I'm going to type the character A at position 5 in the text and that's what gets sent over the wire and the server is able to infer what the full structure of the document is based on that. When you first hear it, you're like "this is a great idea. I can get really granular changes, I can build sliders", but then once you start building it it's really just like a raft of tears. Raise your hand if you have used or implemented an operational transformations algorithm. Sorry, Blake. - - -And so there are libraries, like share JS or OT.JS that you may have encountered. But that sort of and if you've used Google docs, then you've used operational transforms, or Google wave. And you talk to the Google wave developers, they'll tell you not to do OT so this speaks a little bit to what's broken. So we talked about why, so developer-driven version control systems are built for developers, not for writers, most of them assume that conflicting changes can be inferred from whether or not the same line of a document has changed, which is great for poetry, but it's really, really bad for long form text. Operational transformations are great, because they do character-based changes, but there's not a lot of—it doesn't tell you anything. It doesn't tell you, oh, I changed, you know,—I changed some part of the, you know, the vice president's biography for this reason, it's just sort of like you changed the lower case J to a capital J. - -And I think if you—I mean I think the place that we both start from is if you look at the sort of the workflows that git promotes, you know, anyone could put up their hand and said that they used git has probably resolved a merge conflict, and similarly, anyone who's sort of heard the promise of git as sort of the future of writing, and, you know, have worked with writers or was a writer who picked up git and said I'm going to use this for the future of writing and then encountered a merge conflict, just like table flip, right? - -[laughter] - -So OK, I'm going to go back to notepad now. - -And so it's those sorts of interactions that I think we're really interested in. Like, how do we solve those problems? And operational transforms by themselves don't resolve those sorts of merge conflicts, so you know, if those things happen when—if you're connected, if everyone who's working is connected, they're great. But as soon as you have people who are disconnected for a little while, or you know, just doing something weird, like deleting a whole bunch of text, things can happen that don't—that don't make sense to the people involved in the writing. Like how do we express those sorts of interactions in a way that's understandable? - -So in order to sort of understand what—what we need to be thinking about as we sort of invent on a very high level some new paradigms, we want to talk about some of the properties of version control systems and what they sort of provide. [Slide showing original cast of Iron Chef] This is left over—I did—I didn't do another talk about Iron Chef. I was going to tell a whole story about that. So here's what we're going to talk about today. There's going to be two sprint sessions and we'll get to what they are. There's a lot more to version control than this, but we're going to constrain it to these topics: granularity of change—so what does a change constitute as a writer, especially in a newsroom and we're going to be talking a lot about news—so what does a change represent? Character, line or a -- - -Resilience: Imagine if you stored every change over the course of working on a document for a year, what does that storage look like? What do you want to be able to excise? Collaboration: how collaboration and merge deal with conflict resolution, locking, things like that. Authority: so both crediting change to the correct writer and also maybe not to the writer when it shouldn't be or not to the editor when it shouldn't be and also in terms of who's allowed to do something, permissions and authority. And then visibility of change: Both inside your organization, inside your newsroom and to your readers, how does your version control system represent change in a document outside the context of your editor? So this is what we're going to task you with. Many of you, though not all of you, have sticky notes on your tables. And they all correspond to some of these questions. About granularity, resilience, collaboration, authority, and visibility of change. If you are not at a table with stickies, join forces with another table. - -And choose the topic that you're most interested in. You basically are going to discuss this for about 15 minutes and we can help you out if you want or you can just go ahead, and there are a lot of people here, so if you need to split into two—each one into two tables or whatever, do that. And basically I would just want you to talk about these things that—the ones that interest you, for 15 minutes and then we'll come back and do a quick report back on those different subjects. - -Is this granularity or visibility of change? - -Oh, sorry, yeah, screens. - -That's granularity. Orange is visibility of changes. Sorry about that, screens are weird. Yeah, so don't feel you are tethered to your table. But it does mean you will have to pick up your laptops and move to some other table. But basically talk about this from the context of not just version control systems in general, but as writers. So granularity: Answer the questions—what is an atomic change in your version control system, how do you create a change, how do you roll back a change, and what is the story you want your document to tell about how it came into being. - -For resilience, how much history do you need to store, what kind do you need to store and what changes do you need to keep and which do you want to dispose of? Do you not keep secrets, for example. Collaboration will be: how does your version control system manage collaboration between users? That can speak to locking, it can speak to simultaneous editing, whether or not as a writer you're more comfortable working in secret, you don't want somebody staring over your shoulder as you type. - -How do you resolve conflicts. Here is a brain melter. - -Do you want readers to say, oh, David changed this fact because it was incorrect, something like that, and how is that visualized internally, as well. Developers historically have done a horrible job of visualizing change. How would you do that? So find a table, we will revisit at 3 minutes after 1 and then we'll talk about that. - -[group activity] - -Just a reminder, you can start writing down little points as you talk. It can be too many points, it can be too few points, but just something to think about. Post it up here on this board when you're done. - -[group activity] - -I know that you could all spend hours talking about this topic. Four years of your lives would be what we're thinking, but we've come to the end of this 15-minute process, so get some stuff done on paper, and then everybody from each table will nominate somebody to present their scintillating findings. - -OK, everyone ready? Let's start in the back. - - -This works. - - -Announce your concept. - -Our concept was visibility of change. And let's see, I think most of our conversation centered around how this is going to depend a lot on granularity. That potentially you wouldn't want to surface everything, obviously, so we talked a little bit about similar git concept of like version tagging, and maybe that's, you know, where you almost like bundle up public releases of a story, which introduced some—brought up some conversation about you know, what that would allow a reader to do at an interface level, almost like diffing two stories and you know, seeing that, or also just like what the wire services do with their little write-through messages that come across, you know? Something like that. - -Timing of when did it -- - -Yeah, do you want to just -- - -Yeah, there's sort of general consensus that there is a period before publication which those changes should never be surfaced. - -Good job. Already a group has decided they can't do work without talking to another group. You want to pass it over to pink's authority? - -We grant you the option. - - -OK, so we've riffed on a lot of things. I'm not sure we have a central idea. So I'll just go over some of them. So we talked about, let's see, what authority was, and—oh, yeah, yeah. So does authority reside in a single owner of content at an organization, or can it be delegated or is it organized by teams? We talked about, yeah, who owns a particular piece of content. Is there a single owner? Can there be multiple owners? Can authority be delegated? We actually talked about organizational structure in a newsroom and how authority would mesh with that. - -I just began assuming that there would be a corporate structure in authority would radiate from the top and kind of go down a tree, but then Gabriela, right? Mentioned there are other models of organizing media companies where there was shared responsibility or consensus decision-making in which case that model doesn't really apply. - -what else did we talk about here? Public authority, what can a reader do and how can they contribute changes and how are those changes merged? - -We also spoke briefly about what the different models of version in general and how authority applies, you know, in things like GitHub anyone can make a change and then authority resides in the person pulling the change and then merging it and then different systems operate differently, so we'd have to choose some kind of model there. And then for public changes, is there an anymority? Or can you delegate authority or proxy? - -You need to be able to -- - -You can't just have one level of membership, you have to be able to have teams, essentially and teams have to be able to remove their own members, so you can't just have one giant team for your whole org, so that your team can govern itself and have a sense of ownership basically. - -We also briefly mentioned what happens to the authority of someone when they leave? who inherits it? And obviously if a reporter leaves, all their content stays, usually, and who can then modify it? - - -Cool. - -Anything else anybody wants? - -So that was a lot of questions and no answers, but there you go. Yup. - -All right, granularity. Yellow is in front of you. - -All right. So when we were talking about the granularity of changes pretty much all of our discussion ended up revolving around intent, because it became increasingly clear that granularity in terms of types of text wasn't really what we should look at, right? Some character-level changes are really important, but some changes are actually sentences moving or disappearing. And those aren't just sequences of characters. So trying to figure out what you mean when you change the case of something, or add a couple of punctuation marks or what have you. So we went talking about two different hierarchies, one of those was the hierarchy of the like structure of the text, right? You've got a story, you've got paragraphs, you've got sentence, you've got words or phrases, you've got characters. And the other was the hierarchy of the intentions, right? I changed this paragraph. Those changes included renaming this person, adding these quotes around one sentence, so on and so so forth which got into some really weird UI issues and we didn't resolve any of them. - - -Awesome, blue behind you. - -I'm very pleased by the idea of a hierarchy by intention because building authorial intention into the software delights me to no end. We were resilience, and again we came back to how deeply connected resilience is to, in our case, granularity, all they probably other questions too. One of our post-its says "This shit cray". - -I think we have needing taxonomy to understand the change. Some changes are because the level of change kind of determines how long you want to keep that thing around and how much you want it articulated in the software. Some changes are just copy edits and you don't need to keep them that long and there was some question of whether you could programmatically choose character edits? Some changes, though, are sentence level and then there was a discussion of well, can you even pay attention to one paragraph changing through the document, or is that so complex, because what even is a paragraph from the beginning to the end, and by the way, in a news story, like you're moving sentences around, the holding is really tight. That seems like a challenge. - -[laughter] - -We were also talking about making taxonomies to change. Some taxonomies are already determined by the newsroom because they're tasks which are distributed throughout, like, newsroom labor division, so you do have the writers who can make a lot of different kinds and then feature editors who are usually making structural changes and copy editors who are coming in at a different part of the process and that could tie to authority. But in a smaller newsroom this really breaks down and that was another question we had. Am I missing anything? - - -Well, I think we were all a little dissatisfied with purely chronological change histories. We talked a lot about Google docs and how well you can't even label those revisions so it's basically -- - -It's a truly inferior writing experience, I think we can—... - - -[laughter] - -Yeah, so if you could—it's almost like a commit message on certain revisions and there are certain revisions that you might want to look back at and compare to the current revisions and certain revisions that you never really want to look back at, so if we could come up at some way of classifying those, that would really help. - -I have a question on that like to clarify. So purely chronological versus were you taking kind of a tagged chronological but were you also thinking branching? - -I was thinking more I guess the tagged chronological. We didn't talk about branching. - -I didn't know how cray your shit was. - - -It gets way crayer. - -So let's talk to collaboration. - - -So we actually had pretty good into authority, too, because I think we realized collaboration can be very difficult without a hierarchy. So all the questions up there we were pretty quick to answer yes, people should be able to work in secret, simultaneously, there will be no conflicts. - -[laughter] - -And then we realized -- - -Good job. - -Is that that didn't work out great. One of the things we kind of circled around a lot is the idea of roles and stages of the document. So if you have roles like an editor or graphics person, or designer, and you knew that a document was in different stages, whether it was in a draft mode or published or preproduction, we can maybe try to get clever about resolving conflicts based on like, hey, an editor is mostly responsible for the words and so maybe if they're making a change while a graphics person is moving things around, that they should get primacy in that change, but the graphics person should get primacy about where things are organized, and maybe that it's a choice that you can actually like go for algorithm mode or you can go for most recent change mode or you can go for do it yourself mode. Our system works really well but it will always work correctly. We talked about that it needs comments. Comments are required for collaboration, and what else? Oh, in terms of privacy and working in—both working in secret and kind of collaboration, basically having some sort of on-off switch so essentially to work in private you could create a branch that's now your private branch that you can use but it's not the primary branch so if you want to make that public you're essentially merging that back in hand now you can make comments depending on the stage of the document. But you could also essential lock the document and you could essentially lock things together so you could say this paragraph depends on this other paragraph. So you delete this one, you're deleting the first reference for this person so don't screw up my paragraph down here. - -AUDIENCE MEMBER: Ooh, yes! - -That reminds me—if I can have that... - -One of the UI things that we did talk a little bit about tackling was trying to infer what changes go together. So, right, if I added a quote mark, and then, you know, 20 characters later I added another quote mark 5 seconds later, right, I probably surrounded something in quotes? That is one change. And how can we like guess based on time and similarity what—how many changes actually happened and how many the software just thinks happened. - -Cool, that is fantastic. So we're sort of running out of time, so what we'd like to do is if you can mix it up. So get up from your table. Go somewhere else in the room. A little bit of brownian motion here. - -One person may want to stay at their table, maybe, but you're going to mix it up. And if one person can just bring the post-its from each table to us, we'll put them up on this board over here, and then, yeah, once you have moved to a different part of the room, just sit back down. - -OK, so you're now sat at new pillars, mostly, hopefully, so we'd like to talk about different venues of writing, different styles of writing and sort of apply the thoughts that you've been thinking about sort of separately together on each of these. If you feel strongly about any of—any of these forms of writing or anything, you can get up and move around, that's fine. But we are sort of—we've got about 12 minutes left before lunch, so do it quickly, but we'll do the same thing, we'll sort of talk about each of these, and sort of just think about different issues of version control with each of these sorts of things, so we've got: high velocity, short form writing. - -Like Twitter? - -Like Twitter or blog posts or news articles. - -Not so short. - -I mean, yeah. Yeah, so that's more blog posts. Breaking news is the pink one. We've got long form serial articles with secret source, so this is, you know, like all of the stuff that Greenwald has been doing for example. And then long form serial work—so sourced work, public, like science journalism, that kind of thing. Breaking news, so you know, news stories that are coming live. And then Wikipedia, so sort of accreted knowledge reporting essentially, public stuff. - - -So like we're at 1:20 already, so we're not going to do a whole lot of roll-up but go ahead and spend 10 minutes talking about how your system would work with all of your expertises now, and we'll explain at the end that this was just a trick to frustrate you: -[group activity] - -5-minute warning. Just so you know, we're going to ask you to present three separate bullet points that make you unique from everybody else's, OK, so think towards that. -[group activity] - -OK, so it is technically 1:30, which is why those of you that want to go to lunch should be able to go to lunch, but I want to first hear where you're at now. Because I know you haven't solved the problem completely because I know if you had, Blaine and I would want to work for you, so I'm going to bring mic out. Who wants to—raise a hand if you're ready to talk about your notes right now? - -We are. Can we just ask if you presented in the last round, that you hand the mic to someone else? Had. - -A really cool thing that came up just now is that it's hard to get -- - -We're the green long form serial, the sciencey one. You can't do accurate like annotations in a lot of source control systems, the best is on GitHub you can do a comment on a line. But we thought would be really good to be able to do a comment on a piece of punctuation or a citation. Especially like a database across stories so if you're a reporter, you can look up who was the person who reported on the filet lander and being able to accurately report quotes. And also being able to not lose work just having like a robust system for kind of like the tagging of the Google docs thing, so better than just show me the 50,000 versions that I have. And I think? Anybody else? - -Awesome bullet points. Bullet points next, let's move it to the blues, long form serial with secrets. Whoo ... - -Yeah, we this was an interesting one for us. Because we decided that the primary audience would probably be the journalists working on the story, so this is a very private, like, contained system that we wanted to be able to track like which bits of information came from which anonymous sources, so like giving them some sort of like screen name so that that information isn't actually stored, and then we wanted to also track who on the team had corroborated each source's information, even though we don't know who they are, we can still track who's holding themselves responsible for making sure that that information is in there. What else? I think that was most of it. - -Excellent. Good job protecting important people. - -No information. - -No information. Can't wait to hear Wikipedia. High velocity short form, correct? - - -So we were—we feel like most of the changes that would happen to high velocity short form published will happen after the publication, and so how do those changes affect the content of the story and they'll probably be visible and they'll need to be visible because they're changing the initial contents of the story. How do we surface that to readers? We talked about What Is Code a little bit. There's an open GitHub repo for that article and there's a lot of user participation, I guess reader participation with pull requests, making changes to the story and those being merged and surfacing in the web interactive that's really interesting, and with that there's a lot of potentially dirty laundry that would then be entered into the record. It's kind of publicly available for people to see and is that a good or a bad thing? - -Nice, very good. First time Paul Ford's name has been mentioned in the context of short form. - -[laughter] - -Breaking news? - -OK, so we thought that one of the distinctive things about breaking news is that it's fundamentally wrong throughout. So we need a way of surfacing the corrections and kind of being transparent about what we were wrong about earlier, so we thought that might be a good opportunity for having a little bit more public facing view of the changes and the updates as they're coming in. We also thought that there might be a good opportunity for personalization here, because each—anyone who's on that page, things are happening, they're all coming at different times. Maybe someone whenever there's a group, if they come back to a page they can see what's changed since the last time they were there, because the information they saw previously was wrong, we want to make sure they know that not 6 people have died, it was actually 10 and we want to make sure that they're remembering the right stuff. And the last thing is collaboration is going to be really important because you might have four or five or six journalists all converging on one breaking news story and so there's going to be a lot of those conflicts that need to be resolved. - -I just want to point out that you just highlighted a fact that there might be a control system where one of the out-of-sync nodes is your reader's brain and I just wanted to call that out. Oh, good, good, Wikipedia comes last. Excellent. - -But always first. So I guess the big obvious issue with Wikipedia is authority, because, you for example it's edited by everybody, so we talked a little bit about that. And how, like, the idea is that it's just edited by everybody equally but that's not really how it works, because there are sort of like trusted editors and we talked a little bit about how that sort of authority gets established, if it's just that you're a very active user or if there are other ways that that could be assigned. We also talked about, well, like, also because of the nature of Wikipedia being edited by everybody, like visibility of changes is really important because you're not going to just mention to somebody like your editor, oh, yeah, I changed this. It's got to be built into the system. But it also can kind of serve as a metric for things like controversy, something that's edited a lot, or, you know, potentially, depending on the subject. Obviously that could be gamed by people who have an interest in a particular issue, to try to get it like flagged controversial or something, but, yeah, anything else? - - -That is amazing. Thank you so much. I hope we haven't broken your brains too much, but I hope you go and think more about these problems, because I think they need solving. You're our only hope. - -[laughter] - -[applause] - -Definitely go forth and mush your brains on this, and if you feel you want to mush brains with us, we're all around. - -[session ended] +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Session Transcripts +subtitle: A live transcription team captured the SRCCON sessions that were most conducive to a written record—about half the sessions, in all. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/transcripts/writersversioncontrol/index.html +--- + +# Merge Branch—Imagining New Version-Control Systems for Writers and Editors + +### Session Facilitator(s): David Yee, Blaine Cook + +### Day & Time: Friday, 12:30-1:30pm + +### Room: Ski-U-Mah + +We're going to pretend to start. I've been late to every session so far, so I'm just kind of letting other people be late, but then I realized, like, we have a lot of work to do. So OK, first just so we introduce ourselves: I am David Yee, that's my Twitter handle (@tangentialism). I work at Vox Media, but before that, I did the engineering for a product called Editorially, which was a collaborative writing application for writers and editors. It was the only one of its kind except for ... + +Hi, I'm Blaine (@blaine), and I work on Poetica, which is a collaborative writing and editing environment for editors. + +Yeah. + +So we've done a lot of thinking about this, but I want to find out what you guys have done a lot of thinking about, so I'm going to do sort of standard SRCCON role call, so everybody who's a reporter, could you raise your hand? Editors, raise your hand? Developers. Oh, my. + +Designers? + +Legal people? + +Anybody who did not raise their hand? Response? + +Oh, Bernard, yes. Bernard. Bernard is an asset. You will all want Bernard on your game. OK. + +And who among you uses version control on a day-to-day basis? Raise your hand. Who among you has used git in the past. Put your hands down. Who among you understands git. Um, OK, all right. + +And who doesn't use version control on a day-to-day basis? + +And who doesn't—sorry, what was I going to ask? Who doesn't know what git is or understand git? + +OK, cool. + +That's good. Sweet. + +OK, the first in the spirit of telling you what you're about to do, before you do it, we're going to start with an almost comically high level review of version control systems and then we're going to break into a couple of sprints where you guys are going to do some imagineering, and hopefully we're going to get out of here in time for lunch. + +So this is not an inaccurate representation of source controls. So the thing, I mean I think the place that David and I are coming from in common is—this introduction can be shorter, because we've got a lot of knowledge in the room—but basically version control systems are super, super new. We just looked it up and sort of the first modern control system was RCS and that was created in 1982, so you know, they're brand new technologies, and I think Word's track changes was something like '92, so you know, they're a relatively recent convention, and, you for example the ability to reason about you how a document has changed in sort of a computational way has been really, really developer-driven, so I'm going to see that there are some designers in the room. + +It's something that, you know, you take an algorithm and you say, "hey, I can tell what's changed between these two pieces of text," and you kind of run with it and you just use the software, what the software gives you, and there's not a lot of design that's been applied to that. + +So, yeah, it enables a bunch of things, like we can, you know, fast-forward to now, sort of since 2005, so ten years we've had git and now things that ten years ago you would verge on getting fired for suggesting, like "hey, everyone, let's operate on different branches in our code base." You know, that was insanity, and now we do it all the time. + +So there's, you know, there's this massive change that's happened in code bases. But we haven't seen that same sort of change happen with writing. + +And this chart is important for today's talk, and for your experiences, because Blaine and I and one of the members here who is going to be to be a secret asset to whoever gets her, were sitting around last night talking about version control and how mind-bending it is, and those of you who have actually implemented version control systems will understand. Blaine and I realized yesterday that each of us, for the last four years of our life, have really only thought about version control. As a developer, I stopped thinking about anything else. You end up getting into a hole very quickly. So the conversations that we're going to have are going to be very high level and you shouldn't be bogged down in details. Look at what happened to Marty. + +And despite having only thought about version control for the last four years, I certainly still suck at it. + +Yeah, it's yeah, I don't even want to talk about it. If you used Editorially, you know. + +All right, so just a reminder of why we need version control as writers. Obviously the resilience of your work, so being able to say, "I did this, and even though I deleted this text, it's still around, I can still go back to it," it kind of speaks to invertibility, being able to do and undo changes. Being able to track changes, to collaborate, all of these things came in really handy for coders in the course of the last 30 years. But they are probably even better suited to writers. Blaine already talked about where they came from, so, you know, RCS, Subversion, git, a lot of stuff that's all for software, it might be interesting to talk about why these things—let me see what time it is, why these things came into existence when they did. I have a theory that all these pieces of version control software came into existence to reflect a change in the way that we work. Git reflects sort of a much more remote open source culture, git exists because of open source, there was no reason for subversion to be able to work on multiple repositories with multiple people working on it because everybody was just working on, you know, they were working on Windows, they were like, oh, I have to develop Windows with the 5,000 other Microsoft engineers. + +And similarly, so that there's—I think that the version control system that we use for text a lot of the time is called operational transforms, it's different from git, because git has a very sort of developer, again, a very developer-centric view on the world and it makes a bunch of assumptions that you're working essentially in a world that is friendly to developers and not so friendly to writing. Operational transforms works on text much more easily. It's really complicated. The first academic papers came out '89, but we didn't see the first software that sort of took advantage of that until basically subethaedit basically around 2003 and I remember at the same time a friend saying to me, when Google maps came out and the first ajax stuff started happening, he was like I bet you could build a basic subethaedit and now we've got Google docs and that sort of thing but it was that collaboration on the web made collaboration on the web possible so we're starting to see the fruits of all of that. + +And most of the collaborative text editors, I'm assuming that fewer of you are familiar with operational transforms than with git. Most of the cloud based editors use some form of this and it simply says, the client says I'm going to type the character A at position 5 in the text and that's what gets sent over the wire and the server is able to infer what the full structure of the document is based on that. When you first hear it, you're like "this is a great idea. I can get really granular changes, I can build sliders", but then once you start building it it's really just like a raft of tears. Raise your hand if you have used or implemented an operational transformations algorithm. Sorry, Blake. + +And so there are libraries, like share JS or OT.JS that you may have encountered. But that sort of and if you've used Google docs, then you've used operational transforms, or Google wave. And you talk to the Google wave developers, they'll tell you not to do OT so this speaks a little bit to what's broken. So we talked about why, so developer-driven version control systems are built for developers, not for writers, most of them assume that conflicting changes can be inferred from whether or not the same line of a document has changed, which is great for poetry, but it's really, really bad for long form text. Operational transformations are great, because they do character-based changes, but there's not a lot of—it doesn't tell you anything. It doesn't tell you, oh, I changed, you know,—I changed some part of the, you know, the vice president's biography for this reason, it's just sort of like you changed the lower case J to a capital J. + +And I think if you—I mean I think the place that we both start from is if you look at the sort of the workflows that git promotes, you know, anyone could put up their hand and said that they used git has probably resolved a merge conflict, and similarly, anyone who's sort of heard the promise of git as sort of the future of writing, and, you know, have worked with writers or was a writer who picked up git and said I'm going to use this for the future of writing and then encountered a merge conflict, just like table flip, right? + +[laughter] + +So OK, I'm going to go back to notepad now. + +And so it's those sorts of interactions that I think we're really interested in. Like, how do we solve those problems? And operational transforms by themselves don't resolve those sorts of merge conflicts, so you know, if those things happen when—if you're connected, if everyone who's working is connected, they're great. But as soon as you have people who are disconnected for a little while, or you know, just doing something weird, like deleting a whole bunch of text, things can happen that don't—that don't make sense to the people involved in the writing. Like how do we express those sorts of interactions in a way that's understandable? + +So in order to sort of understand what—what we need to be thinking about as we sort of invent on a very high level some new paradigms, we want to talk about some of the properties of version control systems and what they sort of provide. [Slide showing original cast of Iron Chef] This is left over—I did—I didn't do another talk about Iron Chef. I was going to tell a whole story about that. So here's what we're going to talk about today. There's going to be two sprint sessions and we'll get to what they are. There's a lot more to version control than this, but we're going to constrain it to these topics: granularity of change—so what does a change constitute as a writer, especially in a newsroom and we're going to be talking a lot about news—so what does a change represent? Character, line or a -- + +Resilience: Imagine if you stored every change over the course of working on a document for a year, what does that storage look like? What do you want to be able to excise? Collaboration: how collaboration and merge deal with conflict resolution, locking, things like that. Authority: so both crediting change to the correct writer and also maybe not to the writer when it shouldn't be or not to the editor when it shouldn't be and also in terms of who's allowed to do something, permissions and authority. And then visibility of change: Both inside your organization, inside your newsroom and to your readers, how does your version control system represent change in a document outside the context of your editor? So this is what we're going to task you with. Many of you, though not all of you, have sticky notes on your tables. And they all correspond to some of these questions. About granularity, resilience, collaboration, authority, and visibility of change. If you are not at a table with stickies, join forces with another table. + +And choose the topic that you're most interested in. You basically are going to discuss this for about 15 minutes and we can help you out if you want or you can just go ahead, and there are a lot of people here, so if you need to split into two—each one into two tables or whatever, do that. And basically I would just want you to talk about these things that—the ones that interest you, for 15 minutes and then we'll come back and do a quick report back on those different subjects. + +Is this granularity or visibility of change? + +Oh, sorry, yeah, screens. + +That's granularity. Orange is visibility of changes. Sorry about that, screens are weird. Yeah, so don't feel you are tethered to your table. But it does mean you will have to pick up your laptops and move to some other table. But basically talk about this from the context of not just version control systems in general, but as writers. So granularity: Answer the questions—what is an atomic change in your version control system, how do you create a change, how do you roll back a change, and what is the story you want your document to tell about how it came into being. + +For resilience, how much history do you need to store, what kind do you need to store and what changes do you need to keep and which do you want to dispose of? Do you not keep secrets, for example. Collaboration will be: how does your version control system manage collaboration between users? That can speak to locking, it can speak to simultaneous editing, whether or not as a writer you're more comfortable working in secret, you don't want somebody staring over your shoulder as you type. + +How do you resolve conflicts. Here is a brain melter. + +Do you want readers to say, oh, David changed this fact because it was incorrect, something like that, and how is that visualized internally, as well. Developers historically have done a horrible job of visualizing change. How would you do that? So find a table, we will revisit at 3 minutes after 1 and then we'll talk about that. + +[group activity] + +Just a reminder, you can start writing down little points as you talk. It can be too many points, it can be too few points, but just something to think about. Post it up here on this board when you're done. + +[group activity] + +I know that you could all spend hours talking about this topic. Four years of your lives would be what we're thinking, but we've come to the end of this 15-minute process, so get some stuff done on paper, and then everybody from each table will nominate somebody to present their scintillating findings. + +OK, everyone ready? Let's start in the back. + +This works. + +Announce your concept. + +Our concept was visibility of change. And let's see, I think most of our conversation centered around how this is going to depend a lot on granularity. That potentially you wouldn't want to surface everything, obviously, so we talked a little bit about similar git concept of like version tagging, and maybe that's, you know, where you almost like bundle up public releases of a story, which introduced some—brought up some conversation about you know, what that would allow a reader to do at an interface level, almost like diffing two stories and you know, seeing that, or also just like what the wire services do with their little write-through messages that come across, you know? Something like that. + +Timing of when did it -- + +Yeah, do you want to just -- + +Yeah, there's sort of general consensus that there is a period before publication which those changes should never be surfaced. + +Good job. Already a group has decided they can't do work without talking to another group. You want to pass it over to pink's authority? + +We grant you the option. + +OK, so we've riffed on a lot of things. I'm not sure we have a central idea. So I'll just go over some of them. So we talked about, let's see, what authority was, and—oh, yeah, yeah. So does authority reside in a single owner of content at an organization, or can it be delegated or is it organized by teams? We talked about, yeah, who owns a particular piece of content. Is there a single owner? Can there be multiple owners? Can authority be delegated? We actually talked about organizational structure in a newsroom and how authority would mesh with that. + +I just began assuming that there would be a corporate structure in authority would radiate from the top and kind of go down a tree, but then Gabriela, right? Mentioned there are other models of organizing media companies where there was shared responsibility or consensus decision-making in which case that model doesn't really apply. + +what else did we talk about here? Public authority, what can a reader do and how can they contribute changes and how are those changes merged? + +We also spoke briefly about what the different models of version in general and how authority applies, you know, in things like GitHub anyone can make a change and then authority resides in the person pulling the change and then merging it and then different systems operate differently, so we'd have to choose some kind of model there. And then for public changes, is there an anymority? Or can you delegate authority or proxy? + +You need to be able to -- + +You can't just have one level of membership, you have to be able to have teams, essentially and teams have to be able to remove their own members, so you can't just have one giant team for your whole org, so that your team can govern itself and have a sense of ownership basically. + +We also briefly mentioned what happens to the authority of someone when they leave? who inherits it? And obviously if a reporter leaves, all their content stays, usually, and who can then modify it? + +Cool. + +Anything else anybody wants? + +So that was a lot of questions and no answers, but there you go. Yup. + +All right, granularity. Yellow is in front of you. + +All right. So when we were talking about the granularity of changes pretty much all of our discussion ended up revolving around intent, because it became increasingly clear that granularity in terms of types of text wasn't really what we should look at, right? Some character-level changes are really important, but some changes are actually sentences moving or disappearing. And those aren't just sequences of characters. So trying to figure out what you mean when you change the case of something, or add a couple of punctuation marks or what have you. So we went talking about two different hierarchies, one of those was the hierarchy of the like structure of the text, right? You've got a story, you've got paragraphs, you've got sentence, you've got words or phrases, you've got characters. And the other was the hierarchy of the intentions, right? I changed this paragraph. Those changes included renaming this person, adding these quotes around one sentence, so on and so so forth which got into some really weird UI issues and we didn't resolve any of them. + +Awesome, blue behind you. + +I'm very pleased by the idea of a hierarchy by intention because building authorial intention into the software delights me to no end. We were resilience, and again we came back to how deeply connected resilience is to, in our case, granularity, all they probably other questions too. One of our post-its says "This shit cray". + +I think we have needing taxonomy to understand the change. Some changes are because the level of change kind of determines how long you want to keep that thing around and how much you want it articulated in the software. Some changes are just copy edits and you don't need to keep them that long and there was some question of whether you could programmatically choose character edits? Some changes, though, are sentence level and then there was a discussion of well, can you even pay attention to one paragraph changing through the document, or is that so complex, because what even is a paragraph from the beginning to the end, and by the way, in a news story, like you're moving sentences around, the holding is really tight. That seems like a challenge. + +[laughter] + +We were also talking about making taxonomies to change. Some taxonomies are already determined by the newsroom because they're tasks which are distributed throughout, like, newsroom labor division, so you do have the writers who can make a lot of different kinds and then feature editors who are usually making structural changes and copy editors who are coming in at a different part of the process and that could tie to authority. But in a smaller newsroom this really breaks down and that was another question we had. Am I missing anything? + +Well, I think we were all a little dissatisfied with purely chronological change histories. We talked a lot about Google docs and how well you can't even label those revisions so it's basically -- + +It's a truly inferior writing experience, I think we can—... + +[laughter] + +Yeah, so if you could—it's almost like a commit message on certain revisions and there are certain revisions that you might want to look back at and compare to the current revisions and certain revisions that you never really want to look back at, so if we could come up at some way of classifying those, that would really help. + +I have a question on that like to clarify. So purely chronological versus were you taking kind of a tagged chronological but were you also thinking branching? + +I was thinking more I guess the tagged chronological. We didn't talk about branching. + +I didn't know how cray your shit was. + +It gets way crayer. + +So let's talk to collaboration. + +So we actually had pretty good into authority, too, because I think we realized collaboration can be very difficult without a hierarchy. So all the questions up there we were pretty quick to answer yes, people should be able to work in secret, simultaneously, there will be no conflicts. + +[laughter] + +And then we realized -- + +Good job. + +Is that that didn't work out great. One of the things we kind of circled around a lot is the idea of roles and stages of the document. So if you have roles like an editor or graphics person, or designer, and you knew that a document was in different stages, whether it was in a draft mode or published or preproduction, we can maybe try to get clever about resolving conflicts based on like, hey, an editor is mostly responsible for the words and so maybe if they're making a change while a graphics person is moving things around, that they should get primacy in that change, but the graphics person should get primacy about where things are organized, and maybe that it's a choice that you can actually like go for algorithm mode or you can go for most recent change mode or you can go for do it yourself mode. Our system works really well but it will always work correctly. We talked about that it needs comments. Comments are required for collaboration, and what else? Oh, in terms of privacy and working in—both working in secret and kind of collaboration, basically having some sort of on-off switch so essentially to work in private you could create a branch that's now your private branch that you can use but it's not the primary branch so if you want to make that public you're essentially merging that back in hand now you can make comments depending on the stage of the document. But you could also essential lock the document and you could essentially lock things together so you could say this paragraph depends on this other paragraph. So you delete this one, you're deleting the first reference for this person so don't screw up my paragraph down here. + +AUDIENCE MEMBER: Ooh, yes! + +That reminds me—if I can have that... + +One of the UI things that we did talk a little bit about tackling was trying to infer what changes go together. So, right, if I added a quote mark, and then, you know, 20 characters later I added another quote mark 5 seconds later, right, I probably surrounded something in quotes? That is one change. And how can we like guess based on time and similarity what—how many changes actually happened and how many the software just thinks happened. + +Cool, that is fantastic. So we're sort of running out of time, so what we'd like to do is if you can mix it up. So get up from your table. Go somewhere else in the room. A little bit of brownian motion here. + +One person may want to stay at their table, maybe, but you're going to mix it up. And if one person can just bring the post-its from each table to us, we'll put them up on this board over here, and then, yeah, once you have moved to a different part of the room, just sit back down. + +OK, so you're now sat at new pillars, mostly, hopefully, so we'd like to talk about different venues of writing, different styles of writing and sort of apply the thoughts that you've been thinking about sort of separately together on each of these. If you feel strongly about any of—any of these forms of writing or anything, you can get up and move around, that's fine. But we are sort of—we've got about 12 minutes left before lunch, so do it quickly, but we'll do the same thing, we'll sort of talk about each of these, and sort of just think about different issues of version control with each of these sorts of things, so we've got: high velocity, short form writing. + +Like Twitter? + +Like Twitter or blog posts or news articles. + +Not so short. + +I mean, yeah. Yeah, so that's more blog posts. Breaking news is the pink one. We've got long form serial articles with secret source, so this is, you know, like all of the stuff that Greenwald has been doing for example. And then long form serial work—so sourced work, public, like science journalism, that kind of thing. Breaking news, so you know, news stories that are coming live. And then Wikipedia, so sort of accreted knowledge reporting essentially, public stuff. + +So like we're at 1:20 already, so we're not going to do a whole lot of roll-up but go ahead and spend 10 minutes talking about how your system would work with all of your expertises now, and we'll explain at the end that this was just a trick to frustrate you: +[group activity] + +5-minute warning. Just so you know, we're going to ask you to present three separate bullet points that make you unique from everybody else's, OK, so think towards that. +[group activity] + +OK, so it is technically 1:30, which is why those of you that want to go to lunch should be able to go to lunch, but I want to first hear where you're at now. Because I know you haven't solved the problem completely because I know if you had, Blaine and I would want to work for you, so I'm going to bring mic out. Who wants to—raise a hand if you're ready to talk about your notes right now? + +We are. Can we just ask if you presented in the last round, that you hand the mic to someone else? Had. + +A really cool thing that came up just now is that it's hard to get -- + +We're the green long form serial, the sciencey one. You can't do accurate like annotations in a lot of source control systems, the best is on GitHub you can do a comment on a line. But we thought would be really good to be able to do a comment on a piece of punctuation or a citation. Especially like a database across stories so if you're a reporter, you can look up who was the person who reported on the filet lander and being able to accurately report quotes. And also being able to not lose work just having like a robust system for kind of like the tagging of the Google docs thing, so better than just show me the 50,000 versions that I have. And I think? Anybody else? + +Awesome bullet points. Bullet points next, let's move it to the blues, long form serial with secrets. Whoo ... + +Yeah, we this was an interesting one for us. Because we decided that the primary audience would probably be the journalists working on the story, so this is a very private, like, contained system that we wanted to be able to track like which bits of information came from which anonymous sources, so like giving them some sort of like screen name so that that information isn't actually stored, and then we wanted to also track who on the team had corroborated each source's information, even though we don't know who they are, we can still track who's holding themselves responsible for making sure that that information is in there. What else? I think that was most of it. + +Excellent. Good job protecting important people. + +No information. + +No information. Can't wait to hear Wikipedia. High velocity short form, correct? + +So we were—we feel like most of the changes that would happen to high velocity short form published will happen after the publication, and so how do those changes affect the content of the story and they'll probably be visible and they'll need to be visible because they're changing the initial contents of the story. How do we surface that to readers? We talked about What Is Code a little bit. There's an open GitHub repo for that article and there's a lot of user participation, I guess reader participation with pull requests, making changes to the story and those being merged and surfacing in the web interactive that's really interesting, and with that there's a lot of potentially dirty laundry that would then be entered into the record. It's kind of publicly available for people to see and is that a good or a bad thing? + +Nice, very good. First time Paul Ford's name has been mentioned in the context of short form. + +[laughter] + +Breaking news? + +OK, so we thought that one of the distinctive things about breaking news is that it's fundamentally wrong throughout. So we need a way of surfacing the corrections and kind of being transparent about what we were wrong about earlier, so we thought that might be a good opportunity for having a little bit more public facing view of the changes and the updates as they're coming in. We also thought that there might be a good opportunity for personalization here, because each—anyone who's on that page, things are happening, they're all coming at different times. Maybe someone whenever there's a group, if they come back to a page they can see what's changed since the last time they were there, because the information they saw previously was wrong, we want to make sure they know that not 6 people have died, it was actually 10 and we want to make sure that they're remembering the right stuff. And the last thing is collaboration is going to be really important because you might have four or five or six journalists all converging on one breaking news story and so there's going to be a lot of those conflicts that need to be resolved. + +I just want to point out that you just highlighted a fact that there might be a control system where one of the out-of-sync nodes is your reader's brain and I just wanted to call that out. Oh, good, good, Wikipedia comes last. Excellent. + +But always first. So I guess the big obvious issue with Wikipedia is authority, because, you for example it's edited by everybody, so we talked a little bit about that. And how, like, the idea is that it's just edited by everybody equally but that's not really how it works, because there are sort of like trusted editors and we talked a little bit about how that sort of authority gets established, if it's just that you're a very active user or if there are other ways that that could be assigned. We also talked about, well, like, also because of the nature of Wikipedia being edited by everybody, like visibility of changes is really important because you're not going to just mention to somebody like your editor, oh, yeah, I changed this. It's got to be built into the system. But it also can kind of serve as a metric for things like controversy, something that's edited a lot, or, you know, potentially, depending on the subject. Obviously that could be gamed by people who have an interest in a particular issue, to try to get it like flagged controversial or something, but, yeah, anything else? + +That is amazing. Thank you so much. I hope we haven't broken your brains too much, but I hope you go and think more about these problems, because I think they need solving. You're our only hope. + +[laughter] + +[applause] + +Definitely go forth and mush your brains on this, and if you feel you want to mush brains with us, we're all around. + +[session ended] diff --git a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/volunteer.md b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/volunteer.md index dee6b615..affce024 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2015oldz/volunteer.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2015oldz/volunteer.md @@ -4,19 +4,20 @@ title: Volunteer subtitle: Come help us make SRCCON great! sub-section: interior background: scholarships -byline: Matthew Paulson +byline: Matthew Paulson bylineurl: https://flic.kr/p/cZWiFy permalink: /volunteer/index.html --- + We need YOU to help make SRCCON work. In addition to participants running sessions throughout the two days of SRCCON, we'll also need a small group of people to help us keep the event running smoothly. Want to help? Consider volunteering at SRCCON. Volunteers will help with: -* registration -* supporting session leaders -* set-up and clean-up -* those unexpected tasks that always come up during an event +- registration +- supporting session leaders +- set-up and clean-up +- those unexpected tasks that always come up during an event Volunteering will be a significant time commitment. For offering that time and missing out on some (but not all!) of the festivities, you will have our gratitude, free entry to the event, a SRCCON Volunteer T-shirt, and the knowledge that you played an integral role in making our second SRCCON a success. -If you want to attend SRCCON and are excited about playing this type of (vital!) support role, please [email us for information](mailto:srccon@opennews.org) about volunteering. \ No newline at end of file +If you want to attend SRCCON and are excited about playing this type of (vital!) support role, please [email us for information](mailto:srccon@opennews.org) about volunteering. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/great_session.md b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/great_session.md index cf471888..d5cd1b30 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/great_session.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/great_session.md @@ -27,12 +27,12 @@ It's also useful to think about your target information/activity density and des Effective SRCCON facilitation is about effort and preparation more than expertise. Our facilitators plan and guide sessions, ask great questions, share what they know, and learn from their peers. We find that the best sessions are often led by facilitators who: -* have a clear outcome in mind—what they want people to leave with, -* know what they can realistically cover in a single session, -* build a clear outline for the session, but deviate from it as needed, -* actively seek to run balanced, inclusive conversations (for discussion-focused session formats), -* are clear about any necessary prerequisites or environment/setup requirements (for technical sessions), and -* make a few simple backup plans in case a session gets a larger or smaller audience than expected. +- have a clear outcome in mind—what they want people to leave with, +- know what they can realistically cover in a single session, +- build a clear outline for the session, but deviate from it as needed, +- actively seek to run balanced, inclusive conversations (for discussion-focused session formats), +- are clear about any necessary prerequisites or environment/setup requirements (for technical sessions), and +- make a few simple backup plans in case a session gets a larger or smaller audience than expected. On the flip side, facilitators who have a harder time have usually tried to fit too much stuff—information or activities—into too little time. @@ -42,8 +42,8 @@ If that sounds like a lot of effort…it is! But it also means that people who a ## Example Sessions from SRCCON 2015 -* [Become a Better Programmer Through Mundane Programming](http://2015.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-13) -* [Big Ambition, Small Staff, How the F*** Do I Prioritize?](http://2015.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-16) -* [Data Audioization: How Do We Bring Numbers to Life with Sound?](http://2015.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-18) -* [Designing Digital Communities for News](http://2015.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-15) -* [Surviving the News Business: Self-Care and Overcoming Burnout](http://2015.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-47) +- [Become a Better Programmer Through Mundane Programming](https://2015.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-13) +- [Big Ambition, Small Staff, How the F\*\*\* Do I Prioritize?](https://2015.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-16) +- [Data Audioization: How Do We Bring Numbers to Life with Sound?](https://2015.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-18) +- [Designing Digital Communities for News](https://2015.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-15) +- [Surviving the News Business: Self-Care and Overcoming Burnout](https://2015.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-47) diff --git a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/guide.md b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/guide.md index f4742d86..a16df7a8 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/guide.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/guide.md @@ -14,35 +14,35 @@ This year, as we planned out the opening session for our third SRCCON, we realiz ## The Schedule -* The SRCCON schedule lives at [schedule.srccon.org](http://schedule.srccon.org)—there is no printed version, so load that link on your phone. -* SRCCON was inspired by wonderful hallway conversations at other events, so there are big spacious breaks between sessions so that you can actually talk to people—take advantage of them. -* There will be a lot of food available to you over the next two days—meals, snacks, our coffee & tea hacking station, and more, so you don't need to worry about the timing or location of your next food or caffeine. -* The long lunch breaks on both days will include topical Lunch Conversations—and you can sign up at the registration desk to lead one on Friday, if you're interested. -* Thursday evening we've scheduled lightning talks, walks, games, non-work talks and skillshares, and other informal sessions. +- The SRCCON schedule lives at [schedule.srccon.org](https://2016.srccon.org/schedule/)—there is no printed version, so load that link on your phone. +- SRCCON was inspired by wonderful hallway conversations at other events, so there are big spacious breaks between sessions so that you can actually talk to people—take advantage of them. +- There will be a lot of food available to you over the next two days—meals, snacks, our coffee & tea hacking station, and more, so you don't need to worry about the timing or location of your next food or caffeine. +- The long lunch breaks on both days will include topical Lunch Conversations—and you can sign up at the registration desk to lead one on Friday, if you're interested. +- Thursday evening we've scheduled lightning talks, walks, games, non-work talks and skillshares, and other informal sessions. ## Sessions -* Sessions are built for active participation, so you'll have the best experience if you show up willing to (even very quietly) jump in and contribute. -* About half of all sessions will be transcribed by our amazing live-captioning team, and some sessions will be audio-recorded. You can get alerts when each transcription begins streaming live by following [@srccon](https://twitter.com/srccon) or installing our [SRCCON Transcript Alert Slack bot](http://srccon.org/slackbot/). +- Sessions are built for active participation, so you'll have the best experience if you show up willing to (even very quietly) jump in and contribute. +- About half of all sessions will be transcribed by our amazing live-captioning team, and some sessions will be audio-recorded. You can get alerts when each transcription begins streaming live by following [@srccon](https://twitter.com/srccon) or installing our [SRCCON Transcript Alert Slack bot](https://srccon.org/slackbot/). ## Registration -* To register, walk through the main entrance of the PNCA building (facing the post office), past the security desk—you won't need to sign in—to the registration desk in the building's sunny atrium. -* When you register, you can choose a badge lanyard indicating your photo preferences (green = photos fine; yellow = ask first; red = no photos) and, if you like, a pin for your lanyard to communicate your preferred pronouns. +- To register, walk through the main entrance of the PNCA building (facing the post office), past the security desk—you won't need to sign in—to the registration desk in the building's sunny atrium. +- When you register, you can choose a badge lanyard indicating your photo preferences (green = photos fine; yellow = ask first; red = no photos) and, if you like, a pin for your lanyard to communicate your preferred pronouns. ## Safety & conduct -* If we had to state our hopes and expectations for everyone at SRCCON in one sentence, it would go something like "please take care with each other and watch out for your fellow participants." -* Since we don't have to stick to one sentence, our [code of conduct](http://srccon.org/conduct/) sets out our expectations in greater detail, and we hope you'll take a look. -* If you need to report a problem or need assistance during the conference, please text or call SRC CON 2909 (772-266-2909) and we'll do all we can to help. +- If we had to state our hopes and expectations for everyone at SRCCON in one sentence, it would go something like "please take care with each other and watch out for your fellow participants." +- Since we don't have to stick to one sentence, our [code of conduct](https://srccon.org/conduct/) sets out our expectations in greater detail, and we hope you'll take a look. +- If you need to report a problem or need assistance during the conference, please text or call SRC CON 2909 (772-266-2909) and we'll do all we can to help. ## The venue -* Our conference venue is an art school with exhibitions going on and summer classes in session, so please be respectful of classes in progress and take care with the venue's many art installations. -* The building's long history—and beautiful restoration—has resulted in some complicated wayfinding needs. Our sessions take place on three floors, and you'll find maps on the walls—the pink X marks your spot—and plentiful volunteers to help you find your way. -* There's a gender-neutral bathroom on the building's first floor—check any posted map for details. +- Our conference venue is an art school with exhibitions going on and summer classes in session, so please be respectful of classes in progress and take care with the venue's many art installations. +- The building's long history—and beautiful restoration—has resulted in some complicated wayfinding needs. Our sessions take place on three floors, and you'll find maps on the walls—the pink X marks your spot—and plentiful volunteers to help you find your way. +- There's a gender-neutral bathroom on the building's first floor—check any posted map for details. ## More -* Our offical videographer will be moving through the conference both days—rest assured that your lanyard photo preferences will be respected, and he won't be recording audio, so your conversations are safe. -* Our official hashtag is [#SRCCON](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23srccon&src=typd). +- Our offical videographer will be moving through the conference both days—rest assured that your lanyard photo preferences will be respected, and he won't be recording audio, so your conversations are safe. +- Our official hashtag is [#SRCCON](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23srccon&src=typd). diff --git a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/logistics.md b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/logistics.md index ca8fa02e..c34a8212 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/logistics.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/logistics.md @@ -7,14 +7,16 @@ sub-section: interior background: pnca permalink: /logistics/index.html --- + SRCCON 2016 takes place at the [Pacific Northwest College of Art](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pacific+Northwest+College+of+Art/@45.5269699,-122.6803404,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x549509fec32013d9:0x3ad790efffd31e44!8m2!3d45.5269699!4d-122.6781517), a beautifully restored and renovated 1918 building near downtown Portland, Oregon. Portland offers excellent restaurants, cafés, and breweries in a walkable, transit-friendly city, and easy day-trips include hiking around Mt. Hood and the gorgeous—and often sunny—Oregon coast. Over the next six weeks, we'll continue to publish lots of information to help you get the most out of your time at SRCCON and—for those who aren't local—explore the surrounding areas as well. ## Schedule + SRCCON will run from 9am till 10pm on Thursday, July 28 (including breakfast and non-session evening activities), and from 10am till 6pm on Friday, July 29. We'll publish a full session schedule in July! ## Lodging -Our discounted room block at the [Marriott Courtyard Portland City Center](http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/pdxpc-courtyard-portland-city-center/), 550 SW Oak Street, is fully booked. There are still rooms available at the hotel, but they are regular rate (with slight discounts reported via various online booking systems). There are lots of other hotels available near the conference venue, including: +Our discounted room block at the [Marriott Courtyard Portland City Center](https://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/pdxpc-courtyard-portland-city-center/), 550 SW Oak Street, is fully booked. There are still rooms available at the hotel, but they are regular rate (with slight discounts reported via various online booking systems). There are lots of other hotels available near the conference venue, including: **[The Benson](https://www.coasthotels.com/hotels/oregon/portland/the-benson-hotel/) ($269)**
0.4 miles away @@ -22,37 +24,40 @@ Our discounted room block at the [Marriott Courtyard Portland City Center](http:
Portland, OR 97205
(503) 228-2000 -**[Hotel Lucia](http://hotellucia.com/) ($237)** +**[Hotel Lucia](https://hotellucia.com/) ($237)**
0.4 miles away
400 SW Broadway
Portland, OR 97205
(503) 225-1717 -**[Ace Hotel](http://www.acehotel.com/portland) ($195/$295)** +**[Ace Hotel](https://www.acehotel.com/portland) ($195/$295)**
0.5 miles away
1022 Southwest Stark Street
Portland, OR 97205
(503) 228-2277 -**[The Westin Portland](http://www.westinportland.com/) ($269)** +**[The Westin Portland](https://www.westinportland.com/) ($269)**
0.5 miles away
750 SW Alder St
Portland, OR 97205
(503) 294-9000 -**[Hotel Monaco](http://www.monaco-portland.com/) ($290)** +**[Hotel Monaco](https://www.monaco-portland.com/) ($290)**
0.6 miles away
506 Southwest Washington Street
Portland, OR 97204
(503) 222-0001 ## Transit + Portland's [MAX Light Rail system](https://trimet.org/max/) is an easy way to get around the city. You can take the Red Line from the airport to the Oak/SW 1st Ave station for $2.50. That will drop you off about 4 blocks from the conference hotel. ## Thursday Night at SRCCON + Thursday night, join us for SRCCON's evening fun: we'll be hosting games, lightning talks, and other activities. There will be local beverages and snacks, and much more. [Learn more and sign up now](https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/SRCCON2016). ## Childcare + We are offering free, on-site childcare throughout the full SRCCON schedule (including Thursday evening) at the Marriott Courtyard Portland City Center via the genuinely great team at [KiddieCorp](https://www.kiddiecorp.com/). Childcare registration is now closed—if you missed the deadline and need childcare, please [contact us](mailto:srccon@opennews.org), and we'll add you to the wait list. ## Partners at SRCCON @@ -60,10 +65,13 @@ We are offering free, on-site childcare throughout the full SRCCON schedule (inc Some of you are coming to Portland with partners and have wondered if they can take part in any of our activities. We’re happy to say that they’re welcome to join us for Thursday evening’s meal and activities, with a special [$45 partner ticket that you can purchase now](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/srccon-thursday-evening-partner-access-tickets-26333714850?access=SRCCONpartner). ## Meals at SRCCON + We want you to be happy and well-fed at SRCCON, so we're providing breakfast and lunch on both days, as well as a delicious dinner Thursday night. We'll also have tea, coffee, and snacks—both healthy and sugary—throughout the day, so stick around and enjoy the company of your fellow attendees. ## Alcoholics Anonymous -On Thursday night, the closest meeting to SRCCON is at [8pm at the Portland Alano Club](http://home.pdxaa.org/meetings/thurs-night-candlelight/?d=4&r=45&t=O), 909 Northwest 24th Avenue. It is an “open” meeting, meaning that you don’t have to be alcoholic to go. AA Portland also hosts a [full list of area meetings](http://home.pdxaa.org/meetings/). + +On Thursday night, the closest meeting to SRCCON is at [8pm at the Portland Alano Club](https://home.pdxaa.org/meetings/thurs-night-candlelight/?d=4&r=45&t=O), 909 Northwest 24th Avenue. It is an “open” meeting, meaning that you don’t have to be alcoholic to go. AA Portland also hosts a [full list of area meetings](https://home.pdxaa.org/meetings/). ## SRCCON Attendee List + If you'd like to let the rest of the conference know you'll be there, you can add your name to the [attendee list](https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/SRCCON2016-attendees). diff --git a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/pitch.md b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/pitch.md index f7e1864e..a0ed2aae 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/pitch.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/pitch.md @@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ background: stickerdots byline: Erik Westra permalink: /sessions/pitch/index.html --- + # Propose a Session -Proposals for SRCCON 2016 are now closed. Thank you so much for your enthusiastic response. We are now reviewing all proposed sessions [(you can check them out too)](/sessions/proposals) and will be publishing accepted sessions by May 17. +Proposals for SRCCON 2016 are now closed. Thank you so much for your enthusiastic response. We are now reviewing all proposed sessions [(you can check them out too)](/sessions/proposals) and will be publishing accepted sessions by May 17. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/proposals.md b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/proposals.md index da6c6e07..9138ec1d 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/proposals.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/proposals.md @@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ background: stickerdots byline: Erik Westra permalink: /sessions/proposals/index.html --- + These are the proposed sessions for SRCCON 2016. We are currently reviewing this list and will be publishing the list of accepted sessions prior to our [ticket lottery](/tickets) opening on May 18.
{% comment %}The one-line if statement below is ugly but prevents massive whitespace in the template{% endcomment %} diff --git a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/scholarships.md b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/scholarships.md index 6b1fd082..9e3e8a6c 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/scholarships.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/scholarships.md @@ -4,54 +4,73 @@ title: Scholarships subtitle: We know not everyone can afford a trip to Portland, so we offer a limited number of travel scholarships to help you make it to SRCCON. sub-section: interior background: scholarships -byline: Erik Westra +byline: Erik Westra permalink: /scholarships/index.html --- + **The application window for travel scholarships to SRCCON 2016 is now closed. Thank you so much to everyone who applied.** ## Apply for a scholarship + We’re accepting applications for a limited number of scholarships from May 5 to May 18. Whether you’re a newsroom developer at a small organization with a strained professional development budget or a freelance developer eager to learn more about journalism code, we want to help you attend SRCCON. ## What we’re offering + Scholarships include a ticket to SRCCON and $500 for you to use toward the cost of travel to the event. We also have an extremely small number of $1,000 scholarships available for participants with much higher travel costs. (For scholarship recipients who live in the Portland area, we offer a SRCCON ticket without the additional travel funding.) We are also offering five scholarships for Dow Jones News Fund alumni. That scholarship opportunity is also now closed. ## Who should apply -* Anyone who is part of the journalism code community -* Anyone interested in learning more about the journalism code community -* People of color, women, and other underrepresented groups in technology are strongly encouraged to apply + +- Anyone who is part of the journalism code community +- Anyone interested in learning more about the journalism code community +- People of color, women, and other underrepresented groups in technology are strongly encouraged to apply ## What happens after you apply? + We’ll review your application and get back to you by May 20. ## What happens after SRCCON? + You tell us how it went! We’ll send you a short followup survey and will be excited to check out any blog posts or code repos that come out of your participation at SRCCON. ## Why are you offering these scholarships? + We want to make sure that SRCCON is an event that includes the diversity of the communities we serve—geographically, demographically, experientially, and more. We know that travel costs can be a hardship, and offer this scholarship as a way to help mitigate that. ## How do you decide who will receive a scholarship? + OpenNews staff reviews all applications. We prioritize applications from members of communities underrepresented in journalism and technology, as well as from people who would be unable to facilitate an accepted session without the scholarship. ## Do I still need to purchase a ticket to SRCCON? + If you receive a scholarship, you will not have to purchase a ticket. We will notify you about the status of your application before registration closes for the SRCCON lottery. ## When will I receive my scholarship? + When we notify scholarship recipients, we will include information about how to receive the scholarship funds. In short, you will need to send us an invoice, and our administrators will process the payment. It may take a month or so for check processing. ## What if I need more than $500 for my travel? + We're able to offer mostly $500 scholarships at this time. This year, we are also offering an extremely small number of $1,000 scholarships for exceptionally high travel costs. We've added a question to the form to capture more information about the level of need for travel costs. ## What are other ways I can cover the cost of my travel? + Luckily, Portland is a relatively cheap city once you arrive. Also, this entire site is a [GitHub pages repo](https://github.com/OpenNews/srccon), so if you, say, wanted to add a link to a room-share board, you could go right ahead and do that. Or you can [email with any suggestions](erika@opennews.org). ## Questions not covered here? + [Email us](srccon@opennews.org).
-

Scholarships to SRCCON are made possible by Wordpress

-

Additional scholarship support from the Dow Jones News Fund.

+

+ Scholarships to SRCCON are made possible by + Wordpress +

+

+ Additional scholarship support from the + Dow Jones News Fund. +

diff --git a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/sessions.md b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/sessions.md index dfa2c5e1..d158d93e 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/sessions.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/sessions.md @@ -8,7 +8,8 @@ background: stickerdots byline: Erik Westra permalink: /sessions/index.html --- -The following sessions have been confirmed for SRCCON 2016, and you can also [see them in our just-released 2016 schedule](http://schedule.srccon.org). + +The following sessions have been confirmed for SRCCON 2016, and you can also [see them in our just-released 2016 schedule](https://2016.srccon.org/schedule/).
{% comment %}The one-line if statement below is ugly but prevents massive whitespace in the template{% endcomment %} {% for proposal in site.data.sessions %} diff --git a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/sessions_about.md b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/sessions_about.md index 971681d7..8849537e 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/sessions_about.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/sessions_about.md @@ -8,19 +8,21 @@ background: stickerdots byline: Erik Westra permalink: /sessions/about/index.html --- + Our proposal period has now closed, and we are reviewing [this year's amazing list of proposed sessions](/sessions/proposals) now to build the 2016 program. ## How a Pitch Becomes a Session + Session proposals closed on April 20. We're now spending a couple of weeks reviewing proposals within the SRCCON team, with additional reviews and perspectives from across our community as we assemble a final list of sessions. -* **May 11**, notification of accepted proposals -* **May 18**, SRCCON 2016 [ticket lottery](/tickets) opens +- **May 11**, notification of accepted proposals +- **May 18**, SRCCON 2016 [ticket lottery](/tickets) opens In reviewing proposals, we look for: -* topics that are relevant to code, design, and data folks in newsrooms (and allied fields). -* evidence that you've thought through your proposed session topic and format, and what you'd like participants to take away from it. -* sessions that probably wouldn't work as well at another conference. +- topics that are relevant to code, design, and data folks in newsrooms (and allied fields). +- evidence that you've thought through your proposed session topic and format, and what you'd like participants to take away from it. +- sessions that probably wouldn't work as well at another conference. We make it a priority to build a program that is balanced and that reflects the makeup of our communities. We actively welcome session proposals from members of communities underrepresented in journalism and technology, and from non-coastal and small-market news organizations. @@ -28,9 +30,9 @@ We make it a priority to build a program that is balanced and that reflects the We created SRCCON with a few principles in mind that lay the groundwork for our program as a whole: -* SRCCON is built around participation, discussion, and collaborative problem-solving. -* SRCCON exists to respond to the needs and interests of our community, and we must be intentional in including perspectives from throughout the field. -* Every attendee is a peer—no lecturers, no special status, no outsiders. +- SRCCON is built around participation, discussion, and collaborative problem-solving. +- SRCCON exists to respond to the needs and interests of our community, and we must be intentional in including perspectives from throughout the field. +- Every attendee is a peer—no lecturers, no special status, no outsiders. Many of our sessions work as structured discussions and problem-solving groups; others function as peer-to-peer skillshares; still others incorporate games, drawing, field trips, and more—we avoid traditional lecture/conference talk formats and classroom-style trainings, but we welcome a wide range of hands-on and collaborative session styles. @@ -40,7 +42,7 @@ Many of our sessions work as structured discussions and problem-solving groups; We reserve tickets for the facilitators of all accepted sessions, and all facilitators will be given an opportunity to buy a ticket before the [ticket lottery opens](/tickets) on May 18. However, instead of providing free tickets for session facilitators, we offer need-based scholarships that anyone—facilitator or otherwise—can apply for if they need help covering the costs of attending. ([Scholarship applications](/scholarships) will open May 5.) -Why do we do it this way? Mostly because SRCCON is a collaborative, peer-to-peer event, and we consider all attendees to be active participants, rather than either speakers or passive audience members. This approach also helps us keep ticket prices low enough to be affordable for most news organizations. +Why do we do it this way? Mostly because SRCCON is a collaborative, peer-to-peer event, and we consider all attendees to be active participants, rather than either speakers or passive audience members. This approach also helps us keep ticket prices low enough to be affordable for most news organizations. ## Not Just Sessions… diff --git a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/slackbot.md b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/slackbot.md index 9eae45d4..d43c5424 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/slackbot.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/slackbot.md @@ -8,12 +8,12 @@ background: remote permalink: /slackbot/index.html --- -We're excited to be offering live transcription at SRCCON again this year. About half of our 2016 sessions will be transcribed (they're all marked on [the schedule](http://schedule.srccon.org)), and we hope people feel able to take part even if they can't join us in Portland. +We're excited to be offering live transcription at SRCCON again this year. About half of our 2016 sessions will be transcribed (they're all marked on [the schedule](https://2016.srccon.org/schedule/)), and we hope people feel able to take part even if they can't join us in Portland. -We'll send out [alerts on Twitter](http://twitter.com/srccon) when a transcribed session is about to start, but we're also trying something new this year: Slack alerts. Add the "SRCCON Transcript Alerts" bot to your team Slack, and you'll get a reminder and a link right to the live transcript as these sessions get ready to begin. +We'll send out [alerts on Twitter](https://twitter.com/srccon) when a transcribed session is about to start, but we're also trying something new this year: Slack alerts. Add the "SRCCON Transcript Alerts" bot to your team Slack, and you'll get a reminder and a link right to the live transcript as these sessions get ready to begin.

Add to Slack

The "Add to Slack" button will ask you to authorize access for a team you belong to, and choose a channel to receive the alerts. That's it! -

Transcriptions at SRCCON are made possible by The New York Times +

Transcriptions at SRCCON are made possible by The New York Times diff --git a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/slackbot_success.md b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/slackbot_success.md index 37f31427..ccfb8606 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/slackbot_success.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/slackbot_success.md @@ -10,4 +10,4 @@ permalink: /slackbot/success/index.html Thanks for adding SRCCON Transcript Alerts to your team Slack. We'll ping you soon! -

Transcriptions at SRCCON are made possible by The New York Times +

Transcriptions at SRCCON are made possible by The New York Times diff --git a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/thanks.md b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/thanks.md index 49d39979..ec3451e4 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/thanks.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/thanks.md @@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ background: stickerdots byline: Erik Westra permalink: /sessions/thanks/index.html --- +

Thank you for submitting a proposal to SRCCON 2016!

We'll notify all proposers about the status of their sessions by Wednesday, May 11. If you like, you can [submit another proposal](/sessions/pitch). If you’re all set, please consider inviting friends and colleagues to submit a proposal and join us in Portland July 28 and 29. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/tickets.md b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/tickets.md index 27884426..9a65b146 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/tickets.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/tickets.md @@ -15,7 +15,7 @@ permalink: /tickets/index.html SRCCON is a small event and we’re tuning the program (and meals) to the exact attendee list we have, so please let us know as soon as you can if you’re not coming, because it may mean we’ll need to tweak our program a little. -**Transfers:** *All tickets to SRCCON are non-transferrable.* Tickets are specific to the ticketholder and can't be given to a coworker, collaborator, or anyone else. If you can't attend SRCCON, you should cancel your ticket. +**Transfers:** _All tickets to SRCCON are non-transferrable._ Tickets are specific to the ticketholder and can't be given to a coworker, collaborator, or anyone else. If you can't attend SRCCON, you should cancel your ticket. **Cancellations:** You can cancel your ticket for a full refund up until two weeks before the conference begins (July 14). After July 14, we can't refund your ticket, but we would still love to know if you're not attending so we can adjust our plans accordingly. @@ -25,9 +25,9 @@ Some of you are coming to Portland with partners and have wondered if they can t ## Lottery recap -* The lottery was open May 18 until noon Eastern on May 24. -* Everyone who registered was notified of their status in the lottery (selected or not) by **5pm Eastern on May 25**. -* Each selected person has 48 hours to buy a single, non-transferrable ticket. Tickets cost $195. +- The lottery was open May 18 until noon Eastern on May 24. +- Everyone who registered was notified of their status in the lottery (selected or not) by **5pm Eastern on May 25**. +- Each selected person has 48 hours to buy a single, non-transferrable ticket. Tickets cost $195. You can [read lots more about our switch to a lottery system](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-tix/) on the OpenNews blog. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/transcription.md b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/transcription.md index 1fc6a648..1c1be898 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/transcription.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/transcription.md @@ -36,7 +36,6 @@ We had a live-captioning team transcribe 26 sessions at SRCCON. Live streams wer During and after SRCCON, we have a documentation team writing up session summaries, collecting resource lists, and more. We'll be [publishing the write-ups on Source](https://source.opennews.org) in the weeks that follow the conference, and also collecting write-ups and blog posts from attendees. -
- Transcription at SRCCON is made possible by The New York Times + Transcription at SRCCON is made possible by The New York Times
diff --git a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/volunteer.md b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/volunteer.md index c2fec826..7fa6c73e 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2016oldz/volunteer.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2016oldz/volunteer.md @@ -4,19 +4,20 @@ title: Volunteer subtitle: Come help us make SRCCON great! sub-section: interior background: scholarships -byline: Matthew Paulson +byline: Matthew Paulson bylineurl: https://flic.kr/p/cZWiFy permalink: /volunteer/index.html --- + We need YOU to help make SRCCON work. In addition to participants running sessions throughout the two days of SRCCON, we'll also need a small group of people to help us keep the event running smoothly. Want to help? Consider volunteering at SRCCON. Volunteers will help with: -* registration -* supporting session leaders -* set-up and clean-up -* those unexpected tasks that always come up during an event +- registration +- supporting session leaders +- set-up and clean-up +- those unexpected tasks that always come up during an event Volunteering will be a significant time commitment. For offering that time and missing out on some (but not all!) of the festivities, you will have our gratitude, free entry to the event, a SRCCON Volunteer T-shirt, and the knowledge that you played an integral role in making our third SRCCON a success. -If you want to attend SRCCON and are excited about playing this type of (vital!) support role, please [email us for information](mailto:srccon@opennews.org) about volunteering. \ No newline at end of file +If you want to attend SRCCON and are excited about playing this type of (vital!) support role, please [email us for information](mailto:srccon@opennews.org) about volunteering. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/childcare.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/childcare.md index d319ede0..a0086f18 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/childcare.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/childcare.md @@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ background: childcare permalink: /childcare/index.html --- -We are offering free childcare throughout the full SRCCON schedule (including Thursday evening). Our providers are the wonderful [KiddieCorp](https://www.kiddiecorp.com/) team, whom we welcome back for their third year at SRCCON. Registration has now closed, but [email us](mailto:erika@opennews.org) if you have last-minute childcare needs and we'll see what we can do. +We are offering free childcare throughout the full SRCCON schedule (including Thursday evening). Our providers are the wonderful [KiddieCorp](https://www.kiddiecorp.com/) team, whom we welcome back for their third year at SRCCON. Registration has now closed, but [email us](mailto:erika@opennews.org) if you have last-minute childcare needs and we'll see what we can do. ## Our care providers @@ -21,5 +21,5 @@ Two of our own staff members have had their young children happily in KiddieCorp Childcare will take place at the conference hotel, which is right next door to the conference venue. You can [learn more about KiddieCorp's staffing](https://www.kiddiecorp.com/staffselect.html) and [security procedures](https://www.kiddiecorp.com/security.html)..
- Childcare at SRCCON is made possible by John S Knight Fellowships + Childcare at SRCCON is made possible by John S Knight Fellowships
diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/conduct.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/conduct.md index 144f637c..d2cb4733 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/conduct.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/conduct.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ title: Our Code of Conduct subtitle: Your safety matters to us. This is our public commitment to doing all we can to ensure it. sub-section: interior background: lifevests -byline: Dvortygirl +byline: Dvortygirl bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dvortygirl/3982230988 permalink: /conduct/index.html --- @@ -15,9 +15,9 @@ SRCCON and OpenNews are committed to providing a welcoming and harassment-free e SRCCON participants agree to: -* Be considerate in speech and actions, and actively seek to acknowledge and respect the boundaries of fellow attendees. -* Refrain from demeaning, discriminatory, or harassing behavior and speech. Harassment includes, but is not limited to: deliberate intimidation; stalking; unwanted photography or recording; sustained or willful disruption of talks or other events; inappropriate physical contact; use of sexual or discriminatory imagery, comments, or jokes; and unwelcome sexual attention. If you feel that someone has harassed you or otherwise treated you inappropriately, please alert any member of the conference team in person, via the team phone/text line, or via email. -* Take care of each other. Alert a member of the conference team if you notice a dangerous situation, someone in distress, or violations of this code of conduct, even if they seem inconsequential. +- Be considerate in speech and actions, and actively seek to acknowledge and respect the boundaries of fellow attendees. +- Refrain from demeaning, discriminatory, or harassing behavior and speech. Harassment includes, but is not limited to: deliberate intimidation; stalking; unwanted photography or recording; sustained or willful disruption of talks or other events; inappropriate physical contact; use of sexual or discriminatory imagery, comments, or jokes; and unwelcome sexual attention. If you feel that someone has harassed you or otherwise treated you inappropriately, please alert any member of the conference team in person, via the team phone/text line, or via email. +- Take care of each other. Alert a member of the conference team if you notice a dangerous situation, someone in distress, or violations of this code of conduct, even if they seem inconsequential. If any attendee engages in harassing behavior, the conference organizers may take any lawful action we deem appropriate, including but not limited to warning the offender or asking the offender to leave the conference. (If you feel you have been unfairly accused of violating this code of conduct, you should contact the conference team with a concise description of your grievance; any grievances filed will be considered by the entire OpenNews team.) @@ -28,4 +28,4 @@ We welcome your feedback on this and every other aspect of SRCCON, and we thank
-Above text is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Credit to [Citizen Code of Conduct](http://citizencodeofconduct.org/), [the Django Project’s code of conduct](https://www.djangoproject.com/conduct/) and [Theorizing the Web code of conduct](http://theorizingtheweb.tumblr.com/post/79357700249/anti-harassment-statement) from which we’ve extensively borrowed, with general thanks to [the Ada Initiative’s “how to design a code of conduct for your community.”](https://adainitiative.org/2014/02/howto-design-a-code-of-conduct-for-your-community/) +The text above is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Credit to [Citizen Code of Conduct](https://web.archive.org/web/20191127125628/citizencodeofconduct.org/), [the Django Project's Code of Conduct](https://www.djangoproject.com/conduct/), and the [Theorizing the Web Code of Conduct](https://theorizingtheweb.tumblr.com/post/79357700249/anti-harassment-statement) from which we've extensively borrowed, with general thanks to [the Ada Initiative's "how to design a code of conduct for your community."](https://adainitiative.org/2014/02/howto-design-a-code-of-conduct-for-your-community/) diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/docs.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/docs.md index 12db8a02..eaddd852 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/docs.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/docs.md @@ -1,51 +1,54 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Docs -subtitle: We are building SRCCON in the open and sharing what we learn. -section: docs -sub-section: interior -background: books -byline: Nate Bolt -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN -permalink: /docs/index.html ---- - -We put a great deal of emphasis in capturing the work involved in putting SRCCON together. As a result, we have an ongoing series of docs on the logistics and theory that go into SRCCON. - -## Sessions & Proposals -* [SRCCON Facilitator Guide: How to Run a Great Session](/facilitators/index.html) -* [SRCCON Proposal Guide: How to Craft a Great Session Pitch](/sessions/proposals/guide) -* [How We Facilitated A Huge, Participatory, Highly Charged SRCCON Session](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-two/) -* [3 Ways to Facilitate a Great Conference Session](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-one/) -* [Five Things We've Learned About Sessions](http://opennews.org/blog/srccon-top5) -* [How to Plan a Great SRCCON Session](http://opennews.org/blog/srccon-session-planning) - -## Participant Experience -* [SRCCON Participant Guide: How to Have a Great Time at SRCCON](/guide/participant/index.html) -* [Why You Want a Code of Conduct & How We Made One](http://incisive.nu/2014/codes-of-conduct) -* [Making SRCCON Good for Humans](http://opennews.org/blog/srccon-human-stuff) -* [Thursday Nights at SRCCON](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-thursday/) - -## Logistics -* [Why We Wrote Our SRCCON Proposals Guide](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-proposal-guide/) -* [Why We Expanded Our Scholarship Program](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-scholarships-update/) -* [How We Planned & Ran the SRCCON Travel Scholarships](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-scholarship-process-admin/) -* [SRCCON Ticketing: What We Did and Why](http://opennews.org/blog/srccon-tickets) -* [Why You Want a Code of Conduct & How We Made One](http://incisive.nu/2014/codes-of-conduct) -* [The SRCCON Ticket Lottery: What we Learned](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-lottery/) -* [Captioning a Multi-Track Conference - How SRCCON Did It](http://opennews.org/blog/srccon-transcription) - -## Other Resources & Inspiration - -* [2015 Will Be the Year You Pitch a NICAR Lightning Talk](https://medium.com/@sisiwei/2015-will-be-the-year-you-pitch-a-nicar-lightning-talk-dd293e5d78ca) by Sisi Wei -* [Alcohol and Inclusivity: Planning Tech Events with Non-Alcoholic Options](https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/alcohol-and-inclusivity-planning-tech-events-with-non-alcoholic-options) by Kara Sowles -* [Anti-Harassment Policies](https://adainitiative.org/what-we-do/conference-policies/) from the Ada Initiative -* [Convention Tension](https://friendshipping.simplecast.fm/episodes/8885-convention-tension) by Jenn Bane & Trin Garritano -* [Help People Afford to Attend Your Conference](http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/help-more-people-attend-your-conference) by Ashe Dryden -* [Hire More Women in Tech](http://www.hiremorewomenintech.com/) by Karen Schoellkopf -* [How Much It Cost Us to Make More Attendees Feel Safe and Welcome at .concat() 2015](https://medium.com/@boennemann/how-much-it-cost-us-to-make-more-attendees-feel-safe-and-welcome-at-concat-2015-2bc51d4df656) by Stephan Bönnemann -* [HOWTO Design a Code of Conduct for Your Community](https://adainitiative.org/2014/02/howto-design-a-code-of-conduct-for-your-community/) from the Ada Initiative -* [Increasing Diversity at Your Conference](http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/increasing-diversity-at-your-conference) by Ashe Dryden -* [We Are All Awesome](http://weareallaweso.me/) by Tiffany Conroy -* [You Can Choose Who Submits Talks to Your Conference](http://jvns.ca/blog/2015/03/06/you-can-choose-who-submits-talks-to-your-conference/) by Julia Evans -* [Your Next Conference Should Have Real-Time Captioning](http://composition.al/blog/2014/05/31/your-next-conference-should-have-real-time-captioning/) by Lindsey Kuper +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Docs +subtitle: We are building SRCCON in the open and sharing what we learn. +section: docs +sub-section: interior +background: books +byline: Nate Bolt +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/boltron/3212284622/in/photolist-5TRNiC-4VkeqM-4VpqGm-4VkcGz-4Vpr1S-4Vken4-fmXRof-2YtFPR-fmHB44-dFxkXG-7yv4t7-4VnnAn-5A3XSn-4Vnnmv-4VnnqK-9uup4n-4Vnnv6-3ViP2v-4VnngF-4VkgVa-4VkeuZ-4Vkg5R-4VpmbC-4VpnDu-4Vk9rK-4VpqRL-4VpsPb-4VpuU3-4Vkf5D-4Vkdj6-4Vk8uc-b1TXEz-4VkhcX-mF5DPa-fmHXAB-r8mgB3-s5i4Mz-7i3R7t-og8qB5-fmXSCf-7i7Ky9-92YNnD-fmHDut-5C51hV-rMM8b3-k639ok-8FDPAB-apFhiP-rL2vRV-4VptiN +permalink: /docs/index.html +--- + +We put a great deal of emphasis in capturing the work involved in putting SRCCON together. As a result, we have an ongoing series of docs on the logistics and theory that go into SRCCON. + +## Sessions & Proposals + +- [SRCCON Facilitator Guide: How to Run a Great Session](/facilitators/index.html) +- [SRCCON Proposal Guide: How to Craft a Great Session Pitch](/sessions/proposals/guide) +- [How We Facilitated A Huge, Participatory, Highly Charged SRCCON Session](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-two/) +- [3 Ways to Facilitate a Great Conference Session](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-one/) +- [Five Things We've Learned About Sessions](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-top5) +- [How to Plan a Great SRCCON Session](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-session-planning) + +## Participant Experience + +- [SRCCON Participant Guide: How to Have a Great Time at SRCCON](/guide/participant/index.html) +- [Why You Want a Code of Conduct & How We Made One](https://incisive.nu/2014/codes-of-conduct) +- [Making SRCCON Good for Humans](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-human-stuff) +- [Thursday Nights at SRCCON](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-thursday/) + +## Logistics + +- [Why We Wrote Our SRCCON Proposals Guide](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-proposal-guide/) +- [Why We Expanded Our Scholarship Program](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-scholarships-update/) +- [How We Planned & Ran the SRCCON Travel Scholarships](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-scholarship-process-admin/) +- [SRCCON Ticketing: What We Did and Why](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-tickets) +- [Why You Want a Code of Conduct & How We Made One](https://incisive.nu/2014/codes-of-conduct) +- [The SRCCON Ticket Lottery: What we Learned](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-lottery/) +- [Captioning a Multi-Track Conference - How SRCCON Did It](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-transcription) + +## Other Resources & Inspiration + +- [2015 Will Be the Year You Pitch a NICAR Lightning Talk](https://medium.com/@sisiwei/2015-will-be-the-year-you-pitch-a-nicar-lightning-talk-dd293e5d78ca) by Sisi Wei +- [Alcohol and Inclusivity: Planning Tech Events with Non-Alcoholic Options](https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/alcohol-and-inclusivity-planning-tech-events-with-non-alcoholic-options) by Kara Sowles +- [Anti-Harassment Policies](https://adainitiative.org/what-we-do/conference-policies/) from the Ada Initiative +- [Convention Tension](https://friendshipping.simplecast.fm/episodes/8885-convention-tension) by Jenn Bane & Trin Garritano +- [Help People Afford to Attend Your Conference](https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/help-more-people-attend-your-conference) by Ashe Dryden +- [Hire More Women in Tech](https://www.hiremorewomenintech.com/) by Karen Schoellkopf +- [How Much It Cost Us to Make More Attendees Feel Safe and Welcome at .concat() 2015](https://medium.com/@boennemann/how-much-it-cost-us-to-make-more-attendees-feel-safe-and-welcome-at-concat-2015-2bc51d4df656) by Stephan Bönnemann +- [HOWTO Design a Code of Conduct for Your Community](https://adainitiative.org/2014/02/howto-design-a-code-of-conduct-for-your-community/) from the Ada Initiative +- [Increasing Diversity at Your Conference](https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/increasing-diversity-at-your-conference) by Ashe Dryden +- [We Are All Awesome](https://weareallaweso.me/) by Tiffany Conroy +- [You Can Choose Who Submits Talks to Your Conference](https://jvns.ca/blog/2015/03/06/you-can-choose-who-submits-talks-to-your-conference/) by Julia Evans +- [Your Next Conference Should Have Real-Time Captioning](https://composition.al/blog/2014/05/31/your-next-conference-should-have-real-time-captioning/) by Lindsey Kuper diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/facilitator_guide.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/facilitator_guide.md index d45983b6..2ec51f6a 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/facilitator_guide.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/facilitator_guide.md @@ -10,174 +10,175 @@ permalink: /facilitators/index.html --- Session facilitators make SRCCON what it is, a collaborative, hands-on conference that brings peers together to work on the practical challenges facing journalism today. We’ve put this guide together to help you think about planning and running a great session. - + ## In This Guide -* [What Sets SRCCON Apart?](#about-srccon) -* [What Is a Facilitator and What Do They Do?](#what-is-a-facilitator) -* [Key Moments for Facilitators Before SRCCON](#key-moments) -* [Planning Your Session Before SRCCON](#planning) -* [Facilitating a Great Session Once You're at SRCCON](#facilitating) -* [How Many People Will Be In My Session?](#how-many-people) -* [What Kinds of People Will Be In My Session?](#what-kinds-people) -* [What Materials Will I Have?](#what-materials) -* [How Much Time Will I Have?](#how-much-time) -* [Will My Session Be Recorded?](#recording) -* [Tips on Effective Facilitation](#tips-facilitation) -* [Tips on Running an Inclusive Session](#tips-inclusivity) -* [Additional Resources](#resources) + +- [What Sets SRCCON Apart?](#about-srccon) +- [What Is a Facilitator and What Do They Do?](#what-is-a-facilitator) +- [Key Moments for Facilitators Before SRCCON](#key-moments) +- [Planning Your Session Before SRCCON](#planning) +- [Facilitating a Great Session Once You're at SRCCON](#facilitating) +- [How Many People Will Be In My Session?](#how-many-people) +- [What Kinds of People Will Be In My Session?](#what-kinds-people) +- [What Materials Will I Have?](#what-materials) +- [How Much Time Will I Have?](#how-much-time) +- [Will My Session Be Recorded?](#recording) +- [Tips on Effective Facilitation](#tips-facilitation) +- [Tips on Running an Inclusive Session](#tips-inclusivity) +- [Additional Resources](#resources) - + ## What Sets SRCCON Apart? - + SRCCON is a highly participatory event, where everyone is engaged in learning, building, and problem-solving together. That's one of the reasons we refer to you as facilitators, not speakers or presenters. When you run a session at SRCCON, you’re in a room with dozens of other smart people with an opportunity to compare notes, share skills, and help everyone learn from each other. - + We created SRCCON with a few principles in mind that lay the groundwork for our program as a whole: - -* SRCCON is built around participation, discussion, and collaborative problem-solving. -* SRCCON exists to respond to the needs and interests of our community, and we’re intentional in including perspectives from throughout the field. -* Every attendee is a peer. Conference badges don’t flag organizations or speaker status—we're all here to learn from each other. - + +- SRCCON is built around participation, discussion, and collaborative problem-solving. +- SRCCON exists to respond to the needs and interests of our community, and we’re intentional in including perspectives from throughout the field. +- Every attendee is a peer. Conference badges don’t flag organizations or speaker status—we're all here to learn from each other. + Our sessions inhabit these values in different ways, through structured discussions and problem-solving groups; peer-to-peer workshops; even games, drawing, or field trips. We avoid traditional lectures and classroom-style trainings, but we welcome your creativity across a range of hands-on and collaborative session styles. ## What Is a Facilitator and What Do They Do? - + As a facilitator, you bring your experience and excitement (or even skepticism) to leading a discussion or workshop with a highly engaged group. - -* **Guide.** You set an agenda for the group. That could be laying out the contours of a problem you are wrestling with, and then guiding a group conversation that explores solutions. Or it could be teaching participants a new skill or technique they can take back to their newsroom. -* **Invite.** You gather the wisdom in the room. You help make sure everyone feels able to participate, not just the people who already feel comfortable speaking up. You have the power to make conversations inclusive, and to help the room reach consensus, build connections, and find best practices. -* **Organize.** You help everyone make the session productive. That means keeping an eye on time, and working through the activities on your agenda. At the end, you bring everything to a close, helping attendees summarize what they worked on and calling out key takeaways. - -Facilitators don't need to come in with all the answers. You're there to guide discussions or collaborative work, and to help attendees contribute and walk away having learned something new. + +- **Guide.** You set an agenda for the group. That could be laying out the contours of a problem you are wrestling with, and then guiding a group conversation that explores solutions. Or it could be teaching participants a new skill or technique they can take back to their newsroom. +- **Invite.** You gather the wisdom in the room. You help make sure everyone feels able to participate, not just the people who already feel comfortable speaking up. You have the power to make conversations inclusive, and to help the room reach consensus, build connections, and find best practices. +- **Organize.** You help everyone make the session productive. That means keeping an eye on time, and working through the activities on your agenda. At the end, you bring everything to a close, helping attendees summarize what they worked on and calling out key takeaways. + +Facilitators don't need to come in with all the answers. You're there to guide discussions or collaborative work, and to help attendees contribute and walk away having learned something new. ## Key Moments for Facilitators Before SRCCON - -* **End of June:** We'll ask you for any supply and scheduling needs you might have. -* **Early July:** We'll share a timeline you can use for outlining your session, and optionally pair you up with peers for feedback. -* **Mid-July:** We'll build this year's schedule and let you know about time slots and room assignments -* **Late July:** We'll offer an open call to share facilitation tips and a Q&A. -* **SRCCON week:** The night before SRCCON begins, we'll hold a facilitator welcome session at the venue for anyone who'd like to attend. + +- **End of June:** We'll ask you for any supply and scheduling needs you might have. +- **Early July:** We'll share a timeline you can use for outlining your session, and optionally pair you up with peers for feedback. +- **Mid-July:** We'll build this year's schedule and let you know about time slots and room assignments +- **Late July:** We'll offer an open call to share facilitation tips and a Q&A. +- **SRCCON week:** The night before SRCCON begins, we'll hold a facilitator welcome session at the venue for anyone who'd like to attend. ## Planning Your Session Before SRCCON - + SRCCON attendees show up ready to pitch in, whether that's writing code, working through activities, or participating in conversations. Much of the work you'll do as a facilitator will take place in the weeks leading up to SRCCON, as you outline your session. We've found that keeping two things in mind can help translate your awesome ideas into a meaningful experience for SRCCON attendees: - -* **Scope:** Broad topics need some boundaries, or conversations won't go anywhere. Niche sessions are great, but need enough topical space for a variety of people to participate. Similarly, over-programming a session with too many activities can make it impossible to get to your goals—but a session that's underdesigned can easily turn into a conversation between a handful of the loudest people. -* **Outcomes:** Think about what you want attendees to take away from your session. A new or improved skill? A broader sense of community? The excitement of solving a problem they'd been facing alone? If you start planning your session by thinking about the end, it helps you focus everything leading up to that moment. - + +- **Scope:** Broad topics need some boundaries, or conversations won't go anywhere. Niche sessions are great, but need enough topical space for a variety of people to participate. Similarly, over-programming a session with too many activities can make it impossible to get to your goals—but a session that's underdesigned can easily turn into a conversation between a handful of the loudest people. +- **Outcomes:** Think about what you want attendees to take away from your session. A new or improved skill? A broader sense of community? The excitement of solving a problem they'd been facing alone? If you start planning your session by thinking about the end, it helps you focus everything leading up to that moment. + From there, you have a huge amount of room to explore creative ways to work with attendees. Slide presentations and lectures aren’t what you’re after, but conversations and small-group work are staples on the SRCCON schedule. There are many outstanding session formats to consider, as well: design exercises, games, technical workshops, role-playing, even physical movement and field trips outside the conference space. Fun is good. We'll support all sorts of ways to help you engage with people and make abstract concepts real. - + Another thing to consider as you map out your session outline: Expect the unexpected. It's easy to imagine the best-case scenario, where everything runs smoothly and according to plan—and that's probably exactly how your session will go! But what if you ask your first question and no one answers? What if someone shares an amazing idea, and you want to follow up on it? You’ll be responding to situations like these on the fly, and you’ll be a lot more confident if you've thought through some scenarios in advance. Plan more material than you think you'll need, and know you can feel good about dropping half of it—you just don’t know which half it will be. - + And finally, make sure to block out time in your outline for wrapup. We found that between engaging activities and interesting conversations, some facilitators were having a hard time fitting in a closing moment, so this year we’ve lengthened session times from 60 minutes to 75 minutes. We want you to have room to pull groups back together to report on their work, or to share final thoughts and next steps before people head out the door. ## Facilitating a Great Session Once You're at SRCCON - + Once you're at the venue, conference staff and volunteers will be around to answer questions and help you with any problems that come up. We'll also set aside some time before SRCCON begins for you to see the venue and check out the room where you'll be leading your session. Here are a few more things to help you anticipate what the facilitation experience will be like: ### How Many People Will Be In My Session? - + About 275 people attend SRCCON, and we program about 6 topics at a time, so most sessions will have 30 to 50 people in the room. Some topics will draw fewer—and that's fine! Some of the smallest sessions at SRCCON are incredibly meaningful for the people who are there, and we want to encourage those conversations. - + Some sessions might bring in larger crowds as well, so we encourage you to spend a little time thinking about how you might accommodate different group sizes. Will you be working in small groups that can scale up or down? Are you running an activity that might need extra supplies? We'll have volunteers available to help you make room adjustments on the fly, but you'll be happier if you go in knowing how you'll respond to different crowd sizes. - + ### What Kinds of People Will Be In My Session? - + First and foremost, you’ll be surrounded by peers—people excited about journalism and ready to share their expertise at a journalism-centric conference. More than a third of the attendees at SRCCON will be session facilitators themselves. Most participants are developers, designers, and data analysts who work in newsrooms, but we also welcome reporters, editors, managers, and multimedia journalists, as well as attendees from related fields like civic tech, art, mapping, and open data. Most participants come from the U.S., although many countries will be represented. We draw from large media organizations as well as smaller, regional, and noncoastal newsrooms. - + Every person at SRCCON is smart and creative. But not every person in your room will be an expert in the particular subject you’re covering. We encourage attendees, in fact, to go to sessions that challenge them, about topics they might not normally choose. So think about how you might, for example, involve a designer in your software session. Or bring a filmmaker’s thoughts into a conversation about writing. Just as they're in the room to be exposed to new ideas, your topic might be energized by an outside perspective. - + As a facilitator, there are a couple ways you can really support the people in your room: - -* Be a mindful and inclusive leader. There are some [simple things you can do](LINK TO INCLUSIVITY TIPS) to help all your attendees feel able to participate, and make the experience better for everyone in the room. -* Help your attendees prepare before they get there. Many (but not all!) of the attendees check out the schedule and plan what to attend in advance, so your session description is an important preparation resource. Be clear about what attendees will do in your session and what they’ll walk away with. If they should do any prep (like installing software or bringing examples of their own work), let them know, but be ready for folks to join you last-minute as well. If you could use additional resources (like a TA for a particularly technical session), let _us_ know and we’ll get you what you need. + +- Be a mindful and inclusive leader. There are some [simple things you can do](LINK TO INCLUSIVITY TIPS) to help all your attendees feel able to participate, and make the experience better for everyone in the room. +- Help your attendees prepare before they get there. Many (but not all!) of the attendees check out the schedule and plan what to attend in advance, so your session description is an important preparation resource. Be clear about what attendees will do in your session and what they’ll walk away with. If they should do any prep (like installing software or bringing examples of their own work), let them know, but be ready for folks to join you last-minute as well. If you could use additional resources (like a TA for a particularly technical session), let _us_ know and we’ll get you what you need. ### What Materials Will I Have? - + Every room at SRCCON will be well-stocked with note paper, post-it notes, pens, and sharpies. We'll make sure you have a whiteboard or a giant scratchpad on an easel, too; if you want to send people away with ideas they can act on, grabbing a marker and whiteboarding the best comments from the room is a great way to do it. - + Each room will have a screen so you can connect your laptop and walk through a software lesson or show examples to kick off a discussion. We'll also set up a shared document for live note-taking, linked right from your session on the SRCCON schedule. This is a great place to drop links to useful resources for you session attendees. - + If you need any special supplies for your session, we’ll ask you to tell us about them about a month in advance of SRCCON so we can order them and have them ready for you. ### How Much Time Will I Have? - + The conference schedule sets aside 75 minutes for each SRCCON session. You don’t have to fill the entire time, but we want you to have plenty of room to dig into a topic and respond to threads that emerge along the way. If your session needs _more_ than 75 minutes, let us know and we can adjust appropriately. The conference schedule also builds in a 30-minute break between sessions—plenty of time for attendees to hang around and ask questions or continue conversations before they head out. - + How you use your time is completely up to you. While you won't need a script like you might for a traditional conference talk, we do thoroughly encourage outlines. Sessions are always a little less daunting once you break them into smaller pieces, and knowing how you plan to budget your time helps you stay on task while you’re doing it live. - + ### Will My Session Be Recorded? - -SRCCON works with [White Coat Captioning](http://www.whitecoatcaptioning.com/) to provide live transcriptions in about half our sessions each year. This [helps some people at the conference](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-transcription/) track conversations more easily, and allows additional people to participate remotely. It also provides a great record of sessions that have taken place [in previous years](https://2016.srccon.org/transcription/). - + +SRCCON works with [White Coat Captioning](https://www.whitecoatcaptioning.com/) to provide live transcriptions in about half our sessions each year. This [helps some people at the conference](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-transcription/) track conversations more easily, and allows additional people to participate remotely. It also provides a great record of sessions that have taken place [in previous years](https://2016.srccon.org/transcription/). + As we build the conference schedule, we'll decide which sessions formats will translate well into transcription, and we'll let you know in advance if there will be a transcriptionist in your room. If there is, you can always ask participants to note "off the record" before speaking if they'd like the transcriptionist to pause their work. Or if you'd prefer your session to be off the record entirely, that's not a problem—we'll make sure your session isn't transcribed at all. - + We also have experimented with audio recording in some sessions, but again, if yours is a candidate, we'll let you know in advance and make sure you're OK with conversations being captured in that way. ## Tips on Effective Facilitation - + SRCCON is built upon participation and folks are coming to your session expecting to be involved and active. Some things to consider in your role as session facilitator: - + **Start by setting some ground rules.** This can be super helpful for participants, and for you to refer back to as facilitator. Some examples: -* Everyone should speak 1/_n_ of the time, where _n_ is the number of people in the room. This encourages folks to be conscious of how much they are speaking. An additional note is that speaking and offering opinions is not the only way to contribute to a session: listening and asking questions are also powerful ways to participate. -* Respect the schedule. -* Be curious and generous. +- Everyone should speak 1/_n_ of the time, where _n_ is the number of people in the room. This encourages folks to be conscious of how much they are speaking. An additional note is that speaking and offering opinions is not the only way to contribute to a session: listening and asking questions are also powerful ways to participate. +- Respect the schedule. +- Be curious and generous. **Take advantage of your power as facilitator.** You've set the agenda, and your role is to guide and support conversation. -* You can decide in the moment how to handle unexpected challenges. You can also decide when it is best to throw out your original agenda and try something new. -* If a problematic comment comes up in your session, you can confront the issue. For example, if a participant only uses male pronouns to refer to developers, you might clarify that there are skilled developers of all genders, including some folks right there in the room. -* Guide the tenor of the discussion—it’s a conversation, not a debate. Try to make sure the room isn’t dominated by just a few voices; keep an eye out for body language that says “I might have something to add” even when that person doesn’t feel confident enough to cut in. Go ahead and call on that person to see if they’d like to say something. You can also tell folks who keep chattin that you’d like to hear from other people in the room. -* Elicit reflection from the group. "Noticings," or observations without judgment, can help participants build self-awareness and explore statements. For example, "I noticed that you referenced a study, could you say more about what struck you about it?" When you do get a comment that’s not quite what you expected, you can almost always find part of it to build on. +- You can decide in the moment how to handle unexpected challenges. You can also decide when it is best to throw out your original agenda and try something new. +- If a problematic comment comes up in your session, you can confront the issue. For example, if a participant only uses male pronouns to refer to developers, you might clarify that there are skilled developers of all genders, including some folks right there in the room. +- Guide the tenor of the discussion—it’s a conversation, not a debate. Try to make sure the room isn’t dominated by just a few voices; keep an eye out for body language that says “I might have something to add” even when that person doesn’t feel confident enough to cut in. Go ahead and call on that person to see if they’d like to say something. You can also tell folks who keep chattin that you’d like to hear from other people in the room. +- Elicit reflection from the group. "Noticings," or observations without judgment, can help participants build self-awareness and explore statements. For example, "I noticed that you referenced a study, could you say more about what struck you about it?" When you do get a comment that’s not quite what you expected, you can almost always find part of it to build on. **Work with people in the room.** Leading a group of creative people toward a common goal can be hard, especially while you're juggling time, information, and conversations. A cofacilitator can help lighten the load, and keeps each of you from having to be “on” the whole time. But also don’t be afraid to ask an enthusiastic attendee to help keep time, take notes, or watch for people with something to say. **Be clear about outcomes.** Call out the goals for each discussion at the outset, check along the way that you're making progress toward them, and review goals at the end of the session. (This is sometimes referred to as "tell them what you're going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them.") - + Overall, use your wisdom and passion as your guide; we greatly appreciate you sharing your time and knowledge with the group, and trust each facilitator to create an optimal sharing environment. ## Tips on Running an Inclusive Session - + Inclusion is about creating space where people can feel more able to share and work together. It includes respecting things like pronouns and accessibility needs, and at SRCCON we also encourage you to: - -* Avoid jargon, and explain it when you can't work around it. -* Talk about your assumptions about the group's background at the beginning, and consider doing a "temperature check" to validate those assumptions and see--are there mostly journalists in the room? Mostly developers? Checking in helps you know how to tailor your session. -* Think about how to welcome people who aren't experts without feeling like you have to revert to an introductory approach. -* Consider who is taking more visible speaking and participation roles in your session, and encourage multiple voices to take part. - -In your sessions and outside them, the SRCCON staff will fully support you in making SRCCON a safe and welcoming space. If you witness or hear about incidents of harassment, intimidation, or other problems, please get us involved. You can find plenty more information in our conference [code of conduct](http://srccon.org/conduct/). + +- Avoid jargon, and explain it when you can't work around it. +- Talk about your assumptions about the group's background at the beginning, and consider doing a "temperature check" to validate those assumptions and see--are there mostly journalists in the room? Mostly developers? Checking in helps you know how to tailor your session. +- Think about how to welcome people who aren't experts without feeling like you have to revert to an introductory approach. +- Consider who is taking more visible speaking and participation roles in your session, and encourage multiple voices to take part. + +In your sessions and outside them, the SRCCON staff will fully support you in making SRCCON a safe and welcoming space. If you witness or hear about incidents of harassment, intimidation, or other problems, please get us involved. You can find plenty more information in our conference [code of conduct](https://srccon.org/conduct/). ## Additional Resources - -* [How to approach planning a session](http://opennews.org/blog/srccon-session-planning/) -* [How to facilitate a great session, by Sisi Wei](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-one/) -* [How to facilitate a great session, by Alyson Hurt](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-two) -* [Behind the decisions that help make SRCCON, and your sessions, more humane](http://opennews.org/blog/srccon-human-stuff/) -* [Our favorite facilitation guide from AORTA Coop](http://aorta.coop/sites/default/files/ao_facilitation_resource_sheet_july_2014.pdf) -* [Tips from our friends at Aspiration Tech about running a breakout session](http://facilitation.aspirationtech.org/index.php?title=Facilitation:Break-Outs) -* [General facilitation tips from Aspiration Tech](http://facilitation.aspirationtech.org/index.php?title=Facilitation:Facilitator_Guidelines) + +- [How to approach planning a session](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-session-planning/) +- [How to facilitate a great session, by Sisi Wei](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-one/) +- [How to facilitate a great session, by Alyson Hurt](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-two) +- [Behind the decisions that help make SRCCON, and your sessions, more humane](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-human-stuff/) +- [Our favorite facilitation guide from AORTA Coop](https://aorta.coop/sites/default/files/ao_facilitation_resource_sheet_july_2014.pdf) +- [Tips from our friends at Aspiration Tech about running a breakout session](https://facilitation.aspirationtech.org/index.php?title=Facilitation:Break-Outs) +- [General facilitation tips from Aspiration Tech](https://facilitation.aspirationtech.org/index.php?title=Facilitation:Facilitator_Guidelines) diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/homepage.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/homepage.md index 3b116663..67d08b49 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/homepage.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/homepage.md @@ -1,79 +1,78 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: SRCCON 2017 -subtitle: Two amazing days building better newsroom code, culture, and process—together.
-eventdate: SRCCON 2017 took place
August 3 & 4 in Minneapolis -section: homepage -background: homepage -byline: Joe D -bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jadammel/6813663977/in/photolist-bo6NV8-cYJ5BW-dvdBz6-bx3hGz-bjwfyN-eiyt2R-bzndNi-xpTv4c-c1uNoN-87b43u-dwF5Xi-877Usp-9KXu6o-7JWWQ3-eiRr3x-bkmRcj-dmCBA5-dmCbxp-bk8hN1-aPrDyF-c3oCfy-eds2cy-63QpuP-6RykQm-bwqeeP-82nsNg-bcMuqH-p4YhA-6ruw6u-bzQzwU-6N35wm-6yQoFn-diJKXS-dBFrpJ-aG3CYP-edHBYv-4f5wv-jwewB-6CZYnF-4oiFUn-bw5j8Z-4cE92J-bAYTin-bQsdTz-dLN559-5o98t6-bkQyU9-djE7or-duoc32-aJBXGg -permalink: /index.html ---- - -Thank you, SRCCON 2017 attendees! You brought your ideas, your passions, and your whole selves to Minneapolis and created an incredible experience for everyone there. We've been cleaning up [transcripts](/transcription) and publishing writeups on [Source](https://source.opennews.org), and sharing more of the wonderful work that took place in [more than 50 sessions and workshops](http://schedule.srccon.org) this year. - -We'll also be continuing many of these important conversations at [SRCCON:WORK](https://work.srccon.org) this December in Philadelphia. Our program will take on collaboration, career growth, and care, and we invite you to join us in exploring how we can help each other take on the hard work of journalism. - -
-
- -

What is SRCCON like?

-

SRCCON is a hands-on conference, full of conversations and workshops focused on the practical challenges that news technology and data teams encounter every day. We work to make it an inclusive and welcoming event where people can feel comfortable digging into complex problems. Last year SRCCON included nearly 300 attendees and more than 50 sessions that covered a wide range of topics, from tech strategies to workplace culture struggles.

- -
-

SRCCON 2016 highlights video, videography by Searle Video.

-
-
- -## Who attends SRCCON - -The majority of SRCCON participants are developers, designers, and data analysts who work in newsrooms. We also enthusiastically welcome attendees from closely allied fields like civic tech, mapping, open data, and others who are curious about journalism and excited to share their expertise at a journalism-centric conference. - -Our participants represent organizations ranging from massive to tiny, and come from all over the US and many other countries. Each year, we particularly welcome journalists and allies from the city hosting SRCCON, and we're working to build better remote-participation options for those who can't attend in person. - -
-
- -

Contact us

- -

To get information about tickets, our call for proposals and other SRCCON-related info and news, sign up for the OpenNews notification list:

- - - - -
-
-
- - - - -
-
-
-
- -

While all of our SRCCON news will be going out on our mailing list, if you want to contact us, we'd love to hear from you:

- - - - -
-
- -SRCCON is produced by [OpenNews](http://opennews.org), an organization built to connect a network of developers, designers, journalists and editors to collaborate on open technologies and processes within journalism. - -The “src” in SRCCON stands for “Source,” as in "view source." We pronounce it “Source-con,” but you can say it however you want. +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: SRCCON 2017 +subtitle: Two amazing days building better newsroom code, culture, and process—together.
+eventdate: SRCCON 2017 took place
August 3 & 4 in Minneapolis +section: homepage +background: homepage +byline: Joe D +bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jadammel/6813663977/in/photolist-bo6NV8-cYJ5BW-dvdBz6-bx3hGz-bjwfyN-eiyt2R-bzndNi-xpTv4c-c1uNoN-87b43u-dwF5Xi-877Usp-9KXu6o-7JWWQ3-eiRr3x-bkmRcj-dmCBA5-dmCbxp-bk8hN1-aPrDyF-c3oCfy-eds2cy-63QpuP-6RykQm-bwqeeP-82nsNg-bcMuqH-p4YhA-6ruw6u-bzQzwU-6N35wm-6yQoFn-diJKXS-dBFrpJ-aG3CYP-edHBYv-4f5wv-jwewB-6CZYnF-4oiFUn-bw5j8Z-4cE92J-bAYTin-bQsdTz-dLN559-5o98t6-bkQyU9-djE7or-duoc32-aJBXGg +permalink: /index.html +--- + +Thank you, SRCCON 2017 attendees! You brought your ideas, your passions, and your whole selves to Minneapolis and created an incredible experience for everyone there. We've been cleaning up [transcripts](/transcription) and publishing writeups on [Source](https://source.opennews.org), and sharing more of the wonderful work that took place in [more than 50 sessions and workshops](https://2017.srccon.org/schedule/) this year. + +We'll also be continuing many of these important conversations at [SRCCON:WORK](https://work.srccon.org) this December in Philadelphia. Our program will take on collaboration, career growth, and care, and we invite you to join us in exploring how we can help each other take on the hard work of journalism. + +
+
+ +

What is SRCCON like?

+

SRCCON is a hands-on conference, full of conversations and workshops focused on the practical challenges that news technology and data teams encounter every day. We work to make it an inclusive and welcoming event where people can feel comfortable digging into complex problems. Last year SRCCON included nearly 300 attendees and more than 50 sessions that covered a wide range of topics, from tech strategies to workplace culture struggles.

+ +
+

SRCCON 2016 highlights video, videography by Searle Video.

+
+
+ +## Who attends SRCCON + +The majority of SRCCON participants are developers, designers, and data analysts who work in newsrooms. We also enthusiastically welcome attendees from closely allied fields like civic tech, mapping, open data, and others who are curious about journalism and excited to share their expertise at a journalism-centric conference. + +Our participants represent organizations ranging from massive to tiny, and come from all over the US and many other countries. Each year, we particularly welcome journalists and allies from the city hosting SRCCON, and we're working to build better remote-participation options for those who can't attend in person. + +
+
+ +

Contact us

+ +

To get information about tickets, our call for proposals and other SRCCON-related info and news, sign up for the OpenNews notification list:

+ + + + +
+
+
+ + + + +
+
+
+
+ +

While all of our SRCCON news will be going out on our mailing list, if you want to contact us, we'd love to hear from you:

+ + + +
+
+ +SRCCON is produced by [OpenNews](https://opennews.org), an organization built to connect a network of developers, designers, journalists and editors to collaborate on open technologies and processes within journalism. + +The “src” in SRCCON stands for “Source,” as in "view source." We pronounce it “Source-con,” but you can say it however you want. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/local_guide.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/local_guide.md index aa78fae4..1db06f91 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/local_guide.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/local_guide.md @@ -12,23 +12,22 @@ permalink: /guide/index.html

Thanks to MPLS locals Jeff Guntzel, MaryJo Webster, Matt DeLong, Justin Heideman, Andrew Stevenson, CJ Sinner, Will Lager, Tom Nehil, Richard Abdill, Meg Martin, and Eric Nelson.

- ## What's In the Guide -* [How to Get Around](#getaround) -* [Delicious Places: Food on Campus](#food) -* [Delicious Places: Food Further Out](#foodaway) -* [Beautiful Places](#sights) -* [Books!](#books) -* [Records!](#records) -* [Movies!](#movies) -* [Museums and Art!](#art) -* [Live Music!](#music) -* [Festivals and Events!](#festivals) -* [Fun for Kids!](#kids) -* [Just Because…](#because) -* [Day Trips!](#trips) -* [More Lists!](#lists) +- [How to Get Around](#getaround) +- [Delicious Places: Food on Campus](#food) +- [Delicious Places: Food Further Out](#foodaway) +- [Beautiful Places](#sights) +- [Books!](#books) +- [Records!](#records) +- [Movies!](#movies) +- [Museums and Art!](#art) +- [Live Music!](#music) +- [Festivals and Events!](#festivals) +- [Fun for Kids!](#kids) +- [Just Because…](#because) +- [Day Trips!](#trips) +- [More Lists!](#lists) @@ -44,21 +43,21 @@ There is also a bike sharing system called [Nice Ride](https://www.niceridemn.or ### Bun Mi Sandwiches (Vietnamese) -[http://www.bunmisandwiches.com](http://www.bunmisandwiches.com) +[https://www.bunmisandwiches.com](https://www.bunmisandwiches.com) 0.2 miles 604 Washington Ave SE I know, I know--it's Bánh Mì. See what they did there? You know what else they do? Delicious. ### Caspian Bistro -[http://www.viewmenu.com/caspian-bistro-and-marketplace/menu](http://www.viewmenu.com/caspian-bistro-and-marketplace/menu) +[https://www.viewmenu.com/caspian-bistro-and-marketplace/menu](https://www.viewmenu.com/caspian-bistro-and-marketplace/menu) 0.3 miles 2418 University Ave SE Persian market and Middle Eastern cafe. Has great service, is delicious. ### Punch Neapolitan Pizza -[http://www.punchpizza.com](http://www.punchpizza.com) +[https://www.punchpizza.com](https://www.punchpizza.com) 0.1 mile (visible from McNamara) 802 Washington Ave SE or @@ -68,7 +67,7 @@ Fabulous pizzas cooked in a wood-burning oven at 800 degrees for about 90 second ### The Village Wok -[http://www.villagewok.com](http://www.villagewok.com) +[https://www.villagewok.com](https://www.villagewok.com) 0.2 miles 610 Washington Ave SE A U of M institution serving Chinese food in "Cantonese, Shanghainese, Sichuan, Hunan, and Peking styles." @@ -82,20 +81,20 @@ Reasonable beer and food—also, on occasion, live music. ### Haiku Japanese Bistro -[http://www.haikujapanese.com](http://www.haikujapanese.com) +[https://www.haikujapanese.com](https://www.haikujapanese.com) 0.2 miles 620 Washington Avenue Southeast ### Surdyk's Northrop Cafe -[http://www.northrop.umn.edu/visit/surdyks-caf-northrop](http://www.northrop.umn.edu/visit/surdyks-caf-northrop) +[https://www.northrop.umn.edu/visit/surdyks-caf-northrop](https://www.northrop.umn.edu/visit/surdyks-caf-northrop) 0.5 miles 84 Church Street Southeast If you can't get to the full-stack Surdyk's (vast liquor and cheese selections with fantastic sandwiches), their Northrup cafe will do just fine. Good coffee, too! ### Afro Deli -[http://www.afrodeli.com/](http://www.afrodeli.com/) +[https://www.afrodeli.com/](https://www.afrodeli.com/) 0.2 miles 720 SE Washington Ave African and Middle Eastern Cuisine @@ -103,7 +102,7 @@ African and Middle Eastern Cuisine ### Himalayan Dinkytown [https://www.facebook.com/pg/himalayandinkytown/](https://www.facebook.com/pg/himalayandinkytown/) -Review: [http://heavytable.com/himalayan-dinkytown/](http://heavytable.com/himalayan-dinkytown/) +Review: [https://heavytable.com/himalayan-dinkytown/](https://heavytable.com/himalayan-dinkytown/) 0.6 miles 1415 4th St SE Nepalese, Tibetan and Indian food on campus in a fast-casual setting. @@ -117,21 +116,21 @@ Malts! Malts! Malts! Also... Burgers! Burgers! Burgers! ### Purple Onion (coffee shop/cafe) -[http://www.thepurpleonioncafe.com](http://www.thepurpleonioncafe.com) +[https://www.thepurpleonioncafe.com](https://www.thepurpleonioncafe.com) 0.7 miles 1301 University Ave SE A great place to set up shop with a laptop, coffee, and something eggy. ### Shuang Cheng (Cantonese) -[http://www.shuangchengrestaurant.com](http://www.shuangchengrestaurant.com) +[https://www.shuangchengrestaurant.com](https://www.shuangchengrestaurant.com) 0.7 miles 1320 4th Street South East Minneapolis You love Cantonese food and you just need somebody to point you to the good stuff. Right over here, stranger. ### Surly Tap Room -[http://surlybrewing.com](http://surlybrewing.com) +[https://surlybrewing.com](https://surlybrewing.com) 1.0 miles 520 Malcolm Avenue Southeast Surly makes really good beer right here in Minnesota. Really good. Unlike many breweries in town, they also have a full restaurant menu. @@ -149,49 +148,49 @@ Half of the building is dedicated to a fine-dining-ish restaurant, but in the la ### Kramarczuk’s -[http://kramarczuks.com/](http://kramarczuks.com/) +[https://kramarczuks.com/](https://kramarczuks.com/) 1.7 miles 215 E Hennepin Ave Old school Eastern European deli. We never sausage a fine place to dine! ### Foxy Falafel -[http://foxyfalafel.com/](http://foxyfalafel.com/) +[https://foxyfalafel.com/](https://foxyfalafel.com/) 1.8 miles 791 Raymond Ave, St. Paul Just off the Raymond Avenue stop on the Green Line (3 stops east of Stadium Village). Excellent falafel and shwarma. Lots of vegan, vegetarian and organic options. Great gluten-free cookies. Serves alcohol. ### Norseman Distillery -[http://www.norsemandistillery.com/](http://www.norsemandistillery.com/) +[https://www.norsemandistillery.com/](https://www.norsemandistillery.com/) 1.9 miles 451 Taft St NE #19 Distillery with a seasonal cocktail list whose cocktail room doubles as an art gallery. They recently introduced a short new-Nordic inspired food menu. ### Brasa Premium Rotisserie -[http://www.brasa.us](http://www.brasa.us) +[https://www.brasa.us](https://www.brasa.us) 1.9 miles 600 East Hennepin Avenue Lip smacking, finger dripping Southern cooking. ### Surdyk's Liquor & Cheese Shop -[http://surdyks.com](http://surdyks.com) +[https://surdyks.com](https://surdyks.com) 1.9 miles 303 East hennepin Avenue Select a picnic place (Gold Medal Park? The Walker Art Center Sculpture Garden?) and head to Surdyk's to pick up cheese, crackers, sandwiches, fancy fizzy drinks, and desserts. You'll never forget Minneapolis. ### Izzy's Ice Cream -[http://izzysicecream.com/locations/minneapolis/](http://izzysicecream.com/locations/minneapolis/) +[https://izzysicecream.com/locations/minneapolis/](https://izzysicecream.com/locations/minneapolis/) 2.1 miles 1100 South 2nd Street Izzy's ice cream is so, so, so good. And it's right next to Gold Medal Park and the Gutrhie Theater. ### Urban Growler Brewing Co. -[http://www.urbangrowlerbrewing.com](http://www.urbangrowlerbrewing.com) +[https://www.urbangrowlerbrewing.com](https://www.urbangrowlerbrewing.com) 2.4 miles 2325 Endicott Street, St. Paul This is a 10-15 minute walk from the Raymond Avenue stop (3 stops east of Stadium Village). It’s a little off the beaten path and surrounded by warehouses but worth a visit. @@ -199,28 +198,28 @@ A woman-owned and operated craft brewery that makes damn good beer and features ### Acadia Cafe -[http://acadiapub.com](http://acadiapub.com) +[https://acadiapub.com](https://acadiapub.com) 2.2 miles 329 Cedar Avenue A bazillion beers (er, 28) on tap + great food. ### Bauhaus Brew Labs -[http://bauhausbrewlabs.com/](http://bauhausbrewlabs.com/) +[https://bauhausbrewlabs.com/](https://bauhausbrewlabs.com/) 2.7 miles 1315 Tyler Street Northeast -There are[ in Minneapolis, but this one is perhaps the most picturesuqe. Great german-inspired beer, outdoor games, music, and usually have food trucks.](http://mnbeer.com/breweries/) +There are[ in Minneapolis, but this one is perhaps the most picturesuqe. Great german-inspired beer, outdoor games, music, and usually have food trucks.](https://mnbeer.com/breweries/) ### Peace Coffee -[http://www.peacecoffee.com/locations/wonderland-park](http://www.peacecoffee.com/locations/wonderland-park) +[https://www.peacecoffee.com/locations/wonderland-park](https://www.peacecoffee.com/locations/wonderland-park) 2.8 miles 3262 Minnehaha Avenue If going out of your way for good coffee is a thing you do, it's worth doing it for this place. The specialty drinks are bananas. ### Sociable Cider Werks -[http://sociablecider.com/](http://sociablecider.com/) +[https://sociablecider.com/](https://sociablecider.com/) 2.8 miles 1500 Fillmore St NE It’s hard to throw a growler in NE Minneapolis without hitting a brewery, but if you’re looking for cider (or just gluten free options) Sociable is your place. @@ -234,21 +233,21 @@ One of the more buzzed about restaurants to open recently, featuring pizzas and ### 112 Eatery -[http://www.112eatery.com](http://www.112eatery.com) +[https://www.112eatery.com](https://www.112eatery.com) 2.9 miles 112 North 3rd Street Oh crap. This place is a supernatural kind of good. ### Tattersall Distilling -[http://tattersalldistilling.com/](http://tattersalldistilling.com/) +[https://tattersalldistilling.com/](https://tattersalldistilling.com/) 2.9 miles 1620 Central Ave NE Arguably the best cocktails in the Twin Cities, in a beautiful space. Can get busy on weekend nights. No food, but there’s usually a food truck parked outside. ### Fasika (Ethiopian) -[http://www.fasika.com/welcome.html](http://www.fasika.com/welcome.html) +[https://www.fasika.com/welcome.html](https://www.fasika.com/welcome.html) 3.4 miles 510 N Snelling Ave There is no shortage of Ethiopian options in the Twin Cities, but there is an emerging concensus around the greatness of Fasika. @@ -262,63 +261,63 @@ Cooperative brewery with a penchant for sour beers. Great food options abound in ### Pimento Jamaican Kitchen -[http://pimentokitchen.com/](http://pimentokitchen.com/) +[https://pimentokitchen.com/](https://pimentokitchen.com/) 3.5 miles 2524 Nicollet Ave Casual Jamaican. This concept was a one-time winner of "Food Court Wars," but don’t let that deter you — it’s good. ### Chimborazo -[http://chimborazorestaurant.com/](http://chimborazorestaurant.com/) +[https://chimborazorestaurant.com/](https://chimborazorestaurant.com/) 3.8 miles 2851 Central Avenue NE Excellent Ecuadorean food on Central Ave, which is a great eating street in general. ### Matt's Bar -[http://mattsbar.com](http://mattsbar.com) +[https://mattsbar.com](https://mattsbar.com) 3.9 miles 3500 Cedar Avenue This is the place you go for the local novelty food: The Jucy Lucy (yes, that is how they spell it). It's also where, not too long ago, POTUS went for the local novelty food. Here's the thing: This novelty is also a legitimately great burger. And Matt's a legitimately great dive. (The other claimant to the "Jucy Lucy" title is the 5-8 Club, a restaurant and bar on the same road but farther south, near the airport.) ### Hola Arepa -[http://holaarepa.com/](http://holaarepa.com/) +[https://holaarepa.com/](https://holaarepa.com/) 4.6 miles 3501 Nicollet Ave Food-truck turned brick and mortar focusing on Venezuelan-style arepa sandwiches and a creative cocktail list. ### Khyber Pass Cafe (Afghan) -[http://khyberpasscafe.com](http://khyberpasscafe.com) +[https://khyberpasscafe.com](https://khyberpasscafe.com) 4.9 miles 1571 Grand Avenue The chutney sampler--oh my. And anything with lamb in it. ### Angry Catfish Bicycle and Coffee Bar -[http://angrycatfishbicycle.com](http://angrycatfishbicycle.com) +[https://angrycatfishbicycle.com](https://angrycatfishbicycle.com) 5.4 miles 4208 South 28th Avenue If you like your coffee snobs humble, this is your place. This is fussy coffee at its fussiest, and it is a beautiful thing. ### Heyday -[http://heydayeats.com/](http://heydayeats.com/) -5 miles +[https://heydayeats.com/](https://heydayeats.com/) +5 miles 2700 Lyndale Avenue S Dinner or Saturday/Sunday brunch, try to make a reservation just in case. ### Bryant Lake Bowl & Theater -[http://www.bryantlakebowl.com/](http://www.bryantlakebowl.com/) +[https://www.bryantlakebowl.com/](https://www.bryantlakebowl.com/) 5.25 miles 810 West Lake St. At the heart of the walkable LynLake area—food, drink, bowling, and shows. ### Lucia’s -[http://www.lucias.com/](http://www.lucias.com/) +[https://www.lucias.com/](https://www.lucias.com/) 5.5 miles 1432 W 31st St. @@ -327,7 +326,7 @@ At the heart of the walkable LynLake area—food, drink, bowling, and shows. [https://seasalteatery.wordpress.com](https://seasalteatery.wordpress.com) 6.4 miles 4825 Minnehaha Avenue -Let's be honest—this is Minnesota, so we are also talking *lake* food. But you know what? Lake food is delicious and you'll be eating it at an outdoor table within earshot (and from some tables within eyeshot) of Minnehaha Falls. And the whole thing is just a short walk from a lightrail stop. +Let's be honest—this is Minnesota, so we are also talking _lake_ food. But you know what? Lake food is delicious and you'll be eating it at an outdoor table within earshot (and from some tables within eyeshot) of Minnehaha Falls. And the whole thing is just a short walk from a lightrail stop. ### Ha Tien Market @@ -341,7 +340,7 @@ Just off the Western Ave station on the Green line. This has the best banh mi, t ### Guthrie Theater -[http://www.guthrietheater.org](http://www.guthrietheater.org) +[https://www.guthrietheater.org](https://www.guthrietheater.org) 2.2 miles 818 South 2nd Street The Guthrie was built for plays, but anybody can walk in anytime and step out onto their "Endless Bridge" which overlooks Mississippi River and the ruins of the city's flour milling industry. @@ -354,7 +353,7 @@ Gold Medal Park is a lovely picnic spot. Its right next to the Guthrie, which me ### Minnehaha Falls -[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnehaha_Park](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnehaha_Park)_ +[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnehaha_Park](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnehaha_Park)\_ (Minneapolis) 5.2 miles 4825 Minnehaha Avenue A waterfall, hiking trails, and a great seafood restauraunt. Oh, and you can rent those crazy four-person bikes and pretend you are in the things-are'splendid montage of a romantic comedy! @@ -364,7 +363,7 @@ A waterfall, hiking trails, and a great seafood restauraunt. Oh, and you can ren [https://www.walkerart.org/garden/#map-overview/](https://www.walkerart.org/garden/#map-overview/) 4.5 miles 1750 Hennepin Avenue -You know that giant spoon with a giant cherry in it that appears on postcards and special broadcasts from Minneapolis? This is where it lives. And that is fine--it's kind of cool. But there is so much more at the Walker Art Center's sculpture garden. And they've got artist-designed mini-golf! It also got a [serious upgrade](http://www.startribune.com/explore-the-dramatic-makeover-of-the-minneapolis-sculpture-garden/423649194/) this past year and just re-opened in June. +You know that giant spoon with a giant cherry in it that appears on postcards and special broadcasts from Minneapolis? This is where it lives. And that is fine--it's kind of cool. But there is so much more at the Walker Art Center's sculpture garden. And they've got artist-designed mini-golf! It also got a [serious upgrade](https://www.startribune.com/explore-the-dramatic-makeover-of-the-minneapolis-sculpture-garden/423649194/) this past year and just re-opened in June. ### University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum @@ -375,17 +374,17 @@ If you need a quiet place for a stroll, or just want to sit and think while surr ### Mississippi River via Padelford Riverboats -[http://www.riverrides.com/](http://www.riverrides.com/) +[https://www.riverrides.com/](https://www.riverrides.com/) Dr Justus Ohage Blvd, St Paul 9.7 miles A river boat ride on the Mississippi between Minneapolis and St. Paul. ### Chain of Lakes -[http://www.wheelfunrentals.com/Locations/Minneapolis](http://www.wheelfunrentals.com/Locations/Minneapolis) +[https://www.wheelfunrentals.com/Locations/Minneapolis](https://www.wheelfunrentals.com/Locations/Minneapolis) 3000 E. Calhoun Pkwy 5.7 miles -Fittingly enough, the biggest city in the Land of 10,000 Lakes features quite a few lakes of its own. Four of them — Lake Harriet, Lake Calhoun/Bde Maka Ska, Lake of the Isles and Cedar Lake — are connected by continuous parkland and feature pedestrian and bike trails. You can also rent bikes, pedal boats, kayaks, canoes, and paddleboards for lake-splashing enjoyment. +Fittingly enough, the biggest city in the Land of 10,000 Lakes features quite a few lakes of its own. Four of them — Lake Harriet, Lake Calhoun/Bde Maka Ska, Lake of the Isles and Cedar Lake — are connected by continuous parkland and feature pedestrian and bike trails. You can also rent bikes, pedal boats, kayaks, canoes, and paddleboards for lake-splashing enjoyment. @@ -395,49 +394,49 @@ These bookstores are vetted. There are plenty more that could (and maybe should) ### The Book House -[http://www.bookhouseindinkytown.com](http://www.bookhouseindinkytown.com) +[https://www.bookhouseindinkytown.com](https://www.bookhouseindinkytown.com) 0.7 miles 1316 4th Street Southeast #201 ### Midway Books -[http://www.midwaybook.com](http://www.midwaybook.com) +[https://www.midwaybook.com](https://www.midwaybook.com) 3.6 miles 1579 University Avenue West ### Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore -[http://www.unclehugo.com/prod/index.shtml](http://www.unclehugo.com/prod/index.shtml) +[https://www.unclehugo.com/prod/index.shtml](https://www.unclehugo.com/prod/index.shtml) 3.9 miles 2864 Chicago Avenue South ### Once Upon a Crime Mystery Bookstore -[http://www.onceuponacrimebooks.com](http://www.onceuponacrimebooks.com) +[https://www.onceuponacrimebooks.com](https://www.onceuponacrimebooks.com) 4.8 miles 604 West 26th Street ### Common Good Books -[http://www.commongoodbooks.com](http://www.commongoodbooks.com) +[https://www.commongoodbooks.com](https://www.commongoodbooks.com) 4.9 miles 38 Snelling Avenue South ### Dreamhaven Books & Comics -[http://dreamhavenbooks.com](http://dreamhavenbooks.com) +[https://dreamhavenbooks.com](https://dreamhavenbooks.com) 5.2 miles 2301 East 38th Street ### Magers & Quinn -[http://www.magersandquinn.com](http://www.magersandquinn.com) +[https://www.magersandquinn.com](https://www.magersandquinn.com) 5.4 miles 3038 Hennepin Avenue ### Wild Rumpus -[http://www.wildrumpusbooks.com](http://www.wildrumpusbooks.com) +[https://www.wildrumpusbooks.com](https://www.wildrumpusbooks.com) 7.6 miles 2720 West 43rd Street Children’s books only, and featuring a rotating cast of live animals roaming the store. @@ -450,7 +449,7 @@ Like the bookstores, these record stores are vetted! Three things worth noting: ### Barely Brothers -[http://www.barelybrothersrecords.com](http://www.barelybrothersrecords.com) +[https://www.barelybrothersrecords.com](https://www.barelybrothersrecords.com) 1.8 miles 783 Raymond Avenue @@ -462,25 +461,25 @@ Like the bookstores, these record stores are vetted! Three things worth noting: ### Hymie's Vintage Records -[http://hymiesrecords.com](http://hymiesrecords.com) +[https://hymiesrecords.com](https://hymiesrecords.com) 2.7 miles 3820 East Lake Street ### Electric Fetus -[http://www.electricfetus.com](http://www.electricfetus.com) +[https://www.electricfetus.com](https://www.electricfetus.com) 3.4 miles 2000 4th Avenue South ### Treehouse Records -[http://treehouserecords.blogspot.com](http://treehouserecords.blogspot.com) +[https://treehouserecords.blogspot.com](https://treehouserecords.blogspot.com) 4.8 miles 2557 Lyndale Avenue South ### Fifth Element -[http://fifthelementonline.com](http://fifthelementonline.com) +[https://fifthelementonline.com](https://fifthelementonline.com) 4.6 miles 2411 Hennepin Avenue South @@ -492,19 +491,19 @@ You can find the multiplexes easy enough. These are the special theaters. Oh, an ### St. Anthony Main Theatre -[http://www.stanthonymaintheatre.com](http://www.stanthonymaintheatre.com) +[https://www.stanthonymaintheatre.com](https://www.stanthonymaintheatre.com) 1.9 miles 115 Southeast Main Street ### Trylon Microcinema -[http://take-up.org](http://take-up.org) +[https://take-up.org](https://take-up.org) 2.7 miles 3258 Minnehaha Avenue ### Riverview Theater -[http://www.riverviewtheater.com](http://www.riverviewtheater.com) +[https://www.riverviewtheater.com](https://www.riverviewtheater.com) 4.1 miles 3800 42nd Avenue South @@ -514,44 +513,44 @@ You can find the multiplexes easy enough. These are the special theaters. Oh, an ### Weisman Art Museum -[http://www.weisman.umn.edu](http://www.weisman.umn.edu) +[https://www.weisman.umn.edu](https://www.weisman.umn.edu) 0.7 miles 333 East River Parkway ### Walker Art Center -[http://www.walkerart.org](http://www.walkerart.org) +[https://www.walkerart.org](https://www.walkerart.org) 4.5 miles 1750 Hennepin Avenue ### Minneapolis Institute of Arts -[http://new.artsmia.org](http://new.artsmia.org) +[https://new.artsmia.org](https://new.artsmia.org) 3.5 miles 2400 3rd Avenue South ### Mill City Museum -[http://www.millcitymuseum.org/](http://www.millcitymuseum.org/) +[https://www.millcitymuseum.org/](https://www.millcitymuseum.org/) 1.9 miles 704 S 2nd St. Does a really great job of telling some of the key history of Minnesota—the flour industry. Plus you can get a great view of the city, St. Anthony Falls ,and the Mississippi River from the top of the museum. Also great for children! ### Intermedia Arts -[http://intermediaarts.org/](http://intermediaarts.org/) +[https://intermediaarts.org/](https://intermediaarts.org/) 5 miles 2822 Lyndale Avenue S ### Soo Visual Art Center -[http://www.soovac.org/](http://www.soovac.org/) +[https://www.soovac.org/](https://www.soovac.org/) 5.2 miles 2909 Bryant Avenue S Suite 101 ### Highpoint Center for Printmaking -[http://highpointprintmaking.org/](http://highpointprintmaking.org/) +[https://highpointprintmaking.org/](https://highpointprintmaking.org/) 5.4 miles 912 W Lake St @@ -561,49 +560,49 @@ Does a really great job of telling some of the key history of Minnesota—the fl ### Cedar Cultural Center -[http://www.thecedar.org](http://www.thecedar.org) +[https://www.thecedar.org](https://www.thecedar.org) 2.1 miles 416 Cedar Avenue ### Patrick's Cabaret -[http://www.patrickscabaret.org](http://www.patrickscabaret.org) +[https://www.patrickscabaret.org](https://www.patrickscabaret.org) 2.8 miles 3010 Minnehaha Avenue ### The Triple Rock Social Club -[http://www.triplerocksocialclub.com](http://www.triplerocksocialclub.com) +[https://www.triplerocksocialclub.com](https://www.triplerocksocialclub.com) 2.3 miles 629 Cedar Avenue ### Turf Club -[http://turfclub.net](http://turfclub.net) +[https://turfclub.net](https://turfclub.net) 2.4 miles 1601 University Avenue West ### First Avenue & 7th St Entry -[http://first-avenue.com/calendar](http://first-avenue.com/calendar) +[https://first-avenue.com/calendar](https://first-avenue.com/calendar) 4.2 miles 701 North 1st Avenue ### Khyber Pass -[http://khyberpasscafe.com](http://khyberpasscafe.com) +[https://khyberpasscafe.com](https://khyberpasscafe.com) 4.9 miles 1571 Grand Avenue ### Icehouse -[http://www.icehousempls.com](http://www.icehousempls.com) +[https://www.icehousempls.com](https://www.icehousempls.com) 4.3 miles 2528 Nicollet Avenue South ### The Warming House -[http://www.thewarminghouse.net/](http://www.thewarminghouse.net/) +[https://www.thewarminghouse.net/](https://www.thewarminghouse.net/) 5.9 miles 4001 Bryant Ave S The Twin Cities’ only "listening room," the Warming House is a forty-seat venue below a bike shop. There’s no booze on sale, which has the advantage of people coming to actually listen to the mostly acoustic and Americana focused acts. @@ -614,11 +613,11 @@ The Twin Cities’ only "listening room," the Warming House is a forty-seat venu ### Twin Cities Jazz Festival -[http://www.hotsummerjazz.com/](http://www.hotsummerjazz.com/) +[https://www.hotsummerjazz.com/](https://www.hotsummerjazz.com/) ### Twin Cities Pride Festival and Parade -[https://www.tcpride.org/](https://www.tcpride.org/) +[https://www.tcpride.org/](https://www.tcpride.org/) @@ -626,14 +625,14 @@ The Twin Cities’ only "listening room," the Warming House is a forty-seat venu ### Minnesota Children’s Museum -[http://www.mcm.org/](http://www.mcm.org/) +[https://www.mcm.org/](https://www.mcm.org/) 7.5 miles 10 7th St. W., St. Paul Essential, especially because they just re-opened June 2017 after a massive renovation and expansion. Ideal for toddlers to age 8, but we’re hearing that some of the new exhibits will cater to kids even a little older than that. ### Como Zoo -[http://www.comozooconservatory.org/](http://www.comozooconservatory.org/) +[https://www.comozooconservatory.org/](https://www.comozooconservatory.org/) 5.9 miles 1225 Estabrook Drive, St Paul Small, but really nice, zoo; a conservatory; a really cool historical carousel (to ride!); and an amusement park called Como Town that has rides and a splash pad. The rides are geared toward younger kids (toddler through middle school). Como Town and the carousel cost money, but the zoo is free (they ask for donations, however). @@ -646,12 +645,12 @@ Small, but really nice, zoo; a conservatory; a really cool historical carousel ( ### Mississippi National River and Recreation Area -[http://www.nps.gov/miss/planyourvisit/things2do.htm](http://www.nps.gov/miss/planyourvisit/things2do.htm) +[https://www.nps.gov/miss/planyourvisit/things2do.htm](https://www.nps.gov/miss/planyourvisit/things2do.htm) 16.8 miles ### The Raptor Center on the St. Paul University of Minnesota campus -[http://www.raptor.cvm.umn.edu/](http://www.raptor.cvm.umn.edu/) +[https://www.raptor.cvm.umn.edu/](https://www.raptor.cvm.umn.edu/) 4.5 miles 1920 Fitch Avenue, St. Paul @@ -667,34 +666,34 @@ Small, but really nice, zoo; a conservatory; a really cool historical carousel ( ### Ax-Man Surplus Store -[http://www.ax-man.com](http://www.ax-man.com) +[https://www.ax-man.com](https://www.ax-man.com) 3.2 miles 1639 University Avenue West -The most freakishly delightful surplus store this side of the Mississippi. Not military surplus, but *everything* surplus. People walk through the aisles making joyful sounds. For real. +The most freakishly delightful surplus store this side of the Mississippi. Not military surplus, but _everything_ surplus. People walk through the aisles making joyful sounds. For real. ### House of Balls -[http://houseofballs.com](http://houseofballs.com) +[https://houseofballs.com](https://houseofballs.com) 2.2 miles 1504 South 7th Street Just trust... #### Walker Art Center's Artist-Designed Mini-Golf -[http://www.walkerart.org/calendar/2014/walker-green-artist-designed-mini-golf](http://www.walkerart.org/calendar/2014/walker-green-artist-designed-mini-golf) +[https://www.walkerart.org/calendar/2014/walker-green-artist-designed-mini-golf](https://www.walkerart.org/calendar/2014/walker-green-artist-designed-mini-golf) 4.5 miles 1750 Hennepin Avenue Exactly what it says. And no windmills allowed. (For weather-related and course closure information, call 612.375.7697.) ### Prince sites -[http://www.exploreminnesota.com/travel-ideas/prince-tour-of-minneapolis/](http://www.exploreminnesota.com/travel-ideas/prince-tour-of-minneapolis/) -Since the death of Prince in April 2016, a sort of "tour" of key sites has developed. The biggest destination is Paisley Park, which offers daily tours. Paisely Park is located in a suburb south of Minneapolis called Chanhassen. (Sorry the trains don’t run that far). The link above has details and a list of other sites that Prince fans have been visiting. +[https://www.exploreminnesota.com/travel-ideas/prince-tour-of-minneapolis/](https://www.exploreminnesota.com/travel-ideas/prince-tour-of-minneapolis/) +Since the death of Prince in April 2016, a sort of "tour" of key sites has developed. The biggest destination is Paisley Park, which offers daily tours. Paisely Park is located in a suburb south of Minneapolis called Chanhassen. (Sorry the trains don’t run that far). The link above has details and a list of other sites that Prince fans have been visiting. ### Can Can Wonderland -[http://www.cancanwonderland.com/](http://www.cancanwonderland.com/) -Located in St. Paul, right on the border with Minneapolis, this is a new venue for adults to be more like kids. Mini golf, amusements, bar and restaurant, arts-based flora and fauna. Unfortunately it’s not close to the train line, but would be a short cab or Uber ride from the conference hotel. +[https://www.cancanwonderland.com/](https://www.cancanwonderland.com/) +Located in St. Paul, right on the border with Minneapolis, this is a new venue for adults to be more like kids. Mini golf, amusements, bar and restaurant, arts-based flora and fauna. Unfortunately it’s not close to the train line, but would be a short cab or Uber ride from the conference hotel. @@ -702,7 +701,7 @@ Located in St. Paul, right on the border with Minneapolis, this is a new venue f ### Franconia Sculpture Park -[http://www.franconia.org](http://www.franconia.org) +[https://www.franconia.org](https://www.franconia.org) 47.5 miles 29836 Saint Croix Trail, Shafer, MN There is a house suspended from wires, a sculpture made of boom boxes that reaches towards the heavens... Many of the sculptures are welded, formed, and banged together on site. It's sprawling and it's amazing. @@ -718,6 +717,5 @@ It's a 2.5-hour drive, but it's a great little city on a really big lake. If you ### City Pages, "Best of…" lists for 2017 -[http://www.citypages.com/best-of](http://www.citypages.com/best-of) +[https://www.citypages.com/best-of](https://www.citypages.com/best-of) This covers a lot of other ground, especially in food and entertainment. - diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/logistics.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/logistics.md index eb7f9a55..ae2b63e7 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/logistics.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/logistics.md @@ -5,22 +5,26 @@ subtitle: Sometimes it snows in April, but Minneapolis in August is lovely, as i section: logistics sub-section: interior background: mcnamara -byline: lankforddl +byline: lankforddl bylineurl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dannylankford/3616140995 permalink: /logistics/index.html redirect_from: - - /location/index.html + - /location/index.html --- + SRCCON 2017 takes place at the McNamara Alumni Center on the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis. ## Preparing for SRCCON + In addition to this page with all the logistical details you may need as you prep for SRCCON, we wanted to make sure you know what to expect at the conference. Take a look at our new [SRCCON Participant Guide](/guide/participant/). It's our best guess at the questions you may have. ## Getting to SRCCON + If you're still looking to make your lodging arrangements, we've got [a list of nearby hotels](#lodging) and a [roomshare list](#room-share). For getting to the venue, you can also check out [transit](#transit) and [parking](#parking) details. If you're attending from outside the U.S., [we have a recommended resource](#travel-from-outside-the-us) for what to consider at the U.S. border crossing. ## During SRCCON -We've tried to think of everything you might need, from [hearty, tasty meals](#meals-at-srccon) to [childcare](#childcare). You can check out [the full schedule now](http://schedule.srccon.org/) (it's mobile friendly too!). When you arrive at the venue, we'll also have on-the-spot signups to host conversations about the "life" side of work/life balance on Thursday evening, and the "work" side during Friday lunch. + +We've tried to think of everything you might need, from [hearty, tasty meals](#meals-at-srccon) to [childcare](#childcare). You can check out [the full schedule now](https://2017.srccon.org/schedule/) (it's mobile friendly too!). When you arrive at the venue, we'll also have on-the-spot signups to host conversations about the "life" side of work/life balance on Thursday evening, and the "work" side during Friday lunch. Throughout SRCCON, we'll also have office hours (new this year) and a big job board for any positions you'd like to post. We'll have a signup sheet for the office hours, where you can block out an hour to chat one-on-one with participants about a project you're working on or maybe a position you're hiring for. We'll have post-its at the ready for your job posting needs as well. @@ -31,29 +35,35 @@ Also, the entirety of SRCCON is covered by our [code of conduct](/conduct). # All of the logistics ## Meals at SRCCON + We want you to be happy and well-fed at SRCCON, so we're providing breakfast and lunch on both days, as well as a delicious dinner Thursday night. We'll also have tea, coffee, and snacks—healthy and sugary, both—throughout the day, so stick around and enjoy the company of your fellow attendees. ## Thursday evening at SRCCON + We know [evenings at conferences can be tough](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-thursday/), so we schedule Thursday evening as an opportunity to have fun, talk, and relax with colleagues and new friends. You might end up learning a new skill or two as well, but we try to focus the evening program on the "life" side of the work/life balance. We'll keep feeding you, too—there'll be awesome local snacks, beer and wine, and plenty of great nonalcoholic beverages. After dinner on Thursday, the evening program will spread throughout the SRCCON venue for things like: -* board games ([bring one you'd like to teach people to play!](https://etherpad.opennews.org/p/BoardGames)) -* lightning talks -* a guided walk through Minneapolis with a local expert -* conversations about things you love (we'll schedule rooms for these and post a signup sheet at SRCCON) -* hobby workshops +- board games ([bring one you'd like to teach people to play!](https://etherpad.opennews.org/p/BoardGames)) +- lightning talks +- a guided walk through Minneapolis with a local expert +- conversations about things you love (we'll schedule rooms for these and post a signup sheet at SRCCON) +- hobby workshops ## Thursday evening, bring your partners + If you have partners or friends who will be in Minneapolis, feel free to invite them to join the Thursday evening fun. We're happy to welcome them for Thursday evening's dinner and activities, with a special $45 partner ticket that you can purchase now. ## More to Do/Eat/Drink/See/Dance To + If you're looking for things to before, after, or during SRCCON, we have [compiled a guide to wonderful things in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area](/guide/index.html), written by local news nerds. ## Alcoholics Anonymous -On Thursday night, the closest meeting to SRCCON is at Drinkytown AA, [University Lutheran Church of Hope 601 13th Av SE](https://www.google.com/maps/place/University+Lutheran+Church+of+Hope/@44.983557,-93.235761,15z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x7e2b9cb466a3fbda?sa=X&ei=4jiEVZyHMcbgoASy45voCQ&ved=0CG8Q_BIwCg), which meets Thursday at 6:30pm. It is an "open" meeting, meaning that you don't have to be alcoholic to go. AA Minneapolis also [hosts a full list of area meetings](http://www.aaminneapolis.org/pages/meeting/meetings.asp?Location=74&Name=Minneapolis%2C%20Southeast&Image=minneapolissoutheast.gif#Thursday). + +On Thursday night, the closest meeting to SRCCON is at Drinkytown AA, [University Lutheran Church of Hope 601 13th Av SE](https://www.google.com/maps/place/University+Lutheran+Church+of+Hope/@44.983557,-93.235761,15z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x7e2b9cb466a3fbda?sa=X&ei=4jiEVZyHMcbgoASy45voCQ&ved=0CG8Q_BIwCg), which meets Thursday at 6:30pm. It is an "open" meeting, meaning that you don't have to be alcoholic to go. AA Minneapolis also [hosts a full list of area meetings](https://www.aaminneapolis.org/pages/meeting/meetings.asp?Location=74&Name=Minneapolis%2C%20Southeast&Image=minneapolissoutheast.gif#Thursday). ## Childcare + We offer free, on-site childcare throughout the full SRCCON schedule (including Thursday evening) at the adjoining Commons Hotel. The caregivers act as employees of KiddieCorp (not contractors) and are recruited from local licensed daycare centers, elementary schools, preschools, and collegiate departments of early childhood education. [Learn more about our free childcare.](/childcare) ## Travel from outside the U.S. @@ -61,39 +71,43 @@ We offer free, on-site childcare throughout the full SRCCON schedule (including For folks who are coming in from outside the U.S., we recommend the EFF’s [guide to protecting your data at the US border](https://www.eff.org/wp/digital-privacy-us-border-2017) for details on what to consider at the border crossing. If you need any further help or have any questions, please [email us](mailto:srccon@opennews.org). ## Lodging -Our conference rate at the [The Commons Hotel](http://www.commonshotel.com/) has expired, but you can call (800) 822-6757 or (612) 379-8888 to inquire about any rooms that might still be available. + +Our conference rate at the [The Commons Hotel](https://www.commonshotel.com/) has expired, but you can call (800) 822-6757 or (612) 379-8888 to inquire about any rooms that might still be available. Other hotels not far from the conference venue include: -**[Days Hotel](http://www.daysinn.com/hotels/minnesota/minneapolis/days-inn-hotel-university-ave-se/hotel-overview)** +**[Days Hotel](https://www.daysinn.com/hotels/minnesota/minneapolis/days-inn-hotel-university-ave-se/hotel-overview)** .3 miles away 2407 University Ave SE Minneapolis, MN 55414 US (612) 623-3999 -**[University Inn](http://www.universityinnmn.com/)** +**[University Inn](https://www.universityinnmn.com/)** 1 mile away 925 4th Street SE Minneapolis, MN, 55414, United States (612) 746-1300 -**[Courtyard Marriott Downtown](http://courtyard.marriott.com/mspdc)** +**[Courtyard Marriott Downtown](https://courtyard.marriott.com/mspdc)** 1.2 miles away 1500 Washington Ave S Minneapolis, MN 55454 (612) 333-4646 -**[Aloft Minneapolis Hotel](http://www.aloftminneapolis.com/)** +**[Aloft Minneapolis Hotel](https://www.aloftminneapolis.com/)** 3 miles away 900 Washington Avenue South Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55415 (612) 455-8400 ## Room share + Have a room and looking for a roommate? Don’t have a room and looking for someone who does? Add your info to the [room share list](https://etherpad.opennews.org/p/srcconRoomShare2017). ## Transit -The [Minneapolis METRO system](http://www.metrotransit.org/metro-system) is an easy way to get around the city. You can ride light rail from the airport to the conference hotel for $1.75: Follow the light rail signs to the airport tram, which will take you right to the light rail station. Take the northbound ("Downtown Minneapolis") Blue Line to the Downtown East station, then cross to the other track to transfer to the eastbound Green Line. Take the Green Line two stops to East Bank. You’ll be looking right at [The Commons Hotel](http://www.commonshotel.com). The [McNamara Alumni Center](http://www.mac-events.org/) conference venue is another block past the hotel, on SE Oak Street. + +The [Minneapolis METRO system](https://www.metrotransit.org/metro-system) is an easy way to get around the city. You can ride light rail from the airport to the conference hotel for $1.75: Follow the light rail signs to the airport tram, which will take you right to the light rail station. Take the northbound ("Downtown Minneapolis") Blue Line to the Downtown East station, then cross to the other track to transfer to the eastbound Green Line. Take the Green Line two stops to East Bank. You’ll be looking right at [The Commons Hotel](https://www.commonshotel.com). The [McNamara Alumni Center](https://www.mac-events.org/) conference venue is another block past the hotel, on SE Oak Street. ## Parking -Transit in Minneapolis is great, but if you'll be driving, there's [a lot right near the McNamara Alumni Center](http://mac-events.org/directions/). We've reserved 30 spots per day for SRCCON attendees. Parking is $8/day. If you get to the ramp and it says "FULL" or "RESERVATION ONLY," just push "call for help" and tell them you're with SRCCON, and they'll let you in. + +Transit in Minneapolis is great, but if you'll be driving, there's [a lot right near the McNamara Alumni Center](https://mac-events.org/directions/). We've reserved 30 spots per day for SRCCON attendees. Parking is $8/day. If you get to the ramp and it says "FULL" or "RESERVATION ONLY," just push "call for help" and tell them you're with SRCCON, and they'll let you in. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/lottery.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/lottery.md index baebb161..64f657e4 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/lottery.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/lottery.md @@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ background: tickets byline: Alyson Hurt permalink: /tickets/lottery/index.html --- + Our ticket lottery is now closed. If you entered, thank you so much. We will be informing people if they were selected to purchase a ticket by 5pm Eastern on May 11. Hope to see many of you in Minneapolis this August! diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/lottery_thanks.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/lottery_thanks.md index 121c205c..f3f534d8 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/lottery_thanks.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/lottery_thanks.md @@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ background: tickets byline: Alyson Hurt permalink: /tickets/lottery/thanks/index.html --- + ## Ticket request received! Thanks for registering for the SRCCON ticket lottery and/or submitting a scholarship application. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/participant_guide.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/participant_guide.md index d9ecfce8..47cb814b 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/participant_guide.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/participant_guide.md @@ -12,158 +12,187 @@ permalink: /guide/participant/index.html SRCCON is unlike a lot of other conferences. It's highly participatory, and is designed to help you share your skills and wisdom with a bunch of folks who are likely dealing with similar challenges and questions. We've built it around the "hallway conversations" that are often cut short at other conferences. We put together this guide to help newcomers and returning participants alike get the most out of SRCCON. ## In this guide -* [What is SRCCON?](#what-is-srccon) -* [When and where is SRCCON?](#when-and-where-is-srccon) -* [How much time should I allow for traveling to SRCCON?](#how-much-time-should-i-allow-for-traveling-to-srccon) -* [What if I want to bring my kid(s) or need childcare during the conference?](#what-if-i-want-to-bring-my-kids-to-srccon-or-need-childcare-during-the-conference) -* [What if my partner is traveling with me to SRCCON?](#what-if-my-partner-is-traveling-with-me-to-srccon) -* [What do I need to pack?](#what-do-i-need-to-pack) -* [What is the dress code?](#what-is-the-dress-code) -* [Do people do any homework before they arrive?](#do-people-do-any-homework-before-they-arrive) -* [What happens when people arrive at SRCCON?](#what-happens-when-people-arrive-at-srccon) -* [What’s the hashtag? Do you want my pictures?](#whats-the-hashtag-do-you-want-my-pictures) -* [What happens at the opening to SRCCON?](#what-happens-at-the-opening-to-srccon) -* [Wait, why is my org not on my name tag?](#wait-why-is-my-org-not-on-my-name-tag) -* [What are these lanyard colors all about?](#what-are-these-lanyard-colors-all-about) -* [What are the sessions like?](#what-are-the-sessions-like) -* [What do people expect me to do in the sessions?](#what-do-people-expect-me-to-do-in-the-sessions) -* [Where is the conference schedule?](#where-is-the-conference-schedule) -* [How will I find the sessions?](#how-will-i-find-the-sessions) -* [Who are the people with the futuristic keyboards?](#who-are-the-people-with-the-futuristic-keyboards) -* [What if I have a great idea for a conversation at SRCCON that is not already on the schedule?](#what-if-i-have-a-great-idea-for-a-conversation-at-srccon-that-is-not-already-on-the-schedule) -* [What is this coffee station all about?](#what-is-this-coffee-station-all-about) -* [What are the meals like?](#what-are-the-meals-like) -* [What are the non-caffeinated, non-alcoholic drink options like?](#what-are-the-non-caffeinated-non-alcoholic-drink-options-like) -* [What is this Thursday evening thing all about?](#what-is-this-thursday-evening-thing-all-about) -* [What am I supposed to do for 30 minutes in between every session?](#what-am-i-supposed-to-do-for-30-minutes-in-between-every-session) -* [What happens if I feel harassed or unsafe?](#what-happens-if-i-feel-harassed-or-unsafe) -* [What happens if I have a question or need a band-aid, pain reliever, or safety pin?](#what-happens-if-i-have-a-question-or-need-a-band-aid-pain-reliever-or-safety-pin) -* [I have non-conference work to do! Help!](#i-have-non-conference-work-to-do-help) -* [What happens in the closing to SRCCON?](#what-happens-in-the-closing-to-srccon) -* [What happens once SRCCON is over?](#what-happens-once-srccon-is-over) -* [What makes this whole SRCCON thing happen?](#what-makes-this-whole-srccon-thing-happen) -* [I have another question, how can I find out more?](#i-have-another-question-how-can-i-find-out-more) - +- [What is SRCCON?](#what-is-srccon) +- [When and where is SRCCON?](#when-and-where-is-srccon) +- [How much time should I allow for traveling to SRCCON?](#how-much-time-should-i-allow-for-traveling-to-srccon) +- [What if I want to bring my kid(s) or need childcare during the conference?](#what-if-i-want-to-bring-my-kids-to-srccon-or-need-childcare-during-the-conference) +- [What if my partner is traveling with me to SRCCON?](#what-if-my-partner-is-traveling-with-me-to-srccon) +- [What do I need to pack?](#what-do-i-need-to-pack) +- [What is the dress code?](#what-is-the-dress-code) +- [Do people do any homework before they arrive?](#do-people-do-any-homework-before-they-arrive) +- [What happens when people arrive at SRCCON?](#what-happens-when-people-arrive-at-srccon) +- [What’s the hashtag? Do you want my pictures?](#whats-the-hashtag-do-you-want-my-pictures) +- [What happens at the opening to SRCCON?](#what-happens-at-the-opening-to-srccon) +- [Wait, why is my org not on my name tag?](#wait-why-is-my-org-not-on-my-name-tag) +- [What are these lanyard colors all about?](#what-are-these-lanyard-colors-all-about) +- [What are the sessions like?](#what-are-the-sessions-like) +- [What do people expect me to do in the sessions?](#what-do-people-expect-me-to-do-in-the-sessions) +- [Where is the conference schedule?](#where-is-the-conference-schedule) +- [How will I find the sessions?](#how-will-i-find-the-sessions) +- [Who are the people with the futuristic keyboards?](#who-are-the-people-with-the-futuristic-keyboards) +- [What if I have a great idea for a conversation at SRCCON that is not already on the schedule?](#what-if-i-have-a-great-idea-for-a-conversation-at-srccon-that-is-not-already-on-the-schedule) +- [What is this coffee station all about?](#what-is-this-coffee-station-all-about) +- [What are the meals like?](#what-are-the-meals-like) +- [What are the non-caffeinated, non-alcoholic drink options like?](#what-are-the-non-caffeinated-non-alcoholic-drink-options-like) +- [What is this Thursday evening thing all about?](#what-is-this-thursday-evening-thing-all-about) +- [What am I supposed to do for 30 minutes in between every session?](#what-am-i-supposed-to-do-for-30-minutes-in-between-every-session) +- [What happens if I feel harassed or unsafe?](#what-happens-if-i-feel-harassed-or-unsafe) +- [What happens if I have a question or need a band-aid, pain reliever, or safety pin?](#what-happens-if-i-have-a-question-or-need-a-band-aid-pain-reliever-or-safety-pin) +- [I have non-conference work to do! Help!](#i-have-non-conference-work-to-do-help) +- [What happens in the closing to SRCCON?](#what-happens-in-the-closing-to-srccon) +- [What happens once SRCCON is over?](#what-happens-once-srccon-is-over) +- [What makes this whole SRCCON thing happen?](#what-makes-this-whole-srccon-thing-happen) +- [I have another question, how can I find out more?](#i-have-another-question-how-can-i-find-out-more) ## What is SRCCON? + SRCCON is a hands-on conference, full of [conversations and workshops](/sessions) focused on the practical challenges that news technology and data teams encounter every day. SRCCON is pronounced "Source-con," and the "SRC" stands for "Source" as in "view source." It brings together nearly 300 designers, developers, data analysts, editors, and other journalists for two-days of collaborative sessions, group meals, and activities. SRCCON is produced by OpenNews, an organization built to connect a network of developers, designers, journalists and editors to collaborate on open technologies and processes within journalism. ## When and where is SRCCON? + This year we return to Minneapolis on August 3 and 4 at the [McNamara Alumni Center]() at the University of Minnesota. We're still finalizing the overall schedule, but the basic timing is: - **Thursday, August 3** from 9am to 9:30pm, with all meals covered, two blocks of sessions, and a bunch of fun evening activities - **Friday, August 4** from 10am to 6pm, with breakfast and lunch covered, two blocks of sessions, and a closing of the event ## How much time should I allow for traveling to SRCCON? -Most people arrive Wednesday evening in order to get to SRCCON bright and early on Thursday morning. The venue is about 40 minutes from the airport on transit or by cab (depending on traffic). -When people leave varies depending on flight times to their home city and other responsibilities. Some folks leave Friday night after SRCCON closes, while others leave sometime on Saturday. +Most people arrive Wednesday evening in order to get to SRCCON bright and early on Thursday morning. The venue is about 40 minutes from the airport on transit or by cab (depending on traffic). + +When people leave varies depending on flight times to their home city and other responsibilities. Some folks leave Friday night after SRCCON closes, while others leave sometime on Saturday. Your overall travel time will of course depend on how far you live from Minneapolis, but in general, plan for travel to take part of your day on Wednesday, and either Friday evening or Saturday. ## What if I want to bring my kid(s) to SRCCON or need childcare during the conference? + That's great! We offer [free, licensed childcare](/childcare) throughout SRCCON so you can bring your family and know they're having a good time too. KiddieCorp is back for the third year, providing childcare that has left both parents and children very happy each year. Please register as soon as you can so we can prepare to welcome your children. ## What if my partner is traveling with me to SRCCON? + We hope they have an awesome time exploring Minneapolis while you are at SRCCON. While we do not offer a partner ticket for the conference itself, we do offer [an evening ticket](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/srccon-2017-partner-ticket-tickets-36309639108) if your partner would like to join for dinner and activities on Thursday evening. ## What do I need to pack? + In addition to your usual business trip preparation, there's a few additional items you might want to bring with you to SRCCON. Each year we have a coffee station with tasty local coffee, but participants also often bring coffee and tea with them to share a taste of home. So feel free to pack some beans or tea leaves that you'd like to share with fellow attendees. On Thursday evening, many folks also bring board games to play, and in fact there's already a [sign-up sheet](https://etherpad.opennews.org/p/BoardGames) where folks are sharing what games they plan to bring. ## What is the dress code? + The way I've described it in the past is that at SRCCON, people might wear their _favorite_ hoodie. Meaning, it's pretty casual. OpenNews staff will literally all be in T-shirts (so you can find us for safety reasons!), but that gives you a sense of things. If you're more comfortable in dressier clothes or just wanna show off some new item, totally go for it. You'll see a wide range of dress styles at SRCCON. We know that clothing selection can be a really tricky thing to navigate though, so if there's anything we can do to help you feel more comfortable, [just let Erika know](mailto:erika@opennews.org) (who wrote this guide and is heading up planning participant experience this year). ## Do people do any homework before they arrive? -It's certainly possible, but not required by any means. You're coming to SRCCON because you've been doing work in news organizations, or nearby, that makes you curious about how we can work together better. You already have the skills and experiences that will be valuable in your conversations at SRCCON. + +It's certainly possible, but not required by any means. You're coming to SRCCON because you've been doing work in news organizations, or nearby, that makes you curious about how we can work together better. You already have the skills and experiences that will be valuable in your conversations at SRCCON. ## What happens when people arrive at SRCCON? + Many folks stay at The Commons conference hotel, so a lot of attendees will likely congregate in the hotel lobby to find others for dinner or exploring Minneapolis. Several Minneapolis locals helped craft this [locals guide](/guide/index.html) with a bunch of tips to help guide those adventures! A lot of people also use Twitter to help coordinate outings, putting out a call for people to visit a particular type of restaurant or go for a hike or similar. Which brings us to... ## What's the hashtag? Do you want my pictures? + Our conference Twitter account is [SRCCON](https://twitter.com/srccon) and most people just use the hash tag #SRCCON. If that gets overrun by spammers, @SRCCON will tweet a new one. Please feel free to use it to coordinate cab carpools from the airport, dinner plans, and the like. If you take pictures during SRCCON (following the [guidelines below](#what-are-these-lanyard-colors-all-about)), feel free to tag them or [email them to us](mailto:srccon@opennews.org). We love using pics in our materials! ## What happens at the opening to SRCCON? + Most everyone arrives on time for SRCCON for a tasty breakfast and quick introduction to the event and each other. We usually take a quick "turn to your neighbor and say hello" moment that is quite chaotic and loud, but a lot of fun. SRCCON is a great place to catch up with old friends, but we like to create little opportunities like the group welcome to meet a new person in a slightly structured, low-stakes way. (Some introvert-friendly structured socializing!) ## Wait, why is my org not on my name tag? -Too many of us have had the conference experience of someone looking at our name tag and then looking right through us and walking away, simply because they didn't deem talking to someone from that organization worth their time. (Or, the reverse, being swarmed with irrelevant questions simply by being associated with a "big name" organization.) + +Too many of us have had the conference experience of someone looking at our name tag and then looking right through us and walking away, simply because they didn't deem talking to someone from that organization worth their time. (Or, the reverse, being swarmed with irrelevant questions simply by being associated with a "big name" organization.) No organization name on name tag? Now you can just say hello! And, if you're still that curious, look them up on Twitter and their org is probably in the bio anyway. ## What are these lanyard colors all about? + Inspired by [AdaCamps](https://adacamp.org/), we adopted tri-color lanyards for photo privacy. Not everyone is comfortable having their picture taken, and lanyards make it super easy to give or not give consent for photos. Folks with green lanyards, you can take their picture. Folks with yellow lanyards, please ask before taking their picture. Folks with red lanyards, do not take their picture. It's that simple! ## What are the sessions like? + SRCCON is different than many other conferences you may have attended. It’s a highly participatory event: no panels on a stage or speakers running through slides. You might notice that we always refer to facilitators or session leaders, never speakers or presenters, because when you run a session at SRCCON, you’re in a room with dozens of other smart people with an opportunity to compare notes, share skills, and help everyone learn from each other. We created SRCCON with a few principles in mind that lay the groundwork for our program as a whole: -* SRCCON is built around participation, discussion, and collaborative problem-solving. -* SRCCON exists to respond to the needs and interests of our community, and we’re intentional in including perspectives from throughout the field. -* Every attendee is a peer. Conference badges don’t flag organizations or speaker status—we’re all here to learn from each other. +- SRCCON is built around participation, discussion, and collaborative problem-solving. +- SRCCON exists to respond to the needs and interests of our community, and we’re intentional in including perspectives from throughout the field. +- Every attendee is a peer. Conference badges don’t flag organizations or speaker status—we’re all here to learn from each other. Our sessions inhabit these values in different ways, through structured discussions and problem-solving groups; peer-to-peer workshops; even games, drawing, or field trips. We avoid traditional lectures and classroom-style trainings, but we welcome your creativity across a range of hands-on and collaborative session styles. ## What do people expect me to do in the sessions? + Participate! To be clear, participation can take many forms. Contrary to popular opinion, speaking is not the only, primary, or even best way to participate. Many sessions take the form of small-group breakouts where you'll have a brief conversation with 5 or so other attendees. In that group, you could take notes, monitor the time, help facilitate the conversation—all participation roles in addition to any active listening or speaking you may do. -It's possible some sessions might involve moving around the room (as you are able), taking part in a game, drawing, learning a skill, or collaborating on a draft of an idea or prototype. +It's possible some sessions might involve moving around the room (as you are able), taking part in a game, drawing, learning a skill, or collaborating on a draft of an idea or prototype. Each session will be led by a facilitator or two or three who will guide participants through the session and let you know what to expect. If they describe a session that doesn't work for you, no worries, you can totally leave and try out a different session. SRCCON doesn't quite operate under the "rule of two feet" that some unconferences do, where people very frequently walk into and out of sessions, but facilitators do understand that people may leave or enter their sessions at any times and prepare for this. ## Where is the conference schedule? -The SRCCON schedule lives at [schedule.srccon.org](http://schedule.srccon.org), so you'll want to load that link on your phone. The schedule will be posted about a week before SRCCON. You can even mark sessions you want to attend and build your own custom schedule. We'll also post session names outside each room during the conference. + +The SRCCON schedule lives at [schedule.srccon.org](https://2017.srccon.org/schedule/), so you'll want to load that link on your phone. The schedule will be posted about a week before SRCCON. You can even mark sessions you want to attend and build your own custom schedule. We'll also post session names outside each room during the conference. ## How will I find the sessions? -Flip over your nametag, and you'll see a map of the space. There will also be ample signage around the venue. + +Flip over your nametag, and you'll see a map of the space. There will also be ample signage around the venue. ## Who are the people with the futuristic keyboards? -Those are the stenographers. Norma Miller and the [White Coat Captioning crew](http://www.whitecoatcaptioning.com/) will be live transcribing about half of the SRCCON sessions. You'll see a note on the SRCCON schedule about which sessions will be transcribed. We [offer transcription as an accessibility aid](http://opennews.org/blog/srccon-transcription), plus it's just really cool. Please speak up loudly in large group conversations so the stenographers can hear you. If you'd like a comment to be off the record, just say so and they will not record it. + +Those are the stenographers. Norma Miller and the [White Coat Captioning crew](https://www.whitecoatcaptioning.com/) will be live transcribing about half of the SRCCON sessions. You'll see a note on the SRCCON schedule about which sessions will be transcribed. We [offer transcription as an accessibility aid](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-transcription), plus it's just really cool. Please speak up loudly in large group conversations so the stenographers can hear you. If you'd like a comment to be off the record, just say so and they will not record it. ## What if I have a great idea for a conversation at SRCCON that is not already on the schedule? -At lunch during SRCCON, we'll have an open sign up board for anyone who would like to host a conversation during lunch. On Thursday evening, we'll also have space for a bunch of activities and informal discussions. + +At lunch during SRCCON, we'll have an open sign up board for anyone who would like to host a conversation during lunch. On Thursday evening, we'll also have space for a bunch of activities and informal discussions. ## What is this coffee station all about? + Some of the SRCCON organizers are super interested in coffee, so they thought it would be fun to have a spot where people could have actually good coffee (and tea!). The coffee station has a person on-hand to help you figure out how to use all the coffee gadgets, or you could ask the person next to you how to do it because everyone makes the coffee themselves. It's become a nice communal spot, where attendees have a quick chat over the roar of a coffee grinder or while waiting for a tea to steep. In addition to all the coffee gadgetry, there is also hot water and associated devices to make all types of tea. ## What are the meals like? + Meals are buffet style, with a variety of tasty options to meet all dietary needs (just be sure to let us know when you register or [email us](mailto:srccon@opennews.org) if anything changed). Meals are a communal experience at SRCCON. With folks gathering around tables to chat, sometimes to host entire sessions, and enjoy some camaraderie. Yes, sometimes folks catch up on work email as well, but there's a lot of chatting happening too. We provide full breakfast and lunch both days of SRCCON as well as dinner on Thursday night. In addition, there's ample snacks throughout so you never have to worry about finding sufficient energy to keep your brain moving. ## What are the non-caffeinated, non-alcoholic drink options like? + Many SRCCON participants are not into the coffee and beer culture, so we make sure there's plenty of tea and uncaffeinated drinks at the coffee station and at the meals throughout the day. In the evening, when we do provide alcohol, we also provide tasty sodas and non-alcoholic beer. -## What is this Thursday evening thing all about? +## What is this Thursday evening thing all about? + We also want to make sure you get a chance to connect with everyone at SRCCON about the things you love to do in your free time, not just what you work on during the day. Our Thursday night program is all about the "life" side of the work-life balance, and we'll spread throughout the conference venue for board games and lightning talks, get outside for field trips, and pull together hobby workshops and interesting conversations. You can find all the details about the activities on the [page we post them on](). ## What am I supposed to do for 30 minutes in between every session? + You have a bunch of options. You could certainly chat with a stranger who may be thinking exactly the same thing. You could make a(nother) cup of coffee or tea. You could check out the lobby area. You could go for a walk outside in the park in front of the building. You should use that time--as all other time at SRCCON--in the way that best meets your needs. We do our best to provide numerous options so that one of them will be what you need at the time. Extra-long breaks mean you don't have to choose between taking care of your needs or finishing up an interesting conversation with someone else—you have plenty of time for both before you head off to your next session. ## What happens if I feel harassed or unsafe? + You are supported by the [SRCCON code of conduct](/conduct), which is backed by a detailed action plan. If you feel harassed, unsafe, or concerned about something happening to you or that you see happening to someone else, you can call us or flag down a staff person or volunteer in a color-coded SRCCON shirt. ## What happens if I have a question or need a band-aid, pain reliever, or safety pin? + You can ask a volunteer or staff person who you see in a color-coded shirt, or there will also always be someone back at the registration desk as well. ## I have non-conference work to do! Help! + We understand. Given the participatory nature of SRCCON sessions, it's not a good idea to try to multi-task in the session itself. But you can find space throughout the venue for quiet work--there is a lobby area with a bunch of chairs by a fire, there is a wide expansive park in front of the buildings, there's ample hallway space for huddling, and if you're staying at the conference hotel, it's a super short walk (there's even a tunnel!) to head back to the hotel. ## What happens in the closing to SRCCON? + We all gather as a group once last time for a brief reflection and closing chat. After we officially close out the conference, it's a great chance to have that last conversation with someone you've been trying to connect with over the prior two days or find buddies for dinner that evening. ## What happens once SRCCON is over? -After catching our breath, we'll send out a survey to learn more about your experience and any adjustments it'd be helpful for us to make in the future. We'd also love to hear about anything that comes out of your experience at SRCCON, whether that be from sessions, conversations, ideas that SRCCON sparks. You'll see a bunch of coverage on Source from sessions and themes that arose in discussions. In addition, we love it when SRCCON lives on after the event--some facilitators have brought their sessions forward to ONA, Mozilla Festival, NICAR, and other events. Some folks who met at SRCCON one year, pitch a session together the next year, or build from their experience with NICAR Conversations or personal blog posts. + +After catching our breath, we'll send out a survey to learn more about your experience and any adjustments it'd be helpful for us to make in the future. We'd also love to hear about anything that comes out of your experience at SRCCON, whether that be from sessions, conversations, ideas that SRCCON sparks. You'll see a bunch of coverage on Source from sessions and themes that arose in discussions. In addition, we love it when SRCCON lives on after the event--some facilitators have brought their sessions forward to ONA, Mozilla Festival, NICAR, and other events. Some folks who met at SRCCON one year, pitch a session together the next year, or build from their experience with NICAR Conversations or personal blog posts. ## What makes this whole SRCCON thing happen? -SRCCON is organized [by the OpenNews team](https://opennews.org/who) with event management provided by Erik Westra of [WestraCo](http://www.westraco.com/). We started SRCCON in 2014 because we saw that the existing slate of (so many) journalism conferences wasn't well serving the most tech oriented folks in the journalism community. Many news nerds give numerous workshops at NICAR, but have fewer chances to learn from their peers or compare notes about their work. When we first created SRCCON, we thought it would be almost entirely very technical sessions, but it turned out that what this community really needed space to talk about is _how_ we work. Each year, we've built a SRCCON schedule that reflects the range of interests of this community, which include, yes, technical sessions and workshops, but increasingly, also sessions about workplace culture, management, diversity and inclusion, and the process of how technical work happens in newsrooms. -The structure and feel of SRCCON were inspired by the organizing team's experience as speakers, volunteers, organizers, and attendees of many, many tech and journalism conferences. We tried to create the type of event we'd like to attend. We borrowed ideas for session structure from the [Mozilla Festival](https://mozillafestival.org/) an for accessibility and inclusivity from [AdaCamp](https://adacamp.org/). And in the great open source spirit, we [documented our efforts](/docs), including our work [creating a Code of Conduct](http://incisive.nu/2014/codes-of-conduct), which has gone on to inspire several other journalism conferences. +SRCCON is organized [by the OpenNews team](https://opennews.org/who) with event management provided by Erik Westra of [WestraCo](https://www.westraco.com/). We started SRCCON in 2014 because we saw that the existing slate of (so many) journalism conferences wasn't well serving the most tech oriented folks in the journalism community. Many news nerds give numerous workshops at NICAR, but have fewer chances to learn from their peers or compare notes about their work. When we first created SRCCON, we thought it would be almost entirely very technical sessions, but it turned out that what this community really needed space to talk about is _how_ we work. Each year, we've built a SRCCON schedule that reflects the range of interests of this community, which include, yes, technical sessions and workshops, but increasingly, also sessions about workplace culture, management, diversity and inclusion, and the process of how technical work happens in newsrooms. + +The structure and feel of SRCCON were inspired by the organizing team's experience as speakers, volunteers, organizers, and attendees of many, many tech and journalism conferences. We tried to create the type of event we'd like to attend. We borrowed ideas for session structure from the [Mozilla Festival](https://mozillafestival.org/) an for accessibility and inclusivity from [AdaCamp](https://adacamp.org/). And in the great open source spirit, we [documented our efforts](/docs), including our work [creating a Code of Conduct](https://incisive.nu/2014/codes-of-conduct), which has gone on to inspire several other journalism conferences. SRCCON embodies the values of OpenNews: we believe a diverse community of peers working, learning, and solving problems together can create the stronger, more representative ecosystem that journalism needs to thrive. At SRCCON, we get to spend two days together in person with that community. ## I have another question, how can I find out more? -Feel free to [email us](mailto:srccon@opennews.org) or if you're feeling fancy, you can submit a pull request on this page with your question. +Feel free to [email us](mailto:srccon@opennews.org) or if you're feeling fancy, you can submit a pull request on this page with your question. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/proposal_guide.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/proposal_guide.md index 57cf3033..95eb2b9e 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/proposal_guide.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/proposal_guide.md @@ -1,163 +1,164 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: SRCCON Proposal Guide -subtitle: The best sessions combine your passion, creativity, and experience. Here's how to make your idea stand out. -section: sessions -sub-section: interior -background: stickerdots -byline: Erik Westra -permalink: /sessions/proposals/guide/ -redirect_from: - - /proposals/guide/ ---- - -Propose a Session - -There are a lot of ways to think about sessions at SRCCON. We've put this guide together to help you turn your great idea into an equally great session proposal. - -## In this guide -* [What Are SRCCON Sessions Like?](#about-sessions) -* [Key Dates in the Proposal Process](#key-dates) -* [How We Choose Sessions for SRCCON](#how-we-choose) -* [Tickets for Facilitators](#facilitator-tickets) -* [What Makes a Great Session Topic?](#great-session-topic) -* [What Makes a Great Session Proposal?](#great-session-proposal) -* [What Makes a Great Session Plan?](#great-session-plan) -* [Pitching With a Co-Facilitator](#cofacilitators) -* [Session Formats That Work](#session-formats) -* [Example Sessions from SRCCON 2016](#example-sessions) -* [How We Support SRCCON Proposers](#support) -* [Submit a Session Proposal](#submit-proposal) - - - -## What Are SRCCON Sessions Like? - -SRCCON is different than many other conferences you may have attended. It's a highly participatory event: no panels on a stage or speakers running through slides. You might notice that we always refer to facilitators or session leaders, never speakers or presenters, because when you run a session at SRCCON, you're in a room with dozens of other smart people with an opportunity to compare notes, share skills, and help everyone learn from each other. - -We created SRCCON with a few principles in mind that lay the groundwork for our program as a whole: - -* SRCCON is built around participation, discussion, and collaborative problem-solving. -* SRCCON exists to respond to the needs and interests of our community, and we're intentional in including perspectives from throughout the field. -* Every attendee is a peer—no lecturers, no special status, no outsiders. - -Our sessions inhabit these values in different ways, through structured discussions and problem-solving groups; peer-to-peer workshops; even games, drawing, or field trips. We avoid traditional lectures and classroom-style trainings, but we welcome your creativity across a range of hands-on and collaborative session styles. - - - -## Key Dates in the Proposal Process - -* **April 7:** call for proposals closes at 11:59pm ET -* **April 26:** all proposers notified about status of their sessions - - - -## How We Choose Sessions for SRCCON - -Our goal is to build a conference schedule with a mix of technical workshops, culturally focused discussions, and sessions that exist somewhere in between. As the SRCCON team reviews proposals, we look for: - -* topics that are relevant to developers, designers, journalists, and editors in newsrooms -* a session description that shows you've thought through your time with attendees -* thoughts about what you'd like participants to take away from your session - -After the call for proposals closes, we set aside two weeks for consideration by OpenNews staff. We also invite a diverse group of community members to provide feedback during the session review process. Our priority is to build a balanced program that reflects the entire community, and we actively welcome session proposals from members of communities underrepresented in journalism and technology, and from non-coastal and small-market news organizations. - - - -## Tickets for Facilitators - -We'll reserve a ticket for purchase by facilitators of accepted sessions, and they won't need to enter the public SRCCON ticket lottery in May. We do not provide free tickets for session facilitators, but we do offer need-based scholarships that anyone—facilitator or otherwise—can apply for if they need help covering the costs of attending. (Here's [more information about scholarships to SRCCON](/scholarships).) - -Why do we do it this way? SRCCON is a collaborative, peer-to-peer event, and we consider all attendees to be active participants, not just speakers or passive audience members. This approach also helps us keep ticket prices low enough to be affordable for most news organizations. - - - -## What Makes a Great Session Topic? - -Successful sessions often emerge from a single question or problem—if you’ve been struggling with just about any aspect of your work, you can bet others have dealt with it, too. Last year's sessions dealt with topics including advertising tech, audio sharing, chatbots, ethics in news apps, illustration, machine learning, management challenges, mental health, and science fiction. - -Topics don't just emerge from a list of latest trends; we bring them to SRCCON because facilitators are passionate and excited to share. If we see a number of pitches on the same subject, you can bet we'll make sure it's represented on the schedule. Sometimes we'll even suggest that proposers consider joining up to lead a session together. - - - -## What Makes a Great Session Proposal? - -As you propose an idea for SRCCON, your session description is the first opportunity to tell us how you'll spend time your time with everyone else who's excited about the same topic. We reserve 75 minutes for each session, which can be plenty of time to dig into even deep topics—but it does go faster than you think! Even though SRCCON is a conversational conference, a sketch of the ground you hope to cover is a great indicator of the thought you're putting into a session. - -Effective SRCCON sessions are about effort and preparation more than expertise. We encourage you to describe how you'll share what you know, the types of great questions you'll pose, and the ways you'll help people learn something new. We find that the most promising proposals: - -* take on a subject, or a slice of a subject, that can be realistically covered in a little more than an hour -* provide a clear and inviting description of the session -* describe a clear outcome—what people should leave with - -Other qualities that help a proposal stand out: - -* session ideas that might not work as well at a traditional conference -* creative formats that support learning or sharing -* plans to help attendees learn new techniques or technologies, or upgrade their skills -* plans to help attendees build a peer group, engaging with other perspectives from people doing the same work - - - -## What Makes a Great Session Plan? - -To give you a taste of how SRCCON facilitators turn plans into action, here are a few writeups from previous participants on their experience hosting sessions: - -* [3 Ways To Facilitate A Great Conference Session](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-one/), by ProPublica’s Sisi Wei -* [How We Facilitated A Huge, Participatory, Highly Charged SRCCON Session](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-two/), by NPR’s Alyson Hurt -* [OMGWTFBBQ: The Workshop](https://stephyiu.com/2016/08/01/omgwtfbbq-the-workshop/), by Automattic's Steph Yiu - -As we get closer to SRCCON, we'll publish a facilitator guide similar to this one, with more details and advice on leading sessions. - - - -## Pitching With a Co-Facilitator - -A co-facilitator for your SRCCON session can share the load of preparation and facilitation, as well as the fun of participating in the conference itself. If you're comfortable leading a session by yourself, that's great too! - -Only one person needs to fill out the proposal form, and we'll follow up with any co-facilitators to gather their information as well. Feel free to work on the proposal together, but don't limit yourself to pitching with someone who can fill out the form sitting alongside you. - -We consider solo and team proposals alike. But if you feel like your session could benefit from a co-facilitator, we encourage you to consider pitching with someone from another organization, and/or with a different background from your own. If you've attended SRCCON before, you might even consider proposing with someone who hasn't been yet. (We won't reject proposals featuring two members of the same team, two SRCCON alums, etc., but we may favor proposals that mix it up.) - - - -## Session Formats That Work - -SRCCON is a genuinely participatory event, and it's hard to participate in a session that's mostly lecture with a few minutes for discussion. It's great to start thinking about the format for your session now, and include detail in your proposal. It's totally OK if you plan to set up a session with an intro and a few slides, or to use examples throughout to support learning, but we do look for pitches that include real interactivity. Our final program will include both conversational sessions, where people can dig into questions or problems in a way they can't at larger conferences, and technical sessions, where people share specific expertise and participants leave with a new skill. Outstanding session formats in previous years have included: - -* design exercises -* roundtable conversations -* games -* technical workshops -* small-group breakouts -* physical movement and field trips - -We're always interested in new ideas, too, so feel free to propose something we've never imagined! - -It's also useful to think about information/activity density and, again, your desired takeaways. Over-programming a session with too many activities can make it impossible to get to your goals—but a session that's underdesigned can easily turn into a conversation between a handful of the loudest people. We're happy to help proposers figure out the right balance, and we don't expect you to have all the answers at the pitch stage, but it's good to start thinking about content density early on. (When in doubt, narrow your scope.) - - - -## Example Sessions from SRCCON 2016 - -* [Illustrating Investigations: Creating compelling visuals for abstract stories](https://2016.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-illustrating-investigations). This fun, highly interactive, morning session let participants do something they may not normally do: pick up paper and pencil and draw! -* [True Life: I Work Remotely](https://2016.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-remote-work). This was an excellent peer-to-peer experience sharing session that allowed both remotees and the remote-curious to learn from each other. -* [Let's All Be Terrible at Things Together](https://2016.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-lets-be-terrible). This session forced people out of their comfort zones and into collaborating around weaknesses and fears. -* [Every day I’m juggling: Managing managers, peer expectations, and your own project ideas](https://2016.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-juggling-expectations). Talking to management, helping them to see things from your perspective, coaxing change out of newsrooms--it's tough to go it alone. This session used the "experts in the room" to help level each other up. - - - -## How We Support SRCCON Proposers - -Ok, so you're excited to pitch your SRCCON session! If you feel ready to go, [you can submit your proposal now](/sessions/proposals/pitch/). If you have still have some questions, we are here for you: - -* Always feel free to email [srccon@opennews.org](mailto:srccon@opennews.org). We're happy to give feedback on session proposals, answer questions not covered here, or help in other ways. -* Check out the #srccon channel on the [News Nerdery Slack](http://newsnerdery.org/). OpenNews staff members are in the channel, so if there's a question that may be of broad interest, feel free to add it there. We'll also have official office hours 10am-1pm ET on Wednesday, March 29, and 2-5pm ET on Wednesday, April 8. -* Over the next couple of weeks, we'll publish blog posts with more ideas about SRCCON session proposals, including a walkthrough of the proposal form itself, so keep an eye on [@SRCCON](https://twitter.com/srccon) or [sign up for our mailing list](http://opennews.us5.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=71c95e9a43708843d2fdc1f09&id=996e9290cc). -* We'll publish a guide like this one with details and advice about facilitation, and we'll host group calls and provide other resources for facilitators. If you're passionate about your proposal but unsure about the facilitation part, don't worry—you will be well supported in the months leading up to SRCCON. - - - -## Submit a Session Proposal - -Our call for proposals is open until April 7 at 11:59pm ET. We'd love to have you [pitch a session](/sessions/proposals/pitch/) so we can consider your ideas for SRCCON 2017, August 3 & 4 in Minneapolis. +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: SRCCON Proposal Guide +subtitle: The best sessions combine your passion, creativity, and experience. Here's how to make your idea stand out. +section: sessions +sub-section: interior +background: stickerdots +byline: Erik Westra +permalink: /sessions/proposals/guide/ +redirect_from: + - /proposals/guide/ +--- + +Propose a Session + +There are a lot of ways to think about sessions at SRCCON. We've put this guide together to help you turn your great idea into an equally great session proposal. + +## In this guide + +- [What Are SRCCON Sessions Like?](#about-sessions) +- [Key Dates in the Proposal Process](#key-dates) +- [How We Choose Sessions for SRCCON](#how-we-choose) +- [Tickets for Facilitators](#facilitator-tickets) +- [What Makes a Great Session Topic?](#great-session-topic) +- [What Makes a Great Session Proposal?](#great-session-proposal) +- [What Makes a Great Session Plan?](#great-session-plan) +- [Pitching With a Co-Facilitator](#cofacilitators) +- [Session Formats That Work](#session-formats) +- [Example Sessions from SRCCON 2016](#example-sessions) +- [How We Support SRCCON Proposers](#support) +- [Submit a Session Proposal](#submit-proposal) + + + +## What Are SRCCON Sessions Like? + +SRCCON is different than many other conferences you may have attended. It's a highly participatory event: no panels on a stage or speakers running through slides. You might notice that we always refer to facilitators or session leaders, never speakers or presenters, because when you run a session at SRCCON, you're in a room with dozens of other smart people with an opportunity to compare notes, share skills, and help everyone learn from each other. + +We created SRCCON with a few principles in mind that lay the groundwork for our program as a whole: + +- SRCCON is built around participation, discussion, and collaborative problem-solving. +- SRCCON exists to respond to the needs and interests of our community, and we're intentional in including perspectives from throughout the field. +- Every attendee is a peer—no lecturers, no special status, no outsiders. + +Our sessions inhabit these values in different ways, through structured discussions and problem-solving groups; peer-to-peer workshops; even games, drawing, or field trips. We avoid traditional lectures and classroom-style trainings, but we welcome your creativity across a range of hands-on and collaborative session styles. + + + +## Key Dates in the Proposal Process + +- **April 7:** call for proposals closes at 11:59pm ET +- **April 26:** all proposers notified about status of their sessions + + + +## How We Choose Sessions for SRCCON + +Our goal is to build a conference schedule with a mix of technical workshops, culturally focused discussions, and sessions that exist somewhere in between. As the SRCCON team reviews proposals, we look for: + +- topics that are relevant to developers, designers, journalists, and editors in newsrooms +- a session description that shows you've thought through your time with attendees +- thoughts about what you'd like participants to take away from your session + +After the call for proposals closes, we set aside two weeks for consideration by OpenNews staff. We also invite a diverse group of community members to provide feedback during the session review process. Our priority is to build a balanced program that reflects the entire community, and we actively welcome session proposals from members of communities underrepresented in journalism and technology, and from non-coastal and small-market news organizations. + + + +## Tickets for Facilitators + +We'll reserve a ticket for purchase by facilitators of accepted sessions, and they won't need to enter the public SRCCON ticket lottery in May. We do not provide free tickets for session facilitators, but we do offer need-based scholarships that anyone—facilitator or otherwise—can apply for if they need help covering the costs of attending. (Here's [more information about scholarships to SRCCON](/scholarships).) + +Why do we do it this way? SRCCON is a collaborative, peer-to-peer event, and we consider all attendees to be active participants, not just speakers or passive audience members. This approach also helps us keep ticket prices low enough to be affordable for most news organizations. + + + +## What Makes a Great Session Topic? + +Successful sessions often emerge from a single question or problem—if you’ve been struggling with just about any aspect of your work, you can bet others have dealt with it, too. Last year's sessions dealt with topics including advertising tech, audio sharing, chatbots, ethics in news apps, illustration, machine learning, management challenges, mental health, and science fiction. + +Topics don't just emerge from a list of latest trends; we bring them to SRCCON because facilitators are passionate and excited to share. If we see a number of pitches on the same subject, you can bet we'll make sure it's represented on the schedule. Sometimes we'll even suggest that proposers consider joining up to lead a session together. + + + +## What Makes a Great Session Proposal? + +As you propose an idea for SRCCON, your session description is the first opportunity to tell us how you'll spend time your time with everyone else who's excited about the same topic. We reserve 75 minutes for each session, which can be plenty of time to dig into even deep topics—but it does go faster than you think! Even though SRCCON is a conversational conference, a sketch of the ground you hope to cover is a great indicator of the thought you're putting into a session. + +Effective SRCCON sessions are about effort and preparation more than expertise. We encourage you to describe how you'll share what you know, the types of great questions you'll pose, and the ways you'll help people learn something new. We find that the most promising proposals: + +- take on a subject, or a slice of a subject, that can be realistically covered in a little more than an hour +- provide a clear and inviting description of the session +- describe a clear outcome—what people should leave with + +Other qualities that help a proposal stand out: + +- session ideas that might not work as well at a traditional conference +- creative formats that support learning or sharing +- plans to help attendees learn new techniques or technologies, or upgrade their skills +- plans to help attendees build a peer group, engaging with other perspectives from people doing the same work + + + +## What Makes a Great Session Plan? + +To give you a taste of how SRCCON facilitators turn plans into action, here are a few writeups from previous participants on their experience hosting sessions: + +- [3 Ways To Facilitate A Great Conference Session](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-one/), by ProPublica’s Sisi Wei +- [How We Facilitated A Huge, Participatory, Highly Charged SRCCON Session](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-two/), by NPR’s Alyson Hurt +- [OMGWTFBBQ: The Workshop](https://stephyiu.com/2016/08/01/omgwtfbbq-the-workshop/), by Automattic's Steph Yiu + +As we get closer to SRCCON, we'll publish a facilitator guide similar to this one, with more details and advice on leading sessions. + + + +## Pitching With a Co-Facilitator + +A co-facilitator for your SRCCON session can share the load of preparation and facilitation, as well as the fun of participating in the conference itself. If you're comfortable leading a session by yourself, that's great too! + +Only one person needs to fill out the proposal form, and we'll follow up with any co-facilitators to gather their information as well. Feel free to work on the proposal together, but don't limit yourself to pitching with someone who can fill out the form sitting alongside you. + +We consider solo and team proposals alike. But if you feel like your session could benefit from a co-facilitator, we encourage you to consider pitching with someone from another organization, and/or with a different background from your own. If you've attended SRCCON before, you might even consider proposing with someone who hasn't been yet. (We won't reject proposals featuring two members of the same team, two SRCCON alums, etc., but we may favor proposals that mix it up.) + + + +## Session Formats That Work + +SRCCON is a genuinely participatory event, and it's hard to participate in a session that's mostly lecture with a few minutes for discussion. It's great to start thinking about the format for your session now, and include detail in your proposal. It's totally OK if you plan to set up a session with an intro and a few slides, or to use examples throughout to support learning, but we do look for pitches that include real interactivity. Our final program will include both conversational sessions, where people can dig into questions or problems in a way they can't at larger conferences, and technical sessions, where people share specific expertise and participants leave with a new skill. Outstanding session formats in previous years have included: + +- design exercises +- roundtable conversations +- games +- technical workshops +- small-group breakouts +- physical movement and field trips + +We're always interested in new ideas, too, so feel free to propose something we've never imagined! + +It's also useful to think about information/activity density and, again, your desired takeaways. Over-programming a session with too many activities can make it impossible to get to your goals—but a session that's underdesigned can easily turn into a conversation between a handful of the loudest people. We're happy to help proposers figure out the right balance, and we don't expect you to have all the answers at the pitch stage, but it's good to start thinking about content density early on. (When in doubt, narrow your scope.) + + + +## Example Sessions from SRCCON 2016 + +- [Illustrating Investigations: Creating compelling visuals for abstract stories](https://2016.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-illustrating-investigations). This fun, highly interactive, morning session let participants do something they may not normally do: pick up paper and pencil and draw! +- [True Life: I Work Remotely](https://2016.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-remote-work). This was an excellent peer-to-peer experience sharing session that allowed both remotees and the remote-curious to learn from each other. +- [Let's All Be Terrible at Things Together](https://2016.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-lets-be-terrible). This session forced people out of their comfort zones and into collaborating around weaknesses and fears. +- [Every day I’m juggling: Managing managers, peer expectations, and your own project ideas](https://2016.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-juggling-expectations). Talking to management, helping them to see things from your perspective, coaxing change out of newsrooms--it's tough to go it alone. This session used the "experts in the room" to help level each other up. + + + +## How We Support SRCCON Proposers + +Ok, so you're excited to pitch your SRCCON session! If you feel ready to go, [you can submit your proposal now](/sessions/proposals/pitch/). If you have still have some questions, we are here for you: + +- Always feel free to email [srccon@opennews.org](mailto:srccon@opennews.org). We're happy to give feedback on session proposals, answer questions not covered here, or help in other ways. +- Check out the #srccon channel on the [News Nerdery Slack](https://newsnerdery.org/). OpenNews staff members are in the channel, so if there's a question that may be of broad interest, feel free to add it there. We'll also have official office hours 10am-1pm ET on Wednesday, March 29, and 2-5pm ET on Wednesday, April 8. +- Over the next couple of weeks, we'll publish blog posts with more ideas about SRCCON session proposals, including a walkthrough of the proposal form itself, so keep an eye on [@SRCCON](https://twitter.com/srccon) or [sign up for our mailing list](https://opennews.us5.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=71c95e9a43708843d2fdc1f09&id=996e9290cc). +- We'll publish a guide like this one with details and advice about facilitation, and we'll host group calls and provide other resources for facilitators. If you're passionate about your proposal but unsure about the facilitation part, don't worry—you will be well supported in the months leading up to SRCCON. + + + +## Submit a Session Proposal + +Our call for proposals is open until April 7 at 11:59pm ET. We'd love to have you [pitch a session](/sessions/proposals/pitch/) so we can consider your ideas for SRCCON 2017, August 3 & 4 in Minneapolis. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/proposal_pitch.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/proposal_pitch.md index 03a01277..fb12ad02 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/proposal_pitch.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/proposal_pitch.md @@ -1,34 +1,35 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Pitch Your Session -subtitle: Our peer-led sessions combine skillsharing, discussion, and collaboration. -section: sessions -sub-section: interior -background: stickerdots -byline: Erik Westra -permalink: /sessions/proposals/pitch/ -redirect_from: - - /proposals/pitch/ ---- - -Proposals for SRCCON 2017 are now closed. Thank you so much for your enthusiastic response. We're currently reviewing [all proposals](/sessions/proposals), and we'll publish the list of accepted sessions before our [ticket lottery](/tickets) opens on May 3. - -{% comment %} -We can't wait to hear about your idea for SRCCON 2017! After we give your proposal an initial read, we'll publish the title and description on the [SRCCON proposals list](/sessions/proposals). - -**New this year:** [our SRCCON Proposal Guide](/sessions/proposals/guide). If you're thinking about pitching a session, we highly recommend reading through [this guide to crafting a great proposal](/sessions/proposals/guide). Or if you're all set, the proposal form is below! - - - - - -
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- - -{% endcomment %} \ No newline at end of file +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Pitch Your Session +subtitle: Our peer-led sessions combine skillsharing, discussion, and collaboration. +section: sessions +sub-section: interior +background: stickerdots +byline: Erik Westra +permalink: /sessions/proposals/pitch/ +redirect_from: + - /proposals/pitch/ +--- + +Proposals for SRCCON 2017 are now closed. Thank you so much for your enthusiastic response. We're currently reviewing [all proposals](/sessions/proposals), and we'll publish the list of accepted sessions before our [ticket lottery](/tickets) opens on May 3. + +{% comment %} +We can't wait to hear about your idea for SRCCON 2017! After we give your proposal an initial read, we'll publish the title and description on the [SRCCON proposals list](/sessions/proposals). + +**New this year:** [our SRCCON Proposal Guide](/sessions/proposals/guide). If you're thinking about pitching a session, we highly recommend reading through [this guide to crafting a great proposal](/sessions/proposals/guide). Or if you're all set, the proposal form is below! + + + + + +
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+

Powered by Screendoor.

+ + + +{% endcomment %} diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/proposal_thanks.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/proposal_thanks.md index 96d93ba3..b6a5bb33 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/proposal_thanks.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/proposal_thanks.md @@ -1,19 +1,19 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: You're the best! -subtitle: Thanks so much. We can't wait to read your proposal. -section: sessions -sub-section: interior -background: stickerdots -byline: Erik Westra -permalink: /sessions/proposals/thanks/index.html ---- - -## Thank you for submitting a proposal to SRCCON 2017! - -We read through every session idea soon after it comes in, and we'll publish yours on the [SRCCON proposals page](/sessions/proposals) soon. If you like, you can [submit another session proposal](/sessions/proposals/pitch) right now. If you're all set, please consider inviting friends and colleagues to submit proposals and join us in Minneapolis on August 3 & 4. Between now and then, here are a couple of key dates in the SRCCON session review process: - -* The call for proposals closes at 11:59pm ET, **Friday, April 7**. -* We'll notify all proposers about the status of their sessions by **Wednesday, April 26**. - -**Reminder:** Because SRCCON is a collaborative, peer-to-peer event, rather than a series of prepared conference talks, we ask that all participants buy a ticket. We'll reserve a ticket for purchase by facilitators of accepted sessions, and they won't need to enter the public ticket lottery in May. +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: You're the best! +subtitle: Thanks so much. We can't wait to read your proposal. +section: sessions +sub-section: interior +background: stickerdots +byline: Erik Westra +permalink: /sessions/proposals/thanks/index.html +--- + +## Thank you for submitting a proposal to SRCCON 2017! + +We read through every session idea soon after it comes in, and we'll publish yours on the [SRCCON proposals page](/sessions/proposals) soon. If you like, you can [submit another session proposal](/sessions/proposals/pitch) right now. If you're all set, please consider inviting friends and colleagues to submit proposals and join us in Minneapolis on August 3 & 4. Between now and then, here are a couple of key dates in the SRCCON session review process: + +- The call for proposals closes at 11:59pm ET, **Friday, April 7**. +- We'll notify all proposers about the status of their sessions by **Wednesday, April 26**. + +**Reminder:** Because SRCCON is a collaborative, peer-to-peer event, rather than a series of prepared conference talks, we ask that all participants buy a ticket. We'll reserve a ticket for purchase by facilitators of accepted sessions, and they won't need to enter the public ticket lottery in May. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/proposals.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/proposals.md index e3683988..c38b4fc1 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/proposals.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/proposals.md @@ -1,27 +1,27 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Your Proposals -subtitle: We're displaying all the proposed sessions for this year's SRCCON. -section: proposals -sub-section: interior -background: stickerdots -byline: Erik Westra -permalink: /sessions/proposals/ -redirect_from: - - /proposals/ ---- - -We received 149 proposals for SRCCON this year. They were all amazing and are listed here. To see the sessions accepted for SRCCON 2017, visit the [Sessions page](/sessions). - -{% comment %}We'll list proposed sessions for SRCCON 2017 here. After the call for proposals closes on April 7, we'll review them all and publish the list of accepted sessions prior to our [ticket lottery](/tickets) opening on May 3. If you have an idea for this year's SRCCON, you can [propose a session now](/sessions/proposals/pitch)!{% endcomment %} - -
{% comment %}The one-line if statement below is ugly but prevents massive whitespace in the template{% endcomment %} -{% for proposal in site.data.proposals %} - {% if proposal.facilitator and proposal.facilitator_twitter %}{% capture facilitator_name %}{{ proposal.facilitator }}{% endcapture %}{% elsif proposal.facilitator %}{% capture facilitator_name %}{{ proposal.facilitator }}{% endcapture %}{% else %}{% assign facilitator_name = false %}{% endif %}{% if proposal.cofacilitator and proposal.cofacilitator_twitter %}{% capture cofacilitator_name %}{{ proposal.cofacilitator }}{% endcapture %}{% elsif proposal.cofacilitator %}{% capture cofacilitator_name %}and {{ proposal.cofacilitator }}{% endcapture %}{% else %}{% assign cofacilitator_name = false %}{% endif %} -
-

{{ proposal.title }}

- {% if facilitator_name %}

Proposed by {{ facilitator_name }}{% if cofacilitator_name %} and {{ cofacilitator_name }}{% endif %}

{% endif %} -

{{ proposal.description | markdownify }}

-
-{% endfor %} -
+--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Your Proposals +subtitle: We're displaying all the proposed sessions for this year's SRCCON. +section: proposals +sub-section: interior +background: stickerdots +byline: Erik Westra +permalink: /sessions/proposals/ +redirect_from: + - /proposals/ +--- + +We received 149 proposals for SRCCON this year. They were all amazing and are listed here. To see the sessions accepted for SRCCON 2017, visit the [Sessions page](/sessions). + +{% comment %}We'll list proposed sessions for SRCCON 2017 here. After the call for proposals closes on April 7, we'll review them all and publish the list of accepted sessions prior to our [ticket lottery](/tickets) opening on May 3. If you have an idea for this year's SRCCON, you can [propose a session now](/sessions/proposals/pitch)!{% endcomment %} + +
{% comment %}The one-line if statement below is ugly but prevents massive whitespace in the template{% endcomment %} +{% for proposal in site.data.proposals %} + {% if proposal.facilitator and proposal.facilitator_twitter %}{% capture facilitator_name %}{{ proposal.facilitator }}{% endcapture %}{% elsif proposal.facilitator %}{% capture facilitator_name %}{{ proposal.facilitator }}{% endcapture %}{% else %}{% assign facilitator_name = false %}{% endif %}{% if proposal.cofacilitator and proposal.cofacilitator_twitter %}{% capture cofacilitator_name %}{{ proposal.cofacilitator }}{% endcapture %}{% elsif proposal.cofacilitator %}{% capture cofacilitator_name %}and {{ proposal.cofacilitator }}{% endcapture %}{% else %}{% assign cofacilitator_name = false %}{% endif %} +
+

{{ proposal.title }}

+ {% if facilitator_name %}

Proposed by {{ facilitator_name }}{% if cofacilitator_name %} and {{ cofacilitator_name }}{% endif %}

{% endif %} +

{{ proposal.description | markdownify }}

+
+{% endfor %} +
diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/schedule.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/schedule.md deleted file mode 100644 index 4941e1c1..00000000 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/schedule.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Schedule -permalink: /schedule/index.html -redirect_to: - - http://schedule.srccon.org ---- - -schedule.srccon.org \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/scholarships.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/scholarships.md index e1408a46..659e7a21 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/scholarships.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/scholarships.md @@ -1,58 +1,70 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Scholarships -subtitle: We know not everyone can afford a trip to Minneapolis, so we offer a limited number of travel scholarships to help you make it to SRCCON. -sub-section: interior -background: scholarships -byline: Erik Westra -permalink: /scholarships/index.html ---- -**The SRCCON scholarship application is now closed. Thanks to all who applied** - -If you want to attend SRCCON, we don’t want cost to prevent you from coming, which is why we work to keep ticket prices low. To help defray the cost of attending SRCCON, OpenNews offers a limited number of travel scholarships. - -Whether you’re a newsroom developer at a small organization with a strained professional development budget or a freelance developer eager to learn more about journalism code, we want to help you attend SRCCON. - -*New this year*: You do not have to fill out a separate application to apply. Scholarship questions were part of both the call for proposals form and the ticket lottery signup form (registration now closed). - -## What we’re offering -A ticket to SRCCON and $500 for you to use toward the cost of travel to the event. (For scholarship recipients who live in the Minneapolis area, we offer a SRCCON ticket without the additional travel funding.) - -## Who should apply -* Anyone who is part of the journalism code community -* Anyone interested in learning more about the journalism code community -* People of color, women, and other under-represented groups in technology are strongly encouraged to apply - -## How to apply -Select the "Would you like to be considered for a SRCCON scholarship?" option on the application to propose a session or on the ticket lottery sign up form (now closed). A few scholarship-specific questions will then pop onto the form. - -## When notifications go out -Notifications for scholarships will go out alongisde notifications related to session proposals and the ticket lottery. - -## What happens after SRCCON -You tell us how it went! We’ll send you a short follow up survey and will be excited to check out any blog posts or code repos that come out of your participation at SRCCON. - -## Why are you offering this scholarship? -We want to make sure that SRCCON is an event that includes the diversity of the communities we serve—geographically, demographically, experientially, and more. We know that travel costs can be a hardship, and offer this scholarship as a way to help mitigate that. - -## How do you decide who will receive a scholarship? -OpenNews staff reviews all applications. We prioritize applications from members of communities under-represented in journalism and technology and from smaller and non-coastal newsrooms. - -## Do I still need to purchase a ticket to SRCCON? -If you receive a scholarship, you will not have to purchase a ticket. - -## When will I receive my scholarship? -When we notify scholarship recipients, we will include information about how to receive the scholarship funds. In short, you will need to send us an invoice and our administrators will process the payment. It may take a month or so for check processing. - -## What if I need more than $500 for my travel? -We're able to offer $500 scholarships at this time. Luckily, Minneapolis is a relatively cheap city once you arrive. Also, this entire site runs [off a Github repo](https://github.com/OpenNews/srccon), so if you say, wanted to add a link to a room-share board, you could go right ahead and do that. Or, you can [email with any suggestions](mailto:erika@opennews.org). - -## Questions not covered here? -[Email us](mailto:srccon@opennews.org). - -
-

Scholarships to SRCCON are made possible by:

-

Wordpress -New York Times

-

WordPress provided scholarships to SRCCON participants and The New York Times provided scholarships to SRCCON facilitators. Thanks to both organizations for supporting 40 people in attending SRCCON!

-
+--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Scholarships +subtitle: We know not everyone can afford a trip to Minneapolis, so we offer a limited number of travel scholarships to help you make it to SRCCON. +sub-section: interior +background: scholarships +byline: Erik Westra +permalink: /scholarships/index.html +--- + +**The SRCCON scholarship application is now closed. Thanks to all who applied** + +If you want to attend SRCCON, we don’t want cost to prevent you from coming, which is why we work to keep ticket prices low. To help defray the cost of attending SRCCON, OpenNews offers a limited number of travel scholarships. + +Whether you’re a newsroom developer at a small organization with a strained professional development budget or a freelance developer eager to learn more about journalism code, we want to help you attend SRCCON. + +_New this year_: You do not have to fill out a separate application to apply. Scholarship questions were part of both the call for proposals form and the ticket lottery signup form (registration now closed). + +## What we’re offering + +A ticket to SRCCON and $500 for you to use toward the cost of travel to the event. (For scholarship recipients who live in the Minneapolis area, we offer a SRCCON ticket without the additional travel funding.) + +## Who should apply + +- Anyone who is part of the journalism code community +- Anyone interested in learning more about the journalism code community +- People of color, women, and other under-represented groups in technology are strongly encouraged to apply + +## How to apply + +Select the "Would you like to be considered for a SRCCON scholarship?" option on the application to propose a session or on the ticket lottery sign up form (now closed). A few scholarship-specific questions will then pop onto the form. + +## When notifications go out + +Notifications for scholarships will go out alongisde notifications related to session proposals and the ticket lottery. + +## What happens after SRCCON + +You tell us how it went! We’ll send you a short follow up survey and will be excited to check out any blog posts or code repos that come out of your participation at SRCCON. + +## Why are you offering this scholarship? + +We want to make sure that SRCCON is an event that includes the diversity of the communities we serve—geographically, demographically, experientially, and more. We know that travel costs can be a hardship, and offer this scholarship as a way to help mitigate that. + +## How do you decide who will receive a scholarship? + +OpenNews staff reviews all applications. We prioritize applications from members of communities under-represented in journalism and technology and from smaller and non-coastal newsrooms. + +## Do I still need to purchase a ticket to SRCCON? + +If you receive a scholarship, you will not have to purchase a ticket. + +## When will I receive my scholarship? + +When we notify scholarship recipients, we will include information about how to receive the scholarship funds. In short, you will need to send us an invoice and our administrators will process the payment. It may take a month or so for check processing. + +## What if I need more than $500 for my travel? + +We're able to offer $500 scholarships at this time. Luckily, Minneapolis is a relatively cheap city once you arrive. Also, this entire site runs [off a Github repo](https://github.com/OpenNews/srccon), so if you say, wanted to add a link to a room-share board, you could go right ahead and do that. Or, you can [email with any suggestions](mailto:erika@opennews.org). + +## Questions not covered here? + +[Email us](mailto:srccon@opennews.org). + +
+

Scholarships to SRCCON are made possible by:

+

Wordpress +New York Times

+

WordPress provided scholarships to SRCCON participants and The New York Times provided scholarships to SRCCON facilitators. Thanks to both organizations for supporting 40 people in attending SRCCON!

+
diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/sessions.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/sessions.md index 9cd2121b..0e3fafd0 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/sessions.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/sessions.md @@ -1,50 +1,50 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Sessions at SRCCON -subtitle: Our peer-led sessions combine skillsharing, discussion, and collaboration. -section: sessions -sub-section: interior -background: stickerdots -byline: Erik Westra -permalink: /sessions/ ---- - -The following sessions have been confirmed for SRCCON 2017. Huge thanks to all who submitted proposals, and to the [community panel](#community-review) that helped us during the review process. - -Some session descriptions here may evolve between now and SRCCON. This year's final schedule will reflect any updates and include an evening slate of fun, informal talks, discussions, and activities. The complete [2017 SRCCON schedule is available here](http://schedule.srccon.org). - -
{% comment %}The one-line if statement below is ugly but prevents massive whitespace in the template{% endcomment %} -{% for proposal in site.data.sessions %} - {% if proposal.facilitator.size > 0 and proposal.facilitator_twitter.size > 0 %}{% capture facilitator_name %}{{ proposal.facilitator }}{% endcapture %}{% elsif proposal.facilitator.size > 0 %}{% capture facilitator_name %}{{ proposal.facilitator }}{% endcapture %}{% else %}{% assign facilitator_name = false %}{% endif %}{% if proposal.cofacilitator.size > 0 and proposal.cofacilitator_twitter.size > 0 %}{% capture cofacilitator_name %}{{ proposal.cofacilitator }}{% endcapture %}{% elsif proposal.cofacilitator.size > 0 %}{% capture cofacilitator_name %}{{ proposal.cofacilitator }}{% endcapture %}{% else %}{% assign cofacilitator_name = false %}{% endif %}{% if proposal.cofacilitator_two.size > 0 and proposal.cofacilitator_two_twitter.size > 0 %}{% capture cofacilitator_two_name %}{{ proposal.cofacilitator_two }}{% endcapture %}{% elsif proposal.cofacilitator_two.size > 0 %}{% capture cofacilitator_two_name %}{{ proposal.cofacilitator_two }}{% endcapture %}{% else %}{% assign cofacilitator_two_name = false %}{% endif %} -
-

{{ proposal.title }}

- {% if facilitator_name %}

Facilitated by {{ facilitator_name }}{% if cofacilitator_name %} & {{ cofacilitator_name }}{% endif %}{% if cofacilitator_two_name %} & {{ cofacilitator_two_name }}{% endif %}

{% endif %} -

{{ proposal.description | markdownify }}

-
-{% endfor %} -
- - - - - - - -## Community reviewers - -We'd also like to thank the folks who helped us select this amazing slate of sessions! We reached out to community members with a range of experiences and perspectives to make sure that SRCCON would have sessions that responded to your needs. - -Thank you, community reviewers! - -* Michael Grant -* Chris Groskopf -* Geoff Hing -* Greta Kaul -* Dolly Li -* Haoyun Su -* Christine Zhang +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Sessions at SRCCON +subtitle: Our peer-led sessions combine skillsharing, discussion, and collaboration. +section: sessions +sub-section: interior +background: stickerdots +byline: Erik Westra +permalink: /sessions/ +--- + +The following sessions have been confirmed for SRCCON 2017. Huge thanks to all who submitted proposals, and to the [community panel](#community-review) that helped us during the review process. + +Some session descriptions here may evolve between now and SRCCON. This year's final schedule will reflect any updates and include an evening slate of fun, informal talks, discussions, and activities. The complete [2017 SRCCON schedule is available here](https://2017.srccon.org/schedule/). + +
{% comment %}The one-line if statement below is ugly but prevents massive whitespace in the template{% endcomment %} +{% for proposal in site.data.sessions %} + {% if proposal.facilitator.size > 0 and proposal.facilitator_twitter.size > 0 %}{% capture facilitator_name %}{{ proposal.facilitator }}{% endcapture %}{% elsif proposal.facilitator.size > 0 %}{% capture facilitator_name %}{{ proposal.facilitator }}{% endcapture %}{% else %}{% assign facilitator_name = false %}{% endif %}{% if proposal.cofacilitator.size > 0 and proposal.cofacilitator_twitter.size > 0 %}{% capture cofacilitator_name %}{{ proposal.cofacilitator }}{% endcapture %}{% elsif proposal.cofacilitator.size > 0 %}{% capture cofacilitator_name %}{{ proposal.cofacilitator }}{% endcapture %}{% else %}{% assign cofacilitator_name = false %}{% endif %}{% if proposal.cofacilitator_two.size > 0 and proposal.cofacilitator_two_twitter.size > 0 %}{% capture cofacilitator_two_name %}{{ proposal.cofacilitator_two }}{% endcapture %}{% elsif proposal.cofacilitator_two.size > 0 %}{% capture cofacilitator_two_name %}{{ proposal.cofacilitator_two }}{% endcapture %}{% else %}{% assign cofacilitator_two_name = false %}{% endif %} +
+

{{ proposal.title }}

+ {% if facilitator_name %}

Facilitated by {{ facilitator_name }}{% if cofacilitator_name %} & {{ cofacilitator_name }}{% endif %}{% if cofacilitator_two_name %} & {{ cofacilitator_two_name }}{% endif %}

{% endif %} +

{{ proposal.description | markdownify }}

+
+{% endfor %} +
+ + + + + + + +## Community reviewers + +We'd also like to thank the folks who helped us select this amazing slate of sessions! We reached out to community members with a range of experiences and perspectives to make sure that SRCCON would have sessions that responded to your needs. + +Thank you, community reviewers! + +- Michael Grant +- Chris Groskopf +- Geoff Hing +- Greta Kaul +- Dolly Li +- Haoyun Su +- Christine Zhang diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/sessions_about.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/sessions_about.md index 1c16f8a0..1342d64d 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/sessions_about.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/sessions_about.md @@ -1,73 +1,73 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Sessions at SRCCON -subtitle: Our peer-led sessions combine skillsharing, discussion, and collaboration. Proposals open March 22. -section: sessions -sub-section: interior -background: stickerdots -byline: Erik Westra -permalink: /sessions/about/index.html ---- - -SRCCON is built around two days of peer-led conversations, hands-on workshops, and skillshares. The community members who step up to facilitate these sessions make it all possible. - -## We've selected this year's sessions! - -After receiving 149 session proposals, we have [accepted a list of amazing sessions for this year](/sessions). We'll be working these into a final schedule which will be published in July. - -{% comment %} -## Our Call for Session Proposals is Open! - -Propose a Session - -We'll be accepting proposals through **Friday, April 7, at 11:59pm ET**. Session proposals will be [listed on the SRCCON website](/sessions/proposals) shortly after they're submitted. - - -## New this year: A Guide to Proposing Sessions - -Have an idea for this year's SRCCON but not sure about the best way pitch it? Let us help you! We've put together [a proposals guide](/sessions/proposals/guide) with advice on turning great ideas into great session proposals. -{% endcomment %} - -## About Sessions at SRCCON - -There are a lot of ways to think about sessions at SRCCON, but the main thing is to consider how it's *different* than other conferences you may have attended. SRCCON is highly participatory: sessions are not a panel on a stage of a speaker running through slides. This is an opportunity to compare notes, share skills, and learn from each other. - -So you can be prepared to pitch a great session at SRCCON, we asked a couple previous participants to talk about their experience hosting SRCCON sessions: - -* [3 Ways To Facilitate A Great Conference Session](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-one/), by ProPublica's Sisi Wei -* [How We Facilitated A Huge, Participatory, Highly Charged SRCCON Session](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-two/), by NPR's Alyson Hurt - -## What Makes a Great Session Topic? - -Successful sessions often emerge from a single question or problem—if you’ve been struggling with just about any aspect of your work, you can bet others have dealt with it, too. (When we receive multiple pitches on the same subject, we sometimes suggest that the proposers consider combining forces, but no one's obligated to do so.) - -Last year's sessions dealt with topics including burnout, chatbots, community-building, documentation, hiring processes, illustration, machine learning, mobile development, newsroom analytics, and user-centered design. To give you a taste, here's [a small selection of great sessions from 2016](#examples). - -## What Makes a Great Session Format? - -SRCCON is a genuinely participatory event, and it's hard to participate in a session that's mostly lecture with a few minutes for discussion, so we look for pitches that include real interactivity. Outstanding sessions in previous years have included design exercises, games, skillshares, small-group breakouts, physical movement, and field trips, and we're always interested in new ideas. - -It's also useful to think about your target session length and information/activity density. Over-programming a session with too many activities can make it impossible to get to your desired end-state—but a session that's under-designed can easily turn into a conversation between a handful of the loudest people. We're happy to help facilitators figure out the right balance, and don't expect perfection at the pitch stage, but it's good to start thinking about length and density early on. - -## What Does a Session Facilitator Do? - -Effective SRCCON facilitation is about effort and preparation more than expertise. Our faciliators plan and guide sessions, ask great questions, share what they know, and learn from their peers. We find that the best sessions are often led by facilitators who: - -* have a clear outcome in mind—what you want people to leave with, -* know what they can realistically cover in the time allotted, -* build a clear outline for the session, but deviate from it as needed, -* actively seek to run balanced, inclusive conversations, and -* make a few simple backup plans in case a session gets a larger or smaller audience than expected. - -On the flip side, facilitators who have a harder time have usually tried to fit too much stuff into too little time, or are underprepared for guiding an active conversation. - -If that sounds like a lot of effort…it is! But it also means that people who are brand-new to the community—or to a topic—can make excellent facilitators if they're willing to put in a little prep time. We provide group and one-on-one support to help facilitators prepare for their sessions, and we can help match you with a co-facilitator if you're pitching solo and want someone to work with you on the ground. - - - -## Example Sessions from SRCCON 2016 - -* [Illustrating Investigations: Creating compelling visuals for abstract stories](https://2016.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-illustrating-investigations). This fun, highly interactive, morning session let participants do something they may not normally do: pick up paper and pencil and draw! -* [True Life: I Work Remotely](https://2016.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-remote-work). This was an excellent peer-to-peer experience sharing session that allowed both remotees and the remote-curious to learn from each other. -* [Let's All Be Terrible at Things Together](https://2016.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-lets-be-terrible). This session forced people out of their comfort zones and into collaborating around weaknesses and fears. -* [Every day I’m juggling: Managing managers, peer expectations, and your own project ideas](https://2016.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-juggling-expectations). Talking to management, helping them to see things from your perspective, coaxing change out of newsrooms--it's tough to go it alone. This session used the "experts in the room" to help level each other up. +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Sessions at SRCCON +subtitle: Our peer-led sessions combine skillsharing, discussion, and collaboration. Proposals open March 22. +section: sessions +sub-section: interior +background: stickerdots +byline: Erik Westra +permalink: /sessions/about/index.html +--- + +SRCCON is built around two days of peer-led conversations, hands-on workshops, and skillshares. The community members who step up to facilitate these sessions make it all possible. + +## We've selected this year's sessions! + +After receiving 149 session proposals, we have [accepted a list of amazing sessions for this year](/sessions). We'll be working these into a final schedule which will be published in July. + +{% comment %} + +## Our Call for Session Proposals is Open! + +Propose a Session + +We'll be accepting proposals through **Friday, April 7, at 11:59pm ET**. Session proposals will be [listed on the SRCCON website](/sessions/proposals) shortly after they're submitted. + +## New this year: A Guide to Proposing Sessions + +Have an idea for this year's SRCCON but not sure about the best way pitch it? Let us help you! We've put together [a proposals guide](/sessions/proposals/guide) with advice on turning great ideas into great session proposals. +{% endcomment %} + +## About Sessions at SRCCON + +There are a lot of ways to think about sessions at SRCCON, but the main thing is to consider how it's _different_ than other conferences you may have attended. SRCCON is highly participatory: sessions are not a panel on a stage of a speaker running through slides. This is an opportunity to compare notes, share skills, and learn from each other. + +So you can be prepared to pitch a great session at SRCCON, we asked a couple previous participants to talk about their experience hosting SRCCON sessions: + +- [3 Ways To Facilitate A Great Conference Session](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-one/), by ProPublica's Sisi Wei +- [How We Facilitated A Huge, Participatory, Highly Charged SRCCON Session](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-two/), by NPR's Alyson Hurt + +## What Makes a Great Session Topic? + +Successful sessions often emerge from a single question or problem—if you’ve been struggling with just about any aspect of your work, you can bet others have dealt with it, too. (When we receive multiple pitches on the same subject, we sometimes suggest that the proposers consider combining forces, but no one's obligated to do so.) + +Last year's sessions dealt with topics including burnout, chatbots, community-building, documentation, hiring processes, illustration, machine learning, mobile development, newsroom analytics, and user-centered design. To give you a taste, here's [a small selection of great sessions from 2016](#examples). + +## What Makes a Great Session Format? + +SRCCON is a genuinely participatory event, and it's hard to participate in a session that's mostly lecture with a few minutes for discussion, so we look for pitches that include real interactivity. Outstanding sessions in previous years have included design exercises, games, skillshares, small-group breakouts, physical movement, and field trips, and we're always interested in new ideas. + +It's also useful to think about your target session length and information/activity density. Over-programming a session with too many activities can make it impossible to get to your desired end-state—but a session that's under-designed can easily turn into a conversation between a handful of the loudest people. We're happy to help facilitators figure out the right balance, and don't expect perfection at the pitch stage, but it's good to start thinking about length and density early on. + +## What Does a Session Facilitator Do? + +Effective SRCCON facilitation is about effort and preparation more than expertise. Our faciliators plan and guide sessions, ask great questions, share what they know, and learn from their peers. We find that the best sessions are often led by facilitators who: + +- have a clear outcome in mind—what you want people to leave with, +- know what they can realistically cover in the time allotted, +- build a clear outline for the session, but deviate from it as needed, +- actively seek to run balanced, inclusive conversations, and +- make a few simple backup plans in case a session gets a larger or smaller audience than expected. + +On the flip side, facilitators who have a harder time have usually tried to fit too much stuff into too little time, or are underprepared for guiding an active conversation. + +If that sounds like a lot of effort…it is! But it also means that people who are brand-new to the community—or to a topic—can make excellent facilitators if they're willing to put in a little prep time. We provide group and one-on-one support to help facilitators prepare for their sessions, and we can help match you with a co-facilitator if you're pitching solo and want someone to work with you on the ground. + + + +## Example Sessions from SRCCON 2016 + +- [Illustrating Investigations: Creating compelling visuals for abstract stories](https://2016.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-illustrating-investigations). This fun, highly interactive, morning session let participants do something they may not normally do: pick up paper and pencil and draw! +- [True Life: I Work Remotely](https://2016.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-remote-work). This was an excellent peer-to-peer experience sharing session that allowed both remotees and the remote-curious to learn from each other. +- [Let's All Be Terrible at Things Together](https://2016.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-lets-be-terrible). This session forced people out of their comfort zones and into collaborating around weaknesses and fears. +- [Every day I’m juggling: Managing managers, peer expectations, and your own project ideas](https://2016.srccon.org/schedule/#_session-juggling-expectations). Talking to management, helping them to see things from your perspective, coaxing change out of newsrooms--it's tough to go it alone. This session used the "experts in the room" to help level each other up. diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/slackbot.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/slackbot.md index cc98fe32..070498a1 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/slackbot.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/slackbot.md @@ -8,9 +8,9 @@ background: remote permalink: /slackbot/index.html --- -We're excited to be offering live transcription at SRCCON again this year. About half of our 2017 sessions will be transcribed (they're all marked on [the schedule](http://schedule.srccon.org)), and we hope people feel able to take part even if they can't join us in Minneapolis. +We're excited to be offering live transcription at SRCCON again this year. About half of our 2017 sessions will be transcribed (they're all marked on [the schedule](https://2017.srccon.org/schedule/)), and we hope people feel able to take part even if they can't join us in Minneapolis. -We'll [let you know on Twitter](http://twitter.com/srccon) when a transcribed session is about to start, but you can also get alerts sent right into your team's Slack. Add the "SRCCON Transcript Alerts" bot, and you'll get a reminder and a link to the live transcript as these sessions get ready to begin. +We'll [let you know on Twitter](https://twitter.com/srccon) when a transcribed session is about to start, but you can also get alerts sent right into your team's Slack. Add the "SRCCON Transcript Alerts" bot, and you'll get a reminder and a link to the live transcript as these sessions get ready to begin. **Note:** If you added this Slackbot for last year's SRCCON, you _will_ need to auth it again for SRCCON 2017. @@ -18,4 +18,4 @@ We'll [let you know on Twitter](http://twitter.com/srccon) when a transcribed se The "Add to Slack" button will ask you to authorize access for a team you belong to, and choose a channel to receive the alerts. That's it! -

Transcriptions at SRCCON are made possible by Facebook +

Transcriptions at SRCCON are made possible by Facebook diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/slackbot_success.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/slackbot_success.md index cb807310..5c5b908a 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/slackbot_success.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/slackbot_success.md @@ -10,4 +10,4 @@ permalink: /slackbot/success/index.html Thanks for adding SRCCON Transcript Alerts to your team Slack. We'll ping you soon! -

Transcriptions at SRCCON are made possible by Facebook +

Transcriptions at SRCCON are made possible by Facebook diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/sponsors.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/sponsors.md index 8a40b34b..752b2249 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/sponsors.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/sponsors.md @@ -1,68 +1,68 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Our Sponsors -subtitle: Sponsors help make SRCCON happen. Thanks to ours! -section: sponsors -sub-section: interior -background: coffee -permalink: /sponsors/index.html ---- -

-
    - -
  • -

    SRCCON Lead Sponsor

    -

    Condé Nast is a premier media company renowned for producing the highest quality content for the world's most influential audiences. Attracting more than 100 million consumers across its industry-leading print, digital and video brands, the company’s portfolio includes some of the most iconic titles in media: Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Brides, GQ, GQ Style, The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler, Allure, Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, Epicurious, Wired, W, Golf Digest, Golf World, Teen Vogue, Ars Technica, The Scene, Pitchfork and Backchannel. The company’s newest division, Condé Nast Entertainment, was launched in 2011 to develop film, television and premium digital video programming. Want to join Condé Nast in growing and enhancing its digital operations? We are hiring top talent across engineering, data science, product, and design in our New York and Austin offices. -

    • - -
  • -

    SRCCON Scholarship Sponsor

    -

    We free you to publish. That's our mission. Our managed platform is more than just a place to put your sites. It’s purpose-built systems, data centers, tools, practical expertise, and thoughtful specialists that, together, free you and your team to focus on business rather than worrying about DevOps. VIP clients enjoy a best-in-class managed cloud platform, expert guidance and code review, hands-on support, and a partner network of the best WordPress design and development shops on the planet.

    • - -
  • -

    SRCCON Facilitator Scholarship Sponsor

    -

    The Truth is Hard but we're excited to be able to support the community of people who seek it at SRCCON. The New York Times is a continually evolving team of journalists, coders, designers, product managers, women and men all contributing to the 160+ year history of the Grey Lady.

    • - -
  • -

    SRCCON Transcript Sponsor

    -

    The Facebook Journalism Project’s goal is to create stronger ties between Facebook and the news industry by focusing on the collaborative development of news products, training and tools for journalists, and training and tools for everyone.

    • - -
  • -

    SRCCON Childcare Sponsor

    -

    The John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University is looking for passionate journalists, innovators and entrepreneurs who are creating the new models, tools and approaches that are redefining journalism. As widespread change has swept the industry, our core mission has remained the same: to improve the quality of news and information reaching the public.

    • - -
  • -

    SRCCON Coffee & Tea Hack Station Sponsor

    • - -
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Snack Sponsor

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Event Sponsors

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Local Sponsors

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Supporting Sponsor

-
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OpenNews Project Partners

-
    -
  • Knight Foundation
    • -
  • Community Partners
    • -
- -
- +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Our Sponsors +subtitle: Sponsors help make SRCCON happen. Thanks to ours! +section: sponsors +sub-section: interior +background: coffee +permalink: /sponsors/index.html +--- + +
+
    + +
  • +

    SRCCON Lead Sponsor

    +

    Condé Nast is a premier media company renowned for producing the highest quality content for the world's most influential audiences. Attracting more than 100 million consumers across its industry-leading print, digital and video brands, the company’s portfolio includes some of the most iconic titles in media: Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Brides, GQ, GQ Style, The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler, Allure, Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, Epicurious, Wired, W, Golf Digest, Golf World, Teen Vogue, Ars Technica, The Scene, Pitchfork and Backchannel. The company’s newest division, Condé Nast Entertainment, was launched in 2011 to develop film, television and premium digital video programming. Want to join Condé Nast in growing and enhancing its digital operations? We are hiring top talent across engineering, data science, product, and design in our New York and Austin offices. +

    • + +
  • +

    SRCCON Scholarship Sponsor

    +

    We free you to publish. That's our mission. Our managed platform is more than just a place to put your sites. It’s purpose-built systems, data centers, tools, practical expertise, and thoughtful specialists that, together, free you and your team to focus on business rather than worrying about DevOps. VIP clients enjoy a best-in-class managed cloud platform, expert guidance and code review, hands-on support, and a partner network of the best WordPress design and development shops on the planet.

    • + +
  • +

    SRCCON Facilitator Scholarship Sponsor

    +

    The Truth is Hard but we're excited to be able to support the community of people who seek it at SRCCON. The New York Times is a continually evolving team of journalists, coders, designers, product managers, women and men all contributing to the 160+ year history of the Grey Lady.

    • + +
  • +

    SRCCON Transcript Sponsor

    +

    The Facebook Journalism Project’s goal is to create stronger ties between Facebook and the news industry by focusing on the collaborative development of news products, training and tools for journalists, and training and tools for everyone.

    • + +
  • +

    SRCCON Childcare Sponsor

    +

    The John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University is looking for passionate journalists, innovators and entrepreneurs who are creating the new models, tools and approaches that are redefining journalism. As widespread change has swept the industry, our core mission has remained the same: to improve the quality of news and information reaching the public.

    • + +
  • +

    SRCCON Coffee & Tea Hack Station Sponsor

    • + +
+ +

Snack Sponsor

+
    +
    • +
+ +

Event Sponsors

+
    +
    • +
    • +
+ +

Local Sponsors

+
    +
    • +
    • +
+ +

Supporting Sponsor

+
    +
    • +
+ +

OpenNews Project Partners

+
    +
  • Knight Foundation
    • +
  • Community Partners
    • +
+ +
diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/tickets.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/tickets.md index e87120ab..2b7523a1 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/tickets.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/tickets.md @@ -1,33 +1,32 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Tickets at SRCCON -subtitle: Our ticket lottery is now closed. -section: sessions -sub-section: interior -background: tickets -byline: Alyson Hurt -permalink: /tickets/index.html ---- - - -**The SRCCON 2017 ticket lottery is now closed. Thanks to all who entered.** Our lottery system is designed to distribute tickets in a more equitable fashion than a first-come-first-served system that rewards the fastest internet connections or twitchiest mouse-fingers. - -Here's what you need to know about getting a SRCCON ticket: - -* The lottery is open **May 3 until 12 Eastern on May 10.** -* Tickets to SRCCON are $195. In addition to the purchase price, there is an $11.72 fee from our ticket service. -* Each person selected will be able to purchase a single ticket. -* **Tickets are non-transferrable and _may only_ be claimed by the individual selected in the lottery.** -* You will be notified of your status in the lottery (selected or not) by **5pm Eastern on May 11.** If selected, you will have until 5pm Eastern on Sunday, May 14, to buy your ticket. -* If you are not selected and if any unsold tickets remain after the purchase window closes, we will hold a second-chance lottery, drawn from unselected names from the lottery, on Monday, May 15, and will notify about status by the end of that same day. -* If you are selected for the second-chance lottery, you will have until 5pm Eastern on Thursday, May 18, to purchase a ticket. - -## Financial & family assistance - -We offered a limited number of [travel scholarships](/scholarships) to help people who wouldn't otherwise be able to attend. The scholarship is now closed and applicants will be notified alongside notifications for the ticket lottery. - -In addition to financial assistance, we know that making sure you have coverage for your children is important, so we also offer attendees [free childcare](/childcare) run by providers we trust with our own kids. - -## Sponsor tickets - -If you're unable to get a ticket via the lottery and your organization is able to become a SRCCON sponsor, each level of sponsorship has tickets available, either as a part of the sponsorship package or held for reserved purchase. We offer a full rundown of available packages on [our sponsor page](/sponsors). +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Tickets at SRCCON +subtitle: Our ticket lottery is now closed. +section: sessions +sub-section: interior +background: tickets +byline: Alyson Hurt +permalink: /tickets/index.html +--- + +**The SRCCON 2017 ticket lottery is now closed. Thanks to all who entered.** Our lottery system is designed to distribute tickets in a more equitable fashion than a first-come-first-served system that rewards the fastest internet connections or twitchiest mouse-fingers. + +Here's what you need to know about getting a SRCCON ticket: + +- The lottery is open **May 3 until 12 Eastern on May 10.** +- Tickets to SRCCON are $195. In addition to the purchase price, there is an $11.72 fee from our ticket service. +- Each person selected will be able to purchase a single ticket. +- **Tickets are non-transferrable and _may only_ be claimed by the individual selected in the lottery.** +- You will be notified of your status in the lottery (selected or not) by **5pm Eastern on May 11.** If selected, you will have until 5pm Eastern on Sunday, May 14, to buy your ticket. +- If you are not selected and if any unsold tickets remain after the purchase window closes, we will hold a second-chance lottery, drawn from unselected names from the lottery, on Monday, May 15, and will notify about status by the end of that same day. +- If you are selected for the second-chance lottery, you will have until 5pm Eastern on Thursday, May 18, to purchase a ticket. + +## Financial & family assistance + +We offered a limited number of [travel scholarships](/scholarships) to help people who wouldn't otherwise be able to attend. The scholarship is now closed and applicants will be notified alongside notifications for the ticket lottery. + +In addition to financial assistance, we know that making sure you have coverage for your children is important, so we also offer attendees [free childcare](/childcare) run by providers we trust with our own kids. + +## Sponsor tickets + +If you're unable to get a ticket via the lottery and your organization is able to become a SRCCON sponsor, each level of sponsorship has tickets available, either as a part of the sponsorship package or held for reserved purchase. We offer a full rundown of available packages on [our sponsor page](/sponsors). diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/transcription.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/transcription.md index 87c309ab..f2702f49 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/transcription.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/transcription.md @@ -39,5 +39,5 @@ In the leadup to SRCCON 2017, we’re featuring a selection of sessions from las During and after this year's SRCCON, we'll also have a documentation team writing up session summaries, collecting resource lists, and more. We'll [publish everything on Source](https://source.opennews.org) in the weeks that follow the conference, and also collect write-ups and blog posts from attendees.
- Transcription at SRCCON is made possible by Facebook + Transcription at SRCCON is made possible by Facebook
diff --git a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/volunteers.md b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/volunteers.md index 8540fdcb..53e4b7cd 100644 --- a/_archive/pages/2017oldz/volunteers.md +++ b/_archive/pages/2017oldz/volunteers.md @@ -1,23 +1,23 @@ ---- -layout: 2015_layout -title: Volunteer -subtitle: Come help us make SRCCON great! -sub-section: interior -background: scholarships -byline: Matthew Paulson -bylineurl: https://flic.kr/p/cZWiFy -permalink: /volunteer/index.html ---- - -We need YOU to help make SRCCON work. In addition to participants running sessions throughout the conference, we'll also need a small group of people to help us keep the two-day event running smoothly. Want to help? Consider volunteering at SRCCON. - -Volunteers will help with: - -* registration -* supporting session leaders -* set-up and clean-up -* those unexpected tasks that always come up during an event - -Volunteering will be a significant time commitment. For offering that time and missing out on some (but not all!) of the festivities, you will have our gratitude, free entry to the event, a SRCCON Volunteer T-shirt, and the knowledge that you played an integral role in making our fourth SRCCON a success. - -If you want to attend SRCCON and are excited about playing this type of vital support role, [please email us for information](mailto:srccon@opennews.org) about volunteering. +--- +layout: 2015_layout +title: Volunteer +subtitle: Come help us make SRCCON great! +sub-section: interior +background: scholarships +byline: Matthew Paulson +bylineurl: https://flic.kr/p/cZWiFy +permalink: /volunteer/index.html +--- + +We need YOU to help make SRCCON work. In addition to participants running sessions throughout the conference, we'll also need a small group of people to help us keep the two-day event running smoothly. Want to help? Consider volunteering at SRCCON. + +Volunteers will help with: + +- registration +- supporting session leaders +- set-up and clean-up +- those unexpected tasks that always come up during an event + +Volunteering will be a significant time commitment. For offering that time and missing out on some (but not all!) of the festivities, you will have our gratitude, free entry to the event, a SRCCON Volunteer T-shirt, and the knowledge that you played an integral role in making our fourth SRCCON a success. + +If you want to attend SRCCON and are excited about playing this type of vital support role, [please email us for information](mailto:srccon@opennews.org) about volunteering. diff --git a/_archive/sessions/2014/sessions.json b/_archive/sessions/2014/sessions.json index 6293cf9f..c642ba37 100755 --- a/_archive/sessions/2014/sessions.json +++ b/_archive/sessions/2014/sessions.json @@ -1,518 +1,518 @@ [ - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Franklin 2", - "title": "There is no CMS", - "id": "1", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", - "time": "11am-noon", - "leader": "Matt Boggie and Alexis Lloyd", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Anyone who’s written for the web has encountered content management systems: complex monoliths of templates, business rules and workflow that take words and media and transform them into the pages and articles our readers see. Anyone who has worked with these systems for long is also familiar with their flaws, their temperamental assumptions about the world, their frustrating constraints, their sometimes-incomprehensible syntax and controls. Even when they work well, they are monolithic systems that represent fossilizations of earlier processes, and are painful to augment and extend.\n\nThis session will be to convene a discussion about what’s wrong with CMSes -- both the systems themselves and the very concept of CMS -- and some possible solutions. What could be possible when we begin to think beyond the CMS as we know it? What systems or protocols could we create that might not be subject to the same problems and limitations? The New York Times R&D Lab will also present some early work showing what an (admittedly futuristic) alternative could look like." - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Franklin 1", - "title": "Super Mappin': Pushing the limits of online maps with raster data, OSM and CSV", - "id": "2", - "length": "2.5 hours", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", - "time": "11am-1:30pm", - "leader": "Al Shaw, Jue Yang, Derek Lieu, Ian Dees", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Online mapping is going through a quiet revolution. When we first started putting interactive maps on the web, we had only a single toggle between Google’s political and secret-sauce “satellite” view. All the data was proprietary, and working with it meant dropping pins and painstaking line-tracing.\n\nToday, there’s a dizzying array of tools and data sources.\n\nMapbox’s Cloudless Atlas turns NASA Landsat 8 imagery into a gorgeous mosaic. Startups like Planet Labs and Skybox are deploying whole fleets of imaging satellites attached to easy-to-use APIs. OpenStreetMap has reached a million users, a community that contributes and maintains the ever-growing store of infrastructure and road network data.\n\nThe growing competency of frontend mapping tools has made mapping in-browser streamlined. GeoJSON, leaflet.js, easy MapBox hosting, and the all-purpose data-driven-document framework (aka d3.js), have all facilitated the process of \"making a map\" with large amounts of data.\n\nHow can (and should) we use these data and tools in our reporting? And how do we present our findings? In this session we will discuss deeply the world of mapping - with raster and non-raster data, and its architecture in the browser. We will cover strategies and algorithms that make imagery quantifiable, points-of-interest data patterns-of-interest, and ways to load them into the browser for wide distribution via something called the internet.\n\nWe'll break into smaller groups to demonstrate hands-on techniques after our discussion" - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Haas", - "title": "Who are we missing?", - "id": "3", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", - "time": "11am-noon", - "leader": "Mandy Brown", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "There are people who aren't at SRCCON this year who should be here in a year or two. How do we bring them in? This will be a fact-finding session dedicated to articulating pathways into data journalism and newsroom code. What skills do people need? What are the various avenues in to the field? What resources are available to help newcomers? Or, what resources are lacking? Most importantly, how do we make this a welcome space for people with different backgrounds and experiences?" - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Garden 1", - "title": "How NOT to skew with statistics: drafting, data bulletproofing, and tools for well-*developed* stories", - "id": "4", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", - "time": "11am-noon", - "leader": "Aurelia Moser and Chris Keller", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "There’s always a lot of press-stress about interactives that are misleading and skew the data they are intending to represent. There’s also a million ways that different newsrooms homebrew the bulletproofing process, and plan for how to present information with maximum integrity. How do modern news orgs navigate deceptive data and manage to provide critical readings of complicated information? This will be a session about ways that statistics can be charted and plotted and how to make sure that we prep our data appropriately for interactive projects. We’ll also run through process models that we might adopt to make fact-checking and peer review an open and organization-agnostic process. Beyond citing sources and licensing intents to prove validity, we’ll talk about how we package information in an interactive story and the protocols for making sure that honest representation is clear and concise in the various vocabularies we use to communicate the news. Have some things to contribute, tools to solicit feedback on, or just want to listen in and learn? Join us; everyone will walk away with a stack of resources, a collaboratively-assembled and forkable guide/glossary for how to tackle data; we'll workshop this in session.\n\nEtherpad for this session: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/bOwBSAeLe5" - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Garden 2", - "title": "Closing the gaps: Let's identify the holes in open data, then fix them", - "id": "5", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", - "time": "11am-noon", - "leader": "Waldo Jaquith", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "There are some crucial tools and datasets that really need to exist, but don't. Address normalization is a crapshoot. Getting text out of PDFs is terrible, and it's not getting any better. It's impractical to share, manipulate, or analyze enormous datasets. Municipal geodata has to be obtained, individually, from each municipality. And so on. Anybody who works with open data has their own pet peeve.\n\nLet's have a gripe session about things that are terrible, and then let's figure out how to make those things stop being terrible. The US Open Data Institute has the resources and the mandate to start addressing these problems, but we want to solve the important problems." - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Garden 3", - "title": "Releasing data trapped in PDFs with your community", - "id": "6", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", - "time": "11am-noon", - "leader": "Gabriela Rodriguez", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Sometimes we have PDF documents that are impossible to convert into text with the common tools. If you have a scanned PDF then it may be hard to find an OCR tool that can convert it. And you need the data to process, visualize and use in your investigation. Then we can use the power of your community. Call your community to crowdsource the conversion of PDF documents. That is what we did with the senate spendings at La Nacion. The project is called VozData and the software that created it is called Crowdata. This session is going to be a techy one about how to use crowdata in your newsroom." - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Franklin 2", - "title": "Two million dollars and one hour: Can you design a new news org that doesn’t shit the bed?", - "id": "7", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", - "time": "12:30-1:30pm", - "leader": "Dan Sinker", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "It’s clear that there’s demand for new approaches to news, so why have so many of the new news organizations fallen down after high-profile launches? Given the talent at SRCCON, can we sketch a new news organization that (1) produces high-quality news, (2) does it in new ways, and (3) is profitable? And can we do it in an hour.This highly interactive session will divide the room into small teams that will discuss both concept and budget for their news org. All teams will give a one-minute pitch at the end of the session." - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Haas", - "title": "The Hitchhiker's Guide to datasets", - "id": "8", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", - "time": "12:30-1:30pm", - "leader": "Ryan Pitts", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "There are great stories just waiting to be mined from big, traditional datasets, but it can be scary to dig in when you don't know the jargon and nobody left a map. Take the American Community Survey: hundreds of tables full of fascinating data, but before you start reporting with confidence, you need to know about summary levels and table universes, the difference between the 1-year/3-year/5-year releases, and why you should never compare, say, 2012 3-year data against 2011 3-year data.\n\nI can get you caught up on those concepts ... but then I couldn't tell you a *thing* about FEC data. You know who can, though? Derek Willis. And Jake Harris knows AP election data so well he’s taken all the excitement out of the load process. We all know the secrets and traps hidden in the datasets we've spent the most time with; I'll bet you know something just like this that no one else at SRCCON does. So let's start making a guide together by talking about the data each one of us knows well.\n\nFor this session, we'll cover the basics of:\n\n* Census data from the American Community Survey: Joe Germuska and Ryan Pitts\n* Campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission: Derek Willis\n* Elections data from the Associated Press: Jacob Harris\n\nAnd we'll also talk about:\n\n* Your favorite dataset: You\n\nWe should also try to capture this background information. Between now and SRCCON, I'll get a GitHub repository up and running so people can contribute dataset tipsheets in simple way, even if they can't make the conference. Charlie Ornstein from ProPublica's already agreed to write up some background on using Medicare data even though he won't be at SRCCON. Let's help each other out like that and make something neat." - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Garden 1", - "title": "Using web type: pitfalls and workarounds", - "id": "9", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", - "time": "12:30-1:30pm", - "leader": "Allen Tan", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "The use of custom typefaces are commonplace online, but it still doesn’t just work. This session will be an overview of the different situations where things can behave differently from what you’d expect and how to deal with them.\n\n- Font stacks and consistent type size\n- Loading webfonts synchronously vs asynchronously\n- Unicode and selective glyph removal\n- Text rasterization on Windows: GDI vs DirectWrite\n- Different antialiasing modes, type “bleeding” and white type on dark backgrounds\n- New OpenType features available to web browsers\n- Using SVG together with webfonts" - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Garden 2", - "title": "What is our role in the open data movement?", - "id": "10", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", - "time": "12:30-1:30pm", - "leader": "AmyJo Brown and Casey Thomas", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Open data is an idea gaining traction in local governments, with cities in particular beginning to embrace policies that could make public information much easier to acquire.\n\nTwo great examples of how this is playing out are here in Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The cities are crafting legislation and making hires to engage the community in the decision-making about what public data should be released when and how.\n\nThat process raises many questions. In this session, we’re going to explore those questions and what our role, as journalists/news organizations, should be in the open data movement.\n\nOur goal is to craft a set of guidelines and/or a list of questions that journalists and news shops can use to guide their internal conversations about working with cities and local groups such as the Code for America brigades.\n\nA few topics we’d like to discuss:\n\n* How should we define our relationship with the tech communities / open data enthusiasts? We are experienced at working with government data and understand the challenges, pitfalls and potential power of using it to tell stories about our communities. Should we be lending our expertise and partnering? Or should we remain independent observers and fact-checkers of their work, treating them as another beat to cover? What are the pros and cons?\n* What ethical quandaries might we find ourselves in and how should we define the boundaries? (i.e., participating in beta testing / when and how to scrape government sites … others?)\n* The open data groups have already proven to be a powerful lobby on behalf of freedom of information laws. How should we work with them to ensure that local and state laws continue to be friendly and more open? On the flip side, how should we prepare to mitigate the risks of more restrictive laws being enacted if an open data experiment goes wrong (i.e., backlash against certain information being published or interpreted and published incorrectly?)\n* If we talk of partnering, what are the ways (are there ways?) we can balance our business interests with the open data ethos?\n\nWe’re sure other topics will also come up during our session. We’ll discuss and then document our conversation to help develop a framework for others in similar situations." - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Franklin 2", - "title": "Before we can fix the news, we need to redesign the newsroom", - "id": "11", - "length": "2.5 hours", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "time": "3-5:30pm", - "leader": "Tom Meagher", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Most newsrooms don't employ developers. In the lucky places with developers who are allowed to work on news projects, these journalists have a litany of common complaints: nobody understands what I do, nobody understands how databases/the internet/computers work, nobody respects how much time it takes to do this kind of work well. \n\nThere are a lot of reasons for this that we won't be able to solve in an hour, but one legacy we need to overcome is the firmly entrenched organization and management structure of the newspaper itself. For 100 years, reporters sat together with their colleagues who covered the same beat. They reported a story, wrote it up and handed it to an editor who read it. He (almost always a he), edited it, demanded a photo or chart to illustrate it, and then handed it to the copy desk to fix typos and place on a page in the next morning's paper. Repeat for another 40 years until you drop dead at your desk. \n\nObviously, nearly everything about our readers and our industry has changed dramatically in the past three decades, but our newsroom structures are remarkably unchanged. In some places, there may be a separate \"digital\" wing lashed on to the side of the org chart, or a \"real-time\" desk that handles web production. In many newsrooms, reporters report (and tweet and shoot video...), write and hand their product off to someone else to put on the web and in print. They are utterly divorced from doing anything online outside of a rigid CMS.\n\nAs journalist-developers, we know how to build apps for the web. We can visualize data and design engaging user experiences on tablet or mobile. In this session, I'd like us to talk about how we can redesign the newsroom itself to upend our clunky workflows pegged to Sunday's newspaper instead of today's news online. \n\nIf you were the editor of your average major metro daily, how would you redraw your organization to make this work?\n*How can we redesign our newsrooms to bring news developers into the reporting process at the beginning and to help everyone else master new skills? \n* Should we adopt Ben Welsh's philosophy that we ought to train web producers to become news devs and not just SEO-experts and explainer explainers? \n* Should we follow Scott Klein's model of making every developer a reporter, designer and data expert?\n* How many AMEs do you really need? \n* Should web producers sit together or with the copy desk and paginators? Should they be in the same room/floor/building/state as reporters and editors? \n* What are the jobs that really need to be done here?\n\nThis exercise is about more than just rearranging deck chairs. Together, we can wipe the slate clean and design a newsroom that builds skills throughout the organization and forces people to think smarter about the internet as a primary medium rather than an afterthought." - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Franklin 1", - "title": "Human-driven design: how to know your users and build just what they need", - "id": "12", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "time": "3-4pm", - "leader": "Sara Schnadt and Ryan Pitts", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "How do you decide what to build? What does your process look like before you write a line of code? How do users’ needs, desires, skills, and workflows inform how you imagine your solutions and refine them along the way? How do you invite users into your process and be sure that your finished work meets their expectations? \n\nAnd, how can you do all this and also be the creative visionary type who says “hey, they asked for a faster horse-drawn carriage but instead we built them a car”?\n\nLet’s kick around questions like this, and talk about how we build innovative tools for journalists that meet users’ needs on their own terms. We’ll share how we identified the types of journalists we wanted to serve through Census Reporter, then researched, designed, reached out, cajoled, built, took criticism, reworked, and ultimately made a tool that serves up a complex data set with a simple interface. And then we want to hear about your process. How do *you* plan what *you’re* going to build next?" - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Haas", - "title": "Sartre was wrong: Hell is data about other people", - "id": "13", - "length": "2.5 hours", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "time": "3-5:30pm", - "leader": "Derek Willis", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Data about people is all around us. It also comes in countless varieties of formats, with \"unique\" identifiers that aren't or no identification system at all. We all have to deal with people data in our reporting and applications. How do we do it? What are the best (and worst) tools and libraries? What about determining gender? This session is designed to unearth the practices that we use for handling personal identifiers and to find the best ones or to figure out where the unmet needs are, and try to start solving them. Open to any and all languages and platforms." - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Garden 1", - "title": "Interactives and climate change", - "id": "14", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "time": "3-4pm", - "leader": "Brian Jacobs", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "In a 2006 Washington Post editorial, referring to carbon emissions reduction, Bill McKibben wrote, \"there are no silver bullets, only silver buckshot.\" It's a sentiment that reflects the complexity of anthropogenic climate change, and it's relevant to any of us that are thinking about how to use our skills towards a climate change project. Rather than feel overwhelmed and paralyzed by the scale of the issue, we can try to address pieces of the problem from different angles, and do so over time. As designers and developers with a public audience, we can make an impact on public and political perceptions of climate issues in more accessible ways than scientists alone can achieve. But how can we best spend our energy doing so?\n\nWhen considering projects...\n* What topics are the most pressing to address, in international or domestic contexts?\n* What are some small projects that can be tackled by individuals or smaller teams?\n* What audiences are we best catering to: the general public, politicians, children?\n* What existing tools can be used to accelerate the production of climate-related interactives?\n* What tools don't already exist but should?\n* What are some great tapped or untapped datasets?\n\nConsidering the decades of research on climate change...\n* In psychological, sociological, and media studies research on climate communication, how does the public respond towards particular patterns, phrases, and design decisions when expressing climate change concepts?\n* What are the best existing examples of local and global climate stories and visualization, and what can we learn from them? What are the worst and why?\n* What communication lessons can be learned from climatologists, urban planners, and governmental organizations in their understanding of how populations will be affected by changing conditions? How can we improve on their techniques of expressing domain knowledge?" - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Garden 2", - "title": "Data processing pipeline show & tell", - "id": "15", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "time": "3-4pm", - "leader": "Ted Han and Jacqui Maher", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "DocumentCloud is only one of many examples of data processing pipelines in the pursuit of journalism. There are many other examples, open source (Census Reporter, PANDA, Fech) and proprietary (http://datadesk.latimes.com/posts/2013/12/natural-language-processing-in-the-kitchen/ ), large to small (medicare reimbursement data to daily arrest records)\n\nRather than talking about the extract, load, transform workflows in abstract, lets talk about what makes your (or someone else's) processing pipeline interesting! Were there special considerations around how the data was gathered? Any unique constraints on how the data needed to be analyzed or presented? Was the data so large that custom code and tools were necessary.\n\nData collection for this session: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1DVgT6T6aeopENm27zoQVoBqRmHPClQDJB4j-SYhJY8s/viewform" - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Garden 3", - "title": "Mapping influence in investigations", - "id": "16", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "time": "3-4pm", - "leader": "Friedrich Lindenberg and Annabel Church", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Influence mapping tools like LittleSis, Poderopedia and even Gephi have been around for a while and applied in many different contexts. But while these tools have been used to create nice network diagrams and profile pages, they aren't really a meaningful part of journalistic workflows yet. In this session, I want to brainstorm ideas on what is needed to make social network analysis tools not just a fancy form of visualising the outcomes of investigations, but an actual tool to manage evidence, ask journalistic questions and derive unexpected insights.\n\nTo kick off the discussion, I'll quickly introduce the connectedAfrica project, which maps out politically exposed persons in African countries. I'll also demo the grano toolkit, which Code for Africa is building in collaboration with the KnightLab, Poderomedia and others to collect, structure and analyse journalistic network data." - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Franklin 1", - "title": "Art directing posts, sustainably", - "id": "17", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "time": "4:30-5:30pm", - "leader": "Scott Kellum and Lauren Rabaino", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Beautifully designed longform articles are a hot topic right now but \nmaking them work efficiently and at scale is still a hard problem to \nsolve. At Vox Media we have been building and refining longform \njournalism and art directed posts for years in a way that we can do a \nlot of big things at a large scale without putting a strain on our \ndesigners and developers. In this discussion we will identify common \nproblems we have with process and think on solutions to those problems." - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Garden 1", - "title": "Science vs. data journalism", - "id": "18", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "time": "4:30-5:30pm", - "leader": "Noah Veltman", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "There are lots of differences between journalism and research science. Scientists are largely writing for an audience of expert peers, not the general public. They work on long time scales, not one-day deadlines. They frequently design experiments and collect their own data rather than inheriting data from someone else.There's a growing perception of data journalism as edging closer to science. This is kind of dangerous; data journalism can wind up carrying the veneer of scientific rigor without the real thing.Let’s talk about it.Can journalists better adopt the norms of the scientific community, like openness, peer review, reproducibility, incremental discovery, and uncertainty? Should they? What are the tradeoffs?Is there room for data journalism to become more experiment-driven? Should we be creating more of our own data? Can we move beyond casual \"crowdsourcing\" projects into the realm of more rigorous science?" - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Garden 2", - "title": "Make your devs & teams braver through devops (God help us all)\n", - "id": "19", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "time": "4:30-5:30pm", - "leader": "JP Schneider and Chris Chang", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "DevOps isn’t about certain tools or processes, but is instead about culture (admittedly a culture obsessed with animated gifs). If you don’t have DevOps staff, how can DevOps still help you? If you do, how can DevOps help you more?" - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Franklin 2", - "title": "Make your own security blanket", - "id": "20", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", - "time": "11am-noon", - "leader": "Jeff Larson", - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Computer security is a hard problem, and the tools we have to deal with it are confusing, highly technical, and often broken. If you work in news -- in any capacity -- this is a dangerous situation. There are always sensitive sources whether they are informing on a local police department or from a warzone or on national security matters. So, lets talk about communicating securely, why security is so important, and how our community can help." - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Franklin 1", - "title": "Toward web-native storytelling!", - "id": "21", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", - "time": "11am-noon", - "leader": "Claire O'Neill and Tyler Fisher", - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Alberto Cairo recently wrote: \"Data journalists cannot survive in a cocoon.\" Likewise, facts and data can't survive without a story, a history, context, nuance and narrative. But also, the modern storyteller can't exist without technical knowledge. We all know this -- but sometimes it's easy to forget in the daily grind. It's hard to do all the things in a fast-paced newsroom! \n\nHow can people who code, and people who don't, think collaboratively and holistically about storytelling? NPR's Visuals team is testing one solution: An integrated content team. We come together on projects as coders, designers, photographers and content specialists (reporter/editors). Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.\n\nWe can kick off this session with a case study of a project we've built. What went well? What went … less well? \n\nWhat works well and ... less well for you and your team? What are the sticking points for \"content\" people working with programmers, and vice-versa? (And are we really so different?)\n\nAnd, most importantly, who is it all even for?" - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Haas", - "title": "Building exoskeletons for reporters", - "id": "22", - "length": "2.5 hours", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", - "time": "11am-1:30pm", - "leader": "Jeremy Bowers and Aaron Williams", - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Beat reporters are the great treasure of the modern newsroom. Sadly, many of our digital projects start and end with editors. I propose that we take some time to discuss practical methods for outfitting our beat \nreporters with robotic exoskeletons — digital tools that make a beat reporter stronger, faster and smarter.\n\nWe'll break the class up into two sessions. In the first session, we'll plot what we want to make -- identify beats and tools that would assist in those beats. In the second session, we'll take those beats/tools and start working on prototypes. \n\nIf you're a reporter, editor or someone interested in digital strategy, you'll definitely want to be in the first session, but we'd love to have you around for the second session too. If you're a developer or a designer or a project manager, you'll definitely want to stick around for the second session. " - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Garden 1", - "title": "Opening your code for newsrooms to use", - "id": "23", - "length": "2.5 hours", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", - "time": "11am-1:30pm", - "leader": "Gabriela Rodriguez and Jeremy B. Merrill", - "day": "Friday", - "description": "This session will be a place to discuss tips and best practices to release the code you are writing, for newsrooms to use. It will be related to writing code as well as steps to release the code (examples, documentation, tutorials). The outcome will be a guide on how to open your software." - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Garden 2", - "title": "Building smart newsroom tools: how a culture can make or break your internal tools", - "id": "24", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", - "time": "11am-noon", - "leader": "Melody Kramer", - "day": "Friday", - "description": "If you build the world's best tool -- but your newsroom isn't ready for the tool, can't find time to use the tool, doesn't understand the tool, or can't share learnings from the tool, then what's the point?\n\nIn this interactive workshop, we'll talk about how to integrate the people from your newsroom into the development process so that you launch your product with enthusiastic and optimistic supporters. We'll brainstorm strategies, talk about UX principles and sketch out ways to create a product launch that will be successful from the start." - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Garden 3", - "title": "Hands-on: wrangling live data the easy way with Streamtools", - "id": "25", - "length": "2.5 hours", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", - "time": "11am-1:30pm", - "leader": "Mike Dewar, Nik Hanselman, and Jacqui Maher", - "day": "Friday", - "description": "How do you deal with LIVE data? How do you explore it, use it, and shape it into something useful? Streamtools provides a friendly interface that lets you explore live sources of data without having to perform complex infrastructure tasks. \n\nThis workshop will introduce the basics of using streamtools:\ninterrogate live sources of data\nbuild systems to track, aggregate and learn from various sources of data\nimport / export processing patterns and explore the streamtools API\nhook into existing systems and create new streams of data\n\nall from within a browser-based graphical interface!" - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Franklin 2", - "title": "How to diversify the pipeline of journo-coders", - "id": "26", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-2", - "time": "12:30-1:30pm", - "leader": "Emma Carew Grovum and Latoya Peterson", - "day": "Friday", - "description": "The need for more diversity in journalism, specifically in web/coding/tech teams, is indisputable. Let’s talk solutions and find tangible things we can do and encourage others to do to make a difference. What’s worked for people who have had success? What can we try with our next mentee, hire, or opportunity to recommend a speaker? For newsrooms to actually become more diverse, everyone needs to contribute: hiring, managing, promoting, mentoring, teaching, and just generally creating a culture that is welcoming and open.\n\nIf your newsroom is grappling with these issues, if you personally have pondered these questions, or you've had success and want to share it, come on in. " - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Franklin 1", - "title": "Mobile is the future / mobile sucks / the future sucks", - "id": "27", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-2", - "time": "4:30-5:30pm", - "leader": "Alastair Coote", - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Mobile is the future. There can’t really be any argument about that now - mobile audience shares just keep on rising and if your audience isn’t over 50% mobile yet, it will be soon. There’s only one problem: developing for mobile sucks.We'll gather together, group therapy style, and talk out some of the biggest mobile challenges, in areas like:- Small screen sizes and orientation changes- Restrictions on video and audio functionality- Cross-platform testing and debugging- Touch events (and the lack of mouse events)- Connectivity issues and performance restrictionsand plenty more besides. Bring your own horror stories and solutions to share. We'll get through this together." - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Garden 2", - "title": "Style guides: codifying your common interface decisions", - "id": "28", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-2", - "time": "12:30-1:30pm", - "leader": "Alan Palazzolo", - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Over 6 months ago, we started working on a style guide for our interactive projects, and only a few months ago actually started using it. With it, we have seen the productivity of our small team increase significantly from day one of its use.Style guides are one of many ways to codify common decisions that save time. But with coding these decisions, there are still costs associated with creation, maintenance, overriding, and more. Let’s talk about.What are some examples of style guides? In newsrooms? Outside of newsrooms? Good or bad? Is your newsrooms using a style guide? Why or why not? What technologies do you use to manage these templates? How do you deal with existing web or print style guides in your organization?" - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Franklin 2", - "title": "We can stop fighting the CMS, a round-table discussion", - "id": "29", - "length": "2.5 hours", - "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", - "time": "3-5:30pm", - "leader": "Chris Chang and Andrew Nacin", - "day": "Friday", - "description": "The content management system (CMS) is the bane of users and developers alike. This current state of affairs is woefully inadequate for where the industry needs to go, and few have any resources to solve it. We have a great opportunity at SRCCON for CMS users and developers to get together and hash out what we want and how to get there.Let’s go around, describe a problem, discuss solutions, and then if we’re lucky, we’ll walk away with some best-practices for how to solve some common problems. As Waldo Jaquith wrote: \"Let's have a gripe session about things that are terrible, and then let's figure out how to make those things stop being terrible.\"" - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Franklin 1", - "title": "Making things happen with small teams", - "id": "30", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", - "time": "3-4pm", - "leader": "Kaeti Hinck", - "day": "Friday", - "description": "For the small news dev team (including teams of one), resources are often scarce and your time can be split between a number of roles. Let's talk about the best strategies to make the most of what we have without feeling hopeless or falling prey to burn out. Let's gather with our small-team peers (even if you're just getting started!) and share what's helped us stay productive, what *doesn't* work, ideas for proving worth to potentially skeptical colleagues, and practical tools to maximize our capabilities." - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Haas", - "title": "Handguns and tequila: avoiding data disasters", - "id": "31", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", - "time": "3-4pm", - "leader": "Justin Myers", - "day": "Friday", - "description": "There’s a quote attributed to Mitch Ratcliffe: “A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history–with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.”One of the dangerous aspects of using data in journalism is the ability to do things with drastic consequences to your reporting without realizing it. (If you do something like this, of course, you hope to find it before you publish.) Just because computers are efficient doesn’t mean they don’t still need solid reporting and editing around just about everything they do.So with that said, what should you watch out for when you or your reporters are working on a data-driven story? What mistakes are especially easy to make, and what can you do to prevent them or at least notice them before it’s too late?This session is about concepts and consequences at a level that helps you ask the right questions of the people actually running your data analysis (which might be you), so the intention is to avoid specific code examples as much as possible in favor of talking through what went wrong—but if the bug fits, explain it!" - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Garden 1", - "title": "Own your analytics", - "id": "32", - "length": "2.5 hours", - "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", - "time": "3-5:30pm", - "leader": "Brian Abelson, Michael Keller, and Stijn Debrouwere", - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Almost all analytics software has an API and API clients. We'll show people how they can get data from Google Analytics and a few other APIs (GA Live, ChartBeat, Facebook Insights, Google Alerts, Bitly, etc.) as well as how they can get social data from utilities like Pollster, SharedCount.com or the \"raw\" social APIs. We'll then show them how best to organize and join all of this information to create interesting new dashboards, textualizations, visualizations, email reports that respond to events, and even new metrics.\n\nWe'll have example code ready for all of these systems so people\n(1) get a quick overview of how these APIs work and can then\n(2) very quickly move on to actually *doing* things with it.\n\nAt the end of the session, participants should have a clearer path to controlling their own analytics data, integrating numbers from multiple sources, creating more meaningful metrics, and (hopefully) making meaningful decisions informed by data." - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Garden 2", - "title": "New frontiers in javascript: the browser at the bleeding edge", - "id": "33", - "length": "2.5 hours", - "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", - "time": "3-5:30pm", - "leader": "Erik Hinton", - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Once a second tier environment, the browser has become the de facto standard for innovative applications. Complex distributed systems, high-fidelity 3D games, and rich, real-time editorial tools have all moved to browser-based solutions. But with an expanded domain, comes expanded demands and new difficulties. This session is intended to workshop some of the new and experimental tools aimed at creating optimized, complex browser applications.\n\nWe will discuss and workshop the uses, applications and rough edges around experimental, new technologies such as (but not limited to):\n- React.js and its new rendering paradigm\n- Functional Reactive Programming, especially its manifestations in Elm and, to a lesser extent, RxJS\n- Functional languages with a Javascript backend such as GHCJS, Clojurescript, Idris, and Faye\n- Alternative browser concurrency models (such as CSP) as provided by Clojurescript and ES6 generators\n- Sweet.js and the concept of accelerating Javascript evolution through macros" - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Franklin 1", - "title": "How to train your newsroom", - "id": "34", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-2", - "time": "12:30-1:30pm", - "leader": "Jaeah Lee and Tasneem Raja", - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Everyone agrees that siloed skills are bad. But unlocking your newsroom's nerd potential is hard. At Mother Jones, we've been developing an in-house skills sharing program that's had a real multiplier effect. Let's trade notes on what you've tried at your shops. We'll start with the philosophy that everyone is both a teacher and a learner. Think about it: a newsroom in which copy editors learn from open-source geeks, and vice versa, is a better newsroom. In this session, let's take software's pair programming model and reimagine it for journalism." - }, - { - "everyone": "", - "room": "Haas", - "title": "Let's build a wiki of data smells", - "id": "35", - "length": "1 hour", - "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-2", - "time": "4:30-5:30pm", - "leader": "Jacob Harris", - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Help build out a guide to knowing when something's wrong with that shiny new dataset." - }, - { - "everyone": "1", - "room": "Ullyot", - "title": "Registration & Breakfast", - "id": "36", - "length": "", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-morning", - "time": "9-10am", - "leader": "", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Get your badges and get some food (plus plenty of coffee), as you gear up for the first day of SRCCON! Also, this is Philly, so indulge in the mountain of soft pretzels." - }, - { - "everyone": "1", - "room": "Ullyot", - "title": "Welcome to SRCCON", - "id": "37", - "length": "", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-morning", - "time": "10-10:30am", - "leader": "", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Let's kick SRCCON off right, with a welcome, some scene-setting, and a little getting-to-know-you. No songs or trust falls, we promise." - }, - { - "everyone": "1", - "room": "", - "title": "Lunch on your own", - "id": "38", - "length": "", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-lunch", - "time": "1:30-3pm", - "leader": "", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Did you know that Philadelphia is the birthplace of America? Go find out why! There's tons of great food options and more history in a five-square-block radius than you can even believe. Get out and enjoy the heat!" - }, - { - "everyone": "1", - "room": "Ullyot", - "title": "Dinner at SRCCON", - "id": "39", - "length": "", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-evening", - "time": "5:30-7pm", - "leader": "", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "It's taco time at SRCCON! We'll be setting up a taco bar with all the best fixin's, mix-ins, and more. Plus, a ton of Pennsylvania beer and ice cream from Little Baby's." - }, - { - "everyone": "1", - "room": "", - "title": "Evening sessions", - "id": "40", - "length": "", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-evening", - "time": "7-9pm", - "leader": "", - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "It's the SRCCON House Party! We'll have four rooms going with different themes and activities:\n\n* Play games in the Game Room! We'll be running a Magic: The Gathering draft, plus lots of other games to choose from--and bring your own to share and play.\n* Have a topic you're passionate about? Go to the Lightning Talk Room and share your passions in five-minute *slide free* talks!\n* Are you a foodie? Join the legion in the Food Room discussing their favorite recipes, techniques and more.\n* Just want to hack on some stuff? We'll be running a Hack Space for you to share your projects and hack on others." - }, - { - "everyone": "1", - "room": "Ullyot", - "title": "Breakfast", - "id": "41", - "length": "", - "scheduleblock": "friday-morning", - "time": "10-10:45am", - "leader": "", - "day": "Friday", - "description": "The most important meal of the day (or, at least, the first!), share it with us. Coffee hacking stations will be in full effect today as well, if you're nursing a little too much late-night cheesesteak." - }, - { - "everyone": "1", - "room": "Ullyot", - "title": "Lunch at SRCCON", - "id": "42", - "length": "", - "scheduleblock": "friday-lunch", - "time": "1:30-3pm", - "leader": "", - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Keep the conversations from this morning going (or chat about something else) while enjoying sandwiches, drinks, and even more soft pretzels on us!" - }, - { - "everyone": "1", - "room": "Ullyot", - "title": "Closing", - "id": "43", - "length": "", - "scheduleblock": "friday-evening", - "time": "5:30-6pm", - "leader": "", - "day": "Friday", - "description": "This is it. We promise no group sing-along, but we don't promise not to shed a tear or two (probably because we'll be really tired). Help us close out SRCCON and set the stage for what happens next." - } -] \ No newline at end of file + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Franklin 2", + "title": "There is no CMS", + "id": "1", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", + "time": "11am-noon", + "leader": "Matt Boggie and Alexis Lloyd", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Anyone who’s written for the web has encountered content management systems: complex monoliths of templates, business rules and workflow that take words and media and transform them into the pages and articles our readers see. Anyone who has worked with these systems for long is also familiar with their flaws, their temperamental assumptions about the world, their frustrating constraints, their sometimes-incomprehensible syntax and controls. Even when they work well, they are monolithic systems that represent fossilizations of earlier processes, and are painful to augment and extend.\n\nThis session will be to convene a discussion about what’s wrong with CMSes -- both the systems themselves and the very concept of CMS -- and some possible solutions. What could be possible when we begin to think beyond the CMS as we know it? What systems or protocols could we create that might not be subject to the same problems and limitations? The New York Times R&D Lab will also present some early work showing what an (admittedly futuristic) alternative could look like." + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Franklin 1", + "title": "Super Mappin': Pushing the limits of online maps with raster data, OSM and CSV", + "id": "2", + "length": "2.5 hours", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", + "time": "11am-1:30pm", + "leader": "Al Shaw, Jue Yang, Derek Lieu, Ian Dees", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Online mapping is going through a quiet revolution. When we first started putting interactive maps on the web, we had only a single toggle between Google’s political and secret-sauce “satellite” view. All the data was proprietary, and working with it meant dropping pins and painstaking line-tracing.\n\nToday, there’s a dizzying array of tools and data sources.\n\nMapbox’s Cloudless Atlas turns NASA Landsat 8 imagery into a gorgeous mosaic. Startups like Planet Labs and Skybox are deploying whole fleets of imaging satellites attached to easy-to-use APIs. OpenStreetMap has reached a million users, a community that contributes and maintains the ever-growing store of infrastructure and road network data.\n\nThe growing competency of frontend mapping tools has made mapping in-browser streamlined. GeoJSON, leaflet.js, easy MapBox hosting, and the all-purpose data-driven-document framework (aka d3.js), have all facilitated the process of \"making a map\" with large amounts of data.\n\nHow can (and should) we use these data and tools in our reporting? And how do we present our findings? In this session we will discuss deeply the world of mapping - with raster and non-raster data, and its architecture in the browser. We will cover strategies and algorithms that make imagery quantifiable, points-of-interest data patterns-of-interest, and ways to load them into the browser for wide distribution via something called the internet.\n\nWe'll break into smaller groups to demonstrate hands-on techniques after our discussion" + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Haas", + "title": "Who are we missing?", + "id": "3", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", + "time": "11am-noon", + "leader": "Mandy Brown", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "There are people who aren't at SRCCON this year who should be here in a year or two. How do we bring them in? This will be a fact-finding session dedicated to articulating pathways into data journalism and newsroom code. What skills do people need? What are the various avenues in to the field? What resources are available to help newcomers? Or, what resources are lacking? Most importantly, how do we make this a welcome space for people with different backgrounds and experiences?" + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Garden 1", + "title": "How NOT to skew with statistics: drafting, data bulletproofing, and tools for well-*developed* stories", + "id": "4", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", + "time": "11am-noon", + "leader": "Aurelia Moser and Chris Keller", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "There’s always a lot of press-stress about interactives that are misleading and skew the data they are intending to represent. There’s also a million ways that different newsrooms homebrew the bulletproofing process, and plan for how to present information with maximum integrity. How do modern news orgs navigate deceptive data and manage to provide critical readings of complicated information? This will be a session about ways that statistics can be charted and plotted and how to make sure that we prep our data appropriately for interactive projects. We’ll also run through process models that we might adopt to make fact-checking and peer review an open and organization-agnostic process. Beyond citing sources and licensing intents to prove validity, we’ll talk about how we package information in an interactive story and the protocols for making sure that honest representation is clear and concise in the various vocabularies we use to communicate the news. Have some things to contribute, tools to solicit feedback on, or just want to listen in and learn? Join us; everyone will walk away with a stack of resources, a collaboratively-assembled and forkable guide/glossary for how to tackle data; we'll workshop this in session.\n\nEtherpad for this session: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/bOwBSAeLe5" + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Garden 2", + "title": "Closing the gaps: Let's identify the holes in open data, then fix them", + "id": "5", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", + "time": "11am-noon", + "leader": "Waldo Jaquith", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "There are some crucial tools and datasets that really need to exist, but don't. Address normalization is a crapshoot. Getting text out of PDFs is terrible, and it's not getting any better. It's impractical to share, manipulate, or analyze enormous datasets. Municipal geodata has to be obtained, individually, from each municipality. And so on. Anybody who works with open data has their own pet peeve.\n\nLet's have a gripe session about things that are terrible, and then let's figure out how to make those things stop being terrible. The US Open Data Institute has the resources and the mandate to start addressing these problems, but we want to solve the important problems." + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Garden 3", + "title": "Releasing data trapped in PDFs with your community", + "id": "6", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", + "time": "11am-noon", + "leader": "Gabriela Rodriguez", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Sometimes we have PDF documents that are impossible to convert into text with the common tools. If you have a scanned PDF then it may be hard to find an OCR tool that can convert it. And you need the data to process, visualize and use in your investigation. Then we can use the power of your community. Call your community to crowdsource the conversion of PDF documents. That is what we did with the senate spendings at La Nacion. The project is called VozData and the software that created it is called Crowdata. This session is going to be a techy one about how to use crowdata in your newsroom." + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Franklin 2", + "title": "Two million dollars and one hour: Can you design a new news org that doesn’t shit the bed?", + "id": "7", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", + "time": "12:30-1:30pm", + "leader": "Dan Sinker", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "It’s clear that there’s demand for new approaches to news, so why have so many of the new news organizations fallen down after high-profile launches? Given the talent at SRCCON, can we sketch a new news organization that (1) produces high-quality news, (2) does it in new ways, and (3) is profitable? And can we do it in an hour.This highly interactive session will divide the room into small teams that will discuss both concept and budget for their news org. All teams will give a one-minute pitch at the end of the session." + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Haas", + "title": "The Hitchhiker's Guide to datasets", + "id": "8", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", + "time": "12:30-1:30pm", + "leader": "Ryan Pitts", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "There are great stories just waiting to be mined from big, traditional datasets, but it can be scary to dig in when you don't know the jargon and nobody left a map. Take the American Community Survey: hundreds of tables full of fascinating data, but before you start reporting with confidence, you need to know about summary levels and table universes, the difference between the 1-year/3-year/5-year releases, and why you should never compare, say, 2012 3-year data against 2011 3-year data.\n\nI can get you caught up on those concepts ... but then I couldn't tell you a *thing* about FEC data. You know who can, though? Derek Willis. And Jake Harris knows AP election data so well he’s taken all the excitement out of the load process. We all know the secrets and traps hidden in the datasets we've spent the most time with; I'll bet you know something just like this that no one else at SRCCON does. So let's start making a guide together by talking about the data each one of us knows well.\n\nFor this session, we'll cover the basics of:\n\n* Census data from the American Community Survey: Joe Germuska and Ryan Pitts\n* Campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission: Derek Willis\n* Elections data from the Associated Press: Jacob Harris\n\nAnd we'll also talk about:\n\n* Your favorite dataset: You\n\nWe should also try to capture this background information. Between now and SRCCON, I'll get a GitHub repository up and running so people can contribute dataset tipsheets in simple way, even if they can't make the conference. Charlie Ornstein from ProPublica's already agreed to write up some background on using Medicare data even though he won't be at SRCCON. Let's help each other out like that and make something neat." + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Garden 1", + "title": "Using web type: pitfalls and workarounds", + "id": "9", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", + "time": "12:30-1:30pm", + "leader": "Allen Tan", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "The use of custom typefaces are commonplace online, but it still doesn’t just work. This session will be an overview of the different situations where things can behave differently from what you’d expect and how to deal with them.\n\n- Font stacks and consistent type size\n- Loading webfonts synchronously vs asynchronously\n- Unicode and selective glyph removal\n- Text rasterization on Windows: GDI vs DirectWrite\n- Different antialiasing modes, type “bleeding” and white type on dark backgrounds\n- New OpenType features available to web browsers\n- Using SVG together with webfonts" + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Garden 2", + "title": "What is our role in the open data movement?", + "id": "10", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", + "time": "12:30-1:30pm", + "leader": "AmyJo Brown and Casey Thomas", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Open data is an idea gaining traction in local governments, with cities in particular beginning to embrace policies that could make public information much easier to acquire.\n\nTwo great examples of how this is playing out are here in Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The cities are crafting legislation and making hires to engage the community in the decision-making about what public data should be released when and how.\n\nThat process raises many questions. In this session, we’re going to explore those questions and what our role, as journalists/news organizations, should be in the open data movement.\n\nOur goal is to craft a set of guidelines and/or a list of questions that journalists and news shops can use to guide their internal conversations about working with cities and local groups such as the Code for America brigades.\n\nA few topics we’d like to discuss:\n\n* How should we define our relationship with the tech communities / open data enthusiasts? We are experienced at working with government data and understand the challenges, pitfalls and potential power of using it to tell stories about our communities. Should we be lending our expertise and partnering? Or should we remain independent observers and fact-checkers of their work, treating them as another beat to cover? What are the pros and cons?\n* What ethical quandaries might we find ourselves in and how should we define the boundaries? (i.e., participating in beta testing / when and how to scrape government sites … others?)\n* The open data groups have already proven to be a powerful lobby on behalf of freedom of information laws. How should we work with them to ensure that local and state laws continue to be friendly and more open? On the flip side, how should we prepare to mitigate the risks of more restrictive laws being enacted if an open data experiment goes wrong (i.e., backlash against certain information being published or interpreted and published incorrectly?)\n* If we talk of partnering, what are the ways (are there ways?) we can balance our business interests with the open data ethos?\n\nWe’re sure other topics will also come up during our session. We’ll discuss and then document our conversation to help develop a framework for others in similar situations." + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Franklin 2", + "title": "Before we can fix the news, we need to redesign the newsroom", + "id": "11", + "length": "2.5 hours", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "time": "3-5:30pm", + "leader": "Tom Meagher", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Most newsrooms don't employ developers. In the lucky places with developers who are allowed to work on news projects, these journalists have a litany of common complaints: nobody understands what I do, nobody understands how databases/the internet/computers work, nobody respects how much time it takes to do this kind of work well. \n\nThere are a lot of reasons for this that we won't be able to solve in an hour, but one legacy we need to overcome is the firmly entrenched organization and management structure of the newspaper itself. For 100 years, reporters sat together with their colleagues who covered the same beat. They reported a story, wrote it up and handed it to an editor who read it. He (almost always a he), edited it, demanded a photo or chart to illustrate it, and then handed it to the copy desk to fix typos and place on a page in the next morning's paper. Repeat for another 40 years until you drop dead at your desk. \n\nObviously, nearly everything about our readers and our industry has changed dramatically in the past three decades, but our newsroom structures are remarkably unchanged. In some places, there may be a separate \"digital\" wing lashed on to the side of the org chart, or a \"real-time\" desk that handles web production. In many newsrooms, reporters report (and tweet and shoot video...), write and hand their product off to someone else to put on the web and in print. They are utterly divorced from doing anything online outside of a rigid CMS.\n\nAs journalist-developers, we know how to build apps for the web. We can visualize data and design engaging user experiences on tablet or mobile. In this session, I'd like us to talk about how we can redesign the newsroom itself to upend our clunky workflows pegged to Sunday's newspaper instead of today's news online. \n\nIf you were the editor of your average major metro daily, how would you redraw your organization to make this work?\n*How can we redesign our newsrooms to bring news developers into the reporting process at the beginning and to help everyone else master new skills? \n* Should we adopt Ben Welsh's philosophy that we ought to train web producers to become news devs and not just SEO-experts and explainer explainers? \n* Should we follow Scott Klein's model of making every developer a reporter, designer and data expert?\n* How many AMEs do you really need? \n* Should web producers sit together or with the copy desk and paginators? Should they be in the same room/floor/building/state as reporters and editors? \n* What are the jobs that really need to be done here?\n\nThis exercise is about more than just rearranging deck chairs. Together, we can wipe the slate clean and design a newsroom that builds skills throughout the organization and forces people to think smarter about the internet as a primary medium rather than an afterthought." + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Franklin 1", + "title": "Human-driven design: how to know your users and build just what they need", + "id": "12", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "time": "3-4pm", + "leader": "Sara Schnadt and Ryan Pitts", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "How do you decide what to build? What does your process look like before you write a line of code? How do users’ needs, desires, skills, and workflows inform how you imagine your solutions and refine them along the way? How do you invite users into your process and be sure that your finished work meets their expectations? \n\nAnd, how can you do all this and also be the creative visionary type who says “hey, they asked for a faster horse-drawn carriage but instead we built them a car”?\n\nLet’s kick around questions like this, and talk about how we build innovative tools for journalists that meet users’ needs on their own terms. We’ll share how we identified the types of journalists we wanted to serve through Census Reporter, then researched, designed, reached out, cajoled, built, took criticism, reworked, and ultimately made a tool that serves up a complex data set with a simple interface. And then we want to hear about your process. How do *you* plan what *you’re* going to build next?" + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Haas", + "title": "Sartre was wrong: Hell is data about other people", + "id": "13", + "length": "2.5 hours", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "time": "3-5:30pm", + "leader": "Derek Willis", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Data about people is all around us. It also comes in countless varieties of formats, with \"unique\" identifiers that aren't or no identification system at all. We all have to deal with people data in our reporting and applications. How do we do it? What are the best (and worst) tools and libraries? What about determining gender? This session is designed to unearth the practices that we use for handling personal identifiers and to find the best ones or to figure out where the unmet needs are, and try to start solving them. Open to any and all languages and platforms." + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Garden 1", + "title": "Interactives and climate change", + "id": "14", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "time": "3-4pm", + "leader": "Brian Jacobs", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "In a 2006 Washington Post editorial, referring to carbon emissions reduction, Bill McKibben wrote, \"there are no silver bullets, only silver buckshot.\" It's a sentiment that reflects the complexity of anthropogenic climate change, and it's relevant to any of us that are thinking about how to use our skills towards a climate change project. Rather than feel overwhelmed and paralyzed by the scale of the issue, we can try to address pieces of the problem from different angles, and do so over time. As designers and developers with a public audience, we can make an impact on public and political perceptions of climate issues in more accessible ways than scientists alone can achieve. But how can we best spend our energy doing so?\n\nWhen considering projects...\n* What topics are the most pressing to address, in international or domestic contexts?\n* What are some small projects that can be tackled by individuals or smaller teams?\n* What audiences are we best catering to: the general public, politicians, children?\n* What existing tools can be used to accelerate the production of climate-related interactives?\n* What tools don't already exist but should?\n* What are some great tapped or untapped datasets?\n\nConsidering the decades of research on climate change...\n* In psychological, sociological, and media studies research on climate communication, how does the public respond towards particular patterns, phrases, and design decisions when expressing climate change concepts?\n* What are the best existing examples of local and global climate stories and visualization, and what can we learn from them? What are the worst and why?\n* What communication lessons can be learned from climatologists, urban planners, and governmental organizations in their understanding of how populations will be affected by changing conditions? How can we improve on their techniques of expressing domain knowledge?" + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Garden 2", + "title": "Data processing pipeline show & tell", + "id": "15", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "time": "3-4pm", + "leader": "Ted Han and Jacqui Maher", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "DocumentCloud is only one of many examples of data processing pipelines in the pursuit of journalism. There are many other examples, open source (Census Reporter, PANDA, Fech) and proprietary (https://datadesk.latimes.com/posts/2013/12/natural-language-processing-in-the-kitchen/ ), large to small (medicare reimbursement data to daily arrest records)\n\nRather than talking about the extract, load, transform workflows in abstract, lets talk about what makes your (or someone else's) processing pipeline interesting! Were there special considerations around how the data was gathered? Any unique constraints on how the data needed to be analyzed or presented? Was the data so large that custom code and tools were necessary.\n\nData collection for this session: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1DVgT6T6aeopENm27zoQVoBqRmHPClQDJB4j-SYhJY8s/viewform" + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Garden 3", + "title": "Mapping influence in investigations", + "id": "16", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "time": "3-4pm", + "leader": "Friedrich Lindenberg and Annabel Church", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Influence mapping tools like LittleSis, Poderopedia and even Gephi have been around for a while and applied in many different contexts. But while these tools have been used to create nice network diagrams and profile pages, they aren't really a meaningful part of journalistic workflows yet. In this session, I want to brainstorm ideas on what is needed to make social network analysis tools not just a fancy form of visualising the outcomes of investigations, but an actual tool to manage evidence, ask journalistic questions and derive unexpected insights.\n\nTo kick off the discussion, I'll quickly introduce the connectedAfrica project, which maps out politically exposed persons in African countries. I'll also demo the grano toolkit, which Code for Africa is building in collaboration with the KnightLab, Poderomedia and others to collect, structure and analyse journalistic network data." + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Franklin 1", + "title": "Art directing posts, sustainably", + "id": "17", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "time": "4:30-5:30pm", + "leader": "Scott Kellum and Lauren Rabaino", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Beautifully designed longform articles are a hot topic right now but \nmaking them work efficiently and at scale is still a hard problem to \nsolve. At Vox Media we have been building and refining longform \njournalism and art directed posts for years in a way that we can do a \nlot of big things at a large scale without putting a strain on our \ndesigners and developers. In this discussion we will identify common \nproblems we have with process and think on solutions to those problems." + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Garden 1", + "title": "Science vs. data journalism", + "id": "18", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "time": "4:30-5:30pm", + "leader": "Noah Veltman", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "There are lots of differences between journalism and research science. Scientists are largely writing for an audience of expert peers, not the general public. They work on long time scales, not one-day deadlines. They frequently design experiments and collect their own data rather than inheriting data from someone else.There's a growing perception of data journalism as edging closer to science. This is kind of dangerous; data journalism can wind up carrying the veneer of scientific rigor without the real thing.Let’s talk about it.Can journalists better adopt the norms of the scientific community, like openness, peer review, reproducibility, incremental discovery, and uncertainty? Should they? What are the tradeoffs?Is there room for data journalism to become more experiment-driven? Should we be creating more of our own data? Can we move beyond casual \"crowdsourcing\" projects into the realm of more rigorous science?" + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Garden 2", + "title": "Make your devs & teams braver through devops (God help us all)\n", + "id": "19", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "time": "4:30-5:30pm", + "leader": "JP Schneider and Chris Chang", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "DevOps isn’t about certain tools or processes, but is instead about culture (admittedly a culture obsessed with animated gifs). If you don’t have DevOps staff, how can DevOps still help you? If you do, how can DevOps help you more?" + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Franklin 2", + "title": "Make your own security blanket", + "id": "20", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", + "time": "11am-noon", + "leader": "Jeff Larson", + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Computer security is a hard problem, and the tools we have to deal with it are confusing, highly technical, and often broken. If you work in news -- in any capacity -- this is a dangerous situation. There are always sensitive sources whether they are informing on a local police department or from a warzone or on national security matters. So, lets talk about communicating securely, why security is so important, and how our community can help." + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Franklin 1", + "title": "Toward web-native storytelling!", + "id": "21", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", + "time": "11am-noon", + "leader": "Claire O'Neill and Tyler Fisher", + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Alberto Cairo recently wrote: \"Data journalists cannot survive in a cocoon.\" Likewise, facts and data can't survive without a story, a history, context, nuance and narrative. But also, the modern storyteller can't exist without technical knowledge. We all know this -- but sometimes it's easy to forget in the daily grind. It's hard to do all the things in a fast-paced newsroom! \n\nHow can people who code, and people who don't, think collaboratively and holistically about storytelling? NPR's Visuals team is testing one solution: An integrated content team. We come together on projects as coders, designers, photographers and content specialists (reporter/editors). Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.\n\nWe can kick off this session with a case study of a project we've built. What went well? What went … less well? \n\nWhat works well and ... less well for you and your team? What are the sticking points for \"content\" people working with programmers, and vice-versa? (And are we really so different?)\n\nAnd, most importantly, who is it all even for?" + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Haas", + "title": "Building exoskeletons for reporters", + "id": "22", + "length": "2.5 hours", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", + "time": "11am-1:30pm", + "leader": "Jeremy Bowers and Aaron Williams", + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Beat reporters are the great treasure of the modern newsroom. Sadly, many of our digital projects start and end with editors. I propose that we take some time to discuss practical methods for outfitting our beat \nreporters with robotic exoskeletons — digital tools that make a beat reporter stronger, faster and smarter.\n\nWe'll break the class up into two sessions. In the first session, we'll plot what we want to make -- identify beats and tools that would assist in those beats. In the second session, we'll take those beats/tools and start working on prototypes. \n\nIf you're a reporter, editor or someone interested in digital strategy, you'll definitely want to be in the first session, but we'd love to have you around for the second session too. If you're a developer or a designer or a project manager, you'll definitely want to stick around for the second session. " + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Garden 1", + "title": "Opening your code for newsrooms to use", + "id": "23", + "length": "2.5 hours", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", + "time": "11am-1:30pm", + "leader": "Gabriela Rodriguez and Jeremy B. Merrill", + "day": "Friday", + "description": "This session will be a place to discuss tips and best practices to release the code you are writing, for newsrooms to use. It will be related to writing code as well as steps to release the code (examples, documentation, tutorials). The outcome will be a guide on how to open your software." + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Garden 2", + "title": "Building smart newsroom tools: how a culture can make or break your internal tools", + "id": "24", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", + "time": "11am-noon", + "leader": "Melody Kramer", + "day": "Friday", + "description": "If you build the world's best tool -- but your newsroom isn't ready for the tool, can't find time to use the tool, doesn't understand the tool, or can't share learnings from the tool, then what's the point?\n\nIn this interactive workshop, we'll talk about how to integrate the people from your newsroom into the development process so that you launch your product with enthusiastic and optimistic supporters. We'll brainstorm strategies, talk about UX principles and sketch out ways to create a product launch that will be successful from the start." + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Garden 3", + "title": "Hands-on: wrangling live data the easy way with Streamtools", + "id": "25", + "length": "2.5 hours", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", + "time": "11am-1:30pm", + "leader": "Mike Dewar, Nik Hanselman, and Jacqui Maher", + "day": "Friday", + "description": "How do you deal with LIVE data? How do you explore it, use it, and shape it into something useful? Streamtools provides a friendly interface that lets you explore live sources of data without having to perform complex infrastructure tasks. \n\nThis workshop will introduce the basics of using streamtools:\ninterrogate live sources of data\nbuild systems to track, aggregate and learn from various sources of data\nimport / export processing patterns and explore the streamtools API\nhook into existing systems and create new streams of data\n\nall from within a browser-based graphical interface!" + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Franklin 2", + "title": "How to diversify the pipeline of journo-coders", + "id": "26", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-2", + "time": "12:30-1:30pm", + "leader": "Emma Carew Grovum and Latoya Peterson", + "day": "Friday", + "description": "The need for more diversity in journalism, specifically in web/coding/tech teams, is indisputable. Let’s talk solutions and find tangible things we can do and encourage others to do to make a difference. What’s worked for people who have had success? What can we try with our next mentee, hire, or opportunity to recommend a speaker? For newsrooms to actually become more diverse, everyone needs to contribute: hiring, managing, promoting, mentoring, teaching, and just generally creating a culture that is welcoming and open.\n\nIf your newsroom is grappling with these issues, if you personally have pondered these questions, or you've had success and want to share it, come on in. " + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Franklin 1", + "title": "Mobile is the future / mobile sucks / the future sucks", + "id": "27", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-2", + "time": "4:30-5:30pm", + "leader": "Alastair Coote", + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Mobile is the future. There can’t really be any argument about that now - mobile audience shares just keep on rising and if your audience isn’t over 50% mobile yet, it will be soon. There’s only one problem: developing for mobile sucks.We'll gather together, group therapy style, and talk out some of the biggest mobile challenges, in areas like:- Small screen sizes and orientation changes- Restrictions on video and audio functionality- Cross-platform testing and debugging- Touch events (and the lack of mouse events)- Connectivity issues and performance restrictionsand plenty more besides. Bring your own horror stories and solutions to share. We'll get through this together." + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Garden 2", + "title": "Style guides: codifying your common interface decisions", + "id": "28", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-2", + "time": "12:30-1:30pm", + "leader": "Alan Palazzolo", + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Over 6 months ago, we started working on a style guide for our interactive projects, and only a few months ago actually started using it. With it, we have seen the productivity of our small team increase significantly from day one of its use.Style guides are one of many ways to codify common decisions that save time. But with coding these decisions, there are still costs associated with creation, maintenance, overriding, and more. Let’s talk about.What are some examples of style guides? In newsrooms? Outside of newsrooms? Good or bad? Is your newsrooms using a style guide? Why or why not? What technologies do you use to manage these templates? How do you deal with existing web or print style guides in your organization?" + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Franklin 2", + "title": "We can stop fighting the CMS, a round-table discussion", + "id": "29", + "length": "2.5 hours", + "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", + "time": "3-5:30pm", + "leader": "Chris Chang and Andrew Nacin", + "day": "Friday", + "description": "The content management system (CMS) is the bane of users and developers alike. This current state of affairs is woefully inadequate for where the industry needs to go, and few have any resources to solve it. We have a great opportunity at SRCCON for CMS users and developers to get together and hash out what we want and how to get there.Let’s go around, describe a problem, discuss solutions, and then if we’re lucky, we’ll walk away with some best-practices for how to solve some common problems. As Waldo Jaquith wrote: \"Let's have a gripe session about things that are terrible, and then let's figure out how to make those things stop being terrible.\"" + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Franklin 1", + "title": "Making things happen with small teams", + "id": "30", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", + "time": "3-4pm", + "leader": "Kaeti Hinck", + "day": "Friday", + "description": "For the small news dev team (including teams of one), resources are often scarce and your time can be split between a number of roles. Let's talk about the best strategies to make the most of what we have without feeling hopeless or falling prey to burn out. Let's gather with our small-team peers (even if you're just getting started!) and share what's helped us stay productive, what *doesn't* work, ideas for proving worth to potentially skeptical colleagues, and practical tools to maximize our capabilities." + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Haas", + "title": "Handguns and tequila: avoiding data disasters", + "id": "31", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", + "time": "3-4pm", + "leader": "Justin Myers", + "day": "Friday", + "description": "There’s a quote attributed to Mitch Ratcliffe: “A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history–with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.”One of the dangerous aspects of using data in journalism is the ability to do things with drastic consequences to your reporting without realizing it. (If you do something like this, of course, you hope to find it before you publish.) Just because computers are efficient doesn’t mean they don’t still need solid reporting and editing around just about everything they do.So with that said, what should you watch out for when you or your reporters are working on a data-driven story? What mistakes are especially easy to make, and what can you do to prevent them or at least notice them before it’s too late?This session is about concepts and consequences at a level that helps you ask the right questions of the people actually running your data analysis (which might be you), so the intention is to avoid specific code examples as much as possible in favor of talking through what went wrong—but if the bug fits, explain it!" + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Garden 1", + "title": "Own your analytics", + "id": "32", + "length": "2.5 hours", + "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", + "time": "3-5:30pm", + "leader": "Brian Abelson, Michael Keller, and Stijn Debrouwere", + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Almost all analytics software has an API and API clients. We'll show people how they can get data from Google Analytics and a few other APIs (GA Live, ChartBeat, Facebook Insights, Google Alerts, Bitly, etc.) as well as how they can get social data from utilities like Pollster, SharedCount.com or the \"raw\" social APIs. We'll then show them how best to organize and join all of this information to create interesting new dashboards, textualizations, visualizations, email reports that respond to events, and even new metrics.\n\nWe'll have example code ready for all of these systems so people\n(1) get a quick overview of how these APIs work and can then\n(2) very quickly move on to actually *doing* things with it.\n\nAt the end of the session, participants should have a clearer path to controlling their own analytics data, integrating numbers from multiple sources, creating more meaningful metrics, and (hopefully) making meaningful decisions informed by data." + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Garden 2", + "title": "New frontiers in javascript: the browser at the bleeding edge", + "id": "33", + "length": "2.5 hours", + "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", + "time": "3-5:30pm", + "leader": "Erik Hinton", + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Once a second tier environment, the browser has become the de facto standard for innovative applications. Complex distributed systems, high-fidelity 3D games, and rich, real-time editorial tools have all moved to browser-based solutions. But with an expanded domain, comes expanded demands and new difficulties. This session is intended to workshop some of the new and experimental tools aimed at creating optimized, complex browser applications.\n\nWe will discuss and workshop the uses, applications and rough edges around experimental, new technologies such as (but not limited to):\n- React.js and its new rendering paradigm\n- Functional Reactive Programming, especially its manifestations in Elm and, to a lesser extent, RxJS\n- Functional languages with a Javascript backend such as GHCJS, Clojurescript, Idris, and Faye\n- Alternative browser concurrency models (such as CSP) as provided by Clojurescript and ES6 generators\n- Sweet.js and the concept of accelerating Javascript evolution through macros" + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Franklin 1", + "title": "How to train your newsroom", + "id": "34", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-2", + "time": "12:30-1:30pm", + "leader": "Jaeah Lee and Tasneem Raja", + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Everyone agrees that siloed skills are bad. But unlocking your newsroom's nerd potential is hard. At Mother Jones, we've been developing an in-house skills sharing program that's had a real multiplier effect. Let's trade notes on what you've tried at your shops. We'll start with the philosophy that everyone is both a teacher and a learner. Think about it: a newsroom in which copy editors learn from open-source geeks, and vice versa, is a better newsroom. In this session, let's take software's pair programming model and reimagine it for journalism." + }, + { + "everyone": "", + "room": "Haas", + "title": "Let's build a wiki of data smells", + "id": "35", + "length": "1 hour", + "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-2", + "time": "4:30-5:30pm", + "leader": "Jacob Harris", + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Help build out a guide to knowing when something's wrong with that shiny new dataset." + }, + { + "everyone": "1", + "room": "Ullyot", + "title": "Registration & Breakfast", + "id": "36", + "length": "", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-morning", + "time": "9-10am", + "leader": "", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Get your badges and get some food (plus plenty of coffee), as you gear up for the first day of SRCCON! Also, this is Philly, so indulge in the mountain of soft pretzels." + }, + { + "everyone": "1", + "room": "Ullyot", + "title": "Welcome to SRCCON", + "id": "37", + "length": "", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-morning", + "time": "10-10:30am", + "leader": "", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Let's kick SRCCON off right, with a welcome, some scene-setting, and a little getting-to-know-you. No songs or trust falls, we promise." + }, + { + "everyone": "1", + "room": "", + "title": "Lunch on your own", + "id": "38", + "length": "", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-lunch", + "time": "1:30-3pm", + "leader": "", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Did you know that Philadelphia is the birthplace of America? Go find out why! There's tons of great food options and more history in a five-square-block radius than you can even believe. Get out and enjoy the heat!" + }, + { + "everyone": "1", + "room": "Ullyot", + "title": "Dinner at SRCCON", + "id": "39", + "length": "", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-evening", + "time": "5:30-7pm", + "leader": "", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "It's taco time at SRCCON! We'll be setting up a taco bar with all the best fixin's, mix-ins, and more. Plus, a ton of Pennsylvania beer and ice cream from Little Baby's." + }, + { + "everyone": "1", + "room": "", + "title": "Evening sessions", + "id": "40", + "length": "", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-evening", + "time": "7-9pm", + "leader": "", + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "It's the SRCCON House Party! We'll have four rooms going with different themes and activities:\n\n* Play games in the Game Room! We'll be running a Magic: The Gathering draft, plus lots of other games to choose from--and bring your own to share and play.\n* Have a topic you're passionate about? Go to the Lightning Talk Room and share your passions in five-minute *slide free* talks!\n* Are you a foodie? Join the legion in the Food Room discussing their favorite recipes, techniques and more.\n* Just want to hack on some stuff? We'll be running a Hack Space for you to share your projects and hack on others." + }, + { + "everyone": "1", + "room": "Ullyot", + "title": "Breakfast", + "id": "41", + "length": "", + "scheduleblock": "friday-morning", + "time": "10-10:45am", + "leader": "", + "day": "Friday", + "description": "The most important meal of the day (or, at least, the first!), share it with us. Coffee hacking stations will be in full effect today as well, if you're nursing a little too much late-night cheesesteak." + }, + { + "everyone": "1", + "room": "Ullyot", + "title": "Lunch at SRCCON", + "id": "42", + "length": "", + "scheduleblock": "friday-lunch", + "time": "1:30-3pm", + "leader": "", + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Keep the conversations from this morning going (or chat about something else) while enjoying sandwiches, drinks, and even more soft pretzels on us!" + }, + { + "everyone": "1", + "room": "Ullyot", + "title": "Closing", + "id": "43", + "length": "", + "scheduleblock": "friday-evening", + "time": "5:30-6pm", + "leader": "", + "day": "Friday", + "description": "This is it. We promise no group sing-along, but we don't promise not to shed a tear or two (probably because we'll be really tired). Help us close out SRCCON and set the stage for what happens next." + } +] diff --git a/_archive/sessions/2015/sessions.json b/_archive/sessions/2015/sessions.json index e138a982..c2243884 100755 --- a/_archive/sessions/2015/sessions.json +++ b/_archive/sessions/2015/sessions.json @@ -1,743 +1,743 @@ [ - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Get your badges and get some food (plus plenty of coffee), as you gear up for the first day of SRCCON!", - "everyone": "1", - "id": "1", - "leader": "", - "length": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-morning", - "time": "9-10am", - "title": "Registration & Breakfast", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Let's kick SRCCON off right, with a welcome, some scene-setting, and a little getting-to-know-you. No songs or trust falls, we promise.", - "everyone": "1", - "id": "2", - "leader": "", - "length": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-morning", - "time": "10-10:30am", - "title": "Welcome to SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "", - "everyone": "1", - "id": "3", - "leader": "", - "length": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-lunch", - "time": "1:30-3pm", - "title": "Lunch at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "", - "everyone": "1", - "id": "4", - "leader": "", - "length": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-evening", - "time": "5:30-7pm", - "title": "Dinner at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "It's the SRCCON House Party! We'll have several rooms with different themes and activities:\n\n### Game Room\n* **When:** all evening\n* **Where:** Memorial\n* **Facilitators:** Tiff Fehr, Joe Germuska, Sisi Wei\n\nBoard games, card games, story games--we'll have plenty to choose from. Bring your own to share and play.\n\n### Lightning Talks\n* **When:** 7-8pm\n* **Where:** Johnson\n* **Facilitators:** Kaeti Hinck, Alan Palazzolo\n\nListen to people talk about their projects and passions in five-minute bites.\n\n### Evening Walk\n* **When:** 7-8pm\n* **Where:** Meet up near the stage in Memorial, then head outside\n* **Facilitator:** Will Lager\n\nGet outdoors for some fresh air and a guided walk along the river.\n\n### Hack Space and Demo Fair\n* **When:** 8-9pm\n* **Where:** Heritage\n* **Facilitator:** Justin Myers\n\nThis room will be open all evening for anyone who wants to talk about hacker/maker/craft projects. Have a new app that's ready to demo, or a neat project to show off? We'll have a SRCCON Show & Tell here starting at 8pm.\n\n### Book Share\n* **When:** 8-9pm\n* **Where:** Ski-U-Mah\n* **Facilitator:** Adam Schweigert\n\nCome talk about books that are important to you, professionally or personally. Bring a copy to give away, and take something new home with you.\n\n### Quiet Workspace\n* **When:** all evening\n* **Where:** Thomas Swain\n\nA place to check out if you need a break from the day's activities and conversations.", - "everyone": "1", - "id": "5", - "leader": "", - "length": "", - "room": "see event detail", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-evening", - "time": "7-9pm", - "title": "Evening sessions", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "", - "everyone": "1", - "id": "6", - "leader": "", - "length": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "scheduleblock": "friday-morning", - "time": "10-10:45am", - "title": "Breakfast", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "", - "everyone": "1", - "id": "7", - "leader": "", - "length": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "scheduleblock": "friday-lunch", - "time": "1:30-3pm", - "title": "Lunch at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "This is it. We promise no group sing-along, but we don't promise not to shed a tear or two (probably because we'll be really tired). Help us close out SRCCON and set the stage for what happens next.", - "everyone": "1", - "id": "8", - "leader": "", - "length": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "scheduleblock": "friday-evening", - "time": "5:30-6pm", - "title": "Closing", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Design's user-centric orientation places the needs and expectations of users at the center of the designer's decision-making process. Journalism’s objectivity ethos has journalists striving to report on facts (and not their personal attitude toward facts), with fairness and accuracy. \n\nWith newsrooms embracing new skill sets and welcoming more collaboration between people with a variety of professional backgrounds, different practices and traditions collide. Where is the line between designing for an audience and pandering to that audience? \n\nIn this session we explore user-centered design’s fit in the newsroom and the processes of reporting, and how characterizing the audience for a story shapes decisions about what, how when and where a story is told.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "9", - "leader": "Livia Labate, Joe Germuska", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Johnson", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", - "time": "11am-noon", - "title": "Journalistic Objectivity & User-Centered Design", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Collaborating with team members based out of another office, bureau, city or even country is really hard. At its very worst, you can feel slow, frustrated, and disconnected. At its best, you will feel flexible, motivated, and energized. \n\nIn this session, you’ll be moving around the room as we organize you into groups depending on your communication style, role type (designer, developer, manager, newsgatherer, project manager), or organization structure. You’ll learn from those like you, and how to communicate with those unlike you. \n\nYou should walk out of this session with a good sense of what tools other companies are using, what type of collaboration works best for your role, and what communication style works best for you. ", - "everyone": "", - "id": "10", - "leader": "Stephanie Yiu, Davis Shaver", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", - "time": "11am-noon", - "title": "Figuring It Out: Remote Communication", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015RemoteComm" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Let's build an inclusive dictionary of all the language and terms that create a safe and encouraging environment for a diverse group of people in and out of the newsroom. Some topics include: how to think about gender pronouns, what language to include in a job posting to encourage diverse applicants, how to build inclusive narratives, and what a checklist would look like to ensure representative and relevant perspectives on and in stories.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "11", - "leader": "Lena Groeger, Aurelia Moser", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", - "time": "11am-noon", - "title": "A Newsroom Nadsat: How to Build Better Newsrooms with Better Language", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015NewsroomNadsat" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "It doesn’t matter how clever your open source code is if nobody can figure out how to use it. Good documentation is essential for drawing in users, fostering contributions, and encouraging use by less technical audiences.\n\nIn this session, we'll discuss our experiences as both readers and writers of documentation, and work towards a tactical playbook for writing more effective docs. We’ll also break out the red pens for close readings of documentation from some existing popular open source libraries. Bring examples of docs you love, docs you hate, and docs you want to see in the world.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "12", - "leader": "Noah Veltman, Cathy Deng", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Heritage", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", - "time": "11am-noon", - "title": "Better Living Through Documentation", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "One of the most difficult challenges for learning programmers is being able to go beyond basic lessons to building \"the next Facebook\", or even just applying programming to your work projects. The secret is that programming can be practiced -- and used -- on everyday, somewhat \"mundane\" computational tasks. When you learn how to program to do things that are helpful to you, you not only become a better programmer, but you gain insight on how programming fits into the bigger projects you hope to build.\n\nThis session will involve both discussion of everyday programming and demonstrations of creating and refining \"mundane\" programming scripts, with the goal of brainstorming ideas and use cases to expand the scope of problems we can use programming to solve.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "13", - "leader": "Daniel Nguyen, Geoff Hing", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Minnesota", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", - "time": "11am-noon", - "title": "Become a Better Programmer Through Mundane Programming", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015BetterProgramming" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "A lot of tools are built off the Github API. Some are great. Some are funny. One of them is a bot that accepts pull requests to it's own code, based on the number of upvotes the pull request gets in the first half hour. Sort of like a semi-sentient, crowd-pleasing roomba.\n\nI'd like to share some of the things I've worked on that use the Github API (prose.io), and I'd love to hear what others have to add. Together, we can learn a little more about the site that many of us use everyday, and maybe come up with a better, more sentient roomba.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "14", - "leader": "Derek Lieu", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Gateway", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", - "time": "11am-noon", - "title": "We All Have Issues: Sharing Projects Built on GitHub's API", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Today comments are the most common form of community on news sites, but is that all there is? Comment sections are usually just an afterthought and perceived only as an obligation - in this session we'll explore the unrealized value of comments and other forms user-generated content can take. We'll talk about our learnings thus far from the Coral Project, including the challenges news orgs currently face in creating successful digital communities and some existing solutions from journalism and ~beyond~.\n\nTogether we'll come up with our ideal online communities and think about concrete ways in which we can integrate these ideas into newsrooms' approaches to content co-creation. If you were building a news community from scratch, where would you start? What are the ways your audience would contribute or express themselves? How would you encourage inclusive and vibrant conversations? What limits would you set, if any?", - "everyone": "", - "id": "15", - "leader": "Francis Tseng, Tara Adiseshan", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Johnson", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", - "time": "12:30-1:30pm", - "title": "Designing Digital Communities for News", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Many good ideas come out of journalists who are enthusiastic about their beats and the opportunity to capture large audiences. But there are lots of them, and only one or two of us. So how do you say no to good ideas, while keeping those good ideas flowing? How do you tell senior editors that you don’t have the resources when they want Snowfall? How do you determine which of the good ideas has the most value journalistically, and/or most potential for audience, social sharing or revenue? Doing this poorly leads to missed opportunities, time wasted on projects with no legs or shelf life, journalistic flaws, poor execution because of overbooking your time or unrealistic expectations — and burnout from long hours, nights and weekends. Doing it well strengthens our journalism, builds audience and reputation, opens new revenue opportunities and leads to even more good ideas. Successes build on themselves; failures devalue our potential. We’ll also discuss best practices for getting it all done with a small team: prioritizing your own time, ways to make it easier, balancing admin work with coding and strategies to keep learning. ", - "everyone": "", - "id": "16", - "leader": "Rachel Schallom, Tyler Machado", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", - "time": "12:30-1:30pm", - "title": "Big Ambition, Small Staff, How the F*** Do I Prioritize?", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015SmallTeam" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Bring a computer with a web browser and/or command-line terminal to this session and learn how to use the Dat data version control tool in combination with the Flatsheet data editor application to version control, push, pull, diff and merge datasets.\n\nHere's what we will cover in the workshop:\n\n- Sending a data \"pull request\"\n- Merge data contributions from others\n- Set up data import pipelines to wrap legacy data sources/formats\n- Update local copies of data with new changes\n- Revert back to old versions of data\n- Compare two versions of a dataset\n\nWe will have some example datasets to use, but also feel free to bring your own raw data to try out as well. Part of the workshop will be on the command-line, and part will be in the Flatsheet web application. You will need to install both the Dat command line-tool and the Flatsheet application on your own computer, and you will be able to do this at the start of the workshop (it only takes a couple of minutes).\n\nSome basic command-line experience (Mac, Linux or Windows) is necessary to get the most out of this workshop.\n\nMore about Dat and Flatsheet:\n\nDat (http://dat-data.com/) is an open source version control and data sharing tool for data sets. It comes with a command line tool called 'dat' that lets you do things like 'dat pull', 'dat diff', 'dat merge' and 'dat push'. The goal of dat is to let you automate your data workflows so you can share and consume changes to datasets with others easily.\n\nDat is funded by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation and has a primary goal of being used by scientists to publish data for reproducible research and collaboration. It is currently in 'beta'.\n\nFlatsheet lets you edit data sets in realtime with your team. If you've used Google Spreadsheets with a library like Tabletop.js to create an ad-hoc mini-CMS, Flatsheet solves that problem more effectively, and is an open-source tool you can host on your own server. Flatsheet integrates with Dat, so you can use Dat to clone any sheet, edit locally, and push changes back to Flatsheet.\n\nFlatsheet recently received a grant from the Knight Prototype Fund, as well as a code sprint grant from OpenNews. You can see a work-in-progress example at http://data.seattle.io", - "everyone": "", - "id": "17", - "leader": "Maxwell Bridger Abraham Leonidas Herb Ogden, Seth Vincent", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", - "time": "12:30-1:30pm", - "title": "Fork and Merge Some Data with Dat and Flatsheet", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015DatFlatsheet" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "As we design data stories, most of us naturally lean toward visualization and graphic representation. But it doesn’t have to be this way: Take Radiolab’s use of a chorus to demonstrate the color vision of mantis shrimp, or the New York Time’s use of tonal blips to show the difference in finishing time between Olympic medalists. (Find these examples and more at http://listentodata.tumblr.com/.) Audio is a rich, intimate medium that can convey some ideas - like the passage of time - better than graphics and allows you to layer information in sophisticated ways. In this hands on session, we challenge you to think outside the data visualization box and tell a data story using sound as the primary medium. In small groups, we’ll prototype data audioizations using a real dataset. We’ll also discuss what tools, technologies, software and best practices newsrooms can use to incorporate data audioization - or sonification, we’re not sure what to call it yet - into their work.\n\nOptional: If you happen to have an instrument with you, please bring it.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "18", - "leader": "Jordan Wirfs-Brock, Lauren Benichou", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Heritage", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", - "time": "12:30-1:30pm", - "title": "Data Audioization: How Do We Bring Numbers to Life with Sound?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "### Why your boss should let you spend time programming bots.\n\nSometimes the reasons we create our internal newsroom bots — delivering horoscopes, telling horrible knock-knock jokes — aren’t the kinds of reasons that organization leaders will readily appreciate. In this session, we’ll talk about the tricks we’ve taught our bots (or would like to teach our bots) that help our team (whether we’re developers, reporters, or otherwise) get actual journalistic work done — even if the bots’ work is never seen by readers.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "19", - "leader": "Tom Nehil, Justin Myers", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Minnesota", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", - "time": "12:30-1:30pm", - "title": "Post Hoc Justifications for Newsroom Chat Bots", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015ChatBots" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "We are not artists and drawing is scary. But visualizing and creating illustrations is one of the best ways to distill and focus a thought or story.\n\nIn the end, an ugly drawing that makes a point is a hundred times better than a crappy stock photo. And who knows, maybe one of your illustrations will get published some day. How great would that be?\n\nIn this session we can get out of our comfort zones and doodle our way through a story.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "20", - "leader": "Arjuna Soriano, Kavya Sukumar", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Memorial", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", - "time": "12:30-1:30pm", - "title": "Everyone Is an Illustrator: Making Your Own Art When None Exists", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Salary negotiations. Power structures at work. Fighting off impostor syndrome. Married name changes. Maternity leave. Fighting off sexism. We've all had to face these situations in our newsrooms -- and some of us are doing so while feeling alone. We want to foster focused conversations over lunch with an eye toward keeping the conversation and support network going after the conference. We'll set the topics based on interest the day of, and this session will not be recorded for transcription. ", - "everyone": "", - "id": "21", - "leader": "Emma Carew Grovum, Heather Billings", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-lunch", - "time": "2-2:45pm", - "title": "Realtalk for Women in Tech", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "How do we find and scale leadership networks for journalism and technology, particularly in the global context? As news organizations expand their footprints and their partnerships overseas, and as increasing numbers of newsroom workers (not just correspondents!) seek international opportunities, the communities we tap into will make or break our success. In this guided discussion, we'll discuss how to scale leadership across informal and grassroots groups, how to find and engage effective partners, and the right metrics for measuring the effectiveness of events and the participation of members. By brainstorming challenges faced by specific chapters and collectives, we'll gain insight into how the environment for journalism and technology changes drastically in different countries. We'll also create better frameworks for approaching those challenges.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "22", - "leader": "Anika Gupta, Gabriela Rodriguez", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Minnesota", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-lunch", - "time": "2-2:45pm", - "title": "Building Strong Journo-Tech Networks—Internationally", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015IntlNetworks" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "How can we build good products if our energy is spent tearing each other down? We all know that we value a “good team culture,” but we’re often vague about what that means or how to achieve it. But what if it’s as easy as setting out your team practices as a checklist, the same way you would for any other project? For instance, making sure that individual interactions between team members — even arguments — are approached in an “actively positive” manner? Or ensuring that every team member agrees and understands the grounds on which a proposed feature is judged? Thinking about “culture,” precisely and vigorously, comes in especially handy when your team needs to onboard junior members, or when there’s a on-the job learning happening (which is, let’s admit it, all the freaking time). \n\nUsing techniques and advice from an industry that is all about making communication and relationships healthier, we’ll work together in this interactive workshop to create better frameworks for how we give and receive feedback. Participants will leave with actionable strategies for how to make space for criticism on their teams, how to wrangle all the egos, and simple ways we can encourage and support each other as we build things every day.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "23", - "leader": "Amanda Krauss, Rebekah Monson, Liz Lucas", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Johnson", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "time": "3-4pm", - "title": "What Couples Counseling Can Teach Us About Strong Teams and Healthy Feedback", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Accessibility is often on our minds as we build products for the web – but what’s the best way to approach it? Often our efforts focus on a disability or impairment we are trying to accommodate. We can approach these challenges progressively – letting the capabilities of the hardware and software accessing our content be our guide. Sometimes accessibility isn’t just a nice-to-have – it’s required by law. When's the last time you tried navigating your site with just a keyboard? At 200% zoom? With a Wiimote? As Anne Gibson says in her A List Apart piece \"Reframing Accessibility on the Web,\" accessibility should not be just about determining \"your audience and building to their needs\" – accessibility should be a \"trait of the website itself,” an extension of the user experience. We'll chat about how we approach accessibility, share our mutual experiences, touch on common misconceptions and look into techniques to encourage mindfulness as we plan and build our projects going forward.\n\nIf you have a copy of your current accessibility guidelines, or anything that documents your newsroom’s process, please bring them with you!", - "everyone": "", - "id": "24", - "leader": "Ryan Murphy", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "time": "3-4pm", - "title": "Taking Web Accessibility Beyond Assumptions", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015WebAccessbility" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Any large investigative project or feature is going to generate a wealth of reporting that most users never see. We all have interviews, notes, research and data that inform the stories we tell but get thrown away after a story is finished. This session will focus on open notebook reporting and structured journalism, looking at ways we can better use and share more of what we collect in our reporting, without killing ourselves trying to get it online. We'll talk about tools, practices and culture.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "25", - "leader": "Chris Amico", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "time": "3-4pm", - "title": "Every Part of the Pig: How Can We Make Better Use of Reporting in Long Investigations?", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015StructuredReporting" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "How can we open source the processes it takes to put together events—big and small, from conferences to hackathons and meetups—that serve and challenge our communities? What parts can we play as attendees in making conferences and other events more useful, inclusive, and awesome? We'll talk about planning and program design, outreach and accessibility, pitching talks and being a great participant, and lots more. Bring your questions, solutions, problems, and hopes.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "26", - "leader": "Erin Kissane, Erik Westra", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Gateway", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "time": "3-4pm", - "title": "Building Better Events, as Organizers and Participants", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Learn what it really means to play Dungeons & Dragons — and how the creative concepts behind roleplaying games are especially applicable to teaching journalism. After playing some (adapted version of) D&D, we'll discuss examples of how others have used roleplaying to teach, which lessons lend themselves to roleplaying, and finally, create as a group a lesson plan for making your next class an adventure. \n\nThe unamended title of this session pitch is: The Dungeon Master's Guide to Teaching Journalism, 3rd Edition, Revised (v3.5)", - "everyone": "", - "id": "27", - "leader": "Sisi Wei, Eric Sagara", - "length": "90 minutes\n", - "room": "Heritage", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "time": "3-4:30pm", - "title": "The Dungeon Master's Guide to Teaching Journalism", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Last November, The New York Times challenged news sites to fully support HTTPS in 2015. What does it mean to meet that challenge?\n\nThis session will discuss the problems we encountered moving to HTTPS (and how we solved them). We'll then give you hands-on help with anything you need: server configuration, certificates, mixed-content warnings, CDNs — even ads, analytics and A/B tests.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "28", - "leader": "Paul Schreiber, Mike Tigas", - "length": "90 minutes", - "room": "Minnesota", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "time": "3-4:30pm", - "title": "Meeting The New York Times Challenge: Delivering the News Over HTTPS", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015NewsOverHTTPS" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "The workflow system of getting text, photos and static graphics into the printed editions of newspapers has evolved over literally 100+ years and it is now a very, very refined process in every newsroom we’ve been in. Putting those same items on digital has essentially just been tagged onto the end of that process. But in many newsrooms this workflow doesn't work well for digital-only work, particularly when it involves data. We’d like this session to be a work-group format with a goal to create the ideal workflow -- from idea germination to publication. This should include best practices for communication flows, deadlines, how/when items will be edited (for usability, clarity, style, grammar, spelling, etc), process for creating/sharing/discussing mockups, first drafts, etc. A very key piece should be who should be included in the process and when (and by “who” we want to identify skillsets, rather than specific job titles). We’d like to split into three groups, each working on their own proposed workflows to address three different scenarios: 1) a digital product that accompanies an enterprise story that is weeks or months in the making, 2) a digital product that needs to be done quickly (either daily or short-term), either with or without a story and 3) a stand-alone digital-only product, such as a news app or tool which does not heavily feature a text component. At the end of the session, we’ll combine the three groups to discuss implementation. We want to come up with an ideal workflow that can be used by newsrooms as a goal to achieve, since each newsroom will likely have its own unique problems to resolve before achieving it.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "29", - "leader": "MaryJo Webster, C.J. Sinner", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Johnson", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "time": "4:30-5:30pm", - "title": "Let's Create an Ideal Digital Workflow", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "We all have to work together in the end, but the hiring process can get that relationship off to an awkward start. Employers may feel unable to find the best applicants, while applicants often find themselves frustrated by a completely opaque process. Throw in unconscious bias, an emphasis on the elusive \"fit,\" and negotiations about pay and it's no wonder both employers and applicants come into this process with a lot of anxiety. In this session, we'll share our experiences about the roles we've all played in this process: whether it be helping craft job postings, recruitment, hiring, or applying for jobs. We'll discuss strategies for improving hiring and craft some suggestions to bring to a discussion at ONA.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "30", - "leader": "Erika Owens, Helga Salinas, Ted Han", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "time": "4:30-5:30pm", - "title": "Recruiting and Hiring People Not Wishlists", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015Hiring" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Interested in using maps to identify food deserts, compare neighborhood distances to voting polls, or calculate the population within a flood zone? Are you guilty of creating overlapping geographic layers to show correlations?\n\nWhile many newsrooms use maps to visualize geographic information — everything from election results to wildfires — a few simple techniques can make those maps more informed and insightful.\n\nWe’ll show you how to interview geographic data using network analysis and discuss a few common concepts (buffers, spatial joins, distances, etc). We’ll talk about how specific stories have analyzed geodata using a combination of free tools such as QGIS, turf.js, and leaflet.js. Afterward, we’ll open the floor for you to share your own experiences and questions. If you have your own favorite techniques or tools, give them a shout out!\n\nThis session is for beginner and intermediate data journalists who have used maps in their reporting, or for anyone who wants to go beyond simple geographic visualizations.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "31", - "leader": "Gerald Rich, Jue Yang", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "time": "4:30-5:30pm", - "title": "Interviewing the Map: Simple Analysis for Web Maps", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015InterviewingMap" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Whether you’re deploying a static app or an app with a half-dozen databases, you’re making infrastructure choices about where those HTTPS requests go. How do you weigh the tradeoffs around static file hosting, app servers, database servers and all the other pieces we juffle? Does your app emit the best cache control headers? When should a feature be static, when not? How many databases should you be allowed to put in production? How do you monitor all of this stuff (both performance and errors)? When should you integrate with another service, when should you build it yourself? And now that you have all these internal services, how do you coordinate them? How can small ambitious teams be efficient and effective over time?\n\nI built The Marshall Project’s website. Many of us build apps like this, whether it’s a news app, a CMS, or a plugin for an existing system. Let’s enumerate the choices we make when we build things and explore their tradeoffs by sharing war stories. At the end, we’ll come away with a framework for asking the right questions when building your next app.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "32", - "leader": "Ivar Vong", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Gateway", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "time": "4:30-5:30pm", - "title": "War stories: How Do We Build and Deploy All This Code?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Swipe left. Tap here. Shake. Is there way we can harness mobile interactions to encourage engagement and community around news? We'll provide inspiring challenges and give you the materials for a big-think paper prototype session. What you make will inform the work of The Coral Project, a Mozilla/NYT/WaPo collaboration to build open source tools around community and comments.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "33", - "leader": "Andrew Losowsky, Greg Barber", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Memorial", - "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "time": "4:30-5:30pm", - "title": "A Community on Mobile: Paper Prototyping with the Coral Project", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Sometimes, the thing a beginner needs to grasp a concept is a simple analog. For instance, I taught a class in data visualization and one of the early classes was using LEGO to visualize data. There are all sorts of code concepts and data concepts that students -- from university courses to workshops -- struggle to grasp. What if we came up with a list of goofy, hands on ways to teach concepts that others could steal. How could you teach loops by making people run around a room? Or filtering? Or basic algorithms? Or visualization concepts? By making new concepts memorable for beginners, we stand a much better chance of spreading knowledge. Come throw out your ideas.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "34", - "leader": "Matt Waite", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Johnson", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", - "time": "11am-noon", - "title": "Let's Act Out Code Concepts to Help Teach Them", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Machine learning is suddenly the new, hip thing in data journalism. But like every tool in a toolbox, it has some uses but is not a go-to tool in every situation. This session will look at how some journalists have used machine learning and in what situations it's best and in what situations it should be avoided. We'll look at stories that have used machine learning in some capacity including one on watered down audits and another on the leaked Sony emails. While you won't leave the session knowing how to write a machine learning algorithm in Python or R, you'll be provided with the tools to know when you'll need to write one and, most importantly, when you should try something else.\n\nBring all of the questions or tales of machine learning you have. I want this to be more of a discussion than a lecture.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "35", - "leader": "Steven Rich", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", - "time": "11am-noon", - "title": "Machine Learning: How Useful Is it for Journalism?", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015MachineLearning" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Ignoring anything related to ads is a point of pride for a lot of newsroom developers. But there’s a major shift coming in how ads are sold, served, and measured, and it has huge implications for how news websites will be designed and built. If you work on a site that has ads, you should be getting ready for viewability.\n\nMost ads are sold at a price per thousand impressions, and traditionally impressions are counted as soon as the ad is inserted into the page. But the “viewable impression” is counted only after the ad enters the browser’s viewport. For some sites, this means that HALF of all ads served might never be seen by a reader or paid for by an advertiser.\n\nThis session will provide an overview of online advertising in general, and ad viewability in particular. I'll cover the technologies used to measure viewability and how it might impact the design and development of news sites. Finally, I’ll provide some ideas for how newsroom developers can adapt to viewability, use it to their advantage, and even borrow some concepts to improve the news apps you develop.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "36", - "leader": "Josh Kadis", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", - "time": "11am-noon", - "title": "Ad Viewability Is Coming and You Should Care", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015AdViewability" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Want to get your work-in-progress product in front of prospective users but don’t know where to start? Unsure how to get your team comfortable with sharing work before it’s ready to ship? Talking to users can help generate product purposes, validate hunches, and challenge assumptions. User experience researchers from The New York Times will discuss how to foster a culture of soliciting internal and external user feedback. Whether you’re looking to get a few newsroom producers to chime in or want to test with hundreds of people you’ve never met, this conversation about research methods and promoted practices will help you get underway.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "37", - "leader": "Emily Goligoski, Maura Youngman", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Heritage", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", - "time": "11am-noon", - "title": "Designing Collaborative User Research for News Organizations", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "What's MySQL hiding? Is PostgreSQL ready to lead your news app? Just how is SQLServer using your precious resources? Just because your SQL is similar across platforms doesn't mean they work the same under the hood. We'll look deep inside and see how different database platforms work at a granular level, and we'll also show hilarious negative ads about databases.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "38", - "leader": "Michael Corey, Jennifer LaFleur", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Minnesota", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", - "time": "11am-noon", - "title": "Wrong on INFILE, Wrong for America: What Do You Really Know about Your Database Software?", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015DatabaseDifferences" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Like the outdoors? Aerial photography? Documenting illegal deforestation in central America or mapping relief efforts after a natural disaster? Maybe kite mapping is for you. Sure, all the cool kids are using drones. But when journalists get arrested for trespassing when they are using their shiny + easy to spot drone to film correctional facilities, their colleague flying a kite is less likely to be stopped (what, I'm just flying my kite?). Let's make a kite and go for a walk around a Minneapolis lake or two. (Note: this requires some wind. But fear not, if there is no wind the backup plan is to do (helium) ballon mapping instead. Still cheaper than a drone). After kite-flying we'll have a look at the photos, stitch them together, contribute it Open Street Map and talk about some cool kite mapping projects.\n", - "everyone": "", - "id": "39", - "leader": "Linda Sandvik", - "length": "2.5 hours", - "room": "Memorial", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", - "time": "11am-1:30pm", - "title": "Kite Mapping for Fun and Profit!", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "If your news organization was a Disney movie what would it be? What happens when you mix equal parts dreamer, realist and critic into a news organization? We know Walt Disney as the man who brought us Mickey Mouse and the Magic Kingdom, but before that he was a high school drop-out who bankrupted his own business. His three room approach to brainstorming took the most fantastical ideas, and developed them into something timeless. How can we bring that approach to the newsroom? How can we encourage our teams to think like Disney dreamers who bring big ideas to life?", - "everyone": "", - "id": "40", - "leader": "Ramla Mahmood, Kyle Ellis", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Johnson", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-2", - "time": "12:30-1:30pm", - "title": "Brainstorming: The Happiest (and Most Destructive) Place on Earth", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "We gave a couple of people in the Quartz newsroom training in Adobe Illustrator and our graphics style guide and set them loose to make their own graphics. At The Wall Street Journal, reporters regularly make their own online charts with Web-based tools and Excel macros. Let's talk about how terrifying that is and what there is to keep them making great work.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "41", - "leader": "David Yanofsky, Becky Bowers", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-2", - "time": "12:30-1:30pm", - "title": "Let's Stop Worrying and Let Our Reporters Make Their Own Graphics", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015ReporterGraphics" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Version control systems are indispensible for engineering teams, but often afterthoughts in the tools used by writers and editors. The patterns for version control we employ today, invented for specific software development cases that don’t always fit our needs, often force us to shape our tools and practices in ways we might not realize. Let’s change that.\n\nIf we were to start from scratch, how might we design the kinds of version control systems that empower writers and news developers? How can we explain and facilitate powerful and complex version paradigms like branching and merging in the context of a reported article? How might we expose that process to our readers?\n\nLet’s explore some of the implementations of existing version control structures—resilient storage, atomicity, concurrency—and try to conceive of new ways to look at, modify, and understand our content and news applications.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "42", - "leader": "David Yee, Blaine Cook", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-2", - "time": "12:30-1:30pm", - "title": "Merge Branch: Imagining New Version-Control Systems for Writers and Editors", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015WritersVersionControl" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Mobile is growing exponentially and mantras like \"mobile first\" and \"no native app\" are making us all look silly. Mobile is eating everything and if we don't give this Pacman of eyeballs the respect it deserves we are all doomed. What works for you might fail for someone else. We'll talk about how you find what's right for you from technology to content and really huge to just right. We'll present some mobile research and show how they apply and don't apply to media. We'll talk about building mobile teams and when to stop saying \"mobile\" and just accept it's everything. And all of this will happen through an interactive game.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "43", - "leader": "Joey Marburger, Dave Stanton", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Heritage", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-2", - "time": "12:30-1:30pm", - "title": "Mobile: The Gathering (Finding the Mobile Strategy That Works for You)", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Many media organizations have had giant, monolithic software and IT projects that stretched on for years. Some were somewhat successful; many were written off. Some are still ongoing.\n\nSome organizations have used these failures to their advantage, leveraging them to create new teams within the newsroom, avoid existing IT structures, merge print and web operations, and the like. These projects and the challenges they face are not unique to media organizations. It turns out, the federal government is loaded with hobbled projects. In government, the failure that acted as the catalyst was healthcare.gov. After, the White House launched a new U.S. Digital Service and recruited some of the country's top digital minds to serve, to help transform government services.\n\nIt turns out, many of the problems we've all seen affecting large media organizations also affect large government agencies. As government has seen the same failures play out in dozens of projects, it means we're gaining a lot of experience in building effective digital services for citizens and federal employees. (Media organizations also need to build effective services for two constituencies -- its staff and its readers. ) For existing projects, we're getting really good at working through a series of plays to rescue them, and set teams and projects back on track.\n\nThis session will present what's been learned from the first year of the U.S. Digital Service, and how these lessons can be applied to building effective digital tools for writers and readers alike. We can discuss struggling projects at media organizations (you know, hypothetical struggling projects) and dream up how they might be rescued.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "44", - "leader": "Andrew Nacin, Adam Schweigert", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Minnesota", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-2", - "time": "12:30-1:30pm", - "title": "Bringing Modern Development Processes to Monolithic Projects", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015ModernizingProjects" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "In this community dialogue session, attendees will have the opportunity to learn about existing legal resources that are available to independent journalists and nonprofit or startup new organizations free of charge, to ask questions of First Amendment and media law attorneys, and to communicate their biggest needs when it comes to legal support.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "45", - "leader": "Katie Townsend", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Gateway", - "scheduleblock": "friday-am-2", - "time": "12:30-1:30pm", - "title": "Legal Resources for a Changing Media Environment", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Most of what we do is make things for the web, but how we actually do it can vary greatly. Choosing tools and methods can be complex decisions, especially in the hip, constantly-changing front-end space. Let's rap about the tools we use, or don't use, or just thought about using, and all the things that go into those decisions. Beginner or advanced, you will have something to share and will definitely learn a thing or two.\n\nSome potential sub-topics could be CSS processing (LESS/SASS), Javascript frameworks (Backbone/Angular/Ractive), icons (SVG/Font-icons), interface frameworks (Bootsrap/Foundation), dependency management (Require/Browserify), building (Gulp/Grunt), and so much more.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "46", - "leader": "Alan Palazzolo, Justin Heideman", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "scheduleblock": "friday-lunch", - "time": "2-2:45pm", - "title": "What (Front-End) Tools Do You Use?", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015FrontEndTools" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Working in news carries a toll, with the stress of short deadlines, breaking news and shifting priorities (among other things). Work-life balance is a great thing to advocate but is much harder to put into practice. And over time, we (as individuals and as teams) experience career highs, lows and plateaus. How do we dig ourselves out of ruts and prevent stagnation? Let’s discuss how we face these challenges and how we take care of ourselves, our careers and each other. Please join us and bring your own tips and approaches.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "47", - "leader": "Alyson Hurt, Tiff Fehr", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Johnson", - "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", - "time": "3-4pm", - "title": "Surviving the News Business: Self-Care and Overcoming Burnout", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Messaging is the New Browser: Telling stories and building audience one sentence at a time", - "everyone": "", - "id": "48", - "leader": "Yvonne Leow, Michael Morisy", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", - "time": "3-4pm", - "title": "Messaging is the New\nBrowser: Telling Stories and Building Audience One Sentence at a Time", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015Messaging" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "As we consider revenue streams to support good journalism, data may be one of those that gives us the resources and the independence we need. Let’s talk about how to best monetize data responsibly, ethically and without sacrificing journalistic standards. We’ll compile and prioritize a list of the most valuable local datasets a small to metro-sized newsroom could collect and define what we mean by “valuable” in the process. Drawing on our list to ground us, we’ll talk about where the lines might be when it comes to whether or not we charge for the data, what liabilities we might take on by selling data, when and how the idea of practical obscurity should play a part in our decisions and how we might handle redacted data, as well as best practices for securing the data we store. ", - "everyone": "", - "id": "49", - "leader": "AmyJo Brown, Ryann Grochowski Jones", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", - "time": "3-4pm", - "title": "How Can We Best Monetize Data—And Do So Responsibly, Ethically and Without Sacrificing Journalistic Standards?", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015MonetizeData" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Small development teams, particularly in startups with lean budgets, cannot afford to waste time and resources on failed experiments. How can you make every experiment a success? Frame every\nexperiment as an answer to a question.\n\nAt Pop Up Archive we make simple tools to manage sound. We had several questions related to the future business model of our company and what kind of audio product(s) we should be investing our time in creating. Hypothesis-driven development helped us identify what we wanted to know, and then helped us define and measure our experiments as a way of answering our own questions.\n\nCome spend some time talking and listening about experimentation, data-driven decision-making and innovation. We'll talk tools, process and strategy using Audiosear.ch (our experiment) as a case study.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "50", - "leader": "Anne Wootton, Peter Karman", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Minnesota", - "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", - "time": "3-4pm", - "title": "Data Driving Decision-making: What We Learned from Audiosear.ch", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015DataDrivenDecisions" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Let’s brainstorm some best practices for building better interactives. How can we make data viz more mobile-friendly? How can we make it more accessible for assistive technologies? Let’s go beyond our standard desktop designs and think about ways to create engaging, data-driven experiences for all. We’ll present some ideas to get us started – and we want to hear from you about your favorite creative and effective ways to design news apps and graphics for a broader audience. By the end of the session, we’ll compile everyone’s ideas into a living document for future reference.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "51", - "leader": "Aaron Williams, Julia Smith, Youyou Zhou", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Heritage", - "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", - "time": "3-4pm", - "title": "Data Viz for All: Help Us Make Interactives More Usable for Mobile", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "How newsrooms conceive of and measure the impact of their work is a messy, idiosyncratic, and often rigorous process. Based at times on what simply seems worth remembering during the life of a story or, at others, on strict guidelines of what passes the \"impact bar.\" Over the past two years, we conceived of and constructed NewsLynx (http://newslynx.org) to address two needs: first, as an attempt to understand how and through what processes news organizations large and small are currently approaching the \"impact problem\" and second, if we could develop a better way — through building an open-source platform— to help those newsrooms capture the qualitative and quantitive impact of their work.\n\nComing two weeks after the official public release of NewsLynx, this session will serve as the first opportunity for journalists, editors, and open-source hackers to work with the project's creators to install, configure, and extend the platform in their newsroom. We'll discuss the successes and failures we encountered throughout our beta test with six non-profit newsrooms and brainstorm potential means of extending the platform moving forward. If all goes well, we'll help technically-inclinded audience members actually deploy an instance of NewsLynx.\n\nIf you're interested in getting NewsLynx installed on your local machine, please have Vagrant and Ansible installed. Alternatively, if you don't want to run NewsLynx in a VM, have Redis, Postgres 9.3, Python 2.7.6, Node, NPM, and Git already installed. If you'd like to deploy NewsLynx in the cloud, please come with AWS credentials. People interested in Twitter, Facebook, and/or Google Analytics integrations should already have applications registered for these services and have their access tokens handy (see http://dev.twitter.com/, http://developers.facebook.com, and https://developers.google.com/, respectively). If you just want to learn about the platform, come with ideas on how to measure impact and examples of the tools and processes you're currently using in your Newsroom.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "52", - "leader": "Brian Abelson, Michael Keller", - "length": "2.5 hours", - "room": "Gateway", - "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", - "time": "3-5:30pm", - "title": "Modular Analytics for Your Newsroom with NewsLynx.", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Attending conferences with a like-minded community is inspiring, motivating and affirming. We go home full of ideas and energy and hope. Then our day-to-day life creeps back in and it gets hard to move those new ideas forward, becomes tricky to make space for learning the new skills we want, and we can feel isolated from the community we build here. If you can’t attend a conference at all, you can feel all of the above times two. \n\nAfter the conferences, how do we keep that inspiration and how do we stay accountable? For those who don’t have access to conferences or events, how can we make our community — and the inspiration we share — accessible all of the time? What are the obstacles that prevent us from making things happen? How might we build each other and our community up in the day to day, the quiet interludes between the big tent revivals?\n\nDuring this session we’ll work together to identify major obstacles that prevent follow through, and small groups will brainstorm ways to address those obstacles. We’ll leave with a clear sense of how we can collaborate with, contribute to and build our community outside of a conference bubble.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "53", - "leader": "Kaeti Hinck, Millie Tran", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-2", - "time": "4:30-5:30pm", - "title": "After the Altar Call: Maintaining Momentum, Community, and Inspiration Beyond Conferences", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015AltarCall" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Let's talk about archives! An organization that's been making news for a while has a lot of cool stuff in the attic. How can we add context and enticing entry points to turn that raw material into a resource for our readers? What approaches has your organization tried? What off-the-wall ideas would you like to try?\n\nThese questions are also relevant to the journalism we're producing now. Whether you're stretching the limits of the CMS or telling stories on platforms unlikely to exist a decade from now, how might you keep the archives of the future in mind? How do you balance the goals of preserving the content and preserving the material experience? How many Snapchat stories fit on a roll of microfilm? Let's find out, together.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "54", - "leader": "Daniel McLaughlin", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Minnesota", - "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-2", - "time": "4:30-5:30pm", - "title": "The Past of the Future, Today", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015WebArchiving" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "It's been 10 years since chicagocrime.org launched. In the decade since then, coders have joined the ranks of newsrooms large and small, doing jobs that didn’t exist until recently. We now have many tribes of news nerds who use code to tell journalistic stories. We want to take a step back and see how large our community has grown and to ask some questions. Who are we? What jobs do we have? How are our teams built? What problems are we trying to solve? What are the ingredients of a successful team? In tandem with OpenNews, the Online News Association and others, we’re planning the first complete survey of the coder-journalist community. The plan is to find and survey the people who code, crunch data, design interactive tools, present journalism, or manage people who do these things, in and around newsrooms. The process has just begun. We don’t even know the best questions to ask -- and that’s where SRCCON comes in. What do you need to know about our community? How can a survey help support and grow our community? It's been a decade since our little community got started. Let's find out who we are.", - "everyone": "", - "id": "55", - "leader": "Brian Hamman, Scott Klein", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Memorial", - "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-2", - "time": "4:30-5:30pm", - "title": "Journo-Nerd Survey: Help Us Ask Good Questions", - "transcription": "SRCCON2015Survey" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "", - "everyone": "", - "id": "56", - "leader": "", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Minnesota", - "scheduleblock": "friday-lunch", - "time": "2-2:45pm", - "title": "How Can Traditional, Non-Technically Trained Journalists Move into This Space?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "", - "everyone": "", - "id": "57", - "leader": "", - "length": "1 hour", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "scheduleblock": "friday-lunch", - "time": "2-2:45pm", - "title": "Chart-Making Beyond the Graphics Desk", - "transcription": "" - } -] \ No newline at end of file + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Get your badges and get some food (plus plenty of coffee), as you gear up for the first day of SRCCON!", + "everyone": "1", + "id": "1", + "leader": "", + "length": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-morning", + "time": "9-10am", + "title": "Registration & Breakfast", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Let's kick SRCCON off right, with a welcome, some scene-setting, and a little getting-to-know-you. No songs or trust falls, we promise.", + "everyone": "1", + "id": "2", + "leader": "", + "length": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-morning", + "time": "10-10:30am", + "title": "Welcome to SRCCON", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "", + "everyone": "1", + "id": "3", + "leader": "", + "length": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-lunch", + "time": "1:30-3pm", + "title": "Lunch at SRCCON", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "", + "everyone": "1", + "id": "4", + "leader": "", + "length": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-evening", + "time": "5:30-7pm", + "title": "Dinner at SRCCON", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "It's the SRCCON House Party! We'll have several rooms with different themes and activities:\n\n### Game Room\n* **When:** all evening\n* **Where:** Memorial\n* **Facilitators:** Tiff Fehr, Joe Germuska, Sisi Wei\n\nBoard games, card games, story games--we'll have plenty to choose from. Bring your own to share and play.\n\n### Lightning Talks\n* **When:** 7-8pm\n* **Where:** Johnson\n* **Facilitators:** Kaeti Hinck, Alan Palazzolo\n\nListen to people talk about their projects and passions in five-minute bites.\n\n### Evening Walk\n* **When:** 7-8pm\n* **Where:** Meet up near the stage in Memorial, then head outside\n* **Facilitator:** Will Lager\n\nGet outdoors for some fresh air and a guided walk along the river.\n\n### Hack Space and Demo Fair\n* **When:** 8-9pm\n* **Where:** Heritage\n* **Facilitator:** Justin Myers\n\nThis room will be open all evening for anyone who wants to talk about hacker/maker/craft projects. Have a new app that's ready to demo, or a neat project to show off? We'll have a SRCCON Show & Tell here starting at 8pm.\n\n### Book Share\n* **When:** 8-9pm\n* **Where:** Ski-U-Mah\n* **Facilitator:** Adam Schweigert\n\nCome talk about books that are important to you, professionally or personally. Bring a copy to give away, and take something new home with you.\n\n### Quiet Workspace\n* **When:** all evening\n* **Where:** Thomas Swain\n\nA place to check out if you need a break from the day's activities and conversations.", + "everyone": "1", + "id": "5", + "leader": "", + "length": "", + "room": "see event detail", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-evening", + "time": "7-9pm", + "title": "Evening sessions", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "", + "everyone": "1", + "id": "6", + "leader": "", + "length": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "scheduleblock": "friday-morning", + "time": "10-10:45am", + "title": "Breakfast", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "", + "everyone": "1", + "id": "7", + "leader": "", + "length": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "scheduleblock": "friday-lunch", + "time": "1:30-3pm", + "title": "Lunch at SRCCON", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "This is it. We promise no group sing-along, but we don't promise not to shed a tear or two (probably because we'll be really tired). Help us close out SRCCON and set the stage for what happens next.", + "everyone": "1", + "id": "8", + "leader": "", + "length": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "scheduleblock": "friday-evening", + "time": "5:30-6pm", + "title": "Closing", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Design's user-centric orientation places the needs and expectations of users at the center of the designer's decision-making process. Journalism’s objectivity ethos has journalists striving to report on facts (and not their personal attitude toward facts), with fairness and accuracy. \n\nWith newsrooms embracing new skill sets and welcoming more collaboration between people with a variety of professional backgrounds, different practices and traditions collide. Where is the line between designing for an audience and pandering to that audience? \n\nIn this session we explore user-centered design’s fit in the newsroom and the processes of reporting, and how characterizing the audience for a story shapes decisions about what, how when and where a story is told.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "9", + "leader": "Livia Labate, Joe Germuska", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Johnson", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", + "time": "11am-noon", + "title": "Journalistic Objectivity & User-Centered Design", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Collaborating with team members based out of another office, bureau, city or even country is really hard. At its very worst, you can feel slow, frustrated, and disconnected. At its best, you will feel flexible, motivated, and energized. \n\nIn this session, you’ll be moving around the room as we organize you into groups depending on your communication style, role type (designer, developer, manager, newsgatherer, project manager), or organization structure. You’ll learn from those like you, and how to communicate with those unlike you. \n\nYou should walk out of this session with a good sense of what tools other companies are using, what type of collaboration works best for your role, and what communication style works best for you. ", + "everyone": "", + "id": "10", + "leader": "Stephanie Yiu, Davis Shaver", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", + "time": "11am-noon", + "title": "Figuring It Out: Remote Communication", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015RemoteComm" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Let's build an inclusive dictionary of all the language and terms that create a safe and encouraging environment for a diverse group of people in and out of the newsroom. Some topics include: how to think about gender pronouns, what language to include in a job posting to encourage diverse applicants, how to build inclusive narratives, and what a checklist would look like to ensure representative and relevant perspectives on and in stories.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "11", + "leader": "Lena Groeger, Aurelia Moser", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", + "time": "11am-noon", + "title": "A Newsroom Nadsat: How to Build Better Newsrooms with Better Language", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015NewsroomNadsat" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "It doesn’t matter how clever your open source code is if nobody can figure out how to use it. Good documentation is essential for drawing in users, fostering contributions, and encouraging use by less technical audiences.\n\nIn this session, we'll discuss our experiences as both readers and writers of documentation, and work towards a tactical playbook for writing more effective docs. We’ll also break out the red pens for close readings of documentation from some existing popular open source libraries. Bring examples of docs you love, docs you hate, and docs you want to see in the world.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "12", + "leader": "Noah Veltman, Cathy Deng", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Heritage", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", + "time": "11am-noon", + "title": "Better Living Through Documentation", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "One of the most difficult challenges for learning programmers is being able to go beyond basic lessons to building \"the next Facebook\", or even just applying programming to your work projects. The secret is that programming can be practiced -- and used -- on everyday, somewhat \"mundane\" computational tasks. When you learn how to program to do things that are helpful to you, you not only become a better programmer, but you gain insight on how programming fits into the bigger projects you hope to build.\n\nThis session will involve both discussion of everyday programming and demonstrations of creating and refining \"mundane\" programming scripts, with the goal of brainstorming ideas and use cases to expand the scope of problems we can use programming to solve.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "13", + "leader": "Daniel Nguyen, Geoff Hing", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Minnesota", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", + "time": "11am-noon", + "title": "Become a Better Programmer Through Mundane Programming", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015BetterProgramming" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "A lot of tools are built off the Github API. Some are great. Some are funny. One of them is a bot that accepts pull requests to it's own code, based on the number of upvotes the pull request gets in the first half hour. Sort of like a semi-sentient, crowd-pleasing roomba.\n\nI'd like to share some of the things I've worked on that use the Github API (prose.io), and I'd love to hear what others have to add. Together, we can learn a little more about the site that many of us use everyday, and maybe come up with a better, more sentient roomba.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "14", + "leader": "Derek Lieu", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Gateway", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-1", + "time": "11am-noon", + "title": "We All Have Issues: Sharing Projects Built on GitHub's API", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Today comments are the most common form of community on news sites, but is that all there is? Comment sections are usually just an afterthought and perceived only as an obligation - in this session we'll explore the unrealized value of comments and other forms user-generated content can take. We'll talk about our learnings thus far from the Coral Project, including the challenges news orgs currently face in creating successful digital communities and some existing solutions from journalism and ~beyond~.\n\nTogether we'll come up with our ideal online communities and think about concrete ways in which we can integrate these ideas into newsrooms' approaches to content co-creation. If you were building a news community from scratch, where would you start? What are the ways your audience would contribute or express themselves? How would you encourage inclusive and vibrant conversations? What limits would you set, if any?", + "everyone": "", + "id": "15", + "leader": "Francis Tseng, Tara Adiseshan", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Johnson", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", + "time": "12:30-1:30pm", + "title": "Designing Digital Communities for News", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Many good ideas come out of journalists who are enthusiastic about their beats and the opportunity to capture large audiences. But there are lots of them, and only one or two of us. So how do you say no to good ideas, while keeping those good ideas flowing? How do you tell senior editors that you don’t have the resources when they want Snowfall? How do you determine which of the good ideas has the most value journalistically, and/or most potential for audience, social sharing or revenue? Doing this poorly leads to missed opportunities, time wasted on projects with no legs or shelf life, journalistic flaws, poor execution because of overbooking your time or unrealistic expectations — and burnout from long hours, nights and weekends. Doing it well strengthens our journalism, builds audience and reputation, opens new revenue opportunities and leads to even more good ideas. Successes build on themselves; failures devalue our potential. We’ll also discuss best practices for getting it all done with a small team: prioritizing your own time, ways to make it easier, balancing admin work with coding and strategies to keep learning. ", + "everyone": "", + "id": "16", + "leader": "Rachel Schallom, Tyler Machado", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", + "time": "12:30-1:30pm", + "title": "Big Ambition, Small Staff, How the F*** Do I Prioritize?", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015SmallTeam" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Bring a computer with a web browser and/or command-line terminal to this session and learn how to use the Dat data version control tool in combination with the Flatsheet data editor application to version control, push, pull, diff and merge datasets.\n\nHere's what we will cover in the workshop:\n\n- Sending a data \"pull request\"\n- Merge data contributions from others\n- Set up data import pipelines to wrap legacy data sources/formats\n- Update local copies of data with new changes\n- Revert back to old versions of data\n- Compare two versions of a dataset\n\nWe will have some example datasets to use, but also feel free to bring your own raw data to try out as well. Part of the workshop will be on the command-line, and part will be in the Flatsheet web application. You will need to install both the Dat command line-tool and the Flatsheet application on your own computer, and you will be able to do this at the start of the workshop (it only takes a couple of minutes).\n\nSome basic command-line experience (Mac, Linux or Windows) is necessary to get the most out of this workshop.\n\nMore about Dat and Flatsheet:\n\nDat (https://dat-data.com/) is an open source version control and data sharing tool for data sets. It comes with a command line tool called 'dat' that lets you do things like 'dat pull', 'dat diff', 'dat merge' and 'dat push'. The goal of dat is to let you automate your data workflows so you can share and consume changes to datasets with others easily.\n\nDat is funded by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation and has a primary goal of being used by scientists to publish data for reproducible research and collaboration. It is currently in 'beta'.\n\nFlatsheet lets you edit data sets in realtime with your team. If you've used Google Spreadsheets with a library like Tabletop.js to create an ad-hoc mini-CMS, Flatsheet solves that problem more effectively, and is an open-source tool you can host on your own server. Flatsheet integrates with Dat, so you can use Dat to clone any sheet, edit locally, and push changes back to Flatsheet.\n\nFlatsheet recently received a grant from the Knight Prototype Fund, as well as a code sprint grant from OpenNews. You can see a work-in-progress example at https://data.seattle.io", + "everyone": "", + "id": "17", + "leader": "Maxwell Bridger Abraham Leonidas Herb Ogden, Seth Vincent", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", + "time": "12:30-1:30pm", + "title": "Fork and Merge Some Data with Dat and Flatsheet", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015DatFlatsheet" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "As we design data stories, most of us naturally lean toward visualization and graphic representation. But it doesn’t have to be this way: Take Radiolab’s use of a chorus to demonstrate the color vision of mantis shrimp, or the New York Time’s use of tonal blips to show the difference in finishing time between Olympic medalists. (Find these examples and more at https://listentodata.tumblr.com/.) Audio is a rich, intimate medium that can convey some ideas - like the passage of time - better than graphics and allows you to layer information in sophisticated ways. In this hands on session, we challenge you to think outside the data visualization box and tell a data story using sound as the primary medium. In small groups, we’ll prototype data audioizations using a real dataset. We’ll also discuss what tools, technologies, software and best practices newsrooms can use to incorporate data audioization - or sonification, we’re not sure what to call it yet - into their work.\n\nOptional: If you happen to have an instrument with you, please bring it.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "18", + "leader": "Jordan Wirfs-Brock, Lauren Benichou", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Heritage", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", + "time": "12:30-1:30pm", + "title": "Data Audioization: How Do We Bring Numbers to Life with Sound?", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "### Why your boss should let you spend time programming bots.\n\nSometimes the reasons we create our internal newsroom bots — delivering horoscopes, telling horrible knock-knock jokes — aren’t the kinds of reasons that organization leaders will readily appreciate. In this session, we’ll talk about the tricks we’ve taught our bots (or would like to teach our bots) that help our team (whether we’re developers, reporters, or otherwise) get actual journalistic work done — even if the bots’ work is never seen by readers.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "19", + "leader": "Tom Nehil, Justin Myers", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Minnesota", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", + "time": "12:30-1:30pm", + "title": "Post Hoc Justifications for Newsroom Chat Bots", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015ChatBots" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "We are not artists and drawing is scary. But visualizing and creating illustrations is one of the best ways to distill and focus a thought or story.\n\nIn the end, an ugly drawing that makes a point is a hundred times better than a crappy stock photo. And who knows, maybe one of your illustrations will get published some day. How great would that be?\n\nIn this session we can get out of our comfort zones and doodle our way through a story.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "20", + "leader": "Arjuna Soriano, Kavya Sukumar", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Memorial", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-am-2", + "time": "12:30-1:30pm", + "title": "Everyone Is an Illustrator: Making Your Own Art When None Exists", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Salary negotiations. Power structures at work. Fighting off impostor syndrome. Married name changes. Maternity leave. Fighting off sexism. We've all had to face these situations in our newsrooms -- and some of us are doing so while feeling alone. We want to foster focused conversations over lunch with an eye toward keeping the conversation and support network going after the conference. We'll set the topics based on interest the day of, and this session will not be recorded for transcription. ", + "everyone": "", + "id": "21", + "leader": "Emma Carew Grovum, Heather Billings", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-lunch", + "time": "2-2:45pm", + "title": "Realtalk for Women in Tech", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "How do we find and scale leadership networks for journalism and technology, particularly in the global context? As news organizations expand their footprints and their partnerships overseas, and as increasing numbers of newsroom workers (not just correspondents!) seek international opportunities, the communities we tap into will make or break our success. In this guided discussion, we'll discuss how to scale leadership across informal and grassroots groups, how to find and engage effective partners, and the right metrics for measuring the effectiveness of events and the participation of members. By brainstorming challenges faced by specific chapters and collectives, we'll gain insight into how the environment for journalism and technology changes drastically in different countries. We'll also create better frameworks for approaching those challenges.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "22", + "leader": "Anika Gupta, Gabriela Rodriguez", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Minnesota", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-lunch", + "time": "2-2:45pm", + "title": "Building Strong Journo-Tech Networks—Internationally", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015IntlNetworks" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "How can we build good products if our energy is spent tearing each other down? We all know that we value a “good team culture,” but we’re often vague about what that means or how to achieve it. But what if it’s as easy as setting out your team practices as a checklist, the same way you would for any other project? For instance, making sure that individual interactions between team members — even arguments — are approached in an “actively positive” manner? Or ensuring that every team member agrees and understands the grounds on which a proposed feature is judged? Thinking about “culture,” precisely and vigorously, comes in especially handy when your team needs to onboard junior members, or when there’s a on-the job learning happening (which is, let’s admit it, all the freaking time). \n\nUsing techniques and advice from an industry that is all about making communication and relationships healthier, we’ll work together in this interactive workshop to create better frameworks for how we give and receive feedback. Participants will leave with actionable strategies for how to make space for criticism on their teams, how to wrangle all the egos, and simple ways we can encourage and support each other as we build things every day.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "23", + "leader": "Amanda Krauss, Rebekah Monson, Liz Lucas", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Johnson", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "time": "3-4pm", + "title": "What Couples Counseling Can Teach Us About Strong Teams and Healthy Feedback", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Accessibility is often on our minds as we build products for the web – but what’s the best way to approach it? Often our efforts focus on a disability or impairment we are trying to accommodate. We can approach these challenges progressively – letting the capabilities of the hardware and software accessing our content be our guide. Sometimes accessibility isn’t just a nice-to-have – it’s required by law. When's the last time you tried navigating your site with just a keyboard? At 200% zoom? With a Wiimote? As Anne Gibson says in her A List Apart piece \"Reframing Accessibility on the Web,\" accessibility should not be just about determining \"your audience and building to their needs\" – accessibility should be a \"trait of the website itself,” an extension of the user experience. We'll chat about how we approach accessibility, share our mutual experiences, touch on common misconceptions and look into techniques to encourage mindfulness as we plan and build our projects going forward.\n\nIf you have a copy of your current accessibility guidelines, or anything that documents your newsroom’s process, please bring them with you!", + "everyone": "", + "id": "24", + "leader": "Ryan Murphy", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "time": "3-4pm", + "title": "Taking Web Accessibility Beyond Assumptions", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015WebAccessbility" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Any large investigative project or feature is going to generate a wealth of reporting that most users never see. We all have interviews, notes, research and data that inform the stories we tell but get thrown away after a story is finished. This session will focus on open notebook reporting and structured journalism, looking at ways we can better use and share more of what we collect in our reporting, without killing ourselves trying to get it online. We'll talk about tools, practices and culture.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "25", + "leader": "Chris Amico", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "time": "3-4pm", + "title": "Every Part of the Pig: How Can We Make Better Use of Reporting in Long Investigations?", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015StructuredReporting" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "How can we open source the processes it takes to put together events—big and small, from conferences to hackathons and meetups—that serve and challenge our communities? What parts can we play as attendees in making conferences and other events more useful, inclusive, and awesome? We'll talk about planning and program design, outreach and accessibility, pitching talks and being a great participant, and lots more. Bring your questions, solutions, problems, and hopes.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "26", + "leader": "Erin Kissane, Erik Westra", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Gateway", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "time": "3-4pm", + "title": "Building Better Events, as Organizers and Participants", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Learn what it really means to play Dungeons & Dragons — and how the creative concepts behind roleplaying games are especially applicable to teaching journalism. After playing some (adapted version of) D&D, we'll discuss examples of how others have used roleplaying to teach, which lessons lend themselves to roleplaying, and finally, create as a group a lesson plan for making your next class an adventure. \n\nThe unamended title of this session pitch is: The Dungeon Master's Guide to Teaching Journalism, 3rd Edition, Revised (v3.5)", + "everyone": "", + "id": "27", + "leader": "Sisi Wei, Eric Sagara", + "length": "90 minutes\n", + "room": "Heritage", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "time": "3-4:30pm", + "title": "The Dungeon Master's Guide to Teaching Journalism", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Last November, The New York Times challenged news sites to fully support HTTPS in 2015. What does it mean to meet that challenge?\n\nThis session will discuss the problems we encountered moving to HTTPS (and how we solved them). We'll then give you hands-on help with anything you need: server configuration, certificates, mixed-content warnings, CDNs — even ads, analytics and A/B tests.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "28", + "leader": "Paul Schreiber, Mike Tigas", + "length": "90 minutes", + "room": "Minnesota", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "time": "3-4:30pm", + "title": "Meeting The New York Times Challenge: Delivering the News Over HTTPS", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015NewsOverHTTPS" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "The workflow system of getting text, photos and static graphics into the printed editions of newspapers has evolved over literally 100+ years and it is now a very, very refined process in every newsroom we’ve been in. Putting those same items on digital has essentially just been tagged onto the end of that process. But in many newsrooms this workflow doesn't work well for digital-only work, particularly when it involves data. We’d like this session to be a work-group format with a goal to create the ideal workflow -- from idea germination to publication. This should include best practices for communication flows, deadlines, how/when items will be edited (for usability, clarity, style, grammar, spelling, etc), process for creating/sharing/discussing mockups, first drafts, etc. A very key piece should be who should be included in the process and when (and by “who” we want to identify skillsets, rather than specific job titles). We’d like to split into three groups, each working on their own proposed workflows to address three different scenarios: 1) a digital product that accompanies an enterprise story that is weeks or months in the making, 2) a digital product that needs to be done quickly (either daily or short-term), either with or without a story and 3) a stand-alone digital-only product, such as a news app or tool which does not heavily feature a text component. At the end of the session, we’ll combine the three groups to discuss implementation. We want to come up with an ideal workflow that can be used by newsrooms as a goal to achieve, since each newsroom will likely have its own unique problems to resolve before achieving it.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "29", + "leader": "MaryJo Webster, C.J. Sinner", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Johnson", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "time": "4:30-5:30pm", + "title": "Let's Create an Ideal Digital Workflow", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "We all have to work together in the end, but the hiring process can get that relationship off to an awkward start. Employers may feel unable to find the best applicants, while applicants often find themselves frustrated by a completely opaque process. Throw in unconscious bias, an emphasis on the elusive \"fit,\" and negotiations about pay and it's no wonder both employers and applicants come into this process with a lot of anxiety. In this session, we'll share our experiences about the roles we've all played in this process: whether it be helping craft job postings, recruitment, hiring, or applying for jobs. We'll discuss strategies for improving hiring and craft some suggestions to bring to a discussion at ONA.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "30", + "leader": "Erika Owens, Helga Salinas, Ted Han", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "time": "4:30-5:30pm", + "title": "Recruiting and Hiring People Not Wishlists", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015Hiring" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Interested in using maps to identify food deserts, compare neighborhood distances to voting polls, or calculate the population within a flood zone? Are you guilty of creating overlapping geographic layers to show correlations?\n\nWhile many newsrooms use maps to visualize geographic information — everything from election results to wildfires — a few simple techniques can make those maps more informed and insightful.\n\nWe’ll show you how to interview geographic data using network analysis and discuss a few common concepts (buffers, spatial joins, distances, etc). We’ll talk about how specific stories have analyzed geodata using a combination of free tools such as QGIS, turf.js, and leaflet.js. Afterward, we’ll open the floor for you to share your own experiences and questions. If you have your own favorite techniques or tools, give them a shout out!\n\nThis session is for beginner and intermediate data journalists who have used maps in their reporting, or for anyone who wants to go beyond simple geographic visualizations.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "31", + "leader": "Gerald Rich, Jue Yang", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "time": "4:30-5:30pm", + "title": "Interviewing the Map: Simple Analysis for Web Maps", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015InterviewingMap" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Whether you’re deploying a static app or an app with a half-dozen databases, you’re making infrastructure choices about where those HTTPS requests go. How do you weigh the tradeoffs around static file hosting, app servers, database servers and all the other pieces we juffle? Does your app emit the best cache control headers? When should a feature be static, when not? How many databases should you be allowed to put in production? How do you monitor all of this stuff (both performance and errors)? When should you integrate with another service, when should you build it yourself? And now that you have all these internal services, how do you coordinate them? How can small ambitious teams be efficient and effective over time?\n\nI built The Marshall Project’s website. Many of us build apps like this, whether it’s a news app, a CMS, or a plugin for an existing system. Let’s enumerate the choices we make when we build things and explore their tradeoffs by sharing war stories. At the end, we’ll come away with a framework for asking the right questions when building your next app.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "32", + "leader": "Ivar Vong", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Gateway", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "time": "4:30-5:30pm", + "title": "War stories: How Do We Build and Deploy All This Code?", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Swipe left. Tap here. Shake. Is there way we can harness mobile interactions to encourage engagement and community around news? We'll provide inspiring challenges and give you the materials for a big-think paper prototype session. What you make will inform the work of The Coral Project, a Mozilla/NYT/WaPo collaboration to build open source tools around community and comments.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "33", + "leader": "Andrew Losowsky, Greg Barber", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Memorial", + "scheduleblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "time": "4:30-5:30pm", + "title": "A Community on Mobile: Paper Prototyping with the Coral Project", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Sometimes, the thing a beginner needs to grasp a concept is a simple analog. For instance, I taught a class in data visualization and one of the early classes was using LEGO to visualize data. There are all sorts of code concepts and data concepts that students -- from university courses to workshops -- struggle to grasp. What if we came up with a list of goofy, hands on ways to teach concepts that others could steal. How could you teach loops by making people run around a room? Or filtering? Or basic algorithms? Or visualization concepts? By making new concepts memorable for beginners, we stand a much better chance of spreading knowledge. Come throw out your ideas.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "34", + "leader": "Matt Waite", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Johnson", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", + "time": "11am-noon", + "title": "Let's Act Out Code Concepts to Help Teach Them", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Machine learning is suddenly the new, hip thing in data journalism. But like every tool in a toolbox, it has some uses but is not a go-to tool in every situation. This session will look at how some journalists have used machine learning and in what situations it's best and in what situations it should be avoided. We'll look at stories that have used machine learning in some capacity including one on watered down audits and another on the leaked Sony emails. While you won't leave the session knowing how to write a machine learning algorithm in Python or R, you'll be provided with the tools to know when you'll need to write one and, most importantly, when you should try something else.\n\nBring all of the questions or tales of machine learning you have. I want this to be more of a discussion than a lecture.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "35", + "leader": "Steven Rich", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", + "time": "11am-noon", + "title": "Machine Learning: How Useful Is it for Journalism?", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015MachineLearning" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Ignoring anything related to ads is a point of pride for a lot of newsroom developers. But there’s a major shift coming in how ads are sold, served, and measured, and it has huge implications for how news websites will be designed and built. If you work on a site that has ads, you should be getting ready for viewability.\n\nMost ads are sold at a price per thousand impressions, and traditionally impressions are counted as soon as the ad is inserted into the page. But the “viewable impression” is counted only after the ad enters the browser’s viewport. For some sites, this means that HALF of all ads served might never be seen by a reader or paid for by an advertiser.\n\nThis session will provide an overview of online advertising in general, and ad viewability in particular. I'll cover the technologies used to measure viewability and how it might impact the design and development of news sites. Finally, I’ll provide some ideas for how newsroom developers can adapt to viewability, use it to their advantage, and even borrow some concepts to improve the news apps you develop.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "36", + "leader": "Josh Kadis", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", + "time": "11am-noon", + "title": "Ad Viewability Is Coming and You Should Care", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015AdViewability" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Want to get your work-in-progress product in front of prospective users but don’t know where to start? Unsure how to get your team comfortable with sharing work before it’s ready to ship? Talking to users can help generate product purposes, validate hunches, and challenge assumptions. User experience researchers from The New York Times will discuss how to foster a culture of soliciting internal and external user feedback. Whether you’re looking to get a few newsroom producers to chime in or want to test with hundreds of people you’ve never met, this conversation about research methods and promoted practices will help you get underway.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "37", + "leader": "Emily Goligoski, Maura Youngman", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Heritage", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", + "time": "11am-noon", + "title": "Designing Collaborative User Research for News Organizations", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "What's MySQL hiding? Is PostgreSQL ready to lead your news app? Just how is SQLServer using your precious resources? Just because your SQL is similar across platforms doesn't mean they work the same under the hood. We'll look deep inside and see how different database platforms work at a granular level, and we'll also show hilarious negative ads about databases.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "38", + "leader": "Michael Corey, Jennifer LaFleur", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Minnesota", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", + "time": "11am-noon", + "title": "Wrong on INFILE, Wrong for America: What Do You Really Know about Your Database Software?", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015DatabaseDifferences" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Like the outdoors? Aerial photography? Documenting illegal deforestation in central America or mapping relief efforts after a natural disaster? Maybe kite mapping is for you. Sure, all the cool kids are using drones. But when journalists get arrested for trespassing when they are using their shiny + easy to spot drone to film correctional facilities, their colleague flying a kite is less likely to be stopped (what, I'm just flying my kite?). Let's make a kite and go for a walk around a Minneapolis lake or two. (Note: this requires some wind. But fear not, if there is no wind the backup plan is to do (helium) ballon mapping instead. Still cheaper than a drone). After kite-flying we'll have a look at the photos, stitch them together, contribute it Open Street Map and talk about some cool kite mapping projects.\n", + "everyone": "", + "id": "39", + "leader": "Linda Sandvik", + "length": "2.5 hours", + "room": "Memorial", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-1", + "time": "11am-1:30pm", + "title": "Kite Mapping for Fun and Profit!", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "If your news organization was a Disney movie what would it be? What happens when you mix equal parts dreamer, realist and critic into a news organization? We know Walt Disney as the man who brought us Mickey Mouse and the Magic Kingdom, but before that he was a high school drop-out who bankrupted his own business. His three room approach to brainstorming took the most fantastical ideas, and developed them into something timeless. How can we bring that approach to the newsroom? How can we encourage our teams to think like Disney dreamers who bring big ideas to life?", + "everyone": "", + "id": "40", + "leader": "Ramla Mahmood, Kyle Ellis", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Johnson", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-2", + "time": "12:30-1:30pm", + "title": "Brainstorming: The Happiest (and Most Destructive) Place on Earth", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "We gave a couple of people in the Quartz newsroom training in Adobe Illustrator and our graphics style guide and set them loose to make their own graphics. At The Wall Street Journal, reporters regularly make their own online charts with Web-based tools and Excel macros. Let's talk about how terrifying that is and what there is to keep them making great work.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "41", + "leader": "David Yanofsky, Becky Bowers", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-2", + "time": "12:30-1:30pm", + "title": "Let's Stop Worrying and Let Our Reporters Make Their Own Graphics", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015ReporterGraphics" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Version control systems are indispensible for engineering teams, but often afterthoughts in the tools used by writers and editors. The patterns for version control we employ today, invented for specific software development cases that don’t always fit our needs, often force us to shape our tools and practices in ways we might not realize. Let’s change that.\n\nIf we were to start from scratch, how might we design the kinds of version control systems that empower writers and news developers? How can we explain and facilitate powerful and complex version paradigms like branching and merging in the context of a reported article? How might we expose that process to our readers?\n\nLet’s explore some of the implementations of existing version control structures—resilient storage, atomicity, concurrency—and try to conceive of new ways to look at, modify, and understand our content and news applications.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "42", + "leader": "David Yee, Blaine Cook", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-2", + "time": "12:30-1:30pm", + "title": "Merge Branch: Imagining New Version-Control Systems for Writers and Editors", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015WritersVersionControl" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Mobile is growing exponentially and mantras like \"mobile first\" and \"no native app\" are making us all look silly. Mobile is eating everything and if we don't give this Pacman of eyeballs the respect it deserves we are all doomed. What works for you might fail for someone else. We'll talk about how you find what's right for you from technology to content and really huge to just right. We'll present some mobile research and show how they apply and don't apply to media. We'll talk about building mobile teams and when to stop saying \"mobile\" and just accept it's everything. And all of this will happen through an interactive game.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "43", + "leader": "Joey Marburger, Dave Stanton", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Heritage", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-2", + "time": "12:30-1:30pm", + "title": "Mobile: The Gathering (Finding the Mobile Strategy That Works for You)", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Many media organizations have had giant, monolithic software and IT projects that stretched on for years. Some were somewhat successful; many were written off. Some are still ongoing.\n\nSome organizations have used these failures to their advantage, leveraging them to create new teams within the newsroom, avoid existing IT structures, merge print and web operations, and the like. These projects and the challenges they face are not unique to media organizations. It turns out, the federal government is loaded with hobbled projects. In government, the failure that acted as the catalyst was healthcare.gov. After, the White House launched a new U.S. Digital Service and recruited some of the country's top digital minds to serve, to help transform government services.\n\nIt turns out, many of the problems we've all seen affecting large media organizations also affect large government agencies. As government has seen the same failures play out in dozens of projects, it means we're gaining a lot of experience in building effective digital services for citizens and federal employees. (Media organizations also need to build effective services for two constituencies -- its staff and its readers. ) For existing projects, we're getting really good at working through a series of plays to rescue them, and set teams and projects back on track.\n\nThis session will present what's been learned from the first year of the U.S. Digital Service, and how these lessons can be applied to building effective digital tools for writers and readers alike. We can discuss struggling projects at media organizations (you know, hypothetical struggling projects) and dream up how they might be rescued.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "44", + "leader": "Andrew Nacin, Adam Schweigert", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Minnesota", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-2", + "time": "12:30-1:30pm", + "title": "Bringing Modern Development Processes to Monolithic Projects", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015ModernizingProjects" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "In this community dialogue session, attendees will have the opportunity to learn about existing legal resources that are available to independent journalists and nonprofit or startup new organizations free of charge, to ask questions of First Amendment and media law attorneys, and to communicate their biggest needs when it comes to legal support.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "45", + "leader": "Katie Townsend", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Gateway", + "scheduleblock": "friday-am-2", + "time": "12:30-1:30pm", + "title": "Legal Resources for a Changing Media Environment", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Most of what we do is make things for the web, but how we actually do it can vary greatly. Choosing tools and methods can be complex decisions, especially in the hip, constantly-changing front-end space. Let's rap about the tools we use, or don't use, or just thought about using, and all the things that go into those decisions. Beginner or advanced, you will have something to share and will definitely learn a thing or two.\n\nSome potential sub-topics could be CSS processing (LESS/SASS), Javascript frameworks (Backbone/Angular/Ractive), icons (SVG/Font-icons), interface frameworks (Bootsrap/Foundation), dependency management (Require/Browserify), building (Gulp/Grunt), and so much more.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "46", + "leader": "Alan Palazzolo, Justin Heideman", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "scheduleblock": "friday-lunch", + "time": "2-2:45pm", + "title": "What (Front-End) Tools Do You Use?", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015FrontEndTools" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Working in news carries a toll, with the stress of short deadlines, breaking news and shifting priorities (among other things). Work-life balance is a great thing to advocate but is much harder to put into practice. And over time, we (as individuals and as teams) experience career highs, lows and plateaus. How do we dig ourselves out of ruts and prevent stagnation? Let’s discuss how we face these challenges and how we take care of ourselves, our careers and each other. Please join us and bring your own tips and approaches.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "47", + "leader": "Alyson Hurt, Tiff Fehr", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Johnson", + "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", + "time": "3-4pm", + "title": "Surviving the News Business: Self-Care and Overcoming Burnout", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Messaging is the New Browser: Telling stories and building audience one sentence at a time", + "everyone": "", + "id": "48", + "leader": "Yvonne Leow, Michael Morisy", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", + "time": "3-4pm", + "title": "Messaging is the New\nBrowser: Telling Stories and Building Audience One Sentence at a Time", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015Messaging" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "As we consider revenue streams to support good journalism, data may be one of those that gives us the resources and the independence we need. Let’s talk about how to best monetize data responsibly, ethically and without sacrificing journalistic standards. We’ll compile and prioritize a list of the most valuable local datasets a small to metro-sized newsroom could collect and define what we mean by “valuable” in the process. Drawing on our list to ground us, we’ll talk about where the lines might be when it comes to whether or not we charge for the data, what liabilities we might take on by selling data, when and how the idea of practical obscurity should play a part in our decisions and how we might handle redacted data, as well as best practices for securing the data we store. ", + "everyone": "", + "id": "49", + "leader": "AmyJo Brown, Ryann Grochowski Jones", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", + "time": "3-4pm", + "title": "How Can We Best Monetize Data—And Do So Responsibly, Ethically and Without Sacrificing Journalistic Standards?", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015MonetizeData" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Small development teams, particularly in startups with lean budgets, cannot afford to waste time and resources on failed experiments. How can you make every experiment a success? Frame every\nexperiment as an answer to a question.\n\nAt Pop Up Archive we make simple tools to manage sound. We had several questions related to the future business model of our company and what kind of audio product(s) we should be investing our time in creating. Hypothesis-driven development helped us identify what we wanted to know, and then helped us define and measure our experiments as a way of answering our own questions.\n\nCome spend some time talking and listening about experimentation, data-driven decision-making and innovation. We'll talk tools, process and strategy using Audiosear.ch (our experiment) as a case study.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "50", + "leader": "Anne Wootton, Peter Karman", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Minnesota", + "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", + "time": "3-4pm", + "title": "Data Driving Decision-making: What We Learned from Audiosear.ch", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015DataDrivenDecisions" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Let’s brainstorm some best practices for building better interactives. How can we make data viz more mobile-friendly? How can we make it more accessible for assistive technologies? Let’s go beyond our standard desktop designs and think about ways to create engaging, data-driven experiences for all. We’ll present some ideas to get us started – and we want to hear from you about your favorite creative and effective ways to design news apps and graphics for a broader audience. By the end of the session, we’ll compile everyone’s ideas into a living document for future reference.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "51", + "leader": "Aaron Williams, Julia Smith, Youyou Zhou", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Heritage", + "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", + "time": "3-4pm", + "title": "Data Viz for All: Help Us Make Interactives More Usable for Mobile", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "How newsrooms conceive of and measure the impact of their work is a messy, idiosyncratic, and often rigorous process. Based at times on what simply seems worth remembering during the life of a story or, at others, on strict guidelines of what passes the \"impact bar.\" Over the past two years, we conceived of and constructed NewsLynx (https://newslynx.org) to address two needs: first, as an attempt to understand how and through what processes news organizations large and small are currently approaching the \"impact problem\" and second, if we could develop a better way — through building an open-source platform— to help those newsrooms capture the qualitative and quantitive impact of their work.\n\nComing two weeks after the official public release of NewsLynx, this session will serve as the first opportunity for journalists, editors, and open-source hackers to work with the project's creators to install, configure, and extend the platform in their newsroom. We'll discuss the successes and failures we encountered throughout our beta test with six non-profit newsrooms and brainstorm potential means of extending the platform moving forward. If all goes well, we'll help technically-inclinded audience members actually deploy an instance of NewsLynx.\n\nIf you're interested in getting NewsLynx installed on your local machine, please have Vagrant and Ansible installed. Alternatively, if you don't want to run NewsLynx in a VM, have Redis, Postgres 9.3, Python 2.7.6, Node, NPM, and Git already installed. If you'd like to deploy NewsLynx in the cloud, please come with AWS credentials. People interested in Twitter, Facebook, and/or Google Analytics integrations should already have applications registered for these services and have their access tokens handy (see https://dev.twitter.com/, https://developers.facebook.com, and https://developers.google.com/, respectively). If you just want to learn about the platform, come with ideas on how to measure impact and examples of the tools and processes you're currently using in your Newsroom.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "52", + "leader": "Brian Abelson, Michael Keller", + "length": "2.5 hours", + "room": "Gateway", + "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-1", + "time": "3-5:30pm", + "title": "Modular Analytics for Your Newsroom with NewsLynx.", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Attending conferences with a like-minded community is inspiring, motivating and affirming. We go home full of ideas and energy and hope. Then our day-to-day life creeps back in and it gets hard to move those new ideas forward, becomes tricky to make space for learning the new skills we want, and we can feel isolated from the community we build here. If you can’t attend a conference at all, you can feel all of the above times two. \n\nAfter the conferences, how do we keep that inspiration and how do we stay accountable? For those who don’t have access to conferences or events, how can we make our community — and the inspiration we share — accessible all of the time? What are the obstacles that prevent us from making things happen? How might we build each other and our community up in the day to day, the quiet interludes between the big tent revivals?\n\nDuring this session we’ll work together to identify major obstacles that prevent follow through, and small groups will brainstorm ways to address those obstacles. We’ll leave with a clear sense of how we can collaborate with, contribute to and build our community outside of a conference bubble.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "53", + "leader": "Kaeti Hinck, Millie Tran", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-2", + "time": "4:30-5:30pm", + "title": "After the Altar Call: Maintaining Momentum, Community, and Inspiration Beyond Conferences", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015AltarCall" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Let's talk about archives! An organization that's been making news for a while has a lot of cool stuff in the attic. How can we add context and enticing entry points to turn that raw material into a resource for our readers? What approaches has your organization tried? What off-the-wall ideas would you like to try?\n\nThese questions are also relevant to the journalism we're producing now. Whether you're stretching the limits of the CMS or telling stories on platforms unlikely to exist a decade from now, how might you keep the archives of the future in mind? How do you balance the goals of preserving the content and preserving the material experience? How many Snapchat stories fit on a roll of microfilm? Let's find out, together.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "54", + "leader": "Daniel McLaughlin", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Minnesota", + "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-2", + "time": "4:30-5:30pm", + "title": "The Past of the Future, Today", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015WebArchiving" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "It's been 10 years since chicagocrime.org launched. In the decade since then, coders have joined the ranks of newsrooms large and small, doing jobs that didn’t exist until recently. We now have many tribes of news nerds who use code to tell journalistic stories. We want to take a step back and see how large our community has grown and to ask some questions. Who are we? What jobs do we have? How are our teams built? What problems are we trying to solve? What are the ingredients of a successful team? In tandem with OpenNews, the Online News Association and others, we’re planning the first complete survey of the coder-journalist community. The plan is to find and survey the people who code, crunch data, design interactive tools, present journalism, or manage people who do these things, in and around newsrooms. The process has just begun. We don’t even know the best questions to ask -- and that’s where SRCCON comes in. What do you need to know about our community? How can a survey help support and grow our community? It's been a decade since our little community got started. Let's find out who we are.", + "everyone": "", + "id": "55", + "leader": "Brian Hamman, Scott Klein", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Memorial", + "scheduleblock": "friday-pm-2", + "time": "4:30-5:30pm", + "title": "Journo-Nerd Survey: Help Us Ask Good Questions", + "transcription": "SRCCON2015Survey" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "", + "everyone": "", + "id": "56", + "leader": "", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Minnesota", + "scheduleblock": "friday-lunch", + "time": "2-2:45pm", + "title": "How Can Traditional, Non-Technically Trained Journalists Move into This Space?", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "", + "everyone": "", + "id": "57", + "leader": "", + "length": "1 hour", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "scheduleblock": "friday-lunch", + "time": "2-2:45pm", + "title": "Chart-Making Beyond the Graphics Desk", + "transcription": "" + } +] diff --git a/_archive/sessions/2016/sessions.json b/_archive/sessions/2016/sessions.json index ab0932a7..6797455c 100644 --- a/_archive/sessions/2016/sessions.json +++ b/_archive/sessions/2016/sessions.json @@ -1,992 +1,992 @@ [ - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Get your badges and get some food (plus plenty of coffee), as you gear up for the first day of SRCCON!", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-breakfast", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Commons", - "time": "9am", - "timeblock": "thursday-morning", - "title": "Registration & Breakfast", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "We'll kick things off with a welcome, some scene-setting, and some suggestions for getting the most out of SRCCON.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-welcome", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Commons", - "time": "9:45am", - "timeblock": "thursday-morning", - "title": "Welcome to SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-lunch", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Commons", - "time": "1-2:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", - "title": "Lunch at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-dinner", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Commons", - "time": "5:15pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening", - "title": "Dinner at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "It's the SRCCON house party! We'll have plenty of things to snack on, and activities throughout the building to let you hang out and enjoy a some of the \"life\" side of work/life balance. We'll publish an evening schedule here once we get closer to the event, but you can expect:\n\n* Local history walk\n* Games, snacks, and beverages\n* Lightning talks\n* Hobby workshops\n* Evening conversations\n* Fify Licks ice cream truck\n", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-evening", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "", - "time": "6:30-9:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening", - "title": "Evening sessions", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "friday-breakfast", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Commons", - "time": "9:30am", - "timeblock": "friday-morning", - "title": "Breakfast at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "friday-lunch", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Commons", - "time": "1-2:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-lunch", - "title": "Lunch at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "friday-closing", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Commons", - "time": "5:15pm", - "timeblock": "friday-evening", - "title": "Closing", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "When stories have abstract topics, coming up with visual components can be a challenge. How the hell do you visually illustrate “borderless economies” or “Medicaid fraud?” Learn how to approach abstract stories from a visual angle and a step-by-step method for creating compelling visual assets. We’ll be free-associating, writing, drawing and collaging, art-school style. What are the methods people can use beyond photo and video to tell stories? We will dive into the use of abstraction, motion, color, and texture to appeal to people’s emotions. Also, get ready for some drawing games that will change how you think about the abstract.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Allison McCartney, Dolly Li", - "facilitators_twitter": "anmccartney,dollyli", - "id": "illustrating-investigations", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Mediatheque", - "time": "10:30-11:30am", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", - "title": "Illustrating Investigations: Creating compelling visuals for abstract stories", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "News apps teams are becoming more technically sophisticated: building tools, databases and custom CMS’s. Our newsrooms are now (partially) responsible for product, but struggle to implement modern tech processes (user-centric design, agile development, automated testing). How do we balance the “do it right” attitude of product with the “do it now” needs of editorial? Who needs to be at the table for those kinds of decisions? We want to look at some effective lessons that can be shared across the different disciplines and discuss effective, productive ways to bridge the gap.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Julia Wolfe, Ivar Vong", - "facilitators_twitter": "juruwolfe,ivarvong", - "id": "threat-modeling-code", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Innovation Studio", - "time": "10:30-11:30am", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", - "title": "Threat Modeling for Code: When is Bad Code the Better Solution?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "The boons of publishing large, searchable databases are easy to grasp — with the right dataset, they can be major sources of traffic. It's easy to talk about the technical challenges of creating and maintaining these apps, and it's easy to argue for their existence in favor of openness — but what about the ethical challenges? There is much we've collectively learned over the course of nearly six years of maintaining the Texas Tribune's salary and prisoner databases. No matter how prepared you may be for the inevitable requests for exclusion, eventually there will be a request that causes you to pause and ask, \"wait, are we doing this right?\" What do you do when your established protocol is woefully inadequate for a person's request? When your news app puts you or your organization in the position of power, how do you ensure the humans in the data are treated with empathy? Our goal with this session is to encourage a dialog on and around these issues. We will go over our current policies, and share stories of what we've done well... and what we've done not so well. We'll work through different scenarios together, discuss and debate our responses and provide a space to discuss real life examples.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Ryan Murphy", - "facilitators_twitter": "rdmurphy", - "id": "ethics-public-data", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 305", - "time": "10:30-11:30am", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", - "title": "You're The Reason My Name Is On Google: The Ethics Of Publishing Public Data", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Election night. Oscars. Olympics. Earthquake. These are high-pressure, high-visibility, high-traffic moments for you and your newsroom. This workshop will help attendees prepare their team for the biggest news day of the year. How will your team be organized? Who will step up to lead what? How will you communicate? How will you prepare your technology stack so it won’t fall over? How do you protect your team from hacking attacks? What’s your fallback if something breaks? And, once you assemble this plan, how do you engage it in a moment’s notice?", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Steph Yiu, Hamilton Boardman", - "facilitators_twitter": "crushgear", - "id": "omg-breaking-news", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 310", - "time": "10:30-11:30am", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", - "title": "OMGWTFBBQ: Breaking news without breaking your site", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Sometimes the best solution for a problem isn't very user friendly, whether it be command line tools, graphics software, or pretty much any GIS system. Let's talk about the successes and failures of training people in our newsrooms to use highly technical or very specialized tools and brainstorm some more that none of us have tried yet.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "David Yanofsky, Sarah Squire", - "facilitators_twitter": "YAN0,sarahjsquire", - "id": "teach-reporters", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 314", - "time": "10:30-11:30am", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", - "title": "You want to teach a reporter to do what‽", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "As a data science consultant, I use methods from statistics, machine learning, and design to solve problems. Communicating our findings effectively is to key to our success; it’s important to both 1) faithfully and accurately present the data, the findings, and our recommendations, while 2) presenting all of that information in a quick, easily digestible way. Often, our end users don’t have the time or technical expertise to comprehensively study our entire method, but neither do they ever want to blindly trust a “black box” method. So where is the in-between? I'll start the discussion by going through some of our experiences in communicating data science ideas both honestly and intuitively: from data visualization design choices, to experiential learning as a means for clients to understand complex ideas, to presentations with our end-to-end approach illustrated in simple analogies. Then I'd like to open up the floor, and learn from everybody else's experience. Time willing, I'd like to provide the opportunity for people to take a stab at presenting technical ideas of their own, and present them to the group in an intuitive way.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Bo Peng", - "facilitators_twitter": "bo_p", - "id": "technical-ideas-without-dumbdown", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Boardroom", - "time": "10:30-11:30am", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", - "title": "How do we convey technical ideas without dumbing things down?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "The internet is rife with tools to clip, remix, and gif visual content: we make reaction gifs of our favorite TV shows, screenshot articles to highlight interesting ideas, and have gif buttons built into many of our social networks. For fans of audio content, like podcasts, however, there are far fewer tools that allow them to engage with, comment on, and share their fandom of their favorite show. This creates a twofold problem: fans can't highlight, comment on, or share parts of their favorite podcast, and potential new listeners can't discover shows through those clips and highlights. In this session, we'll explore the idea of what \"giffable audio\" might be. We'll discuss what forms of expression we can support through giffable audio, what unique and interesting affordances audio (and more specifically, podcasts) might have, and how we can design tools that can create this new kind of audio culture on social media. We'll also discuss what tools and technologies currently exist in this realm, including our own project, Shortcut, which is an in-progress web audio tool that allows podcast fans to clip audio into short, shareable snippets that can instantly be embedded on social media.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Darius Kazemi, Jane Friedhoff", - "facilitators_twitter": "tinysubversions,jfriedhoff", - "id": "giffable-audio", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Mediatheque", - "time": "12-1pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", - "title": "Giffable Audio and the Social Web", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "At the end of 2014, Eric Meyer opened his Facebook feed to see an automated post marked \"your year in review,\" with a picture of his daughter--who had died that year from a brain tumor--surrounded by clip art of partygoers, confetti, and balloons. Nobody meant to cause Meyer harm, but thoughtlessness in the design of the feature (what he termed \"inadvertent algorithmic cruelty\") still left him shaken. And countless other examples abound. Of course, in the news industry, we're no strangers to accidental (and disastrous) juxtaposition: real estate ads placed next to stories on homelessness, bots that generate cringe-worthy content, and scheduled social media posts that go out during the worst kind of breaking news. In this session, we'll look at case studies of humane and inhumane design, practice identifying pitfalls in our news apps, and figure out how to care for our readers beyond just transmitting information.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Thomas Wilburn", - "facilitators_twitter": "thomaswilburn", - "id": "humane-news-apps", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Innovation Studio", - "time": "12-1pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", - "title": "Building news apps for humanity", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Adblockers, malware, load times. How can we break the cycle of bad business and worse code sinking journalism? Advertising technology is unavoidably part of our sites and stories. Right now it slows our output; damages our relationship with readers; and is failing even to fund most of our efforts. Without collaboration to create better tools and processes we are failing. Newsrooms, sales floors and tech teams must come together to repair our relationship with users and advertisers or find ourselves without the resources to continue. The session would focus on starting the multi-team conversations we aren't having. How can we work together to earn and keep the trust and attention of our readers? How can our organizations collaborate to build better, more open, and more trustworthy alternatives to malware-infested inaccurate ad tech? What would that look like and what data could we comfortably provide advertisers so we can better manage expectations? What are the conversations we should be having, the tools we should be building, with our sales departments?", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Aram Zucker-Scharff, Jarrod Dicker", - "facilitators_twitter": "Chronotope", - "id": "fixing-ad-tech", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 305", - "time": "12-1pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", - "title": "Skipping the blame game and working across teams to fix newsroom Ad Tech", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Participants will take a source dataset from a real story and a \"recipe\" for the analysis, break into groups and replicate the data analysis using a technology of their choice. They could use R, they could use Python and Pandas, they could use Excel, they could use a SQL database, a pencil and calculator or any set of tools of their choice. Participants will reconvene to share there experiences and push their code, spreadsheets and notes to a shared git repository.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Geoff Hing, Stefan Wehrmeyer", - "facilitators_twitter": "geoffhing,stefanwehrmeyer", - "id": "data-analysis-n-ways", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 310", - "time": "12-1pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", - "title": "Data analysis N ways", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "This discussion wants to dive deeper into the pros and cons of remote working. It is often a privilege (mobility, autonomy, etc ...) but can be a bit daunting (feeling like an outsider, quicker to talk face to face, etc...). Where do you stand on that spectrum? We will dive into these specifics(and possibly more): - What does your company/team do to create a sense of community? (ex:Slack) - What do you think your company/team should do to improve that same sense of community? - Do you think remote work is the future? - How will that impact the way journalists report the news? And how will that impact product teams?", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Pamela Assogba, Kavya Sukumar", - "facilitators_twitter": "pam_yam,kavyasukumar", - "id": "remote-work", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 314", - "time": "12-1pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", - "title": "True Life: I Work Remotely", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "How can we make sure that our data stories are being held to a high standard? It can be hard to fight the temptation to draw sweeping conclusions with bad data, but perhaps there are ways to put checks and balances in place to make sure that our analysis is accurate. Let's discuss peer review processes and things that have worked in newsrooms and methods that have proved ineffective. Is there a best-practices approach to holding ourselves accountable for the data stories we tell?", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Ariana Giorgi, Christine Zhang", - "facilitators_twitter": "ArianaNGiorgi,christinezhang", - "id": "peer-review-data-stories", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Boardroom", - "time": "12-1pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", - "title": "How can we peer review our data stories?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "The more complicated an interactive project gets, the harder it is to make it work right on every platform and OS. Sure, your app works fine on desktop and mobile, but will your CMS try and kill it? Can it be iframed or Pym’d? Will it work on Facebook Instant Articles or Amp? Maybe it’s best to admit defeat and scale back our features, producing more static, less interactive content. Or should we fight against our limits and find ways to make our features work everywhere? Most importantly, how do we communicate our decision-making process to others and establish reasonable expectations in the newsroom? In this session we’ll break into groups and think about how we might build interactives given different constraints of people, time and tech. We’ll talk about how we to deal with platform constraints on deadline and how to get your newsroom on board with the plan.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Scott Pham, Daniel Wood", - "facilitators_twitter": "scottpham,danielpwwood", - "id": "platform-constraints", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Commons", - "time": "12-1pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", - "title": "Platform Constraints—When to Fight and When to Admit Defeat", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "**This is a lunch session, so grab your meal first and join the conversation.**\n\nAccording to the Washington Post, American reporting jobs based in New York, D.C, and L.A. went from 1 in 8 in 2004 to 1 in 5 in 2014 (http://wapo.st/1pKHjRN). In the newsroom developer community, that number has got to be even tinier. How do we get developers into the smaller metropolitan newsrooms that need them? How do we reorganize and reinvent this segment of our news ecosystem that is least equipped to hire and experiment with new products and platforms? As our field evolves and matures, it's worth examining why our jobs continue to gravitate to big-money coastal newsrooms, what it means for local news to be left out of the renaissance, and how we might endeavor to change it.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Chris Canipe, Jon McClure", - "facilitators_twitter": "ccanipe,JonRMcClure", - "id": "midsize-metro-newsdevs", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Innovation Studio", - "time": "1:30-2:15pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", - "title": "Where Are the Midsize Metro News Developers", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "**This is a lunch session, so grab your meal first and join the conversation.**\n\nWhen Michael Brown was shot and killed by a Ferguson police officer, one of the first questions many editors had was \"how often does this happen?\" It turns out the data was so bad we didn't really know. At The Washington Post, we set out to put his death in context by collecting our own data. We'll talk about what went into that effort and how it can be useful for other topics, as well.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Steven Rich, Aaron Williams", - "facilitators_twitter": "dataeditor,aboutaaron", - "id": "shootings-terrible-data", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 310", - "time": "1:30-2:15pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", - "title": "Covering police shootings (and other events) when the data is terrible", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "**This is a lunch session, so grab your meal first and join the conversation.**\n\nAll software built these days depends on some kind of open source infrastructure. Whether it's PyPI to install packages, OpenSSL to download them securely, or Linux and Apache to run your website. These projects are rarely sustainability funded, and we'll talk about the current state of things and how you might be able to help. For more background, check out Nadia Eghbal's whitepaper, [as summarized here](https://storify.com/Lukasaoz/open-source-infrastructure-white-paper).", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Eric Holscher", - "facilitators_twitter": "ericholscher", - "id": "oss-funding", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Boardroom", - "time": "1:30-2:15pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", - "title": "Funding Open Source Infrastructure", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Let's see if we can get past the data in data sonification and work on the music. Bring in a dataset, and we'll translate it on the spot into sheet music. Neena Satija will put her sight-reading skills to the test as we try to play some data live. Please, please bring your own instruments. We'll experiment with keys, speed, themes and variations and whatever else comes up to see what works.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Michael Corey, Neena Satija", - "facilitators_twitter": "mikejcorey,neenareports", - "id": "data-sonification", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Mediatheque", - "time": "2:30-3:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "Data sonification piano bar", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Algorithms play an increasingly relevant role in shaping our digital and physical experiences of the world. It is frequently the case that data from our digital footprints is used to predict our behavior and make decisions about the choices available to us. This unprecedented capacity to collect and analyze data has brought along with it a troubling dismissiveness of user agency, participation, and ownership. Such systems assume that it is an acceptable by-product for their users to have no understanding of the decisions being made about them and no agency in that decision-making process. For the most part, the invisibilized nature of these decisions are seen as a feature, not a bug, of a good user experience. As we begin to use algorithmic decision-making in areas of our lives that are increasingly high-stakes, it is essential that we create and utilize processes that maintain user agency and understanding. In this session, participants will be imagining and designing user experiences that employ participatory algorithmic-decision making processes. The session will be open to folks from all experience levels. We would be excited to see folks from a variety of different backgrounds, including designers, data scientists, journalists, privacy & security practitioners, and organizers from marginalized and frequently surveilled communities.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Tara Adiseshan, Linda Sandvik", - "facilitators_twitter": "taraadiseshan,hyper_linda", - "id": "participatory-algorithms", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Innovation Studio", - "time": "2:30-3:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "Designing Participatory Algorithmic Decision-Making Processes", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "We talk a lot about documenting our work throughout projects, but we really don't talk enough about how we can use better documentation to start us off in our jobs with the right knowledge and technology stack of the newsroom. For example, when someone leaves the newsroom is there some type of minimum documentation that they have to do or is there no expectation set for this? What about all of the institutional knowledge that people take when they leave a newsroom? Should there be guidelines on what sources and information you leave behind so the next person doesn't have to spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel? Let's have a discussion about newsroom on-boarding and off-boarding processes and how we, as a news nerd community, can work through some simple ways together to make these processes more efficient and useful for the future.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Sandhya Kambhampati", - "facilitators_twitter": "sandhya__k", - "id": "newsroom-onboarding", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 305", - "time": "2:30-3:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "The good and bad of newsroom on-boarding processes (and how can we make them better)", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "The design and deployment of software has important implications for maintenance and operation in a newsroom. We'll discuss the attributes of software projects that have an impact on their sustainability & ease of use over time (who will run your code when you're gone?). We'll also play a little design game to map out which attributes take priority in our newsrooms, and how open source software projects in the news match up to those priorities.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Ted Han, Mike Tigas", - "facilitators_twitter": "knowtheory,mtigas", - "id": "ecology-newsroom-software", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 310", - "time": "2:30-3:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "The Ecology of Newsroom Software", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Journalists and newsroom developers face particular challenges to their mental health, including tight deadlines and sensitive coverage topics set against the backdrop of an ever-changing industry. Depression, anxiety and mental illness are exacerbated when they’re not discussed openly or taken seriously. Through guided discussions, this session will equip individuals to better care for their own mental health, and identify changes we can make to our newsrooms to build safer, more positive workplaces.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Joel Eastwood, Emma Carew Grovum", - "facilitators_twitter": "JoelEastwood,emmacarew", - "id": "mental-health-newsrooms", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 314", - "time": "2:30-3:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "Balancing mental health in the newsroom", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Let's take a walk through the existing ecosystem of The Coral Project - by installing it on your own machine. We'll share how it's built, supply dummy data so you can play with it immediately, and discuss how to approach big problems with ambitious open-source software.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Gabriela Rodriguez Beron, David Erwin", - "facilitators_twitter": "gaba,daviderwin", - "id": "coral-install-party", - "length": "2.5 hours", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Boardroom", - "time": "2:30-5pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "Install Party: The Coral Project", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Vox Media is in the business of developing high-value digital journalism, storytelling, and brand advertising at scale. We have traditionally done a lot of custom design and engineering work for each brand that joins Vox Media. More recently, we’ve found that brand building is less about designing a website and more about designing a full brand identity package and by designing systems. Building bespoke experiences doesn’t scale. This session will take a workshop format where we provide context for building brands through designing scalable systems with a short open conversation, and will lead to small breakout groups where teams will work together to create a brand-focused system that scales.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Josh Laincz, Georgia Cowley", - "facilitators_twitter": "zohf, hellogeorgia,hellogeorgia", - "id": "designing-brands", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Commons", - "time": "2:30-3:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "Designing brands at scale", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Pitchfork started 20 years ago. Just a wee baby. The New Yorker hit 91 years in age. The NYTimes, Guardian, Washington Post, Galena Gazette, and more have several centuries worth of content between them. However it's fair to say that 90% of daily traffic goes directly against stories published in the last week. Archive stories can hold a rich and unique mirror to the events of today, but face a number of challenges in being found and resurfaced: organization, classification, relevancy. Resurfacing content from even moderately sized archives is a challenge: often, it’s as much art as science. It is almost a brute force exercise to determine quality and notability. Yet we know there is a meaningful history and legacy buried there. How do we make sense of the present when we cannot easily access the past? Why is this hard? We often think in historical terms over decades - and rarely in the smaller events that define our day to day. Staff across many departments may not have the necessary depth of knowledge about the archives to know where to draw from, and institutional knowledge is lost between generations. Metadata and taxonomy may not be established to help classify and surface. Tooling may not exist or may be inaccessible to guide making intelligent suggestions. In this talk, we’ll explore working with your archives by talking about how we work with ours. Low-hanging fruit to bring gems to the surface, long-term strategies to make archives more accessible, and to ensure that today's content is accessible tomorrow.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Matt Dennewitz, Michael Donohoe", - "facilitators_twitter": "mattdennewitz,donohoe", - "id": "evergreen-content", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Mediatheque", - "time": "4-5pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "title": "Sometimes I Sit and Think About Evergreen Content and Sometimes I Just Sit", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Who are you building for? What do they need? User research is something everyone on the team can be involved in, whether by asking a partner what they think or creating a quick usability test for others to try. Let's make a user research toolkit for everyone who's in a distributed dev team that works in news. How can we empower everyone on the team to run their own mini research projects, and then filter the results back into the product? Which listening/observation methods would help you with your work? We'll talk as a group about different methodologies, techniques, and organizational resistance that we've encountered. Together we'll aim to create a scrappy user research toolkit for all SRCCONers to take with them back to the office.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Emily Goligoski, Andrew Losowosky", - "facilitators_twitter": "emgollie", - "id": "user-research-toolkit", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Innovation Studio", - "time": "4-5pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "title": "Hungry for audience insights? Let’s make a DIY user research toolkit for newsrooms!", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Readers are increasingly interacting with news content from a variety of locations, environments and levels of ability. As a result, news organizations need to think about creating platforms and stories that readers can access in as many ways as possible. This session will discuss best practices for web accessibility, graphics, closed captioning, and social media and facilitate a discussion about what news organizations are doing and how we can improve as an industry.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Joanna S. Kao, John Burn-Murdoch", - "facilitators_twitter": "joannaskao", - "id": "accessibility", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 305", - "time": "4-5pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "title": "Accessibility in media", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Getting hundreds of reporters from different newsrooms in different countries to work together on the same project -and share- is the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ (ICIJ) day-to-day challenge. For our latest investigation, the Panama Papers, we gathered more than 370 journalists from almost 80 countries to mine 11.5 million files. One of the missions of ICIJ's Data & Research Unit is to create the tools to make these collaborations happen seamlessly across borders. We've implemented social network platforms for reporters to communicate the findings, developed platforms to search over millions of documents and data and also to explore them visually. With reporters collaborating more and more across borders - or with different organizations - our challenge today could be yours tomorrow. Learn from our successes (and mistakes). We want to share with you our experience in deploying Apache Solr (http://lucene.apache.org/solr/) to search unstructured data with added metadata, using Neo4J and Linkurious for graph databases (https://linkurio.us/) and implementing the social network Oxwall (http://www.oxwall.org/) to communicate efficiently.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Miguel Fiandor", - "facilitators_twitter": "mfiandor", - "id": "tools-document-search", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 310", - "time": "4-5pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "title": "Tools to search millions of documents remotely and across borders", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "You're throwing a fancy party for your friends, so you hire a chef. There are certain expectations between you and the chef: they will cook food; the food will be good; they will respect your home; they will reflect well upon you and treat your friends as their own guests; they will not put business cards on each plate; they will not poison your friends, introduce wolves, or burn your house down. These guidelines apply equally well to those of us providing shareable components for embedding on other people's websites. We are co-hosts to other people's guests. We should provide the service we advertise on the tin, not break people's stuff, and generally remember we are part of someone else's story and need to make them look better to their readers. (And not inject malware.) Through discussion and example, we'll explore the various concerns especially relevant to third-party shareable component providers, and curate a clear and concise set of best practices.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Justin Reese, Arjuna Soriano", - "facilitators_twitter": "reefdog,arjunasoriano", - "id": "embeds", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 314", - "time": "4-5pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "title": "How to be a guest chef at someone's house party, or, Being a responsible embed provider", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "The news-nerd community is pretty good at collaboration. So let's work together to sort out our weakest points—as individuals, teams, maybe even as a community—and figure out how to get 'em patched. We'll work in small groups, come together to bubble up common worries and problems, and then nail down the kinds of things we need to get better. Bring your deepest insecurities about tech, process, design, and culture, and be honest: most of the session will be off-record, and prizes may be awarded for the most potentially embarrassing admissions. You'll leave knowing which of your troubles are widely shared, and our best guess at what needs to be done to level everybody up.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Erin Kissane, Ingrid Burrington", - "facilitators_twitter": "kissane,lifewinning", - "id": "lets-be-terrible", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Commons", - "time": "4-5pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "title": "Let's All Be Terrible at Things Together", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "We have a common language and set of processes for getting a news story reported, vetted and published. But what’s the right process for redesigning a news website? A news app? A data interactive? These projects can become complex. They need to be collaborative. The bosses need to buy in early. Let’s stop winging it. In this session, we’ll discuss what we can borrow from the design industry, which has developed a plethora of methods that can be used to facilitate meetings, surface and prioritize user needs, define project scope, generate ideas and test assumptions, and keep a project moving toward its deadline. We’ll brainstorm the common problems and challenges we all face in managing these projects, and then we’ll tackle the most pressing — sharing and evaluating which design methods might work best to solve them.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "AmyJo Brown, Jennifer Thibault", - "facilitators_twitter": "amyjo_brown,jlthibault", - "id": "design-world-ideas", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Mediatheque", - "time": "10:30-11:30am", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "What ideas can we borrow from the design world to solve news design problems?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "You’ve read about messaging apps and the rise of AI-driven conversational news interfaces — but what’s really effective for a news bot and what’s just a tedious iteration of Choose Your Own Adventure, or Excel Macros, or if-this-then-that statements by another name? Millie and SMI spent the last year thinking about what makes a news app sound like a smart interesting friend. In this session we’ll workshop how to ensure your news bots don't get stuck in a boring valley of uncanny.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Millie Tran, Stacy-Marie Ishmael", - "facilitators_twitter": "Millie,s_m_i", - "id": "bots-need-humans", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Innovation Studio", - "time": "10:30-11:30am", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "Why your bot is nothing without a human", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Audience development has become a hot, new buzzword inside nearly every news organization across the country. Everyone, it seems, is clamoring to hire an audience team. But what exactly is audience development? How do you find these magical creatures? What do they do? And can they really help connect your journalism with more people? The simple answer is yes. If you do it right. FRONTLINE has had an audience development team for four years, and it has been transformative. We’ve learned that when our editorial and audience teams work side by side, hand in hand we CAN make magic together. We've seen double and triple digit growth across multiple platforms. But the process isn’t always easy, pretty or comfortable. In this session we’ll have an open and honest conversation about our lessons learned. We’ll share stories of success and failures. And we’ll offer practical advice and tips for people who work in traditional newsrooms -- and for traditional bosses uncomfortable with thinking about audience. We’d also open it up to the room to hear more about how other newsrooms are approaching this.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Sarah Moughty, Pamela Johnston", - "facilitators_twitter": "smoughts,pamjohnston", - "id": "editorial-audience-development", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 305", - "time": "10:30-11:30am", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "Break Down that Wall: Why Editorial and Audience Development Need to Work Together", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "In this session the attendees will learn how to enrich stories with VR experiences without the help of developers using open source tools based on web standards. This experiences can be distributed as websites or embed as widgets and are ready for headsets like the Oculus Rift and the Google Cardboard. The presented tools includes a project called GuriVR (gurivr.com), developed as part of my Knight-Mozilla fellowship.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Dan Zajdband", - "facilitators_twitter": "impronunciable", - "id": "webvr", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 310", - "time": "10:30-11:30am", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "WebVR for the rest of us", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "It's not as easy as just putting the code up on GitHub. This session will work through the complex legal, social, competitive and organizational challenges to making your software open source. As a bonus: We'll figure out best practices for docs, release schedules and version numbering!", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Jeremy Bowers", - "facilitators_twitter": "jeremybowers", - "id": "open-sourcing", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 314", - "time": "10:30-11:30am", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "Open Sourcing And You", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "With the ‘silent movie’ format of autoplaying Facebook News Feed videos, captioning has gone from being an accessibility concern, to being the primary hook many viewers will have into your video. Let’s share examples of publishers making the most of this new creative format which demands a different story-telling style, combining text, animation and video. Optimising for this silent format is also a great reason to make your videos accessible through subtitles or closed-captions. Whether you’re already captioning your videos or looking to get started let’s go through recently developed tools for making this easier including crowdsourcing (Amara) and Speech To Text (Trint) and how you can integrate them into your workflows publishing on YouTube and Facebook.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Gideon Goldberg", - "facilitators_twitter": "gidsg", - "id": "video-captioning", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Boardroom", - "time": "10:30-11:30am", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "‘Insert Caption Here’: how Facebook made video captioning cool", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Usually, collaboration, especially in a small newsroom, looks a bit like this: Person A slogs in the trenches solo, cleans data, analyzes, comes up with an insight, writes a draft, sends to Person B. Person B realizes Person A likely made an error in the cleaning, tears apart draft, comes up with new insight. Person A goes back to square one, finds their error, redoes everything and sends it back. Person B questions their own judgement and sends the draft to Person C. Person C finds more errors Person B noticed but decided not to raise considering the hell they’d already put Person A through. Newsroom dissolves in a panic as Persons A, B and C all realize that this is going in next month’s issue so they’d better find, fix and spruce up these errors and fast. In a slightly better world, Person A notices their error, asks Person B for help, Person B drops everything they’re doing, helps find the error in 100 lines of code and correct it, tries to explain what they did, and then, if they’re lucky, return to the work they were doing before. But again, newsroom panic is likely. We think pair programming might be a way to short-circuit this cycle of agony and provide ways for small clusters of reporters to work together more effectively. For example, if Person A and Person B worked in tandem instead on projects like data cleaning, but also like writing, audio editing and page-designing, and helped catch errors early. That saves time and energy. We also think it could be a way to help build reusable skills in micro-newsrooms where multipurpose projects are a necessity. So instead of Person B simply correcting the error, they can correct the error in tandem with Person A so Person A can now fix that problem for themselves. We don’t know for sure this will work but we want to try to out different models of collaboration. In essence, we’d like to run an experiment on a group of SRCCON attendees: Can pair programming and other forms of collaboration drawn from outside the journalism field help resolve some of our own intractable problems? Here’s what we imagine the session looking like: Intro discussion on what pair programming is, why people do it, what makes pairing different from other forms of collaboration (10 min) Pairing activity - Attendees will split into pairs, pick a non-programming task (analyzing a data set, writing a script, editing audio, etc.) and use pair programming techniques to complete that task (25 min) Groups share their experiences (5 min) Discussion - What other types of process from programming can we adopt in the newsroom? (10 min)", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Katharine Schimel, Jordan Wirfs-Brock", - "facilitators_twitter": "kateschimel,jordanwb", - "id": "pair-program-news", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Commons", - "time": "10:30-11:30am", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "Can We Pair Program The News?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Mobile devices gather information about us as we go about our days by default, and we often voluntarily grant access to additional information in exchange for access to apps and services. News organizations could be taking better advantage of what mobile devices track, delivering better news experiences by taking into account time of day and a user’s location and personal preferences. But how much information are users willing to give up about themselves? And where should we draw the line between offering valuable experiences and being overly invasive? This workshop will prompt thinking about questions around privacy and mobile use, casting participants in the role of users (which we all are, anyway) and asking them to consider: What personal information would you be willing to give up for the sake of a news-focused digital service, and why? We’ll discuss the range of permissions that mobile developers have access to, and debate when and how they might be used to deliver better experiences. At the end the session we’ll have considered as a group the ways users may want to limit the personal data they share, and also what kinds of convenience or customization in news experiences on mobile would make the exchange of personal information more palatable.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Sasha Koren, Alastair Coote", - "facilitators_twitter": "sashak,_alastair", - "id": "mobile-privacy", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Mediatheque", - "time": "12-1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-2", - "title": "News, mobile and privacy: Where’s the line between convenient and creepy?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "In newsrooms of old, jobs were pretty easy to understand (reporters, editors, photographers, illustrators), as were the responsibilities that went with those jobs. But newsrooms still can be old-school, so even if you write and deploy code, you still probably have some non-technical managers and peers. How do you help them better understand what you do? How can you work effectively together and stay on good terms? How do you pitch ideas to them, and how do they pitch ideas to you? How do you communicate about progress, priorities and problems, both on a daily basis and in a crisis? Let's talk about what's worked and what still needs improvement.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Gina Boysun, Justin Myers", - "facilitators_twitter": "gboysun,myersjustinc", - "id": "juggling-expectations", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Innovation Studio", - "time": "12-1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-2", - "title": "Every day I'm juggling: Managing managers, peer expectations, and your own project ideas", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Visual journalism is on the rise. Recent articles highlight its importance in the future of news, but most focus on video and interactives. Few, if any, even mention photojournalism. Let's spend a session overcompensating. We'll take the challenges we're interested in, whether it's interactive storytelling, push notifications, audience engagement or anything else, and come up with the most photo-centric solutions. Then, we will bring all of these ideas together and try to figure out how and where photojournalism fits best in our constantly shifting vision of the future.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Neil Bedi", - "facilitators_twitter": "_neilbedi", - "id": "photojournalism-future-news", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 305", - "time": "12-1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-2", - "title": "Where does photojournalism fit in the future of news?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "The formula seems simple: something happens and we report on it. The faster the better, so long as we follow standards. But the pace accelerated quickly – print and hourly news segments seems antiquated compared to the internet, where a tweet from a source is seconds away from being pushed, klaxon'd and marquee'd worldwide. Editors need ever-evolving tools & guidelines that enable quick publishing on their own platforms and social/distribution channels. Newsroom nerds need to build stable and iterable tools so editors can keep tabs on their report, audience and competition. Readers, on the other hand, expect the news to find them like magic — mobile-first, device-friendly, geo-fenced, natively rendered (AMP, Facebook, iOS), media-rich AND omnisciently relevant to their specific interests.\n\n* How do we balance all those moving parts?\n* How do we reach people who define relevant breaking news for themselves?\n* How do we answer different-paced audiences — news-junkies vs. news-curious vs. late-comers?\n* How do we adjust when features that seem great one moment are clichéd the next?\n\nThis conversation will look inside two newsrooms: the New York Times (storied, weighty, born of a print legacy) and Breaking News (younger, nimble and born of Twitter) for what lessons each can each share.\n", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Martin McClellan, Tiff Fehr", - "facilitators_twitter": "hellbox,tiffehr", - "id": "pace-breaking-news", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 310", - "time": "12-1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-2", - "title": "Working at the pace of Breaking News", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "According to this [Very Scientific™ poll](https://twitter.com/brianloveswords/status/717749353914490881), ~75% of developers still primarily rely on `console.log` debugging. While there is nothing wrong with `console.log`, modern browsers contain a rich suite of tools that can help you debug even some of the gnarliest nested callback pyramids and promise chains. In this session we'll show you some of those tools and teach you how to use them so next time you're running into problems you might not have to debug with `console.log(\"why isn't this workinggggg\")`.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Brian J Brennan", - "facilitators_twitter": "brianloveswords", - "id": "developer-tools", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 314", - "time": "12-1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-2", - "title": "Beyond console.log: making the most of your developer tools", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "When dealing with data that encapsulates the lives of hundreds, or even thousands, of people, keeping those people from becoming anonymous numbers can be challenging. In this session, we walk through tactics and strategies for keeping humanity at the centre of complex stories, and avoiding losing our audience while exploring the sheer scale of some of these data stories. We will use the evolution -- from early stage design sketches to version 3 finished product -- of the CBC's award-winning investigation into missing and murdered aboriginal women across Canada as some of our guiding examples through this discussion.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "William Wolfe-Wylie", - "facilitators_twitter": "wolfewylie", - "id": "people-data-stories", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Boardroom", - "time": "12-1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-2", - "title": "Keeping people at the forefront of data stories", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Whenever we work together with some other team mate, more often than not, we end up learning a more efficient way of approaching a particular recurrent task that will improve my producivity. Since we are going to congregate a lot of news nerdy knowlegde in Portland, I think a good session could be held to try to get some of our tips and tricks out of our brains and share them with the community.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Juan Elosua", - "facilitators_twitter": "jjelosua", - "id": "tips-tricks", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Commons", - "time": "12-1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-2", - "title": "Let's share our small time savers", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "**This is a lunch session, so grab your meal first and join the conversation.**\n\nAs news organizations continue to evolve around the country, journalists and newsroom developers face many different challenges. This includes working to enhance the news and digital experience for our audiences using a wide variety of tools and resources, but how do we enhance our own skills on the job? In this conversation, we will talk about the different ways that journo enthusiasts and newsroom developers can enhance themselves by taking advantage of professional development opportunities.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Ebony Martin", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "professional-development", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 310", - "time": "1:30-2:15pm", - "timeblock": "friday-lunch", - "title": "Professional development in the digital age: How to get started, how to keep going", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "We set aside rooms during lunchtime for people to lead conversational sessions over meals. You'll find a signup grid in the Commons area, so if a topic emerges while you're at SRCCON that you'd like to discuss, sign up!", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "lunch-conversations", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "", - "room": "", - "time": "1:30-2:15pm", - "timeblock": "friday-lunch", - "title": "Lunch conversations - sign up at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "You’re leading a team in your organization, or you’re ready to step into a bigger role. Maybe you’re managing people for the first time, or you’ve been doing it for a while. You’ve read the books, listened to the management advice podcasts, maybe even participated in some leadership training. But much of the advice out there doesn’t account for the unique challenges you face as a journalism/tech manager when you are a woman, person of color, or in another underrepresented group. From overt dismissal to subtle yet insidious microaggressions, how do we succeed as leaders in an industry where the decision makers are still predominantly white and male? Let’s share advice and brainstorm specific tactics for handling the roadblocks faced by women, people of color, and other underrepresented folks who want to lead and make big things happen. Everyone is welcome to participate, but if you’re in a majority group, aim to listen A LOT more than you talk.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Kaeti Hinck, Emily Chow", - "facilitators_twitter": "kaeti,eschow", - "id": "underrepresented-managers", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Mediatheque", - "time": "2:30-3:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "They don’t want you to lead: Major keys to success as an underrepresented manager", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Science Fiction authors often embed deep insights into the future of technology within their stories. Come to this session to share examples of fascinating science fictional treatments of media and networked communication with other attendees and geek out about who got it right and who may yet come out correct. (My idea is to solicit ahead of time 4-6 super fans who are willing to give low-key lightning talks summarizing plots with an emphasis on the interesting media bits.)", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Joe Germuska", - "facilitators_twitter": "JoeGermuska", - "id": "media-science-fiction", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Innovation Studio", - "time": "2:30-3:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "Through an iPhone Darkly: Media and Networks through the lens of Science Fiction", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "As more news organizations turn an eye to analytical measurement, it is important to discuss what we're actually trying to measure when we use analytics. Often, that comes down to defining what success means for your storytelling. This session will help you to think about your stories and your needs before you start thinking about analytics. With a strong definition of success, it becomes easier to define success measurements. We will share different tools for creating success measurements as well.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Tyler Fisher, Sonya Song", - "facilitators_twitter": "tylrfishr,sonya2song", - "id": "better-analytics", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 305", - "time": "2:30-3:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "Better Analytics: Why You Have to Define Success Before You Use Analytics — And How To Do It", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "As technology and our capacity grows, data projects become more and more ambitious. We scrape millions of rows and present readers a whole universe of information with one news app or interactive page. But is it always the more the merrier? When we throw this much unprocessed information at readers, do they all have the ability to sift through it and find the \"nut graph\" of the story? Or is nut graph even a necessary part of news these days with all the big data available to explore? The line between news and academic research has blurred more and more since we started catching up with their toolbox. How to distinguish ourselves from a think tank or an academic institution and not to bore our readers with too much information and numbers is the question everyone in the news industry should ask themselves. \"Less is more\" should not only be applied to writing, but for data reporting as well. In this session, let's discuss successful and not so successful examples of \"too much data\", think about when is it time to give up the desire of \"show them all\", how to trim down information effectively to create a truly enjoyable experience for readers, and hopefully come up with a draft of guidelines for future practices.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Evie Liu, Steve Suo", - "facilitators_twitter": "Evie_xing,stevesuo", - "id": "big-data-less-more", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 310", - "time": "2:30-3:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "When is big data too big? When is less more?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Using some of the videos from the Whistle Blowers Interview Archive, we’ll take an hands on approach to explore key concepts, ideas and techniques to identify narrative points, test out story ideas, and craft a compelling story. This session focusses on the underlying evergreen storytelling principles that transcend the medium, so no knowledge of video editing required, just curiosity towards story telling principles and techniques.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Pietro Passarelli, Niels Ladefoged", - "facilitators_twitter": "pietropassarell", - "id": "video-interviews", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 314", - "time": "2:30-3:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "How to craft compelling stories out of video interviews?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Strong communities start with one-on-one relationships that grow into networks. But what if you’re a lonely coder, a student, or someone in a remote area without constant access to the wider news nerd network? Let's brainstorm ways to better facilitate connections between individuals in the community – perhaps through online meetings for project feedback or career advice. What would you want help with? How would you want to help someone else? What could these meetings look like? What would make them successful?", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Julia Smith", - "facilitators_twitter": "julia67", - "id": "remote-mentorship", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Boardroom", - "time": "2:30-3:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "Give and Receive: Can we strengthen our community through remote mentorship and office hours?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Let's take a moment and get away from the weighty, important conversations and just make/hack something. In a short amount of time, and through a loosely structured format, you will make something. That something could be a more fully-formed idea, a better title and mission for an existing project, a paper prototype of a news app, a drawing of a visualization, an interview process and actual interview, a quickly coded prototype, code tests for a project, a new logo, and so much more. Just come with a small, achievable idea. Groups are welcome, but its suggested to keep them at no more than 2 or 3 people.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Alan Palazzolo, Clarisa Diaz", - "facilitators_twitter": "zzolo,clarii_d", - "id": "playtime", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Commons", - "time": "2:30-3:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "Playtime (in ludicrous speed)", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "In the past few years, we’ve seen emerging recognition of graphics and data journalism, most recently in the Pulitzers awarded to data-centric projects. Our community is reflecting on recent years of our work and has established design patterns and philosophies. But we mostly talk about how we do our journalism -- now let’s talk about the people doing it. How have the expectations of a journalist’s career trajectory changed with emerging roles and disciplines? Have we made our corner of the industry open to aspiring news nerds who might not have access to the tools and resources that gave many of us a lift into this field? And what if you don’t see your job as your calling? Our goal is provide a catharsis about our work and develop solutions that look out for the people doing this work. We’ll ask hard questions of ourselves to foster a discussion about the sustainability of what we do.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Katie Park, Aaron Williams", - "facilitators_twitter": "katiepark,aboutaaron", - "id": "data-analysis-ourselves", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Mediatheque", - "time": "4-5pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", - "title": "Who is that journalist I see, staring straight back at me?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Writing down processes, goals, and workflows is an important part of building healthy, transparent, and collaborative teams. But finding time to write and making sure that people read those documents is a constant challenge. This activity-based brainstorm session will lean into the expertise and experience of attendees to explore methods for building solid documentation practices into a team’s culture.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Kelsey Scherer, Lauren Rabaino", - "facilitators_twitter": "kelsa_,laurenrabaino", - "id": "documentation-culture", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Innovation Studio", - "time": "4-5pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", - "title": "How can teams build a consistent culture of documentation?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "One of the things I love about our undergraduate internship for newsroom developers is that every year we can't quite believe we'll cope without them when they go back to finish their degree, but somehow every year we get another cohort that are just as amazing. Another thing I love is that when they complete their degrees a year later, we're number one on their list of prospective employers. And another thing is that, eight years into the program, seven out of the eleven interns who've graduated are now full time developers at the BBC. Four of them are seniors. So, maybe you'd like to share your experiences of running internships and we can compare notes.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Andrew Leimdorfer, Annie Daniel", - "facilitators_twitter": "leimdorfer,anieldaniel", - "id": "internships", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 305", - "time": "4-5pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", - "title": "Running undergraduate internships that produce great newsroom developers", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "This one’s for new parents, anyone who might want to be a parent some day, and the unicorns who have it all figured out. A lot of us got to where we are today by tinkering. We did our real job and then kept going: learning new tools, building things for fun, contributing to friends’ projects. How do we keep being creative — and keep creating — on a parent’s schedule? Let’s hear from each other about how we can adapt, and about the doubts and the triumphs that come along with being a working parent.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Jason Alcorn, Lisa Waananen Jones", - "facilitators_twitter": "jasonalcorn,lisawaananen", - "id": "parenthood", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Classroom 310", - "time": "4-5pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", - "title": "Expanding the Team: Parenthood in the News Business", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Faced with the drive to program to remote partners, apps, and corporate-owned-and-operated chat platforms, we find ourselves rolling the dice on a future that seems to call for a referendum on The Web. As the tools we use for storytelling become not just more diverse but more constrained by the spectre of Terms Of Service, can we hedge our bets? Or to put it a different way, does our work to serve both third-party platforms and the websites that serve as our foundations actually constitute a zero-sum game? This session proposes that, by stepping back, we can imagine a workflow and toolset that serves both needs—and, by extension, newsrooms—even better than the current generation of content management systems. In order to investigate this approach, we will ask three questions: 1. Rather than abandon the benefits that the web affords us as a structure, how can we carry with us the ethos and process of the web as we negotiate these new platforms? 2. Can our industry call upon a history of standards and protocols to avoid partner lock-in? 3. Should our tools pivot from a focus on authorship to one of reportage and remixing, allowing us to use new platforms in focused ways without losing control over the source material? What if the web is the best idea? How can we retain the imperatives of the web as we serve the future of storytelling, and what are the kinds of tools and standards we can rally around to preserve that context while allowing us to experiment in other people's walled gardens?", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "David Yee", - "facilitators_twitter": "tangentialism", - "id": "platforms-web-storytelling", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Boardroom", - "time": "4-5pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", - "title": "Get you a CMS that can do both: Platforms, the web, and storytelling imperatives", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "What if I told you there’s more to running a newsroom experiment than just trying out a new thing for the first time? That there are processes to make sure you’ll get the most out doing them, and that the rest of your newsroom will benefit, too. Using practical exercises, this session will take you through the steps of planning a newsroom experiment and, crucially, what to do afterwards. You will come away from this session with a framework for how to structure and plan newsroom experiments", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Robin Kwong", - "facilitators_twitter": "robinkwong", - "id": "newsroom-experiments", - "length": "1 hour", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Commons", - "time": "4-5pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", - "title": "Getting more out of your newsroom experiments", - "transcription": "" - } -] \ No newline at end of file + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Get your badges and get some food (plus plenty of coffee), as you gear up for the first day of SRCCON!", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-breakfast", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Commons", + "time": "9am", + "timeblock": "thursday-morning", + "title": "Registration & Breakfast", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "We'll kick things off with a welcome, some scene-setting, and some suggestions for getting the most out of SRCCON.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-welcome", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Commons", + "time": "9:45am", + "timeblock": "thursday-morning", + "title": "Welcome to SRCCON", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-lunch", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Commons", + "time": "1-2:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", + "title": "Lunch at SRCCON", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-dinner", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Commons", + "time": "5:15pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening", + "title": "Dinner at SRCCON", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "It's the SRCCON house party! We'll have plenty of things to snack on, and activities throughout the building to let you hang out and enjoy a some of the \"life\" side of work/life balance. We'll publish an evening schedule here once we get closer to the event, but you can expect:\n\n* Local history walk\n* Games, snacks, and beverages\n* Lightning talks\n* Hobby workshops\n* Evening conversations\n* Fify Licks ice cream truck\n", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-evening", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "", + "time": "6:30-9:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening", + "title": "Evening sessions", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "friday-breakfast", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Commons", + "time": "9:30am", + "timeblock": "friday-morning", + "title": "Breakfast at SRCCON", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "friday-lunch", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Commons", + "time": "1-2:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-lunch", + "title": "Lunch at SRCCON", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "friday-closing", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Commons", + "time": "5:15pm", + "timeblock": "friday-evening", + "title": "Closing", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "When stories have abstract topics, coming up with visual components can be a challenge. How the hell do you visually illustrate “borderless economies” or “Medicaid fraud?” Learn how to approach abstract stories from a visual angle and a step-by-step method for creating compelling visual assets. We’ll be free-associating, writing, drawing and collaging, art-school style. What are the methods people can use beyond photo and video to tell stories? We will dive into the use of abstraction, motion, color, and texture to appeal to people’s emotions. Also, get ready for some drawing games that will change how you think about the abstract.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Allison McCartney, Dolly Li", + "facilitators_twitter": "anmccartney,dollyli", + "id": "illustrating-investigations", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Mediatheque", + "time": "10:30-11:30am", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", + "title": "Illustrating Investigations: Creating compelling visuals for abstract stories", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "News apps teams are becoming more technically sophisticated: building tools, databases and custom CMS’s. Our newsrooms are now (partially) responsible for product, but struggle to implement modern tech processes (user-centric design, agile development, automated testing). How do we balance the “do it right” attitude of product with the “do it now” needs of editorial? Who needs to be at the table for those kinds of decisions? We want to look at some effective lessons that can be shared across the different disciplines and discuss effective, productive ways to bridge the gap.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Julia Wolfe, Ivar Vong", + "facilitators_twitter": "juruwolfe,ivarvong", + "id": "threat-modeling-code", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Innovation Studio", + "time": "10:30-11:30am", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", + "title": "Threat Modeling for Code: When is Bad Code the Better Solution?", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "The boons of publishing large, searchable databases are easy to grasp — with the right dataset, they can be major sources of traffic. It's easy to talk about the technical challenges of creating and maintaining these apps, and it's easy to argue for their existence in favor of openness — but what about the ethical challenges? There is much we've collectively learned over the course of nearly six years of maintaining the Texas Tribune's salary and prisoner databases. No matter how prepared you may be for the inevitable requests for exclusion, eventually there will be a request that causes you to pause and ask, \"wait, are we doing this right?\" What do you do when your established protocol is woefully inadequate for a person's request? When your news app puts you or your organization in the position of power, how do you ensure the humans in the data are treated with empathy? Our goal with this session is to encourage a dialog on and around these issues. We will go over our current policies, and share stories of what we've done well... and what we've done not so well. We'll work through different scenarios together, discuss and debate our responses and provide a space to discuss real life examples.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Ryan Murphy", + "facilitators_twitter": "rdmurphy", + "id": "ethics-public-data", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 305", + "time": "10:30-11:30am", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", + "title": "You're The Reason My Name Is On Google: The Ethics Of Publishing Public Data", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Election night. Oscars. Olympics. Earthquake. These are high-pressure, high-visibility, high-traffic moments for you and your newsroom. This workshop will help attendees prepare their team for the biggest news day of the year. How will your team be organized? Who will step up to lead what? How will you communicate? How will you prepare your technology stack so it won’t fall over? How do you protect your team from hacking attacks? What’s your fallback if something breaks? And, once you assemble this plan, how do you engage it in a moment’s notice?", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Steph Yiu, Hamilton Boardman", + "facilitators_twitter": "crushgear", + "id": "omg-breaking-news", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 310", + "time": "10:30-11:30am", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", + "title": "OMGWTFBBQ: Breaking news without breaking your site", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Sometimes the best solution for a problem isn't very user friendly, whether it be command line tools, graphics software, or pretty much any GIS system. Let's talk about the successes and failures of training people in our newsrooms to use highly technical or very specialized tools and brainstorm some more that none of us have tried yet.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "David Yanofsky, Sarah Squire", + "facilitators_twitter": "YAN0,sarahjsquire", + "id": "teach-reporters", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 314", + "time": "10:30-11:30am", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", + "title": "You want to teach a reporter to do what‽", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "As a data science consultant, I use methods from statistics, machine learning, and design to solve problems. Communicating our findings effectively is to key to our success; it’s important to both 1) faithfully and accurately present the data, the findings, and our recommendations, while 2) presenting all of that information in a quick, easily digestible way. Often, our end users don’t have the time or technical expertise to comprehensively study our entire method, but neither do they ever want to blindly trust a “black box” method. So where is the in-between? I'll start the discussion by going through some of our experiences in communicating data science ideas both honestly and intuitively: from data visualization design choices, to experiential learning as a means for clients to understand complex ideas, to presentations with our end-to-end approach illustrated in simple analogies. Then I'd like to open up the floor, and learn from everybody else's experience. Time willing, I'd like to provide the opportunity for people to take a stab at presenting technical ideas of their own, and present them to the group in an intuitive way.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Bo Peng", + "facilitators_twitter": "bo_p", + "id": "technical-ideas-without-dumbdown", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Boardroom", + "time": "10:30-11:30am", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", + "title": "How do we convey technical ideas without dumbing things down?", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "The internet is rife with tools to clip, remix, and gif visual content: we make reaction gifs of our favorite TV shows, screenshot articles to highlight interesting ideas, and have gif buttons built into many of our social networks. For fans of audio content, like podcasts, however, there are far fewer tools that allow them to engage with, comment on, and share their fandom of their favorite show. This creates a twofold problem: fans can't highlight, comment on, or share parts of their favorite podcast, and potential new listeners can't discover shows through those clips and highlights. In this session, we'll explore the idea of what \"giffable audio\" might be. We'll discuss what forms of expression we can support through giffable audio, what unique and interesting affordances audio (and more specifically, podcasts) might have, and how we can design tools that can create this new kind of audio culture on social media. We'll also discuss what tools and technologies currently exist in this realm, including our own project, Shortcut, which is an in-progress web audio tool that allows podcast fans to clip audio into short, shareable snippets that can instantly be embedded on social media.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Darius Kazemi, Jane Friedhoff", + "facilitators_twitter": "tinysubversions,jfriedhoff", + "id": "giffable-audio", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Mediatheque", + "time": "12-1pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", + "title": "Giffable Audio and the Social Web", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "At the end of 2014, Eric Meyer opened his Facebook feed to see an automated post marked \"your year in review,\" with a picture of his daughter--who had died that year from a brain tumor--surrounded by clip art of partygoers, confetti, and balloons. Nobody meant to cause Meyer harm, but thoughtlessness in the design of the feature (what he termed \"inadvertent algorithmic cruelty\") still left him shaken. And countless other examples abound. Of course, in the news industry, we're no strangers to accidental (and disastrous) juxtaposition: real estate ads placed next to stories on homelessness, bots that generate cringe-worthy content, and scheduled social media posts that go out during the worst kind of breaking news. In this session, we'll look at case studies of humane and inhumane design, practice identifying pitfalls in our news apps, and figure out how to care for our readers beyond just transmitting information.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Thomas Wilburn", + "facilitators_twitter": "thomaswilburn", + "id": "humane-news-apps", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Innovation Studio", + "time": "12-1pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", + "title": "Building news apps for humanity", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Adblockers, malware, load times. How can we break the cycle of bad business and worse code sinking journalism? Advertising technology is unavoidably part of our sites and stories. Right now it slows our output; damages our relationship with readers; and is failing even to fund most of our efforts. Without collaboration to create better tools and processes we are failing. Newsrooms, sales floors and tech teams must come together to repair our relationship with users and advertisers or find ourselves without the resources to continue. The session would focus on starting the multi-team conversations we aren't having. How can we work together to earn and keep the trust and attention of our readers? How can our organizations collaborate to build better, more open, and more trustworthy alternatives to malware-infested inaccurate ad tech? What would that look like and what data could we comfortably provide advertisers so we can better manage expectations? What are the conversations we should be having, the tools we should be building, with our sales departments?", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Aram Zucker-Scharff, Jarrod Dicker", + "facilitators_twitter": "Chronotope", + "id": "fixing-ad-tech", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 305", + "time": "12-1pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", + "title": "Skipping the blame game and working across teams to fix newsroom Ad Tech", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Participants will take a source dataset from a real story and a \"recipe\" for the analysis, break into groups and replicate the data analysis using a technology of their choice. They could use R, they could use Python and Pandas, they could use Excel, they could use a SQL database, a pencil and calculator or any set of tools of their choice. Participants will reconvene to share there experiences and push their code, spreadsheets and notes to a shared git repository.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Geoff Hing, Stefan Wehrmeyer", + "facilitators_twitter": "geoffhing,stefanwehrmeyer", + "id": "data-analysis-n-ways", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 310", + "time": "12-1pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", + "title": "Data analysis N ways", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "This discussion wants to dive deeper into the pros and cons of remote working. It is often a privilege (mobility, autonomy, etc ...) but can be a bit daunting (feeling like an outsider, quicker to talk face to face, etc...). Where do you stand on that spectrum? We will dive into these specifics(and possibly more): - What does your company/team do to create a sense of community? (ex:Slack) - What do you think your company/team should do to improve that same sense of community? - Do you think remote work is the future? - How will that impact the way journalists report the news? And how will that impact product teams?", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Pamela Assogba, Kavya Sukumar", + "facilitators_twitter": "pam_yam,kavyasukumar", + "id": "remote-work", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 314", + "time": "12-1pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", + "title": "True Life: I Work Remotely", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "How can we make sure that our data stories are being held to a high standard? It can be hard to fight the temptation to draw sweeping conclusions with bad data, but perhaps there are ways to put checks and balances in place to make sure that our analysis is accurate. Let's discuss peer review processes and things that have worked in newsrooms and methods that have proved ineffective. Is there a best-practices approach to holding ourselves accountable for the data stories we tell?", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Ariana Giorgi, Christine Zhang", + "facilitators_twitter": "ArianaNGiorgi,christinezhang", + "id": "peer-review-data-stories", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Boardroom", + "time": "12-1pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", + "title": "How can we peer review our data stories?", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "The more complicated an interactive project gets, the harder it is to make it work right on every platform and OS. Sure, your app works fine on desktop and mobile, but will your CMS try and kill it? Can it be iframed or Pym’d? Will it work on Facebook Instant Articles or Amp? Maybe it’s best to admit defeat and scale back our features, producing more static, less interactive content. Or should we fight against our limits and find ways to make our features work everywhere? Most importantly, how do we communicate our decision-making process to others and establish reasonable expectations in the newsroom? In this session we’ll break into groups and think about how we might build interactives given different constraints of people, time and tech. We’ll talk about how we to deal with platform constraints on deadline and how to get your newsroom on board with the plan.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Scott Pham, Daniel Wood", + "facilitators_twitter": "scottpham,danielpwwood", + "id": "platform-constraints", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Commons", + "time": "12-1pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", + "title": "Platform Constraints—When to Fight and When to Admit Defeat", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "**This is a lunch session, so grab your meal first and join the conversation.**\n\nAccording to the Washington Post, American reporting jobs based in New York, D.C, and L.A. went from 1 in 8 in 2004 to 1 in 5 in 2014 (https://wapo.st/1pKHjRN). In the newsroom developer community, that number has got to be even tinier. How do we get developers into the smaller metropolitan newsrooms that need them? How do we reorganize and reinvent this segment of our news ecosystem that is least equipped to hire and experiment with new products and platforms? As our field evolves and matures, it's worth examining why our jobs continue to gravitate to big-money coastal newsrooms, what it means for local news to be left out of the renaissance, and how we might endeavor to change it.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Chris Canipe, Jon McClure", + "facilitators_twitter": "ccanipe,JonRMcClure", + "id": "midsize-metro-newsdevs", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Innovation Studio", + "time": "1:30-2:15pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", + "title": "Where Are the Midsize Metro News Developers", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "**This is a lunch session, so grab your meal first and join the conversation.**\n\nWhen Michael Brown was shot and killed by a Ferguson police officer, one of the first questions many editors had was \"how often does this happen?\" It turns out the data was so bad we didn't really know. At The Washington Post, we set out to put his death in context by collecting our own data. We'll talk about what went into that effort and how it can be useful for other topics, as well.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Steven Rich, Aaron Williams", + "facilitators_twitter": "dataeditor,aboutaaron", + "id": "shootings-terrible-data", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 310", + "time": "1:30-2:15pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", + "title": "Covering police shootings (and other events) when the data is terrible", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "**This is a lunch session, so grab your meal first and join the conversation.**\n\nAll software built these days depends on some kind of open source infrastructure. Whether it's PyPI to install packages, OpenSSL to download them securely, or Linux and Apache to run your website. These projects are rarely sustainability funded, and we'll talk about the current state of things and how you might be able to help. For more background, check out Nadia Eghbal's whitepaper, [as summarized here](https://storify.com/Lukasaoz/open-source-infrastructure-white-paper).", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Eric Holscher", + "facilitators_twitter": "ericholscher", + "id": "oss-funding", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Boardroom", + "time": "1:30-2:15pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", + "title": "Funding Open Source Infrastructure", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Let's see if we can get past the data in data sonification and work on the music. Bring in a dataset, and we'll translate it on the spot into sheet music. Neena Satija will put her sight-reading skills to the test as we try to play some data live. Please, please bring your own instruments. We'll experiment with keys, speed, themes and variations and whatever else comes up to see what works.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Michael Corey, Neena Satija", + "facilitators_twitter": "mikejcorey,neenareports", + "id": "data-sonification", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Mediatheque", + "time": "2:30-3:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "Data sonification piano bar", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Algorithms play an increasingly relevant role in shaping our digital and physical experiences of the world. It is frequently the case that data from our digital footprints is used to predict our behavior and make decisions about the choices available to us. This unprecedented capacity to collect and analyze data has brought along with it a troubling dismissiveness of user agency, participation, and ownership. Such systems assume that it is an acceptable by-product for their users to have no understanding of the decisions being made about them and no agency in that decision-making process. For the most part, the invisibilized nature of these decisions are seen as a feature, not a bug, of a good user experience. As we begin to use algorithmic decision-making in areas of our lives that are increasingly high-stakes, it is essential that we create and utilize processes that maintain user agency and understanding. In this session, participants will be imagining and designing user experiences that employ participatory algorithmic-decision making processes. The session will be open to folks from all experience levels. We would be excited to see folks from a variety of different backgrounds, including designers, data scientists, journalists, privacy & security practitioners, and organizers from marginalized and frequently surveilled communities.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Tara Adiseshan, Linda Sandvik", + "facilitators_twitter": "taraadiseshan,hyper_linda", + "id": "participatory-algorithms", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Innovation Studio", + "time": "2:30-3:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "Designing Participatory Algorithmic Decision-Making Processes", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "We talk a lot about documenting our work throughout projects, but we really don't talk enough about how we can use better documentation to start us off in our jobs with the right knowledge and technology stack of the newsroom. For example, when someone leaves the newsroom is there some type of minimum documentation that they have to do or is there no expectation set for this? What about all of the institutional knowledge that people take when they leave a newsroom? Should there be guidelines on what sources and information you leave behind so the next person doesn't have to spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel? Let's have a discussion about newsroom on-boarding and off-boarding processes and how we, as a news nerd community, can work through some simple ways together to make these processes more efficient and useful for the future.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Sandhya Kambhampati", + "facilitators_twitter": "sandhya__k", + "id": "newsroom-onboarding", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 305", + "time": "2:30-3:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "The good and bad of newsroom on-boarding processes (and how can we make them better)", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "The design and deployment of software has important implications for maintenance and operation in a newsroom. We'll discuss the attributes of software projects that have an impact on their sustainability & ease of use over time (who will run your code when you're gone?). We'll also play a little design game to map out which attributes take priority in our newsrooms, and how open source software projects in the news match up to those priorities.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Ted Han, Mike Tigas", + "facilitators_twitter": "knowtheory,mtigas", + "id": "ecology-newsroom-software", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 310", + "time": "2:30-3:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "The Ecology of Newsroom Software", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Journalists and newsroom developers face particular challenges to their mental health, including tight deadlines and sensitive coverage topics set against the backdrop of an ever-changing industry. Depression, anxiety and mental illness are exacerbated when they’re not discussed openly or taken seriously. Through guided discussions, this session will equip individuals to better care for their own mental health, and identify changes we can make to our newsrooms to build safer, more positive workplaces.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Joel Eastwood, Emma Carew Grovum", + "facilitators_twitter": "JoelEastwood,emmacarew", + "id": "mental-health-newsrooms", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 314", + "time": "2:30-3:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "Balancing mental health in the newsroom", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Let's take a walk through the existing ecosystem of The Coral Project - by installing it on your own machine. We'll share how it's built, supply dummy data so you can play with it immediately, and discuss how to approach big problems with ambitious open-source software.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Gabriela Rodriguez Beron, David Erwin", + "facilitators_twitter": "gaba,daviderwin", + "id": "coral-install-party", + "length": "2.5 hours", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Boardroom", + "time": "2:30-5pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "Install Party: The Coral Project", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Vox Media is in the business of developing high-value digital journalism, storytelling, and brand advertising at scale. We have traditionally done a lot of custom design and engineering work for each brand that joins Vox Media. More recently, we’ve found that brand building is less about designing a website and more about designing a full brand identity package and by designing systems. Building bespoke experiences doesn’t scale. This session will take a workshop format where we provide context for building brands through designing scalable systems with a short open conversation, and will lead to small breakout groups where teams will work together to create a brand-focused system that scales.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Josh Laincz, Georgia Cowley", + "facilitators_twitter": "zohf, hellogeorgia,hellogeorgia", + "id": "designing-brands", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Commons", + "time": "2:30-3:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "Designing brands at scale", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Pitchfork started 20 years ago. Just a wee baby. The New Yorker hit 91 years in age. The NYTimes, Guardian, Washington Post, Galena Gazette, and more have several centuries worth of content between them. However it's fair to say that 90% of daily traffic goes directly against stories published in the last week. Archive stories can hold a rich and unique mirror to the events of today, but face a number of challenges in being found and resurfaced: organization, classification, relevancy. Resurfacing content from even moderately sized archives is a challenge: often, it’s as much art as science. It is almost a brute force exercise to determine quality and notability. Yet we know there is a meaningful history and legacy buried there. How do we make sense of the present when we cannot easily access the past? Why is this hard? We often think in historical terms over decades - and rarely in the smaller events that define our day to day. Staff across many departments may not have the necessary depth of knowledge about the archives to know where to draw from, and institutional knowledge is lost between generations. Metadata and taxonomy may not be established to help classify and surface. Tooling may not exist or may be inaccessible to guide making intelligent suggestions. In this talk, we’ll explore working with your archives by talking about how we work with ours. Low-hanging fruit to bring gems to the surface, long-term strategies to make archives more accessible, and to ensure that today's content is accessible tomorrow.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Matt Dennewitz, Michael Donohoe", + "facilitators_twitter": "mattdennewitz,donohoe", + "id": "evergreen-content", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Mediatheque", + "time": "4-5pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "title": "Sometimes I Sit and Think About Evergreen Content and Sometimes I Just Sit", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Who are you building for? What do they need? User research is something everyone on the team can be involved in, whether by asking a partner what they think or creating a quick usability test for others to try. Let's make a user research toolkit for everyone who's in a distributed dev team that works in news. How can we empower everyone on the team to run their own mini research projects, and then filter the results back into the product? Which listening/observation methods would help you with your work? We'll talk as a group about different methodologies, techniques, and organizational resistance that we've encountered. Together we'll aim to create a scrappy user research toolkit for all SRCCONers to take with them back to the office.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Emily Goligoski, Andrew Losowosky", + "facilitators_twitter": "emgollie", + "id": "user-research-toolkit", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Innovation Studio", + "time": "4-5pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "title": "Hungry for audience insights? Let’s make a DIY user research toolkit for newsrooms!", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Readers are increasingly interacting with news content from a variety of locations, environments and levels of ability. As a result, news organizations need to think about creating platforms and stories that readers can access in as many ways as possible. This session will discuss best practices for web accessibility, graphics, closed captioning, and social media and facilitate a discussion about what news organizations are doing and how we can improve as an industry.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Joanna S. Kao, John Burn-Murdoch", + "facilitators_twitter": "joannaskao", + "id": "accessibility", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 305", + "time": "4-5pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "title": "Accessibility in media", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Getting hundreds of reporters from different newsrooms in different countries to work together on the same project -and share- is the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ (ICIJ) day-to-day challenge. For our latest investigation, the Panama Papers, we gathered more than 370 journalists from almost 80 countries to mine 11.5 million files. One of the missions of ICIJ's Data & Research Unit is to create the tools to make these collaborations happen seamlessly across borders. We've implemented social network platforms for reporters to communicate the findings, developed platforms to search over millions of documents and data and also to explore them visually. With reporters collaborating more and more across borders - or with different organizations - our challenge today could be yours tomorrow. Learn from our successes (and mistakes). We want to share with you our experience in deploying Apache Solr (https://lucene.apache.org/solr/) to search unstructured data with added metadata, using Neo4J and Linkurious for graph databases (https://linkurio.us/) and implementing the social network Oxwall (https://www.oxwall.org/) to communicate efficiently.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Miguel Fiandor", + "facilitators_twitter": "mfiandor", + "id": "tools-document-search", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 310", + "time": "4-5pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "title": "Tools to search millions of documents remotely and across borders", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "You're throwing a fancy party for your friends, so you hire a chef. There are certain expectations between you and the chef: they will cook food; the food will be good; they will respect your home; they will reflect well upon you and treat your friends as their own guests; they will not put business cards on each plate; they will not poison your friends, introduce wolves, or burn your house down. These guidelines apply equally well to those of us providing shareable components for embedding on other people's websites. We are co-hosts to other people's guests. We should provide the service we advertise on the tin, not break people's stuff, and generally remember we are part of someone else's story and need to make them look better to their readers. (And not inject malware.) Through discussion and example, we'll explore the various concerns especially relevant to third-party shareable component providers, and curate a clear and concise set of best practices.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Justin Reese, Arjuna Soriano", + "facilitators_twitter": "reefdog,arjunasoriano", + "id": "embeds", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 314", + "time": "4-5pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "title": "How to be a guest chef at someone's house party, or, Being a responsible embed provider", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "The news-nerd community is pretty good at collaboration. So let's work together to sort out our weakest points—as individuals, teams, maybe even as a community—and figure out how to get 'em patched. We'll work in small groups, come together to bubble up common worries and problems, and then nail down the kinds of things we need to get better. Bring your deepest insecurities about tech, process, design, and culture, and be honest: most of the session will be off-record, and prizes may be awarded for the most potentially embarrassing admissions. You'll leave knowing which of your troubles are widely shared, and our best guess at what needs to be done to level everybody up.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Erin Kissane, Ingrid Burrington", + "facilitators_twitter": "kissane,lifewinning", + "id": "lets-be-terrible", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Commons", + "time": "4-5pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "title": "Let's All Be Terrible at Things Together", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "We have a common language and set of processes for getting a news story reported, vetted and published. But what’s the right process for redesigning a news website? A news app? A data interactive? These projects can become complex. They need to be collaborative. The bosses need to buy in early. Let’s stop winging it. In this session, we’ll discuss what we can borrow from the design industry, which has developed a plethora of methods that can be used to facilitate meetings, surface and prioritize user needs, define project scope, generate ideas and test assumptions, and keep a project moving toward its deadline. We’ll brainstorm the common problems and challenges we all face in managing these projects, and then we’ll tackle the most pressing — sharing and evaluating which design methods might work best to solve them.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "AmyJo Brown, Jennifer Thibault", + "facilitators_twitter": "amyjo_brown,jlthibault", + "id": "design-world-ideas", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Mediatheque", + "time": "10:30-11:30am", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "What ideas can we borrow from the design world to solve news design problems?", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "You’ve read about messaging apps and the rise of AI-driven conversational news interfaces — but what’s really effective for a news bot and what’s just a tedious iteration of Choose Your Own Adventure, or Excel Macros, or if-this-then-that statements by another name? Millie and SMI spent the last year thinking about what makes a news app sound like a smart interesting friend. In this session we’ll workshop how to ensure your news bots don't get stuck in a boring valley of uncanny.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Millie Tran, Stacy-Marie Ishmael", + "facilitators_twitter": "Millie,s_m_i", + "id": "bots-need-humans", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Innovation Studio", + "time": "10:30-11:30am", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "Why your bot is nothing without a human", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Audience development has become a hot, new buzzword inside nearly every news organization across the country. Everyone, it seems, is clamoring to hire an audience team. But what exactly is audience development? How do you find these magical creatures? What do they do? And can they really help connect your journalism with more people? The simple answer is yes. If you do it right. FRONTLINE has had an audience development team for four years, and it has been transformative. We’ve learned that when our editorial and audience teams work side by side, hand in hand we CAN make magic together. We've seen double and triple digit growth across multiple platforms. But the process isn’t always easy, pretty or comfortable. In this session we’ll have an open and honest conversation about our lessons learned. We’ll share stories of success and failures. And we’ll offer practical advice and tips for people who work in traditional newsrooms -- and for traditional bosses uncomfortable with thinking about audience. We’d also open it up to the room to hear more about how other newsrooms are approaching this.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Sarah Moughty, Pamela Johnston", + "facilitators_twitter": "smoughts,pamjohnston", + "id": "editorial-audience-development", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 305", + "time": "10:30-11:30am", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "Break Down that Wall: Why Editorial and Audience Development Need to Work Together", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "In this session the attendees will learn how to enrich stories with VR experiences without the help of developers using open source tools based on web standards. This experiences can be distributed as websites or embed as widgets and are ready for headsets like the Oculus Rift and the Google Cardboard. The presented tools includes a project called GuriVR (gurivr.com), developed as part of my Knight-Mozilla fellowship.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Dan Zajdband", + "facilitators_twitter": "impronunciable", + "id": "webvr", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 310", + "time": "10:30-11:30am", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "WebVR for the rest of us", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "It's not as easy as just putting the code up on GitHub. This session will work through the complex legal, social, competitive and organizational challenges to making your software open source. As a bonus: We'll figure out best practices for docs, release schedules and version numbering!", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Jeremy Bowers", + "facilitators_twitter": "jeremybowers", + "id": "open-sourcing", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 314", + "time": "10:30-11:30am", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "Open Sourcing And You", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "With the ‘silent movie’ format of autoplaying Facebook News Feed videos, captioning has gone from being an accessibility concern, to being the primary hook many viewers will have into your video. Let’s share examples of publishers making the most of this new creative format which demands a different story-telling style, combining text, animation and video. Optimising for this silent format is also a great reason to make your videos accessible through subtitles or closed-captions. Whether you’re already captioning your videos or looking to get started let’s go through recently developed tools for making this easier including crowdsourcing (Amara) and Speech To Text (Trint) and how you can integrate them into your workflows publishing on YouTube and Facebook.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Gideon Goldberg", + "facilitators_twitter": "gidsg", + "id": "video-captioning", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Boardroom", + "time": "10:30-11:30am", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "‘Insert Caption Here’: how Facebook made video captioning cool", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Usually, collaboration, especially in a small newsroom, looks a bit like this: Person A slogs in the trenches solo, cleans data, analyzes, comes up with an insight, writes a draft, sends to Person B. Person B realizes Person A likely made an error in the cleaning, tears apart draft, comes up with new insight. Person A goes back to square one, finds their error, redoes everything and sends it back. Person B questions their own judgement and sends the draft to Person C. Person C finds more errors Person B noticed but decided not to raise considering the hell they’d already put Person A through. Newsroom dissolves in a panic as Persons A, B and C all realize that this is going in next month’s issue so they’d better find, fix and spruce up these errors and fast. In a slightly better world, Person A notices their error, asks Person B for help, Person B drops everything they’re doing, helps find the error in 100 lines of code and correct it, tries to explain what they did, and then, if they’re lucky, return to the work they were doing before. But again, newsroom panic is likely. We think pair programming might be a way to short-circuit this cycle of agony and provide ways for small clusters of reporters to work together more effectively. For example, if Person A and Person B worked in tandem instead on projects like data cleaning, but also like writing, audio editing and page-designing, and helped catch errors early. That saves time and energy. We also think it could be a way to help build reusable skills in micro-newsrooms where multipurpose projects are a necessity. So instead of Person B simply correcting the error, they can correct the error in tandem with Person A so Person A can now fix that problem for themselves. We don’t know for sure this will work but we want to try to out different models of collaboration. In essence, we’d like to run an experiment on a group of SRCCON attendees: Can pair programming and other forms of collaboration drawn from outside the journalism field help resolve some of our own intractable problems? Here’s what we imagine the session looking like: Intro discussion on what pair programming is, why people do it, what makes pairing different from other forms of collaboration (10 min) Pairing activity - Attendees will split into pairs, pick a non-programming task (analyzing a data set, writing a script, editing audio, etc.) and use pair programming techniques to complete that task (25 min) Groups share their experiences (5 min) Discussion - What other types of process from programming can we adopt in the newsroom? (10 min)", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Katharine Schimel, Jordan Wirfs-Brock", + "facilitators_twitter": "kateschimel,jordanwb", + "id": "pair-program-news", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Commons", + "time": "10:30-11:30am", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "Can We Pair Program The News?", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Mobile devices gather information about us as we go about our days by default, and we often voluntarily grant access to additional information in exchange for access to apps and services. News organizations could be taking better advantage of what mobile devices track, delivering better news experiences by taking into account time of day and a user’s location and personal preferences. But how much information are users willing to give up about themselves? And where should we draw the line between offering valuable experiences and being overly invasive? This workshop will prompt thinking about questions around privacy and mobile use, casting participants in the role of users (which we all are, anyway) and asking them to consider: What personal information would you be willing to give up for the sake of a news-focused digital service, and why? We’ll discuss the range of permissions that mobile developers have access to, and debate when and how they might be used to deliver better experiences. At the end the session we’ll have considered as a group the ways users may want to limit the personal data they share, and also what kinds of convenience or customization in news experiences on mobile would make the exchange of personal information more palatable.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Sasha Koren, Alastair Coote", + "facilitators_twitter": "sashak,_alastair", + "id": "mobile-privacy", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Mediatheque", + "time": "12-1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-2", + "title": "News, mobile and privacy: Where’s the line between convenient and creepy?", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "In newsrooms of old, jobs were pretty easy to understand (reporters, editors, photographers, illustrators), as were the responsibilities that went with those jobs. But newsrooms still can be old-school, so even if you write and deploy code, you still probably have some non-technical managers and peers. How do you help them better understand what you do? How can you work effectively together and stay on good terms? How do you pitch ideas to them, and how do they pitch ideas to you? How do you communicate about progress, priorities and problems, both on a daily basis and in a crisis? Let's talk about what's worked and what still needs improvement.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Gina Boysun, Justin Myers", + "facilitators_twitter": "gboysun,myersjustinc", + "id": "juggling-expectations", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Innovation Studio", + "time": "12-1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-2", + "title": "Every day I'm juggling: Managing managers, peer expectations, and your own project ideas", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Visual journalism is on the rise. Recent articles highlight its importance in the future of news, but most focus on video and interactives. Few, if any, even mention photojournalism. Let's spend a session overcompensating. We'll take the challenges we're interested in, whether it's interactive storytelling, push notifications, audience engagement or anything else, and come up with the most photo-centric solutions. Then, we will bring all of these ideas together and try to figure out how and where photojournalism fits best in our constantly shifting vision of the future.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Neil Bedi", + "facilitators_twitter": "_neilbedi", + "id": "photojournalism-future-news", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 305", + "time": "12-1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-2", + "title": "Where does photojournalism fit in the future of news?", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "The formula seems simple: something happens and we report on it. The faster the better, so long as we follow standards. But the pace accelerated quickly – print and hourly news segments seems antiquated compared to the internet, where a tweet from a source is seconds away from being pushed, klaxon'd and marquee'd worldwide. Editors need ever-evolving tools & guidelines that enable quick publishing on their own platforms and social/distribution channels. Newsroom nerds need to build stable and iterable tools so editors can keep tabs on their report, audience and competition. Readers, on the other hand, expect the news to find them like magic — mobile-first, device-friendly, geo-fenced, natively rendered (AMP, Facebook, iOS), media-rich AND omnisciently relevant to their specific interests.\n\n* How do we balance all those moving parts?\n* How do we reach people who define relevant breaking news for themselves?\n* How do we answer different-paced audiences — news-junkies vs. news-curious vs. late-comers?\n* How do we adjust when features that seem great one moment are clichéd the next?\n\nThis conversation will look inside two newsrooms: the New York Times (storied, weighty, born of a print legacy) and Breaking News (younger, nimble and born of Twitter) for what lessons each can each share.\n", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Martin McClellan, Tiff Fehr", + "facilitators_twitter": "hellbox,tiffehr", + "id": "pace-breaking-news", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 310", + "time": "12-1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-2", + "title": "Working at the pace of Breaking News", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "According to this [Very Scientific™ poll](https://twitter.com/brianloveswords/status/717749353914490881), ~75% of developers still primarily rely on `console.log` debugging. While there is nothing wrong with `console.log`, modern browsers contain a rich suite of tools that can help you debug even some of the gnarliest nested callback pyramids and promise chains. In this session we'll show you some of those tools and teach you how to use them so next time you're running into problems you might not have to debug with `console.log(\"why isn't this workinggggg\")`.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Brian J Brennan", + "facilitators_twitter": "brianloveswords", + "id": "developer-tools", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 314", + "time": "12-1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-2", + "title": "Beyond console.log: making the most of your developer tools", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "When dealing with data that encapsulates the lives of hundreds, or even thousands, of people, keeping those people from becoming anonymous numbers can be challenging. In this session, we walk through tactics and strategies for keeping humanity at the centre of complex stories, and avoiding losing our audience while exploring the sheer scale of some of these data stories. We will use the evolution -- from early stage design sketches to version 3 finished product -- of the CBC's award-winning investigation into missing and murdered aboriginal women across Canada as some of our guiding examples through this discussion.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "William Wolfe-Wylie", + "facilitators_twitter": "wolfewylie", + "id": "people-data-stories", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Boardroom", + "time": "12-1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-2", + "title": "Keeping people at the forefront of data stories", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Whenever we work together with some other team mate, more often than not, we end up learning a more efficient way of approaching a particular recurrent task that will improve my producivity. Since we are going to congregate a lot of news nerdy knowlegde in Portland, I think a good session could be held to try to get some of our tips and tricks out of our brains and share them with the community.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Juan Elosua", + "facilitators_twitter": "jjelosua", + "id": "tips-tricks", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Commons", + "time": "12-1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-2", + "title": "Let's share our small time savers", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "**This is a lunch session, so grab your meal first and join the conversation.**\n\nAs news organizations continue to evolve around the country, journalists and newsroom developers face many different challenges. This includes working to enhance the news and digital experience for our audiences using a wide variety of tools and resources, but how do we enhance our own skills on the job? In this conversation, we will talk about the different ways that journo enthusiasts and newsroom developers can enhance themselves by taking advantage of professional development opportunities.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Ebony Martin", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "professional-development", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 310", + "time": "1:30-2:15pm", + "timeblock": "friday-lunch", + "title": "Professional development in the digital age: How to get started, how to keep going", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "We set aside rooms during lunchtime for people to lead conversational sessions over meals. You'll find a signup grid in the Commons area, so if a topic emerges while you're at SRCCON that you'd like to discuss, sign up!", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "lunch-conversations", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "", + "room": "", + "time": "1:30-2:15pm", + "timeblock": "friday-lunch", + "title": "Lunch conversations - sign up at SRCCON", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "You’re leading a team in your organization, or you’re ready to step into a bigger role. Maybe you’re managing people for the first time, or you’ve been doing it for a while. You’ve read the books, listened to the management advice podcasts, maybe even participated in some leadership training. But much of the advice out there doesn’t account for the unique challenges you face as a journalism/tech manager when you are a woman, person of color, or in another underrepresented group. From overt dismissal to subtle yet insidious microaggressions, how do we succeed as leaders in an industry where the decision makers are still predominantly white and male? Let’s share advice and brainstorm specific tactics for handling the roadblocks faced by women, people of color, and other underrepresented folks who want to lead and make big things happen. Everyone is welcome to participate, but if you’re in a majority group, aim to listen A LOT more than you talk.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Kaeti Hinck, Emily Chow", + "facilitators_twitter": "kaeti,eschow", + "id": "underrepresented-managers", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Mediatheque", + "time": "2:30-3:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "They don’t want you to lead: Major keys to success as an underrepresented manager", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Science Fiction authors often embed deep insights into the future of technology within their stories. Come to this session to share examples of fascinating science fictional treatments of media and networked communication with other attendees and geek out about who got it right and who may yet come out correct. (My idea is to solicit ahead of time 4-6 super fans who are willing to give low-key lightning talks summarizing plots with an emphasis on the interesting media bits.)", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Joe Germuska", + "facilitators_twitter": "JoeGermuska", + "id": "media-science-fiction", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Innovation Studio", + "time": "2:30-3:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "Through an iPhone Darkly: Media and Networks through the lens of Science Fiction", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "As more news organizations turn an eye to analytical measurement, it is important to discuss what we're actually trying to measure when we use analytics. Often, that comes down to defining what success means for your storytelling. This session will help you to think about your stories and your needs before you start thinking about analytics. With a strong definition of success, it becomes easier to define success measurements. We will share different tools for creating success measurements as well.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Tyler Fisher, Sonya Song", + "facilitators_twitter": "tylrfishr,sonya2song", + "id": "better-analytics", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 305", + "time": "2:30-3:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "Better Analytics: Why You Have to Define Success Before You Use Analytics — And How To Do It", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "As technology and our capacity grows, data projects become more and more ambitious. We scrape millions of rows and present readers a whole universe of information with one news app or interactive page. But is it always the more the merrier? When we throw this much unprocessed information at readers, do they all have the ability to sift through it and find the \"nut graph\" of the story? Or is nut graph even a necessary part of news these days with all the big data available to explore? The line between news and academic research has blurred more and more since we started catching up with their toolbox. How to distinguish ourselves from a think tank or an academic institution and not to bore our readers with too much information and numbers is the question everyone in the news industry should ask themselves. \"Less is more\" should not only be applied to writing, but for data reporting as well. In this session, let's discuss successful and not so successful examples of \"too much data\", think about when is it time to give up the desire of \"show them all\", how to trim down information effectively to create a truly enjoyable experience for readers, and hopefully come up with a draft of guidelines for future practices.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Evie Liu, Steve Suo", + "facilitators_twitter": "Evie_xing,stevesuo", + "id": "big-data-less-more", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 310", + "time": "2:30-3:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "When is big data too big? When is less more?", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Using some of the videos from the Whistle Blowers Interview Archive, we’ll take an hands on approach to explore key concepts, ideas and techniques to identify narrative points, test out story ideas, and craft a compelling story. This session focusses on the underlying evergreen storytelling principles that transcend the medium, so no knowledge of video editing required, just curiosity towards story telling principles and techniques.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Pietro Passarelli, Niels Ladefoged", + "facilitators_twitter": "pietropassarell", + "id": "video-interviews", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 314", + "time": "2:30-3:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "How to craft compelling stories out of video interviews?", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Strong communities start with one-on-one relationships that grow into networks. But what if you’re a lonely coder, a student, or someone in a remote area without constant access to the wider news nerd network? Let's brainstorm ways to better facilitate connections between individuals in the community – perhaps through online meetings for project feedback or career advice. What would you want help with? How would you want to help someone else? What could these meetings look like? What would make them successful?", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Julia Smith", + "facilitators_twitter": "julia67", + "id": "remote-mentorship", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Boardroom", + "time": "2:30-3:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "Give and Receive: Can we strengthen our community through remote mentorship and office hours?", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Let's take a moment and get away from the weighty, important conversations and just make/hack something. In a short amount of time, and through a loosely structured format, you will make something. That something could be a more fully-formed idea, a better title and mission for an existing project, a paper prototype of a news app, a drawing of a visualization, an interview process and actual interview, a quickly coded prototype, code tests for a project, a new logo, and so much more. Just come with a small, achievable idea. Groups are welcome, but its suggested to keep them at no more than 2 or 3 people.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Alan Palazzolo, Clarisa Diaz", + "facilitators_twitter": "zzolo,clarii_d", + "id": "playtime", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Commons", + "time": "2:30-3:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "Playtime (in ludicrous speed)", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "In the past few years, we’ve seen emerging recognition of graphics and data journalism, most recently in the Pulitzers awarded to data-centric projects. Our community is reflecting on recent years of our work and has established design patterns and philosophies. But we mostly talk about how we do our journalism -- now let’s talk about the people doing it. How have the expectations of a journalist’s career trajectory changed with emerging roles and disciplines? Have we made our corner of the industry open to aspiring news nerds who might not have access to the tools and resources that gave many of us a lift into this field? And what if you don’t see your job as your calling? Our goal is provide a catharsis about our work and develop solutions that look out for the people doing this work. We’ll ask hard questions of ourselves to foster a discussion about the sustainability of what we do.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Katie Park, Aaron Williams", + "facilitators_twitter": "katiepark,aboutaaron", + "id": "data-analysis-ourselves", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Mediatheque", + "time": "4-5pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", + "title": "Who is that journalist I see, staring straight back at me?", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Writing down processes, goals, and workflows is an important part of building healthy, transparent, and collaborative teams. But finding time to write and making sure that people read those documents is a constant challenge. This activity-based brainstorm session will lean into the expertise and experience of attendees to explore methods for building solid documentation practices into a team’s culture.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Kelsey Scherer, Lauren Rabaino", + "facilitators_twitter": "kelsa_,laurenrabaino", + "id": "documentation-culture", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Innovation Studio", + "time": "4-5pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", + "title": "How can teams build a consistent culture of documentation?", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "One of the things I love about our undergraduate internship for newsroom developers is that every year we can't quite believe we'll cope without them when they go back to finish their degree, but somehow every year we get another cohort that are just as amazing. Another thing I love is that when they complete their degrees a year later, we're number one on their list of prospective employers. And another thing is that, eight years into the program, seven out of the eleven interns who've graduated are now full time developers at the BBC. Four of them are seniors. So, maybe you'd like to share your experiences of running internships and we can compare notes.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Andrew Leimdorfer, Annie Daniel", + "facilitators_twitter": "leimdorfer,anieldaniel", + "id": "internships", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 305", + "time": "4-5pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", + "title": "Running undergraduate internships that produce great newsroom developers", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "This one’s for new parents, anyone who might want to be a parent some day, and the unicorns who have it all figured out. A lot of us got to where we are today by tinkering. We did our real job and then kept going: learning new tools, building things for fun, contributing to friends’ projects. How do we keep being creative — and keep creating — on a parent’s schedule? Let’s hear from each other about how we can adapt, and about the doubts and the triumphs that come along with being a working parent.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Jason Alcorn, Lisa Waananen Jones", + "facilitators_twitter": "jasonalcorn,lisawaananen", + "id": "parenthood", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Classroom 310", + "time": "4-5pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", + "title": "Expanding the Team: Parenthood in the News Business", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Faced with the drive to program to remote partners, apps, and corporate-owned-and-operated chat platforms, we find ourselves rolling the dice on a future that seems to call for a referendum on The Web. As the tools we use for storytelling become not just more diverse but more constrained by the spectre of Terms Of Service, can we hedge our bets? Or to put it a different way, does our work to serve both third-party platforms and the websites that serve as our foundations actually constitute a zero-sum game? This session proposes that, by stepping back, we can imagine a workflow and toolset that serves both needs—and, by extension, newsrooms—even better than the current generation of content management systems. In order to investigate this approach, we will ask three questions: 1. Rather than abandon the benefits that the web affords us as a structure, how can we carry with us the ethos and process of the web as we negotiate these new platforms? 2. Can our industry call upon a history of standards and protocols to avoid partner lock-in? 3. Should our tools pivot from a focus on authorship to one of reportage and remixing, allowing us to use new platforms in focused ways without losing control over the source material? What if the web is the best idea? How can we retain the imperatives of the web as we serve the future of storytelling, and what are the kinds of tools and standards we can rally around to preserve that context while allowing us to experiment in other people's walled gardens?", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "David Yee", + "facilitators_twitter": "tangentialism", + "id": "platforms-web-storytelling", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Boardroom", + "time": "4-5pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", + "title": "Get you a CMS that can do both: Platforms, the web, and storytelling imperatives", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "What if I told you there’s more to running a newsroom experiment than just trying out a new thing for the first time? That there are processes to make sure you’ll get the most out doing them, and that the rest of your newsroom will benefit, too. Using practical exercises, this session will take you through the steps of planning a newsroom experiment and, crucially, what to do afterwards. You will come away from this session with a framework for how to structure and plan newsroom experiments", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Robin Kwong", + "facilitators_twitter": "robinkwong", + "id": "newsroom-experiments", + "length": "1 hour", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Commons", + "time": "4-5pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", + "title": "Getting more out of your newsroom experiments", + "transcription": "" + } +] diff --git a/_archive/sessions/2017/sessions.json b/_archive/sessions/2017/sessions.json index 5207de34..5e90a807 100644 --- a/_archive/sessions/2017/sessions.json +++ b/_archive/sessions/2017/sessions.json @@ -1,1322 +1,1322 @@ [ - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Get your badges and get some food (plus plenty of coffee), as you gear up for the first day of SRCCON!", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-breakfast", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "8:30am", - "timeblock": "thursday-morning", - "title": "Registration & Breakfast", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "We'll kick things off with a welcome, some scene-setting, and some suggestions for getting the most out of SRCCON.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-welcome", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "9:30am", - "timeblock": "thursday-morning", - "title": "Welcome to SRCCON", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "As thoughtful and deliberate as we try to be, we’re all still human, and the overwhelming majority of us tend to seek out information that confirms what we already believe to be true. That’s a problem. As media organizations, we’re only serving a fraction of our communities if we can only reach those who already know and agree with the stories we’re sharing. So, what actually encourages people to consider perspectives that differ from their own, and how do we create more space for that?\n\nIn this session, we’ll dig in on these questions and get a little vulnerable as we try to create that space for ourselves. We’ll talk about how people come to believe what they believe, and look at the latest research around confirmation bias, the backlash effect, and other factors that shape how we make decisions and, ultimately, change our minds. In small groups, we’ll talk about areas where our perspectives have changed over time, and reflect on the forces that helped us change our point of view. We’ll surface common themes as a group and discuss ways these experiences could inform and—dare we say—change the way we approach our work.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Marie Connelly, B Cordelia Yu", - "facilitators_twitter": "eyemadequiet,thebestsophist", - "id": "change-our-minds", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "10-11:15am", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", - "title": "How do we change our minds anyway?", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Stop throwing away your shot. Using the dueling personalities of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, we’ll discuss solutions to common problems standing between you and a more productive, calm workday.\n\nLearn effective ways to get things done, improve your workflow, find better ways to collaborate and more!\n\nYou don’t need to know the [Hamilton soundtrack](https://open.spotify.com/album/1kCHru7uhxBUdzkm4gzRQc) inside out to participate, though some familiarity might make this more enjoyable. We’ll put together any story-specific information you need to know as a group and go from there.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Hannah Birch", - "facilitators_twitter": "hannahsbirch", - "id": "hamilton-or-burr", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "10-11:15am", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", - "title": "Are you Hamilton or Burr? How to benignly manipulate the people around you", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "FOIA is an awesome tool for government transparency, but FOIA is often also slow and easily blocked by various exceptions. In this session, we'll look at some of the other ways in which the federal government publicizes what it is up to and how you can use that to figure out things before you must resort to FOIA.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Jacob Harris, Rebecca Williams", - "facilitators_twitter": "harrisj,internetrebecca", - "id": "beyond-foia-brainstorming", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "10-11:15am", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", - "title": "Beyond FOIA: Brainstorming Other Ways To See What Your Government Is Up To", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Whether you’re an aspiring manager, or have been leading teams for years, managing people can present intimidating challenges. What are you most afraid of? Maybe you think you’re not ~ charismatic ~ enough. Or you worry that being manager means you’re not doing “real” work. Perhaps you’re nervous that your team doesn’t like you (and you might be right). As a group, or in small groups, we’ll talk about the things that most terrify us, and then work together to come up with solutions and ideas. ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Kaeti Hinck", - "facilitators_twitter": "kaeti", - "id": "managing-people-yourself", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Minnesota", - "time": "10-11:15am", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", - "title": "Managing people, managing yourself", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "In the current political environment, news cycles are getting shorter and the amount of work that needs to be done is greater by the day. We would like to discuss practical approaches newsrooms are taking to cover American democracy in the age of Trump, from building databases to automating information changes to making life easier for on-the-ground reporters and everything in between.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Aaron Williams, Steven Rich", - "facilitators_twitter": "aboutaaron,dataeditor", - "id": "practical-software-democracy", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "10-11:15am", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", - "title": "Practical approaches for creating software to cover democracy", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "**Resound - Audio management apps**\nKPCC\n\n**Gamifying News**\nFANschool.org", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "office-hours-1", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "11am-12pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", - "title": "Office Hours", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Inviting audiences to share their feedback opens paths to better serve our communities. Every stage of the news process is an opportunity to engage our audiences, yet in many newsrooms, we only solicit feedback post-publication. User experience (UX) research is a common tool technologists use when developing new products. But it’s applicable to all kinds of newsroom workflows beyond tech teams, from editorial to design to engagement to business development. Creating processes to learn and improve user experiences can lead to more inclusive digital platforms, content, and tools that share information and engage audiences.\n\nWhen is user feedback valuable? Pretty much always: during the ideation, creation or validation phases for content, platforms, tools and experiences. However, at each of these stages, how and why we use audience feedback is subtly different. So, to navigate this process, we will work together to draw a project roadmap that outlines what types of user feedback can be collected at each stage, and what methods are most appropriate. We’ll identify and practice some ways to gather and respond to user feedback. We will also brainstorm audience engagement tactics, such as: usability testing of interactive graphics on mobile devices, focus groups to decide next steps after a story is produced, or co-designing processes for audiences to engage with your organization in new ways.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Sonja Marziano, Jordan Wirfs-Brock", - "facilitators_twitter": "ssmarziano,jordanwb", - "id": "roadmap-user-testing", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "11:45am-1pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", - "title": "Let’s create a roadmap for user testing and feedback in newsrooms", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "News is competitive. Digital news, even more so. And when we're all playing in the same space of news feeds and closed captioning, text must find a way to captivate an audience. But manipulating typography has been an age-old trick of tabloid magazines and sensationalized journalism, so why have we allowed some of these tactics to leak into the realm of digital journalism? Intentional or not, our use and abuse of typography brings up everything from silly snafus, like announcing the wrong winner of Miss Universe, to deeply unethical content that can stir fear and manipulate an audience's point of view. Let's explore how we may be using and abusing type in our newsrooms, how to avoid unethical treatment of typography, and what we can do to leverage text to our advantage *and* our audience's advantage.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Dolly Li", - "facilitators_twitter": "dollyli", - "id": "typography-social-video", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "11:45am-1pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", - "title": "Using and Abusing Typography: How Social Video Is Playing Games With Your Heart", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Imagine a job where you could spend all your time pursuing new, creative projects, and get your whole office on board for every big, exciting idea you come up with. \n\nThat’s probably not your job (If it is, we envy you!). When you have an idea, you have to convince other people to embrace it. Maybe you’re trying to get buy-in on a new digital project, but your newsroom is focused on the reporting-writing-editing process. Maybe you’re trying to convince others to embrace a big idea that’s going to require lots of resources and time. Or maybe you see a way to overhaul a longstanding process to make your organization function better. In this session, we’ll create games to help us figure out ways to face the challenges of navigating digital initiatives in a small news organization.\n\nBring a work challenge you’ve been grappling with — or just bring yourself and your creativity!", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Sara Konrad Baranowski, Andrea Suozzo", - "facilitators_twitter": "skonradb,asuozzo", - "id": "navigate-roadblocks-games", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "11:45am-1pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", - "title": "Candyland, Catan and Codenames — Oh My! Navigate Roadblocks in Small Newsrooms With Games", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Liveblogs in 2016 are very different from live coverage in 2017. Breaking news formats have evolved. So have story pace and reader preferences. The New York Times has moved away from liveblogs towards a handful of new forms, each under active guidance/editing. The Guardian Mobile Lab is prototyping a future for live coverage that moves beyond the single pageview towards self-updating and sequential notifications, alongside “shifting lenses” to give different perspectives throughout a live event. But even the newest ideas continue to wrestle with being seen as a Product and all that entails. Let’s discuss the latest habits — for newsrooms, readership and notifications — and the future of live coverage tools.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Tiff Fehr, Alastair Coote, Hamilton Boardman", - "facilitators_twitter": "tiffehr,_alastair,nytham", - "id": "live-coverage-forms", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "11:45am-1pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", - "title": "Live Coverage Forms For (and From) the Immediate Future", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "What can newsrooms learn from the process of launching a product? In this session we’ll use a WTF Just Happened Today as a case study to illustrate an example of launching an MVP product, validating product decisions, and iterating on a product. We’ll define a set of constraints through a group brainstorming session to identify a set of problems to be solved. From there, we’ll do a design brainstorm to think through products that can solve those problems, and create a hypothetical new news product worth paying for.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Matt Kiser, Kelsey Scherer", - "facilitators_twitter": "matt_kiser,kelsa_", - "id": "news-products", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "11:45am-1pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", - "title": "News products: How to design, launch, and iterate something worth paying for", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Journalism is a powerful tool. A place to show different views of the world as well and an opportunity to do active solidarity and combat historical bias . Based on the Ada Initiative Ally Skills workshop by Valerie Aurora, this lab puts ally skills to work on journalistic product. How can we take our professional skills as journalists, editors, data scientists, programmers et al , and really commit to changing the way we cover issues and produce product? \n\nKeeping our desire to fight inequality at the fore how would those skills change the reporting on the contentious issues of right now and confront systemic oppression with journalistic excellence.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Gabriela Rodriguez Beron, Sydette Harry", - "facilitators_twitter": "gaba,blackamazon", - "id": "privileges-allies-lab", - "length": "2 hours", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Board Room (5th floor)", - "time": "11:45am-1:45pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", - "title": "Aim to Misbehave: Privileges & Allies in the Media Creation : A Lab/Remix", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-lunch", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "1pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", - "title": "Lunch at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Everyone agrees that mentorship is a good thing, but formal mentorship programs often fail because they are too time consuming to run. The Women in Tech group at The Times decided to tackle this problem last year and was able to create a mentorship program (for women and men!) that rolled out to the entire digital organization. We will share tips, discuss the lessons we learned and run a condensed version of the goal planning and peer coaching workshops that are part of the program. ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Erica Greene, Jessica Kosturko", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "mentorship-at-scale", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "1:15-2:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", - "title": "Mentorship at Scale: How The NYT Women in Tech group build a mentorship program for 250+ people in our free time", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Are you cripplingly shy? Socially awkward, perhaps? Do you get taken advantage of because you don't know how to say no? Maybe you have a colleague who picks on you. Any newsroom has a cast of personalities ranging from introverted to outwardly aggressive. If you're that person who fears talking to people -- a skill that's required of journalists -- or gets bullied by the big loudmouth in the newsroom who undermines you and your ideas, finding your place in a collaborative newsroom environment or just do your job as a journalist can be challenging. This session, or therapy circle, would explore real strategies to overcome whatever personality traits participants may have that hinders their journalism. For example, to deal with my debilitating anxiety attacks that precede asking colleagues or sources to do something for me, I put my 'roller derby hat' on and become a whole new person to become as fierce and unapologetic as I am on the track beating up and getting beaten up by other women. Find your 'roller derby hat' or 'Sasha Fierce' here.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Yoohyun Jung, Emma Carew Grovum", - "facilitators_twitter": "yoohyun_jung,emmacarew", - "id": "overcoming-personality-traits", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "1:15-2:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", - "title": "Overcoming crippling personality traits to survive in a newsroom", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Making any startup run is hard work, but there are specific challenges -- and specific benefits -- to running one inside a bigger company.\n\nSome topics of conversation:\n- Risk vs. stability\n- Rolling your own vs. leveraging existing company platforms\n- Equity vs. job security\n- Nesting dolls corporate executive structures\n- Being a company inside of a division.\n- Spinning up vs. finding external funding.\n- How do I do this at my own company?\n\nWhy us?\n\nBreaking News germinated inside MSNBC.com, when it was still an independent joint venture of Microsoft and NBC. We had good neighbors -- the company had bought NEWSVINE and EveryBlock. We became a part of NBC News when they fully bought out Msnbc.com in 2014. At our height, we had 20 employees, evenly split between product and editorial. ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Martin McClellan, Ben Tesch", - "facilitators_twitter": "hellbox,magnetbox", - "id": "sailing-pirate-ship", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "1:15-2:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", - "title": "Sailing the pirate ship: running a startup inside a bigger company", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thu-lunch-talk-hiring", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Minnesota", - "time": "1:15-2:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", - "title": "Let's Talk About Hiring", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "**1-2pm**\n**Web Performance**\nConde Nast\n\n**OPEN SLOT**\n\n**2-3pm**\n**Publishing on the Web Progressively**\nJohn Paul\n\n**Building an Engineering Culture at a News Org**\nNew York Times", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "office-hours-2", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "1-3pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", - "title": "Office Hours", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Pothole locations, property tax bills, school test scores– local data is still vital to people’s daily lives and therefore, an important part of local news coverage. However, it can many times be tough to get ahold of and to deal with, especially when your editors expect New York Times level of quality with the budget and resources of the Pawnee Journal. In this session, we invite other local data journalists and enthusiasts to discuss the difficulties in working with local data and how can we make it better. How do we deal with local governments that give you data from a dot matrix printer? What are the best strategies to take national stories and localize them, especially when data might not exist on the local level? What’s the best way to showcase a data story that will really resonate with your readers who want to know more about what’s going on in their community? We’ll also be discussing our roles in small and ever-shrinking newsrooms, like we can maximize our usefulness without becoming a service desk. Join us to come up with a game plan to make local data journalism on par quality-wise with what the national newsrooms are doing. ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Carla Astudillo, Erin Petenko, Steve Stirling", - "facilitators_twitter": "carla_astudi,EPetenko,SStirling", - "id": "local-data-journalism", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "3-4:15pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "Local data journalism still matters (and we can make it better!)", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "If people come to you to find out how to troubleshoot encryption keys or choose a password manager, you’re a security trainer, even if you think you’re neither qualified nor an expert. Let’s talk about best practices for ethical and responsible skill sharing, and about strategies for helping your newsroom colleagues and sources protect private conversations.\n\nOpen News and BuzzFeed Open Lab are collaborating on a curriculum designed specifically for newsroom trainers, so we'll use that as a jumping off point for our session.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Amanda Hickman, Matt Perry", - "facilitators_twitter": "amandabee,mattoperry", - "id": "better-security-trainers", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "3-4:15pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "Let's be better security trainers together", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Explore how the art of storytelling can begin with… art. In this session, Leah Kohlenberg, a former journalist and founder of The Roaming Studio, will lead you through a drawing exercise — yes, even those of you who say \"I can’t draw” — and demonstrate how stirring your creative juices helps you tell better stories. She’s been doing this with news organizations and academic environments for a couple of years now, researching it along the way. Her early conclusion: It really works!", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Leah Kohlenberg", - "facilitators_twitter": "leahkohlenberg", - "id": "learn-to-draw-1", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "3-4:15pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "Learn to Draw, Boost Your Brain Power!", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Code review is the examination of code to identify any mistakes, and/or ways to make the working code more efficient. While this might be standard practice in tech, it can be overlooked in news environments where barriers and demands can be very different. In this session we’ll share our nightmares that illustrate why code review is important (I have some!), barriers to code review, and solutions: how can we integrate code review into the coding process? Whether we use code in software or web development, data analysis, visualization, or something else – what strategies work when you have someone to review or pair with, versus when you’re the solo coder, or when everyone is just too busy?! Come if you have thoughts, experiences, failures, strategies, or questions! We want to end the session with strategies we can all take back to our workplaces to try.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Jennifer Stark", - "facilitators_twitter": "_JAStark", - "id": "code-review-strategies", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Minnesota", - "time": "3-4:15pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "Code review strategies when you're on a team vs. code solo.", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Distribution platforms like AMP, Facebook Instant Articles, and Apple News have changed how our organizations work. Having grown reliant on social distribution to reach new audiences, Publishers who had only ever dictated their terms of distribution had to learn to adapt their already-aging business models to walled gardens, new ways to measure reach and engagement, and work within Other People’s Priorities. Content format compatibility issues, maintaining wholly separate designs inside of early-stage platforms with low feature-sets, participation being equally opt-in and required to maintain SEO and reach, reduced ad opportunities, and gaps in analytics...it was a lot to take in. But publishers are doing more than making the best of it: they’re thriving.\n\nIn this session, we’ll look at what we’ve learned from learning to adapt. Your humble hosts will draw from their experience at The New Yorker, Pitchfork, Wired, Quartz, Hearst, Condé Nast, and Vox Media to offer a survey of the technologies and strategies publishers have created to navigate this uncharted frontier. We’ll discuss how our organizations monitor engagement, drive subscriptions and revenue, and balance our legacy systems with the needs these new platforms oblige. ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Matt Dennewitz, Michael Donohoe, Luigi Ray-Montanez", - "facilitators_twitter": "mattdennewitz,donohoe,1uigi", - "id": "platform-life", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "3-4:15pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "My Life In the Bush of Platforms", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "At NICAR, Helga Salinas led a session where journalists of color shared anecdotal accounts of moments that led them to question their existence in their newsrooms. Such instances may arise while reporting racially-charged news, and can even present themselves as social experiences within our newsrooms. She identified themes that included feeling tokenized, being completely ignored or being made to feel inadequate. Let us note that such experiences place us in a predicament: our behavior could confirm a bad view of our group and of ourselves, as members of the group. In a book titled “Whistling Vivaldi,” author Claude Steele arrives to a term called “stereotype threat” to describe the pressures we feel in these instances. Expanding on conversations at NICAR, Helga and Michael Grant are inspired to share what they have learned about the mechanics of threats to our identities. Bring your minds to an open space and don’t be afraid to share your truth in this session. We’ll shed light on the forces that cause us bring our own identities into question. We will ask questions that help us think critically about our experiences. We will gather into groups to share and discuss these experiences. We will break-down the contingencies relatable to journalists of color. And we will share and discuss some methods journalists of color can take to reduce the pressure of threats to our identities.\n\nTo maintain a safe space for our audience, this session is only for people of color.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Helga Salinas, Mike Grant", - "facilitators_twitter": "helga_salinas,mikegrantme", - "id": "people-of-color-newsrooms", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "University Hall", - "time": "3-4:15pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "Answering \"How do I exist as a person of color in a newsroom?\"", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "**Making VR Journalism with Journalism Budgets**\nEmblematic Group\n\n**OPEN SLOT**", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "office-hours-3", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "4-5pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "Office Hours", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Pushing for projects with your managers can be hard. In resource-strapped newsrooms, diverting time and money towards digital experimentation can seem like a huge ask.\n\nOne way to get around that? Tiny experiments. Smaller initiatives can be implemented quickly to gather some initial intel that can inform the original idea, spur iteration and help to nudge a project forward.\n\nLet’s talk through how to make a tiny experiment, implement it and, if we have time, prototype (or role play) one on the spot! ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Julia B. Chan, Madeline Welsh", - "facilitators_twitter": "juliachanb,madelinebwelsh", - "id": "push-dont-pitch", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "4:45-6pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "title": "Push don’t pitch: Conduct tiny experiments to push through ideas instead of pitching them", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "The Panama Papers, Electionland, Documenting Hate -- in an age of shrinking newsrooms and big stories, collaboration between news organizations is key. Tools and systems that enable the many to work together -- both off-the-shelf and custom -- are a key ingredient to making that collaboration smooth. Together, we'll talk about the pros, cons, and heartaches in getting newsrooms to collaborate, and explore the possibilities through fun, group activities.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Alan Palazzolo, Andre Natta", - "facilitators_twitter": "zzolo,acnatta", - "id": "newsroom-collaboration", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "4:45-6pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "title": "Greasing the wheels of inter-newsroom collaboration", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "We’ll start with a brainstorm of common topics, concepts, and processes that we think would benefit from explanation on interdisciplinary teams, i.e. version control, APIs, web accessibility, HTTPS, staging vs. production. Then, we’ll divide into groups and come up with any and all relevant metaphors (if time allows, we’ll even do a GIF-based brainstorm!) We’ll eventually refine and narrow down a list of useful metaphors — and none of that “explain what you do to your mom” language — the outcome of this session will be accessible and inclusive metaphors for all!", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Nicole Zhu", - "facilitators_twitter": "nicolelzhu", - "id": "better-tech-metaphors", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "4:45-6pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "title": "Toward better metaphors: Accessible and inclusive ways to explain technical work", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "You're on a product, design or engineering team but you work at a news organization. Should you play by the same rules as the newsroom, or is this an infringement on your speech? Reasonable people can disagree, so let's do that. Let's disagree and see what we can learn on either end of the spectrum.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Brian Hamman, Carrie Brown", - "facilitators_twitter": "hamman,Brizzyc", - "id": "engineers-politics", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "4:45-6pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "title": "Should Our Engineers Donate to Campaigns?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "The pressures on news storytellers to be resourceful and to deliver have never been greater. The stresses involved can be compounded by our day-to-day caregiving responsibilities for children and parents, among others. Building on a generative discussion at SRCCON 2016, we’ll discuss promoted practices for prioritizing work projects while being present for loved ones (all while creating some opportunities for fun). We’ll take from examples from what works at different news organizations, in countries around the world, and from your own experiences.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Emily Goligoski, Joe Germuska", - "facilitators_twitter": "emgollie,joegermuska", - "id": "caregiving-journalism", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Minnesota", - "time": "4:45-6pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "title": "Caregiving while Reporting, Editing, Publishing, and Analyzing the News", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Hackers, governmental entities, malicious ads, coffeeshop snoopers, airline Wi-fi, us-- all of these have the potential to violate the privacy of our users, our staff, and our sources. What responsibility does a newsroom have to protect these group’s privacy and personal information? How can we realistically fulfill these responsibilities? How can we assess what we have control over and what we can’t control? \n\nPrivacy in the digital world is complex and it is time for newsrooms to solidify their footing with new guidelines and tips. We want to explore multiple scenarios involving a privacy breach. The scenarios will cover behavioral, technological, and ethical issues based on real-life examples. You, the newsroom, will tackle the situation given to you. Your mission: come up with a set of guidelines on how to prevent and respond to your specific scenario.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Ian Carrico, Lo Benichou", - "facilitators_twitter": "iamcarrico,LoBenichou", - "id": "protect-user-privacy", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "4:45-6pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "title": "How do we protect our users' privacy?", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "An ever-growing cornucopia of tools, frameworks, packages, and languages beckons to newsroom developers and media technologists. Whether you’re an individual developer or part of a large, medium, or small team, deciding which technologies to invest your time and sweat equity into may be one of the most important and complex decisions you make. Do we use an old standby that we know really well, or we forge out and try something new? How do we balance following technological passions and interests while still making sure everyone on the team knows how to work with the codebase? Are the benefits of getting in on the ground floor of something new worth the risks? How do you know if your team has the expertise to pull it off, or if your organization has the resources?", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Matt Johnson, Elliot Bentley", - "facilitators_twitter": "xmatt,elliot_bentley", - "id": "stack-tech-deck", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "University Hall", - "time": "4:45-6pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "title": "How Do You Stack Your Tech Deck?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-dinner", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "6pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening", - "title": "Dinner at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Sometimes the art of the FOIA lies in knowing exactly what record you want to request, and hounding it down until you get it. Other times, though, there are benefits to casting a wide net and requesting things that would be interesting if they exist. FOIA The Dead, a project that files a FOIA request to the FBI for the subject of every New York Times obituary as it's published, is an example of the latter. In this session, we'll discuss what other kinds of problems can be solved with parallel automated records requests, and give participants the tools to start filing.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Parker Higgins", - "facilitators_twitter": "xor", - "id": "bring-out-foia", - "length": "", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "7-8pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", - "title": "Bring Out Your Dead: lessons in massively parallel records request from 2000 FOIAed obituaries", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "\"Can't draw a stick figure,\" you say? Let me prove you wrong in one lesson! Realistic drawing isn't as hard as it looks - and there are a lot of reasons to try and do it. Learning to draw exercises your right brain, which can aid focus, attention, memory and analytical ability (think of it as cross training for the brain). Come try it out yourself at this session, as I walk you step-by-step through completing a finished, realistic drawing. For all experience levels, including the complete beginner.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Leah Kohlenberg", - "facilitators_twitter": "leahkohlenberg", - "id": "learn-to-draw-2", - "length": "", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "7-8pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", - "title": "Learn to Draw, Boost Your Brain Power!", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "evening-point-of-it-all", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Minnesota", - "time": "7-8pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", - "title": "Conversation: What's the point of it all? (Does journalism make a difference)", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Carpal tunnel syndrome is a real risk for those of us who spent all of our waking hours on the computer. Come learn a few simple exercises my dad (a bone and joint surgeon) taught me to help relieve the strain on your wrists!", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Aditi Bhandari", - "facilitators_twitter": "AditiHBhandari", - "id": "evening-hobby-1", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "7-8pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", - "title": "Hobby workshop: Physiotherapy (save your wrists!)", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Bring your walking shoes and water bottle for a walking tour through part of Minneapolis. We will take a stroll through the University of Minnesota campus to the Mississippi River and across the river gorge through the Twin Cities urban [National Park](https://www.nps.gov/miss/index.htm). The path will provide spectacular views of the river, riverfront and downtown while learning a bit about the history of Minneapolis. We will follow trails that are paved and accessible. Led by Will Lager of Minnesota Public Radio News.\n\nMeet up at 7pm by the doors in Memorial Hall, then head out!", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Will Lager", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "walking-tour", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "7-8pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", - "title": "Local walking tour", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Minneapolis was declared “America’s best bike city” by Bicycling magazine in 2010. Join us for a low-speed, no-sweat ride to explore the city’s network of off-street bike paths using the city’s bikesharing system. We’ll aim for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden on the other side of downtown, about a 30-40 minute ride from the university campus, via the riverfront bike paths and the Cedar Lake Trail. Along the way we’ll check out St. Anthony Falls and the historic mill district, and we’ll ride underneath Target Field, where the Twins are scheduled to be playing the Rangers.\n\nMeet up at 7pm by the doors in Memorial Hall, then head out!", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Christian MilNeil", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "bike-tour", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "7-8pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", - "title": "Local biking tour", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Kai Teoh", - "facilitators_twitter": "jkteoh", - "id": "evening-immigration", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "7-8pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", - "title": "Immigration! Visas! Are you on one? Let's chat!", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Board games, card games, story games--we'll have plenty to choose from. Bring your own to share and play.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Tiff Fehr, Joe Germuska", - "facilitators_twitter": "tiffehr,joegermuska", - "id": "evening-games-1", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "All evening", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", - "title": "Game Room", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "You're not alone. We've all made mistakes. Let’s talk about our biggest or smallest mess-ups, things we learned from them and what others can do to avoid making the same mistakes. Maybe you cleared your computer by accident or had to issue several corrections on a story. Whatever it is, we're here to support each other.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Sandhya Kambhampati", - "facilitators_twitter": "sandhya__k", - "id": "lightning-talks", - "length": "", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "8-9pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", - "title": "Lightning talks: I've made mistakes, you've made mistakes, we've all made mistakes. And it's OK", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Board games, card games, story games--we'll have plenty to choose from. Bring your own to share and play.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Tiff Fehr, Joe Germuska", - "facilitators_twitter": "tiffehr,joegermuska", - "id": "evening-games-2", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "All evening", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", - "title": "Game Room", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "I can't make you the next Rodney Mullen, but I'm confident I can help you pop your first ollie. Come learn the physics behind an ollie and other skateboard tricks. I'll also have some practice boards to give it a shot. Closed-toe shoes required to practice.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Dave Stanton", - "facilitators_twitter": "gotoplanb", - "id": "evening-hobby-2", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "8-9pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", - "title": "Hobby workshop: Pop an ollie on a skateboard", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Bring your favorite destinations and your survival strategies!", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Dan Sinker,Janice Dillard", - "facilitators_twitter": "dansinker,janicedillard", - "id": "evening-road-trips", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "8-9pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", - "title": "Conversation: Road trips!", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "AMA with \"Minority Whip,\" aka Rachel, a data geek and skater", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Rachel Alexander", - "facilitators_twitter": "rachelwalexande", - "id": "evening-roller-derby", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Minnesota", - "time": "8-9pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", - "title": "Conversation: Roller Derby as journalism stress coping", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Conversations are your opportunity to get a small group together to talk about how to plan an amazing vacation or listen to your favorite music or discuss what book changed your life—anything that you're passionate about. We'll have signup sheets at SRCCON, so you bring the ideas and we'll make the space.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "evening-conversations-2", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "", - "time": "8-9pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", - "title": "Evening conversations (Sign up at SRCCON!)", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Who doesn't love a good, old fashioned pub quiz? At the start of the session, we will break the room up into groups of five or fewer. Everyone will be given a small whiteboard to write their answers.\n\nRound One: Trivia. We will have four categories: local news, millennials, apps, and accessibility. Each category has four questions and you will get 1, 3, 5, or 7 points to wager on each question. The questions will be based off user research and academic studies about how people consume news.\n\nRound Two: Pictures. We will have screenshots of A/B tests from apps and websites of real publications. Players will need to guess which screenshot was the winning one.\n\nRound Three: Numbers. We will ask questions about the percentage of online users that engage in certain habits. The team that guesses the closest correct percentage wins the points.\n\nFinal Round: Guess the pub! We will read five clues (audience characteristics) of each publication. The earlier you guess the publication, the more points you get – but be careful, if you guess incorrectly you'll get 0 points!\n\nThe winning team will get something totally amazing, like tickets to Hamilton or a puppy. This pub quiz is a great way to have some fun, get to know other attendees, and learn something about the people who consume the content we create. (Credit: This structure is based off of Stump Trivia from the Boston area)", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Steph Yiu", - "facilitators_twitter": "crushgear", - "id": "audience-pub-trivia", - "length": "", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "9-10pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-3", - "title": "Know Your Audience! A Pub(lication) Trivia Night (or Afternoon)", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Board games, card games, story games--we'll have plenty to choose from. Bring your own to share and play.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Tiff Fehr, Joe Germuska", - "facilitators_twitter": "tiffehr,joegermuska", - "id": "evening-games-3", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "All evening", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-3", - "title": "Game Room", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Drones have gotten very popular, cheap, and are incredibly capable platforms. Let's explore together the various sorts of photos and video you can capture from the air, what you can do with those images, and the best way to go about collecting it.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Ian Dees", - "facilitators_twitter": "iandees", - "id": "evening-hobby-4", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "9-10pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-3", - "title": "Hobby workshop: Drone photography", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Conversations are your opportunity to get a small group together to talk about how to plan an amazing vacation or listen to your favorite music or discuss what book changed your life—anything that you're passionate about. We'll have signup sheets at SRCCON, so you bring the ideas and we'll make the space.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "evening-conversations-3", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "", - "time": "9-10pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-3", - "title": "Evening conversations (Sign up at SRCCON!)", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "friday-breakfast", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "9am", - "timeblock": "friday-morning", - "title": "Breakfast at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "**OPEN SLOT**\n\n**OPEN SLOT**", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "office-hours-4", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "9-10am", - "timeblock": "friday-morning", - "title": "Office Hours", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "The Fluxkit, designed and assembled by George Maciunas in 1965, contained printed matter, a film, and a variety of objects including a “wood box with offset labels and rubber opening containing unknown object,” by the Fluxus artist Ay-O. The label read: “put finger in hole.”\n\nFluxus artists were playful revolutionaries who tried to undermine the authority of the museum and the primacy of the artist. One strategy they deployed was demanding that the viewer complete (and thereby co-create) certain pieces of art.\n\nTo many of us news nerds, “interactive” has become a noun. But how interactive is your interactive, really? When’s the last time you stopped to consider just how revolutionary an idea it is to include your reader in the completion (or co-creation) of your work as a journalist?\n\nIn this session, we’ll forget about our newsrooms, tools, and data sets for a while and think about the essence of interaction. What inspires us as individuals to reach out and try to affect the world? As part of a group? By what means can we do so? How might find we are changed in turn? What invites us and what repels us? Where do exploration and interaction diverge?\n\nThen we’ll zoom back in and ask: how can we orchestrate meaningful interactive experiences through our work? I’ll suggest some inspiration from the art world: happenings, instruction pieces, escape rooms, live action installations; please bring some inspirations of your own.\n\nAlone and in teams, we will hammer out manifestos and instruction pieces for building digital interactives, then swap them with each other. Take your instructions home. Follow them. After SRCCON, we’ll publish the raw materials and the the interactives together as new sNerdFluxkit (2017).", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Scott Blumenthal, Britt Binler", - "facilitators_twitter": "blumysden,brittbinler", - "id": "new-snerd-fluxkit", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "10-11:15am", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "new sNerdFluxkit (2017): inspiration and provocations for people who make interactives", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "The U.S. has become increasingly polarized and, ironically, we complain about it within our own filter bubbles. Indeed, we comfortably sympathize with the views of our political parties, influencers and friends, and ignore the banter; in fact, Fox News viewers believe the news they watch is “fair and balanced”, while CNN watchers dismiss the idea that they could possibly be consuming “fake news.” But why such polarization and how did we get here? If Brexit and the US election teach us one thing, it is that it may be time to step outside our comfort bubbles and start a conversation with the opposing view.\n\nNow suppose you land in another filter bubble full of despisers and disbelievers. How would you convince them that universal healthcare isn’t a bad idea, or that a strong dollar doesn’t translate into a strong US economy? How would you even start such a conversation? For more complicated political and economic issues, how would you help people move forward beyond face value and hearsay? If laying out facts doesn’t work, how can you approach others outside your own filter bubbles with a more accessible, heartfelt or persuasive approach?\n\nThe suggested encounter will not be easy. But filter bubbles won’t burst by themselves. It is up to us to take them on, and we are conscientious and badass enough to pull it off! ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Sonya Song", - "facilitators_twitter": "sonya2song", - "id": "filter-bubbles", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "10-11:15am", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "Why you are part of the filter bubble problem and what you can do about it", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Forget the taboos. Let's talk frankly about revenue, engagement, and transparency. We want this group to discuss (and hopefully design) engagement ladders that aren't only ethical, but that also directly improve both reporting and revenue potential – all without compromising journalistic independence. Let's break down the wall and have some frank conversations about metrics, money, and bringing the audience closer to everything we do.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Andrew Losowsky, Mary Walter-Brown", - "facilitators_twitter": "losowsky,mwbvosd", - "id": "engagement-revenue", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "10-11:15am", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "Let's Talk About Engagement and Revenue", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Once the exclusive domain of scientists, engineers and HAM radio operators, a new generation of cheap hardware and open source software have cracked open the radio spectrum for hackers and hobbyists – and journalists – to explore. Radios are built into dozens of devices we use every day, and the radio spectrum is a tightly regulated, poorly understood invisible national asset. There are stories flying around in the air around you, and it’s time you started looking for them. Using the popular $20 RTL-SDR USB dongle (limited quantities will be provided at the workshop) we will get you up and running with the tools you’ll need to track aircraft flying over your head, listen to emergency responder radios and download weather satellite images WITHOUT THE INTERNET. We’ll also look at some interesting examples of how the radio spectrum has been used in reporting the news. ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Jon Keegan", - "facilitators_twitter": "jonkeegan", - "id": "radio-spectrum", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Minnesota", - "time": "10-11:15am", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "Exploring the Radio Spectrum for News", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "When sharing ideas while interviewing for a position, you're essentially doing free consulting work if you don't get the gig. Together, let's explore better methods of testing skills through the hiring process. We'll dig into skills tests, idea proposals and more to come up with some best practices for the journalism-tech industry.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Rachel Schallom", - "facilitators_twitter": "rschallom", - "id": "hiring-skills-tests", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "10-11:15am", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "Finding a better way to test skills while hiring", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Sometimes it’s hard to see the data ~right before our eyes~. In this session, we’ll talk about ways for people to find sources of inspiration for data-driven stories within communities they cover, even if no dataset currently exists. What if you collected the results of your readers grading the president or used crowdsourcing to find out where cicadas are swarming (both real examples!) to tell stories about your community?\n\nWe’ll talk about how to look for patterns in everyday occurrences to create structured datasets out of text, images, public statements and more, which can enrich and inform our storytelling. We’ll also look at some surprising data sets that already exist and discuss how to incorporate them into our own coverage and use them find new story ideas. Together, we’ll brainstorm data-driven stories inspired by what we find during our stay in Minneapolis, around SRCCON, or even the just in the room we’re in. We’ll workshop some of those ideas and expand the discussion to incorporate them into possible stories in our own communities. We’ll also talk about how to get the rest of your newsroom to think in a data-driven mindset while reporting, and leave with some story ideas to take back with us.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Ashley Wu, Priya Krishnakumar", - "facilitators_twitter": "ashhwu,priyakkumar", - "id": "data-walk-among-us", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Board Room (5th floor)", - "time": "10-11:15am", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "Data: They walk among us!", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "**Digital security for journalists**\nWordPress.com VIP\n\n**Google Trends 101**\nGoogle News Lab", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "office-hours-5", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "11am-12pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "Office Hours", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Why is it so hard for even the nerdiest among us to work across teams in a newsroom? In small teams, we’ll create short comics that illustrate collaboration challenges and (possible) solutions. What kinds of collaboration problems? Ones we know and love: failure to communicate early, tap the right partners and manage time effectively. We’ll show some examples and talk about the scenarios they describe, then guide the group exercise to storyboard our own solutions. Toward the end, we’ll share our work and discuss. No drawing skills required!", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Becky Bowers, Darla Cameron, Tiff Fehr", - "facilitators_twitter": "beckybowers,darlacameron,tiffehr", - "id": "drawn-together", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "11:45am-1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-2", - "title": "Drawn Together: Doodling Our Way Toward Stronger Collaboration", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Happy teams know what they're trying to achieve, and what their jobs are. It's easy to define crystal-clear goals and roles, but many managers fail to do so. (Ourselves included!) Whether you're a manager or just desperate for direction, join us to talk about proven techniques for team happiness.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Brian Boyer, Livia Labate", - "facilitators_twitter": "brianboyer,livlab", - "id": "goals-roles", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "11:45am-1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-2", - "title": "Goals and Roles: Explicit is better than implicit", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "It’s surprisingly easy to end up in a teaching role without any particular training in how to teach. Whether you teach regularly or just occasionally (like leading sessions at conferences, hint, hint), come join this crash course in how we can teach to groups more effectively. We’ll take a quick look at recent trends and research in pedagogy for strategies you can use, then talk through common classroom problems such as needy and know-it-all students, questions you can’t answer off-hand, and how to deal if you don’t fit your students’ expectations about what a teacher is like.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Lisa Waananen Jones, Amy Kovac-Ashley", - "facilitators_twitter": "lisawaananen,terabithia4", - "id": "teachers-lounge", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "11:45am-1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-2", - "title": "Teachers' Lounge: Talking Tips and Strategies for Effective Teaching to Groups", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "In this guided session, we'll ask you a series of questions to help you identify what you're most worried about and why. We'll work through how to take care of yourself emotionally, how to keep what you plan for manageable, and how to identify those who can help you.\n\nThis session is great for those are worried, or those who want to know how to help others. Participants can talk through their answers with others, or go through the session individually.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Mago Torres, Sisi Wei", - "facilitators_twitter": "magiccia,@sisiwei", - "id": "threat-modeling-well-being", - "length": "90 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "11:45am-1:15pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-2", - "title": "Threat Modeling, But For Your Own Well-Being", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "The Intercept newsroom just went thru a unionizing drive and joined the Writer's Guild Association (https://www.wgaeast.org/2017/04/the-intercept-unionizes-with-the-writers-guild-of-america-east/). Being part of the union organizing committee we dealt with the challenges of unionizing. Given that we're in an era where the journalism community is under persistent attack from the Trump regime, we want more newsrooms to unionize across the country.\n\nIn this session we want to have a broader discussion about unionizing, focusing on the pros and cons and the process of joining a union.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Moiz Syed, Akil Harris", - "facilitators_twitter": "moizsyed,ghostofakilism", - "id": "pros-cons-unions", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Minnesota", - "time": "11:45am-1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-2", - "title": "Unionize! Pros and cons of being in a union and how to unionize your newsroom", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Is your newsroom moving to WordPress? Moving away from WordPress? Moving to your parent company's CMS? Moving to Arc? Building a new CMS from scratch using Node? Rails? Django? (Are you using Django-CMS or Mezzanine or Wagtail?) Going headless with WordPress? Going headless with React?\n\n...or is your newsroom paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of the task of choosing and migrating to a new CMS, let along upgrading your current one?\n\nThis session is about the why and how of migrating your content to new systems. When is it time to change up your CMS, and why? When is it better to repair your ship instead of jumping off? What does the transition process look like-- for instance, how do you handle your archival stories, or make sure your frontend and backend features are in sync? How do you pull it off (technically)? How do you pull it off (organizationally)? Most importantly: was it worth it?", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Liam Andrew, Pattie Reaves", - "facilitators_twitter": "mailbackwards,pazzypunk", - "id": "switching-cmses", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "11:45am-1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-2", - "title": "Switching CMSes", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "friday-lunch", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-lunch", - "title": "Lunch at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Chris Groskopf", - "facilitators_twitter": "onyxfish", - "id": "fri-lunch-mapping", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-lunch", - "title": "Mapping Problems WTF: Bivariates vs. Choropleths (and other things that are hard too)", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "fri-lunch-journalism-impact", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-lunch", - "title": "Rethinking Journalism's Impact and How We Measure It", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "fri-lunch-podcasts", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Minnesota", - "time": "1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-lunch", - "title": "Podcasts: Let's recommend our favorites", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "An intro course on Gregg Shorthand using stereotypically millennial phrases", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Stan Sakai", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "fri-lunch-shorthand", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-lunch", - "title": "Shorthand on fleek: An intro course using stereotypically millennial phrases", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Get outside to see how looking at the world like an artist can make you a better journalist", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Leah Kohlenberg,Alexandra Nicolas", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "fri-lunch-sketching", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-lunch", - "title": "Urban sketching for journalists", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "**1-2pm**\n**How to Become a JSK Fellow**\nJSK Fellowships\n\n**Job possibilities in data, viz, digital design at NJAM**\nNJ Advance Media\n\n**2-3pm**\n**Mapbox! Tech support + jobs**\nMapbox\n\n**Open Source Tools For Effective Community**\nThe Coral Project", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "office-hours-6", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "1-3pm", - "timeblock": "friday-lunch", - "title": "Office Hours", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "News breaks and journalists & editors scramble to react. Afterward shoulders are shrugged and we say \"Forget it, Jake. It's breaking news.\" That's how it works right?\n\nBut that's not how it needs to work. What if instead we could approach breaking news situations with a sense of calm and confidence? What if we considered the who, what, where, why and how of things that could happen, and simply left the when to chance?\n\nPut simply - let's all plan for the news that could/will happen in our market and consider a needs assessment.\n\nWhat background information and context should be at or near our fingertips? How to teach a reporting staff to know what their first \"reads\" are of a situation given their beat? What roles need to be filled first to get a handle on the news? What efficient and non-repetitive methods of managing information exist? How can we receive information from our audience? How can we convey meaningful information to our audience? And what traps exist?", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Chris Keller, Sara Simon", - "facilitators_twitter": "chrislkeller,sarambsimon", - "id": "breaking-news-plan", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "2:30-3:45pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "This just in... You can plan for breaking news", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Global warming is quite possibly the biggest challenge humanity is facing in our lifetime. Yet, we are having a hard time getting the message through: According to a [2016 Pew report](http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/10/04/public-views-on-climate-change-and-climate-scientists/), less than half of Americans believe that man-made global warming is real.\n\nClimate change is a complex topic but also diffuse and impersonal – hard to grasp for both the audience and us journalists. In this session, we'll work on better understanding climate change issues and on finding new, relatable ways to communicate them. We'll play a game in which we step in the shoes of climate change deniers, beneficiaries, but most importantly of those who suffer from the effects of global warming. Based on our learnings from that, we’ll come up with new ideas for communicating global warming, its reasons, and its effects on people’s lives – through graphics, interactive storytelling, or whatever else we can prototype on paper.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Simon Jockers, Cathy Deng", - "facilitators_twitter": "sjockers,cthydng", - "id": "climate-change-personal", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "2:30-3:45pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "Making climate change personal", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "News nerds have the skills and interests to play a number of different roles in the newsroom. How can we nurture the development of those skills in early career journalists? How do we focus — or broaden — the work of mid-career journalists? And how can we accomplish this all against the backdrop of layoffs, pay negotiations, and lack of mentors or advocates? \n\nSome questions we’ll discuss as a group are:\n* How many of you are doing the job you... expected to be doing?... the job you want to be doing?\n* If you could do another job, what would it be?\n* Does your job support you in pursuing new skills and training?\n* If you wanted to pursue a project outside of your discipline (like write a story if you're a programmer, or make an interactive project if you're a reporter), could you do it? Would your managers or editors encourage you?", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Vanessa Martinez, Chris Canipe, Soo Oh", - "facilitators_twitter": "vnessamartinez,ccanipe,SooOh", - "id": "career-development", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "2:30-3:45pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "Finding your spot in the newsroom", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Jupyter is an amazing tool for data work, but it has all sorts of problems. You have to be able to code in Python, it doesn't manage data versions, isn't designed for audiences to understand, and there's no easy way to share reusable data processing recipes. Come see the Computational Journalism Workbench, a new open source platform that aims to solve these problems for you -- and needs your suggestions and support.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Jonathan Stray", - "facilitators_twitter": "jonathanstray", - "id": "fri-lunch-build-data-notebook", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "2:30-3:45pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "Build a Better Data Notebook", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Designing accessible experiences can feel like a big, hairy problem. Not very many great resources exist, testing can be a pain, and just figuring out where to start can leave you scratching your head. Thinking about it in the context of journalism and visual storytelling — where content is dominant and often unpredictable — can be even more confusing. As a result, if accessibility gets thought about at all, it’s often an afterthought. If you’re someone who needs an accessible site, you’re left wandering in an information wasteland.\n\nIt doesn’t have to be this way! Building accessible content and interfaces — even on tight deadlines — is completely doable. You just have to think about it from the beginning. In this session, we’ll start with an overview of basic accessibility principles, tools, and testing. We’ll then break into groups and look at those principles in the context of journalism — testing some apps, looking at alt text, debating the pros and cons of delivering alternative experiences and and dissecting data visualizations and sites in a way that will help you think about how usable the site really is. You’ll walk away with a sheaf of resources, practical tips to improve your next project and, hopefully, a new understanding of what accessibility on the web can look like.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Joanna S Kao", - "facilitators_twitter": "joannaskao", - "id": "accessibility-news", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Minnesota", - "time": "2:30-3:45pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "News for everyone: Thinking about accessibility", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "True or false?: Major political events are regularly covered on live TV, and all of them feature speakers with an agenda.\n\nWhen the lens of public attention shines on politicians it is important for journalists to be able to contextualize their messages as quickly and effectively as possible. During this session we will teach participants about open source tools that are being used today by live fact checkers to create annotated transcripts. They will learn about an open service called Opened Captions and how it can be used in conjunction with google doc to get real time transcriptions of political speeches.\n\nThis is an hands on session, drawing on experience from Vox and NPR collaboration, participants will also be shown how to export the annotated speech from the google doc into a news article static web page, that could be ready for publication.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Pietro Passarelli, David Eads", - "facilitators_twitter": "pietropassarell,eads", - "id": "live-factchecking", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Board Room (5th floor)", - "time": "2:30-3:45pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "Hands on: Live fact checking TV speeches in your google docs!", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "**OPEN SLOT**\n\n**OPEN SLOT**", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "office-hours-7", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "3:30-4:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "Office Hours", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "How do we make learning and training journalists a more enjoyable and a less intimidating experience for everyone involved? What does the structure of good training actually look like?\n\nIn this session, we’ll start by discussing the good and the bad ways newsrooms approach training and then we will brainstorm opportunities in our own newsrooms to create new or retool existing training to better provide an engaging and more meaningful learning experience for our staff.\n\nTeams will then tackle a series of three short Amazing Race-style scenarios — involving roadblocks and detours — as they work to create a checklist that will serve as starting point for those looking develop their own curriculum or lead their own training sessions in their newsrooms.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Andrew Nguyen, Julia Wolfe, Danielle Webb", - "facilitators_twitter": "onlyandrewn,juruwolfe,daniwebb_", - "id": "better-newsroom-training", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "4:15-5:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", - "title": "Expanding your team’s tool belt: Developing better training for your newsroom", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Daily iPad editions. Audio slideshows. Snowfall everything. Publish with Facebook / Apple / Google / RSS / VR / ???. The Next Big Thing will save the journalism industry, until it doesn’t, by which point we’re already onto the next Next Big Thing. Let’s remember the forgotten futures, share our own favorite failed experiments (was it “too weird” or “not Times-ian” enough?), and acknowledge that most innovation leads to failure -- and no single Next Big Thing will save us.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Joel Eastwood, Erik Hinton", - "facilitators_twitter": "JoelEastwood,erikhinton", - "id": "future-news-not", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Board Room (5th floor)", - "time": "4:15-5:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", - "title": "The Future Of News That Wasn't", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "While it would be amazing for journalists to be spread across America, the big media companies are parked mostly in NYC and DC. This means we analyze data from afar and write anecdotal trend pieces without much understanding of the vast and diverse local populations that might be impacted or influencing some topic. Fear not! There are bunches of motivated and stoked people at the local level that want to find, process, and provide information to the public to help them be more informed. These civic hacktivists share an ethos with journalists. We should look to connect with local Code for America brigades to get more context at the local level until we actually achieve better geographic diversity in media.\n\nDave and Ernie help connect hackers and activists with their local governments to find ways to make government work better for the people. Come and discuss tactics for connecting with local brigades to find data and better understand local issues, local people and local governments… since we know y’all don’t have people living there.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Dave Stanton, Ernie Hsiung", - "facilitators_twitter": "gotoplanb,ErnieAtLYD", - "id": "code-across-america", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "4:15-5:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", - "title": "Code Across America: Working with local Code for America brigades to find local stories", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "When we meet someone new at conferences like this one, we usually ask \"\"What do you do?\"\" or \"\"Where are you from?\"\" as in, where do you work? Our work can become a huge part of our identities, especially as passionate, smart people with ambition who look to find purpose in their work. That's a really tall order as we advance in our careers and struggle to find meaning in our work with one job.\n\nDuring this session, we'll discuss the things we want to do and impact with our work; the big stuff that we want to accomplish in our careers; the projects we want to run, not backlog. How do we start building those opportunities outside of our jobs to grow our careers? How can we create side projects at work and become an \"\"intrapreneur\"\" so you have institutional resources? What should we look for in full time work that is compatible with your career, and how do you navigate that line?", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Elite Truong, Pamela L Assogba", - "facilitators_twitter": "elitetruong,pam_yam", - "id": "expanding-career", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "4:15-5:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", - "title": "Every Day I'm Hustling: Building and managing a career outside of your day job", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "It was a great idea. You worked really hard to bring it into this world, watched it grow and blossom. It had its moment in the sun, but now it's starting to slow down. Show its age. It's having a hard time keeping up, to be completely honest. Maybe you've even already moved on. How do you say goodbye? What does end of life care look like for news/tech projects? How do you manage successful transitions and handoffs? In this session we'll talk about about the hard decisions you sometimes have to make, how to prepare for these situations and how to make sure your projects (or at least the lessons learned) live on.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Adam Schweigert", - "facilitators_twitter": "aschweig", - "id": "death-of-a-project", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "4:15-5:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", - "title": "Let's Talk About Death 💀", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "friday-closing", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "5:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-evening", - "title": "Closing", - "transcription": "y" - } -] \ No newline at end of file + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Get your badges and get some food (plus plenty of coffee), as you gear up for the first day of SRCCON!", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-breakfast", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "8:30am", + "timeblock": "thursday-morning", + "title": "Registration & Breakfast", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "We'll kick things off with a welcome, some scene-setting, and some suggestions for getting the most out of SRCCON.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-welcome", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "9:30am", + "timeblock": "thursday-morning", + "title": "Welcome to SRCCON", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "As thoughtful and deliberate as we try to be, we’re all still human, and the overwhelming majority of us tend to seek out information that confirms what we already believe to be true. That’s a problem. As media organizations, we’re only serving a fraction of our communities if we can only reach those who already know and agree with the stories we’re sharing. So, what actually encourages people to consider perspectives that differ from their own, and how do we create more space for that?\n\nIn this session, we’ll dig in on these questions and get a little vulnerable as we try to create that space for ourselves. We’ll talk about how people come to believe what they believe, and look at the latest research around confirmation bias, the backlash effect, and other factors that shape how we make decisions and, ultimately, change our minds. In small groups, we’ll talk about areas where our perspectives have changed over time, and reflect on the forces that helped us change our point of view. We’ll surface common themes as a group and discuss ways these experiences could inform and—dare we say—change the way we approach our work.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Marie Connelly, B Cordelia Yu", + "facilitators_twitter": "eyemadequiet,thebestsophist", + "id": "change-our-minds", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "10-11:15am", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", + "title": "How do we change our minds anyway?", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Stop throwing away your shot. Using the dueling personalities of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, we’ll discuss solutions to common problems standing between you and a more productive, calm workday.\n\nLearn effective ways to get things done, improve your workflow, find better ways to collaborate and more!\n\nYou don’t need to know the [Hamilton soundtrack](https://open.spotify.com/album/1kCHru7uhxBUdzkm4gzRQc) inside out to participate, though some familiarity might make this more enjoyable. We’ll put together any story-specific information you need to know as a group and go from there.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Hannah Birch", + "facilitators_twitter": "hannahsbirch", + "id": "hamilton-or-burr", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "10-11:15am", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", + "title": "Are you Hamilton or Burr? How to benignly manipulate the people around you", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "FOIA is an awesome tool for government transparency, but FOIA is often also slow and easily blocked by various exceptions. In this session, we'll look at some of the other ways in which the federal government publicizes what it is up to and how you can use that to figure out things before you must resort to FOIA.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Jacob Harris, Rebecca Williams", + "facilitators_twitter": "harrisj,internetrebecca", + "id": "beyond-foia-brainstorming", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "10-11:15am", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", + "title": "Beyond FOIA: Brainstorming Other Ways To See What Your Government Is Up To", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Whether you’re an aspiring manager, or have been leading teams for years, managing people can present intimidating challenges. What are you most afraid of? Maybe you think you’re not ~ charismatic ~ enough. Or you worry that being manager means you’re not doing “real” work. Perhaps you’re nervous that your team doesn’t like you (and you might be right). As a group, or in small groups, we’ll talk about the things that most terrify us, and then work together to come up with solutions and ideas. ", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Kaeti Hinck", + "facilitators_twitter": "kaeti", + "id": "managing-people-yourself", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Minnesota", + "time": "10-11:15am", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", + "title": "Managing people, managing yourself", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "In the current political environment, news cycles are getting shorter and the amount of work that needs to be done is greater by the day. We would like to discuss practical approaches newsrooms are taking to cover American democracy in the age of Trump, from building databases to automating information changes to making life easier for on-the-ground reporters and everything in between.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Aaron Williams, Steven Rich", + "facilitators_twitter": "aboutaaron,dataeditor", + "id": "practical-software-democracy", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "10-11:15am", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", + "title": "Practical approaches for creating software to cover democracy", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "**Resound - Audio management apps**\nKPCC\n\n**Gamifying News**\nFANschool.org", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "office-hours-1", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "11am-12pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", + "title": "Office Hours", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Inviting audiences to share their feedback opens paths to better serve our communities. Every stage of the news process is an opportunity to engage our audiences, yet in many newsrooms, we only solicit feedback post-publication. User experience (UX) research is a common tool technologists use when developing new products. But it’s applicable to all kinds of newsroom workflows beyond tech teams, from editorial to design to engagement to business development. Creating processes to learn and improve user experiences can lead to more inclusive digital platforms, content, and tools that share information and engage audiences.\n\nWhen is user feedback valuable? Pretty much always: during the ideation, creation or validation phases for content, platforms, tools and experiences. However, at each of these stages, how and why we use audience feedback is subtly different. So, to navigate this process, we will work together to draw a project roadmap that outlines what types of user feedback can be collected at each stage, and what methods are most appropriate. We’ll identify and practice some ways to gather and respond to user feedback. We will also brainstorm audience engagement tactics, such as: usability testing of interactive graphics on mobile devices, focus groups to decide next steps after a story is produced, or co-designing processes for audiences to engage with your organization in new ways.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Sonja Marziano, Jordan Wirfs-Brock", + "facilitators_twitter": "ssmarziano,jordanwb", + "id": "roadmap-user-testing", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "11:45am-1pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", + "title": "Let’s create a roadmap for user testing and feedback in newsrooms", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "News is competitive. Digital news, even more so. And when we're all playing in the same space of news feeds and closed captioning, text must find a way to captivate an audience. But manipulating typography has been an age-old trick of tabloid magazines and sensationalized journalism, so why have we allowed some of these tactics to leak into the realm of digital journalism? Intentional or not, our use and abuse of typography brings up everything from silly snafus, like announcing the wrong winner of Miss Universe, to deeply unethical content that can stir fear and manipulate an audience's point of view. Let's explore how we may be using and abusing type in our newsrooms, how to avoid unethical treatment of typography, and what we can do to leverage text to our advantage *and* our audience's advantage.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Dolly Li", + "facilitators_twitter": "dollyli", + "id": "typography-social-video", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "11:45am-1pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", + "title": "Using and Abusing Typography: How Social Video Is Playing Games With Your Heart", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Imagine a job where you could spend all your time pursuing new, creative projects, and get your whole office on board for every big, exciting idea you come up with. \n\nThat’s probably not your job (If it is, we envy you!). When you have an idea, you have to convince other people to embrace it. Maybe you’re trying to get buy-in on a new digital project, but your newsroom is focused on the reporting-writing-editing process. Maybe you’re trying to convince others to embrace a big idea that’s going to require lots of resources and time. Or maybe you see a way to overhaul a longstanding process to make your organization function better. In this session, we’ll create games to help us figure out ways to face the challenges of navigating digital initiatives in a small news organization.\n\nBring a work challenge you’ve been grappling with — or just bring yourself and your creativity!", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Sara Konrad Baranowski, Andrea Suozzo", + "facilitators_twitter": "skonradb,asuozzo", + "id": "navigate-roadblocks-games", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "11:45am-1pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", + "title": "Candyland, Catan and Codenames — Oh My! Navigate Roadblocks in Small Newsrooms With Games", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Liveblogs in 2016 are very different from live coverage in 2017. Breaking news formats have evolved. So have story pace and reader preferences. The New York Times has moved away from liveblogs towards a handful of new forms, each under active guidance/editing. The Guardian Mobile Lab is prototyping a future for live coverage that moves beyond the single pageview towards self-updating and sequential notifications, alongside “shifting lenses” to give different perspectives throughout a live event. But even the newest ideas continue to wrestle with being seen as a Product and all that entails. Let’s discuss the latest habits — for newsrooms, readership and notifications — and the future of live coverage tools.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Tiff Fehr, Alastair Coote, Hamilton Boardman", + "facilitators_twitter": "tiffehr,_alastair,nytham", + "id": "live-coverage-forms", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "11:45am-1pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", + "title": "Live Coverage Forms For (and From) the Immediate Future", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "What can newsrooms learn from the process of launching a product? In this session we’ll use a WTF Just Happened Today as a case study to illustrate an example of launching an MVP product, validating product decisions, and iterating on a product. We’ll define a set of constraints through a group brainstorming session to identify a set of problems to be solved. From there, we’ll do a design brainstorm to think through products that can solve those problems, and create a hypothetical new news product worth paying for.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Matt Kiser, Kelsey Scherer", + "facilitators_twitter": "matt_kiser,kelsa_", + "id": "news-products", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "11:45am-1pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", + "title": "News products: How to design, launch, and iterate something worth paying for", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Journalism is a powerful tool. A place to show different views of the world as well and an opportunity to do active solidarity and combat historical bias . Based on the Ada Initiative Ally Skills workshop by Valerie Aurora, this lab puts ally skills to work on journalistic product. How can we take our professional skills as journalists, editors, data scientists, programmers et al , and really commit to changing the way we cover issues and produce product? \n\nKeeping our desire to fight inequality at the fore how would those skills change the reporting on the contentious issues of right now and confront systemic oppression with journalistic excellence.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Gabriela Rodriguez Beron, Sydette Harry", + "facilitators_twitter": "gaba,blackamazon", + "id": "privileges-allies-lab", + "length": "2 hours", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Board Room (5th floor)", + "time": "11:45am-1:45pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", + "title": "Aim to Misbehave: Privileges & Allies in the Media Creation : A Lab/Remix", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-lunch", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "1pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", + "title": "Lunch at SRCCON", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Everyone agrees that mentorship is a good thing, but formal mentorship programs often fail because they are too time consuming to run. The Women in Tech group at The Times decided to tackle this problem last year and was able to create a mentorship program (for women and men!) that rolled out to the entire digital organization. We will share tips, discuss the lessons we learned and run a condensed version of the goal planning and peer coaching workshops that are part of the program. ", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Erica Greene, Jessica Kosturko", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "mentorship-at-scale", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "1:15-2:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", + "title": "Mentorship at Scale: How The NYT Women in Tech group build a mentorship program for 250+ people in our free time", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Are you cripplingly shy? Socially awkward, perhaps? Do you get taken advantage of because you don't know how to say no? Maybe you have a colleague who picks on you. Any newsroom has a cast of personalities ranging from introverted to outwardly aggressive. If you're that person who fears talking to people -- a skill that's required of journalists -- or gets bullied by the big loudmouth in the newsroom who undermines you and your ideas, finding your place in a collaborative newsroom environment or just do your job as a journalist can be challenging. This session, or therapy circle, would explore real strategies to overcome whatever personality traits participants may have that hinders their journalism. For example, to deal with my debilitating anxiety attacks that precede asking colleagues or sources to do something for me, I put my 'roller derby hat' on and become a whole new person to become as fierce and unapologetic as I am on the track beating up and getting beaten up by other women. Find your 'roller derby hat' or 'Sasha Fierce' here.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Yoohyun Jung, Emma Carew Grovum", + "facilitators_twitter": "yoohyun_jung,emmacarew", + "id": "overcoming-personality-traits", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "1:15-2:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", + "title": "Overcoming crippling personality traits to survive in a newsroom", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Making any startup run is hard work, but there are specific challenges -- and specific benefits -- to running one inside a bigger company.\n\nSome topics of conversation:\n- Risk vs. stability\n- Rolling your own vs. leveraging existing company platforms\n- Equity vs. job security\n- Nesting dolls corporate executive structures\n- Being a company inside of a division.\n- Spinning up vs. finding external funding.\n- How do I do this at my own company?\n\nWhy us?\n\nBreaking News germinated inside MSNBC.com, when it was still an independent joint venture of Microsoft and NBC. We had good neighbors -- the company had bought NEWSVINE and EveryBlock. We became a part of NBC News when they fully bought out Msnbc.com in 2014. At our height, we had 20 employees, evenly split between product and editorial. ", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Martin McClellan, Ben Tesch", + "facilitators_twitter": "hellbox,magnetbox", + "id": "sailing-pirate-ship", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "1:15-2:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", + "title": "Sailing the pirate ship: running a startup inside a bigger company", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thu-lunch-talk-hiring", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Minnesota", + "time": "1:15-2:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", + "title": "Let's Talk About Hiring", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "**1-2pm**\n**Web Performance**\nConde Nast\n\n**OPEN SLOT**\n\n**2-3pm**\n**Publishing on the Web Progressively**\nJohn Paul\n\n**Building an Engineering Culture at a News Org**\nNew York Times", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "office-hours-2", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "1-3pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", + "title": "Office Hours", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Pothole locations, property tax bills, school test scores– local data is still vital to people’s daily lives and therefore, an important part of local news coverage. However, it can many times be tough to get ahold of and to deal with, especially when your editors expect New York Times level of quality with the budget and resources of the Pawnee Journal. In this session, we invite other local data journalists and enthusiasts to discuss the difficulties in working with local data and how can we make it better. How do we deal with local governments that give you data from a dot matrix printer? What are the best strategies to take national stories and localize them, especially when data might not exist on the local level? What’s the best way to showcase a data story that will really resonate with your readers who want to know more about what’s going on in their community? We’ll also be discussing our roles in small and ever-shrinking newsrooms, like we can maximize our usefulness without becoming a service desk. Join us to come up with a game plan to make local data journalism on par quality-wise with what the national newsrooms are doing. ", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Carla Astudillo, Erin Petenko, Steve Stirling", + "facilitators_twitter": "carla_astudi,EPetenko,SStirling", + "id": "local-data-journalism", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "3-4:15pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "Local data journalism still matters (and we can make it better!)", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "If people come to you to find out how to troubleshoot encryption keys or choose a password manager, you’re a security trainer, even if you think you’re neither qualified nor an expert. Let’s talk about best practices for ethical and responsible skill sharing, and about strategies for helping your newsroom colleagues and sources protect private conversations.\n\nOpen News and BuzzFeed Open Lab are collaborating on a curriculum designed specifically for newsroom trainers, so we'll use that as a jumping off point for our session.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Amanda Hickman, Matt Perry", + "facilitators_twitter": "amandabee,mattoperry", + "id": "better-security-trainers", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "3-4:15pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "Let's be better security trainers together", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Explore how the art of storytelling can begin with… art. In this session, Leah Kohlenberg, a former journalist and founder of The Roaming Studio, will lead you through a drawing exercise — yes, even those of you who say \"I can’t draw” — and demonstrate how stirring your creative juices helps you tell better stories. She’s been doing this with news organizations and academic environments for a couple of years now, researching it along the way. Her early conclusion: It really works!", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Leah Kohlenberg", + "facilitators_twitter": "leahkohlenberg", + "id": "learn-to-draw-1", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "3-4:15pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "Learn to Draw, Boost Your Brain Power!", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Code review is the examination of code to identify any mistakes, and/or ways to make the working code more efficient. While this might be standard practice in tech, it can be overlooked in news environments where barriers and demands can be very different. In this session we’ll share our nightmares that illustrate why code review is important (I have some!), barriers to code review, and solutions: how can we integrate code review into the coding process? Whether we use code in software or web development, data analysis, visualization, or something else – what strategies work when you have someone to review or pair with, versus when you’re the solo coder, or when everyone is just too busy?! Come if you have thoughts, experiences, failures, strategies, or questions! We want to end the session with strategies we can all take back to our workplaces to try.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Jennifer Stark", + "facilitators_twitter": "_JAStark", + "id": "code-review-strategies", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Minnesota", + "time": "3-4:15pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "Code review strategies when you're on a team vs. code solo.", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Distribution platforms like AMP, Facebook Instant Articles, and Apple News have changed how our organizations work. Having grown reliant on social distribution to reach new audiences, Publishers who had only ever dictated their terms of distribution had to learn to adapt their already-aging business models to walled gardens, new ways to measure reach and engagement, and work within Other People’s Priorities. Content format compatibility issues, maintaining wholly separate designs inside of early-stage platforms with low feature-sets, participation being equally opt-in and required to maintain SEO and reach, reduced ad opportunities, and gaps in analytics...it was a lot to take in. But publishers are doing more than making the best of it: they’re thriving.\n\nIn this session, we’ll look at what we’ve learned from learning to adapt. Your humble hosts will draw from their experience at The New Yorker, Pitchfork, Wired, Quartz, Hearst, Condé Nast, and Vox Media to offer a survey of the technologies and strategies publishers have created to navigate this uncharted frontier. We’ll discuss how our organizations monitor engagement, drive subscriptions and revenue, and balance our legacy systems with the needs these new platforms oblige. ", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Matt Dennewitz, Michael Donohoe, Luigi Ray-Montanez", + "facilitators_twitter": "mattdennewitz,donohoe,1uigi", + "id": "platform-life", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "3-4:15pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "My Life In the Bush of Platforms", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "At NICAR, Helga Salinas led a session where journalists of color shared anecdotal accounts of moments that led them to question their existence in their newsrooms. Such instances may arise while reporting racially-charged news, and can even present themselves as social experiences within our newsrooms. She identified themes that included feeling tokenized, being completely ignored or being made to feel inadequate. Let us note that such experiences place us in a predicament: our behavior could confirm a bad view of our group and of ourselves, as members of the group. In a book titled “Whistling Vivaldi,” author Claude Steele arrives to a term called “stereotype threat” to describe the pressures we feel in these instances. Expanding on conversations at NICAR, Helga and Michael Grant are inspired to share what they have learned about the mechanics of threats to our identities. Bring your minds to an open space and don’t be afraid to share your truth in this session. We’ll shed light on the forces that cause us bring our own identities into question. We will ask questions that help us think critically about our experiences. We will gather into groups to share and discuss these experiences. We will break-down the contingencies relatable to journalists of color. And we will share and discuss some methods journalists of color can take to reduce the pressure of threats to our identities.\n\nTo maintain a safe space for our audience, this session is only for people of color.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Helga Salinas, Mike Grant", + "facilitators_twitter": "helga_salinas,mikegrantme", + "id": "people-of-color-newsrooms", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "University Hall", + "time": "3-4:15pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "Answering \"How do I exist as a person of color in a newsroom?\"", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "**Making VR Journalism with Journalism Budgets**\nEmblematic Group\n\n**OPEN SLOT**", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "office-hours-3", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "4-5pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "Office Hours", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Pushing for projects with your managers can be hard. In resource-strapped newsrooms, diverting time and money towards digital experimentation can seem like a huge ask.\n\nOne way to get around that? Tiny experiments. Smaller initiatives can be implemented quickly to gather some initial intel that can inform the original idea, spur iteration and help to nudge a project forward.\n\nLet’s talk through how to make a tiny experiment, implement it and, if we have time, prototype (or role play) one on the spot! ", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Julia B. Chan, Madeline Welsh", + "facilitators_twitter": "juliachanb,madelinebwelsh", + "id": "push-dont-pitch", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "4:45-6pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "title": "Push don’t pitch: Conduct tiny experiments to push through ideas instead of pitching them", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "The Panama Papers, Electionland, Documenting Hate -- in an age of shrinking newsrooms and big stories, collaboration between news organizations is key. Tools and systems that enable the many to work together -- both off-the-shelf and custom -- are a key ingredient to making that collaboration smooth. Together, we'll talk about the pros, cons, and heartaches in getting newsrooms to collaborate, and explore the possibilities through fun, group activities.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Alan Palazzolo, Andre Natta", + "facilitators_twitter": "zzolo,acnatta", + "id": "newsroom-collaboration", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "4:45-6pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "title": "Greasing the wheels of inter-newsroom collaboration", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "We’ll start with a brainstorm of common topics, concepts, and processes that we think would benefit from explanation on interdisciplinary teams, i.e. version control, APIs, web accessibility, HTTPS, staging vs. production. Then, we’ll divide into groups and come up with any and all relevant metaphors (if time allows, we’ll even do a GIF-based brainstorm!) We’ll eventually refine and narrow down a list of useful metaphors — and none of that “explain what you do to your mom” language — the outcome of this session will be accessible and inclusive metaphors for all!", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Nicole Zhu", + "facilitators_twitter": "nicolelzhu", + "id": "better-tech-metaphors", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "4:45-6pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "title": "Toward better metaphors: Accessible and inclusive ways to explain technical work", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "You're on a product, design or engineering team but you work at a news organization. Should you play by the same rules as the newsroom, or is this an infringement on your speech? Reasonable people can disagree, so let's do that. Let's disagree and see what we can learn on either end of the spectrum.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Brian Hamman, Carrie Brown", + "facilitators_twitter": "hamman,Brizzyc", + "id": "engineers-politics", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "4:45-6pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "title": "Should Our Engineers Donate to Campaigns?", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "The pressures on news storytellers to be resourceful and to deliver have never been greater. The stresses involved can be compounded by our day-to-day caregiving responsibilities for children and parents, among others. Building on a generative discussion at SRCCON 2016, we’ll discuss promoted practices for prioritizing work projects while being present for loved ones (all while creating some opportunities for fun). We’ll take from examples from what works at different news organizations, in countries around the world, and from your own experiences.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Emily Goligoski, Joe Germuska", + "facilitators_twitter": "emgollie,joegermuska", + "id": "caregiving-journalism", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Minnesota", + "time": "4:45-6pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "title": "Caregiving while Reporting, Editing, Publishing, and Analyzing the News", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Hackers, governmental entities, malicious ads, coffeeshop snoopers, airline Wi-fi, us-- all of these have the potential to violate the privacy of our users, our staff, and our sources. What responsibility does a newsroom have to protect these group’s privacy and personal information? How can we realistically fulfill these responsibilities? How can we assess what we have control over and what we can’t control? \n\nPrivacy in the digital world is complex and it is time for newsrooms to solidify their footing with new guidelines and tips. We want to explore multiple scenarios involving a privacy breach. The scenarios will cover behavioral, technological, and ethical issues based on real-life examples. You, the newsroom, will tackle the situation given to you. Your mission: come up with a set of guidelines on how to prevent and respond to your specific scenario.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Ian Carrico, Lo Benichou", + "facilitators_twitter": "iamcarrico,LoBenichou", + "id": "protect-user-privacy", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "4:45-6pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "title": "How do we protect our users' privacy?", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "An ever-growing cornucopia of tools, frameworks, packages, and languages beckons to newsroom developers and media technologists. Whether you’re an individual developer or part of a large, medium, or small team, deciding which technologies to invest your time and sweat equity into may be one of the most important and complex decisions you make. Do we use an old standby that we know really well, or we forge out and try something new? How do we balance following technological passions and interests while still making sure everyone on the team knows how to work with the codebase? Are the benefits of getting in on the ground floor of something new worth the risks? How do you know if your team has the expertise to pull it off, or if your organization has the resources?", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Matt Johnson, Elliot Bentley", + "facilitators_twitter": "xmatt,elliot_bentley", + "id": "stack-tech-deck", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "University Hall", + "time": "4:45-6pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "title": "How Do You Stack Your Tech Deck?", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-dinner", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "6pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening", + "title": "Dinner at SRCCON", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Sometimes the art of the FOIA lies in knowing exactly what record you want to request, and hounding it down until you get it. Other times, though, there are benefits to casting a wide net and requesting things that would be interesting if they exist. FOIA The Dead, a project that files a FOIA request to the FBI for the subject of every New York Times obituary as it's published, is an example of the latter. In this session, we'll discuss what other kinds of problems can be solved with parallel automated records requests, and give participants the tools to start filing.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Parker Higgins", + "facilitators_twitter": "xor", + "id": "bring-out-foia", + "length": "", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "7-8pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", + "title": "Bring Out Your Dead: lessons in massively parallel records request from 2000 FOIAed obituaries", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "\"Can't draw a stick figure,\" you say? Let me prove you wrong in one lesson! Realistic drawing isn't as hard as it looks - and there are a lot of reasons to try and do it. Learning to draw exercises your right brain, which can aid focus, attention, memory and analytical ability (think of it as cross training for the brain). Come try it out yourself at this session, as I walk you step-by-step through completing a finished, realistic drawing. For all experience levels, including the complete beginner.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Leah Kohlenberg", + "facilitators_twitter": "leahkohlenberg", + "id": "learn-to-draw-2", + "length": "", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "7-8pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", + "title": "Learn to Draw, Boost Your Brain Power!", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "evening-point-of-it-all", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Minnesota", + "time": "7-8pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", + "title": "Conversation: What's the point of it all? (Does journalism make a difference)", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Carpal tunnel syndrome is a real risk for those of us who spent all of our waking hours on the computer. Come learn a few simple exercises my dad (a bone and joint surgeon) taught me to help relieve the strain on your wrists!", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Aditi Bhandari", + "facilitators_twitter": "AditiHBhandari", + "id": "evening-hobby-1", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "7-8pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", + "title": "Hobby workshop: Physiotherapy (save your wrists!)", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Bring your walking shoes and water bottle for a walking tour through part of Minneapolis. We will take a stroll through the University of Minnesota campus to the Mississippi River and across the river gorge through the Twin Cities urban [National Park](https://www.nps.gov/miss/index.htm). The path will provide spectacular views of the river, riverfront and downtown while learning a bit about the history of Minneapolis. We will follow trails that are paved and accessible. Led by Will Lager of Minnesota Public Radio News.\n\nMeet up at 7pm by the doors in Memorial Hall, then head out!", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Will Lager", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "walking-tour", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "7-8pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", + "title": "Local walking tour", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Minneapolis was declared “America’s best bike city” by Bicycling magazine in 2010. Join us for a low-speed, no-sweat ride to explore the city’s network of off-street bike paths using the city’s bikesharing system. We’ll aim for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden on the other side of downtown, about a 30-40 minute ride from the university campus, via the riverfront bike paths and the Cedar Lake Trail. Along the way we’ll check out St. Anthony Falls and the historic mill district, and we’ll ride underneath Target Field, where the Twins are scheduled to be playing the Rangers.\n\nMeet up at 7pm by the doors in Memorial Hall, then head out!", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Christian MilNeil", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "bike-tour", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "7-8pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", + "title": "Local biking tour", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Kai Teoh", + "facilitators_twitter": "jkteoh", + "id": "evening-immigration", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "7-8pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", + "title": "Immigration! Visas! Are you on one? Let's chat!", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Board games, card games, story games--we'll have plenty to choose from. Bring your own to share and play.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Tiff Fehr, Joe Germuska", + "facilitators_twitter": "tiffehr,joegermuska", + "id": "evening-games-1", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "All evening", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", + "title": "Game Room", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "You're not alone. We've all made mistakes. Let’s talk about our biggest or smallest mess-ups, things we learned from them and what others can do to avoid making the same mistakes. Maybe you cleared your computer by accident or had to issue several corrections on a story. Whatever it is, we're here to support each other.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Sandhya Kambhampati", + "facilitators_twitter": "sandhya__k", + "id": "lightning-talks", + "length": "", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "8-9pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", + "title": "Lightning talks: I've made mistakes, you've made mistakes, we've all made mistakes. And it's OK", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Board games, card games, story games--we'll have plenty to choose from. Bring your own to share and play.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Tiff Fehr, Joe Germuska", + "facilitators_twitter": "tiffehr,joegermuska", + "id": "evening-games-2", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "All evening", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", + "title": "Game Room", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "I can't make you the next Rodney Mullen, but I'm confident I can help you pop your first ollie. Come learn the physics behind an ollie and other skateboard tricks. I'll also have some practice boards to give it a shot. Closed-toe shoes required to practice.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Dave Stanton", + "facilitators_twitter": "gotoplanb", + "id": "evening-hobby-2", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "8-9pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", + "title": "Hobby workshop: Pop an ollie on a skateboard", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Bring your favorite destinations and your survival strategies!", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Dan Sinker,Janice Dillard", + "facilitators_twitter": "dansinker,janicedillard", + "id": "evening-road-trips", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "8-9pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", + "title": "Conversation: Road trips!", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "AMA with \"Minority Whip,\" aka Rachel, a data geek and skater", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Rachel Alexander", + "facilitators_twitter": "rachelwalexande", + "id": "evening-roller-derby", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Minnesota", + "time": "8-9pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", + "title": "Conversation: Roller Derby as journalism stress coping", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Conversations are your opportunity to get a small group together to talk about how to plan an amazing vacation or listen to your favorite music or discuss what book changed your life—anything that you're passionate about. We'll have signup sheets at SRCCON, so you bring the ideas and we'll make the space.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "evening-conversations-2", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "", + "time": "8-9pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", + "title": "Evening conversations (Sign up at SRCCON!)", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Who doesn't love a good, old fashioned pub quiz? At the start of the session, we will break the room up into groups of five or fewer. Everyone will be given a small whiteboard to write their answers.\n\nRound One: Trivia. We will have four categories: local news, millennials, apps, and accessibility. Each category has four questions and you will get 1, 3, 5, or 7 points to wager on each question. The questions will be based off user research and academic studies about how people consume news.\n\nRound Two: Pictures. We will have screenshots of A/B tests from apps and websites of real publications. Players will need to guess which screenshot was the winning one.\n\nRound Three: Numbers. We will ask questions about the percentage of online users that engage in certain habits. The team that guesses the closest correct percentage wins the points.\n\nFinal Round: Guess the pub! We will read five clues (audience characteristics) of each publication. The earlier you guess the publication, the more points you get – but be careful, if you guess incorrectly you'll get 0 points!\n\nThe winning team will get something totally amazing, like tickets to Hamilton or a puppy. This pub quiz is a great way to have some fun, get to know other attendees, and learn something about the people who consume the content we create. (Credit: This structure is based off of Stump Trivia from the Boston area)", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Steph Yiu", + "facilitators_twitter": "crushgear", + "id": "audience-pub-trivia", + "length": "", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "9-10pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-3", + "title": "Know Your Audience! A Pub(lication) Trivia Night (or Afternoon)", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Board games, card games, story games--we'll have plenty to choose from. Bring your own to share and play.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Tiff Fehr, Joe Germuska", + "facilitators_twitter": "tiffehr,joegermuska", + "id": "evening-games-3", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "All evening", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-3", + "title": "Game Room", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Drones have gotten very popular, cheap, and are incredibly capable platforms. Let's explore together the various sorts of photos and video you can capture from the air, what you can do with those images, and the best way to go about collecting it.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Ian Dees", + "facilitators_twitter": "iandees", + "id": "evening-hobby-4", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "9-10pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-3", + "title": "Hobby workshop: Drone photography", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Conversations are your opportunity to get a small group together to talk about how to plan an amazing vacation or listen to your favorite music or discuss what book changed your life—anything that you're passionate about. We'll have signup sheets at SRCCON, so you bring the ideas and we'll make the space.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "evening-conversations-3", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "", + "time": "9-10pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-3", + "title": "Evening conversations (Sign up at SRCCON!)", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "friday-breakfast", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "9am", + "timeblock": "friday-morning", + "title": "Breakfast at SRCCON", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "**OPEN SLOT**\n\n**OPEN SLOT**", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "office-hours-4", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "9-10am", + "timeblock": "friday-morning", + "title": "Office Hours", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "The Fluxkit, designed and assembled by George Maciunas in 1965, contained printed matter, a film, and a variety of objects including a “wood box with offset labels and rubber opening containing unknown object,” by the Fluxus artist Ay-O. The label read: “put finger in hole.”\n\nFluxus artists were playful revolutionaries who tried to undermine the authority of the museum and the primacy of the artist. One strategy they deployed was demanding that the viewer complete (and thereby co-create) certain pieces of art.\n\nTo many of us news nerds, “interactive” has become a noun. But how interactive is your interactive, really? When’s the last time you stopped to consider just how revolutionary an idea it is to include your reader in the completion (or co-creation) of your work as a journalist?\n\nIn this session, we’ll forget about our newsrooms, tools, and data sets for a while and think about the essence of interaction. What inspires us as individuals to reach out and try to affect the world? As part of a group? By what means can we do so? How might find we are changed in turn? What invites us and what repels us? Where do exploration and interaction diverge?\n\nThen we’ll zoom back in and ask: how can we orchestrate meaningful interactive experiences through our work? I’ll suggest some inspiration from the art world: happenings, instruction pieces, escape rooms, live action installations; please bring some inspirations of your own.\n\nAlone and in teams, we will hammer out manifestos and instruction pieces for building digital interactives, then swap them with each other. Take your instructions home. Follow them. After SRCCON, we’ll publish the raw materials and the the interactives together as new sNerdFluxkit (2017).", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Scott Blumenthal, Britt Binler", + "facilitators_twitter": "blumysden,brittbinler", + "id": "new-snerd-fluxkit", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "10-11:15am", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "new sNerdFluxkit (2017): inspiration and provocations for people who make interactives", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "The U.S. has become increasingly polarized and, ironically, we complain about it within our own filter bubbles. Indeed, we comfortably sympathize with the views of our political parties, influencers and friends, and ignore the banter; in fact, Fox News viewers believe the news they watch is “fair and balanced”, while CNN watchers dismiss the idea that they could possibly be consuming “fake news.” But why such polarization and how did we get here? If Brexit and the US election teach us one thing, it is that it may be time to step outside our comfort bubbles and start a conversation with the opposing view.\n\nNow suppose you land in another filter bubble full of despisers and disbelievers. How would you convince them that universal healthcare isn’t a bad idea, or that a strong dollar doesn’t translate into a strong US economy? How would you even start such a conversation? For more complicated political and economic issues, how would you help people move forward beyond face value and hearsay? If laying out facts doesn’t work, how can you approach others outside your own filter bubbles with a more accessible, heartfelt or persuasive approach?\n\nThe suggested encounter will not be easy. But filter bubbles won’t burst by themselves. It is up to us to take them on, and we are conscientious and badass enough to pull it off! ", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Sonya Song", + "facilitators_twitter": "sonya2song", + "id": "filter-bubbles", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "10-11:15am", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "Why you are part of the filter bubble problem and what you can do about it", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Forget the taboos. Let's talk frankly about revenue, engagement, and transparency. We want this group to discuss (and hopefully design) engagement ladders that aren't only ethical, but that also directly improve both reporting and revenue potential – all without compromising journalistic independence. Let's break down the wall and have some frank conversations about metrics, money, and bringing the audience closer to everything we do.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Andrew Losowsky, Mary Walter-Brown", + "facilitators_twitter": "losowsky,mwbvosd", + "id": "engagement-revenue", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "10-11:15am", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "Let's Talk About Engagement and Revenue", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Once the exclusive domain of scientists, engineers and HAM radio operators, a new generation of cheap hardware and open source software have cracked open the radio spectrum for hackers and hobbyists – and journalists – to explore. Radios are built into dozens of devices we use every day, and the radio spectrum is a tightly regulated, poorly understood invisible national asset. There are stories flying around in the air around you, and it’s time you started looking for them. Using the popular $20 RTL-SDR USB dongle (limited quantities will be provided at the workshop) we will get you up and running with the tools you’ll need to track aircraft flying over your head, listen to emergency responder radios and download weather satellite images WITHOUT THE INTERNET. We’ll also look at some interesting examples of how the radio spectrum has been used in reporting the news. ", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Jon Keegan", + "facilitators_twitter": "jonkeegan", + "id": "radio-spectrum", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Minnesota", + "time": "10-11:15am", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "Exploring the Radio Spectrum for News", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "When sharing ideas while interviewing for a position, you're essentially doing free consulting work if you don't get the gig. Together, let's explore better methods of testing skills through the hiring process. We'll dig into skills tests, idea proposals and more to come up with some best practices for the journalism-tech industry.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Rachel Schallom", + "facilitators_twitter": "rschallom", + "id": "hiring-skills-tests", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "10-11:15am", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "Finding a better way to test skills while hiring", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Sometimes it’s hard to see the data ~right before our eyes~. In this session, we’ll talk about ways for people to find sources of inspiration for data-driven stories within communities they cover, even if no dataset currently exists. What if you collected the results of your readers grading the president or used crowdsourcing to find out where cicadas are swarming (both real examples!) to tell stories about your community?\n\nWe’ll talk about how to look for patterns in everyday occurrences to create structured datasets out of text, images, public statements and more, which can enrich and inform our storytelling. We’ll also look at some surprising data sets that already exist and discuss how to incorporate them into our own coverage and use them find new story ideas. Together, we’ll brainstorm data-driven stories inspired by what we find during our stay in Minneapolis, around SRCCON, or even the just in the room we’re in. We’ll workshop some of those ideas and expand the discussion to incorporate them into possible stories in our own communities. We’ll also talk about how to get the rest of your newsroom to think in a data-driven mindset while reporting, and leave with some story ideas to take back with us.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Ashley Wu, Priya Krishnakumar", + "facilitators_twitter": "ashhwu,priyakkumar", + "id": "data-walk-among-us", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Board Room (5th floor)", + "time": "10-11:15am", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "Data: They walk among us!", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "**Digital security for journalists**\nWordPress.com VIP\n\n**Google Trends 101**\nGoogle News Lab", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "office-hours-5", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "11am-12pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "Office Hours", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Why is it so hard for even the nerdiest among us to work across teams in a newsroom? In small teams, we’ll create short comics that illustrate collaboration challenges and (possible) solutions. What kinds of collaboration problems? Ones we know and love: failure to communicate early, tap the right partners and manage time effectively. We’ll show some examples and talk about the scenarios they describe, then guide the group exercise to storyboard our own solutions. Toward the end, we’ll share our work and discuss. No drawing skills required!", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Becky Bowers, Darla Cameron, Tiff Fehr", + "facilitators_twitter": "beckybowers,darlacameron,tiffehr", + "id": "drawn-together", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "11:45am-1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-2", + "title": "Drawn Together: Doodling Our Way Toward Stronger Collaboration", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Happy teams know what they're trying to achieve, and what their jobs are. It's easy to define crystal-clear goals and roles, but many managers fail to do so. (Ourselves included!) Whether you're a manager or just desperate for direction, join us to talk about proven techniques for team happiness.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Brian Boyer, Livia Labate", + "facilitators_twitter": "brianboyer,livlab", + "id": "goals-roles", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "11:45am-1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-2", + "title": "Goals and Roles: Explicit is better than implicit", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "It’s surprisingly easy to end up in a teaching role without any particular training in how to teach. Whether you teach regularly or just occasionally (like leading sessions at conferences, hint, hint), come join this crash course in how we can teach to groups more effectively. We’ll take a quick look at recent trends and research in pedagogy for strategies you can use, then talk through common classroom problems such as needy and know-it-all students, questions you can’t answer off-hand, and how to deal if you don’t fit your students’ expectations about what a teacher is like.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Lisa Waananen Jones, Amy Kovac-Ashley", + "facilitators_twitter": "lisawaananen,terabithia4", + "id": "teachers-lounge", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "11:45am-1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-2", + "title": "Teachers' Lounge: Talking Tips and Strategies for Effective Teaching to Groups", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "In this guided session, we'll ask you a series of questions to help you identify what you're most worried about and why. We'll work through how to take care of yourself emotionally, how to keep what you plan for manageable, and how to identify those who can help you.\n\nThis session is great for those are worried, or those who want to know how to help others. Participants can talk through their answers with others, or go through the session individually.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Mago Torres, Sisi Wei", + "facilitators_twitter": "magiccia,@sisiwei", + "id": "threat-modeling-well-being", + "length": "90 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "11:45am-1:15pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-2", + "title": "Threat Modeling, But For Your Own Well-Being", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "The Intercept newsroom just went thru a unionizing drive and joined the Writer's Guild Association (https://www.wgaeast.org/2017/04/the-intercept-unionizes-with-the-writers-guild-of-america-east/). Being part of the union organizing committee we dealt with the challenges of unionizing. Given that we're in an era where the journalism community is under persistent attack from the Trump regime, we want more newsrooms to unionize across the country.\n\nIn this session we want to have a broader discussion about unionizing, focusing on the pros and cons and the process of joining a union.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Moiz Syed, Akil Harris", + "facilitators_twitter": "moizsyed,ghostofakilism", + "id": "pros-cons-unions", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Minnesota", + "time": "11:45am-1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-2", + "title": "Unionize! Pros and cons of being in a union and how to unionize your newsroom", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Is your newsroom moving to WordPress? Moving away from WordPress? Moving to your parent company's CMS? Moving to Arc? Building a new CMS from scratch using Node? Rails? Django? (Are you using Django-CMS or Mezzanine or Wagtail?) Going headless with WordPress? Going headless with React?\n\n...or is your newsroom paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of the task of choosing and migrating to a new CMS, let along upgrading your current one?\n\nThis session is about the why and how of migrating your content to new systems. When is it time to change up your CMS, and why? When is it better to repair your ship instead of jumping off? What does the transition process look like-- for instance, how do you handle your archival stories, or make sure your frontend and backend features are in sync? How do you pull it off (technically)? How do you pull it off (organizationally)? Most importantly: was it worth it?", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Liam Andrew, Pattie Reaves", + "facilitators_twitter": "mailbackwards,pazzypunk", + "id": "switching-cmses", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "11:45am-1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-2", + "title": "Switching CMSes", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "friday-lunch", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-lunch", + "title": "Lunch at SRCCON", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Chris Groskopf", + "facilitators_twitter": "onyxfish", + "id": "fri-lunch-mapping", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-lunch", + "title": "Mapping Problems WTF: Bivariates vs. Choropleths (and other things that are hard too)", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "fri-lunch-journalism-impact", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-lunch", + "title": "Rethinking Journalism's Impact and How We Measure It", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "fri-lunch-podcasts", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Minnesota", + "time": "1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-lunch", + "title": "Podcasts: Let's recommend our favorites", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "An intro course on Gregg Shorthand using stereotypically millennial phrases", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Stan Sakai", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "fri-lunch-shorthand", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-lunch", + "title": "Shorthand on fleek: An intro course using stereotypically millennial phrases", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Get outside to see how looking at the world like an artist can make you a better journalist", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Leah Kohlenberg,Alexandra Nicolas", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "fri-lunch-sketching", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-lunch", + "title": "Urban sketching for journalists", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "**1-2pm**\n**How to Become a JSK Fellow**\nJSK Fellowships\n\n**Job possibilities in data, viz, digital design at NJAM**\nNJ Advance Media\n\n**2-3pm**\n**Mapbox! Tech support + jobs**\nMapbox\n\n**Open Source Tools For Effective Community**\nThe Coral Project", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "office-hours-6", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "1-3pm", + "timeblock": "friday-lunch", + "title": "Office Hours", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "News breaks and journalists & editors scramble to react. Afterward shoulders are shrugged and we say \"Forget it, Jake. It's breaking news.\" That's how it works right?\n\nBut that's not how it needs to work. What if instead we could approach breaking news situations with a sense of calm and confidence? What if we considered the who, what, where, why and how of things that could happen, and simply left the when to chance?\n\nPut simply - let's all plan for the news that could/will happen in our market and consider a needs assessment.\n\nWhat background information and context should be at or near our fingertips? How to teach a reporting staff to know what their first \"reads\" are of a situation given their beat? What roles need to be filled first to get a handle on the news? What efficient and non-repetitive methods of managing information exist? How can we receive information from our audience? How can we convey meaningful information to our audience? And what traps exist?", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Chris Keller, Sara Simon", + "facilitators_twitter": "chrislkeller,sarambsimon", + "id": "breaking-news-plan", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "2:30-3:45pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "This just in... You can plan for breaking news", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Global warming is quite possibly the biggest challenge humanity is facing in our lifetime. Yet, we are having a hard time getting the message through: According to a [2016 Pew report](https://www.pewinternet.org/2016/10/04/public-views-on-climate-change-and-climate-scientists/), less than half of Americans believe that man-made global warming is real.\n\nClimate change is a complex topic but also diffuse and impersonal – hard to grasp for both the audience and us journalists. In this session, we'll work on better understanding climate change issues and on finding new, relatable ways to communicate them. We'll play a game in which we step in the shoes of climate change deniers, beneficiaries, but most importantly of those who suffer from the effects of global warming. Based on our learnings from that, we’ll come up with new ideas for communicating global warming, its reasons, and its effects on people’s lives – through graphics, interactive storytelling, or whatever else we can prototype on paper.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Simon Jockers, Cathy Deng", + "facilitators_twitter": "sjockers,cthydng", + "id": "climate-change-personal", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "2:30-3:45pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "Making climate change personal", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "News nerds have the skills and interests to play a number of different roles in the newsroom. How can we nurture the development of those skills in early career journalists? How do we focus — or broaden — the work of mid-career journalists? And how can we accomplish this all against the backdrop of layoffs, pay negotiations, and lack of mentors or advocates? \n\nSome questions we’ll discuss as a group are:\n* How many of you are doing the job you... expected to be doing?... the job you want to be doing?\n* If you could do another job, what would it be?\n* Does your job support you in pursuing new skills and training?\n* If you wanted to pursue a project outside of your discipline (like write a story if you're a programmer, or make an interactive project if you're a reporter), could you do it? Would your managers or editors encourage you?", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Vanessa Martinez, Chris Canipe, Soo Oh", + "facilitators_twitter": "vnessamartinez,ccanipe,SooOh", + "id": "career-development", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "2:30-3:45pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "Finding your spot in the newsroom", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Jupyter is an amazing tool for data work, but it has all sorts of problems. You have to be able to code in Python, it doesn't manage data versions, isn't designed for audiences to understand, and there's no easy way to share reusable data processing recipes. Come see the Computational Journalism Workbench, a new open source platform that aims to solve these problems for you -- and needs your suggestions and support.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Jonathan Stray", + "facilitators_twitter": "jonathanstray", + "id": "fri-lunch-build-data-notebook", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "2:30-3:45pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "Build a Better Data Notebook", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Designing accessible experiences can feel like a big, hairy problem. Not very many great resources exist, testing can be a pain, and just figuring out where to start can leave you scratching your head. Thinking about it in the context of journalism and visual storytelling — where content is dominant and often unpredictable — can be even more confusing. As a result, if accessibility gets thought about at all, it’s often an afterthought. If you’re someone who needs an accessible site, you’re left wandering in an information wasteland.\n\nIt doesn’t have to be this way! Building accessible content and interfaces — even on tight deadlines — is completely doable. You just have to think about it from the beginning. In this session, we’ll start with an overview of basic accessibility principles, tools, and testing. We’ll then break into groups and look at those principles in the context of journalism — testing some apps, looking at alt text, debating the pros and cons of delivering alternative experiences and and dissecting data visualizations and sites in a way that will help you think about how usable the site really is. You’ll walk away with a sheaf of resources, practical tips to improve your next project and, hopefully, a new understanding of what accessibility on the web can look like.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Joanna S Kao", + "facilitators_twitter": "joannaskao", + "id": "accessibility-news", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Minnesota", + "time": "2:30-3:45pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "News for everyone: Thinking about accessibility", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "True or false?: Major political events are regularly covered on live TV, and all of them feature speakers with an agenda.\n\nWhen the lens of public attention shines on politicians it is important for journalists to be able to contextualize their messages as quickly and effectively as possible. During this session we will teach participants about open source tools that are being used today by live fact checkers to create annotated transcripts. They will learn about an open service called Opened Captions and how it can be used in conjunction with google doc to get real time transcriptions of political speeches.\n\nThis is an hands on session, drawing on experience from Vox and NPR collaboration, participants will also be shown how to export the annotated speech from the google doc into a news article static web page, that could be ready for publication.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Pietro Passarelli, David Eads", + "facilitators_twitter": "pietropassarell,eads", + "id": "live-factchecking", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Board Room (5th floor)", + "time": "2:30-3:45pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "Hands on: Live fact checking TV speeches in your google docs!", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "**OPEN SLOT**\n\n**OPEN SLOT**", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "office-hours-7", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "3:30-4:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "Office Hours", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "How do we make learning and training journalists a more enjoyable and a less intimidating experience for everyone involved? What does the structure of good training actually look like?\n\nIn this session, we’ll start by discussing the good and the bad ways newsrooms approach training and then we will brainstorm opportunities in our own newsrooms to create new or retool existing training to better provide an engaging and more meaningful learning experience for our staff.\n\nTeams will then tackle a series of three short Amazing Race-style scenarios — involving roadblocks and detours — as they work to create a checklist that will serve as starting point for those looking develop their own curriculum or lead their own training sessions in their newsrooms.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Andrew Nguyen, Julia Wolfe, Danielle Webb", + "facilitators_twitter": "onlyandrewn,juruwolfe,daniwebb_", + "id": "better-newsroom-training", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "4:15-5:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", + "title": "Expanding your team’s tool belt: Developing better training for your newsroom", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Daily iPad editions. Audio slideshows. Snowfall everything. Publish with Facebook / Apple / Google / RSS / VR / ???. The Next Big Thing will save the journalism industry, until it doesn’t, by which point we’re already onto the next Next Big Thing. Let’s remember the forgotten futures, share our own favorite failed experiments (was it “too weird” or “not Times-ian” enough?), and acknowledge that most innovation leads to failure -- and no single Next Big Thing will save us.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Joel Eastwood, Erik Hinton", + "facilitators_twitter": "JoelEastwood,erikhinton", + "id": "future-news-not", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Board Room (5th floor)", + "time": "4:15-5:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", + "title": "The Future Of News That Wasn't", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "While it would be amazing for journalists to be spread across America, the big media companies are parked mostly in NYC and DC. This means we analyze data from afar and write anecdotal trend pieces without much understanding of the vast and diverse local populations that might be impacted or influencing some topic. Fear not! There are bunches of motivated and stoked people at the local level that want to find, process, and provide information to the public to help them be more informed. These civic hacktivists share an ethos with journalists. We should look to connect with local Code for America brigades to get more context at the local level until we actually achieve better geographic diversity in media.\n\nDave and Ernie help connect hackers and activists with their local governments to find ways to make government work better for the people. Come and discuss tactics for connecting with local brigades to find data and better understand local issues, local people and local governments… since we know y’all don’t have people living there.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Dave Stanton, Ernie Hsiung", + "facilitators_twitter": "gotoplanb,ErnieAtLYD", + "id": "code-across-america", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "4:15-5:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", + "title": "Code Across America: Working with local Code for America brigades to find local stories", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "When we meet someone new at conferences like this one, we usually ask \"\"What do you do?\"\" or \"\"Where are you from?\"\" as in, where do you work? Our work can become a huge part of our identities, especially as passionate, smart people with ambition who look to find purpose in their work. That's a really tall order as we advance in our careers and struggle to find meaning in our work with one job.\n\nDuring this session, we'll discuss the things we want to do and impact with our work; the big stuff that we want to accomplish in our careers; the projects we want to run, not backlog. How do we start building those opportunities outside of our jobs to grow our careers? How can we create side projects at work and become an \"\"intrapreneur\"\" so you have institutional resources? What should we look for in full time work that is compatible with your career, and how do you navigate that line?", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Elite Truong, Pamela L Assogba", + "facilitators_twitter": "elitetruong,pam_yam", + "id": "expanding-career", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "4:15-5:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", + "title": "Every Day I'm Hustling: Building and managing a career outside of your day job", + "transcription": "" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "It was a great idea. You worked really hard to bring it into this world, watched it grow and blossom. It had its moment in the sun, but now it's starting to slow down. Show its age. It's having a hard time keeping up, to be completely honest. Maybe you've even already moved on. How do you say goodbye? What does end of life care look like for news/tech projects? How do you manage successful transitions and handoffs? In this session we'll talk about about the hard decisions you sometimes have to make, how to prepare for these situations and how to make sure your projects (or at least the lessons learned) live on.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Adam Schweigert", + "facilitators_twitter": "aschweig", + "id": "death-of-a-project", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "4:15-5:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", + "title": "Let's Talk About Death 💀", + "transcription": "y" + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "friday-closing", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "5:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-evening", + "title": "Closing", + "transcription": "y" + } +] diff --git a/_archive/sessions/2018/sessions.json b/_archive/sessions/2018/sessions.json index 6812f9f2..191592da 100644 --- a/_archive/sessions/2018/sessions.json +++ b/_archive/sessions/2018/sessions.json @@ -1,563 +1,563 @@ [ - { - "cofacilitator": "Rajiv Sinclair", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "jeeves", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Collaborative projects and partnerships can improve journalism efforts by uniting organizations where competition typically exists. We know the value that collaboration can add to projects by sharing the effort or including diverse perspectives. Yet it is challenging to build shared values of privacy and collaboration into a model that serves each individual organization and their needs. The Chicago Data Collaborative was a test to see if, together, news organizations, researchers, advocacy groups and civic technologists were greater than the sum of their parts. Today, the Chicago Data Collaborative is working to access data from public agencies, and then organize, document, and link that data together to help understand Chicago’s criminal justice system.\n\nIn this session, we will share some of the lessons we learned— from assessing the expertise and needs in our ecosystem to creating a data-sharing and governance agreement and a pilot database of criminal justice data. More importantly, as a group, we will discuss and navigate the steps to convene organizations and to create a sustainable model that reflects the goals of all parties involved.", - "facilitator": "Jenny Choi", - "facilitator_twitter": "jennychoinews", - "id": "lessons-data-collective", - "title": "Approaching Collaboration: Lessons Learned from Building a Data Collaborative" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Kathleen Hansen", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "khans1", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "It's easier for me to see what The New York Times published in print in 1851 than it is to see what it published digitally in 1996. Why is that? Is any other news website in a better state?\n\nDigital publishing moves fast, but as we evolve the form of news online, how can we preserve what we publish in a way that will let the historians of the future understand the evolution of the medium? Is a SoundSlides audio slideshow going to work in any way in 50 years? Or a Brightcove player video? If you do archive a page, has it lost something essential if it's lost the dynamic ad code or personalization features?\n\nThese are hard questions, but let's come together and create a plan for pitching the value of preserving digital news to others at our organizations, creating best practices for doing it, and helping identify champions and partners inside and outside the news organization to help make the case for archiving.", - "facilitator": "Albert Sun", - "facilitator_twitter": "albertsun", - "id": "archiving-news-websites", - "title": "Archiving News Websites for the Long Long Term" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Sasha Koren", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "sashak", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Let’s be clear: a lot of experimentation is happening in newsrooms right now. But let’s also be honest: it’s predominantly being done in a messy, ad-hoc way and we’re too quick to move on. As more teams are given the freedom to experiment, the need for a practical model to do it with empathy, intention and a willingness to learn is ever greater. \n\nOver two years in the Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab we developed a sustainable process for running experiments by trying methods out until they (mostly) worked for us. In this session, we’ll talk about the essential building blocks of our process, take it for a test run, and invite others to share methods they’ve used in their newsrooms. \n\nThe Mobile Lab’s methodology on its surface is pretty simple: \n* draw a line between an idea and an actual hypothesis\n* define success metrics based on all aspects of a user’s experience\n* implement precise analytics\n* survey your audience about how things went\n* have a “burndown” meeting with the entire team to discuss results and insights\n\nThe hard part, we admit, is putting this all together and not losing steam. \n\nFeel free to bring a news experiment idea you want to put through the paces, or we’ll have a few on file to suggest (Obituaries newsletter, anyone?!)", - "facilitator": "Sarah D Schmalbach", - "facilitator_twitter": "schmalie", - "id": "running-experiments", - "title": "Are you running an experiment, or are you just winging it?" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Jun-Kai Teoh", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "jkteoh", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "For the immigrants: There are tons of us, but probably not enough under one roof to form a functional community. So let's get together and chat about how we can keep our heads above water while traversing a unique set of problems: from taking additional care to understand and report on issues that we probably haven’t grown up around, to working extra hard to find and land a job that sponsors a visa, and to dealing with entirely new identities.\n\nFor the allies: We know you care, we know you want to be supportive, but may not always know how. Join us so you can understand and support us in our struggles that we do not often feel like talking about.\n\nIn this two-part session, we will discuss how to navigate the (perhaps steep) learning curve of surviving and thriving in a culture that may be utterly unfamiliar, and then collectively devise and document strategies to better support immigrant journalists.", - "facilitator": "Disha Raychaudhuri", - "facilitator_twitter": "Disha_RC", - "id": "community-immigrant-journalists", - "title": "Building a community guide for immigrant journalists: How to survive and support" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Eileen Webb", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "webmeadow", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "We’ve all heard the folk wisdom that “people hate change”, but, well… do we? We’re all successfully navigating change every day, but the narrative that people are generally stubborn or unable to adapt persists.\n\nUsing a series of conversational exercises, we’ll explore cultural and personal attitudes around handling change. What are the stories we believe about our own resilience, and where did they come from? How do our views affect how we plan projects and trainings for our teams? What might change in our design and planning approaches as we shift our understanding of people’s capacity for integration of new information? How can we help our colleagues and friends build resilience and trust in their own capabilities? ", - "facilitator": "Marie Connelly", - "facilitator_twitter": "eyemadequiet", - "id": "building-resilience", - "title": "Building Resilience: Moving Beyond a Fear-Based Model of Change" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Public meetings are important spaces for democracy where any resident can participate in civic life and hold public figures accountable. But how does the public know when meetings are happening? It isn’t easy! These events are spread across dozens of websites, rarely in useful data formats.\n\nThat’s why we're working with a team of civic coders to develop and coordinate the #CityScrapers, a community open source project designed to standardize, scrape and share these meetings in a central database, in collaboration with City Bureau's Documenters program. \n\nAre you working on issues related to governmental transparency, civic tech and journalism? Join us for a hands on session, stay for lessons on creating a more perfect democracy.", - "facilitator": "Darryl Holliday", - "facilitator_twitter": "city_bureau", - "id": "democracy-documenters", - "title": "Democracy, Documenters and the City Scrapers Project" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Casey Miller", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "caseymmiller", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Are you a freelancer or a lonely coder looking for feedback as you’re working on your latest project? Do you work on a team with access to an editor but they don’t have the right experience or skills to review your work? \n\nNo matter your level of expertise, having a skilled pair of eyes thoroughly scan your code, design, or writing is a crucial step in producing quality journalism. Enter the role of editor. Having a good editor is a truly amazing experience. Not only can a good editor help point out the errors in the text or the flaws in a design, but they can also offer guidance on story structure, layout, etc). Their feedback can make the difference between an average piece and an impactful piece.\n\nSo what can you do if that resource isn’t available to you? How can you shape stories without the keen eye of an editor?\n\nHere’s the thing, none of us have the perfect answer. In this session, we want to share some of our strategies and we want you to hear what solutions you’ve come up with.", - "facilitator": "Lo Benichou", - "facilitator_twitter": "lobenichou", - "id": "working-without-editors", - "title": "Don’t Panic: the guide to working without an editor, even if you have one sitting right next to you" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Jonathan Stray", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "jonathanstray", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Anything is possible in Python, but that doesn’t mean you should be programming. Let’s share tools and tricks to scrape, clean, monitor, script, query, and visualize data in sophisticated ways that might even be better than writing custom code. We’ll be looking at two free, open-source tools in-depth:\n\nWorkbench (http://workbenchdata.com) is a platform that combines data tools and training for journalists. It is designed to help you stay focused on your story without needing resources from technical teams. Workbench makes it easy to scrape, clean and manipulate data in a repeatable and transparent way – without coding.\n\nDatasette (https://github.com/simonw/datasette) is a tool for publishing structured data to the web in a way that makes it easy for your audience to search and explore. Datasette also provides a JSON+SQL API that allows developers to quickly build apps and visualizations on top of that data.\n\nThis will be a hands-on tutorial. Example data will be provided, but if you can bring your own data (ideally as CSV but other formats will work fine as well) you’ll be able to analyze, visualize and publish it during the course of the session.", - "facilitator": "Simon Willison", - "facilitator_twitter": "simonw", - "id": "more-data-less-programming", - "title": "Doing more data with less programming" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Ariel Zambelich", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "azambelich", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Newsrooms are increasingly collaborative with (1) other teams in the newsroom (i.e. audience teams that need to work with video teams to produce social content) and (2) teams across a media company (i.e working with technology teams on building out the CMS). The development of bridge roles -- where people move from a data team into the newsroom, or from the newsroom into a product management role -- is the most recent example of this trend. These roles may or may not have people reporting into them (requiring direct, downward management) but almost certainly have other people/teams they have dependencies on. How can you make sure to get things done even when you don't have the authority to do so?\n\nLearn how to understand/read people's communication preferences (we'll do some group work), and how this knowledge can (read: should) be incorporated into your management style.", - "facilitator": "Alyssa Zeisler", - "facilitator_twitter": "a_zeisler", - "id": "getting-it-done", - "title": "Getting sh*t done without authority" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Evan Wyloge", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "EvanWyloge", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Love transparency, but want to do more than than Instagram your most ridiculous redactions? Come talk about the ways emerging technologies intersect with local and federal practices around public records law, and brainstorm the tools we need to make public records work for today’s journalists, researchers, and the general public. How should public officials be handling requests for Facebook, WhatsApp, or Signal messages, and how can we work to make sure that happens? What strategies are effective for getting the databases we need to do our reporting?\n\nWe’ll share what has worked and possible best practices that will push governments toward greater transparency. We’ll also take a look at data from MuckRock and FOIA Machine, which have collectively helped file over 50,000 requests across over 10,000 agencies, and we’d like to hear your ideas on how this data can help all requesters file better requests. We also explore a database of every state’s public records laws, including sample exemptions, appeal letters, and more, and we’d love to find ways to integrate these tools into your newsroom’s processes.", - "facilitator": "Michael Morisy", - "facilitator_twitter": "morisy", - "id": "foia-digital-era", - "title": "Help drag FOIA (kicking and screaming) into the digital era" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Katie Park", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "katiepark", - "cofacilitator_two": "Alyson Hurt", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "alykat", - "description": "We’re humans who are constantly changing, and our work life should be, too. Whether you’re taking a new job, switching to remote work or taking leave, how can you make that transition successful?\n\nWe’ll discuss strategies for dealing with change. The first step: Planning a graceful exit. That means writing an effective passoff document to let others know where you left off with important projects and who to ask for key information.\n\nThen, we’ll move on to the return to work or first days at a new gig. What’s the best goal to set in your first day, week and month? What’s the ideal way to introduce (or re-introduce) yourself to your manager and best enable them to help you meet your career goals? How do you get yourself up to speed?\n\nWhether you're leaving a team or welcoming a new colleague, what can we all do to make these transitions go more smoothly? Let's find ways set ourselves up for transition success — and better support each other.", - "facilitator": "Darla Cameron", - "facilitator_twitter": "darlacameron", - "id": "cool-transitions", - "title": "How to make a big transition and maintain your cool" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Emily Yount Swelgin", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "emilyyount", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Good, healthy critique is crucial to visual storytelling, data visualization and design. But bad design has become a punchline and Twitter amplifies the performance of calling out flaws, corrections and grievances. When we fail to take care in our criticism, we look brash or dismissive, contribute negatively to our community and possibly even discourage others from participating. Above all, we miss an opportunity to give our peers and colleagues valuable, constructive feedback.\n\nHow can we be kinder and more effective in our public critiques? How can we structure meetings and discussion to encourage productive critique? How can we ask better questions and feel more confident giving feedback?\n\nTogether, we’ll learn how to facilitate, give and receive better critique, both in public forums and among our own teams.", - "facilitator": "Kennedy Elliott", - "facilitator_twitter": "kennelliott", - "id": "great-feedback", - "title": "How to give great feedback and look good doing it" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Helga Salinas", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "@helga_salinas", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "What can we do to empower diverse journalists, including younger journalists, people of color, and women and non-binary individuals, in newsrooms that often lack mentorship and support? To answer this question, first we must address your identity—which parts of your identity do you bring with you to work? Which parts do you leave at the door? How does that affect your newsroom experience and how the news is covered in America’s increasingly divisive political and social climate? We’ll begin the session with an exercise that explores our own identities. Different identities impact the work you do and how you interact with others. Then, after hearing from different people in the group, we’ll develop strategies for listening, mentorship, and self-care, using examples from our own experiences at The Seattle Times and The New York Times to explore strategies that we’ve seen work, and how to improve.", - "facilitator": "Audrey Carlsen", - "facilitator_twitter": "audcarls", - "id": "young-journalists-of-color", - "title": "I’m a stranger here myself: Building a newsroom roadmap for young journalists of color and their allies" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Sara Bremen Rabstenek", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "An editor, a designer, an engineer, and a product person walk into a room…\n\nIt sounds like the start of a corny joke, but increasingly we find ourselves in these types of situations - small, interdisciplinary teams working together to solve a problem. The thinking says - throw a lot of really smart people in a room and -magic!- they will figure it out! \n\nThe reality is, it does work, but it’s extremely difficult. People misunderstand each other, and motivations and goals are not often articulated, leading to disarray. Working with new people is hard, and it’s especially hard when you have to move fast and you’re not all speaking the same language! But fear not - starting things off on the right foot can have huge payoffs - team buy-in, alignment, and trust. The goal is to get the team to move faster by getting some tough conversations out of the way. \n\nThis is an interactive session in which participants will simulate this exact situation - participants will be given a problem prompt, break out into small, cross-disciplinary teams, then participate in kickoff exercises designed to force hard conversations and perhaps give participants a moment of self-reflection - \"are you an order or chaos muppet?\", hopes/fears/sacred cows, the road to nirvana, the pre-mortem - and more! \n\nThese exercises work best for teams with 5-10 members with any combination of disciplines, but can be scaled up or down as needed.", - "facilitator": "Rosy Catanach", - "facilitator_twitter": "", - "id": "kickoff-kit", - "title": "Kickoff Kit: helping new teams move faster by aligning early" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Ryann Grochowski Jones", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "ryanngro", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "News nerd teams within various orgs have been working really hard on developing newer hiring practices, including acrobatics like double-blind initial screenings, unbiased assessments of resumes, standardized interview processes, and rigorous, team-consensus evaluations. It’s ridiculously time-intensive but 1,000% worth it -- these efforts have resulted in diverse, talented finalist pools. We have a window available now for getting ahead of any given news org’s “rebooted” corporate recruiting and hiring efforts.\n\nNews nerd teams can cut the trail by adopting hiring practices that truly put our shared ideals front and center, as a demonstration for newsroom and technology groups. Like-minded news nerds like Brittany Mayes and Sisi Wei have spoken eloquently about their efforts for internships and fellowships. SRCCON audiences have been appreciative and very attentive, which means there’s more to uncover on the topic. There’s a lot to share, so come join us and take home some low-frills ideas about how to push your hiring efforts forward.", - "facilitator": "Tiff Fehr", - "facilitator_twitter": "tiffehr", - "id": "hacking-hiring", - "title": "Leading News Orgs to Water by Hacking Our Hiring" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Local news is in trouble. We get it. And it rightfully makes us sad. But that isn't stopping many of our best and brightest from decamping for the coasts, where better pay, comparative stability, and communities of like-minded news nerds beckon from enclaves like New York and D.C.\n\nNo judgment. I worked at coastal media organizations for almost 10 years. And not for no reason: From The Times and the Post to small, nimble startups, the benefits of working in coastal newsrooms are very real. Local newsrooms have advantages, too, but on many fronts they just can't compete.\n\nBut that doesn't mean we can't help them try.\n\nIn this session, we'll discuss what local newsrooms can do to successfully recruit people like you — some of the best, brightest and most forward-thinking folks in the business. We'll be mindful of constraints (big salaries, expensive benefits) and focus on things hiring managers can realistically implement: Cultural adjustments. Workplace policies. Lifestyle perks. Bulldozing bureaucratic barriers. And whatever else we think of.\n\nOur discussion will result in a how-to document that will be shared far and wide with local newsroom managers, explaining realistic, actionable things they can do to create an environment news nerds want to work for.", - "facilitator": "Chase Davis", - "facilitator_twitter": "chasedavis", - "id": "leave-coasts", - "title": "Leave the coasts." - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Aminata Dia", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "Ami_Dia", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Every job opening for a newsroom developer job (of which there are few) gets dozens of resumes. Job postings for the CMS get fewer, but still some. But nobody wants to come to a media organization to work on the payment processing system or ad tech.\n\nAnd that's a problem! \n\nWe need more of the passionate, mission-driven people who attend SRCCON to contribute to the financial engine of journalism. Let's get together and talk about what life outside of the newsroom can look like and see if we can come up with ways to convince more people (maybe even ourselves!) to join the business side.", - "facilitator": "Brian Hamman", - "facilitator_twitter": "hamman", - "id": "leave-newsroom", - "title": "Leave the newsroom!" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Sarah Cohen", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "sarahcnyt", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Data journalism education has problems -- too few places teach it, too few faculty have the skills, and there's precious little consensus about what students need. Tools? Thinking? Case studies? Story assignments? Simultaneously, academic publishing is beyond broken: too slow to keep up, too expensive for students to afford. So we're on a mission: Make the mother of all modern data journalism textbooks. And, at the same time, publish it so it can get to the most students, with the most up-to-date materials, without academic publishing price barriers. But how? We need your help. What do we include? How do we get it to people? We have ideas, we want to hear yours. Let's make a table of contents together!", - "facilitator": "Matt Waite", - "facilitator_twitter": "mattwaite", - "id": "data-journalism-textbook", - "title": "Let's build the data journalism textbook we need, and break academic publishing while we're at it. " - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Miles Watkins", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Open States has been a major civic tech project for over eight years. The rate at which it became Sunlight's most-used API demonstrated a clear thirst for accessible information on state legislative information in the civic tech & journalism communities. Two years ago the project became independent, and is now run as a volunteer project.\n\nThe goal of this session is to discuss how Open States and other state legislative projects can improve to be as useful as possible to the wider community. Open States grew as an Open Source project with over 100 collaborators, many from newsrooms- and we want to have a conversation to help determine the right direction for the now mature project in the years to come.", - "facilitator": "James Turk", - "facilitator_twitter": "jamesturk", - "id": "state-legislative-information", - "title": "Let's Make State Legislative Information Useful" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Jeremy B. F. Merrill", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "jeremybmerrill", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Do you yearn to be a datapoint adrift in a sea of predictions? This is your opportunity to get to the bottom of what actually happens when a machine learning algorithm runs by acting it out.\n\nAfter you BECOME a machine learning algorithm -- a human learning algorithm! -- we will discuss the technical, ethical and communication problems we have unconvered. What is it like to be the most technical person in the room when someone shouts, \"Why don't we try machine learning?\"\n\nJournalists are no longer just reporting on machine learning, but also using it. What's more, your editors and colleagues are suggesting that we use it. You'll leave this session with a better understanding of common principles in machine learning and an awareness of how people in similar roles are thinking about these problems.", - "facilitator": "Rachel Shorey", - "facilitator_twitter": "rachel_shorey", - "id": "lights-camera-algorithms", - "title": "Lights, Camera, Algorithms: Acting out (and then discussing) Machine Learning" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "It happens all the time. We parachute into a community for a short time because something \"newsworthy\" happens rather than coming in to stay and maintain a steady relationship. Think Sutherland Springs and other locales of mass shootings. Think rural America and the 2016 presidential election. Think of the minority areas of our communities that remain underserved, underrepresented and without coverage aside from tragedies. \n\nHow do we put down the ripcord and instead pull up a chair in these communities? \n\nLet's spend some time learning how to do a baseline assessment of our news organization's coverage of diverse communities using analytics tools we already use everyday to identify blind spots. Let's arm ourselves with actionable strategies we can use when we return to our newsrooms and can use to have these difficult conversations about our coverage's shortcomings with top decision-makers. And finally, let's devise a set of best practices to engage diverse communities in the interim between news events and build lasting future relationships.", - "facilitator": "Dana Amihere", - "facilitator_twitter": "write_this_way", - "id": "blind-spots-coverage", - "title": "Managing the blind spots in community news coverage" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Kevin O'Gorman", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "heretohinder", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "OpenNews and the BuzzFeed Open Lab collaborated with a ton of really smart journalists, editors, and trainers to compile a resource guide for newsroom security trainers. (https://securitytraining.opennews.org/). It's a great round up of new lesson plans and links out to existing lessons that cover important topics in digital privacy and security. We'd love to show you what's in the guide and spend some time adding even more resources to it. If you have lesson plans to share or just a few favorite resources or news stories that really make sense of a particular topic, bring them!", - "facilitator": "Amanda Hickman", - "facilitator_twitter": "amandabee", - "id": "security-trainers", - "title": "More security trainers, please!" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Candice D Fortman", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "cande313", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "We are told there are two sides to every story. But really, there are several and many voices which should be heard are often overlooked by journalists in favor of those who are either louder or more obvious. Looking at the Parkland #MeToo stories, we will talk about how minority were included in the narrative, what we did to elevate those voices and lessons we taught our journalists.", - "facilitator": "Kristyn Wellesley", - "facilitator_twitter": "kriswellesley", - "id": "many-sides-coin", - "title": "More than two sides to the coin" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Karen Hao", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "_KarenHao", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "You're in a technical role in a newsroom and you find yourself in one of two positions: The Asker, where you gather project pieces from different contributors to create a product; or the Person Being Asked, where you must parse people's technical needs into a tangible plan of action. Getting what you need is an art for any developer who also wears a project management hat. But how to ask? Or how to dig in to find out where a question is stemming from? What's the best way to communicate with people eager to help, but who may not understand the technical challenges? Many of the technical problems developers experience can be fixed with clear communication among mixed teams where everyone's expertise is validated, so we’ll be sharing tips, common pitfalls and experiences on how to manage a project from vision to reality. This session will be part open round table discussion, and part small groups and games.", - "facilitator": "Lauren Flannery", - "facilitator_twitter": "LaurenFlannery3", - "id": "speaking-visuals", - "title": "Navigating technical communication with journalists" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Hannah Young", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Our phones are incredibly intimate devices. We lovingly cradle them and stare into their gently glowing screens at all hours of the day. In this session, we will explore methods for using that intimacy to build authentic personal relationships with audiences via SMS – without being spammy or creepy.\n\nParticipants should bring a recent or upcoming story, and together we will conceive, script, and prototype a SMS campaign to connect with your audience.\n\nWe’ll touch on topics including: message tone and frequency, what to send people and when, choosing the right technology platform, potential costs, legal considerations, as well as common pitfalls and tactics for overcoming them. We’ll also share some of our data on how building respectful SMS products has impacted membership.", - "facilitator": "Sam Ward", - "facilitator_twitter": "sward13", - "id": "audience-sms", - "title": "New phone, who dis: Building intimate audience relationships without the creep factor." - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Sinduja Rangarajan", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "cynduja", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "The traditional academic-journalist relationship goes like this: a journalist would talk to an academic as a source and expert for a story. An academic would reach out to the media with findings published in a new paper. But are there ways to forge deeper relationships and bring researchers into the reporting process? Is there a way for journalists to shape research questions to quantify anecdotes they encounter in their reporting? What do journalists bring to the table for academics and vice versa?\n\nThrough discussion and activities we’ll envision new relationships between research teams, journalists, and the public. We’ll all talk about our experiences with these types of collaborations, what has and hasn’t worked, and how we might upend the the traditional one-way flows from research -> journalism -> public. We’re a journalist who’s been partnering with academics to produce stories and a researcher whose work has been reported on with varying degrees of collaboration. Whether you’re an academic or a journalist or both or neither, come join us to think outside of the box about how these partnerships can enrich journalism and increase access to information.", - "facilitator": "Laura Laderman", - "facilitator_twitter": "liladerm", - "id": "academia-journalism-partnerships", - "title": "Off the shelf and into the open: forging academia-journalism partnerships to bring findings out of journals and original research into reporting" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Mike Tigas", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "mtigas", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "So, your code broke the internet, but nobody's noticed yet. Not long ago the NPRViz team got a report from one of their users about a pretty serious security flaw in Pym.js, and so suddenly found themselves with the challenge of figuring out how to notify Pym users they needed to upgrade immediately without just blasting out to the world that it was possible to steal their users session data & cookies. I (and others) ended up helping them walk through the security disclosure process, helped draft messages intended to encourage users to upgrade, and poked people in the community. There are individual things that folks who produce software for others can do to make this process easier for themselves & users, but also there are things that we should be doing as users to make sure we're prepared to upgrade when flaws are announced, and also, how to lend a hand when things are going wrong. Lets talk about what _more_ we can and should be doing.", - "facilitator": "Ted Han", - "facilitator_twitter": "knowtheory", - "id": "security-prep", - "title": "Preparing for security vulnerabilities if you're an open source maintainer *or* user" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Andrew McGill", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "andrewmcgill", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "‘Membership’ and ‘reader revenue’ have become media buzzwords. But how do you build and measure the success of your own membership program? What tools do you use to listen to readers, and what data do you track to make decisions about product offerings? Anika Gupta and Andrew McGill are senior product managers at the Atlantic, where they work on the organization’s Masthead membership program. Anika’s also a former researcher with the Membership Puzzle Project in New York. They’ll review the Atlantic’s approach to building their membership program, as well as MPP’s research on best practices and ‘thick’ versus ‘thin’ models of participation. The session will start with some user research exercises, discuss MPP’s theory and the Atlantic’s implementation, then break into small teams for workshops and brainstorming exercises focused on designing the right membership program and offerings for your organization.", - "facilitator": "Anika Gupta", - "facilitator_twitter": "DigitalAnika", - "id": "radical-listening-membership", - "title": "Radical listening - How do you design a media membership program focused on participation" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Amanda Hicks", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "amandahi", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Are you tired of wrestling with endless JavaScript 'pixels' and awful ad services? With the attention on Facebook and the advent of European GDPR regulations, the digital ads marketplace sits on a knife's edge. For the first time in nearly a decade the user-data-driven targeted-programmatic ad space is in real danger. But also open to real change. Now is the moment for intelligent publishers to put a hand back on the wheel and reassert their ethical imperative in the next generation of ad tech.\n\nWe will be bringing a proposed draft for API-driven advertising to this session. We'll run through what we have, the thinking behind it and the types of products we believe the API schema can drive. We'll end the session by sitting down with participants and working through criticism and ideas for alterations. Our goal is to build a schema that content management systems and advertising back ends can share, allowing different publishers and third parties to communicate server to server. Then at the end of the session we'll take the beta version of the JSON schema and open source it on GitHub.", - "facilitator": "Aram Zucker-Scharff", - "facilitator_twitter": "Chronotope", - "id": "rebuilding-ad-tech", - "title": "Rebuilding Ad Tech: Open Source, Server to Server, Publisher First" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Hannah Fresques", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "HannahFresques", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Increasingly, journalists don't just visualize data in raw form but build simple regression models that draw trendlines through a set of data points, telling the reader where the story runs through the dataset. In more advanced forms, reporters fill in gaps of missing data with an original simulation or draw connections between data points with a model.\n\nWhen journalists lean on statisticians' tools, we take on the same responsibilities for accuracy and fairness even as the methods we use change. Statistical techniques can falsely frame or overstate the importance of a trend or relationship between data points when used carelessly.\n\nLet's talk about what basic assumptions and considerations journalists should make when using statistical methods, and what kinds of red flags statisticians look for in bad model selection or diagnosis. How should a journalist should be thinking about these questions as opposed to a social scientist or researcher? What are some basic techniques all journalists should know when running data through a regression model? Let's also introduce some more advanced techniques that can teach us to see our data in new ways and open future discussions.", - "facilitator": "Sam Petulla", - "facilitator_twitter": "spetulla", - "id": "stats-newsroom", - "title": "Regression in the newsroom: When to use it and thinking about best practices" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Martin Stabe", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "martinstabe", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "A “words” journalist can spend their entire career as a reporter, starting with daily general assignment reporting and moving to beat reporting, international reporting, or investigative reporting. Along the way, they increase their visibility, credibility, and earnings. What could that look like for the journalism-tech community? For example, a “news nerd” version of a traditional foreign correspondent could uncover datasets abroad, figure out ways to engage the local community, or deploy hardware sensors to track environmental conditions.\n\nWe’ll first talk about all the different kinds of skills we bring to newsrooms. Then we’ll spend some time interviewing each other before we create out-of-the-box job descriptions we can get excited about.", - "facilitator": "Soo Oh", - "facilitator_twitter": "soooh", - "id": "job-listings-career", - "title": "Reimagining news nerd career paths via job listings" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Matt Dennewitz", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "mattdennewitz", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Privacy is coming to the forefront of national conversation (again) and many non-EU publishers are discovering late in the game they need to comply with the EU privacy laws like the GDPR - or block all EU traffic. California is pondering similar laws, Canada might follow Europe’s approach and the ad industry scrambles to adapt.\n\nWe are all responsible for the state of internet privacy. Whether you are adding “that one line of JavaScript” as requested by the marketing team, or the Instagram embed in your article. We are allowing our readers (which includes us too) to be tracked across the internet in ways we don’t know about or very often can’t explain.\n\nThis session will start with real and practical approaches to lockdown your site from a privacy perspective (with source code) and best practices on how to minimize data collection and tracking on your visitors. \n\nIt will include a larger discussion to share notes, strategies, concerns from news organizations on how we can improve and do better. The goal is that participants are more aware of the issues, and armed to grapple with privacy concerns in their organizations.", - "facilitator": "Michael Donohoe", - "facilitator_twitter": "donohoe", - "id": "restoring-reader-privacy", - "title": "Restoring our reader’s privacy in a time of none" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Gabriel Hongsdusit", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "ghongsdusit", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "The command line is a black box (a white box on a Mac) that holds so much power but is very inaccessible to newcomers. Personally, it has taken me years to feel comfortable with it, and I still regularly learn things that wow me and improve my workflow. Being comfortable with the command line can make you more efficient in your work, might even be fun, and people in coffee-shops will think you are some kind of \"hacker\".\n\nHow can we shed light on this amazing, scary black box? What are the things you do to make the command line more fun? What scares you about the command line? How did you go from someone that just copies and pastes commands to one that writes commands from scratch? How do we find answers to our questions about the command line? And what's the difference between the command line, Terminal, shell, bash, Powershell, and many other weird words?\n\nBeginners and experts alike, let's share our real world experience with the command line and raise everyone's ANSI boats.", - "facilitator": "Alan Palazzolo", - "facilitator_twitter": "zzolo", - "id": "light-command-line", - "title": "Shedding light on the command line" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Hannah Birch", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "hannahsbirch", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "How do you disclose to your manager that you have a disability? Do you wait until after the job offer? How do you keep up with the demands of a 24-hour news cycle if you need special accommodations? What does this mean for your job growth? How do you manage an employee whose function can be unexpectedly limited? How can you live up to your reporting potential when your biology is thwarting you at seemingly every turn?\n\nThis session will start with anecdotes of tackling these tough conversations with bosses and coworkers, sharing what hasn’t worked and what has worked…better. The session will then move to a conversation where participants with disabilities can discuss life in the news industry. Topics could include how people have communicated their needs or accommodations to their employer, experiences working with HR, trying to fit in with the rest of their team or just attempting to get coworkers to understand. The goal of this session is to connect folks with disabilities, share coping techniques, and allow those without disabilities to listen and learn how best to support their colleagues.", - "facilitator": "Jasmine Mithani", - "facilitator_twitter": "jazzmyth", - "id": "disability-in-newsroom", - "title": "Sick [journalist] theory: real talk about navigating disability in the newsroom" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Tyler Chance", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "tchance121", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "What have you built that’s now ignored? What took off and is now central to your newsroom’s daily grind? What was the difference?\n\nWe’re a product manager in New York and an editor in D.C., on the front lines of making and deciding to use a variety of tools, from those that help with daily coverage planning to chart-making to immersive storytelling. Let's talk about what's lived on and what's languished so that we can crack the code on building tools journalists actually use.\n\nOne strong hunch of ours: We can take concrete steps to deepen relationships between folks who see opportunities to solve problems (or stand to benefit) and those who are building the solutions.\n\nLet’s find themes in our boondoggles and wild successes and come away with an invaluable compilation of battle-tested advice to guide your next project.", - "facilitator": "Becky Bowers", - "facilitator_twitter": "beckybowers", - "id": "using-tools", - "title": "Sure, You're Making Tools. But Do People Use Them?" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "David Plazas", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "davidplazas", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "When most journalists listen, all we are doing is waiting for the next opportunity to ask a question of a source or community member. Rarely do we employ active listening - a practice that could help us when trying to reach neglected audiences. Through a series of guided exercises in small groups, we will talk about how _really_ listening can change the way journalists do their jobs and about the culture change required in newsrooms to achieve this goal. Our jumping-off point will be the findings from a spring thought leader summit that the American Press Institute held in Nashville. We expect participants will have many of their own experiences - both highs and lows - to share with each other.", - "facilitator": "Amy L. Kovac-Ashley", - "facilitator_twitter": "terabithia4", - "id": "talk-less-listen-more", - "title": "Talk Less. Listen More. How Listening Can Help Journalists Begin to Repair Relationships with Marginalized or Ignored Communities" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Ryan Murphy", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "rdmurphy", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": " Taking on managerial roles can be a chance to have a bigger say and influence in how your organization functions, but new managers are not always set up to succeed. How can organizations (and fellow managers) do a better job of ensuring individuals have all the tools they need to navigate the new dynamics that come with new responsibilities (and typically new titles)? Sometimes new managers still have production obligations, and how do you balance the need to still be a producer and a leader? How do you navigate the interpersonal dynamics of suddenly having newfound authority, potentially a significant dynamic change on your team?\n\nAs two folks who have recently moved more and more into decision making roles, we’ll talk about our respective experiences, and give others a chance share their stories and suggestions.", - "facilitator": "Yue Qiu", - "facilitator_twitter": "YueQiu_cuj", - "id": "new-managers", - "title": "The Balancing Act of Becoming a New Manager" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "The practice of interviews in your daily collaboration with coworkers—whether in mentorship conversations, working with or as managers, moderating panels, conducting user research, or building products—is an incredibly valuable craft to hone. Engaging in a dialogue built on questions (especially at the intersection of journalism and technology) can help you better understand the people on your teams and surface the stories that inform their lived experiences—using those experiences to help you make smarter decisions and build better and more thoughtful products. \n\nLet's discuss how to: build constructive listening skills, use different classes of questions to guide and evaluate conversation, build a line of reasoning from a conversation as it evolves, and frame really productive interviews in service of getting to know your subject. Participants will spend time both asking and responding to questions in unstructured interviews, and we’ll reflect as a group on the practice and outcomes. At the end, you should walk away from this session not just with the tools you need to start building interviews into your daily work, but with a keener understanding of the skill of intense, focused listening.", - "facilitator": "David Yee", - "facilitator_twitter": "tangentialism", - "id": "listening-asking-questions", - "title": "The Interview: Building a practice of listening and asking questions in our work" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Natasha Khan", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "khantasha", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Recently, Current wrote a call-to-action article on developing cross-newsroom collaboratives.\n\nUsing this article as a template, we propose to lead a session aimed at creating a Newsroom Collaborative Manifesto.\n\nWe hope to create not only a single session, but a group of people with a continuing dedication to answering questions like:\n- How does collaboration work at national, regional and local levels?\n- How does collaboration work between commercial and public media?\n- What platforms can collaboratives use to communicate?\n- What platforms can we use to share collaborative materials?\n- How do you pitch collaboration to an unwilling management team?\n- How do you collect analytics from collaborations and how do you measure success?", - "facilitator": "Alexandra Kanik", - "facilitator_twitter": "act_rational", - "id": "newsroom-collaborative-manifesto", - "title": "The Newsroom Collaborative Manifesto" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Do you get exhausted trying to keep up with trend-driven pace of innovation? Struggling to engage with your target audience despite the latest and greatest 4K camera being pointed at your subject? Did you know the BEST stories have shapes? Yup. Throw that gimbal away and pick up your Crayons! USA Today Producer Jarrad Henderson explores the “Shape of Stories” as conceived by Kurt Vonnegut and shows you why it’s time to get back to basics. Come learn how shapes, the art of the remix and practicing the A.I. Technique can help you become a master storyteller!", - "facilitator": "Jarrad Henderson", - "facilitator_twitter": "jarrad_tweets", - "id": "shape-of-stories", - "title": "The Shape of Stories: Unleash Your :60 Storyteller" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Millie Tran", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "millie", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Where do people find time to nurture long-term goals? How do we get past treading water at work and move toward what we want next? And how do we even figure out what that is when we’re overwhelmed and overworked? In this session, building on what we explored at SRCCON:WORK, we’ll dig into how to create space for longer term goals, and brainstorm specific ways to balance the short and long term in our daily lives.", - "facilitator": "Kaeti Hinck", - "facilitator_twitter": "kaeti", - "id": "time-to-grow", - "title": "Time to grow: How to dig deep and stretch yourself in the midst of day-to-day survival" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Andrew Haeg", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "andrewhaeg", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "How might newsrooms create an ethical framework around their engagement work, similar to a code of conduct for staff relationships? \n\n\"Engagement\" is becoming more central to newsroom revenue models, and with it comes a lot of thorny issues that start with the question: \"*why* exactly are you trying to engage the public?\" If the answer doesn't include \"to learn and in-turn create more useful content for the public\" than it's worth interrogating the purpose of that work and the forces at play calling for something else. \n\nThis session will be an in depth discussion around the issues surrounding engagement work, and we'll emerge with a shareable framework for newsrooms to use when orienting toward non-extractive models. ", - "facilitator": "Jennifer Brandel", - "facilitator_twitter": "JenniferBrandel", - "id": "ethical-engagement", - "title": "Toward an ethical framework for engagement" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Akil Harris", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "ghostofakilism", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "This session will continue and build on the incredible discussion we had last year at SRCCON about the pros and cons of unionizing a newsroom. We are now much further along in our union bargaining efforts at The Intercept and have been exposed to and tackling new problems including how to bargain with management effectively, and maintain the unit's solidarity when the going gets tough.", - "facilitator": "Moiz Syed", - "facilitator_twitter": "moizsyed", - "id": "unionize", - "title": "Unionize! Part two!" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Joanna Kao", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "joannaskao", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "As digital journalists, we often push the platform forward, with cool new interactives and high-impact layouts. Unfortunately, accessibility is often ignored in the process. It's easy to make excuses: we're on deadline, or visual content wouldn't work in a screen reader anyway. But what if it's far easier than you think? In this session, we'll set up accessibility tools, share lessons we've learned about creating inclusive pages, and assemble a list of easy wins that you can take back to your newsrooms and digital teams.", - "facilitator": "Thomas Wilburn", - "facilitator_twitter": "thomaswilburn", - "id": "visualization-civil-right", - "title": "Visualization as a Civil Right" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Hilary Fung", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "hil_fung", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "If you are a news nerd, you probably know how to make data graphics in just a few lines of code, whether in d3, R, or python. But computer tools can restrict your creativity by making you think inside the box, both figuratively and literally. \n\nIn this session, we'll bust out the markers, paper, stickers, string, balloons, and other fun stuff. We'll practice iterating on ideas, freed from the computer. Inspired by the work of Mona Chalabi (who uses hand-drawn visualizations to make her work more accessible), Stefanie Posavec and Giorgia Lupi (who embarked on a year-long personal data collection postcard project which became the book Dear Data), and Jose Duarte (of Handmade Visuals), we will play with color, shape, size, and texture. \n\nI'll provide some supplies, but you're welcome to bring your own! Do you have a pack of Prismacolor markers burning a hole in your pocket? A washi tape collection that never sees the light of day? We can visualize data with that!", - "facilitator": "Amelia McNamara", - "facilitator_twitter": "AmeliaMN", - "id": "visualizing-data", - "title": "Visualizing data by hand" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Arjuna Soriano", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "arjunasoriano", - "cofacilitator_two": "Ha-Hoa Hamano", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "hahoais_", - "description": "Voice interfaces are not the future. They are here. Today. This will change how we write, communicate, develop, and design. This session will take a look at how voice is affecting journalism, how our different newsrooms are reacting to the new platform, and the implications for the future. We will discuss learnings, challenges, successes, failures, opportunities, and false starts. We will attempt to predict the future of the voice space with a brainstorming exercise followed by sketching a voice interface for news.", - "facilitator": "Yuri Victor", - "facilitator_twitter": "yurivictor", - "id": "voice-interfaces", - "title": "Voice interfaces and their impact on journalism" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Heather Bryant", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "HBCompass", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Trust is a buzzword throughout journalism and society. Journalists and the communities we serve wonder how much trust we have available to give. This is important in a world where we see a never-ending battle for attention. It might need us as a profession to be more open to being vulnerable to society. It doesn't necessarily have to be an uncomfortable or robotic interaction.\n\nThis session will explore how to be more vulnerable as an individual and with your news team. We'll also discuss how we can do so with the communities we attempt to serve with our journalism.", - "facilitator": "Andre Natta", - "facilitator_twitter": "acnatta", - "id": "vulnerability-strategy", - "title": "Vulnerability as a News Strategy" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Steven Rich", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "dataeditor", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Most journalism conferences these days have a session about mental health. A lot of us have stressful jobs, and coming up with strategies to decompress from that is great. But what if you have a chronic mental illness or condition that’s unrelated to (or exacerbated by) your work?\nOr you’re not sure, but yoga and kale aren’t cutting it?\n\nIn this session, we’ll go beyond self-care to talk about strategies for managing chronic jerkbrains in, and outside of, the newsroom. From cognitive behavioral therapy to grounding, let’s share practical ways to be your best at work and in life. This session will be completely off-the-record.", - "facilitator": "Rachel Alexander", - "facilitator_twitter": "rachelwalexande", - "id": "newsroom-therapy", - "title": "We Went to Therapy So You Don’t Have To" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Hannah Sung", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "hannahsung", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Ever wish you had a roadmap for how to bridge all the different ways we work in a modern newsroom? There are data journalists, developers, traditional beat reporters…and what does a producer do, anyway? This session is for all of you. Everyone will leave with their own personal roadmap, a one-sheet list that will come out of collaborative brainstorming. The point is to better understand ourselves, where we are situated and how to communicate in order to collaborate once we are back in our own newsrooms. Come and build your own map by joining us.\n\nAs we are all experiencing with the intersection of tech and journalism, journalists have to work with developers, data journalists have to work with designers; while product managers, producers and editors try to translate between them all. It can be frustrating to figure out how to do this well and not silently stew. We’ll work through the struggles with understanding and identify how to foster better collaboration and bridge communication gaps.\n\nThough newsrooms are working on innovative new projects with these teams more than ever, it can be difficult to know how to work with people whose skills you might not understand; and even more tricky to lead those teams.\n\nThe aim is to leave this workshop with a better handle on how you can work better and more collaboratively upon your return to work.", - "facilitator": "Hannah Wise", - "facilitator_twitter": "hannahjwise", - "id": "bridging-gaps", - "title": "Whine & Shine: A support group for nerds, journalists, and those who bridge the gap" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "Do I use \"display\" or \"position\" for that? Sometimes you just want to make sure your newsroom tool does it's job and not have to worry about what it looks like. Well, your days of worrying about front-end design could soon be over. Slack's suite of API's are vast and the documentation is one of the best of any API out there. In this session, I'll quickly demo most of the different methods of interaction available with Slack's APIs. We'll build a simple graphics request form together as a group. When that's finished, we'll brainstorm ideas for other newsroom tools and discuss how our front-end needs could be met by one or more of the methods we've seen so far. We'll be using Flask to do it, so basic Flask and Python knowledge will be required.\n\nSlack has a number of features you might need from a front-end design already included. Unprompted function calls? Slack has slash commands. Do they support arguments? You bet they do. Filling out forms? Slack's got that too. Giving personal user feedback when a script runs? Ephemeral messages make sure that only a single user can see the notification without ever having to leave the channel. Learn about all these and more in the session.", - "facilitator": "Andrew Briz", - "facilitator_twitter": "brizandrew", - "id": "slack-as-frontend", - "title": "Who Needs A Front End? – How To Leave The UX of Newsroom Tools to Slack" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Matt Raw", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "Mattbot", - "cofacilitator_two": "", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", - "description": "What drives people to pay for journalism? Is it access to exclusive content? Incentives in the UX? Affordability? Attitudes and beliefs? Or is it something else? Together we’ll work through some universal ways of thinking about compelling people to support journalism with money. The session will begin with brainstorming to identify the reasons people pay for journalism. We’ll sort those ideas to find common themes that - surprise! - exist in any news organization, whether its focus is global, local or something in between. We’ll end with an exercise to develop ideas for real-world implementation so that everyone leaves the room with at least one concrete plan that they think will get their readers to pay for news.", - "facilitator": "Sara Konrad Baranowski", - "facilitator_twitter": "skonradb", - "id": "readers-pay-news", - "title": "Without Free or Favor: Compelling readers to pay for news (tote bags not included)" - } -] \ No newline at end of file + { + "cofacilitator": "Rajiv Sinclair", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "jeeves", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Collaborative projects and partnerships can improve journalism efforts by uniting organizations where competition typically exists. We know the value that collaboration can add to projects by sharing the effort or including diverse perspectives. Yet it is challenging to build shared values of privacy and collaboration into a model that serves each individual organization and their needs. The Chicago Data Collaborative was a test to see if, together, news organizations, researchers, advocacy groups and civic technologists were greater than the sum of their parts. Today, the Chicago Data Collaborative is working to access data from public agencies, and then organize, document, and link that data together to help understand Chicago’s criminal justice system.\n\nIn this session, we will share some of the lessons we learned— from assessing the expertise and needs in our ecosystem to creating a data-sharing and governance agreement and a pilot database of criminal justice data. More importantly, as a group, we will discuss and navigate the steps to convene organizations and to create a sustainable model that reflects the goals of all parties involved.", + "facilitator": "Jenny Choi", + "facilitator_twitter": "jennychoinews", + "id": "lessons-data-collective", + "title": "Approaching Collaboration: Lessons Learned from Building a Data Collaborative" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Kathleen Hansen", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "khans1", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "It's easier for me to see what The New York Times published in print in 1851 than it is to see what it published digitally in 1996. Why is that? Is any other news website in a better state?\n\nDigital publishing moves fast, but as we evolve the form of news online, how can we preserve what we publish in a way that will let the historians of the future understand the evolution of the medium? Is a SoundSlides audio slideshow going to work in any way in 50 years? Or a Brightcove player video? If you do archive a page, has it lost something essential if it's lost the dynamic ad code or personalization features?\n\nThese are hard questions, but let's come together and create a plan for pitching the value of preserving digital news to others at our organizations, creating best practices for doing it, and helping identify champions and partners inside and outside the news organization to help make the case for archiving.", + "facilitator": "Albert Sun", + "facilitator_twitter": "albertsun", + "id": "archiving-news-websites", + "title": "Archiving News Websites for the Long Long Term" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Sasha Koren", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "sashak", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Let’s be clear: a lot of experimentation is happening in newsrooms right now. But let’s also be honest: it’s predominantly being done in a messy, ad-hoc way and we’re too quick to move on. As more teams are given the freedom to experiment, the need for a practical model to do it with empathy, intention and a willingness to learn is ever greater. \n\nOver two years in the Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab we developed a sustainable process for running experiments by trying methods out until they (mostly) worked for us. In this session, we’ll talk about the essential building blocks of our process, take it for a test run, and invite others to share methods they’ve used in their newsrooms. \n\nThe Mobile Lab’s methodology on its surface is pretty simple: \n* draw a line between an idea and an actual hypothesis\n* define success metrics based on all aspects of a user’s experience\n* implement precise analytics\n* survey your audience about how things went\n* have a “burndown” meeting with the entire team to discuss results and insights\n\nThe hard part, we admit, is putting this all together and not losing steam. \n\nFeel free to bring a news experiment idea you want to put through the paces, or we’ll have a few on file to suggest (Obituaries newsletter, anyone?!)", + "facilitator": "Sarah D Schmalbach", + "facilitator_twitter": "schmalie", + "id": "running-experiments", + "title": "Are you running an experiment, or are you just winging it?" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Jun-Kai Teoh", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "jkteoh", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "For the immigrants: There are tons of us, but probably not enough under one roof to form a functional community. So let's get together and chat about how we can keep our heads above water while traversing a unique set of problems: from taking additional care to understand and report on issues that we probably haven’t grown up around, to working extra hard to find and land a job that sponsors a visa, and to dealing with entirely new identities.\n\nFor the allies: We know you care, we know you want to be supportive, but may not always know how. Join us so you can understand and support us in our struggles that we do not often feel like talking about.\n\nIn this two-part session, we will discuss how to navigate the (perhaps steep) learning curve of surviving and thriving in a culture that may be utterly unfamiliar, and then collectively devise and document strategies to better support immigrant journalists.", + "facilitator": "Disha Raychaudhuri", + "facilitator_twitter": "Disha_RC", + "id": "community-immigrant-journalists", + "title": "Building a community guide for immigrant journalists: How to survive and support" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Eileen Webb", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "webmeadow", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "We’ve all heard the folk wisdom that “people hate change”, but, well… do we? We’re all successfully navigating change every day, but the narrative that people are generally stubborn or unable to adapt persists.\n\nUsing a series of conversational exercises, we’ll explore cultural and personal attitudes around handling change. What are the stories we believe about our own resilience, and where did they come from? How do our views affect how we plan projects and trainings for our teams? What might change in our design and planning approaches as we shift our understanding of people’s capacity for integration of new information? How can we help our colleagues and friends build resilience and trust in their own capabilities? ", + "facilitator": "Marie Connelly", + "facilitator_twitter": "eyemadequiet", + "id": "building-resilience", + "title": "Building Resilience: Moving Beyond a Fear-Based Model of Change" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Public meetings are important spaces for democracy where any resident can participate in civic life and hold public figures accountable. But how does the public know when meetings are happening? It isn’t easy! These events are spread across dozens of websites, rarely in useful data formats.\n\nThat’s why we're working with a team of civic coders to develop and coordinate the #CityScrapers, a community open source project designed to standardize, scrape and share these meetings in a central database, in collaboration with City Bureau's Documenters program. \n\nAre you working on issues related to governmental transparency, civic tech and journalism? Join us for a hands on session, stay for lessons on creating a more perfect democracy.", + "facilitator": "Darryl Holliday", + "facilitator_twitter": "city_bureau", + "id": "democracy-documenters", + "title": "Democracy, Documenters and the City Scrapers Project" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Casey Miller", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "caseymmiller", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Are you a freelancer or a lonely coder looking for feedback as you’re working on your latest project? Do you work on a team with access to an editor but they don’t have the right experience or skills to review your work? \n\nNo matter your level of expertise, having a skilled pair of eyes thoroughly scan your code, design, or writing is a crucial step in producing quality journalism. Enter the role of editor. Having a good editor is a truly amazing experience. Not only can a good editor help point out the errors in the text or the flaws in a design, but they can also offer guidance on story structure, layout, etc). Their feedback can make the difference between an average piece and an impactful piece.\n\nSo what can you do if that resource isn’t available to you? How can you shape stories without the keen eye of an editor?\n\nHere’s the thing, none of us have the perfect answer. In this session, we want to share some of our strategies and we want you to hear what solutions you’ve come up with.", + "facilitator": "Lo Benichou", + "facilitator_twitter": "lobenichou", + "id": "working-without-editors", + "title": "Don’t Panic: the guide to working without an editor, even if you have one sitting right next to you" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Jonathan Stray", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "jonathanstray", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Anything is possible in Python, but that doesn’t mean you should be programming. Let’s share tools and tricks to scrape, clean, monitor, script, query, and visualize data in sophisticated ways that might even be better than writing custom code. We’ll be looking at two free, open-source tools in-depth:\n\nWorkbench (https://workbenchdata.com) is a platform that combines data tools and training for journalists. It is designed to help you stay focused on your story without needing resources from technical teams. Workbench makes it easy to scrape, clean and manipulate data in a repeatable and transparent way – without coding.\n\nDatasette (https://github.com/simonw/datasette) is a tool for publishing structured data to the web in a way that makes it easy for your audience to search and explore. Datasette also provides a JSON+SQL API that allows developers to quickly build apps and visualizations on top of that data.\n\nThis will be a hands-on tutorial. Example data will be provided, but if you can bring your own data (ideally as CSV but other formats will work fine as well) you’ll be able to analyze, visualize and publish it during the course of the session.", + "facilitator": "Simon Willison", + "facilitator_twitter": "simonw", + "id": "more-data-less-programming", + "title": "Doing more data with less programming" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Ariel Zambelich", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "azambelich", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Newsrooms are increasingly collaborative with (1) other teams in the newsroom (i.e. audience teams that need to work with video teams to produce social content) and (2) teams across a media company (i.e working with technology teams on building out the CMS). The development of bridge roles -- where people move from a data team into the newsroom, or from the newsroom into a product management role -- is the most recent example of this trend. These roles may or may not have people reporting into them (requiring direct, downward management) but almost certainly have other people/teams they have dependencies on. How can you make sure to get things done even when you don't have the authority to do so?\n\nLearn how to understand/read people's communication preferences (we'll do some group work), and how this knowledge can (read: should) be incorporated into your management style.", + "facilitator": "Alyssa Zeisler", + "facilitator_twitter": "a_zeisler", + "id": "getting-it-done", + "title": "Getting sh*t done without authority" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Evan Wyloge", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "EvanWyloge", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Love transparency, but want to do more than than Instagram your most ridiculous redactions? Come talk about the ways emerging technologies intersect with local and federal practices around public records law, and brainstorm the tools we need to make public records work for today’s journalists, researchers, and the general public. How should public officials be handling requests for Facebook, WhatsApp, or Signal messages, and how can we work to make sure that happens? What strategies are effective for getting the databases we need to do our reporting?\n\nWe’ll share what has worked and possible best practices that will push governments toward greater transparency. We’ll also take a look at data from MuckRock and FOIA Machine, which have collectively helped file over 50,000 requests across over 10,000 agencies, and we’d like to hear your ideas on how this data can help all requesters file better requests. We also explore a database of every state’s public records laws, including sample exemptions, appeal letters, and more, and we’d love to find ways to integrate these tools into your newsroom’s processes.", + "facilitator": "Michael Morisy", + "facilitator_twitter": "morisy", + "id": "foia-digital-era", + "title": "Help drag FOIA (kicking and screaming) into the digital era" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Katie Park", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "katiepark", + "cofacilitator_two": "Alyson Hurt", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "alykat", + "description": "We’re humans who are constantly changing, and our work life should be, too. Whether you’re taking a new job, switching to remote work or taking leave, how can you make that transition successful?\n\nWe’ll discuss strategies for dealing with change. The first step: Planning a graceful exit. That means writing an effective passoff document to let others know where you left off with important projects and who to ask for key information.\n\nThen, we’ll move on to the return to work or first days at a new gig. What’s the best goal to set in your first day, week and month? What’s the ideal way to introduce (or re-introduce) yourself to your manager and best enable them to help you meet your career goals? How do you get yourself up to speed?\n\nWhether you're leaving a team or welcoming a new colleague, what can we all do to make these transitions go more smoothly? Let's find ways set ourselves up for transition success — and better support each other.", + "facilitator": "Darla Cameron", + "facilitator_twitter": "darlacameron", + "id": "cool-transitions", + "title": "How to make a big transition and maintain your cool" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Emily Yount Swelgin", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "emilyyount", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Good, healthy critique is crucial to visual storytelling, data visualization and design. But bad design has become a punchline and Twitter amplifies the performance of calling out flaws, corrections and grievances. When we fail to take care in our criticism, we look brash or dismissive, contribute negatively to our community and possibly even discourage others from participating. Above all, we miss an opportunity to give our peers and colleagues valuable, constructive feedback.\n\nHow can we be kinder and more effective in our public critiques? How can we structure meetings and discussion to encourage productive critique? How can we ask better questions and feel more confident giving feedback?\n\nTogether, we’ll learn how to facilitate, give and receive better critique, both in public forums and among our own teams.", + "facilitator": "Kennedy Elliott", + "facilitator_twitter": "kennelliott", + "id": "great-feedback", + "title": "How to give great feedback and look good doing it" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Helga Salinas", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "@helga_salinas", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "What can we do to empower diverse journalists, including younger journalists, people of color, and women and non-binary individuals, in newsrooms that often lack mentorship and support? To answer this question, first we must address your identity—which parts of your identity do you bring with you to work? Which parts do you leave at the door? How does that affect your newsroom experience and how the news is covered in America’s increasingly divisive political and social climate? We’ll begin the session with an exercise that explores our own identities. Different identities impact the work you do and how you interact with others. Then, after hearing from different people in the group, we’ll develop strategies for listening, mentorship, and self-care, using examples from our own experiences at The Seattle Times and The New York Times to explore strategies that we’ve seen work, and how to improve.", + "facilitator": "Audrey Carlsen", + "facilitator_twitter": "audcarls", + "id": "young-journalists-of-color", + "title": "I’m a stranger here myself: Building a newsroom roadmap for young journalists of color and their allies" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Sara Bremen Rabstenek", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "An editor, a designer, an engineer, and a product person walk into a room…\n\nIt sounds like the start of a corny joke, but increasingly we find ourselves in these types of situations - small, interdisciplinary teams working together to solve a problem. The thinking says - throw a lot of really smart people in a room and -magic!- they will figure it out! \n\nThe reality is, it does work, but it’s extremely difficult. People misunderstand each other, and motivations and goals are not often articulated, leading to disarray. Working with new people is hard, and it’s especially hard when you have to move fast and you’re not all speaking the same language! But fear not - starting things off on the right foot can have huge payoffs - team buy-in, alignment, and trust. The goal is to get the team to move faster by getting some tough conversations out of the way. \n\nThis is an interactive session in which participants will simulate this exact situation - participants will be given a problem prompt, break out into small, cross-disciplinary teams, then participate in kickoff exercises designed to force hard conversations and perhaps give participants a moment of self-reflection - \"are you an order or chaos muppet?\", hopes/fears/sacred cows, the road to nirvana, the pre-mortem - and more! \n\nThese exercises work best for teams with 5-10 members with any combination of disciplines, but can be scaled up or down as needed.", + "facilitator": "Rosy Catanach", + "facilitator_twitter": "", + "id": "kickoff-kit", + "title": "Kickoff Kit: helping new teams move faster by aligning early" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Ryann Grochowski Jones", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "ryanngro", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "News nerd teams within various orgs have been working really hard on developing newer hiring practices, including acrobatics like double-blind initial screenings, unbiased assessments of resumes, standardized interview processes, and rigorous, team-consensus evaluations. It’s ridiculously time-intensive but 1,000% worth it -- these efforts have resulted in diverse, talented finalist pools. We have a window available now for getting ahead of any given news org’s “rebooted” corporate recruiting and hiring efforts.\n\nNews nerd teams can cut the trail by adopting hiring practices that truly put our shared ideals front and center, as a demonstration for newsroom and technology groups. Like-minded news nerds like Brittany Mayes and Sisi Wei have spoken eloquently about their efforts for internships and fellowships. SRCCON audiences have been appreciative and very attentive, which means there’s more to uncover on the topic. There’s a lot to share, so come join us and take home some low-frills ideas about how to push your hiring efforts forward.", + "facilitator": "Tiff Fehr", + "facilitator_twitter": "tiffehr", + "id": "hacking-hiring", + "title": "Leading News Orgs to Water by Hacking Our Hiring" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Local news is in trouble. We get it. And it rightfully makes us sad. But that isn't stopping many of our best and brightest from decamping for the coasts, where better pay, comparative stability, and communities of like-minded news nerds beckon from enclaves like New York and D.C.\n\nNo judgment. I worked at coastal media organizations for almost 10 years. And not for no reason: From The Times and the Post to small, nimble startups, the benefits of working in coastal newsrooms are very real. Local newsrooms have advantages, too, but on many fronts they just can't compete.\n\nBut that doesn't mean we can't help them try.\n\nIn this session, we'll discuss what local newsrooms can do to successfully recruit people like you — some of the best, brightest and most forward-thinking folks in the business. We'll be mindful of constraints (big salaries, expensive benefits) and focus on things hiring managers can realistically implement: Cultural adjustments. Workplace policies. Lifestyle perks. Bulldozing bureaucratic barriers. And whatever else we think of.\n\nOur discussion will result in a how-to document that will be shared far and wide with local newsroom managers, explaining realistic, actionable things they can do to create an environment news nerds want to work for.", + "facilitator": "Chase Davis", + "facilitator_twitter": "chasedavis", + "id": "leave-coasts", + "title": "Leave the coasts." + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Aminata Dia", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "Ami_Dia", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Every job opening for a newsroom developer job (of which there are few) gets dozens of resumes. Job postings for the CMS get fewer, but still some. But nobody wants to come to a media organization to work on the payment processing system or ad tech.\n\nAnd that's a problem! \n\nWe need more of the passionate, mission-driven people who attend SRCCON to contribute to the financial engine of journalism. Let's get together and talk about what life outside of the newsroom can look like and see if we can come up with ways to convince more people (maybe even ourselves!) to join the business side.", + "facilitator": "Brian Hamman", + "facilitator_twitter": "hamman", + "id": "leave-newsroom", + "title": "Leave the newsroom!" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Sarah Cohen", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "sarahcnyt", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Data journalism education has problems -- too few places teach it, too few faculty have the skills, and there's precious little consensus about what students need. Tools? Thinking? Case studies? Story assignments? Simultaneously, academic publishing is beyond broken: too slow to keep up, too expensive for students to afford. So we're on a mission: Make the mother of all modern data journalism textbooks. And, at the same time, publish it so it can get to the most students, with the most up-to-date materials, without academic publishing price barriers. But how? We need your help. What do we include? How do we get it to people? We have ideas, we want to hear yours. Let's make a table of contents together!", + "facilitator": "Matt Waite", + "facilitator_twitter": "mattwaite", + "id": "data-journalism-textbook", + "title": "Let's build the data journalism textbook we need, and break academic publishing while we're at it. " + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Miles Watkins", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Open States has been a major civic tech project for over eight years. The rate at which it became Sunlight's most-used API demonstrated a clear thirst for accessible information on state legislative information in the civic tech & journalism communities. Two years ago the project became independent, and is now run as a volunteer project.\n\nThe goal of this session is to discuss how Open States and other state legislative projects can improve to be as useful as possible to the wider community. Open States grew as an Open Source project with over 100 collaborators, many from newsrooms- and we want to have a conversation to help determine the right direction for the now mature project in the years to come.", + "facilitator": "James Turk", + "facilitator_twitter": "jamesturk", + "id": "state-legislative-information", + "title": "Let's Make State Legislative Information Useful" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Jeremy B. F. Merrill", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "jeremybmerrill", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Do you yearn to be a datapoint adrift in a sea of predictions? This is your opportunity to get to the bottom of what actually happens when a machine learning algorithm runs by acting it out.\n\nAfter you BECOME a machine learning algorithm -- a human learning algorithm! -- we will discuss the technical, ethical and communication problems we have unconvered. What is it like to be the most technical person in the room when someone shouts, \"Why don't we try machine learning?\"\n\nJournalists are no longer just reporting on machine learning, but also using it. What's more, your editors and colleagues are suggesting that we use it. You'll leave this session with a better understanding of common principles in machine learning and an awareness of how people in similar roles are thinking about these problems.", + "facilitator": "Rachel Shorey", + "facilitator_twitter": "rachel_shorey", + "id": "lights-camera-algorithms", + "title": "Lights, Camera, Algorithms: Acting out (and then discussing) Machine Learning" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "It happens all the time. We parachute into a community for a short time because something \"newsworthy\" happens rather than coming in to stay and maintain a steady relationship. Think Sutherland Springs and other locales of mass shootings. Think rural America and the 2016 presidential election. Think of the minority areas of our communities that remain underserved, underrepresented and without coverage aside from tragedies. \n\nHow do we put down the ripcord and instead pull up a chair in these communities? \n\nLet's spend some time learning how to do a baseline assessment of our news organization's coverage of diverse communities using analytics tools we already use everyday to identify blind spots. Let's arm ourselves with actionable strategies we can use when we return to our newsrooms and can use to have these difficult conversations about our coverage's shortcomings with top decision-makers. And finally, let's devise a set of best practices to engage diverse communities in the interim between news events and build lasting future relationships.", + "facilitator": "Dana Amihere", + "facilitator_twitter": "write_this_way", + "id": "blind-spots-coverage", + "title": "Managing the blind spots in community news coverage" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Kevin O'Gorman", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "heretohinder", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "OpenNews and the BuzzFeed Open Lab collaborated with a ton of really smart journalists, editors, and trainers to compile a resource guide for newsroom security trainers. (https://securitytraining.opennews.org/). It's a great round up of new lesson plans and links out to existing lessons that cover important topics in digital privacy and security. We'd love to show you what's in the guide and spend some time adding even more resources to it. If you have lesson plans to share or just a few favorite resources or news stories that really make sense of a particular topic, bring them!", + "facilitator": "Amanda Hickman", + "facilitator_twitter": "amandabee", + "id": "security-trainers", + "title": "More security trainers, please!" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Candice D Fortman", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "cande313", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "We are told there are two sides to every story. But really, there are several and many voices which should be heard are often overlooked by journalists in favor of those who are either louder or more obvious. Looking at the Parkland #MeToo stories, we will talk about how minority were included in the narrative, what we did to elevate those voices and lessons we taught our journalists.", + "facilitator": "Kristyn Wellesley", + "facilitator_twitter": "kriswellesley", + "id": "many-sides-coin", + "title": "More than two sides to the coin" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Karen Hao", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "_KarenHao", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "You're in a technical role in a newsroom and you find yourself in one of two positions: The Asker, where you gather project pieces from different contributors to create a product; or the Person Being Asked, where you must parse people's technical needs into a tangible plan of action. Getting what you need is an art for any developer who also wears a project management hat. But how to ask? Or how to dig in to find out where a question is stemming from? What's the best way to communicate with people eager to help, but who may not understand the technical challenges? Many of the technical problems developers experience can be fixed with clear communication among mixed teams where everyone's expertise is validated, so we’ll be sharing tips, common pitfalls and experiences on how to manage a project from vision to reality. This session will be part open round table discussion, and part small groups and games.", + "facilitator": "Lauren Flannery", + "facilitator_twitter": "LaurenFlannery3", + "id": "speaking-visuals", + "title": "Navigating technical communication with journalists" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Hannah Young", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Our phones are incredibly intimate devices. We lovingly cradle them and stare into their gently glowing screens at all hours of the day. In this session, we will explore methods for using that intimacy to build authentic personal relationships with audiences via SMS – without being spammy or creepy.\n\nParticipants should bring a recent or upcoming story, and together we will conceive, script, and prototype a SMS campaign to connect with your audience.\n\nWe’ll touch on topics including: message tone and frequency, what to send people and when, choosing the right technology platform, potential costs, legal considerations, as well as common pitfalls and tactics for overcoming them. We’ll also share some of our data on how building respectful SMS products has impacted membership.", + "facilitator": "Sam Ward", + "facilitator_twitter": "sward13", + "id": "audience-sms", + "title": "New phone, who dis: Building intimate audience relationships without the creep factor." + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Sinduja Rangarajan", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "cynduja", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "The traditional academic-journalist relationship goes like this: a journalist would talk to an academic as a source and expert for a story. An academic would reach out to the media with findings published in a new paper. But are there ways to forge deeper relationships and bring researchers into the reporting process? Is there a way for journalists to shape research questions to quantify anecdotes they encounter in their reporting? What do journalists bring to the table for academics and vice versa?\n\nThrough discussion and activities we’ll envision new relationships between research teams, journalists, and the public. We’ll all talk about our experiences with these types of collaborations, what has and hasn’t worked, and how we might upend the the traditional one-way flows from research -> journalism -> public. We’re a journalist who’s been partnering with academics to produce stories and a researcher whose work has been reported on with varying degrees of collaboration. Whether you’re an academic or a journalist or both or neither, come join us to think outside of the box about how these partnerships can enrich journalism and increase access to information.", + "facilitator": "Laura Laderman", + "facilitator_twitter": "liladerm", + "id": "academia-journalism-partnerships", + "title": "Off the shelf and into the open: forging academia-journalism partnerships to bring findings out of journals and original research into reporting" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Mike Tigas", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "mtigas", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "So, your code broke the internet, but nobody's noticed yet. Not long ago the NPRViz team got a report from one of their users about a pretty serious security flaw in Pym.js, and so suddenly found themselves with the challenge of figuring out how to notify Pym users they needed to upgrade immediately without just blasting out to the world that it was possible to steal their users session data & cookies. I (and others) ended up helping them walk through the security disclosure process, helped draft messages intended to encourage users to upgrade, and poked people in the community. There are individual things that folks who produce software for others can do to make this process easier for themselves & users, but also there are things that we should be doing as users to make sure we're prepared to upgrade when flaws are announced, and also, how to lend a hand when things are going wrong. Lets talk about what _more_ we can and should be doing.", + "facilitator": "Ted Han", + "facilitator_twitter": "knowtheory", + "id": "security-prep", + "title": "Preparing for security vulnerabilities if you're an open source maintainer *or* user" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Andrew McGill", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "andrewmcgill", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "‘Membership’ and ‘reader revenue’ have become media buzzwords. But how do you build and measure the success of your own membership program? What tools do you use to listen to readers, and what data do you track to make decisions about product offerings? Anika Gupta and Andrew McGill are senior product managers at the Atlantic, where they work on the organization’s Masthead membership program. Anika’s also a former researcher with the Membership Puzzle Project in New York. They’ll review the Atlantic’s approach to building their membership program, as well as MPP’s research on best practices and ‘thick’ versus ‘thin’ models of participation. The session will start with some user research exercises, discuss MPP’s theory and the Atlantic’s implementation, then break into small teams for workshops and brainstorming exercises focused on designing the right membership program and offerings for your organization.", + "facilitator": "Anika Gupta", + "facilitator_twitter": "DigitalAnika", + "id": "radical-listening-membership", + "title": "Radical listening - How do you design a media membership program focused on participation" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Amanda Hicks", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "amandahi", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Are you tired of wrestling with endless JavaScript 'pixels' and awful ad services? With the attention on Facebook and the advent of European GDPR regulations, the digital ads marketplace sits on a knife's edge. For the first time in nearly a decade the user-data-driven targeted-programmatic ad space is in real danger. But also open to real change. Now is the moment for intelligent publishers to put a hand back on the wheel and reassert their ethical imperative in the next generation of ad tech.\n\nWe will be bringing a proposed draft for API-driven advertising to this session. We'll run through what we have, the thinking behind it and the types of products we believe the API schema can drive. We'll end the session by sitting down with participants and working through criticism and ideas for alterations. Our goal is to build a schema that content management systems and advertising back ends can share, allowing different publishers and third parties to communicate server to server. Then at the end of the session we'll take the beta version of the JSON schema and open source it on GitHub.", + "facilitator": "Aram Zucker-Scharff", + "facilitator_twitter": "Chronotope", + "id": "rebuilding-ad-tech", + "title": "Rebuilding Ad Tech: Open Source, Server to Server, Publisher First" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Hannah Fresques", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "HannahFresques", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Increasingly, journalists don't just visualize data in raw form but build simple regression models that draw trendlines through a set of data points, telling the reader where the story runs through the dataset. In more advanced forms, reporters fill in gaps of missing data with an original simulation or draw connections between data points with a model.\n\nWhen journalists lean on statisticians' tools, we take on the same responsibilities for accuracy and fairness even as the methods we use change. Statistical techniques can falsely frame or overstate the importance of a trend or relationship between data points when used carelessly.\n\nLet's talk about what basic assumptions and considerations journalists should make when using statistical methods, and what kinds of red flags statisticians look for in bad model selection or diagnosis. How should a journalist should be thinking about these questions as opposed to a social scientist or researcher? What are some basic techniques all journalists should know when running data through a regression model? Let's also introduce some more advanced techniques that can teach us to see our data in new ways and open future discussions.", + "facilitator": "Sam Petulla", + "facilitator_twitter": "spetulla", + "id": "stats-newsroom", + "title": "Regression in the newsroom: When to use it and thinking about best practices" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Martin Stabe", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "martinstabe", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "A “words” journalist can spend their entire career as a reporter, starting with daily general assignment reporting and moving to beat reporting, international reporting, or investigative reporting. Along the way, they increase their visibility, credibility, and earnings. What could that look like for the journalism-tech community? For example, a “news nerd” version of a traditional foreign correspondent could uncover datasets abroad, figure out ways to engage the local community, or deploy hardware sensors to track environmental conditions.\n\nWe’ll first talk about all the different kinds of skills we bring to newsrooms. Then we’ll spend some time interviewing each other before we create out-of-the-box job descriptions we can get excited about.", + "facilitator": "Soo Oh", + "facilitator_twitter": "soooh", + "id": "job-listings-career", + "title": "Reimagining news nerd career paths via job listings" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Matt Dennewitz", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "mattdennewitz", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Privacy is coming to the forefront of national conversation (again) and many non-EU publishers are discovering late in the game they need to comply with the EU privacy laws like the GDPR - or block all EU traffic. California is pondering similar laws, Canada might follow Europe’s approach and the ad industry scrambles to adapt.\n\nWe are all responsible for the state of internet privacy. Whether you are adding “that one line of JavaScript” as requested by the marketing team, or the Instagram embed in your article. We are allowing our readers (which includes us too) to be tracked across the internet in ways we don’t know about or very often can’t explain.\n\nThis session will start with real and practical approaches to lockdown your site from a privacy perspective (with source code) and best practices on how to minimize data collection and tracking on your visitors. \n\nIt will include a larger discussion to share notes, strategies, concerns from news organizations on how we can improve and do better. The goal is that participants are more aware of the issues, and armed to grapple with privacy concerns in their organizations.", + "facilitator": "Michael Donohoe", + "facilitator_twitter": "donohoe", + "id": "restoring-reader-privacy", + "title": "Restoring our reader’s privacy in a time of none" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Gabriel Hongsdusit", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "ghongsdusit", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "The command line is a black box (a white box on a Mac) that holds so much power but is very inaccessible to newcomers. Personally, it has taken me years to feel comfortable with it, and I still regularly learn things that wow me and improve my workflow. Being comfortable with the command line can make you more efficient in your work, might even be fun, and people in coffee-shops will think you are some kind of \"hacker\".\n\nHow can we shed light on this amazing, scary black box? What are the things you do to make the command line more fun? What scares you about the command line? How did you go from someone that just copies and pastes commands to one that writes commands from scratch? How do we find answers to our questions about the command line? And what's the difference between the command line, Terminal, shell, bash, Powershell, and many other weird words?\n\nBeginners and experts alike, let's share our real world experience with the command line and raise everyone's ANSI boats.", + "facilitator": "Alan Palazzolo", + "facilitator_twitter": "zzolo", + "id": "light-command-line", + "title": "Shedding light on the command line" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Hannah Birch", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "hannahsbirch", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "How do you disclose to your manager that you have a disability? Do you wait until after the job offer? How do you keep up with the demands of a 24-hour news cycle if you need special accommodations? What does this mean for your job growth? How do you manage an employee whose function can be unexpectedly limited? How can you live up to your reporting potential when your biology is thwarting you at seemingly every turn?\n\nThis session will start with anecdotes of tackling these tough conversations with bosses and coworkers, sharing what hasn’t worked and what has worked…better. The session will then move to a conversation where participants with disabilities can discuss life in the news industry. Topics could include how people have communicated their needs or accommodations to their employer, experiences working with HR, trying to fit in with the rest of their team or just attempting to get coworkers to understand. The goal of this session is to connect folks with disabilities, share coping techniques, and allow those without disabilities to listen and learn how best to support their colleagues.", + "facilitator": "Jasmine Mithani", + "facilitator_twitter": "jazzmyth", + "id": "disability-in-newsroom", + "title": "Sick [journalist] theory: real talk about navigating disability in the newsroom" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Tyler Chance", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "tchance121", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "What have you built that’s now ignored? What took off and is now central to your newsroom’s daily grind? What was the difference?\n\nWe’re a product manager in New York and an editor in D.C., on the front lines of making and deciding to use a variety of tools, from those that help with daily coverage planning to chart-making to immersive storytelling. Let's talk about what's lived on and what's languished so that we can crack the code on building tools journalists actually use.\n\nOne strong hunch of ours: We can take concrete steps to deepen relationships between folks who see opportunities to solve problems (or stand to benefit) and those who are building the solutions.\n\nLet’s find themes in our boondoggles and wild successes and come away with an invaluable compilation of battle-tested advice to guide your next project.", + "facilitator": "Becky Bowers", + "facilitator_twitter": "beckybowers", + "id": "using-tools", + "title": "Sure, You're Making Tools. But Do People Use Them?" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "David Plazas", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "davidplazas", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "When most journalists listen, all we are doing is waiting for the next opportunity to ask a question of a source or community member. Rarely do we employ active listening - a practice that could help us when trying to reach neglected audiences. Through a series of guided exercises in small groups, we will talk about how _really_ listening can change the way journalists do their jobs and about the culture change required in newsrooms to achieve this goal. Our jumping-off point will be the findings from a spring thought leader summit that the American Press Institute held in Nashville. We expect participants will have many of their own experiences - both highs and lows - to share with each other.", + "facilitator": "Amy L. Kovac-Ashley", + "facilitator_twitter": "terabithia4", + "id": "talk-less-listen-more", + "title": "Talk Less. Listen More. How Listening Can Help Journalists Begin to Repair Relationships with Marginalized or Ignored Communities" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Ryan Murphy", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "rdmurphy", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": " Taking on managerial roles can be a chance to have a bigger say and influence in how your organization functions, but new managers are not always set up to succeed. How can organizations (and fellow managers) do a better job of ensuring individuals have all the tools they need to navigate the new dynamics that come with new responsibilities (and typically new titles)? Sometimes new managers still have production obligations, and how do you balance the need to still be a producer and a leader? How do you navigate the interpersonal dynamics of suddenly having newfound authority, potentially a significant dynamic change on your team?\n\nAs two folks who have recently moved more and more into decision making roles, we’ll talk about our respective experiences, and give others a chance share their stories and suggestions.", + "facilitator": "Yue Qiu", + "facilitator_twitter": "YueQiu_cuj", + "id": "new-managers", + "title": "The Balancing Act of Becoming a New Manager" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "The practice of interviews in your daily collaboration with coworkers—whether in mentorship conversations, working with or as managers, moderating panels, conducting user research, or building products—is an incredibly valuable craft to hone. Engaging in a dialogue built on questions (especially at the intersection of journalism and technology) can help you better understand the people on your teams and surface the stories that inform their lived experiences—using those experiences to help you make smarter decisions and build better and more thoughtful products. \n\nLet's discuss how to: build constructive listening skills, use different classes of questions to guide and evaluate conversation, build a line of reasoning from a conversation as it evolves, and frame really productive interviews in service of getting to know your subject. Participants will spend time both asking and responding to questions in unstructured interviews, and we’ll reflect as a group on the practice and outcomes. At the end, you should walk away from this session not just with the tools you need to start building interviews into your daily work, but with a keener understanding of the skill of intense, focused listening.", + "facilitator": "David Yee", + "facilitator_twitter": "tangentialism", + "id": "listening-asking-questions", + "title": "The Interview: Building a practice of listening and asking questions in our work" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Natasha Khan", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "khantasha", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Recently, Current wrote a call-to-action article on developing cross-newsroom collaboratives.\n\nUsing this article as a template, we propose to lead a session aimed at creating a Newsroom Collaborative Manifesto.\n\nWe hope to create not only a single session, but a group of people with a continuing dedication to answering questions like:\n- How does collaboration work at national, regional and local levels?\n- How does collaboration work between commercial and public media?\n- What platforms can collaboratives use to communicate?\n- What platforms can we use to share collaborative materials?\n- How do you pitch collaboration to an unwilling management team?\n- How do you collect analytics from collaborations and how do you measure success?", + "facilitator": "Alexandra Kanik", + "facilitator_twitter": "act_rational", + "id": "newsroom-collaborative-manifesto", + "title": "The Newsroom Collaborative Manifesto" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Do you get exhausted trying to keep up with trend-driven pace of innovation? Struggling to engage with your target audience despite the latest and greatest 4K camera being pointed at your subject? Did you know the BEST stories have shapes? Yup. Throw that gimbal away and pick up your Crayons! USA Today Producer Jarrad Henderson explores the “Shape of Stories” as conceived by Kurt Vonnegut and shows you why it’s time to get back to basics. Come learn how shapes, the art of the remix and practicing the A.I. Technique can help you become a master storyteller!", + "facilitator": "Jarrad Henderson", + "facilitator_twitter": "jarrad_tweets", + "id": "shape-of-stories", + "title": "The Shape of Stories: Unleash Your :60 Storyteller" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Millie Tran", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "millie", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Where do people find time to nurture long-term goals? How do we get past treading water at work and move toward what we want next? And how do we even figure out what that is when we’re overwhelmed and overworked? In this session, building on what we explored at SRCCON:WORK, we’ll dig into how to create space for longer term goals, and brainstorm specific ways to balance the short and long term in our daily lives.", + "facilitator": "Kaeti Hinck", + "facilitator_twitter": "kaeti", + "id": "time-to-grow", + "title": "Time to grow: How to dig deep and stretch yourself in the midst of day-to-day survival" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Andrew Haeg", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "andrewhaeg", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "How might newsrooms create an ethical framework around their engagement work, similar to a code of conduct for staff relationships? \n\n\"Engagement\" is becoming more central to newsroom revenue models, and with it comes a lot of thorny issues that start with the question: \"*why* exactly are you trying to engage the public?\" If the answer doesn't include \"to learn and in-turn create more useful content for the public\" than it's worth interrogating the purpose of that work and the forces at play calling for something else. \n\nThis session will be an in depth discussion around the issues surrounding engagement work, and we'll emerge with a shareable framework for newsrooms to use when orienting toward non-extractive models. ", + "facilitator": "Jennifer Brandel", + "facilitator_twitter": "JenniferBrandel", + "id": "ethical-engagement", + "title": "Toward an ethical framework for engagement" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Akil Harris", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "ghostofakilism", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "This session will continue and build on the incredible discussion we had last year at SRCCON about the pros and cons of unionizing a newsroom. We are now much further along in our union bargaining efforts at The Intercept and have been exposed to and tackling new problems including how to bargain with management effectively, and maintain the unit's solidarity when the going gets tough.", + "facilitator": "Moiz Syed", + "facilitator_twitter": "moizsyed", + "id": "unionize", + "title": "Unionize! Part two!" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Joanna Kao", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "joannaskao", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "As digital journalists, we often push the platform forward, with cool new interactives and high-impact layouts. Unfortunately, accessibility is often ignored in the process. It's easy to make excuses: we're on deadline, or visual content wouldn't work in a screen reader anyway. But what if it's far easier than you think? In this session, we'll set up accessibility tools, share lessons we've learned about creating inclusive pages, and assemble a list of easy wins that you can take back to your newsrooms and digital teams.", + "facilitator": "Thomas Wilburn", + "facilitator_twitter": "thomaswilburn", + "id": "visualization-civil-right", + "title": "Visualization as a Civil Right" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Hilary Fung", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "hil_fung", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "If you are a news nerd, you probably know how to make data graphics in just a few lines of code, whether in d3, R, or python. But computer tools can restrict your creativity by making you think inside the box, both figuratively and literally. \n\nIn this session, we'll bust out the markers, paper, stickers, string, balloons, and other fun stuff. We'll practice iterating on ideas, freed from the computer. Inspired by the work of Mona Chalabi (who uses hand-drawn visualizations to make her work more accessible), Stefanie Posavec and Giorgia Lupi (who embarked on a year-long personal data collection postcard project which became the book Dear Data), and Jose Duarte (of Handmade Visuals), we will play with color, shape, size, and texture. \n\nI'll provide some supplies, but you're welcome to bring your own! Do you have a pack of Prismacolor markers burning a hole in your pocket? A washi tape collection that never sees the light of day? We can visualize data with that!", + "facilitator": "Amelia McNamara", + "facilitator_twitter": "AmeliaMN", + "id": "visualizing-data", + "title": "Visualizing data by hand" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Arjuna Soriano", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "arjunasoriano", + "cofacilitator_two": "Ha-Hoa Hamano", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "hahoais_", + "description": "Voice interfaces are not the future. They are here. Today. This will change how we write, communicate, develop, and design. This session will take a look at how voice is affecting journalism, how our different newsrooms are reacting to the new platform, and the implications for the future. We will discuss learnings, challenges, successes, failures, opportunities, and false starts. We will attempt to predict the future of the voice space with a brainstorming exercise followed by sketching a voice interface for news.", + "facilitator": "Yuri Victor", + "facilitator_twitter": "yurivictor", + "id": "voice-interfaces", + "title": "Voice interfaces and their impact on journalism" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Heather Bryant", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "HBCompass", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Trust is a buzzword throughout journalism and society. Journalists and the communities we serve wonder how much trust we have available to give. This is important in a world where we see a never-ending battle for attention. It might need us as a profession to be more open to being vulnerable to society. It doesn't necessarily have to be an uncomfortable or robotic interaction.\n\nThis session will explore how to be more vulnerable as an individual and with your news team. We'll also discuss how we can do so with the communities we attempt to serve with our journalism.", + "facilitator": "Andre Natta", + "facilitator_twitter": "acnatta", + "id": "vulnerability-strategy", + "title": "Vulnerability as a News Strategy" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Steven Rich", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "dataeditor", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Most journalism conferences these days have a session about mental health. A lot of us have stressful jobs, and coming up with strategies to decompress from that is great. But what if you have a chronic mental illness or condition that’s unrelated to (or exacerbated by) your work?\nOr you’re not sure, but yoga and kale aren’t cutting it?\n\nIn this session, we’ll go beyond self-care to talk about strategies for managing chronic jerkbrains in, and outside of, the newsroom. From cognitive behavioral therapy to grounding, let’s share practical ways to be your best at work and in life. This session will be completely off-the-record.", + "facilitator": "Rachel Alexander", + "facilitator_twitter": "rachelwalexande", + "id": "newsroom-therapy", + "title": "We Went to Therapy So You Don’t Have To" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Hannah Sung", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "hannahsung", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Ever wish you had a roadmap for how to bridge all the different ways we work in a modern newsroom? There are data journalists, developers, traditional beat reporters…and what does a producer do, anyway? This session is for all of you. Everyone will leave with their own personal roadmap, a one-sheet list that will come out of collaborative brainstorming. The point is to better understand ourselves, where we are situated and how to communicate in order to collaborate once we are back in our own newsrooms. Come and build your own map by joining us.\n\nAs we are all experiencing with the intersection of tech and journalism, journalists have to work with developers, data journalists have to work with designers; while product managers, producers and editors try to translate between them all. It can be frustrating to figure out how to do this well and not silently stew. We’ll work through the struggles with understanding and identify how to foster better collaboration and bridge communication gaps.\n\nThough newsrooms are working on innovative new projects with these teams more than ever, it can be difficult to know how to work with people whose skills you might not understand; and even more tricky to lead those teams.\n\nThe aim is to leave this workshop with a better handle on how you can work better and more collaboratively upon your return to work.", + "facilitator": "Hannah Wise", + "facilitator_twitter": "hannahjwise", + "id": "bridging-gaps", + "title": "Whine & Shine: A support group for nerds, journalists, and those who bridge the gap" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "Do I use \"display\" or \"position\" for that? Sometimes you just want to make sure your newsroom tool does it's job and not have to worry about what it looks like. Well, your days of worrying about front-end design could soon be over. Slack's suite of API's are vast and the documentation is one of the best of any API out there. In this session, I'll quickly demo most of the different methods of interaction available with Slack's APIs. We'll build a simple graphics request form together as a group. When that's finished, we'll brainstorm ideas for other newsroom tools and discuss how our front-end needs could be met by one or more of the methods we've seen so far. We'll be using Flask to do it, so basic Flask and Python knowledge will be required.\n\nSlack has a number of features you might need from a front-end design already included. Unprompted function calls? Slack has slash commands. Do they support arguments? You bet they do. Filling out forms? Slack's got that too. Giving personal user feedback when a script runs? Ephemeral messages make sure that only a single user can see the notification without ever having to leave the channel. Learn about all these and more in the session.", + "facilitator": "Andrew Briz", + "facilitator_twitter": "brizandrew", + "id": "slack-as-frontend", + "title": "Who Needs A Front End? – How To Leave The UX of Newsroom Tools to Slack" + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Matt Raw", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "Mattbot", + "cofacilitator_two": "", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "", + "description": "What drives people to pay for journalism? Is it access to exclusive content? Incentives in the UX? Affordability? Attitudes and beliefs? Or is it something else? Together we’ll work through some universal ways of thinking about compelling people to support journalism with money. The session will begin with brainstorming to identify the reasons people pay for journalism. We’ll sort those ideas to find common themes that - surprise! - exist in any news organization, whether its focus is global, local or something in between. We’ll end with an exercise to develop ideas for real-world implementation so that everyone leaves the room with at least one concrete plan that they think will get their readers to pay for news.", + "facilitator": "Sara Konrad Baranowski", + "facilitator_twitter": "skonradb", + "id": "readers-pay-news", + "title": "Without Free or Favor: Compelling readers to pay for news (tote bags not included)" + } +] diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Introduction.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Introduction.md index 5f9463b2..5a059b05 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Introduction.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Introduction.md @@ -1,176 +1,176 @@ -Welcome to SRCCON! -Session facilitator(s): OpenNews Staff -Day & Time: Thursday, 10am -Room: Ullyot - ->> Hi. Hello. Am I on? All right. Hi, everyone. I'm Dan Sinker, if you don't know me I'm the Director of the Knight-Mozilla Open News Project. And I'm apparently hitting "settings" on my phone. I'm really thrilled to be kicking SRCCON off today and I'm incredibly amazed that everybody is here on time especially because a lot of you got delayed due to the monsoon that blew through last night. So thanks for getting here, and dealing with some travel hiccups. About a year and a half ago I was sitting next to Erin Kissane in the Knight CAR Conference in Louisville and it was during the lightning talks which are amazing if you've been to Knight CAR and I'm going to guess the Venn diagram of people that have been to Knight CAR, and the people that are here almost looks like a circle. And I lean over to person and I said, "You know what, I want a conference that's all this. I want a conference that's all of this but not in five minute shots, okay?" I want this level of passion and this level of fun, and this level of commitment for the whole time, right? I want people to be able to talk and to learn about teach in equal amounts. And I want people to be able to build new things together and that was about a year and a half and about six months ago. We were like, okay, maybe we should do a conference. And about three months ago, we sat in a conference room in Portland, Oregon and we spent literally, the first, what, three hours discussing the emotional arc of the conference, and we divided that that's the team that should be putting together a conference. Anyway, we're here. This is a conference filled with your passions with your ideas, and it's an event that's about sharing as much as it is about learning: Whether it's sharing things that you're doing. Whether it's sharing coffee. All sorts of different things will get shared this weekend -- or two days. We're so excited about doing this with you. But first we want to get a couple of things out of the way. We're going to talk a little bit about the schedule and the arc of the next couple of days. Probably not touch on the emotional arc as much as the actual, physical teaser of the things you do. We're going to talk about some of the expectations that we have of you. Some of our ground rules, and some additional information you need to know. And finally, this is going to be a bit of a cluster but we're actually going to get to know all of you in this session. But before we do any of that, this is a conference literally couldn't have happened without a lot of people doing a lot of things and I want to introduce three of the folks who are responsible for SRCCON as much as anyone. So Ryan Pitts, Erika Owens, and Erin Kissane. ->> Hello, I'm Ryan. And first of all, I have to say, it is so awesome to look out and see all of you here. So, I just want go over real quick kind of what we'll spend the next two days doing together. Some of you may have seen it already. We have a schedule app available for you, it's at schedule.srccon.org. Even if the conference Wi-Fi goes down, you will still have that schedule app available to you. If you take a look through it we have the next two days divided into morning blocks and afternoon blocks. We'll have sessions filling I up both of those. And if you look at those blocks you'll see that there's a couple of codes for the section sessions, the lighter of which, the CSS pioneers will identify as "papaya whip" that designates one-hour sessions, and the blue those designate two and a half hour sessions. So each session block has two, one and a half hour sessions with a two and a half block hour in between so if you go to a long session say at 11:00 today, that will run through until lunch. What we'll do is finish up our time here together. We'll get you out of here so you can greet, coffee, grab some snacks and the first block goes until we break for lunch at 1:30 and then we're going to turn you loose, set you free, stretch out your legs, go about on your own and then we come back here for our afternoon blocks which starts at 3:00 we'll take our afternoon section sessions at 5:30 which, taco bar. And we also have an bunch of local beers for you guys to drink. We'll drink in here for a while, and then at 7:00 we'll kind of redistribute to different rooms for what we've been starting to call the "house party." So I want to take a second and introduce you to a few people who will be leading you through different rooms. We have different activities set up in different rooms tonight. Starting at 7:00, the Foodie Room, Jeremy Bowers, are you here? This is Jeremy Bowers, he is our Hufflepuff Prefects. If you're interested in food and things like that. Talk to Jeremy, he is running that session. We have a game room, Jeff Phonako, are you here? And and Jeff -- he is a board game master. He has a lot of things planned, and Eric will be running a Magic: The Gathering tournament. And we have cards, and we have plans, Eric knows how to run a draft. Come and play a few games. Those are our Gryffindors. Where are our Ravenclaws? Those are our lighting talk coordinators. If you have a passion that you can talk in about five minutes and come get people excited about, come do a lighting talk. Our Hacking Room, the Slytherins. And the NYT Labs Crew will be talking about hacking, hobbies, science fair-type displays that people are interested in. So our house party will need to wrap up around 9:00. There are literal alarms that turn on in this building at around 10:00, so we do need a hard stop there. Of course, you guys are all welcome to go out, find refreshing beverages, keep talking to people. We won't get back together until tomorrow morning, though. We'll have breakfast here. And then with a morning session at 11:00 that runs through, and we'll have lunch together in this room tomorrow. And then our afternoon sessions start at 3:00 and then we'll get back together for a short closing wrap-up at 5:30 tomorrow afternoon where we'll talk about kind of what we've experienced and hopefully what we'll see everybody doing together going forward. So that's the next couple of days. Eric and Erika are going to talk about some logistics now. ->> Thanks. So I am excited that everyone is here in Philly. So I live in Philly, so welcome. We hope you enjoy your time here and it's also really exciting to be in this space. You're going to get to see there's actually natural light, there's greenery outside. It's not your typical conference space. There's also a museum that you can go to at any point when the museum is open throughout the conference time. So it's a really great space. We hope you enjoy it, and I just wanted to tell you about a few logistics items. So one logistics item that is probably at the top of your mind is the Internet access and so there are signs around this room. And throughout upstairs about Internet access. So, the Wi-Fi password, it's 0102030405. It's easy to remember-ish. And we request that you turn things off like Dropbox and syncing apps just to conserve the bandwidth to make sure that we can access it during the event. And also another thing with the events there are people in coordinated shirts. So the volunteers are in the snazzy orange shirts and the staff are in the snazzy blue shirts. So these are people to contact if you have any questions, or if anything comes up. And we have different volunteers in different roles to support session leaders. So help prep the space. So there'll be people on hand to help us in different ways. But you can always tap us on the shoulders to discuss anything else that you need to know about. So just to tell you a little bit about the session rooms. We're going to be here for these big group events but we're going to be going upstairs to where all the session rooms are. You can see the map on the back of your lanyard in a handy way that's easy to look at. ->> Just twist! Just twist, and it faces you! ->> I'm sorry, I'm not a very good demonstrator. But you can experiment yourself. -[ Laughter ] -So in each of the session rooms, there is a packet of Post-Its and Sharpies, and foot boards, and whiteboards, and projectors, and all the fun things that you'll need for your session and there'll be particular volunteers supporting the sessions, as well. So that should be -- it should be great. And in front of every room is the name of the room and the sessions that are coming up this morning so you can more easily find where you're heading. And we also wanted to let you know about some other folks in the room are transcribers. We're doing live transcription for about half of the sessions at SRCCON which we're really, really excited about. So just wanted to introduce those folks to you. So Stan is actually transcribing this session right now. He's that table over there, typing up here. Allison, do you want to raise your hand to indicate Stan? - Awesome. And Norma and Lora are over by the door. You'll see these folks in your room and they'll be taking down what people are saying so that we have a record of it and also for accessibility for people outside of the session who weren't able to make it as well. So that's linked up on the site and I think that's about it and I'll turn it over to Erin for a few more details. - - -So just an extension on the transcription piece -- we're so psyched to have transcribers here, by the way. They are awesome people. - -[ Applause ] -Just because there are, you know, various kinds of situations where in a session you may want to tell a personal story, you may want to talk about something that's kind of under friend DA, that you don't want necessarily going out, necessarily, in a live transcription over the Internet. That's fine. What we're asking is that you say, "I'm going to take this off the record" which, is the term that we figure y'all already know. Make sure you tell them when to go back on the record. It'll be like the VCR -- I'm old -- and you go off for the commercials. And don't joke around and say, "Don't put this down." Like, the magic words are, "I'm going off the record" and then they'll take it off and then say, "We're back on." So that's happening. And all those transcripts are going to be archived on the sites afterwards. So you'll access to those. I also want to talk a little bit about just some policy stuff. We have a code of conduct. Lots of people have an code of conduct and it's a good thing to have but we wanted to call it out specifically because it's sort of more than fine print for us. We think of it as an expression for a lot of the complex ethics of this community. So it's not just that we don't post outside. You can see it online at srccon.org/conduct. The spirit is, be considerate in your speech and actions to your fellow attendees and actively seek to acknowledge and respect the boundaries of the people that you're hanging out with. Anything else is really midrash. Those are the core things. If you have a problem, if you have a health or safety issue, if you see something that makes you uncomfortable, if you see something that seems to be not in that spirit, there is a number to call that will reach the staff and that is SRCCON-2909. You can also find me, but if you see my arm, you don't need to call the number. You know, if you don't have access to your phone or whatever, grab a volunteer and they'll get one of us. But the thing is we're here to help you. If you have an emergency and someone is bleeding, call 911 first and then call us. But if it's not an actual, like, "emergency services" emergency, let one of us know and we will come help you. For that matter if you're stranded in a room, and you need Post-Its, feel free to call us also, which'll be fun for us, because we'll think someone is bleeding from the head. Another policy think is, just a quick photo policy if you're going to take a group photo -- actually if you're going to take a photo of an identifiable human being, just give a warning to anyone who doesn't want to be photographed. And if someone says, don't post that picture, just honor that request. This is all sort of basic stuff, but sort of pay attention to that. And food, I like to talk about that. A lot of people folks have allergic dietary restrictions. If you know you have something like that, and you haven't told us -- shellfish will kill you or something like that -- let one of us in the blue shirts know. Everything should be labeled so that everyone is safe from food. And sort of related to that if you see something that looks delicious but it's the gluten-free, soy-free, vegan. Don't eat that unless you need to eat it because other people will be hungry instead. If you are observing a fast for Ramadan or anything else just grab one of us, and if there's anything that we can do to accommodate we'll be happy to hold the food for later or whatever for you. And just a note about the building, the stairs just between the two floors we're on go through the museum and you can't have food in the museum so that means, food stays where you get it. If you eat food down here, it stays down here. If you eat food upstairs, coffee, or whatever, it gets eaten upstairs. It can't travel between floors. It's a little weird. But you can't have cupcakes next to the original container that they used to invent Bakelite in, which is kind of tragic. Anything else on the logistics? All right I'm going to turn it back over to you. - ->> One other room logistics or building logistics thing. If you are a mom who needs room to pump, there is one. Let one of us know and we can direct you to how to get into that, because it's actually not in a direct space but it is a designated space for that. So if you need that, we've got that. At Open News we've done a lot of events for a while, and every time we open them, we borrow some rules from our friend and colleague Gunnar. Anyone who knows Gunnar, doesn't know his last name. But he lays out awesome ways of conducting yourself especially in a room like this where every single one of you is so damn brilliant. One is focusing on listening you know we all have things that we want to impart on with each other but don't be the person who hogs up everyone else's opportunity to share their brilliance, as well. Honor the schedule. We are trying our best to honor the schedule, to lead by example. Things happen on time. As Ryan said, they do set alarms in this building. I'm convinced they also flood it with Halon gas. So be sure to honor the schedule so that we can continue on time. Resist the desire to debate, right? It is okay to disagree. It's not okay to take over a session trying to force your opinion down everyone else's throats. And these two, I think, are the most important for an event like this. One is be willing to ask questions and when you're asking those questions, a big one is, all of us come here with an incredible amount of jargon, right? And, it's okay if somebody starts jargoning to say, "I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean when you're talking about how Heartbleed was compromised by Open SSL," or whatever it was that was supposed to come out of my mouth. It's okay to ask questions when you don't understand something. In fact, it's the only thing that you can learn. And finally, talk to people you don't know. We are a community that one of the things that's been interesting to me, leading into this, is how many people said, "Man, I looked at the etherpad that people created of people attending and there's so many people that I think I know but then I realize that I don't actually know." All right, so get to know people, whether you think you know them or you totally don't know them, get to know them this weekend. So looping quickly back to SRCCON. We anticipated a lot of SRCCON. We anticipated that you love coffee and so we have two coffee hacking stations with grinders and scales and seven different ways to brew your coffee and beans beyond belief. We anticipated that you wanted to learn things. We created sessions and times for that. We anticipated that you wanted to have fun, so we created the evening. We did not anticipate that this session -- that this conference was going to sell out in three minutes. And ever since that day, we've worked super hard to live up to that expectation, right, because it's definitely something that all of us were like, "Oh, shit. Now we've really got to have a conference." And we know that the topics that are being discussed over the next two days, whether they're things like CMSs, or security, or the incredible lead for more diversity in this field, that these are topics that are important to journalism. That they're important to the web, and most importantly, they're important to you, right? And we know that because we asked you. Every session at SRCCON was proposed, is being run, and of course is being attended by you, right? But "attend" really isn't the right word. SRCCON is is highly participatory. One of the things that kept coming up when we asked people what this conference should be like was, "I want to just compare notes with people," right? I want to figure out the way that I'm doing things and the way this person's doing things. I want to figure out how we can do those things together, right? These sessions are where your voice is as valuable as the voices of the people that are leading them. So really by signing on here, you've signed on to play the part of sharing your experiences, sharing your knowledge, and really being active in this. And that's really what this conference is about, I think. It's about sharing notes and experiences, and helping each other chart uncharted waters, right? The work that we do in newsrooms is not tested by doing hundreds of years of doing news. It's tested by months, sometimes hours. So whether you've been doing journalism work that's been around for decades or centuries, or one that's been around for a matter of months. We're all kind of feeling our way through this together. And the best way to do that is to work together to find your way, right? Probably also drink a lot of coffee. But working together also to make coffee is a good thing. And so I think it's only appropriate that we actually take a second here -- it's going to take more than a second, spiritual alert -- to get to know each other. So if anyone's been to a food conference we're going to steal their move. Each of you is going to say three things, your name, where you're from, and brief keywords about yourself. And by three, I don't mean paragraphs, I mean words. The way that we're going to do this, we're going to hand two mics. This is one and this is the other one. I'm going to hand it to my colleagues who are going to demonstrate best practices, first. One person will say this, the next person, the next two people at the table will be standing with a mic ready to go. When person one finishes, they will hand their mic to person three, and person two will then, introduce, and person three will be standing and we're going to blow this shit up! So we'll start. I'm person one. I'm Dan Sinker, I'm from Chicago, I'm not moving from Chicago, at least for now. And, goats, tacos, building stuff. ->> I'm Erika, I'm from Philadelphia. Community, blah, and welcome. ->> Erin Kissane, I'm from Brooklyn. Pitch, meat, source articles. ->> I'm Ryan Pitts, I'm from Spokane, Washington. Metadata, beer, and papaya whip. ->> I'm Erika Westerdale (phonetic) and I'm from Minneapolis. Records, events, and sessions. ->> My name is Matt Pogey (phonetic). Code, coffee, and hockey. ->> I'm Mike from Brooklyn. I guess, data, data, and data. ->> And I'm Alexis, I'm from Brooklyn. Design, code, and food. ->> I'm Nick Hasselman (phonetic), I'm coming from Brooklyn. Visualization, data, and cats. ->> I'm Eric Booth (phonetic), Brooklyn. Code, beer, cats. ->> I'm Sarah Viras (phonetic) from New York. Photography, web, and music. ->> I'm Allen Tan, I'm from New York. Design, WebType, and "Community," the TV show. ->> I'm Scott, I'm from Brooklyn. And I, am, sassy. ->> I'm Ally, I'm from D.C. Design, code, sass. ->> I'm Rama (phonetic), I'm from D.C., design, dessert, design. ->> I'm Jason Santamaria (phonetic) from Brooklyn. Books, typography, coffee. ->> I'm David Yee (phonetic). Data space, public space, cheeseburgers. ->> I'm [Inaudible]. Code design, non-existent, cheese emoji. ->> I'm Rebecca, and I'm from Hong Kong. And code, bourbon, and bicycles. ->> Hi, I'm Ryan Mark. I'm in D.C., by way of Chicago, by way of D.C. And making stuff, beer, and music. ->> Hi, I'm Laura Verbato (phonetic). I'm from New York and shipping, awesome, products. ->> And I'm Noah, New York. Internet, Internet, sandwiches. ->> I'm Candice. Tiaras, drag queens, controlled chaos. ->> I'm Brian Jacobs, I'm from New York. Flip, flip, Philadelphia? ->> Hi, I'm Annabelle (phonetic), I'm from New Zealand. Code, coffee, and cake. ->> Hi, I'm Aurelia from Brooklyn. Stats, semantics, and waffles. ->> I'm Gabriella from Uruguay. Code, Internet, and community. ->> Hello, I'm Risdale (phonetic) from Argentina. Hockey, data, and mate. ->> I'm from Ben from D.C. Data, data, eating. ->> I'm Atul (phonetic) from New York. Education, prototyping, and design. ->> I'm Walter from Jakesville, and I'm an open data evangelist. ->> I'm [inaudible] and I'm for open data tools. ->> I'm [inaudible]. I live in Columbia, Missouri. Documents, linguistics, and "what-what." ->> I'm Joe from Chicago, D.ata, learning, language. ->> Kio Stark (phonetic) from Brooklyn. Learning, fiction-writing, and talking to strangers. ->> I'm [inaudible] from Spokane, Washington. Study, sleep, repeat. ->> I'm Missy from Brooklyn. Design, music, and ramen. ->> I'm Lauren from Brooklyn. Design, work, people. ->> Hi, I'm Derek from Washington D.C. Um, high-waisted pants. ->> I'm Derek, from Washington D.C., and I'm going to say, audiences, metrics, and whiskey. ->> I'm Willy Tran. I'm from D.C. as well. Journalism, travel, and pho. ->> I'm Rob Meyer, also from D.C. Words, trees, and emoji. ->> Hi, I'm Allister, I'm from New York and mobile, web, and Indian food. ->> I'm Tyler from D.C. Story, telling, open-source. ->> I'm Jeff from Brooklyn. I'm going on a charm offensive. ->> Hi, I'm Eric, soon to be from Brooklyn. Let's go with functional programming, microfiction, and Halo. ->> I'm Alex from New York. Give, me, subway, tokens. ->> I'm Jeremy. I'm from New York. I love news, transit, and linguistics. ->> Marcos, cold, cold, beer. ->> I'm [inaudible] from Austin. Technology is great but I hate technology, too. ->> My name is Matt Long. I am from Queens. Code, campaign, finance, and I'm very tall. ->> Hi, I'm Allison from London. Visualization, coding, and free-form radio. ->> This is Stan. -[ Laughter ] ->> Hi, I'm Ryan Murphy from Austin, Texas. And corgis, bears, and web standards. ->> I'm Erik Reyna, I'm from Texas. Photo-journalism, coding, and barbecue. ->> I'm Mandy, I'm from Brooklyn. Books, booze, and pitbulls. ->> I'm Gary Victor (phonetic), D.C. Weird, build stuff, favorites. ->> I'm Ed. I'm from Jersey City. Design, dot-connecting, and -- ->> [inaudible]. Music, travel and cocktails. ->> I'm Sarah from Brooklyn. I like to ski. And I like sarcasm, journalism, whatever. ->> Hi, I'm Jackie I'm from Brooklyn. Liverpool football, and -- ->> And I'm John from Brooklyn, as well. And, I would say design, type, and LOLCats. ->> Tiffany, I'm also from Brooklyn. Books, beer, and bourbon. ->> Chris, from D.C. Definitely, not, boring. ->> Hi, I'm Jacob Paris from D.C. I guess, code, Twitter, and squirrels. ->> Debby Nosky (phonetic). I'm from Brooklyn via LA. Charts, imposter, syndrome. ->> I'm Michael from Michigan, now New York. Cynical, but, optimistic. ->> I'm Sam from New York. And code, things, and lightbulbs. ->> I'm Ian from Virginia, now, I guess. Open, data, and maps. ->> Matthew Pleasant from Tampa, Florida. Reporting, storytelling. ->> I'm Dan from York, Pennsylvania. Code design, cats, and 0-based axes. ->> Chris Williams, currently Chicago, soon to be D.C. I like bicycling, IPA's, and beer. ->> I'm Tom Meagher. I live in New Jersey. I like beer, soccer, and reporting. ->> My name is Ferguson. Senses, impact, and cycling. ->> Hi, I'm Jeremy. I live in D.C. I like the gout, beer, and I miss Python a lot. ->> Hi, I'm Helen Ubez (phonetic) from Philly. I'm petrified, story-telling, and dogs. ->> Hi, I'm Stan from Belgium. CSS, and news analytics. ->> I'm Andy from D.C. Open-source, community, and CMS. ->> I'm Will Davis. Main issues-based story telling. ->> I'm Michael from New York. CSE rules everything around me. ->> Aaron from New York. Accessibility, open-source, and Yuri Victor Fan Club. ->> Stephanie from Boston. Happy, I'm, here. ->> My name is Russel Heimlich (phonetic). I'm from the Internet. And Reading Rainbow, Thundercats, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. ->> I'm Harry from Seattle. WordPress, soccer, and waking up. ->> I'm Ken Koehler from Washington D.C. And about today, free speech and I could use a nap. ->> Hey there, I'm Justin Myers from Arlington, Virginia by way of Nixon, Missouri. And, making, story-telling, and bourbon. ->> Hey, I'm Davis, I'm from Philly. I like WordPress, history, and beer. ->> My name is Andrew Spill (phonetic). I'm from Portland. Learning, information, and WordPress. ->> I'm Chris Bar (phonetic) from Miami, Florida. Prototypes, philanthropy, and puppies. ->> I'm Silvia, I live in Boston. I like photography, cooking and meetups. ->> I'm Adrian, and I chose adventure, transmedia story-telling, and rock-climbing. ->> I'm Daniel McLachlan and I'm from Boston. I like cities, lists, and spaces. ->> I'm Vijith Assar. Front-end Javascript, back-end Javascript and brewskies. ->> I'm [inaudible]. I'm from Colombia, and living in [inaudible]. Technology, mountains, and good times. ->> I'm Aaron Williams from Oakland by way of San Francisco and I like rap music, Python and pitching your start-up. ->> I'm Sue. I just from LA, I'm hungry, I'm always full, and I like speculative fiction. ->> Arman (phonetic) from Baton Rouge and now, LA. I like bikes, beers, and building things. ->> AmyJo from Pittsburgh. Gardening, history, and public records. ->> Jacob Sanders, also from Pittsburgh. Food and drink, baseball, building shit. ->> I'm Nanali (phonetic) from Queens, New York. User experience design, and -- ->> Chris Kelly from LA. This is freakin' awesome. And thank, you, all. ->> I'm Claire, I'm from D.C. Collaboration, narrative, and how about wine? ->> I'm Alice, also -- Alice from D.C. Maps, making messes, airplanes. ->> I'm Robert from LA. Teeballs, left eye, and -- ->> I'm Helga, originally from LA coming from D.C. Story-telling, code, and history. ->> I'm Yeem (phonetic) from LA, too. Story, Twin Towers, and sausages. ->> I'm Sonia, I'm from D.C. Data, statistics -- ->> Michael from Boston. Design, travel, and wine. ->> Rich from New York. I like magic, unfinished lists... -[ Laughter ] ->> Hey, I'm Zack Green from Brooklyn. Storytelling, jokes, weird. ->> Andre from Brooklyn. Visualization, politics, and predictions. ->> I'm Derek Willis from Silverspring, Maryland. Test, match, cricket. ->> Keenan from Brooklyn. I like brightly-colored shoelaces. ->> Reuben from Brooklyn. Mapping, sports, and the outdoors. ->> Hi, Guilding (phonetic). New York, beer, cupcakes, Kindle. ->> Allison from San Diego. Soccer, beaches, and more soccer. ->> Nadia from Brooklyn. Words, graphics and science stuff. ->> I'm Richie from Brooklyn. I like Manhattan sizer accent mojitos (?). ->> Allison from Princeton, New Jersey. Highlighting, statistics, expert [Inaudible]. ->> Brian Brennan from Brooklyn. Humans, feelings, and DHTML. ->> Adam from the Midwest. I don't identify as Midwestern. I like small towns, records, and, let's see, non-profits. ->> Hi, I'm Kaeti Hinck from Minneapolis. I like design, solving problems, and Star Trek-themed Tumblrs. ->> I'm Julia, I live in D.C., and, um, miming? It works... ->> Hi, I'm Tesene Raja (phonetic). Editing, archive, nicer in real life than on Twitter. ->> Hi, I'm Jaya. I live in San Francisco. Hiphop, noodles, and journalism? ->> Hi, I'm Allen from Minneapolis. Open-source all the things, and doughnuts. ->> I'm [inaudible] from Minneapolis, awkward public speaker. ->> Latoya Peterson from Washington D.C. Breaking telephone news and design. ->> I'm Drew Mill from New York. Politics, databases, linguistics. ->> I'm Allen from New York. Code, data, machine learning. ->> Fred Kaimann, from New Jersey. Unexpected, impatient, and Beethoven, or not from Brooklyn. ->> Jessica from Harlem. Travel, building, and pirate ->> Hi, I'm Micaela Fernandez, I'm from Uruguay, but I'm living in Washington D.C. ->> Stanford by way of Washington D.C. What, you, said. ->> Melody, Washington D.C. by way of Philadelphia. Audio, tagging, open-sourcing. ->> Hi, Leon, Toronto. Fiction, history, yeah... ->> Hi, I'm Solani, from Rockville, Maryland. I'm into science, education, and charts. ->> Hi, I'm Tyler Mashado (phonetic). I'm from Massachusetts. I'm into basketball, vinyl, and Googling Javascript questions. ->> I'm Sarah Schneider from Los Angeles. Performance artist, unlikely confluences. ->> I'm Sarah Spire from New York City. My job is Instagram. ->> Rico Roberto. Code, data, and Star Trek. ->> Danielle Alvari (phonetic) from Washington D.C. Mapping, data, Star Trek. ->> I'm Lorie from Chicago. I like stories and weirdoes, and "yes." ->> Hey, I'm Jeff from Philadelphia. Nick Keen movies. ->> Jen Low from Brooklyn via Arizona. Data, communication, and open spaces. ->> I'm Casey Holland from New York. I like systems thinking, free education, and small tools. ->> Pipin Lee from Toronto, Canada. I like teaching code with bad gifs, eh. ->> Is that it? All right. That was 18 minutes and seven seconds. -[ Applause ] -I think we can do better, so let's do it again. -[ Laughter ] -Note, you've got 12 minutes until our 11:00 sessions start. That took a while but I think it's super important that everyone gets names attached to their faces. Their names attached to your neck, as well. Again, user guide: Just twist it, and there's the map facing you. But yeah, there's about 12 minutes or so to your session. If you're a session leader, you I want to head up sooner than that and just get your session going. There are waters clearly labeled, session leader waters in the rooms. Those are for you. And yeah they're up on the second floor -- the coffee hacking stations exist. And they are there for you and there's a wonderful coffee guy by the name of Cory who's not making you coffee but he will help you make coffee. And you can help each other as well and have an wonderful, wonderful morning. And Eric has a shout-out. ->> Also one quick thing. There's elevators that go up, as well as the stairwell that's in the museum. So there's a lot of us going up there right now, so use both of those opportunities. ->> Have an wonderful time? There are two, one-hour sessions. Lunch is out in this wonderful historic place. We will see you soon. Have an wonderful time. +Welcome to SRCCON! +Session facilitator(s): OpenNews Staff +Day & Time: Thursday, 10am +Room: Ullyot + +> > Hi. Hello. Am I on? All right. Hi, everyone. I'm Dan Sinker, if you don't know me I'm the Director of the Knight-Mozilla Open News Project. And I'm apparently hitting "settings" on my phone. I'm really thrilled to be kicking SRCCON off today and I'm incredibly amazed that everybody is here on time especially because a lot of you got delayed due to the monsoon that blew through last night. So thanks for getting here, and dealing with some travel hiccups. About a year and a half ago I was sitting next to Erin Kissane in the Knight CAR Conference in Louisville and it was during the lightning talks which are amazing if you've been to Knight CAR and I'm going to guess the Venn diagram of people that have been to Knight CAR, and the people that are here almost looks like a circle. And I lean over to person and I said, "You know what, I want a conference that's all this. I want a conference that's all of this but not in five minute shots, okay?" I want this level of passion and this level of fun, and this level of commitment for the whole time, right? I want people to be able to talk and to learn about teach in equal amounts. And I want people to be able to build new things together and that was about a year and a half and about six months ago. We were like, okay, maybe we should do a conference. And about three months ago, we sat in a conference room in Portland, Oregon and we spent literally, the first, what, three hours discussing the emotional arc of the conference, and we divided that that's the team that should be putting together a conference. Anyway, we're here. This is a conference filled with your passions with your ideas, and it's an event that's about sharing as much as it is about learning: Whether it's sharing things that you're doing. Whether it's sharing coffee. All sorts of different things will get shared this weekend -- or two days. We're so excited about doing this with you. But first we want to get a couple of things out of the way. We're going to talk a little bit about the schedule and the arc of the next couple of days. Probably not touch on the emotional arc as much as the actual, physical teaser of the things you do. We're going to talk about some of the expectations that we have of you. Some of our ground rules, and some additional information you need to know. And finally, this is going to be a bit of a cluster but we're actually going to get to know all of you in this session. But before we do any of that, this is a conference literally couldn't have happened without a lot of people doing a lot of things and I want to introduce three of the folks who are responsible for SRCCON as much as anyone. So Ryan Pitts, Erika Owens, and Erin Kissane. +> > Hello, I'm Ryan. And first of all, I have to say, it is so awesome to look out and see all of you here. So, I just want go over real quick kind of what we'll spend the next two days doing together. Some of you may have seen it already. We have a schedule app available for you, it's at schedule.srccon.org. Even if the conference Wi-Fi goes down, you will still have that schedule app available to you. If you take a look through it we have the next two days divided into morning blocks and afternoon blocks. We'll have sessions filling I up both of those. And if you look at those blocks you'll see that there's a couple of codes for the section sessions, the lighter of which, the CSS pioneers will identify as "papaya whip" that designates one-hour sessions, and the blue those designate two and a half hour sessions. So each session block has two, one and a half hour sessions with a two and a half block hour in between so if you go to a long session say at 11:00 today, that will run through until lunch. What we'll do is finish up our time here together. We'll get you out of here so you can greet, coffee, grab some snacks and the first block goes until we break for lunch at 1:30 and then we're going to turn you loose, set you free, stretch out your legs, go about on your own and then we come back here for our afternoon blocks which starts at 3:00 we'll take our afternoon section sessions at 5:30 which, taco bar. And we also have an bunch of local beers for you guys to drink. We'll drink in here for a while, and then at 7:00 we'll kind of redistribute to different rooms for what we've been starting to call the "house party." So I want to take a second and introduce you to a few people who will be leading you through different rooms. We have different activities set up in different rooms tonight. Starting at 7:00, the Foodie Room, Jeremy Bowers, are you here? This is Jeremy Bowers, he is our Hufflepuff Prefects. If you're interested in food and things like that. Talk to Jeremy, he is running that session. We have a game room, Jeff Phonako, are you here? And and Jeff -- he is a board game master. He has a lot of things planned, and Eric will be running a Magic: The Gathering tournament. And we have cards, and we have plans, Eric knows how to run a draft. Come and play a few games. Those are our Gryffindors. Where are our Ravenclaws? Those are our lighting talk coordinators. If you have a passion that you can talk in about five minutes and come get people excited about, come do a lighting talk. Our Hacking Room, the Slytherins. And the NYT Labs Crew will be talking about hacking, hobbies, science fair-type displays that people are interested in. So our house party will need to wrap up around 9:00. There are literal alarms that turn on in this building at around 10:00, so we do need a hard stop there. Of course, you guys are all welcome to go out, find refreshing beverages, keep talking to people. We won't get back together until tomorrow morning, though. We'll have breakfast here. And then with a morning session at 11:00 that runs through, and we'll have lunch together in this room tomorrow. And then our afternoon sessions start at 3:00 and then we'll get back together for a short closing wrap-up at 5:30 tomorrow afternoon where we'll talk about kind of what we've experienced and hopefully what we'll see everybody doing together going forward. So that's the next couple of days. Eric and Erika are going to talk about some logistics now. +> > Thanks. So I am excited that everyone is here in Philly. So I live in Philly, so welcome. We hope you enjoy your time here and it's also really exciting to be in this space. You're going to get to see there's actually natural light, there's greenery outside. It's not your typical conference space. There's also a museum that you can go to at any point when the museum is open throughout the conference time. So it's a really great space. We hope you enjoy it, and I just wanted to tell you about a few logistics items. So one logistics item that is probably at the top of your mind is the Internet access and so there are signs around this room. And throughout upstairs about Internet access. So, the Wi-Fi password, it's 0102030405. It's easy to remember-ish. And we request that you turn things off like Dropbox and syncing apps just to conserve the bandwidth to make sure that we can access it during the event. And also another thing with the events there are people in coordinated shirts. So the volunteers are in the snazzy orange shirts and the staff are in the snazzy blue shirts. So these are people to contact if you have any questions, or if anything comes up. And we have different volunteers in different roles to support session leaders. So help prep the space. So there'll be people on hand to help us in different ways. But you can always tap us on the shoulders to discuss anything else that you need to know about. So just to tell you a little bit about the session rooms. We're going to be here for these big group events but we're going to be going upstairs to where all the session rooms are. You can see the map on the back of your lanyard in a handy way that's easy to look at. +> > Just twist! Just twist, and it faces you! +> > I'm sorry, I'm not a very good demonstrator. But you can experiment yourself. +> > [ Laughter ] +> > So in each of the session rooms, there is a packet of Post-Its and Sharpies, and foot boards, and whiteboards, and projectors, and all the fun things that you'll need for your session and there'll be particular volunteers supporting the sessions, as well. So that should be -- it should be great. And in front of every room is the name of the room and the sessions that are coming up this morning so you can more easily find where you're heading. And we also wanted to let you know about some other folks in the room are transcribers. We're doing live transcription for about half of the sessions at SRCCON which we're really, really excited about. So just wanted to introduce those folks to you. So Stan is actually transcribing this session right now. He's that table over there, typing up here. Allison, do you want to raise your hand to indicate Stan? + + Awesome. And Norma and Lora are over by the door. You'll see these folks in your room and they'll be taking down what people are saying so that we have a record of it and also for accessibility for people outside of the session who weren't able to make it as well. So that's linked up on the site and I think that's about it and I'll turn it over to Erin for a few more details. + +So just an extension on the transcription piece -- we're so psyched to have transcribers here, by the way. They are awesome people. + +[ Applause ] +Just because there are, you know, various kinds of situations where in a session you may want to tell a personal story, you may want to talk about something that's kind of under friend DA, that you don't want necessarily going out, necessarily, in a live transcription over the Internet. That's fine. What we're asking is that you say, "I'm going to take this off the record" which, is the term that we figure y'all already know. Make sure you tell them when to go back on the record. It'll be like the VCR -- I'm old -- and you go off for the commercials. And don't joke around and say, "Don't put this down." Like, the magic words are, "I'm going off the record" and then they'll take it off and then say, "We're back on." So that's happening. And all those transcripts are going to be archived on the sites afterwards. So you'll access to those. I also want to talk a little bit about just some policy stuff. We have a code of conduct. Lots of people have an code of conduct and it's a good thing to have but we wanted to call it out specifically because it's sort of more than fine print for us. We think of it as an expression for a lot of the complex ethics of this community. So it's not just that we don't post outside. You can see it online at srccon.org/conduct. The spirit is, be considerate in your speech and actions to your fellow attendees and actively seek to acknowledge and respect the boundaries of the people that you're hanging out with. Anything else is really midrash. Those are the core things. If you have a problem, if you have a health or safety issue, if you see something that makes you uncomfortable, if you see something that seems to be not in that spirit, there is a number to call that will reach the staff and that is SRCCON-2909. You can also find me, but if you see my arm, you don't need to call the number. You know, if you don't have access to your phone or whatever, grab a volunteer and they'll get one of us. But the thing is we're here to help you. If you have an emergency and someone is bleeding, call 911 first and then call us. But if it's not an actual, like, "emergency services" emergency, let one of us know and we will come help you. For that matter if you're stranded in a room, and you need Post-Its, feel free to call us also, which'll be fun for us, because we'll think someone is bleeding from the head. Another policy think is, just a quick photo policy if you're going to take a group photo -- actually if you're going to take a photo of an identifiable human being, just give a warning to anyone who doesn't want to be photographed. And if someone says, don't post that picture, just honor that request. This is all sort of basic stuff, but sort of pay attention to that. And food, I like to talk about that. A lot of people folks have allergic dietary restrictions. If you know you have something like that, and you haven't told us -- shellfish will kill you or something like that -- let one of us in the blue shirts know. Everything should be labeled so that everyone is safe from food. And sort of related to that if you see something that looks delicious but it's the gluten-free, soy-free, vegan. Don't eat that unless you need to eat it because other people will be hungry instead. If you are observing a fast for Ramadan or anything else just grab one of us, and if there's anything that we can do to accommodate we'll be happy to hold the food for later or whatever for you. And just a note about the building, the stairs just between the two floors we're on go through the museum and you can't have food in the museum so that means, food stays where you get it. If you eat food down here, it stays down here. If you eat food upstairs, coffee, or whatever, it gets eaten upstairs. It can't travel between floors. It's a little weird. But you can't have cupcakes next to the original container that they used to invent Bakelite in, which is kind of tragic. Anything else on the logistics? All right I'm going to turn it back over to you. + +> > One other room logistics or building logistics thing. If you are a mom who needs room to pump, there is one. Let one of us know and we can direct you to how to get into that, because it's actually not in a direct space but it is a designated space for that. So if you need that, we've got that. At Open News we've done a lot of events for a while, and every time we open them, we borrow some rules from our friend and colleague Gunnar. Anyone who knows Gunnar, doesn't know his last name. But he lays out awesome ways of conducting yourself especially in a room like this where every single one of you is so damn brilliant. One is focusing on listening you know we all have things that we want to impart on with each other but don't be the person who hogs up everyone else's opportunity to share their brilliance, as well. Honor the schedule. We are trying our best to honor the schedule, to lead by example. Things happen on time. As Ryan said, they do set alarms in this building. I'm convinced they also flood it with Halon gas. So be sure to honor the schedule so that we can continue on time. Resist the desire to debate, right? It is okay to disagree. It's not okay to take over a session trying to force your opinion down everyone else's throats. And these two, I think, are the most important for an event like this. One is be willing to ask questions and when you're asking those questions, a big one is, all of us come here with an incredible amount of jargon, right? And, it's okay if somebody starts jargoning to say, "I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean when you're talking about how Heartbleed was compromised by Open SSL," or whatever it was that was supposed to come out of my mouth. It's okay to ask questions when you don't understand something. In fact, it's the only thing that you can learn. And finally, talk to people you don't know. We are a community that one of the things that's been interesting to me, leading into this, is how many people said, "Man, I looked at the etherpad that people created of people attending and there's so many people that I think I know but then I realize that I don't actually know." All right, so get to know people, whether you think you know them or you totally don't know them, get to know them this weekend. So looping quickly back to SRCCON. We anticipated a lot of SRCCON. We anticipated that you love coffee and so we have two coffee hacking stations with grinders and scales and seven different ways to brew your coffee and beans beyond belief. We anticipated that you wanted to learn things. We created sessions and times for that. We anticipated that you wanted to have fun, so we created the evening. We did not anticipate that this session -- that this conference was going to sell out in three minutes. And ever since that day, we've worked super hard to live up to that expectation, right, because it's definitely something that all of us were like, "Oh, shit. Now we've really got to have a conference." And we know that the topics that are being discussed over the next two days, whether they're things like CMSs, or security, or the incredible lead for more diversity in this field, that these are topics that are important to journalism. That they're important to the web, and most importantly, they're important to you, right? And we know that because we asked you. Every session at SRCCON was proposed, is being run, and of course is being attended by you, right? But "attend" really isn't the right word. SRCCON is is highly participatory. One of the things that kept coming up when we asked people what this conference should be like was, "I want to just compare notes with people," right? I want to figure out the way that I'm doing things and the way this person's doing things. I want to figure out how we can do those things together, right? These sessions are where your voice is as valuable as the voices of the people that are leading them. So really by signing on here, you've signed on to play the part of sharing your experiences, sharing your knowledge, and really being active in this. And that's really what this conference is about, I think. It's about sharing notes and experiences, and helping each other chart uncharted waters, right? The work that we do in newsrooms is not tested by doing hundreds of years of doing news. It's tested by months, sometimes hours. So whether you've been doing journalism work that's been around for decades or centuries, or one that's been around for a matter of months. We're all kind of feeling our way through this together. And the best way to do that is to work together to find your way, right? Probably also drink a lot of coffee. But working together also to make coffee is a good thing. And so I think it's only appropriate that we actually take a second here -- it's going to take more than a second, spiritual alert -- to get to know each other. So if anyone's been to a food conference we're going to steal their move. Each of you is going to say three things, your name, where you're from, and brief keywords about yourself. And by three, I don't mean paragraphs, I mean words. The way that we're going to do this, we're going to hand two mics. This is one and this is the other one. I'm going to hand it to my colleagues who are going to demonstrate best practices, first. One person will say this, the next person, the next two people at the table will be standing with a mic ready to go. When person one finishes, they will hand their mic to person three, and person two will then, introduce, and person three will be standing and we're going to blow this shit up! So we'll start. I'm person one. I'm Dan Sinker, I'm from Chicago, I'm not moving from Chicago, at least for now. And, goats, tacos, building stuff. +> > I'm Erika, I'm from Philadelphia. Community, blah, and welcome. +> > Erin Kissane, I'm from Brooklyn. Pitch, meat, source articles. +> > I'm Ryan Pitts, I'm from Spokane, Washington. Metadata, beer, and papaya whip. +> > I'm Erika Westerdale (phonetic) and I'm from Minneapolis. Records, events, and sessions. +> > My name is Matt Pogey (phonetic). Code, coffee, and hockey. +> > I'm Mike from Brooklyn. I guess, data, data, and data. +> > And I'm Alexis, I'm from Brooklyn. Design, code, and food. +> > I'm Nick Hasselman (phonetic), I'm coming from Brooklyn. Visualization, data, and cats. +> > I'm Eric Booth (phonetic), Brooklyn. Code, beer, cats. +> > I'm Sarah Viras (phonetic) from New York. Photography, web, and music. +> > I'm Allen Tan, I'm from New York. Design, WebType, and "Community," the TV show. +> > I'm Scott, I'm from Brooklyn. And I, am, sassy. +> > I'm Ally, I'm from D.C. Design, code, sass. +> > I'm Rama (phonetic), I'm from D.C., design, dessert, design. +> > I'm Jason Santamaria (phonetic) from Brooklyn. Books, typography, coffee. +> > I'm David Yee (phonetic). Data space, public space, cheeseburgers. +> > I'm [Inaudible]. Code design, non-existent, cheese emoji. +> > I'm Rebecca, and I'm from Hong Kong. And code, bourbon, and bicycles. +> > Hi, I'm Ryan Mark. I'm in D.C., by way of Chicago, by way of D.C. And making stuff, beer, and music. +> > Hi, I'm Laura Verbato (phonetic). I'm from New York and shipping, awesome, products. +> > And I'm Noah, New York. Internet, Internet, sandwiches. +> > I'm Candice. Tiaras, drag queens, controlled chaos. +> > I'm Brian Jacobs, I'm from New York. Flip, flip, Philadelphia? +> > Hi, I'm Annabelle (phonetic), I'm from New Zealand. Code, coffee, and cake. +> > Hi, I'm Aurelia from Brooklyn. Stats, semantics, and waffles. +> > I'm Gabriella from Uruguay. Code, Internet, and community. +> > Hello, I'm Risdale (phonetic) from Argentina. Hockey, data, and mate. +> > I'm from Ben from D.C. Data, data, eating. +> > I'm Atul (phonetic) from New York. Education, prototyping, and design. +> > I'm Walter from Jakesville, and I'm an open data evangelist. +> > I'm [inaudible] and I'm for open data tools. +> > I'm [inaudible]. I live in Columbia, Missouri. Documents, linguistics, and "what-what." +> > I'm Joe from Chicago, D.ata, learning, language. +> > Kio Stark (phonetic) from Brooklyn. Learning, fiction-writing, and talking to strangers. +> > I'm [inaudible] from Spokane, Washington. Study, sleep, repeat. +> > I'm Missy from Brooklyn. Design, music, and ramen. +> > I'm Lauren from Brooklyn. Design, work, people. +> > Hi, I'm Derek from Washington D.C. Um, high-waisted pants. +> > I'm Derek, from Washington D.C., and I'm going to say, audiences, metrics, and whiskey. +> > I'm Willy Tran. I'm from D.C. as well. Journalism, travel, and pho. +> > I'm Rob Meyer, also from D.C. Words, trees, and emoji. +> > Hi, I'm Allister, I'm from New York and mobile, web, and Indian food. +> > I'm Tyler from D.C. Story, telling, open-source. +> > I'm Jeff from Brooklyn. I'm going on a charm offensive. +> > Hi, I'm Eric, soon to be from Brooklyn. Let's go with functional programming, microfiction, and Halo. +> > I'm Alex from New York. Give, me, subway, tokens. +> > I'm Jeremy. I'm from New York. I love news, transit, and linguistics. +> > Marcos, cold, cold, beer. +> > I'm [inaudible] from Austin. Technology is great but I hate technology, too. +> > My name is Matt Long. I am from Queens. Code, campaign, finance, and I'm very tall. +> > Hi, I'm Allison from London. Visualization, coding, and free-form radio. +> > This is Stan. +> > [ Laughter ] +> > Hi, I'm Ryan Murphy from Austin, Texas. And corgis, bears, and web standards. +> > I'm Erik Reyna, I'm from Texas. Photo-journalism, coding, and barbecue. +> > I'm Mandy, I'm from Brooklyn. Books, booze, and pitbulls. +> > I'm Gary Victor (phonetic), D.C. Weird, build stuff, favorites. +> > I'm Ed. I'm from Jersey City. Design, dot-connecting, and -- +> > [inaudible]. Music, travel and cocktails. +> > I'm Sarah from Brooklyn. I like to ski. And I like sarcasm, journalism, whatever. +> > Hi, I'm Jackie I'm from Brooklyn. Liverpool football, and -- +> > And I'm John from Brooklyn, as well. And, I would say design, type, and LOLCats. +> > Tiffany, I'm also from Brooklyn. Books, beer, and bourbon. +> > Chris, from D.C. Definitely, not, boring. +> > Hi, I'm Jacob Paris from D.C. I guess, code, Twitter, and squirrels. +> > Debby Nosky (phonetic). I'm from Brooklyn via LA. Charts, imposter, syndrome. +> > I'm Michael from Michigan, now New York. Cynical, but, optimistic. +> > I'm Sam from New York. And code, things, and lightbulbs. +> > I'm Ian from Virginia, now, I guess. Open, data, and maps. +> > Matthew Pleasant from Tampa, Florida. Reporting, storytelling. +> > I'm Dan from York, Pennsylvania. Code design, cats, and 0-based axes. +> > Chris Williams, currently Chicago, soon to be D.C. I like bicycling, IPA's, and beer. +> > I'm Tom Meagher. I live in New Jersey. I like beer, soccer, and reporting. +> > My name is Ferguson. Senses, impact, and cycling. +> > Hi, I'm Jeremy. I live in D.C. I like the gout, beer, and I miss Python a lot. +> > Hi, I'm Helen Ubez (phonetic) from Philly. I'm petrified, story-telling, and dogs. +> > Hi, I'm Stan from Belgium. CSS, and news analytics. +> > I'm Andy from D.C. Open-source, community, and CMS. +> > I'm Will Davis. Main issues-based story telling. +> > I'm Michael from New York. CSE rules everything around me. +> > Aaron from New York. Accessibility, open-source, and Yuri Victor Fan Club. +> > Stephanie from Boston. Happy, I'm, here. +> > My name is Russel Heimlich (phonetic). I'm from the Internet. And Reading Rainbow, Thundercats, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. +> > I'm Harry from Seattle. WordPress, soccer, and waking up. +> > I'm Ken Koehler from Washington D.C. And about today, free speech and I could use a nap. +> > Hey there, I'm Justin Myers from Arlington, Virginia by way of Nixon, Missouri. And, making, story-telling, and bourbon. +> > Hey, I'm Davis, I'm from Philly. I like WordPress, history, and beer. +> > My name is Andrew Spill (phonetic). I'm from Portland. Learning, information, and WordPress. +> > I'm Chris Bar (phonetic) from Miami, Florida. Prototypes, philanthropy, and puppies. +> > I'm Silvia, I live in Boston. I like photography, cooking and meetups. +> > I'm Adrian, and I chose adventure, transmedia story-telling, and rock-climbing. +> > I'm Daniel McLachlan and I'm from Boston. I like cities, lists, and spaces. +> > I'm Vijith Assar. Front-end Javascript, back-end Javascript and brewskies. +> > I'm [inaudible]. I'm from Colombia, and living in [inaudible]. Technology, mountains, and good times. +> > I'm Aaron Williams from Oakland by way of San Francisco and I like rap music, Python and pitching your start-up. +> > I'm Sue. I just from LA, I'm hungry, I'm always full, and I like speculative fiction. +> > Arman (phonetic) from Baton Rouge and now, LA. I like bikes, beers, and building things. +> > AmyJo from Pittsburgh. Gardening, history, and public records. +> > Jacob Sanders, also from Pittsburgh. Food and drink, baseball, building shit. +> > I'm Nanali (phonetic) from Queens, New York. User experience design, and -- +> > Chris Kelly from LA. This is freakin' awesome. And thank, you, all. +> > I'm Claire, I'm from D.C. Collaboration, narrative, and how about wine? +> > I'm Alice, also -- Alice from D.C. Maps, making messes, airplanes. +> > I'm Robert from LA. Teeballs, left eye, and -- +> > I'm Helga, originally from LA coming from D.C. Story-telling, code, and history. +> > I'm Yeem (phonetic) from LA, too. Story, Twin Towers, and sausages. +> > I'm Sonia, I'm from D.C. Data, statistics -- +> > Michael from Boston. Design, travel, and wine. +> > Rich from New York. I like magic, unfinished lists... +> > [ Laughter ] +> > Hey, I'm Zack Green from Brooklyn. Storytelling, jokes, weird. +> > Andre from Brooklyn. Visualization, politics, and predictions. +> > I'm Derek Willis from Silverspring, Maryland. Test, match, cricket. +> > Keenan from Brooklyn. I like brightly-colored shoelaces. +> > Reuben from Brooklyn. Mapping, sports, and the outdoors. +> > Hi, Guilding (phonetic). New York, beer, cupcakes, Kindle. +> > Allison from San Diego. Soccer, beaches, and more soccer. +> > Nadia from Brooklyn. Words, graphics and science stuff. +> > I'm Richie from Brooklyn. I like Manhattan sizer accent mojitos (?). +> > Allison from Princeton, New Jersey. Highlighting, statistics, expert [Inaudible]. +> > Brian Brennan from Brooklyn. Humans, feelings, and DHTML. +> > Adam from the Midwest. I don't identify as Midwestern. I like small towns, records, and, let's see, non-profits. +> > Hi, I'm Kaeti Hinck from Minneapolis. I like design, solving problems, and Star Trek-themed Tumblrs. +> > I'm Julia, I live in D.C., and, um, miming? It works... +> > Hi, I'm Tesene Raja (phonetic). Editing, archive, nicer in real life than on Twitter. +> > Hi, I'm Jaya. I live in San Francisco. Hiphop, noodles, and journalism? +> > Hi, I'm Allen from Minneapolis. Open-source all the things, and doughnuts. +> > I'm [inaudible] from Minneapolis, awkward public speaker. +> > Latoya Peterson from Washington D.C. Breaking telephone news and design. +> > I'm Drew Mill from New York. Politics, databases, linguistics. +> > I'm Allen from New York. Code, data, machine learning. +> > Fred Kaimann, from New Jersey. Unexpected, impatient, and Beethoven, or not from Brooklyn. +> > Jessica from Harlem. Travel, building, and pirate +> > Hi, I'm Micaela Fernandez, I'm from Uruguay, but I'm living in Washington D.C. +> > Stanford by way of Washington D.C. What, you, said. +> > Melody, Washington D.C. by way of Philadelphia. Audio, tagging, open-sourcing. +> > Hi, Leon, Toronto. Fiction, history, yeah... +> > Hi, I'm Solani, from Rockville, Maryland. I'm into science, education, and charts. +> > Hi, I'm Tyler Mashado (phonetic). I'm from Massachusetts. I'm into basketball, vinyl, and Googling Javascript questions. +> > I'm Sarah Schneider from Los Angeles. Performance artist, unlikely confluences. +> > I'm Sarah Spire from New York City. My job is Instagram. +> > Rico Roberto. Code, data, and Star Trek. +> > Danielle Alvari (phonetic) from Washington D.C. Mapping, data, Star Trek. +> > I'm Lorie from Chicago. I like stories and weirdoes, and "yes." +> > Hey, I'm Jeff from Philadelphia. Nick Keen movies. +> > Jen Low from Brooklyn via Arizona. Data, communication, and open spaces. +> > I'm Casey Holland from New York. I like systems thinking, free education, and small tools. +> > Pipin Lee from Toronto, Canada. I like teaching code with bad gifs, eh. +> > Is that it? All right. That was 18 minutes and seven seconds. +> > [ Applause ] +> > I think we can do better, so let's do it again. +> > [ Laughter ] +> > Note, you've got 12 minutes until our 11:00 sessions start. That took a while but I think it's super important that everyone gets names attached to their faces. Their names attached to your neck, as well. Again, user guide: Just twist it, and there's the map facing you. But yeah, there's about 12 minutes or so to your session. If you're a session leader, you I want to head up sooner than that and just get your session going. There are waters clearly labeled, session leader waters in the rooms. Those are for you. And yeah they're up on the second floor -- the coffee hacking stations exist. And they are there for you and there's a wonderful coffee guy by the name of Cory who's not making you coffee but he will help you make coffee. And you can help each other as well and have an wonderful, wonderful morning. And Eric has a shout-out. +> > Also one quick thing. There's elevators that go up, as well as the stairwell that's in the museum. So there's a lot of us going up there right now, so use both of those opportunities. +> > Have an wonderful time? There are two, one-hour sessions. Lunch is out in this wonderful historic place. We will see you soon. Have an wonderful time. diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Lightning_Talks.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Lightning_Talks.md index 1edcc794..e5d3b38b 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Lightning_Talks.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Lightning_Talks.md @@ -1,112 +1,108 @@ -Lightning Talks -Session facilitator(s): Alan Palazzolo, Kaeti Hinck -Day & Time: Thursday, 7pm -Room: - ->> Hi, everyone. You're at the lighting talks. We've got a lot to do. I'm just going to assume everyone's here, and if not, since we got limited time, and you know, for sure the short presentations but it's going to take up a fair amount of time. If you could just look at where you are, who's in front of you. That would be awesome. I'm Allen, and this is Katie. ->> Thanks for doing lighting talks. I'll be timing people. I'll give you a warning when you've got one minute left, and at five minutes, you're done. ->> If you have visualize with the computers there's an apple and a VGA hook-up. If you don't have those things, you're going to have to accept that 'cause we don't have too much time to do AV stuff in between. So, I think with that,. ->> Yeah, let's get started. ->> Tyler, take it away. ->> I'm going to talk about what DJ taught me about story telling. ->> So I started DJing in high school... ->> And I had musical talent so I figured DJing -- taking up DJing wasn't going to be all that hard. Technically, DJ's not really that hard. Musically, all a DJ really does is sync tempos of songs, and match the key, or the tonal center of songs. You match two songs together, and suddenly you're DJing. There's more to it than that, but you know, that's the basic art, and computers make this trivially easy, they'll do all the work for you. So my friend Peter and I started talking to the DJ class above us to see if we could start doing some of the parties and they agreed to let us take half of the first parties that we did father-in-law so Peter and I decided to split and a half again. So, night came. I went first, I got set up, I started my set, eager to blow my pierce's minds and no such thing happened. The crowd lingered about 90 seconds through my awkward rap choices and then they shuffled off the dance floor unable to dance to what I was playing. Eventually, the older student, the more experienced DJ dame to me, and said, dude, just play Umbrella. This was 2008. I begrudgingly obliged and everyone came to the dance floor dancing. So my first lesson, pop music is fucking awesome, and like all good stories, a DJ set notes to empathize. So another detail about my boarding school. The 200 students at my school came from about 75 different countries. Needle to say in synthesizing be he began to understand the rhythms much reggaeton, so the bottom bass to bowl wood. My sets started incorporating all these different things and I I communicated -- while they came with their own tastes and inclinations, part of the school's mission and part of my mission as a DJ was to introduce all these other different styles into one cohesive story. This interrogation, and you know, I'm -- integration, I'm still introduction music that they didn't know, that they didn't know how to dance to. But it differed from my original set where I was playing my favorites because playing a bowl wood tune or a reggaeton tune, it impassioned them. It allowed them to tell my story from my decisions. So, you know what about story telling? Story telling and stories are about your audience. You can't tell a story without considering who it is for. Later in life, as a developer and not a DJ, I encountered user centered design and it felt natural because I DJed parties on a hill in New Mexico, thanks. We have Emmy up next. ->> I just have one visual. can I just sneak up on a website? ->> Yeah, you can assuming that I can turn this back on. ->> I don't stand behind podiums. Little too structured for me. Am I on time? So this is going to be super, super fast lighting talk, I believe in the lighting talks. Good afternoon who don't though, I'm the editor in residence at the D school in Stanford, I've incident last ten months basically figuring out what design is, but prior to that, I was an editor at the Washington Post, it was a ferryifyingly structured job. Will she and I thought I had made it. That was my destination. Editor bring 4:30 goal achieved. I was a homeowner, my life was stable. I got an invitation to go to Stanford, to assume this little role of editor in residence. And I thought okay, I'll take a sabbatical. An is he balance cat before 40, mission accomplished and I got there and realized, the destination is not enough. Fly displaced my entire life, moved across the country, and didn't really realize what I had done and can now, I'm going to be in Stanford for another year because I can't imagine just yet going to a newsroom yet. So I -- now I have no notes. I have not repaired anything for this speech. I like to do this with absolutely no preparation whatsoever. Because I just think it's more genuine that way and it's more fun and one of the things that we really believe in at the D school that you're constantly uncomfortable. And in that state of uncomfortableness you can give unforeseen. My job was also to create there is this. I did it with the help of Sarah Sam son who was actually he or she. This was her design and I loved doing this and I loved the bluing and I loved the work. But it's a destination and again, a destination is not enough. I want to create new tools for story telling I want to create new things I want to introduce how we can tell stories differently and in ways where we meet neurotransmitters where they are in process and not when they're done with process. So for me, it's like my entire life has been getting from place to place, destination to destination. I got into high school, I got into college, I even got into graduate school twice. I got a job, I made a blog but now I want a journey but thousand I hope you guys want to come with me. If you want to keep to D let me know and I'll be happy to post you. - - - - - - - What the hell are we doing? This is Stan. I'm norma. So here's what we do. It's very, it's kind of difficult to explain but there's Stan's raw steno coming up on the screen. I wish we could quack I wanted to show you a picture and if you Google, steno keyboard layout, it'll tell you what's on the keys. Rather than typing, it's nothing -- please don't say, "Typings." We are not typing. We are writing steno, more like, it's more like writing chords on a piano than anything like typing. We're writing word-by-word or syllable by syllable, worst comes to absolute worse, we have to write it -- spell it out, you know, letter-by-letter but no, I'd rather die. Stan is very good. And Stan -- your jobs this. But you know, San Francisco can be mobile, he can be in a museum. What we -- we normally do this for deaf and hard of hearing people. So, we, you know, this is opening up doors for a lot of people who want to go to museums, who've been hard of hearing, have not been able to understand what the presentations say. Stan does this sort of stuff. I don't. I just sit in my little chair and do my thing which is enough. When I interviewed Stan, I had a string of ugh, abysmal interviews of just really bad interferes, and uber, they either -- interferes and they either had something wrong with them, and it was either personality but mostly it was skills. -[ Laughter ] -And I mean, you really do have to be a people person. A lot of what we do is -- -[ Laughter ] -We work for college students who are deaf and hard of hearing. That's a lot of what we do. So you really kind of have to have the people part, as well. So when I interviewed Stan, I had been, I was pretty depressed, and he was pretty hot shit. Like, really amazing. And, um, and so okay, I'm interviewing him by Skype and I pulled up, have you ever heard of vi hart? VIhart -But I was once at a conference where they played and I I'm considered pretty okay at the steno game but vih -- and I said, hey, Stan, you know, have you ever heard of vihart, and I said Google her, and he did, and he pulled up a YouTube video and I said, just start listening to this and tell me what do you do well he happened to have his steno machine looked hooked up and we had the same stream text that we used at the conference today and he started writing it, and I went you're hired. He's motiving. He's so fast, and he's just such a natural. And -- and -- and he taught himself steno. That's the most amazing part. This talk wasn't really meant to be all and Stan. It wasn't really meant to be about what we do. It's appeal, you know, you guys are not the only coders. We're coders, as well. Decree, so I've been on a Beltway of a rush lately. A little while appearing, this story came out in New York, there was a tarantula missing in one of the neighborhoods of Brooklyn that I lived in and so I was a little in Brooklyn, and so that sort of, it sort of took me down a path, Mr. I had done this, actually, I had ended up sort of cropping the at a ranch la image so that I would. And did a Google image search which, basically rather than searching for text terms, you can upload an image have have Google match it, which I embarrassingly found out through the show cat fish if anyone's seen that. But it got me thinking. Oh, yeah -- I had not seen this before like five minutes ago. So, um, but then, so it wasn't much longer, not much later actually when the Malaysia airline crash happened. And it was sort of on my mind and it sort of came to a head because this tweet came out that showed footage of the crash of the Malaysiaian airlines and it was actually from the TV show lost and someone photoshopped the Malaysia airlines and actually if you put that into Google images it's abundantly clear that it's actually an actual real image but still it was retweeted 4,000 times. And even before during the World Cup and there's a website called tin eye which actually does something very similar to Google image search ->> They were first. ->> And they were actually the only one. And that was the only one that actually has an API. And I could show, this was sort of an info thing and it didn't work very well. And so there we go. Basically, made a, um, browser plug-in that sort of interfaces are tweet deck that when you load up an image will show you this box underneath any photo on Twitter oof it's done tin eye API search to see if a similar image was found and so this was againen the same day there were no images found, so yeah, that. It's still not guaranteed that it's a genuine image but it's at least a hint that it is. But if you go and look at the lost one after the checks, the first time that this single was seen it was in 2012. It gives a link to that source from 2012 which is on Getty Images. So I'm basically, I'm trying to work out a way to be able to sort of, pool resources, someone's going to have to pay some money at some point but hopefully somebody else can use it somehow. So I'm here talking about this in the hope that some people out there have some bright ideas and want to talk about it. ->> Yes, you should talk to John Ressig because he's actually using it for one of his projects because it was civic-related. ->> You know, I emailed him. And I said, can image I do a non-profit thing. And he said no. ->> You should talk to John Ressig. ->> Well, okay, that's done. -[ Laughter ] ->> But if anyone would feel to talk about it. I think it's something that, it feels very achievable. I think it would be very useful, so yeah. That's that. ->> Great. ->> Do you need visualize? ->> No. ->> Actually maybe I'll draw something on the whiteboard. Can you bring the screen up? Is there Kleenex? I'm going to wipe it off. It's going to pop, like, right around here. Let's see, what else. I think about it. Let's see if I can do a little... ->> One minute. ->> All right, we're waiting. ->> Aww! ->> I remember I did this on Q before. Hold on... ->> Yeah! ->> Whooooo! ->> All right! ->> What? ->> I will note he did that with two seconds left. ->> All right, next up, we have Millie. ->> I'll just... use your computer. ->> Awesome. ->> Ay really have no qualifications to do this, other than to say that I make a pot of rice a lot -- maybe, like, five times a week. how to make a perfect pot of rice. There was kind of this big article in New York Times last week and it was very controversial but it's very easy to make a perfect pot of rice. And as Noah said, ingredients are the more important part. -- most important part. I'm biased, so use whereas minute rice. It's the most fragrant. So as you get your rice, put it in your pot. You'll you'll use the first knuckle of your dissection finger and you'll want -- of your index fingers and you'll want the rice to about your first knuckle and you'll want to rinse the rice. So this part is also very devicive. There's one camp that believes the more you rinse it, the better it is because that's the part when the surface gluten, or the surface starch comes off and the other camp believes at a. I'm in the former camp, wash it until the water's, like, mostly clear. That's maybe 4 inches. You can probably get -- rinses, but you can probably get by with two. Instead of putting your finger down to the bottom of the pot, you'll want it to the top of the rice, and you'll want to fill it again, to the top knuckle. If you grew up, maybe in a western home you might have learned, cooking rice, water's twice. That's another thing but use the finger. And it's foolproof. After that, you'll want to let it boil, don't cover it. And then,and then once it boils, cover it, and put it on for about 15 minutes. And then don't stir, don't touch it. Just let it be. People think that you have to stir it. Just walk away. When you come back, you'll have have an perfect set bowl of rice. The reason that I'm biased towards Jasmine rice is because it burns very well so if you want a crispy underpiece, put it for 20 minutes. And I'm not kidding, burnt rice is a delicacy. And that's how you make a perfect pot of rice. ->> Chris Chang and then Derek? Do you need a visual? ->> No. ->> Do you -- ->> I'm going to start. This is about four sayingings -- two of them are original, maybe two and a half are original, and one I stole off Twitter but they are sayings that I say around the office and they've settled many arguments. First one is, "Do the thing that we've already done unless we can do it lazier." And so this is when you're solving a new problem. If you've already solved it in the past, just reuse the same solution that you did before unless, you know of a way to do it even lazier. So a lot of times there'll be like a -- a lot of fights about, "No we're going to do it this way, or that way. "and in the end, you just pick the one that's laziest. And the other one that I've recently -- the newest one is if you test it -- no, "If you like it, you better put a test on it." Except you don't say it like that. You say it, "If you like it, then you gotta put a test on it..." ->> Yes! ->> But the idea is, there's so many developers, everyone's editing everyone else Oz code, if you accidentally break someone else's code and they didn't write a test for it, it's okay, because... it's like, they didn't care enough about that code to write a test for it, so it's okay, it broke. And the third thing that I say around the office is, "We can definitely suck as much as we want to." The idea is, don't write everything in ourselves. If there's a third-party service with a good API just use that and we'll just use the API to get the data. So, just -- lots of "sucking" around the office. And the office. And the fourth one is a taco bell future. Which is not more of an anaphorism, but what we're working for. Remember in demolition man, can a to bell is the finest restaurant of the future so the idea is, when you ever a huge, monolithic site that we do and you write something and you change CSS2 years from now, and it broke the thing from the past, then, like, that's a problem so the idea, all right, so we'll freeze it just like Sylvester Stallone, and it'll always be in the state that we deployed it. So, we make the app, we launch is, and then, um, soon afterwards, we'll um, archive it. Right now, we use W-get script to archive it to S-3. And then we switch it over so that you're always serving out the frozen version off S-3. There's like a little reverse proxy in front that does that job. And the idea is, if you unfreeze it, and it breaks, then, like you may end up in a world where taco bell is the king of the restaurant industry but that's the world -- that's the risk you take when you freeze something. You can always throw it back in the freezer and work on it again but the idea is that, with the taco bell future, like, apps don't break -[ Laughter ] -Don't let your old data visualizations break because you changed something. That's it. -[ Applause ] ->> After Derek is Frederick. Okay, cool. So I'm here to talk about get rebase. This is not the get rebase talk that you think it is. I'm not here to hate you. I'm here to share a personal story about get rebase. And any diversification that you get from this is not -- there's more here than I thought would be, and that's great. So let's see how you can revise your past in order to change your future. So, I have a website and I, um, you know, it's Monday. And Monday's where we all start, and I knew these -- I put it up on my website because I need to get a new job, and so, I've been fixing on the header, because I've got a header and things. But actually I think I'm going to make a branch as we do. And, and, and I -- I want to look professional, you know on my header. And so I'm just going to change a few quick things because I don't have much time here... to... -[ Laughter ] -Now, it's Wednesday. So Wednesday I decided I needed to do some more work. And so, you know, I have a list of things I need to do, and I'm good at, you know, it's a little out of date and so I need to update that. And so I make a branch as you do. And -- and so, there -- these are things that I'm good at, but no one uses things like check and more, so I'm just going to update that. And you know one thing that I'm really good at right now, you know, I don't know, ruby, whatever. Maybe that'll make me employable. So let's just keep that, and let's just keep that other one. And, and so, and now, it's Friday and so on Friday what I do as all Fridays and what I'm doing today is I go out for drinks and I come back and make commits on get. And, and when I have -- and I have a few drinks, I get crazy. And I get -- a little desperate and I make a terrible, terrible lie. And... and I do something I will regret in the morning. Because I don't know anything about this. And so, it's Saturday morning... and I wake up not remembering anything about the night and all I have is any git history to go by. And I look and I see that something terrible has happened. And I can't just, like, get reset hard, you know? I don't know what I did last night. I'm not capable of anything. You know, I had mind complex systems like, people's lives are on the stake here. But wait... I think. I can create a revisionist history. And so -- and so I smile to myself. And I start to look and see what I'm doing. ->> One minute. ->> And I realize that with this power I can change history. And I -- and I need to remember how this works again. -[ Laughter ] -And I need to take what I did before -[ Laughter ] --- and put it into what I did then and then I need to type in the magic words and I need to just, you know, append a few things here and there. And I know now what I need to do. And... and so I've successfully deleted the evidence. And it's Monday. Thank you. ->> This is a metaphor for journalism today. -[ Laughter ] -And I thought it would be funny. Musical instruments create sound by vibrating columns of air. Most musical instruments are symmetrical like a trumpet or a drum or a bell and when they are, they create a pleasing sound. When that column is created by an instrument that's not symmetric, the sound is terrible so when a bell cracks, it sounds absolutely horrible. That's why, you know, you hear the you don't hear the Liberty Bell sound virtually ever and that's why when this crack happened, you think, they took the Liberty Bell out of service and it came a symbol of America. This bell is two and a half blocks away, that way. I suggest that you go take a look at it. It's in a museum behind glass, a gigantic glass window here so that you can see it any time day or night. Go down and have an look. What you think happened is, this bell was sounded and this crack formed here and then the bell sounded horrible and wasn't used again, that's not true. This is not a crack from the Liberty Bell that made it sound bad. That is a gap that was made by people to fix the crack that happened when the bell was struck the bell was cast in 1752, I believe, and the crack that happened was a hairline crack and the problem with a hairline crack is, when you have a bell like this, the two sides are rubbing up against each other and when that happens, you don't have a symmetric instrument -- air-vibrate be surface. So to eliminate that, people in the colonies drilled out the crack and created this gap and they drilled, drilled, drilled, and drilled up to here. And then they put in these two bolts to hold each side of the Liberty Bell together. So, both sides of the bell would vibrate at the same rate. That was the fix of the Liberty Bell. That's not a crack that's a gap. That gap was then put back into service with the two bolts holding it together. And on the very first strike, to resound the Liberty Bell several hundred years ago, a new crack developed and that crack is still there and it is right up here and it goes like that. And, it was so definitive in compromising the construction of that bell, that it could not be drilled out again because if they did, the whole bell would fall apart. So that's why the bell was taken out of service and the Liberty Bell is not cracked in the way you think it is. It's cracked just a very, very different way and you can see it today. Thank you. -[ Applause ] ->> Um, so before I start, I want to do a Pro Bono applaud for the foodies' room, they have enough liquor for everyone in this room. So, so much -- yeah, they lied. It's not food.... there but before I start, the background of my talk is that I'm a designer, a front-end developer working at a tech company. - Shit... - ->> So while that warms up, so I work at a newspaper. And we have a problem of actually publishing the stories that we've worked on, like, how do we get our interactive projects onto S-3 which is a weird problem because it's a very simple way to think. It's not a like a rails app where you have to have this system but we have this issue we're publishing all these flat projects and we want to make sure that exactly what's published is exactly what's on our GitHub repo and it's all synced up and all that. So I built this thing called kestral and I want to talk about it because I want to see if it's helpful to other people and it has some bugs in it, and I wanted to see we wanted to work on it. So here's your website. It looks like this. It was loaded on, like, local host. It looks like that. There she so what you do, all the commands start with swoop 'cause it's like a bird that watches your repo and when it changes, it reflects your changes. So it has a few components, so you go like swoop in it, and then that will create a GitHub repo. This was here, like, on a-jam kestral test. So we have done this before. And now it exists and it's empty and it created a web room. So we're going to have, like, a server that's going to watch this GitHub repo and then update changes and so we have initialize git, so it initialized repo. It set the origin to the thing. And it's repeated and repeated. And once it pushes we create the search here. There she so let's just add everything and do init and then we'll push here. Wait for that to go. So you can see it's all here. And the second part of it, so that's like the can liner face. There she so the second part of it is, the server you have here running. Pay no attention to the IP address. It's behind a and you can check out, like, my branch, any commit level. Pretty informal. If you then wanted to publish it, you would do swoop, deploy -- spell it correctly. And it would ask you, like, if you wanted to go to the staging server, or the abrupt server, it goes to, like, different s-3 buckets. Staging particular so you can either do syncing or overwrite. So something's wrong with the S3 server and then you do sync. So how it works it reads the commit messages that it pushes to GitHub for a particular string that you set and if that sets. It syncs it to s3, and if not, it's just just a normal commit,. ->> Over an hour and a half during the opening, this was part of a larger show, so at the opening reception for the show, I performed just the departures that happened just in that specific hour familiar from O'Hare, correct me if I'm wrong logically, all with a handwritingly cheat sheet. Chronological. ->> Wool wire and string that took up about the length of this room over a month in a museum space. And plotted it to one side of map of Internet access which I found IP addresses and also, Internet exchange points and physically drew them with little shiny mylar dots and then hand-drawn circles for different percentages of IPO much of address allocation on a map on one side of the wall, on the other side, I had a text array map of all the popular searches from Google something like that Geist and Twitter zeitgeist and Twitter. And I have other ones that are more data driven. The other one I made the universe using thousands of tiny metal nets. And also, I like to use mirrors a lot to play with your sense of space. I had a totally dark mirror on a dark floor. And I was simulating universes over and over again to kind of think about the scientific method and the intense effort and the stamina and vision of running an experiment over and over again to try and figure something out. And the audience could also walk into the universe in between shifts. I do that one for about three hours at a time. They're very labor speeches. They are very visual. They intensive. They're super esoteric to most people. So my work gives them, like, a direct material, spatial, and oftentimes, an experience of that so that's kind of to turn it into a direct, interpretive experience rather than an abstraction, three levels removed experience for them. So that's kind of my spiel. And this is almost done, it's just going to do a couple of different pans. Now I'm learning to code because it's really, really ridiculous to be hand-compiling large amounts of data. And I'm really glad to be here, thank you. ->> Okay, this is going to be exciting, hopefully. This is mainly going to be me trying to tell you about part of my linguistics degree that I haven't done in ten years, so we'll see how this goes. So, most people are familiar with English, presumably here in this room. Most people probably aren't familiar with the lamda calculus how many people in the room radio? Most people in the room, either programming languages like lisp, or Javascript, or things like they've read the Wikipedia page on what the y-compenator is, so it's not an angel investment thing. It's -- so lamdas are typically marked with so you'll see something like this. And we're going to explain this using plain English. Now the interesting parts about what -- what linguistics introduced in the 80s is -- figured out in the 80s is you can actually represent English using logical formalisms so that allows you -- so the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Okay, so most of us have been through exercises where you have to diagram sentences and figure out what the internal structure is. Now, the -- so everybody's seen, you know, charts that look kind of like this that denote what the structure of the sentence ends up being. And, um, the kind of neat thing that you can actually do is figure out, like, so how does the structure of the sentence actually match up with the meaning, right? There are pieces within here, that, you can kind of conceptually see and you can swap out. And so we can say the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy cat. And, um, you can actually think about all -- you can break up all of these sentences into smaller chunks and actually represent individual pieces. So, you know, the world is represented, so it has a whole bunch of different things in it but we can categorize them down into smaller pieces, right, dogs are not the same as foxes. You can represent all the things in the world as a set and you can actually talk about dogs as an individual subset of all of the set of things. But they can you can also say, you can restrict the all the possible dogs to lazy dogs and you want to be able to represent each one of these pieces as a higher-level thing. So, um, one of the things that you can do if you want to try and represent both the structure and the meanings of these sentences. Everybody knows, like, okay, a dog is a common noun. You can talk about the lazy dog as a noun phrase and, one of the ways that you can kind of intuitively think about lamdas is actually as basically modifiers on top of the set of all the things. So, a dog is a -- dogs were a set of things in the world. You can talk about, um, lazy dogs and, the lazy dog as a higher-level structure. So, um, if you imagine the set of all things as dogs you can actually say -- you can actually start talking about adjectives as modifiers on top of the set of dogs. So you can say something like x, lazy x. And then, apply that, specifically to a dog, okay? So, what this means is, you've got a set of things that are dogs and now you can denote the way the set of lazy dogs. In this particular case, if you think of dogs as a set of objects, what this function basically -- you can describe lazy as a function on all the dogs. So now, you can talk about "lazy" as a single object. And, it's got a particular type, right. It takes dog as a particular input and denotes a particular set of objects so now the interesting part about this is, is now if I want to say the extremely lazy dog, what does that actually mean, right? So we can represent "extremely" as a lamda function that takes adjectives and says, "Extremely," "extremely P." So the interesting part now is we can also take extremely and apply it to quick. You can talk about adverbs as a function on top of adjectives that take dogs or some sort of noun as an argument so you can represent each one of the pieces in the sentence as a function that, eventually maps down to nouns and real things in the world. So when you look at a sentence like this, you can actually say, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog -- does that actually match a set ever circumstances in the world? If I were to put the quick brown unicorn jumped over the lazy dog, we can say definitively that that sentence is not true because unicorns aren't things that exist in the world. ->> Ooh! ->> All right. ->> Controversial! ->> Is that it? ->> Yup. -[ Applause ] ->> We have Lorie, and then Michael and then Brian are the last ones. ->> You killed it, unicorn! ->> More than one. There's a reason I'm a programmer. ->> Well, that's a nice segue right there. ->> I want to thank you. And challenge... ->> I am a data scientist and I am from Chicago. -[ Laughter ] - My talk is unicorn bootcamp, you want me to teach what to who, and how long to whom, excuse me. ->> So yeah, I was a social/numeral scientist and I didn't want to be an academic anymore and I found out about data scientist and I said, can I be one and they said yes. And I said, what she I start doing. And I started learning some stuff a lot of people and it used to be way easier to learn stuff when I started teaching people and then I started the idea of a data boot camp and they said yes, and I immediately said, oh, crap. So we've been designing a data science boot camp and it's from a company called Kaplan Medis and it's going to be this fall in New York City applications are open, and it's really exciting. But we wanted to find out what the heck to and the reason that I wanted to become a data scientist was because I wanted to do cool stuff with fewer restrictions and that's what we do in principle with our company and this will hopefully be not an exception if we manage to pull it off. So we had to figure out what to do. So we've got 12 weeks to train people to be data scientists and another thing I like is not being bored. So, that was another principle we brought. So what kind of data boot camp not bore me as a hypothetical student and will not bore me as an instructor and also if I'm training someone, if I think of training, I think of repetition what are we going to repeat to train people to become data scientists, you know, that we want to hire at the end of two weeks. So we thought of what you would do on the jobs. So he made that into the class. So we made this model. What is a data scientist, what is a data science project and I think the common things that people think about are what are the imprisonments, the machinery -- algorithms, what data are you going to do it to, and what tools are you going to do it in. You mean, those are great but that's not the whole thing and it's not even the parts that are frequently the parts that are most exciting to me. You have to know what question you're answering and that the the thing that you're doing is going to answer the question that you're asking. And the people that you're communicated that to have done what -- and that's what a project is. So we took those 12 weeks, and again, we gave them code names. Again, don't bore yourself. So we said TV detectives, we can think of a lot of them and that's our final class. So we started, like, with a simple one and we started getting more complicated and students get more independent. By the last one it's like the passion project and with each of those ones. And so far I'm like this sounds pretty cool and so we presented that to the client and they said great, so who can take your course? You know? Data scientists? Grow them into real ones and you know, we have to make a press release. You have to market this thing. I mean like who is our audience and I was, like, God this is hard. So I love -- what I love about my job is we come from different backgrounds, you know? It's not a bunch of -- we didn't all come from the same program. We're all bringing perspectives to a problem and it's fun. So I was, like, so, how inclusive we be? How can I responsibly say, if you're excited, if you do this job, I think you can get there in these 12 weeks. So we had to think about what are those what do you have to end up with at the end? What do data scientists have that make them data scientists? So we made another model and we had to carve the unicorn and so we came up with this model. I don't know if you can see it, but kind of, like, three, skills-based, and kind of like three, personality-based components of being a data scientist. So you have to -- it's a code -- sorry. Everybody -- gotta be able to write some code. You need to be able to do statistics and machine learning and, um, communication. So, talking about what you did. There are people who can code, some crazy stats and explain to someone exactly as smart as them, or more smart what they have done but if they have to explain it to their aunt, it might not be that comfortable or productive. There she so communication's a big deal. And, um, authorized to get there, in order to do the job well, I think that you have to be creative. You know, you have to be able to fit solutions to problems. You have to be in a new situation and make something up, and make a lot of stuff up. You have to be curious because all of this stuff is way too painful if you're not driven to find out what the answer is, kind of internally. And, you have to have grit because again all this stuff hurts and you have to ticking on, and if you don't know what's ticking. You have to Google stuff in front of people, and say you don't know. So, that is what we came up with. So at the end, that was the end. So, that's our data science boot camp, and so we were looking for people that can show us that they have the capacity for these skill set so you need to bring us a little bit of proof. We've made some heuristics on how much programming and how much statistics. But are you going to hit the ground running with us? And is this what you really want to do or is this the sexist career of the 21st century with a nice paycheck attached so with this we want to do. ->> Z not boring, and useful. And it helps me to talk about it with people like you. So thank you so much for listening. ->> While there's switchover happening, I think you're coming close to finishing, yeah? ->> This is the last one. ->> Man, I'm psychic. I knew you should come in. ->> Once you guys are done. You're welcome to head downstairs. There's still ice cream, and beer and fun to be had until 9:00. And so when you're done, head on down but it seems to have been fantastic and I know these are -- ->> Hi, I'm Michael, oh, wait, no -- I'm Brian. Cheers. So this is going to be interesting. I'm Brian, this is Michael. We do this thing called CSV sound system and we've done this for two years, people meeting up for programming. And and every week we send out an email, and every email is kind of a Weird Al, yankovic coding nerdy sense. There she and an example of this has been the Fresh Prince of my MacBook Air. Pulps, comma, people, any others? ->> I want to hack with somebody? ->> When you hear this. ->> And but the one we always come back to is our favorite by our namesake, LCD Sound System, which is snowfall, I love you, but you're bringing me down at me and so tonight we are going to sing this for you. We are hoping that you will sing along. And you know -- if you know the. ->> LEE: ->> We couldn't program the bouncing ball in time 'cause we had -- ->> But we've never done this before outside of the context of me singing Michael to sleep. ->> These are the lyrics. ->> Brian programmed the song earlier today, and we're going to program that, as background accompaniment because there was no karaoke please join us. ->> +Lightning Talks +Session facilitator(s): Alan Palazzolo, Kaeti Hinck +Day & Time: Thursday, 7pm +Room: + +> > Hi, everyone. You're at the lighting talks. We've got a lot to do. I'm just going to assume everyone's here, and if not, since we got limited time, and you know, for sure the short presentations but it's going to take up a fair amount of time. If you could just look at where you are, who's in front of you. That would be awesome. I'm Allen, and this is Katie. +> > Thanks for doing lighting talks. I'll be timing people. I'll give you a warning when you've got one minute left, and at five minutes, you're done. +> > If you have visualize with the computers there's an apple and a VGA hook-up. If you don't have those things, you're going to have to accept that 'cause we don't have too much time to do AV stuff in between. So, I think with that,. +> > Yeah, let's get started. +> > Tyler, take it away. +> > I'm going to talk about what DJ taught me about story telling. +> > So I started DJing in high school... +> > And I had musical talent so I figured DJing -- taking up DJing wasn't going to be all that hard. Technically, DJ's not really that hard. Musically, all a DJ really does is sync tempos of songs, and match the key, or the tonal center of songs. You match two songs together, and suddenly you're DJing. There's more to it than that, but you know, that's the basic art, and computers make this trivially easy, they'll do all the work for you. So my friend Peter and I started talking to the DJ class above us to see if we could start doing some of the parties and they agreed to let us take half of the first parties that we did father-in-law so Peter and I decided to split and a half again. So, night came. I went first, I got set up, I started my set, eager to blow my pierce's minds and no such thing happened. The crowd lingered about 90 seconds through my awkward rap choices and then they shuffled off the dance floor unable to dance to what I was playing. Eventually, the older student, the more experienced DJ dame to me, and said, dude, just play Umbrella. This was 2008. I begrudgingly obliged and everyone came to the dance floor dancing. So my first lesson, pop music is fucking awesome, and like all good stories, a DJ set notes to empathize. So another detail about my boarding school. The 200 students at my school came from about 75 different countries. Needle to say in synthesizing be he began to understand the rhythms much reggaeton, so the bottom bass to bowl wood. My sets started incorporating all these different things and I I communicated -- while they came with their own tastes and inclinations, part of the school's mission and part of my mission as a DJ was to introduce all these other different styles into one cohesive story. This interrogation, and you know, I'm -- integration, I'm still introduction music that they didn't know, that they didn't know how to dance to. But it differed from my original set where I was playing my favorites because playing a bowl wood tune or a reggaeton tune, it impassioned them. It allowed them to tell my story from my decisions. So, you know what about story telling? Story telling and stories are about your audience. You can't tell a story without considering who it is for. Later in life, as a developer and not a DJ, I encountered user centered design and it felt natural because I DJed parties on a hill in New Mexico, thanks. We have Emmy up next. +> > I just have one visual. can I just sneak up on a website? +> > Yeah, you can assuming that I can turn this back on. +> > I don't stand behind podiums. Little too structured for me. Am I on time? So this is going to be super, super fast lighting talk, I believe in the lighting talks. Good afternoon who don't though, I'm the editor in residence at the D school in Stanford, I've incident last ten months basically figuring out what design is, but prior to that, I was an editor at the Washington Post, it was a ferryifyingly structured job. Will she and I thought I had made it. That was my destination. Editor bring 4:30 goal achieved. I was a homeowner, my life was stable. I got an invitation to go to Stanford, to assume this little role of editor in residence. And I thought okay, I'll take a sabbatical. An is he balance cat before 40, mission accomplished and I got there and realized, the destination is not enough. Fly displaced my entire life, moved across the country, and didn't really realize what I had done and can now, I'm going to be in Stanford for another year because I can't imagine just yet going to a newsroom yet. So I -- now I have no notes. I have not repaired anything for this speech. I like to do this with absolutely no preparation whatsoever. Because I just think it's more genuine that way and it's more fun and one of the things that we really believe in at the D school that you're constantly uncomfortable. And in that state of uncomfortableness you can give unforeseen. My job was also to create there is this. I did it with the help of Sarah Sam son who was actually he or she. This was her design and I loved doing this and I loved the bluing and I loved the work. But it's a destination and again, a destination is not enough. I want to create new tools for story telling I want to create new things I want to introduce how we can tell stories differently and in ways where we meet neurotransmitters where they are in process and not when they're done with process. So for me, it's like my entire life has been getting from place to place, destination to destination. I got into high school, I got into college, I even got into graduate school twice. I got a job, I made a blog but now I want a journey but thousand I hope you guys want to come with me. If you want to keep to D let me know and I'll be happy to post you. + +What the hell are we doing? This is Stan. I'm norma. So here's what we do. It's very, it's kind of difficult to explain but there's Stan's raw steno coming up on the screen. I wish we could quack I wanted to show you a picture and if you Google, steno keyboard layout, it'll tell you what's on the keys. Rather than typing, it's nothing -- please don't say, "Typings." We are not typing. We are writing steno, more like, it's more like writing chords on a piano than anything like typing. We're writing word-by-word or syllable by syllable, worst comes to absolute worse, we have to write it -- spell it out, you know, letter-by-letter but no, I'd rather die. Stan is very good. And Stan -- your jobs this. But you know, San Francisco can be mobile, he can be in a museum. What we -- we normally do this for deaf and hard of hearing people. So, we, you know, this is opening up doors for a lot of people who want to go to museums, who've been hard of hearing, have not been able to understand what the presentations say. Stan does this sort of stuff. I don't. I just sit in my little chair and do my thing which is enough. When I interviewed Stan, I had a string of ugh, abysmal interviews of just really bad interferes, and uber, they either -- interferes and they either had something wrong with them, and it was either personality but mostly it was skills. +[ Laughter ] +And I mean, you really do have to be a people person. A lot of what we do is -- +[ Laughter ] +We work for college students who are deaf and hard of hearing. That's a lot of what we do. So you really kind of have to have the people part, as well. So when I interviewed Stan, I had been, I was pretty depressed, and he was pretty hot shit. Like, really amazing. And, um, and so okay, I'm interviewing him by Skype and I pulled up, have you ever heard of vi hart? VIhart +But I was once at a conference where they played and I I'm considered pretty okay at the steno game but vih -- and I said, hey, Stan, you know, have you ever heard of vihart, and I said Google her, and he did, and he pulled up a YouTube video and I said, just start listening to this and tell me what do you do well he happened to have his steno machine looked hooked up and we had the same stream text that we used at the conference today and he started writing it, and I went you're hired. He's motiving. He's so fast, and he's just such a natural. And -- and -- and he taught himself steno. That's the most amazing part. This talk wasn't really meant to be all and Stan. It wasn't really meant to be about what we do. It's appeal, you know, you guys are not the only coders. We're coders, as well. Decree, so I've been on a Beltway of a rush lately. A little while appearing, this story came out in New York, there was a tarantula missing in one of the neighborhoods of Brooklyn that I lived in and so I was a little in Brooklyn, and so that sort of, it sort of took me down a path, Mr. I had done this, actually, I had ended up sort of cropping the at a ranch la image so that I would. And did a Google image search which, basically rather than searching for text terms, you can upload an image have have Google match it, which I embarrassingly found out through the show cat fish if anyone's seen that. But it got me thinking. Oh, yeah -- I had not seen this before like five minutes ago. So, um, but then, so it wasn't much longer, not much later actually when the Malaysia airline crash happened. And it was sort of on my mind and it sort of came to a head because this tweet came out that showed footage of the crash of the Malaysiaian airlines and it was actually from the TV show lost and someone photoshopped the Malaysia airlines and actually if you put that into Google images it's abundantly clear that it's actually an actual real image but still it was retweeted 4,000 times. And even before during the World Cup and there's a website called tin eye which actually does something very similar to Google image search + +> > They were first. +> > And they were actually the only one. And that was the only one that actually has an API. And I could show, this was sort of an info thing and it didn't work very well. And so there we go. Basically, made a, um, browser plug-in that sort of interfaces are tweet deck that when you load up an image will show you this box underneath any photo on Twitter oof it's done tin eye API search to see if a similar image was found and so this was againen the same day there were no images found, so yeah, that. It's still not guaranteed that it's a genuine image but it's at least a hint that it is. But if you go and look at the lost one after the checks, the first time that this single was seen it was in 2012. It gives a link to that source from 2012 which is on Getty Images. So I'm basically, I'm trying to work out a way to be able to sort of, pool resources, someone's going to have to pay some money at some point but hopefully somebody else can use it somehow. So I'm here talking about this in the hope that some people out there have some bright ideas and want to talk about it. +> > Yes, you should talk to John Ressig because he's actually using it for one of his projects because it was civic-related. +> > You know, I emailed him. And I said, can image I do a non-profit thing. And he said no. +> > You should talk to John Ressig. +> > Well, okay, that's done. +> > [ Laughter ] +> > But if anyone would feel to talk about it. I think it's something that, it feels very achievable. I think it would be very useful, so yeah. That's that. +> > Great. +> > Do you need visualize? +> > No. +> > Actually maybe I'll draw something on the whiteboard. Can you bring the screen up? Is there Kleenex? I'm going to wipe it off. It's going to pop, like, right around here. Let's see, what else. I think about it. Let's see if I can do a little... +> > One minute. +> > All right, we're waiting. +> > Aww! +> > I remember I did this on Q before. Hold on... +> > Yeah! +> > Whooooo! +> > All right! +> > What? +> > I will note he did that with two seconds left. +> > All right, next up, we have Millie. +> > I'll just... use your computer. +> > Awesome. +> > Ay really have no qualifications to do this, other than to say that I make a pot of rice a lot -- maybe, like, five times a week. how to make a perfect pot of rice. There was kind of this big article in New York Times last week and it was very controversial but it's very easy to make a perfect pot of rice. And as Noah said, ingredients are the more important part. -- most important part. I'm biased, so use whereas minute rice. It's the most fragrant. So as you get your rice, put it in your pot. You'll you'll use the first knuckle of your dissection finger and you'll want -- of your index fingers and you'll want the rice to about your first knuckle and you'll want to rinse the rice. So this part is also very devicive. There's one camp that believes the more you rinse it, the better it is because that's the part when the surface gluten, or the surface starch comes off and the other camp believes at a. I'm in the former camp, wash it until the water's, like, mostly clear. That's maybe 4 inches. You can probably get -- rinses, but you can probably get by with two. Instead of putting your finger down to the bottom of the pot, you'll want it to the top of the rice, and you'll want to fill it again, to the top knuckle. If you grew up, maybe in a western home you might have learned, cooking rice, water's twice. That's another thing but use the finger. And it's foolproof. After that, you'll want to let it boil, don't cover it. And then,and then once it boils, cover it, and put it on for about 15 minutes. And then don't stir, don't touch it. Just let it be. People think that you have to stir it. Just walk away. When you come back, you'll have have an perfect set bowl of rice. The reason that I'm biased towards Jasmine rice is because it burns very well so if you want a crispy underpiece, put it for 20 minutes. And I'm not kidding, burnt rice is a delicacy. And that's how you make a perfect pot of rice. +> > Chris Chang and then Derek? Do you need a visual? +> > No. +> > Do you -- +> > I'm going to start. This is about four sayingings -- two of them are original, maybe two and a half are original, and one I stole off Twitter but they are sayings that I say around the office and they've settled many arguments. First one is, "Do the thing that we've already done unless we can do it lazier." And so this is when you're solving a new problem. If you've already solved it in the past, just reuse the same solution that you did before unless, you know of a way to do it even lazier. So a lot of times there'll be like a -- a lot of fights about, "No we're going to do it this way, or that way. "and in the end, you just pick the one that's laziest. And the other one that I've recently -- the newest one is if you test it -- no, "If you like it, you better put a test on it." Except you don't say it like that. You say it, "If you like it, then you gotta put a test on it..." +> > Yes! +> > But the idea is, there's so many developers, everyone's editing everyone else Oz code, if you accidentally break someone else's code and they didn't write a test for it, it's okay, because... it's like, they didn't care enough about that code to write a test for it, so it's okay, it broke. And the third thing that I say around the office is, "We can definitely suck as much as we want to." The idea is, don't write everything in ourselves. If there's a third-party service with a good API just use that and we'll just use the API to get the data. So, just -- lots of "sucking" around the office. And the office. And the fourth one is a taco bell future. Which is not more of an anaphorism, but what we're working for. Remember in demolition man, can a to bell is the finest restaurant of the future so the idea is, when you ever a huge, monolithic site that we do and you write something and you change CSS2 years from now, and it broke the thing from the past, then, like, that's a problem so the idea, all right, so we'll freeze it just like Sylvester Stallone, and it'll always be in the state that we deployed it. So, we make the app, we launch is, and then, um, soon afterwards, we'll um, archive it. Right now, we use W-get script to archive it to S-3. And then we switch it over so that you're always serving out the frozen version off S-3. There's like a little reverse proxy in front that does that job. And the idea is, if you unfreeze it, and it breaks, then, like you may end up in a world where taco bell is the king of the restaurant industry but that's the world -- that's the risk you take when you freeze something. You can always throw it back in the freezer and work on it again but the idea is that, with the taco bell future, like, apps don't break +> > [ Laughter ] +> > Don't let your old data visualizations break because you changed something. That's it. +> > [ Applause ] +> > After Derek is Frederick. Okay, cool. So I'm here to talk about get rebase. This is not the get rebase talk that you think it is. I'm not here to hate you. I'm here to share a personal story about get rebase. And any diversification that you get from this is not -- there's more here than I thought would be, and that's great. So let's see how you can revise your past in order to change your future. So, I have a website and I, um, you know, it's Monday. And Monday's where we all start, and I knew these -- I put it up on my website because I need to get a new job, and so, I've been fixing on the header, because I've got a header and things. But actually I think I'm going to make a branch as we do. And, and, and I -- I want to look professional, you know on my header. And so I'm just going to change a few quick things because I don't have much time here... to... +> > [ Laughter ] +> > Now, it's Wednesday. So Wednesday I decided I needed to do some more work. And so, you know, I have a list of things I need to do, and I'm good at, you know, it's a little out of date and so I need to update that. And so I make a branch as you do. And -- and so, there -- these are things that I'm good at, but no one uses things like check and more, so I'm just going to update that. And you know one thing that I'm really good at right now, you know, I don't know, ruby, whatever. Maybe that'll make me employable. So let's just keep that, and let's just keep that other one. And, and so, and now, it's Friday and so on Friday what I do as all Fridays and what I'm doing today is I go out for drinks and I come back and make commits on get. And, and when I have -- and I have a few drinks, I get crazy. And I get -- a little desperate and I make a terrible, terrible lie. And... and I do something I will regret in the morning. Because I don't know anything about this. And so, it's Saturday morning... and I wake up not remembering anything about the night and all I have is any git history to go by. And I look and I see that something terrible has happened. And I can't just, like, get reset hard, you know? I don't know what I did last night. I'm not capable of anything. You know, I had mind complex systems like, people's lives are on the stake here. But wait... I think. I can create a revisionist history. And so -- and so I smile to myself. And I start to look and see what I'm doing. +> > One minute. +> > And I realize that with this power I can change history. And I -- and I need to remember how this works again. +> > [ Laughter ] +> > And I need to take what I did before +> > [ Laughter ] +> > -- and put it into what I did then and then I need to type in the magic words and I need to just, you know, append a few things here and there. And I know now what I need to do. And... and so I've successfully deleted the evidence. And it's Monday. Thank you. +> > This is a metaphor for journalism today. +> > [ Laughter ] +> > And I thought it would be funny. Musical instruments create sound by vibrating columns of air. Most musical instruments are symmetrical like a trumpet or a drum or a bell and when they are, they create a pleasing sound. When that column is created by an instrument that's not symmetric, the sound is terrible so when a bell cracks, it sounds absolutely horrible. That's why, you know, you hear the you don't hear the Liberty Bell sound virtually ever and that's why when this crack happened, you think, they took the Liberty Bell out of service and it came a symbol of America. This bell is two and a half blocks away, that way. I suggest that you go take a look at it. It's in a museum behind glass, a gigantic glass window here so that you can see it any time day or night. Go down and have an look. What you think happened is, this bell was sounded and this crack formed here and then the bell sounded horrible and wasn't used again, that's not true. This is not a crack from the Liberty Bell that made it sound bad. That is a gap that was made by people to fix the crack that happened when the bell was struck the bell was cast in 1752, I believe, and the crack that happened was a hairline crack and the problem with a hairline crack is, when you have a bell like this, the two sides are rubbing up against each other and when that happens, you don't have a symmetric instrument -- air-vibrate be surface. So to eliminate that, people in the colonies drilled out the crack and created this gap and they drilled, drilled, drilled, and drilled up to here. And then they put in these two bolts to hold each side of the Liberty Bell together. So, both sides of the bell would vibrate at the same rate. That was the fix of the Liberty Bell. That's not a crack that's a gap. That gap was then put back into service with the two bolts holding it together. And on the very first strike, to resound the Liberty Bell several hundred years ago, a new crack developed and that crack is still there and it is right up here and it goes like that. And, it was so definitive in compromising the construction of that bell, that it could not be drilled out again because if they did, the whole bell would fall apart. So that's why the bell was taken out of service and the Liberty Bell is not cracked in the way you think it is. It's cracked just a very, very different way and you can see it today. Thank you. +> > [ Applause ] +> > Um, so before I start, I want to do a Pro Bono applaud for the foodies' room, they have enough liquor for everyone in this room. So, so much -- yeah, they lied. It's not food.... there but before I start, the background of my talk is that I'm a designer, a front-end developer working at a tech company. + + Shit... + +> > So while that warms up, so I work at a newspaper. And we have a problem of actually publishing the stories that we've worked on, like, how do we get our interactive projects onto S-3 which is a weird problem because it's a very simple way to think. It's not a like a rails app where you have to have this system but we have this issue we're publishing all these flat projects and we want to make sure that exactly what's published is exactly what's on our GitHub repo and it's all synced up and all that. So I built this thing called kestral and I want to talk about it because I want to see if it's helpful to other people and it has some bugs in it, and I wanted to see we wanted to work on it. So here's your website. It looks like this. It was loaded on, like, local host. It looks like that. There she so what you do, all the commands start with swoop 'cause it's like a bird that watches your repo and when it changes, it reflects your changes. So it has a few components, so you go like swoop in it, and then that will create a GitHub repo. This was here, like, on a-jam kestral test. So we have done this before. And now it exists and it's empty and it created a web room. So we're going to have, like, a server that's going to watch this GitHub repo and then update changes and so we have initialize git, so it initialized repo. It set the origin to the thing. And it's repeated and repeated. And once it pushes we create the search here. There she so let's just add everything and do init and then we'll push here. Wait for that to go. So you can see it's all here. And the second part of it, so that's like the can liner face. There she so the second part of it is, the server you have here running. Pay no attention to the IP address. It's behind a and you can check out, like, my branch, any commit level. Pretty informal. If you then wanted to publish it, you would do swoop, deploy -- spell it correctly. And it would ask you, like, if you wanted to go to the staging server, or the abrupt server, it goes to, like, different s-3 buckets. Staging particular so you can either do syncing or overwrite. So something's wrong with the S3 server and then you do sync. So how it works it reads the commit messages that it pushes to GitHub for a particular string that you set and if that sets. It syncs it to s3, and if not, it's just just a normal commit,. +> > Over an hour and a half during the opening, this was part of a larger show, so at the opening reception for the show, I performed just the departures that happened just in that specific hour familiar from O'Hare, correct me if I'm wrong logically, all with a handwritingly cheat sheet. Chronological. +> > Wool wire and string that took up about the length of this room over a month in a museum space. And plotted it to one side of map of Internet access which I found IP addresses and also, Internet exchange points and physically drew them with little shiny mylar dots and then hand-drawn circles for different percentages of IPO much of address allocation on a map on one side of the wall, on the other side, I had a text array map of all the popular searches from Google something like that Geist and Twitter zeitgeist and Twitter. And I have other ones that are more data driven. The other one I made the universe using thousands of tiny metal nets. And also, I like to use mirrors a lot to play with your sense of space. I had a totally dark mirror on a dark floor. And I was simulating universes over and over again to kind of think about the scientific method and the intense effort and the stamina and vision of running an experiment over and over again to try and figure something out. And the audience could also walk into the universe in between shifts. I do that one for about three hours at a time. They're very labor speeches. They are very visual. They intensive. They're super esoteric to most people. So my work gives them, like, a direct material, spatial, and oftentimes, an experience of that so that's kind of to turn it into a direct, interpretive experience rather than an abstraction, three levels removed experience for them. So that's kind of my spiel. And this is almost done, it's just going to do a couple of different pans. Now I'm learning to code because it's really, really ridiculous to be hand-compiling large amounts of data. And I'm really glad to be here, thank you. +> > Okay, this is going to be exciting, hopefully. This is mainly going to be me trying to tell you about part of my linguistics degree that I haven't done in ten years, so we'll see how this goes. So, most people are familiar with English, presumably here in this room. Most people probably aren't familiar with the lamda calculus how many people in the room radio? Most people in the room, either programming languages like lisp, or Javascript, or things like they've read the Wikipedia page on what the y-compenator is, so it's not an angel investment thing. It's -- so lamdas are typically marked with so you'll see something like this. And we're going to explain this using plain English. Now the interesting parts about what -- what linguistics introduced in the 80s is -- figured out in the 80s is you can actually represent English using logical formalisms so that allows you -- so the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Okay, so most of us have been through exercises where you have to diagram sentences and figure out what the internal structure is. Now, the -- so everybody's seen, you know, charts that look kind of like this that denote what the structure of the sentence ends up being. And, um, the kind of neat thing that you can actually do is figure out, like, so how does the structure of the sentence actually match up with the meaning, right? There are pieces within here, that, you can kind of conceptually see and you can swap out. And so we can say the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy cat. And, um, you can actually think about all -- you can break up all of these sentences into smaller chunks and actually represent individual pieces. So, you know, the world is represented, so it has a whole bunch of different things in it but we can categorize them down into smaller pieces, right, dogs are not the same as foxes. You can represent all the things in the world as a set and you can actually talk about dogs as an individual subset of all of the set of things. But they can you can also say, you can restrict the all the possible dogs to lazy dogs and you want to be able to represent each one of these pieces as a higher-level thing. So, um, one of the things that you can do if you want to try and represent both the structure and the meanings of these sentences. Everybody knows, like, okay, a dog is a common noun. You can talk about the lazy dog as a noun phrase and, one of the ways that you can kind of intuitively think about lamdas is actually as basically modifiers on top of the set of all the things. So, a dog is a -- dogs were a set of things in the world. You can talk about, um, lazy dogs and, the lazy dog as a higher-level structure. So, um, if you imagine the set of all things as dogs you can actually say -- you can actually start talking about adjectives as modifiers on top of the set of dogs. So you can say something like �x, lazy x. And then, apply that, specifically to a dog, okay? So, what this means is, you've got a set of things that are dogs and now you can denote the way the set of lazy dogs. In this particular case, if you think of dogs as a set of objects, what this function basically -- you can describe lazy as a function on all the dogs. So now, you can talk about "lazy" as a single object. And, it's got a particular type, right. It takes dog as a particular input and denotes a particular set of objects so now the interesting part about this is, is now if I want to say the extremely lazy dog, what does that actually mean, right? So we can represent "extremely" as a lamda function that takes adjectives and says, "Extremely," "extremely P." So the interesting part now is we can also take extremely and apply it to quick. You can talk about adverbs as a function on top of adjectives that take dogs or some sort of noun as an argument so you can represent each one of the pieces in the sentence as a function that, eventually maps down to nouns and real things in the world. So when you look at a sentence like this, you can actually say, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog -- does that actually match a set ever circumstances in the world? If I were to put the quick brown unicorn jumped over the lazy dog, we can say definitively that that sentence is not true because unicorns aren't things that exist in the world. +> > Ooh! +> > All right. +> > Controversial! +> > Is that it? +> > Yup. +> > [ Applause ] +> > We have Lorie, and then Michael and then Brian are the last ones. +> > You killed it, unicorn! +> > More than one. There's a reason I'm a programmer. +> > Well, that's a nice segue right there. +> > I want to thank you. And challenge... +> > I am a data scientist and I am from Chicago. +> > [ Laughter ] +> > My talk is unicorn bootcamp, you want me to teach what to who, and how long to whom, excuse me. +> > So yeah, I was a social/numeral scientist and I didn't want to be an academic anymore and I found out about data scientist and I said, can I be one and they said yes. And I said, what she I start doing. And I started learning some stuff a lot of people and it used to be way easier to learn stuff when I started teaching people and then I started the idea of a data boot camp and they said yes, and I immediately said, oh, crap. So we've been designing a data science boot camp and it's from a company called Kaplan Medis and it's going to be this fall in New York City applications are open, and it's really exciting. But we wanted to find out what the heck to and the reason that I wanted to become a data scientist was because I wanted to do cool stuff with fewer restrictions and that's what we do in principle with our company and this will hopefully be not an exception if we manage to pull it off. So we had to figure out what to do. So we've got 12 weeks to train people to be data scientists and another thing I like is not being bored. So, that was another principle we brought. So what kind of data boot camp not bore me as a hypothetical student and will not bore me as an instructor and also if I'm training someone, if I think of training, I think of repetition what are we going to repeat to train people to become data scientists, you know, that we want to hire at the end of two weeks. So we thought of what you would do on the jobs. So he made that into the class. So we made this model. What is a data scientist, what is a data science project and I think the common things that people think about are what are the imprisonments, the machinery -- algorithms, what data are you going to do it to, and what tools are you going to do it in. You mean, those are great but that's not the whole thing and it's not even the parts that are frequently the parts that are most exciting to me. You have to know what question you're answering and that the the thing that you're doing is going to answer the question that you're asking. And the people that you're communicated that to have done what -- and that's what a project is. So we took those 12 weeks, and again, we gave them code names. Again, don't bore yourself. So we said TV detectives, we can think of a lot of them and that's our final class. So we started, like, with a simple one and we started getting more complicated and students get more independent. By the last one it's like the passion project and with each of those ones. And so far I'm like this sounds pretty cool and so we presented that to the client and they said great, so who can take your course? You know? Data scientists? Grow them into real ones and you know, we have to make a press release. You have to market this thing. I mean like who is our audience and I was, like, God this is hard. So I love -- what I love about my job is we come from different backgrounds, you know? It's not a bunch of -- we didn't all come from the same program. We're all bringing perspectives to a problem and it's fun. So I was, like, so, how inclusive we be? How can I responsibly say, if you're excited, if you do this job, I think you can get there in these 12 weeks. So we had to think about what are those what do you have to end up with at the end? What do data scientists have that make them data scientists? So we made another model and we had to carve the unicorn and so we came up with this model. I don't know if you can see it, but kind of, like, three, skills-based, and kind of like three, personality-based components of being a data scientist. So you have to -- it's a code -- sorry. Everybody -- gotta be able to write some code. You need to be able to do statistics and machine learning and, um, communication. So, talking about what you did. There are people who can code, some crazy stats and explain to someone exactly as smart as them, or more smart what they have done but if they have to explain it to their aunt, it might not be that comfortable or productive. There she so communication's a big deal. And, um, authorized to get there, in order to do the job well, I think that you have to be creative. You know, you have to be able to fit solutions to problems. You have to be in a new situation and make something up, and make a lot of stuff up. You have to be curious because all of this stuff is way too painful if you're not driven to find out what the answer is, kind of internally. And, you have to have grit because again all this stuff hurts and you have to ticking on, and if you don't know what's ticking. You have to Google stuff in front of people, and say you don't know. So, that is what we came up with. So at the end, that was the end. So, that's our data science boot camp, and so we were looking for people that can show us that they have the capacity for these skill set so you need to bring us a little bit of proof. We've made some heuristics on how much programming and how much statistics. But are you going to hit the ground running with us? And is this what you really want to do or is this the sexist career of the 21st century with a nice paycheck attached so with this we want to do. +> > Z not boring, and useful. And it helps me to talk about it with people like you. So thank you so much for listening. +> > While there's switchover happening, I think you're coming close to finishing, yeah? +> > This is the last one. +> > Man, I'm psychic. I knew you should come in. +> > Once you guys are done. You're welcome to head downstairs. There's still ice cream, and beer and fun to be had until 9:00. And so when you're done, head on down but it seems to have been fantastic and I know these are -- +> > Hi, I'm Michael, oh, wait, no -- I'm Brian. Cheers. So this is going to be interesting. I'm Brian, this is Michael. We do this thing called CSV sound system and we've done this for two years, people meeting up for programming. And and every week we send out an email, and every email is kind of a Weird Al, yankovic coding nerdy sense. There she and an example of this has been the Fresh Prince of my MacBook Air. Pulps, comma, people, any others? +> > I want to hack with somebody? +> > When you hear this. +> > And but the one we always come back to is our favorite by our namesake, LCD Sound System, which is snowfall, I love you, but you're bringing me down at me and so tonight we are going to sing this for you. We are hoping that you will sing along. And you know -- if you know the. +> > LEE: +> > We couldn't program the bouncing ball in time 'cause we had -- +> > But we've never done this before outside of the context of me singing Michael to sleep. +> > These are the lyrics. +> > Brian programmed the song earlier today, and we're going to program that, as background accompaniment because there was no karaoke please join us. diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_01_No_CMS.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_01_No_CMS.md index b895d249..e210d2ba 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_01_No_CMS.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_01_No_CMS.md @@ -1,76 +1,76 @@ -There is no CMS -Session facilitator(s): Matt Boggie, Alexis Lloyd -Day & Time: Thursday, 11am-12pm -Room: Franklin 2 - ->> Hi, everyone. Good morning. Hi, everybody. We're going to start. ->> Hello! ->> Would someone in the back not mind closing the door so that we don't get the noise from the outside, unless there are people coming in, in which case you're welcome to come in. Hi. I'm Alexis Lloyd, I'm a creative director at The Lab at the New York Times. ->> And I'm Matt, together we run databases. We're here today to test a couple of hypotheses. We've been looking at a tons of emphases from an architectural point of view, an organizational and technological point of view, and they suck. And I think we all know that and that's why we're here. We're going to go through a couple of reasons why we think this and what we can potentially do to get around that. That part of the workshop today will be part of the participatory part of the workshop where we'll lay out the hypotheses and the questions. And you'll break out into groups of at least five in these tables and from that point we'll talk about the approach but before that we want to make sure that we're on the same page about why we're here and what's going on next. ->> The heating and cooling is really loud. So... ->> We will try to project. ->> We will try to project. There's no amplification but we'll do our best. At some point if we start dissipating, and you can't hear us, tell us to speak up. I just want to start out with a few of show of hands, questions. Who here had to switch CMSs in the past year? In the past two years? In the past three years? Okay, so most of the people here have been through this pretty recently. Who here has worked for an organization that has built or implemented multiple CMSs to support multiple products? Okay. Who here has written code to hack your CMSs so that you can do something that it doesn't want to do? ->> Of course. ->> Who here has published something outside of the bounds of your CMSs because it just won't do what you want it to do? So we're all on the same page. This is kind of where we are. ->> So as we look at the world that we're in today. This is sort of the spectrum of stuff that we have been trying to use or forced to use or trying to implement depending on what we're doing. As we've been looking at all of these different systems the thing that we find consistently is that CMSs tend to create more constraints than affordances. They're walling you into a certain idea about what the world is, rather than letting you play and see what comes out of that. Every day we work on these systems and the thing about is that they're built on decisions about our processes that were built years ago, even in those cases where you've implemented a new CMS for a reason. You've gone through this process of saying, "I know what's wrong today. I know all the things that I'm trying to fix. So let's write them all down and build our systems because those are the things that'll fix it." ->> 'Cause now we've got it right. ->> 'Cause now we've got it right. So nine months later, you've got nine months' worth of stuff in between -- ->> I'll interrupt, but it's totally worth it. He needs to come in to make the mic work. ->> Talk quietly amongst yourselves for just a second. ->> I'll just keep going, then. ->> We'll just keep talking louder. ->> So just to finish up on that thought. A couple things. So we're building on these systems based on the assumptions that we have today. We've improved all of the depth, the process depth that comes out. By the time it comes out we're already behind. So we're building based on assumptions that are wrong, or at best, limiting and what we think. So yeah, some assumptions that we were thinking about, specifically, some assumptions that they might enforce, relationships between data, text, assets, and presentations. The way that we think about the products that we try to create. The organizational process that goes into creating the news that we do. Who's allowed to publish and under what conditions. Who's allowed to edit and improve under what situations? They often enforce some rules about visual design layouts. The biggest thing I think that we can all agree on is that templates are both a blessing and a curse in a lot of ways. Probably more often on the curse side. And most importantly I think the big thing that we often forget when we talk about CMS is the base assumption, which is what is it that we're publishing and comes out over the overarching product? Are you publishing a newspaper, or a website? Or publishing into a mobile app and even more fine-grained level? Are we publishing videos, text, data, graphs, and all of those are changing as we go through, and those are actually some of the biggest assumptions that we don't document very well as we're thinking about the systems. ->> So we have a couple of hypotheses about why this breaks. And the fundamental problem here is that we build these as monoliths. These are big, centralized systems that are trying to do too many things at once and like any kind of, all-in-one solution. Like anyone here who's bought an all-in-one printer, it never does any of the individual things particularly well and by building all these things into one big monolithic centralized things, we also make it inflexible so that it can't adapt and change as organizational needs change. -And so, there's a list up here of that, you know, you could probably make, you know, three poster-sized things with more on there but this is an initial list that we made of, like, the different kinds of things that CMSs often are trying to do from text editing so asset management. So workflow tracking, so archiving, and SEO, and publishing, and all these different tasks. And it's trying to do all these things at once and, as a result, does in them really well -- none of them very well. So our hypothesis is that we need this not this. We need not a monolith, but all these different tools. We have tools for all these different things. Everyone has a text editor they like. People who work with photo editors, there are tools they prefer to use. There are SEO tools that people prefer to use and on and on and on. So the question is, why do we need CMS tools? Why can't we enable people to use the best tools available for each task and allow those tools to collaborate or communicate through a very minimal piece of tool or centralization? And that system should be modular and flexible so that it should allow for the rapid adaptation that we need. -And so we've been thinking about this. This is our hypothesis at a high level: Is that, rather than one centralized thing we need a set of pieces loosely joined. But there's still a bunch of questions that that brings up about, you know, what is the minimal amount of stuff that you need to hold these things together. Like, what is a CMS? Why do we need it? What would a not-CMS look like, and also what does that imply for the rest of the organization? So one of the interesting things that butted up against in a lot of the arguments that we've been having in our review lab about this is -- our questions about, this is kind of where technical design and organizational process butt up against each other and there are these really interesting places where one influences the other. ->> So how many of you know about Sorites' Paradox? So Sorites is Greek for "heap." So starting from bad principles, you can ask questions, here's a pile of sand. If I take a grain of sand away is it still a pile? Yes, so if you use a mathematical proof to that, one grain is a pile, negative grains are in fact a pile, so we don't buy that at all. So there comes a point semantically, where the "pile" stops being a "pile." If that's our pile, and that's our list of stuff, and another page of two of stuff is a pile as well. Is CMS -- what is the minimal amount of stuff that we can create that stitches all these things together that maybe isn't yet considered a pile? What would that look like if I'm editing using something like Sublime Text, or I'm measuring my photos in Lightroom, or Aperture? And like Alexis said, that stuff is an organizational process. So knowing the room here, we've got technologists, we've got writers, organizational people, people who have been through the system. -So this really is the task that we're set up with today: How do we take that heap and break it down into something so that it is down into something so that it's quasi-recognizable, but maybe knowledge still considered a pile. So that's what we're going to do. It's 11:15 so what I wanted to do was take about 20 minutes, circulate through and start talking about this hypothesis to see if we agree with it, to see if there are additions we want to add to it. And start to think about the nitty-gritty on how to implement this. So what are the alternatives that you can develop to having the one centralized system? Is it possible to allow or facilitate the use of preferred tools? And in this case, you might go down the road of choosing one and building a buttress to it. Or you might allow for an architecture that allows lots of things to talk to other things. And if -- so if you can do that, what is the minimal amount of centralization that's required, organizationally, and technically, to actually create a product? And as you go through this think a lot about process and the technology that you would to glue that together. But perhaps, more importantly, as you do this as a group, closely document the assumptions that you're making. What is it that you're making? Is it a site, is it a paper, is it a mobile web app, is it all of those things? What are your assets? Who are your users? What are your outputs? ->> How big is your organization? ->> How big is your organization? We're going to go around from table to table at the end talking about the solutions that you've outlined, and start potentially focusing on holes in them. What if you were to add a new product on? Or what if you suddenly merged with another company, how would you get around some of those kinds of questions, both organizationally and technically, logistically? We've got a lot of people standing up in the back and open tables up front. And as best you can, try and get into -- I guess we'll have an sixth table -- wherever there's a table, there's a group and there'll be a "tableless" nexus group of people back there. Alexis and I will be circulating around the room to answer sort of logistical questions. It's a centrally open ended activity and I hope you title as a challenge rather than a fear-based thing. So you can define this as best the team has the skills to do. As technical as you want, as organizational as you want. Any questions before we go? Really? That made sense? Awesome. Great. Break into your groups and start. If you need supplies we have Post-Its over here. - -[ Discussion Groups ] - ->> We have six groups and we want to talk about either about the organization or the -- ->> Is everyone hear? ->> Can everyone hear Matt a little better now? ->> This seems to kind of work so I'm going to pass this around to those groups that are presenting. By now, pick a person to be your guinea pig. Each team will have about three minutes to just talk a little bit about what they've talked about, some of the solutions they've come up with, some of the challenges that are out there. We do have some other questions along the way and that should get us through here. So we'll start out here. ->> Good, so, we totally solved all these problems. So you guys, should just -- all right. We got it all here on this notebook. This solves all the problems. So no, we didn't solve all of the problems, actually we didn't even solve any of the problems. We were overall concerned about how people put things into the CMS, assuming that all of the rest of you would be concerned about what it is stored and what it is outputted. So we'll just let you guys handle that part. So we were really interested in how people, or how a reporter, or a photographer or someone who makes video or somebody who, like, does a video project, what does a look like what they file into an awesome, "that-world CMS" that we were inventing, right? So the thing that we kind of stuck on was we need together to go reach people that they are. So if we have people that like to file on Word documents, we should have them file on Word documents, if they want to email the story to somebody, they should continue emailing to somebody. And we should figure out some technology that passes it to some agnostic thing in the middle that will store it and can and that's where you guys are probably come up with really good ideas. So we were very fascinated with listing the different types of content that our news organizations produce as a result of their deliberations and hard work. So Tyler works at NPR and they produce audio. There's pieces of audio that are made shorter, or -- and binary is really hard to do in a content management system so that's, like, one of the stumbling blocks that will make your life really difficult, and just imagine that times a billion with photographs and video, and all of these things that are non-text, that you still need to be able to edit and show differences in. And then we have all these different forms of text and, like, data, and metadata about things that need to get put in so that's the part where we just decided what we really need is a really good messaging system full of u-bots that interprets our behavior and. We decided that was super hard so what we wanted to do was fire the editors and just have a crew of people doing all the time, what they want to do. That's about the part where we broke down, and then it reverted into a state of nature. I'm really hoping that you guys have much better solutions than us. So yeah, we basically -- so we came out of this with humans and robots are really good but we should all work together. And it would be better if we had more sentience, generally. ->> Wow, okay. Lots of open questions there. I'm going to keep going through. We'll come to the second table. Who wants to tell us where you landed. ->> You can do it. ->> I do not want to do it. ->> You wrote it down. ->> We'll fill in. ->> So I don't know how to follow up that. We do have union corns and pandas, and cats in ours. So our basic conversation was about storing the content, the content libraries should be separate than the content-creation process, some related to you all. We believe that the content creators should do that wherever they would like to do that. And so, the content creators, we need to build tools that actually get that content from them and that is the problem right now. So we talked a lot about how people used Microsoft Word, or Sublime, or whatever text editor they want to I don't say and we're trying to force people to create -- we're trying to force people to create content within the CMS. And so then the content library would just have an API that could push to whatever, editing interface. The magical robots choose to push it to. So you could have an different mobile editor, a different print editor and then that would push to all of the screens in the world. So, all 26 different sizes. Do you guys want to add anything? ->> That sounds good. ->> Move onto unicorns? Why do they come in? ->> They're in the middle. ->> They're stored in the content library, mostly. And then they're released when someone's sad. I think. ->> I think the big thing for us was just this idea of this should be a content library that stores structured data, that stores your content as structure structured data instead of oh here's an article and it's finished and it's got images in it. So there's articles, and there's photos and then there's charts of everything you do and then it's someone else's job later with a different tool to piece that together to what it should be for print and then for mobile, and then for different kinds of websites so it's not one thing that's edited in one CMS. They're just pieces of content stored in a library and then really smart editors later can put them together in different ways. ->> That sounds pretty good before we go then the next -- before we go onto the next. We've heard a lot about content creation at the level of the article or the asset. I'll put this to all the groups has anybody thought about information at the subasset level. There's some coverage, for example of Circa's CMSs for quote-level attributions that could later be retrieved? ->> We were talking about how CMSs are all right now based around the idea that there's a slightly big body types and actually it would make more sense to have a list of objects, effectively be that a paragraph, or a part of a paragraph or one graphic so that it becomes something that these guys were saying so that it becomes structured data and assets. ->> And then the challenge becomes how do you not make that look like a big, huge, behemoth form? ->> Would you go mind if we listened to their solution and then came back to you? Why don't you continue on a little bit? ->> Okay, so yeah, um, so, we sort of started thinking about CMSs as a monolith, and I think we originally made the CMSs today aren't stupid it was just that there was no way that you would anticipate the kind of things that we had today. So what about the CMS is basically an API, and what is the core, smallest level that you could rely on that would not end up tripping up you up in the future so we're sort of talking about probably the ideas that you guys had. But the idea is that it's very modular. So what it's really called is a CPS store and then there's various modules that plugged and took data out of it. So we started to think about the core users and security because that seems like that's something that's unite universal and then there's needs to be versioning of whatever the structure of the data is, and there would need to be some kind of eventing system. So my web publishing module, or my A publishing module can listen, and hopefully just sort of end up with this seamless data flow, and the responsibilities of very centralized in these tiny modules. ->> And we also talked about how the, like, how we would display content and how that would be decided and how that would be organized would be separate. And how you bring content into the system, how you author it, would also be separate. ->> Okay. Any thoughts on that approach? ->> So I have a quick question, sort of for the room based on what people have said so far which is a basically if people see storage as a centralized part here, or whether storage is also a part that could become modular? ->> You know, I think there's a level at which it doesn't matter, right, you know, if we have a bunch of tools that could all talk to each other, they could be responsible for storing their own data as long as they all speak a common language. So what common storage becomes is a common language. That's what we talked about, at least. ->> Do you want to keep going, then? ->> Someone else. I was just answering a single question. ->> Um, well, you know, as journalism gets, you know, increasingly interactive, the question becomes, you know, what is the unit of content? And I'm sure everybody here is familiar with the snowfall project that the Times put out a year, a year and a half ago. You know, really interactive one that won the Pulitzer Prize. There's a wall on the 50th floor for all the prizes they've done. And there's a plaque. You know, what is in the content at that point? ->> But the question that you asked, I thought that was really interesting was that, like, what is -- okay -- so the question that got asked which was really interesting was what is Snowfall going to look like in 150 years? Which is really cool because it's kind of like you think about what the Times or any of our other papers look like whenever they opened, you know, in the late 1800's, so 19 hundreds, we can look back and see the same thing but with the development of technology, like, many technologies even if you look back ten years, you're looking back at, like, Flash interactives, and what is that going to look like in 50 years, and how are we going to archive these things, and how how are we going to plan for that obsolescence and Alexis asked a really good question of this is, what is the need of standardization? So what can that serve for us? We kind of went back and forth a lot about, like, two taxonomy, or to not taxonomy and what does that mean? And, you know, what does tagging mean for us? Is it possible for us to standardize tagging the way that people in, say, the audio world, that you just brought up have been able to do is that possible for journalism and if so, who is responsibility is that? Is it WordPress' responsibility as the CMS creator, or is it our responsibility as technologists and edittorily staff in the newspaper to define that standardization? That's about as far as I got. ->> Some of us said, that tagging is not possible. Fool's errand but there's no other choice, I think. ->> I think, it's a 50/50 at this point. ->> But the 150 year point is interesting. The tag point as well. So we have tags about things like molasses floods which is kind of amazing. Why don't we go back here. Volunteers? ->> Okay, so we started trying to define fundamentals, basically, and how do you start collapsing four layers that do one integrated thing: Creation, importation, and display. And you know, where are those points at which we can sort of merge or integrate those things or just sort of collapse them? And then, also defining, you know, what are the CMS limitations versus the template limitation? You know, harass with we interpreting as CMS problems that are actually displayed problems with our templates that are actually fixable on that end? Also thinking about the users of that CMS in layers. You've got a technical layer of builders and support. Backend editorial, or whoever will all need to use the same thing on the backend. But also customers and leaders at the final point. And then how much do you want to integrate user customizability and what does that introduce if you're trying to sort of have a centralized repo, or library of various sort of content types. If you want the user to be able to customize display, or priority, how does that factor into what you're building on the backend? We didn't get as far as solutions more than just sort of talking these things out, and defining problems. Did I miss anything? ->> Um... I'll take that one. So we have a list up here of different features. I think you just went through four sort of overarching groups of features: Creation, importation, publication, and display. Are there other major pieces that we should also be considering along the way other than those four? I think we can probably debate taxonomy to the end of it. Storage is one. ->> So, there are some categories of content that I don't really -- that don't necessarily have any of these components in the system where there's, like, say you build an app, that app needs to control the entire experience. So it's not, in many ways it's not as useful as an abstract in a publishing system for display. It's not necessarily usable in terms of categorization, but there's still stuff that the CMSs supposes as content making it discoverable, and making it "interactivable." ->> And you know, starting fundamentals is a great way to think about this. What do the things that we need to make, where do they go, what do we do to them? All three of those answers have effects on the other questions. ->> And how many people need to do things, too. ->> Right, who are your users. Last group over here? ->> So... so basically we've basically come up with this called, we're calling it moveable type. So actually we came up with a lot of problems, like, you know, and we started bring asking questions like: Are we building this from scratch or are we starting from something that already exists. Obviously if you're starting with something that already exists. It's probably easier. And then you started from scratch and it's going to take even longer. So we go back to the existing tools. And then the idea is, do you do things very well in one place, or do you do things really, super well in silence? And the problem with silos is that then how do you tie them together because content even like a content like a list is 40 different pieces of content together as one. It's not just, like, this one big thing. It's a post, and then ten child posts and then how do you search for it? And how do do you do all these things so we came back to little pieces like how the Internet originally started? Somebody built a shipping software in VB and then somebody else built a billing software in VB, and it's like, I have no idea how to get those talk together. And I know Perl until they change and then the duct tape breaks. And then who gets to build these and maintain these? And it's all of us. So I just want to apologize and then we came up with the gravity theory which was, what we really want is, something really big in the center that you can just throw stuff in it, and then it'll just orbit around it just fine and then throw stuff. And so you've got this whole solar system of content where you've got, like, your "moon CMS" part roaming around, the "Earth CMS" part, and then they're all tied together by this massive sun in the center and so we just played God for a little bit. ->> Wow... ->> God, CMS is trademarked, too. ->> Good point. So we have literally one minute left. So just to wrap up. I love that ending and I was sort of getting halfway through with some of the other answers and just this experience of sitting for an hour and trying to redesign the most core process of any of our organizations is actually obviously a fool's errand but I think it does point to a central conflict that we're all dealing with here, which is that we're all trying to play God. We are trying to define the solution for dozens of different processes and outcomes in a very complicated organization with hundreds, if not thousands of people contributing to them. Why would ten people around a table be able to do that? So what are some of the ways that we can enable better does thed thinking? Can we build something that somebody can plug into so that we can make a system so that it works with everybody else and it doesn't need to go through a big, centralized committee to decide that. These are difficult questions. There are many different problems involved in them. It wasn't meant to solve the whole world today. But hopefully you can start thinking about these questions as you build your next project. Great. ->> More of this tomorrow at 3:00 in the same room. ->> Yeah, you can make that CMS that makes other CMSs. +There is no CMS +Session facilitator(s): Matt Boggie, Alexis Lloyd +Day & Time: Thursday, 11am-12pm +Room: Franklin 2 + +> > Hi, everyone. Good morning. Hi, everybody. We're going to start. +> > Hello! +> > Would someone in the back not mind closing the door so that we don't get the noise from the outside, unless there are people coming in, in which case you're welcome to come in. Hi. I'm Alexis Lloyd, I'm a creative director at The Lab at the New York Times. +> > And I'm Matt, together we run databases. We're here today to test a couple of hypotheses. We've been looking at a tons of emphases from an architectural point of view, an organizational and technological point of view, and they suck. And I think we all know that and that's why we're here. We're going to go through a couple of reasons why we think this and what we can potentially do to get around that. That part of the workshop today will be part of the participatory part of the workshop where we'll lay out the hypotheses and the questions. And you'll break out into groups of at least five in these tables and from that point we'll talk about the approach but before that we want to make sure that we're on the same page about why we're here and what's going on next. +> > The heating and cooling is really loud. So... +> > We will try to project. +> > We will try to project. There's no amplification but we'll do our best. At some point if we start dissipating, and you can't hear us, tell us to speak up. I just want to start out with a few of show of hands, questions. Who here had to switch CMSs in the past year? In the past two years? In the past three years? Okay, so most of the people here have been through this pretty recently. Who here has worked for an organization that has built or implemented multiple CMSs to support multiple products? Okay. Who here has written code to hack your CMSs so that you can do something that it doesn't want to do? +> > Of course. +> > Who here has published something outside of the bounds of your CMSs because it just won't do what you want it to do? So we're all on the same page. This is kind of where we are. +> > So as we look at the world that we're in today. This is sort of the spectrum of stuff that we have been trying to use or forced to use or trying to implement depending on what we're doing. As we've been looking at all of these different systems the thing that we find consistently is that CMSs tend to create more constraints than affordances. They're walling you into a certain idea about what the world is, rather than letting you play and see what comes out of that. Every day we work on these systems and the thing about is that they're built on decisions about our processes that were built years ago, even in those cases where you've implemented a new CMS for a reason. You've gone through this process of saying, "I know what's wrong today. I know all the things that I'm trying to fix. So let's write them all down and build our systems because those are the things that'll fix it." +> > 'Cause now we've got it right. +> > 'Cause now we've got it right. So nine months later, you've got nine months' worth of stuff in between -- +> > I'll interrupt, but it's totally worth it. He needs to come in to make the mic work. +> > Talk quietly amongst yourselves for just a second. +> > I'll just keep going, then. +> > We'll just keep talking louder. +> > So just to finish up on that thought. A couple things. So we're building on these systems based on the assumptions that we have today. We've improved all of the depth, the process depth that comes out. By the time it comes out we're already behind. So we're building based on assumptions that are wrong, or at best, limiting and what we think. So yeah, some assumptions that we were thinking about, specifically, some assumptions that they might enforce, relationships between data, text, assets, and presentations. The way that we think about the products that we try to create. The organizational process that goes into creating the news that we do. Who's allowed to publish and under what conditions. Who's allowed to edit and improve under what situations? They often enforce some rules about visual design layouts. The biggest thing I think that we can all agree on is that templates are both a blessing and a curse in a lot of ways. Probably more often on the curse side. And most importantly I think the big thing that we often forget when we talk about CMS is the base assumption, which is what is it that we're publishing and comes out over the overarching product? Are you publishing a newspaper, or a website? Or publishing into a mobile app and even more fine-grained level? Are we publishing videos, text, data, graphs, and all of those are changing as we go through, and those are actually some of the biggest assumptions that we don't document very well as we're thinking about the systems. +> > So we have a couple of hypotheses about why this breaks. And the fundamental problem here is that we build these as monoliths. These are big, centralized systems that are trying to do too many things at once and like any kind of, all-in-one solution. Like anyone here who's bought an all-in-one printer, it never does any of the individual things particularly well and by building all these things into one big monolithic centralized things, we also make it inflexible so that it can't adapt and change as organizational needs change. +> > And so, there's a list up here of that, you know, you could probably make, you know, three poster-sized things with more on there but this is an initial list that we made of, like, the different kinds of things that CMSs often are trying to do from text editing so asset management. So workflow tracking, so archiving, and SEO, and publishing, and all these different tasks. And it's trying to do all these things at once and, as a result, does in them really well -- none of them very well. So our hypothesis is that we need this not this. We need not a monolith, but all these different tools. We have tools for all these different things. Everyone has a text editor they like. People who work with photo editors, there are tools they prefer to use. There are SEO tools that people prefer to use and on and on and on. So the question is, why do we need CMS tools? Why can't we enable people to use the best tools available for each task and allow those tools to collaborate or communicate through a very minimal piece of tool or centralization? And that system should be modular and flexible so that it should allow for the rapid adaptation that we need. +> > And so we've been thinking about this. This is our hypothesis at a high level: Is that, rather than one centralized thing we need a set of pieces loosely joined. But there's still a bunch of questions that that brings up about, you know, what is the minimal amount of stuff that you need to hold these things together. Like, what is a CMS? Why do we need it? What would a not-CMS look like, and also what does that imply for the rest of the organization? So one of the interesting things that butted up against in a lot of the arguments that we've been having in our review lab about this is -- our questions about, this is kind of where technical design and organizational process butt up against each other and there are these really interesting places where one influences the other. +> > So how many of you know about Sorites' Paradox? So Sorites is Greek for "heap." So starting from bad principles, you can ask questions, here's a pile of sand. If I take a grain of sand away is it still a pile? Yes, so if you use a mathematical proof to that, one grain is a pile, negative grains are in fact a pile, so we don't buy that at all. So there comes a point semantically, where the "pile" stops being a "pile." If that's our pile, and that's our list of stuff, and another page of two of stuff is a pile as well. Is CMS -- what is the minimal amount of stuff that we can create that stitches all these things together that maybe isn't yet considered a pile? What would that look like if I'm editing using something like Sublime Text, or I'm measuring my photos in Lightroom, or Aperture? And like Alexis said, that stuff is an organizational process. So knowing the room here, we've got technologists, we've got writers, organizational people, people who have been through the system. +> > So this really is the task that we're set up with today: How do we take that heap and break it down into something so that it is down into something so that it's quasi-recognizable, but maybe knowledge still considered a pile. So that's what we're going to do. It's 11:15 so what I wanted to do was take about 20 minutes, circulate through and start talking about this hypothesis to see if we agree with it, to see if there are additions we want to add to it. And start to think about the nitty-gritty on how to implement this. So what are the alternatives that you can develop to having the one centralized system? Is it possible to allow or facilitate the use of preferred tools? And in this case, you might go down the road of choosing one and building a buttress to it. Or you might allow for an architecture that allows lots of things to talk to other things. And if -- so if you can do that, what is the minimal amount of centralization that's required, organizationally, and technically, to actually create a product? And as you go through this think a lot about process and the technology that you would to glue that together. But perhaps, more importantly, as you do this as a group, closely document the assumptions that you're making. What is it that you're making? Is it a site, is it a paper, is it a mobile web app, is it all of those things? What are your assets? Who are your users? What are your outputs? +> > How big is your organization? +> > How big is your organization? We're going to go around from table to table at the end talking about the solutions that you've outlined, and start potentially focusing on holes in them. What if you were to add a new product on? Or what if you suddenly merged with another company, how would you get around some of those kinds of questions, both organizationally and technically, logistically? We've got a lot of people standing up in the back and open tables up front. And as best you can, try and get into -- I guess we'll have an sixth table -- wherever there's a table, there's a group and there'll be a "tableless" nexus group of people back there. Alexis and I will be circulating around the room to answer sort of logistical questions. It's a centrally open ended activity and I hope you title as a challenge rather than a fear-based thing. So you can define this as best the team has the skills to do. As technical as you want, as organizational as you want. Any questions before we go? Really? That made sense? Awesome. Great. Break into your groups and start. If you need supplies we have Post-Its over here. + +[ Discussion Groups ] + +> > We have six groups and we want to talk about either about the organization or the -- +> > Is everyone hear? +> > Can everyone hear Matt a little better now? +> > This seems to kind of work so I'm going to pass this around to those groups that are presenting. By now, pick a person to be your guinea pig. Each team will have about three minutes to just talk a little bit about what they've talked about, some of the solutions they've come up with, some of the challenges that are out there. We do have some other questions along the way and that should get us through here. So we'll start out here. +> > Good, so, we totally solved all these problems. So you guys, should just -- all right. We got it all here on this notebook. This solves all the problems. So no, we didn't solve all of the problems, actually we didn't even solve any of the problems. We were overall concerned about how people put things into the CMS, assuming that all of the rest of you would be concerned about what it is stored and what it is outputted. So we'll just let you guys handle that part. So we were really interested in how people, or how a reporter, or a photographer or someone who makes video or somebody who, like, does a video project, what does a look like what they file into an awesome, "that-world CMS" that we were inventing, right? So the thing that we kind of stuck on was we need together to go reach people that they are. So if we have people that like to file on Word documents, we should have them file on Word documents, if they want to email the story to somebody, they should continue emailing to somebody. And we should figure out some technology that passes it to some agnostic thing in the middle that will store it and can and that's where you guys are probably come up with really good ideas. So we were very fascinated with listing the different types of content that our news organizations produce as a result of their deliberations and hard work. So Tyler works at NPR and they produce audio. There's pieces of audio that are made shorter, or -- and binary is really hard to do in a content management system so that's, like, one of the stumbling blocks that will make your life really difficult, and just imagine that times a billion with photographs and video, and all of these things that are non-text, that you still need to be able to edit and show differences in. And then we have all these different forms of text and, like, data, and metadata about things that need to get put in so that's the part where we just decided what we really need is a really good messaging system full of u-bots that interprets our behavior and. We decided that was super hard so what we wanted to do was fire the editors and just have a crew of people doing all the time, what they want to do. That's about the part where we broke down, and then it reverted into a state of nature. I'm really hoping that you guys have much better solutions than us. So yeah, we basically -- so we came out of this with humans and robots are really good but we should all work together. And it would be better if we had more sentience, generally. +> > Wow, okay. Lots of open questions there. I'm going to keep going through. We'll come to the second table. Who wants to tell us where you landed. +> > You can do it. +> > I do not want to do it. +> > You wrote it down. +> > We'll fill in. +> > So I don't know how to follow up that. We do have union corns and pandas, and cats in ours. So our basic conversation was about storing the content, the content libraries should be separate than the content-creation process, some related to you all. We believe that the content creators should do that wherever they would like to do that. And so, the content creators, we need to build tools that actually get that content from them and that is the problem right now. So we talked a lot about how people used Microsoft Word, or Sublime, or whatever text editor they want to I don't say and we're trying to force people to create -- we're trying to force people to create content within the CMS. And so then the content library would just have an API that could push to whatever, editing interface. The magical robots choose to push it to. So you could have an different mobile editor, a different print editor and then that would push to all of the screens in the world. So, all 26 different sizes. Do you guys want to add anything? +> > That sounds good. +> > Move onto unicorns? Why do they come in? +> > They're in the middle. +> > They're stored in the content library, mostly. And then they're released when someone's sad. I think. +> > I think the big thing for us was just this idea of this should be a content library that stores structured data, that stores your content as structure structured data instead of oh here's an article and it's finished and it's got images in it. So there's articles, and there's photos and then there's charts of everything you do and then it's someone else's job later with a different tool to piece that together to what it should be for print and then for mobile, and then for different kinds of websites so it's not one thing that's edited in one CMS. They're just pieces of content stored in a library and then really smart editors later can put them together in different ways. +> > That sounds pretty good before we go then the next -- before we go onto the next. We've heard a lot about content creation at the level of the article or the asset. I'll put this to all the groups has anybody thought about information at the subasset level. There's some coverage, for example of Circa's CMSs for quote-level attributions that could later be retrieved? +> > We were talking about how CMSs are all right now based around the idea that there's a slightly big body types and actually it would make more sense to have a list of objects, effectively be that a paragraph, or a part of a paragraph or one graphic so that it becomes something that these guys were saying so that it becomes structured data and assets. +> > And then the challenge becomes how do you not make that look like a big, huge, behemoth form? +> > Would you go mind if we listened to their solution and then came back to you? Why don't you continue on a little bit? +> > Okay, so yeah, um, so, we sort of started thinking about CMSs as a monolith, and I think we originally made the CMSs today aren't stupid it was just that there was no way that you would anticipate the kind of things that we had today. So what about the CMS is basically an API, and what is the core, smallest level that you could rely on that would not end up tripping up you up in the future so we're sort of talking about probably the ideas that you guys had. But the idea is that it's very modular. So what it's really called is a CPS store and then there's various modules that plugged and took data out of it. So we started to think about the core users and security because that seems like that's something that's unite universal and then there's needs to be versioning of whatever the structure of the data is, and there would need to be some kind of eventing system. So my web publishing module, or my A publishing module can listen, and hopefully just sort of end up with this seamless data flow, and the responsibilities of very centralized in these tiny modules. +> > And we also talked about how the, like, how we would display content and how that would be decided and how that would be organized would be separate. And how you bring content into the system, how you author it, would also be separate. +> > Okay. Any thoughts on that approach? +> > So I have a quick question, sort of for the room based on what people have said so far which is a basically if people see storage as a centralized part here, or whether storage is also a part that could become modular? +> > You know, I think there's a level at which it doesn't matter, right, you know, if we have a bunch of tools that could all talk to each other, they could be responsible for storing their own data as long as they all speak a common language. So what common storage becomes is a common language. That's what we talked about, at least. +> > Do you want to keep going, then? +> > Someone else. I was just answering a single question. +> > Um, well, you know, as journalism gets, you know, increasingly interactive, the question becomes, you know, what is the unit of content? And I'm sure everybody here is familiar with the snowfall project that the Times put out a year, a year and a half ago. You know, really interactive one that won the Pulitzer Prize. There's a wall on the 50th floor for all the prizes they've done. And there's a plaque. You know, what is in the content at that point? +> > But the question that you asked, I thought that was really interesting was that, like, what is -- okay -- so the question that got asked which was really interesting was what is Snowfall going to look like in 150 years? Which is really cool because it's kind of like you think about what the Times or any of our other papers look like whenever they opened, you know, in the late 1800's, so 19 hundreds, we can look back and see the same thing but with the development of technology, like, many technologies even if you look back ten years, you're looking back at, like, Flash interactives, and what is that going to look like in 50 years, and how are we going to archive these things, and how how are we going to plan for that obsolescence and Alexis asked a really good question of this is, what is the need of standardization? So what can that serve for us? We kind of went back and forth a lot about, like, two taxonomy, or to not taxonomy and what does that mean? And, you know, what does tagging mean for us? Is it possible for us to standardize tagging the way that people in, say, the audio world, that you just brought up have been able to do is that possible for journalism and if so, who is responsibility is that? Is it WordPress' responsibility as the CMS creator, or is it our responsibility as technologists and edittorily staff in the newspaper to define that standardization? That's about as far as I got. +> > Some of us said, that tagging is not possible. Fool's errand but there's no other choice, I think. +> > I think, it's a 50/50 at this point. +> > But the 150 year point is interesting. The tag point as well. So we have tags about things like molasses floods which is kind of amazing. Why don't we go back here. Volunteers? +> > Okay, so we started trying to define fundamentals, basically, and how do you start collapsing four layers that do one integrated thing: Creation, importation, and display. And you know, where are those points at which we can sort of merge or integrate those things or just sort of collapse them? And then, also defining, you know, what are the CMS limitations versus the template limitation? You know, harass with we interpreting as CMS problems that are actually displayed problems with our templates that are actually fixable on that end? Also thinking about the users of that CMS in layers. You've got a technical layer of builders and support. Backend editorial, or whoever will all need to use the same thing on the backend. But also customers and leaders at the final point. And then how much do you want to integrate user customizability and what does that introduce if you're trying to sort of have a centralized repo, or library of various sort of content types. If you want the user to be able to customize display, or priority, how does that factor into what you're building on the backend? We didn't get as far as solutions more than just sort of talking these things out, and defining problems. Did I miss anything? +> > Um... I'll take that one. So we have a list up here of different features. I think you just went through four sort of overarching groups of features: Creation, importation, publication, and display. Are there other major pieces that we should also be considering along the way other than those four? I think we can probably debate taxonomy to the end of it. Storage is one. +> > So, there are some categories of content that I don't really -- that don't necessarily have any of these components in the system where there's, like, say you build an app, that app needs to control the entire experience. So it's not, in many ways it's not as useful as an abstract in a publishing system for display. It's not necessarily usable in terms of categorization, but there's still stuff that the CMSs supposes as content making it discoverable, and making it "interactivable." +> > And you know, starting fundamentals is a great way to think about this. What do the things that we need to make, where do they go, what do we do to them? All three of those answers have effects on the other questions. +> > And how many people need to do things, too. +> > Right, who are your users. Last group over here? +> > So... so basically we've basically come up with this called, we're calling it moveable type. So actually we came up with a lot of problems, like, you know, and we started bring asking questions like: Are we building this from scratch or are we starting from something that already exists. Obviously if you're starting with something that already exists. It's probably easier. And then you started from scratch and it's going to take even longer. So we go back to the existing tools. And then the idea is, do you do things very well in one place, or do you do things really, super well in silence? And the problem with silos is that then how do you tie them together because content even like a content like a list is 40 different pieces of content together as one. It's not just, like, this one big thing. It's a post, and then ten child posts and then how do you search for it? And how do do you do all these things so we came back to little pieces like how the Internet originally started? Somebody built a shipping software in VB and then somebody else built a billing software in VB, and it's like, I have no idea how to get those talk together. And I know Perl until they change and then the duct tape breaks. And then who gets to build these and maintain these? And it's all of us. So I just want to apologize and then we came up with the gravity theory which was, what we really want is, something really big in the center that you can just throw stuff in it, and then it'll just orbit around it just fine and then throw stuff. And so you've got this whole solar system of content where you've got, like, your "moon CMS" part roaming around, the "Earth CMS" part, and then they're all tied together by this massive sun in the center and so we just played God for a little bit. +> > Wow... +> > God, CMS is trademarked, too. +> > Good point. So we have literally one minute left. So just to wrap up. I love that ending and I was sort of getting halfway through with some of the other answers and just this experience of sitting for an hour and trying to redesign the most core process of any of our organizations is actually obviously a fool's errand but I think it does point to a central conflict that we're all dealing with here, which is that we're all trying to play God. We are trying to define the solution for dozens of different processes and outcomes in a very complicated organization with hundreds, if not thousands of people contributing to them. Why would ten people around a table be able to do that? So what are some of the ways that we can enable better does thed thinking? Can we build something that somebody can plug into so that we can make a system so that it works with everybody else and it doesn't need to go through a big, centralized committee to decide that. These are difficult questions. There are many different problems involved in them. It wasn't meant to solve the whole world today. But hopefully you can start thinking about these questions as you build your next project. Great. +> > More of this tomorrow at 3:00 in the same room. +> > Yeah, you can make that CMS that makes other CMSs. diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_03_Who_Are_We_Missing.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_03_Who_Are_We_Missing.md index 1b47b4bc..7cd71d48 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_03_Who_Are_We_Missing.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_03_Who_Are_We_Missing.md @@ -1,181 +1,177 @@ -This is a DRAFT TRANSCRIPT from a live session at SRCCON 2014. This transcript should be considered provisional, and if you were in attendance (or spot an obvious error) we'd love your help fixing it. More information on SRCCON is available at http://srccon.org. - -Captioning by the wonderful people of White Coat Captioning, LLC -whitecoatcaptioning.com - - - -Thursday -Session 3 -- Who are we missing? -Session Leader: Mandy Brown - ->> All right, I'm going to get started. I think more people are going to trickle in, but since Dan told us to be on time, I'm going to adhere to that. This is the short URL for a Google Doc which I started already, and if you would like to pop your name and like URL in there, I'm hoping to do a little SRC post about what comes out of this session and I will credit you as being a part of that if you put your name in there. If you want to be anonymous, that's cool. You don't have to put your name in there. - -I was going to make you guys take notes for me during this session, but it turns out we have an awesome stenographer over here named Norma, so we have professional notes, so you don't have do that, but David is going to pop in there and write down some kind of high-level themes and ideas that come out of this and you're free to contribute to that, as well. - -Just in case you didn't remember from that whole big thing where we just introduced each other, but I am Mandy Brown, I'm from Brooklyn, I'm from Vox product. Before Vox I was CEO of a little startup called Editorially, which is a collaborative editing platform which David built along with a few other people who are still here. We sold that to Vox and are now working on similar tools inside Vox. So I work on content management systems, basically. But that I was a communications director, and that's kind of how I started doing product. Before that I was in traditional book publishing and I will the cofounded a book apart. I proposed this session because I want to know the apes to the questions that I put in there. I do not actually know them. - -So I have a lot of questions, and I'm hoping that we -- like the people in this room have some ideas or even a way to like flesh out those questions, because I don't have the answers to any of these questions. And partly, and I say this with a lot of my colleagues in this room, who I don't want to scare them, but one of the things that I have thought about over the last like five or six years is that I'm kind of always thinking about what my next job or career is going to be. Not leaving my current one. And I think that news room code and data journalism are fields which are welcoming to people of a lot of different backgrounds. This is the kind of field that actually benefits from people coming from lots of different directions. And I'm curious for myself how I might transition into something like that. Whether or not I actually do that -- come on in. - -Whether or not I actually do that is up to question, but one of the things that I thought about is that I'm interested in the stuff but I'm not really sure how to get started so there is a wealth of skills around presenting content on the web. HTML and CSS are kind of stable states at this point in the field. Javascript, Ruby on Rails, and various kinds of frameworks. There's a set of tools and skillset around actually doing like statistical analysis, so things like Python and R -- please come in -- and also just basic competencies around like how do stats work and how do you look at data and know what to do with it, and there's probably all kinds of other things, I think, around kind of the power that comes along with that data, so the ethical considerations you have to take into account, like what kinds of things you could be revealing or not revealing what it says when you're acting on it, those kinds of things. So I will put the question out to -- let's do this. Who actually works in either newsroom code or data journalism. I know at least one, two, three and a half -- what do you do? ->> I help run social strategy. ->> I work on the programmer side of newsroom. ->> OK. Katie, also at MinnPost. I lead our news application team and web development and design. ->> Tiff at New York Times. I'm a developer. ->> So for the folks who are developers in the room, what do you think if someone was starting out going into newsroom code what are the first things someone needs to learn and what are the best ways to go about that. First things that you need to learn? - ->> Do you mean like what someone needs to learn to be a developer in the newsroom? Or someone needs to know going into the newsroom? ->> Let's start with the first one. So if you want to become a developer in a newsroom, how do you get started with that? What are some of the core skills you need going into that experience? ->> ->> For me, I mean a lot of it obviously technical, like how to program, but the ability to work quickly and not be perfect in your work is kind of really important skill. ->> Kind of efficiency and lack of perfectionism. Both really important. ->> I think there's a translation aspect, like translating what you're doing to people who might not understand or might not understand why it's important and not only translating it to other developers, but translating it to your newsroom. ->> So making sure the newsroom understands the importance of that development work? ->> Mm-hm. ->> Yeah, I think the more you can break down those silos, it will allow people to see into what the work actually looks like, and transition more people toward it. ->> Yeah, yup. ->> Kind of going off of that is to try to align goals as much as you you can between silos, so you're kind of working toward one goal. ->> So you guys say all that stuff I think about, like hybrids, like people who are not specialists in any particular area, but like it move around in a lot of things which is where I've kind of. I've specialized in being a hybrid for most of my career for better or worse. But I wonder if are there there areas of in depth experience where if someone wants to go to maybe a type of management roam into like actually working on it and I'll put this out as a really basic question. Which programming skills do you think is most important right now? I look at all the places I spend time working and it's ah, it's too much. ->> What are the things that like I ought to get into? We can just make this session, "What should Mandy do next?" as a framing thing here. ->> Feel like that question comes up a lot, and it's always, it's sort of dependent on your project, and I think so first and foremost, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to make a map that people can search for their home town and maybe you should learn this first or maybe some other things. I always find that question just like insanely hard to answer. I can tell you what I learned first in my like weird process, but that was because I needed it for this one graphic that I was doing or something like that. ->> But I think the ultimately the most important thing is learn whatever lets you do what project you're working on and if you've seen projects you like that are built in Javascript, then like sure, go learn that, and I don't know, I haven't come up with a better answer to that question. ->> So that argues for determining what kind of project you want to do first and then breaking down. ->> Yeah. ->> Keogh, who's actually here a book called "Don't Go Back To School," like a lot of people in that book talked about how they learned things and that's one of the things that turned up repeatedly is like I found a project and I figured out what that project needed. ->> Once you need one it's very easy to to find another. I learned CSS because that's what I learned in high school. I mainly code in Python now, because it was easy to make that transition. ->> I think just having some really basic knowledge of what type of code does what. So you can kind of use that and either dive in more to get whatever project you need done. I feel like everything is becoming very project-based. And it's not like you said, there are like a million languages. You learned two or three. It's going to be less about a particular language, I think, but knowing the use of each language and being able to apply that. ->> Did most of you folks learn on the job? ->> ->> Lots of nodding heads. Did anyone learn in school? You learned C++ in school technically or half in school? Do you think that's for someone who is, say, junior, who kind of wants to et head into this stuff that school is it a good path or would you argue for sending them straight into a job? I see shaking heads. ->> So I should disclose I'm a professor, and we just hired Peggy, who's formerly a news developer who's teaching Javascript and stuff in our program. And I have an approach. When someone asks me what should I learn for coding it's almost like they've -- they've heard the message that I need to be a developer, if not, I will never have a job and that's a little bit of bullshit there and they're scared and they just are panicking, so it's not the right reason to answer that question. So it's a tricky one to answer. ->> What's a better question. ->> What do you want to do for your life what do you have fun doing? And you may or may not get paid for it and we'll get you where you want to be going. Usually it's like I want to be an entrepreneur. If you answer that question, you're not going to be an entrepreneur. If you have gone through your programs and you haven't opened that book or you haven't had these conversations it's difficult to all of a sudden jump on that train and I have found that a lot of people are jumping on that train for the wrong reasons. ->> You have to really like to troubleshoot. That to me is the most important skill. That's the core skill that I try to instill in my students. MacGuyver this shit. I don't know what the fuck just happened, let's solve it. ->> Do you think that's an innate type of thing or do you think that particular habit of OK, something went wrong and I figure out how to do it is something you can teach if. ->> I think -- I would say it's a bit of both. ->> I think one of the problems is that we're even in this conversation we're starting in the middle. Which language, blah blah blah, and everybody I've talked to at NICAR who aren't coders, they're like, which one do I start? How do I even start, how does it go together? And I think you need to start by explaining HTML, CSS, Javascript what do those do and the students I taught this year, as soon as I explained that, they were just like: And I mean personally, you should start for programming language, Javascript is excellent because you don't need a big setup, you don't need Ruby on Rails installed. You just do it in your browser and with that you work on the basics, variables, arrays, blah blah blah. And all also right now, Python is great, Ruby on Rails. All of those are just used for to get to the databases, but now that we're doing so much with json and flat files, Javascript is real is not only a great place to begin, but it's really the one that's going to take over. ->> I guess for me. ->> I'm not really kind of sure what position I'm in, because I'm very comfortable with code, but I really want to get into a research setting and like like knowing certain languages is well and good, I think it's the difficulty is figuring out where I'd be useful, where -- or like there are issues that I care about a lot, and stuff that I want to work on, but I don't know if I have to focus more on statistical kind of projects or more of an interactive thing, like -- ->> Yeah, so the other side of this if I can interrupt for a second is there's one side OK I'm in or near a newsroom but I'm not coding and I want to get closer to the code. The little bit of a perspective that I take to myself personally but the other side you're saying is I've got the code down and I get in the newsroom and I want to work on shit that matters. Some of the folks are in the newsroom here. There are like two sides of that, right? There's the stuff that gets ticked out, like how to you build a website in using this stuff and presenting this stuff. A lot of what we're doing at Vox is how do you present the news and the other side is how do you use programming to tell stories and in the sense of like digging through a database and figuring out where the story is in there. I think the first part of that is I'm going to guess more familiar with that, in terms of how do you get things up in the internet, but the second part of that I think seems a little opaque or someone could argue with me about that, too. Tiff, you do some of this stuff, right? How does someone get into doing news with data? ->> I think a lot of our cases, only a handful of projects really are data analysis. They tend to be identified as that early on. It's like the ones where you need to put together a database or really spend a lot of time trolling through a lot of information. The majority of the projects that we handle for the interactive graphics desk at the New York Times are really CNS hacking. OK, you did this one interesting preparation on this one story that went up online, how do you get it there, and starting to accrue this weird library of all the little hacks and tweaks the CMS lets you do to get into just tweaking the story a little bit. Once you have a library of a lot of those internal, I don't know, I guess it would be, you know, internal expertise in the CMS or whatever the system that your particular news operation runs, the questions are firstly how do I get this journalists will come to you you and say how do I get these things here, and then it's what if we want to customize it, and so the more of a library that you can have of those little edges of skills, the more you're in a conversation being like you have this cool piece that's coming up, you were telling me about this earlier, what if you were to do a little built of a custom, you know, adjust what the C column looks like or change the art that turns into a discussion with the journalists and gradually the teams that are doing that on a regular basis, they come and talk to you about stuff, too. It's kind of a sideways answer. ->> Some of that comes down also to what's the best way to show this stuff, right, so you could have a table but there are lots of different ways to present that table that they are going to be more or less successful as a news story so a design coming into could potentially be really effective in that role. You were raising your hand back there. ->> I don't remember what I was going to say but a lot of it has to do is latching onto people who know things that you don't regardless of your position. So if you're in the newsroom and you're you know, I feel like I should learn code, it's usually not so much I should learn because that's what everyone is saying it's because knowing how HTML and Jworks opens up lots of story-telling possibilities and once you are conversant in this language you then have this whole new toolset, new ways of saying things to why you are audience, you don't have to write it, you have to know how to talk to people who can. And knowing it is huge and I think that what at these types of conferences we don't hear much is the inverse. Latch onto the old-school storytellers, like the writers, and learn sort of how narrative works and like sort of the beginning, middle and end, classic things, and like the two can really learn from each other, I think, but so much is collaboration. At least that's in my experience. ->> Demystifying each other, as well. Like demystifying technology and why does this photo run in color, we sold an ad on that page, not because it was more important, stuff like that. ->> Just to sort of play off of what you were saying as an old-school storyteller, I may be the only person here of dinosaur paper at the Daily News who works here as a columnist, and I think conversations like this are awesome, and clearly there's a lot of talent. For myself, just sort of coming from one old school newspaper to another, the biggest frustration is knowing that there's so much talent out here and how do we get it into these shrinking papers with no budget and limited staff and all that and once they get in there, how do we break it down that this person is not coming for your job. I don't have the answer. But I keep coming to events like this, even though I feel oh, my God, I have no idea what people are talking are. They're going to take my old lady card at the door. But there's this opportunity, and I feel like inside our building and maybe outside, we haven't quite figured out how to meet in the middle. ->> Part of that friction that I see happening in newsrooms, too, is because there's these deadline pressures constantly, so there's never enough time, which then kind of, and there tends to be this trend of the developers in the newsrooms are way overworked and tasked, so they start to lose patience with excessive questions and rightfully so, because there's only so much you can do, but then it sort of creates this environment that, you know, is not welcoming for people to dip their toes in that or ask questions, so part of it is leads to like management's responsibility in, right, right, that's a largest issue. ->> That face was off the record. ->> [laughter] ->> I wonder if Claire could talk a little with working with some of the people in our now room who are not digital natives and not the most digitally savvy, because she works on a team of app developers. ->> I mean like we're sort of an experiment in that we're sort of like a content team of like basically we were a former multimedia team, which is like photo and video and we merged with what was the apps team which was developers and designers and so now we're this little hub that sort of consults with what we call subject matter experts which is I guess like our reporters, and we're basically like, we can't tell a story without your reporting, you guys tell us but they're like we can't build a site without you guys. It's a very collaborative learn as you go type thing, but they're basically our subject matter experts is the terminology that we use. ->> And we don't make projects very often, because we can't. And that's where we're at at the moment, but it's very sort of collaborative thing. ->> Is there anything I can do in my newsroom or other newsrooms, or anybody who's in the old school newsroom that we can sort of maybe make this happen more because the flip side of what you were talking about is that you have all these reporters who are totally on deadline being asked to do more with less, being asked to do more and more and more and we're told use some of that newfangled social stuff, and to be honest with you, I was 20 years at the Hartford Courant in Connecticut, and then I'm here our social media session ended with Twitter. I kid you not. ->> I'll say one thing, which is that one of the things that I've done in previous jobs when you had people who were like overworked and weren't communicating, was I found a place for them to go eat dinner together outside of work, you buy everyone a meal. Everyone likes free food. You kind of break it down, some of those, any tension that might be around if you like put a plate of pasta in front of somebody, they're going to hang out until the end of that plate of pasta, at least. You can initiate the conversation. It does sound, at least from my perspective, that some of this is maybe kind of groundswell. ->> So in my newsroom I work with 500 to 600 people, most of whom are not digital natives, and part of my goal is to get them more ramped up on using these things, and the way that I've tried to do that is we have an internal listserv. It's public. Every day I write an internal note that praises people very publicly within our company for doing good things in digital and social, and that could be anywhere from like our 65-year-old film critic who took to Twitter to, you know, we noticed that people in the building were collaborating together and it's a very loose definition of what digital means. When I first started it was opt in for everybody except management. People started really liking being praised this way and they could share what they were doing and I could pass it back out to management, and then they, we don't necessarily use these things when we're like hiring people or when we're promoting people and I wanted them to think like this is important if so-and-so is doing this and it helped create this atmosphere at NPR were people are sharing more what they're doing. If something works for one team, they tell me and I can tell everybody in the building. But it's not just praising the people who know how to code and it's not just praising the reporters but if I notice somebody in development is doing something, everybody is on this listserv and we make the entire thing public so you can read it too. ->> and the other thing is you should be doing what you're doing right here, in terms of being with this. And also hacks and hackers is literally a mix of old school news people and hackers and they have a pretty active chapter in New York, and I think in Philly, as well. So it's definitely worth checking out. I've been to some really good presentations there. Al Shaw I think is one of the people who helps run the New York one. And I think he's somewhere around here. ->> I've just. ->> We have one on the 30th on source cod rejects. ->> There's ONA, as well. ->> I actually know that. So see, not that old. ->> It depends on what you want to -- ->> I came from -- and my first career I worked in old school book publishing, I worked at WW Norton and company which is about as crotchety as book publishers get. They edit on paper to this day. And I got into web design partly like I started reading a list apart, to kind of lurking around in the comments there, and then I like submitted an essay to that place about like a little thing that I had something to say. I went to meetups and things like that, to figure out how to teach myself HTML and CSS and those kinds of things. Partly proactive. ->> You do it by yourself? ->> I think I had a couple -- I mean we're going back a long time here, so probably did get some nudges, but partly I think I was also just looking for I was like, I can't stay a print design er why, I'm not going to -- like I wanted a longer-lived career than that and web seemed like it was exciting and so I started going into that. But it doesn't take much to build a small network. Talk with and work with and hang out and make being connections with other people. ->> I know we're not supposed to take over. I swear it will be the last one. ->> But you guys have mentioned this often about manage the as sort of as enthusiastic as I may be or other people are, I don't want to be Debbie Downer more than I already have, but this is a really small example, and it's kind of embarrassing, so it's not like I'm like newfangled stuff. I went to management and, you know, that would be a really cool way for us to do some stories. They're like, "Could we just wait until after the budget season?" "This is not going to cost you money." ->> I mean the classic startup answer to that is you ask forgiveness later, don't ask permission up front. Just do it. ->> I worked every digital job on the newspaper side and the lesson that I learned is go rogue respectfully, and a lesson I learned a long time ago is I forgot who coined the term, fool, be a present of the online. So whatever side of the fence that you feel you're on, find an ally. Let's not make this project be the project, but if it fails, no one even notices, but if it succeeds, you'll start building up that credibility. What happens with management is they will block all your ideas but when an idea breaks through, all of a sudden they're all like that's a really good idea we had, wasn't it, so work from within, you plant those seeds and they'll blossom and grow. ->> Thanks, sorry. ->> I really like John Keefe at WNYC. His story of how he became the head of this new digital apps kind of team was he just made a map right before hurricane, I guess it was hurricane Irene of the flood map area that existed as a PDF on the New York City government website and he made it interactive and that got more traffic than anything else that WNRC had seen, and they were like hey, this mapping internet stuff is it is really cool. I'm at ProPublica, and something we've started is we have this brown bag sessions where we either bring people in or we have a little like here's how the web inspector works for everybody in the newsroom and that's like a lunch hour and because we do it often it's not a huge deal and people can come in and out and it's not super formal. But it does get the kind of more technical skills and kind of people talking and sharing and good ideas and that kind much thing. Noah V., when he was at the BBC, he did these little brown bags, and did that to the newsroom and they then asked him more questions and management is OK with you having like little lunch. -> They may not even know about it necessarily, right. ->> It didn't cost them anything and you're basically doing the job that they should be doing, which is training and build willing moderate staff. ->> This isn't a solution, this is just an observation, watching the industry and the jobs that are going by. The big players, you know, they have established web development teams and they're integrating. There's been a flood over the last like 6 months of sort of next step down papers, or news organizations looking for developers, and data journalists and what I'm seeing is that they're confused about what they're asking for, so they put in the kitchen sink. They want a data reporter, they want a developer, they want a dev ops guy. You must understand HTML, TTS, you know, hypertechnical stuff, and that just doesn't exist, and then I can think of two of those jobs that were literally, you know, they couldn't find anybody, because that person doesn't exist, and then the job goes away, because if you couldn't fill it, then the management says it's useless, because, you know, we lived without it for nine months, what's there. So as I said, this is not a solution, it's an observation of like, well, how do you get past that point? Because if you don't also we're not keeping the flow of journalist developers going, and they're all at the New York Times, now, so you know, how do you get people in at the ground level if they're expected to be seasoned journalists who are going to work for $30,000, you know, out in, you know, Redlands, California. ->> You if I may, I think that's a really great point. I think when you're listening to people downstairs in sort of the big hall there's definitely patterns emerging and those patterns are big blobby patterns, and I think we have the luxury because I'm taking the notes, there's a lot of this question of creating sort of alliances, acting on your own, working in small teams, if something comes to mind that it's not an option. I want to be clear it's not an option for everybody to work on nights and weekends on side projects and things like that which to me traditionally have been very fulfilling. If you have that luxury, if you have the personal time and space to do that, then you create these cool little sparks and splinters, which I think can then catch fire for small and mid level organizations as people determine what their passions are. Like the things Mike the mid post I think are really fascinating because either a regional or a topical subject matter or a community subject matter that once you develop the skills and alliances to begin to fill in the blanks, you get an outward form from more monolithic teams, I hope. ->> I'm also thinking that basically the people in charge of writing these don't understand what -- writing these job descriptions don't understand what they're writing. So but you can't, you know, pull it out from them and have somebody who actually does understand it because they're not high enough in the management or whatever. ->> So my thought to that, I came into journalism recently and I came from an engineering program. My thought to that, you know, when you said that there aren't people that know all these things, well no, no, there are people who know all these things, they're in computer science programs in colleges around the country and I think as a computer science student that is graduating, sure you have a lot of options where you can get paid a lot or whatever, but like a lot of CS students are like sure, I can make twice as much at this company that manufactures nuts and bolts or I can make half as much working in something that I really feel is meaningful, and I feel like a lot of the students in my program had no idea that these opportunities existed so I think in terms of getting people that are really technically skilled, even if they have no journalism training, they'll be really excited to be in the newsroom and I think that's something not enough news organizations are looking at. ->> Well, that's part of my question of who are we missing, is there are people out there who don't know newsrooms are a career path and we have to get that in front of them in whatever way that takes. ->> I agree but what I was really pointing out is that they expect a data journalist who has car experience, literally I just saw this, you know, you knows how to -- it's like. ->> There's definitely some of -- ->> Speaking of management in seeing the description in interviewing like the person who wrote that back in the day was like, must know how to write a headline, do CMS, and know flash. This is a home page shift at night, why are you asking for flash? They're like, we don't know what we'll get. Maybe we'll get someone, and by osmosis, we'll get flash. I think it's the same. Just put it out there and see what you get, and it scares people. ->> Why aren't these places going to computer science schools in the universities in the towns where they are and say what isn't going on out there, let's partner in a project. People in intro classes they're not being taught, you know, they're being taught how to code but they're not being taught to code in terms of like real-life projects. If the daily news approached temple which has a new dean of the journalism school, and said we would like to work with the computer science department and we would like to work with these three classes and say to the professor this is what we'd like the students to build at the end of it, the students build something real, they learn useful skills, they get to meet journalists, they're put into the pipeline. They might be more diverse than people in newsrooms. ->> I'm just curious, I don't know the answer to this question, but I mean are there efforts being made by newspapers to, like, open some of their projects up or parts of it? I mean obviously you don't want to tell the story to reveal where you're going to be presenting, but you want to show some of it, or make people able to contribute to it? ->> I mean, I know the times has a lot of projects that are sitting on GitHub right now that are open. I don't know what the licensing but you can see them at least and poke around with them and play with them. Vox has been opening up a lot of their stuff, mostly like tools and making a lot of stuff like tiff was talking about. They built up a bunch of stuff there. I think any of the good newsrooms now, they at least have augite hub repo with a lot of stuff into in it. It's work poking around in them and seeing what you can find or contributing to them. And improve it, that's a good way to get the attention of the team. ->> Is it like a growing trend. ->> I think so. Yeah, I mean I started at Vox four weeks ago and at their hack week, and the project that I ended up jumping into that in that was specifically about open sourcing things at Vox, because it's something that they always wanted to do, but hadn't done it, and they were getting a lot of pressure, partly from Dan Sinker, to getting around to actually doing it and I think the presence at this conference is that a lot of newsrooms are starting to think that at the very least it's a recruiting effort and I think that a lot of the things that they're doing if you build a tool to evaluate a particular kind of data, it's not proprietary necessarily to you, like you don't benefit at keeping that closed. You're better off having people finding the bugs and fixing it for you. Are local newspapers doing that a lot? Maybe not, but the big nationals definitely are. ->> A lot of newspapers are open sourcing like tools and reusable sort of stuff, but like NPR actually open-sources their stories and we at min post have been open sourcing a lot of our stories for a long time. We haven't really tried this or explored it, but like it would be hard to bring outside people on that process of making the story. Like once it's published, it's easy just, you know, have it out there and let people do what they want with it, but I don't know of a process that to like get outside help. ->> I mean I've seen stories that are kind of crowdsourced data analysis kind of as the story was going on, you had tomorrow data that you needed so you opened up that part of it, I can't think an example right now but I know I've seen that a couple of times. It is tough in terms of the presentation of a story that's not something that lends itself to have open source contributions necessarily. ->> I think sometimes it's a matter of documentation and thinking about documentation in a different way. If you're writing code documentation is so that other coders can understand it, that's good, but if you've been writing code and opened it up to so other people can understand it, that's. We have to think how to document this stuff externally and internally so it's not just coders who can understand the code. ->> Let me turn this around a bit. We've talked a lot about coding skills and the way that work actually gets done, but we haven't talked about the other side of it which is like the kind of ethical questions that come into a lot of this stuff, which like I feel like a lot of people are also ill equipped for when they get into a newsroom, so if you didn't go to J school which I'm going to assume that most people in this room did not go to J school. Did anyone go to J school? Yeah, three, four. And not that there's anything wrong with J school, but I think a lot of people -- ->> It's not required. ->> I think a lot of people in this field came from elsewhere and kind of moved in. It's actually the thing I like about this area is there's a lot of diverse people from a lot of diverse backgrounds. If you didn't go to J school how do you learn about the ethics and the politics that go -- and not to shit on FiveThirtyEight, because there's probably someone in here that works for them. But they've done things with data that maybe weren't such a good idea in the last couple of months and Vox I think has had its not so great moments. As someone who works for Vox now I can admit that. I feel there's a certain path towards becoming literate HTML and CSS, I'm not sure that translates with the path to becoming ethical with. ->> I think that's where the buddy system comes in handy. And like someone was saying before latch onto those people that you work with that have that experience and talk to them early in the process. Don't wait until you've built something and then bring them a project and say hey, we built this, we did it and they're like you didn't ask this fundamental question or consider the ethics of publishing this and so keeping people who have this experience looped in early and learning from it often. ->> I think those meetups are the secret sauce to progressing forward in terms of if you're a developer and you want to get into the news industry, going to hacks hackers and being a regular there, you get over that awkward socialness and start to build a better relationship there and that's the better pipeline. I wouldn't figure J schools to figure it out and it's not easy to collaborate, even in these institutions but if you can find like these moments -- we need more misfits. We look at your title like who are you missing, we need more misfits who have overcome their imposter syndrome. Giving a shit instead of just getting a paycheck. How do we've appeal to those folks and diversify that. The hackathons or at the meetups for either end of the group and the key there is for whoever is organizing that is that balance. Because you've all been to these meetups where it's all idea people who've got their startup that's going to beat Facebook and one poor developer that are leaching on and it's just bad or the other extreme where they're doing extreme tech stuff that has no relevance to the real word but they've figured out this cool code. Finding that balance and having that, you know, conferences like this, or news fu or spark camp. -- ->> So if many I'm teaching myself Javascript and it's not doing the thing that I expect it to do or I'm getting an error, I can go look at that on stack overflow and find an answer quickly. Is there an equivalent resource for ethical questions, for things around that. ->> I think as a developer who, like, found his way into news, I think one simple answer is just reading about the history of journalism. I started reading this book called The Essentials of Journalism, and it sounds stupid, but like it explains the history of news and news ethics and all of the sort of problems that management encounters with news and conflicts of interest, and it was really enlightening for me. And I think any developer who comes in from outside of news, you just hand him this book and say it's mandatory. ->> I think there's also a lot to say about watching publications. I find some days I only read Times stuff, and I have to force myself read other publications in part to see what other data teams, you can see some programming stuff behind certain stories and see like oh, they thought to ask these questions, so if we ever wanted to do a piece about X or we graft it this way, and just like collecting in your head a library of what you thought was good and bad about how organizations approach a similar project for whatever you're kind of currently working on or formulating. And then -- ->> Audit the best practices that you can see. ->> Yeah and then figuring out also the culture of the different places like do you know that the team there is relatively new and therefore kind of scrappy about what they're up to or in the case of the times we've got a lot of Timesian culture and stuff behind what we do. Would the Times do this project? Would this smaller paper do this particular project? Where does any concept sort of sit in terms of what a newsroom would want to approach? And then getting in touch with other developers at meetups, saying why did you guys do it this way, what were the pitfalls, was there a gotcha behind that project that you guys didn't realize until after? Just so sessions are so valuable. ->> I think also knowing the limits of your expertise, I don't know, like starting in a newsroom five years ago, working with like, you know, NPR vet reporters who are like experts at what they do, who maybe don't know the internet, they don't know what Twitter is and I'm awesome at the internet, but I like maybe suck at, you know, story telling and so it's like I can help you internet, but you have to help me know like what's good there. ->> and like learning as you go, and we did this big project a while back with the Planet Money guys, and it was this big internet hoopla project and there was a lot of resistance like oh, but the regular reporters they don't know what works in video story telling and actually they're really brilliant editors, so it's just like asking, which is at least in my experience, really important. ->> I think -- so I did go to J school, but I would say that the ethics class that we had was like the most horrible thing that I -- ->> Everyone hates it. ->> Yeah, so I don't think like actually the only real difference that journalism school lets you do is you produce a lot of stories and then you get somebody to read them before they are published and then they can tell you like no, this is horrible, so you have a buffer before you put it out in the world. So I think if you have a friend who's a journalist or a professor or somebody that just like another trustworthy person, giving them your project and being like hey, can you look this over, will catch like many, many, you know, problems that -- and getting that experience of like oh, no, actually I'm looking at the data wrong or I'm trying to make a point that is not backed up or I didn't adjust for population or all that stuff. ->> and you get a lot of feedback and then you do the revision, right? ->> Sure, it's back and forth for sure. ->> So that you will earn from your mistakes, right? ->> *. ->> But it's not necessarily, you don't get instilled some like, I don't know, totally new ethical, like feelings or, you know, by going to J school. It's just that you have a little bit more of a buffer while you're learning and you have tomorrow training wheels, but I think the same thing applies here. ->> So good editors. ->> I agree with that and it's not only about learning from your own stories, like you have to go through other stories, as well, we have this assessing process for each student. So it's a really rewarding process so you have to work through like several different stories before you graduate, so you already have that -- ->> So if you're in a newsroom looking at how other stories are being developed. ->> Right, even though you didn't do that by yourself. ->> Oh, one more thing, this only applies to science journaIism is the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, is basically like an analysis of science news and I felt reading that was I learned more lessons about pitfalls and I think a lot of things in covering science stories apply to the data problems that we've seen. There are tons of similarities there. But reading more like critiques or at least like analysis like how this is covered catches many of those same like ethical or the things that you might not have thought of if you're coming from a different background. So I like that. ->> Also suggesting some of what we were talking about at the beginning which is that it's kind of project based or subject based that if you're doing a story that's about science and you spend some extra time learning about the pitfalls there, versus something if you're using election data or something like that. There might be cross-pollination things, but there's also specific things that you can learn about that you're doing a story about AIDS or something like that. ->> It used to be that you learn on the job and you just sort of like you were around it, you did calendar listings and you learned the who, what, when, where, why, and is that system just nonexistent now because print people, you know, old people don't want to engage with the online people or are the classic hard-core reporters, are they all gone, have they been all laid off? How can that basically apprenticeship system no longer exists? ->> I don't know the answer to that question. I can say in my own career, apprenticeship has not been available. I had to kind of figure things out on my own. I don't know if other folks who came up in newsrooms, if you had different experiences. ->> For me, that's why I went to J school and when I was there, someone taught me. My first boss was actually a good boss and then after that, not so good, but yeah, it's not that -- that system is not -- ->> and there is also lot more people applying for those jobs, so therefore -- or those, you know, data entry jobs for calendar listings, some of them are scripted and so it's easier to do and stuff like that. ->> I suspect -- and this is very anecdotal -- is the concept of apprenticeship kind of went away with pensions. The idea of investing in an employee who's going to stick around 30 years -- when I started. I was one of the last people to get in before they stopped pensions. I'll get like 20 bucks a month when I retire eventually, but started with one of the last publisher holdouts who still that had those kind of benefits. As an employer, I'm going to invest a lot of money in you and you're going to stick around for a long time, I do think that I suspect that that's part of what's coming from there. But also what I'm hearing from a lot of the things we've talked about in this room is there are lots of opportunities to find that apprenticeship on your own. It might take a little more up-front work but there are communities you can participate in, there are people who you can find and kind of do work with, there are opportunities to kind of find that apprenticeship in the space that you're in, whether or not it is like sanctioned by management, you can like seek out mentors and collaborators within your space and that feels like potentially a productive alternative, like we can make our own apprenticeships if someone is not laying them out for us necessarily. ->> Our younger people in the newsroom less inclined from anybody's observation less inclined to seek experience from people who have been in the newsroom before? Is that anecdotally the case, as well, in addition to maybe the other side of the equation where people are less willing to convey that information? Are people more inclined to look on the internet or something like that? ->> My experience at news day is I'm hoping that will change but there's a huge cultural split, even though online and the paper were, you know, like 10 feet apart, they were -- they didn't associate -- you know, paper people hated the online, online hated the paper -- so it's, you know, hard to get over that rift to address these people who have had 20, 30 years experience because they don't want to associate and maybe online people, it's also like oh, those old print people. So I think it's a cultural thing, maybe, you know, where it's hard to reach out. Did that answer the question? ->> I think it depends on the job and the market that you're at, the organization that you're at. I think younger up and coming aspiring journalists have more opportunities in nontraditional ways, like if you got into Twitter, all of a sudden you're the Social Media Senior Editor, which that just popped up, seniors in titles like candy or something like that. But if you're a reporter, like breaking news reporter, you're a breaking news reporter, so let me go think or mentor with someone, that incentive is almost squashed out because of that deadline. It depends on the organization. ->> I also kind of get the sense, like I know that both sides are sort of wedded to this narrative of like the old journalists are crusty and don't want anything to do with these new young journalists and the young journalists are too afraid or don't care what the older journalists, I kind of get the sense that for the old people who are in newsrooms now and for the young people who are coming in newsrooms, I mean there's a sense if you're sort of old school and still in a newsroom, you want to learn all these skills. You want to have this collaborations so I don't think that narrative. ->> That was the narrative five years ago. ->> Yeah, and we're still sticking to that. And I think the ones stick to go that are the managers, and the editors for some strange reason. When we connect with each other, we in fact don't. I see young journalists really wanting to talk to the veteran journalists about old-style storytelling, and I really hate that term, even though I call myself old and all that. There is an opportunity where these two sides want to start working with each other but I'm not sure if they know how to do it when you have the leadership or the management not quite helping. ->> Do you think that's partially a factor -- this is something we see quite a bit too, where fewer people to do a broader and broader role and so they get so deadline driven on those projects, even if there is a culture and they have the impetus to want to do a wider variety of work, the sheer volume of work keeps enforcing that perspective. ->> And the reality is when you're not in New York Times or and you're like in the Daily News or the Hartford Courant, there's not the money. I'm kind of wish there was a way for us to have the conversation at that level because we don't know what we want to do and we want to do it and we're stuck on Twitter and that's embarrassing. ->> That gets back to the job descriptions that want everything and they want to pay $40,000 in a city that -- ->> That's pretty good these days. ->> It is, but that's, you know, did. ->> I'm going to pull back from that question a little bit. I do want to ask one more question which is, so let's imagine that next year SRCCON is even bigger. What kinds of people who maybe don't know about SRCCON do you think should be here? One of those things I want to do is find where those people are and make sure they know about this and know about hackers and these communities. It's easy for a lot of teams to be in a field and not knowing what's going on on the outside of it. What kinds of people do you think we need, what are our newsrooms missing that, you know, could be productive if we found those people and brought them in here? ->> One point which is totally self-interested, but the audience development person tends to get or in many newsrooms is sort of pushed out of the development process, and that, I think those communities need to be interconnected more so that you're achieving the ultimate goal of reaching and expanding your community. ->> So audience development is one. Everyone know what audience development is. ->> Or engagement or social media person or and not all of that, you know, Melody is a really great example, but like most social media editors, I know that's not exactly your title, but you know, they don't have coding skills of any kind. They just are adept at the internet, and so kind of bridging that gap of skills. ->> So you might have someone who's in PR right now and hating their life but they could do much better work. ->> Even though that PR knows a shit-ton of stuff that we don't even, they're smarter than we are, I just put that out there in terms of metrics and analysis. ->> They use data. ->> So we're going to invite PR people to the next SRCCON. ->> I would argue on that point that a lot of organizations are creating their own newsrooms. Like Coca-Cola started writing their own press releases,. ->> They codified an innovation site. ->> They're basically doing what they're doing. So I think we should take PR people really seriously. ->> the older editors in the Coca-Cola newsroom are not happy. ->> I latch onto misfits who -- like I think of Kinsey for example, the first time I've heard of Kinsey Wilson at NPR, I sat down with him and interviewed him and tried to find other managers that. The thing with John Keefe, everyone uses him as an arc but he was the news director could he he could do whatever he wants. But there are other people who are like I get it and I want to empower. I think of Ken Sands who started off at the Spokesman Review with Ryan Pitts and he basically said dude, do what you do, and it was a great relationship there. It was like those misfits that kind of get it and here's what I've found comfortable with what they don't know and are confident with what they do and are happy to share it. ->> I think another thing is kind of we underestimate how significant it is to pull someone in. I think a lot of times we kind of like say there are all these resources, like you should just know that they exist and that should be enough, but I think kind of like trying to identify those people and it's a hard skill to kind of identify those not obvious traits. I think as much as we can be cognizant to like not everyone that's doing good work is upon Twitter all the time because they can't be on Twitter all the time, to be honest and kind of not just basing it on those obvious metrics. And then pulling them in. I think there's a lot to be said about just direct connection and having that kind of support and link. ->> ->> Mel? - -Just bouncing off of that, the only reason I'm here at this conference is because Erin emailed me and said you should come to this conference and you should speak at the conference and I think, you know, figuring out who those people are and inviting them with an email message whether you're hiring or trying to find sources or trying to bring people into projects, it really does a lot just to you know, I believe in like praise and reaching out to people and bringing them directly in and that's how you diversify every part of this. ->> ->> Yeah, I back that up. I was also an invitee, and, you know, I think that they did a great job of doing that, especially considering how quick it sold out and maybe there are some ways that they can tier the registration to kind of modeled off of what they did, I think they did a great job, but expanding on that forward. ->> Are there other folks besides like PR people or like engagement people who we think that the newsrooms? ->> Leadership. - ->>Leadership, you think? ->> Yeah, get some of the executives in the room to hear what's going on. ->> Those that get it. Because it's like that has happened many times. ->> Combine it. Get the ones who get it and get the ones don't, so that they see the power of the ones who don't. The ones who get it is likely the ones who are succeeding if you bring like-minded people into the room. If everybody's an engineer and you're trying to do fine arts, it's like you need some fine arts people in there. I think it's the same principle. ->> Google Doc is going to stay up and stay public. And we have a lovely transcript from our fan Norma, here. If you put your name in this doc, I will follow up with it, because I'm going to try to write it up and pitch it to the source. I might ask some follow-up questions. ->> You should all pitch to source. That is part of the work being done in this room. So yes, send me your shit: ... ... ... ... ... -[break] - - - +This is a DRAFT TRANSCRIPT from a live session at SRCCON 2014. This transcript should be considered provisional, and if you were in attendance (or spot an obvious error) we'd love your help fixing it. More information on SRCCON is available at https://srccon.org. + +Captioning by the wonderful people of White Coat Captioning, LLC +whitecoatcaptioning.com + +Thursday +Session 3 -- Who are we missing? +Session Leader: Mandy Brown + +> > All right, I'm going to get started. I think more people are going to trickle in, but since Dan told us to be on time, I'm going to adhere to that. This is the short URL for a Google Doc which I started already, and if you would like to pop your name and like URL in there, I'm hoping to do a little SRC post about what comes out of this session and I will credit you as being a part of that if you put your name in there. If you want to be anonymous, that's cool. You don't have to put your name in there. + +I was going to make you guys take notes for me during this session, but it turns out we have an awesome stenographer over here named Norma, so we have professional notes, so you don't have do that, but David is going to pop in there and write down some kind of high-level themes and ideas that come out of this and you're free to contribute to that, as well. + +Just in case you didn't remember from that whole big thing where we just introduced each other, but I am Mandy Brown, I'm from Brooklyn, I'm from Vox product. Before Vox I was CEO of a little startup called Editorially, which is a collaborative editing platform which David built along with a few other people who are still here. We sold that to Vox and are now working on similar tools inside Vox. So I work on content management systems, basically. But that I was a communications director, and that's kind of how I started doing product. Before that I was in traditional book publishing and I will the cofounded a book apart. I proposed this session because I want to know the apes to the questions that I put in there. I do not actually know them. + +So I have a lot of questions, and I'm hoping that we -- like the people in this room have some ideas or even a way to like flesh out those questions, because I don't have the answers to any of these questions. And partly, and I say this with a lot of my colleagues in this room, who I don't want to scare them, but one of the things that I have thought about over the last like five or six years is that I'm kind of always thinking about what my next job or career is going to be. Not leaving my current one. And I think that news room code and data journalism are fields which are welcoming to people of a lot of different backgrounds. This is the kind of field that actually benefits from people coming from lots of different directions. And I'm curious for myself how I might transition into something like that. Whether or not I actually do that -- come on in. + +Whether or not I actually do that is up to question, but one of the things that I thought about is that I'm interested in the stuff but I'm not really sure how to get started so there is a wealth of skills around presenting content on the web. HTML and CSS are kind of stable states at this point in the field. Javascript, Ruby on Rails, and various kinds of frameworks. There's a set of tools and skillset around actually doing like statistical analysis, so things like Python and R -- please come in -- and also just basic competencies around like how do stats work and how do you look at data and know what to do with it, and there's probably all kinds of other things, I think, around kind of the power that comes along with that data, so the ethical considerations you have to take into account, like what kinds of things you could be revealing or not revealing what it says when you're acting on it, those kinds of things. So I will put the question out to -- let's do this. Who actually works in either newsroom code or data journalism. I know at least one, two, three and a half -- what do you do? + +> > I help run social strategy. +> > I work on the programmer side of newsroom. +> > OK. Katie, also at MinnPost. I lead our news application team and web development and design. +> > Tiff at New York Times. I'm a developer. +> > So for the folks who are developers in the room, what do you think if someone was starting out going into newsroom code what are the first things someone needs to learn and what are the best ways to go about that. First things that you need to learn? + +> > Do you mean like what someone needs to learn to be a developer in the newsroom? Or someone needs to know going into the newsroom? +> > Let's start with the first one. So if you want to become a developer in a newsroom, how do you get started with that? What are some of the core skills you need going into that experience? +> > +> > For me, I mean a lot of it obviously technical, like how to program, but the ability to work quickly and not be perfect in your work is kind of really important skill. +> > Kind of efficiency and lack of perfectionism. Both really important. +> > I think there's a translation aspect, like translating what you're doing to people who might not understand or might not understand why it's important and not only translating it to other developers, but translating it to your newsroom. +> > So making sure the newsroom understands the importance of that development work? +> > Mm-hm. +> > Yeah, I think the more you can break down those silos, it will allow people to see into what the work actually looks like, and transition more people toward it. +> > Yeah, yup. +> > Kind of going off of that is to try to align goals as much as you you can between silos, so you're kind of working toward one goal. +> > So you guys say all that stuff I think about, like hybrids, like people who are not specialists in any particular area, but like it move around in a lot of things which is where I've kind of. I've specialized in being a hybrid for most of my career for better or worse. But I wonder if are there there areas of in depth experience where if someone wants to go to maybe a type of management roam into like actually working on it and I'll put this out as a really basic question. Which programming skills do you think is most important right now? I look at all the places I spend time working and it's ah, it's too much. +> > What are the things that like I ought to get into? We can just make this session, "What should Mandy do next?" as a framing thing here. +> > Feel like that question comes up a lot, and it's always, it's sort of dependent on your project, and I think so first and foremost, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to make a map that people can search for their home town and maybe you should learn this first or maybe some other things. I always find that question just like insanely hard to answer. I can tell you what I learned first in my like weird process, but that was because I needed it for this one graphic that I was doing or something like that. +> > But I think the ultimately the most important thing is learn whatever lets you do what project you're working on and if you've seen projects you like that are built in Javascript, then like sure, go learn that, and I don't know, I haven't come up with a better answer to that question. +> > So that argues for determining what kind of project you want to do first and then breaking down. +> > Yeah. +> > Keogh, who's actually here a book called "Don't Go Back To School," like a lot of people in that book talked about how they learned things and that's one of the things that turned up repeatedly is like I found a project and I figured out what that project needed. +> > Once you need one it's very easy to to find another. I learned CSS because that's what I learned in high school. I mainly code in Python now, because it was easy to make that transition. +> > I think just having some really basic knowledge of what type of code does what. So you can kind of use that and either dive in more to get whatever project you need done. I feel like everything is becoming very project-based. And it's not like you said, there are like a million languages. You learned two or three. It's going to be less about a particular language, I think, but knowing the use of each language and being able to apply that. +> > Did most of you folks learn on the job? +> > +> > Lots of nodding heads. Did anyone learn in school? You learned C++ in school technically or half in school? Do you think that's for someone who is, say, junior, who kind of wants to et head into this stuff that school is it a good path or would you argue for sending them straight into a job? I see shaking heads. +> > So I should disclose I'm a professor, and we just hired Peggy, who's formerly a news developer who's teaching Javascript and stuff in our program. And I have an approach. When someone asks me what should I learn for coding it's almost like they've -- they've heard the message that I need to be a developer, if not, I will never have a job and that's a little bit of bullshit there and they're scared and they just are panicking, so it's not the right reason to answer that question. So it's a tricky one to answer. +> > What's a better question. +> > What do you want to do for your life what do you have fun doing? And you may or may not get paid for it and we'll get you where you want to be going. Usually it's like I want to be an entrepreneur. If you answer that question, you're not going to be an entrepreneur. If you have gone through your programs and you haven't opened that book or you haven't had these conversations it's difficult to all of a sudden jump on that train and I have found that a lot of people are jumping on that train for the wrong reasons. +> > You have to really like to troubleshoot. That to me is the most important skill. That's the core skill that I try to instill in my students. MacGuyver this shit. I don't know what the fuck just happened, let's solve it. +> > Do you think that's an innate type of thing or do you think that particular habit of OK, something went wrong and I figure out how to do it is something you can teach if. +> > I think -- I would say it's a bit of both. +> > I think one of the problems is that we're even in this conversation we're starting in the middle. Which language, blah blah blah, and everybody I've talked to at NICAR who aren't coders, they're like, which one do I start? How do I even start, how does it go together? And I think you need to start by explaining HTML, CSS, Javascript what do those do and the students I taught this year, as soon as I explained that, they were just like: And I mean personally, you should start for programming language, Javascript is excellent because you don't need a big setup, you don't need Ruby on Rails installed. You just do it in your browser and with that you work on the basics, variables, arrays, blah blah blah. And all also right now, Python is great, Ruby on Rails. All of those are just used for to get to the databases, but now that we're doing so much with json and flat files, Javascript is real is not only a great place to begin, but it's really the one that's going to take over. +> > I guess for me. +> > I'm not really kind of sure what position I'm in, because I'm very comfortable with code, but I really want to get into a research setting and like like knowing certain languages is well and good, I think it's the difficulty is figuring out where I'd be useful, where -- or like there are issues that I care about a lot, and stuff that I want to work on, but I don't know if I have to focus more on statistical kind of projects or more of an interactive thing, like -- +> > Yeah, so the other side of this if I can interrupt for a second is there's one side OK I'm in or near a newsroom but I'm not coding and I want to get closer to the code. The little bit of a perspective that I take to myself personally but the other side you're saying is I've got the code down and I get in the newsroom and I want to work on shit that matters. Some of the folks are in the newsroom here. There are like two sides of that, right? There's the stuff that gets ticked out, like how to you build a website in using this stuff and presenting this stuff. A lot of what we're doing at Vox is how do you present the news and the other side is how do you use programming to tell stories and in the sense of like digging through a database and figuring out where the story is in there. I think the first part of that is I'm going to guess more familiar with that, in terms of how do you get things up in the internet, but the second part of that I think seems a little opaque or someone could argue with me about that, too. Tiff, you do some of this stuff, right? How does someone get into doing news with data? +> > I think a lot of our cases, only a handful of projects really are data analysis. They tend to be identified as that early on. It's like the ones where you need to put together a database or really spend a lot of time trolling through a lot of information. The majority of the projects that we handle for the interactive graphics desk at the New York Times are really CNS hacking. OK, you did this one interesting preparation on this one story that went up online, how do you get it there, and starting to accrue this weird library of all the little hacks and tweaks the CMS lets you do to get into just tweaking the story a little bit. Once you have a library of a lot of those internal, I don't know, I guess it would be, you know, internal expertise in the CMS or whatever the system that your particular news operation runs, the questions are firstly how do I get this journalists will come to you you and say how do I get these things here, and then it's what if we want to customize it, and so the more of a library that you can have of those little edges of skills, the more you're in a conversation being like you have this cool piece that's coming up, you were telling me about this earlier, what if you were to do a little built of a custom, you know, adjust what the C column looks like or change the art that turns into a discussion with the journalists and gradually the teams that are doing that on a regular basis, they come and talk to you about stuff, too. It's kind of a sideways answer. +> > Some of that comes down also to what's the best way to show this stuff, right, so you could have a table but there are lots of different ways to present that table that they are going to be more or less successful as a news story so a design coming into could potentially be really effective in that role. You were raising your hand back there. +> > I don't remember what I was going to say but a lot of it has to do is latching onto people who know things that you don't regardless of your position. So if you're in the newsroom and you're you know, I feel like I should learn code, it's usually not so much I should learn because that's what everyone is saying it's because knowing how HTML and Jworks opens up lots of story-telling possibilities and once you are conversant in this language you then have this whole new toolset, new ways of saying things to why you are audience, you don't have to write it, you have to know how to talk to people who can. And knowing it is huge and I think that what at these types of conferences we don't hear much is the inverse. Latch onto the old-school storytellers, like the writers, and learn sort of how narrative works and like sort of the beginning, middle and end, classic things, and like the two can really learn from each other, I think, but so much is collaboration. At least that's in my experience. +> > Demystifying each other, as well. Like demystifying technology and why does this photo run in color, we sold an ad on that page, not because it was more important, stuff like that. +> > Just to sort of play off of what you were saying as an old-school storyteller, I may be the only person here of dinosaur paper at the Daily News who works here as a columnist, and I think conversations like this are awesome, and clearly there's a lot of talent. For myself, just sort of coming from one old school newspaper to another, the biggest frustration is knowing that there's so much talent out here and how do we get it into these shrinking papers with no budget and limited staff and all that and once they get in there, how do we break it down that this person is not coming for your job. I don't have the answer. But I keep coming to events like this, even though I feel oh, my God, I have no idea what people are talking are. They're going to take my old lady card at the door. But there's this opportunity, and I feel like inside our building and maybe outside, we haven't quite figured out how to meet in the middle. +> > Part of that friction that I see happening in newsrooms, too, is because there's these deadline pressures constantly, so there's never enough time, which then kind of, and there tends to be this trend of the developers in the newsrooms are way overworked and tasked, so they start to lose patience with excessive questions and rightfully so, because there's only so much you can do, but then it sort of creates this environment that, you know, is not welcoming for people to dip their toes in that or ask questions, so part of it is leads to like management's responsibility in, right, right, that's a largest issue. +> > That face was off the record. +> > [laughter] +> > I wonder if Claire could talk a little with working with some of the people in our now room who are not digital natives and not the most digitally savvy, because she works on a team of app developers. +> > I mean like we're sort of an experiment in that we're sort of like a content team of like basically we were a former multimedia team, which is like photo and video and we merged with what was the apps team which was developers and designers and so now we're this little hub that sort of consults with what we call subject matter experts which is I guess like our reporters, and we're basically like, we can't tell a story without your reporting, you guys tell us but they're like we can't build a site without you guys. It's a very collaborative learn as you go type thing, but they're basically our subject matter experts is the terminology that we use. +> > And we don't make projects very often, because we can't. And that's where we're at at the moment, but it's very sort of collaborative thing. +> > Is there anything I can do in my newsroom or other newsrooms, or anybody who's in the old school newsroom that we can sort of maybe make this happen more because the flip side of what you were talking about is that you have all these reporters who are totally on deadline being asked to do more with less, being asked to do more and more and more and we're told use some of that newfangled social stuff, and to be honest with you, I was 20 years at the Hartford Courant in Connecticut, and then I'm here our social media session ended with Twitter. I kid you not. +> > I'll say one thing, which is that one of the things that I've done in previous jobs when you had people who were like overworked and weren't communicating, was I found a place for them to go eat dinner together outside of work, you buy everyone a meal. Everyone likes free food. You kind of break it down, some of those, any tension that might be around if you like put a plate of pasta in front of somebody, they're going to hang out until the end of that plate of pasta, at least. You can initiate the conversation. It does sound, at least from my perspective, that some of this is maybe kind of groundswell. +> > So in my newsroom I work with 500 to 600 people, most of whom are not digital natives, and part of my goal is to get them more ramped up on using these things, and the way that I've tried to do that is we have an internal listserv. It's public. Every day I write an internal note that praises people very publicly within our company for doing good things in digital and social, and that could be anywhere from like our 65-year-old film critic who took to Twitter to, you know, we noticed that people in the building were collaborating together and it's a very loose definition of what digital means. When I first started it was opt in for everybody except management. People started really liking being praised this way and they could share what they were doing and I could pass it back out to management, and then they, we don't necessarily use these things when we're like hiring people or when we're promoting people and I wanted them to think like this is important if so-and-so is doing this and it helped create this atmosphere at NPR were people are sharing more what they're doing. If something works for one team, they tell me and I can tell everybody in the building. But it's not just praising the people who know how to code and it's not just praising the reporters but if I notice somebody in development is doing something, everybody is on this listserv and we make the entire thing public so you can read it too. +> > and the other thing is you should be doing what you're doing right here, in terms of being with this. And also hacks and hackers is literally a mix of old school news people and hackers and they have a pretty active chapter in New York, and I think in Philly, as well. So it's definitely worth checking out. I've been to some really good presentations there. Al Shaw I think is one of the people who helps run the New York one. And I think he's somewhere around here. +> > I've just. +> > We have one on the 30th on source cod rejects. +> > There's ONA, as well. +> > I actually know that. So see, not that old. +> > It depends on what you want to -- +> > I came from -- and my first career I worked in old school book publishing, I worked at WW Norton and company which is about as crotchety as book publishers get. They edit on paper to this day. And I got into web design partly like I started reading a list apart, to kind of lurking around in the comments there, and then I like submitted an essay to that place about like a little thing that I had something to say. I went to meetups and things like that, to figure out how to teach myself HTML and CSS and those kinds of things. Partly proactive. +> > You do it by yourself? +> > I think I had a couple -- I mean we're going back a long time here, so probably did get some nudges, but partly I think I was also just looking for I was like, I can't stay a print design er why, I'm not going to -- like I wanted a longer-lived career than that and web seemed like it was exciting and so I started going into that. But it doesn't take much to build a small network. Talk with and work with and hang out and make being connections with other people. +> > I know we're not supposed to take over. I swear it will be the last one. +> > But you guys have mentioned this often about manage the as sort of as enthusiastic as I may be or other people are, I don't want to be Debbie Downer more than I already have, but this is a really small example, and it's kind of embarrassing, so it's not like I'm like newfangled stuff. I went to management and, you know, that would be a really cool way for us to do some stories. They're like, "Could we just wait until after the budget season?" "This is not going to cost you money." +> > I mean the classic startup answer to that is you ask forgiveness later, don't ask permission up front. Just do it. +> > I worked every digital job on the newspaper side and the lesson that I learned is go rogue respectfully, and a lesson I learned a long time ago is I forgot who coined the term, fool, be a present of the online. So whatever side of the fence that you feel you're on, find an ally. Let's not make this project be the project, but if it fails, no one even notices, but if it succeeds, you'll start building up that credibility. What happens with management is they will block all your ideas but when an idea breaks through, all of a sudden they're all like that's a really good idea we had, wasn't it, so work from within, you plant those seeds and they'll blossom and grow. +> > Thanks, sorry. +> > I really like John Keefe at WNYC. His story of how he became the head of this new digital apps kind of team was he just made a map right before hurricane, I guess it was hurricane Irene of the flood map area that existed as a PDF on the New York City government website and he made it interactive and that got more traffic than anything else that WNRC had seen, and they were like hey, this mapping internet stuff is it is really cool. I'm at ProPublica, and something we've started is we have this brown bag sessions where we either bring people in or we have a little like here's how the web inspector works for everybody in the newsroom and that's like a lunch hour and because we do it often it's not a huge deal and people can come in and out and it's not super formal. But it does get the kind of more technical skills and kind of people talking and sharing and good ideas and that kind much thing. Noah V., when he was at the BBC, he did these little brown bags, and did that to the newsroom and they then asked him more questions and management is OK with you having like little lunch. +> > They may not even know about it necessarily, right. +> > It didn't cost them anything and you're basically doing the job that they should be doing, which is training and build willing moderate staff. +> > This isn't a solution, this is just an observation, watching the industry and the jobs that are going by. The big players, you know, they have established web development teams and they're integrating. There's been a flood over the last like 6 months of sort of next step down papers, or news organizations looking for developers, and data journalists and what I'm seeing is that they're confused about what they're asking for, so they put in the kitchen sink. They want a data reporter, they want a developer, they want a dev ops guy. You must understand HTML, TTS, you know, hypertechnical stuff, and that just doesn't exist, and then I can think of two of those jobs that were literally, you know, they couldn't find anybody, because that person doesn't exist, and then the job goes away, because if you couldn't fill it, then the management says it's useless, because, you know, we lived without it for nine months, what's there. So as I said, this is not a solution, it's an observation of like, well, how do you get past that point? Because if you don't also we're not keeping the flow of journalist developers going, and they're all at the New York Times, now, so you know, how do you get people in at the ground level if they're expected to be seasoned journalists who are going to work for $30,000, you know, out in, you know, Redlands, California. +> > You if I may, I think that's a really great point. I think when you're listening to people downstairs in sort of the big hall there's definitely patterns emerging and those patterns are big blobby patterns, and I think we have the luxury because I'm taking the notes, there's a lot of this question of creating sort of alliances, acting on your own, working in small teams, if something comes to mind that it's not an option. I want to be clear it's not an option for everybody to work on nights and weekends on side projects and things like that which to me traditionally have been very fulfilling. If you have that luxury, if you have the personal time and space to do that, then you create these cool little sparks and splinters, which I think can then catch fire for small and mid level organizations as people determine what their passions are. Like the things Mike the mid post I think are really fascinating because either a regional or a topical subject matter or a community subject matter that once you develop the skills and alliances to begin to fill in the blanks, you get an outward form from more monolithic teams, I hope. +> > I'm also thinking that basically the people in charge of writing these don't understand what -- writing these job descriptions don't understand what they're writing. So but you can't, you know, pull it out from them and have somebody who actually does understand it because they're not high enough in the management or whatever. +> > So my thought to that, I came into journalism recently and I came from an engineering program. My thought to that, you know, when you said that there aren't people that know all these things, well no, no, there are people who know all these things, they're in computer science programs in colleges around the country and I think as a computer science student that is graduating, sure you have a lot of options where you can get paid a lot or whatever, but like a lot of CS students are like sure, I can make twice as much at this company that manufactures nuts and bolts or I can make half as much working in something that I really feel is meaningful, and I feel like a lot of the students in my program had no idea that these opportunities existed so I think in terms of getting people that are really technically skilled, even if they have no journalism training, they'll be really excited to be in the newsroom and I think that's something not enough news organizations are looking at. +> > Well, that's part of my question of who are we missing, is there are people out there who don't know newsrooms are a career path and we have to get that in front of them in whatever way that takes. +> > I agree but what I was really pointing out is that they expect a data journalist who has car experience, literally I just saw this, you know, you knows how to -- it's like. +> > There's definitely some of -- +> > Speaking of management in seeing the description in interviewing like the person who wrote that back in the day was like, must know how to write a headline, do CMS, and know flash. This is a home page shift at night, why are you asking for flash? They're like, we don't know what we'll get. Maybe we'll get someone, and by osmosis, we'll get flash. I think it's the same. Just put it out there and see what you get, and it scares people. +> > Why aren't these places going to computer science schools in the universities in the towns where they are and say what isn't going on out there, let's partner in a project. People in intro classes they're not being taught, you know, they're being taught how to code but they're not being taught to code in terms of like real-life projects. If the daily news approached temple which has a new dean of the journalism school, and said we would like to work with the computer science department and we would like to work with these three classes and say to the professor this is what we'd like the students to build at the end of it, the students build something real, they learn useful skills, they get to meet journalists, they're put into the pipeline. They might be more diverse than people in newsrooms. +> > I'm just curious, I don't know the answer to this question, but I mean are there efforts being made by newspapers to, like, open some of their projects up or parts of it? I mean obviously you don't want to tell the story to reveal where you're going to be presenting, but you want to show some of it, or make people able to contribute to it? +> > I mean, I know the times has a lot of projects that are sitting on GitHub right now that are open. I don't know what the licensing but you can see them at least and poke around with them and play with them. Vox has been opening up a lot of their stuff, mostly like tools and making a lot of stuff like tiff was talking about. They built up a bunch of stuff there. I think any of the good newsrooms now, they at least have augite hub repo with a lot of stuff into in it. It's work poking around in them and seeing what you can find or contributing to them. And improve it, that's a good way to get the attention of the team. +> > Is it like a growing trend. +> > I think so. Yeah, I mean I started at Vox four weeks ago and at their hack week, and the project that I ended up jumping into that in that was specifically about open sourcing things at Vox, because it's something that they always wanted to do, but hadn't done it, and they were getting a lot of pressure, partly from Dan Sinker, to getting around to actually doing it and I think the presence at this conference is that a lot of newsrooms are starting to think that at the very least it's a recruiting effort and I think that a lot of the things that they're doing if you build a tool to evaluate a particular kind of data, it's not proprietary necessarily to you, like you don't benefit at keeping that closed. You're better off having people finding the bugs and fixing it for you. Are local newspapers doing that a lot? Maybe not, but the big nationals definitely are. +> > A lot of newspapers are open sourcing like tools and reusable sort of stuff, but like NPR actually open-sources their stories and we at min post have been open sourcing a lot of our stories for a long time. We haven't really tried this or explored it, but like it would be hard to bring outside people on that process of making the story. Like once it's published, it's easy just, you know, have it out there and let people do what they want with it, but I don't know of a process that to like get outside help. +> > I mean I've seen stories that are kind of crowdsourced data analysis kind of as the story was going on, you had tomorrow data that you needed so you opened up that part of it, I can't think an example right now but I know I've seen that a couple of times. It is tough in terms of the presentation of a story that's not something that lends itself to have open source contributions necessarily. +> > I think sometimes it's a matter of documentation and thinking about documentation in a different way. If you're writing code documentation is so that other coders can understand it, that's good, but if you've been writing code and opened it up to so other people can understand it, that's. We have to think how to document this stuff externally and internally so it's not just coders who can understand the code. +> > Let me turn this around a bit. We've talked a lot about coding skills and the way that work actually gets done, but we haven't talked about the other side of it which is like the kind of ethical questions that come into a lot of this stuff, which like I feel like a lot of people are also ill equipped for when they get into a newsroom, so if you didn't go to J school which I'm going to assume that most people in this room did not go to J school. Did anyone go to J school? Yeah, three, four. And not that there's anything wrong with J school, but I think a lot of people -- +> > It's not required. +> > I think a lot of people in this field came from elsewhere and kind of moved in. It's actually the thing I like about this area is there's a lot of diverse people from a lot of diverse backgrounds. If you didn't go to J school how do you learn about the ethics and the politics that go -- and not to shit on FiveThirtyEight, because there's probably someone in here that works for them. But they've done things with data that maybe weren't such a good idea in the last couple of months and Vox I think has had its not so great moments. As someone who works for Vox now I can admit that. I feel there's a certain path towards becoming literate HTML and CSS, I'm not sure that translates with the path to becoming ethical with. +> > I think that's where the buddy system comes in handy. And like someone was saying before latch onto those people that you work with that have that experience and talk to them early in the process. Don't wait until you've built something and then bring them a project and say hey, we built this, we did it and they're like you didn't ask this fundamental question or consider the ethics of publishing this and so keeping people who have this experience looped in early and learning from it often. +> > I think those meetups are the secret sauce to progressing forward in terms of if you're a developer and you want to get into the news industry, going to hacks hackers and being a regular there, you get over that awkward socialness and start to build a better relationship there and that's the better pipeline. I wouldn't figure J schools to figure it out and it's not easy to collaborate, even in these institutions but if you can find like these moments -- we need more misfits. We look at your title like who are you missing, we need more misfits who have overcome their imposter syndrome. Giving a shit instead of just getting a paycheck. How do we've appeal to those folks and diversify that. The hackathons or at the meetups for either end of the group and the key there is for whoever is organizing that is that balance. Because you've all been to these meetups where it's all idea people who've got their startup that's going to beat Facebook and one poor developer that are leaching on and it's just bad or the other extreme where they're doing extreme tech stuff that has no relevance to the real word but they've figured out this cool code. Finding that balance and having that, you know, conferences like this, or news fu or spark camp. -- +> > So if many I'm teaching myself Javascript and it's not doing the thing that I expect it to do or I'm getting an error, I can go look at that on stack overflow and find an answer quickly. Is there an equivalent resource for ethical questions, for things around that. +> > I think as a developer who, like, found his way into news, I think one simple answer is just reading about the history of journalism. I started reading this book called The Essentials of Journalism, and it sounds stupid, but like it explains the history of news and news ethics and all of the sort of problems that management encounters with news and conflicts of interest, and it was really enlightening for me. And I think any developer who comes in from outside of news, you just hand him this book and say it's mandatory. +> > I think there's also a lot to say about watching publications. I find some days I only read Times stuff, and I have to force myself read other publications in part to see what other data teams, you can see some programming stuff behind certain stories and see like oh, they thought to ask these questions, so if we ever wanted to do a piece about X or we graft it this way, and just like collecting in your head a library of what you thought was good and bad about how organizations approach a similar project for whatever you're kind of currently working on or formulating. And then -- +> > Audit the best practices that you can see. +> > Yeah and then figuring out also the culture of the different places like do you know that the team there is relatively new and therefore kind of scrappy about what they're up to or in the case of the times we've got a lot of Timesian culture and stuff behind what we do. Would the Times do this project? Would this smaller paper do this particular project? Where does any concept sort of sit in terms of what a newsroom would want to approach? And then getting in touch with other developers at meetups, saying why did you guys do it this way, what were the pitfalls, was there a gotcha behind that project that you guys didn't realize until after? Just so sessions are so valuable. +> > I think also knowing the limits of your expertise, I don't know, like starting in a newsroom five years ago, working with like, you know, NPR vet reporters who are like experts at what they do, who maybe don't know the internet, they don't know what Twitter is and I'm awesome at the internet, but I like maybe suck at, you know, story telling and so it's like I can help you internet, but you have to help me know like what's good there. +> > and like learning as you go, and we did this big project a while back with the Planet Money guys, and it was this big internet hoopla project and there was a lot of resistance like oh, but the regular reporters they don't know what works in video story telling and actually they're really brilliant editors, so it's just like asking, which is at least in my experience, really important. +> > I think -- so I did go to J school, but I would say that the ethics class that we had was like the most horrible thing that I -- +> > Everyone hates it. +> > Yeah, so I don't think like actually the only real difference that journalism school lets you do is you produce a lot of stories and then you get somebody to read them before they are published and then they can tell you like no, this is horrible, so you have a buffer before you put it out in the world. So I think if you have a friend who's a journalist or a professor or somebody that just like another trustworthy person, giving them your project and being like hey, can you look this over, will catch like many, many, you know, problems that -- and getting that experience of like oh, no, actually I'm looking at the data wrong or I'm trying to make a point that is not backed up or I didn't adjust for population or all that stuff. +> > and you get a lot of feedback and then you do the revision, right? +> > Sure, it's back and forth for sure. +> > So that you will earn from your mistakes, right? +> > \*. +> > But it's not necessarily, you don't get instilled some like, I don't know, totally new ethical, like feelings or, you know, by going to J school. It's just that you have a little bit more of a buffer while you're learning and you have tomorrow training wheels, but I think the same thing applies here. +> > So good editors. +> > I agree with that and it's not only about learning from your own stories, like you have to go through other stories, as well, we have this assessing process for each student. So it's a really rewarding process so you have to work through like several different stories before you graduate, so you already have that -- +> > So if you're in a newsroom looking at how other stories are being developed. +> > Right, even though you didn't do that by yourself. +> > Oh, one more thing, this only applies to science journaIism is the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, is basically like an analysis of science news and I felt reading that was I learned more lessons about pitfalls and I think a lot of things in covering science stories apply to the data problems that we've seen. There are tons of similarities there. But reading more like critiques or at least like analysis like how this is covered catches many of those same like ethical or the things that you might not have thought of if you're coming from a different background. So I like that. +> > Also suggesting some of what we were talking about at the beginning which is that it's kind of project based or subject based that if you're doing a story that's about science and you spend some extra time learning about the pitfalls there, versus something if you're using election data or something like that. There might be cross-pollination things, but there's also specific things that you can learn about that you're doing a story about AIDS or something like that. +> > It used to be that you learn on the job and you just sort of like you were around it, you did calendar listings and you learned the who, what, when, where, why, and is that system just nonexistent now because print people, you know, old people don't want to engage with the online people or are the classic hard-core reporters, are they all gone, have they been all laid off? How can that basically apprenticeship system no longer exists? +> > I don't know the answer to that question. I can say in my own career, apprenticeship has not been available. I had to kind of figure things out on my own. I don't know if other folks who came up in newsrooms, if you had different experiences. +> > For me, that's why I went to J school and when I was there, someone taught me. My first boss was actually a good boss and then after that, not so good, but yeah, it's not that -- that system is not -- +> > and there is also lot more people applying for those jobs, so therefore -- or those, you know, data entry jobs for calendar listings, some of them are scripted and so it's easier to do and stuff like that. +> > I suspect -- and this is very anecdotal -- is the concept of apprenticeship kind of went away with pensions. The idea of investing in an employee who's going to stick around 30 years -- when I started. I was one of the last people to get in before they stopped pensions. I'll get like 20 bucks a month when I retire eventually, but started with one of the last publisher holdouts who still that had those kind of benefits. As an employer, I'm going to invest a lot of money in you and you're going to stick around for a long time, I do think that I suspect that that's part of what's coming from there. But also what I'm hearing from a lot of the things we've talked about in this room is there are lots of opportunities to find that apprenticeship on your own. It might take a little more up-front work but there are communities you can participate in, there are people who you can find and kind of do work with, there are opportunities to kind of find that apprenticeship in the space that you're in, whether or not it is like sanctioned by management, you can like seek out mentors and collaborators within your space and that feels like potentially a productive alternative, like we can make our own apprenticeships if someone is not laying them out for us necessarily. +> > Our younger people in the newsroom less inclined from anybody's observation less inclined to seek experience from people who have been in the newsroom before? Is that anecdotally the case, as well, in addition to maybe the other side of the equation where people are less willing to convey that information? Are people more inclined to look on the internet or something like that? +> > My experience at news day is I'm hoping that will change but there's a huge cultural split, even though online and the paper were, you know, like 10 feet apart, they were -- they didn't associate -- you know, paper people hated the online, online hated the paper -- so it's, you know, hard to get over that rift to address these people who have had 20, 30 years experience because they don't want to associate and maybe online people, it's also like oh, those old print people. So I think it's a cultural thing, maybe, you know, where it's hard to reach out. Did that answer the question? +> > I think it depends on the job and the market that you're at, the organization that you're at. I think younger up and coming aspiring journalists have more opportunities in nontraditional ways, like if you got into Twitter, all of a sudden you're the Social Media Senior Editor, which that just popped up, seniors in titles like candy or something like that. But if you're a reporter, like breaking news reporter, you're a breaking news reporter, so let me go think or mentor with someone, that incentive is almost squashed out because of that deadline. It depends on the organization. +> > I also kind of get the sense, like I know that both sides are sort of wedded to this narrative of like the old journalists are crusty and don't want anything to do with these new young journalists and the young journalists are too afraid or don't care what the older journalists, I kind of get the sense that for the old people who are in newsrooms now and for the young people who are coming in newsrooms, I mean there's a sense if you're sort of old school and still in a newsroom, you want to learn all these skills. You want to have this collaborations so I don't think that narrative. +> > That was the narrative five years ago. +> > Yeah, and we're still sticking to that. And I think the ones stick to go that are the managers, and the editors for some strange reason. When we connect with each other, we in fact don't. I see young journalists really wanting to talk to the veteran journalists about old-style storytelling, and I really hate that term, even though I call myself old and all that. There is an opportunity where these two sides want to start working with each other but I'm not sure if they know how to do it when you have the leadership or the management not quite helping. +> > Do you think that's partially a factor -- this is something we see quite a bit too, where fewer people to do a broader and broader role and so they get so deadline driven on those projects, even if there is a culture and they have the impetus to want to do a wider variety of work, the sheer volume of work keeps enforcing that perspective. +> > And the reality is when you're not in New York Times or and you're like in the Daily News or the Hartford Courant, there's not the money. I'm kind of wish there was a way for us to have the conversation at that level because we don't know what we want to do and we want to do it and we're stuck on Twitter and that's embarrassing. +> > That gets back to the job descriptions that want everything and they want to pay $40,000 in a city that -- +> > That's pretty good these days. +> > It is, but that's, you know, did. +> > I'm going to pull back from that question a little bit. I do want to ask one more question which is, so let's imagine that next year SRCCON is even bigger. What kinds of people who maybe don't know about SRCCON do you think should be here? One of those things I want to do is find where those people are and make sure they know about this and know about hackers and these communities. It's easy for a lot of teams to be in a field and not knowing what's going on on the outside of it. What kinds of people do you think we need, what are our newsrooms missing that, you know, could be productive if we found those people and brought them in here? +> > One point which is totally self-interested, but the audience development person tends to get or in many newsrooms is sort of pushed out of the development process, and that, I think those communities need to be interconnected more so that you're achieving the ultimate goal of reaching and expanding your community. +> > So audience development is one. Everyone know what audience development is. +> > Or engagement or social media person or and not all of that, you know, Melody is a really great example, but like most social media editors, I know that's not exactly your title, but you know, they don't have coding skills of any kind. They just are adept at the internet, and so kind of bridging that gap of skills. +> > So you might have someone who's in PR right now and hating their life but they could do much better work. +> > Even though that PR knows a shit-ton of stuff that we don't even, they're smarter than we are, I just put that out there in terms of metrics and analysis. +> > They use data. +> > So we're going to invite PR people to the next SRCCON. +> > I would argue on that point that a lot of organizations are creating their own newsrooms. Like Coca-Cola started writing their own press releases,. +> > They codified an innovation site. +> > They're basically doing what they're doing. So I think we should take PR people really seriously. +> > the older editors in the Coca-Cola newsroom are not happy. +> > I latch onto misfits who -- like I think of Kinsey for example, the first time I've heard of Kinsey Wilson at NPR, I sat down with him and interviewed him and tried to find other managers that. The thing with John Keefe, everyone uses him as an arc but he was the news director could he he could do whatever he wants. But there are other people who are like I get it and I want to empower. I think of Ken Sands who started off at the Spokesman Review with Ryan Pitts and he basically said dude, do what you do, and it was a great relationship there. It was like those misfits that kind of get it and here's what I've found comfortable with what they don't know and are confident with what they do and are happy to share it. +> > I think another thing is kind of we underestimate how significant it is to pull someone in. I think a lot of times we kind of like say there are all these resources, like you should just know that they exist and that should be enough, but I think kind of like trying to identify those people and it's a hard skill to kind of identify those not obvious traits. I think as much as we can be cognizant to like not everyone that's doing good work is upon Twitter all the time because they can't be on Twitter all the time, to be honest and kind of not just basing it on those obvious metrics. And then pulling them in. I think there's a lot to be said about just direct connection and having that kind of support and link. +> > +> > Mel? + +Just bouncing off of that, the only reason I'm here at this conference is because Erin emailed me and said you should come to this conference and you should speak at the conference and I think, you know, figuring out who those people are and inviting them with an email message whether you're hiring or trying to find sources or trying to bring people into projects, it really does a lot just to you know, I believe in like praise and reaching out to people and bringing them directly in and that's how you diversify every part of this. + +> > Yeah, I back that up. I was also an invitee, and, you know, I think that they did a great job of doing that, especially considering how quick it sold out and maybe there are some ways that they can tier the registration to kind of modeled off of what they did, I think they did a great job, but expanding on that forward. +> > Are there other folks besides like PR people or like engagement people who we think that the newsrooms? +> > Leadership. + +> > Leadership, you think? +> > Yeah, get some of the executives in the room to hear what's going on. +> > Those that get it. Because it's like that has happened many times. +> > Combine it. Get the ones who get it and get the ones don't, so that they see the power of the ones who don't. The ones who get it is likely the ones who are succeeding if you bring like-minded people into the room. If everybody's an engineer and you're trying to do fine arts, it's like you need some fine arts people in there. I think it's the same principle. +> > Google Doc is going to stay up and stay public. And we have a lovely transcript from our fan Norma, here. If you put your name in this doc, I will follow up with it, because I'm going to try to write it up and pitch it to the source. I might ask some follow-up questions. +> > You should all pitch to source. That is part of the work being done in this room. So yes, send me your shit: ... ... ... ... ... +> > [break] diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_05_Closing_the_Gaps_Open_Data.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_05_Closing_the_Gaps_Open_Data.md index 7afd327d..12d6e8c5 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_05_Closing_the_Gaps_Open_Data.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_05_Closing_the_Gaps_Open_Data.md @@ -1,668 +1,645 @@ -Closing the Gaps: Let's identify the holes in open data, then fix them -Session facilitator(s): Waldo Jaquith -Day & Time: Thursday, 11am-12pm -Room: Garden 2 - ->> This is a gripe session. ->> That's why I'm here. ->> A metaphor occurred to me earlier, I'm in the habit of, I'll -bring -- I got a new office last December but I took a month off work. -I brought all the stuff from my old office home and put it on the -railing thing at the top of my stairs in my house and got a new office -in January. And finally last week my wife says, so, about all the -O'Reilly books on the ledge, were you going to keep them there or ... -But to me ... That's where they go now. I stopped seeing them. -So it's been my experience at a lot of levels, not just my home, -I've come to accept things that are terrible. That is how you deal -with it. That's how you get the data. That is what it's like to -propose a correction to something or what it's like to install CKAN -or the process of getting parcel level geo data for multiple countries -or whatever. -So the director of the U.S. Open Data Institute which is a small -organization, started in January, trying to find the things that make -open data awful. To produce or consume for government, producing it -or consuming it or for people outside the government trying to consume -it. We're trying to find those bumps and smooth them out so it -becomes simpler to produce and consume mobile data. So that there's a -project that Greg and I were talking about working with the open -knowledge foundation to make core changes to CKAN to the data -repository that is awful to install. It's gotten better but it's -unpleasant to install. -We're going to pay for some developers to make a website where -you can launch a CKAN instance and fire up an easy 2 server or a -cloud hosting service and boom you have your repository and let you -host its for free for two months. That is going to make it possible I -hope for hundreds of municipal and state governments and agencies to -have repositories: Now they don't have the IT services to house the -software like that. There are a handful of projects like that. -Another one that sounds weird, open hunting and fishing data. -It's a real problem for people who want to hunt or fish and I would -ask for a show of hands but none would go up. Seriously? ->> Used to. ->> I ask who hunts and no hands go up. Millions of people hunt -but knowing where and what and when is very difficult. So we're just -about finished. In a couple weeks we'll work with this data on -developing an initial standard there. This is like a thing that was -not going to happen otherwise. -We tried to provide resources that would not otherwise exist in -the private sector any time soon. -What I would love to talk about here and learn about here, for -those who produce or consume open data or deal with it in some way -about what is awful, maybe awful in ways that we've forgotten about - - - - -because we're accustomed to it. My organization which has great -resources maybe can help to solve. We hire programmers or bounties on -open geo data or working with vendors to say here is an opportunity -that you didn't know existed. -A thing I will mention to get things started is this sharing and -syncing of large data sends. If you tried to do that using GIT for -instance you know it doesn't work. There is a point with the size of -data where it's impractical to sync a big dataset. Max Ogden has a -program called DAT and now it's the open data institute project. I -get to facilitate max doing brilliant work. We're creating a free -open source program called DAT making it easy to share data and -datasets and accept full requests and revisions and so on the way you -can with anything else, but the scale is better to bigger datasets. -There are similar clever things that it does because Max is very -smart. But that is a project, that's a problem that is frustrating. -And when I talk to government and why they're scared about publishing -data and scared about people finding mistakes and what to do about it, -it's a problem. Joe, if you find a mistake in census data you do -nothing? ->> I wouldn't know what to do. ->> This is like a serious problem. It's going to be more and -more of a problem as government publishes more data that we need to -figure out how to deal with and maybe DAT is the method or something -else will be for sure. But at the moment it's a terrible mess. With -bio data it's rough, if you have a complete sequence genome and you -only need 10 percent of the file, how do you get that 10 percent. ->> We're talking about getting small segments of census data. -The projects that we've done -- you can get a lot of it and if you're -able to deal with all the data you can slice and dice it. There are a -lot of datasets where there are fundamental cuts you have to make to -make it manageable and there doesn't seem to be any best practices -around offering that to people. ->> Seems like you can slice it state by state but what if you -want one column for all states. ->> One example of a dataset that I played with that exhibits this -problem and I don't know it well, but the CDC has a dataset called -wonder which has health indicators. I was curious about drug -mortality. How many people do die from these things. It's really -hard to find it. But their whole thing, there is no way as far as I -can tell to get all of the data involved which may be because it's not -feasible because there is so much of it but also the interface for -making cuts through it is hard. If we can articulate some ways of -framing that problem, maybe you can make tools to make it. ->> Is that a problem that only we haven't solved as civil yarns. -Sounds like business intelligence they probably have OLAP standards. ->> That is a good question. ->> We tend to reinvent corporate stuff that maybe has been -figured out for ten years. ->> That is because of the cost. ->> The cost of what they built is extreme. If you have a cluster - - - - -of ... ->> Somebody solves a problem, like real estate data and it -applies to Genovics too. ->> A potential comply cater of that is open datasets are less -well linked. Like OLAP environment, the corrections between the -datasets are made clear I think. ->> Here is a pinpoint with open data, I think we need something -like everything that starts with open Taxonomies where we have a -website with cleaned up versions of code lists for everything. There -is a global standard for budget data, right. Classifications of -functions of government and just having one clean version of everyone -who works with data cleans up open data would refer to. That would be -useful. I wonder how many domains that would apply to. ->> What about the link to open data stuff that uses these -classifications is that relevant. ->> It probably is. I don't understand it well enough to know -whether it does taxonomies. I mean codeless. How many code lists are -there for describing the different types of accounting categories in -the government or how many code lists for describing whatever you can -hunt. ->> Honoring the idea that we shouldn't debate too much. But I -have a real skepticism about top down things like that. I feel like -getting coordination is hard to do. ->> If you want to do it bottom up you need to define mappings. ->> I think to note as a problem with data is clear mappings -between linking datasets, however it gets down, it's harder -- it -would be great if it was easier to link data. I recently was talking -to folks about the census, I realized a way to summarize some of the -challenges that we find working with census data is they provide the -data for data analysis and we want to be application builders. People -who come from an application standpoint have different needs for data. -Unique identifiers and the census makes it really hard to identify -things. If you're writing an app, we know that is the key. It's not -always the case but for a lot of cases the data wasn't produced to -make apps from it. It was produced for people to analyze it using -much more stable methods. ->> What also makes it tough with data, an apartment building that -I lived in that went condo for a while and then stopped and all the -residents were above 80 and I was 22. I learned not to ask my -neighbors how are you doing today. Because I hear, my gout is acting -up and you should have seen my bowel movement. -There is no off button for data people. You know what is -interesting about link data? Oh no, what have I done. There is no -way to turn them off. I did something where I had to unsubscribe, I -think I was called a Nazi at one point because link data was not the -appropriate standard. -Data might be swell ... What are some other painting points? ->> That's a huge point. Referencing of things. Because in -the -- we have this United States project that references legislators. -I just pulled it up, there are 16 different possible IDs or 15 ID - - - - -systems that we have to crosswalk. We don't have to. But we provide -a crosswalk ID for people who should have one. -Right? So? ->> People are an extreme case. ->> People are an extreme case. ->> You mean identifying ... ->> Yes. But like this is what we, these are some of our needs. -Whether it's people or -- even places. Like when we were starting -with open elections and Joe knows more about this now than I do, but -there is someone that told us the census burro was going to move away -from this ID to this and this ID. Okay. I feel like the painting -point is not to beat the familiar horse, but what a site like that -should be is here is what we mean when we say these things and here is -how to use these data. The lack of documentation and/or agreement. -I feel that's a really ... Really hard road to get over before -you can start using something? ->> So for code places that use this place, hooks in for -descriptors ... ->> Yes. And part of that is greedy. Saying, hey, make it easier -for me to do stuff so I don't have to work so hard. Part of that is -efficiency and where we have more accuracy and we all know what we're -talking about. ->> Getting a commitment so certain discipline to producing the -data. The census bureau, the meta data, they publish that as a spread -sheet. If you want to do mass operates against thousands of columns -of data you go to the excel problems. Maybe pushing one to push -something back up, you got the indent value wrong for column C of this -weird spread sheet. But also saying Meta data is a kind of data -itself and we need a rigor about having the universe of potential -values here. That kind of stuff. They don't, that is not how they -think about it. ->> This is much wider than the scope that you wanted to go forth, -these aren't necessarily different pain points now but things that -will be happening over the next one to five years that are relevant to -how we think about open data portals. One is that most data releases -are done in terms of repositories that somebody goes and gets. Maybe -refreshers or updates or whatnot. That tends to reflect the fact that -a lot of data comes from administrative processes. It may be that -data comes from different processes. Like what is happening through -the census. And that means that streams of data are a much more -relevant way of collecting that. It's not a big issue now but it may -be something that happens in the future. -Related to that, and this might be way kind of upstream of where -you want to be, is the systems and technology and to a certain extent -the processes that produce data are increasingly being privatized. -They fall outside of what the government can say. If you take a look -at the shocks system (ph.) it's a series of microphones that detect -where gunshots are. Initially the first round of that was something -that police officers bought and ran themselves. Now it's a service -provided by a company and therefore all of the systems fall outside - - - - -something related to a government and that is happening in -infrastructure system after infrastructure system. It's not a -technical solution. It might be an advocacy thing. When a government -signs a contract it should say wider access to the data. That's it? ->> That's part of a larger ongoing problem that I've seen of -procuring problems with the government. We see that procurement often -places no obligation on the contractor to do anything by way of -licensing data or the software that is being created or any level of -openness and solving procurement is a big difficult problem. Just the -one small change of requiring that when you are out sourcing the -collection of data to a third party for government purposes, that data -can't just be for the government. It has to be for the public, too. ->> I suspect that it's not a malicious gap. ->> Although I think that is often serves those vendors well as a -result. Whether or not they intended for that to happen. ->> I don't want that to be out of the scope of this discussion. ->> Out sourcing would almost make it easier if there is a -standard. The government wouldn't be doing it for themselves. These -guys want to keep their contracts. ->> You would think that except when you deal with many, many, at -least in the United States. In other countries with a sensible -representation -- or sensible execution of what we call federalist -government, in the United States, it just doesn't. ->> If there were clearer standards than businesses would move to -provide a scalable service to meet those standards. The problem is -standardization is challenging. ->> The flip side is one key component to a good vendor lock in is -a 1983 binary format that nobody else has. That's a great business -strategy to not follow standards. ->> If you get a big customer that says we want the data in this -format and that is standard and company X does that. Then when they -go out to all of their other clients, this is the standard that we -provide data and Joe Blow doesn't. ->> You can't use the word "standard" without a data standard. -This is what other people use and you need to buy it too. ->> It's possibly to see the professional open source world -applying to civil technology and data provision. They're making a -living on open standards if the government adopts those open -standards. ->> The great thing about standards is there are so many of them. ->> Are you seeking broadly like broad pain points or specific -pain points? ->> Both. ->> For specific pain points is it worth raising essentially, if -my problems aren't everybody's problems. We all have our own unique -set of problems that we run into. Not to be too challenging, what is -the point of us raising our own issues? ->> Because I want to fix them. That's why. For instance there -is -- just to give a specific example, there is some model legislation -in the uniform law commission put together and states are gradually - - - - -passing. Almost all states will pass it. And it requires but four or -five states it passed so far. It requires any states who adopted any -legal information that they publish be of verifiable. So that means -if you get a -- if there is a court decision they release online, -there needs to be some mechanism once I have a copy of the court -decision to check against a master or whatever mechanism, to say this -is official and it's unchanged and no word or character changed. All -of these states are moving to only publishing legal data as PDFs. -That's a disaster. So we outsourced to Dan Schultz. They got the -contract to put together a really simple repository system for storing -hashes of these documents. Basically the nontechnical version is -anybody with a file can go to the state's website and say I want to -compare it to the master repository. It either says yes, that is -exactly what we have here or the document is changed. ->> Isn't that called GIT. ->> Good luck getting it, GIT. We have to make it easy to get -documents into the system and for people to verify against them. It -was a great system that was put together for 7500 bucks. So now we're -working with states to put this together and find vendors. We are -trying to find vendors to sell hosting for 100 or 1,000 or whatever -dollars per month for the governments that want to sign up and install -the software. It's a very specific problem. We solved it by -addressing that problem and making it possible for states to release -open data that otherwise would have been by law just PDFs. So I hope -that we're able to address that. -Very specific problems can sometimes wind up with solutions that -help in bigger ways than anticipated. -There is an objection that we've been seeing, governments who -say, gosh, we'd love to share data but if we gave away raw XML of -legislation, somebody could download it and change it and redistribute -it. And we wouldn't know -- so we can't possibly give away? ->> Or the public would be confused. ->> We're scraping that data anyway. ->> We get that with congress. ->> The other reason for the software is that excuse has to go -away. We have this software, you can use it. That allows the data to -be verified and that excuse is gone. That is a nonsense excuse, that -is not really the problem. The real problem is they don't want to -release data for other causes, mostly because it's scary. So they -cite verifiability as the cause. ->> I wonder if it's worthwhile, what we found in gathering -elections data from around the United States is not everybody but a -decent number of states use -- there is like four or five vendors that -seem to be -- maybe three that seem to be dominant. People use many -different systems. But of the vendors there is like two or three or -four. And there are like we found, you can just search around to find -people who have run tools and pry stuff out of the common systems. -But on a very local level. I wonder if it's worth it for your -organization to sort of pool -- okay, these are the easiest targets -that will get us the most data out. In other words like if I'm - - - - -writing a scraper for elections in Arkansas but it's used in six other -states. It's worth the effort and time to make a tool that is generic -enough that will result in the maximum production or freeing of data -for the minimum effort. Clarity is a vendor for elections and it's -used in probably 8 or 10 states. Like if there were sort of -- we're -probably going to end up writing one I suppose. Those are the kind of -things where it's common vendors used across the United States that -produce the data but not in a useful or easy to get at form. ->> A couple weeks ago I spoke at the national secretaries of -states conference in Baltimore and then I had lunch with the secretary -of state in Vermont. Any leader of Vermont you can just call them up -and ask them to have lunch. Yes, I have nothing better to do at -11 o'clock on Wednesday. -They hate these vendors. The competition with the three or four -vendors, nobody is like I love my election results vendor. One of the -painting points that we're trying to remove for election results is -we're looking at getting some states to pool their resources to create -something open source. A few states? ->> This quasi monopoly can be a great place to push through a -standard. In Germany we have only three different vendors for counsel -document management systems. So there is 11,000 municipalities in -Germany and they all have a piece of this software. Except for one -cousin that has ... ->> I have been that cousin. ->> A friend of mine, I thought it was hopeless but a friend of -mine started talking to these vendors and they have a speck and a data -standard and they're going to all release data in the same format. ->> And probably efficiently because it's German vendors. ->> I don't know about that. We like to use money and procurement -and that stuff. So it's going to cost. It's going to be split across -a thousand municipalities for each vendor so it's okay. ->> The time points, the ones that you've identified, I mean -- ->> We found some very big pain points and very small pain points. -I'm trying to think of a few of the active projects. I'm not going to -try to dig it up now of the active projects they're working on. -The biggest pain points seem to be not in the consumption of open -data. The people doing it now are clever. The people that come to -events like this and used to dealing with terrible input. The pain -points are more in the output of open data, the government end of -things. We're at the point with the production of open data with the -exception of the federal government, but on municipal and state agency -level where they have been told, you need to make open data happen. -We have no budget. We have no internal ability to do this. But you -do have to do it. And so what they produce if anything is terrible. -Like the state of Virginia launched an open data portal at -Virginia dot Virginia dot Gov. Somebody put it together on the front -page. It's like a list of 8 excel files. And I'm working with them, -I have a two-hour meeting. I and the deputy secretary of technology -is going to work on getting CKAN installed. It took six months to -get permission to put up a virtual server. It would have costed 4,000 - - - - -a month I think. -What a really, things that are simple for us are very difficult -in government when they have no resources. Often when open data -happens it's because one or two people in government, somehow produce -something. When they finally get it done, often the response is this -is not good enough. This sucks, you should be embarrassed. We worked -weekends with no resources, can you just say thank you. -When they work through those awful experiences and produce -something, even that is usually not exactly richly rewarded by the -public. Those are the things that we're trying to simplify? ->> I'm curious in Germany did that standard get developed because -you went to the government and said you need to develop better -standards or did you go to the vendors as a citizen and say this would -be a fantastic thing. ->> It worked through these round tables. That is what solves it -in that case. Bringing together people from city government and -initiatives and the vendors and making them talk it out. -I don't know why that worked. It shouldn't. -I wonder, about the municipalities and them releasing data, one -big problem is there is a guy whose job it is to set up the open data -portal and goes to all the different offices in the city and says do -you have any files that wouldn't find the public to look at. -Open data is for shit but yeah, I wonder what the downside and -upside of having a standard data list would be. This is the -prioritized list for what a city should release on the data portal and -here are nice examples of good formats and that kind of stuff? ->> That can be quite well served for the benefits for the city -and the stake holders releasing this stuff. ->> We've started on a project on our U.S. Open Data Institute. -Get hub/open data. A document called how to. It's just a very lose -frame work now. It's a book that is broken down by department. If -you're in a social services department, here is the data that people -want. It's a terrible question but a question that I get all the time -from government agencies, how do we know what people want. And I -started telling them, forget what people want, what do you want. What -are you sick of people asking you for. What do agencies and other -departments need? Great, put that up. Satisfy that first. And then -go to geeks and find out what we want. What we want is not -sustainable. What is more useful is internally what you want. ->> There are city portals that opened up around the country. If -there weren't preexisting guidelines what was their criteria. ->> Really like what is lying around. For the state of Virginia I -seriously spent a couple hours with Google. It's ridiculous. It's -not a comprehensive inventory. When the file is updated, who -reuploads it to the data repository. It's a unsustainable system. -And then the rest of us go to the data repository thinks here is all -the data. No, it's out of date and not close to anything. -I found in Vermont when I was speaking to them and yelling at -them on Monday evening, they have this data repository and it looks -for all the word like Secrada. Secrada set up the first site and - - - - -they're like hey, do you want to use this? Yep, we're done. We have -a dataset now. It's like a demo. It's not a good system? ->> This can happen at any level. The European commission running -128 countries basically. They started a data portal and didn't have a -basic understanding-over the data they already published in other -places. We sent them a list saying here are 20 amazing datasets that -you already published, can you please include them in your data -portal. In all of Europe there is a directive that any government has -to maintain asset registers. They have to have lists of all the data -they have or all the information access they have. Nobody really -knows how to do that or -- it would be interesting to find out how to -do interesting registers for a city to know what they have. ->> In Chicago they worked with Shapen hall connected to the -university of Chicago. They called it a data dictionary. It was -meant to be what you're describing. It's unsatisfying. It's worth -looking at. Maybe this is -- when we say this is not exactly what we -mean. I don't think it stays up to date. It doesn't integrate with -the city's data portal. You're right. That is a good thing to try -and help explain to people what we mean. I just wanted to point out -in the write up for this session you talked about how we're going to -fix these things. ->> Yes. ->> Here is something that I encountered at the federal and state -level. People don't know how to produce CSV files. Part of the -problem is for example the federal election commission does this. You -can grab CSVs from their site and they load fine in excel. And -because people are idiots and Microsoft has people that want this to -work, they have all sorts of invalid files. ->> Including a table with an invalid CSV file. ->> It's interior double quotes. Every, virtually every -programming language, CSVs just blow up when they hit that. It's not -valid and you can't parse that. I go through line by line and fix it -when I find it. It's a terrible thing to do. And it's a relatively -simple thing to do. Say like don't, when you create CSV files, -they're not creating these manually. Create them properly. The test -here is for them I presume, does its open in excel. If it does, we're -done. There is something in the process of producing it, hey, that is -not enough to do or there is -- there could be another, something -else. That's a legitimate problem that wastes time and it makes it -harder to -- for people to use it on the fly. ->> That sounds like a great tool we can build for ourselves, -standardizing the CSVs. ->> In Britain they're doing a lot of work on CSVs. The problem -is all the link data that have nothing to do in their lives have -joined the CSV group and they're trying to make it a subset ... -Watching this was almost funny it was so painful. ->> I don't think it deals with the quote thing but CSV kit, there -is a CSV clean utility that I wrote to deal with unescaped new lines -and it helps to reconfigure CSVs. That is one. ->> This is nice for government. It's basically a web based - - - - -validation, hey, you're too stupid to produce CSV for the following -reasons. ->> But gently. ->> Here is my dream process. I have no understanding of how to -do this. There are a bunch of vendors and Microsoft is among them, of -software that holds documents that many governments use. What is the -Microsoft makes some -- share point, thank you. Share point is used -by 930 percent of fortune 500s. My understanding is it's broadly used -for government as well. You should be able to right click on a file -in share point and say this is open data. And from there on out any -change made to that data, if it's an excel file, it's cleaned up into -proper CSV and published on the portal any time someone makes a -change. -When I talk about this, the time that heads start nodding is when -I say the current process. Take the access database and export to -excel and then you save as CSV is and go to a data portal website and -every time you change it, it saves it. That is crazy. -Nothing more difficult than right click, this is open data. -Because that's ... As much as you can expect from government -employees. I'm not trying to insult government employees but they -have better things to do. And the number of employees with open data -in their job description I can probably count on two hands. This is -not really their problem? ->> Here is something that would be interesting coming from your -organization. I would love to see advocacy for journalism -organizations proactive. For example the police departments are -putting out an RFP for a new system. And so especially -- -specifically in new England states, a lot of things are controlled at -the county level and new England it's all at the municipality level. -In Maine, the counts don't have a standardized system. They're all -they're little own systems, I don't understand how that works. -Some advice or guidance from your organization on like here are -the top five police department systems. If you're going to talk to a -police department and try to convince them to get on a system that -supported a decent data standard that can be easily exported so you're -not getting e-mailed or faxed police logs, these are five great -systems that support it and here is a run down of them. -It would make it a lot easier for -- otherwise every newspaper or -whatever you have to go in and research that? ->> I'm mediating a dispute now between one of the open crime -websites and a police department about that problem. ->> They hate it. ->> Yes. ->> They're scared of it. But at the same time it makes it so -much harder if we don't know what we're talking about, which we often -times don't. ->> It would be interesting to re-examine the idea that most of -the problems are at the production of open data rather than the -consumption of open data. The reason that there is an interest in -re-examining that, you -- most of the people that come to open data - - - - -websites are smart professionals but that maybe a self-selecting -group. Especially for the second tier of journalism organizations. -It's not where they're going because they don't have those skills. -Just -- maybe examine that. The suggestion from over here that maybe -the open data portal hooks in for tutorials and co-bases that are -preexisting, what is it. The meta data descriptions may be part of -what can help that problem. ->> If I can pitch quickly. The project that I talked about, the -census reporter, it's that kind of thing. In the next block of -programs here, I'm going to do something with Brian Pitts. We're -calling it -- datasets and we're making resources for consumer. If -you have a dataset that you love that you would like to do, come in -and talk about a way to help us do that on a small level. ->> On the topic of audience for open data sites. I got an -intriguing tweet from the city of San Francisco. I had written a blog -entry a couple months ago. Open data being by government for -government. That should be their primary audience. And it got really -great reception within the government. It was like a terrible -- just -confusing chart that appears to be from an internal survey of city -employees about where they get data files from when they need them. -It used to be they would mostly as of a year or whatever ago, -they would get it by walking down the hall and knocking on the door -and saying I need that data or e-mail. Not by a magical repository. -But on people's USB drives. -Half of surveyed employees said they find datasets on San -Francisco's open data site. That's not to say it has people -- half -the city employees said when they look for data they look on that -site. That is going to be healthy. When it comes time to renew that -contact, the city employees will say you can't get rid of that. That -is where our data is. If it's valuable to them it hopefully has value -to the public as well. -Other than that I think it's data geeks and confused people. I -bet that is what the traffic log shows. -I want to mention something on the consumption side of open data. -What I thought was important at the hack anon. An employee of the -sunlight foundation produced a proof of concept for how to deal with -the crap that is PDFs. His idea was to treat PDFs as basically TOPO -data and use GIS software to map each document page and then using the -really very healthy collection of useful open source software to allow -you to analyze each page once you're treating it as physical space as -on a map, things get a lot easier. -He has done a proof of concept. That one hackathon idea -justified the event. But to my knowledge nobody else has done -anything with handling PDFs. ->> Yes, I agree with that. We deal with PDFs for election -results and Jeff Haine in Chicago developed a table splitter. The -idea is it doesn't work with every PDF but those that have tables in -them, there is a deliciously named C library called LSD. Stands for -lion segment detector. It detects lines and line segments. It's -useful for isolating, instead of -- I was trying to do OCR on a full - - - - -page of results. A full table. To do it on individual cells -essentially. There is -- Jeff has written a sort of slightly better -than proof of concept called table splitter that I can send to you. -But it makes it possible to extract cells from a tabular image PDF and -look at pieces of it. ->> Sounds like ... ->> It uses a slightly different underlying technology and it's -also doing individual piecings of it rather than trying to capture ... ->> Manuel wisely has nothing to do with texts. ->> Because he is not crazy. ->> But you have to get that data somehow. ->> It's actually worked for our worst case scenario, our worst -case scenario data which is Mississippi. ->> I have seen those tweets. ->> Here are OCRed results that work. So we're really excited -about that. ->> Getting data out of PDFs is quintessential open data problem. ->> We'd love to have people test it and say it works for this but -doesn't work for that. ->> It seems like we went for years without getting any data out -of PDFs. It seems like we're now getting new traction. If nobody -does anybody interesting or clever with this GIS stuff soon, I think -we as an organization will try to figure out who we can give money to -do make something happen about this. ->> Do you remember what the project is called? ->> No. We have a couple minutes left. I will get that for you. ->> I would be grateful if any of you all would keep me in mind -when you encounter things that make you crazy dealing with open data. -It's unlikely that you are the only person having that problem. And -it is unlikely that it's just because you don't know enough. Odds are -fairly good that this is just yet another of these seemingly -intractable problems that make dealing with data terrible. And then -tell me. ->> You're e-mail address. ->> Waldo@USODI.ORG. And I'm on Twitter. ->> One final thing just to mention quickly named entity -recognition. Once you have stuff out of PDFs most of the time it's a -piece of text. And all we have is open CALE (ph.) I'm sending all my -research to writers and I need it to be in one of three languages that -most of the world doesn't speak. I think that's a big need getting -better stuff on that. MLTK and whatever is built in that sucks. ->> At the moment we have whatever it is part to have Apache -world. They have software and it's very hard to install. ->> They wrap around everything. They have 15 different things -and I don't know whether any of them do good things. ->> Seems like we need -- Elasticsearch has something like solar -or something like that. ->> It's going on my long term list. ->> If you wanted to produce open data more clearly wouldn't it be -better to make explicit the named entities. For the documents to say -specifically where there are people or other entities. ->> The way for example the -- transcripts in Microsoft word, and -to do anything else would take years. ->> That can be a tool for them. ->> We should have socials in PDFs. ->> That is a tool that Manuel helped to produce at MIT. To -redact social security numbers from PDF. -Thank you all for your time and insight. I have a list of -homework. Some very small and some huge, reforming government. We'll -get on that. ->> Are you going to publish the outcomes of this anywhere. ->> I'm happy to. Sure. At GIT hub -- I don't know, where would -be good. ->> I think you guys are doing cool things. ->> Can we just register issues with pains. ->> There is a repository on open data at GITHUB with the problems -that you have getting data. We are trying to address some of those -problems. That is probably the place I should put those. -The program is called what word where. That's the GIS tool. -All right. Thanks folks. I guess there is another session now. ->> Half hour break, another session and then lunch. ->> I will be very hungry. - +Closing the Gaps: Let's identify the holes in open data, then fix them +Session facilitator(s): Waldo Jaquith +Day & Time: Thursday, 11am-12pm +Room: Garden 2 + +> > This is a gripe session. +> > That's why I'm here. +> > A metaphor occurred to me earlier, I'm in the habit of, I'll +> > bring -- I got a new office last December but I took a month off work. +> > I brought all the stuff from my old office home and put it on the +> > railing thing at the top of my stairs in my house and got a new office +> > in January. And finally last week my wife says, so, about all the +> > O'Reilly books on the ledge, were you going to keep them there or ... +> > But to me ... That's where they go now. I stopped seeing them. +> > So it's been my experience at a lot of levels, not just my home, +> > I've come to accept things that are terrible. That is how you deal +> > with it. That's how you get the data. That is what it's like to +> > propose a correction to something or what it's like to install CKAN +> > or the process of getting parcel level geo data for multiple countries +> > or whatever. +> > So the director of the U.S. Open Data Institute which is a small +> > organization, started in January, trying to find the things that make +> > open data awful. To produce or consume for government, producing it +> > or consuming it or for people outside the government trying to consume +> > it. We're trying to find those bumps and smooth them out so it +> > becomes simpler to produce and consume mobile data. So that there's a +> > project that Greg and I were talking about working with the open +> > knowledge foundation to make core changes to CKAN to the data +> > repository that is awful to install. It's gotten better but it's +> > unpleasant to install. +> > We're going to pay for some developers to make a website where +> > you can launch a CKAN instance and fire up an easy 2 server or a +> > cloud hosting service and boom you have your repository and let you +> > host its for free for two months. That is going to make it possible I +> > hope for hundreds of municipal and state governments and agencies to +> > have repositories: Now they don't have the IT services to house the +> > software like that. There are a handful of projects like that. +> > Another one that sounds weird, open hunting and fishing data. +> > It's a real problem for people who want to hunt or fish and I would +> > ask for a show of hands but none would go up. Seriously? +> > Used to. +> > I ask who hunts and no hands go up. Millions of people hunt +> > but knowing where and what and when is very difficult. So we're just +> > about finished. In a couple weeks we'll work with this data on +> > developing an initial standard there. This is like a thing that was +> > not going to happen otherwise. +> > We tried to provide resources that would not otherwise exist in +> > the private sector any time soon. +> > What I would love to talk about here and learn about here, for +> > those who produce or consume open data or deal with it in some way +> > about what is awful, maybe awful in ways that we've forgotten about + +because we're accustomed to it. My organization which has great +resources maybe can help to solve. We hire programmers or bounties on +open geo data or working with vendors to say here is an opportunity +that you didn't know existed. +A thing I will mention to get things started is this sharing and +syncing of large data sends. If you tried to do that using GIT for +instance you know it doesn't work. There is a point with the size of +data where it's impractical to sync a big dataset. Max Ogden has a +program called DAT and now it's the open data institute project. I +get to facilitate max doing brilliant work. We're creating a free +open source program called DAT making it easy to share data and +datasets and accept full requests and revisions and so on the way you +can with anything else, but the scale is better to bigger datasets. +There are similar clever things that it does because Max is very +smart. But that is a project, that's a problem that is frustrating. +And when I talk to government and why they're scared about publishing +data and scared about people finding mistakes and what to do about it, +it's a problem. Joe, if you find a mistake in census data you do +nothing? + +> > I wouldn't know what to do. +> > This is like a serious problem. It's going to be more and +> > more of a problem as government publishes more data that we need to +> > figure out how to deal with and maybe DAT is the method or something +> > else will be for sure. But at the moment it's a terrible mess. With +> > bio data it's rough, if you have a complete sequence genome and you +> > only need 10 percent of the file, how do you get that 10 percent. +> > We're talking about getting small segments of census data. +> > The projects that we've done -- you can get a lot of it and if you're +> > able to deal with all the data you can slice and dice it. There are a +> > lot of datasets where there are fundamental cuts you have to make to +> > make it manageable and there doesn't seem to be any best practices +> > around offering that to people. +> > Seems like you can slice it state by state but what if you +> > want one column for all states. +> > One example of a dataset that I played with that exhibits this +> > problem and I don't know it well, but the CDC has a dataset called +> > wonder which has health indicators. I was curious about drug +> > mortality. How many people do die from these things. It's really +> > hard to find it. But their whole thing, there is no way as far as I +> > can tell to get all of the data involved which may be because it's not +> > feasible because there is so much of it but also the interface for +> > making cuts through it is hard. If we can articulate some ways of +> > framing that problem, maybe you can make tools to make it. +> > Is that a problem that only we haven't solved as civil yarns. +> > Sounds like business intelligence they probably have OLAP standards. +> > That is a good question. +> > We tend to reinvent corporate stuff that maybe has been +> > figured out for ten years. +> > That is because of the cost. +> > The cost of what they built is extreme. If you have a cluster + +of ... + +> > Somebody solves a problem, like real estate data and it +> > applies to Genovics too. +> > A potential comply cater of that is open datasets are less +> > well linked. Like OLAP environment, the corrections between the +> > datasets are made clear I think. +> > Here is a pinpoint with open data, I think we need something +> > like everything that starts with open Taxonomies where we have a +> > website with cleaned up versions of code lists for everything. There +> > is a global standard for budget data, right. Classifications of +> > functions of government and just having one clean version of everyone +> > who works with data cleans up open data would refer to. That would be +> > useful. I wonder how many domains that would apply to. +> > What about the link to open data stuff that uses these +> > classifications is that relevant. +> > It probably is. I don't understand it well enough to know +> > whether it does taxonomies. I mean codeless. How many code lists are +> > there for describing the different types of accounting categories in +> > the government or how many code lists for describing whatever you can +> > hunt. +> > Honoring the idea that we shouldn't debate too much. But I +> > have a real skepticism about top down things like that. I feel like +> > getting coordination is hard to do. +> > If you want to do it bottom up you need to define mappings. +> > I think to note as a problem with data is clear mappings +> > between linking datasets, however it gets down, it's harder -- it +> > would be great if it was easier to link data. I recently was talking +> > to folks about the census, I realized a way to summarize some of the +> > challenges that we find working with census data is they provide the +> > data for data analysis and we want to be application builders. People +> > who come from an application standpoint have different needs for data. +> > Unique identifiers and the census makes it really hard to identify +> > things. If you're writing an app, we know that is the key. It's not +> > always the case but for a lot of cases the data wasn't produced to +> > make apps from it. It was produced for people to analyze it using +> > much more stable methods. +> > What also makes it tough with data, an apartment building that +> > I lived in that went condo for a while and then stopped and all the +> > residents were above 80 and I was 22. I learned not to ask my +> > neighbors how are you doing today. Because I hear, my gout is acting +> > up and you should have seen my bowel movement. +> > There is no off button for data people. You know what is +> > interesting about link data? Oh no, what have I done. There is no +> > way to turn them off. I did something where I had to unsubscribe, I +> > think I was called a Nazi at one point because link data was not the +> > appropriate standard. +> > Data might be swell ... What are some other painting points? +> > That's a huge point. Referencing of things. Because in +> > the -- we have this United States project that references legislators. +> > I just pulled it up, there are 16 different possible IDs or 15 ID + +systems that we have to crosswalk. We don't have to. But we provide +a crosswalk ID for people who should have one. +Right? So? + +> > People are an extreme case. +> > People are an extreme case. +> > You mean identifying ... +> > Yes. But like this is what we, these are some of our needs. +> > Whether it's people or -- even places. Like when we were starting +> > with open elections and Joe knows more about this now than I do, but +> > there is someone that told us the census burro was going to move away +> > from this ID to this and this ID. Okay. I feel like the painting +> > point is not to beat the familiar horse, but what a site like that +> > should be is here is what we mean when we say these things and here is +> > how to use these data. The lack of documentation and/or agreement. +> > I feel that's a really ... Really hard road to get over before +> > you can start using something? +> > So for code places that use this place, hooks in for +> > descriptors ... +> > Yes. And part of that is greedy. Saying, hey, make it easier +> > for me to do stuff so I don't have to work so hard. Part of that is +> > efficiency and where we have more accuracy and we all know what we're +> > talking about. +> > Getting a commitment so certain discipline to producing the +> > data. The census bureau, the meta data, they publish that as a spread +> > sheet. If you want to do mass operates against thousands of columns +> > of data you go to the excel problems. Maybe pushing one to push +> > something back up, you got the indent value wrong for column C of this +> > weird spread sheet. But also saying Meta data is a kind of data +> > itself and we need a rigor about having the universe of potential +> > values here. That kind of stuff. They don't, that is not how they +> > think about it. +> > This is much wider than the scope that you wanted to go forth, +> > these aren't necessarily different pain points now but things that +> > will be happening over the next one to five years that are relevant to +> > how we think about open data portals. One is that most data releases +> > are done in terms of repositories that somebody goes and gets. Maybe +> > refreshers or updates or whatnot. That tends to reflect the fact that +> > a lot of data comes from administrative processes. It may be that +> > data comes from different processes. Like what is happening through +> > the census. And that means that streams of data are a much more +> > relevant way of collecting that. It's not a big issue now but it may +> > be something that happens in the future. +> > Related to that, and this might be way kind of upstream of where +> > you want to be, is the systems and technology and to a certain extent +> > the processes that produce data are increasingly being privatized. +> > They fall outside of what the government can say. If you take a look +> > at the shocks system (ph.) it's a series of microphones that detect +> > where gunshots are. Initially the first round of that was something +> > that police officers bought and ran themselves. Now it's a service +> > provided by a company and therefore all of the systems fall outside + +something related to a government and that is happening in +infrastructure system after infrastructure system. It's not a +technical solution. It might be an advocacy thing. When a government +signs a contract it should say wider access to the data. That's it? + +> > That's part of a larger ongoing problem that I've seen of +> > procuring problems with the government. We see that procurement often +> > places no obligation on the contractor to do anything by way of +> > licensing data or the software that is being created or any level of +> > openness and solving procurement is a big difficult problem. Just the +> > one small change of requiring that when you are out sourcing the +> > collection of data to a third party for government purposes, that data +> > can't just be for the government. It has to be for the public, too. +> > I suspect that it's not a malicious gap. +> > Although I think that is often serves those vendors well as a +> > result. Whether or not they intended for that to happen. +> > I don't want that to be out of the scope of this discussion. +> > Out sourcing would almost make it easier if there is a +> > standard. The government wouldn't be doing it for themselves. These +> > guys want to keep their contracts. +> > You would think that except when you deal with many, many, at +> > least in the United States. In other countries with a sensible +> > representation -- or sensible execution of what we call federalist +> > government, in the United States, it just doesn't. +> > If there were clearer standards than businesses would move to +> > provide a scalable service to meet those standards. The problem is +> > standardization is challenging. +> > The flip side is one key component to a good vendor lock in is +> > a 1983 binary format that nobody else has. That's a great business +> > strategy to not follow standards. +> > If you get a big customer that says we want the data in this +> > format and that is standard and company X does that. Then when they +> > go out to all of their other clients, this is the standard that we +> > provide data and Joe Blow doesn't. +> > You can't use the word "standard" without a data standard. +> > This is what other people use and you need to buy it too. +> > It's possibly to see the professional open source world +> > applying to civil technology and data provision. They're making a +> > living on open standards if the government adopts those open +> > standards. +> > The great thing about standards is there are so many of them. +> > Are you seeking broadly like broad pain points or specific +> > pain points? +> > Both. +> > For specific pain points is it worth raising essentially, if +> > my problems aren't everybody's problems. We all have our own unique +> > set of problems that we run into. Not to be too challenging, what is +> > the point of us raising our own issues? +> > Because I want to fix them. That's why. For instance there +> > is -- just to give a specific example, there is some model legislation +> > in the uniform law commission put together and states are gradually + +passing. Almost all states will pass it. And it requires but four or +five states it passed so far. It requires any states who adopted any +legal information that they publish be of verifiable. So that means +if you get a -- if there is a court decision they release online, +there needs to be some mechanism once I have a copy of the court +decision to check against a master or whatever mechanism, to say this +is official and it's unchanged and no word or character changed. All +of these states are moving to only publishing legal data as PDFs. +That's a disaster. So we outsourced to Dan Schultz. They got the +contract to put together a really simple repository system for storing +hashes of these documents. Basically the nontechnical version is +anybody with a file can go to the state's website and say I want to +compare it to the master repository. It either says yes, that is +exactly what we have here or the document is changed. + +> > Isn't that called GIT. +> > Good luck getting it, GIT. We have to make it easy to get +> > documents into the system and for people to verify against them. It +> > was a great system that was put together for 7500 bucks. So now we're +> > working with states to put this together and find vendors. We are +> > trying to find vendors to sell hosting for 100 or 1,000 or whatever +> > dollars per month for the governments that want to sign up and install +> > the software. It's a very specific problem. We solved it by +> > addressing that problem and making it possible for states to release +> > open data that otherwise would have been by law just PDFs. So I hope +> > that we're able to address that. +> > Very specific problems can sometimes wind up with solutions that +> > help in bigger ways than anticipated. +> > There is an objection that we've been seeing, governments who +> > say, gosh, we'd love to share data but if we gave away raw XML of +> > legislation, somebody could download it and change it and redistribute +> > it. And we wouldn't know -- so we can't possibly give away? +> > Or the public would be confused. +> > We're scraping that data anyway. +> > We get that with congress. +> > The other reason for the software is that excuse has to go +> > away. We have this software, you can use it. That allows the data to +> > be verified and that excuse is gone. That is a nonsense excuse, that +> > is not really the problem. The real problem is they don't want to +> > release data for other causes, mostly because it's scary. So they +> > cite verifiability as the cause. +> > I wonder if it's worthwhile, what we found in gathering +> > elections data from around the United States is not everybody but a +> > decent number of states use -- there is like four or five vendors that +> > seem to be -- maybe three that seem to be dominant. People use many +> > different systems. But of the vendors there is like two or three or +> > four. And there are like we found, you can just search around to find +> > people who have run tools and pry stuff out of the common systems. +> > But on a very local level. I wonder if it's worth it for your +> > organization to sort of pool -- okay, these are the easiest targets +> > that will get us the most data out. In other words like if I'm + +writing a scraper for elections in Arkansas but it's used in six other +states. It's worth the effort and time to make a tool that is generic +enough that will result in the maximum production or freeing of data +for the minimum effort. Clarity is a vendor for elections and it's +used in probably 8 or 10 states. Like if there were sort of -- we're +probably going to end up writing one I suppose. Those are the kind of +things where it's common vendors used across the United States that +produce the data but not in a useful or easy to get at form. + +> > A couple weeks ago I spoke at the national secretaries of +> > states conference in Baltimore and then I had lunch with the secretary +> > of state in Vermont. Any leader of Vermont you can just call them up +> > and ask them to have lunch. Yes, I have nothing better to do at +> > 11 o'clock on Wednesday. +> > They hate these vendors. The competition with the three or four +> > vendors, nobody is like I love my election results vendor. One of the +> > painting points that we're trying to remove for election results is +> > we're looking at getting some states to pool their resources to create +> > something open source. A few states? +> > This quasi monopoly can be a great place to push through a +> > standard. In Germany we have only three different vendors for counsel +> > document management systems. So there is 11,000 municipalities in +> > Germany and they all have a piece of this software. Except for one +> > cousin that has ... +> > I have been that cousin. +> > A friend of mine, I thought it was hopeless but a friend of +> > mine started talking to these vendors and they have a speck and a data +> > standard and they're going to all release data in the same format. +> > And probably efficiently because it's German vendors. +> > I don't know about that. We like to use money and procurement +> > and that stuff. So it's going to cost. It's going to be split across +> > a thousand municipalities for each vendor so it's okay. +> > The time points, the ones that you've identified, I mean -- +> > We found some very big pain points and very small pain points. +> > I'm trying to think of a few of the active projects. I'm not going to +> > try to dig it up now of the active projects they're working on. +> > The biggest pain points seem to be not in the consumption of open +> > data. The people doing it now are clever. The people that come to +> > events like this and used to dealing with terrible input. The pain +> > points are more in the output of open data, the government end of +> > things. We're at the point with the production of open data with the +> > exception of the federal government, but on municipal and state agency +> > level where they have been told, you need to make open data happen. +> > We have no budget. We have no internal ability to do this. But you +> > do have to do it. And so what they produce if anything is terrible. +> > Like the state of Virginia launched an open data portal at +> > Virginia dot Virginia dot Gov. Somebody put it together on the front +> > page. It's like a list of 8 excel files. And I'm working with them, +> > I have a two-hour meeting. I and the deputy secretary of technology +> > is going to work on getting CKAN installed. It took six months to +> > get permission to put up a virtual server. It would have costed 4,000 + +a month I think. +What a really, things that are simple for us are very difficult +in government when they have no resources. Often when open data +happens it's because one or two people in government, somehow produce +something. When they finally get it done, often the response is this +is not good enough. This sucks, you should be embarrassed. We worked +weekends with no resources, can you just say thank you. +When they work through those awful experiences and produce +something, even that is usually not exactly richly rewarded by the +public. Those are the things that we're trying to simplify? + +> > I'm curious in Germany did that standard get developed because +> > you went to the government and said you need to develop better +> > standards or did you go to the vendors as a citizen and say this would +> > be a fantastic thing. +> > It worked through these round tables. That is what solves it +> > in that case. Bringing together people from city government and +> > initiatives and the vendors and making them talk it out. +> > I don't know why that worked. It shouldn't. +> > I wonder, about the municipalities and them releasing data, one +> > big problem is there is a guy whose job it is to set up the open data +> > portal and goes to all the different offices in the city and says do +> > you have any files that wouldn't find the public to look at. +> > Open data is for shit but yeah, I wonder what the downside and +> > upside of having a standard data list would be. This is the +> > prioritized list for what a city should release on the data portal and +> > here are nice examples of good formats and that kind of stuff? +> > That can be quite well served for the benefits for the city +> > and the stake holders releasing this stuff. +> > We've started on a project on our U.S. Open Data Institute. +> > Get hub/open data. A document called how to. It's just a very lose +> > frame work now. It's a book that is broken down by department. If +> > you're in a social services department, here is the data that people +> > want. It's a terrible question but a question that I get all the time +> > from government agencies, how do we know what people want. And I +> > started telling them, forget what people want, what do you want. What +> > are you sick of people asking you for. What do agencies and other +> > departments need? Great, put that up. Satisfy that first. And then +> > go to geeks and find out what we want. What we want is not +> > sustainable. What is more useful is internally what you want. +> > There are city portals that opened up around the country. If +> > there weren't preexisting guidelines what was their criteria. +> > Really like what is lying around. For the state of Virginia I +> > seriously spent a couple hours with Google. It's ridiculous. It's +> > not a comprehensive inventory. When the file is updated, who +> > reuploads it to the data repository. It's a unsustainable system. +> > And then the rest of us go to the data repository thinks here is all +> > the data. No, it's out of date and not close to anything. +> > I found in Vermont when I was speaking to them and yelling at +> > them on Monday evening, they have this data repository and it looks +> > for all the word like Secrada. Secrada set up the first site and + +they're like hey, do you want to use this? Yep, we're done. We have +a dataset now. It's like a demo. It's not a good system? + +> > This can happen at any level. The European commission running +> > 128 countries basically. They started a data portal and didn't have a +> > basic understanding-over the data they already published in other +> > places. We sent them a list saying here are 20 amazing datasets that +> > you already published, can you please include them in your data +> > portal. In all of Europe there is a directive that any government has +> > to maintain asset registers. They have to have lists of all the data +> > they have or all the information access they have. Nobody really +> > knows how to do that or -- it would be interesting to find out how to +> > do interesting registers for a city to know what they have. +> > In Chicago they worked with Shapen hall connected to the +> > university of Chicago. They called it a data dictionary. It was +> > meant to be what you're describing. It's unsatisfying. It's worth +> > looking at. Maybe this is -- when we say this is not exactly what we +> > mean. I don't think it stays up to date. It doesn't integrate with +> > the city's data portal. You're right. That is a good thing to try +> > and help explain to people what we mean. I just wanted to point out +> > in the write up for this session you talked about how we're going to +> > fix these things. +> > Yes. +> > Here is something that I encountered at the federal and state +> > level. People don't know how to produce CSV files. Part of the +> > problem is for example the federal election commission does this. You +> > can grab CSVs from their site and they load fine in excel. And +> > because people are idiots and Microsoft has people that want this to +> > work, they have all sorts of invalid files. +> > Including a table with an invalid CSV file. +> > It's interior double quotes. Every, virtually every +> > programming language, CSVs just blow up when they hit that. It's not +> > valid and you can't parse that. I go through line by line and fix it +> > when I find it. It's a terrible thing to do. And it's a relatively +> > simple thing to do. Say like don't, when you create CSV files, +> > they're not creating these manually. Create them properly. The test +> > here is for them I presume, does its open in excel. If it does, we're +> > done. There is something in the process of producing it, hey, that is +> > not enough to do or there is -- there could be another, something +> > else. That's a legitimate problem that wastes time and it makes it +> > harder to -- for people to use it on the fly. +> > That sounds like a great tool we can build for ourselves, +> > standardizing the CSVs. +> > In Britain they're doing a lot of work on CSVs. The problem +> > is all the link data that have nothing to do in their lives have +> > joined the CSV group and they're trying to make it a subset ... +> > Watching this was almost funny it was so painful. +> > I don't think it deals with the quote thing but CSV kit, there +> > is a CSV clean utility that I wrote to deal with unescaped new lines +> > and it helps to reconfigure CSVs. That is one. +> > This is nice for government. It's basically a web based + +validation, hey, you're too stupid to produce CSV for the following +reasons. + +> > But gently. +> > Here is my dream process. I have no understanding of how to +> > do this. There are a bunch of vendors and Microsoft is among them, of +> > software that holds documents that many governments use. What is the +> > Microsoft makes some -- share point, thank you. Share point is used +> > by 930 percent of fortune 500s. My understanding is it's broadly used +> > for government as well. You should be able to right click on a file +> > in share point and say this is open data. And from there on out any +> > change made to that data, if it's an excel file, it's cleaned up into +> > proper CSV and published on the portal any time someone makes a +> > change. +> > When I talk about this, the time that heads start nodding is when +> > I say the current process. Take the access database and export to +> > excel and then you save as CSV is and go to a data portal website and +> > every time you change it, it saves it. That is crazy. +> > Nothing more difficult than right click, this is open data. +> > Because that's ... As much as you can expect from government +> > employees. I'm not trying to insult government employees but they +> > have better things to do. And the number of employees with open data +> > in their job description I can probably count on two hands. This is +> > not really their problem? +> > Here is something that would be interesting coming from your +> > organization. I would love to see advocacy for journalism +> > organizations proactive. For example the police departments are +> > putting out an RFP for a new system. And so especially -- +> > specifically in new England states, a lot of things are controlled at +> > the county level and new England it's all at the municipality level. +> > In Maine, the counts don't have a standardized system. They're all +> > they're little own systems, I don't understand how that works. +> > Some advice or guidance from your organization on like here are +> > the top five police department systems. If you're going to talk to a +> > police department and try to convince them to get on a system that +> > supported a decent data standard that can be easily exported so you're +> > not getting e-mailed or faxed police logs, these are five great +> > systems that support it and here is a run down of them. +> > It would make it a lot easier for -- otherwise every newspaper or +> > whatever you have to go in and research that? +> > I'm mediating a dispute now between one of the open crime +> > websites and a police department about that problem. +> > They hate it. +> > Yes. +> > They're scared of it. But at the same time it makes it so +> > much harder if we don't know what we're talking about, which we often +> > times don't. +> > It would be interesting to re-examine the idea that most of +> > the problems are at the production of open data rather than the +> > consumption of open data. The reason that there is an interest in +> > re-examining that, you -- most of the people that come to open data + +websites are smart professionals but that maybe a self-selecting +group. Especially for the second tier of journalism organizations. +It's not where they're going because they don't have those skills. +Just -- maybe examine that. The suggestion from over here that maybe +the open data portal hooks in for tutorials and co-bases that are +preexisting, what is it. The meta data descriptions may be part of +what can help that problem. + +> > If I can pitch quickly. The project that I talked about, the +> > census reporter, it's that kind of thing. In the next block of +> > programs here, I'm going to do something with Brian Pitts. We're +> > calling it -- datasets and we're making resources for consumer. If +> > you have a dataset that you love that you would like to do, come in +> > and talk about a way to help us do that on a small level. +> > On the topic of audience for open data sites. I got an +> > intriguing tweet from the city of San Francisco. I had written a blog +> > entry a couple months ago. Open data being by government for +> > government. That should be their primary audience. And it got really +> > great reception within the government. It was like a terrible -- just +> > confusing chart that appears to be from an internal survey of city +> > employees about where they get data files from when they need them. +> > It used to be they would mostly as of a year or whatever ago, +> > they would get it by walking down the hall and knocking on the door +> > and saying I need that data or e-mail. Not by a magical repository. +> > But on people's USB drives. +> > Half of surveyed employees said they find datasets on San +> > Francisco's open data site. That's not to say it has people -- half +> > the city employees said when they look for data they look on that +> > site. That is going to be healthy. When it comes time to renew that +> > contact, the city employees will say you can't get rid of that. That +> > is where our data is. If it's valuable to them it hopefully has value +> > to the public as well. +> > Other than that I think it's data geeks and confused people. I +> > bet that is what the traffic log shows. +> > I want to mention something on the consumption side of open data. +> > What I thought was important at the hack anon. An employee of the +> > sunlight foundation produced a proof of concept for how to deal with +> > the crap that is PDFs. His idea was to treat PDFs as basically TOPO +> > data and use GIS software to map each document page and then using the +> > really very healthy collection of useful open source software to allow +> > you to analyze each page once you're treating it as physical space as +> > on a map, things get a lot easier. +> > He has done a proof of concept. That one hackathon idea +> > justified the event. But to my knowledge nobody else has done +> > anything with handling PDFs. +> > Yes, I agree with that. We deal with PDFs for election +> > results and Jeff Haine in Chicago developed a table splitter. The +> > idea is it doesn't work with every PDF but those that have tables in +> > them, there is a deliciously named C library called LSD. Stands for +> > lion segment detector. It detects lines and line segments. It's +> > useful for isolating, instead of -- I was trying to do OCR on a full + +page of results. A full table. To do it on individual cells +essentially. There is -- Jeff has written a sort of slightly better +than proof of concept called table splitter that I can send to you. +But it makes it possible to extract cells from a tabular image PDF and +look at pieces of it. + +> > Sounds like ... +> > It uses a slightly different underlying technology and it's +> > also doing individual piecings of it rather than trying to capture ... +> > Manuel wisely has nothing to do with texts. +> > Because he is not crazy. +> > But you have to get that data somehow. +> > It's actually worked for our worst case scenario, our worst +> > case scenario data which is Mississippi. +> > I have seen those tweets. +> > Here are OCRed results that work. So we're really excited +> > about that. +> > Getting data out of PDFs is quintessential open data problem. +> > We'd love to have people test it and say it works for this but +> > doesn't work for that. +> > It seems like we went for years without getting any data out +> > of PDFs. It seems like we're now getting new traction. If nobody +> > does anybody interesting or clever with this GIS stuff soon, I think +> > we as an organization will try to figure out who we can give money to +> > do make something happen about this. +> > Do you remember what the project is called? +> > No. We have a couple minutes left. I will get that for you. +> > I would be grateful if any of you all would keep me in mind +> > when you encounter things that make you crazy dealing with open data. +> > It's unlikely that you are the only person having that problem. And +> > it is unlikely that it's just because you don't know enough. Odds are +> > fairly good that this is just yet another of these seemingly +> > intractable problems that make dealing with data terrible. And then +> > tell me. +> > You're e-mail address. +> > Waldo@USODI.ORG. And I'm on Twitter. +> > One final thing just to mention quickly named entity +> > recognition. Once you have stuff out of PDFs most of the time it's a +> > piece of text. And all we have is open CALE (ph.) I'm sending all my +> > research to writers and I need it to be in one of three languages that +> > most of the world doesn't speak. I think that's a big need getting +> > better stuff on that. MLTK and whatever is built in that sucks. +> > At the moment we have whatever it is part to have Apache +> > world. They have software and it's very hard to install. +> > They wrap around everything. They have 15 different things +> > and I don't know whether any of them do good things. +> > Seems like we need -- Elasticsearch has something like solar +> > or something like that. +> > It's going on my long term list. +> > If you wanted to produce open data more clearly wouldn't it be +> > better to make explicit the named entities. For the documents to say +> > specifically where there are people or other entities. +> > The way for example the -- transcripts in Microsoft word, and +> > to do anything else would take years. +> > That can be a tool for them. +> > We should have socials in PDFs. +> > That is a tool that Manuel helped to produce at MIT. To +> > redact social security numbers from PDF. +> > Thank you all for your time and insight. I have a list of +> > homework. Some very small and some huge, reforming government. We'll +> > get on that. +> > Are you going to publish the outcomes of this anywhere. +> > I'm happy to. Sure. At GIT hub -- I don't know, where would +> > be good. +> > I think you guys are doing cool things. +> > Can we just register issues with pains. +> > There is a repository on open data at GITHUB with the problems +> > that you have getting data. We are trying to address some of those +> > problems. That is probably the place I should put those. +> > The program is called what word where. That's the GIS tool. +> > All right. Thanks folks. I guess there is another session now. +> > Half hour break, another session and then lunch. +> > I will be very hungry. diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_08_Hitchhikers_Guide_to_Datasets.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_08_Hitchhikers_Guide_to_Datasets.md index 2612600b..932b43a1 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_08_Hitchhikers_Guide_to_Datasets.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_08_Hitchhikers_Guide_to_Datasets.md @@ -1,332 +1,330 @@ -This is a DRAFT TRANSCRIPT from a live session at SRCCON 2014. This transcript should be considered provisional, and if you were in attendance (or spot an obvious error) we'd love your help fixing it. More information on SRCCON is available at http://srccon.org. - -Captioning by the wonderful people of White Coat Captioning, LLC -whitecoatcaptioning.com - - -Thursday, Session 8: - -Hitchhiker's Guide to Datasets -Session Leader: Ryan Pitts -Guest Presenters: Joe Germuska, Derek Willis, Jacob Harris --- - - -RYAN: All right, it's 12:30 by my clock. Hello, everyone, welcome to the Hitchhikers Guide to datasets session. I'm Ryan. I have a few people who are going to help me out during this session, but let's talk a little bit about why we're here, first of all. So it will probably not come as a shock to anyone in this room if I were to tell you that data is a pretty awesome source to do journalism with. Probably a lot of us in here who have done this kind of analysis ourselves, whether looking at crime data and a reporting on that or analyzing census data to talk about the way that demographics of our city are changing over time or maybe we write a bot that tweets out anonymous campaign finance donations. Or maybe we become once with the FEC dataset, and we just sense anomalies and we tweet them manually. A lot of us have probably participated in the News Nerd Super Bowl, which is election night, delivering stories to our readers and there are probably a lot of people in this room who are very comfortable with doing journalism with data and we've been doing it for a long time. I think it's also fair to say that over the past two or three years we've seen a real surge in interest in this type of data analysis. There are a lot of reporters working now who wouldn't necessarily have identified as data analysts before, but they're definitely working data analysis in their beats. There are entire sites launching with data analysis kind of the core of their DNA. - -If any of you were at the last NICAR, it was like the biggest one ever. There were like a thousand news nerds there, so data analysis is really of high interest right now. So in thinking about SRCCON and getting together a bunch much smart people it felt like it would be cool for us to collect some of the knowledge about all of these datasets that we know about. For a couple of reasons, both so that journalists know what's out there and what's available, because I run across interesting datasets that are interesting to me all the time. You probably do the same thing. So that we all embark into this kind of analysis that we're doing the right kind of work and that's something that's kind of worrisome, because it's true that the first time you look at a particular dataset it's kind of daunting. You may not be real familiar with the meta data that they use, you might not understand the way one agency classifies certain things versus another agency. You might not even know how the data is collected and that's pretty important before you actually start describing it to other people. - -And so the risk that we have, if we're just kind of doing something for the first time, is that we'll make mistakes, so we ought to try to help each other avoid that. I was trying to think of a good analogy for this, and the best thing I could come up would be, it's like trying to read an essay that's written in a language you took a couple of years of in high school and so you see these are letters on the page, I know that there are words made of these letters and maybe I understand a few of the words or phrases, but never in a million years would you turn to a person next to you and say, and here's what this essay actually means. You would want to understand that language before you were trying to tell someone else what it means. That's what we do as journalists. - -So that might be a terrible analogy. Probably a better analogy is one I heard first from Derek Willis, who talks about interviewing your data, getting familiar with what columns are available to you, how are the numbers distributed, what does an outlier look like, so when it comes time to identify what is actually interesting in this dataset, you can do some good reporting. - -So in this session, I want to kind of take one step backward from that. We're going to try to talk about doing the backgrounding before you actually do the data. If you were going to sit down and you were going to interview a person you would not start before backgrounding a person. I called it hitchhiker's guide, because like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is designed to give you the context you need to go out and explore the galaxy on your own, so we have a repository on GitHub already and we'll come back to that later. There's a few outcomes that I have in mind for this session. Some of which I know we can achieve and some of which will actually take your participation for us to achieve. - -What I want is for everybody to walk out of this room having learned something new about a dataset that they didn't know about, and so in a few minutes we'll do a walking tour of the American Community Survey, some FEC data, and then election data. And I want everybody to have the opportunity to share something about a dataset that you know something about that we might not. If you have a cool dataset in mind just over the next few minutes, just kind of think what's the background that somebody would need to have to understand this dataset and to dig in and start doing reporting out of it. And then if we have time to break into small groups, we'll take a look at that repository and let's actually start doing some work and building something together and doing something that journalists who are not in this room or at this conference can use going forward. We want it to be a resource that lives on. There's already a couple things in place. If you haven't done data work before, we still will have jobs for you to do. If you have done data work we will have other jobs for you to do. But that's kind of what I have in mind for this session, so I'm going to turn it over to Joe to talk about the American Community Survey. - -> And this is participatory, so absolutely pepper with questions. Participate in whatever way makes sense to you. - -> Just briefly in five minutes. - -JOE GERMUSKA: So the US Census Bureau is a great provider of open data so that journalists can know about the world around them where they're reporting. They do three big products and a lot of other ones. The three big ones are the decennial census: They vary in degrees of precision and timeliness. We did sense reporter based mostly on the American Community Survey because we think it's the sweet spot in terms of timeliness versus precision. First, the American Community Survey is a survey so you have to be aware that there's margins of error, talking about precision. The more geographically precise you want to be, the more risk there is that the margin of error are problematic and so one of the things you need to come to terms with is what level of accuracy you can deal with and also just how to talk about it so when you write about data from the American Community Survey, rarely do you want to say one is the most or the least, but with the margin of order, the lists might change order. But you can still get a lot of out of it as long as you're careful not to treat it as extremely precise data. So every table has a different universe that is sort of what's being counted so most of them would be talking about these are all the people and of all the people, this many are men or women, this many are this age or that age. But some tables have a different universe, for example there are tables about how people get to work and the universe for that is workers and specifically workers I think between the age of 15 and 50, and so when you compare numbers from a table like that to another table, if the universes aren't the same, then you have to be very careful that you're comparing apples to apples and not apples to oranges. - -So I mentioned a little about about geographic precision. One of the things that census data users have to come to terms with is what's called a summary level. So summary levels are basically class of geography, so the obvious ones are states, counties, you may have heard of census tracks and block groups. I think there's like 200 summary levels but some of that is overly complicated. What you really need to know is there's about 20 of them. A lot of the rest of them come to do with how those shapes are broken down and you can usually separate those out: One of the sort of caveats that is a good one to know early on is that a lot of people want data for their city. In sometimes that's called a place, city or town. But sometimes it's like a town that doesn't have a government. So there's a whole bunch of those called places but in certain parts of America, places don't really cover everything and there's another level which is called county subdivision which is a better way to use if you're doing things especially New England, Michigan and...[inaudible] - -If you're using analysis just within those places you'll get more of the places that you're trying to think about if you don't use the summary that's called place. Again, this is something in the repository so you don't have to get it from me trying to make it concise in five minutes. Another kind of interesting wrinkles is in ever any year they actually do three different releases. For big enough places they release data on them every year and big enough in that case means 65,000 people or more, so in that data, you can do year by year comparisons going back to 2005, but for places that are less than 65,000 people, the bureau doesn't believe that the margins of error and the sample sizes are good enough to get good results so they collect data for three years and use that for places that are 20,000 or more. And they also have a release that collects data for five years and they have to use for ... again at the block group level you run a decent risk of margin of error problems, especially if you're trying to get a very specific sort of subculture, so the numbers of men versus women in a block group are pretty reliable estimates, but the number of, you know. 15- to 25-year-old men of Ecuadorian heritage is less likely to be a number that you can trust at the block group level and you need to get a bigger aggregate for that. - -Another wrinkle to now about is a lot of people like to do data analysis by county across the whole United States, but actually only about I think 25 percent of American counties are big enough to be in the one-year dataset and only about I think it's 40% are big enough to be in the three-year dataset. But a decent number of counties are too small to be in anything but the five-year dataset in terms of population and so you just have to sort of be aware of that when you set out to do things. You get these giant counties that have no people in them and they look really important on a map. It's important to be careful not to cross compare data across one year, three year, five year datasets. You should get all your data out of the same datasets. So if want to talk about Chicago and also towns around Chicago that are not in the dataset. - -It's also comparison over time is tricky with the ACS, for a couple of reasons. One is that for smaller geographies, so that because the time periods overlap, the census bureau generally discourages people from using comparisons from releases that do overlap, so they want you to have adjacent releases so that you're doing 2010 to 2012 for the three-year dataset, you are and you want to compare that to the 2007 to 2009 dataset, not the 2009 to 2011, so you don't want them to be overlapping because you have mixed numbers in there that cause confusion. But for the various geographies, there are not always data adjacent five-year datasets. The other trick there is that the maps are redrawn at every decennial census. the real point of the census is to figure out how to vote for representatives in Congress, the maps get changed and so the data from the 2000-2010 period are for maps that are not the same as the data for 2010, and I actually don't know the proper state of the art for correcting in the change in the maps for the survey data. We do it for decennial census level, but for ACS it's complicated. But I was at a seminar and I was surprised that the Census Bureau was put on the seminar. ... it's still a pretty new thing and the best practices are being defined all the time. - -So I think those are the main kind of points I want to talk about. I could go on and on and if you get me the a the bar and ask me the wrong question you might get me to do that. But for now that's kind of a brief introduction. This and a lot more is in the repository that Ryan was talking about. For now, I'll yield the floor to the next person. - -DEREK WILLIS: So hey, I'm Derek Willis, I don't have any buttons to give away to you, so but I'll advertise the census reporting buttons. So I want to introduce you a little bit to the Federal Election Commission data which is available, and the good news is that there's a lot of data. The bad news is that there's a lot of data and it covers different things. You wouldn't day it like a circle, you would draws it as like a house that you bought and then added the rooms on and then other people got to design some of those rooms or pick many so of those rooms and then maybe you leveled them off and there were different architects representing different styles that built onto that house so that it ended up looking like crazy town basically which is sort of a decent way to describe it because the Federal Election Commission covers House, Senate and presidential races, that's it. And all the politics that goes along with it. So automatically there's a stratification level of not all elections. We don't do state elections. So that's not there. - -And then of course there are varying methods of how you get that information in, and schedules, and times that people file, and you can choose to file, and so it is not a -- again, like thanks to the constitution, it's a federalist system, it's more of an opt-in system for data than it is a required system for data in some respects. So just to give you some brief example: Candidates can choose to file, at a minimum, every quarter. Every three months. But they also can choose to file monthly, and now monthly is better for us, I think as journalists and folks who build things. - -Quarterly might be better for people who frankly don't have a large campaign staff and who don't want to pay to have somebody type stuff every month, or it's not important to them or frankly they'd like to remain in a little bit of a stealth mode for a little while for strategic political reasons. So there's sort of disclosure, there's like degrees of disclosure, but there are also degrees of like tactical degrees of disclosure that you have to get in the mind set of thinking, well, what would I do or how would I do it? - -A really sort of good example of this that you might have heard of recently is this project by the Harvard law professor Lawrence L. Lessig, to fund this super PAC to end all super PACs, which is both ironic and clever at the same time, and because of how they structured their fundraising drive, it actually fell over two reporting periods, and so some of the money that they raised, we know that they have raised a total of $6 million from individual donors, some of that money was reported on the 15th of July, because it was raised before June 30th. Some of the money was raised after June 30th, so technically they wouldn't have to tell us anything about the money they raised after June 30th, until after October 15th, which seems ridiculous in a lot of respects, but that's the schedule they've chosen to file upon. They could choose to file monthly but they've chosen not to. Now, they are going to release stuff every two weeks on their site which is another whole weird layer of disclosure. There are a lot of choices here. I'm not going to say that the census and ACS are not complex, because they are complex, but they are fairly consistent about how they release data, when they release data, there's a nice schedule it's not like we're releasing data for 49 states, one of the states opted out. But with campaign finance, that can happen, at especially at the federal level. That makes comparisons pretty tricky in a lot of respects, because if mostly all the candidates in a race will file on the same schedule, but, you know, sometimes you have some variation there, but if you wanted to compare across candidacies or across other things, that makes it difficult, as well. - -So the repository is essentially a guide to the things that the Federal Election Commission makes available. There is bulk data that covers the entirety of a two-year election cycle and that is cumulative data, essentially every time a new candidate comes in, every time a new transaction comes in, it all gets shoved into cumulative files, we download all of the individual contributions all at once. And then there is episodic data, which is to say that each individual filing is available -- well, unless you're a Senate candidate, each individual filing is available electronically, so you can look at it in that respect, you can be like I want this filing and I want that filing, or I want all the files by a particular candidate. - -The Senate, in its infinite wisdom, as the world's greatest legislative body, they file on paper. And I don't know when they're going to stop doing this. Because if it took them 80 years to really come to conclusion on the one-person-one-vote theory, it may take them 160 years to come to the conclusion that computers-are-a-better-way-to-do-things theory. So there's a huge time lag for the availability of Senate data, but for House data and for the committees, the political action committees that kind of work around election there's not it's not exactly real-time data but there is a lot more data than you would think of in terms of just these filing deadlines, whether they're monthly or quarterly. Committees and candidates file every day and you know, including amendments of previous filings so it's worth sort of coming up to speed and looking at things and how you find out about the FEC data is you just look at it and keep looking at it. - -The problem is that unlike the careful, the really careful folks in the Census Bureau, the FEC folks, it's not that they're not careful, but they're not careful enough and there's too many filings for them to deal with, so there are mistakes or people make mistakes in filings and everything has to be greeted with or approached with fairly abiding skepticism that well, if something looks wrong, yeah, it probably is wrong. So on again in the FEC data section of the repository, I'd love for people, you know, whether it's in here or outside of this session, to take a look at it and be like this part doesn't make sense to me or that part doesn't make sense to me or can you explain this a little more and that's sort of the way I feel that we will get kind of pushed forward on a larger front than simply me looking at findings all the time and tweeting out weird things. On the other hand, if you enjoy this sort of stuff, maybe we can schedule shifts where can you tweet weird stuff from findings when I'm on vacation, which starts in 48 hours from now. So thank you. - -JACOB HARRIS: Ryan invited me to be on the panel, and he wanted me to give information on the AP. Which I actually pushed back on a little bit. - -> For a newspaper of 70 to 80,000 circulation, they were charging $5,000 for access. - -OK, per state? - -> I believe that was the -- I think it was probably national package, and I think they quote different prices to different papers. - -Yeah, so anyway. Well, you know, it's also -- sort of also the point is they're not the only sort of game in town anymore. It used to be the AP was the only organization that collected sort of national election results because they would basically put stringers in every state's, you know, even down on various county levels reporting to a national operation. - -I mean there's also other people, also, in the state, in the sort of space, of probably like election results, so you can obviously go to the states themselves. States run their own election, it's in the constitution. That's not ever going to change. There's no sort of federal election, you know, commission controlling, they don't control, as Derek said, how elections are run in each state, so you have to go to each state and that's usually where the problem happens. - -You know, and so what I want to talk about is not so much the specifics of working with the AP, but just the specifics of working with election data. I mean how many of you have actually reported on elections before? Just a quick show of hands. How many how many of think you would ever want to? I mean because the fun thing about elections is actually the data model itself is really simple compared to say, like, you know, the census data or the FEC data. Because it's really just three tables. You have your races, right, which is just like these could be statewide races, could be county level results, it could be results rolled up congressional district. It could be precinct. But those are all races. You have candidates which, unlike the census, you're not rolling up data from millions of Americans, or unlike the FEC data you're not reporting every campaign donor with their address. - -You know generally who the candidates are for a given election, and you can say, OK, I want to copy that they're named or something like that. It's not going to kill you to go through all those names and they're joined by a table which is basically the results which is basically this candidate got this many votes in this election, simple, done, you know? And usually there's one other table that you care about which is C, calls. And those who won this race because we don't want to say who got the most votes, we want to say this will be the next senator from Mississippi or whatever. The challenge is not so much the data that goes into this, I mean the actual data of these tables, it's just the process that goes into sort of creating this data and sending it to your database and that's where things basically get fucked up repeatedly. - -Because every state runs their election in their -- - -> Don't sugar coat it, Jake. -[laughter] - -JACOB: Sorry. And usually there's just generally a slider of I mean the process of this whole thing this data is collected usually varies based on the laws of that state, the process in which the votes are tabulated, things like that. The one thing I would say if you're ever with going to work with election data is you should acquaint yourself with the two concepts. Which is one, you should assume nothing, you know, about the data unless you can sort of guarantee it, so a lot of people say, oh, well, I have a race one, there's only going to be one race winner for a given race, right? Only one person can win a race. Oh, you poor naive fool. You know, sometimes you have races that have two winners, California has open primaries, for instance, OK, where the top two winners go on to general election, certain assembly races in New Jersey. Sometimes states have these rules, well you have a winner if someone gets more than 50% of the vote, otherwise, we go to a runoff, OK, and then you have to say, OK, these two top candidates go for a runoff, so you have to flag for that. Sometimes the race is literally too close to call. You can't really put it that a race is called either. It may not be called while you're still counting votes, OK? It could go to recount later. - -People also assume, well, candidates, these are people, right? No, not always. You have ballot initiatives, right, so those are your you're actually voting for two fake people, yes or no, affirm or reject, things like that, those aren't really people. Some allow you to say none of the above. You can vote for that. And I think actually it was a Nevada where for the democratic primary "none of the above" won. Now, under state law, that actually meant that the first candidate underneath actually won the race, but none of the above actually had the most votes. They don't actually send nobody. This is more of a protest thing. But that's what they want to do in Nevada, so you've got to live with it. And similar other sort of things like that. - -Results also, people think this actually represents the actual votes of the election and normally that's true except whenever you deal with basically presidential primaries or caucuses, your results may actually be like, you know, delegate allocations and stuff like that, so the other sort of point I would probably make about this is that you know, primaries themselves can be complicated and vary with rules from states to states, but presidential caucuses and presidential primaries are the most insane collection of edge cases and weird rules you will ever see, and so I hope if you ever find yourself doing election data, you don't do presidential primaries, because that's just nuts. - -> I don't know how much, you know -- Yeah. - -JACOB: OK. I mean, you know, and that's pretty much it. I'm working on trying to sort of collect a document like the ones that are on the GitHub for now. But I think it's just going to be a long listing of various ways in which you have to sort of be prepared for, you know, various exceptions arising, so we'll look for that. - -> Awesome. - -RYAN: OK. Does anybody have any questions about census or FEC or election data that you want to get out right now? Sorry. - -> Is there a way as an individual person that you could get AP election data? - -> I kind of doubt it. - -> Yeah, you have to be a member anyway, I think. - -> I think that's right. You have to be a member organization. - -> I'm pretty sure they would sell to somebody else at the right price. - -> They sell to other people. - -> At the right price. - -JACOB: I mean the real question I guess I would ask. If you were reporting the election that night, if you were more interested in analyzing a prior election, you could go to something like open elections you know, which is a good resource. - -DEREK: It will be when we're done. - -JACOB: You know, or you can scrape -- yeah, I don't know. - -DEREK: And academics, as well. I mean like in the course of an open election, we found there's a professor at ivy state that keeps results of elections since 1967, like I don't know why. It's probably his Ph.D., but he has it. - -> Did you ask him why? - -DEREK: Honestly I think I'd never get out of that conversation. - -RYAN: All right, who else came with a cool dataset that you don't have to spend five minutes talking about, but that you at least want to throw out there and let us know that this thing exists and maybe give us a little bit of background so that we might be able to tell stories with it. Anyone? - -Jeff? - -> JEFF LARSON: NASA has two satellites, Landsat 7 and Landsat 8, and if you ever need relatively quick raster data, satellite data, the picture is not super high resolution, but it's really available and it's the largest dataset we are currently working with. Al Shaw on his work computer has 320 gigabytes of raster data. - -RYAN: When you say raster data? - -> JEFF: I mean pictures of the earth from space, so ProPublica used to do investigative journalism, and now we do investigative space journalism. That's right, motherfuckers! - -> Are you going to try on one of the space suits down in -- - -> I already have one. It smells kind of bad. - -RYAN: What kind of stories are you going to tell with this -- with pictures of the earth from space? - -> JEFF: Uh, think about it. Sorry, we don't talk about stories, but we do like playing with it, so we can show you a demo. The fun part of this data is -- well, not for me, but for the designers in our crew -- is it's the only data that you get to play with in Photoshop, because you can do many things, most people think raster data is images, right, and it is imagery, but the other thing that you can do is you can create false color images to look at things like vegetation growth, because the way -- Here, I'll sort of draw it on the board. Because the way that Landsat works, it's for a lot of scientists, but the way that Landsat works, is there's sort of this spectrum of light in, you know, the electromagnetic spectrum, and Landsat sort of picks up sort of like this stuff, right, so it picks up, there are these different bands. It has like actually 8 different cameras or something like that, and it will pick up like the red band, the green band, and the blue band, and then you can also get ultraviolet, so you can do things like pick up vegetation, you can get infra -- a little bit of infrared, although that gets a little weird, and the way that you combine all of these different bands shows how you can, you know, defines what the picture that you're showing is. And it's actually a dataset, right, when you think about a picture, it actually is, if you add geo reference coordinate to it, you're actually dealing with little itty-bitty grids of data, right, so this is maybe, you know, a gigabyte, so would that it be, you know, like 1,000 by 1,000 grids on the earth that contain like actual emanations of data. People do all sorts of things like flood modeling with grids like this, where they'll just mask out all of the blue stuff and there's your water, and then all of a sudden you can feed that through, you know, like GPUs and things like that to do analysis on it. - -> And it's just like a really cool dataset that I don't think we've done much with outside of just plain imagery of you know, plane crashes and war zones, and I think there's a lot of talk about investigative space journalism but I think we can do a lot with this and I'd like to see people fiddling more with raster data. Because it really is true, you know GDAL and Photoshop, you're just dealing with. - -> What's GDAL? - -> JEFF: Geodata Abstraction Library, which is actually this great library. There are a million, you know, different proprietary file formats for this, because meteor -- the weather guys, were around long before we had freely available satellite data, right? And the weather guys all came up with their own grid-based data, so what GDAL allows you to do is take all of these weird formats that maybe an academic likes one sort of format and translate it to geo TIF that you can then edit and Photoshop or do, and the other thing is you can do spatial statistics on this, right so there's a great raster dataset that classifies these little grid images by these little grid pixels by land cover, and I forget what it's called, but it's on NASA's website, so what you can do is you can run classifications based on these colors, so if it has this much infrared, if it has this much blue or something like that, this much of this spectrum, more in the violet range you're looking at water, right? You're looking more brownish, you're looking at cities, right, and so you could do things like you could look at the south side of Chicago and see that it doesn't have the same sort of -- you could quantify that, I don't know if everybody saw it, but someone did sort of like compared the south side of Chicago and there's like no trees and the north side of Chicago and it's all trees, you know, sort of like urban renewal kind of projects, so you can classify -- you can correlate between like wealth and tree cover, right? Actually sort of works in some places and you can do that just by running statistics on these colors. So there's tons of great ideas on using satellite data. - -> Wetland mitigation banking is a term that you're familiar with in your state, where developers have to set aside preserve wetlands and they can destroy wetlands in order to build stuff like Florida, for example. You can use this stuff to compare where the wetlands went. - -> One of the dark sides of this satellite data is there are companies out there who will do basically like corporate. It's maybe not a dark side, I shouldn't say, who will do sort of corporate fact-finding is what they do call it, so they take all the satellite pictures and they look the at amount of oil in an oil tank, and then all of a sudden you have like actionable intelligence, right, if this oil is really, really low, then maybe we should hold onto our oil reserves, you know, the futures that we have, if it's really, really high, you would sell them off. So things like that you can also find out, which is a lot of fun. So anyway, that's my dataset that I think we all should work with. - -> One specific example of how we used in addition to the imagery, you can get elevation titles, raster elevation titles from NASA, so that's a great thing if you want to use it to see rising sea levels or that sort of things. Like we used it in the Philippines last year. If you open up an image editor, just look like black and white, but each pixel is a different shade depending on the elevation and there's free software that will process that. - -> In the United States it is called the national elevation dataset and it goes in some places, especially wetland areas, the United States department of -- the army Corps of engineers will fly planes over and shoot lasers at the ground like it's so cool, this stuff is so cooled and they call it LIDAR and build digital images with it. - -> You can say it's 10.5 feet off of the ground, not RGB, right, so again, right, like it's the future. - -[laughter] - -> So, yeah, and I think -- - -> I was going to say that Al Shaw talked about this at length in the earlier session and he talked about the project you're working on about Louisiana land loss. - -> JEFF: I didn't want to say that, but I guess he's not as close to the chest. Yeah, the Louisiana land loss, so what we're doing is looking at cities that no longer exist because of soil erosion, using these same sort of methods that we were talking about. - -> How far back does the data go? - -> JEFF: Landsat, so the problem is, we had this great -- Landsat go back to the 80s, the problem is like since 1996, something happened to Landsat 7, so a lot of the data in the beginning of 2000, you'll get these weird bands of no data that look like that, and then here will be data because the sensor got misaligned somehow, I mean it's in space, so you can't go up there and jiggle it a little bit ... - -> But Landsat 8, has this great layer which is black and white. It's very high res, so you can like see people walking around ... - -RYAN: Anybody else who's got cool data? - -> DAVID YANOFSKY: Yeah, so I'm David Yanofsky. My dataset that I always go back to is an an endless fount of stories for me, is this international trade databases, the [US has a great one](https://usatrade.census.gov/) that you have to pay for. The International Trade Centre—which is a joint agency of the WTO and the UN—provide free access to journalists to [their database](http://www.trademap.org/), and in the international version you can get trade flows for very specific commodities, all categorized under the system called the [harmonized system](http://hts.usitc.gov/) and everything is in a hierarchy. At a high level is something like [petroleum products](http://hts.usitc.gov/Table%2027.xml) and all the way down to, you know, [soccer balls](http://hts.usitc.gov/Table%2095.xml#9506.62.4080) if you want to, you know, or I guess from soccer balls to toys, most generally. And if you get access to the US dataset—which is really cheap, it's like for one seat it's like $300 bucks a year—you can get port level data at even more specific levels, where if you're doing local stories, you can see all of these items that are leaving, not just from your city, but from specific ports, you know, in this -- people, if you're familiar with the way that people talk about trade, they talk about the oh, the port of Los Angeles and long beach as like this one thing. They're actually two separate ports, and the data shows it as two separate ports where like this is the stuff that's going through long beach and this is the stuff that's going through Los Angeles and that's a business story and you can talk about who has control of who docks where, if you know who's getting the tax revenue from those things, from the workers that are at those locations, the US data is anonymized, in that the census tries to protect business interests of the exporters and importers. - -> So you know, you can sometimes see these things that, you know, are -- stories that I've written range from this is [everything that the US exported to Iran](http://qz.com/91152/), and here is why that's important, that led to a story about that -- so that's kind of a serious thing about sanctions and that you know, the US is providing a lot of you know, humanitarian aid, but that also less to this really silly story about bull semen that Iran is one of the biggest importers of US bull semen and then I did a story about [all the other importers of US bull semen](http://qz.com/91718/). - -> Why? Why? - -> DAVID: Why not. - -> Why would you not? Who wouldn't read that. - -> DAVID: First off, who wouldn't read that, and second off, the miracle of the American cow. The reason -- just to explain this story, the reason why it's so popular is American cows are really productive. More productive than cows around the world, so if you know, if the US has bred cows that make thousands of gallons of more milk a year than here countries, so people want the special sauce. - -> It seems like the least possible interesting explanation. - -RYAN: Awesome, thank you for ending on that note. - -> DAVID: You're welcome. - -RYAN: Who's going to follow that? Anybody? Somebody else got cool data? - -> JUSTIN MYERS: Not that cool. - -RYAN: All right. - -> JUSTIN: So one that I tend to use a lot at chronicle of higher education is called IPEDS. It's the Integrated Post-Secondary Data System. Basically if you're an institution that participants in federal student aid at all, you have to give them all of this data, and even if you don't participate in federal student aid, if you want to get listed on like at department websites for possible students other families, like college navigators, that they've been promoting, then in order to get in that, you have to participate in IPEDS, at least a little. So they collect a bunch of stuff on really weird schedules throughout the year. It's like nine or ten surveys spaced throughout the year. Some of them are optional in different years, the schedules are weird: But you've got things like tuition, professor pay, degree breakdowns by field and level, really narrow fields even, they have like these progressively smaller codes they call CIP codes, I forget, it's like classification of instructional programs or something. But, you know, so if you want to see how many people in Arkansas got Ph.D.s in, you know, microbiology, like, you can do that, and you can get it by school. And you know so there's attendance, there's all kinds of stuff. So they have their own really weird online tool that takes some getting used to to access all of this stuff and they also have big CSVs broken down by year if you want to dig in. They're a bit crazy to work with, I'm trying to start writing something up for Ryan's repo, but if you're interested hit me up. - -RYAN: So this seems like a really good opportunity to talk about this repo. Can we come full circle here? We have about ten minutes left, so maybe not enough time to actually do small group work, but let me write this address up here. This is where this thing -- this is where you can get to it right now. Bit.ly/dataset guide. - -There's a readme, and then there are two guides that I think are in a state of doneness, one of them is on American Community Survey, Joe and I teamed up on that one. Derek has one in there about FEC data, like Ryan said, Chris Chang has already started on one about IPED data so we should totally hook you two guys up to work on that, and Jake who was going to work on something for elections. - -I mean I just want to listen about people talk about cool data. I do want this ideally to become a resource for people who are not here. And so one thing that we kind of talked about leading into the session was, if we had had time to do small groups, if any of you are unfamiliar with some of the datasets that are written up there, it would be fantastic if you could go through them with an editor's eye. Does the writeup on ACS data tell you enough that you would feel comfortable about going to census reporter, looking something up and writing a story, do you have that kind of background? Same with FEC data. The other thing I was hoping we might be able to do is to have people identify datasets that you wish we had guides for and we can probably actually do. We have enough time to do some of that: And I kind of wrote down the ones that got mentioned. - -> So the processes people should also, if they should fork off the dataset guide and -- - -RYAN: The process, yeah, whatever is easiest for you honestly. If you feel like e-mailing me and saying I can write something and I will email you, I will totally do that. If you use GitHub and you can fork and do a pull request, that obviously is awesome, as well. If you see a mistake, something like that, just get ahold of me, I will kind of try and carry this torch forward. - -> Is that the same thing you people to do with I don't get this. - -RYAN: Yeah, whichever way of communication is easiest for you. - -So we have ACS, FEC in progress, is it IPEDS they have system in it. And elex is kind of in progress, as well. - -Is it actually called Landsat? - -> JEFF: Yeah, I mean yeah, sure. Space, space pictures. - -RYAN: I think Jeff entered into a binding contract to write a guide on this. We talked about, is it NED? - -> JEFF: Yeah, National Elevation Dataset. - -> Landsat's Twitter is awesome, too. - -> DAVID: International Trade Centre trade map, it's trademap.org, and it's center with an "r-e," and the other one is USA Trade Online is the census database. - -RYAN: OK. All right, so those are the ones that people kind of talked about just now. So we have a few minutes left. What -- yeah? - -> Probably UCR. - -RYAN: UCR? - -> The crime center. - -RYAN: For people who are not familiar with UCR? - -> Uniform Crime Report. The FBI gathers it from local police agencies. - -RYAN: Is this a dataset you are familiar with and are you volunteering to write a guide? - -> I hate that dataset. - -RYAN: You're the perfect person. - -> I don't have a dataset, but I was thinking there's a collaborate source and I've been taking notes on what people have been saying so we could put those and people could flesh it out ... - -RYAN: What datasets frighten you that would love to tell stories from? - -> The CDC Wonder dataset. - -> The aptly named Wonder. - -> And I don't know anything about it, but I've tried to fool with it, and I need somebody to write one of these guides for me. - -RYAN: CDC Wonder? - -> Yeah, it's probably an acronym, but I don't know what it's for. - -RYAN: Oh, that's even cooler. - -> Time use dataset from BLS, which is like how Americans spend their day. - -> JEFF: Actually everything on BLS. If I could get a dummy's guide to BLS, I would give you so many space pictures. - -RYAN: Does anybody in the room know who should write that. - -> I could write that. I have it from BLS. send me those space pictures tomorrow. - -> JEFF: OK, I will. - -> NAA Fisheries. So they'll tell you like what fish imports and exports of various countries are. - -> There's tons of stuff on OSHA. - -> Are you also interested in any state-specific ones, as well? - -RYAN: Absolutely. I was kind of thinking if we divided up in small groups, something probably worth talking about is how is this going to end up being more useful from an architecture kind of perspective. I don't know if it needs to get divided up. Probably the thing to do would be to get more of these articles in and then a structure will just emerge. - -> Well, the one that like I would be maybe able to do is Texas campaign finance, Texas ethics commission. - -RYAN: I know that there is a -- that California recently -- they have basically their own FEC dataset now for at the state level, but Dan Welsh isn't here. There might be somebody from -- - -> Yeah, I'm actually not familiar with it. - -> NYC Pluto dataset. - -> Yeah. - -> Is it's a building lot level shape files of New York City. - -RYAN: Cool. Yeah? - -> I would love more information on the Federal Lobbyists Registration Datasets. - -DEREK: It's actually a pretty simple guide to write: "Don't use it." But -- - -[laughter] - -DEREK: That's actually useful information. There's a lot of datasets that look legit, but stay away from them. - -RYAN: Yeah, the ACS has datasets on health coverage but there's a lot better information than that. - -> Federal Reserve Database. - -DEREK: They have an iPad app; have you ever seen it? - -> The Center for Medicare or Medicaid, or CMS, has a ton of data on hospitals. There's a ton of stuff there. - -RYAN: Awesome. Cool, we have a couple minutes left if there's more stuff to get on this list. - -> SEC filings. - -> This is kind of more like a wishful thinking thing, but the new government startup ATF for technology innovation for government. I wonder if they're making these kinds of lists and if they would share. Do you know anything about that? - -> I don't know, I mean I've seen them exist on Twitter, but that's -- - -> Yeah. That's an interesting thought. - -RYAN: Just like hitting them up and showing this kind of thing in progress. Can we assign someone to do that? - -> I can do that, yup. - -RYAN: OK, these things are on there, any of you who are willing to be editors, did we tell you enough so you feel comfortable actually doing analysis? These are in progress, these are ones that we will endeavor to recruit writers for, some of whom are right in this room. Jake? - -> Are you going to put this list up on the actual dataset guide. - -> I can add it. - -RYAN: And if you can write the etherpad link up there, yeah, keep adding to it. Maybe by next SRCCON, we'll have a much more fleshed-out guide. That will be awesome. So cool. Anybody have any last thoughts before we free everyone up for lunch? - -JACOB: I totally forgot most of my presentation when I was giving it, but if you interested in elections or you just want to hear me just complain about caucuses, just feel free to talk to me or email me or whatever. That's it all. - -DEREK: When Jake says complain, he means say really smart things. - -JACOB: Yeah, caucuses are the worst. - -RYAN: Awesome, all right, well, I think we're at the end of our time, so make some coffee, eat some lunch, stretch your legs, all that kind of stuff. Thank you for hanging out. +This is a DRAFT TRANSCRIPT from a live session at SRCCON 2014. This transcript should be considered provisional, and if you were in attendance (or spot an obvious error) we'd love your help fixing it. More information on SRCCON is available at https://srccon.org. + +Captioning by the wonderful people of White Coat Captioning, LLC +whitecoatcaptioning.com + +Thursday, Session 8: + +Hitchhiker's Guide to Datasets +Session Leader: Ryan Pitts +Guest Presenters: Joe Germuska, Derek Willis, Jacob Harris +-- + +RYAN: All right, it's 12:30 by my clock. Hello, everyone, welcome to the Hitchhikers Guide to datasets session. I'm Ryan. I have a few people who are going to help me out during this session, but let's talk a little bit about why we're here, first of all. So it will probably not come as a shock to anyone in this room if I were to tell you that data is a pretty awesome source to do journalism with. Probably a lot of us in here who have done this kind of analysis ourselves, whether looking at crime data and a reporting on that or analyzing census data to talk about the way that demographics of our city are changing over time or maybe we write a bot that tweets out anonymous campaign finance donations. Or maybe we become once with the FEC dataset, and we just sense anomalies and we tweet them manually. A lot of us have probably participated in the News Nerd Super Bowl, which is election night, delivering stories to our readers and there are probably a lot of people in this room who are very comfortable with doing journalism with data and we've been doing it for a long time. I think it's also fair to say that over the past two or three years we've seen a real surge in interest in this type of data analysis. There are a lot of reporters working now who wouldn't necessarily have identified as data analysts before, but they're definitely working data analysis in their beats. There are entire sites launching with data analysis kind of the core of their DNA. + +If any of you were at the last NICAR, it was like the biggest one ever. There were like a thousand news nerds there, so data analysis is really of high interest right now. So in thinking about SRCCON and getting together a bunch much smart people it felt like it would be cool for us to collect some of the knowledge about all of these datasets that we know about. For a couple of reasons, both so that journalists know what's out there and what's available, because I run across interesting datasets that are interesting to me all the time. You probably do the same thing. So that we all embark into this kind of analysis that we're doing the right kind of work and that's something that's kind of worrisome, because it's true that the first time you look at a particular dataset it's kind of daunting. You may not be real familiar with the meta data that they use, you might not understand the way one agency classifies certain things versus another agency. You might not even know how the data is collected and that's pretty important before you actually start describing it to other people. + +And so the risk that we have, if we're just kind of doing something for the first time, is that we'll make mistakes, so we ought to try to help each other avoid that. I was trying to think of a good analogy for this, and the best thing I could come up would be, it's like trying to read an essay that's written in a language you took a couple of years of in high school and so you see these are letters on the page, I know that there are words made of these letters and maybe I understand a few of the words or phrases, but never in a million years would you turn to a person next to you and say, and here's what this essay actually means. You would want to understand that language before you were trying to tell someone else what it means. That's what we do as journalists. + +So that might be a terrible analogy. Probably a better analogy is one I heard first from Derek Willis, who talks about interviewing your data, getting familiar with what columns are available to you, how are the numbers distributed, what does an outlier look like, so when it comes time to identify what is actually interesting in this dataset, you can do some good reporting. + +So in this session, I want to kind of take one step backward from that. We're going to try to talk about doing the backgrounding before you actually do the data. If you were going to sit down and you were going to interview a person you would not start before backgrounding a person. I called it hitchhiker's guide, because like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is designed to give you the context you need to go out and explore the galaxy on your own, so we have a repository on GitHub already and we'll come back to that later. There's a few outcomes that I have in mind for this session. Some of which I know we can achieve and some of which will actually take your participation for us to achieve. + +What I want is for everybody to walk out of this room having learned something new about a dataset that they didn't know about, and so in a few minutes we'll do a walking tour of the American Community Survey, some FEC data, and then election data. And I want everybody to have the opportunity to share something about a dataset that you know something about that we might not. If you have a cool dataset in mind just over the next few minutes, just kind of think what's the background that somebody would need to have to understand this dataset and to dig in and start doing reporting out of it. And then if we have time to break into small groups, we'll take a look at that repository and let's actually start doing some work and building something together and doing something that journalists who are not in this room or at this conference can use going forward. We want it to be a resource that lives on. There's already a couple things in place. If you haven't done data work before, we still will have jobs for you to do. If you have done data work we will have other jobs for you to do. But that's kind of what I have in mind for this session, so I'm going to turn it over to Joe to talk about the American Community Survey. + +> And this is participatory, so absolutely pepper with questions. Participate in whatever way makes sense to you. + +> Just briefly in five minutes. + +JOE GERMUSKA: So the US Census Bureau is a great provider of open data so that journalists can know about the world around them where they're reporting. They do three big products and a lot of other ones. The three big ones are the decennial census: They vary in degrees of precision and timeliness. We did sense reporter based mostly on the American Community Survey because we think it's the sweet spot in terms of timeliness versus precision. First, the American Community Survey is a survey so you have to be aware that there's margins of error, talking about precision. The more geographically precise you want to be, the more risk there is that the margin of error are problematic and so one of the things you need to come to terms with is what level of accuracy you can deal with and also just how to talk about it so when you write about data from the American Community Survey, rarely do you want to say one is the most or the least, but with the margin of order, the lists might change order. But you can still get a lot of out of it as long as you're careful not to treat it as extremely precise data. So every table has a different universe that is sort of what's being counted so most of them would be talking about these are all the people and of all the people, this many are men or women, this many are this age or that age. But some tables have a different universe, for example there are tables about how people get to work and the universe for that is workers and specifically workers I think between the age of 15 and 50, and so when you compare numbers from a table like that to another table, if the universes aren't the same, then you have to be very careful that you're comparing apples to apples and not apples to oranges. + +So I mentioned a little about about geographic precision. One of the things that census data users have to come to terms with is what's called a summary level. So summary levels are basically class of geography, so the obvious ones are states, counties, you may have heard of census tracks and block groups. I think there's like 200 summary levels but some of that is overly complicated. What you really need to know is there's about 20 of them. A lot of the rest of them come to do with how those shapes are broken down and you can usually separate those out: One of the sort of caveats that is a good one to know early on is that a lot of people want data for their city. In sometimes that's called a place, city or town. But sometimes it's like a town that doesn't have a government. So there's a whole bunch of those called places but in certain parts of America, places don't really cover everything and there's another level which is called county subdivision which is a better way to use if you're doing things especially New England, Michigan and...[inaudible] + +If you're using analysis just within those places you'll get more of the places that you're trying to think about if you don't use the summary that's called place. Again, this is something in the repository so you don't have to get it from me trying to make it concise in five minutes. Another kind of interesting wrinkles is in ever any year they actually do three different releases. For big enough places they release data on them every year and big enough in that case means 65,000 people or more, so in that data, you can do year by year comparisons going back to 2005, but for places that are less than 65,000 people, the bureau doesn't believe that the margins of error and the sample sizes are good enough to get good results so they collect data for three years and use that for places that are 20,000 or more. And they also have a release that collects data for five years and they have to use for ... again at the block group level you run a decent risk of margin of error problems, especially if you're trying to get a very specific sort of subculture, so the numbers of men versus women in a block group are pretty reliable estimates, but the number of, you know. 15- to 25-year-old men of Ecuadorian heritage is less likely to be a number that you can trust at the block group level and you need to get a bigger aggregate for that. + +Another wrinkle to now about is a lot of people like to do data analysis by county across the whole United States, but actually only about I think 25 percent of American counties are big enough to be in the one-year dataset and only about I think it's 40% are big enough to be in the three-year dataset. But a decent number of counties are too small to be in anything but the five-year dataset in terms of population and so you just have to sort of be aware of that when you set out to do things. You get these giant counties that have no people in them and they look really important on a map. It's important to be careful not to cross compare data across one year, three year, five year datasets. You should get all your data out of the same datasets. So if want to talk about Chicago and also towns around Chicago that are not in the dataset. + +It's also comparison over time is tricky with the ACS, for a couple of reasons. One is that for smaller geographies, so that because the time periods overlap, the census bureau generally discourages people from using comparisons from releases that do overlap, so they want you to have adjacent releases so that you're doing 2010 to 2012 for the three-year dataset, you are and you want to compare that to the 2007 to 2009 dataset, not the 2009 to 2011, so you don't want them to be overlapping because you have mixed numbers in there that cause confusion. But for the various geographies, there are not always data adjacent five-year datasets. The other trick there is that the maps are redrawn at every decennial census. the real point of the census is to figure out how to vote for representatives in Congress, the maps get changed and so the data from the 2000-2010 period are for maps that are not the same as the data for 2010, and I actually don't know the proper state of the art for correcting in the change in the maps for the survey data. We do it for decennial census level, but for ACS it's complicated. But I was at a seminar and I was surprised that the Census Bureau was put on the seminar. ... it's still a pretty new thing and the best practices are being defined all the time. + +So I think those are the main kind of points I want to talk about. I could go on and on and if you get me the a the bar and ask me the wrong question you might get me to do that. But for now that's kind of a brief introduction. This and a lot more is in the repository that Ryan was talking about. For now, I'll yield the floor to the next person. + +DEREK WILLIS: So hey, I'm Derek Willis, I don't have any buttons to give away to you, so but I'll advertise the census reporting buttons. So I want to introduce you a little bit to the Federal Election Commission data which is available, and the good news is that there's a lot of data. The bad news is that there's a lot of data and it covers different things. You wouldn't day it like a circle, you would draws it as like a house that you bought and then added the rooms on and then other people got to design some of those rooms or pick many so of those rooms and then maybe you leveled them off and there were different architects representing different styles that built onto that house so that it ended up looking like crazy town basically which is sort of a decent way to describe it because the Federal Election Commission covers House, Senate and presidential races, that's it. And all the politics that goes along with it. So automatically there's a stratification level of not all elections. We don't do state elections. So that's not there. + +And then of course there are varying methods of how you get that information in, and schedules, and times that people file, and you can choose to file, and so it is not a -- again, like thanks to the constitution, it's a federalist system, it's more of an opt-in system for data than it is a required system for data in some respects. So just to give you some brief example: Candidates can choose to file, at a minimum, every quarter. Every three months. But they also can choose to file monthly, and now monthly is better for us, I think as journalists and folks who build things. + +Quarterly might be better for people who frankly don't have a large campaign staff and who don't want to pay to have somebody type stuff every month, or it's not important to them or frankly they'd like to remain in a little bit of a stealth mode for a little while for strategic political reasons. So there's sort of disclosure, there's like degrees of disclosure, but there are also degrees of like tactical degrees of disclosure that you have to get in the mind set of thinking, well, what would I do or how would I do it? + +A really sort of good example of this that you might have heard of recently is this project by the Harvard law professor Lawrence L. Lessig, to fund this super PAC to end all super PACs, which is both ironic and clever at the same time, and because of how they structured their fundraising drive, it actually fell over two reporting periods, and so some of the money that they raised, we know that they have raised a total of $6 million from individual donors, some of that money was reported on the 15th of July, because it was raised before June 30th. Some of the money was raised after June 30th, so technically they wouldn't have to tell us anything about the money they raised after June 30th, until after October 15th, which seems ridiculous in a lot of respects, but that's the schedule they've chosen to file upon. They could choose to file monthly but they've chosen not to. Now, they are going to release stuff every two weeks on their site which is another whole weird layer of disclosure. There are a lot of choices here. I'm not going to say that the census and ACS are not complex, because they are complex, but they are fairly consistent about how they release data, when they release data, there's a nice schedule it's not like we're releasing data for 49 states, one of the states opted out. But with campaign finance, that can happen, at especially at the federal level. That makes comparisons pretty tricky in a lot of respects, because if mostly all the candidates in a race will file on the same schedule, but, you know, sometimes you have some variation there, but if you wanted to compare across candidacies or across other things, that makes it difficult, as well. + +So the repository is essentially a guide to the things that the Federal Election Commission makes available. There is bulk data that covers the entirety of a two-year election cycle and that is cumulative data, essentially every time a new candidate comes in, every time a new transaction comes in, it all gets shoved into cumulative files, we download all of the individual contributions all at once. And then there is episodic data, which is to say that each individual filing is available -- well, unless you're a Senate candidate, each individual filing is available electronically, so you can look at it in that respect, you can be like I want this filing and I want that filing, or I want all the files by a particular candidate. + +The Senate, in its infinite wisdom, as the world's greatest legislative body, they file on paper. And I don't know when they're going to stop doing this. Because if it took them 80 years to really come to conclusion on the one-person-one-vote theory, it may take them 160 years to come to the conclusion that computers-are-a-better-way-to-do-things theory. So there's a huge time lag for the availability of Senate data, but for House data and for the committees, the political action committees that kind of work around election there's not it's not exactly real-time data but there is a lot more data than you would think of in terms of just these filing deadlines, whether they're monthly or quarterly. Committees and candidates file every day and you know, including amendments of previous filings so it's worth sort of coming up to speed and looking at things and how you find out about the FEC data is you just look at it and keep looking at it. + +The problem is that unlike the careful, the really careful folks in the Census Bureau, the FEC folks, it's not that they're not careful, but they're not careful enough and there's too many filings for them to deal with, so there are mistakes or people make mistakes in filings and everything has to be greeted with or approached with fairly abiding skepticism that well, if something looks wrong, yeah, it probably is wrong. So on again in the FEC data section of the repository, I'd love for people, you know, whether it's in here or outside of this session, to take a look at it and be like this part doesn't make sense to me or that part doesn't make sense to me or can you explain this a little more and that's sort of the way I feel that we will get kind of pushed forward on a larger front than simply me looking at findings all the time and tweeting out weird things. On the other hand, if you enjoy this sort of stuff, maybe we can schedule shifts where can you tweet weird stuff from findings when I'm on vacation, which starts in 48 hours from now. So thank you. + +JACOB HARRIS: Ryan invited me to be on the panel, and he wanted me to give information on the AP. Which I actually pushed back on a little bit. + +> For a newspaper of 70 to 80,000 circulation, they were charging $5,000 for access. + +OK, per state? + +> I believe that was the -- I think it was probably national package, and I think they quote different prices to different papers. + +Yeah, so anyway. Well, you know, it's also -- sort of also the point is they're not the only sort of game in town anymore. It used to be the AP was the only organization that collected sort of national election results because they would basically put stringers in every state's, you know, even down on various county levels reporting to a national operation. + +I mean there's also other people, also, in the state, in the sort of space, of probably like election results, so you can obviously go to the states themselves. States run their own election, it's in the constitution. That's not ever going to change. There's no sort of federal election, you know, commission controlling, they don't control, as Derek said, how elections are run in each state, so you have to go to each state and that's usually where the problem happens. + +You know, and so what I want to talk about is not so much the specifics of working with the AP, but just the specifics of working with election data. I mean how many of you have actually reported on elections before? Just a quick show of hands. How many how many of think you would ever want to? I mean because the fun thing about elections is actually the data model itself is really simple compared to say, like, you know, the census data or the FEC data. Because it's really just three tables. You have your races, right, which is just like these could be statewide races, could be county level results, it could be results rolled up congressional district. It could be precinct. But those are all races. You have candidates which, unlike the census, you're not rolling up data from millions of Americans, or unlike the FEC data you're not reporting every campaign donor with their address. + +You know generally who the candidates are for a given election, and you can say, OK, I want to copy that they're named or something like that. It's not going to kill you to go through all those names and they're joined by a table which is basically the results which is basically this candidate got this many votes in this election, simple, done, you know? And usually there's one other table that you care about which is C, calls. And those who won this race because we don't want to say who got the most votes, we want to say this will be the next senator from Mississippi or whatever. The challenge is not so much the data that goes into this, I mean the actual data of these tables, it's just the process that goes into sort of creating this data and sending it to your database and that's where things basically get fucked up repeatedly. + +Because every state runs their election in their -- + +> Don't sugar coat it, Jake. +> [laughter] + +JACOB: Sorry. And usually there's just generally a slider of I mean the process of this whole thing this data is collected usually varies based on the laws of that state, the process in which the votes are tabulated, things like that. The one thing I would say if you're ever with going to work with election data is you should acquaint yourself with the two concepts. Which is one, you should assume nothing, you know, about the data unless you can sort of guarantee it, so a lot of people say, oh, well, I have a race one, there's only going to be one race winner for a given race, right? Only one person can win a race. Oh, you poor naive fool. You know, sometimes you have races that have two winners, California has open primaries, for instance, OK, where the top two winners go on to general election, certain assembly races in New Jersey. Sometimes states have these rules, well you have a winner if someone gets more than 50% of the vote, otherwise, we go to a runoff, OK, and then you have to say, OK, these two top candidates go for a runoff, so you have to flag for that. Sometimes the race is literally too close to call. You can't really put it that a race is called either. It may not be called while you're still counting votes, OK? It could go to recount later. + +People also assume, well, candidates, these are people, right? No, not always. You have ballot initiatives, right, so those are your you're actually voting for two fake people, yes or no, affirm or reject, things like that, those aren't really people. Some allow you to say none of the above. You can vote for that. And I think actually it was a Nevada where for the democratic primary "none of the above" won. Now, under state law, that actually meant that the first candidate underneath actually won the race, but none of the above actually had the most votes. They don't actually send nobody. This is more of a protest thing. But that's what they want to do in Nevada, so you've got to live with it. And similar other sort of things like that. + +Results also, people think this actually represents the actual votes of the election and normally that's true except whenever you deal with basically presidential primaries or caucuses, your results may actually be like, you know, delegate allocations and stuff like that, so the other sort of point I would probably make about this is that you know, primaries themselves can be complicated and vary with rules from states to states, but presidential caucuses and presidential primaries are the most insane collection of edge cases and weird rules you will ever see, and so I hope if you ever find yourself doing election data, you don't do presidential primaries, because that's just nuts. + +> I don't know how much, you know -- Yeah. + +JACOB: OK. I mean, you know, and that's pretty much it. I'm working on trying to sort of collect a document like the ones that are on the GitHub for now. But I think it's just going to be a long listing of various ways in which you have to sort of be prepared for, you know, various exceptions arising, so we'll look for that. + +> Awesome. + +RYAN: OK. Does anybody have any questions about census or FEC or election data that you want to get out right now? Sorry. + +> Is there a way as an individual person that you could get AP election data? + +> I kind of doubt it. + +> Yeah, you have to be a member anyway, I think. + +> I think that's right. You have to be a member organization. + +> I'm pretty sure they would sell to somebody else at the right price. + +> They sell to other people. + +> At the right price. + +JACOB: I mean the real question I guess I would ask. If you were reporting the election that night, if you were more interested in analyzing a prior election, you could go to something like open elections you know, which is a good resource. + +DEREK: It will be when we're done. + +JACOB: You know, or you can scrape -- yeah, I don't know. + +DEREK: And academics, as well. I mean like in the course of an open election, we found there's a professor at ivy state that keeps results of elections since 1967, like I don't know why. It's probably his Ph.D., but he has it. + +> Did you ask him why? + +DEREK: Honestly I think I'd never get out of that conversation. + +RYAN: All right, who else came with a cool dataset that you don't have to spend five minutes talking about, but that you at least want to throw out there and let us know that this thing exists and maybe give us a little bit of background so that we might be able to tell stories with it. Anyone? + +Jeff? + +> JEFF LARSON: NASA has two satellites, Landsat 7 and Landsat 8, and if you ever need relatively quick raster data, satellite data, the picture is not super high resolution, but it's really available and it's the largest dataset we are currently working with. Al Shaw on his work computer has 320 gigabytes of raster data. + +RYAN: When you say raster data? + +> JEFF: I mean pictures of the earth from space, so ProPublica used to do investigative journalism, and now we do investigative space journalism. That's right, motherfuckers! + +> Are you going to try on one of the space suits down in -- + +> I already have one. It smells kind of bad. + +RYAN: What kind of stories are you going to tell with this -- with pictures of the earth from space? + +> JEFF: Uh, think about it. Sorry, we don't talk about stories, but we do like playing with it, so we can show you a demo. The fun part of this data is -- well, not for me, but for the designers in our crew -- is it's the only data that you get to play with in Photoshop, because you can do many things, most people think raster data is images, right, and it is imagery, but the other thing that you can do is you can create false color images to look at things like vegetation growth, because the way -- Here, I'll sort of draw it on the board. Because the way that Landsat works, it's for a lot of scientists, but the way that Landsat works, is there's sort of this spectrum of light in, you know, the electromagnetic spectrum, and Landsat sort of picks up sort of like this stuff, right, so it picks up, there are these different bands. It has like actually 8 different cameras or something like that, and it will pick up like the red band, the green band, and the blue band, and then you can also get ultraviolet, so you can do things like pick up vegetation, you can get infra -- a little bit of infrared, although that gets a little weird, and the way that you combine all of these different bands shows how you can, you know, defines what the picture that you're showing is. And it's actually a dataset, right, when you think about a picture, it actually is, if you add geo reference coordinate to it, you're actually dealing with little itty-bitty grids of data, right, so this is maybe, you know, a gigabyte, so would that it be, you know, like 1,000 by 1,000 grids on the earth that contain like actual emanations of data. People do all sorts of things like flood modeling with grids like this, where they'll just mask out all of the blue stuff and there's your water, and then all of a sudden you can feed that through, you know, like GPUs and things like that to do analysis on it. + +> And it's just like a really cool dataset that I don't think we've done much with outside of just plain imagery of you know, plane crashes and war zones, and I think there's a lot of talk about investigative space journalism but I think we can do a lot with this and I'd like to see people fiddling more with raster data. Because it really is true, you know GDAL and Photoshop, you're just dealing with. + +> What's GDAL? + +> JEFF: Geodata Abstraction Library, which is actually this great library. There are a million, you know, different proprietary file formats for this, because meteor -- the weather guys, were around long before we had freely available satellite data, right? And the weather guys all came up with their own grid-based data, so what GDAL allows you to do is take all of these weird formats that maybe an academic likes one sort of format and translate it to geo TIF that you can then edit and Photoshop or do, and the other thing is you can do spatial statistics on this, right so there's a great raster dataset that classifies these little grid images by these little grid pixels by land cover, and I forget what it's called, but it's on NASA's website, so what you can do is you can run classifications based on these colors, so if it has this much infrared, if it has this much blue or something like that, this much of this spectrum, more in the violet range you're looking at water, right? You're looking more brownish, you're looking at cities, right, and so you could do things like you could look at the south side of Chicago and see that it doesn't have the same sort of -- you could quantify that, I don't know if everybody saw it, but someone did sort of like compared the south side of Chicago and there's like no trees and the north side of Chicago and it's all trees, you know, sort of like urban renewal kind of projects, so you can classify -- you can correlate between like wealth and tree cover, right? Actually sort of works in some places and you can do that just by running statistics on these colors. So there's tons of great ideas on using satellite data. + +> Wetland mitigation banking is a term that you're familiar with in your state, where developers have to set aside preserve wetlands and they can destroy wetlands in order to build stuff like Florida, for example. You can use this stuff to compare where the wetlands went. + +> One of the dark sides of this satellite data is there are companies out there who will do basically like corporate. It's maybe not a dark side, I shouldn't say, who will do sort of corporate fact-finding is what they do call it, so they take all the satellite pictures and they look the at amount of oil in an oil tank, and then all of a sudden you have like actionable intelligence, right, if this oil is really, really low, then maybe we should hold onto our oil reserves, you know, the futures that we have, if it's really, really high, you would sell them off. So things like that you can also find out, which is a lot of fun. So anyway, that's my dataset that I think we all should work with. + +> One specific example of how we used in addition to the imagery, you can get elevation titles, raster elevation titles from NASA, so that's a great thing if you want to use it to see rising sea levels or that sort of things. Like we used it in the Philippines last year. If you open up an image editor, just look like black and white, but each pixel is a different shade depending on the elevation and there's free software that will process that. + +> In the United States it is called the national elevation dataset and it goes in some places, especially wetland areas, the United States department of -- the army Corps of engineers will fly planes over and shoot lasers at the ground like it's so cool, this stuff is so cooled and they call it LIDAR and build digital images with it. + +> You can say it's 10.5 feet off of the ground, not RGB, right, so again, right, like it's the future. + +[laughter] + +> So, yeah, and I think -- + +> I was going to say that Al Shaw talked about this at length in the earlier session and he talked about the project you're working on about Louisiana land loss. + +> JEFF: I didn't want to say that, but I guess he's not as close to the chest. Yeah, the Louisiana land loss, so what we're doing is looking at cities that no longer exist because of soil erosion, using these same sort of methods that we were talking about. + +> How far back does the data go? + +> JEFF: Landsat, so the problem is, we had this great -- Landsat go back to the 80s, the problem is like since 1996, something happened to Landsat 7, so a lot of the data in the beginning of 2000, you'll get these weird bands of no data that look like that, and then here will be data because the sensor got misaligned somehow, I mean it's in space, so you can't go up there and jiggle it a little bit ... + +> But Landsat 8, has this great layer which is black and white. It's very high res, so you can like see people walking around ... + +RYAN: Anybody else who's got cool data? + +> DAVID YANOFSKY: Yeah, so I'm David Yanofsky. My dataset that I always go back to is an an endless fount of stories for me, is this international trade databases, the [US has a great one](https://usatrade.census.gov/) that you have to pay for. The International Trade Centre—which is a joint agency of the WTO and the UN—provide free access to journalists to [their database](https://www.trademap.org/), and in the international version you can get trade flows for very specific commodities, all categorized under the system called the [harmonized system](https://hts.usitc.gov/) and everything is in a hierarchy. At a high level is something like [petroleum products](https://hts.usitc.gov/Table%2027.xml) and all the way down to, you know, [soccer balls](https://hts.usitc.gov/Table%2095.xml#9506.62.4080) if you want to, you know, or I guess from soccer balls to toys, most generally. And if you get access to the US dataset—which is really cheap, it's like for one seat it's like $300 bucks a year—you can get port level data at even more specific levels, where if you're doing local stories, you can see all of these items that are leaving, not just from your city, but from specific ports, you know, in this -- people, if you're familiar with the way that people talk about trade, they talk about the oh, the port of Los Angeles and long beach as like this one thing. They're actually two separate ports, and the data shows it as two separate ports where like this is the stuff that's going through long beach and this is the stuff that's going through Los Angeles and that's a business story and you can talk about who has control of who docks where, if you know who's getting the tax revenue from those things, from the workers that are at those locations, the US data is anonymized, in that the census tries to protect business interests of the exporters and importers. + +> So you know, you can sometimes see these things that, you know, are -- stories that I've written range from this is [everything that the US exported to Iran](https://qz.com/91152/), and here is why that's important, that led to a story about that -- so that's kind of a serious thing about sanctions and that you know, the US is providing a lot of you know, humanitarian aid, but that also less to this really silly story about bull semen that Iran is one of the biggest importers of US bull semen and then I did a story about [all the other importers of US bull semen](https://qz.com/91718/). + +> Why? Why? + +> DAVID: Why not. + +> Why would you not? Who wouldn't read that. + +> DAVID: First off, who wouldn't read that, and second off, the miracle of the American cow. The reason -- just to explain this story, the reason why it's so popular is American cows are really productive. More productive than cows around the world, so if you know, if the US has bred cows that make thousands of gallons of more milk a year than here countries, so people want the special sauce. + +> It seems like the least possible interesting explanation. + +RYAN: Awesome, thank you for ending on that note. + +> DAVID: You're welcome. + +RYAN: Who's going to follow that? Anybody? Somebody else got cool data? + +> JUSTIN MYERS: Not that cool. + +RYAN: All right. + +> JUSTIN: So one that I tend to use a lot at chronicle of higher education is called IPEDS. It's the Integrated Post-Secondary Data System. Basically if you're an institution that participants in federal student aid at all, you have to give them all of this data, and even if you don't participate in federal student aid, if you want to get listed on like at department websites for possible students other families, like college navigators, that they've been promoting, then in order to get in that, you have to participate in IPEDS, at least a little. So they collect a bunch of stuff on really weird schedules throughout the year. It's like nine or ten surveys spaced throughout the year. Some of them are optional in different years, the schedules are weird: But you've got things like tuition, professor pay, degree breakdowns by field and level, really narrow fields even, they have like these progressively smaller codes they call CIP codes, I forget, it's like classification of instructional programs or something. But, you know, so if you want to see how many people in Arkansas got Ph.D.s in, you know, microbiology, like, you can do that, and you can get it by school. And you know so there's attendance, there's all kinds of stuff. So they have their own really weird online tool that takes some getting used to to access all of this stuff and they also have big CSVs broken down by year if you want to dig in. They're a bit crazy to work with, I'm trying to start writing something up for Ryan's repo, but if you're interested hit me up. + +RYAN: So this seems like a really good opportunity to talk about this repo. Can we come full circle here? We have about ten minutes left, so maybe not enough time to actually do small group work, but let me write this address up here. This is where this thing -- this is where you can get to it right now. Bit.ly/dataset guide. + +There's a readme, and then there are two guides that I think are in a state of doneness, one of them is on American Community Survey, Joe and I teamed up on that one. Derek has one in there about FEC data, like Ryan said, Chris Chang has already started on one about IPED data so we should totally hook you two guys up to work on that, and Jake who was going to work on something for elections. + +I mean I just want to listen about people talk about cool data. I do want this ideally to become a resource for people who are not here. And so one thing that we kind of talked about leading into the session was, if we had had time to do small groups, if any of you are unfamiliar with some of the datasets that are written up there, it would be fantastic if you could go through them with an editor's eye. Does the writeup on ACS data tell you enough that you would feel comfortable about going to census reporter, looking something up and writing a story, do you have that kind of background? Same with FEC data. The other thing I was hoping we might be able to do is to have people identify datasets that you wish we had guides for and we can probably actually do. We have enough time to do some of that: And I kind of wrote down the ones that got mentioned. + +> So the processes people should also, if they should fork off the dataset guide and -- + +RYAN: The process, yeah, whatever is easiest for you honestly. If you feel like e-mailing me and saying I can write something and I will email you, I will totally do that. If you use GitHub and you can fork and do a pull request, that obviously is awesome, as well. If you see a mistake, something like that, just get ahold of me, I will kind of try and carry this torch forward. + +> Is that the same thing you people to do with I don't get this. + +RYAN: Yeah, whichever way of communication is easiest for you. + +So we have ACS, FEC in progress, is it IPEDS they have system in it. And elex is kind of in progress, as well. + +Is it actually called Landsat? + +> JEFF: Yeah, I mean yeah, sure. Space, space pictures. + +RYAN: I think Jeff entered into a binding contract to write a guide on this. We talked about, is it NED? + +> JEFF: Yeah, National Elevation Dataset. + +> Landsat's Twitter is awesome, too. + +> DAVID: International Trade Centre trade map, it's trademap.org, and it's center with an "r-e," and the other one is USA Trade Online is the census database. + +RYAN: OK. All right, so those are the ones that people kind of talked about just now. So we have a few minutes left. What -- yeah? + +> Probably UCR. + +RYAN: UCR? + +> The crime center. + +RYAN: For people who are not familiar with UCR? + +> Uniform Crime Report. The FBI gathers it from local police agencies. + +RYAN: Is this a dataset you are familiar with and are you volunteering to write a guide? + +> I hate that dataset. + +RYAN: You're the perfect person. + +> I don't have a dataset, but I was thinking there's a collaborate source and I've been taking notes on what people have been saying so we could put those and people could flesh it out ... + +RYAN: What datasets frighten you that would love to tell stories from? + +> The CDC Wonder dataset. + +> The aptly named Wonder. + +> And I don't know anything about it, but I've tried to fool with it, and I need somebody to write one of these guides for me. + +RYAN: CDC Wonder? + +> Yeah, it's probably an acronym, but I don't know what it's for. + +RYAN: Oh, that's even cooler. + +> Time use dataset from BLS, which is like how Americans spend their day. + +> JEFF: Actually everything on BLS. If I could get a dummy's guide to BLS, I would give you so many space pictures. + +RYAN: Does anybody in the room know who should write that. + +> I could write that. I have it from BLS. send me those space pictures tomorrow. + +> JEFF: OK, I will. + +> NAA Fisheries. So they'll tell you like what fish imports and exports of various countries are. + +> There's tons of stuff on OSHA. + +> Are you also interested in any state-specific ones, as well? + +RYAN: Absolutely. I was kind of thinking if we divided up in small groups, something probably worth talking about is how is this going to end up being more useful from an architecture kind of perspective. I don't know if it needs to get divided up. Probably the thing to do would be to get more of these articles in and then a structure will just emerge. + +> Well, the one that like I would be maybe able to do is Texas campaign finance, Texas ethics commission. + +RYAN: I know that there is a -- that California recently -- they have basically their own FEC dataset now for at the state level, but Dan Welsh isn't here. There might be somebody from -- + +> Yeah, I'm actually not familiar with it. + +> NYC Pluto dataset. + +> Yeah. + +> Is it's a building lot level shape files of New York City. + +RYAN: Cool. Yeah? + +> I would love more information on the Federal Lobbyists Registration Datasets. + +DEREK: It's actually a pretty simple guide to write: "Don't use it." But -- + +[laughter] + +DEREK: That's actually useful information. There's a lot of datasets that look legit, but stay away from them. + +RYAN: Yeah, the ACS has datasets on health coverage but there's a lot better information than that. + +> Federal Reserve Database. + +DEREK: They have an iPad app; have you ever seen it? + +> The Center for Medicare or Medicaid, or CMS, has a ton of data on hospitals. There's a ton of stuff there. + +RYAN: Awesome. Cool, we have a couple minutes left if there's more stuff to get on this list. + +> SEC filings. + +> This is kind of more like a wishful thinking thing, but the new government startup ATF for technology innovation for government. I wonder if they're making these kinds of lists and if they would share. Do you know anything about that? + +> I don't know, I mean I've seen them exist on Twitter, but that's -- + +> Yeah. That's an interesting thought. + +RYAN: Just like hitting them up and showing this kind of thing in progress. Can we assign someone to do that? + +> I can do that, yup. + +RYAN: OK, these things are on there, any of you who are willing to be editors, did we tell you enough so you feel comfortable actually doing analysis? These are in progress, these are ones that we will endeavor to recruit writers for, some of whom are right in this room. Jake? + +> Are you going to put this list up on the actual dataset guide. + +> I can add it. + +RYAN: And if you can write the etherpad link up there, yeah, keep adding to it. Maybe by next SRCCON, we'll have a much more fleshed-out guide. That will be awesome. So cool. Anybody have any last thoughts before we free everyone up for lunch? + +JACOB: I totally forgot most of my presentation when I was giving it, but if you interested in elections or you just want to hear me just complain about caucuses, just feel free to talk to me or email me or whatever. That's it all. + +DEREK: When Jake says complain, he means say really smart things. + +JACOB: Yeah, caucuses are the worst. + +RYAN: Awesome, all right, well, I think we're at the end of our time, so make some coffee, eat some lunch, stretch your legs, all that kind of stuff. Thank you for hanging out. diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_09_Web_Type.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_09_Web_Type.md index 2721c277..f6a8c5ee 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_09_Web_Type.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_09_Web_Type.md @@ -1,50 +1,49 @@ -Using web type: pitfalls and workarounds -Session facilitator(s): Allen Tan -Day & Time: Thursday, 12:30-1:30pm -Room: Garden 1 - ->> Okay, so I guess we can start unless people are still coming in. Can you close the door? Cool. I didn't expect so many people to come. So this is awesome. So, I'm Allen. I work in Digital Design for the New York Times and one of the biggest things that we did in the redesign over the past year was we migrated all of our fonts that we were using in print and putting that online and we were -- we had for years, been using them in a couple of small places but this was kind of the first time that we deployed it site-wide. And it seemed like from seeing a lot of new sites redesigning in the past year or two, everyone has been shifting to web fonts. So I guess it would be good to just sort of talk about, you know? Have people worked with them before? Are there problems that you've run into. Are there things that you wish that you can do that you can't do now? So I guess, first of all who works at a place whose website uses web fonts? So... good. Good proportion. Does everyone use Typekit? Do they use Fontdeck? Webtype. ->> Font kit. ->> Do you roll your own stack? Okay, cool. Yeah, so I think that's one of the first things we're going to talk about, is just five years ago, Typekit was a really innovative thing and they really worked to standardize and support cross browsers but we have been, at least in the Times, we've been finding that they're not super responsive to the needs of a news organization where you have, you know, your set of five fonts that you're going to use and you don't need their entire catalogue. And browser support has gotten good enough that we don't really need to pay a service every month to do that. So I guess one of the things to talk about is just like, is there an ideal solution now where you can roll everything in CS and use font face? And also, what does that mean for performance and what do you do when you're loading web fonts on mobile, and you don't want that to block the rest of your page from loading? But, that type of stuff. So I think -- yeah, the main things that we're going to try to do is sort of break -- there are three tables and we're going to have three different topics to talk about. And I think just, like, move to, like, the table that you're interested in, and we'll talk about it at the end. So the first one is, yeah, "What does an ideal webfont tech stack look like?" "How is browser support?" "What does that look like?" "Should you only use CSS support?" "Do you use a JS loader?" What does that mean for caching and performance? And what does that mean on mobile web? So, I... I'm going to move this on this table since you guys have already set up. You will work on your own stack and then people can talk about that if you're interested. And then, next question was how many of you work on, like, special graphics or interactives, and use type in that sort of scenario in, like, one off custom solutions? Okay, cool, so a lot of people. So, the next thing just sort of like, what is your wishlist on things that you wish you could do dynamically in Javascript? Like, could we have proper justification? Could we have hyphenation? Could we have proper kerning? Things like that. And then the last one is just general problems that people have had in using web fonts. You know, do you have rendering problems across different browsers, across different OSs? And do people create icon fonts? Do any of you use those? Okay. Awesome. So, I think that's kind of, like, the third topic -- it's kind of a grab bag and I'll just put that in the middle table. So there are Sharpies, Post-Its on the tables. So feel free to start. -[ Discussion ] -ALLEN: Okay, so I think we're going to sort of go through each group and talk about the things you've come up with. It also seems like a lot of people had very specific links for things they were talking about. So I just started an etherpad. You can go to it from shoutkey.com/mossy, and I think it would probably be useful for us to collect the different links that we were talking about and pointing people to. ->> Shoutkey.com slash what? -ALLEN: Shoutkey.com/mossy, M-O-S-S-Y. So just add your links to the top of the document when you're presenting. We should start with you guys. ->> Um, so we had kind of like, a wishlist of things that we've both had problems with and things we want. So the fonts are too large is, you know, a problem. We're, I guess trying to pack a bunch of fonts into our sites. A lot of times, there's almost, like, a performance budget that we have to have in terms of how many things are loaded. So, you know, some websites have, like, subsetting where you can subset just English-language characters which helps with font size, a little bit. So we were like, how big is too big? And it's different depending on, like, mobile versus, you know, broadband connection. We also have kind of an issue with licensing for individual posts. So if, like, there's a big feature that we're doing, we don't want to, like, spend the money to license that as like a full website. That's just a 1-off. So kind of having this big yearly renewal thing is kind of a bit much for and a one post-tests -- bit much for one post. So Typekit has la cart licensing, but for the most part we've been using Google Fonts which are free but you get what you pay for. Centralized place to find fonts is something that we've been having a little trouble with. So, you know, where to find these things, and you know, as we're looking through one library we have no idea what another library has. So being able to compare those would be great. What effects can we apply? So, like, it would be really nice to have, like, a library of effects and share a little bit more knowledge, in terms of those kinds of things. Rendering's all over the map. So halfway-consistent idea in terms of what rendering can be like in different browser. Better printing support was something that came up. A lot so printing can often result in missing characters and, like, weird glyphs, so making that better would be great. Actual kerning support like JS, where it wraps in span. We were having a really long discussion on, you know, how to make that work. And no real answers but fascinating discussion. And also, window controls. So there's always like that widow at the end that is super annoying. So yeah, that's kind of the stuff we came up with. -ALLEN: I think that's part of the CSS 4 spec that's being worked on now. One of the things that you'll be able to detect is how good your data connection is. I think there's, like, shitty, okay, and good. I think it's three levels. ->> Yeah, that's what they're called. -ALLEN: Yeah, so something that might be useful. How about you guys in the middle? ->> So yeah, talking about rendering problems across different browsers and OSes, and?" Tradeoffs of how to embed images -- icon fonts, or SVG's. So some rendering problems with type that I've had are loading certain fonts on IE like IE8, and maybe nine too will just default to italic. You have to specifically, you know, if you're trying to embed a whole family in, it will find the italic version first. We've been running. ->> Like, Typekit has a blog post about how to specifically specify, you know, the normal, the regular version instead of that if you're having that. But it kind of sucks because you can't -- you have to, like, specify different family in CSS for italic if you want to use that. Another one like ine height differences in Firefox it seems like if you use M's, it'll calculate it a little differently and that runs into some issues with, like, icon alignment, baseline alignment, that kind of stuff. And, you know, so there's the, you know, the brief flash of unstyled type error where before it, you know, actually loads your font especially if you don't, or I guess if you load it asynchronously. And if you have, like, a large kit you'll see the fallback font first. And a lot of times, you know, like, the same font at a different -- or at the same point size will -- or different fonts at the same point size will be totally different sizes and that will throw off your lines and all that. And it'll just be very jarring. I've had it -- it's probably just me. I've had, like, issues with SVG's, and, um, the whitespace, like, rendering them in Illustrator and have the artboard be a certain size. Like, I'll embed them in IE, and it'll cut it off. I think this has to do when you don't specify a fixed size in SVG when you're trying to have it, like, a percentage or adjust it, and that's one reason why importantly to use icon fonts because I don't have that issue. And, yeah but the one issue with icon fonts is that, um, you have to -- if you want to add another icon, you have to update the whole -- you have to render the whole font again, and, you know, you might make an error that'll mess up other icons. Yeah. Anything else to add? Anything that I missed? ->> I'm mostly unqualified to answer this question, but I don't know, I was really interested in Cory's approach. They have their own JSLoader, which is not Typekit. ->> Sorry can you repeat what the question is? ->> Sorry, our question is what does an ideal web font text doc look like? And most of us at this table maybe not in the leads about how that happens. But Typekit, obviously is one solution that, you know, a lot of people use and uses a JSLoader to split up fonts so you're only getting piece at a time and I think it puts it together in some ways. So it gives you some sort of DRM support but I don't know. Do you guys want to talk about it? ->> Yeah, I mean, while you're saying that, I think what we do is we load, we load the font using a JSLoader so that it renders the page and then it comes back, but then -- it upgrades the page but I think what happens is that we store the font in local storage and so the JSLoader checks to see if that exists and then something some decision-making based on that because you can see it on our site but we have a beta site that's getting ready to roll out all across all of the web and the goal of that site is to load, incrementally, progressively enhancing pages versus what we have now is where you have everything. So it's kind of that thought process is what trickles down to fonts? ->> Who's "we?" ->> The Guardian? ->> That sounds similar to something that we tried, or experimenting now for mobile Webtype where you don't always have a great connection, so you can't hide the unstyled text until your font loads. So one of the things that we were planning on was, like, we will load the page initially and we'll do some Javascript logic, initially where we look at local storage to see whether the font has been downloaded and if it hasn't been flooded we'll download the font but not actually change the page until the next time that you actually go to another local and then we detect that you've already downloaded the font, and then we do that and avoid the flash. ->> I think part of why we don't do that because in the mobile apps, the pages render as HTML and they're, like, really big on consistency. So if you come to a home page and it's there, and then you come to an article and it's not, it's, like, obviously a strange thing. So I think that's one reason they do. ->> I don't know. At the New York Times we have this huge default, sort of "kit" of, I don't know, how many -- ->> 700 kilobytes? ->> It's 700 kilobytes, which, I guess on the desktop just sucks the first time, if you're a repeat visitor, it's probably fine but then there's team like mine where we build off of interactives where we might want to use more than that, or different ones than that. So we get we've got that 700, or 800K off of the platform and then we're adding video, and then we're adding images. It's not the most ideal tech implementation. So I feel like having that very skinny baseline set of faces for your platform and then CSS being able to add certain faces as you go might be better performance-wise. -ALLEN: Right now, we're selling Typekit and it's everything. And we never had pages that loaded all of them, or that needed all of them so it doesn't make sense to do that. ->> But we talked about how it's very aggressively cached, so once you have it, you have it for a year. ->> Typekit it? ->> Well, is that an advantage of a JSLoader versus just CSS, because CSS browsers -- it's whatever the browser knows is -- ->> So it downloads a font file and that font file could be cached locally by your browser so that if I make a request it doesn't do it again. What Typekit is doing is loading it and putting a query string on it because they're tracking their page views, right? Their usage of it so that's why Typekit uses a Javascript solution to do that as well as the other benefits of that, CSS classes to say when something is loaded versus when it's not, stuff like that. But if you have the fonts on your server already, you can already serve it up just using add font face rules. ->> There's no downfall of that or drawback? Like, there must be some advantage to, you know, rolling your own JSLoader, right? ->> Well, I mean you would want to do it with pure CS because you don't need the Javascript dependence for it, but then you can't make decisions, I only want to load this on, or it's Windows and chrome, I don't want to load the CSS file. Those kinds of decisions have to happen somewhere. What Google Fonts does is, it does it on the serve side so when you include that CSS file, you're making a request to their server and sending back the font that you need so that you don't send all the different variants. ->> Is that slow? ->> No, that's better, but that takes a lot more computing resources that's harder to do, and any of that backend logic to be able to do that. ->> I just learned a lot. ->> I mean, all the web fonts are they're just binary files that you just download. So just like an image, you can cache images so that your browser holds onto them longer. You can do the same thing with a font file but it just doesn't work the same way if -- like, your browser still has to check -- I used to have this font file, and you still get that flash of unstyled content. So it would be better if it was like. Let me download this font and now I know that this site has this font stored locally as if it was a native font stored on your system. Do you know what I mean? ->> I'm curious if anyone's played with serving two packages. So maybe a critical font package of just like, you know, a base, you know, regular sans which is on your page, and then I don't know, enhance that with the italics and bolds later, so it might be similar to critical CSS and some of those optimizations. ->> The only thing if you were curious about this was that there was this -- the guy who had actually been responsible for the next Jen guaranteed site very fast gave this presentation, his name is Patrick, if you on, and there's a Nieman journalism lab post about it, and they put his speaker deck slide show on this but one of the things that he talked about was I guess one of the tricks they use, and he talks about lots of tricks is inlining critical CSS such that it was only there, and I think that also helps to avoid some of the flash. But there is a portion further in the deck where he talks about what fonts, too. But that may be interesting, this particular. ->> One thing that we were speculating on was what if you could get -- do a sort of, like, a tiny font that just has the glyphs that's just above the full that you could put in a data URL in your CSS and then have, when the full thing comes in, I don't think you could get a font that small. And, the backend effort required to get that -- ->> It would be different per article, right? ->> It would. What if you had a font that was just metrics, did not actually have the glyphs, so it would load, and everything would space out. ->> One character? -ALLEN: Cool, well it seems like a lot of people have very solution-specific questions. So I'm glad that we had that there. And if you have any follow-up things, just talk to the person, or stick it on the back. Thanks, guys. ->> Thank you. -[ Applause ] - +Using web type: pitfalls and workarounds +Session facilitator(s): Allen Tan +Day & Time: Thursday, 12:30-1:30pm +Room: Garden 1 + +> > Okay, so I guess we can start unless people are still coming in. Can you close the door? Cool. I didn't expect so many people to come. So this is awesome. So, I'm Allen. I work in Digital Design for the New York Times and one of the biggest things that we did in the redesign over the past year was we migrated all of our fonts that we were using in print and putting that online and we were -- we had for years, been using them in a couple of small places but this was kind of the first time that we deployed it site-wide. And it seemed like from seeing a lot of new sites redesigning in the past year or two, everyone has been shifting to web fonts. So I guess it would be good to just sort of talk about, you know? Have people worked with them before? Are there problems that you've run into. Are there things that you wish that you can do that you can't do now? So I guess, first of all who works at a place whose website uses web fonts? So... good. Good proportion. Does everyone use Typekit? Do they use Fontdeck? Webtype. +> > Font kit. +> > Do you roll your own stack? Okay, cool. Yeah, so I think that's one of the first things we're going to talk about, is just five years ago, Typekit was a really innovative thing and they really worked to standardize and support cross browsers but we have been, at least in the Times, we've been finding that they're not super responsive to the needs of a news organization where you have, you know, your set of five fonts that you're going to use and you don't need their entire catalogue. And browser support has gotten good enough that we don't really need to pay a service every month to do that. So I guess one of the things to talk about is just like, is there an ideal solution now where you can roll everything in CS and use font face? And also, what does that mean for performance and what do you do when you're loading web fonts on mobile, and you don't want that to block the rest of your page from loading? But, that type of stuff. So I think -- yeah, the main things that we're going to try to do is sort of break -- there are three tables and we're going to have three different topics to talk about. And I think just, like, move to, like, the table that you're interested in, and we'll talk about it at the end. So the first one is, yeah, "What does an ideal webfont tech stack look like?" "How is browser support?" "What does that look like?" "Should you only use CSS support?" "Do you use a JS loader?" What does that mean for caching and performance? And what does that mean on mobile web? So, I... I'm going to move this on this table since you guys have already set up. You will work on your own stack and then people can talk about that if you're interested. And then, next question was how many of you work on, like, special graphics or interactives, and use type in that sort of scenario in, like, one off custom solutions? Okay, cool, so a lot of people. So, the next thing just sort of like, what is your wishlist on things that you wish you could do dynamically in Javascript? Like, could we have proper justification? Could we have hyphenation? Could we have proper kerning? Things like that. And then the last one is just general problems that people have had in using web fonts. You know, do you have rendering problems across different browsers, across different OSs? And do people create icon fonts? Do any of you use those? Okay. Awesome. So, I think that's kind of, like, the third topic -- it's kind of a grab bag and I'll just put that in the middle table. So there are Sharpies, Post-Its on the tables. So feel free to start. +> > [ Discussion ] +> > ALLEN: Okay, so I think we're going to sort of go through each group and talk about the things you've come up with. It also seems like a lot of people had very specific links for things they were talking about. So I just started an etherpad. You can go to it from shoutkey.com/mossy, and I think it would probably be useful for us to collect the different links that we were talking about and pointing people to. +> > Shoutkey.com slash what? +> > ALLEN: Shoutkey.com/mossy, M-O-S-S-Y. So just add your links to the top of the document when you're presenting. We should start with you guys. +> > Um, so we had kind of like, a wishlist of things that we've both had problems with and things we want. So the fonts are too large is, you know, a problem. We're, I guess trying to pack a bunch of fonts into our sites. A lot of times, there's almost, like, a performance budget that we have to have in terms of how many things are loaded. So, you know, some websites have, like, subsetting where you can subset just English-language characters which helps with font size, a little bit. So we were like, how big is too big? And it's different depending on, like, mobile versus, you know, broadband connection. We also have kind of an issue with licensing for individual posts. So if, like, there's a big feature that we're doing, we don't want to, like, spend the money to license that as like a full website. That's just a 1-off. So kind of having this big yearly renewal thing is kind of a bit much for and a one post-tests -- bit much for one post. So Typekit has � la cart licensing, but for the most part we've been using Google Fonts which are free but you get what you pay for. Centralized place to find fonts is something that we've been having a little trouble with. So, you know, where to find these things, and you know, as we're looking through one library we have no idea what another library has. So being able to compare those would be great. What effects can we apply? So, like, it would be really nice to have, like, a library of effects and share a little bit more knowledge, in terms of those kinds of things. Rendering's all over the map. So halfway-consistent idea in terms of what rendering can be like in different browser. Better printing support was something that came up. A lot so printing can often result in missing characters and, like, weird glyphs, so making that better would be great. Actual kerning support like JS, where it wraps in span. We were having a really long discussion on, you know, how to make that work. And no real answers but fascinating discussion. And also, window controls. So there's always like that widow at the end that is super annoying. So yeah, that's kind of the stuff we came up with. +> > ALLEN: I think that's part of the CSS 4 spec that's being worked on now. One of the things that you'll be able to detect is how good your data connection is. I think there's, like, shitty, okay, and good. I think it's three levels. +> > Yeah, that's what they're called. +> > ALLEN: Yeah, so something that might be useful. How about you guys in the middle? +> > So yeah, talking about rendering problems across different browsers and OSes, and?" Tradeoffs of how to embed images -- icon fonts, or SVG's. So some rendering problems with type that I've had are loading certain fonts on IE like IE8, and maybe nine too will just default to italic. You have to specifically, you know, if you're trying to embed a whole family in, it will find the italic version first. We've been running. +> > Like, Typekit has a blog post about how to specifically specify, you know, the normal, the regular version instead of that if you're having that. But it kind of sucks because you can't -- you have to, like, specify different family in CSS for italic if you want to use that. Another one like ine height differences in Firefox it seems like if you use M's, it'll calculate it a little differently and that runs into some issues with, like, icon alignment, baseline alignment, that kind of stuff. And, you know, so there's the, you know, the brief flash of unstyled type error where before it, you know, actually loads your font especially if you don't, or I guess if you load it asynchronously. And if you have, like, a large kit you'll see the fallback font first. And a lot of times, you know, like, the same font at a different -- or at the same point size will -- or different fonts at the same point size will be totally different sizes and that will throw off your lines and all that. And it'll just be very jarring. I've had it -- it's probably just me. I've had, like, issues with SVG's, and, um, the whitespace, like, rendering them in Illustrator and have the artboard be a certain size. Like, I'll embed them in IE, and it'll cut it off. I think this has to do when you don't specify a fixed size in SVG when you're trying to have it, like, a percentage or adjust it, and that's one reason why importantly to use icon fonts because I don't have that issue. And, yeah but the one issue with icon fonts is that, um, you have to -- if you want to add another icon, you have to update the whole -- you have to render the whole font again, and, you know, you might make an error that'll mess up other icons. Yeah. Anything else to add? Anything that I missed? +> > I'm mostly unqualified to answer this question, but I don't know, I was really interested in Cory's approach. They have their own JSLoader, which is not Typekit. +> > Sorry can you repeat what the question is? +> > Sorry, our question is what does an ideal web font text doc look like? And most of us at this table maybe not in the leads about how that happens. But Typekit, obviously is one solution that, you know, a lot of people use and uses a JSLoader to split up fonts so you're only getting piece at a time and I think it puts it together in some ways. So it gives you some sort of DRM support but I don't know. Do you guys want to talk about it? +> > Yeah, I mean, while you're saying that, I think what we do is we load, we load the font using a JSLoader so that it renders the page and then it comes back, but then -- it upgrades the page but I think what happens is that we store the font in local storage and so the JSLoader checks to see if that exists and then something some decision-making based on that because you can see it on our site but we have a beta site that's getting ready to roll out all across all of the web and the goal of that site is to load, incrementally, progressively enhancing pages versus what we have now is where you have everything. So it's kind of that thought process is what trickles down to fonts? +> > Who's "we?" +> > The Guardian? +> > That sounds similar to something that we tried, or experimenting now for mobile Webtype where you don't always have a great connection, so you can't hide the unstyled text until your font loads. So one of the things that we were planning on was, like, we will load the page initially and we'll do some Javascript logic, initially where we look at local storage to see whether the font has been downloaded and if it hasn't been flooded we'll download the font but not actually change the page until the next time that you actually go to another local and then we detect that you've already downloaded the font, and then we do that and avoid the flash. +> > I think part of why we don't do that because in the mobile apps, the pages render as HTML and they're, like, really big on consistency. So if you come to a home page and it's there, and then you come to an article and it's not, it's, like, obviously a strange thing. So I think that's one reason they do. +> > I don't know. At the New York Times we have this huge default, sort of "kit" of, I don't know, how many -- +> > 700 kilobytes? +> > It's 700 kilobytes, which, I guess on the desktop just sucks the first time, if you're a repeat visitor, it's probably fine but then there's team like mine where we build off of interactives where we might want to use more than that, or different ones than that. So we get we've got that 700, or 800K off of the platform and then we're adding video, and then we're adding images. It's not the most ideal tech implementation. So I feel like having that very skinny baseline set of faces for your platform and then CSS being able to add certain faces as you go might be better performance-wise. +> > ALLEN: Right now, we're selling Typekit and it's everything. And we never had pages that loaded all of them, or that needed all of them so it doesn't make sense to do that. +> > But we talked about how it's very aggressively cached, so once you have it, you have it for a year. +> > Typekit it? +> > Well, is that an advantage of a JSLoader versus just CSS, because CSS browsers -- it's whatever the browser knows is -- +> > So it downloads a font file and that font file could be cached locally by your browser so that if I make a request it doesn't do it again. What Typekit is doing is loading it and putting a query string on it because they're tracking their page views, right? Their usage of it so that's why Typekit uses a Javascript solution to do that as well as the other benefits of that, CSS classes to say when something is loaded versus when it's not, stuff like that. But if you have the fonts on your server already, you can already serve it up just using add font face rules. +> > There's no downfall of that or drawback? Like, there must be some advantage to, you know, rolling your own JSLoader, right? +> > Well, I mean you would want to do it with pure CS because you don't need the Javascript dependence for it, but then you can't make decisions, I only want to load this on, or it's Windows and chrome, I don't want to load the CSS file. Those kinds of decisions have to happen somewhere. What Google Fonts does is, it does it on the serve side so when you include that CSS file, you're making a request to their server and sending back the font that you need so that you don't send all the different variants. +> > Is that slow? +> > No, that's better, but that takes a lot more computing resources that's harder to do, and any of that backend logic to be able to do that. +> > I just learned a lot. +> > I mean, all the web fonts are they're just binary files that you just download. So just like an image, you can cache images so that your browser holds onto them longer. You can do the same thing with a font file but it just doesn't work the same way if -- like, your browser still has to check -- I used to have this font file, and you still get that flash of unstyled content. So it would be better if it was like. Let me download this font and now I know that this site has this font stored locally as if it was a native font stored on your system. Do you know what I mean? +> > I'm curious if anyone's played with serving two packages. So maybe a critical font package of just like, you know, a base, you know, regular sans which is on your page, and then I don't know, enhance that with the italics and bolds later, so it might be similar to critical CSS and some of those optimizations. +> > The only thing if you were curious about this was that there was this -- the guy who had actually been responsible for the next Jen guaranteed site very fast gave this presentation, his name is Patrick, if you on, and there's a Nieman journalism lab post about it, and they put his speaker deck slide show on this but one of the things that he talked about was I guess one of the tricks they use, and he talks about lots of tricks is inlining critical CSS such that it was only there, and I think that also helps to avoid some of the flash. But there is a portion further in the deck where he talks about what fonts, too. But that may be interesting, this particular. +> > One thing that we were speculating on was what if you could get -- do a sort of, like, a tiny font that just has the glyphs that's just above the full that you could put in a data URL in your CSS and then have, when the full thing comes in, I don't think you could get a font that small. And, the backend effort required to get that -- +> > It would be different per article, right? +> > It would. What if you had a font that was just metrics, did not actually have the glyphs, so it would load, and everything would space out. +> > One character? +> > ALLEN: Cool, well it seems like a lot of people have very solution-specific questions. So I'm glad that we had that there. And if you have any follow-up things, just talk to the person, or stick it on the back. Thanks, guys. +> > Thank you. +> > [ Applause ] diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_10_Role_In_Open_Data.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_10_Role_In_Open_Data.md index cc364ed6..ee503c55 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_10_Role_In_Open_Data.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_10_Role_In_Open_Data.md @@ -1,719 +1,691 @@ -What is our role in the open data movement? -Session facilitator(s): AmyJo Brown, Casey Thomas -Day & Time: Thursday, 12:30-1:30pm -Room: Garden 2 - ->> Hi. I'm Casey and this is AmyJo. I do freelance journalism -here in Philadelphia. I worked at the Inquirer and the local NPR -affiliate. The sort of root of this session is -- our sessions were -combined but a lot of these questions we proposed in our sessions and -it's a lot of things I encountered and didn't know the answer to. The -session title is a question. -Amy will explain. ->> I'm AmyJo from Pittsburgh. I'm a freelance journalist as well -and working on a new start up. Hopefully announcing it in detail in -the next few weeks. I came across a lot of questions. The mayor who -is embracing the idea at least so far, I've been lurking on the open -date group and watching it and a friend of mine that works at the Post -has gotten involved. Where are the lines. The open data group had a -conversation. He's the only news reporter there. They were like can -we work on that during his work time. The way they do that is if they -work with the Post Gazette. There is a lot of resource and partnering -with the Post Gazette. There were a lot of conversations just around -that. -And, actually, just this week I was getting in some local pack -files at the county office and discovered the open data group filed to -be a pack. That raises other questions about reporting involvement -and such. -What we decided to do, we found a bunch of questions, broad -questions, we wanted to brainstorm where the lines or boundaries might -be. It's an open discussion and there is no right or wrong answer at -this point. We wanted to provide context for news rooms. If you're -wrestling with these ideas, what should you think if you want to be a -beta tester for a city or join an advisory group. -I think because it's small, do you want to it do one by one? ->> Sure. ->> We have post it notes and markers on each table and we'll -start with the first one. One idea per post it. You can think, write -down ideas, stick it under the column that you think and we'll do a -group discussion overall about everybody's concepts. ->> Are we discussing at a table or individually. ->> We were going to break up into groups but some people may be -by themselves. So as a group we'll go through and do it one by one. ->> The first thing we wanted to think about is should we provide -input to government on data releases or data services? Examples to -think about is if you're asked to be a beta tester or join an advisory -group. You can think through what might be some pros to being -involved that early on in that process and cons in terms of getting -involved that early in the process. -Take a couple of minutes, think through, write your ideas on the -post its and then ... - - - - ->> Should we say what our role is, too. I work for a print -newspaper which is different than mainstream media. ->> I think when you come up with your idea, you can say this is -why, or this is why I think this is a pro- or a con. I think your -interesting angles will bring up interesting ideas. -Give you about one more minute. -Okay. ->> This is a little more stacked on the pro side than I thought. -I was asked to do beta testing for the City of Philadelphia and I -initially said yes and then got access to all this data and felt -weird. It was very informal. I thought if I take this data now, I -can just report on it. But I was supposed to provide beta testing and -it got weird. -On the pro side a lot of these are about informing the schema, -knowing what fields are useful. What fields would be nice to have and -how that can make someone's job easier. We might get a field that we -need rather than have him do it for you. -On the con side. This one says soul crushing time sink. ->> You can go around the room and talk about what you put up on -the post it and explain more you thinking. Let's start with -government really needs that help. Who put that up there? Tell us -more about what you're thinking there. ->> Government really needs to help. In many government agencies -particularly the ones down to a municipal level, they're using open -data because someone told them they have to but they have no resource, -no budget and only the IT staff they have if they have to time to do -with it. By the time they produce something, they're land basted by -media or local geeks for not doing a good enough job. It seems cruel -to me to say do this and do it well, we're not going to tell you what -it means and if you don't do it up to our secret standards we're going -to yell at you. ->> Anybody else want to share the reasoning behind what is up -there. ->> When you ask for something, you can tell them to provide -information to you. You don't get terrible PDF database or something. ->> Jeremy, you had creates a conflict of interest and I can't -read the example. What were you thinking. ->> I think the stuff can be really hard. And I was imagining a -releasing some dataset. It's possible to mess it up. We're -conflicted on reporting on this mess up because we were involved in -it. -An example that I wrote is if we release information -accidentally, personal identifying information that we didn't intend -to release or didn't anticipate the consequences of and feel bad about -it and complain about it? ->> I think that is interesting because you're working with groups -of people who are not reporters and don't know our internal code so to -speak on how to do this stuff. ->> I can give you a really weird very current example. I work -for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the complicated story is access Philly - - - - -this local web entity wanted to keep alive this data archiving -website. Open data Philly. In the process it sort of involves the -city. At some point the city group of -- I don't know what the group -is officially called -- but it's essentially the data evangelists so -to speak. They wanted to have a meeting of stake holders and I was -already on board. I got carried over into this city meeting. -Suddenly I'm sitting among mostly government employees as they share -their entire wish list of the hundreds of datasets they want to -release and what stage everything is in. I'm the investigative slash -data reporting reporter for the Philadelphia inquiry and I'm like this -is where they stand on everything they have a hope of and what is not -here, I know what they never want to release. And it was like the -most awkward meeting ever. And then to make it funnier they wanted to -photograph the meeting. ->> Did they ask you to be off the record during the meeting. ->> It was so informal. There were no ground rules set. I was -sitting next to the head of the group who was getting promoted into -this title. I'm sitting next to them and they go and photograph -everything. And now this guy has an investigative reporter next to -him in the shot. -After the meeting I said to this person, what I wanted to make -sure our ground rules were. I basically said totally -- I consider -this off the record, I want to help. I want to get the data out -there. Please don't say anything gigantic in the meeting like the -mayor is resigning. Even though it's off the record, it would put me -in a weird situation. They are supposed to meet again in a month and -I'm wondering 50/50 if I'll be invited back? ->> What kinds of conversations do you have with your bosses about -that? ->> We weren't sure if I was going to be involved in the beginning -because it's like how far do we want to go. The original entity was -not city controlled. And at that point it was like well the city is -involved but they don't control the website. Therefore we didn't feel -like we couldn't also be involved. -And then that's moving a little bit. This is? ->> That doesn't have a conversation when the city did become more -involved. ->> Technically that still hasn't changed but this meeting was -just an odd thing that came up and I wasn't going to say no. ->> Can I ask a maybe stupid question. Why is there a difference -between the city involved and a private company involved for you to be -involved? ->> It really -- it was an open data site, open data group. The -city's data evangelist was going to be one of the advisers of this -board for the soul purpose of getting a grant piece moving. Right. -And in the name of helping get open data moving for Philadelphia, it -was my paper, my bosses and I felt it was good to be included and we -were sort of overlooking that part of it. And it just kind of ... It -was worth it for the bigger picture. That was kind of the thinking. -We didn't have it all worked out. I'm not trying to betray anybody - - - - -either but once thaw tell me this, it's like I can't undo this. Now I -know this list. ->> Who else? We have government agencies don't know what is -useful? Can you talk about that. ->> It's like what Waldo was saying. Smaller agencies that want -to put something out they don't have an idea what data to put out, -what format it should be in, what is relevant and what is not. Sort -of in a side gig in New Jersey I work for this group called hack -jersey and we have a seminar that walled do came and talked about but -they don't know where to start. It could be an opportunity to say, we -don't necessarily care about some obscure dataset. These are the ones -you want. If you're going to put it out here are some things that -would be helpful. ->> What about on the con side. It introduced bias. Can you talk -about that. ->> Just to build off what you were just saying. If a government -agency asks a particular person, what format is helpful. What format -is useful and they get an answer which they might mistake for the -answer. The other groups are like why did you bring that up? I want -the raw data or who chose this format. Everybody has a perspective -and the responsibility of that perspective is something to be aware -of. ->> It's interesting to see if they go through that process and -there is an advisory group, and they do publish things, is that going -to be a way to make the information or the dataset harder. So they're -going to say, oh, it's already there for you so we're not going to -answer your request to provide it in another format. It might be an -out to getting what you really want. ->> It's setting a precedence of what you want and what you don't -want. ->> Few more on there. Anyone else want to share what they put up -there? ->> Just my con was that if you want to report on the process of -opening data being involved in that process kind of is a conflict of -interest. Not that I think there's a lot of reporting on the open -data process. ->> Not yet at least. But potentially. ->> I had a pro and it turned into a con. Particularly for beta -testing. If you get involved with a beta program early on, you have -connections into the group that is forward enough to think about open -data, the challenging of that can look like bias when it comes out of -beta. You have networking or friendship connections into the group -that put that together and maybe they're not on the right side of the -issue in the long run. That can be weird. Because you're in the beta -testing and you're chummy with the group. Particularly to outside -resources. You've been a part of that faction since the beginning and -you're like, I didn't know there were factions. ->> That's true. ->> Let's tackle the second one. The question that we put up -there is what are the ethical quandaries we might find ourselves in by - - - - -consuming city data services. This is the idea of forward recording -or using the apps that we build. The example geo coding. ->> This is something that the city opened up a geo coding -service. Everyone has done geo coding and it sucks because have you -to pay after so long. But this was free and it's based off the data -that I'm trying to reference. Yes, they come from the same sources. -It's a perfect geo coding but it's like a city service. We use city -data all the time but these are sort of new things that cities are -trying to do and I didn't know if it's cool to use it in the app or -not. ->> If you want to take a few minutes and think through that and -again post any thoughts you might have on the subject. ->> The two boxes there are quandaries or where you find yourself -ethically. And the other side is maybe a way to get around one of -those or find some happy medium. -Another example would be releasing open data in bulk form which -we all use and they release the data as an API which Philadelphia does -a lot. Would you build an app off a city API. -That is maybe updated every night as opposed to the data list -that is updated every month or something like that. -A few more seconds ... ->> Okay. Cool. So this first one is interesting. It says this -is a problem many places which is fair enough. Who -- Tom. ->> I was thinking in most places particularly in New Jersey like -the data is so shitty, this is a dream problem. An agency that -provides an API or some sort of machinery of data would be fantastic. -I would love to tackle that. Philly is an awesome example of a place -that is pretty far ahead. ->> This one says we use city APIs but as a news room we don't -control them. If they shut them down or apps die. ->> We have things like our interactive crime map that is updated -every night and all these other pieces. And if they change something -it breaks the app or if they decide they're not going to do it -anymore, all of our time and energy went into something that is no -longer useful. ->> Have you talked with the people that maintain it about making -changes to it? ->> Yes. We have had some luck. The other thing sometimes is -there are things that are in there, you know, that aren't very -explainable. Internally the city knows what it means but what gets -released isn't always like ... You know. Some of that is like what -the hell is this? ->> And then be wary of becoming over-reliant and not examining -unofficial data sources. ->> That was me again. I would worry about if the city provides a -service of crime data, particularly if you're doing analysis for a -story and you're like I know this is what I can get from the city. -These are the fields that are available, those are the stories you do -over and over. And you have to make sure you're constantly looking -for other sources of data and reporting. - - - - ->> The same downfall as them releasing bulk data. ->> Right. ->> Potential privacy violation. For example a New York City -license cab number. ->> I can speak to that. This might have been just a New York -thing and I read just one story so I'm not an expert. We have cabs in -New York -- yellow cabs -- you can reverse engineer, you can reverse -engineer and find out what cab by it was and how much money they're -making. The technical river that put into obscuring their data wasn't -strong enough. And I can easily see myself building an entire project -off that and not realizing that flaw wasn't in there from the -beginning. So something we discussed at the times and began using the -data. Double and triple checking to make sure it can't be broken by -people who are going to be malicious with it. ->> Someone from the prior session in the room said the Bangor -Daily News was being sued because of unredacted social security -numbers in it. The secretary of state cannot be sued for that. The -Bangor News can. ->> The risk the cities take on, Philadelphia just had to pay out -$1.4 million because they released the list of gun permit appeals. -And it was up for four days. And then, you know, they pulled it down. -Everyone that was on that is now getting a small amount of money that -adds up to a lot for the city. It's funny, the risk isn't all on the -individuals but even the cities are taking risks. ->> New York had that with shredding of documents and dropping -them at public events. There were full social security numbers in the -confetti. People collected it and were able to map out 10 or 15 -individuals and police officers. That is just municipal shredding. -It was like having all of the experts that you have available look it -over and look it over to smoke out potential issues. ->> I just got that cab data for Philly and it's not -- it's just -raw data. I wouldn't even have considered the thing that came from -New York because I just don't think about it. ->> In that case it's easy not to include the license number. But -if the city already says (inaudible) you might not think that it is. -I can include it so people have a bit more information. That would be -a problem. ->> It's interesting, the decisions like we may get public -information but that doesn't necessarily mean we'll publish that -information. There is a responsibility aspect. Just because we can -doesn't mean we should. I have campaign finance data and I want to -map where the contributions are coming from. Is a city counselor -getting money from his district or is it outside the city. I got -everyone's home addresses, the registration database and voters -database. When I publish this I don't want to put everyone's -addresses out. I don't want someone to reverse engineer it to find -someone's home address. And that's what we're doing. We may not have -any control about open data groups but that is an area. Just because -data is provided doesn't mean the world needs to have easy access to -it maybe. - - - - ->> This is a point where our interest as journalists can conflict -with the interests of open data groups. Like the tax you data. I -would trust me with that data but I can see why people don't want it -out for the entire world to know each Cabbies income. We might ask -for it, get denied and get it informally. You're working cross -purposes with the open data world if we do that. ->> Can I ask, this is a vaguely related topic. I'm coming from -outside the world of journalism. Speaking specifically to when you -FOIA, they're going out of the way to try toll give me as little as -possible. I have to question the thoroughness and accuracy of the -data I'm receiving. Do you assume in an open data movement that the -data can be trusted, complete and accurate? ->> No. ->> What process do you employ to interrogate that. When you're -reporting based on data -- how do you question that. ->> I think we even had a particular conversation about this with -hackathons, data. That's exciting. There is not a lot of necessarily -checking that that data is good data to use. -Anyone want to speak to the process? ->> A lot of the open data movement now is about experimenting and -getting data online. So there's not actually a huge amount of -examples of open data groups using data very successfully, I don't -think. There is a lot of examples of people doing things with open -data but whether they're changing communities or really making an -impact is debatable. -Open data now has the goal of opening data not necessarily making -that data useful? ->> Even verifying, like if you had -- imagine you had to properly -source every row in a table, it's not scalable. What middle ground is -there. ->> There is often talking and this hasn't been realized the idea -of open data is a two-way thing. Not a one way. The idea of feed -back and the feed back loop is some government agencies are sort of -involved in that but many aren't. That is definitely a part of the -conversation but it's not happening. ->> I think it comes down to, for mainstream media when I'm -looking at data, however I got it, I want to go back to the stake -holder who is really going to be their feet to the fire if we write it -up. And they are probably going to list me because of that. That -means there is a barrier between me and the government that they're -not going to be super-friendly to me. Someone from the open data -world that the city might view as more of a partner won't be as -concerned about it. It doesn't mean if you bring them a finding and -say it looks like crime is up a million percent, they should react the -same. If they care about the data integrity whether it's ewe or me -they should say that doesn't sound right. Like bullet proofing for -journalism is take that information back to them before you publish -and verify it and give them an opportunity to say, well you have that -wrong or thank you for telling us this. We'll fix it. -Whatever it is. The same process applies. You should take from - - - - -the journalism world that checklist that is out there. There is a lot -of them out there and take the parts that are tried and true? ->> A lot of it is really understanding that data source and -understanding how it's being collected. If there is something you -don't understand, journalists are often use the phrase don't make any -assumptions. If there is anything you don't know 100 percent and you -can't say I swear on oath this is correct. You go back and ask the -question and come back. -The campaign finance data was incredibly dirty. The law is not -clear on some practices and county employees interpret it differently, -it was a lot of phone calls to the county. How are you looking at -this. And the candidates, how do you interpret this. And making -notes saying this candidate filed the late contribution reports this -way and another this way. When we released the data, we normalized it -so you know our process for it. ->> I didn't put any up because it took a little listening to what -other people were saying to contextualize that. Now I want to move -that one over there. And poisoning the well with good intentions and -building off what you're saying. How do I trust these rows of data -and I think that building like the bullet list, you can end up with a -due diligence area. What is the best spread sheet you can have. A -passive pipeline. 311 calls get dumped in there, nobody touches it. -I have to truth. The last session I was in we were talking about how -that led to a completely bizarre story about the greatest -concentration of graffiti being in a nice neighborhood. -They publish it and it's like you didn't normalize based on how -many calls per neighborhood. There are assumptions you're putting in -there. You might be making someone look stupid who is working to open -data for everybody. I think that is a kind of ethical quandary -especially if we're talking about the relationships between the -government, open data, and journalists because they all have cross -purposes. But working towards somewhat similar goals but different -paths? ->> I was speaking to his point about the two-way thing. I'm from -New York and I'm working with some of the things that the city has -done recently about opening up the building data. Now, like you said, -it was all about open data open data. People want this and that. -People are working towards just opening that data. But the part which -is now in conversation is about the New York City Department -- open -street map is much more current than their data sometimes. It's a -question of like if there's a new construction happening, like one of -us will find it before the city. It gets reported to the city. The -permits are still going through but the construction is starting. All -that kind of stuff. This whole process, the city to have someone go -out there, report it, update the data, that kind of stuff. The -conversation around, okay we give you all these things, you put it in -there. How can you feed it back to us. So the loop of like if -there's a -- so then it speeds up their process. Something new -happened. They're going to send someone immediately out there. If -it's incorrect they stop it. Like address changes and all those - - - - -things. That happens much faster than the city can do it. -And another thing is like recycling for example. In the city, -people are -- on a neighborhood basis. Somethings are happening. If -you go to the city's website to get that data, all the current stuff -isn't in there. How to kind of converge the two so they're informing -each other. There are other sources that are more current than the -government. So how to converge these two if someone wants a set of -data it can be as accurate as possible? ->> Interesting and raises that question of should we be feeding -accurate data directly back to the city. I think I would struggle -with that. ->> As long as it's like a two-way exchange. I'm not sure about -the social security numbers and license plate information, if that -should be exposed and who handles that. That's a different thing all -together. But if it's a loop and it's open, like the government is -pulling from the same things, and verifying the correct things. ->> One of the quandaries I can see being raised is if you're -feeding information back and political decisions are made off that. -How do you -- now you've become part of that process. So how do you -be transparent about your role and what if you did it wrong. And now -you're the one that -- now you're reporting on yourself. The city -counsel is making this horrible decision and they did it based on your -bad work. ->> Going back to that, getting involved with the government, -just -- there was concern about should you advise them on how to -release data. Just something like there are a lot of city agencies -and in a city as big as this, they don't talk to each other. They -have data that collectively would be more than the sum of its parts. -They build these things in Silos. One ID number here doesn't match -anything here and if those two talk to each other the city's -efficiency would go up. -One of the things that I see not being a problem at all is for me -to say, can you use one geo code structure for everything. Can you -guys use one method for tracking, you know, whatever it may be, roads -or city boundaries so we don't, you know, we don't have these data -things that don't connect. -I have my reasons for wanting the end result but for the city it -helps too? ->> I think that one thing is also, in our own city I hear a lot -of my community and I would include with us the open data people and -tech outsiders wanted to love their city making weird assumptions that -I think are unfair. I think we can attribute maliciousness or -stupidity when it's a giant old system built in pieces by a million -people over time. And have a respect for that inefficient balance. -Sometimes if you shout loud enough, this is really important and you -have to do it, they're going to be rebels. Now we're dealing with, oh -gosh, any Chicago peeps? We swished our transit payment system to -this awful thing. Someone is like it should be this way and it's -going to be this wristband thing and it wasn't that great. -I have a police detective friend and they were switching to, they - - - - -wanted more transparency in cops hours. These cops with bad. They're -not working the hours they're charging for. They started buying this -time card system and it was going to just throw awful wrenches in -everything. It was going to require precise, really precise note -taking on lunch breaks. And like okay, who cares? Well, if I like -don't get -- if I didn't have my supervisor approve my lunch break -change in the system, then it couldn't go in. We always have to be -flexible. Everybody is doing that. If you have this many cops and -this many supervisors we need to hire three more supervisors to -approve lunch breaks and if we don't hire them. I can say I was -taking a statement and at lunch at the same time. -So like we don't have the whole picture and I think that -humility. This might not be the answer but this is what this looks -like or would this be asking questions other than yelling should be a -priority? ->> Should we be demanding, we as a community, certain kinds of -data, because hey, it would be cool to have that data but there are -consequences of collecting that data. ->> I think it's your ratio of listening versus shouting and -cultivating a healthy balance. ->> That is a lead in to the next question. There are going to be -open data projects. It's a new thing and you have new people coming -in that are going to go wrong. We've all worked with crime data and -how messy it is. And the differences if you're scraping something and -saying there is a lot of a particular crime in a neighborhood but it's -not coded correctly and whatnot. -We want to get thoughts on what do we do about a project that -seems to be going wrong. Or the brigade publishes crime data and we -know it's flawed but it's getting a lot of attention in the community -because it gets people sort of looking at that data and drawing -conclusions from it. What do we do? Should we be diving in to help -them fix that. Critically reporting on the pieces that they're -putting out there? We want to take everybody's pros and cons to -either of those strategies. -I'm going to give you a few minutes to think through that. ->> I like the little illustration. This is cool, too. Right on -the line there. -You put up a bunch of cards. Do you want to go through your -thoughts? ->> So for a con, I think about maybe there is some criterion for -when it's necessary. What is the consequence of this? Is it like, -oh, I know this and you don't? Or is it, our government should not -make a decision based on this because I something I see and you don't. -I think that it feels like this is new and fragile. Hearing like -you're going to do it wrong will scare a lot of people out of trying -from all sides. -So in general, like, how can we help each other until maybe we -mature and then we can go at each other's throats when it's a fair -game. -And then the sailboat, thinking about people's time and doing - - - - -something in an efficient way that you can learn about whatnot to do -and you can tell on yourself and do it in a spirit. I can say like -it's a lot easier to say you did that wrong if you're like here look -at this page where I really screwed up and what I had to do. And -then, yeah, so the boat is for like the rising tide. I don't remember -the stupid adage. Raises all the boats. If stuff is hard and there -are a lot of got yeas, nobody is going to think of all of them. We -have to make it okay to have an addendum to this story. New -corrections. ->> The threshold for intervention. Is that yours as well? ->> Yes. I started with that, just like thinking about is this -important to act on? ->> Would that be even going maybe to a hack -- or a weekly meet -up and sitting down and spending time. ->> I think I was thinking what are the consequences of this -mistake? Is this worth my time and publicly shaming someone? ->> Right. In Philly there is a part of code for Philly and they -have a weekly hack session and there are 25 to 30 people there a week -working on things and it's a good opportunity to show up and not try -to be expert-ish but sit down. A lot of these things are focused on -building something and not spending time fixing data because it's not -as fun to do that. Well, some people think it's fun. -Someone has critical reporting. ->> That's me. On the side of reporting on projects that are -misusing data. There are two prongs of it. Right. One going back to -the organization, next time you do this you can do this a little bit -better in a sort of thanks for the data, this was a good attempt -phrasing. And the other is like educating the public about stuff. -The project came to me like any of the mug shot websites. Yes, you -want to see this but does it help you. You know this is available but -what does it serve as a public good to create something that is -ethically riff just because we have the data for it. People reporting -on open data projects and whether or not they were used well or -whatever is more the fact that it's out there and people can read it -and address their questions that they want to see their government -reporting about or their groups reporting about. ->> Right. And then Jeremy, conflict of interest. It is news but -it could endangerer our ability to report news, question mark. ->> Maybe the solution is since we understand the conflict here, -is to try to report on it in a way that doesn't look at how awful this -is or how much better, it doesn't work great this time but it could be -better, that kind of angle. ->> I guess I see what physically going to these groups and being -like hey, what do you think about this? And working through the -people there. I mean so many of these things like the New York City -taxi thing got a million hits. But there's so many that don't get any -traffic at all. Spending time like ... I think you want to get as -close back to the root of the problem. So go and fix it in the fourth -release but you have no idea if it's going to be popular. Maybe you -write a story about the taxi identification but it doesn't get as much - - - - -traffic. I don't know ... So ... ->> I think there's also the we're smart but we aren't necessarily -the expert. Say someone did something and you're like, whoa, they -didn't think about this or they didn't write about this caveat. Maybe -they did think about that stuff. Even if you're going to report, you -still have to talk to them and see what they did and why they did it. ->> That's true. ->> I was going to say if there -- Tom, if you want to comment and -if anyone has questions that you're burning with for the group, let's -end the remaining time and talk about that. ->> I was going to say the nice thing in a lot of places outside -New York, these communities are pretty small and rarely does anything -come up that is a big surprise. There are opportunities for open -source projects for something coming down. You can file a HIB issue -and say I've worked with this crime data, be aware of this or have you -thought about that. I think it's fair to raise those questions while -something is in development. And like wise if you're going to report -on them, it's not a surprise to those people. They're going to know -that you're watching and you're going to go to them. I don't think -anybody wants to feel like they've been mistreated but if you write -the story and you're forthcoming with them, okay, here are issues that -came up, let's talk about it. I think it's fair to work both sides. -I don't think you need to be a core contributor but if you have -reporting and expertise on them, you should ... ->> How do you -- the historical reporting. Copying a dataset and -you're responsible for what comes out of the dataset. How do you keep -up with the data as it moves from story to story using one story for -another. How does that echo down the pipeline? It becomes -de-normalized and nobody is trying to track this story which is -related to this story that reports on this story tracks back to this -open data source. ->> That is something that I'm working on in Pittsburgh. It's -something we're looking to build. I'm collecting all the campaign -finance data. Do we want to update that for every report. We get to -a point where we're collecting enough data and we have the historical -record. You can look at the funding in this campaign back in 2009 and -compare it to the 2013 campaign and have that record. But we don't -- -we're still mutilating and talking through how do we ensure that is -maintained and when you up load the data that it matches the data that -you've already got. -I don't know answers but it's something that we're noodlating, at -least starting to think about. ->> Was that word "noodling"? ->> Noodlating. ->> I think of words all the time. ->> I think it's important to document, I got this data from this -source and here is the process that got me to this story. And the -more open you can be about that, the better it's going to be for -anyone who take it is story further and it's great for yourself and -the organization. Really starting at the source level and going each - - - - -step of the way. ->> Any other burning questions someone has about open data or -working with open data groups? ->> I'd be curious about the line between, going back to some of -the underlying questions, reporting on open data efforts. -Particularly ones that end up -- there is a lot of developers that go -and do their own projects. But commenting on projects you see or the -projects that you're working on on your own. The line between when -you're reporting on a project based just tech upon your tree, you have -personal developer problems about how a certain group provided data -compared to like it's building into a story and reporting. And -walking that line just so you aren't conflicting with your own self -about it later on if something turns into a full story versus all of -the opinions you spatted on Twitter about it. I don't know that I've -seen a lot of people walk that enough to say I have a good sense of -what that is. ->> Any thoughts. ->> It might be a total dead end question and that's fine. I was -just thinking about it. ->> Casey you're on the other side. You work for the government. -You have the whole perspective. You've done freelance, you worked for -the Inquirer and done other things what was it like when you worked -for the city and saw it from the other side? ->> I mean, yeah ... Philadelphia is such a big city that it's -hard to find larger groups that are aware of these things. It's -mostly one or two people in the department that even care. And maybe -they have a relationship for open data and are really excited and talk -to their boss. But at the time I was working for the city it was -- -open data wasn't that big. And a lot of the data stuff, there was -data out there but there wasn't the open Philly. It was too messy. -It wasn't a big campaign like it is now. I feel like people in this -city have a good idea what is going on and what it means. Not that -they're all sold on it. I remember requests for Pennsylvania law on -the other side and the lawyers being like do we have this exact thing -as they word it here? No, but it would take five seconds to do a -query but we don't have it. I don't know if that sort of initial -response kind of thing has changed. Just because it seems like the -city is getting more comfortable. Our chief data officer left because -he ran into department heads not wanted to release more important -datasets. They released bike rack locations. That is great, it's -easy. It's useful to some people but what about the salary data or -police internal affair investigations. It's at that point where we -have bigger and more important datasets in the city and it got to a -point where it's more about politics than technology. These things -are being built but blocked because the city doesn't want them out -there. -My time with the city, people didn't really know or care. We -would respond, we had better luck doing it informally at least at the -water department? ->> At one point we wanted to do something with water usage at the -parcel level. It was something about city vacancies and the thinking -is if there is water usage there is somebody there. But the city -couldn't give it to us. ->> I know I gave chunks of it to students and stuff like that. I -don't know, I mean it probably hasn't changed that much. I had better -luck doing informal requests at that point and that seems to be one -advantage that journalists have over mainstream media is that we then -can often turn to this back-door route. Which is a little unfair -because we're supposed to be just the public. But sometimes -government agencies work with the media if they feel like, you know, -there's something -- whatever their motive is. The average person may -not think to go that route or have the ability. ->> So we are at time. What we're going to do is take the notes -from the session, it was being transcribed and we have the notes from -the post its and we'll create a document and organize it so it can -spark conversations in the news room. So you can see where we fell -with pros and cons and hopefully that can help you talk through -working with open data groups. -We'll release that later. ->> Thank you so much for coming. - +What is our role in the open data movement? +Session facilitator(s): AmyJo Brown, Casey Thomas +Day & Time: Thursday, 12:30-1:30pm +Room: Garden 2 + +> > Hi. I'm Casey and this is AmyJo. I do freelance journalism +> > here in Philadelphia. I worked at the Inquirer and the local NPR +> > affiliate. The sort of root of this session is -- our sessions were +> > combined but a lot of these questions we proposed in our sessions and +> > it's a lot of things I encountered and didn't know the answer to. The +> > session title is a question. +> > Amy will explain. +> > I'm AmyJo from Pittsburgh. I'm a freelance journalist as well +> > and working on a new start up. Hopefully announcing it in detail in +> > the next few weeks. I came across a lot of questions. The mayor who +> > is embracing the idea at least so far, I've been lurking on the open +> > date group and watching it and a friend of mine that works at the Post +> > has gotten involved. Where are the lines. The open data group had a +> > conversation. He's the only news reporter there. They were like can +> > we work on that during his work time. The way they do that is if they +> > work with the Post Gazette. There is a lot of resource and partnering +> > with the Post Gazette. There were a lot of conversations just around +> > that. +> > And, actually, just this week I was getting in some local pack +> > files at the county office and discovered the open data group filed to +> > be a pack. That raises other questions about reporting involvement +> > and such. +> > What we decided to do, we found a bunch of questions, broad +> > questions, we wanted to brainstorm where the lines or boundaries might +> > be. It's an open discussion and there is no right or wrong answer at +> > this point. We wanted to provide context for news rooms. If you're +> > wrestling with these ideas, what should you think if you want to be a +> > beta tester for a city or join an advisory group. +> > I think because it's small, do you want to it do one by one? +> > Sure. +> > We have post it notes and markers on each table and we'll +> > start with the first one. One idea per post it. You can think, write +> > down ideas, stick it under the column that you think and we'll do a +> > group discussion overall about everybody's concepts. +> > Are we discussing at a table or individually. +> > We were going to break up into groups but some people may be +> > by themselves. So as a group we'll go through and do it one by one. +> > The first thing we wanted to think about is should we provide +> > input to government on data releases or data services? Examples to +> > think about is if you're asked to be a beta tester or join an advisory +> > group. You can think through what might be some pros to being +> > involved that early on in that process and cons in terms of getting +> > involved that early in the process. +> > Take a couple of minutes, think through, write your ideas on the +> > post its and then ... + +> > Should we say what our role is, too. I work for a print +> > newspaper which is different than mainstream media. +> > I think when you come up with your idea, you can say this is +> > why, or this is why I think this is a pro- or a con. I think your +> > interesting angles will bring up interesting ideas. +> > Give you about one more minute. +> > Okay. +> > This is a little more stacked on the pro side than I thought. +> > I was asked to do beta testing for the City of Philadelphia and I +> > initially said yes and then got access to all this data and felt +> > weird. It was very informal. I thought if I take this data now, I +> > can just report on it. But I was supposed to provide beta testing and +> > it got weird. +> > On the pro side a lot of these are about informing the schema, +> > knowing what fields are useful. What fields would be nice to have and +> > how that can make someone's job easier. We might get a field that we +> > need rather than have him do it for you. +> > On the con side. This one says soul crushing time sink. +> > You can go around the room and talk about what you put up on +> > the post it and explain more you thinking. Let's start with +> > government really needs that help. Who put that up there? Tell us +> > more about what you're thinking there. +> > Government really needs to help. In many government agencies +> > particularly the ones down to a municipal level, they're using open +> > data because someone told them they have to but they have no resource, +> > no budget and only the IT staff they have if they have to time to do +> > with it. By the time they produce something, they're land basted by +> > media or local geeks for not doing a good enough job. It seems cruel +> > to me to say do this and do it well, we're not going to tell you what +> > it means and if you don't do it up to our secret standards we're going +> > to yell at you. +> > Anybody else want to share the reasoning behind what is up +> > there. +> > When you ask for something, you can tell them to provide +> > information to you. You don't get terrible PDF database or something. +> > Jeremy, you had creates a conflict of interest and I can't +> > read the example. What were you thinking. +> > I think the stuff can be really hard. And I was imagining a +> > releasing some dataset. It's possible to mess it up. We're +> > conflicted on reporting on this mess up because we were involved in +> > it. +> > An example that I wrote is if we release information +> > accidentally, personal identifying information that we didn't intend +> > to release or didn't anticipate the consequences of and feel bad about +> > it and complain about it? +> > I think that is interesting because you're working with groups +> > of people who are not reporters and don't know our internal code so to +> > speak on how to do this stuff. +> > I can give you a really weird very current example. I work +> > for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the complicated story is access Philly + +this local web entity wanted to keep alive this data archiving +website. Open data Philly. In the process it sort of involves the +city. At some point the city group of -- I don't know what the group +is officially called -- but it's essentially the data evangelists so +to speak. They wanted to have a meeting of stake holders and I was +already on board. I got carried over into this city meeting. +Suddenly I'm sitting among mostly government employees as they share +their entire wish list of the hundreds of datasets they want to +release and what stage everything is in. I'm the investigative slash +data reporting reporter for the Philadelphia inquiry and I'm like this +is where they stand on everything they have a hope of and what is not +here, I know what they never want to release. And it was like the +most awkward meeting ever. And then to make it funnier they wanted to +photograph the meeting. + +> > Did they ask you to be off the record during the meeting. +> > It was so informal. There were no ground rules set. I was +> > sitting next to the head of the group who was getting promoted into +> > this title. I'm sitting next to them and they go and photograph +> > everything. And now this guy has an investigative reporter next to +> > him in the shot. +> > After the meeting I said to this person, what I wanted to make +> > sure our ground rules were. I basically said totally -- I consider +> > this off the record, I want to help. I want to get the data out +> > there. Please don't say anything gigantic in the meeting like the +> > mayor is resigning. Even though it's off the record, it would put me +> > in a weird situation. They are supposed to meet again in a month and +> > I'm wondering 50/50 if I'll be invited back? +> > What kinds of conversations do you have with your bosses about +> > that? +> > We weren't sure if I was going to be involved in the beginning +> > because it's like how far do we want to go. The original entity was +> > not city controlled. And at that point it was like well the city is +> > involved but they don't control the website. Therefore we didn't feel +> > like we couldn't also be involved. +> > And then that's moving a little bit. This is? +> > That doesn't have a conversation when the city did become more +> > involved. +> > Technically that still hasn't changed but this meeting was +> > just an odd thing that came up and I wasn't going to say no. +> > Can I ask a maybe stupid question. Why is there a difference +> > between the city involved and a private company involved for you to be +> > involved? +> > It really -- it was an open data site, open data group. The +> > city's data evangelist was going to be one of the advisers of this +> > board for the soul purpose of getting a grant piece moving. Right. +> > And in the name of helping get open data moving for Philadelphia, it +> > was my paper, my bosses and I felt it was good to be included and we +> > were sort of overlooking that part of it. And it just kind of ... It +> > was worth it for the bigger picture. That was kind of the thinking. +> > We didn't have it all worked out. I'm not trying to betray anybody + +either but once thaw tell me this, it's like I can't undo this. Now I +know this list. + +> > Who else? We have government agencies don't know what is +> > useful? Can you talk about that. +> > It's like what Waldo was saying. Smaller agencies that want +> > to put something out they don't have an idea what data to put out, +> > what format it should be in, what is relevant and what is not. Sort +> > of in a side gig in New Jersey I work for this group called hack +> > jersey and we have a seminar that walled do came and talked about but +> > they don't know where to start. It could be an opportunity to say, we +> > don't necessarily care about some obscure dataset. These are the ones +> > you want. If you're going to put it out here are some things that +> > would be helpful. +> > What about on the con side. It introduced bias. Can you talk +> > about that. +> > Just to build off what you were just saying. If a government +> > agency asks a particular person, what format is helpful. What format +> > is useful and they get an answer which they might mistake for the +> > answer. The other groups are like why did you bring that up? I want +> > the raw data or who chose this format. Everybody has a perspective +> > and the responsibility of that perspective is something to be aware +> > of. +> > It's interesting to see if they go through that process and +> > there is an advisory group, and they do publish things, is that going +> > to be a way to make the information or the dataset harder. So they're +> > going to say, oh, it's already there for you so we're not going to +> > answer your request to provide it in another format. It might be an +> > out to getting what you really want. +> > It's setting a precedence of what you want and what you don't +> > want. +> > Few more on there. Anyone else want to share what they put up +> > there? +> > Just my con was that if you want to report on the process of +> > opening data being involved in that process kind of is a conflict of +> > interest. Not that I think there's a lot of reporting on the open +> > data process. +> > Not yet at least. But potentially. +> > I had a pro and it turned into a con. Particularly for beta +> > testing. If you get involved with a beta program early on, you have +> > connections into the group that is forward enough to think about open +> > data, the challenging of that can look like bias when it comes out of +> > beta. You have networking or friendship connections into the group +> > that put that together and maybe they're not on the right side of the +> > issue in the long run. That can be weird. Because you're in the beta +> > testing and you're chummy with the group. Particularly to outside +> > resources. You've been a part of that faction since the beginning and +> > you're like, I didn't know there were factions. +> > That's true. +> > Let's tackle the second one. The question that we put up +> > there is what are the ethical quandaries we might find ourselves in by + +consuming city data services. This is the idea of forward recording +or using the apps that we build. The example geo coding. + +> > This is something that the city opened up a geo coding +> > service. Everyone has done geo coding and it sucks because have you +> > to pay after so long. But this was free and it's based off the data +> > that I'm trying to reference. Yes, they come from the same sources. +> > It's a perfect geo coding but it's like a city service. We use city +> > data all the time but these are sort of new things that cities are +> > trying to do and I didn't know if it's cool to use it in the app or +> > not. +> > If you want to take a few minutes and think through that and +> > again post any thoughts you might have on the subject. +> > The two boxes there are quandaries or where you find yourself +> > ethically. And the other side is maybe a way to get around one of +> > those or find some happy medium. +> > Another example would be releasing open data in bulk form which +> > we all use and they release the data as an API which Philadelphia does +> > a lot. Would you build an app off a city API. +> > That is maybe updated every night as opposed to the data list +> > that is updated every month or something like that. +> > A few more seconds ... +> > Okay. Cool. So this first one is interesting. It says this +> > is a problem many places which is fair enough. Who -- Tom. +> > I was thinking in most places particularly in New Jersey like +> > the data is so shitty, this is a dream problem. An agency that +> > provides an API or some sort of machinery of data would be fantastic. +> > I would love to tackle that. Philly is an awesome example of a place +> > that is pretty far ahead. +> > This one says we use city APIs but as a news room we don't +> > control them. If they shut them down or apps die. +> > We have things like our interactive crime map that is updated +> > every night and all these other pieces. And if they change something +> > it breaks the app or if they decide they're not going to do it +> > anymore, all of our time and energy went into something that is no +> > longer useful. +> > Have you talked with the people that maintain it about making +> > changes to it? +> > Yes. We have had some luck. The other thing sometimes is +> > there are things that are in there, you know, that aren't very +> > explainable. Internally the city knows what it means but what gets +> > released isn't always like ... You know. Some of that is like what +> > the hell is this? +> > And then be wary of becoming over-reliant and not examining +> > unofficial data sources. +> > That was me again. I would worry about if the city provides a +> > service of crime data, particularly if you're doing analysis for a +> > story and you're like I know this is what I can get from the city. +> > These are the fields that are available, those are the stories you do +> > over and over. And you have to make sure you're constantly looking +> > for other sources of data and reporting. + +> > The same downfall as them releasing bulk data. +> > Right. +> > Potential privacy violation. For example a New York City +> > license cab number. +> > I can speak to that. This might have been just a New York +> > thing and I read just one story so I'm not an expert. We have cabs in +> > New York -- yellow cabs -- you can reverse engineer, you can reverse +> > engineer and find out what cab by it was and how much money they're +> > making. The technical river that put into obscuring their data wasn't +> > strong enough. And I can easily see myself building an entire project +> > off that and not realizing that flaw wasn't in there from the +> > beginning. So something we discussed at the times and began using the +> > data. Double and triple checking to make sure it can't be broken by +> > people who are going to be malicious with it. +> > Someone from the prior session in the room said the Bangor +> > Daily News was being sued because of unredacted social security +> > numbers in it. The secretary of state cannot be sued for that. The +> > Bangor News can. +> > The risk the cities take on, Philadelphia just had to pay out +> > $1.4 million because they released the list of gun permit appeals. +> > And it was up for four days. And then, you know, they pulled it down. +> > Everyone that was on that is now getting a small amount of money that +> > adds up to a lot for the city. It's funny, the risk isn't all on the +> > individuals but even the cities are taking risks. +> > New York had that with shredding of documents and dropping +> > them at public events. There were full social security numbers in the +> > confetti. People collected it and were able to map out 10 or 15 +> > individuals and police officers. That is just municipal shredding. +> > It was like having all of the experts that you have available look it +> > over and look it over to smoke out potential issues. +> > I just got that cab data for Philly and it's not -- it's just +> > raw data. I wouldn't even have considered the thing that came from +> > New York because I just don't think about it. +> > In that case it's easy not to include the license number. But +> > if the city already says (inaudible) you might not think that it is. +> > I can include it so people have a bit more information. That would be +> > a problem. +> > It's interesting, the decisions like we may get public +> > information but that doesn't necessarily mean we'll publish that +> > information. There is a responsibility aspect. Just because we can +> > doesn't mean we should. I have campaign finance data and I want to +> > map where the contributions are coming from. Is a city counselor +> > getting money from his district or is it outside the city. I got +> > everyone's home addresses, the registration database and voters +> > database. When I publish this I don't want to put everyone's +> > addresses out. I don't want someone to reverse engineer it to find +> > someone's home address. And that's what we're doing. We may not have +> > any control about open data groups but that is an area. Just because +> > data is provided doesn't mean the world needs to have easy access to +> > it maybe. + +> > This is a point where our interest as journalists can conflict +> > with the interests of open data groups. Like the tax you data. I +> > would trust me with that data but I can see why people don't want it +> > out for the entire world to know each Cabbies income. We might ask +> > for it, get denied and get it informally. You're working cross +> > purposes with the open data world if we do that. +> > Can I ask, this is a vaguely related topic. I'm coming from +> > outside the world of journalism. Speaking specifically to when you +> > FOIA, they're going out of the way to try toll give me as little as +> > possible. I have to question the thoroughness and accuracy of the +> > data I'm receiving. Do you assume in an open data movement that the +> > data can be trusted, complete and accurate? +> > No. +> > What process do you employ to interrogate that. When you're +> > reporting based on data -- how do you question that. +> > I think we even had a particular conversation about this with +> > hackathons, data. That's exciting. There is not a lot of necessarily +> > checking that that data is good data to use. +> > Anyone want to speak to the process? +> > A lot of the open data movement now is about experimenting and +> > getting data online. So there's not actually a huge amount of +> > examples of open data groups using data very successfully, I don't +> > think. There is a lot of examples of people doing things with open +> > data but whether they're changing communities or really making an +> > impact is debatable. +> > Open data now has the goal of opening data not necessarily making +> > that data useful? +> > Even verifying, like if you had -- imagine you had to properly +> > source every row in a table, it's not scalable. What middle ground is +> > there. +> > There is often talking and this hasn't been realized the idea +> > of open data is a two-way thing. Not a one way. The idea of feed +> > back and the feed back loop is some government agencies are sort of +> > involved in that but many aren't. That is definitely a part of the +> > conversation but it's not happening. +> > I think it comes down to, for mainstream media when I'm +> > looking at data, however I got it, I want to go back to the stake +> > holder who is really going to be their feet to the fire if we write it +> > up. And they are probably going to list me because of that. That +> > means there is a barrier between me and the government that they're +> > not going to be super-friendly to me. Someone from the open data +> > world that the city might view as more of a partner won't be as +> > concerned about it. It doesn't mean if you bring them a finding and +> > say it looks like crime is up a million percent, they should react the +> > same. If they care about the data integrity whether it's ewe or me +> > they should say that doesn't sound right. Like bullet proofing for +> > journalism is take that information back to them before you publish +> > and verify it and give them an opportunity to say, well you have that +> > wrong or thank you for telling us this. We'll fix it. +> > Whatever it is. The same process applies. You should take from + +the journalism world that checklist that is out there. There is a lot +of them out there and take the parts that are tried and true? + +> > A lot of it is really understanding that data source and +> > understanding how it's being collected. If there is something you +> > don't understand, journalists are often use the phrase don't make any +> > assumptions. If there is anything you don't know 100 percent and you +> > can't say I swear on oath this is correct. You go back and ask the +> > question and come back. +> > The campaign finance data was incredibly dirty. The law is not +> > clear on some practices and county employees interpret it differently, +> > it was a lot of phone calls to the county. How are you looking at +> > this. And the candidates, how do you interpret this. And making +> > notes saying this candidate filed the late contribution reports this +> > way and another this way. When we released the data, we normalized it +> > so you know our process for it. +> > I didn't put any up because it took a little listening to what +> > other people were saying to contextualize that. Now I want to move +> > that one over there. And poisoning the well with good intentions and +> > building off what you're saying. How do I trust these rows of data +> > and I think that building like the bullet list, you can end up with a +> > due diligence area. What is the best spread sheet you can have. A +> > passive pipeline. 311 calls get dumped in there, nobody touches it. +> > I have to truth. The last session I was in we were talking about how +> > that led to a completely bizarre story about the greatest +> > concentration of graffiti being in a nice neighborhood. +> > They publish it and it's like you didn't normalize based on how +> > many calls per neighborhood. There are assumptions you're putting in +> > there. You might be making someone look stupid who is working to open +> > data for everybody. I think that is a kind of ethical quandary +> > especially if we're talking about the relationships between the +> > government, open data, and journalists because they all have cross +> > purposes. But working towards somewhat similar goals but different +> > paths? +> > I was speaking to his point about the two-way thing. I'm from +> > New York and I'm working with some of the things that the city has +> > done recently about opening up the building data. Now, like you said, +> > it was all about open data open data. People want this and that. +> > People are working towards just opening that data. But the part which +> > is now in conversation is about the New York City Department -- open +> > street map is much more current than their data sometimes. It's a +> > question of like if there's a new construction happening, like one of +> > us will find it before the city. It gets reported to the city. The +> > permits are still going through but the construction is starting. All +> > that kind of stuff. This whole process, the city to have someone go +> > out there, report it, update the data, that kind of stuff. The +> > conversation around, okay we give you all these things, you put it in +> > there. How can you feed it back to us. So the loop of like if +> > there's a -- so then it speeds up their process. Something new +> > happened. They're going to send someone immediately out there. If +> > it's incorrect they stop it. Like address changes and all those + +things. That happens much faster than the city can do it. +And another thing is like recycling for example. In the city, +people are -- on a neighborhood basis. Somethings are happening. If +you go to the city's website to get that data, all the current stuff +isn't in there. How to kind of converge the two so they're informing +each other. There are other sources that are more current than the +government. So how to converge these two if someone wants a set of +data it can be as accurate as possible? + +> > Interesting and raises that question of should we be feeding +> > accurate data directly back to the city. I think I would struggle +> > with that. +> > As long as it's like a two-way exchange. I'm not sure about +> > the social security numbers and license plate information, if that +> > should be exposed and who handles that. That's a different thing all +> > together. But if it's a loop and it's open, like the government is +> > pulling from the same things, and verifying the correct things. +> > One of the quandaries I can see being raised is if you're +> > feeding information back and political decisions are made off that. +> > How do you -- now you've become part of that process. So how do you +> > be transparent about your role and what if you did it wrong. And now +> > you're the one that -- now you're reporting on yourself. The city +> > counsel is making this horrible decision and they did it based on your +> > bad work. +> > Going back to that, getting involved with the government, +> > just -- there was concern about should you advise them on how to +> > release data. Just something like there are a lot of city agencies +> > and in a city as big as this, they don't talk to each other. They +> > have data that collectively would be more than the sum of its parts. +> > They build these things in Silos. One ID number here doesn't match +> > anything here and if those two talk to each other the city's +> > efficiency would go up. +> > One of the things that I see not being a problem at all is for me +> > to say, can you use one geo code structure for everything. Can you +> > guys use one method for tracking, you know, whatever it may be, roads +> > or city boundaries so we don't, you know, we don't have these data +> > things that don't connect. +> > I have my reasons for wanting the end result but for the city it +> > helps too? +> > I think that one thing is also, in our own city I hear a lot +> > of my community and I would include with us the open data people and +> > tech outsiders wanted to love their city making weird assumptions that +> > I think are unfair. I think we can attribute maliciousness or +> > stupidity when it's a giant old system built in pieces by a million +> > people over time. And have a respect for that inefficient balance. +> > Sometimes if you shout loud enough, this is really important and you +> > have to do it, they're going to be rebels. Now we're dealing with, oh +> > gosh, any Chicago peeps? We swished our transit payment system to +> > this awful thing. Someone is like it should be this way and it's +> > going to be this wristband thing and it wasn't that great. +> > I have a police detective friend and they were switching to, they + +wanted more transparency in cops hours. These cops with bad. They're +not working the hours they're charging for. They started buying this +time card system and it was going to just throw awful wrenches in +everything. It was going to require precise, really precise note +taking on lunch breaks. And like okay, who cares? Well, if I like +don't get -- if I didn't have my supervisor approve my lunch break +change in the system, then it couldn't go in. We always have to be +flexible. Everybody is doing that. If you have this many cops and +this many supervisors we need to hire three more supervisors to +approve lunch breaks and if we don't hire them. I can say I was +taking a statement and at lunch at the same time. +So like we don't have the whole picture and I think that +humility. This might not be the answer but this is what this looks +like or would this be asking questions other than yelling should be a +priority? + +> > Should we be demanding, we as a community, certain kinds of +> > data, because hey, it would be cool to have that data but there are +> > consequences of collecting that data. +> > I think it's your ratio of listening versus shouting and +> > cultivating a healthy balance. +> > That is a lead in to the next question. There are going to be +> > open data projects. It's a new thing and you have new people coming +> > in that are going to go wrong. We've all worked with crime data and +> > how messy it is. And the differences if you're scraping something and +> > saying there is a lot of a particular crime in a neighborhood but it's +> > not coded correctly and whatnot. +> > We want to get thoughts on what do we do about a project that +> > seems to be going wrong. Or the brigade publishes crime data and we +> > know it's flawed but it's getting a lot of attention in the community +> > because it gets people sort of looking at that data and drawing +> > conclusions from it. What do we do? Should we be diving in to help +> > them fix that. Critically reporting on the pieces that they're +> > putting out there? We want to take everybody's pros and cons to +> > either of those strategies. +> > I'm going to give you a few minutes to think through that. +> > I like the little illustration. This is cool, too. Right on +> > the line there. +> > You put up a bunch of cards. Do you want to go through your +> > thoughts? +> > So for a con, I think about maybe there is some criterion for +> > when it's necessary. What is the consequence of this? Is it like, +> > oh, I know this and you don't? Or is it, our government should not +> > make a decision based on this because I something I see and you don't. +> > I think that it feels like this is new and fragile. Hearing like +> > you're going to do it wrong will scare a lot of people out of trying +> > from all sides. +> > So in general, like, how can we help each other until maybe we +> > mature and then we can go at each other's throats when it's a fair +> > game. +> > And then the sailboat, thinking about people's time and doing + +something in an efficient way that you can learn about whatnot to do +and you can tell on yourself and do it in a spirit. I can say like +it's a lot easier to say you did that wrong if you're like here look +at this page where I really screwed up and what I had to do. And +then, yeah, so the boat is for like the rising tide. I don't remember +the stupid adage. Raises all the boats. If stuff is hard and there +are a lot of got yeas, nobody is going to think of all of them. We +have to make it okay to have an addendum to this story. New +corrections. + +> > The threshold for intervention. Is that yours as well? +> > Yes. I started with that, just like thinking about is this +> > important to act on? +> > Would that be even going maybe to a hack -- or a weekly meet +> > up and sitting down and spending time. +> > I think I was thinking what are the consequences of this +> > mistake? Is this worth my time and publicly shaming someone? +> > Right. In Philly there is a part of code for Philly and they +> > have a weekly hack session and there are 25 to 30 people there a week +> > working on things and it's a good opportunity to show up and not try +> > to be expert-ish but sit down. A lot of these things are focused on +> > building something and not spending time fixing data because it's not +> > as fun to do that. Well, some people think it's fun. +> > Someone has critical reporting. +> > That's me. On the side of reporting on projects that are +> > misusing data. There are two prongs of it. Right. One going back to +> > the organization, next time you do this you can do this a little bit +> > better in a sort of thanks for the data, this was a good attempt +> > phrasing. And the other is like educating the public about stuff. +> > The project came to me like any of the mug shot websites. Yes, you +> > want to see this but does it help you. You know this is available but +> > what does it serve as a public good to create something that is +> > ethically riff just because we have the data for it. People reporting +> > on open data projects and whether or not they were used well or +> > whatever is more the fact that it's out there and people can read it +> > and address their questions that they want to see their government +> > reporting about or their groups reporting about. +> > Right. And then Jeremy, conflict of interest. It is news but +> > it could endangerer our ability to report news, question mark. +> > Maybe the solution is since we understand the conflict here, +> > is to try to report on it in a way that doesn't look at how awful this +> > is or how much better, it doesn't work great this time but it could be +> > better, that kind of angle. +> > I guess I see what physically going to these groups and being +> > like hey, what do you think about this? And working through the +> > people there. I mean so many of these things like the New York City +> > taxi thing got a million hits. But there's so many that don't get any +> > traffic at all. Spending time like ... I think you want to get as +> > close back to the root of the problem. So go and fix it in the fourth +> > release but you have no idea if it's going to be popular. Maybe you +> > write a story about the taxi identification but it doesn't get as much + +traffic. I don't know ... So ... + +> > I think there's also the we're smart but we aren't necessarily +> > the expert. Say someone did something and you're like, whoa, they +> > didn't think about this or they didn't write about this caveat. Maybe +> > they did think about that stuff. Even if you're going to report, you +> > still have to talk to them and see what they did and why they did it. +> > That's true. +> > I was going to say if there -- Tom, if you want to comment and +> > if anyone has questions that you're burning with for the group, let's +> > end the remaining time and talk about that. +> > I was going to say the nice thing in a lot of places outside +> > New York, these communities are pretty small and rarely does anything +> > come up that is a big surprise. There are opportunities for open +> > source projects for something coming down. You can file a HIB issue +> > and say I've worked with this crime data, be aware of this or have you +> > thought about that. I think it's fair to raise those questions while +> > something is in development. And like wise if you're going to report +> > on them, it's not a surprise to those people. They're going to know +> > that you're watching and you're going to go to them. I don't think +> > anybody wants to feel like they've been mistreated but if you write +> > the story and you're forthcoming with them, okay, here are issues that +> > came up, let's talk about it. I think it's fair to work both sides. +> > I don't think you need to be a core contributor but if you have +> > reporting and expertise on them, you should ... +> > How do you -- the historical reporting. Copying a dataset and +> > you're responsible for what comes out of the dataset. How do you keep +> > up with the data as it moves from story to story using one story for +> > another. How does that echo down the pipeline? It becomes +> > de-normalized and nobody is trying to track this story which is +> > related to this story that reports on this story tracks back to this +> > open data source. +> > That is something that I'm working on in Pittsburgh. It's +> > something we're looking to build. I'm collecting all the campaign +> > finance data. Do we want to update that for every report. We get to +> > a point where we're collecting enough data and we have the historical +> > record. You can look at the funding in this campaign back in 2009 and +> > compare it to the 2013 campaign and have that record. But we don't -- +> > we're still mutilating and talking through how do we ensure that is +> > maintained and when you up load the data that it matches the data that +> > you've already got. +> > I don't know answers but it's something that we're noodlating, at +> > least starting to think about. +> > Was that word "noodling"? +> > Noodlating. +> > I think of words all the time. +> > I think it's important to document, I got this data from this +> > source and here is the process that got me to this story. And the +> > more open you can be about that, the better it's going to be for +> > anyone who take it is story further and it's great for yourself and +> > the organization. Really starting at the source level and going each + +step of the way. + +> > Any other burning questions someone has about open data or +> > working with open data groups? +> > I'd be curious about the line between, going back to some of +> > the underlying questions, reporting on open data efforts. +> > Particularly ones that end up -- there is a lot of developers that go +> > and do their own projects. But commenting on projects you see or the +> > projects that you're working on on your own. The line between when +> > you're reporting on a project based just tech upon your tree, you have +> > personal developer problems about how a certain group provided data +> > compared to like it's building into a story and reporting. And +> > walking that line just so you aren't conflicting with your own self +> > about it later on if something turns into a full story versus all of +> > the opinions you spatted on Twitter about it. I don't know that I've +> > seen a lot of people walk that enough to say I have a good sense of +> > what that is. +> > Any thoughts. +> > It might be a total dead end question and that's fine. I was +> > just thinking about it. +> > Casey you're on the other side. You work for the government. +> > You have the whole perspective. You've done freelance, you worked for +> > the Inquirer and done other things what was it like when you worked +> > for the city and saw it from the other side? +> > I mean, yeah ... Philadelphia is such a big city that it's +> > hard to find larger groups that are aware of these things. It's +> > mostly one or two people in the department that even care. And maybe +> > they have a relationship for open data and are really excited and talk +> > to their boss. But at the time I was working for the city it was -- +> > open data wasn't that big. And a lot of the data stuff, there was +> > data out there but there wasn't the open Philly. It was too messy. +> > It wasn't a big campaign like it is now. I feel like people in this +> > city have a good idea what is going on and what it means. Not that +> > they're all sold on it. I remember requests for Pennsylvania law on +> > the other side and the lawyers being like do we have this exact thing +> > as they word it here? No, but it would take five seconds to do a +> > query but we don't have it. I don't know if that sort of initial +> > response kind of thing has changed. Just because it seems like the +> > city is getting more comfortable. Our chief data officer left because +> > he ran into department heads not wanted to release more important +> > datasets. They released bike rack locations. That is great, it's +> > easy. It's useful to some people but what about the salary data or +> > police internal affair investigations. It's at that point where we +> > have bigger and more important datasets in the city and it got to a +> > point where it's more about politics than technology. These things +> > are being built but blocked because the city doesn't want them out +> > there. +> > My time with the city, people didn't really know or care. We +> > would respond, we had better luck doing it informally at least at the +> > water department? +> > At one point we wanted to do something with water usage at the +> > parcel level. It was something about city vacancies and the thinking +> > is if there is water usage there is somebody there. But the city +> > couldn't give it to us. +> > I know I gave chunks of it to students and stuff like that. I +> > don't know, I mean it probably hasn't changed that much. I had better +> > luck doing informal requests at that point and that seems to be one +> > advantage that journalists have over mainstream media is that we then +> > can often turn to this back-door route. Which is a little unfair +> > because we're supposed to be just the public. But sometimes +> > government agencies work with the media if they feel like, you know, +> > there's something -- whatever their motive is. The average person may +> > not think to go that route or have the ability. +> > So we are at time. What we're going to do is take the notes +> > from the session, it was being transcribed and we have the notes from +> > the post its and we'll create a document and organize it so it can +> > spark conversations in the news room. So you can see where we fell +> > with pros and cons and hopefully that can help you talk through +> > working with open data groups. +> > We'll release that later. +> > Thank you so much for coming. diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_13_Data_About_Other_People.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_13_Data_About_Other_People.md index ae9e6024..f84457cb 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_13_Data_About_Other_People.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_13_Data_About_Other_People.md @@ -1,466 +1,464 @@ -This is a DRAFT TRANSCRIPT from a live session at SRCCON 2014. This transcript should be considered provisional, and if you were in attendance (or spot an obvious error) we'd love your help fixing it. More information on SRCCON is available at http://srccon.org. - -Captioning by the wonderful people of White Coat Captioning, LLC -whitecoatcaptioning.com - - -Thursday -Session 13 - Sartre was wrong - Hell is data about other people -Session Leader Derek Willis. - -> OK, so as folks are -- yeah, people will probably be trickling in and out, depending on how exciting I am, which is to say after lunch, not that exciting, so this is both a kind of a weirdly complex session that will test your patience and ability to remain in the room. So congratulations on deciding to come here in the first place. - -> So the resolution is not the greatest here. Honestly I don't think we're going to be using this a lot. But I wanted to do a couple of just introductory things. First of all, I'm Derek Willis, I work for the New York Times. Colleagues from the New York Times who showed up, your checks will be in the mail. - -> So the idea behind the session, which is data about people and dealing with data about people, is that this seems to me to be a common problem that we all kind of have, in that we all deal with or likely deal with datasets that involve individuals in one capacity or another, whether it's people who hold off office or people who are give money to run for office in the realm of politics or it could be people who have a particular license from the government, or some sort of standard that they qualified for and you have their names and other information about them. And there are lots of problems around this idea of people data, but I wanted to focus this session on, I think, two or three of them, and it is totally, like the direction of this is pretty much up to all of us, which is to say it's up to you, you can output to me at any time, about which problems we might want to tackle or look at or explore, but roughly speaking, those problems are as follows: And this is sort of degree of difficulty beginning with sort of the easiest or most solved problems at the top. - -> The first one is the parsing of names. Like a full name into name parts. There are lots of different libraries and tool kits that do this in one form or another, but it's still something enough, it's still enough of an announce for people that there are multiple, the fact that there are multiple tool kits that this do sort of testifies to the fact that like this is still kind of a problem that people feel compelled to tackle. In one, you know, they may have edge cases that are unique enough that force them to start writing code or they may feel that whatever exists isn't narrow enough or isn't in their language or something like that, so I think that there is still room for solutions of one kind or another, and I'd like for us to sort of engage in part brainstorming of what solutions, what that might look like, whether or not that's buildable and whether or not we could build, if there's anything we could contribute in the next couple of hours. Now, that's ambitious but that's one part of it and I think that's sort of the easiest part of it because there is a lot of prior art on name parsing that exists. - -> The second problem is more of a standardization problem. In other words, is this person the same as this other person? And that problem exists when you have a lot of individuals in a dataset, and whether that's again, like whether it's permit holders. I encounter this a lot in campaign finance data, and there are again solutions to this problem, but many of them are pretty messy solutions, like the solutions that exist kind of range from at one end of the spectrum, from doing semi-manual standardization -- in other words, fixing things and then keeping a record of the stuff that you fix and then applying those fixes to new data as it comes in and hoping that it picks up most of those and then fixing the rest, to all the way up to machine learning, sort of like trying to train a dataset to identify people who are similar or the same person based on a certain set of characteristics, and there are some tool kits for that. There probably are people who are a lot smarter than me who have even better tool kits for that that we don't know about, that maybe you know about, that we should be using as journalists in order to do this. - -> The third problem is really not much of a coding problem but it's more of sort of a community problem, which is why I kind of pitched this for SRCCON, which is that each of us has to do this at some level, probably, or probably will have to do this if you haven't already. Are we reinventing the wheel too much? Are we not actually building on what each of us or all of us together are doing? And should there be something that does that? - -> Like for example, should there be a name reconciliation service for political donors? that you can essentially you know, in one scenario say you get a filing with a list of donors in it and you sort of post it to this service and it tries to give you back standardization and/or IDs that correspond to who it's been able to identify those people as. - -> **Sorry, do you mean like a personal database, so that everything would be in the system?** - -> Yeah, or a system that is based upon maybe it calls out to other services, maybe it's an aggregator of other collections of data that have APIs and other way that is they can -- yeah, if it is a persistent storage you run into the issue well, that's a pretty big storage at some point, right? But on the other hand like, storage is not really the problem. Like you know that's not even that expensive of a problem, at least compared to a couple years ago. - -> I think the problem is, is that like in my particular domain of politics, like I can't really tell you with a real high degree of accuracy, like how much money a certain person has given to state or federal races, like that's ridiculous. Like, that's a terrible problem. - -> Like, that's not something that we should really be proud of. We should be able to fix this. Because if you look at various sites in campaign finance, like the folks at center for responsible politics will say that some person have given this much money and other places might say it's this much money and another place might say no, it's a third number and they might be somewhat close, but based on the standardized data or what data they include or the policy of their parsing and standardization practices, you're liable to end up with multiple figures, which seems again, like imprecision is one of those things that bugs me, that we really can't say how much money a certain person has given. We can get close. I hate having to write at least in front of every campaign finance number I ever cite. I mean can we do better than that? - -> So like that's -- those are sort of the universe of problems, and again, maybe we can all we can do on the second and the third is to come up with an outline of like what we would like to see. Or what might be possible. Because I know that from my -- you know from my vantage point I've been banging my head against the wall on this for years and obviously I haven't come up with it on my own and as I age that's probably going to be even less likely. I think that is something that we can kind of bring some muscle, some brains to bear in a larger scale that might actually get something moving forward in this. - -> So what I'd like to do is there's GitHub repo under my account, and then other hyphened people, and then, assuming that the ethernet is, working here, and maybe it isn't ... There's a couple things that I've done -- come on, CSS. There we go. There's a couple things that I've done in sort of preparation for this. And I invite -- and what I want to do is I want to sort of spend some time discussing and you know, banging things around, but I'd also like for us to spend some time kind of looking at some of the existing tools, pulling out what we think we like, conceptually, like you don't have to be like I really like this line of code because it's elegant, because then we'll just have the Ruby and the Python people fighting each other all day. So what we're looking for is utility, rather than, you know, elegance in code. But and also like the kinds of things that you want to see or these particular tasks, parsing standardization, what would lend themselves, the best tools to accomplish those, and then what's missing, and I think like it would be great if in a couple of hours we could create a system or even a blueprint with coming up with saying hey, we're going to have the ultimate name-parsing campaign. - -> I'm selfishly thinking of even the civic universe, of like public data that's like people, whether it's politics or permit holders or things like that. Like the smaller the universe the less the problem really this is. For instance the campaign donors, the number of people who give campaign donations is blissfully small, compared to the population as a whole and it's largely a lot of the same people. - -> So at any point in this process, if people have, you know, questions ideas, whatever, you should feel free to shout them out and we'll kick things around. I'd like to sort of start off by having people taking a few minutes, look at some of these tools, to the extent that we can bring them up on your laptops and even not like I said the code, but the description of what they do, and maybe we can compile a list of like the stuff that name parsers should do really well and then the stuff that, you know, should be sort of optional. - -> Does that make sense? - -> So on this list, there's the -- I separated them into kinds of different kinds of categories. One of them is Swiss army knives, which I think are tools that do a wide range of stuff with names. And I think it's fine to look at those for lots of things, but I also -- there's also a lot more, and again, this is -- this list of parsing libraries is just simply for me like doing a search on GitHub, right? I know there's more out there. I know there's probably even better academic-level ones that exist out there, but even doing a search for name parsers gives you 12 or 15 different libraries, and so maybe this problem is solved in the sense that like maybe between these, like, or there's one in here that's clearly superior or does more than anybody else's, but I kind of feel like we should know that. - -> Like, we should be able to come to some sort of consensus on hey, these are the things that a name parser should do for our purposes, and of those things, there's one, two, three or four of these that are closest to fitting the bill. And maybe it's something that you know we can agree to contribute on or you know, import into your own favorite language or whatever but I shy we should have an easy answer the next time someone in a listserv or a chat room says, "What do I use to parse names?" you should be able to tell them this is what you use. - -> Like I said, I'd like to check out some of the features of these, the descriptions of these, and maybe we can draw a list. In fact, maybe I can just raise the thing and we can start writing down a list of things of sort of key parts of so why don't we take about five minutes or so and kind of look through, have a list in your mind, maybe type it up a little bit on your laptop, whatever. Talk amongst yourselves about what would make the elements of a good name parser, what should it do? What kinds of situations should it handle? Should it be like in my mind one of those might be like it should deal with -- try to deal with international names in a sane way, because we don't get to have just the John Smiths anymore. And that's both a good thing and something we can do about it. - -> **Are we just talking about parsing a name where we know the start and the finish or is this sort of distracters?** - -> Yeah, if you think of it like as a, you know, John W. Smith III, like essentially being able to have something that segments those into the logical places. - -> **We don't have to find that in a paragraph?** - -> No, I mean ideally, talking about a separate but related problem, but ideally we're dealing with data here that is one row that has a name field of some kind. Because most most civic-related data that has a name in this format or this format, you know, or in some cases, the really smart and advanced ones have them broken up into fields, which is nice. But I don't know if people have run into this with name fields that are segmented, is like there are times when you have a first name field that has a first and a middle name or a last and a middle name field that has a last name and a suffix in it, and that's fine, but it's not fine. The expectation is it's a last name field and it should have simply a last name. So there are all kinds of issues with that. So let's take a couple of minutes. Look around, see what we think. Jeff, I'm going to come haunt you: - -> OK. The other thing I want to do is you're going to start to fall asleep, and people are, so like if you feel like there's something that should be up there, like what it should do, get up and write on the board. - -> **You want us to make a list there of things that we want to do.** - -> Yeah, because one, my handwriting is terrible, and two, getting up will get the blood circulating and hopefully prevent you from falling asleep. Not guaranteed, but there's always the hope. -[group activity] - -> All right, so let's see what we've got so far. - -> Oh, yeah, this is good. Honorifics, so I'm going to * show my cultural Imperialism. What's a nonwestern example of a honorific? - -> Imam. -> Supreme leader. -> Yes. -[laughter] - -> Don't worry, actually, that will be adopted by the United States very soon. - -> Oh, yes, this is a fun one, the reversal of names. Which in some cases can be really, really insidious, right, because it can be hard to tell. Yeah, that's going to be a fun one to solve. But I mean there are ways to sort of, like depending on what other information is available, there's probably ways that we could tackle that, right? - -> Like if there were address information, it would be compared to yeah, this looks like it should be reversed. - -> Or even just a library -- I ran into that not too long ago, and what we ended up doing is going back with like it was politicians' names and the same thing as below it, politicians names, we just had to throw a whole bunch much data against it and say oh, there's M.P. Davis and Davis P. William, and the chances of those not being the same people are just like so marginal. - -> Yeah, and I feel like there's also mentioned a probability of accuracy scores or confidence numbers or however we want to call it. I feel like this is really, you know, the crux, probably the crux of the matter in a lot of respects for a lot of these questions, because years ago, when I started out doing standardization and things, it was literally all done in sequel and if it matches, then boom it matches and then you're left with thousands and thousands of unmatched ones that are just hell, right and so I do feel like this is some -- there's definitely some role for probability for machine learning for essentially trying to work through issues and to recommend like I don't know for sure but I think maybe this is the best one, so the linking family members, like that has lots and lots of uses obviously for Civics or you know for political data in particular. And I think is a really valuable thing. That tends to be like -- but you tend to have to be like close to the ground. Like I couldn't do it for Maine in the same way that you could do. Like I don't know who these people are, like it looks like the same-ish. There's a great IRE training set that involves a Haslam family, a guy who's a governor in Tennessee. In Tennessee, it's a fairly famous name before he was governor, Haslam, except in a tenth of the records it's an e with instead of an a. And it's like what do you do with that? - -> Again applying the address, the nature of how -- whether it lines up with other information in terms of dates of contributions of in other people and similarities. Maybe like you get into soundex comparisons of like yeah, they're pretty close, whatever. - -> Ah, the nicknames embedded in the full name. Terminator, really? Is that self-selected? Or. - -> No, I'm just curious, I mean if you earned it, that's even more impressive, right? Right? So so what do we want to do with nicknames? - -> Like, where do they go? Is it just a nickname field or if it's somebody if they're known by that, do you want to -- - -> Bill Clinton versus William Clinton. - -> Well, yes, or I mean the governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal. Well, Bobby is not his first name, I think it's Pausch -- anybody know? Anyway, it's not Bob, but everybody knows him as Bobby, you're likely to refer to him in publication, online or whatever as Bobby Jindal. So do we promote nicknames to, you know, first-name status? Is like how do we? What do people think? Is it really, like if there is a nickname, do we only use it like do we only fill in the nickname field essentially when there's nickname that that person is known by -- - -> I guess the only way I can think of to handle it would be basically a multi-first name field so you're Bill or William or Billy. - -> a multi-first-name field ... ... huh. - -> I mean it does seem important to preserve, because that's how your readers are going to, you know, relate to that name. - -> Right. Talk -- the multi-first-name field, go with that a little bit. - -> Well, sometimes you know sometimes I'm Will and sometimes I'm William. I can imagine people trying to clean my thing up and so generally the last name is pretty static, and it's all the variations of how that person has been referred to. Just like mostly so you can tie it back so you probably want to have that Christian given name as a specific field, but a nickname is in a singular -- I mean it could be a nickname field but it's not a singular field. You don't just generally go by one single name. - -> So is that something like if we're looking at this structurally, is that something where it could be like connected but slightly removed? Like in other words not as part of like a -- - -> Yeah. - -> Like an also known as? I don't know. - -> I mean you could use punctuation marks potentially, like some sort of way of combining stuff in a way that means something, but we'll have to wait 'til we get to the last thing on the list before we talk more about that. - -> Right, right,. - -> So I just tweeted out a link. I think ancestry.com is doing some work on this, and they're in tech folks have a blog, so I just sent out the link where they talk about how they're handling this very problem and they're using alternate names and prioritizing them, so there's a -- I believe -- I've read a couple of them so I'm trying to remember if this is the same thing, but they have a way of like asking it questions and then if it meets all these criteria, they kind rule out the impossible I think is perhaps how they're working backwards to come up with this is an alternative name that is the name person. - -> There's tons of like public -- like Intelious is one we use a lot. They charge you just buttloads for it, but this is what they do. They come up with all your addresses and all your phone numbers and all of your also known as. - -> Although I would point out that the Obama campaign has since 2008 believed I live in Woodridge, Virginia, where I've never lived because when I pointed it out to some people in the campaign, they didn't believe me. They're like, Are you sure you've never lived there? I'm like, I'm pretty sure, no, no, no, our scores are pretty accurate, I'm like, I'm pretty sure I've never lived there. - -> But that would be another -- I mean there's like public records, background checks, those kinds this things. - -> Those are incredibly flat, though, when you start pulling those up. - -> I think one sort of thing to rule them all, yeah, I think it would be useful. I suspect, even for the large when we talk about large datasets, I mean for campaign finance, it's several million people or several million donation, really by like maybe a million and you know, million and a half people, like I feel like it's somewhat more solvable. At least and maybe I'm just being selfish and thinking narrowly but I think it's maybe not as grave as -- like put it this way: Like I don't -- I can't remember -- I can't think of anything in the Times where we would spend money on a commercial service to do that for us and if we're not going to do it. - -> I just wonder how they do it. I also wonder if name parsing would be more important than address parsing. - -> That's the next session. - -> [laughter] - -> No, I would have to buy beer for everybody to have an address parsing session, right? That was like my backup if this was rejected. We're going to double down. But yeah, I mean like the address part is I think -- like my colleague Chase Davis at the Times has a toolkit that tries to standardize PEF donors. But his done go down to the street address level. It's basically city, state, and zip and it's good, but not perfect. So I think there's definitely a role for that. - -> So confidence numbers for gender? Some of the libraries, I think, on the list, actually do give, if you scroll down the list of the libraries, the one that do gender evaluation, whatever. Some of them do actually give like some kind of score, whether it's a percentage or maybe it's a text term or you know, I'm likely, very likely, not so likely, whatever for this, but I also -- this is also kind of a -- an issue in many ways. I was saying -- I was saying to some folks, we worked at the Times on a story last year about political appointees and trying to figure out the percentage of female appointees, and we had the names and so then we ran them through one of the brilliantly named library here called Sex Machine. Which is just paternal, terrible -- it's basically like the comical Ruby library naming convention, and I mean it's bad as itself, but it's worse, because they really don't mention James Brown in it. But we ran it through that and it nailed movement of the Anglicized names really well. You know, with the exceptions of your Pats, and it just totally merped on every nonAnglicized name. No idea. And we have data with names in it, some of which comes with gender, like Jeff, what you were talking about? - -> The NPI database, the National Provider Identifier, which every doctor in the United States gets a you unique identifier and you can download the whole thing. So that's 800,000 names, with gender, with, you know, like a titles on the back, so like you know, doctors have all sorts of crazy fucking titles. They like go to a conference and get a new title which I'm going to institute. - -> We're going to actually be handing out titles. - -> We all get the name parsing doctorate after this. But anyway, like that could be -- that all of a sudden you start to get into you can -- and it's all cut out and fielded because the programmer who made the MPI form actually like split it apart and didn't allow freeform text and it's important to have your name because you get paid. Right, is that how you get paid if you misspell your name or whatever your checks from Medicare aren't going to go through and all of a sudden you don't have a practice, so you know, datasets like that if we're going to go to the training and the positional approach. I think it would help with the positional approach, because you know, we're talking like maximum entropy or something like that, if that was Dr. W John Smith or Ph.D. at the end or something like that. And also, you know, doctors are a pretty diverse bunch, so. - -> Yeah, I think if you know, maybe not the least we could do, but one thing I think we could do as people who work with data is to maybe agree on sort of a or maybe several gender detection libraries in whatever language it is, and most of them come with datasets and if we could be like look, let's make these datasets better by adding in these dataset. Or heck, you know, I don't love the idea of taking an existing one and adding in new training data. Worst case scenario we could actually take their training data and add our training data and make a better library. I feel like there's room for work in that that we could actually make a good contribution. - -> I just grabbed the voter registration database in Allegheny County. - -> I know a lot of voter registration data does contain gender, as well, and so that's like a good example. - -> and the same with addresses, because I know one of the things we're looking at doing with the campaign finance data is to run it against the voter registration database to match the mailing address to see if there's actually a match. - -> Usually people don't register at their place of work or their church or whatever. Right. - -> So, all right, what else? Jenny 8 Lee, right. And not that we would necessarily deal with this in federal campaign contribution data but our foreign desk is a lot of people with one name. Where do we put the name. It sounds like a stupid question, but like where do we put the name in the data? - -> I mean towards that end, is there a case for like purpose-built parsers as libraries? - -> Purpose-built parsers? - -> So like if you know the data, if you know the intended use of the parser, like none of this stuff in this list is categorized by use. There's like 17 parsers, and you know, like the thing that Chase has for campaign finance data, especially with the machine learning stuff, is there a chance that you know if we're trying to accommodate for things like Jenny 8 Lee for instance, that we could end up overtraining that actually weaken the model that we have for a certain set of data, whereby hey if you know you're mostly you know, names that are are not using online characters or something like that, that you should be using a different parser? - -> Yeah, that's actually, I mean -- I think that makes a certain amount of sense in some respects, because one parser that claims to do everything. - -> Or like if you had access to the -- that that might change the logic for how your parser works in a way that it would actually be fundamentally different if there was no address field. - -> Right, so if you had some data and I'm going to like I could parse it try to parse it simply on the names and I could parse it simply, but then I could also, it could be an option or you have another separate parsing to do names and addresses together. - -> Right or if I knew I had to identify names at academic \]conference or something like that, the dataset that I would use to produce a model would be different in a way that might not apply to, you know, if I knew I needed the, you know, passenger manifest for like a front division or something like that. - -> Right, right, yeah, I think -- I can see the value of that. Because I mean a lot of what we end up doing is domain-specific, you know? I think if you were, yeah, I mean if you were looking through -- yeah, if you had, you know, -- if you were doing something that had physician names, but they were not standardized or you wanted to match they up, ideally I would match they up against the MPI or some other source like that. - -> Yeah. Yeah, I can see the case for that. - -> I mean some of it probably does exist already. It seems like one service we could provide is just creating a directory. You know, you already started with these links and names of existing libraries. A little bit of description on you know strengths and weaknesses, what it does, what it doesn't have, I think would be enormously helpful. Because we always are starting from scratch, you know. - -> Yea, that would be interesting to know even automatically from data set, based on the composition of this dataset, what kind of tool should we be looking for, something like that. Maybe there's even like a service that provides that you know? - -> Like you feed it in, it tells you where you want to go. - -> Although it's got to parse to be able to tell you. - -> Maybe, maybe not. - -> There's some meta data you could -- - -> I don't know if any parsers do this, but if you're doing something like campaign finance or even a lot of other circumstances you could even actually have a their profession, so it would be interesting in campaign finance to go through OK, let's find everyone who's a doctor and match it up it the MPI. - -> Yeah, well, I mean if they don't take Medicare, they wouldn't be in there, but all doctors take Medicare. - -> So you could look at any of the license database, so if you built something that I mean you got all that license information in advance and updated it, this might be more of a local solution, because then you match up any of your campaign doper database, right, you could run a check any against any of the professional licensing data because they have to update those. - -> So it's like parsing and standardizing by piece. Yeah, I had not given that one thought at all. So good. We're making progress. - -> Well, there's one thing that could muddle things, and that's -- I mean a doctor could be an actual physician of some kind, but he could also be a Doctor of Philosophy. - -> Like my dad, yeah. OK. But I want to write this sort of down, sort of like parsing -- OK domain. Like domains of doctors, licenses,. - -> Public employees,. - -> Public employees, might also be interesting to use that stuff to tell us when a potential like joining up multiple differently spelled names is more suspicious or people would be skeptical of it, by seeing if similar names in that location on the voter rolls, so if I know that there are three Derek Willis in Montgomery County and the fact that I'm joining a Derek Willis and a Derek Q. Willis means I've really got to be careful of that. If there's only one in the county, it's more likely. - -> I was thinking of this specifically with the nicknames, because the one where we really run into trouble is this person goes by John, but this person's actually name is John. So this person's name is Jonathan and this person is actually John. - -> All right, so who wrote that we need another standard? OK,. - -> I mean it's not going to happen. - -> I mean we should all throw things now. - -> But it does just kind of seem like I mean this is madness, you know, the fact that we're having to do this is total madness, and like you know, I just wonder if anybody is work everything on kind of trying to nip it in the bud, you know, you're working on tons of different agencies, you know, the reporting schedules of these things are all over the place, but I'm curious to know, you know, what is the history of trying to synchronize this problem. - -> I'm sure the Social Security Administration has some tools up its sleeve, but we don't have a hope in hell of getting access to that. - -> Well, you say that, but yeah, we don't have access to, but I don't know, maybe they've produced some -- like maybe there are reports or studies or other publications that they produce or like maybe academics have studied this and said this is how they do it and it works pretty well, or not. Or it needs this, you know. I do feel like, you know, while there are, I think, you know, I think we've identified some places where it would be fairly, you know, where we could make obvious contributions to sort of existing parsers, or some existing parsers? I think some of the parsers that I linked to have the capability of dealing with honorifics, and you know, suffixes and reverse names and some of these other fairly common use case, I do think that like the places where we could probably make the most immediate impact would be on things like bringing to bear like specific domains, data that we already have that this name involved, improving the training datasets for things like gender, for nonwestern names. I feel like -- I feel like those are the kinds of things that we could get people to get into, on a practical level, but I do think like it's worth having a discussion of like what are we doing here, and how are we -- because the first, you know, what I described as sort of the low-hanging fruit is in a sense but it also is basically committing or, you know, like assuming that people are going to keep doing this, right? Like I'm going to -- I'm going to grab and keep updating things and I'm going to keep contributing back to these, you know, improving these datasets or I'm going to keep standardizing in this domain. - -> and people will always continue doing things weirdly in new ways. - -> and you have this thing where it becomes oh, we have a phenomenal set of Illinois politician names that's just been totally scrubbed clean and standardized for like 30 years and a that's great, except I don't live in Illinois. - -> and I don't care. And it's not useful to me, so like we end up with either like we have silos of people doing, you know, siloed data, and it field to me like it's the web, we should have some way of either being able to wrangle that into common resources, or to be able to, you know, sort of tie them together somehow, whether it's like a common sort of standard identifying or parsing engine or service or something like that. - -> I mean I guess I was even talking about going one step back from that. Like putting pressure on agencies themselves, on the reporting agencies, to adopt a common standard, you know, like the way that these forms work, the way that they are putting this data out into the world is where the problem starts in many ways because there's no consistency, so you know, that's why I say it's not going to happen because you have to get a lot of bureaucracy types on board across so many municipalities. - -> and people keep naming their kids really weird things, like we have to put a stop to that now. - -> Yeah, but I mean you know we'll always just be cleaning up the mess. - -> Well, I mean this is the life we chose, right? - -> So I don't know -- this may be completely a crazy idea, but so I'm doing a lot of work in Allegheny County, so I -- - -> For everybody else, Allegheny County is Pittsburgh, greatest city on the planet. - -> So I am cleaning these names, and often these are people I am familiar with, I know the names so I can kind of authoritatively say that this is X and X. If there was sort of like a format where we could share our naming data, like as a news organization, news organization the journalist puts their stamp on it and says I verified that this is write and then an AA service in a sort of way where we all contributed and using that to train if you're getting a federal reported and I verified it down at my level, you can have confidence that the name was right because I was the source of it. - -> Ooh, so actual distributed work that's valuable to lots of. Like I like this. We're overpromising, sure, but no, no, I like this. Because I'm using the campaign database to build data at the city and county level so I'm going to get the licensing information, I'm going to get the other data and but those people are also going to be involved at the state level and federal level and so that might be of value if it was contributed to a larger -- - -> Right, so that requires two things, right? You need to track the provenance and you also need some sort of a way to actually like. - -> Get that into -- - -> Well, not just that, but actually score how likely this is to be right or wrong. - -> Yeah, yeah, but I think the point is I'm much more likely to be oh, well, clearly you know this -- the assumption is you know this better than I do, that local area and you know, better than I do, so like the difference between, I suppose, a score of like confidence that some, you know, machine learning or whatever algorithm spit something out for me based on a geographic set that I don't have any particular expertise in and something like that that is further guided and/or overseen by someone who does, I think there is a -- you know, a little bit of a boost there. - -> I mean we have an advantage, too, which is you know, as we said when we first got started here, it is actually not a huge universe of people who contribute. - -> It's -- I mean it's a lot of data that I'm working with, but it's all manual at this point. I'm literally going into my spreadsheet, I know that Charles Hamill, there's a second and a third and they all contribute and I know where they are and I know where they live and I'm going OK, this Charles Hamill and this Charles Hamill, because they're all in the news. - -> I feel like we should really have something that prevents, that makes it possible for Amy not to have to do this manually. I think wouldn't that be kind of nice? Yeah? - -> It sounds like you should be able to do that once, right, and put it somewhere and then have other people be able to benefit from that. - -> So I have the campaign donors from the mayoral election and now when I'm uploading the ones for city council, I can match that. - -> So that does bring us back to standards, if we're going to have something or if we're just spit bawling here, we're going to have something that is, you know, enables people to put stuff in at one level and have it be used by people at another level, then we need like, OK, this is the kind of information, you know, this is the minimum set of information, you get sort of some optional stuff to it, and then, you know, other people know if you're going to contribute to this, you have to have at least this, and maybe this extra, as well. So I mean I think -- I think we kind of can figure out in our heads what that might be -- what that information might be, but just so that we're not, you know that we're all sort of on the same page, I mean obviously aside from the name, which ideally is parsed, what else is the minimum set of information that would go into that? - -> City, state. - -> Would you want the full address, though? - -> I think you would want it ideally, but I don't know I suspect that in some cases you might not be able to get it in every single instance. I think you would like to include it and maybe we're talking about a fully parsed address. Ideally like street number, street number, you know, but again that's a whole another session for address parsing. But I think in terms of the minimum, city and state, and do we care about zip codes or are they just too just weird or annoying or people misspell them or old or new ones? - -> I've done stuff like this zip codes are one of the mother reliable things, because where city and states have a lot more representational flexibility, zip code if it's 5 digits, it's probably the right 5 digits. - -> OK,. - -> Strong testimony. - -> I remember seeing a city entry that was ASDF so they don't really put too much effort into it. - -> I believe it like the horror stories of address data. It might be the only thing that's worse than names, frankly, I think. - -> OK, so is that the basic set? Like the minimum? - -> I could see age which may be hard to come by. - -> Age or date of birth? - -> Date of birth. - -> I agree. I would prefer date of birth, you about it's funny that I think now voter registration data that in some places that always had date of birth, some have switched to providing age as a privacy measure. - -> So you could do if you know the date that they captured that age, you could reverse engineer that because that's what ancestry.com does, so you'll get records that says he was born about 1932, so you can have some confidence that you've got the person. - -> But in order to get that at at like the local level like you're almost, you know, at the local level, correct me if I'm wrong but probably the easiest way to get that for a larger set of people is probably voter registration, but obviously that eliminates everybody under 18 and not that we're dealing with a lot of kids anyway, in general, but it also excludes, like, in many cases like people who had been convicted of crimes but are now out of prison and you know, who could legally give money or run for office even, as unlikely as it may be. - -> Although I have seen literally children, like minor children appear in the FEC dataset. It is under certain circumstances, yes. It has to be their own money. I mean like our daughter has an allowance, so she has her own money, but. - -> and how much does she contribute on an annual basis? - -[laughter] - -> Thankfully nothing yet, so I worry, though. I do worry. So but it is actually permissible for like if you have your own money, so and again, it's like people with trust funds essentially being able to contribute. - -> Is there a limit on how much minors can give. - -> No, they can give as much so you'll see like five people from a family and it's like OK, well, that's, you know, there's kids there and maybe some of them are adult kids, but some of them are -- you can look and no, there are some minor kids in there, so OK, so yeah, I think -- I mean I'm sort of wavering on whether it's a -- I think in some cases it could be harder to get. - -> I think it would be nice to have. - -> It's very nice to have, but I suspect that it's probably a little more optional. We had other suggestions in terms of like employer or occupation or things like that, although I mean and I think like it's better to have than to not have, but I think there is also a, you know, from my experience of campaign finance data, what happens in a lot of cases is that if someone has been running for office for decades or for you know, 20 years, and they have had a regular donor during that period, they just use like whatever the previous donation record had on it, in a lot of cases so you'll see people currently who clearly -- like people in the news, people whose names everyone knows and it will have like you know, some previous job, or even better, it will be like unknown, it will have like Bill Gates, unknow? Is it really unknown? So there is a lot of variability in that sense. But I do think like it's good to have. It can be good to have in terms of specific domains or disambiguating particular members of a particular family. - -> Isn't it all about that one time when you can match it up with? I mean if you're going to go off employer, that one time you can match it up with that database that you can really trust and then you know, so here's the horizontal line to that database and here's the vertical line with all the other entries under that. - -> Right, but I feel like one of the issues for us is sort of as an industry is it that most of us, and for fairly decent legitimate reasons, don't really share the data that we really trust. You know? And I'm not saying everybody should just turn over all your stuff but I feel like there's got to be some compromise that we can make to be able to like, hey, look, there's you know, without giving away the store, we can still have something useful that other people can work off of. All right, so name, parsed name, maybe a parsed address, city, state, zip, and age and maybe employer, and/or occupation information. - -> I'm coming at this from mostly a political data domain so there's not much else information that we get in campaign finance about individuals. - -> What about like average contribution amount because people who give a little are likely to continue giving a little, you so you can kind of see and say you know, this Derek Willis gives 40 bucks every year, but this one gives $4,000, it's probably not the same guy. - -> So some kind of categorization of some kind. - -> of broken decks. -> Right. - -[laughter] - -> Same thing with like restaurant reviews, for price of restaurants, one dollar sign, four dollar signs, something like that? Are there any other licensing or voter registration databases that have information that is not in here that we might consider to be part of a nice to have set? - -> I'm sorry, I joined the session late, but I'm trying to think about a way of what combination of these attributes make a unique person. Like could with a Derek Willis from the same city, same state. - -> How do we disambiguate, yeah. Yeah. - -> What are the minimum kind of requirements? Like place of birth, I don't know does that help spell someone's name better or like pronunciation? - -> I mean I think that there's no formal way to do that absent the data managers doing it responsibly, because everything up there can legitimately change. - -> and does. - -> and does from either sloppy data handling or life events, and so I came in late, too, so I'm not exactly sure what this is driving towards, but in general working on problems of matching people between datasets, you have to basically fill in the uncertainty and make that a thing that you always have an opportunity to check yourself before you make a mistake if the uncertainty comes into play. You know, we're doing some things at the night lab with campaign financing and find out that one thing we do is mostly disregard even checking low number donors, because you know what they're just not important, right? So these methods that say reduce what you are worried about being correct is a strategy. Can you say in like two sentences where you guys are driving since I came in late. - -> We've been a little running on and off the road a little bit but a couple things, one is sort of -- we're kind of on two tracks. One is, the tools that we have for parsing and standardizing names, how can we improve them, is there room for that for you know, do they need to be, are there obvious improvements that we could make, or you know, even just I think somebody suggested can we evaluate them in terms of so people know what tools are right and good or useful and what they offer versus like, you know, so we can properly answer the question, I have to parse name fields, what should I use. So that's one sort of track. The other track is how do we stop doing the same work over and over, like both individually and collectively, and can we create, or you know, imagine some sort of either service or common repository that helps us to stop, you know, doing things repetitively and perhaps mistakenly. You know, part of one of the founding questions of the session for me was like this perennial campaign financing question which is we can never really say with any real certainty exactly how much money somebody has given because we're never really sure, and so I don't know that we can ever really perfectly solve that, but like I'd like to be able to get closer, it's just that every time that we try to answer those questions, it's usually dealing with someone who on the off chance I've ever heard of them before I'm only tangentially aware of them and now I have to become an expert of every name they've used and their employment history in like four hours right, or a day. Or can we build on stuff that maybe all of us do and maybe extract a portion of the work that all of us do, and be able to contribute it to some sort of common thing that we can all draw upon. And be like look, I'm not the expert in western Pennsylvania political donors, but someone else is and they've uploaded a data that sort of standardizes and identifies the data from that community. - -> So how do you verify like right now, you get the Allegheny County stuff, like every time you get political donations from Allegheny County, you go through them and do the exact same matching every time or how do you -- - -> So we're kind of working through how to do this in an automated fashion. Because it is very manual right now. I have taken campaign finance reports and enter them into a spreadsheet that I then go through open refine. And I go through it again OK, I know these people I'm cleaning it up that way. We want it to just keep building on itself. We're going to say campaign finance data was one of our foundational sets, we're always going to run names against that to see if we've already built up their profile and that's part of why I was really excited about this session which is the exact thing. - -> Unfortunately since we don't have it solved it's kind of a let-down for her, but you know, I feel like, yeah, you know, I feel like there are a bunch of -- several different ways we could go with this, right? So all right, any more on sort of -- any other fields that -- any other types of information that people are collecting that might be useful or is this a good. - -> I think the last thing I would put in there is if you're talk talking about campaign finance would be registered party that they are registered as or if you donate to Democrats all I don't remember life. - -> I mean there's two ways to get at that, like if some states offer it, like is a registered whatever, although that can change over time, obviously and then the states that don't offer it, you could kind of divide it based on donation history, which is again, not terribly different. All right, so we've got that. So if this is let's say, and this isn't, you know, this isn't a terribly large amount of information about a person or about people to like maintain and upload. And then there may be a lot of people, but like this is not a huge dataset. So what would the repository for this look like? Where would we keep it? You know, what would it be? Like, would it be -- I don't know, would it be files on GitHub, would it be a common database that we all upload to. - -> It might be interesting to I did. Refine API on CSE. It's already quite useful because then you can go through the data and say hey here's a person living in this state that might be a good candidate whoever you might have in your batch of data, so that might be something I'd do. - -> Hm, OK. - -> Any others? - -> I mean, do we need -- is this something that like we need someone to like set up and like pay for and run and administer, like -- - -> I kind of think maybe, because you want that confidence that what's being uploaded is coming from a good source, and so if there's some way to say -- I don't know, that some sort of membership or some sort of way to -- if you want to look at where the sources of data are coming from, it's not something that -- someone who, you know, is just working on a school project uploads a bunch much dirty names, like some sort of way to -- - -> But I feel like it's a really -- I feel like the likelihood that someone is either going to try to game the system or inadvertently upload not quality information is not -- like maybe not worth worrying about. If it's a tradeoff toward having a frictionless system, having critical mass for this to be useful, the more that we need community type people around it, the less likely that's going to be to happen. - -> I think I could see just a couple of snare Joseph, this is my paranoia, you could have people who are concerned about privacy who don't like this idea, but they could contribute false information to throw it off. And they that would be our source, and the other thing is this could end up being valuable for a lot of commercial services and so it could get co-opted. We may be willing to contribute to other journalists and journalistic efforts but I don't necessarily want to contribute to a commercial entity who's trying to collect on debts. - -> That's a really good point. - -> Plus it would be expensive to maintain that and I think the thing that would be least resistance to maintain and probably most useful is if you had that really excellent sort of the domains list. These are the domains that we have really excellent data for, and then you could throw yourself against those domains and you could parse that out sort of locally. - -> Oh, so you -- right, I mean I can see -- yeah, you can pull stuff down and run your local stuff against it, but then does the local stuff get back to, you know, -- that's -- because I feel like that's sort of what's happening now to a certain extent, to the extent it happens at all, is that we, you know we'll take a resource and use it for our specific project needs and then not put -- I mean I'm as guilty of this as anybody else. I have a lot of standardized campaign records that have not been sort of shared widely. - -> I mean maybe it's that you get back like scores on each of these names or just like you know, a status on each of these names. What you don't get is access to the full database, but most journalists are not going to be satisfied with that. - -> No you're going to have to have that transparency. That's why I'm thinking a closed database, some sort of membership thing. I think it would be a source that everyone would trust and a neutral place. - -> Is it to get to 100% or just to hit the max with it. 100% is that we have absolute confidence that every person in this dataset, we know who that person is and we could match he them up to prior and future. - -> Ooh. - -> But I mean is it so 100% is obviously too far but is it 99.99% we're shooting for or are we going tore everybody who's given over 20 bucks in their lifetime or whatever. - -> I think for journalists the goal can be find stories that are being told. So 100% is not necessary so I think a system that reduces the effort that a journalist has to spend to identified needs to follow, believes that the latitude to verify any potential I consistencies with the system is where you would go. But I think it would be impossible to sell publicly. Remember the clamor when the gunnera database were published in New York. As much as it would be nice to eliminate duplicate work. - -> Couldn't you have like a subscription thing where basically -- I know that Derek has like these cleaned up data feeds, these cleaned up methods, I subcribe to him, he has to approve my getting access to him and then we have a mutual kind of trust thing. - -> I mean that already exists, right, in commercial databases, you know that insurance companies have and whatnot, it's not that this information isn't out there already. It's that the barrier to entry is really high. - -> Right, you could have that, I think. - -> First you have a bunch of people producing strong systems of their own that say I've -- I know who's who, and I know these three different representations are the same person, and then some sort of a semiprivate synch. - -> Does GPG help at all in this scenario. - -> Jo. - -> In the sense that I think the bigger issue here is not whether we trust each other, but whether like as a public effort, like it would be -- there would be some sort of backlash against it. Judge but would it be public, though, if the only people who have access to it would be people who have keys. - -> Which would be essentially the subscription model. - -> Let's increase how people trust. - -> Look at Israel, I think the full census leaks and everybody has everybody's kind of details. - -> Yeah, but that's a small country. It'sites also a decoy thing. - -> I'm actually interested in that topic if these sort of thing has been done in other countries, I think some of the Nordic like your Social Security number is public. But whether journalists in those countries have used or tried to use those databases to solve these same sorts ever problems. - -> Here's the other thing, where are they going to get pissed off and how are they going to prove it right so the issues with things like plotting people's addresses who have gun licenses is the fact that somebody can just share a URL and everybody can go there. So I me like there are ways to thinking nefariously tamp down on possible objections to these sorts of things, right? And I think that, you know, having something like the subscription thing and anybody who's -- - -> Command line interface. - -> Yes, makes it a lot easier to say, you know, can you actual search be if you stick your name in Google is your tax return the first result. This is the problem the document cloud has people search their name and people say where did this document come from. I think this is a search problem in that regard, as opposed to whether it's successful. - -> If I know all the players who are contributing, that makes me more likely as a journalist to feel good about using that information. - -> I think that's -- - -> I guess part of the question is is it enough of a problem. - -> Like, is this enough of a pain in the ass? - -> What, the -- - -> the problem of all of us us doing this siloed work of name cleaning year after year. - -> I think it's expensive. We all have things that better journalism not necessarily journalism, but other journalism we'd all like to be doing rather than spending hundreds and hundreds of hours a year. - -> and I've been working with campaign finances and I'm fooling myself if I say, yeah, I'm an spirit in broadly geographic, I mean like I don't know who these people are. I mean like I you know, I think it's very difficult for us to pretend that like it's the both the best use of our time and that we're really that good at it on a broad base. I feel like you know, there is some precedent for developing something that helps us out broadly and maybe it's possible. - -> Maybe we could talk a little bit about just sort of how you hold onto your accumulated knowledge, like what would be a system that would allow you to basically keep track and sort of connect in new data into old data. I so I mentioned at the knight lab we're doing some stuff with campaign finance so there's a library actually Al knows about this, there's a library that some guys have made called dedupe, which is a statistical tool to try to identify basically names that look different but should be the same. And one of our -- we have a summer intern whose goal is produce something at the end for journalists a document that says here' how you use this for campaign financing. But one of the questions then is if you get new data from the next stuff, how you link that back into what you've already done, so I guess -- we'll try to break this down into smaller pieces so that no one is too big so one would be a statistical method for identifying linking names, one might be a method for cleaning names so that they match preprecisely because they've been cleaned, rather than the other way around. But the other is where do you put that. - -> One of the things that we do with campaign finance data is essentially we do have a sort of a master set of transactions that are then sort of augmented, that it's the base data that we get from the FEC, but then there are essentially standardizations or corrections or augmentations to it that make it easier, some of it is sort of a practical, like, denormalization kind of thing where I don't want to have to join tables on a 9-million-row database so I'm going to add a column and populate that. But some of it is fixing no, is this a committee mismarked or whatever and there's the stupid old way that I learned which is that you make new columns. You know, like name, clean name. Or whatever you want to call it. Like there's a -- again, that's like a -- that is a lot of, there's a certain -- there's a manual aspect that is not totally appealing. On the other hand, I can very clearly see what has been done, and what the differences are between sort of the original and the improvements or changes in augmentations. But I can also see essentially, there are probably other ways to layer that on top. - -> One thing I remember and it's really a question for the room is what tools are we using or what tools are we comfortable with. Because making some system that's going to help all your problems if you only change completely and do it this way is not going to be maybe a win. But I guess what would be the smallest possible thing that would work. - -> I don't think you warrant want the smallest thing that can possibly work. - -> You don't. - -> No, but identity is such a complex thing that basically it's mostly possibly work with a CSV with name, canonical name and done, and that sucks in so many levels that it's not funny. - -> Why? - -> First of all because names aren't -- I've done a lot of work on European lobbying data. Then you want to where you've got this original stuff so you have provenance on all this kind of stuff and then you want to have information that's time sensitive, right, so and there's a rule that green parliamentarians coming in, the females they all get married after like one year. I don't know why that is true, but it seems to be a rule, so you know that they've switched names and you can kind of therefore improve the accuracy of the guesses if you kind of know when they got married, right, so all this kind of stuff you want to catch because otherwise you just kind of produce a lot of weird overlap. - -> Here's the other thing that we do in certain -- like there's a project -- a group of us who use congressional legislative data in Washington have put on GitHub with the United States organization and there's a crosswalk that we built for every lawmaker, current lawmaker that crosswalks like 14 or 15 different ID systems for them. It's a total pain in the ass to do for everybody, but on the other hand it's useful in the sense that it hooks you up to a wide variety of other systems, so it's the official canonical ID that Congress gives each member of Congress, but it's also the ID that C-span gives each member of Congress, because they have what amounts to a crappy API of their appearance on C-span or on the floor of the House or on the floor of the Senate or whatever. And so this doesn't probably -- it's probably not the -- like as useful for donors, I mean most states don't don't assign like canonical IDs to donors. - -> Unless you're talking about PACs. - -> Unless you're talking about committees, right, and the committees they actually do that in a lot of places whether it's on a form or simply on their website they use a sequential ID or whatever ID you can pull out and say no, that's how this state or whatever authority refers to this thing. I think that the least -- like, sort of public relations problematic thing we could do is -- that's still useful is to build crosswalks where they don't, is to essentially fill in crosswalks where they don't exist or to publish like here's how you know, like if you do a project like the center for investigative reporting did from California, and here's how they're known in our system, like in the California database and here's how they're known at the national institute for money in state politics and here's how they're known in the FEC. Like already that's useful in the sense that they're the people we're probably likeliest to write about if we're writing about political donors in California, anyway, so simply if it was name, ID, ID. - -> Donors don't have identify fires in FEC, right? - -> Well, there could be that, but also in the FEC they don't, but like for instance, the National Institute of money in state politics which goes in and standardized, they generate IDs for people, and the center for responsive politics does generate IDs for individual donors, it's not obvious from their website that they do this, but they do do this, they're not always right, but I mean they're very, very good. They don't make a lot of mistakes, because they've been doing this a long time and they employed an army of interns to help them. But there is an ID. There are systems out there that would probably help a little bit. - -> So I'm kind of thinking that a combination of something that is automated and also is manual, like I could upload a dataset, compare it against something else and then manually checkmark, like I have being looked at these two names and they're the same. I could go back to ancestry.com in sort of how they're doing it is sort of an elegant way. Like you can edit the data and it goes back. So they're kind of using your knowledge to build the confidence in that, and if what we're building is, as a reporter in Allegheny County and maybe there's someone at other papers and we're all contributing and we keep checkmarking and saying this record and this record is the same person so we as a group can all feel confident in that so we're helping build that locally and then building it up in that sense. - -> the basic idea, this John ... suggested this in his class, how can you take multiple datasets, use something algorhythmic and update images when they're actually checked or whatever, right? But you can do something like that for this, where you give a governance to as to like we know this person, actually probably knows who this is or whatever or some other way that you can track linkages, but that is a sort of system where you could account for some of this in. - -> There's one other thing I didn't mention at the outset. I knew a large portion of this would steer back to campaign finance because me and there's a very common people dataset. But there's a guy at Stanford who has built a classifier for 20 years of FEC data. It's pretty good because I think it ignores suffixes, which is a bad problem in campaign finance, but like it is something that I feel like there must be other sets like that out there that various academics have worked with just either to test out their algorithms or to solve a domain-specific problem that there might be datasets as journalists that we're not paying attention to or we could get our hands on that could provide the foundation for things that we do, in other words, that could form like a, you know, like I said, a foundation for like hey, you know what? This dataset isn't perfect, but this person has done a certain amount of work on it and I can actually take it from here and improve it to a certain extent. Rather than compare it to the raw data it itself. Where essentially I'm replicating 80 or 90 pers of what these researchers did and I feel like to some extent we're not always taking advantage of. Put it this way, it's easy for me after 15 some years of, working with campaign finance 2 just to go back to the FEC and every Monday morning and grab the new data and run it through the system and I feel like maybe I should be looking around at what other people are doing, particularly with publicly available datasets, because in some case, even if their problems aren't the same problems as mine, like perhaps they have at least done things or developed techniques or tested out algorithms that have resulted in a pretty good useful usable basis. - -> I'm kind of drawing parallels to like this problem that just for a second not thinking about like the privacy or the security aspect, of do these people want their names online, but something like a Twitter verify check or something, where multiple people have uploaded the dataset like you said, someone went and manually said this is the same person and adding a time stamp of when this was last verified or something like that, does that make it more legit? - -> Like date, time, and who did it kind of thing and I work a lot with like OpenStreetMap, so there's like a record going back in time for like when a certain place is edited, so it's similarly to a name like if names change or people's addresses change or like it's a living, breathing kind of document. - -> I can easily see why OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia and other places do that, because it's the easiest way to figure out what happened to it even if you are somewhat suspicious of it or skeptical of it, but that sort of thing implies that there is a -- that there is some sort of system that's built to handle that kind of input, whether it's behind a subscription or password or whatever or whether it's out in the open. Which again, may be fine, but I do think there are some concerns that folks would raise, whether we would consider them to be like oh, that's totally legitimate or not. You know, I think folks who have mentioned that there might be concerns about privacy and search availability, I think we have to acknowledge that, and kind of deal with it as best we can. So we've been talking for wow, almost an hour and a half how. Which is good. I think we've had a really good discussion. I'm curious to know sort of where people want to go from here to the extent that it doesn't involve leaving the room, because I know that's not only a possibility, but eventual the ultimate likelihood, but I am curious if what people what do you guys want to do at this point? Are there things that we haven't discussed that are really sort of gripping people? Are there things that we could do in the remaining time that we have that would actually leave us with something to show in addition to what we've already sort of talked about and put down? Somebody mentioned at the outset, you know, even going through like some of these libraries and sort of describing them and be like, this is valuable, this is not as useful, like I don't know if it's a ranking system that we have a checklist, does that, doesn't do that. Are people interested in that? - -> So I guess in that sense I probably should have put that stuff on a wiki rather than in a repository. - -> Can we add a new event page? - -> Well, what we should do is we should check to we should add an etherpad page or we could start the wiki on the repo and go from there, but we should also figure out if we're going to do that, what we're going to add, like you know, free text is great, but I think we should probably have some common basis for how we're going to describe these tools. ... ... : -[group activity] - +This is a DRAFT TRANSCRIPT from a live session at SRCCON 2014. This transcript should be considered provisional, and if you were in attendance (or spot an obvious error) we'd love your help fixing it. More information on SRCCON is available at https://srccon.org. + +Captioning by the wonderful people of White Coat Captioning, LLC +whitecoatcaptioning.com + +Thursday +Session 13 - Sartre was wrong - Hell is data about other people +Session Leader Derek Willis. + +> OK, so as folks are -- yeah, people will probably be trickling in and out, depending on how exciting I am, which is to say after lunch, not that exciting, so this is both a kind of a weirdly complex session that will test your patience and ability to remain in the room. So congratulations on deciding to come here in the first place. + +> So the resolution is not the greatest here. Honestly I don't think we're going to be using this a lot. But I wanted to do a couple of just introductory things. First of all, I'm Derek Willis, I work for the New York Times. Colleagues from the New York Times who showed up, your checks will be in the mail. + +> So the idea behind the session, which is data about people and dealing with data about people, is that this seems to me to be a common problem that we all kind of have, in that we all deal with or likely deal with datasets that involve individuals in one capacity or another, whether it's people who hold off office or people who are give money to run for office in the realm of politics or it could be people who have a particular license from the government, or some sort of standard that they qualified for and you have their names and other information about them. And there are lots of problems around this idea of people data, but I wanted to focus this session on, I think, two or three of them, and it is totally, like the direction of this is pretty much up to all of us, which is to say it's up to you, you can output to me at any time, about which problems we might want to tackle or look at or explore, but roughly speaking, those problems are as follows: And this is sort of degree of difficulty beginning with sort of the easiest or most solved problems at the top. + +> The first one is the parsing of names. Like a full name into name parts. There are lots of different libraries and tool kits that do this in one form or another, but it's still something enough, it's still enough of an announce for people that there are multiple, the fact that there are multiple tool kits that this do sort of testifies to the fact that like this is still kind of a problem that people feel compelled to tackle. In one, you know, they may have edge cases that are unique enough that force them to start writing code or they may feel that whatever exists isn't narrow enough or isn't in their language or something like that, so I think that there is still room for solutions of one kind or another, and I'd like for us to sort of engage in part brainstorming of what solutions, what that might look like, whether or not that's buildable and whether or not we could build, if there's anything we could contribute in the next couple of hours. Now, that's ambitious but that's one part of it and I think that's sort of the easiest part of it because there is a lot of prior art on name parsing that exists. + +> The second problem is more of a standardization problem. In other words, is this person the same as this other person? And that problem exists when you have a lot of individuals in a dataset, and whether that's again, like whether it's permit holders. I encounter this a lot in campaign finance data, and there are again solutions to this problem, but many of them are pretty messy solutions, like the solutions that exist kind of range from at one end of the spectrum, from doing semi-manual standardization -- in other words, fixing things and then keeping a record of the stuff that you fix and then applying those fixes to new data as it comes in and hoping that it picks up most of those and then fixing the rest, to all the way up to machine learning, sort of like trying to train a dataset to identify people who are similar or the same person based on a certain set of characteristics, and there are some tool kits for that. There probably are people who are a lot smarter than me who have even better tool kits for that that we don't know about, that maybe you know about, that we should be using as journalists in order to do this. + +> The third problem is really not much of a coding problem but it's more of sort of a community problem, which is why I kind of pitched this for SRCCON, which is that each of us has to do this at some level, probably, or probably will have to do this if you haven't already. Are we reinventing the wheel too much? Are we not actually building on what each of us or all of us together are doing? And should there be something that does that? + +> Like for example, should there be a name reconciliation service for political donors? that you can essentially you know, in one scenario say you get a filing with a list of donors in it and you sort of post it to this service and it tries to give you back standardization and/or IDs that correspond to who it's been able to identify those people as. + +> **Sorry, do you mean like a personal database, so that everything would be in the system?** + +> Yeah, or a system that is based upon maybe it calls out to other services, maybe it's an aggregator of other collections of data that have APIs and other way that is they can -- yeah, if it is a persistent storage you run into the issue well, that's a pretty big storage at some point, right? But on the other hand like, storage is not really the problem. Like you know that's not even that expensive of a problem, at least compared to a couple years ago. + +> I think the problem is, is that like in my particular domain of politics, like I can't really tell you with a real high degree of accuracy, like how much money a certain person has given to state or federal races, like that's ridiculous. Like, that's a terrible problem. + +> Like, that's not something that we should really be proud of. We should be able to fix this. Because if you look at various sites in campaign finance, like the folks at center for responsible politics will say that some person have given this much money and other places might say it's this much money and another place might say no, it's a third number and they might be somewhat close, but based on the standardized data or what data they include or the policy of their parsing and standardization practices, you're liable to end up with multiple figures, which seems again, like imprecision is one of those things that bugs me, that we really can't say how much money a certain person has given. We can get close. I hate having to write at least in front of every campaign finance number I ever cite. I mean can we do better than that? + +> So like that's -- those are sort of the universe of problems, and again, maybe we can all we can do on the second and the third is to come up with an outline of like what we would like to see. Or what might be possible. Because I know that from my -- you know from my vantage point I've been banging my head against the wall on this for years and obviously I haven't come up with it on my own and as I age that's probably going to be even less likely. I think that is something that we can kind of bring some muscle, some brains to bear in a larger scale that might actually get something moving forward in this. + +> So what I'd like to do is there's GitHub repo under my account, and then other hyphened people, and then, assuming that the ethernet is, working here, and maybe it isn't ... There's a couple things that I've done -- come on, CSS. There we go. There's a couple things that I've done in sort of preparation for this. And I invite -- and what I want to do is I want to sort of spend some time discussing and you know, banging things around, but I'd also like for us to spend some time kind of looking at some of the existing tools, pulling out what we think we like, conceptually, like you don't have to be like I really like this line of code because it's elegant, because then we'll just have the Ruby and the Python people fighting each other all day. So what we're looking for is utility, rather than, you know, elegance in code. But and also like the kinds of things that you want to see or these particular tasks, parsing standardization, what would lend themselves, the best tools to accomplish those, and then what's missing, and I think like it would be great if in a couple of hours we could create a system or even a blueprint with coming up with saying hey, we're going to have the ultimate name-parsing campaign. + +> I'm selfishly thinking of even the civic universe, of like public data that's like people, whether it's politics or permit holders or things like that. Like the smaller the universe the less the problem really this is. For instance the campaign donors, the number of people who give campaign donations is blissfully small, compared to the population as a whole and it's largely a lot of the same people. + +> So at any point in this process, if people have, you know, questions ideas, whatever, you should feel free to shout them out and we'll kick things around. I'd like to sort of start off by having people taking a few minutes, look at some of these tools, to the extent that we can bring them up on your laptops and even not like I said the code, but the description of what they do, and maybe we can compile a list of like the stuff that name parsers should do really well and then the stuff that, you know, should be sort of optional. + +> Does that make sense? + +> So on this list, there's the -- I separated them into kinds of different kinds of categories. One of them is Swiss army knives, which I think are tools that do a wide range of stuff with names. And I think it's fine to look at those for lots of things, but I also -- there's also a lot more, and again, this is -- this list of parsing libraries is just simply for me like doing a search on GitHub, right? I know there's more out there. I know there's probably even better academic-level ones that exist out there, but even doing a search for name parsers gives you 12 or 15 different libraries, and so maybe this problem is solved in the sense that like maybe between these, like, or there's one in here that's clearly superior or does more than anybody else's, but I kind of feel like we should know that. + +> Like, we should be able to come to some sort of consensus on hey, these are the things that a name parser should do for our purposes, and of those things, there's one, two, three or four of these that are closest to fitting the bill. And maybe it's something that you know we can agree to contribute on or you know, import into your own favorite language or whatever but I shy we should have an easy answer the next time someone in a listserv or a chat room says, "What do I use to parse names?" you should be able to tell them this is what you use. + +> Like I said, I'd like to check out some of the features of these, the descriptions of these, and maybe we can draw a list. In fact, maybe I can just raise the thing and we can start writing down a list of things of sort of key parts of so why don't we take about five minutes or so and kind of look through, have a list in your mind, maybe type it up a little bit on your laptop, whatever. Talk amongst yourselves about what would make the elements of a good name parser, what should it do? What kinds of situations should it handle? Should it be like in my mind one of those might be like it should deal with -- try to deal with international names in a sane way, because we don't get to have just the John Smiths anymore. And that's both a good thing and something we can do about it. + +> **Are we just talking about parsing a name where we know the start and the finish or is this sort of distracters?** + +> Yeah, if you think of it like as a, you know, John W. Smith III, like essentially being able to have something that segments those into the logical places. + +> **We don't have to find that in a paragraph?** + +> No, I mean ideally, talking about a separate but related problem, but ideally we're dealing with data here that is one row that has a name field of some kind. Because most most civic-related data that has a name in this format or this format, you know, or in some cases, the really smart and advanced ones have them broken up into fields, which is nice. But I don't know if people have run into this with name fields that are segmented, is like there are times when you have a first name field that has a first and a middle name or a last and a middle name field that has a last name and a suffix in it, and that's fine, but it's not fine. The expectation is it's a last name field and it should have simply a last name. So there are all kinds of issues with that. So let's take a couple of minutes. Look around, see what we think. Jeff, I'm going to come haunt you: + +> OK. The other thing I want to do is you're going to start to fall asleep, and people are, so like if you feel like there's something that should be up there, like what it should do, get up and write on the board. + +> **You want us to make a list there of things that we want to do.** + +> Yeah, because one, my handwriting is terrible, and two, getting up will get the blood circulating and hopefully prevent you from falling asleep. Not guaranteed, but there's always the hope. +> [group activity] + +> All right, so let's see what we've got so far. + +> Oh, yeah, this is good. Honorifics, so I'm going to \* show my cultural Imperialism. What's a nonwestern example of a honorific? + +> Imam. +> Supreme leader. +> Yes. +> [laughter] + +> Don't worry, actually, that will be adopted by the United States very soon. + +> Oh, yes, this is a fun one, the reversal of names. Which in some cases can be really, really insidious, right, because it can be hard to tell. Yeah, that's going to be a fun one to solve. But I mean there are ways to sort of, like depending on what other information is available, there's probably ways that we could tackle that, right? + +> Like if there were address information, it would be compared to yeah, this looks like it should be reversed. + +> Or even just a library -- I ran into that not too long ago, and what we ended up doing is going back with like it was politicians' names and the same thing as below it, politicians names, we just had to throw a whole bunch much data against it and say oh, there's M.P. Davis and Davis P. William, and the chances of those not being the same people are just like so marginal. + +> Yeah, and I feel like there's also mentioned a probability of accuracy scores or confidence numbers or however we want to call it. I feel like this is really, you know, the crux, probably the crux of the matter in a lot of respects for a lot of these questions, because years ago, when I started out doing standardization and things, it was literally all done in sequel and if it matches, then boom it matches and then you're left with thousands and thousands of unmatched ones that are just hell, right and so I do feel like this is some -- there's definitely some role for probability for machine learning for essentially trying to work through issues and to recommend like I don't know for sure but I think maybe this is the best one, so the linking family members, like that has lots and lots of uses obviously for Civics or you know for political data in particular. And I think is a really valuable thing. That tends to be like -- but you tend to have to be like close to the ground. Like I couldn't do it for Maine in the same way that you could do. Like I don't know who these people are, like it looks like the same-ish. There's a great IRE training set that involves a Haslam family, a guy who's a governor in Tennessee. In Tennessee, it's a fairly famous name before he was governor, Haslam, except in a tenth of the records it's an e with instead of an a. And it's like what do you do with that? + +> Again applying the address, the nature of how -- whether it lines up with other information in terms of dates of contributions of in other people and similarities. Maybe like you get into soundex comparisons of like yeah, they're pretty close, whatever. + +> Ah, the nicknames embedded in the full name. Terminator, really? Is that self-selected? Or. + +> No, I'm just curious, I mean if you earned it, that's even more impressive, right? Right? So so what do we want to do with nicknames? + +> Like, where do they go? Is it just a nickname field or if it's somebody if they're known by that, do you want to -- + +> Bill Clinton versus William Clinton. + +> Well, yes, or I mean the governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal. Well, Bobby is not his first name, I think it's Pausch -- anybody know? Anyway, it's not Bob, but everybody knows him as Bobby, you're likely to refer to him in publication, online or whatever as Bobby Jindal. So do we promote nicknames to, you know, first-name status? Is like how do we? What do people think? Is it really, like if there is a nickname, do we only use it like do we only fill in the nickname field essentially when there's nickname that that person is known by -- + +> I guess the only way I can think of to handle it would be basically a multi-first name field so you're Bill or William or Billy. + +> a multi-first-name field ... ... huh. + +> I mean it does seem important to preserve, because that's how your readers are going to, you know, relate to that name. + +> Right. Talk -- the multi-first-name field, go with that a little bit. + +> Well, sometimes you know sometimes I'm Will and sometimes I'm William. I can imagine people trying to clean my thing up and so generally the last name is pretty static, and it's all the variations of how that person has been referred to. Just like mostly so you can tie it back so you probably want to have that Christian given name as a specific field, but a nickname is in a singular -- I mean it could be a nickname field but it's not a singular field. You don't just generally go by one single name. + +> So is that something like if we're looking at this structurally, is that something where it could be like connected but slightly removed? Like in other words not as part of like a -- + +> Yeah. + +> Like an also known as? I don't know. + +> I mean you could use punctuation marks potentially, like some sort of way of combining stuff in a way that means something, but we'll have to wait 'til we get to the last thing on the list before we talk more about that. + +> Right, right,. + +> So I just tweeted out a link. I think ancestry.com is doing some work on this, and they're in tech folks have a blog, so I just sent out the link where they talk about how they're handling this very problem and they're using alternate names and prioritizing them, so there's a -- I believe -- I've read a couple of them so I'm trying to remember if this is the same thing, but they have a way of like asking it questions and then if it meets all these criteria, they kind rule out the impossible I think is perhaps how they're working backwards to come up with this is an alternative name that is the name person. + +> There's tons of like public -- like Intelious is one we use a lot. They charge you just buttloads for it, but this is what they do. They come up with all your addresses and all your phone numbers and all of your also known as. + +> Although I would point out that the Obama campaign has since 2008 believed I live in Woodridge, Virginia, where I've never lived because when I pointed it out to some people in the campaign, they didn't believe me. They're like, Are you sure you've never lived there? I'm like, I'm pretty sure, no, no, no, our scores are pretty accurate, I'm like, I'm pretty sure I've never lived there. + +> But that would be another -- I mean there's like public records, background checks, those kinds this things. + +> Those are incredibly flat, though, when you start pulling those up. + +> I think one sort of thing to rule them all, yeah, I think it would be useful. I suspect, even for the large when we talk about large datasets, I mean for campaign finance, it's several million people or several million donation, really by like maybe a million and you know, million and a half people, like I feel like it's somewhat more solvable. At least and maybe I'm just being selfish and thinking narrowly but I think it's maybe not as grave as -- like put it this way: Like I don't -- I can't remember -- I can't think of anything in the Times where we would spend money on a commercial service to do that for us and if we're not going to do it. + +> I just wonder how they do it. I also wonder if name parsing would be more important than address parsing. + +> That's the next session. + +> [laughter] + +> No, I would have to buy beer for everybody to have an address parsing session, right? That was like my backup if this was rejected. We're going to double down. But yeah, I mean like the address part is I think -- like my colleague Chase Davis at the Times has a toolkit that tries to standardize PEF donors. But his done go down to the street address level. It's basically city, state, and zip and it's good, but not perfect. So I think there's definitely a role for that. + +> So confidence numbers for gender? Some of the libraries, I think, on the list, actually do give, if you scroll down the list of the libraries, the one that do gender evaluation, whatever. Some of them do actually give like some kind of score, whether it's a percentage or maybe it's a text term or you know, I'm likely, very likely, not so likely, whatever for this, but I also -- this is also kind of a -- an issue in many ways. I was saying -- I was saying to some folks, we worked at the Times on a story last year about political appointees and trying to figure out the percentage of female appointees, and we had the names and so then we ran them through one of the brilliantly named library here called Sex Machine. Which is just paternal, terrible -- it's basically like the comical Ruby library naming convention, and I mean it's bad as itself, but it's worse, because they really don't mention James Brown in it. But we ran it through that and it nailed movement of the Anglicized names really well. You know, with the exceptions of your Pats, and it just totally merped on every nonAnglicized name. No idea. And we have data with names in it, some of which comes with gender, like Jeff, what you were talking about? + +> The NPI database, the National Provider Identifier, which every doctor in the United States gets a you unique identifier and you can download the whole thing. So that's 800,000 names, with gender, with, you know, like a titles on the back, so like you know, doctors have all sorts of crazy fucking titles. They like go to a conference and get a new title which I'm going to institute. + +> We're going to actually be handing out titles. + +> We all get the name parsing doctorate after this. But anyway, like that could be -- that all of a sudden you start to get into you can -- and it's all cut out and fielded because the programmer who made the MPI form actually like split it apart and didn't allow freeform text and it's important to have your name because you get paid. Right, is that how you get paid if you misspell your name or whatever your checks from Medicare aren't going to go through and all of a sudden you don't have a practice, so you know, datasets like that if we're going to go to the training and the positional approach. I think it would help with the positional approach, because you know, we're talking like maximum entropy or something like that, if that was Dr. W John Smith or Ph.D. at the end or something like that. And also, you know, doctors are a pretty diverse bunch, so. + +> Yeah, I think if you know, maybe not the least we could do, but one thing I think we could do as people who work with data is to maybe agree on sort of a or maybe several gender detection libraries in whatever language it is, and most of them come with datasets and if we could be like look, let's make these datasets better by adding in these dataset. Or heck, you know, I don't love the idea of taking an existing one and adding in new training data. Worst case scenario we could actually take their training data and add our training data and make a better library. I feel like there's room for work in that that we could actually make a good contribution. + +> I just grabbed the voter registration database in Allegheny County. + +> I know a lot of voter registration data does contain gender, as well, and so that's like a good example. + +> and the same with addresses, because I know one of the things we're looking at doing with the campaign finance data is to run it against the voter registration database to match the mailing address to see if there's actually a match. + +> Usually people don't register at their place of work or their church or whatever. Right. + +> So, all right, what else? Jenny 8 Lee, right. And not that we would necessarily deal with this in federal campaign contribution data but our foreign desk is a lot of people with one name. Where do we put the name. It sounds like a stupid question, but like where do we put the name in the data? + +> I mean towards that end, is there a case for like purpose-built parsers as libraries? + +> Purpose-built parsers? + +> So like if you know the data, if you know the intended use of the parser, like none of this stuff in this list is categorized by use. There's like 17 parsers, and you know, like the thing that Chase has for campaign finance data, especially with the machine learning stuff, is there a chance that you know if we're trying to accommodate for things like Jenny 8 Lee for instance, that we could end up overtraining that actually weaken the model that we have for a certain set of data, whereby hey if you know you're mostly you know, names that are are not using online characters or something like that, that you should be using a different parser? + +> Yeah, that's actually, I mean -- I think that makes a certain amount of sense in some respects, because one parser that claims to do everything. + +> Or like if you had access to the -- that that might change the logic for how your parser works in a way that it would actually be fundamentally different if there was no address field. + +> Right, so if you had some data and I'm going to like I could parse it try to parse it simply on the names and I could parse it simply, but then I could also, it could be an option or you have another separate parsing to do names and addresses together. + +> Right or if I knew I had to identify names at academic \]conference or something like that, the dataset that I would use to produce a model would be different in a way that might not apply to, you know, if I knew I needed the, you know, passenger manifest for like a front division or something like that. + +> Right, right, yeah, I think -- I can see the value of that. Because I mean a lot of what we end up doing is domain-specific, you know? I think if you were, yeah, I mean if you were looking through -- yeah, if you had, you know, -- if you were doing something that had physician names, but they were not standardized or you wanted to match they up, ideally I would match they up against the MPI or some other source like that. + +> Yeah. Yeah, I can see the case for that. + +> I mean some of it probably does exist already. It seems like one service we could provide is just creating a directory. You know, you already started with these links and names of existing libraries. A little bit of description on you know strengths and weaknesses, what it does, what it doesn't have, I think would be enormously helpful. Because we always are starting from scratch, you know. + +> Yea, that would be interesting to know even automatically from data set, based on the composition of this dataset, what kind of tool should we be looking for, something like that. Maybe there's even like a service that provides that you know? + +> Like you feed it in, it tells you where you want to go. + +> Although it's got to parse to be able to tell you. + +> Maybe, maybe not. + +> There's some meta data you could -- + +> I don't know if any parsers do this, but if you're doing something like campaign finance or even a lot of other circumstances you could even actually have a their profession, so it would be interesting in campaign finance to go through OK, let's find everyone who's a doctor and match it up it the MPI. + +> Yeah, well, I mean if they don't take Medicare, they wouldn't be in there, but all doctors take Medicare. + +> So you could look at any of the license database, so if you built something that I mean you got all that license information in advance and updated it, this might be more of a local solution, because then you match up any of your campaign doper database, right, you could run a check any against any of the professional licensing data because they have to update those. + +> So it's like parsing and standardizing by piece. Yeah, I had not given that one thought at all. So good. We're making progress. + +> Well, there's one thing that could muddle things, and that's -- I mean a doctor could be an actual physician of some kind, but he could also be a Doctor of Philosophy. + +> Like my dad, yeah. OK. But I want to write this sort of down, sort of like parsing -- OK domain. Like domains of doctors, licenses,. + +> Public employees,. + +> Public employees, might also be interesting to use that stuff to tell us when a potential like joining up multiple differently spelled names is more suspicious or people would be skeptical of it, by seeing if similar names in that location on the voter rolls, so if I know that there are three Derek Willis in Montgomery County and the fact that I'm joining a Derek Willis and a Derek Q. Willis means I've really got to be careful of that. If there's only one in the county, it's more likely. + +> I was thinking of this specifically with the nicknames, because the one where we really run into trouble is this person goes by John, but this person's actually name is John. So this person's name is Jonathan and this person is actually John. + +> All right, so who wrote that we need another standard? OK,. + +> I mean it's not going to happen. + +> I mean we should all throw things now. + +> But it does just kind of seem like I mean this is madness, you know, the fact that we're having to do this is total madness, and like you know, I just wonder if anybody is work everything on kind of trying to nip it in the bud, you know, you're working on tons of different agencies, you know, the reporting schedules of these things are all over the place, but I'm curious to know, you know, what is the history of trying to synchronize this problem. + +> I'm sure the Social Security Administration has some tools up its sleeve, but we don't have a hope in hell of getting access to that. + +> Well, you say that, but yeah, we don't have access to, but I don't know, maybe they've produced some -- like maybe there are reports or studies or other publications that they produce or like maybe academics have studied this and said this is how they do it and it works pretty well, or not. Or it needs this, you know. I do feel like, you know, while there are, I think, you know, I think we've identified some places where it would be fairly, you know, where we could make obvious contributions to sort of existing parsers, or some existing parsers? I think some of the parsers that I linked to have the capability of dealing with honorifics, and you know, suffixes and reverse names and some of these other fairly common use case, I do think that like the places where we could probably make the most immediate impact would be on things like bringing to bear like specific domains, data that we already have that this name involved, improving the training datasets for things like gender, for nonwestern names. I feel like -- I feel like those are the kinds of things that we could get people to get into, on a practical level, but I do think like it's worth having a discussion of like what are we doing here, and how are we -- because the first, you know, what I described as sort of the low-hanging fruit is in a sense but it also is basically committing or, you know, like assuming that people are going to keep doing this, right? Like I'm going to -- I'm going to grab and keep updating things and I'm going to keep contributing back to these, you know, improving these datasets or I'm going to keep standardizing in this domain. + +> and people will always continue doing things weirdly in new ways. + +> and you have this thing where it becomes oh, we have a phenomenal set of Illinois politician names that's just been totally scrubbed clean and standardized for like 30 years and a that's great, except I don't live in Illinois. + +> and I don't care. And it's not useful to me, so like we end up with either like we have silos of people doing, you know, siloed data, and it field to me like it's the web, we should have some way of either being able to wrangle that into common resources, or to be able to, you know, sort of tie them together somehow, whether it's like a common sort of standard identifying or parsing engine or service or something like that. + +> I mean I guess I was even talking about going one step back from that. Like putting pressure on agencies themselves, on the reporting agencies, to adopt a common standard, you know, like the way that these forms work, the way that they are putting this data out into the world is where the problem starts in many ways because there's no consistency, so you know, that's why I say it's not going to happen because you have to get a lot of bureaucracy types on board across so many municipalities. + +> and people keep naming their kids really weird things, like we have to put a stop to that now. + +> Yeah, but I mean you know we'll always just be cleaning up the mess. + +> Well, I mean this is the life we chose, right? + +> So I don't know -- this may be completely a crazy idea, but so I'm doing a lot of work in Allegheny County, so I -- + +> For everybody else, Allegheny County is Pittsburgh, greatest city on the planet. + +> So I am cleaning these names, and often these are people I am familiar with, I know the names so I can kind of authoritatively say that this is X and X. If there was sort of like a format where we could share our naming data, like as a news organization, news organization the journalist puts their stamp on it and says I verified that this is write and then an AA service in a sort of way where we all contributed and using that to train if you're getting a federal reported and I verified it down at my level, you can have confidence that the name was right because I was the source of it. + +> Ooh, so actual distributed work that's valuable to lots of. Like I like this. We're overpromising, sure, but no, no, I like this. Because I'm using the campaign database to build data at the city and county level so I'm going to get the licensing information, I'm going to get the other data and but those people are also going to be involved at the state level and federal level and so that might be of value if it was contributed to a larger -- + +> Right, so that requires two things, right? You need to track the provenance and you also need some sort of a way to actually like. + +> Get that into -- + +> Well, not just that, but actually score how likely this is to be right or wrong. + +> Yeah, yeah, but I think the point is I'm much more likely to be oh, well, clearly you know this -- the assumption is you know this better than I do, that local area and you know, better than I do, so like the difference between, I suppose, a score of like confidence that some, you know, machine learning or whatever algorithm spit something out for me based on a geographic set that I don't have any particular expertise in and something like that that is further guided and/or overseen by someone who does, I think there is a -- you know, a little bit of a boost there. + +> I mean we have an advantage, too, which is you know, as we said when we first got started here, it is actually not a huge universe of people who contribute. + +> It's -- I mean it's a lot of data that I'm working with, but it's all manual at this point. I'm literally going into my spreadsheet, I know that Charles Hamill, there's a second and a third and they all contribute and I know where they are and I know where they live and I'm going OK, this Charles Hamill and this Charles Hamill, because they're all in the news. + +> I feel like we should really have something that prevents, that makes it possible for Amy not to have to do this manually. I think wouldn't that be kind of nice? Yeah? + +> It sounds like you should be able to do that once, right, and put it somewhere and then have other people be able to benefit from that. + +> So I have the campaign donors from the mayoral election and now when I'm uploading the ones for city council, I can match that. + +> So that does bring us back to standards, if we're going to have something or if we're just spit bawling here, we're going to have something that is, you know, enables people to put stuff in at one level and have it be used by people at another level, then we need like, OK, this is the kind of information, you know, this is the minimum set of information, you get sort of some optional stuff to it, and then, you know, other people know if you're going to contribute to this, you have to have at least this, and maybe this extra, as well. So I mean I think -- I think we kind of can figure out in our heads what that might be -- what that information might be, but just so that we're not, you know that we're all sort of on the same page, I mean obviously aside from the name, which ideally is parsed, what else is the minimum set of information that would go into that? + +> City, state. + +> Would you want the full address, though? + +> I think you would want it ideally, but I don't know I suspect that in some cases you might not be able to get it in every single instance. I think you would like to include it and maybe we're talking about a fully parsed address. Ideally like street number, street number, you know, but again that's a whole another session for address parsing. But I think in terms of the minimum, city and state, and do we care about zip codes or are they just too just weird or annoying or people misspell them or old or new ones? + +> I've done stuff like this zip codes are one of the mother reliable things, because where city and states have a lot more representational flexibility, zip code if it's 5 digits, it's probably the right 5 digits. + +> OK,. + +> Strong testimony. + +> I remember seeing a city entry that was ASDF so they don't really put too much effort into it. + +> I believe it like the horror stories of address data. It might be the only thing that's worse than names, frankly, I think. + +> OK, so is that the basic set? Like the minimum? + +> I could see age which may be hard to come by. + +> Age or date of birth? + +> Date of birth. + +> I agree. I would prefer date of birth, you about it's funny that I think now voter registration data that in some places that always had date of birth, some have switched to providing age as a privacy measure. + +> So you could do if you know the date that they captured that age, you could reverse engineer that because that's what ancestry.com does, so you'll get records that says he was born about 1932, so you can have some confidence that you've got the person. + +> But in order to get that at at like the local level like you're almost, you know, at the local level, correct me if I'm wrong but probably the easiest way to get that for a larger set of people is probably voter registration, but obviously that eliminates everybody under 18 and not that we're dealing with a lot of kids anyway, in general, but it also excludes, like, in many cases like people who had been convicted of crimes but are now out of prison and you know, who could legally give money or run for office even, as unlikely as it may be. + +> Although I have seen literally children, like minor children appear in the FEC dataset. It is under certain circumstances, yes. It has to be their own money. I mean like our daughter has an allowance, so she has her own money, but. + +> and how much does she contribute on an annual basis? + +[laughter] + +> Thankfully nothing yet, so I worry, though. I do worry. So but it is actually permissible for like if you have your own money, so and again, it's like people with trust funds essentially being able to contribute. + +> Is there a limit on how much minors can give. + +> No, they can give as much so you'll see like five people from a family and it's like OK, well, that's, you know, there's kids there and maybe some of them are adult kids, but some of them are -- you can look and no, there are some minor kids in there, so OK, so yeah, I think -- I mean I'm sort of wavering on whether it's a -- I think in some cases it could be harder to get. + +> I think it would be nice to have. + +> It's very nice to have, but I suspect that it's probably a little more optional. We had other suggestions in terms of like employer or occupation or things like that, although I mean and I think like it's better to have than to not have, but I think there is also a, you know, from my experience of campaign finance data, what happens in a lot of cases is that if someone has been running for office for decades or for you know, 20 years, and they have had a regular donor during that period, they just use like whatever the previous donation record had on it, in a lot of cases so you'll see people currently who clearly -- like people in the news, people whose names everyone knows and it will have like you know, some previous job, or even better, it will be like unknown, it will have like Bill Gates, unknow? Is it really unknown? So there is a lot of variability in that sense. But I do think like it's good to have. It can be good to have in terms of specific domains or disambiguating particular members of a particular family. + +> Isn't it all about that one time when you can match it up with? I mean if you're going to go off employer, that one time you can match it up with that database that you can really trust and then you know, so here's the horizontal line to that database and here's the vertical line with all the other entries under that. + +> Right, but I feel like one of the issues for us is sort of as an industry is it that most of us, and for fairly decent legitimate reasons, don't really share the data that we really trust. You know? And I'm not saying everybody should just turn over all your stuff but I feel like there's got to be some compromise that we can make to be able to like, hey, look, there's you know, without giving away the store, we can still have something useful that other people can work off of. All right, so name, parsed name, maybe a parsed address, city, state, zip, and age and maybe employer, and/or occupation information. + +> I'm coming at this from mostly a political data domain so there's not much else information that we get in campaign finance about individuals. + +> What about like average contribution amount because people who give a little are likely to continue giving a little, you so you can kind of see and say you know, this Derek Willis gives 40 bucks every year, but this one gives $4,000, it's probably not the same guy. + +> So some kind of categorization of some kind. + +> of broken decks. +> Right. + +[laughter] + +> Same thing with like restaurant reviews, for price of restaurants, one dollar sign, four dollar signs, something like that? Are there any other licensing or voter registration databases that have information that is not in here that we might consider to be part of a nice to have set? + +> I'm sorry, I joined the session late, but I'm trying to think about a way of what combination of these attributes make a unique person. Like could with a Derek Willis from the same city, same state. + +> How do we disambiguate, yeah. Yeah. + +> What are the minimum kind of requirements? Like place of birth, I don't know does that help spell someone's name better or like pronunciation? + +> I mean I think that there's no formal way to do that absent the data managers doing it responsibly, because everything up there can legitimately change. + +> and does. + +> and does from either sloppy data handling or life events, and so I came in late, too, so I'm not exactly sure what this is driving towards, but in general working on problems of matching people between datasets, you have to basically fill in the uncertainty and make that a thing that you always have an opportunity to check yourself before you make a mistake if the uncertainty comes into play. You know, we're doing some things at the night lab with campaign financing and find out that one thing we do is mostly disregard even checking low number donors, because you know what they're just not important, right? So these methods that say reduce what you are worried about being correct is a strategy. Can you say in like two sentences where you guys are driving since I came in late. + +> We've been a little running on and off the road a little bit but a couple things, one is sort of -- we're kind of on two tracks. One is, the tools that we have for parsing and standardizing names, how can we improve them, is there room for that for you know, do they need to be, are there obvious improvements that we could make, or you know, even just I think somebody suggested can we evaluate them in terms of so people know what tools are right and good or useful and what they offer versus like, you know, so we can properly answer the question, I have to parse name fields, what should I use. So that's one sort of track. The other track is how do we stop doing the same work over and over, like both individually and collectively, and can we create, or you know, imagine some sort of either service or common repository that helps us to stop, you know, doing things repetitively and perhaps mistakenly. You know, part of one of the founding questions of the session for me was like this perennial campaign financing question which is we can never really say with any real certainty exactly how much money somebody has given because we're never really sure, and so I don't know that we can ever really perfectly solve that, but like I'd like to be able to get closer, it's just that every time that we try to answer those questions, it's usually dealing with someone who on the off chance I've ever heard of them before I'm only tangentially aware of them and now I have to become an expert of every name they've used and their employment history in like four hours right, or a day. Or can we build on stuff that maybe all of us do and maybe extract a portion of the work that all of us do, and be able to contribute it to some sort of common thing that we can all draw upon. And be like look, I'm not the expert in western Pennsylvania political donors, but someone else is and they've uploaded a data that sort of standardizes and identifies the data from that community. + +> So how do you verify like right now, you get the Allegheny County stuff, like every time you get political donations from Allegheny County, you go through them and do the exact same matching every time or how do you -- + +> So we're kind of working through how to do this in an automated fashion. Because it is very manual right now. I have taken campaign finance reports and enter them into a spreadsheet that I then go through open refine. And I go through it again OK, I know these people I'm cleaning it up that way. We want it to just keep building on itself. We're going to say campaign finance data was one of our foundational sets, we're always going to run names against that to see if we've already built up their profile and that's part of why I was really excited about this session which is the exact thing. + +> Unfortunately since we don't have it solved it's kind of a let-down for her, but you know, I feel like, yeah, you know, I feel like there are a bunch of -- several different ways we could go with this, right? So all right, any more on sort of -- any other fields that -- any other types of information that people are collecting that might be useful or is this a good. + +> I think the last thing I would put in there is if you're talk talking about campaign finance would be registered party that they are registered as or if you donate to Democrats all I don't remember life. + +> I mean there's two ways to get at that, like if some states offer it, like is a registered whatever, although that can change over time, obviously and then the states that don't offer it, you could kind of divide it based on donation history, which is again, not terribly different. All right, so we've got that. So if this is let's say, and this isn't, you know, this isn't a terribly large amount of information about a person or about people to like maintain and upload. And then there may be a lot of people, but like this is not a huge dataset. So what would the repository for this look like? Where would we keep it? You know, what would it be? Like, would it be -- I don't know, would it be files on GitHub, would it be a common database that we all upload to. + +> It might be interesting to I did. Refine API on CSE. It's already quite useful because then you can go through the data and say hey here's a person living in this state that might be a good candidate whoever you might have in your batch of data, so that might be something I'd do. + +> Hm, OK. + +> Any others? + +> I mean, do we need -- is this something that like we need someone to like set up and like pay for and run and administer, like -- + +> I kind of think maybe, because you want that confidence that what's being uploaded is coming from a good source, and so if there's some way to say -- I don't know, that some sort of membership or some sort of way to -- if you want to look at where the sources of data are coming from, it's not something that -- someone who, you know, is just working on a school project uploads a bunch much dirty names, like some sort of way to -- + +> But I feel like it's a really -- I feel like the likelihood that someone is either going to try to game the system or inadvertently upload not quality information is not -- like maybe not worth worrying about. If it's a tradeoff toward having a frictionless system, having critical mass for this to be useful, the more that we need community type people around it, the less likely that's going to be to happen. + +> I think I could see just a couple of snare Joseph, this is my paranoia, you could have people who are concerned about privacy who don't like this idea, but they could contribute false information to throw it off. And they that would be our source, and the other thing is this could end up being valuable for a lot of commercial services and so it could get co-opted. We may be willing to contribute to other journalists and journalistic efforts but I don't necessarily want to contribute to a commercial entity who's trying to collect on debts. + +> That's a really good point. + +> Plus it would be expensive to maintain that and I think the thing that would be least resistance to maintain and probably most useful is if you had that really excellent sort of the domains list. These are the domains that we have really excellent data for, and then you could throw yourself against those domains and you could parse that out sort of locally. + +> Oh, so you -- right, I mean I can see -- yeah, you can pull stuff down and run your local stuff against it, but then does the local stuff get back to, you know, -- that's -- because I feel like that's sort of what's happening now to a certain extent, to the extent it happens at all, is that we, you know we'll take a resource and use it for our specific project needs and then not put -- I mean I'm as guilty of this as anybody else. I have a lot of standardized campaign records that have not been sort of shared widely. + +> I mean maybe it's that you get back like scores on each of these names or just like you know, a status on each of these names. What you don't get is access to the full database, but most journalists are not going to be satisfied with that. + +> No you're going to have to have that transparency. That's why I'm thinking a closed database, some sort of membership thing. I think it would be a source that everyone would trust and a neutral place. + +> Is it to get to 100% or just to hit the max with it. 100% is that we have absolute confidence that every person in this dataset, we know who that person is and we could match he them up to prior and future. + +> Ooh. + +> But I mean is it so 100% is obviously too far but is it 99.99% we're shooting for or are we going tore everybody who's given over 20 bucks in their lifetime or whatever. + +> I think for journalists the goal can be find stories that are being told. So 100% is not necessary so I think a system that reduces the effort that a journalist has to spend to identified needs to follow, believes that the latitude to verify any potential I consistencies with the system is where you would go. But I think it would be impossible to sell publicly. Remember the clamor when the gunnera database were published in New York. As much as it would be nice to eliminate duplicate work. + +> Couldn't you have like a subscription thing where basically -- I know that Derek has like these cleaned up data feeds, these cleaned up methods, I subcribe to him, he has to approve my getting access to him and then we have a mutual kind of trust thing. + +> I mean that already exists, right, in commercial databases, you know that insurance companies have and whatnot, it's not that this information isn't out there already. It's that the barrier to entry is really high. + +> Right, you could have that, I think. + +> First you have a bunch of people producing strong systems of their own that say I've -- I know who's who, and I know these three different representations are the same person, and then some sort of a semiprivate synch. + +> Does GPG help at all in this scenario. + +> Jo. + +> In the sense that I think the bigger issue here is not whether we trust each other, but whether like as a public effort, like it would be -- there would be some sort of backlash against it. Judge but would it be public, though, if the only people who have access to it would be people who have keys. + +> Which would be essentially the subscription model. + +> Let's increase how people trust. + +> Look at Israel, I think the full census leaks and everybody has everybody's kind of details. + +> Yeah, but that's a small country. It'sites also a decoy thing. + +> I'm actually interested in that topic if these sort of thing has been done in other countries, I think some of the Nordic like your Social Security number is public. But whether journalists in those countries have used or tried to use those databases to solve these same sorts ever problems. + +> Here's the other thing, where are they going to get pissed off and how are they going to prove it right so the issues with things like plotting people's addresses who have gun licenses is the fact that somebody can just share a URL and everybody can go there. So I me like there are ways to thinking nefariously tamp down on possible objections to these sorts of things, right? And I think that, you know, having something like the subscription thing and anybody who's -- + +> Command line interface. + +> Yes, makes it a lot easier to say, you know, can you actual search be if you stick your name in Google is your tax return the first result. This is the problem the document cloud has people search their name and people say where did this document come from. I think this is a search problem in that regard, as opposed to whether it's successful. + +> If I know all the players who are contributing, that makes me more likely as a journalist to feel good about using that information. + +> I think that's -- + +> I guess part of the question is is it enough of a problem. + +> Like, is this enough of a pain in the ass? + +> What, the -- + +> the problem of all of us us doing this siloed work of name cleaning year after year. + +> I think it's expensive. We all have things that better journalism not necessarily journalism, but other journalism we'd all like to be doing rather than spending hundreds and hundreds of hours a year. + +> and I've been working with campaign finances and I'm fooling myself if I say, yeah, I'm an spirit in broadly geographic, I mean like I don't know who these people are. I mean like I you know, I think it's very difficult for us to pretend that like it's the both the best use of our time and that we're really that good at it on a broad base. I feel like you know, there is some precedent for developing something that helps us out broadly and maybe it's possible. + +> Maybe we could talk a little bit about just sort of how you hold onto your accumulated knowledge, like what would be a system that would allow you to basically keep track and sort of connect in new data into old data. I so I mentioned at the knight lab we're doing some stuff with campaign finance so there's a library actually Al knows about this, there's a library that some guys have made called dedupe, which is a statistical tool to try to identify basically names that look different but should be the same. And one of our -- we have a summer intern whose goal is produce something at the end for journalists a document that says here' how you use this for campaign financing. But one of the questions then is if you get new data from the next stuff, how you link that back into what you've already done, so I guess -- we'll try to break this down into smaller pieces so that no one is too big so one would be a statistical method for identifying linking names, one might be a method for cleaning names so that they match preprecisely because they've been cleaned, rather than the other way around. But the other is where do you put that. + +> One of the things that we do with campaign finance data is essentially we do have a sort of a master set of transactions that are then sort of augmented, that it's the base data that we get from the FEC, but then there are essentially standardizations or corrections or augmentations to it that make it easier, some of it is sort of a practical, like, denormalization kind of thing where I don't want to have to join tables on a 9-million-row database so I'm going to add a column and populate that. But some of it is fixing no, is this a committee mismarked or whatever and there's the stupid old way that I learned which is that you make new columns. You know, like name, clean name. Or whatever you want to call it. Like there's a -- again, that's like a -- that is a lot of, there's a certain -- there's a manual aspect that is not totally appealing. On the other hand, I can very clearly see what has been done, and what the differences are between sort of the original and the improvements or changes in augmentations. But I can also see essentially, there are probably other ways to layer that on top. + +> One thing I remember and it's really a question for the room is what tools are we using or what tools are we comfortable with. Because making some system that's going to help all your problems if you only change completely and do it this way is not going to be maybe a win. But I guess what would be the smallest possible thing that would work. + +> I don't think you warrant want the smallest thing that can possibly work. + +> You don't. + +> No, but identity is such a complex thing that basically it's mostly possibly work with a CSV with name, canonical name and done, and that sucks in so many levels that it's not funny. + +> Why? + +> First of all because names aren't -- I've done a lot of work on European lobbying data. Then you want to where you've got this original stuff so you have provenance on all this kind of stuff and then you want to have information that's time sensitive, right, so and there's a rule that green parliamentarians coming in, the females they all get married after like one year. I don't know why that is true, but it seems to be a rule, so you know that they've switched names and you can kind of therefore improve the accuracy of the guesses if you kind of know when they got married, right, so all this kind of stuff you want to catch because otherwise you just kind of produce a lot of weird overlap. + +> Here's the other thing that we do in certain -- like there's a project -- a group of us who use congressional legislative data in Washington have put on GitHub with the United States organization and there's a crosswalk that we built for every lawmaker, current lawmaker that crosswalks like 14 or 15 different ID systems for them. It's a total pain in the ass to do for everybody, but on the other hand it's useful in the sense that it hooks you up to a wide variety of other systems, so it's the official canonical ID that Congress gives each member of Congress, but it's also the ID that C-span gives each member of Congress, because they have what amounts to a crappy API of their appearance on C-span or on the floor of the House or on the floor of the Senate or whatever. And so this doesn't probably -- it's probably not the -- like as useful for donors, I mean most states don't don't assign like canonical IDs to donors. + +> Unless you're talking about PACs. + +> Unless you're talking about committees, right, and the committees they actually do that in a lot of places whether it's on a form or simply on their website they use a sequential ID or whatever ID you can pull out and say no, that's how this state or whatever authority refers to this thing. I think that the least -- like, sort of public relations problematic thing we could do is -- that's still useful is to build crosswalks where they don't, is to essentially fill in crosswalks where they don't exist or to publish like here's how you know, like if you do a project like the center for investigative reporting did from California, and here's how they're known in our system, like in the California database and here's how they're known at the national institute for money in state politics and here's how they're known in the FEC. Like already that's useful in the sense that they're the people we're probably likeliest to write about if we're writing about political donors in California, anyway, so simply if it was name, ID, ID. + +> Donors don't have identify fires in FEC, right? + +> Well, there could be that, but also in the FEC they don't, but like for instance, the National Institute of money in state politics which goes in and standardized, they generate IDs for people, and the center for responsive politics does generate IDs for individual donors, it's not obvious from their website that they do this, but they do do this, they're not always right, but I mean they're very, very good. They don't make a lot of mistakes, because they've been doing this a long time and they employed an army of interns to help them. But there is an ID. There are systems out there that would probably help a little bit. + +> So I'm kind of thinking that a combination of something that is automated and also is manual, like I could upload a dataset, compare it against something else and then manually checkmark, like I have being looked at these two names and they're the same. I could go back to ancestry.com in sort of how they're doing it is sort of an elegant way. Like you can edit the data and it goes back. So they're kind of using your knowledge to build the confidence in that, and if what we're building is, as a reporter in Allegheny County and maybe there's someone at other papers and we're all contributing and we keep checkmarking and saying this record and this record is the same person so we as a group can all feel confident in that so we're helping build that locally and then building it up in that sense. + +> the basic idea, this John ... suggested this in his class, how can you take multiple datasets, use something algorhythmic and update images when they're actually checked or whatever, right? But you can do something like that for this, where you give a governance to as to like we know this person, actually probably knows who this is or whatever or some other way that you can track linkages, but that is a sort of system where you could account for some of this in. + +> There's one other thing I didn't mention at the outset. I knew a large portion of this would steer back to campaign finance because me and there's a very common people dataset. But there's a guy at Stanford who has built a classifier for 20 years of FEC data. It's pretty good because I think it ignores suffixes, which is a bad problem in campaign finance, but like it is something that I feel like there must be other sets like that out there that various academics have worked with just either to test out their algorithms or to solve a domain-specific problem that there might be datasets as journalists that we're not paying attention to or we could get our hands on that could provide the foundation for things that we do, in other words, that could form like a, you know, like I said, a foundation for like hey, you know what? This dataset isn't perfect, but this person has done a certain amount of work on it and I can actually take it from here and improve it to a certain extent. Rather than compare it to the raw data it itself. Where essentially I'm replicating 80 or 90 pers of what these researchers did and I feel like to some extent we're not always taking advantage of. Put it this way, it's easy for me after 15 some years of, working with campaign finance 2 just to go back to the FEC and every Monday morning and grab the new data and run it through the system and I feel like maybe I should be looking around at what other people are doing, particularly with publicly available datasets, because in some case, even if their problems aren't the same problems as mine, like perhaps they have at least done things or developed techniques or tested out algorithms that have resulted in a pretty good useful usable basis. + +> I'm kind of drawing parallels to like this problem that just for a second not thinking about like the privacy or the security aspect, of do these people want their names online, but something like a Twitter verify check or something, where multiple people have uploaded the dataset like you said, someone went and manually said this is the same person and adding a time stamp of when this was last verified or something like that, does that make it more legit? + +> Like date, time, and who did it kind of thing and I work a lot with like OpenStreetMap, so there's like a record going back in time for like when a certain place is edited, so it's similarly to a name like if names change or people's addresses change or like it's a living, breathing kind of document. + +> I can easily see why OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia and other places do that, because it's the easiest way to figure out what happened to it even if you are somewhat suspicious of it or skeptical of it, but that sort of thing implies that there is a -- that there is some sort of system that's built to handle that kind of input, whether it's behind a subscription or password or whatever or whether it's out in the open. Which again, may be fine, but I do think there are some concerns that folks would raise, whether we would consider them to be like oh, that's totally legitimate or not. You know, I think folks who have mentioned that there might be concerns about privacy and search availability, I think we have to acknowledge that, and kind of deal with it as best we can. So we've been talking for wow, almost an hour and a half how. Which is good. I think we've had a really good discussion. I'm curious to know sort of where people want to go from here to the extent that it doesn't involve leaving the room, because I know that's not only a possibility, but eventual the ultimate likelihood, but I am curious if what people what do you guys want to do at this point? Are there things that we haven't discussed that are really sort of gripping people? Are there things that we could do in the remaining time that we have that would actually leave us with something to show in addition to what we've already sort of talked about and put down? Somebody mentioned at the outset, you know, even going through like some of these libraries and sort of describing them and be like, this is valuable, this is not as useful, like I don't know if it's a ranking system that we have a checklist, does that, doesn't do that. Are people interested in that? + +> So I guess in that sense I probably should have put that stuff on a wiki rather than in a repository. + +> Can we add a new event page? + +> Well, what we should do is we should check to we should add an etherpad page or we could start the wiki on the repo and go from there, but we should also figure out if we're going to do that, what we're going to add, like you know, free text is great, but I think we should probably have some common basis for how we're going to describe these tools. ... ... : +> [group activity] diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_14_Interactives_Climate_Change.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_14_Interactives_Climate_Change.md index 5fd29e23..66c32676 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_14_Interactives_Climate_Change.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_14_Interactives_Climate_Change.md @@ -1,71 +1,77 @@ -Interactives and Climate Change -Session facilitator(s): Brian Jacobs -Day & Time: Thursday, 3-4pm -Room: Garden 1 - -BRIAN: All right, I guess let's do this. Y'all get together? ->> Yeah, let's do it. -BRIAN: So, there's some links up here. The one on the bottom is basically what -- there's a lot of, like, reading material and basically, the deal is I'm just going to talk about -- kind of frame the issue a little bit and then break out into a few groups and then try to tackle some really specific stuff. So the really specific stuff you'll just have to read the descriptions. They're in both of these. So I had originally called this section, "Interactives at the End of the World." And I changed it to something a lot more boring because I didn't want to consider this as a sensationalist, doom-and-gloom scenario here, because that's very overwhelming and it's counterproductive. And, I'm trying to consider more than just, you know, the climatology angle; the more of the psychological perspective here. And there's been a lot of research done about that, about how you present the issue and the words you use to express this kind of topic. But in the people that cover this stuff, you know, there is kind of a focus on disaster and kind of broader adaptation changes. But I think there could be a lot more diversity on how you cover it and how just there's a lot of different ways to think of it. And I think a big part of it is bringing into, like, a local perspective -- kind of getting people to understand that events around the world are -- well -- it's not happening directly to them, to yourself. But it will. And you need to start appreciating that. And I think one -- so just before I talk about that, this is just a graph of coverage in the U.S. and it kind of peaked. And these are for major newspapers and it kind of peaked in 2007, 2008, and it's kind of had peaks and valleys. ->> Is it based on a particular search term? -BRIAN: It's a study of -- yeah, I guess -- it's a study on Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, all of the major newspapers, and I'm not sure how they quantify the articles but it's just counting the number of articles. ->> Mm-hmm. -BRIAN: But I don't think -- I think it's less about the volume, and right -- about the type of coverage that could be given. So, let's not focus on the global. So there's three major angles to addressing climate change and it's not just disaster like after Sandy but it's about mitigation. So how are we thinking about preventing it and adaptations? So after a catastrophe, or accepting certain eventualities of it and then changing our behavior or our infrastructure. And so after Sandy, there was a lot of kind of before and after coverage, which, I think is really interesting and it kind of motivates people to, you know, it makes it really real for them 'cause, you know, something's happened that's really intense. - So how do -- I guess how do we -- I guess, we just want to make people more aware of the subtleties here and there. So how do you make people more aware? So we're talking about global atmospheric changes on the largest scale but they'll manifest locally, regionally in ecosystem changes and so human reality's there. So, narrowing the topic: In the west we're talking about in the U.S. We're talking about, like, drought and wildfires. This is, like, very general. In human terms that's like water supply issues and, like, shelter issues. In the east we're talking about flooding, hurricane effects, and in human terms, your house is flooding. Or there are scarier things. Uh, in a city, a superfund site, a massive contamination site might be near a flood-risk area and that will contaminate other flood-risk areas. In the Midwest, we're talking extreme storms and the gulf, to name a few. Flooding, fossil fuel, infrastructure damage, which has economic ramifications -- displaced population. So this is all USA focused and there's a lot of tradeoffs with just covering the U.S. And I think people more readily relate to things that are happening in their country and in their neighborhood. But the effects will be felt more in, like, the global south or developing nations and because it's where there's higher populations and -- that are less able to adapt -- less readily able, I guess -- economically able to adapt to events that occur, cataclysmic events that occur. So and with the climate models, the south is going to get hotter faster. So developing countries will get worse but developed nations are responsible for most of the emissions. So there's an argument to be made to try to increase attention to all this externally, so not focus on the U.S. issues. But in terms of media coverage, how to make international problems not a distant kind of "not our problem" thing for an already-abstract, projected, kind of probabilistic thing that's out there. Like, that's a huge challenge. And it's the hardest challenge. And you know, having one of these sessions, I don't want to try to -- I'm just throwing vague, scary things at you. I want to try to, you know, do this a little more concretely. So, how do we -- so how do we do this? Here's one thing to try. I, basically in that document, the Bitly one, basically if you're looking at it -- if you're going down to the bottom, there's this topic section. I've basically compiled topics and domains to cover, facets to cover, phenomena that will occur and a certain perspective. And I've basically just did kind of a random number generator and made a few scenarios of really, sort of specific things that we can break out into groups and try to talk about. But I want to frame it in -- so what to think of, just visualizations or graphics or interactive anything. Just a way to, using that, to put things into local scales and local contexts, which is challenging. But I think Michael Keller did a really interesting thing -- who's in this room. So basically there was this -- this is a good example of kind of bringing something foreign and bring it to a local context. So, there was this Syrian Refugee Crisis, basically. And he basically, you might have seen this, it's Al Jazeera. You kind of pick where you live and it shows the, kind of where a refugee population would fit in your neck of the woods. So around Gainsville, Florida, if my Internet's good, it'll show you kind of the population distribution. It'll show you, if you're from there, that's kind of a shit ton of people and it kind of makes it a little more real in where you live. So that's one example of bringing something foreign, making it closer. So in terms of climate change, maybe we can do something along these lines. But, you know... ->> Sorry. -BRIAN: This is just what I do. I guess let's split out into groups and I can assign you a really specific scenario and kind of think about something interactive that needs to be made and try to put it, depending on where you're from, try to put it into your own terms and try to -- yeah, you guys are smart. So, all right. Let's say group one over here. Somebody who can write this down or is looking at the document, this is the -- you're going to cover the demographic impact of disaster stemming from coastal flooding in urban Indonesia. Really specific, but you gotta get specific with this stuff because it'll, like, melt your brain because it's so overwhelming. So, take your best shot. In group two, let's do these guys. You're going to -- you have to tell me -- so I have infrastructure for adaptation to thermohaline and circulation changes, so that's the global current of the ocean and how that relates to municipality government. Do you guys know what, like, the general effects of thermohaline circulation slow-down? ->> Like El Nio? ->> No, I think it'll exacerbate El Nio. It'll cool Europe, essentially. ->> Yeah, it's like this exaggerated to a thousand times. It's day after tomorrow, right? -BRIAN: Yeah, it's exaggerated ten times. Screw that one. Economics of mitigation of wildfires in the western U.S. from an ecosystem perspective. Okay? And over here? ->> Aqua? -BRIAN: Yeah, that's aquaculture and mitigation of ocean simplification from the Pacific Northwest from a local industry perspective. ->> I don't know if you're allowed to pick. -BRIAN: I gave a lot here and it's random anyways. So, you know, take notes and you can present back if you come up with anything cool. ->> So what do you expect us to actually present with? -BRIAN: I am expecting either an idea for a visualization, or a graphic, or something interactive, or data sets you want to use, or things that might exist already? ->> So it's a draft kind of -- if we were to actually do a project, actually? -BRIAN: But keeping in mind making the whole thing successful, too. Not just you; but another population. ->> Right. -BRIAN: It's a pretty complicated directive but, yeah... go for it. - [ Group Discussion ] - - Okay, who wants to go first? You guys? - >> Okay. - >> Okay, our theme that we were tasked with trying to show was demographic -- the demographic impact of disasters of coastal flooding in Indonesia. And so we are just brainstorming, like, what data should we try and look for and see what's available and then what could we do with that, what could we show? And so what data we were looking for was, like, which areas, like, were prone to flooding, like, across the globe sock so maybe we could, like, compare it with where people live, you know, if Indonesia was similar to, like, Florida. Records of past floods in Indonesia from year to year, and maybe if we could, you know, find a trend in how bad these floods have been, we can pair that with, like, climate change projections, like, water level projections. Like, how that would sort of predict how much worse the flooding could be later. Yeah, like I said before, how many cities where's prone to flooding and then looking at the water-regulating infrastructures of various cities, like, you could do an infographic or something that would show how levies were, when they were last built, maintained, and I guess I won't go through all of them but the thing that we kind of settled on, is like, maybe something like a narrative that kind of allows -- that puts users in the place of a flood victim and, maybe, it's, you know, you could show two scenarios, like one that is if, like, you know if this flood were similar to the last major flood that happened and then side-by-side show a projection of how the flooding is expected to worsen in, like, ten or 20 years and then show, like, the difference of what happens compensate it would be sort of like a timeline thing like, three days before the flood, it's kind of like a "choose your own inadvertent." You have a choice to make, should I either flee the region, or should I stay? And then at that time, you know, we talked about maybe kind of showing sort of a, you know -- because as the user we could see, we could predict, like, what would actually happen in the future. So if, you know, if it's three days before the flood and you've chosen to stay, you know, you're no longer able to flee the region on food, or by bicycle, or something. Now, you can only flee it if you own it car. So that would be kind of -- that would be an example of how your socioeconomic status would impact that, or, you know, whether you have kids. Maybe that means that you only have four days to flee bring the flood instead of, um -- or instead of, like, two. What else? -BRIAN: Cool, cool. Can you wrap it up quick so that we can finish up everybody? ->> Sorry. -BRIAN: No, that's good. ->> Is that it? ->> Yeah? ->> That sums it up. -BRIAN: You guys? ->> We don't have the visual aid here. ->> Um, so we had economics of mitigation of wildfires in western U.S. from an ecosystem perspective and we talked along ideas around that, looking at kind of two trends of, you know, increased fire -- well we wanted to investigate how urbanization has affected what fire zones -- what areas are in fire zones and how intense those fires might be. And then, look at where people are living and if that puts them in increased risk areas, or you're creating spots that were not fire zones that are now fire zones. So we kind of spent time looking at well, what existing data is there? And it turns out there are some data sets. ->> Turns out, the government has fire data going back to the 80s, so you can get every single fire that's ever happened back to 1980-something. So we were thinking it might be phone where you can build something where you would put in your address and see where fires have been, how often, if they've increased, or decreased over time, and then look at kind of the urban density and the change in urban density to where the most fires happen. ->> And then, also looking at this idea you were talking about, is it a complex issue? You know, you can't stop fires totally. So you're either delaying it, or increasing it. So a fire happens, and you're kind of looking at three, I guess kind of like characters, either an animal or a person in that ecosystem and how they're affected by it. Some are benefited, some aren't. ->> I mean, sort of exploring this idea ought we, ought we not mitigate forest fires? What are the factors involved? -BRIAN: So when it comes to ecosystems, you guys are thinking human ecosystem? ->> Well, that was the urbanization one, but we also talked about the ideas like sort of, you know, was it an area that wasn't used fires and now that ecosystem's changed or how it has been benefited by the existence of fires. ->> And whether or not humans are building into areas that were previously wild, wild lands or national forests or stuff like that, and how that's affecting the fire risk. -BRIAN: Cool. Nice. ->> Yeah, so we were talking about a simplification about oceans, specifically in the Northwest. Yeah, so I guess I can, like, talk about our thought process. I mean, we basically kind of wanted to make a narrative of that. There is both kind of a natural, "We are kind of hurting the world with pollution and therefore, there's a certification there's also a financial impact on fishermen." So I guess the goal is to create more of the towards people who don't necessarily live in fishing communities but are definitely contributing to the problem. So we talked over a number of different ideas. I think, you know, we can look at, like, the Northwest as, like, the starting point, right, because I think that was our objective but -- or the simplification of your world in general, but there's patterns all over the world. So showing people -- I mean we were looking at changes from the 1700s onwards to 2100 -- there are predictions. And, whether or not this can reverse-develop. I mean, there was obviously some research we didn't do, right? But kind of painting the picture to people who don't really understand where the acidification is coming from. People may understand that it's pollution but what does that mean, right? Is there a majority of, you know, companies that are, like, producing stuff in factories that are, like, contributing to this? And what are, like -- obviously the government has sort of "I don't get it, at least in carbon taxes." So even around the world, what are different policies that the government has mandated companies to, like, you know, put filters, like, on their stacks or whatever? And so looking at the changes and showing that. Yeah, so we left a couple of different models to actually show this in terms of, like, actually showing different areas of the ocean with different levels of acidity in them, what that actually looks like in terms of the landscape. Obviously, kind of showing that kind of gives a direct view of that. ->> Yeah, I was interested in whether we would be able to build aquatic economic profile of different regions so that we can compare them across the Pacific Northwest, for example, what other regions of the world is it most similar to, and how this acidification is going to impact it and similar for any other region that depends on fishing is on a coast. ->> Yeah, and show the global projections of acidification so that we can see the economic impact that's impending on other regions. -BRIAN: I think that's interesting -- the -- what part of the world you're most similar to and in reverse, what part of the world they're most similar to. ->> Yeah. ->> Which ocean are you? ->> It's a BuzzFeed quiz. -BRIAN: So it's 4:00. Did anyone have anything in general they wanted to discuss? ->> I sort of did. It was in the brief for this talk -- something about how do we think about breaking off pieces of topics that are this big. So, I think that there's something interesting in the idea of, like, repeatedly doing such specific things on a huge topic. But always something quite different. So, all of these projects that we've just discussed -- if they were to come to life, if it was one a month, or something, build up from the ground of these comprehensive ideas of all the impacts of climate change as opposed to, like, the one master interactive that's going to help you understand climate change, does that make sense? -BRIAN: No, it makes sense. If every interactive thing or if every story that you make had to cover the topic comprehensively, you would be paralyzed. ->> Well, I think there's a tendency to do that, at least in my own mind there is. -BRIAN: Well, I'm not sure what the real barriers are newsrooms of the specific policies are -- whether it's the newsrooms. But it's a big question. ->> Are you experienced with climate projects? -BRIAN: I guess I'm working on environmental projects. It's got the climate component but I don't have a particular background in it. I'm just interested like many in -- ->> I'm just thinking if there's, like, similar patterns to the problems that we were talking about. -BRIAN: Um... ->> that -- that would -- yeah. ->> I used to work at Gris, and one problem that we had, or one problem that existed in that universe was connecting specific issues like this in the public mind to big ideas like climate change like you talk about wildfires or reefs or fish, or something. People don't automatically associate big policy issues. So it's an interesting metaproblem when doing these kinds of things. ->> Right, which is why if it's understood if all these things that you're doing are a part of a greater push of your organization to cover climate change and these are just, like, several specific things that you've done under that, I think it should be easier to relate to -- to your picture, maybe. -BRIAN: Well, it's a balance. A balance between the bigger picture and not becoming kind of, numbed by how big the bigger picture is. Related to the bigger picture but keep it as, you know, palatable as possible. I don't know if that's the word. Well, I guess we should move out. Thanks, everyone. ->> Thank you. \ No newline at end of file +Interactives and Climate Change +Session facilitator(s): Brian Jacobs +Day & Time: Thursday, 3-4pm +Room: Garden 1 + +BRIAN: All right, I guess let's do this. Y'all get together? + +> > Yeah, let's do it. +> > BRIAN: So, there's some links up here. The one on the bottom is basically what -- there's a lot of, like, reading material and basically, the deal is I'm just going to talk about -- kind of frame the issue a little bit and then break out into a few groups and then try to tackle some really specific stuff. So the really specific stuff you'll just have to read the descriptions. They're in both of these. So I had originally called this section, "Interactives at the End of the World." And I changed it to something a lot more boring because I didn't want to consider this as a sensationalist, doom-and-gloom scenario here, because that's very overwhelming and it's counterproductive. And, I'm trying to consider more than just, you know, the climatology angle; the more of the psychological perspective here. And there's been a lot of research done about that, about how you present the issue and the words you use to express this kind of topic. But in the people that cover this stuff, you know, there is kind of a focus on disaster and kind of broader adaptation changes. But I think there could be a lot more diversity on how you cover it and how just there's a lot of different ways to think of it. And I think a big part of it is bringing into, like, a local perspective -- kind of getting people to understand that events around the world are -- well -- it's not happening directly to them, to yourself. But it will. And you need to start appreciating that. And I think one -- so just before I talk about that, this is just a graph of coverage in the U.S. and it kind of peaked. And these are for major newspapers and it kind of peaked in 2007, 2008, and it's kind of had peaks and valleys. +> > Is it based on a particular search term? +> > BRIAN: It's a study of -- yeah, I guess -- it's a study on Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, all of the major newspapers, and I'm not sure how they quantify the articles but it's just counting the number of articles. +> > Mm-hmm. +> > BRIAN: But I don't think -- I think it's less about the volume, and right -- about the type of coverage that could be given. So, let's not focus on the global. So there's three major angles to addressing climate change and it's not just disaster like after Sandy but it's about mitigation. So how are we thinking about preventing it and adaptations? So after a catastrophe, or accepting certain eventualities of it and then changing our behavior or our infrastructure. And so after Sandy, there was a lot of kind of before and after coverage, which, I think is really interesting and it kind of motivates people to, you know, it makes it really real for them 'cause, you know, something's happened that's really intense. + + So how do -- I guess how do we -- I guess, we just want to make people more aware of the subtleties here and there. So how do you make people more aware? So we're talking about global atmospheric changes on the largest scale but they'll manifest locally, regionally in ecosystem changes and so human reality's there. So, narrowing the topic: In the west we're talking about in the U.S. We're talking about, like, drought and wildfires. This is, like, very general. In human terms that's like water supply issues and, like, shelter issues. In the east we're talking about flooding, hurricane effects, and in human terms, your house is flooding. Or there are scarier things. Uh, in a city, a superfund site, a massive contamination site might be near a flood-risk area and that will contaminate other flood-risk areas. In the Midwest, we're talking extreme storms and the gulf, to name a few. Flooding, fossil fuel, infrastructure damage, which has economic ramifications -- displaced population. So this is all USA focused and there's a lot of tradeoffs with just covering the U.S. And I think people more readily relate to things that are happening in their country and in their neighborhood. But the effects will be felt more in, like, the global south or developing nations and because it's where there's higher populations and -- that are less able to adapt -- less readily able, I guess -- economically able to adapt to events that occur, cataclysmic events that occur. So and with the climate models, the south is going to get hotter faster. So developing countries will get worse but developed nations are responsible for most of the emissions. So there's an argument to be made to try to increase attention to all this externally, so not focus on the U.S. issues. But in terms of media coverage, how to make international problems not a distant kind of "not our problem" thing for an already-abstract, projected, kind of probabilistic thing that's out there. Like, that's a huge challenge. And it's the hardest challenge. And you know, having one of these sessions, I don't want to try to -- I'm just throwing vague, scary things at you. I want to try to, you know, do this a little more concretely. So, how do we -- so how do we do this? Here's one thing to try. I, basically in that document, the Bitly one, basically if you're looking at it -- if you're going down to the bottom, there's this topic section. I've basically compiled topics and domains to cover, facets to cover, phenomena that will occur and a certain perspective. And I've basically just did kind of a random number generator and made a few scenarios of really, sort of specific things that we can break out into groups and try to talk about. But I want to frame it in -- so what to think of, just visualizations or graphics or interactive anything. Just a way to, using that, to put things into local scales and local contexts, which is challenging. But I think Michael Keller did a really interesting thing -- who's in this room. So basically there was this -- this is a good example of kind of bringing something foreign and bring it to a local context. So, there was this Syrian Refugee Crisis, basically. And he basically, you might have seen this, it's Al Jazeera. You kind of pick where you live and it shows the, kind of where a refugee population would fit in your neck of the woods. So around Gainsville, Florida, if my Internet's good, it'll show you kind of the population distribution. It'll show you, if you're from there, that's kind of a shit ton of people and it kind of makes it a little more real in where you live. So that's one example of bringing something foreign, making it closer. So in terms of climate change, maybe we can do something along these lines. But, you know... + +> > Sorry. +> > BRIAN: This is just what I do. I guess let's split out into groups and I can assign you a really specific scenario and kind of think about something interactive that needs to be made and try to put it, depending on where you're from, try to put it into your own terms and try to -- yeah, you guys are smart. So, all right. Let's say group one over here. Somebody who can write this down or is looking at the document, this is the -- you're going to cover the demographic impact of disaster stemming from coastal flooding in urban Indonesia. Really specific, but you gotta get specific with this stuff because it'll, like, melt your brain because it's so overwhelming. So, take your best shot. In group two, let's do these guys. You're going to -- you have to tell me -- so I have infrastructure for adaptation to thermohaline and circulation changes, so that's the global current of the ocean and how that relates to municipality government. Do you guys know what, like, the general effects of thermohaline circulation slow-down? +> > Like El Ni�o? +> > No, I think it'll exacerbate El Ni�o. It'll cool Europe, essentially. +> > Yeah, it's like this exaggerated to a thousand times. It's day after tomorrow, right? +> > BRIAN: Yeah, it's exaggerated ten times. Screw that one. Economics of mitigation of wildfires in the western U.S. from an ecosystem perspective. Okay? And over here? +> > Aqua? +> > BRIAN: Yeah, that's aquaculture and mitigation of ocean simplification from the Pacific Northwest from a local industry perspective. +> > I don't know if you're allowed to pick. +> > BRIAN: I gave a lot here and it's random anyways. So, you know, take notes and you can present back if you come up with anything cool. +> > So what do you expect us to actually present with? +> > BRIAN: I am expecting either an idea for a visualization, or a graphic, or something interactive, or data sets you want to use, or things that might exist already? +> > So it's a draft kind of -- if we were to actually do a project, actually? +> > BRIAN: But keeping in mind making the whole thing successful, too. Not just you; but another population. +> > Right. +> > BRIAN: It's a pretty complicated directive but, yeah... go for it. + + [ Group Discussion ] + + Okay, who wants to go first? You guys? + >> Okay. + >> Okay, our theme that we were tasked with trying to show was demographic -- the demographic impact of disasters of coastal flooding in Indonesia. And so we are just brainstorming, like, what data should we try and look for and see what's available and then what could we do with that, what could we show? And so what data we were looking for was, like, which areas, like, were prone to flooding, like, across the globe sock so maybe we could, like, compare it with where people live, you know, if Indonesia was similar to, like, Florida. Records of past floods in Indonesia from year to year, and maybe if we could, you know, find a trend in how bad these floods have been, we can pair that with, like, climate change projections, like, water level projections. Like, how that would sort of predict how much worse the flooding could be later. Yeah, like I said before, how many cities where's prone to flooding and then looking at the water-regulating infrastructures of various cities, like, you could do an infographic or something that would show how levies were, when they were last built, maintained, and I guess I won't go through all of them but the thing that we kind of settled on, is like, maybe something like a narrative that kind of allows -- that puts users in the place of a flood victim and, maybe, it's, you know, you could show two scenarios, like one that is if, like, you know if this flood were similar to the last major flood that happened and then side-by-side show a projection of how the flooding is expected to worsen in, like, ten or 20 years and then show, like, the difference of what happens compensate it would be sort of like a timeline thing like, three days before the flood, it's kind of like a "choose your own inadvertent." You have a choice to make, should I either flee the region, or should I stay? And then at that time, you know, we talked about maybe kind of showing sort of a, you know -- because as the user we could see, we could predict, like, what would actually happen in the future. So if, you know, if it's three days before the flood and you've chosen to stay, you know, you're no longer able to flee the region on food, or by bicycle, or something. Now, you can only flee it if you own it car. So that would be kind of -- that would be an example of how your socioeconomic status would impact that, or, you know, whether you have kids. Maybe that means that you only have four days to flee bring the flood instead of, um -- or instead of, like, two. What else? + +BRIAN: Cool, cool. Can you wrap it up quick so that we can finish up everybody? + +> > Sorry. +> > BRIAN: No, that's good. +> > Is that it? +> > Yeah? +> > That sums it up. +> > BRIAN: You guys? +> > We don't have the visual aid here. +> > Um, so we had economics of mitigation of wildfires in western U.S. from an ecosystem perspective and we talked along ideas around that, looking at kind of two trends of, you know, increased fire -- well we wanted to investigate how urbanization has affected what fire zones -- what areas are in fire zones and how intense those fires might be. And then, look at where people are living and if that puts them in increased risk areas, or you're creating spots that were not fire zones that are now fire zones. So we kind of spent time looking at well, what existing data is there? And it turns out there are some data sets. +> > Turns out, the government has fire data going back to the 80s, so you can get every single fire that's ever happened back to 1980-something. So we were thinking it might be phone where you can build something where you would put in your address and see where fires have been, how often, if they've increased, or decreased over time, and then look at kind of the urban density and the change in urban density to where the most fires happen. +> > And then, also looking at this idea you were talking about, is it a complex issue? You know, you can't stop fires totally. So you're either delaying it, or increasing it. So a fire happens, and you're kind of looking at three, I guess kind of like characters, either an animal or a person in that ecosystem and how they're affected by it. Some are benefited, some aren't. +> > I mean, sort of exploring this idea ought we, ought we not mitigate forest fires? What are the factors involved? +> > BRIAN: So when it comes to ecosystems, you guys are thinking human ecosystem? +> > Well, that was the urbanization one, but we also talked about the ideas like sort of, you know, was it an area that wasn't used fires and now that ecosystem's changed or how it has been benefited by the existence of fires. +> > And whether or not humans are building into areas that were previously wild, wild lands or national forests or stuff like that, and how that's affecting the fire risk. +> > BRIAN: Cool. Nice. +> > Yeah, so we were talking about a simplification about oceans, specifically in the Northwest. Yeah, so I guess I can, like, talk about our thought process. I mean, we basically kind of wanted to make a narrative of that. There is both kind of a natural, "We are kind of hurting the world with pollution and therefore, there's a certification there's also a financial impact on fishermen." So I guess the goal is to create more of the towards people who don't necessarily live in fishing communities but are definitely contributing to the problem. So we talked over a number of different ideas. I think, you know, we can look at, like, the Northwest as, like, the starting point, right, because I think that was our objective but -- or the simplification of your world in general, but there's patterns all over the world. So showing people -- I mean we were looking at changes from the 1700s onwards to 2100 -- there are predictions. And, whether or not this can reverse-develop. I mean, there was obviously some research we didn't do, right? But kind of painting the picture to people who don't really understand where the acidification is coming from. People may understand that it's pollution but what does that mean, right? Is there a majority of, you know, companies that are, like, producing stuff in factories that are, like, contributing to this? And what are, like -- obviously the government has sort of "I don't get it, at least in carbon taxes." So even around the world, what are different policies that the government has mandated companies to, like, you know, put filters, like, on their stacks or whatever? And so looking at the changes and showing that. Yeah, so we left a couple of different models to actually show this in terms of, like, actually showing different areas of the ocean with different levels of acidity in them, what that actually looks like in terms of the landscape. Obviously, kind of showing that kind of gives a direct view of that. +> > Yeah, I was interested in whether we would be able to build aquatic economic profile of different regions so that we can compare them across the Pacific Northwest, for example, what other regions of the world is it most similar to, and how this acidification is going to impact it and similar for any other region that depends on fishing is on a coast. +> > Yeah, and show the global projections of acidification so that we can see the economic impact that's impending on other regions. +> > BRIAN: I think that's interesting -- the -- what part of the world you're most similar to and in reverse, what part of the world they're most similar to. +> > Yeah. +> > Which ocean are you? +> > It's a BuzzFeed quiz. +> > BRIAN: So it's 4:00. Did anyone have anything in general they wanted to discuss? +> > I sort of did. It was in the brief for this talk -- something about how do we think about breaking off pieces of topics that are this big. So, I think that there's something interesting in the idea of, like, repeatedly doing such specific things on a huge topic. But always something quite different. So, all of these projects that we've just discussed -- if they were to come to life, if it was one a month, or something, build up from the ground of these comprehensive ideas of all the impacts of climate change as opposed to, like, the one master interactive that's going to help you understand climate change, does that make sense? +> > BRIAN: No, it makes sense. If every interactive thing or if every story that you make had to cover the topic comprehensively, you would be paralyzed. +> > Well, I think there's a tendency to do that, at least in my own mind there is. +> > BRIAN: Well, I'm not sure what the real barriers are newsrooms of the specific policies are -- whether it's the newsrooms. But it's a big question. +> > Are you experienced with climate projects? +> > BRIAN: I guess I'm working on environmental projects. It's got the climate component but I don't have a particular background in it. I'm just interested like many in -- +> > I'm just thinking if there's, like, similar patterns to the problems that we were talking about. +> > BRIAN: Um... +> > that -- that would -- yeah. +> > I used to work at Gris, and one problem that we had, or one problem that existed in that universe was connecting specific issues like this in the public mind to big ideas like climate change like you talk about wildfires or reefs or fish, or something. People don't automatically associate big policy issues. So it's an interesting metaproblem when doing these kinds of things. +> > Right, which is why if it's understood if all these things that you're doing are a part of a greater push of your organization to cover climate change and these are just, like, several specific things that you've done under that, I think it should be easier to relate to -- to your picture, maybe. +> > BRIAN: Well, it's a balance. A balance between the bigger picture and not becoming kind of, numbed by how big the bigger picture is. Related to the bigger picture but keep it as, you know, palatable as possible. I don't know if that's the word. Well, I guess we should move out. Thanks, everyone. +> > Thank you. diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_15_Data_Processing_Pipeline.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_15_Data_Processing_Pipeline.md index 607d9296..d3150daa 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_15_Data_Processing_Pipeline.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_15_Data_Processing_Pipeline.md @@ -1,640 +1,613 @@ -Data Processing Pipeline show and tell -Session facilitator(s): Ted Han, Jacqui Maher -Day & Time: Thursday, 3-4pm -Room: Garden 2 - ->> Shall we do this thing? Enthusiasm. All right. Cool. Data. -We're talking about data. Data processing pipelines. I assume -everyone here, I know a number of you here but not everyone here. Has -everyone here had to process data? Raise your hands. -Okay. Everyone in this room has had to process data. Good. -That means we can do the whole show and tell portion of this. There -are at the moment, two, four, six, eight, ten, we have 60 minutes. -Everybody gets six minutes then at the moment. -I'll try to be quick. So ultimately this is the question that I -was interested in talking about. Obviously I know my portion of the -world. I know how to process documents in a variety of way. I know -ruby and some of the pipeline choices there as well as getting up to -speed on the sorts of data, data stores that you can collect and store -information in. Jacqui and I put together a questionnaire that you -can get to via that. You guys don't have to fill this out now but I -would be really interested in hearing about the sorts of projects that -you have. -What I'd like to do is compile a little resource but we'll see -how that goes. It would be fun and interesting to just hear about a -little bit about the projects that people have made and try to figure -out what are the primary constraints that led to those tactical -decisions. And so I mean we might as well jump in and give some -examples of how this works. Would you like to start? ->> Sure. Sure. Back in 1999 or so I got a job at an -- on an -interactive news team at Hearst. They dissolved it at tend of 2001. -Maybe it was too early. I don't know. My first project was the -esquire drinks data base. They wanted to make an esquire drinks -database. The first constraint was that I could not have a database. -They would not let me have a database. What do you mean? It's a -database. I had to come up with a way of somehow storing all of the -drink ingredients and stuff and at that time the answer to everyone's -problems was XML. Which ...(laughing)... which is a new problem, new -problem. I ended up having to write a lot of pearl to generate and -then parse a lot of XML. It was fun because it was all about -cocktails? ->> Let's see. I forget to mention that -- we're going to have -more people. ->> Welcome. ->> Quickly, just to give the vital statistics for the sorts of -projects and describe my first data project that I did for work thing. -I was a student archivist at Ohio state cartoon research library on -the bill Blackbeard collection. It was newspaper clippings collected -over 30 years. -The archivist in charge had asked for a student to tribe into -excel spread sheets what was in the collection and she would open each - - - - -and type in the XML document that was the index for the project. I -thought that is bullshit, I will write a pearl script in order to -take a CSV and spit out the XML that we need and you essentially -double click on a pearl script and it ran. All the data was just in -excel spread sheets. -That gets -- so the primary constraint there is what can my -librarian actually run and I didn't know shit about anything. I was -like doing the pearl thing. Once you get up to a problem like -DocumentCloud, our goal is to take PDFs or whatever document you've -got, break it into parts so you can manipulate the text and get images -and embed all those assets on the website. The stack is all ruby. We -use H GIS and have a solar search engine that has gone to shit today. -The data that we've got there is essentially the raw documents -themselves which get stored in S3. The search, the searchable text -and images. We use a distributive library called CloudCrowd so we can -defer the processing of the documents off into a pipeline because -obviously DocumentCloud serves a dual role of having to serve viewable -documents to anybody that comes to view things and crunch through -potentially thousands of documents that journalists are up loading all -at the same time. -Shall we at that point, or do you have any thing you want to -describe? ->> I've done stuff since 1999. So about a year ago at the New -York times Aaron decided that we needed a news room analytics team. -We have analytics going on throughout the building. Towards the end -of the year I started working on trying to figure out how to do like a -... Basically started out as one person writing -- this is becoming a -theme -- pearl scripts -- to parse data that we had collected on how -our readers were using our site. Like whether it was like how people -are navigating from story to story or you can guess all the met -tricks. -But when I became part of that team my goal was to make this more -scaleable. The first question is where is this data. Where the data -was, was in a bucket on S3 filled with G zipped files and the files -were named according to I think like an EC2 incidence ID and time -stamp. And I looked at that and was like, what? How am I supposed to -find who is looking at the home page or anything like that. Lots and -lots of people within the news room on the developer side had tried -various ways of doing this. I heard about -- I took a stab at writing -a bunch of ruby scripts to download and parse and it took forever. -There were people doing -- kind of jobs and I became aware of a -project in R and D called stream tools that I won't go into too much -because we're doing a session on it tomorrow that is -- let's see -- -am I answering all the questions? -The problem, tons and tons and tons of data not in an obvious -searchable format. How to we get that into a searchable format to do -analysis and so on. The stack in my case became stream tools which is -a tool kit for dealing with lots of data and filtering it live. So -it's written in go. Has lots of libraries, too many to mention right -now I think. - - - - -But the delivery is constant, it's streaming? ->> We would like to see if we can go through quickly and ask -people the sorts of projects they're working on and catalog some of -this information and ask people to dump some of this into a spread -sheet and hopefully have a quick moment for a question or two if there -is anything that people want to ask. ->> We want to hear from you. ->> Yes. How about we start in that corner of the room. Waldo -would you like to describe a data processing project. You don't have -to if you don't want to. ->> Sure. There is a hobby one that -- despite when I run the -U.S. data institute, when I go home in the evening I work on it in -ways that I can't do at work. There is a project. Crump, named for -Beverly T. Crump, the very first secretary of business in Virginia in -1901. I buy data from the State of Virginia of their corporate -records. They sell them for a monthly subscription. I pay the -subscription and give the data away so nobody else has to pay for the -subscription. It's awful. It's 800 megs of data. I put together a -data processing pipeline to turn it into something useful. It's in -Python and I have yellow files that specify the text and the field -names they should mount to. So it produces J song versions of that. -It can produce one J son file for each record. That gives you -millions of J son files. You get an elastic search map that tells you -the constraint for each column and it also creates bulk import files. -Elastic search can only import 10,000 at a time I think. ->> How does it run. ->> Straight up uses Python. It's Python configured through -Yammel (ph.), configured out searched files and there is a data -file -- it runs every Wednesday morning at 2:30 a.m. or whenever the -data updates. That's the ultimate effector though. ->> I think given the number of people in the room we should keep -them ... ->> Let's say census reporter is a website that takes in ACS data -from the census bureau and spits out a beautiful website with the help -of two humans. Questions were, the problem ... Census does a great -job of collecting the data. A horrible job of distributing it. Each -year the data has it's own little flavor of problem. For example -sometimes nulls are dashes, sometimes they're zeros and sometimes -they're periods. Sometimes they're blank. Sometimes the geography -changes between each release. So the problem -- that was the problem -we were trying to solve. We were trying to get that out in a -consistent format. The stack, we use Python pretty much exclusively. -I guess we would download the data from census bureau, use Python to -convert the data from their CSV into a CSV that made more sense and -then we stick it into PostGIS to do queries on. The delivery of the -data happens roughly once a year with releases that are -- three -releases that are spaced out by about a month. -They're all CSV files and, yeah, frequency. Yearly. ->> Cool. Thank you. ->> I was going to say those of you on the ground, there are two - - - - -chairs here. ->> I'm going to be standing so if somebody wants to sit here. ->> I'll take it. ->> Okay. ->> I'll pass. ->> Brian, anything you want to share? ->> I've been working for the last -- really the last year and a -half but formally on this thing called news links and the idea is to -try to collect all sorts of analytics data from APIs and from websites -and RSS feeds and to do that for like naively for any website or any -Twitter feed or whatever. So we have tons of data. -And more than that tons of sources and also the possibility of -more sources in the future that we don't even know about. -So the problem is not just getting the data we know we have but -the unknown data. The unknown knowns, unknown unknowns. -So our problem is like we have to be able to quickly make new -scripts that fit into our current pipeline. Our approach has been to -actually turn everything into gel scripts, that pipe things from -standard in to standard out. You can type from Twitter into -postscripts or type from Facebook into elastic search or S3 or -whatever. And that's been good because it means we can really quickly -write something that will get from Tumblr or chart feed or whatever. -So our -- that's all written in Python. And we haven't really decided -on a database yet. But probably post press or elastic search. And -the second problem is that these things have to be running all the -time and often times -- for instance if you need to count how many -shares of a link has on Twitter and you have to do that for 100,000 -links every five minutes, you have to do this all on some sort of -distributed processing system. -So we've been using just Amazon SQS to put those sort of things -into a cue and have that on a sort of cluster that is listed. Yeah. -That's about it. Yes? ->> Okay. Thank you. ->> I'll pass. ->> Okay. ->> I'm June. I'll share one project. We did a project for -United Nations developer programs. And basically they are publishing -their data to this standard called international initiative for aid -transparency. They process their data in a certain way so it spits -out XML. Yeah. So a lot of USA or the international people use that -data, they use that as their publishing format. They came to us for -like, to use that data and make it into something more like useful. -So we did -- it was about two years ago we did a custom solution -for them. We parsed their XM, we download the XML data up loaded -monthly and run -- wrote a Python script to process them and to -process the whole XML into a custom J son that we consume and built a -four static APLs online. Just split the J sons into sub J sons and we -consume it and built a website on top of that and the technology we're -using is all static. We're using get hub and jackal and when they -need an update we just, if they need -- if they're just updating the - - - - -data, they run the script again and it will automatically push to the -pages on the hub. If they need a feature edit, sometimes they come -back to us and we do a full request. On GitHub they're open so that's -the workload we have with them? ->> So that's interesting. It's a constraint on work flow. Thank -you. ->> We'll jump over here. ->> I came in late. I'm sorry. ->> I have a similar project. ->> Those are the sort of totems to sort of focus on. You don't -have to go right now if you want. We can come back to you if we -prefer. ->> The thing that is coming to mind is a project that is similar -where I'm leveraging the GitHub system to send me updates on files -that I need to process and post to visualization that they have. -We're exploring the vocabulary on the different topics in the library. -Now it's Kludgy, I get their requests and push a couple of -things. I suppose at some point I would like to sit down and figure -out how to button click and have it all run in a smooth little job or -run at the same time. I'm assuming they'll send me an e-mail at the -same time every week. I haven't done it and it's a time problem on my -part and not a data processing problem? ->> It's totally a data processing problem. ->> What is the name of the project. ->> Intra-news project. I think it's my fellowship repo they have -and they send me an update. ->> Stack. That was the ... ->> I do Python for part of it. It's a bit of GitHub as well -which is already up there. ->> Thank you. ->> I was going to talk about Tribune -- database. Our -- I'll go -right to the problem. The Tribune employs other databases and we -collect the salary information from public schools and cities and -counties and any government agency you can think of. One of the -struggles there is obviously we're asking -- for the most part asking -everyone the same way for the data they have. But there is no -guarantee that we're going to get all of those people to give -information to us in the same standard format. Some people are -charging for mainframe time and others have it sitting on their -desktop. There are different things that we have to bring together -and standardize to some degree so we can present them all together in -a sort of way. -The struggle there, the thing that we've been working on and -hopefully will be more public the next couple weeks is kind of a -series and I'll give a out to Travis Vicegood. But working on things -called transformers. We're doing this in Python. Essentially -having -- there's the raw dataset living on S3 which is going as far -as being an excellent spread sheet but having a code-driven way of -bringing that to the database using CSV kit to convert it. Having -code written to transform. Go through each row and turn it into - - - - -something that is standardized across what the data list expects? ->> How does that run? ->> Right now this first batch of them will be a very, very long -time. Take a long time to go. We can distribute it. But I did -- -the idea here is once we do this big redo it's going to be one or two -a week that will happen. There is no need -- there are 250,000 -employees so that one takes a couple hours. But most places are -school districts. -The idea is obviously of the a well-documented process for how it -got from XL spread sheet or access database to inside on the site. -Because the previous version of it was people massaging things in -excel. We trust everyone but it's a thing where we also have a case -where dates got changed or converted wrong. And like all the higher -dates have extra five years. Things that if we automated in some way -wouldn't have been a problem. Having this system that you know -looking through the spread sheet and figuring out what needs to be -changed from each column to convert it and then having the code that -was rewritten to do that. -And then that's part of the repo. So it's well documented. How -did this data get in there. This is how it interacted with every name -and interacted with every salary number and so on? ->> Cool. Thanks. -Moving on? ->> I have a challenging data processing pipeline but I'm not -going to talk about it because it's boring. ->> Okay. ->> The one I will talk about. I was in an elevator in Texas and -on the inspection certificate it said to search for more information -go to this website. I went to the website and they have a CSV. I -have a website that has all of the inspection data for the elevators -in Texas. And the closest elevator to us right now is in a Wyndham -hotel in Texas. A lot of this was based off of pain points from -previous data projects that we've done. And that is that data -needs -- the reporting needs to be repeatable so everything can be -done with one make command. Like make scrape I think. It runs and -does everything and it's reduced to one like one goal was, one command -does all the imports. If you look at the source code it's easy to -know what that command is doing in turn. -And the other thing that we do is -- it's a CSV so the CSV is -stored in a separate Git repo. So there is some history, another -audit trail, I can go back in time and see what my data was like at a -certain time? ->> Can I ask a question? How horrifying is the information. ->> There is a lot of dirty data but it's fun. ->> And the elevators themselves? ->> Yes? Should I be concerned. ->> It's actually pretty good. ->> Texas is on the map. Just stay out of Houston. -So it's mostly, heavily relied on Git, shell scripts and Python. ->> We'll call Git and GitHub the same thing. - - - - ->> Back in 2009/2010 I was in Portland, Oregon and found 20,000 -Twitter users in Portland and pulled their historical data and a few -million Tweets. Somebody uses one hash tag. What are the hash tags -they're using and the user mentions and stuff. My SQL is taking -forever. I made other tables that linked the count. For this hash -tag and this user ID this is how many times they used it. This hash -tag and user mention this is how many are tied together and stuff like -that and search on it. -I'm doing something similar. Like Portland I'm looking at -politicians. I'm testing using the SQL memory tables to have faster -joins. -The code was in PHP and MySQL. ->> Would you like to go next? ->> Sure. My team works on Cicero. It's an elected official -matching PSI. We assemble the election boundaries and district -boundaries at the local, state, and federal level as well as all the -contact information for the elected officials that serve those -districts. The problem is how do I quickly and easily find out who -the local and state and federal officials are. We assemble this data -in a post GIST database and built an API that allows both address to -official matching and district ID to official matching. -And we have a soap and a rest API. Essentially just makes it -much easier to find your elected officials. ->> Cool. ->> PostGIS. ->> Thanks. ->> So we -- I got to talk about the tribune even though I don't -work there anymore. We have a dump of all of the historical archives -from the Chicago Tribune going back to 1805 from ProQuest. 3.2 -terabytes of tar balls. And it was a tar ball for each day since -between 1855 and 1990. Like, some time in January of 1990. And so -this was like the most hideous crap that I've ever seen. In each tar -ball it was just like in randomly numbered folders structured in -there. There were TIF files. Nothing had a file extension so you -couldn't tell what the file was. -All the extensions were 001, 002, 003. And this document -explained that. 002 was .TIF and .001 was. INI and .003 was Berkeley -database. There were INI files, TIF files, XML files and Berkeley -data files for each issue. There was this other specialized like -mapping binary file format that ProQuest invented. Luckily, we didn't -have to do anything with that. -What we did is wrote some Python to just start tearing apart -archives one by one. The goal was to take this stuff online and make -it usable and searchable. They have the alpha version up at archive -at Chicago Tribune.com. -We decided to use the document bureau from document hub. We were -able to quickly take a few archives and throw them through Python and -generate like the J son document and thumbnails that the document -viewer needed to show stuff. So pretty quickly we had a hot demo and -we're like, sweet, we can do something with this. - - - - -We started working on its and we thought it would take a few -months to do and it ended uptaking close to a year. We never had a -whole lot of people working on it at once because other stuff was -going on. -But the problem was there was 3.2 terabytes of this stuff. Once -it was unzipped we needed to create thumbnails for each page and -process the meta data. Include OCR text for each article on each page -and in a lot of cases that OCR text was worthless and nothing you -wanted to show to the user. -And so we wrote this Python script to process this thing and -rewrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it. We finally got it down. We -would write this script and run it through a sample set of data and -okay, it's going to take 8 months to process the entire script? ->> This was one script. ->> Yes. One. And then we threaded it to process more than one -at the time and then it was down to 6 month. ->> This was process multi-threading. ->> Yes. And then we're like how many Amazon service ... We -worked through this until we got it to a point where we found out so -much, discovered so much about imaging processing libraries and -graphics magic is the most performant one that we found working with -Python. Python PIL or whatever, would just take so much more time and -that time added up very quickly. -So yeah ... ->> Thanks. Did we miss anything? ->> Quick show of hands, how many of you had to deal with ProQuest -data? ->> The rest of you are very lucky. ->> I don't know if I have any good examples here. ->> Well, if you think of any. ->> Al? ->> I'm a student at North Western currently interning. Last year -I was working on a project for the school called Social Scraper. We -were basically trying to look at a political campaign. Can we analyze -all of the Facebook and social data about this campaign and come up -with like real insights that would actually help them. Like the -Schneider campaign in Illinois. We wrote a bunch -- tried using the -APS, the Facebook API and Twitter API and all publicly available data. -It ended up not being enough. You can't get user feed and even on -Twitter you get rate limited every hour. -We ended up writing a library called social scraper on Python and -it goes into Twitter and goes into Facebook. Kind of like logs in as -an account and grabs all available information about publicly -available people in general. This is all people that like a certain -page. Finding all people that liked the Schneider campaign page. It -was a couple gigabytes of data. We put it in postscript and that like -Chris said, the SQL queries took however. So we piped it into elastic -search and that created an amazing interface of pie charts and gender -and things that people like and a map of where all the people are. So -definitely plus one on the elastic serve Kabana plaque. - - - - ->> Thank you. ->> The fellow sitting directly behind ... ->> Me? Or Aaron can go next. ->> Okay. My problem was California campaign financed data. -After a lot of the support we got raw dumps of campaign finance -expenditures by elected officials and lobbying reports. California -has a proprietary database form they use and they have a script that -dumps into it tab limited files but in a horrible fashion. Me and Ben -of the LA Times wrote a script using Python and Django going through -these dumps. 800-megabyte dumps per day of new data. He calls down -this new data and cleans up the TSVs and CSVs and now we have raw data -and using an OBZ we load it up in the SQL server so the reporters can -query it. That is not helpful unless you know how to write SQL code. -So then we pulled out the reports, candidates and the candidate -committees that formed when looking for reelection and the money -coming in. We did a new Django application to break that part out. -Now we have the lobbying reports. New Django report and pull out the -reports. It's a large dump and then separate campaign finance for -elected officials and separate for lobbyists and the full script takes -24 hours to run. Which is crazy so we're working on optimizing that. ->> Is the processing frame work around what you're using to run -it or screen, run, command. ->> Say again. ->> Do you have a processing thing that you're doing for it. Or -is it like you're dipping in Python run script. ->> It's like Python manage POI, build campaign finance and build -lobbying. Then we wanted to compare the reports that lobbyists said -they received versus the candidates. And the lobbyist data is in -the -- and the candidates have it in PDF. We up load all to MS3 and -Python, paid people 5 to 11 and had them annotate anything and had -them write a cleaning script for what we thought was the right answer. -It was a long process, but. ->> We'll go left. ->> I'll complain about the IRS. One of the papers I work for is -the chronical of philanthropy. We love and hate the form 990. The -tax return that is publicly available that every nonprofit files. And -the IRS has to give you a 990 for an organization if you ask for it. -The organization also has to give it to you. The IRS will give you -all of them filed in a given time period but only on these large -stacks of DVDs. DVDs of scanned pages as single page TIFs. -So we had a few different problems we wanted to solve in the news -room. One was just getting these in a format that we can use like -that we can all access in one central place. One was being able to -search that information internally. And then one was being able to -potentially link to one of these returns for a reader publicly, like -if we have an example of something shady or interesting that somebody -is doing, want to link to that particular return. Basically a way to -manage this stuff coming in and sticking it online. -So we have essentially a bunch of Python scripts. One that just -given what the set of DVDs is, so you know, form 990PF filed in - - - - -January 2010. Here is the stack of those DVDs. Just go through and -rip them and put them together the way that the sort of manifest on -the DVD says that they go together. Here is this organization and -this file name is page one, this file name is page 2, all the way to -the end. -And then we store that in an internal my SQL server. Using the -Django ROM. One it gives us access to the Django admin that I didn't -have to write and it gives us an easy way to serialize that. So we -have back ups of test 3 which is where the combined PDFs are of these -scans. We can search it internally, get to it and publicly available -files that we can direct other people like our readers to if we think -it's useful? ->> Cool. ->> I have one quick example. It's actually Jacqui's example. -One of the things I'm trying to do now that I'm having difficulty -doing. Is finding every page view of every story about the bridge -gate scandal in New York. The New Jersey governor closed the bridge -because he is an ass hole and we wrote about it a lot. I've been -reading a lot of stories about this guy and I'm upset about the whole -thing. -Jacqui said we store page view logs in S3 but we do it in a -dramatically unhelpful manner. We have every 10 minutes 50 servers, -each of the 50 servers writes one tart G zipped love file (ph.) to S3 -folder indexed by the dates. -Which means that if I want to find all the pages over 3 months I -have to go through 68,000 log files. So the way we do that is with -EMI. I wanted to make sure that I got first mention of that even -though I hate it. HADOOP can't deal with small files. It will break -quickly. If you run out of memory it's a well-known problem. If you -Google the HADOOP small file problem, what we have to do is run a -cluster per day over 3 months. So I've stood up about 90 clusters to -find one time series that I really need to find far project. So it's -a grumpy story, but I wanted to make sure Hadoop was on the board. ->> We have ten minutes. ->> Okay. ->> We have ten minutes. We can go through everyone. Would you -like to ... ->> I have nothing. ->> I'm fine. ->> Either of you two? ->> Okay. We can have ten minutes for questions. What are things -that have come up that you either wanted to know or something -interesting that somebody mentioned in the room or problems that you -have that you want the collective brain power in the room to help -answer. Does anyone have any questions? ->> To look at politicians on Twitter, I was wondering if anything -had a solid dataset that had everybody running for election in the -U.S. senate and the U.S. house in the fall. ->> Sunlight has some of it but not ... ->> Are there current legislators running for reelection? - - - - ->> Incumbents, the United States project on GitHub has like their -congress legislators repo and one of the things that's stored in -there, wherever they know it is like Twitter and Facebook URLs. ->> I found that for people that have been elected but in terms -of -- ->> Opponents, I don't know. ->> Some county board of elections might have it. ->> State by state or for campaign finance. I can get people who -are reporting on that and get it from there. I was hoping that -someone had a clean dataset if possible. It's probably more like a -unicorn. ->> Specifically Twitter. ->> If I get their names that is half the battle. Twitter would -be great. The first step is getting the names. ->> Sunlight would at least have their names, I think. ->> Then they sometimes, the primaries already occurred so people -who aren't running anymore are in the campaign finance as well. It's -a lot of data. But I was wondering if anything had the magic -solution. ->> We collect them from Texas. If there was a place for us to -submit, we could submit some place. ->> Sounds like somebody should make a GitHub repo. ->> Have you talked to the elections guys? ->> Not about this subject. ->> Too bad none of them are here. -All right. ->> I have a quick question to ask the crowd. With this campaign -finance that I used. We're using Django and tens of millions of -records I have to go through. And store them into a database and -getting CSVs and putting them in a database. With Django you have the -bulk record -- to do 30,000 records at a time. I'm running into -24-hour bottlenecks. So I'm curious if anyone has problems. If they -have millions of records and want to slam that into a database. -Anything you've tried. ->> PostGIS copy command. ->> We're using PostGIS. ->> It can go directly into SQL as long as the columns match your -tables. ->> We're trying to create the Django models on top of that. ->> You can create the models and pop late through the database in -separate steps. ->> The model in a sense is just a row in the table. You don't -have to add other meta data. ->> I suggest from what we learned from building the crime site at -the Chicago Tribune. When we modeled that we model Django to the data -coming in. It wasn't the data that we wanted to put out. When we -were trying to display the data we were doing complex queries and it -made more sense once we looked at it again to go back and say, was the -data we needed to displace, build models for that and process the data -into those models. - - - - ->> If your tables don't match the data you want to show, I would -say create temporary tables that match the CSVs and write a SQL -command that creates a new table and copies the data from that -imported table into your, the one you want to create the model around. ->> We had a similar problem, my only concern is make sure that if -everyone on the team were wiped out by an asteroid and picked up the -next day, don't write a ton of code that is hard to read. The ability -to pass the knowledge on is a pretty big deal. ->> Sweet, thank you. ->> Other questions? ->> What's people's preferred ways for D2B (ph.) on the fly. Like -pulling an RSV or something. I'm curious how people do that. If you -want to just have the unique records do you up search. Ignore when -you're pulling it down. ->> I personally try to clean out -- yeah. ->> I think it depends. What counts as a DUP versus an update or -whatever depends on the dataset. ->> Whatever you think is a DUP. ->> I use replace into because it's faster to just write it twice, -over write the first one. ->> There is also a library in Python called DDO that I use with -campaign finance data. It deals with records that are almost the same -but not exactly the same. ->> How often are people encountering DUP data without a unique -ID? ->> A lot. ->> Django has been mentioned five times and I've been to Django -con a few times. I think it would be useful if there was a form for -Django problems that developers run into. ->> I feel like some of that comes up on the Python Journos list. -I wouldn't say Python Journos has a lot of traffic but when these -questions come up that is where they do. ->> Also the C++ and Journo list. There is only one of us. ->> That is Jeff Larson. ->> Cool. ->> Is that it. ->> Basically. I think we're going to compile this and write some -stuff up. ->> I wrote down all the questions. ->> Sweet. ->> If you also want to go up to the thing and fill out more -information about your project that would be helpful. There are some -obviously things that everybody is using here. Most people use -Python. But it's interesting to see where else we can see how these -different tools are applied in different situations. -Let us know and thank you. +Data Processing Pipeline show and tell +Session facilitator(s): Ted Han, Jacqui Maher +Day & Time: Thursday, 3-4pm +Room: Garden 2 + +> > Shall we do this thing? Enthusiasm. All right. Cool. Data. +> > We're talking about data. Data processing pipelines. I assume +> > everyone here, I know a number of you here but not everyone here. Has +> > everyone here had to process data? Raise your hands. +> > Okay. Everyone in this room has had to process data. Good. +> > That means we can do the whole show and tell portion of this. There +> > are at the moment, two, four, six, eight, ten, we have 60 minutes. +> > Everybody gets six minutes then at the moment. +> > I'll try to be quick. So ultimately this is the question that I +> > was interested in talking about. Obviously I know my portion of the +> > world. I know how to process documents in a variety of way. I know +> > ruby and some of the pipeline choices there as well as getting up to +> > speed on the sorts of data, data stores that you can collect and store +> > information in. Jacqui and I put together a questionnaire that you +> > can get to via that. You guys don't have to fill this out now but I +> > would be really interested in hearing about the sorts of projects that +> > you have. +> > What I'd like to do is compile a little resource but we'll see +> > how that goes. It would be fun and interesting to just hear about a +> > little bit about the projects that people have made and try to figure +> > out what are the primary constraints that led to those tactical +> > decisions. And so I mean we might as well jump in and give some +> > examples of how this works. Would you like to start? +> > Sure. Sure. Back in 1999 or so I got a job at an -- on an +> > interactive news team at Hearst. They dissolved it at tend of 2001. +> > Maybe it was too early. I don't know. My first project was the +> > esquire drinks data base. They wanted to make an esquire drinks +> > database. The first constraint was that I could not have a database. +> > They would not let me have a database. What do you mean? It's a +> > database. I had to come up with a way of somehow storing all of the +> > drink ingredients and stuff and at that time the answer to everyone's +> > problems was XML. Which ...(laughing)... which is a new problem, new +> > problem. I ended up having to write a lot of pearl to generate and +> > then parse a lot of XML. It was fun because it was all about +> > cocktails? +> > Let's see. I forget to mention that -- we're going to have +> > more people. +> > Welcome. +> > Quickly, just to give the vital statistics for the sorts of +> > projects and describe my first data project that I did for work thing. +> > I was a student archivist at Ohio state cartoon research library on +> > the bill Blackbeard collection. It was newspaper clippings collected +> > over 30 years. +> > The archivist in charge had asked for a student to tribe into +> > excel spread sheets what was in the collection and she would open each + +and type in the XML document that was the index for the project. I +thought that is bullshit, I will write a pearl script in order to +take a CSV and spit out the XML that we need and you essentially +double click on a pearl script and it ran. All the data was just in +excel spread sheets. +That gets -- so the primary constraint there is what can my +librarian actually run and I didn't know shit about anything. I was +like doing the pearl thing. Once you get up to a problem like +DocumentCloud, our goal is to take PDFs or whatever document you've +got, break it into parts so you can manipulate the text and get images +and embed all those assets on the website. The stack is all ruby. We +use H GIS and have a solar search engine that has gone to shit today. +The data that we've got there is essentially the raw documents +themselves which get stored in S3. The search, the searchable text +and images. We use a distributive library called CloudCrowd so we can +defer the processing of the documents off into a pipeline because +obviously DocumentCloud serves a dual role of having to serve viewable +documents to anybody that comes to view things and crunch through +potentially thousands of documents that journalists are up loading all +at the same time. +Shall we at that point, or do you have any thing you want to +describe? + +> > I've done stuff since 1999. So about a year ago at the New +> > York times Aaron decided that we needed a news room analytics team. +> > We have analytics going on throughout the building. Towards the end +> > of the year I started working on trying to figure out how to do like a +> > ... Basically started out as one person writing -- this is becoming a +> > theme -- pearl scripts -- to parse data that we had collected on how +> > our readers were using our site. Like whether it was like how people +> > are navigating from story to story or you can guess all the met +> > tricks. +> > But when I became part of that team my goal was to make this more +> > scaleable. The first question is where is this data. Where the data +> > was, was in a bucket on S3 filled with G zipped files and the files +> > were named according to I think like an EC2 incidence ID and time +> > stamp. And I looked at that and was like, what? How am I supposed to +> > find who is looking at the home page or anything like that. Lots and +> > lots of people within the news room on the developer side had tried +> > various ways of doing this. I heard about -- I took a stab at writing +> > a bunch of ruby scripts to download and parse and it took forever. +> > There were people doing -- kind of jobs and I became aware of a +> > project in R and D called stream tools that I won't go into too much +> > because we're doing a session on it tomorrow that is -- let's see -- +> > am I answering all the questions? +> > The problem, tons and tons and tons of data not in an obvious +> > searchable format. How to we get that into a searchable format to do +> > analysis and so on. The stack in my case became stream tools which is +> > a tool kit for dealing with lots of data and filtering it live. So +> > it's written in go. Has lots of libraries, too many to mention right +> > now I think. + +But the delivery is constant, it's streaming? + +> > We would like to see if we can go through quickly and ask +> > people the sorts of projects they're working on and catalog some of +> > this information and ask people to dump some of this into a spread +> > sheet and hopefully have a quick moment for a question or two if there +> > is anything that people want to ask. +> > We want to hear from you. +> > Yes. How about we start in that corner of the room. Waldo +> > would you like to describe a data processing project. You don't have +> > to if you don't want to. +> > Sure. There is a hobby one that -- despite when I run the +> > U.S. data institute, when I go home in the evening I work on it in +> > ways that I can't do at work. There is a project. Crump, named for +> > Beverly T. Crump, the very first secretary of business in Virginia in 1901. I buy data from the State of Virginia of their corporate +> > records. They sell them for a monthly subscription. I pay the +> > subscription and give the data away so nobody else has to pay for the +> > subscription. It's awful. It's 800 megs of data. I put together a +> > data processing pipeline to turn it into something useful. It's in +> > Python and I have yellow files that specify the text and the field +> > names they should mount to. So it produces J song versions of that. +> > It can produce one J son file for each record. That gives you +> > millions of J son files. You get an elastic search map that tells you +> > the constraint for each column and it also creates bulk import files. +> > Elastic search can only import 10,000 at a time I think. +> > How does it run. +> > Straight up uses Python. It's Python configured through +> > Yammel (ph.), configured out searched files and there is a data +> > file -- it runs every Wednesday morning at 2:30 a.m. or whenever the +> > data updates. That's the ultimate effector though. +> > I think given the number of people in the room we should keep +> > them ... +> > Let's say census reporter is a website that takes in ACS data +> > from the census bureau and spits out a beautiful website with the help +> > of two humans. Questions were, the problem ... Census does a great +> > job of collecting the data. A horrible job of distributing it. Each +> > year the data has it's own little flavor of problem. For example +> > sometimes nulls are dashes, sometimes they're zeros and sometimes +> > they're periods. Sometimes they're blank. Sometimes the geography +> > changes between each release. So the problem -- that was the problem +> > we were trying to solve. We were trying to get that out in a +> > consistent format. The stack, we use Python pretty much exclusively. +> > I guess we would download the data from census bureau, use Python to +> > convert the data from their CSV into a CSV that made more sense and +> > then we stick it into PostGIS to do queries on. The delivery of the +> > data happens roughly once a year with releases that are -- three +> > releases that are spaced out by about a month. +> > They're all CSV files and, yeah, frequency. Yearly. +> > Cool. Thank you. +> > I was going to say those of you on the ground, there are two + +chairs here. + +> > I'm going to be standing so if somebody wants to sit here. +> > I'll take it. +> > Okay. +> > I'll pass. +> > Brian, anything you want to share? +> > I've been working for the last -- really the last year and a +> > half but formally on this thing called news links and the idea is to +> > try to collect all sorts of analytics data from APIs and from websites +> > and RSS feeds and to do that for like naively for any website or any +> > Twitter feed or whatever. So we have tons of data. +> > And more than that tons of sources and also the possibility of +> > more sources in the future that we don't even know about. +> > So the problem is not just getting the data we know we have but +> > the unknown data. The unknown knowns, unknown unknowns. +> > So our problem is like we have to be able to quickly make new +> > scripts that fit into our current pipeline. Our approach has been to +> > actually turn everything into gel scripts, that pipe things from +> > standard in to standard out. You can type from Twitter into +> > postscripts or type from Facebook into elastic search or S3 or +> > whatever. And that's been good because it means we can really quickly +> > write something that will get from Tumblr or chart feed or whatever. +> > So our -- that's all written in Python. And we haven't really decided +> > on a database yet. But probably post press or elastic search. And +> > the second problem is that these things have to be running all the +> > time and often times -- for instance if you need to count how many +> > shares of a link has on Twitter and you have to do that for 100,000 +> > links every five minutes, you have to do this all on some sort of +> > distributed processing system. +> > So we've been using just Amazon SQS to put those sort of things +> > into a cue and have that on a sort of cluster that is listed. Yeah. +> > That's about it. Yes? +> > Okay. Thank you. +> > I'll pass. +> > Okay. +> > I'm June. I'll share one project. We did a project for +> > United Nations developer programs. And basically they are publishing +> > their data to this standard called international initiative for aid +> > transparency. They process their data in a certain way so it spits +> > out XML. Yeah. So a lot of USA or the international people use that +> > data, they use that as their publishing format. They came to us for +> > like, to use that data and make it into something more like useful. +> > So we did -- it was about two years ago we did a custom solution +> > for them. We parsed their XM, we download the XML data up loaded +> > monthly and run -- wrote a Python script to process them and to +> > process the whole XML into a custom J son that we consume and built a +> > four static APLs online. Just split the J sons into sub J sons and we +> > consume it and built a website on top of that and the technology we're +> > using is all static. We're using get hub and jackal and when they +> > need an update we just, if they need -- if they're just updating the + +data, they run the script again and it will automatically push to the +pages on the hub. If they need a feature edit, sometimes they come +back to us and we do a full request. On GitHub they're open so that's +the workload we have with them? + +> > So that's interesting. It's a constraint on work flow. Thank +> > you. +> > We'll jump over here. +> > I came in late. I'm sorry. +> > I have a similar project. +> > Those are the sort of totems to sort of focus on. You don't +> > have to go right now if you want. We can come back to you if we +> > prefer. +> > The thing that is coming to mind is a project that is similar +> > where I'm leveraging the GitHub system to send me updates on files +> > that I need to process and post to visualization that they have. +> > We're exploring the vocabulary on the different topics in the library. +> > Now it's Kludgy, I get their requests and push a couple of +> > things. I suppose at some point I would like to sit down and figure +> > out how to button click and have it all run in a smooth little job or +> > run at the same time. I'm assuming they'll send me an e-mail at the +> > same time every week. I haven't done it and it's a time problem on my +> > part and not a data processing problem? +> > It's totally a data processing problem. +> > What is the name of the project. +> > Intra-news project. I think it's my fellowship repo they have +> > and they send me an update. +> > Stack. That was the ... +> > I do Python for part of it. It's a bit of GitHub as well +> > which is already up there. +> > Thank you. +> > I was going to talk about Tribune -- database. Our -- I'll go +> > right to the problem. The Tribune employs other databases and we +> > collect the salary information from public schools and cities and +> > counties and any government agency you can think of. One of the +> > struggles there is obviously we're asking -- for the most part asking +> > everyone the same way for the data they have. But there is no +> > guarantee that we're going to get all of those people to give +> > information to us in the same standard format. Some people are +> > charging for mainframe time and others have it sitting on their +> > desktop. There are different things that we have to bring together +> > and standardize to some degree so we can present them all together in +> > a sort of way. +> > The struggle there, the thing that we've been working on and +> > hopefully will be more public the next couple weeks is kind of a +> > series and I'll give a out to Travis Vicegood. But working on things +> > called transformers. We're doing this in Python. Essentially +> > having -- there's the raw dataset living on S3 which is going as far +> > as being an excellent spread sheet but having a code-driven way of +> > bringing that to the database using CSV kit to convert it. Having +> > code written to transform. Go through each row and turn it into + +something that is standardized across what the data list expects? + +> > How does that run? +> > Right now this first batch of them will be a very, very long +> > time. Take a long time to go. We can distribute it. But I did -- +> > the idea here is once we do this big redo it's going to be one or two +> > a week that will happen. There is no need -- there are 250,000 +> > employees so that one takes a couple hours. But most places are +> > school districts. +> > The idea is obviously of the a well-documented process for how it +> > got from XL spread sheet or access database to inside on the site. +> > Because the previous version of it was people massaging things in +> > excel. We trust everyone but it's a thing where we also have a case +> > where dates got changed or converted wrong. And like all the higher +> > dates have extra five years. Things that if we automated in some way +> > wouldn't have been a problem. Having this system that you know +> > looking through the spread sheet and figuring out what needs to be +> > changed from each column to convert it and then having the code that +> > was rewritten to do that. +> > And then that's part of the repo. So it's well documented. How +> > did this data get in there. This is how it interacted with every name +> > and interacted with every salary number and so on? +> > Cool. Thanks. +> > Moving on? +> > I have a challenging data processing pipeline but I'm not +> > going to talk about it because it's boring. +> > Okay. +> > The one I will talk about. I was in an elevator in Texas and +> > on the inspection certificate it said to search for more information +> > go to this website. I went to the website and they have a CSV. I +> > have a website that has all of the inspection data for the elevators +> > in Texas. And the closest elevator to us right now is in a Wyndham +> > hotel in Texas. A lot of this was based off of pain points from +> > previous data projects that we've done. And that is that data +> > needs -- the reporting needs to be repeatable so everything can be +> > done with one make command. Like make scrape I think. It runs and +> > does everything and it's reduced to one like one goal was, one command +> > does all the imports. If you look at the source code it's easy to +> > know what that command is doing in turn. +> > And the other thing that we do is -- it's a CSV so the CSV is +> > stored in a separate Git repo. So there is some history, another +> > audit trail, I can go back in time and see what my data was like at a +> > certain time? +> > Can I ask a question? How horrifying is the information. +> > There is a lot of dirty data but it's fun. +> > And the elevators themselves? +> > Yes? Should I be concerned. +> > It's actually pretty good. +> > Texas is on the map. Just stay out of Houston. +> > So it's mostly, heavily relied on Git, shell scripts and Python. +> > We'll call Git and GitHub the same thing. + +> > Back in 2009/2010 I was in Portland, Oregon and found 20,000 +> > Twitter users in Portland and pulled their historical data and a few +> > million Tweets. Somebody uses one hash tag. What are the hash tags +> > they're using and the user mentions and stuff. My SQL is taking +> > forever. I made other tables that linked the count. For this hash +> > tag and this user ID this is how many times they used it. This hash +> > tag and user mention this is how many are tied together and stuff like +> > that and search on it. +> > I'm doing something similar. Like Portland I'm looking at +> > politicians. I'm testing using the SQL memory tables to have faster +> > joins. +> > The code was in PHP and MySQL. +> > Would you like to go next? +> > Sure. My team works on Cicero. It's an elected official +> > matching PSI. We assemble the election boundaries and district +> > boundaries at the local, state, and federal level as well as all the +> > contact information for the elected officials that serve those +> > districts. The problem is how do I quickly and easily find out who +> > the local and state and federal officials are. We assemble this data +> > in a post GIST database and built an API that allows both address to +> > official matching and district ID to official matching. +> > And we have a soap and a rest API. Essentially just makes it +> > much easier to find your elected officials. +> > Cool. +> > PostGIS. +> > Thanks. +> > So we -- I got to talk about the tribune even though I don't +> > work there anymore. We have a dump of all of the historical archives +> > from the Chicago Tribune going back to 1805 from ProQuest. 3.2 +> > terabytes of tar balls. And it was a tar ball for each day since +> > between 1855 and 1990. Like, some time in January of 1990. And so +> > this was like the most hideous crap that I've ever seen. In each tar +> > ball it was just like in randomly numbered folders structured in +> > there. There were TIF files. Nothing had a file extension so you +> > couldn't tell what the file was. +> > All the extensions were 001, 002, 003. And this document +> > explained that. 002 was .TIF and .001 was. INI and .003 was Berkeley +> > database. There were INI files, TIF files, XML files and Berkeley +> > data files for each issue. There was this other specialized like +> > mapping binary file format that ProQuest invented. Luckily, we didn't +> > have to do anything with that. +> > What we did is wrote some Python to just start tearing apart +> > archives one by one. The goal was to take this stuff online and make +> > it usable and searchable. They have the alpha version up at archive +> > at Chicago Tribune.com. +> > We decided to use the document bureau from document hub. We were +> > able to quickly take a few archives and throw them through Python and +> > generate like the J son document and thumbnails that the document +> > viewer needed to show stuff. So pretty quickly we had a hot demo and +> > we're like, sweet, we can do something with this. + +We started working on its and we thought it would take a few +months to do and it ended uptaking close to a year. We never had a +whole lot of people working on it at once because other stuff was +going on. +But the problem was there was 3.2 terabytes of this stuff. Once +it was unzipped we needed to create thumbnails for each page and +process the meta data. Include OCR text for each article on each page +and in a lot of cases that OCR text was worthless and nothing you +wanted to show to the user. +And so we wrote this Python script to process this thing and +rewrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it. We finally got it down. We +would write this script and run it through a sample set of data and +okay, it's going to take 8 months to process the entire script? + +> > This was one script. +> > Yes. One. And then we threaded it to process more than one +> > at the time and then it was down to 6 month. +> > This was process multi-threading. +> > Yes. And then we're like how many Amazon service ... We +> > worked through this until we got it to a point where we found out so +> > much, discovered so much about imaging processing libraries and +> > graphics magic is the most performant one that we found working with +> > Python. Python PIL or whatever, would just take so much more time and +> > that time added up very quickly. +> > So yeah ... +> > Thanks. Did we miss anything? +> > Quick show of hands, how many of you had to deal with ProQuest +> > data? +> > The rest of you are very lucky. +> > I don't know if I have any good examples here. +> > Well, if you think of any. +> > Al? +> > I'm a student at North Western currently interning. Last year +> > I was working on a project for the school called Social Scraper. We +> > were basically trying to look at a political campaign. Can we analyze +> > all of the Facebook and social data about this campaign and come up +> > with like real insights that would actually help them. Like the +> > Schneider campaign in Illinois. We wrote a bunch -- tried using the +> > APS, the Facebook API and Twitter API and all publicly available data. +> > It ended up not being enough. You can't get user feed and even on +> > Twitter you get rate limited every hour. +> > We ended up writing a library called social scraper on Python and +> > it goes into Twitter and goes into Facebook. Kind of like logs in as +> > an account and grabs all available information about publicly +> > available people in general. This is all people that like a certain +> > page. Finding all people that liked the Schneider campaign page. It +> > was a couple gigabytes of data. We put it in postscript and that like +> > Chris said, the SQL queries took however. So we piped it into elastic +> > search and that created an amazing interface of pie charts and gender +> > and things that people like and a map of where all the people are. So +> > definitely plus one on the elastic serve Kabana plaque. + +> > Thank you. +> > The fellow sitting directly behind ... +> > Me? Or Aaron can go next. +> > Okay. My problem was California campaign financed data. +> > After a lot of the support we got raw dumps of campaign finance +> > expenditures by elected officials and lobbying reports. California +> > has a proprietary database form they use and they have a script that +> > dumps into it tab limited files but in a horrible fashion. Me and Ben +> > of the LA Times wrote a script using Python and Django going through +> > these dumps. 800-megabyte dumps per day of new data. He calls down +> > this new data and cleans up the TSVs and CSVs and now we have raw data +> > and using an OBZ we load it up in the SQL server so the reporters can +> > query it. That is not helpful unless you know how to write SQL code. +> > So then we pulled out the reports, candidates and the candidate +> > committees that formed when looking for reelection and the money +> > coming in. We did a new Django application to break that part out. +> > Now we have the lobbying reports. New Django report and pull out the +> > reports. It's a large dump and then separate campaign finance for +> > elected officials and separate for lobbyists and the full script takes +> > 24 hours to run. Which is crazy so we're working on optimizing that. +> > Is the processing frame work around what you're using to run +> > it or screen, run, command. +> > Say again. +> > Do you have a processing thing that you're doing for it. Or +> > is it like you're dipping in Python run script. +> > It's like Python manage POI, build campaign finance and build +> > lobbying. Then we wanted to compare the reports that lobbyists said +> > they received versus the candidates. And the lobbyist data is in +> > the -- and the candidates have it in PDF. We up load all to MS3 and +> > Python, paid people 5 to 11 and had them annotate anything and had +> > them write a cleaning script for what we thought was the right answer. +> > It was a long process, but. +> > We'll go left. +> > I'll complain about the IRS. One of the papers I work for is +> > the chronical of philanthropy. We love and hate the form 990. The +> > tax return that is publicly available that every nonprofit files. And +> > the IRS has to give you a 990 for an organization if you ask for it. +> > The organization also has to give it to you. The IRS will give you +> > all of them filed in a given time period but only on these large +> > stacks of DVDs. DVDs of scanned pages as single page TIFs. +> > So we had a few different problems we wanted to solve in the news +> > room. One was just getting these in a format that we can use like +> > that we can all access in one central place. One was being able to +> > search that information internally. And then one was being able to +> > potentially link to one of these returns for a reader publicly, like +> > if we have an example of something shady or interesting that somebody +> > is doing, want to link to that particular return. Basically a way to +> > manage this stuff coming in and sticking it online. +> > So we have essentially a bunch of Python scripts. One that just +> > given what the set of DVDs is, so you know, form 990PF filed in + +January 2010. Here is the stack of those DVDs. Just go through and +rip them and put them together the way that the sort of manifest on +the DVD says that they go together. Here is this organization and +this file name is page one, this file name is page 2, all the way to +the end. +And then we store that in an internal my SQL server. Using the +Django ROM. One it gives us access to the Django admin that I didn't +have to write and it gives us an easy way to serialize that. So we +have back ups of test 3 which is where the combined PDFs are of these +scans. We can search it internally, get to it and publicly available +files that we can direct other people like our readers to if we think +it's useful? + +> > Cool. +> > I have one quick example. It's actually Jacqui's example. +> > One of the things I'm trying to do now that I'm having difficulty +> > doing. Is finding every page view of every story about the bridge +> > gate scandal in New York. The New Jersey governor closed the bridge +> > because he is an ass hole and we wrote about it a lot. I've been +> > reading a lot of stories about this guy and I'm upset about the whole +> > thing. +> > Jacqui said we store page view logs in S3 but we do it in a +> > dramatically unhelpful manner. We have every 10 minutes 50 servers, +> > each of the 50 servers writes one tart G zipped love file (ph.) to S3 +> > folder indexed by the dates. +> > Which means that if I want to find all the pages over 3 months I +> > have to go through 68,000 log files. So the way we do that is with +> > EMI. I wanted to make sure that I got first mention of that even +> > though I hate it. HADOOP can't deal with small files. It will break +> > quickly. If you run out of memory it's a well-known problem. If you +> > Google the HADOOP small file problem, what we have to do is run a +> > cluster per day over 3 months. So I've stood up about 90 clusters to +> > find one time series that I really need to find far project. So it's +> > a grumpy story, but I wanted to make sure Hadoop was on the board. +> > We have ten minutes. +> > Okay. +> > We have ten minutes. We can go through everyone. Would you +> > like to ... +> > I have nothing. +> > I'm fine. +> > Either of you two? +> > Okay. We can have ten minutes for questions. What are things +> > that have come up that you either wanted to know or something +> > interesting that somebody mentioned in the room or problems that you +> > have that you want the collective brain power in the room to help +> > answer. Does anyone have any questions? +> > To look at politicians on Twitter, I was wondering if anything +> > had a solid dataset that had everybody running for election in the +> > U.S. senate and the U.S. house in the fall. +> > Sunlight has some of it but not ... +> > Are there current legislators running for reelection? + +> > Incumbents, the United States project on GitHub has like their +> > congress legislators repo and one of the things that's stored in +> > there, wherever they know it is like Twitter and Facebook URLs. +> > I found that for people that have been elected but in terms +> > of -- +> > Opponents, I don't know. +> > Some county board of elections might have it. +> > State by state or for campaign finance. I can get people who +> > are reporting on that and get it from there. I was hoping that +> > someone had a clean dataset if possible. It's probably more like a +> > unicorn. +> > Specifically Twitter. +> > If I get their names that is half the battle. Twitter would +> > be great. The first step is getting the names. +> > Sunlight would at least have their names, I think. +> > Then they sometimes, the primaries already occurred so people +> > who aren't running anymore are in the campaign finance as well. It's +> > a lot of data. But I was wondering if anything had the magic +> > solution. +> > We collect them from Texas. If there was a place for us to +> > submit, we could submit some place. +> > Sounds like somebody should make a GitHub repo. +> > Have you talked to the elections guys? +> > Not about this subject. +> > Too bad none of them are here. +> > All right. +> > I have a quick question to ask the crowd. With this campaign +> > finance that I used. We're using Django and tens of millions of +> > records I have to go through. And store them into a database and +> > getting CSVs and putting them in a database. With Django you have the +> > bulk record -- to do 30,000 records at a time. I'm running into +> > 24-hour bottlenecks. So I'm curious if anyone has problems. If they +> > have millions of records and want to slam that into a database. +> > Anything you've tried. +> > PostGIS copy command. +> > We're using PostGIS. +> > It can go directly into SQL as long as the columns match your +> > tables. +> > We're trying to create the Django models on top of that. +> > You can create the models and pop late through the database in +> > separate steps. +> > The model in a sense is just a row in the table. You don't +> > have to add other meta data. +> > I suggest from what we learned from building the crime site at +> > the Chicago Tribune. When we modeled that we model Django to the data +> > coming in. It wasn't the data that we wanted to put out. When we +> > were trying to display the data we were doing complex queries and it +> > made more sense once we looked at it again to go back and say, was the +> > data we needed to displace, build models for that and process the data +> > into those models. + +> > If your tables don't match the data you want to show, I would +> > say create temporary tables that match the CSVs and write a SQL +> > command that creates a new table and copies the data from that +> > imported table into your, the one you want to create the model around. +> > We had a similar problem, my only concern is make sure that if +> > everyone on the team were wiped out by an asteroid and picked up the +> > next day, don't write a ton of code that is hard to read. The ability +> > to pass the knowledge on is a pretty big deal. +> > Sweet, thank you. +> > Other questions? +> > What's people's preferred ways for D2B (ph.) on the fly. Like +> > pulling an RSV or something. I'm curious how people do that. If you +> > want to just have the unique records do you up search. Ignore when +> > you're pulling it down. +> > I personally try to clean out -- yeah. +> > I think it depends. What counts as a DUP versus an update or +> > whatever depends on the dataset. +> > Whatever you think is a DUP. +> > I use replace into because it's faster to just write it twice, +> > over write the first one. +> > There is also a library in Python called DDO that I use with +> > campaign finance data. It deals with records that are almost the same +> > but not exactly the same. +> > How often are people encountering DUP data without a unique +> > ID? +> > A lot. +> > Django has been mentioned five times and I've been to Django +> > con a few times. I think it would be useful if there was a form for +> > Django problems that developers run into. +> > I feel like some of that comes up on the Python Journos list. +> > I wouldn't say Python Journos has a lot of traffic but when these +> > questions come up that is where they do. +> > Also the C++ and Journo list. There is only one of us. +> > That is Jeff Larson. +> > Cool. +> > Is that it. +> > Basically. I think we're going to compile this and write some +> > stuff up. +> > I wrote down all the questions. +> > Sweet. +> > If you also want to go up to the thing and fill out more +> > information about your project that would be helpful. There are some +> > obviously things that everybody is using here. Most people use +> > Python. But it's interesting to see where else we can see how these +> > different tools are applied in different situations. +> > Let us know and thank you. diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_18_Science_vs_Data_Journalism.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_18_Science_vs_Data_Journalism.md index 9d9ed16f..8c5a6205 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_18_Science_vs_Data_Journalism.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_18_Science_vs_Data_Journalism.md @@ -1,193 +1,194 @@ -Science vs. data journalism -Session facilitator(s): Noah Veltman -Day & Time: Thursday, 4:30-5:30pm -Room: Garden 1 - -NOAH: Welcome, everyone. All right. So we're going to get started, I'm sure people will start to straggle in a little bit. My name is Noah, for those who didn't know me. I work for New York Public Radio. I'm on the data news team. So the name of the session is Data Journalism Versus Science, or Science Versus Data Journalism. It's not meant to be like a wrestling match antagonism sort of thing. My sort of inspiration for wanting to do this session started when I was talking at the Wilson Center, this place in D.C. for the science policy group and we got into it, a little bit on this subject much data journalism as kind of edging closer to science at least in appearance but often not in practice, not in form. And I'm feeling increasingly sort of guilty about this sort of, subconscious about it. Both in my work, or in others' work are sort of "sciencish" but don't actually have the rigor of real research science. So I wanted to talk about it. And I thought, so there's etherpad if you go to that link. I have a lot of notes here but I did the want to put all that in there. And I did not want to guide the discussion. I wanted you guys to talk. But I had these three kind of burning questions. The first is, what are sort of the difference between sort of serious research science and data jury room as we tend to practice it. And what are the similarities? And out of that, are there things that we wish that we could move in one direction or the other. Are there things that scientist do that we aspire to do more of, or value, or sort of adopt more fully from them, and from that wish list, how would we make that happen? If we had pure view in the newsroom or something what would that actually look like? How would that work, and jibe with business goals and actually get that done? So that's kind of my plan. So question one about what you see about the similarities and differences, I'm very messily going to scribe what you guys said, will she there's the first point that's the kudos norms, that this guy Robert Kimerton (phonetic) came up when trying to come up with what the this didn't of the scientific community are, and I think this was back in the 40s and the 50s. It's commonalism -- but in this case, it's communalism. Different sorts of politics in the sense that the things that you're doing are contributing to a shared body of knowledge. So you make a scientific finding and it goes out into the world, you don't own it. And it's shared knowledge. U as in universalism. It's not this prestood people that got to be called scientists, or the people at the top of universities who get to be so-called scientists. D is disinterestedness. That you're in it for the science, you're not in it to be famous. Your goal for science, is science itself. Originality. You're striving for new knowledge, new information about the world that does not yet exist. And S is skepticism. Any finding, any claim deserves skepticism. And it's only through that skepticism and that scrutiny that it becomes valid and sort of, more valuable and all those things sort of on the surface sound like values of journalists but I think there are just a lot of differences. So what do you guys think? Should I just go into my those? Anyone have any -- ->> I have a question. Do you mean, like, "science" like physics or biology, or chemistry as opposed to social science or data science? -NOAH: No, no. It could be social science. It could be data science. Not necessarily hard sciences but I mean "science" in the sense of research science. Something that you would have more in an academic setting where your goal is to produce some new specific new piece of knowledge about the world and work through normal scientific processes to get there. ->> Um, so I'm not actually very familiar with either field, but I know that at Mozilla, we recently started a project called the Mozilla Science Lab where, from everything that I have read about, and talked -- I have read about, and talked to the head about it, apparently, to the science world. That's actually, like, this funky ideal that just like reading from that ideal, you think like, all scientists are open-source people or something like that. But in fact, partly because of the way incentives are structured, they often will horde all of their information, and not release nifty before publishing because publishing is like this big, that's what actually gets you credit and able to move forward in your career, or stay in your career, or whatever. And so it's not like it's not like they're, like, they have, like, get repo, and they are publishing all or the results as they're doing their research and clashing with each other. In a lot of ways, it's actually very closed, and that's part of what the science lab is trying to do, is to try to make them work in a more open-sourcey way but that was interesting to me because I was always like yeah, scientists, it just sounds like open-source is just what they would be raised in, or something like that. -NOAH: Okay, so you think -- which column would you even put that the, you think, sort of lack of openness, or lack of collaboration? Sort of both? ->> It seems that they are both heterogeneous in that, there's like a growing community in both that is trying to do things in a very open, rigorous, peer-reviewed kind of way but definitely in science, I think that Caitlin, head of the Mozilla Science Lab was saying that only about 2% of all researchers, or something actually, um, work in this sort of open kind of way. It's just like a very small percentage and I have no idea what it is in journalism. ->> A related question. -NOAH: Yeah? ->> For the purpose of -- my question was going to be, like, for the purpose of this discussion and for, like, simplicity, are we thinking of, like, comparing ourselves, comparing journalism as idealized sciences as presented here or leaving the nitty-gritty of what science is actually doing to another conversation or should we be roll? -NOAH: Yes, there's a lot of potential. I mean we can probably spend an hour arguing over the definition of, "Science." But I think we can too a little of both. I think maybe it's more started to focus on ideals, right, on values and norms that people aspire to, maybe 'cause the question of, like -- and I put at the bottom of the ether pad, questions we won't get to, and we'll get to this, how scientists don't live up to their own norms and that it's probably a whole session for itself. ->> The whole column, science is slow and for journalism, it's fast. ->> I think it's -- are we raising hands or am I just talking? -NOAH: You can just talk, Ben. You can always talk. ->> I think sort of just jumping off of the open-source analogy, it's interesting to think of the sort of the metaphor of forking in journalism versus science where, at least to a degree in science, there's in a given field there's, like, an universal, established literature, and there's this ongoing conversation where, like, a new paper will be a follow-up, or an experiment in new circumstances or a direct refutation, but, like, it's this ongoing -- everyone is aware of each other, at least in -- especially if the field is smaller where there's nothing wrong in journalism to outlets producing identical, especially, content but maybe -- essentially content but maybe they thought of the front-end visualization differently. -NOAH: Sort of like duplicating? ->> Versus -- -NOAH: Versus having a cannon, one thing kind of like -- ->> And then -- well, I don't have an "and then" yet but it's interesting. ->> I wondering if a way of thinking about it, for as slow as science is, there's actually more of an import on publishing first in science than in journalism. There is a big emphasis on publishing first in journalism but if you publish second or third, you can still be useful. -NOAH: Sure. ->> And science, you won't even get published second or third because no longer an use to having that paper in the world. ->> I also thought it was a big issue with uncertainty -- there was a big issue with uncertainty. I guess, again goes back to what you were saying whether they live up to their own ideals but ideally, science embraces uncertainty to a greater degree than journalism does because there's qualify indications that comes out whereas journalism they want to present a simple and understandable view of the world, which might not be the case. But if you have a five paragraph on methodology, no one's going to read it. ->> And in science, this philosopher of science named Feyerabend talked about how science is kind of founded on these Copernican terms; not a linear march or consensus. Not because both don't depend on and aren't beholding to fact but because, the kind of healthiest scientific environment is one in which someone can say, well, what if it does revolve around the sun or something like that? At any time, the foundations can be shaken to such a degree that whole new fields can -- can spring up. It would be something very strange would happen in journalism -- I mean, I'm not saying that we've never been lied to or found out new information after the fact. Sure that's what journalism does. Every time there's a big smoking gun, our foundations of the world are shaken a little bit. So in a certain way they are close but also, the core principles or something like that in journalism can't -- aren't subject to change in the same way that science is, at least in kind of an ideal sense. -NOAH: So like, maybe messier road to progress for science or more unstable, everything is always in dispute. Everything is always up for skepticism? How would you phrase that? ->> I don't know, I mean, 'cause that sounds good. I mean, I really like what the person before me said about how -- I forget exactly the words that were used -- but I thought it kind of captured that spirit nicely about how in journalism there's -- you want to be more guarded, you're a little more cagey about your certainty because it's not all right to be like, "Oops." -NOAH: And it's not a great story to say, "We may be found out this but we're not sure." ->> Yeah. ->> One kind of infrastructural thing that ties this together is because of publishing through journals there's a very set way of referencing previous work that you're building on, or responding to, or sort of mentioning. And I mean, a lot of stories do, in their text kind of mention related developments but there isn't -- there's no -- it's not codified. So you can't look it it in kind of the abstract. There's to easy way to take an article and say, like, let's look at what this is based on methodologically, and what is this building on theorems of the body -- has this building on in terms of the body effects. -NOAH: Yes, and there's a certain competitive angle there, about the willingness to talk about, "Oh, here's all the good stories that people have talked about on this topic." ->> If somebody is attributing somebody else, it means that they think it might not necessarily be true. ->> And in science there's sort of this emphasis on method -- was part of science you come from. There's an agreement that we have sort of experiments and we have hypotheses and the method is very established, whereas the end product might be vastly different and in journalism. Whatever method you get, and even in this conference there are people who do the same thing like ten different ways but we more agree on like the end product -- oh, you know, it's for public interest or communicating information, but there is little method to journalism in the same kind of systematic way. ->> I was going to say diversity of methods? ->> There's not the experimental method but there is sort of like getting quotes from a certain set of people. I think it's, I don't know. Heuristics and the methods are probably -- -NOAH: In journalism, the methods are more established for classic, narrative journalism that's been around longer. ->> Sure than for new stuff. ->> I also think there's also kind of a different way of reasoning about things. Journalism is kind of deductive logic A which directly proves B, which proves C. Whereas in science you see more of an inductive model, where I have 95% confidence that A implies B, and sometimes you see what's called abductive reasoning: I have B and I'm going to say A is a result because I have the observation B and that's like a whole different thing. And sometimes you find journalism that has, like, statistics in it, but we're really uncomfortable, in general, kind of thinking in this kind of inductive or abductive way that science is a lot more comfortable with. ->> I mean, to go along with that a lot of science is like, presumed A, we can say this with some certainty but it's not necessarily -- it's very rare that you see a piece of journalism that says, working from the premise that the government wouldn't actively be trying to be screwing over its citizens and it's like well no, that's not an acceptable way to kind of journal. ->> For a quick one, science has a peer review prior to publication and journalism you have a freedom to choose your subject matter -- your choice of subject matter is free from external identities like granting bodies. You can just do what you and your staff want to do, your editor, or whoever. ->> Another topic, I don't know if that's relevant but can we also compare phoning and the supporting part of journalism because I know scientists have regular donors. It's kind of how it works in our case, where their donors would like to see their outcome. But we as journalists, we have crowdsourcing right now. But I don't know if that's another direction. -NOAH: Absolutely, the funding, that issue of grant-making and is what scientists need to do in order to, you know, pay the bills and have their work funded. Not that journalism all has the same business model but certainly different. ->> I feel they have very different approaches to ethics. Science has come up with ethical frameworks for doing experiments whereas in journalism it's thought more of as the limits of what you can get away with rather than anything. You very rarely hear people discuss ethics when they're talking about journalism, even beta journalism. ->> I think slightly different audiences is a big thing. And running with that, slightly different missions. I think historically, journalism is a little more civic oriented, at least historically. And I think that whereas, you know, with the scientists -- scientific journals you have sort of a ludry (phonetic) of a community who knows what you're talking about but in journalism, historically, the mission is to translate what the scientist is doing to the wider public. -NOAH: And that goes back to the originality question. Sometimes it's enough to take something that people already know and help people understand it. ->> Journalism -- it has to be interesting. I mean, people need to want to read it, and there's a lot of really important science that nobody cares. I mean, no, there really is it's not a break-radio through. It's just expanding a data set. Skew I would say that's not although true. It could be both it's really hard to publish null hypotheses in science because there's this idea that what you come up with has don't be novel horde to move forward. ->> Well, I think there are important scientific papers with intermediary results. Like a protein structure, someone later is going to develop the drug. Maybe there's a science/engineering divide. ->> But if they don't. ->> But I think it's the audience again, who's it interesting to. ->> I think we only read third of the stories published. Screw but that's the mission, right? The goal is for people. ->> Well for something like the paper of record. There's all this, you know, we have to publish the intermediary results of, like, oh, you know, we talked to somebody and he has no comment, or something like, you know? Ask I don't know, for better or worse, probably worse. Screw I think the shared part is that someone always does care. There's one person who cares about every single. ->> Sure. ->> Scientific publishing, even if it is about one person -- and the same is true, if you're covering this block in this city in this county changing to single assortment recycling, they are fighting, they will get it in. And they will fight to get coverage for it, and they will fight -- -NOAH: I put this in the shared column of intermediary results. It looks like there are some different views on this. The null hypothesis issue but this question of publication bias which may sort of apply to both. It may be hard to get your paper published that's not saying anything interesting similarly if you look at a data set many a newsroom and the answer is, nothing was interesting -- that's -- ->> We face the same problem, though because it's like prosecute better or worse, you know, a writer's kind of gold star, or whatever is, they want a story, right? And that's not going to change for a while, at least. Or you know, depending on what publication, maybe it's the hundredth retweet, or whatever about a story, right? But there is a degree where you're disincentivized trauma publishing an important but you know, not very buzzy result or something because, you know, people want the smoking gun. People want, "Conclusive corruption after all." -NOAH: I saw some more hands. ->> Just sort of on the methodology and the secrecy thing. I think in science there is, like, sort of an obligation to show your work just later that you have to explain how you did things so that somebody else can reproduce it in a way that I don't think is much the case in journalism. ->> In science, there's also a direct incentive not to publish your failed experiments because you don't want anybody to know what you're trying. -NOAH: Sure, do you think that applies in journalism as well? ->> Like like, you wouldn't publish a half of a story, if you decide to scrap it, or if it's not going anywhere. But I don't think it's for the same reason, though. You're not worried about that somebody else is going to put together something like that many. You're just worried that it sucks, right? ->> Looks like there's no corruption, after all. ->> Surprise, it was puppies! ->> I went to a science conference last fall. It was an imitational conference for young experimental scientists and I just spent two days straight trying to get people to cross-fertilize with each other and this is because science are apparently even-sided from each other. And they don't even have the same specialized terminology from one field to the next. And I just found that from meeting with them and talking with them, I was really amazed how really non-individualistic they were. They had one idea of a career path, and if you deviate from that, you're ex-communicated and journalists are really seen themselves in a way that's really different from scientists, and the language is so specialized, the language is so chronically specialized in scientist. ->> A lot of scientists lament not being able to talk to each other. There's two mama technicians if you give the ten view of what they do, an algebraically geometric, and but they can't talk to each other. They might be studying the savoring and they don't even have the same words for it. It becomes this tower of babble. And, I don't know. ->> That's true. At least since where ostensibly writing for sort of a common audience, like, you know, like a less specialized audience in journalism, there's at least more opportunity for intercommunication, some more mingling just 'cause we at least still have some ground in a common language, if not audience. -NOAH: And the question of expert audience versus an audience for laypeople. It's also this, how interesting is it to drone on and on about methodology. If you paper a scientific paper and you can assume expertise, and they will talk about methods and go into detail about what they did but maybe there's less of an appetite about that with a data journalism piece where they want to get to the findings, the interesting part, and they don't want to hear about the five pages of here's all the stuff that you did with this cool data. ->> Shove it off into the nerd box at the bottom of the page, or something like that. ->> I think the whole point of this conference was to avoid this stag Nancy. Where there's not room for innovation. I think there's more of that in journalism. ->> Journalists and scientists are both supposed to be correct and precise in public and if they make a mistake, it's bad and it's visible for the rest of forever. -NOAH: So on that visible on the rest of forever, do you think there's a difference in shelf life of a mistake that, say makes it into a scientific journal versus an article that's meant to be published and read and maybe not get a lot of audience after that? Or do you think that's kind of similar, or both? ->> I think it probably comes out in the wash because, you know, it's kind of like a huger audience. So there's a lot of noise in journalism. You know, just speaking -- in signal terms whereas, you know, if you have this narrow focus of research. You know, if I'm looking at a specific gene doing whatever, whatever, all the people who follow in those foot footsteps are going to follow longer. ->> I mean, it seems and it gets to the publishing the wrong information, the two ways the field -- this may be really obvious, the two ways the fields conceive the world is different. Science is about rational, like, empirical experimental process toward universal static laws and journalism is all about the case and about following, you know, even when it's data, it's about this case. So when science gets something wrong in public, that error may last forever but it's a methodological error and so people understand it as a methodological error. That this guy isn't there in journalism yet. We don't -- because we don't conceive of it as we're getting toward the "err" answer for whatever it is, kidnappings in Nigeria. -NOAH: So it's different audience expectations, right? ->> And different ways of conceiving knowledge. I don't know, it might be interesting to look at science journalists where the two have already intermingled for a while, in that how scientists have figured out how to state scientific findings in ways, responsible and irresponsible for journalistic audiences. ->> And people respect sciences scientists and they don't respect journalists. -NOAH: So scientists get more of the benefit of the doubt? ->> I think that's more of a reflection of what you're saying, though. Whenever there's a public trust index, or whatever. The journalists, and politician, and rapists, scientists are routinely held up to be, you know, paragons of exactly what you're saying. ->> Well, if science is so respectable, then you should put that journalists are cool. ->> Depends on who's funding the scientists. 'Cause if they're being funded by, like, the major oil companies and they're trying to tell you that global warming doesn't exist. ->> Is that different from who funds mainstream journalism, though. ->> From the fact that large corporations fund their publications? ->> No, you're right. ->> I was whale going to say that trust would be in both columns, ideally. The ideal of science and journalism is that the public trusts both, but in both cases I don't know if that ideal is realized. ->> I think people are more aware of the discrepancy in the case of journalism than in the case of science, maybe. ->> I don't know how much time science spends thinking about how much the public trusts them. ->> Does it matter? -NOAH: You think the public is not so much their constituency? ->> Yeah. ->> To that end, I wonder how much journalism is any more, than the last 20, 25 careers is parroting sources, going back to the journalism thing, whereas science is more of the end result if that Massachusetts. Journalism is hey this knowledge exists trauma this public official, or some study they did and I'm just going to regurgitate. ->> But that's the top level science. For hundred of those. There's undergrads, well this person's doing an experiment, you can help them. ->> Or like in journalism the ideal of objectivity is actually a crutch because what that actually means is that you're being balanced and have been you've interviewed someone on this side and that side, and your objective, and unbiased but I think that word is really dangerous and scientists have a different understanding of what is objective than we do. ->> I think we've been only considering the more empirical science. Let's not forget about qualitative which is more of the gray area, I think between science and journalism when it comes to ethnography. ->> Sort of like trolling. ->> Which is what you started with. With doing data journalism that, making it look "science-y" and, you know, whether that kind of journalism is different than the things that we have been talking about, you know, is different than peer journalism. ->> Um, is it worth saying that, um, the public's perception of science is changing to be more like the perception of journalism? I'm thinking specifically of there's, like, companies -- lots of times PR agencies or marketing firms will actually pay to have a study done for some -- for some clients that are drug companies, or whatever to -- and like, yeah, there's like a feature on -- it was on the media, or like on some podcast about this about how scientist will regularly get contacted to do -- to do some sort of study just so they can have a sound bite in an ad for it, or something like that. And it makes me think of the way that the public react to movie reviews. Scientists are effectively drug reviewers. ->> Their version of native advertising? ->> I actually don't know what native advertising it is -- oh, the things that are supposed to appear as news stories but are ads? -NOAH: Public trust in an ideal that they're falling short of these apparent conflicts? ->> But yeah, this is a huge problem in health care. Your doctor taking pharmaceutical money and taking fees. And lo and behold, that's the drug they're giving to all patients but I think more people trust their doctor on any of these surveys more than -- but suddenly that's also, people finding out more and more that, oh, well, there are reasons that they're prescribing you this thing, or that thing and that's sort of crumbling that trust. ->> There's still a difference, though between science where we started, and shit scientists do, and journalism, and, like, shit journalists write, so we have to be careful about which ones we're actually talking about. -NOAH: What about the question of where data comes from for findings. Scientists being more comfortable designing their own experiments and getting new data new certain way as opposed to often, inheriting data, you know? Sometimes from antagonistic parties, from governmental agencies and things like that. Do you think that's a difference, or do you think that's exactly the...? ->> Well, the scientists can't source them as honest sources. Nominates sources -- anonymous sources. ->> Well, this goes without saying, that I think journalism is loose that if you write some super, breaking story, or some viral content that it's going to show up on every news site just with a new lead, or reaching around a little bit. Or you'll get full daily mail and they'll rip your whole story. I wouldn't imagine in science the blatant taking of one another's stuff wouldn't be quite as accepted. ->> Well, but that's how science was founded, right? There's a whole history of mathematicians, like, literally shooting each other to death in the 1600s because they would steal each other's algebra and stuff. ->> Could we have a people column? Just do this to each other. ->> That goes in the middle yeah, that definitely, definitely happens. ->> Don't journalists do that? ->> Oh, journalists don't have the same kind of popularized, people don't have a general awareness of journalists' processes the way you can talk about shoot-outs between mathematicians in the 1600s. ->> Just get more journalists to shoot each other. ->> There's stories that I remember, like the one about This American Life episode where they talked to a guy who was, like, knew something about apple and I never actually listened to the episode but they had coverage about how they totally broke and this was this weird thing. Like is This American Life journalistic enterprise? And did they rake with ethics by not checking this guy's sources and writing whatever he said, or whatever? It seems like journalists do have a high responsibility, I mean like, and -- and the civic goals type stuff, public perception of journalists, civic goals is, makes them have that sort of -- what was the original question? ->> Should we shoot each other? ->> Yes! ->> There are high ideals in journalism but I think the public perception is that they're rarely seen and I think what made that episode so interesting when they did the let's visit the Mike Daisy Apple story because you rarely read for an hour, a news organization saying, we fucked up, and really trying to figure out how and all that. ->> It seems like the apparatus of science is distilling what can truly be said. So what can we say. And not just in the hard sciences, in the social science. Journalism isn't that. When we have -- and when there are boners, like data journalism boners, like, mistakes, that's a problem. ->> Like what? ->> Mistakes! Mistakes! Sorry! ->> Example? ->> Um... ->> That should mean something, though. ->> I'm actually not too familiar with how this works in science but one thing that comes to mind is, are the legal ramifications of making mistakes? Are there legal ramifications of making mistakes and most media organizations, I assume have some kind of lawyer on retainer. I mean, where I work at Mother Jones, there's always a sensitivity toward, is this going to get us sued? And I would wonder what the thought process is besides your entire academic career being ruined and your peers no longer respecting you but could you actually go to jail or, you know, incur some kind of real cost? ->> Can you slander a molecule? ->> To speak to that -- I think there's a -- ->> I think if your findings are used in some way and you were found to nothingly do false things. Scientists go up to Congress and, like, you know, are witnesses in things and, you know, they're lying or... ->> But Congress goes up to Congress. ->> True, but there is a sense of, I mean, if you're misrepresenting facts and that injuries someone in some way. Not necessarily defamation in take that we worry about in journalism but at least negligence. ->> Right. ->> But with the Wakefield case with the vaccination? I guess that he was tried in the UK. ->> But that's like a standard of fraud, right? ->> Sure. ->> Like, being wrong is supposed to be a part of science. You're supposed to be allowed to do that, and I feel like you're protected for being innocently wrong when you're doing science but if you're doing introduced, that's something totally different but a journalist can be innocently wrong and someone could be like, your stupid mistake hurt me, pay me. ->> Wasn't there some issue in Italy with these you think these geologists that were either -- I forget whether it was a criminal thing, or something where they hadn't predicted an earthquake or something and they actually did seek legal ramifications. ->> They were sued and the reason that we heard about it was because it was so ludicrous and unprecedented that a scientist would be sued and someone trying to take action on it. Fluke? No. The legal stuff is going to be different in each. -NOAH: The legal stuff is going to be different in each cultural context but one thing off of that is are journalists more likely to have enemies from what they're doing. Are they more likely picking a human fight as opposed to disinterestedly pursuing knowledge? ->> That's entirely true. People make entire careers of being an enemy of someone else's career. I'm an adversary for your organization. ->> There was a story in the New Yorker that someone did for like chemical company and like the chemical company wanted him to analyze a fertilize or whatever and he started getting findings that were -- where it was, you know, it turned out that the fertilize was actually doing plaintiff smarm the company -- was doing a lot of harm and the company tried to get him to quiet down and then he started acting like a paranoid person, that people under following him around, but it turned out that it was true and that they were following him around, and stuff. But that was a New Yorker story. I don't know what the commonality of that is. ->> Think about the guys who discovered cold fusion, or thought they had. How difficult their lives must be now even though now they were made straightforward, they weren't committing fraud, everyone just laughs at them now. So it does happen occasionally that if you mess up in a big way your career could be over skew and then there's that ongoing Dr. Oz ways where he was telling his audience members to take all these vitamins and their benefits weren't proven and he was brought before a congressional panel, and, like, interrogated about this, but I don't know if, like, aside from that hurting his reputation what other -- like if legally he could be held accountable in any way. ->> It's funny that on a couple of different threads, much of the examples of in subjects that we were citing have been journalistic coverage of scientists and whenever we cite about this or that, we're seeing a really small slice of the total scientific community and in general, outliers because outliers make news. ->> And this is a problem, at least for the scientific community and I would even go as far as to say for the humanities. Most people have almost absolutely no access to them. Every journal ask locked behind these proprietary, university-only subscriptions that you to pay thousands of dollars a year for. There's been no attempt to kind of normalize the vocabulary such that anyone could, you know, pick this up. I like matte, you know, I study math but still any of the new breaking path I can't read a sentence of it, do you know what I mean? And this is a hard thing for, and granted we obviously won't be able to stay on the van guard of these kinds of, you know, scientific endeavors but because it's so poorly publishized from within their group it's much more difficult for people like everyone here, or everyone -- we're outliers. People -- our readers to know what's going on other than when we cover it and we only cover it when it's something sensational like geologists prosecuted or like, you know, do babies have nuclear fusion, or something like that? ->> I think there's no incentive for that to happen because it's like a closed-loop system. ->> But isn't that sort of the ideal and the hope of journalism, is that it's kind of the best of these two worlds coming together in the way that Dr. Oz is the worst of the two worlds coming together, creative journalism is like, you have the power of like, being able to think through something thoroughly, and being able to deset me mate it widely, instead of having people have this publish accessible. ->> The fundamental between between scientists and journalists is that scientists are makers. And journalists are the reporters but data scientists -- ->> Sort of on that note, there, I feel more so historically in the sciences but now potentially in journalism, there's more of a potential -- more potential hazards, like physical hazards in the process of making and researching these things like in the case of sciences, you might be dealing with hazardous materials and God help you if they leak and on the journalism side, now we're dealing with people trying to take video via drones slash flying upside down lawnmowers that could potentially crash into people and cause a very bad day. So, it'll be interesting as some of our methods get more technically interesting, how, like, the liabilities and training requirements of those go 'cause like in labs, I had to sit through plenty of hazmat classes. Like hey, don't do this with the acid, k, thanks, bye. -NOAH: So there's an educational requirement, there's not the same barrier of becoming a working, recognized journalist than there is to becoming a lab scientist. ->> And that's becoming the other way, which is weird when you think about it. ->> Journalists, for human subjects don't need consent and scientists do. ->> Sort of building on the concept of liability, you know, it's possible in science to be a part of a volume of work that can be ensurable as a concept and then you have like, subsequent work, at some point people say legally this is something that I can actually negotiate, some sort of protection around. There isn't that same sort of protection in a volume of work for journalism where you have a series of stories or something like that where someone is willing to say this is enough of a product that penal are going to bat for that legally, or otherwise. The concept that journalism isn't ensurable is interesting if you're talking about the lines of corporate research. -NOAH: We have 14 minutes left. You were talking about how data journalism is potentially supposed to represent this kind of, merger of these two, of the best of both, a little bit. I think that's a very good segue to possibly spend the next ten or 15 minutes which is talking about. Can we identify these differences? Is there a wishlist? Is there a list that we could possibly take from this side, as data journalists, as working journalists, where we can more proudly, and authentically wear scientist hats. Rather than the illusion of... ->> Well, I think the questions of these reliability and professional responsibility it seems like maybe we're aiming more in a direction of engineering than science 'cause if you're a scientist there's a sense that, like, you follow the process, you do things right and you hope for the best and that sort of protects you, whereas if you're engineering, you need to take into account that you're actually doing things that will affect people, directly. And the same questions seem to sort of be raised in journalism when you're asserting things about the world in a way that journalists do. ->> Is there any worry that data journalism could be the worst of both worlds and what I mean is that, you know, it all depends on which way we can combine these things, right? Because in one sense we say that journalism is faster and there's like, you know, less embracement of uncertainty and things sort of moving like a linear progress and people read it, kind of -- it has, like, an agenda ask all these kind of things that we talk about in Swedish House Mafia. The thing that I worry about with data journalism is yes, we often catch handicaps in the Nigerian kidnapping but the people that are catching them. And the people that are aware of the corrections and redactions, are people like us. The people in the Nieman lab, not like my parents, the people I grew up with, right? But they might see the original headline, they might see the incorrect statement, they might see the skewed data set that didn't come out of malice, or negligence as much as simple handicaps, or bugs, or whatever. Whereas in science, it's kind of insulated against that because you've got a peer review, you've got a provides that's lightyears away from actually -- I don't say that scientific mistakes don't hurt people, but it's lightkeys away from the beginning of the work drastically hurting somebody. Whereas in journalism, the first stab at a graph or a map could mess things up. You don't have that sense skepticism, or the peer reviewing, that mulling over, that insulation. -NOAH: So would you say that possibly you wish that data journalists had sort of a professional standard or some fraction of something that does a little bit of peer review that was a little bit more proactive, a means of catching things before they're out in the public. ->> But then you lose feed, you lose kind of the way we work. 'Cause we get a story, and hey, I need it in eight hours. We don't have enough time, oh, can we pass it by the data science word, someone with a -- under with an Excel sheet saying, yes, yes, yes, that looks correct. ->> But this is also why we have editors. That's the role. Just wish we had better editors. ->> I think the quality of editors is even they will ever the problem, it's the fact that data journalism, being this new and shiny thing has somehow bypassed in edit y'all rose, it certainly has in the place that I I work. And maybe it's just the organizations that we work for don't fully understand the risks inherent in some things that we're talked about. -NOAH: And I think only now are some places starting to hire data editors, people that are meant to fulfill that role, specifically for those projects. Propel has a very fortunate data-minded editor. ->> I would like to see the citation list. It would be very difficult and it would be a rabbit hole in journalism. ->> We have links! ->> Oh, yeah! ->> We use links all the time. -NOAH: So that's another question about the system, not a question about the system but maybe the culture. ->> They're not real links, I mean, they're... ->> Even scientific studies that, you know, just recite each other and recycle, like, the same stat. After a while, it's hard to track down exactly where it came from. -NOAH: Your hand's up. ->> I like links, but the problem is links die because after a career, suddenly that link's broken. There's this old site on New York Times that's called hyper wocky from annoyances, you know and half of the links are dead but I die a little inside when I see a link and it says 404, or whatever. I wish we had some sort of -- -NOAH: Archiving? ->> Kind of a way to say, kind of, you've got a 404, I'm going to automatically look on the Internet archive to see -- but yeah, I don't know. ->> I'm not a data journalist and so one thing that I actually -- we were talking a little bit about methodology and transparency and one thing that I think would be nice is to give the audience the benefit of the doubt and be a little bit more transparent about your process and your method and explain, you know, if you can walk me through your data, that's the story, that's the narrative and like, you can kill two birds with one stone there. You can create a narrative but also talk a little bit about your methodology and be a little more transparent. I think one of the great things about journalism, one of our jobs is to explain why it matters, or what it means, whereas that's not always the case with science. So, the book doesn't stop with the data set. It's like you still have to explain what it means. So that's something that I would like to keep doing. ->> I agree. The little box in the left-hand corner where no one's going to look, but going beyond that. I think we're seeing more of it, like, bleed in from the open-source world where you're seeing more documentation -- oftentimes, I think by and large, that's around how we built the thing we built but yeah, definitely about, you know, reverse-engineering the reporting you did. And Dan Nguyen, actually started these really good data diaries and how he obtained the data, and down to the SQL queries he asked the data set and I think we could definitely use more of that in the journalism community. -NOAH: I think, on my own list had something on that which was more consistency on the way things are documented and packaged because that's a key element of the reproducibility because, like, if every project is starting from zero and how they decided to tell you about it, and how they make their code and everything, it discourages people from making the effort to reproduce it, so the more that we can make it easier to look at what a project is, and apply that scrutiny, then the more people are going to do it, I hope. ->> That's actually one of the problems that science lab is trying to fix because the reproducible code that's used, when executable code is part of some research project, that includes hard-coded paths and all this stuff, that makes it just completely not really useable. ->> And one other thing to the inherited data versus the original data, which seems kind of like an obvious direction data journalism is going, and it's interesting to me, because at what point -- we do all of the structures that scientists do. But it's interesting to see it work. I know NPR did something on stress. And although it was buttressed by a lot of scientific studies, be sure but they also used surveys of people and it it was exciting a lot -- and I'm interested to know how like what process that went through. Did they show it to scientists? Was there, like, a statistician in one of the other organizations? Or how you can be certain in what you're reporting if you don't have, like, that kind of process. ->> And that kind of goes to what I was suggesting in the sense of, like, lots of times just because someone did an experiment that proves something in science, you know? It's like lots of times it's not accepted as fact, or you know, even begun to be entertained as fact until it's reproducible, and reconfirmed by others in the scientific world and we've seen this in journalism, in a lot of ways where someone will crunch like some census numbers, and do some model or something like that, and start we see consensus among the journalists, where we start to see these things begun to be treated as facts whereas, when the worse comes to worst, the first model comes out, and the first model published -- it's not a paper, it's a newspaper, right? And then people are like, well, you know, it obviously works but it's probably like me, having just learned how to model this thing, helpings it up in R and being like, "I think it's right." I don't want to speak for everyone, but at least that's my method. -NOAH: So you would like to see more journalists trying to validity one another's work, and trying to reproduce them? ->> I think that -- ->> Also review in a sense. It's not just better editing. ->> And I also think just to add onto that. This is something that I'm always tempted to do is to just do data diving as opposed to like real hypothesis testing. So doing this huge data dump, and open it up, and make this scatter plot matrix and look at which things correlate, and look for outliers but you're definitely going to find false positives when you do that. So just being rigorous about stating your hypothesis before decompressing that zip file, you know, that's kind of a huge, important step. -NOAH: Having a hypothesis. And to your point, also like would you like to see greater consultation between journalists that are sort of gathering information and actual scientists, of more advisory interactions between the two? Is that somewhat the stress? ->> But isn't that what traditional reporting is? Making sure to call up the experts? ->> I don't think it's just that. I think it's also being very transparent with, like, what is your original -- and like what is scientific in the sense -- or what is something that may be anecdotal that you may be adding. Because if it's done from a survey of too many people I don't know if that's -- just listening to that sentence, like we did a survey with a bunch of people, like, I don't know what that means, necessarily. -NOAH: And I do think that in plenty of cases, it ends up being puddled in -- bundled in a science-y way. But they didn't think of themselves as scientists and they didn't care to play it up that way. ->> And we also have an degree of chart decoration, too, to get weeded outdoor before getting peer-reviewed content especially if you're handed data source. You're just reproducing straight out. There's an amount of churn that we all do. Where there isn't any new work. It's just munching other things together, and putting it out in a slightly different layout so long as there's going to be projects of that nature asking for some more rigor of this stuff because this is just a rehash of this work over here, but I think that gets into ethical issues as to why you're even rehashing. So that's a separate thing. Just a for the wishlist, I would put a better model of what scientists do 'cause it sounds like a few things here are kind of, like, guesses or imaginations and some of them are, like, based on other news stories about science, or at least the pressure Lisa said, so what is peer review and why is it slow? It's slow because I'm handing my work to my competitors and they have to approve before I can publish it so if there was a different model, it might be more manageable. And when I hear, oh, the scientist use silly arcane language because they're so insulated, well, it's often the most efficient way to communicate precisely exactly what we need to say. So it seems kind of like an assumption oh we're journalists out in the air and active and we're together to work for a while and we're going to find a way to do things that are interesting, ethical, price, fast, and underbudget. So it's like, whoa. -NOAH: So how would you like to see that come about in practice? And how would you like to see working journalists be forced to work more closely with that process and the differences in that process. Would that be something that when they're in school, when they're taking classes, they're forced to produce original research? ->> I mean, not to be adversarial, I imagine that you would learn by trial and error, and pretend that you invented it. No, but yeah, I think talking to each other like everything else is a really good way. ->> How about in-house scientists? Why not scientists? ->> Well, I think the field of science communication is becoming increasingly important and we could definitely use more of them. More Neil Degrasse Tysons, or whatever. ->> What if we were to do this session like that? -NOAH: That would be fascinating. ->> I'm sure they would agree to everything that we said. ->> Journalists are so cool! ->> Go journalism! I watched House of Cards. -NOAH: It is now past 5:30. But I thought this was very interesting. I hope you all did too. Thank you for coming. +Science vs. data journalism +Session facilitator(s): Noah Veltman +Day & Time: Thursday, 4:30-5:30pm +Room: Garden 1 + +NOAH: Welcome, everyone. All right. So we're going to get started, I'm sure people will start to straggle in a little bit. My name is Noah, for those who didn't know me. I work for New York Public Radio. I'm on the data news team. So the name of the session is Data Journalism Versus Science, or Science Versus Data Journalism. It's not meant to be like a wrestling match antagonism sort of thing. My sort of inspiration for wanting to do this session started when I was talking at the Wilson Center, this place in D.C. for the science policy group and we got into it, a little bit on this subject much data journalism as kind of edging closer to science at least in appearance but often not in practice, not in form. And I'm feeling increasingly sort of guilty about this sort of, subconscious about it. Both in my work, or in others' work are sort of "sciencish" but don't actually have the rigor of real research science. So I wanted to talk about it. And I thought, so there's etherpad if you go to that link. I have a lot of notes here but I did the want to put all that in there. And I did not want to guide the discussion. I wanted you guys to talk. But I had these three kind of burning questions. The first is, what are sort of the difference between sort of serious research science and data jury room as we tend to practice it. And what are the similarities? And out of that, are there things that we wish that we could move in one direction or the other. Are there things that scientist do that we aspire to do more of, or value, or sort of adopt more fully from them, and from that wish list, how would we make that happen? If we had pure view in the newsroom or something what would that actually look like? How would that work, and jibe with business goals and actually get that done? So that's kind of my plan. So question one about what you see about the similarities and differences, I'm very messily going to scribe what you guys said, will she there's the first point that's the kudos norms, that this guy Robert Kimerton (phonetic) came up when trying to come up with what the this didn't of the scientific community are, and I think this was back in the 40s and the 50s. It's commonalism -- but in this case, it's communalism. Different sorts of politics in the sense that the things that you're doing are contributing to a shared body of knowledge. So you make a scientific finding and it goes out into the world, you don't own it. And it's shared knowledge. U as in universalism. It's not this prestood people that got to be called scientists, or the people at the top of universities who get to be so-called scientists. D is disinterestedness. That you're in it for the science, you're not in it to be famous. Your goal for science, is science itself. Originality. You're striving for new knowledge, new information about the world that does not yet exist. And S is skepticism. Any finding, any claim deserves skepticism. And it's only through that skepticism and that scrutiny that it becomes valid and sort of, more valuable and all those things sort of on the surface sound like values of journalists but I think there are just a lot of differences. So what do you guys think? Should I just go into my those? Anyone have any -- + +> > I have a question. Do you mean, like, "science" like physics or biology, or chemistry as opposed to social science or data science? +> > NOAH: No, no. It could be social science. It could be data science. Not necessarily hard sciences but I mean "science" in the sense of research science. Something that you would have more in an academic setting where your goal is to produce some new specific new piece of knowledge about the world and work through normal scientific processes to get there. +> > Um, so I'm not actually very familiar with either field, but I know that at Mozilla, we recently started a project called the Mozilla Science Lab where, from everything that I have read about, and talked -- I have read about, and talked to the head about it, apparently, to the science world. That's actually, like, this funky ideal that just like reading from that ideal, you think like, all scientists are open-source people or something like that. But in fact, partly because of the way incentives are structured, they often will horde all of their information, and not release nifty before publishing because publishing is like this big, that's what actually gets you credit and able to move forward in your career, or stay in your career, or whatever. And so it's not like it's not like they're, like, they have, like, get repo, and they are publishing all or the results as they're doing their research and clashing with each other. In a lot of ways, it's actually very closed, and that's part of what the science lab is trying to do, is to try to make them work in a more open-sourcey way but that was interesting to me because I was always like yeah, scientists, it just sounds like open-source is just what they would be raised in, or something like that. +> > NOAH: Okay, so you think -- which column would you even put that the, you think, sort of lack of openness, or lack of collaboration? Sort of both? +> > It seems that they are both heterogeneous in that, there's like a growing community in both that is trying to do things in a very open, rigorous, peer-reviewed kind of way but definitely in science, I think that Caitlin, head of the Mozilla Science Lab was saying that only about 2% of all researchers, or something actually, um, work in this sort of open kind of way. It's just like a very small percentage and I have no idea what it is in journalism. +> > A related question. +> > NOAH: Yeah? +> > For the purpose of -- my question was going to be, like, for the purpose of this discussion and for, like, simplicity, are we thinking of, like, comparing ourselves, comparing journalism as idealized sciences as presented here or leaving the nitty-gritty of what science is actually doing to another conversation or should we be roll? +> > NOAH: Yes, there's a lot of potential. I mean we can probably spend an hour arguing over the definition of, "Science." But I think we can too a little of both. I think maybe it's more started to focus on ideals, right, on values and norms that people aspire to, maybe 'cause the question of, like -- and I put at the bottom of the ether pad, questions we won't get to, and we'll get to this, how scientists don't live up to their own norms and that it's probably a whole session for itself. +> > The whole column, science is slow and for journalism, it's fast. +> > I think it's -- are we raising hands or am I just talking? +> > NOAH: You can just talk, Ben. You can always talk. +> > I think sort of just jumping off of the open-source analogy, it's interesting to think of the sort of the metaphor of forking in journalism versus science where, at least to a degree in science, there's in a given field there's, like, an universal, established literature, and there's this ongoing conversation where, like, a new paper will be a follow-up, or an experiment in new circumstances or a direct refutation, but, like, it's this ongoing -- everyone is aware of each other, at least in -- especially if the field is smaller where there's nothing wrong in journalism to outlets producing identical, especially, content but maybe -- essentially content but maybe they thought of the front-end visualization differently. +> > NOAH: Sort of like duplicating? +> > Versus -- +> > NOAH: Versus having a cannon, one thing kind of like -- +> > And then -- well, I don't have an "and then" yet but it's interesting. +> > I wondering if a way of thinking about it, for as slow as science is, there's actually more of an import on publishing first in science than in journalism. There is a big emphasis on publishing first in journalism but if you publish second or third, you can still be useful. +> > NOAH: Sure. +> > And science, you won't even get published second or third because no longer an use to having that paper in the world. +> > I also thought it was a big issue with uncertainty -- there was a big issue with uncertainty. I guess, again goes back to what you were saying whether they live up to their own ideals but ideally, science embraces uncertainty to a greater degree than journalism does because there's qualify indications that comes out whereas journalism they want to present a simple and understandable view of the world, which might not be the case. But if you have a five paragraph on methodology, no one's going to read it. +> > And in science, this philosopher of science named Feyerabend talked about how science is kind of founded on these Copernican terms; not a linear march or consensus. Not because both don't depend on and aren't beholding to fact but because, the kind of healthiest scientific environment is one in which someone can say, well, what if it does revolve around the sun or something like that? At any time, the foundations can be shaken to such a degree that whole new fields can -- can spring up. It would be something very strange would happen in journalism -- I mean, I'm not saying that we've never been lied to or found out new information after the fact. Sure that's what journalism does. Every time there's a big smoking gun, our foundations of the world are shaken a little bit. So in a certain way they are close but also, the core principles or something like that in journalism can't -- aren't subject to change in the same way that science is, at least in kind of an ideal sense. +> > NOAH: So like, maybe messier road to progress for science or more unstable, everything is always in dispute. Everything is always up for skepticism? How would you phrase that? +> > I don't know, I mean, 'cause that sounds good. I mean, I really like what the person before me said about how -- I forget exactly the words that were used -- but I thought it kind of captured that spirit nicely about how in journalism there's -- you want to be more guarded, you're a little more cagey about your certainty because it's not all right to be like, "Oops." +> > NOAH: And it's not a great story to say, "We may be found out this but we're not sure." +> > Yeah. +> > One kind of infrastructural thing that ties this together is because of publishing through journals there's a very set way of referencing previous work that you're building on, or responding to, or sort of mentioning. And I mean, a lot of stories do, in their text kind of mention related developments but there isn't -- there's no -- it's not codified. So you can't look it it in kind of the abstract. There's to easy way to take an article and say, like, let's look at what this is based on methodologically, and what is this building on theorems of the body -- has this building on in terms of the body effects. +> > NOAH: Yes, and there's a certain competitive angle there, about the willingness to talk about, "Oh, here's all the good stories that people have talked about on this topic." +> > If somebody is attributing somebody else, it means that they think it might not necessarily be true. +> > And in science there's sort of this emphasis on method -- was part of science you come from. There's an agreement that we have sort of experiments and we have hypotheses and the method is very established, whereas the end product might be vastly different and in journalism. Whatever method you get, and even in this conference there are people who do the same thing like ten different ways but we more agree on like the end product -- oh, you know, it's for public interest or communicating information, but there is little method to journalism in the same kind of systematic way. +> > I was going to say diversity of methods? +> > There's not the experimental method but there is sort of like getting quotes from a certain set of people. I think it's, I don't know. Heuristics and the methods are probably -- +> > NOAH: In journalism, the methods are more established for classic, narrative journalism that's been around longer. +> > Sure than for new stuff. +> > I also think there's also kind of a different way of reasoning about things. Journalism is kind of deductive logic A which directly proves B, which proves C. Whereas in science you see more of an inductive model, where I have 95% confidence that A implies B, and sometimes you see what's called abductive reasoning: I have B and I'm going to say A is a result because I have the observation B and that's like a whole different thing. And sometimes you find journalism that has, like, statistics in it, but we're really uncomfortable, in general, kind of thinking in this kind of inductive or abductive way that science is a lot more comfortable with. +> > I mean, to go along with that a lot of science is like, presumed A, we can say this with some certainty but it's not necessarily -- it's very rare that you see a piece of journalism that says, working from the premise that the government wouldn't actively be trying to be screwing over its citizens and it's like well no, that's not an acceptable way to kind of journal. +> > For a quick one, science has a peer review prior to publication and journalism you have a freedom to choose your subject matter -- your choice of subject matter is free from external identities like granting bodies. You can just do what you and your staff want to do, your editor, or whoever. +> > Another topic, I don't know if that's relevant but can we also compare phoning and the supporting part of journalism because I know scientists have regular donors. It's kind of how it works in our case, where their donors would like to see their outcome. But we as journalists, we have crowdsourcing right now. But I don't know if that's another direction. +> > NOAH: Absolutely, the funding, that issue of grant-making and is what scientists need to do in order to, you know, pay the bills and have their work funded. Not that journalism all has the same business model but certainly different. +> > I feel they have very different approaches to ethics. Science has come up with ethical frameworks for doing experiments whereas in journalism it's thought more of as the limits of what you can get away with rather than anything. You very rarely hear people discuss ethics when they're talking about journalism, even beta journalism. +> > I think slightly different audiences is a big thing. And running with that, slightly different missions. I think historically, journalism is a little more civic oriented, at least historically. And I think that whereas, you know, with the scientists -- scientific journals you have sort of a ludry (phonetic) of a community who knows what you're talking about but in journalism, historically, the mission is to translate what the scientist is doing to the wider public. +> > NOAH: And that goes back to the originality question. Sometimes it's enough to take something that people already know and help people understand it. +> > Journalism -- it has to be interesting. I mean, people need to want to read it, and there's a lot of really important science that nobody cares. I mean, no, there really is it's not a break-radio through. It's just expanding a data set. Skew I would say that's not although true. It could be both it's really hard to publish null hypotheses in science because there's this idea that what you come up with has don't be novel horde to move forward. +> > Well, I think there are important scientific papers with intermediary results. Like a protein structure, someone later is going to develop the drug. Maybe there's a science/engineering divide. +> > But if they don't. +> > But I think it's the audience again, who's it interesting to. +> > I think we only read third of the stories published. Screw but that's the mission, right? The goal is for people. +> > Well for something like the paper of record. There's all this, you know, we have to publish the intermediary results of, like, oh, you know, we talked to somebody and he has no comment, or something like, you know? Ask I don't know, for better or worse, probably worse. Screw I think the shared part is that someone always does care. There's one person who cares about every single. +> > Sure. +> > Scientific publishing, even if it is about one person -- and the same is true, if you're covering this block in this city in this county changing to single assortment recycling, they are fighting, they will get it in. And they will fight to get coverage for it, and they will fight -- +> > NOAH: I put this in the shared column of intermediary results. It looks like there are some different views on this. The null hypothesis issue but this question of publication bias which may sort of apply to both. It may be hard to get your paper published that's not saying anything interesting similarly if you look at a data set many a newsroom and the answer is, nothing was interesting -- that's -- +> > We face the same problem, though because it's like prosecute better or worse, you know, a writer's kind of gold star, or whatever is, they want a story, right? And that's not going to change for a while, at least. Or you know, depending on what publication, maybe it's the hundredth retweet, or whatever about a story, right? But there is a degree where you're disincentivized trauma publishing an important but you know, not very buzzy result or something because, you know, people want the smoking gun. People want, "Conclusive corruption after all." +> > NOAH: I saw some more hands. +> > Just sort of on the methodology and the secrecy thing. I think in science there is, like, sort of an obligation to show your work just later that you have to explain how you did things so that somebody else can reproduce it in a way that I don't think is much the case in journalism. +> > In science, there's also a direct incentive not to publish your failed experiments because you don't want anybody to know what you're trying. +> > NOAH: Sure, do you think that applies in journalism as well? +> > Like like, you wouldn't publish a half of a story, if you decide to scrap it, or if it's not going anywhere. But I don't think it's for the same reason, though. You're not worried about that somebody else is going to put together something like that many. You're just worried that it sucks, right? +> > Looks like there's no corruption, after all. +> > Surprise, it was puppies! +> > I went to a science conference last fall. It was an imitational conference for young experimental scientists and I just spent two days straight trying to get people to cross-fertilize with each other and this is because science are apparently even-sided from each other. And they don't even have the same specialized terminology from one field to the next. And I just found that from meeting with them and talking with them, I was really amazed how really non-individualistic they were. They had one idea of a career path, and if you deviate from that, you're ex-communicated and journalists are really seen themselves in a way that's really different from scientists, and the language is so specialized, the language is so chronically specialized in scientist. +> > A lot of scientists lament not being able to talk to each other. There's two mama technicians if you give the ten view of what they do, an algebraically geometric, and but they can't talk to each other. They might be studying the savoring and they don't even have the same words for it. It becomes this tower of babble. And, I don't know. +> > That's true. At least since where ostensibly writing for sort of a common audience, like, you know, like a less specialized audience in journalism, there's at least more opportunity for intercommunication, some more mingling just 'cause we at least still have some ground in a common language, if not audience. +> > NOAH: And the question of expert audience versus an audience for laypeople. It's also this, how interesting is it to drone on and on about methodology. If you paper a scientific paper and you can assume expertise, and they will talk about methods and go into detail about what they did but maybe there's less of an appetite about that with a data journalism piece where they want to get to the findings, the interesting part, and they don't want to hear about the five pages of here's all the stuff that you did with this cool data. +> > Shove it off into the nerd box at the bottom of the page, or something like that. +> > I think the whole point of this conference was to avoid this stag Nancy. Where there's not room for innovation. I think there's more of that in journalism. +> > Journalists and scientists are both supposed to be correct and precise in public and if they make a mistake, it's bad and it's visible for the rest of forever. +> > NOAH: So on that visible on the rest of forever, do you think there's a difference in shelf life of a mistake that, say makes it into a scientific journal versus an article that's meant to be published and read and maybe not get a lot of audience after that? Or do you think that's kind of similar, or both? +> > I think it probably comes out in the wash because, you know, it's kind of like a huger audience. So there's a lot of noise in journalism. You know, just speaking -- in signal terms whereas, you know, if you have this narrow focus of research. You know, if I'm looking at a specific gene doing whatever, whatever, all the people who follow in those foot footsteps are going to follow longer. +> > I mean, it seems and it gets to the publishing the wrong information, the two ways the field -- this may be really obvious, the two ways the fields conceive the world is different. Science is about rational, like, empirical experimental process toward universal static laws and journalism is all about the case and about following, you know, even when it's data, it's about this case. So when science gets something wrong in public, that error may last forever but it's a methodological error and so people understand it as a methodological error. That this guy isn't there in journalism yet. We don't -- because we don't conceive of it as we're getting toward the "err" answer for whatever it is, kidnappings in Nigeria. +> > NOAH: So it's different audience expectations, right? +> > And different ways of conceiving knowledge. I don't know, it might be interesting to look at science journalists where the two have already intermingled for a while, in that how scientists have figured out how to state scientific findings in ways, responsible and irresponsible for journalistic audiences. +> > And people respect sciences scientists and they don't respect journalists. +> > NOAH: So scientists get more of the benefit of the doubt? +> > I think that's more of a reflection of what you're saying, though. Whenever there's a public trust index, or whatever. The journalists, and politician, and rapists, scientists are routinely held up to be, you know, paragons of exactly what you're saying. +> > Well, if science is so respectable, then you should put that journalists are cool. +> > Depends on who's funding the scientists. 'Cause if they're being funded by, like, the major oil companies and they're trying to tell you that global warming doesn't exist. +> > Is that different from who funds mainstream journalism, though. +> > From the fact that large corporations fund their publications? +> > No, you're right. +> > I was whale going to say that trust would be in both columns, ideally. The ideal of science and journalism is that the public trusts both, but in both cases I don't know if that ideal is realized. +> > I think people are more aware of the discrepancy in the case of journalism than in the case of science, maybe. +> > I don't know how much time science spends thinking about how much the public trusts them. +> > Does it matter? +> > NOAH: You think the public is not so much their constituency? +> > Yeah. +> > To that end, I wonder how much journalism is any more, than the last 20, 25 careers is parroting sources, going back to the journalism thing, whereas science is more of the end result if that Massachusetts. Journalism is hey this knowledge exists trauma this public official, or some study they did and I'm just going to regurgitate. +> > But that's the top level science. For hundred of those. There's undergrads, well this person's doing an experiment, you can help them. +> > Or like in journalism the ideal of objectivity is actually a crutch because what that actually means is that you're being balanced and have been you've interviewed someone on this side and that side, and your objective, and unbiased but I think that word is really dangerous and scientists have a different understanding of what is objective than we do. +> > I think we've been only considering the more empirical science. Let's not forget about qualitative which is more of the gray area, I think between science and journalism when it comes to ethnography. +> > Sort of like trolling. +> > Which is what you started with. With doing data journalism that, making it look "science-y" and, you know, whether that kind of journalism is different than the things that we have been talking about, you know, is different than peer journalism. +> > Um, is it worth saying that, um, the public's perception of science is changing to be more like the perception of journalism? I'm thinking specifically of there's, like, companies -- lots of times PR agencies or marketing firms will actually pay to have a study done for some -- for some clients that are drug companies, or whatever to -- and like, yeah, there's like a feature on -- it was on the media, or like on some podcast about this about how scientist will regularly get contacted to do -- to do some sort of study just so they can have a sound bite in an ad for it, or something like that. And it makes me think of the way that the public react to movie reviews. Scientists are effectively drug reviewers. +> > Their version of native advertising? +> > I actually don't know what native advertising it is -- oh, the things that are supposed to appear as news stories but are ads? +> > NOAH: Public trust in an ideal that they're falling short of these apparent conflicts? +> > But yeah, this is a huge problem in health care. Your doctor taking pharmaceutical money and taking fees. And lo and behold, that's the drug they're giving to all patients but I think more people trust their doctor on any of these surveys more than -- but suddenly that's also, people finding out more and more that, oh, well, there are reasons that they're prescribing you this thing, or that thing and that's sort of crumbling that trust. +> > There's still a difference, though between science where we started, and shit scientists do, and journalism, and, like, shit journalists write, so we have to be careful about which ones we're actually talking about. +> > NOAH: What about the question of where data comes from for findings. Scientists being more comfortable designing their own experiments and getting new data new certain way as opposed to often, inheriting data, you know? Sometimes from antagonistic parties, from governmental agencies and things like that. Do you think that's a difference, or do you think that's exactly the...? +> > Well, the scientists can't source them as honest sources. Nominates sources -- anonymous sources. +> > Well, this goes without saying, that I think journalism is loose that if you write some super, breaking story, or some viral content that it's going to show up on every news site just with a new lead, or reaching around a little bit. Or you'll get full daily mail and they'll rip your whole story. I wouldn't imagine in science the blatant taking of one another's stuff wouldn't be quite as accepted. +> > Well, but that's how science was founded, right? There's a whole history of mathematicians, like, literally shooting each other to death in the 1600s because they would steal each other's algebra and stuff. +> > Could we have a people column? Just do this to each other. +> > That goes in the middle yeah, that definitely, definitely happens. +> > Don't journalists do that? +> > Oh, journalists don't have the same kind of popularized, people don't have a general awareness of journalists' processes the way you can talk about shoot-outs between mathematicians in the 1600s. +> > Just get more journalists to shoot each other. +> > There's stories that I remember, like the one about This American Life episode where they talked to a guy who was, like, knew something about apple and I never actually listened to the episode but they had coverage about how they totally broke and this was this weird thing. Like is This American Life journalistic enterprise? And did they rake with ethics by not checking this guy's sources and writing whatever he said, or whatever? It seems like journalists do have a high responsibility, I mean like, and -- and the civic goals type stuff, public perception of journalists, civic goals is, makes them have that sort of -- what was the original question? +> > Should we shoot each other? +> > Yes! +> > There are high ideals in journalism but I think the public perception is that they're rarely seen and I think what made that episode so interesting when they did the let's visit the Mike Daisy Apple story because you rarely read for an hour, a news organization saying, we fucked up, and really trying to figure out how and all that. +> > It seems like the apparatus of science is distilling what can truly be said. So what can we say. And not just in the hard sciences, in the social science. Journalism isn't that. When we have -- and when there are boners, like data journalism boners, like, mistakes, that's a problem. +> > Like what? +> > Mistakes! Mistakes! Sorry! +> > Example? +> > Um... +> > That should mean something, though. +> > I'm actually not too familiar with how this works in science but one thing that comes to mind is, are the legal ramifications of making mistakes? Are there legal ramifications of making mistakes and most media organizations, I assume have some kind of lawyer on retainer. I mean, where I work at Mother Jones, there's always a sensitivity toward, is this going to get us sued? And I would wonder what the thought process is besides your entire academic career being ruined and your peers no longer respecting you but could you actually go to jail or, you know, incur some kind of real cost? +> > Can you slander a molecule? +> > To speak to that -- I think there's a -- +> > I think if your findings are used in some way and you were found to nothingly do false things. Scientists go up to Congress and, like, you know, are witnesses in things and, you know, they're lying or... +> > But Congress goes up to Congress. +> > True, but there is a sense of, I mean, if you're misrepresenting facts and that injuries someone in some way. Not necessarily defamation in take that we worry about in journalism but at least negligence. +> > Right. +> > But with the Wakefield case with the vaccination? I guess that he was tried in the UK. +> > But that's like a standard of fraud, right? +> > Sure. +> > Like, being wrong is supposed to be a part of science. You're supposed to be allowed to do that, and I feel like you're protected for being innocently wrong when you're doing science but if you're doing introduced, that's something totally different but a journalist can be innocently wrong and someone could be like, your stupid mistake hurt me, pay me. +> > Wasn't there some issue in Italy with these you think these geologists that were either -- I forget whether it was a criminal thing, or something where they hadn't predicted an earthquake or something and they actually did seek legal ramifications. +> > They were sued and the reason that we heard about it was because it was so ludicrous and unprecedented that a scientist would be sued and someone trying to take action on it. Fluke? No. The legal stuff is going to be different in each. +> > NOAH: The legal stuff is going to be different in each cultural context but one thing off of that is are journalists more likely to have enemies from what they're doing. Are they more likely picking a human fight as opposed to disinterestedly pursuing knowledge? +> > That's entirely true. People make entire careers of being an enemy of someone else's career. I'm an adversary for your organization. +> > There was a story in the New Yorker that someone did for like chemical company and like the chemical company wanted him to analyze a fertilize or whatever and he started getting findings that were -- where it was, you know, it turned out that the fertilize was actually doing plaintiff smarm the company -- was doing a lot of harm and the company tried to get him to quiet down and then he started acting like a paranoid person, that people under following him around, but it turned out that it was true and that they were following him around, and stuff. But that was a New Yorker story. I don't know what the commonality of that is. +> > Think about the guys who discovered cold fusion, or thought they had. How difficult their lives must be now even though now they were made straightforward, they weren't committing fraud, everyone just laughs at them now. So it does happen occasionally that if you mess up in a big way your career could be over skew and then there's that ongoing Dr. Oz ways where he was telling his audience members to take all these vitamins and their benefits weren't proven and he was brought before a congressional panel, and, like, interrogated about this, but I don't know if, like, aside from that hurting his reputation what other -- like if legally he could be held accountable in any way. +> > It's funny that on a couple of different threads, much of the examples of in subjects that we were citing have been journalistic coverage of scientists and whenever we cite about this or that, we're seeing a really small slice of the total scientific community and in general, outliers because outliers make news. +> > And this is a problem, at least for the scientific community and I would even go as far as to say for the humanities. Most people have almost absolutely no access to them. Every journal ask locked behind these proprietary, university-only subscriptions that you to pay thousands of dollars a year for. There's been no attempt to kind of normalize the vocabulary such that anyone could, you know, pick this up. I like matte, you know, I study math but still any of the new breaking path I can't read a sentence of it, do you know what I mean? And this is a hard thing for, and granted we obviously won't be able to stay on the van guard of these kinds of, you know, scientific endeavors but because it's so poorly publishized from within their group it's much more difficult for people like everyone here, or everyone -- we're outliers. People -- our readers to know what's going on other than when we cover it and we only cover it when it's something sensational like geologists prosecuted or like, you know, do babies have nuclear fusion, or something like that? +> > I think there's no incentive for that to happen because it's like a closed-loop system. +> > But isn't that sort of the ideal and the hope of journalism, is that it's kind of the best of these two worlds coming together in the way that Dr. Oz is the worst of the two worlds coming together, creative journalism is like, you have the power of like, being able to think through something thoroughly, and being able to deset me mate it widely, instead of having people have this publish accessible. +> > The fundamental between between scientists and journalists is that scientists are makers. And journalists are the reporters but data scientists -- +> > Sort of on that note, there, I feel more so historically in the sciences but now potentially in journalism, there's more of a potential -- more potential hazards, like physical hazards in the process of making and researching these things like in the case of sciences, you might be dealing with hazardous materials and God help you if they leak and on the journalism side, now we're dealing with people trying to take video via drones slash flying upside down lawnmowers that could potentially crash into people and cause a very bad day. So, it'll be interesting as some of our methods get more technically interesting, how, like, the liabilities and training requirements of those go 'cause like in labs, I had to sit through plenty of hazmat classes. Like hey, don't do this with the acid, k, thanks, bye. +> > NOAH: So there's an educational requirement, there's not the same barrier of becoming a working, recognized journalist than there is to becoming a lab scientist. +> > And that's becoming the other way, which is weird when you think about it. +> > Journalists, for human subjects don't need consent and scientists do. +> > Sort of building on the concept of liability, you know, it's possible in science to be a part of a volume of work that can be ensurable as a concept and then you have like, subsequent work, at some point people say legally this is something that I can actually negotiate, some sort of protection around. There isn't that same sort of protection in a volume of work for journalism where you have a series of stories or something like that where someone is willing to say this is enough of a product that penal are going to bat for that legally, or otherwise. The concept that journalism isn't ensurable is interesting if you're talking about the lines of corporate research. +> > NOAH: We have 14 minutes left. You were talking about how data journalism is potentially supposed to represent this kind of, merger of these two, of the best of both, a little bit. I think that's a very good segue to possibly spend the next ten or 15 minutes which is talking about. Can we identify these differences? Is there a wishlist? Is there a list that we could possibly take from this side, as data journalists, as working journalists, where we can more proudly, and authentically wear scientist hats. Rather than the illusion of... +> > Well, I think the questions of these reliability and professional responsibility it seems like maybe we're aiming more in a direction of engineering than science 'cause if you're a scientist there's a sense that, like, you follow the process, you do things right and you hope for the best and that sort of protects you, whereas if you're engineering, you need to take into account that you're actually doing things that will affect people, directly. And the same questions seem to sort of be raised in journalism when you're asserting things about the world in a way that journalists do. +> > Is there any worry that data journalism could be the worst of both worlds and what I mean is that, you know, it all depends on which way we can combine these things, right? Because in one sense we say that journalism is faster and there's like, you know, less embracement of uncertainty and things sort of moving like a linear progress and people read it, kind of -- it has, like, an agenda ask all these kind of things that we talk about in Swedish House Mafia. The thing that I worry about with data journalism is yes, we often catch handicaps in the Nigerian kidnapping but the people that are catching them. And the people that are aware of the corrections and redactions, are people like us. The people in the Nieman lab, not like my parents, the people I grew up with, right? But they might see the original headline, they might see the incorrect statement, they might see the skewed data set that didn't come out of malice, or negligence as much as simple handicaps, or bugs, or whatever. Whereas in science, it's kind of insulated against that because you've got a peer review, you've got a provides that's lightyears away from actually -- I don't say that scientific mistakes don't hurt people, but it's lightkeys away from the beginning of the work drastically hurting somebody. Whereas in journalism, the first stab at a graph or a map could mess things up. You don't have that sense skepticism, or the peer reviewing, that mulling over, that insulation. +> > NOAH: So would you say that possibly you wish that data journalists had sort of a professional standard or some fraction of something that does a little bit of peer review that was a little bit more proactive, a means of catching things before they're out in the public. +> > But then you lose feed, you lose kind of the way we work. 'Cause we get a story, and hey, I need it in eight hours. We don't have enough time, oh, can we pass it by the data science word, someone with a -- under with an Excel sheet saying, yes, yes, yes, that looks correct. +> > But this is also why we have editors. That's the role. Just wish we had better editors. +> > I think the quality of editors is even they will ever the problem, it's the fact that data journalism, being this new and shiny thing has somehow bypassed in edit y'all rose, it certainly has in the place that I I work. And maybe it's just the organizations that we work for don't fully understand the risks inherent in some things that we're talked about. +> > NOAH: And I think only now are some places starting to hire data editors, people that are meant to fulfill that role, specifically for those projects. Propel has a very fortunate data-minded editor. +> > I would like to see the citation list. It would be very difficult and it would be a rabbit hole in journalism. +> > We have links! +> > Oh, yeah! +> > We use links all the time. +> > NOAH: So that's another question about the system, not a question about the system but maybe the culture. +> > They're not real links, I mean, they're... +> > Even scientific studies that, you know, just recite each other and recycle, like, the same stat. After a while, it's hard to track down exactly where it came from. +> > NOAH: Your hand's up. +> > I like links, but the problem is links die because after a career, suddenly that link's broken. There's this old site on New York Times that's called hyper wocky from annoyances, you know and half of the links are dead but I die a little inside when I see a link and it says 404, or whatever. I wish we had some sort of -- +> > NOAH: Archiving? +> > Kind of a way to say, kind of, you've got a 404, I'm going to automatically look on the Internet archive to see -- but yeah, I don't know. +> > I'm not a data journalist and so one thing that I actually -- we were talking a little bit about methodology and transparency and one thing that I think would be nice is to give the audience the benefit of the doubt and be a little bit more transparent about your process and your method and explain, you know, if you can walk me through your data, that's the story, that's the narrative and like, you can kill two birds with one stone there. You can create a narrative but also talk a little bit about your methodology and be a little more transparent. I think one of the great things about journalism, one of our jobs is to explain why it matters, or what it means, whereas that's not always the case with science. So, the book doesn't stop with the data set. It's like you still have to explain what it means. So that's something that I would like to keep doing. +> > I agree. The little box in the left-hand corner where no one's going to look, but going beyond that. I think we're seeing more of it, like, bleed in from the open-source world where you're seeing more documentation -- oftentimes, I think by and large, that's around how we built the thing we built but yeah, definitely about, you know, reverse-engineering the reporting you did. And Dan Nguyen, actually started these really good data diaries and how he obtained the data, and down to the SQL queries he asked the data set and I think we could definitely use more of that in the journalism community. +> > NOAH: I think, on my own list had something on that which was more consistency on the way things are documented and packaged because that's a key element of the reproducibility because, like, if every project is starting from zero and how they decided to tell you about it, and how they make their code and everything, it discourages people from making the effort to reproduce it, so the more that we can make it easier to look at what a project is, and apply that scrutiny, then the more people are going to do it, I hope. +> > That's actually one of the problems that science lab is trying to fix because the reproducible code that's used, when executable code is part of some research project, that includes hard-coded paths and all this stuff, that makes it just completely not really useable. +> > And one other thing to the inherited data versus the original data, which seems kind of like an obvious direction data journalism is going, and it's interesting to me, because at what point -- we do all of the structures that scientists do. But it's interesting to see it work. I know NPR did something on stress. And although it was buttressed by a lot of scientific studies, be sure but they also used surveys of people and it it was exciting a lot -- and I'm interested to know how like what process that went through. Did they show it to scientists? Was there, like, a statistician in one of the other organizations? Or how you can be certain in what you're reporting if you don't have, like, that kind of process. +> > And that kind of goes to what I was suggesting in the sense of, like, lots of times just because someone did an experiment that proves something in science, you know? It's like lots of times it's not accepted as fact, or you know, even begun to be entertained as fact until it's reproducible, and reconfirmed by others in the scientific world and we've seen this in journalism, in a lot of ways where someone will crunch like some census numbers, and do some model or something like that, and start we see consensus among the journalists, where we start to see these things begun to be treated as facts whereas, when the worse comes to worst, the first model comes out, and the first model published -- it's not a paper, it's a newspaper, right? And then people are like, well, you know, it obviously works but it's probably like me, having just learned how to model this thing, helpings it up in R and being like, "I think it's right." I don't want to speak for everyone, but at least that's my method. +> > NOAH: So you would like to see more journalists trying to validity one another's work, and trying to reproduce them? +> > I think that -- +> > Also review in a sense. It's not just better editing. +> > And I also think just to add onto that. This is something that I'm always tempted to do is to just do data diving as opposed to like real hypothesis testing. So doing this huge data dump, and open it up, and make this scatter plot matrix and look at which things correlate, and look for outliers but you're definitely going to find false positives when you do that. So just being rigorous about stating your hypothesis before decompressing that zip file, you know, that's kind of a huge, important step. +> > NOAH: Having a hypothesis. And to your point, also like would you like to see greater consultation between journalists that are sort of gathering information and actual scientists, of more advisory interactions between the two? Is that somewhat the stress? +> > But isn't that what traditional reporting is? Making sure to call up the experts? +> > I don't think it's just that. I think it's also being very transparent with, like, what is your original -- and like what is scientific in the sense -- or what is something that may be anecdotal that you may be adding. Because if it's done from a survey of too many people I don't know if that's -- just listening to that sentence, like we did a survey with a bunch of people, like, I don't know what that means, necessarily. +> > NOAH: And I do think that in plenty of cases, it ends up being puddled in -- bundled in a science-y way. But they didn't think of themselves as scientists and they didn't care to play it up that way. +> > And we also have an degree of chart decoration, too, to get weeded outdoor before getting peer-reviewed content especially if you're handed data source. You're just reproducing straight out. There's an amount of churn that we all do. Where there isn't any new work. It's just munching other things together, and putting it out in a slightly different layout so long as there's going to be projects of that nature asking for some more rigor of this stuff because this is just a rehash of this work over here, but I think that gets into ethical issues as to why you're even rehashing. So that's a separate thing. Just a for the wishlist, I would put a better model of what scientists do 'cause it sounds like a few things here are kind of, like, guesses or imaginations and some of them are, like, based on other news stories about science, or at least the pressure Lisa said, so what is peer review and why is it slow? It's slow because I'm handing my work to my competitors and they have to approve before I can publish it so if there was a different model, it might be more manageable. And when I hear, oh, the scientist use silly arcane language because they're so insulated, well, it's often the most efficient way to communicate precisely exactly what we need to say. So it seems kind of like an assumption oh we're journalists out in the air and active and we're together to work for a while and we're going to find a way to do things that are interesting, ethical, price, fast, and underbudget. So it's like, whoa. +> > NOAH: So how would you like to see that come about in practice? And how would you like to see working journalists be forced to work more closely with that process and the differences in that process. Would that be something that when they're in school, when they're taking classes, they're forced to produce original research? +> > I mean, not to be adversarial, I imagine that you would learn by trial and error, and pretend that you invented it. No, but yeah, I think talking to each other like everything else is a really good way. +> > How about in-house scientists? Why not scientists? +> > Well, I think the field of science communication is becoming increasingly important and we could definitely use more of them. More Neil Degrasse Tysons, or whatever. +> > What if we were to do this session like that? +> > NOAH: That would be fascinating. +> > I'm sure they would agree to everything that we said. +> > Journalists are so cool! +> > Go journalism! I watched House of Cards. +> > NOAH: It is now past 5:30. But I thought this was very interesting. I hope you all did too. Thank you for coming. diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_19_Dev_Ops.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_19_Dev_Ops.md index 5fd99f7f..3dfcca97 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_19_Dev_Ops.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_19_Dev_Ops.md @@ -1,716 +1,688 @@ -Make your devs and teams braver through dev ops (God help us all.) -Session facilitator(s): Chris Chang -Day & Time: Thursday, 4:30-5:30pm -Room: Garden 2 - - >> JP was supposed to be here but he got stuck in Pittsburgh. - I'm going to get started. Most of these notes are from the -previous session but they have nice buzz words. - My name is Chris Chang. JP Schneider wouldn't make it but that's -okay because if all goes well I will do very little talking. - I guess I wanted to start off by going around and can you give -your ... A little bit of -- I guess your name would be good and your -background. I'll start. - I'm Chris Chang of the Texas Tribune. We run on AWS and I -program in Django and I also help maintain the servers that we -- that -run our site. So in that respect I'm doing the dev and the ops. It's -been painful. That's why we're here. - >> My name is Russell, I work at the Pew Research Center in -Washington, D.C. We have our own two dedicated server that is we run -our sites off of and I do full stack from the front end all the way to -the end. I try to make things work transparently so no one has to hit -the barriers of doing system and stuff. I try to make it as invisible -as possible. - >> I'm Matt. I'm a developer. Right now I'm free to just -develop purely develop except for you know maintaining my own -development systems. I've worked for Tribune, digital first media. I -didn't do too much dev ops but I worked in Norwalk, Connecticut where I -maintained everything. That was painful. - >> I'm from source fabrics. I'm from Bulgaria. We are having -(inaudible) where we host -- I'm under -- we're trying to -get to the solution to occur to -- we find out which program -- we -care about the servers ... - >> Eric. I'm from the interactive news department at the New -York times where I'm pretty much the only person that does dev ops. -Our weird situation is we run a shadow infrastructure at the New York -times and there is a large New York Times department that handles most -things and things that don't fit there we handle. Like one-off stuff, -things that are timely or otherwise unusual. To do that we maintain -our own set of servers. It's kind of a strange problem because it -ends up being a pretty heterogeneous group of things. - >> This table? - >> My name is Chris. I work at the center for public integrity -in D.C. I do a lot of front end stuff and sometimes back end stuff. -Not a whole lot of dev ops in my current job except one random window's -server that was related to a project that I ended up administering -that was on AWS. But we do a lot of wrack space, cloud, and mostly -that gets handled by somebody else but I would like to learn more and -that's why I'm here. - >> Within the organization? - >> Yes. There is a guy that manages the CMS. And he's been -doing -- so far. - - - - - >> I'm Stan. I'm mostly here to learn as well. I use the odd -bit of Ansible and stuff like that, some Vagrant. But I know enough -to be dangerous but in a bad way. - >> I'm Michael Keller. I work on the interactive reporting team. -We're a small team. We run our own system outside the CMS. We used -Tarbo in the past for publishing and other machines for more dynamic -apps. - >> Inter-news Kenya, I do mostly database and front end things. -I worked at a tech company previously where we had dev ops engineers -and I would go to them when I needed help and they would tell me what -to type. Now that I'm a smaller person, the only person on my team at -inter-news. I can deploy little things but the bigger projects I -don't have the do main knowledge and usually have to consult friends -and I would like to learn more about it so I don't have to consult -them as much. - >> Matt Perry. I work at automatic on the WordPress.com VIT team. -I'm not a system admin but I work with the media clients and other -clients, Word Press applications. We sit on top of large Word Press -infrastructures. I talk to engineers a lot and Steph. - >> We work with the options system closely and I would love to -learn as much as we can. - >> Frank. I work at PDS news in Arlington, Virginia. The only -developer in the news room. We have another who is remote and we -share the responsibilities to look over the account. I'm here to -learn as much as I can. - >> I'm Jacob, I'm the engagement editor at the Post Gazette, and -I can tell you that I work an awful lot with the IT folks as well as -developers in the news room and I'm slowly teaching myself background -coding. I wanted a better idea of some of the possibilities and just -to have smarter, stronger conversations than I'm already having. - >> I'm Sarah at the New York Times. Mostly front-end developer. -I had a variety of jobs there and one of them was sort of managed both -front end and back end. I'm curious to learn more about deploying and -stuff like that. - >> My original proposal, the idea was we recently split into -- -we have a more core day-to-day CMS team and a news apps team and I -would look at our news apps team and they have very little experience -deploying things and I was worried about them. That was my idea for -this session. Upon talking to JP, and doing some more research, I -learned that for me dev ops was something you put on your resume or a -job pad, kind of a buzz word like a Ninja. Turns out there is a lot -more to dev ops than that. So I thought dev ops was tools. But it -turns out it's more of a philosophy way of life. - So I thought I would talk a few minutes about the philosophy of -dev ops and then we all talk about tools. Because that is what we -want -- we want to come up with solutions to problems, how I have -this -- it's working on my box. How do I get it so other people can -access it, too. - And so there was this video I watched recently where the title of -the doc is making ourselves braver with dev ops. And that's really the - - - - -case. dev ops is all about embracing failure, deploying, like, don't -be afraid to deploy if you find a mistake and crash the site. It's an -opportunity to learn how to never let that happen again. - You run through that a few times, enough times and you end up -with something that is bullet proof. And what you've done is you've -created a safety net under yourself and part of how you get there is -faster generation, I tear down walls. dev ops is two words combined. -The same principle all around is don't wait to take a problem to your -ops person. Your organization probably doesn't have one. You are the -ops team. The other thing that struck me when researching this topic -is a lot of us are kind of familiar with this concept because of the -whole data journalism aspect, like those people are often called -unicorns because, like, oh they've broken down the walls between data -and journalism. dev ops is the same thing for the developer ops world. - There is a couple ways of getting to it. I guess I'm really into -running tests now. I used to think they were a huge waste of time but -I do them now because they keep me -- they let me sleep at night -basically. I guess that's more of a tip from me to you. I will -consult my notes now ... - >> How do you test if you're up against deadlines? - >> This is a -- I guess that's my gripe, too. If there is dead -space I'll pitch out a concept. But if you have a question, we can -start going through those. Testing, the thing that I found helped a -lot was basically just forcing myself to -- I don't exactly do testing -during development but sometimes I do. My thought was tests are hard. -Why do I do this? But eventually if you write enough tests you reach -a critical point where it only slows you down by 10 percent. I found -it always saved me time in the long term. - >> Okay. So you start really, really small. - >> You have to start practicing. - >> You do the easy things and then work your way up to harder -things. - >> There are a lot of different kinds of tests so it's good to -know the vocabulary of a unit test versus an integration test. I -don't know if anyone wants me to go through that? - >> Yes. - >> I used to be an engineer so I almost drew a diagram but I'm -not going to do that. - The idea of a unit test is it will tell you exactly what broke -and the general idea of an integration/functional test is that it -will -- they're generally easier to write. And they'll tell you when -things break but they won't tell you what exactly broke. - One thing that I've learned is that when you -- a benefit of -running tests is that you also end up writing better code. Because if -you're writing unit tests, it keeps you from writing spaghetti code -because it forces you to write things modular. An example of a -functional test is you -- is anyone familiar with curl? - >> Yes. - >> An example of a functional test is curling a URL and making -sure something came back. And an example of an integration test is - - - - -running a name through a function and making sure it got split up into -first and last name. - >> Where you type in a certain value out? - >> Yeah. The common thing is asserted versus expected. Make -sure that they match. - >> So one of the things in our world that makes testing a -difficult proposition is sometimes the transients of something that -you're working on, not because you need it immediately but many times -you are on deadline but it's unlikely to persist. The trade offs in -the application code producing like a robust scene. From my point of -view I think there are times when it's not -- from the dev ops point of -view we test stuff that is going to be repeatable and stand the test -of time. But something on a short turn around and it's not going to -persist for long, sometimes from my point of view, the answer is more -like make it easy to fix the problems as they happen. - >> This is something that we've done. We've done like a simple -quiz in Java script. That has no tests. You throw it up and hope it -work. Sometime later, someone goes, hey, remember the quiz we did? -Let's do another one. - What will happen is if you start reusing code, then that might be -a good time to start adding tests. And you don't have to test -everything but if you have the background of writing tests, then -sometimes you can just -- I'm going to say the word -- the word that -popped into my head is prematurely optimized. But think ahead and I -provide code in small bits just in case I want to test later. It's -easier if I write it in small chunks instead of something long. - One of my secrets is that if something is more than one screen, -if something is less than one screen, I do, it's like terrible, -terrible code. But it all fits on one screen so I don't care. - >> Do you test like one ... - >> The moment you start -- for me personally there is a threshold -where the moment that this code becomes hard to understand, you got to -put more effort into it so that -- - >> There is a higher chance it will break so you have to test. - >> It's about passing on this code to someone else. What will -they have to deal with. That other person maybe your future self. - >> I think testing versus no testing is the same trade off in -transitory versus permanent code. Sometimes you just have to get it -down. Maybe you never use it again. We can build a job script quiz -because we know we will use it in the future. Therefore you should -test it because you know you're going to use it in the future. - >> There is like, to avoid prematurely optimizing stuff there is -a way you can prematurely stabilize things or prematurely -- I mean -weave run into problems where many times we tried to build the quiz -generator before we knew we needed that. That not unlike some forms, -like some of the prematurely stabilizing can end up with a wasted -effort where the thing doesn't actually happen. - It's a difficult thing. - >> Does anyone have questions about like how do I deploy -something? I know -- here is a problem I've run into. How do you - - - - -have a lot of post genesis (ph.) online without running out of your -budget. That is probably the most expensive thing we do. - >> Depends, a lot of the database requirements can also be short -lived. Where you have -- a couple months ago there was this big drop -of medicare data for instance and for a time it was necessary to run a -cluster of servers for instance to provide easy access to this data, -both the reporters and to readers. But the need for that capacity -didn't persist in a way that -- part of dealing with the budget was -having a way to wind that down. Some day we're not going to have the -web page up anymore where you are free text search for doctor's names. - >> What becomes the -- you say it's the most expensive part -- -what makes it expensive the number of databases or the size of them? - >> So it's -- as far as an ops from the ops perspective, -databases are a pain. We tend to go for -- run our choices Amazon -RDS. It's a good trade off between value and it's so easy to set up -if you know how to use AWS. I have one and it runs 30 bucks a month -which isn't bad. But it can add up. - >> The RDS stuff is a good choice and it's easy to change the -size of it over time. - >> How many people have access to an AWS count at work? - And then how much freedom do you have with the AWS account? -We're in a spot where we have a lot of control and we can pretty much -spend whatever we want. I'm curious about others out there? - >> This is where it's hard to communicate about what we're doing -in AWS. In some ways it's so flexible that people outside of our -department seem to pick and choose metrixs they care about. Some -people say you have this number of instances up and nobody cares if -they're at different sizes or how you're paying for them or coming in -and out. We have a little bit of a communication problem there. -We're figuring out what money for what machines is attached to what -project. We don't do that now so we get a lot of freedom and -frustration. - >> The other thing that I wanted to go through is like how many -people have ROKU sets they use like production for user in English? -We've got a bunch. - >> I was going to say I guess I'm more prone because I don't have -a dev ops background to use the platform of the service than the -structure of the service. I will use ROKU and put the code somewhere -and have it do the dev ops thing for me because I don't have the -background. Yeah. - >> And Bart of this is also -- AWS is really hard and it's -annoying for a journalist under a deadline to have to learn this just -to share their work with the world. So what can we do to make that -easier? - >> Volunteer for my news room to not get paid to do work -obviously. - >> My journal advice is use HAROKU (ph). - >> Most journalists who are going to need that instantaneous, -they have some background, it's not going to be like go see a reporter -who has never seen. I need AWS on this tomorrow. It's more important - - - - -to make sure the people who do know are involved in those projects -from the beginning. That goes throughout the entire project -formulation. You need to be in on those projects early so it's not -like we need this in a rush, can you make it up for us for tomorrow. - >> The way we handle it for the most part is trying to make -everything as self-service as possible. Just like a paradigm. And -sometimes that's like a knowledge sharing thing. Interacting with -people on a project so they can do the next thing themselves. - A lot of it is giving them a set of tools that is as simple as -macros for a couple of actions up to and approaching the periphery -style automation. - But for the most part, people are pretty contend to attempt to -solve their own problems if they have enough tools to do it and they -can do it in a relatively safe way. We're making it safer to get onto -a server so people can be familiar and maybe hack out a problem but -not in a way that is going to blow everything up, I guess is the gist? - >> Speaking of blowing things up, how do you monitor your servers -once they're up? We use, we mostly use new relic, the free tear. And -our apps we use the free tear, a separate account for each one and -also a paid account for our website. - >> We're kind of like an awkward size where we're big enough that -new relic would be a really expense I have choice for us. But not so -big that we can pay for the expensive choice. - Ends up being a combination of things. I think for -- there are -a couple different kinds of monitoring. You're looking for a system -metrix that tells you something useful if you have access to capacity -or whether or not some applications are (trailing off ...) for things -that are transient we use note Pang (ph.). - For us this sort of full stack monitoring stuff seems to be, you -know, over the long run more useful in the cycle of turning it down. -It's a mix of things? - >> We use a service called PING it. I don't like it anymore. -What that does is checks your site every couple of seconds. If it -doesn't get a response it will e-mail you or page you. - >> You can see it if it slows down for whatever reason. - >> There are great things for rails project, you can install it -every time an exception shows up. This is good for people responsible -for individual projects. X developer that worked on a project might -have a good idea and you can notify them. - >> Have you used century for anything? - >> No. - >> It was for Django but now pretty much works for everything. -You can learn it for free. Basically any time there is an exception -it does a good job of collecting that information. You get a graph of -how often it happens. You can choose how to get notified when an -exception happens. - Speaking of all these tools, JP and I collected a lot of tools -that we think would be accessible to the news room at this (pointing) -as you mention things can you check to see if they're there. If you -check that list and want more information about a tool just go ahead - - - - -and shout that out. I should update it on the ether pad but I can't -do that and talk at the same time. - I can walk through how we would use the tool. - AWS has some monitoring for free. We've been playing around with -making it easier to get at and understand because I haven't been able -to find a good product to say, just give me a CP graph of my web -application so that I can just peak at it once in a while. That is -surprisingly hard to do but it's possible. - I'm working on a project internally for making that easier. But -it's kind of a lot of work already to get set up. But it's still -better than the status quo. - Has anyone used Jenkins or heard of it? We just started using it -and we've enjoyed it so far. I think right now we're about even on -the time spent versus time saved. As we use it more, it will save us -more and more time. - >> Can you give an example what you do with it? - >> The primary purpose is to mimic TREVIS CI. That is a service -that is free and what it will do is run tests so that you know -- a -lot of times I'm too lazy or forgetful to run my own tests. If you're -hosting on GitHub, Trevis will pull the code and make sure it tests -correctly. And it will make sure that the test passes which is good -to know before you make the full request. - Trevis CI only does tests. Jenkins has the capability of doing -tests but you have to run a whole server just to run Jenkins. But -Jenkins does anything you want automated. It will deal with it. Our -work flow is Jenkins will run tests -- it will let us know if anything -breaks but it will check our code for complaints. We use Python. -Most of our code is Python and JAVA script and it will tell us whether -a pull request deviates from accepted Python coding styling -conventions and if JAVA script deviates. Jenkins is set up to notice -that sort of thing. Everyone -- it enforces styles that everyone can -read everyone else's code and developers can work on each other's code -a lot more easily? - >> There's a pretty interesting future Docker based CI solution -that is more similar to Trevis the way the server responds to your -hooks. It can pull down your code and test it. This paradigm -essentially runs your code inside a Docker container. It's like a -Trevis file but the neat thing is you can specify what container you -want it to start from. - Instead of like, one of the pains of Jenkins is assessing the -massive system that can do all things. And instead you're in a wider -host that will assess the container. This Python, you pull down the -Python container and do the test. The way that it works is you -specify a series of scripts that you want to run. - We do it for billing processes and things like that. Like we'll -use drone to pull it down and load the build and up load the binary. -There are people that will run the tests and if the tests pass they -move right to running the script or whatever they need to run. It's a -way to kind of pretty cheaply, you can do all the stuff that Jenkins -does. It's lighter and less frustrating. We run it internally. The - - - - -only server requirement is you must be able to hit a point that you -have an on call back. - But it works pretty well. - >> We've started, a few -- our tests are now run, Jenkins builds -a Docker image and then runs tests inside that. - >> Cool. - >> Jenkins does Docker. But we're transitioning to Docker piece -by piece slowly. Jenkins also does builds for us, too. That's -probably -- I don't know how much of that you guys would ever run into -actually. But if you're pulling application code to the server, what -we do is -- what our new site is our Jenkins builds a DVD file that -then gets pushed out to (inaudible). We mentioned Docker a few times. -I don't know, how many people have played with Docker? - The great thing about Docker is you know how dev ops works on the -local machine, why doesn't it work on production. Docker is a -solution to that because you can actually very closely mimic your -production environment locally. So if it works locally, then you just -take that code and you can push it up and it would work in production. - It's something that we're still just playing with. We're not -running anything in Docker in production. We're all very excited -about it. The one thing that I definitely -- the way I mostly use -Docker know is with post GIS. It's a pain to set up and sometimes for -different projects you need different versions of post GI S. And with -Docker you can have multiple positions of PostGIS on the same machine -at the same time and not worry about accidentally calling the wrong -version and also of not like -- making sure the right version of -PostGIS is online or not? - >> It's like vagrant, right? - >> I've also tried vagrant and my problem with vagrant was that -basically it was too slow. It's the same concept where -- - >> Virtual machine. - >> It's not exactly a virtual machine. Vagrant depends on -virtual machines. Docker is a piece of software that is built on LXC -which is something in the LYNX Colonel. It's like a heavily isolated -process. It's running more or less in the same OS that you're in. -There is no sub or simulated CP. It appears to that process that it's -on its own machine. - >> A vagrant machine will simulate the memory of every CPU. But -Docker shares that with the hosts. You can restrict it. - >> Is it there for lighter and less intensative in general? - >> Yes. One of the big things is memory. To do it in vagrant -you have to set aside a chunk of memory ahead of time. I need two -gigs of memory and I have one now, Docker is a process that can grab -memory to whatever one you set. It doesn't actually consume that -memory. - >> Does it require LINUX then. - >> Yes. - >> There is boot to Docker that makes the -- you can pretty much -use Docker as if you were running LINUX. - >> We love vagrant. That is how we simulate our production. - - - - - >> If you have a work flow with vagrant, I don't know if I would -spend a lot of time. If you did switch to Docker, the time it takes -to spit up a machine in vagrant is noticeable. - >> I don't know how far along it is but vagrant has a Docker at -this point. - >> I think it's out. - >> It is out? - >> The thing is you're more limited. You have to run something -to Docker if you're on a Mac but it's possible. - >> The great thing about Docker is if you have an exotic set up, -like you need to search PostGIS, Redis, Log Stash, if you need an -alphabet soup of servers just to test something out, Docker will make -it easier because you don't have to sit there and install everything. -If you jump to another machine, you don't have to try to remember how -you got everything installed. - There's actually a project called fig which just got absorbed -into Docker that lets you describe all the services your project needs -and it will -- you type fig up and it spins up all of the external -services that you need to run your project and you just can -- it's -called orchestration. It spins everything up and it's ready for you -to start working. - >> There is like a more general big picture question, do you find -an advantage to develop applications that run in their own little -environment and play that environment out than have a bunch of -different environments as opposed to having one big environment that a -bunch of apps run off of? - >> Someone mentioned this recently in the video I just watched. -And it was the auto.com Docker.com/talk. - >> You're deploying stuff to AWS. You probably have an AWS -account for one situation. You have one AWS instance for that. - >> We do one instance. We can keep everything separate. AWS has -a new instance called T2 which is a new good sweet spot because before -it's really easy to over provision. I need this thing run fast but I -only need it sometimes. So the T2 instance is, lets you burst CPU and -then -- so like Jenkins is a good example because you need it to run -your tests. You want your answers now. But most of the time it's -just sitting there waiting for you to push a new command. - AWS has a lot of instances, you can probably find one that's a -good price point. So like you're not going to -- like if you're -trying to save money, I don't know if you'll be able to save money by -getting one instance and trying to utilize it to its max? - >> I think sort of the philosophical question of what's better -comes down to from my point of view, I want to give other developers -and people working on these apps as much access to their app and how -it's running as possible. It becomes problematic where there is one -server. The possibility of them trying to turn off their app for a -second and turn off every app is way higher. There are trade offs in -the resources way. Ideally I'd have an actual computer for every app. -It would be incredibly expensive. So in reality I was to collapse it -down. - - - - - What tools do you pick to make that process as painless as -possible? That is what this is about. Docker is interesting because -you can get some of the same benefits of -- isolation. But at the -same time I can keep them away from other people's apps. Not in a bad -way but in a way -- - >> You don't want them to take down everything. - >> They don't feel comfortable with that situation either. -Everybody is power hungry about getting on the power server. Oh shit -this is the command line on our only server. - >> When somebody is building something you have to make a -conscious decision that, um, I think this thing is only going to last -a year or whatever. Because you can't like just get a new instance, a -new instance and then you have thousands and thousands of instances. - And as you were saying if you're using different versions of -post-GIS, eventually something is going to have to be upgraded to work -on newer software and corralled together. It's hard to manage what -you're saying. That's the problem, right? - >> We talk about what we can do to design, it's like designing a -packaging so it's more recyclable. How do you design an app so it's a -set of flat files that we put on cheap storage and never have to run a -data bass again. Some of it is that. But we end up with a lot of -legacy stuff. We run 150 apps and they're not all current I guess is -what I'm saying. That's putting it lightly I guess. - >> Going back to the -- basically, the point I want to get across -is with dev ops, it lets you be braver. If AWS is A, I and S, if you -don't have the ability to shut down something else you'll be more -confident to be in a command line. If I mess something up, I'll only -mess up my own stuff. If you have the ability to reprovision things, -if you have a good recovery plan, then, if you take down the whole -site and you have a plan to deal with it, then like, you just ... -It's okay to make mistakes. - And a really good example of that is the net flicks chaos monkey. -Has anyone heard of that? Basically the idea is that imagine there -salmon key in your data center just like randomly destroying one thing -at random times of the day. Could you deal with that? - And so Netflix has a software monkey that goes around and shuts -down and destroys things on the infrastructure. If they can't recover -from that, then they're not doing their job. - So this is kind of like testing. You got to spend some extra -time to do a little bit of extra work to make sure you can -- there is -like running tests is one step. And then automatic provisioning which -is a pretty huge step. But then there is a lot of morphing to go. -Now I have multiple availability zones in AWS. I have to be able to -recover my -- like this service after writing a recovery plan for this -service I have to jump to the next one. It will take time but in the -long run it will give you confidence that your infrastructure will -survive and you're not woken up at 4 a.m. by your CEO and asking why -the site isn't working? - >> One thing I really appreciate about our ops folks is they've -written amazing deploy scripts and made them widely available. And - - - - -literally you type the word deploy. There is nothing I have to know -as a developer in order to use that. There is an equally easy way to -revert and fix something. - It makes me more courageous as a developer. And certainly when I -was just starting to begin to be useful. - >> There is a concept called Chet ops and you do all the deploys -from hip chat or ISC (ph.). Right now the only thing I have got is -that I've got it so you can purge things from cache. We have our -testing reports fed into Chet. I want to make it so we can deploy -from Chet. It makes everything public. It's not a tool to show up. -It's a tool to open up. Like, hey, if you want to get something -deployed, you don't need to find me. You can do it yourself. - >> We have all of our deploy go into the ISV. But you see it -right away in the channel deployer command. - >> I have more things to go over. Well, I guess I am wondering -what -- for those of you who said you wanted to learn more about how -to deploy things yourself, do you have any specifics? - >> No, I'm sorry guys. - >> I'm fine. I guess recommendations -- I'm good at reading -documentation and stuff so if there is anything helpful for me to read -to be more sympathetic with the people I work with in dev ops, I would -be cool with that. I don't know if that is a dumb request. You can -say it is, I won't be offended? Or you can laugh or make a noise that -would also be cool. - It's a little uncomfortable bracketing this with silence? - >> This URL has a list of some tools. The very last link is a -list to a much larger list. If you really want to dive into what is -out there, it's a good list to go see. I want to do like customer -surveys. I think there is a whole bunch of links in there about that. - >> I did a couple links. There was a project, an open day-to-day -and there were a group of dev ops engineers that talked about this -project minus which is an easier work flow for data flow, whatever -platform service they want to. And I'm not sure if it's been audited. -I know they're maintaining it kind of. But I think it was like three -dudes. - I just put it up there because I thought maybe they would -appreciate some feed back from other people that work in different -news rooms and things. I am trying to hijack the silence with my -comment? - >> This makes me think of a question in general. This stuff is -highly complicated. A lot of it. It would appear to me if I'm a news -developer or something, the optimal amount for me to know about this -is zero. The more I have to know about this, the more I don't think -about my job which is developing these apps or something. - First of all, is that true? And second of all, if I am stuck -without the dev ops person I must know something about this, what are -the -- what is the minimal set of things I should learn? - >> The minimum useful set. - >> Roku I guess. - >> What I would say is like that's not totally true for most - - - - -people in the sense that everything that you need to know is -everything that you have to ask somebody about when you're blocked on -doing something. There are a lot of those things I'm sure. - Those are the pieces that instead of having to ask that question, -like, you know, even doing dev ops, I would want to know how can I -figure out how to let you solve that problem next time. I don't want -to update the DNS routes for your application. I don't want to add a -rewrite for you. If in certain scenarios I have to be the person that -does that, those are exactly those things. There are things with your -applications where you have pain points that involve you having to ask -for something from a dev ops person and that is a loosely formed set of -things that varies from organization to organization. But there are -things that are appealing to the minimal useful set of things. What -do you get block on for your application which you normally think of -as not the development part of your process but really is. - In general, be comfortable with the command line is something I -would say. Some of these things are good places to start. Knowing -how to run your application is a pretty good -- if nothing else a -simulation on what it takes to deploy. Getting familiar with Docker -is a good place to start. That is a technology that we are going to -be using more and more. And I think it's going to be something you're -going to hear about eventually. And not only that but it's easy to -wrap your head around from a non-ops point of view. Say something -happens in your data center, it's not as complicated as the virtual -machines. I think it's only a question of time for that. - But that's it? - >> Increasingly there are tons of free, for vagrant there are -tons of environments that you can grab. Just something you can start -to build. If you have an idea probably someone did it before and you -can find it. - >> Right. - >> I think that within a year if you can build it yourself -locally in Docker you'll be able to also deploy it. - >> I totally agree and I think we're figuring out how some of -those tools work now, it will serve you well in the next year. That -might be where all this is heading. I think it's becoming less -important to know a lot of the nitty-gritty stuff that is happening on -the server and more important to understand how to package your app in -a way that it can play nice. - I don't think everybody should run out and learn AWK (ph.) and -stuff. But learning how to build a Docker file for your Python -application would go a long way. - >> I find building stuff up and tearing it down and building it -up and tearing it down, repeating the process just to wrap your head -around it. - >> Speaking of, I've never liked chef or puppet. I've played -with them a few times. I've always given up. - >> They've been through the wringer. I think there is a world -where the Docker stuff is very threatening to them as well and it -solves a lot of problems in a different way. - - - - - The automatic infrastructure and code stuff is an interesting -concept. That is what chef is about. Write a ruby script that -configures all of your servers. That stuff can break down, too, if -you don't see it coming. You have databases full of passwords for -other databases and no way to interact with them. In a way you can -build a meta trap out of that. It's not a bad concept but it's a -really interesting time in the dev ops world. That was the very -accepted wisdom from the recent several years and I think people are -coming out of it into different things? - >> One of the things I think is really interesting is that a few -years ago if you wanted something online it was like PHP, Apache, -Linux. And one box just install the services and you're online. And -now, it's like, oh, you need 15 different boxes just to do zero cue -and all these crazy alphabet soup. Just to run this one app. - I think with Docker, we're going to get back to something like -Lam. - >> With Docker you can go back. You can use all the modern -components if you want but if a developer wants to write in PHP they -can pull down that container and have at it. It's cool. - >> I think it's helpful if you're a apps developer to know about -ops. Knowing if the code you're writing will break the cache or not -is a valuable skill. Look it's a feature and then it will be a while -and one person will go, wait, that will totally fuck up our cache and -the sun will go down and we'll scramble. If everyone developing code -has these ops, like dev ops, then you'll know that if I make this -change it will probably break the cycle. So I probably should do it. - So we've got -- we went through this trial of learning what vary -by cookie meant. Vary by cookie is whenever you serve -- a good -example is every website you go to it says log in. Or you registered -at this at the top, if you're logged in or not it will know. The only -way to cache that is if you vary it by cookie. You don't want to send -Alice's log in message to Bob. What you end up with is caching an -entire site for this one box at the top right. There are tricks and -tips and techniques for not doing that. - But there are things like if you're doing a quiz and you want to -customize the results, you have to realize if there is a caching in -front, whether or not every page is going to be served from caching or -from the server or not. - That's information you don't know unless you're on both sides of -dev and ops. - And speaking of like archiving a lot of old sites, I've been -doing a lot of research into using WGIT to pull down and archive old -chunks of our site, we keep accidentally breaking stuff. And people -go, hey, remember this interactive from 2011, why doesn't it work -anymore? - >> Somebody does. - >> We've been experimenting with transparently serving, like we -have a core, for caching we have a common share CSS but we've been -experimenting with quickly archiving not just single pages but whole -sub sites. From a cache instead of from the shifting common style - - - - -sheet. So as we change styles, random act rebuilt two years ago that -relied on one quirk and it doesn't break. Accept we have to do it -proactively. - It's still better, it's a huge improvement over what we used to -know. Now we don't have to fix it. We just have to archive it. - I hear a little activity. I don't know what time it is? - >> It's 5:30. - >> What time do we end? - >> 5:30. - >> I'm hoping this will live as a living resource. As you find -things that you think are useful, I have a link and a small -explanation of why I think it's something valuable. So I hate chef -and puppet but they're in the list because a lot of people like them. +Make your devs and teams braver through dev ops (God help us all.) +Session facilitator(s): Chris Chang +Day & Time: Thursday, 4:30-5:30pm +Room: Garden 2 + +> > JP was supposed to be here but he got stuck in Pittsburgh. +> > I'm going to get started. Most of these notes are from the +> > previous session but they have nice buzz words. +> > My name is Chris Chang. JP Schneider wouldn't make it but that's +> > okay because if all goes well I will do very little talking. +> > I guess I wanted to start off by going around and can you give +> > your ... A little bit of -- I guess your name would be good and your +> > background. I'll start. +> > I'm Chris Chang of the Texas Tribune. We run on AWS and I +> > program in Django and I also help maintain the servers that we -- that +> > run our site. So in that respect I'm doing the dev and the ops. It's +> > been painful. That's why we're here. +> > My name is Russell, I work at the Pew Research Center in +> > Washington, D.C. We have our own two dedicated server that is we run +> > our sites off of and I do full stack from the front end all the way to +> > the end. I try to make things work transparently so no one has to hit +> > the barriers of doing system and stuff. I try to make it as invisible +> > as possible. +> > I'm Matt. I'm a developer. Right now I'm free to just +> > develop purely develop except for you know maintaining my own +> > development systems. I've worked for Tribune, digital first media. I +> > didn't do too much dev ops but I worked in Norwalk, Connecticut where I +> > maintained everything. That was painful. +> > I'm from source fabrics. I'm from Bulgaria. We are having +> > (inaudible) where we host -- I'm under -- we're trying to +> > get to the solution to occur to -- we find out which program -- we +> > care about the servers ... +> > Eric. I'm from the interactive news department at the New +> > York times where I'm pretty much the only person that does dev ops. +> > Our weird situation is we run a shadow infrastructure at the New York +> > times and there is a large New York Times department that handles most +> > things and things that don't fit there we handle. Like one-off stuff, +> > things that are timely or otherwise unusual. To do that we maintain +> > our own set of servers. It's kind of a strange problem because it +> > ends up being a pretty heterogeneous group of things. +> > This table? +> > My name is Chris. I work at the center for public integrity +> > in D.C. I do a lot of front end stuff and sometimes back end stuff. +> > Not a whole lot of dev ops in my current job except one random window's +> > server that was related to a project that I ended up administering +> > that was on AWS. But we do a lot of wrack space, cloud, and mostly +> > that gets handled by somebody else but I would like to learn more and +> > that's why I'm here. +> > Within the organization? +> > Yes. There is a guy that manages the CMS. And he's been +> > doing -- so far. + +> > I'm Stan. I'm mostly here to learn as well. I use the odd +> > bit of Ansible and stuff like that, some Vagrant. But I know enough +> > to be dangerous but in a bad way. +> > I'm Michael Keller. I work on the interactive reporting team. +> > We're a small team. We run our own system outside the CMS. We used +> > Tarbo in the past for publishing and other machines for more dynamic +> > apps. +> > Inter-news Kenya, I do mostly database and front end things. +> > I worked at a tech company previously where we had dev ops engineers +> > and I would go to them when I needed help and they would tell me what +> > to type. Now that I'm a smaller person, the only person on my team at +> > inter-news. I can deploy little things but the bigger projects I +> > don't have the do main knowledge and usually have to consult friends +> > and I would like to learn more about it so I don't have to consult +> > them as much. +> > Matt Perry. I work at automatic on the WordPress.com VIT team. +> > I'm not a system admin but I work with the media clients and other +> > clients, Word Press applications. We sit on top of large Word Press +> > infrastructures. I talk to engineers a lot and Steph. +> > We work with the options system closely and I would love to +> > learn as much as we can. +> > Frank. I work at PDS news in Arlington, Virginia. The only +> > developer in the news room. We have another who is remote and we +> > share the responsibilities to look over the account. I'm here to +> > learn as much as I can. +> > I'm Jacob, I'm the engagement editor at the Post Gazette, and +> > I can tell you that I work an awful lot with the IT folks as well as +> > developers in the news room and I'm slowly teaching myself background +> > coding. I wanted a better idea of some of the possibilities and just +> > to have smarter, stronger conversations than I'm already having. +> > I'm Sarah at the New York Times. Mostly front-end developer. +> > I had a variety of jobs there and one of them was sort of managed both +> > front end and back end. I'm curious to learn more about deploying and +> > stuff like that. +> > My original proposal, the idea was we recently split into -- +> > we have a more core day-to-day CMS team and a news apps team and I +> > would look at our news apps team and they have very little experience +> > deploying things and I was worried about them. That was my idea for +> > this session. Upon talking to JP, and doing some more research, I +> > learned that for me dev ops was something you put on your resume or a +> > job pad, kind of a buzz word like a Ninja. Turns out there is a lot +> > more to dev ops than that. So I thought dev ops was tools. But it +> > turns out it's more of a philosophy way of life. +> > So I thought I would talk a few minutes about the philosophy of +> > dev ops and then we all talk about tools. Because that is what we +> > want -- we want to come up with solutions to problems, how I have +> > this -- it's working on my box. How do I get it so other people can +> > access it, too. +> > And so there was this video I watched recently where the title of +> > the doc is making ourselves braver with dev ops. And that's really the + +case. dev ops is all about embracing failure, deploying, like, don't +be afraid to deploy if you find a mistake and crash the site. It's an +opportunity to learn how to never let that happen again. +You run through that a few times, enough times and you end up +with something that is bullet proof. And what you've done is you've +created a safety net under yourself and part of how you get there is +faster generation, I tear down walls. dev ops is two words combined. +The same principle all around is don't wait to take a problem to your +ops person. Your organization probably doesn't have one. You are the +ops team. The other thing that struck me when researching this topic +is a lot of us are kind of familiar with this concept because of the +whole data journalism aspect, like those people are often called +unicorns because, like, oh they've broken down the walls between data +and journalism. dev ops is the same thing for the developer ops world. +There is a couple ways of getting to it. I guess I'm really into +running tests now. I used to think they were a huge waste of time but +I do them now because they keep me -- they let me sleep at night +basically. I guess that's more of a tip from me to you. I will +consult my notes now ... + +> > How do you test if you're up against deadlines? +> > This is a -- I guess that's my gripe, too. If there is dead +> > space I'll pitch out a concept. But if you have a question, we can +> > start going through those. Testing, the thing that I found helped a +> > lot was basically just forcing myself to -- I don't exactly do testing +> > during development but sometimes I do. My thought was tests are hard. +> > Why do I do this? But eventually if you write enough tests you reach +> > a critical point where it only slows you down by 10 percent. I found +> > it always saved me time in the long term. +> > Okay. So you start really, really small. +> > You have to start practicing. +> > You do the easy things and then work your way up to harder +> > things. +> > There are a lot of different kinds of tests so it's good to +> > know the vocabulary of a unit test versus an integration test. I +> > don't know if anyone wants me to go through that? +> > Yes. +> > I used to be an engineer so I almost drew a diagram but I'm +> > not going to do that. +> > The idea of a unit test is it will tell you exactly what broke +> > and the general idea of an integration/functional test is that it +> > will -- they're generally easier to write. And they'll tell you when +> > things break but they won't tell you what exactly broke. +> > One thing that I've learned is that when you -- a benefit of +> > running tests is that you also end up writing better code. Because if +> > you're writing unit tests, it keeps you from writing spaghetti code +> > because it forces you to write things modular. An example of a +> > functional test is you -- is anyone familiar with curl? +> > Yes. +> > An example of a functional test is curling a URL and making +> > sure something came back. And an example of an integration test is + +running a name through a function and making sure it got split up into +first and last name. + +> > Where you type in a certain value out? +> > Yeah. The common thing is asserted versus expected. Make +> > sure that they match. +> > So one of the things in our world that makes testing a +> > difficult proposition is sometimes the transients of something that +> > you're working on, not because you need it immediately but many times +> > you are on deadline but it's unlikely to persist. The trade offs in +> > the application code producing like a robust scene. From my point of +> > view I think there are times when it's not -- from the dev ops point of +> > view we test stuff that is going to be repeatable and stand the test +> > of time. But something on a short turn around and it's not going to +> > persist for long, sometimes from my point of view, the answer is more +> > like make it easy to fix the problems as they happen. +> > This is something that we've done. We've done like a simple +> > quiz in Java script. That has no tests. You throw it up and hope it +> > work. Sometime later, someone goes, hey, remember the quiz we did? +> > Let's do another one. +> > What will happen is if you start reusing code, then that might be +> > a good time to start adding tests. And you don't have to test +> > everything but if you have the background of writing tests, then +> > sometimes you can just -- I'm going to say the word -- the word that +> > popped into my head is prematurely optimized. But think ahead and I +> > provide code in small bits just in case I want to test later. It's +> > easier if I write it in small chunks instead of something long. +> > One of my secrets is that if something is more than one screen, +> > if something is less than one screen, I do, it's like terrible, +> > terrible code. But it all fits on one screen so I don't care. +> > Do you test like one ... +> > The moment you start -- for me personally there is a threshold +> > where the moment that this code becomes hard to understand, you got to +> > put more effort into it so that -- +> > There is a higher chance it will break so you have to test. +> > It's about passing on this code to someone else. What will +> > they have to deal with. That other person maybe your future self. +> > I think testing versus no testing is the same trade off in +> > transitory versus permanent code. Sometimes you just have to get it +> > down. Maybe you never use it again. We can build a job script quiz +> > because we know we will use it in the future. Therefore you should +> > test it because you know you're going to use it in the future. +> > There is like, to avoid prematurely optimizing stuff there is +> > a way you can prematurely stabilize things or prematurely -- I mean +> > weave run into problems where many times we tried to build the quiz +> > generator before we knew we needed that. That not unlike some forms, +> > like some of the prematurely stabilizing can end up with a wasted +> > effort where the thing doesn't actually happen. +> > It's a difficult thing. +> > Does anyone have questions about like how do I deploy +> > something? I know -- here is a problem I've run into. How do you + +have a lot of post genesis (ph.) online without running out of your +budget. That is probably the most expensive thing we do. + +> > Depends, a lot of the database requirements can also be short +> > lived. Where you have -- a couple months ago there was this big drop +> > of medicare data for instance and for a time it was necessary to run a +> > cluster of servers for instance to provide easy access to this data, +> > both the reporters and to readers. But the need for that capacity +> > didn't persist in a way that -- part of dealing with the budget was +> > having a way to wind that down. Some day we're not going to have the +> > web page up anymore where you are free text search for doctor's names. +> > What becomes the -- you say it's the most expensive part -- +> > what makes it expensive the number of databases or the size of them? +> > So it's -- as far as an ops from the ops perspective, +> > databases are a pain. We tend to go for -- run our choices Amazon +> > RDS. It's a good trade off between value and it's so easy to set up +> > if you know how to use AWS. I have one and it runs 30 bucks a month +> > which isn't bad. But it can add up. +> > The RDS stuff is a good choice and it's easy to change the +> > size of it over time. +> > How many people have access to an AWS count at work? +> > And then how much freedom do you have with the AWS account? +> > We're in a spot where we have a lot of control and we can pretty much +> > spend whatever we want. I'm curious about others out there? +> > This is where it's hard to communicate about what we're doing +> > in AWS. In some ways it's so flexible that people outside of our +> > department seem to pick and choose metrixs they care about. Some +> > people say you have this number of instances up and nobody cares if +> > they're at different sizes or how you're paying for them or coming in +> > and out. We have a little bit of a communication problem there. +> > We're figuring out what money for what machines is attached to what +> > project. We don't do that now so we get a lot of freedom and +> > frustration. +> > The other thing that I wanted to go through is like how many +> > people have ROKU sets they use like production for user in English? +> > We've got a bunch. +> > I was going to say I guess I'm more prone because I don't have +> > a dev ops background to use the platform of the service than the +> > structure of the service. I will use ROKU and put the code somewhere +> > and have it do the dev ops thing for me because I don't have the +> > background. Yeah. +> > And Bart of this is also -- AWS is really hard and it's +> > annoying for a journalist under a deadline to have to learn this just +> > to share their work with the world. So what can we do to make that +> > easier? +> > Volunteer for my news room to not get paid to do work +> > obviously. +> > My journal advice is use HAROKU (ph). +> > Most journalists who are going to need that instantaneous, +> > they have some background, it's not going to be like go see a reporter +> > who has never seen. I need AWS on this tomorrow. It's more important + +to make sure the people who do know are involved in those projects +from the beginning. That goes throughout the entire project +formulation. You need to be in on those projects early so it's not +like we need this in a rush, can you make it up for us for tomorrow. + +> > The way we handle it for the most part is trying to make +> > everything as self-service as possible. Just like a paradigm. And +> > sometimes that's like a knowledge sharing thing. Interacting with +> > people on a project so they can do the next thing themselves. +> > A lot of it is giving them a set of tools that is as simple as +> > macros for a couple of actions up to and approaching the periphery +> > style automation. +> > But for the most part, people are pretty contend to attempt to +> > solve their own problems if they have enough tools to do it and they +> > can do it in a relatively safe way. We're making it safer to get onto +> > a server so people can be familiar and maybe hack out a problem but +> > not in a way that is going to blow everything up, I guess is the gist? +> > Speaking of blowing things up, how do you monitor your servers +> > once they're up? We use, we mostly use new relic, the free tear. And +> > our apps we use the free tear, a separate account for each one and +> > also a paid account for our website. +> > We're kind of like an awkward size where we're big enough that +> > new relic would be a really expense I have choice for us. But not so +> > big that we can pay for the expensive choice. +> > Ends up being a combination of things. I think for -- there are +> > a couple different kinds of monitoring. You're looking for a system +> > metrix that tells you something useful if you have access to capacity +> > or whether or not some applications are (trailing off ...) for things +> > that are transient we use note Pang (ph.). +> > For us this sort of full stack monitoring stuff seems to be, you +> > know, over the long run more useful in the cycle of turning it down. +> > It's a mix of things? +> > We use a service called PING it. I don't like it anymore. +> > What that does is checks your site every couple of seconds. If it +> > doesn't get a response it will e-mail you or page you. +> > You can see it if it slows down for whatever reason. +> > There are great things for rails project, you can install it +> > every time an exception shows up. This is good for people responsible +> > for individual projects. X developer that worked on a project might +> > have a good idea and you can notify them. +> > Have you used century for anything? +> > No. +> > It was for Django but now pretty much works for everything. +> > You can learn it for free. Basically any time there is an exception +> > it does a good job of collecting that information. You get a graph of +> > how often it happens. You can choose how to get notified when an +> > exception happens. +> > Speaking of all these tools, JP and I collected a lot of tools +> > that we think would be accessible to the news room at this (pointing) +> > as you mention things can you check to see if they're there. If you +> > check that list and want more information about a tool just go ahead + +and shout that out. I should update it on the ether pad but I can't +do that and talk at the same time. +I can walk through how we would use the tool. +AWS has some monitoring for free. We've been playing around with +making it easier to get at and understand because I haven't been able +to find a good product to say, just give me a CP graph of my web +application so that I can just peak at it once in a while. That is +surprisingly hard to do but it's possible. +I'm working on a project internally for making that easier. But +it's kind of a lot of work already to get set up. But it's still +better than the status quo. +Has anyone used Jenkins or heard of it? We just started using it +and we've enjoyed it so far. I think right now we're about even on +the time spent versus time saved. As we use it more, it will save us +more and more time. + +> > Can you give an example what you do with it? +> > The primary purpose is to mimic TREVIS CI. That is a service +> > that is free and what it will do is run tests so that you know -- a +> > lot of times I'm too lazy or forgetful to run my own tests. If you're +> > hosting on GitHub, Trevis will pull the code and make sure it tests +> > correctly. And it will make sure that the test passes which is good +> > to know before you make the full request. +> > Trevis CI only does tests. Jenkins has the capability of doing +> > tests but you have to run a whole server just to run Jenkins. But +> > Jenkins does anything you want automated. It will deal with it. Our +> > work flow is Jenkins will run tests -- it will let us know if anything +> > breaks but it will check our code for complaints. We use Python. +> > Most of our code is Python and JAVA script and it will tell us whether +> > a pull request deviates from accepted Python coding styling +> > conventions and if JAVA script deviates. Jenkins is set up to notice +> > that sort of thing. Everyone -- it enforces styles that everyone can +> > read everyone else's code and developers can work on each other's code +> > a lot more easily? +> > There's a pretty interesting future Docker based CI solution +> > that is more similar to Trevis the way the server responds to your +> > hooks. It can pull down your code and test it. This paradigm +> > essentially runs your code inside a Docker container. It's like a +> > Trevis file but the neat thing is you can specify what container you +> > want it to start from. +> > Instead of like, one of the pains of Jenkins is assessing the +> > massive system that can do all things. And instead you're in a wider +> > host that will assess the container. This Python, you pull down the +> > Python container and do the test. The way that it works is you +> > specify a series of scripts that you want to run. +> > We do it for billing processes and things like that. Like we'll +> > use drone to pull it down and load the build and up load the binary. +> > There are people that will run the tests and if the tests pass they +> > move right to running the script or whatever they need to run. It's a +> > way to kind of pretty cheaply, you can do all the stuff that Jenkins +> > does. It's lighter and less frustrating. We run it internally. The + +only server requirement is you must be able to hit a point that you +have an on call back. +But it works pretty well. + +> > We've started, a few -- our tests are now run, Jenkins builds +> > a Docker image and then runs tests inside that. +> > Cool. +> > Jenkins does Docker. But we're transitioning to Docker piece +> > by piece slowly. Jenkins also does builds for us, too. That's +> > probably -- I don't know how much of that you guys would ever run into +> > actually. But if you're pulling application code to the server, what +> > we do is -- what our new site is our Jenkins builds a DVD file that +> > then gets pushed out to (inaudible). We mentioned Docker a few times. +> > I don't know, how many people have played with Docker? +> > The great thing about Docker is you know how dev ops works on the +> > local machine, why doesn't it work on production. Docker is a +> > solution to that because you can actually very closely mimic your +> > production environment locally. So if it works locally, then you just +> > take that code and you can push it up and it would work in production. +> > It's something that we're still just playing with. We're not +> > running anything in Docker in production. We're all very excited +> > about it. The one thing that I definitely -- the way I mostly use +> > Docker know is with post GIS. It's a pain to set up and sometimes for +> > different projects you need different versions of post GI S. And with +> > Docker you can have multiple positions of PostGIS on the same machine +> > at the same time and not worry about accidentally calling the wrong +> > version and also of not like -- making sure the right version of +> > PostGIS is online or not? +> > It's like vagrant, right? +> > I've also tried vagrant and my problem with vagrant was that +> > basically it was too slow. It's the same concept where -- +> > Virtual machine. +> > It's not exactly a virtual machine. Vagrant depends on +> > virtual machines. Docker is a piece of software that is built on LXC +> > which is something in the LYNX Colonel. It's like a heavily isolated +> > process. It's running more or less in the same OS that you're in. +> > There is no sub or simulated CP. It appears to that process that it's +> > on its own machine. +> > A vagrant machine will simulate the memory of every CPU. But +> > Docker shares that with the hosts. You can restrict it. +> > Is it there for lighter and less intensative in general? +> > Yes. One of the big things is memory. To do it in vagrant +> > you have to set aside a chunk of memory ahead of time. I need two +> > gigs of memory and I have one now, Docker is a process that can grab +> > memory to whatever one you set. It doesn't actually consume that +> > memory. +> > Does it require LINUX then. +> > Yes. +> > There is boot to Docker that makes the -- you can pretty much +> > use Docker as if you were running LINUX. +> > We love vagrant. That is how we simulate our production. + +> > If you have a work flow with vagrant, I don't know if I would +> > spend a lot of time. If you did switch to Docker, the time it takes +> > to spit up a machine in vagrant is noticeable. +> > I don't know how far along it is but vagrant has a Docker at +> > this point. +> > I think it's out. +> > It is out? +> > The thing is you're more limited. You have to run something +> > to Docker if you're on a Mac but it's possible. +> > The great thing about Docker is if you have an exotic set up, +> > like you need to search PostGIS, Redis, Log Stash, if you need an +> > alphabet soup of servers just to test something out, Docker will make +> > it easier because you don't have to sit there and install everything. +> > If you jump to another machine, you don't have to try to remember how +> > you got everything installed. +> > There's actually a project called fig which just got absorbed +> > into Docker that lets you describe all the services your project needs +> > and it will -- you type fig up and it spins up all of the external +> > services that you need to run your project and you just can -- it's +> > called orchestration. It spins everything up and it's ready for you +> > to start working. +> > There is like a more general big picture question, do you find +> > an advantage to develop applications that run in their own little +> > environment and play that environment out than have a bunch of +> > different environments as opposed to having one big environment that a +> > bunch of apps run off of? +> > Someone mentioned this recently in the video I just watched. +> > And it was the auto.com Docker.com/talk. +> > You're deploying stuff to AWS. You probably have an AWS +> > account for one situation. You have one AWS instance for that. +> > We do one instance. We can keep everything separate. AWS has +> > a new instance called T2 which is a new good sweet spot because before +> > it's really easy to over provision. I need this thing run fast but I +> > only need it sometimes. So the T2 instance is, lets you burst CPU and +> > then -- so like Jenkins is a good example because you need it to run +> > your tests. You want your answers now. But most of the time it's +> > just sitting there waiting for you to push a new command. +> > AWS has a lot of instances, you can probably find one that's a +> > good price point. So like you're not going to -- like if you're +> > trying to save money, I don't know if you'll be able to save money by +> > getting one instance and trying to utilize it to its max? +> > I think sort of the philosophical question of what's better +> > comes down to from my point of view, I want to give other developers +> > and people working on these apps as much access to their app and how +> > it's running as possible. It becomes problematic where there is one +> > server. The possibility of them trying to turn off their app for a +> > second and turn off every app is way higher. There are trade offs in +> > the resources way. Ideally I'd have an actual computer for every app. +> > It would be incredibly expensive. So in reality I was to collapse it +> > down. + +What tools do you pick to make that process as painless as +possible? That is what this is about. Docker is interesting because +you can get some of the same benefits of -- isolation. But at the +same time I can keep them away from other people's apps. Not in a bad +way but in a way -- + +> > You don't want them to take down everything. +> > They don't feel comfortable with that situation either. +> > Everybody is power hungry about getting on the power server. Oh shit +> > this is the command line on our only server. +> > When somebody is building something you have to make a +> > conscious decision that, um, I think this thing is only going to last +> > a year or whatever. Because you can't like just get a new instance, a +> > new instance and then you have thousands and thousands of instances. +> > And as you were saying if you're using different versions of +> > post-GIS, eventually something is going to have to be upgraded to work +> > on newer software and corralled together. It's hard to manage what +> > you're saying. That's the problem, right? +> > We talk about what we can do to design, it's like designing a +> > packaging so it's more recyclable. How do you design an app so it's a +> > set of flat files that we put on cheap storage and never have to run a +> > data bass again. Some of it is that. But we end up with a lot of +> > legacy stuff. We run 150 apps and they're not all current I guess is +> > what I'm saying. That's putting it lightly I guess. +> > Going back to the -- basically, the point I want to get across +> > is with dev ops, it lets you be braver. If AWS is A, I and S, if you +> > don't have the ability to shut down something else you'll be more +> > confident to be in a command line. If I mess something up, I'll only +> > mess up my own stuff. If you have the ability to reprovision things, +> > if you have a good recovery plan, then, if you take down the whole +> > site and you have a plan to deal with it, then like, you just ... +> > It's okay to make mistakes. +> > And a really good example of that is the net flicks chaos monkey. +> > Has anyone heard of that? Basically the idea is that imagine there +> > salmon key in your data center just like randomly destroying one thing +> > at random times of the day. Could you deal with that? +> > And so Netflix has a software monkey that goes around and shuts +> > down and destroys things on the infrastructure. If they can't recover +> > from that, then they're not doing their job. +> > So this is kind of like testing. You got to spend some extra +> > time to do a little bit of extra work to make sure you can -- there is +> > like running tests is one step. And then automatic provisioning which +> > is a pretty huge step. But then there is a lot of morphing to go. +> > Now I have multiple availability zones in AWS. I have to be able to +> > recover my -- like this service after writing a recovery plan for this +> > service I have to jump to the next one. It will take time but in the +> > long run it will give you confidence that your infrastructure will +> > survive and you're not woken up at 4 a.m. by your CEO and asking why +> > the site isn't working? +> > One thing I really appreciate about our ops folks is they've +> > written amazing deploy scripts and made them widely available. And + +literally you type the word deploy. There is nothing I have to know +as a developer in order to use that. There is an equally easy way to +revert and fix something. +It makes me more courageous as a developer. And certainly when I +was just starting to begin to be useful. + +> > There is a concept called Chet ops and you do all the deploys +> > from hip chat or ISC (ph.). Right now the only thing I have got is +> > that I've got it so you can purge things from cache. We have our +> > testing reports fed into Chet. I want to make it so we can deploy +> > from Chet. It makes everything public. It's not a tool to show up. +> > It's a tool to open up. Like, hey, if you want to get something +> > deployed, you don't need to find me. You can do it yourself. +> > We have all of our deploy go into the ISV. But you see it +> > right away in the channel deployer command. +> > I have more things to go over. Well, I guess I am wondering +> > what -- for those of you who said you wanted to learn more about how +> > to deploy things yourself, do you have any specifics? +> > No, I'm sorry guys. +> > I'm fine. I guess recommendations -- I'm good at reading +> > documentation and stuff so if there is anything helpful for me to read +> > to be more sympathetic with the people I work with in dev ops, I would +> > be cool with that. I don't know if that is a dumb request. You can +> > say it is, I won't be offended? Or you can laugh or make a noise that +> > would also be cool. +> > It's a little uncomfortable bracketing this with silence? +> > This URL has a list of some tools. The very last link is a +> > list to a much larger list. If you really want to dive into what is +> > out there, it's a good list to go see. I want to do like customer +> > surveys. I think there is a whole bunch of links in there about that. +> > I did a couple links. There was a project, an open day-to-day +> > and there were a group of dev ops engineers that talked about this +> > project minus which is an easier work flow for data flow, whatever +> > platform service they want to. And I'm not sure if it's been audited. +> > I know they're maintaining it kind of. But I think it was like three +> > dudes. +> > I just put it up there because I thought maybe they would +> > appreciate some feed back from other people that work in different +> > news rooms and things. I am trying to hijack the silence with my +> > comment? +> > This makes me think of a question in general. This stuff is +> > highly complicated. A lot of it. It would appear to me if I'm a news +> > developer or something, the optimal amount for me to know about this +> > is zero. The more I have to know about this, the more I don't think +> > about my job which is developing these apps or something. +> > First of all, is that true? And second of all, if I am stuck +> > without the dev ops person I must know something about this, what are +> > the -- what is the minimal set of things I should learn? +> > The minimum useful set. +> > Roku I guess. +> > What I would say is like that's not totally true for most + +people in the sense that everything that you need to know is +everything that you have to ask somebody about when you're blocked on +doing something. There are a lot of those things I'm sure. +Those are the pieces that instead of having to ask that question, +like, you know, even doing dev ops, I would want to know how can I +figure out how to let you solve that problem next time. I don't want +to update the DNS routes for your application. I don't want to add a +rewrite for you. If in certain scenarios I have to be the person that +does that, those are exactly those things. There are things with your +applications where you have pain points that involve you having to ask +for something from a dev ops person and that is a loosely formed set of +things that varies from organization to organization. But there are +things that are appealing to the minimal useful set of things. What +do you get block on for your application which you normally think of +as not the development part of your process but really is. +In general, be comfortable with the command line is something I +would say. Some of these things are good places to start. Knowing +how to run your application is a pretty good -- if nothing else a +simulation on what it takes to deploy. Getting familiar with Docker +is a good place to start. That is a technology that we are going to +be using more and more. And I think it's going to be something you're +going to hear about eventually. And not only that but it's easy to +wrap your head around from a non-ops point of view. Say something +happens in your data center, it's not as complicated as the virtual +machines. I think it's only a question of time for that. +But that's it? + +> > Increasingly there are tons of free, for vagrant there are +> > tons of environments that you can grab. Just something you can start +> > to build. If you have an idea probably someone did it before and you +> > can find it. +> > Right. +> > I think that within a year if you can build it yourself +> > locally in Docker you'll be able to also deploy it. +> > I totally agree and I think we're figuring out how some of +> > those tools work now, it will serve you well in the next year. That +> > might be where all this is heading. I think it's becoming less +> > important to know a lot of the nitty-gritty stuff that is happening on +> > the server and more important to understand how to package your app in +> > a way that it can play nice. +> > I don't think everybody should run out and learn AWK (ph.) and +> > stuff. But learning how to build a Docker file for your Python +> > application would go a long way. +> > I find building stuff up and tearing it down and building it +> > up and tearing it down, repeating the process just to wrap your head +> > around it. +> > Speaking of, I've never liked chef or puppet. I've played +> > with them a few times. I've always given up. +> > They've been through the wringer. I think there is a world +> > where the Docker stuff is very threatening to them as well and it +> > solves a lot of problems in a different way. + +The automatic infrastructure and code stuff is an interesting +concept. That is what chef is about. Write a ruby script that +configures all of your servers. That stuff can break down, too, if +you don't see it coming. You have databases full of passwords for +other databases and no way to interact with them. In a way you can +build a meta trap out of that. It's not a bad concept but it's a +really interesting time in the dev ops world. That was the very +accepted wisdom from the recent several years and I think people are +coming out of it into different things? + +> > One of the things I think is really interesting is that a few +> > years ago if you wanted something online it was like PHP, Apache, +> > Linux. And one box just install the services and you're online. And +> > now, it's like, oh, you need 15 different boxes just to do zero cue +> > and all these crazy alphabet soup. Just to run this one app. +> > I think with Docker, we're going to get back to something like +> > Lam. +> > With Docker you can go back. You can use all the modern +> > components if you want but if a developer wants to write in PHP they +> > can pull down that container and have at it. It's cool. +> > I think it's helpful if you're a apps developer to know about +> > ops. Knowing if the code you're writing will break the cache or not +> > is a valuable skill. Look it's a feature and then it will be a while +> > and one person will go, wait, that will totally fuck up our cache and +> > the sun will go down and we'll scramble. If everyone developing code +> > has these ops, like dev ops, then you'll know that if I make this +> > change it will probably break the cycle. So I probably should do it. +> > So we've got -- we went through this trial of learning what vary +> > by cookie meant. Vary by cookie is whenever you serve -- a good +> > example is every website you go to it says log in. Or you registered +> > at this at the top, if you're logged in or not it will know. The only +> > way to cache that is if you vary it by cookie. You don't want to send +> > Alice's log in message to Bob. What you end up with is caching an +> > entire site for this one box at the top right. There are tricks and +> > tips and techniques for not doing that. +> > But there are things like if you're doing a quiz and you want to +> > customize the results, you have to realize if there is a caching in +> > front, whether or not every page is going to be served from caching or +> > from the server or not. +> > That's information you don't know unless you're on both sides of +> > dev and ops. +> > And speaking of like archiving a lot of old sites, I've been +> > doing a lot of research into using WGIT to pull down and archive old +> > chunks of our site, we keep accidentally breaking stuff. And people +> > go, hey, remember this interactive from 2011, why doesn't it work +> > anymore? +> > Somebody does. +> > We've been experimenting with transparently serving, like we +> > have a core, for caching we have a common share CSS but we've been +> > experimenting with quickly archiving not just single pages but whole +> > sub sites. From a cache instead of from the shifting common style + +sheet. So as we change styles, random act rebuilt two years ago that +relied on one quirk and it doesn't break. Accept we have to do it +proactively. +It's still better, it's a huge improvement over what we used to +know. Now we don't have to fix it. We just have to archive it. +I hear a little activity. I don't know what time it is? + +> > It's 5:30. +> > What time do we end? +> > 5:30. +> > I'm hoping this will live as a living resource. As you find +> > things that you think are useful, I have a link and a small +> > explanation of why I think it's something valuable. So I hate chef +> > and puppet but they're in the list because a lot of people like them. diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_20_Make_Security_Blanket.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_20_Make_Security_Blanket.md index 9f7ecccd..79da37e1 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_20_Make_Security_Blanket.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_20_Make_Security_Blanket.md @@ -1,271 +1,272 @@ -Make your own security blanket -Session facilitator(s): Jeff Larson -Day & Time: Friday, 11am-12pm -Room: Franklin 2 - -JEFF: So I'm Jeff Larson, I work with ProPublica. I have been living in -- let's just say -- sort of a high-security lifestyle for a year now. Last June, a bunch of very nice British gentlemen came to our offices and asked us if we wanted to work on the Snowden story to which I freaked out because I didn't know how to communicate securely. About two months before that, my boss and I spent a week setting up PGPT keys. And funny story. Klein, who's my boss, he has two PGPT keys because he forgot the password to the first one. He is the smartest guy in the whole entire world. Like, he knows Perl. So he has a PGP, and he also forgot to generate a revocation certificate which is a thing that you have to do to take down a key. So now, he has a permanent key that he can't use. And a lot of people email him. So I want to talk about that situation, right? - -I carry around two laptops. I got an extra one here. And it's a pain in the neck because, you know, it's a pain in the neck to use these things. So two nights ago, there's a security tool that I use, and Bart Gellman uses, a tool called Tails which we'll get into but I want to whine about it, first. Two nights ago, you know I learned that there was an upgrade for Tails and my wife and I came back from a lamaze class, and maybe have an nice night but I said, "No, I'm going to upgrade Tails." I stay up until 2:00 in the morning trying to fight this stuff. So it's really important to me that these security tools steal your life, right? Everything that's easy -- everything that you do right now is easy and automatic and like, you don't have to worry about it but once you start reporting in -- you know, it doesn't have to be on the student stories. If you're talking to people in war zones, or even if you're working on a story that might be under a threat of being subpoenaed, this kind of stuff might happen. So that's just kind of the overarching theme of this talk, is that security's too hard. I'm going to show you a bunch of tools. But, you know, maybe start thinking about, like, as I go through all these tools, start thinking about if you've ever used any in the past, ways in which they were, like, hard to use or difficult to use, or not fun. If you haven't used any in the past, please, by all means visit the websites and visit the websites as I go through them and think to yourselves, "Could I figure that out?" And if the answer's no, then that security tool's a failure, right? If you haven't used some of the tools, visit the website. Try and figure out if you could figure it out. And how long. Try and budget it because at the end I want to do this sort of experiment where everybody goes through and says, "How many hours would they have to devote to, you know, having a second laptop and doing everything securely?" So we're going to start with security tools. Then we're going to do -- I'm going to do, actually, a fun example of how cryptography works. We're going to talk about elliptic curve exchange because we're at a programming conference and everybody should at least know the underlying protocols. And it's really easy, so don't worry about it and then we're going to talk about slow crypto, you know, this idea that you -- you can do it yourself. You can also write in routines and then figure it out. And then we're going to circle back and talk about how. So first things first. Throw out, can people start throwing out security tools that they've heard of? So we've already talked about one which is Tails. We're talking about that a little bit. But anybody else? - -> Keybase. - -Keybase is more of a directory server. - -> It also helps you set up a PGP. - -JEFF: PGP and GPG. - -> OTR? - -JEFF: OTR. Any other ones? - -> Tor? - -JEFF: Tor. - -> Onion browser. - -JEFF: Onion browser. That was written by our own Mike Tigas. - -> And https? - -JEFF: Https, great. This is the one that everyone uses. - -> Hopefully. - -JEFF: Well, if you've ever logged into a bank -- how many times have people, like, when you get the yellow screen saying that this site's certificate isn't valid, you just click right through so that's the value of this thing. So we've got Tails, Keybase, OTR, Tor. There are -- I'm just going to throw in a couple more here that I want to talk about. Cryptocat, and I want to talk about MiniLock. - -> Would you consider the two-step authentication for Gmail or things like that? - -JEFF: Sure, two-step authentication. But you don't have a choice with that. So I would consider that a part of security. You would have an choice if you're implementing it yourself but as a civilian, two steepy then the indication doesn't help me, you know, hide things from surveillance. So -- and if I sound like a crazy it's because I've been living this for a year, right? And there's one final one which is, you really only useful if you just want to talk to yourself, and no one uses it, it's called Pond. So what I want to do is I want to sort of use a proxy variable here. We're going to go through these tools and we're going to assign it a score based on how many of you guys have used it, or know about it and then we're going to go through them. So Tails, how many people have used Tails? Okay, we've got one person. How many people, let's -- Keybase, it's part of PGP. How many people have PGP keys? - -> Tried but failed in the setup and I said, "Fuck it." - -JEFF: Eight so -- - -> And then we worked with someone else and then we both said fuck it. - -JEFF: The higher the score the more prevailing it is. - -> Can you ask a second account on how many people could use it on purpose. - -JEFF: How many people can use it on purpose. - -> I actually haven't use it in years. - -JEFF: So one fuck up, eight have used it, four can use it, like, regularly. - -> Like, I have a PGP key but I can't remember how to do anything with it. - -> You have multiple keys? - -JEFF: OTR? - -> More keys on the keychain. - -JEFF: How many people have used OTR? One, two, three, how many people have he had vested fingerprints of people that you were talking to? Okay, great? So, so far we're doing pretty bad. How many people have used Tor? Just curious what you used Tor for? - -> To try it out. - -> The Raspberry Pi or -- - -JEFF: Listen, Tor is actually really easy to use, you just download the browser bundle and you can use Tor. Https, we don't need to go through that. Anybody here of those, crypto cat? MiniLock? And pond, don't worry about pond. So now, for everybody else let's go back through and talk about what these things are. So Tails is basically you install -- I have it here -- you install Linux distro on an USB stick and it takes over your computer and you use, technically, what will be in theory, a very secure, very ugly -- you have a secure operating environment. You can do on a write-only thing and what happens when you shut it down it wipes the whole entire memory. So everything that was, like, ephemeral there just gets erased and wiped. So even if someone else's like, pulls you over and is give us your USB sticks. You go great, cool, you figure it out. - -> Is it enencrypted on there? - -JEFF: There is an option, there's no persistent store by default but there is an option for persistent store. The problem is tails is you come home at 2:00 in the morning and you're trying to upgrade it. It's not possible for humans to install on an USB stick. It takes -- you have to download like this, you have to download Perl and you -- and all of this stuff. So while this is their secure and you get essentially a very secure environment because you're not storing anything on it. And if you are storing, it has to be encrypted, it is super, super difficult to use, right? - -> So the persistent storage, do you have to actually -- I mean do you have to trigger a shut down for it to know, okay, wipe the memory now? You pull it out? - -JEFF: Basically if you pull out the USB stick, there's a kernel panel that wipes the memory. As soon as possible. The other funny part and it is that there's also an omission to cloak it, you can make it look like a Windows XP computer -- yolo, I guess, right? So Keybase, PGP, the whole sort of -- the whole sort of environment surrounding PGP, and PGP. How many people have never heard of PGP? So PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy. There's an open-source version written by Richard Stallman called the GNU Privacy Guard. And essentially what happens with PGP is you generate a key pair, so you generate a public key and a private key. You keep the private key on your computer. I still have no idea where they store it on my computer. Try and find private keys, you won't be successful. And essentially, what you do is, it's for email. So you want to send an email that's encrypted that can't be read over the wire, you encrypt your email with the person you are sending private key, and you sign it to make sure that it's verified. And then they're able to unlock that thing. Does that make sense? - -> You encrypt it with their public key. - -JEFF: Yeah, with their public key. So they always about to. So there's Alice and Bob, and Alice has a public key and a private key. This is -- we're going to -- let's just do secret key. Public and discrete. And Bob has a public and secret. Bob encrypts with her public key and through the magic of cryptography -- and then he signs the message with his secret key through the magic of encryption. Once Bob -- once Alice receives this message she can decrypt it with her secret key. So it's a very low-level version of PGP key. There's many ways to use it as a command line tool. Traditionally if you set up a search how to set up a PGP. How to make a command line page, you can throw your computer in the trash at that point because you don't want to use the command line tool. For Mac there's GPG Tools. GPG Tools. And for Windows, it's WinFour -- GPG for Win. Not "Win for Mac" -- that would be awesome. GPG for win. So what do those GPG Tools, what does that do? -JEFF: So these GPG Tools -- GPG Tools installs as a binary distribution, installs it on your computer and it allows you to use the built-in Mac Mail like pretty transparent. - -> So it sounds like you send a message? - -JEFF: -- signed and encrypted with your key. Now the problem with these things is the other person has to have a key. So if you're talking to a source, or if you're, you know, like a relative or whatever, they're not going to have an key. So there's an adoption problem. Like, if you're talking to me, I have a key and we'll encrypt all day, it would be awesome. But, you know, if you're talking to a loved one or something they're not going to have that automatically. Google is trying to fix this problem by creating an add-in to Gmail that's currently being security audited. Couple of these things you're going to have to wait a couple of weeks and then you'll have access to them but -- so it's it sort of begs the question and where I was going with that is how do you get someone else's key. Well, you could meet in person and say, here's my key but there are, as part of the PGP universe there are these things called key servers which stores all these keys. So you upload it to a key server and then other people download your key and they have to verify a small number, but how many people have verified PGP keys in the past? Okay, two people. You know, 'cause I mean, whatever, right? So that's like an extra step, right, all of these tools steal your time. That's how they work, which is frustrating. - -> Should you ever upload your private key to a key server? - -No, no, never, ever. Your private key, you shouldn't ever even look at it. It shouldn't even be in your brain. So your private, that's the other problem, if I have one computer and there's a problem that MiniLock's trying to solve but if I have one computer with keys on it, and another computer with keys on it I have to, like, merge those somehow, so there's, like, this really complicated way of extracting keys and putting them on a different thing, and you don't want to send them over the network 'cause you're going to say, I guess, and then you don't want to email it to yourself. That sort of thing. - -> So does that mean that you should have an different one for work than for home or? - -JEFF: I have -- you -- it's so complicated to answer that question. You want to have one key per email address, right? There is a way, and I have never been able to figure it out, attach multiple keys to one identity. My guess would be, if you go to pgp.mit.edu and search for Mike Tigas' key, which is this super crazy nerd thing that you can do. But I've never been able to figure it out. So the problem is these PGP servers often aren't encrypted and there's only one point of verification. You only know -- if you typed in who you want to talk to in a search box, you have no idea if that's actually their key. And so what Keybase is trying to do is fix that situation where you can follow somebody on Keybase and they will post on GitHub, on their Twitter, "Security proves that the this is actually their key." So they'll tweet out, "This is actually my key." And that he is into Keybase and it'll verify on Keybase. They'll post something on GitHub and it'll verify on Keybase. The problem with Keybase for journalists is a social graph. If I follow Ryan Pitts to get his Keybase, or if I follow -- he has secret documents then all of a sudden that's, like, public information. So there's a lot of things that you have to think about. But I love that Keybase is fixing this problem of getting other people's keys so you don't have to, like, walk over to their house. - -> Keybase will let you upload your private keys using their web interface, though. Which I did, after which, I realized... - -JEFF: So... my look of horror? - -> They shouldn't even have that feature. - -> It's like yeah, it's built in. - -JEFF: That's, like, the other people other thing. Now you're putting a whole shit ton of trust in Keybase that they're not going to get hacked but for most people, for most people it doesn't matter. For most people, it's easier, and you're not -- I wouldn't worry so much about it. A lot of this security stuff is figuring out your threshold of worry. My threshold of worry is pretty fucking high. Other people's -- I just want to write secret stuff. I want write things that are not super, hyper-sensitive incentive, right. So I'm doing a story about the cops. What are the cops going to do? Check your emails, maybe? Well, you can have all my emails but they're all encrypted, good luck with that, guys. Or you can do what levo lessen son did. And print out your key in very tiny type and it would be, like, 16 pages. He he no longer runs his company because of that but you can try. The one thing that I haven't gone over is, this is all just math and what public keys and private keys actually are are just gigantic numbers that are 496 bits of -- 496 divided by eight, I don't know, like, 500 character long numbers, right? That are just super, super hi and then via some tricky math we'll get into this a little bit in a second, you are able to do this encryption. So bee case and -- - -> Is it important to understand because I know when I created a couple of different keys I can create more complex keys by redoing the math so is that important to understand at all? - -JEFF: So how many people have set up https on a web server? This is the same sort of thing if you use RSA keys. How did you -- did you read, like, the manual page on how strong to make your keys? There's, like, a manual page and you have options because computers get faster over time. So, finding out a secret key from a public key just requires a lot of math and there are fancy algorithms for that that you can brute force. And there are options, right? So this is another reason. How do I know how big my key should be? This is another thing that you got to do a little bit of research. There's 1,024 bit is I think the smallest that you can make if you're making RSA keys. But, this is no longer considered secure by NIST, so anything greater than 1,024 because it goes by the number of bits that you add, it's an exponential curve for breaking it. So if you do 2,048, you'll probably be fine for a very, very long time. If you want to be fine until the stars die and the oceans collapse and, you know, the universe shrinks in on itself, assuming we don't get quantum computers, you want to do 4,096. Anything bigger -- Mike Tigas has -- I love Mike Tigas obviously. He had a 16,000 key, and again steals your time. It takes 15 minutes for him to encrypt an email. And he has a supercomputer sitting on his desk. So, you know, that's, um, kind of how it steals your time. - -So OTR. So does everybody know what we're talking about when we talk about OTR? Anybody not know? - -> I don't know. - -JEFF: Okay, looking at those things, what -- and I'm -- this is sort of trolling the stenographer right now. This is considered off the record. We're not going off the record. This technology -- we're talking about "off the record." I will switch back to OTR. We're on the records. OTR is a layer on top of -- it's a chat protocol on chat protocols that you use all the time. So when you're using Gmail, you're using this protocol called Jabber. Well, not anymore but you can use Jabber with Google Chat. And, it encrypts on top -- it's basically a transparent plugin that you download Adium or something and it encrypts on top of it. So what Google sees is just garbage. What the person you're talking to sees is, you know, clean, plain text. Now the tricky part about OTR is the first message that you send to somebody is never encrypted 'cause "reasons," right? Why would you want the first message encrypted? And people don't know that. So I'll often get, "Hey, did you do that super secret thing?" And I'm like, "Oh, well, I guess it's not super secret anymore." So usually what I do when I do OTR if you ever chat with me, you'll get a bunch of dots. I actually go to the fourth message because it has this weird key rotation. And you'll think that I've just, like, sat on my keyboard. But OTR is relatively easy to use, in terms of easiness, you can see on our score, right, PGP a lot of people have used it, but we've had five fuck-ups. OTR, one person used it, and it was pretty nice. - -> If you use Adium, it's super easy. - -> But both who are chatting need it too, right? - -JEFF: And the another part is and it happens to me all the time, if you have encryption, the other party then gets a message that looks like garbage and it tells you to go to cypherpunks.ca. And -- because cypherpunks sounds really cool to us, like, fuck yeah, hackers, right? But everybody else looks at that and think, "You're in my computer." And they throw their computer away. - -> Which is also probably secure, right? - -JEFF: Which is also better. More talking to each other, and hanging out, and drinking coffee, but sometimes your mom's in Minneapolis, or something. And she's getting this message about cipher punks. So OTR super easy to use has weird quirks that are really, really frustrating -- again stealing your time. So all of these things are stealing your time. You're giving up your time in order to feel a little bit more safe. And to actually be, in some situations, more safe. So think on that when you start to use them. Think on who are you protecting from? If you're really, really excited about it and you want to use it because it's already cool and you feel like a badass, use them all the time. Every email I get that is signed so that everybody gets my PGP key. So you can encrypt -- you can sign an email to verify that this is what what you wrote. You know, when you use git, and you look at the git command and it's a long hash, that's basically signing. It's a similar sort of algorithm. It's that -- it's a proof that no one tampered with this email on the way. So, and it just sort of becomes part of your life over time. So Tor, first time I used Tor was to script bureau prisons website because they rate limit you. So the way Tor works, and you've seen this in movies. When they're like, we're trying to trace the hacker. And it shows a map, and there's all these lines and it's, like, he's routing the money through seven different banks and we can't find it, or whatever. That's exactly how Tor works. So you connect to the Tor network. Your traffic sort of bounces around all over the place and then, um, it exits the Tor network and then communicates with, like, Google, or Twitter and in my case, the bureau of prisons website so that I don't get rate limited and the idea is that then your traffic is anonymous. That someone watching the network can't see that you're visiting Google, right? Doesn't know, right? Because you get a whole new IP address and your IP address goes in here. It's a great tool, you know? It's a great tool that I like to use when, you know, say I'm investigating an agency or something like that, and I don't want, like, you know that Congress edit Twitter account? Have people been following that. So Congress Edit are people from Congress who are editing Wikipedia and they edit the yes -- there was, like, one guy who really, really likes Yes, like, the band Yes and he goes in every day and tweaks the article over and over and over again. That guy should probably be using Tor because at work, he's really geeked out about Yes. - -> So if you were investigating someone you would use Tor to investigate their website so that they wouldn't know you were investigating them? - -JEFF: Exact same reason for the Bureau of Prisons, it's a good way to get around and be secret, discreet. - -> It also, um, if you have, like, web sense or something at work but you use Tor. Web sense doesn't know what you're looking at either, right? - -JEFF: Yeah, yeah. So you connect to some random person on the Internet, essentially. - -> So if Netflix, for example is not allowed at your workplace. - -JEFF: Not a that I've tried that. Except for this server, this exit point, probably, like, in Germany because the Germans love Tor. Tor is the German word for "gate" so it sort of makes sense. So, it's sort of, like -- I like to describe Tor as https on steroids, right. - -> What's .onion? - -JEFF: Okay, how many people have heard of secure drop? Okay, Secure Drop is a Dropbox that news organizations are setting up where you can get where, basically we can get anonymous "here's a leak" or "here's a whistleblower" thing. But my problem with Dropbox is we're going to have to verify it anyway. We have to reach out to the person who anonymously dropped it, and say, okay, how are these real? Did you make them in Photoshop? But Secure Drop, the way that it works is, you visit a https page that tells you to download a Tor and then it goes to a ".onion" URL and that's a hidden service and that's a service that's only connectable through the Tor network. There's this great -- there's also this really, really really fantastic tool for sharing -- for sharing files. And I like to use it not because it's secure or whatever, but because I can share a file from across a country to my boss. It's called OnionShare. So let's say I want to send a huge file that's too big for an email, I just drop it into OnionShare and it's written in Python and it's, like, really, really awesome. You guys should look at it. That, I would say -- these -- I'm going to put that into easy section. So it's OnionShare. These guys are the easy section. And this guy 'cause you used it already. Cryptocat will offer some security -- Cryptocat is -- it's basically -- it's like the Nintendo version of OTR, right? It's kind of like the Game Boy version. You guys should all go to the website 'cause it's adorable. It has, like, the best icon. And it essentially is, you download Cryptocat and you log in to a chat room, and everything is encrypted. You don't have to verify fingerprints. You don't have to, like, worry about anything. It's the super easiest thing in the whole entire world to use. In the past, it had some security problems but now they've sort of fixed it and it works really, really well. So if you -- the other thing is, these tools here are the few tools that actually solve, like, great problems. These tools make your life difficult. These tools if you want to chat with somebody, you just say, "Download this and join me in the 'jeff is awesome' room." And everything's encrypted. And it's, like, super easy. I could get my mom to queues this. I could get my dad to use this. And, you know, people who are not particularly technical can use it in a heartbeat, you just send them a link. - -> So you just said that Cryptocat had some security problems but they're fixed now? - -JEFF: Well originally. - -> How do you know is my question. How do you know that there's no...? - -JEFF: Well that brings up a good point with these things. You trust the developer. You're looking for tools that have been audited. Auditing is more important than open-source. It really, really is. Paying a company to try and sit down and break a tool. And like all these tools, https is so widely used is that it's not really an issue. So they're starting up the auditing on Open SSL but you want -- so these ones -- OnionShare is currently undergoing an audit. Mike Tigas -- Onion Browser, which is Tor for your phone underwent a security audit. And minute-lock even before and we'll get to this in a second, MiniLock underwent a security audit. I don't think Tails had one. Tor certainly has had many. - -> Where would you look to find if a service has been audited? - -JEFF: Just Google, you know, "Tails audit." There's a handful of firms, like, Cure53 does it. You know, the other thing that you can do is, all of these things have issue trackers. So go back to the issue trackers and just see if anything smells weird. But again, even in Cryptocat's case it would take somebody on their laptop, like, six months to break a conversation, right? So when we talk about -- so cryptographers and security researchers are, like, some of the -- you know, I have friends in that community but when they talk about technology but they're some of the meanest people that you've ever met, right? And they'll tell you anything less than perfect is broken because that's how they have to live their lives, right? They have to live their lives in this theatrical world. But Cryptocat taking six months for the encryption -- six months on a laptop for the encryption to be broken is not a really big problem for most people. At least it's encrypted. You'd have to have been talking about some really, really, really crazy stuff for them to want to break that. In the meantime, if they're that interested, they'll just throw you in jail and wait until you tell them, right? Or they might just ask you. - -> You said that you would email the link to somebody, wouldn't that be the entry point rather than getting to the chat room? - -JEFF: Yeah. - -> Check the link. I'm in there, too. - -JEFF: Here's the link. I was just saying, hoard to get people up and rolling on Cryptocat. It's the easiest thing. Go to this website, meet me in blah, blah, blah and then that person shows up, right? OnionShare solves a great problem. It's sort of like a peer-to-peer Dropbox. So if I wanted to send something to Ryan or folks, you just drop it in, they click a link on the Tor browser and you get the file. And it shows you how -- and then it closes and then that secret, hidden service disappears for the rest of ever. -> How do you know that the person who shows up in your Cryptocat room is who they say they are? - -JEFF: Ask them, hey, Ryan, what did we do at NICAR last year? - -> So there's no signing? - -JEFF: Well, you could do the fingerprint verification, but do you know what fingerprint verification is? Hey, are you Ryan Pitts? That's not technically true -- this is so crazy to me but we're talking about, like, somebody who owns the network, right. There can technically be, like, somebody, there can be a guy in between you -- this is Alice, Bob, and Mallory is what people like to call him. It sounds like a band name, right? He can be sitting in between and intercepting Bob's messages, transmitting them to Alice. So that's why the fingerprint is there. You know? You call him up on the phone and say, hey, what are your numbers, what are the numbers underneath your name, or Cryptocat actually chooses colors. I'm not entirely sure. I know my wife had a little bit of problems when we were chatting on it, verifying via colors. So I think he might have changed it so that they're colorblind-safe but that's actually a great way so that the read-off is not a string of numbers. You just say, beige, light purple, and there are four or five different things. Cryptocat is great. If you Google search it, a lot of people beat up on him because he was sort of outside of the security community, I think for political reasons. And it's written in Javascript and a lot of people are, like, oh, man, Javascript crypto, but you know, it's browser-based crypto that's bad. It's that website that does AES encryption on a web page that you go to that's not https, served over https. It's not Javascript crypto. So code stuff. So Cryptocat started as, um, as a website and then he made it a browser plugin that you download and you can put in Chrome, basically, essentially. There's a standalone version essentially, too. But that goes through a verification process and the code is signed, just like how you sign your email. So you're guaranteed to get a sort of verified program that you run on your computer. - -MiniLock is coming out in two weeks, currently undergoing a security audit. It's beautiful, wonderful code. It is GPG encryption without the mess. So you boot up MiniLock, and you log in, and you type in your password and then it generates these key pairs and then you can encrypt and send a file to somebody. It's beautiful and amazing. And Pond, pond is, um -- it took Mike Tigas six hours to set up Pond, so let's not talk about it. Pond has to run over Tor, it runs on Tails. Basically if you want to talk to yourself, or me, you can get on Pond but I wouldn't do it. If I had to do it -- yeah... all right. - -> Jeff, what about TrueCrypt? - -JEFF: Haha, what about TrueCrypt? I don't know, and it's freaking me out right now because we use a lot of TrueCrypt. Let me say a sentence to you that probably should have freaked us out from the beginning. We're, at ProPublica we use an encryption tool built by people, or a person, or people who no one knows who they are, wasn't fully open-source, didn't take any bug fix issues and we trust it with some pretty secret stuff. Like, that's what TrueCrypt is. It seems to work. Everybody that looks like it seems to say, yeah, this is the right way to do it. But I don't know, right? - -> What does TrueCrypt do? - -JEFF: TrueCrypt is like MiniLock. TrueCrypt, basically, essentially it creates a sort of, like, encrypted file container that you then mount and you can drag files in and when you close it up, it just looks like random bytes, right, that are indistinguishable from something else because it's encrypted. But what happened two or three months ago is they took down their website and they were, like, just use Windows encryption and you're like, ah, man, really? So they say Windows, or on your Mac, you can jump through a lot of hoops in creating an encrypted file container, too. But I don't know the jury's still out on TrueCrypt. It was undergoing an audit at the time and the guy who's doing the audit, Matthew Green, I talked to him and he said, the code base is still pretty clean and clear but I don't have an answer for you. TrueCrypt is an easier tool to use. - -> Do you know much about, like, the firevault, the Mac sort of disk encryption stuff. Like, is there -- has that been audited? Is there any way to know that it's secure? - -JEFF: It's closed-source but it's written by Apple. It's the same sentence as it's closed source but it's written by Microsoft. I don't know. I don't know, I mean, the cops aren't going to break it. You know, again, right, you know, my questions are always, "Who is going to want this stuff in this encryption?" How much more difficult does it make my life, right? And are there any sort of, like, things that oog (phonetic) me out? So when we were talking about all this before, going through the issue tracker -- audits before -- Archy Say (phonetic) at the New York Times made one for me, one time but I don't know how to make that particular one on a Mac, so I just never honestly used it because it makes my life harder in a weird way, right, because I load it after five minutes the searching size fuck this, I'll just use TrueCrypt. But if that's your jam and and if you want to do that I would say bundle it all up in a zip -- you gotta ask yourself what you're using it for. Are you using it to have an encrypted file that, maybe you'll lock yourself out of in a year because you don't remember the password? And it's not really all that sensitive material, or whatever and it's sitting on your computer, it's not traveling anywhere then I would say, think that through. If it's, you know, if you -- if you want to send the file to somebody, you know, encrypted containers are actually really great -- if you want to send multiple files to somebody, encrypted containers are great because they're just a volume and you just send it to them via OnionShare or something like that, and it makes your life easier in that instance. It's not that hard to set one up. You just drag all your files and you send them to them. And you just say, hey, log in to Cryptocat, or Pond, or something like that, well no one use Pond, please. And you know, send a password over a different channel and then you're set, right? And that's a pretty easy workflow and one that you could work with. And the benefit of that is it's in a little bucket: Here's all your files that you requested. All right, so let's see... did I yammer past -- well, I yammered past our thing. So those are the tools. I want to fix this. I only have seven minutes left. We got sort of, like, obsessed with tools, which I would say -- that is the current state-of-the-art with crypto. We're all obsessed with tools. And tools don't help make your job -- or do your job or live your life. I mean, they help you but if you're focused on the tools you're not building your house, right. You're just like, I've got a fucking sweet hammer. And I went, and I did research. And in the end your house is just a bunch of bricks, right. But things like Keybase, Cryptocat, Onion Lock and OnionShare. But as news nerds we build things for reporters we build tools for ourselves. And I would say, like, maybe there's some way that we can help it in this situation. And it doesn't have to be perfect because not everybody is, you know, protecting against a global network advesary, so a lot of these tools sacrifice usability for perfectness. We're really good at doing visualizations and explaining things to people. But it sort of makes sense, we take this difficult thing to do and we start working on security tools, maybe something be bubble out of this community. Maybe, next time Ryan Pitts can generate a PGP key or something. And I don't know, necessarily -- I feel like I'm talking at you but -- does anybody have any ideas on how to make it better? Like, one idea I would say is the idea of keys doesn't make any sense. You can't have two keys because -- one's a lock and one's a key, right. You can't -- you can't unlock anything with two keys, you know? - -> A lot of it just seems like language. - -JEFF: What? - -> Like, if somebody had just written -- if they would just write something these things, it would not make sense to someone who's not a nerd. Like, I found -- I'm pretty nerdy, and I found a lot of the stuff that was supposed to explain PGP actually impenetrable. Keybase actually be a pretty good job. - -JEFF: Who? - -> Keybase, in explaining that kind of stuff, actually thinking about the language around it and talking about it in a way like, you're approaching in a way people who don't already have all this background information, you know, who aren't cryptographers, I think, makes a big difference, and importantly -- and I think this is sometimes tough for the community of people doing this. You have to talk in a way that's accessible and, like, not offensive. I think it's really easy to talk down to people. - -JEFF: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely. - -> Kind of on that point if you're in a newsroom and you, like, I sit with people who could help me do this, and I don't want to bug them. - -JEFF: Right. - -> And like -- if you know how to do it, making yourself more available and making it clear that the person who needs help isn't done. - -JEFF: The fun -- the fun -- the reason that I gotta assigned this Snowden story was because I figured out how to open the documents and they were like, well, Jeff should... so there's benefits, I guess. Self-accessible. - -> I think you need almost, like, tiers. Like off the shelf you're an average beat reporter, here's these tools -- Tor, and stuff like that. Ford journalism had something like that. Different degrees of security, like, okay, shit's getting real and there are things in newsrooms where I hate to say this but IT's at fault. You ever a new laptop, and here's base setup instead of having -- you know, news nerds have to go set up. - -> So it's more of an opinion aid stance on it because there are a lot of options for people that are just getting into it and it's a choice pay-off. - -> But I like the idea of Robert's though. Because it reminds me of what Jonathan Stray is trying to get over people's head, what's your threat model. Who are you trying to protect yourself against? The local cops? The state government? The NSA, or some corporation? But in this case, do this thing. Here's how it would be wonderful. - -JEFF: I also think because reporters and people write so sure, talking about threat modeling and stuff that's very, very important, but answering this question, how is this tool going to make my life better, right, you know? - -> Well, you have to understand, like, why do you need it? - -JEFF: Why do you need it? - -> Do you think you still need to convince people? - -JEFF: What. - -> Do you think you need to still convince at least journalists saying this shit? - -> I think so, if you're an education reporter, like, and you're getting emails from a source who works, you know for the teachers' union or whatever. - -> I didn't even think. - -> And the email trail, your source gets fired because of the emails that they sent to you. And and it's like dude, you don't want to lose your source. Making that argument I think is helpful. -> And it's helpful. - -> And it's different if we protect our sources. We go to jail if I don't protect my source. - -> But I think a lot of reporters that aren't thinking I'm just emailing back and forth. There's a trail now that even if our IT department reads it one way. - -> I think it makes a difference whether it's like can tell whether there was email traffic or what it was the documents that were sent, or that sort of thing that probably people like want it -- you know that that's, I feel like that's the thinking that people don't necessarily have as part of their -- - -> I also would imagine in some cases cases it would be easier to have a couple of burner phones and transfer the documents. - -JEFF: And again, some of this stuff is in person but you know, rent car and go. - -> I think there's a need for a basic understanding of technology and the Internet, right, like you have to sort of know how the Internet works in a really basic sense in order to understand why you need encryption. - -JEFF: Sure. And I feel like -- And I just want to point out, right? Like, I've circled these ones for a reason because these are the easiest. These are the ones that if -- -JEFF: Every reporter used this if they were on Cryptocat chatting and if they were using MiniLock, they wouldn't need PGP, right? If they were using OnionShare, Secure Drop disappears, do you know what I'm saying? And all of a sudden, these easy tools, while they may not be perfect, have benefited their lives. You know? I encourage you guys to take a look at this. Because all of a sudden, because, explaining how the Internet works falls under -- I didn't write it down -- like, being nice and not talking down. The reporters don't give a shit how the Internet works. On what https. - -> But if they were like hey use this and they don't know why they're using it or if they somehow get hacked around it for whatever. - -JEFF: Yeah, I understand. - -> You have to understand a little bit of the larger concept, you can't just be like hey use this because this is the best. - -JEFF: Because the NSA, that's my favorite thing. Use this because the NSA is watching you. Well, who cares? I'm not doing anything wrong. - -> Or each of us has a different focus like, I'm just going to push okay, know where to do that. - -JEFF: So at the outset I asked how many people clicked okay on the cert error. It's like okay, who cares, I just want to go home and see my kid, right? I don't have time -- I asked how many people actually did fingerprint verification and everyone was like, 'cause why would you do that? So I definitely got your point, and I think that's an great point. And I think framing it in a way that -- the way that I've done it in the past for reporters is, this will make your life better plus here's how the Internet works. - -> Right. - -JEFF: You know? And why you want to use this tool instead of um, Skype, or something. Did we run...? Sorry guys, I talked far too much and didn't let you guys climb in enough. But I'm -- chime in enough. But I'm Jeff Larson, and I'm ProPublica and I think we're... - [ Applause ] - -> Thanks, Jeff. - -> Jeff, what's slow crypto? - -JEFF: Slow crypto is artisanal crypto. - -> It's Brooklyn crypto? - -JEFF: It's Brooklyn crypto. It's crypto that if you're interested in cryptography and you play around and encrypt a bunch of shit and there's a library that fits in 100 beats called NACL and it's written by two of the best cryptographers in the world. So if you were to have sort of play around with it, it's a great library. It literally has encrypt, decrypt, and those are the functions you can do. And I would definitely check it out. I was going to show you guys graphs and stuff on how encryption works but... and elliptic curves. +Make your own security blanket +Session facilitator(s): Jeff Larson +Day & Time: Friday, 11am-12pm +Room: Franklin 2 + +JEFF: So I'm Jeff Larson, I work with ProPublica. I have been living in -- let's just say -- sort of a high-security lifestyle for a year now. Last June, a bunch of very nice British gentlemen came to our offices and asked us if we wanted to work on the Snowden story to which I freaked out because I didn't know how to communicate securely. About two months before that, my boss and I spent a week setting up PGPT keys. And funny story. Klein, who's my boss, he has two PGPT keys because he forgot the password to the first one. He is the smartest guy in the whole entire world. Like, he knows Perl. So he has a PGP, and he also forgot to generate a revocation certificate which is a thing that you have to do to take down a key. So now, he has a permanent key that he can't use. And a lot of people email him. So I want to talk about that situation, right? + +I carry around two laptops. I got an extra one here. And it's a pain in the neck because, you know, it's a pain in the neck to use these things. So two nights ago, there's a security tool that I use, and Bart Gellman uses, a tool called Tails which we'll get into but I want to whine about it, first. Two nights ago, you know I learned that there was an upgrade for Tails and my wife and I came back from a lamaze class, and maybe have an nice night but I said, "No, I'm going to upgrade Tails." I stay up until 2:00 in the morning trying to fight this stuff. So it's really important to me that these security tools steal your life, right? Everything that's easy -- everything that you do right now is easy and automatic and like, you don't have to worry about it but once you start reporting in -- you know, it doesn't have to be on the student stories. If you're talking to people in war zones, or even if you're working on a story that might be under a threat of being subpoenaed, this kind of stuff might happen. So that's just kind of the overarching theme of this talk, is that security's too hard. I'm going to show you a bunch of tools. But, you know, maybe start thinking about, like, as I go through all these tools, start thinking about if you've ever used any in the past, ways in which they were, like, hard to use or difficult to use, or not fun. If you haven't used any in the past, please, by all means visit the websites and visit the websites as I go through them and think to yourselves, "Could I figure that out?" And if the answer's no, then that security tool's a failure, right? If you haven't used some of the tools, visit the website. Try and figure out if you could figure it out. And how long. Try and budget it because at the end I want to do this sort of experiment where everybody goes through and says, "How many hours would they have to devote to, you know, having a second laptop and doing everything securely?" So we're going to start with security tools. Then we're going to do -- I'm going to do, actually, a fun example of how cryptography works. We're going to talk about elliptic curve exchange because we're at a programming conference and everybody should at least know the underlying protocols. And it's really easy, so don't worry about it and then we're going to talk about slow crypto, you know, this idea that you -- you can do it yourself. You can also write in routines and then figure it out. And then we're going to circle back and talk about how. So first things first. Throw out, can people start throwing out security tools that they've heard of? So we've already talked about one which is Tails. We're talking about that a little bit. But anybody else? + +> Keybase. + +Keybase is more of a directory server. + +> It also helps you set up a PGP. + +JEFF: PGP and GPG. + +> OTR? + +JEFF: OTR. Any other ones? + +> Tor? + +JEFF: Tor. + +> Onion browser. + +JEFF: Onion browser. That was written by our own Mike Tigas. + +> And https? + +JEFF: Https, great. This is the one that everyone uses. + +> Hopefully. + +JEFF: Well, if you've ever logged into a bank -- how many times have people, like, when you get the yellow screen saying that this site's certificate isn't valid, you just click right through so that's the value of this thing. So we've got Tails, Keybase, OTR, Tor. There are -- I'm just going to throw in a couple more here that I want to talk about. Cryptocat, and I want to talk about MiniLock. + +> Would you consider the two-step authentication for Gmail or things like that? + +JEFF: Sure, two-step authentication. But you don't have a choice with that. So I would consider that a part of security. You would have an choice if you're implementing it yourself but as a civilian, two steepy then the indication doesn't help me, you know, hide things from surveillance. So -- and if I sound like a crazy it's because I've been living this for a year, right? And there's one final one which is, you really only useful if you just want to talk to yourself, and no one uses it, it's called Pond. So what I want to do is I want to sort of use a proxy variable here. We're going to go through these tools and we're going to assign it a score based on how many of you guys have used it, or know about it and then we're going to go through them. So Tails, how many people have used Tails? Okay, we've got one person. How many people, let's -- Keybase, it's part of PGP. How many people have PGP keys? + +> Tried but failed in the setup and I said, "Fuck it." + +JEFF: Eight so -- + +> And then we worked with someone else and then we both said fuck it. + +JEFF: The higher the score the more prevailing it is. + +> Can you ask a second account on how many people could use it on purpose. + +JEFF: How many people can use it on purpose. + +> I actually haven't use it in years. + +JEFF: So one fuck up, eight have used it, four can use it, like, regularly. + +> Like, I have a PGP key but I can't remember how to do anything with it. + +> You have multiple keys? + +JEFF: OTR? + +> More keys on the keychain. + +JEFF: How many people have used OTR? One, two, three, how many people have he had vested fingerprints of people that you were talking to? Okay, great? So, so far we're doing pretty bad. How many people have used Tor? Just curious what you used Tor for? + +> To try it out. + +> The Raspberry Pi or -- + +JEFF: Listen, Tor is actually really easy to use, you just download the browser bundle and you can use Tor. Https, we don't need to go through that. Anybody here of those, crypto cat? MiniLock? And pond, don't worry about pond. So now, for everybody else let's go back through and talk about what these things are. So Tails is basically you install -- I have it here -- you install Linux distro on an USB stick and it takes over your computer and you use, technically, what will be in theory, a very secure, very ugly -- you have a secure operating environment. You can do on a write-only thing and what happens when you shut it down it wipes the whole entire memory. So everything that was, like, ephemeral there just gets erased and wiped. So even if someone else's like, pulls you over and is give us your USB sticks. You go great, cool, you figure it out. + +> Is it enencrypted on there? + +JEFF: There is an option, there's no persistent store by default but there is an option for persistent store. The problem is tails is you come home at 2:00 in the morning and you're trying to upgrade it. It's not possible for humans to install on an USB stick. It takes -- you have to download like this, you have to download Perl and you -- and all of this stuff. So while this is their secure and you get essentially a very secure environment because you're not storing anything on it. And if you are storing, it has to be encrypted, it is super, super difficult to use, right? + +> So the persistent storage, do you have to actually -- I mean do you have to trigger a shut down for it to know, okay, wipe the memory now? You pull it out? + +JEFF: Basically if you pull out the USB stick, there's a kernel panel that wipes the memory. As soon as possible. The other funny part and it is that there's also an omission to cloak it, you can make it look like a Windows XP computer -- yolo, I guess, right? So Keybase, PGP, the whole sort of -- the whole sort of environment surrounding PGP, and PGP. How many people have never heard of PGP? So PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy. There's an open-source version written by Richard Stallman called the GNU Privacy Guard. And essentially what happens with PGP is you generate a key pair, so you generate a public key and a private key. You keep the private key on your computer. I still have no idea where they store it on my computer. Try and find private keys, you won't be successful. And essentially, what you do is, it's for email. So you want to send an email that's encrypted that can't be read over the wire, you encrypt your email with the person you are sending private key, and you sign it to make sure that it's verified. And then they're able to unlock that thing. Does that make sense? + +> You encrypt it with their public key. + +JEFF: Yeah, with their public key. So they always about to. So there's Alice and Bob, and Alice has a public key and a private key. This is -- we're going to -- let's just do secret key. Public and discrete. And Bob has a public and secret. Bob encrypts with her public key and through the magic of cryptography -- and then he signs the message with his secret key through the magic of encryption. Once Bob -- once Alice receives this message she can decrypt it with her secret key. So it's a very low-level version of PGP key. There's many ways to use it as a command line tool. Traditionally if you set up a search how to set up a PGP. How to make a command line page, you can throw your computer in the trash at that point because you don't want to use the command line tool. For Mac there's GPG Tools. GPG Tools. And for Windows, it's WinFour -- GPG for Win. Not "Win for Mac" -- that would be awesome. GPG for win. So what do those GPG Tools, what does that do? +JEFF: So these GPG Tools -- GPG Tools installs as a binary distribution, installs it on your computer and it allows you to use the built-in Mac Mail like pretty transparent. + +> So it sounds like you send a message? + +JEFF: -- signed and encrypted with your key. Now the problem with these things is the other person has to have a key. So if you're talking to a source, or if you're, you know, like a relative or whatever, they're not going to have an key. So there's an adoption problem. Like, if you're talking to me, I have a key and we'll encrypt all day, it would be awesome. But, you know, if you're talking to a loved one or something they're not going to have that automatically. Google is trying to fix this problem by creating an add-in to Gmail that's currently being security audited. Couple of these things you're going to have to wait a couple of weeks and then you'll have access to them but -- so it's it sort of begs the question and where I was going with that is how do you get someone else's key. Well, you could meet in person and say, here's my key but there are, as part of the PGP universe there are these things called key servers which stores all these keys. So you upload it to a key server and then other people download your key and they have to verify a small number, but how many people have verified PGP keys in the past? Okay, two people. You know, 'cause I mean, whatever, right? So that's like an extra step, right, all of these tools steal your time. That's how they work, which is frustrating. + +> Should you ever upload your private key to a key server? + +No, no, never, ever. Your private key, you shouldn't ever even look at it. It shouldn't even be in your brain. So your private, that's the other problem, if I have one computer and there's a problem that MiniLock's trying to solve but if I have one computer with keys on it, and another computer with keys on it I have to, like, merge those somehow, so there's, like, this really complicated way of extracting keys and putting them on a different thing, and you don't want to send them over the network 'cause you're going to say, I guess, and then you don't want to email it to yourself. That sort of thing. + +> So does that mean that you should have an different one for work than for home or? + +JEFF: I have -- you -- it's so complicated to answer that question. You want to have one key per email address, right? There is a way, and I have never been able to figure it out, attach multiple keys to one identity. My guess would be, if you go to pgp.mit.edu and search for Mike Tigas' key, which is this super crazy nerd thing that you can do. But I've never been able to figure it out. So the problem is these PGP servers often aren't encrypted and there's only one point of verification. You only know -- if you typed in who you want to talk to in a search box, you have no idea if that's actually their key. And so what Keybase is trying to do is fix that situation where you can follow somebody on Keybase and they will post on GitHub, on their Twitter, "Security proves that the this is actually their key." So they'll tweet out, "This is actually my key." And that he is into Keybase and it'll verify on Keybase. They'll post something on GitHub and it'll verify on Keybase. The problem with Keybase for journalists is a social graph. If I follow Ryan Pitts to get his Keybase, or if I follow -- he has secret documents then all of a sudden that's, like, public information. So there's a lot of things that you have to think about. But I love that Keybase is fixing this problem of getting other people's keys so you don't have to, like, walk over to their house. + +> Keybase will let you upload your private keys using their web interface, though. Which I did, after which, I realized... + +JEFF: So... my look of horror? + +> They shouldn't even have that feature. + +> It's like yeah, it's built in. + +JEFF: That's, like, the other people other thing. Now you're putting a whole shit ton of trust in Keybase that they're not going to get hacked but for most people, for most people it doesn't matter. For most people, it's easier, and you're not -- I wouldn't worry so much about it. A lot of this security stuff is figuring out your threshold of worry. My threshold of worry is pretty fucking high. Other people's -- I just want to write secret stuff. I want write things that are not super, hyper-sensitive incentive, right. So I'm doing a story about the cops. What are the cops going to do? Check your emails, maybe? Well, you can have all my emails but they're all encrypted, good luck with that, guys. Or you can do what levo lessen son did. And print out your key in very tiny type and it would be, like, 16 pages. He he no longer runs his company because of that but you can try. The one thing that I haven't gone over is, this is all just math and what public keys and private keys actually are are just gigantic numbers that are 496 bits of -- 496 divided by eight, I don't know, like, 500 character long numbers, right? That are just super, super hi and then via some tricky math we'll get into this a little bit in a second, you are able to do this encryption. So bee case and -- + +> Is it important to understand because I know when I created a couple of different keys I can create more complex keys by redoing the math so is that important to understand at all? + +JEFF: So how many people have set up https on a web server? This is the same sort of thing if you use RSA keys. How did you -- did you read, like, the manual page on how strong to make your keys? There's, like, a manual page and you have options because computers get faster over time. So, finding out a secret key from a public key just requires a lot of math and there are fancy algorithms for that that you can brute force. And there are options, right? So this is another reason. How do I know how big my key should be? This is another thing that you got to do a little bit of research. There's 1,024 bit is I think the smallest that you can make if you're making RSA keys. But, this is no longer considered secure by NIST, so anything greater than 1,024 because it goes by the number of bits that you add, it's an exponential curve for breaking it. So if you do 2,048, you'll probably be fine for a very, very long time. If you want to be fine until the stars die and the oceans collapse and, you know, the universe shrinks in on itself, assuming we don't get quantum computers, you want to do 4,096. Anything bigger -- Mike Tigas has -- I love Mike Tigas obviously. He had a 16,000 key, and again steals your time. It takes 15 minutes for him to encrypt an email. And he has a supercomputer sitting on his desk. So, you know, that's, um, kind of how it steals your time. + +So OTR. So does everybody know what we're talking about when we talk about OTR? Anybody not know? + +> I don't know. + +JEFF: Okay, looking at those things, what -- and I'm -- this is sort of trolling the stenographer right now. This is considered off the record. We're not going off the record. This technology -- we're talking about "off the record." I will switch back to OTR. We're on the records. OTR is a layer on top of -- it's a chat protocol on chat protocols that you use all the time. So when you're using Gmail, you're using this protocol called Jabber. Well, not anymore but you can use Jabber with Google Chat. And, it encrypts on top -- it's basically a transparent plugin that you download Adium or something and it encrypts on top of it. So what Google sees is just garbage. What the person you're talking to sees is, you know, clean, plain text. Now the tricky part about OTR is the first message that you send to somebody is never encrypted 'cause "reasons," right? Why would you want the first message encrypted? And people don't know that. So I'll often get, "Hey, did you do that super secret thing?" And I'm like, "Oh, well, I guess it's not super secret anymore." So usually what I do when I do OTR if you ever chat with me, you'll get a bunch of dots. I actually go to the fourth message because it has this weird key rotation. And you'll think that I've just, like, sat on my keyboard. But OTR is relatively easy to use, in terms of easiness, you can see on our score, right, PGP a lot of people have used it, but we've had five fuck-ups. OTR, one person used it, and it was pretty nice. + +> If you use Adium, it's super easy. + +> But both who are chatting need it too, right? + +JEFF: And the another part is and it happens to me all the time, if you have encryption, the other party then gets a message that looks like garbage and it tells you to go to cypherpunks.ca. And -- because cypherpunks sounds really cool to us, like, fuck yeah, hackers, right? But everybody else looks at that and think, "You're in my computer." And they throw their computer away. + +> Which is also probably secure, right? + +JEFF: Which is also better. More talking to each other, and hanging out, and drinking coffee, but sometimes your mom's in Minneapolis, or something. And she's getting this message about cipher punks. So OTR super easy to use has weird quirks that are really, really frustrating -- again stealing your time. So all of these things are stealing your time. You're giving up your time in order to feel a little bit more safe. And to actually be, in some situations, more safe. So think on that when you start to use them. Think on who are you protecting from? If you're really, really excited about it and you want to use it because it's already cool and you feel like a badass, use them all the time. Every email I get that is signed so that everybody gets my PGP key. So you can encrypt -- you can sign an email to verify that this is what what you wrote. You know, when you use git, and you look at the git command and it's a long hash, that's basically signing. It's a similar sort of algorithm. It's that -- it's a proof that no one tampered with this email on the way. So, and it just sort of becomes part of your life over time. So Tor, first time I used Tor was to script bureau prisons website because they rate limit you. So the way Tor works, and you've seen this in movies. When they're like, we're trying to trace the hacker. And it shows a map, and there's all these lines and it's, like, he's routing the money through seven different banks and we can't find it, or whatever. That's exactly how Tor works. So you connect to the Tor network. Your traffic sort of bounces around all over the place and then, um, it exits the Tor network and then communicates with, like, Google, or Twitter and in my case, the bureau of prisons website so that I don't get rate limited and the idea is that then your traffic is anonymous. That someone watching the network can't see that you're visiting Google, right? Doesn't know, right? Because you get a whole new IP address and your IP address goes in here. It's a great tool, you know? It's a great tool that I like to use when, you know, say I'm investigating an agency or something like that, and I don't want, like, you know that Congress edit Twitter account? Have people been following that. So Congress Edit are people from Congress who are editing Wikipedia and they edit the yes -- there was, like, one guy who really, really likes Yes, like, the band Yes and he goes in every day and tweaks the article over and over and over again. That guy should probably be using Tor because at work, he's really geeked out about Yes. + +> So if you were investigating someone you would use Tor to investigate their website so that they wouldn't know you were investigating them? + +JEFF: Exact same reason for the Bureau of Prisons, it's a good way to get around and be secret, discreet. + +> It also, um, if you have, like, web sense or something at work but you use Tor. Web sense doesn't know what you're looking at either, right? + +JEFF: Yeah, yeah. So you connect to some random person on the Internet, essentially. + +> So if Netflix, for example is not allowed at your workplace. + +JEFF: Not a that I've tried that. Except for this server, this exit point, probably, like, in Germany because the Germans love Tor. Tor is the German word for "gate" so it sort of makes sense. So, it's sort of, like -- I like to describe Tor as https on steroids, right. + +> What's .onion? + +JEFF: Okay, how many people have heard of secure drop? Okay, Secure Drop is a Dropbox that news organizations are setting up where you can get where, basically we can get anonymous "here's a leak" or "here's a whistleblower" thing. But my problem with Dropbox is we're going to have to verify it anyway. We have to reach out to the person who anonymously dropped it, and say, okay, how are these real? Did you make them in Photoshop? But Secure Drop, the way that it works is, you visit a https page that tells you to download a Tor and then it goes to a ".onion" URL and that's a hidden service and that's a service that's only connectable through the Tor network. There's this great -- there's also this really, really really fantastic tool for sharing -- for sharing files. And I like to use it not because it's secure or whatever, but because I can share a file from across a country to my boss. It's called OnionShare. So let's say I want to send a huge file that's too big for an email, I just drop it into OnionShare and it's written in Python and it's, like, really, really awesome. You guys should look at it. That, I would say -- these -- I'm going to put that into easy section. So it's OnionShare. These guys are the easy section. And this guy 'cause you used it already. Cryptocat will offer some security -- Cryptocat is -- it's basically -- it's like the Nintendo version of OTR, right? It's kind of like the Game Boy version. You guys should all go to the website 'cause it's adorable. It has, like, the best icon. And it essentially is, you download Cryptocat and you log in to a chat room, and everything is encrypted. You don't have to verify fingerprints. You don't have to, like, worry about anything. It's the super easiest thing in the whole entire world to use. In the past, it had some security problems but now they've sort of fixed it and it works really, really well. So if you -- the other thing is, these tools here are the few tools that actually solve, like, great problems. These tools make your life difficult. These tools if you want to chat with somebody, you just say, "Download this and join me in the 'jeff is awesome' room." And everything's encrypted. And it's, like, super easy. I could get my mom to queues this. I could get my dad to use this. And, you know, people who are not particularly technical can use it in a heartbeat, you just send them a link. + +> So you just said that Cryptocat had some security problems but they're fixed now? + +JEFF: Well originally. + +> How do you know is my question. How do you know that there's no...? + +JEFF: Well that brings up a good point with these things. You trust the developer. You're looking for tools that have been audited. Auditing is more important than open-source. It really, really is. Paying a company to try and sit down and break a tool. And like all these tools, https is so widely used is that it's not really an issue. So they're starting up the auditing on Open SSL but you want -- so these ones -- OnionShare is currently undergoing an audit. Mike Tigas -- Onion Browser, which is Tor for your phone underwent a security audit. And minute-lock even before and we'll get to this in a second, MiniLock underwent a security audit. I don't think Tails had one. Tor certainly has had many. + +> Where would you look to find if a service has been audited? + +JEFF: Just Google, you know, "Tails audit." There's a handful of firms, like, Cure53 does it. You know, the other thing that you can do is, all of these things have issue trackers. So go back to the issue trackers and just see if anything smells weird. But again, even in Cryptocat's case it would take somebody on their laptop, like, six months to break a conversation, right? So when we talk about -- so cryptographers and security researchers are, like, some of the -- you know, I have friends in that community but when they talk about technology but they're some of the meanest people that you've ever met, right? And they'll tell you anything less than perfect is broken because that's how they have to live their lives, right? They have to live their lives in this theatrical world. But Cryptocat taking six months for the encryption -- six months on a laptop for the encryption to be broken is not a really big problem for most people. At least it's encrypted. You'd have to have been talking about some really, really, really crazy stuff for them to want to break that. In the meantime, if they're that interested, they'll just throw you in jail and wait until you tell them, right? Or they might just ask you. + +> You said that you would email the link to somebody, wouldn't that be the entry point rather than getting to the chat room? + +JEFF: Yeah. + +> Check the link. I'm in there, too. + +JEFF: Here's the link. I was just saying, hoard to get people up and rolling on Cryptocat. It's the easiest thing. Go to this website, meet me in blah, blah, blah and then that person shows up, right? OnionShare solves a great problem. It's sort of like a peer-to-peer Dropbox. So if I wanted to send something to Ryan or folks, you just drop it in, they click a link on the Tor browser and you get the file. And it shows you how -- and then it closes and then that secret, hidden service disappears for the rest of ever. + +> How do you know that the person who shows up in your Cryptocat room is who they say they are? + +JEFF: Ask them, hey, Ryan, what did we do at NICAR last year? + +> So there's no signing? + +JEFF: Well, you could do the fingerprint verification, but do you know what fingerprint verification is? Hey, are you Ryan Pitts? That's not technically true -- this is so crazy to me but we're talking about, like, somebody who owns the network, right. There can technically be, like, somebody, there can be a guy in between you -- this is Alice, Bob, and Mallory is what people like to call him. It sounds like a band name, right? He can be sitting in between and intercepting Bob's messages, transmitting them to Alice. So that's why the fingerprint is there. You know? You call him up on the phone and say, hey, what are your numbers, what are the numbers underneath your name, or Cryptocat actually chooses colors. I'm not entirely sure. I know my wife had a little bit of problems when we were chatting on it, verifying via colors. So I think he might have changed it so that they're colorblind-safe but that's actually a great way so that the read-off is not a string of numbers. You just say, beige, light purple, and there are four or five different things. Cryptocat is great. If you Google search it, a lot of people beat up on him because he was sort of outside of the security community, I think for political reasons. And it's written in Javascript and a lot of people are, like, oh, man, Javascript crypto, but you know, it's browser-based crypto that's bad. It's that website that does AES encryption on a web page that you go to that's not https, served over https. It's not Javascript crypto. So code stuff. So Cryptocat started as, um, as a website and then he made it a browser plugin that you download and you can put in Chrome, basically, essentially. There's a standalone version essentially, too. But that goes through a verification process and the code is signed, just like how you sign your email. So you're guaranteed to get a sort of verified program that you run on your computer. + +MiniLock is coming out in two weeks, currently undergoing a security audit. It's beautiful, wonderful code. It is GPG encryption without the mess. So you boot up MiniLock, and you log in, and you type in your password and then it generates these key pairs and then you can encrypt and send a file to somebody. It's beautiful and amazing. And Pond, pond is, um -- it took Mike Tigas six hours to set up Pond, so let's not talk about it. Pond has to run over Tor, it runs on Tails. Basically if you want to talk to yourself, or me, you can get on Pond but I wouldn't do it. If I had to do it -- yeah... all right. + +> Jeff, what about TrueCrypt? + +JEFF: Haha, what about TrueCrypt? I don't know, and it's freaking me out right now because we use a lot of TrueCrypt. Let me say a sentence to you that probably should have freaked us out from the beginning. We're, at ProPublica we use an encryption tool built by people, or a person, or people who no one knows who they are, wasn't fully open-source, didn't take any bug fix issues and we trust it with some pretty secret stuff. Like, that's what TrueCrypt is. It seems to work. Everybody that looks like it seems to say, yeah, this is the right way to do it. But I don't know, right? + +> What does TrueCrypt do? + +JEFF: TrueCrypt is like MiniLock. TrueCrypt, basically, essentially it creates a sort of, like, encrypted file container that you then mount and you can drag files in and when you close it up, it just looks like random bytes, right, that are indistinguishable from something else because it's encrypted. But what happened two or three months ago is they took down their website and they were, like, just use Windows encryption and you're like, ah, man, really? So they say Windows, or on your Mac, you can jump through a lot of hoops in creating an encrypted file container, too. But I don't know the jury's still out on TrueCrypt. It was undergoing an audit at the time and the guy who's doing the audit, Matthew Green, I talked to him and he said, the code base is still pretty clean and clear but I don't have an answer for you. TrueCrypt is an easier tool to use. + +> Do you know much about, like, the firevault, the Mac sort of disk encryption stuff. Like, is there -- has that been audited? Is there any way to know that it's secure? + +JEFF: It's closed-source but it's written by Apple. It's the same sentence as it's closed source but it's written by Microsoft. I don't know. I don't know, I mean, the cops aren't going to break it. You know, again, right, you know, my questions are always, "Who is going to want this stuff in this encryption?" How much more difficult does it make my life, right? And are there any sort of, like, things that oog (phonetic) me out? So when we were talking about all this before, going through the issue tracker -- audits before -- Archy Say (phonetic) at the New York Times made one for me, one time but I don't know how to make that particular one on a Mac, so I just never honestly used it because it makes my life harder in a weird way, right, because I load it after five minutes the searching size fuck this, I'll just use TrueCrypt. But if that's your jam and and if you want to do that I would say bundle it all up in a zip -- you gotta ask yourself what you're using it for. Are you using it to have an encrypted file that, maybe you'll lock yourself out of in a year because you don't remember the password? And it's not really all that sensitive material, or whatever and it's sitting on your computer, it's not traveling anywhere then I would say, think that through. If it's, you know, if you -- if you want to send the file to somebody, you know, encrypted containers are actually really great -- if you want to send multiple files to somebody, encrypted containers are great because they're just a volume and you just send it to them via OnionShare or something like that, and it makes your life easier in that instance. It's not that hard to set one up. You just drag all your files and you send them to them. And you just say, hey, log in to Cryptocat, or Pond, or something like that, well no one use Pond, please. And you know, send a password over a different channel and then you're set, right? And that's a pretty easy workflow and one that you could work with. And the benefit of that is it's in a little bucket: Here's all your files that you requested. All right, so let's see... did I yammer past -- well, I yammered past our thing. So those are the tools. I want to fix this. I only have seven minutes left. We got sort of, like, obsessed with tools, which I would say -- that is the current state-of-the-art with crypto. We're all obsessed with tools. And tools don't help make your job -- or do your job or live your life. I mean, they help you but if you're focused on the tools you're not building your house, right. You're just like, I've got a fucking sweet hammer. And I went, and I did research. And in the end your house is just a bunch of bricks, right. But things like Keybase, Cryptocat, Onion Lock and OnionShare. But as news nerds we build things for reporters we build tools for ourselves. And I would say, like, maybe there's some way that we can help it in this situation. And it doesn't have to be perfect because not everybody is, you know, protecting against a global network advesary, so a lot of these tools sacrifice usability for perfectness. We're really good at doing visualizations and explaining things to people. But it sort of makes sense, we take this difficult thing to do and we start working on security tools, maybe something be bubble out of this community. Maybe, next time Ryan Pitts can generate a PGP key or something. And I don't know, necessarily -- I feel like I'm talking at you but -- does anybody have any ideas on how to make it better? Like, one idea I would say is the idea of keys doesn't make any sense. You can't have two keys because -- one's a lock and one's a key, right. You can't -- you can't unlock anything with two keys, you know? + +> A lot of it just seems like language. + +JEFF: What? + +> Like, if somebody had just written -- if they would just write something these things, it would not make sense to someone who's not a nerd. Like, I found -- I'm pretty nerdy, and I found a lot of the stuff that was supposed to explain PGP actually impenetrable. Keybase actually be a pretty good job. + +JEFF: Who? + +> Keybase, in explaining that kind of stuff, actually thinking about the language around it and talking about it in a way like, you're approaching in a way people who don't already have all this background information, you know, who aren't cryptographers, I think, makes a big difference, and importantly -- and I think this is sometimes tough for the community of people doing this. You have to talk in a way that's accessible and, like, not offensive. I think it's really easy to talk down to people. + +JEFF: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely. + +> Kind of on that point if you're in a newsroom and you, like, I sit with people who could help me do this, and I don't want to bug them. + +JEFF: Right. + +> And like -- if you know how to do it, making yourself more available and making it clear that the person who needs help isn't done. + +JEFF: The fun -- the fun -- the reason that I gotta assigned this Snowden story was because I figured out how to open the documents and they were like, well, Jeff should... so there's benefits, I guess. Self-accessible. + +> I think you need almost, like, tiers. Like off the shelf you're an average beat reporter, here's these tools -- Tor, and stuff like that. Ford journalism had something like that. Different degrees of security, like, okay, shit's getting real and there are things in newsrooms where I hate to say this but IT's at fault. You ever a new laptop, and here's base setup instead of having -- you know, news nerds have to go set up. + +> So it's more of an opinion aid stance on it because there are a lot of options for people that are just getting into it and it's a choice pay-off. + +> But I like the idea of Robert's though. Because it reminds me of what Jonathan Stray is trying to get over people's head, what's your threat model. Who are you trying to protect yourself against? The local cops? The state government? The NSA, or some corporation? But in this case, do this thing. Here's how it would be wonderful. + +JEFF: I also think because reporters and people write so sure, talking about threat modeling and stuff that's very, very important, but answering this question, how is this tool going to make my life better, right, you know? + +> Well, you have to understand, like, why do you need it? + +JEFF: Why do you need it? + +> Do you think you still need to convince people? + +JEFF: What. + +> Do you think you need to still convince at least journalists saying this shit? + +> I think so, if you're an education reporter, like, and you're getting emails from a source who works, you know for the teachers' union or whatever. + +> I didn't even think. + +> And the email trail, your source gets fired because of the emails that they sent to you. And and it's like dude, you don't want to lose your source. Making that argument I think is helpful. +> And it's helpful. + +> And it's different if we protect our sources. We go to jail if I don't protect my source. + +> But I think a lot of reporters that aren't thinking I'm just emailing back and forth. There's a trail now that even if our IT department reads it one way. + +> I think it makes a difference whether it's like can tell whether there was email traffic or what it was the documents that were sent, or that sort of thing that probably people like want it -- you know that that's, I feel like that's the thinking that people don't necessarily have as part of their -- + +> I also would imagine in some cases cases it would be easier to have a couple of burner phones and transfer the documents. + +JEFF: And again, some of this stuff is in person but you know, rent car and go. + +> I think there's a need for a basic understanding of technology and the Internet, right, like you have to sort of know how the Internet works in a really basic sense in order to understand why you need encryption. + +JEFF: Sure. And I feel like -- And I just want to point out, right? Like, I've circled these ones for a reason because these are the easiest. These are the ones that if -- +JEFF: Every reporter used this if they were on Cryptocat chatting and if they were using MiniLock, they wouldn't need PGP, right? If they were using OnionShare, Secure Drop disappears, do you know what I'm saying? And all of a sudden, these easy tools, while they may not be perfect, have benefited their lives. You know? I encourage you guys to take a look at this. Because all of a sudden, because, explaining how the Internet works falls under -- I didn't write it down -- like, being nice and not talking down. The reporters don't give a shit how the Internet works. On what https. + +> But if they were like hey use this and they don't know why they're using it or if they somehow get hacked around it for whatever. + +JEFF: Yeah, I understand. + +> You have to understand a little bit of the larger concept, you can't just be like hey use this because this is the best. + +JEFF: Because the NSA, that's my favorite thing. Use this because the NSA is watching you. Well, who cares? I'm not doing anything wrong. + +> Or each of us has a different focus like, I'm just going to push okay, know where to do that. + +JEFF: So at the outset I asked how many people clicked okay on the cert error. It's like okay, who cares, I just want to go home and see my kid, right? I don't have time -- I asked how many people actually did fingerprint verification and everyone was like, 'cause why would you do that? So I definitely got your point, and I think that's an great point. And I think framing it in a way that -- the way that I've done it in the past for reporters is, this will make your life better plus here's how the Internet works. + +> Right. + +JEFF: You know? And why you want to use this tool instead of um, Skype, or something. Did we run...? Sorry guys, I talked far too much and didn't let you guys climb in enough. But I'm -- chime in enough. But I'm Jeff Larson, and I'm ProPublica and I think we're... +[ Applause ] + +> Thanks, Jeff. + +> Jeff, what's slow crypto? + +JEFF: Slow crypto is artisanal crypto. + +> It's Brooklyn crypto? + +JEFF: It's Brooklyn crypto. It's crypto that if you're interested in cryptography and you play around and encrypt a bunch of shit and there's a library that fits in 100 beats called NACL and it's written by two of the best cryptographers in the world. So if you were to have sort of play around with it, it's a great library. It literally has encrypt, decrypt, and those are the functions you can do. And I would definitely check it out. I was going to show you guys graphs and stuff on how encryption works but... and elliptic curves. diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_21_Web_Native_Storytelling.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_21_Web_Native_Storytelling.md index c25e84e5..3691f187 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_21_Web_Native_Storytelling.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_21_Web_Native_Storytelling.md @@ -1,158 +1,157 @@ -Toward web-native storytelling! -Session facilitator(s): Claire O'Neill, Tyler Fisher -Day & Time: Friday, 11am-12pm -Room: Franklin 1 - ->>Morning, everyone: So this session was originally called "Cool data bro', but what's the story?" and that seemed kind of mean, so I changed it to web storytelling, whatever that means. So I guess we can introduce ourselves first. What we're thinking of doing is we'll introduce ourselves, we'll talk a little bit about our team, and we can sort of talk about a project you did, but then we thought it might be interesting to sort of talk about our design exercise, basically the exercise we do and then break into groups and do that design exercise for a story. - -So who am I? I'm Claire O'Neill, I work at NPR on our visuals team. Yeah, so I've been at NPR for about five years, I started as an intern, at the time the only department doing internet was like, well, we had web producers basically filling out radio stories and then radio team. But so I was there for about five years, and somewhat recently our boss at that department left and Brian Boyer was hired to start a news apps team, and so at that point, our teams merged and so now we're sort of a content team of designers, photo editors, and my role is sort of more of an editor sort of content strategy. ->> I'm Chris Groskopf. No, I'm Tyler Fisher -- I just started this month and I'm a designer developer on the team. I also started as an intern and was hired, and I, you know, I think a lot of people assume, like because I sort of do news apps development that all I care about is data, and I just want to make charts, but I find what we do at NPR a lot more rewarding because we're telling stories with really inventive amazing visuals and trying to find the best way to tell a story, not just assume that a bar chart will do the job. So I will be in the session to make that a more systemic thing in our field to think about what the story actually is and how it needs to be told. ->> How many people here are on similar teams like that? Yeah, where do you work and how does your team work? ->> I'm an intern right now at FiveThirtyEight, so a lot of our visuals are just charts and line graphs and things like that. We usually have one larger interactive, for example, like the World Cup interactive, and the majority of stories are told using charts. ->> ->> Who else? What about you? ->> I'm at ProPublica, it's like a small news application team, so that's designers and developers and kind of everybody is both a reporter and [inaudible]. ->> Are there any like photo or video editors on your team? ->> There's a new design director. ->> Who else? ->> I'm on the interactive news team at the New York Times, and we it's kind of like we don't have photo and video editors on the team, but we work with the editors that are actually on the separate desks. ->> So how does that work? Say you've got a project you're working on, what's your process? ->> Um, it changes a lot. I can't really speak for every team there, but certainly it would usually sort of end up that we will create a prototype and then show that to the desk and then work with them and then work with our news design team, because the interactive news team is very developer heavy, it doesn't have designers on it, so we then work with designers to make the prototype that we've created into something actually worth using. ->> So I guess the way that Brian, our team leader, describes it is we're sort of like the backup end. We consult reporters who are like our lead singers. Which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Steve Inskeep, who's the host of one of our radio shows, Morning Edition, was going to be spending two weeks on the US-Mexico border, so we had -- we went into the planning meetings and sort of like spitballed a bunch of things, wrote them all down on the wall, asked a bunch of questions: What is the point of this reporting trip? And the thing that we ended up circling at the end is, "What does it feel like to be there?" That's it. And then simultaneously, CIR came to us with a bunch of data about, can you describe like sort of -- ->> Yeah, so actually I don't think I saw the actual map, but so CIR had data basically they'd done one thing where they had basically gone and mapped the entire like fenced border between the US and Mexico, where the US had put up some sort of obstruction between the borders to prevent people from crossing, to prevent livestock from crossing, all these various things, and it's not all that well documented, so they pretty much had to go out and map out where everything was, and also, you know, categorize the different types of fence, because it varied wildly, between, you know, San Diego, and you know, El Paso. - ->> They had very, very different fences. So we wanted to sort of look at -- or they wanted with the map to look at that divide, and that was data-driven way of looking at how this border is constructed, but we also had, you know, Steve Inskeep, there hearing interesting stories, a much more interesting way to tell a story about the border that's more inclusive and much more encompassing. - ->> Before CIR had done that -- I mean this is the most thorough documentation between where there's fence and where there's not, you can drill down to like street view. So we had another brainstorming session, one idea was let's make it an interactive map, we've got a photographer there, let's have them shoot every kind of fence that they encountered along the way. There's like 12 different kinds of fence. Maybe we can have people explore this map and see the differences along the way, so our photographer was there with Steve Inskeep for two weeks. She started -- this is the thing that caught my eye off the bat. She sent this pictures which seemed real -- toothbrushes, which seemed really unusual. All of these objects and artifacts had been left behind. These just seemed like such an interesting way of getting at the people and the sort of humanity behind the story, and so we're like OK, we need to rethink how we're going to do this. So we took over a back room in our office, and basically started storyboarding it almost like a magazine. And well, this is the mobile view. So we've got a series of stories here. One leads to the other. They each work on their own. But together they sort of create this story about what it feels like to be on the border. We also had this data about traffic. - -[Inaudible] [we're having technical difficulties in the room and the captioner can't hear the speaker] - ->> So we had some internal debate about the ordering of these stories. This is what we ended up doing with all of the map data. ->> Can you zoom out a little bit? ->> There we go. Thanks. ->> So it was really interesting talking to the CIR, like Mike Corey who works there, and Matt Stiles was, working on this and hearing them talk about the fence was just so much more interesting than seeing the map. So we were like, OK, let's just sit in a room and talk about all of the fence facts and distill, you know, the most important things we need to know, and then do it in this larger format, and that entire sort of. And this is our attempt to sort of like walk the reader through it, sort of like narrating data, narrating graphics, mirroring the text to the images. There's a million things that don't work about this project, but this is sort of like our first step toward -- I mean you can see this is glorified photo editing, which works in some ways and some doesn't. But it's at least -- it's talking to the data and putting it out in a story. ->> So yeah, I mean ... So yeah, so basically like the idea behind this project is it cribs a little bit from classic photo editing. Basically when we're training people how to edit the photo gallery, we say that there's like five steps to telling visual narrative, we have a wide establishing shot, you're closeup detail, your portrait, your detailed shot and your action shot. And so the idea is that the story. - ->>It's a story about the Ethiopian woman, $15,000 in five years to reach the border. - -ROOM WRANGLER: We're trying to get somebody to turn on the microphone, but it's not likely and we're trying to get the white noise turned off, but that's not likely, either. -SESSION LEADER: Right, so we zoom in on a person, a human who can sort of connect it us to the story and then we have a few detail shots of you knee know, recipes on border and then some action shots, you know, a story in essay proceedings speak about an actual episode that they had border control. Some things were cool about this, some things weren't, but this is sort of our team's first collaborative project together. - -How many people are on the team and what were the roles that they played in helping you build this? ->> So our team in general or the team that worked on this. ->> For this project in particular. - ->> So that's really interesting. Steve Inskeep is, let's say, the lead reporter. We sort of called him our content specialist, but what was really interesting. He reported 20 stories for the radio, gave us all of his reporting but then sort of stepped back and allowed us to write what we needed for the web and became our editor basically. We went to him and we said, you know, there is we weren't there, tell us what it was like, otherwise we're going to write a few essays about these photos, we're going to write a little story these toothbrushes and do our own reporting on that. Can you edit it? So that's how that works. The only photographer on this was with Steve two weeks straight, shot everything. I worked with designer Wes Endamood (?) ->> Yeah, so after they storyboarded, they came back with sort of an idea to do this sort of slide format. Wes and I worked for I think a week or two, it was just the two of us mostly, working on just making some sort of prototype of the border, not really all the content of how this is going to function from a technical perspective. We went through a bunch of iterations. The first initial thing we did was we were trying to incorporate a way where the stories were stacked vertically and you would scroll through each story and more none vertically for each story. We found that was really difficult to just like wrap your head around where you are. Because you can leave a story and then come back to it and halfway through it, wait, what happened? I don't know where I am. So we found that just putting it all in one long slideshow, even if it felt a little bit like, oh, we're just making a slideshow, but not really, because we're doing so many things with slide on and aspect ratio, and then it got to the became a little more technically challenging. We pulled in who was supposed to be doing the session. ->> We worked on it for a few weeks, had a few iteration views, and I mean what's interesting about this is this only happened because Brian Weir was out of town. Like basically this is what happens when people like myself and the photographer were like let's do all of these things with all of these photos, you guys can build that, right? Which is problematic. I mean this has been a learning experience in sort of learning better what Tyler and Chris could do in a reasonable amount of time, so yeah, I mean I feel like I don't know -- the story of my experience, and NPR and at conferencing, I feel like I'm like forcing my way in. And trying to learn better. ->> So I'm curious about sort of the project management aspect of it. Because you were working with this other team as well as your own reporters, so you were really kind of working with a lot of different people. Did you do weekly meetings? I mean how did you kind of coordinate that all and kind of keep it rolling at the same time with everyone knowing what their tasks were and their deadlines and all of that? -SESSION LEADER: Yeah, a lot of meetings. And product management was sort of a coteam. Becky Lettenberger who also was on my multimedia team of photographers and videographers, she doesn't quite know how to product manage data reporters just yet, so they were sort of managing it together, but we would have weekly meetings? ->> Yeah, we had weekly iteration reviews that we meet with everybody on the project, including like Steve Inskeep would come to the meeting and see our progress. Also Brian when he was around would also get involved. So that keeps us in check and plans out and we work for the week and then what we get done, we present it and move on from there. It allows us to you know, pivot when we need to. If something didn't work. OK, let's try this week, see if that works, go down this pathway. Yeah. ->> What was the total time start to finish on it? ->> Let's see. ->> Four weeks, yeah? ->> So in terms of the work flow between producers and writers and videographers, and photographers, how was that set up? ->> Through a spreadsheet. ->> So it was all driven like so you just edit the Google spreadsheets and it loads in. ->> Yeah, so the developing had to -- it's not running live on the spreadsheet, but so every slide is its own row of instruction and -- can we move on to the session? - ->>Yeah, unless there are other questions. I didn't mean to dwell on this so much, but yeah. ->> Why did you choose to do a [inaudible]. ->> Because if we put this into scroll you would be scrolling forward, and also, I think like we thought about it as a magazine and we're kind of focusing on one thing at a time. And we're. ->> So it's a gut level how you want to work the story? ->> Yeah. I mean it was an experiment in sort of like revealing bite-size parts of the story one at a time. What's interesting is the time on site for this was, I think 22 minutes, which is how long it takes to get through the thing. The other that's interesting is there's a little video in the middle, and very few people watched it. And, yeah, I think it cribs a little bit from magazines in that way, but where it's different from magazines is like, so we played with layouts a lot. In this section of portraits, and I feel like this is still a little magaziney in the way that it's laid out but we had these cropped as vertical photos with a quote on the side and that just feels too much like print so we tried a few ways to make this feel more webby and internetty, and this feels a little bit better, but it's still not quite there. ->> So it seems like before Steve and the whole crew went to work on the story, you guys got to work with them before -- so is that how your projects normally run where you get to work with the team before they actually start to take pictures or like write the story? Or you know, or is it like the other way around where they'll come to the story and like hey, we want something made for this. ->> It's a little bit of both, but the tides are changing there a little bit so that we're there at that very beginning brainstorming part of reporting. Which is really important. I think I'm going to do a story on this thing, they'll come to us, and we'll be like that's awesome, that's an incredibly visual story and we should do that with photos or we should do that with a map and then like we'll go into the field with them and we'll collaboratively report it. What was awesome about this is when Steve would edit it. He's a radio reporter, but he had awesome things to stay about how to tell the story and how to pace it and what words to use. So that was really important. ->> In terms of being able to focus on just this piece, are there any other stories going on at the same time that you have to work on or are you just mostly focused on whatever is in front of you. ->> Our team is doing a mix of daily and feature content like this, so for the most part, I was focused on this, but like one of our designers is pumping out maps and graphs every day. ->> I think we smartly divide our work in a way that ally is responsible for the daily requests and if she is overloaded we can put some work on somebody else. But she is the first contact. She can almost always handle the work that comes in. So that allows us to plan at a more macro level. ->> Move on to -- ->> Yeah, so what might be interesting is we'll shut up. So we're going to be working in the next few weeks on a story about homeless veterans. There are, I think, approximately 60,000 in the US. I think about 8% of those are veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. So it might be interesting. I think we should break into groups, but first let's do our design exercise which I do at beginning of every project like this. OK, we're going to do a big project on home less vets, so we have to ask a few questions. The first one who's the audience? ... Second question: What are their needs? In other words, what are the main questions we need to ask and ask answer for our audience and then how do we make it work? So why don't we do the first one as a room and talk about who could be the potential audience for a story about homeless veterans, and then we'll break into smaller groups, each group will have a different audience and you guys will answer the next two questions. So who could be the audience for a story about homeless vets? ->> Other veterans. ->> Policymakers, maybe. ->> Social service workers. Family members. ->> Community members, like local. ->> Yeah, people who pass the homeless vets on the streets every day. ->> Anyone else you'd want to target? ->> Could people who aren't aware of veterans issues, because it's a public issue that they should be aware of, so people who don't know very much about the topic. ->> People who don't know about veterans issues in general? ->> Mm-hm. ->> The homeless folks themselves. ->> ->> Interesting. ->> ->> I have a quick question. Would you typically do this with any type of data or research? Are you trying to answer these questions based on your own assumptions? ->> Say it again? ->> Would you typically back up the answers to these questions, who's the audience and what are their needs with any type of research or data, or are you basing these answers in and the way you approach the project based on your own assumptions and sort of what you think? ->> So like if we like have a set of data, do we then ask these questions? ->> No, do we have data about what homeless veterans, like how they get media? Is that what you're asking? ->> Well, I mean -- ->> Like, how can we get to our audience? What sorts of things are they using that would be -- ->> Yeah, so these are, you know, this is a good list of potential audiences, right? And if we move on to the next question, what are their needs and we start to answer that, just out of our brain skulls, we are making wild assumptions, right? ->> Yes. ->> Those might be right or wrong occasionally, but we're not potentially actually learning anything that's going to help us make a better project. It's maybe going to help us brainstorm, but it's potentially dangerous assumptions if it's not backed up by any kind of research or data. ->> Well, let's go down there. Let's do an example. So let's say we want to talk to people who don't really know about veterans issues. ->> OK. ->> So what are their needs? ->> We don't know. We need to talk to them: ->> But then if you took and said what do you need to know about veterans issues? They're not going to know, so it's -- it's difficult, right? I mean you -- ->> What are the needs is probably the kind of the wrong way of saying it, but it's like what do they need to know. ->> Yeah, they'll need more context. ->> a degree of awareness there's a problem, right, like some statistics that set up a scene. ->> I see what you're getting at, like is this a backwards way of doing it. ->> Is the answer to who's the audience ever like let's look at demographic information of who lives in the center of Peoria? ->> It's just is sort of the ethnographic research, the early stage interviewing about with users, about their actual needs and understanding, those sorts of things. Are typically put on the wayside, and we do this sort of work in the abstract and then we move to start making things and then we sort of measure -- do qualitative research while we're doing user testing and stuff like that, but potentially we made the wrong thing because we didn't really understand what our users needed or wanted. ->> So what would be a better way of doing it? ->> Well, I mean you might -- you probably wouldn't do that at a project level, right, for something like this that you have to turn around in a he can week you're not going to be able to put together a fly on the wall investigations of user needs of very specific sets, but I think there is probably organizational level and brand level work that you can do on that, that you can start each project with. ->> Yeah, I mean NPR has a wide swath of data and statistics on NPR.org users, how they're coming to our content, what they're looking for, statistics about them. I've been actually pretty impressed by the service that kind of handles that for us. That's something that we always have at the back of our heads, like who's coming to NPR.org and I think that helps us when picking whether to do stories at all. ->> I feel like in a way this is very similar process to how reporters will craft stories, right? So part of it's intuitive, part of it is built from experience and kind of knowing what stories resonate and how that story gets put together, because data is great and it can inform a lot of things, but there's also a way of kind of telling people something that will grab their interest, you kind of have to surprise them, you have to do something they don't expect, so they're not going to feed you the exact information you need to build that. ->> Well, you wouldn't expect that in a human centered design process, either? Right? You wouldn't be able to expect people to tell you the thing that they don't know that you would make, right? The data is about informing your next step and whether it be qualitative or quantitative data, right? I'm not saying we need heavy demographics. ->> Yeah, I think if the time is there and the right opportunity is there, learning about your audience before you start is invaluable, but I think when we're doing two-week projects, this is as close as we can get this. Exercise for us is as close. It serves as a design constraint for us so we don't get feature crazy. We're thinking about this audience, let's think about what we can build for them instead of building for everybody. ->>It's part design exercise and part storyboarding exercise. For me what's helpful about this, is it puts a person in my head like a person, OK, I have to explain this to my uncle Joe, so how do I do that? So it's less like, you know, -- it's just an exercise, yeah, but I think that's -- you're raising an interesting point. ->> But maybe it's worth continuing down this rabbit hole, like let's try it. So why don't we listen -- let's do this for ten minutes: ->> I had a question about the process. ->> So you -- do you narrow it down from there or -- [inaudible] ->> Yeah, yeah. ->> So the next part of this is we can probably use it by table, right? So by table you're going to get one of these audience groups and you're going to decide whether what you need to make a story about this. And this is a story about homeless veterans. ->> Yeah, so let's say this is a story about homeless veterans, you have to relay information to a specific audience. You have access to any dataset that's relevant, and you also have a photographer and a reporter. Just to give some context, I was in San Diego last weekend at an event called stand down where San Diego VA brings veterans in off the street, convenience them up and we did a lot of portraits. OK, so you guys want to join forces. ->> Let's say Group 1, you're talking to homeless vets. ->> You look pained. ->> Homeless vets don't have devices. ->> Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. ->> Group 2, other veterans. Group 3, family members. Group 4, let's do policymakers, group 5, people in the community and group 6, people who don't know about vets at all. ->> I don't think there's a group 6. I think we're 5, yeah ... ... -[group activity] - -SESSION LEADER: So, what do you guys think? ->> We figured it all out, so it totally works. -SESSION LEADER: Is there value in doing it this way? ->> I think so. Even for us on number one, we're doing homeless vets, and so I don't think any of us have any like direct, you know, exposure to what that experience is like, and so trying to understand what that is, we made a bunch of assumptions, came up with a bunch much ideas and tried to be thoughtful a about what that would be, but I think it would be like super difficult. ->> We don't really know what the problem is because we don't have that experience. ->> It seems like there might have to be some interaction with other parts of organization, like marketing, maybe in a sense of like where who's the audience those things intersect with the actual demographics of your visitors are, you make this thing for homeless vets, we sort of assume, OK, they're going to the library to look at this. How do we know that they know about the NPR website to go to the library to go and look at it. ->> ->> And I think when we do this exercise, we will probably not do homeless vets. I imagine we will do something else. -SESSION LEADER: That's interesting that you guys say that you don't know the experience. You need to talk to folks, right. ->> It's a really hard problem, it made us step way outside the box in terms of our experience. ->> Yeah, I think it might also give us some questions to ask. ->> Yeah, yeah. ->> [inaudible] -SESSION LEADER: Anyone else? ->> I think the tricky part is probably what comes next, because you're not making five separate interactives, it's when you're going to be thinking about all of these different audiences and then you try to find the intersections of what works for more than one of them. And there probably is plenty of crossover. ->> Did anybody start thinking about like what you would actually make? ->> We did. We thought about like, you know, like the last thing we were talking about is you all have that project about playgrounds, it's actually an ongoing resource and it's updated from time to time and it's nor homeless vets. Potentially part of this story will be like services and local charity and whatever, and making sure those are like making a resource for them that's updated and we were trying to figure out like how they would be accessing this, that it would be running to libraries, and that probably means [inaudible] ->> Yeah, I think that's like a really good example of, you know, that group was given a really diffuse case, something we probably wouldn't pick. It's like we're going to build a story about homeless vets for homeless vets and homeless vets don't have computers. So we're making a thing on computers for people who don't have computers. But then you start thinking about what they really need and they need something that helps them. Not just tells a story, but helps them and I don't think if you just approach a story like hey, please send a photographer out to help us get homeless data, you would never come to that conclusion without doing this exercise, I don't think. Anybody else? You guys said you -- ->> So our audience was other vets, so we thought it was not just about -- : [inaudible] generally older male, may also run internet explorer, so we started thinking about story design and that should be linear and minimal interaction, maybe not as many opportunities to get lost in data, but maybe guide them through so they understand the parts that we want: ->> Yeah, I mean depending on your audience, it could be a tool, it could be an explainer, it could be a documentary, and I think it's, you know, it's really important to think about, because we all know this, but it's an important thing about those things, because for those of us who work at sort of national news organizations it's often like America is our audience, but that's impossible. It's crippling, and your story is going to suffer because of it. This has been awesome, thanks for your feedback. ->> Actually I have a question. Did you do this exercise for the border lands thing and I'm just curious what you came up with for who's the audience for that? ->> Yeah, well, we did it for both the back data when we had it and we also did it for Steve Inskeep's radio story, and you know, basically what we decided is that it's -- it's for people who don't live in that area, and we wanted to -- and our mission was to explain that the border is like more a place than a line in the sand, so it's sort of people who don't live there. And again, that's like a huge audience. ->> ->> Coming from a reporting and editing background, it almost feels like it would be really valuable, so like as a reporter, I wouldn't -- I might start off with these questions, but I wouldn't necessarily know what it was I was going to write at this stage. Like going to Chris' point, I would go out and I would be asking these questions and doing interviews so I could come back and have sort of a more informed discussion about how that story gets structured and presented and I think this from that experience you'd have a better sense or your reporters and editors would have a better sense of what's the news or story we have here and which audiences is that going to resonate the most with, and then work from that angle. ->> Yeah. ->> You know, and I know that it has to be sore sort of iterative and you kind of have to be together but some of these questions aren't answerable until the reporting. ->> You're going to get something that's totally not what you thought and you should be able to go that way. ->> and I think in a lot of shops if you go too far down, you'll have others saying but we've already built we've already spent all this time there, and you might get trapped. ->> This is a before you go out in the field, let's talk about it, and then go out in the field, do whatever you have to do, and come back and let's see what you have. Yeah. So ... - - - - +Toward web-native storytelling! +Session facilitator(s): Claire O'Neill, Tyler Fisher +Day & Time: Friday, 11am-12pm +Room: Franklin 1 + +> > Morning, everyone: So this session was originally called "Cool data bro', but what's the story?" and that seemed kind of mean, so I changed it to web storytelling, whatever that means. So I guess we can introduce ourselves first. What we're thinking of doing is we'll introduce ourselves, we'll talk a little bit about our team, and we can sort of talk about a project you did, but then we thought it might be interesting to sort of talk about our design exercise, basically the exercise we do and then break into groups and do that design exercise for a story. + +So who am I? I'm Claire O'Neill, I work at NPR on our visuals team. Yeah, so I've been at NPR for about five years, I started as an intern, at the time the only department doing internet was like, well, we had web producers basically filling out radio stories and then radio team. But so I was there for about five years, and somewhat recently our boss at that department left and Brian Boyer was hired to start a news apps team, and so at that point, our teams merged and so now we're sort of a content team of designers, photo editors, and my role is sort of more of an editor sort of content strategy. + +> > I'm Chris Groskopf. No, I'm Tyler Fisher -- I just started this month and I'm a designer developer on the team. I also started as an intern and was hired, and I, you know, I think a lot of people assume, like because I sort of do news apps development that all I care about is data, and I just want to make charts, but I find what we do at NPR a lot more rewarding because we're telling stories with really inventive amazing visuals and trying to find the best way to tell a story, not just assume that a bar chart will do the job. So I will be in the session to make that a more systemic thing in our field to think about what the story actually is and how it needs to be told. +> > How many people here are on similar teams like that? Yeah, where do you work and how does your team work? +> > I'm an intern right now at FiveThirtyEight, so a lot of our visuals are just charts and line graphs and things like that. We usually have one larger interactive, for example, like the World Cup interactive, and the majority of stories are told using charts. +> > +> > Who else? What about you? +> > I'm at ProPublica, it's like a small news application team, so that's designers and developers and kind of everybody is both a reporter and [inaudible]. +> > Are there any like photo or video editors on your team? +> > There's a new design director. +> > Who else? +> > I'm on the interactive news team at the New York Times, and we it's kind of like we don't have photo and video editors on the team, but we work with the editors that are actually on the separate desks. +> > So how does that work? Say you've got a project you're working on, what's your process? +> > Um, it changes a lot. I can't really speak for every team there, but certainly it would usually sort of end up that we will create a prototype and then show that to the desk and then work with them and then work with our news design team, because the interactive news team is very developer heavy, it doesn't have designers on it, so we then work with designers to make the prototype that we've created into something actually worth using. +> > So I guess the way that Brian, our team leader, describes it is we're sort of like the backup end. We consult reporters who are like our lead singers. Which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Steve Inskeep, who's the host of one of our radio shows, Morning Edition, was going to be spending two weeks on the US-Mexico border, so we had -- we went into the planning meetings and sort of like spitballed a bunch of things, wrote them all down on the wall, asked a bunch of questions: What is the point of this reporting trip? And the thing that we ended up circling at the end is, "What does it feel like to be there?" That's it. And then simultaneously, CIR came to us with a bunch of data about, can you describe like sort of -- +> > Yeah, so actually I don't think I saw the actual map, but so CIR had data basically they'd done one thing where they had basically gone and mapped the entire like fenced border between the US and Mexico, where the US had put up some sort of obstruction between the borders to prevent people from crossing, to prevent livestock from crossing, all these various things, and it's not all that well documented, so they pretty much had to go out and map out where everything was, and also, you know, categorize the different types of fence, because it varied wildly, between, you know, San Diego, and you know, El Paso. + +> > They had very, very different fences. So we wanted to sort of look at -- or they wanted with the map to look at that divide, and that was data-driven way of looking at how this border is constructed, but we also had, you know, Steve Inskeep, there hearing interesting stories, a much more interesting way to tell a story about the border that's more inclusive and much more encompassing. + +> > Before CIR had done that -- I mean this is the most thorough documentation between where there's fence and where there's not, you can drill down to like street view. So we had another brainstorming session, one idea was let's make it an interactive map, we've got a photographer there, let's have them shoot every kind of fence that they encountered along the way. There's like 12 different kinds of fence. Maybe we can have people explore this map and see the differences along the way, so our photographer was there with Steve Inskeep for two weeks. She started -- this is the thing that caught my eye off the bat. She sent this pictures which seemed real -- toothbrushes, which seemed really unusual. All of these objects and artifacts had been left behind. These just seemed like such an interesting way of getting at the people and the sort of humanity behind the story, and so we're like OK, we need to rethink how we're going to do this. So we took over a back room in our office, and basically started storyboarding it almost like a magazine. And well, this is the mobile view. So we've got a series of stories here. One leads to the other. They each work on their own. But together they sort of create this story about what it feels like to be on the border. We also had this data about traffic. + +[Inaudible] [we're having technical difficulties in the room and the captioner can't hear the speaker] + +> > So we had some internal debate about the ordering of these stories. This is what we ended up doing with all of the map data. +> > Can you zoom out a little bit? +> > There we go. Thanks. +> > So it was really interesting talking to the CIR, like Mike Corey who works there, and Matt Stiles was, working on this and hearing them talk about the fence was just so much more interesting than seeing the map. So we were like, OK, let's just sit in a room and talk about all of the fence facts and distill, you know, the most important things we need to know, and then do it in this larger format, and that entire sort of. And this is our attempt to sort of like walk the reader through it, sort of like narrating data, narrating graphics, mirroring the text to the images. There's a million things that don't work about this project, but this is sort of like our first step toward -- I mean you can see this is glorified photo editing, which works in some ways and some doesn't. But it's at least -- it's talking to the data and putting it out in a story. +> > So yeah, I mean ... So yeah, so basically like the idea behind this project is it cribs a little bit from classic photo editing. Basically when we're training people how to edit the photo gallery, we say that there's like five steps to telling visual narrative, we have a wide establishing shot, you're closeup detail, your portrait, your detailed shot and your action shot. And so the idea is that the story. + +> > It's a story about the Ethiopian woman, $15,000 in five years to reach the border. + +ROOM WRANGLER: We're trying to get somebody to turn on the microphone, but it's not likely and we're trying to get the white noise turned off, but that's not likely, either. +SESSION LEADER: Right, so we zoom in on a person, a human who can sort of connect it us to the story and then we have a few detail shots of you knee know, recipes on border and then some action shots, you know, a story in essay proceedings speak about an actual episode that they had border control. Some things were cool about this, some things weren't, but this is sort of our team's first collaborative project together. + +How many people are on the team and what were the roles that they played in helping you build this? + +> > So our team in general or the team that worked on this. +> > For this project in particular. + +> > So that's really interesting. Steve Inskeep is, let's say, the lead reporter. We sort of called him our content specialist, but what was really interesting. He reported 20 stories for the radio, gave us all of his reporting but then sort of stepped back and allowed us to write what we needed for the web and became our editor basically. We went to him and we said, you know, there is we weren't there, tell us what it was like, otherwise we're going to write a few essays about these photos, we're going to write a little story these toothbrushes and do our own reporting on that. Can you edit it? So that's how that works. The only photographer on this was with Steve two weeks straight, shot everything. I worked with designer Wes Endamood (?) +> > Yeah, so after they storyboarded, they came back with sort of an idea to do this sort of slide format. Wes and I worked for I think a week or two, it was just the two of us mostly, working on just making some sort of prototype of the border, not really all the content of how this is going to function from a technical perspective. We went through a bunch of iterations. The first initial thing we did was we were trying to incorporate a way where the stories were stacked vertically and you would scroll through each story and more none vertically for each story. We found that was really difficult to just like wrap your head around where you are. Because you can leave a story and then come back to it and halfway through it, wait, what happened? I don't know where I am. So we found that just putting it all in one long slideshow, even if it felt a little bit like, oh, we're just making a slideshow, but not really, because we're doing so many things with slide on and aspect ratio, and then it got to the became a little more technically challenging. We pulled in who was supposed to be doing the session. +> > We worked on it for a few weeks, had a few iteration views, and I mean what's interesting about this is this only happened because Brian Weir was out of town. Like basically this is what happens when people like myself and the photographer were like let's do all of these things with all of these photos, you guys can build that, right? Which is problematic. I mean this has been a learning experience in sort of learning better what Tyler and Chris could do in a reasonable amount of time, so yeah, I mean I feel like I don't know -- the story of my experience, and NPR and at conferencing, I feel like I'm like forcing my way in. And trying to learn better. +> > So I'm curious about sort of the project management aspect of it. Because you were working with this other team as well as your own reporters, so you were really kind of working with a lot of different people. Did you do weekly meetings? I mean how did you kind of coordinate that all and kind of keep it rolling at the same time with everyone knowing what their tasks were and their deadlines and all of that? +> > SESSION LEADER: Yeah, a lot of meetings. And product management was sort of a coteam. Becky Lettenberger who also was on my multimedia team of photographers and videographers, she doesn't quite know how to product manage data reporters just yet, so they were sort of managing it together, but we would have weekly meetings? +> > Yeah, we had weekly iteration reviews that we meet with everybody on the project, including like Steve Inskeep would come to the meeting and see our progress. Also Brian when he was around would also get involved. So that keeps us in check and plans out and we work for the week and then what we get done, we present it and move on from there. It allows us to you know, pivot when we need to. If something didn't work. OK, let's try this week, see if that works, go down this pathway. Yeah. +> > What was the total time start to finish on it? +> > Let's see. +> > Four weeks, yeah? +> > So in terms of the work flow between producers and writers and videographers, and photographers, how was that set up? +> > Through a spreadsheet. +> > So it was all driven like so you just edit the Google spreadsheets and it loads in. +> > Yeah, so the developing had to -- it's not running live on the spreadsheet, but so every slide is its own row of instruction and -- can we move on to the session? + +> > Yeah, unless there are other questions. I didn't mean to dwell on this so much, but yeah. +> > Why did you choose to do a [inaudible]. +> > Because if we put this into scroll you would be scrolling forward, and also, I think like we thought about it as a magazine and we're kind of focusing on one thing at a time. And we're. +> > So it's a gut level how you want to work the story? +> > Yeah. I mean it was an experiment in sort of like revealing bite-size parts of the story one at a time. What's interesting is the time on site for this was, I think 22 minutes, which is how long it takes to get through the thing. The other that's interesting is there's a little video in the middle, and very few people watched it. And, yeah, I think it cribs a little bit from magazines in that way, but where it's different from magazines is like, so we played with layouts a lot. In this section of portraits, and I feel like this is still a little magaziney in the way that it's laid out but we had these cropped as vertical photos with a quote on the side and that just feels too much like print so we tried a few ways to make this feel more webby and internetty, and this feels a little bit better, but it's still not quite there. +> > So it seems like before Steve and the whole crew went to work on the story, you guys got to work with them before -- so is that how your projects normally run where you get to work with the team before they actually start to take pictures or like write the story? Or you know, or is it like the other way around where they'll come to the story and like hey, we want something made for this. +> > It's a little bit of both, but the tides are changing there a little bit so that we're there at that very beginning brainstorming part of reporting. Which is really important. I think I'm going to do a story on this thing, they'll come to us, and we'll be like that's awesome, that's an incredibly visual story and we should do that with photos or we should do that with a map and then like we'll go into the field with them and we'll collaboratively report it. What was awesome about this is when Steve would edit it. He's a radio reporter, but he had awesome things to stay about how to tell the story and how to pace it and what words to use. So that was really important. +> > In terms of being able to focus on just this piece, are there any other stories going on at the same time that you have to work on or are you just mostly focused on whatever is in front of you. +> > Our team is doing a mix of daily and feature content like this, so for the most part, I was focused on this, but like one of our designers is pumping out maps and graphs every day. +> > I think we smartly divide our work in a way that ally is responsible for the daily requests and if she is overloaded we can put some work on somebody else. But she is the first contact. She can almost always handle the work that comes in. So that allows us to plan at a more macro level. +> > Move on to -- +> > Yeah, so what might be interesting is we'll shut up. So we're going to be working in the next few weeks on a story about homeless veterans. There are, I think, approximately 60,000 in the US. I think about 8% of those are veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. So it might be interesting. I think we should break into groups, but first let's do our design exercise which I do at beginning of every project like this. OK, we're going to do a big project on home less vets, so we have to ask a few questions. The first one who's the audience? ... Second question: What are their needs? In other words, what are the main questions we need to ask and ask answer for our audience and then how do we make it work? So why don't we do the first one as a room and talk about who could be the potential audience for a story about homeless veterans, and then we'll break into smaller groups, each group will have a different audience and you guys will answer the next two questions. So who could be the audience for a story about homeless vets? +> > Other veterans. +> > Policymakers, maybe. +> > Social service workers. Family members. +> > Community members, like local. +> > Yeah, people who pass the homeless vets on the streets every day. +> > Anyone else you'd want to target? +> > Could people who aren't aware of veterans issues, because it's a public issue that they should be aware of, so people who don't know very much about the topic. +> > People who don't know about veterans issues in general? +> > Mm-hm. +> > The homeless folks themselves. +> > +> > Interesting. +> > +> > I have a quick question. Would you typically do this with any type of data or research? Are you trying to answer these questions based on your own assumptions? +> > Say it again? +> > Would you typically back up the answers to these questions, who's the audience and what are their needs with any type of research or data, or are you basing these answers in and the way you approach the project based on your own assumptions and sort of what you think? +> > So like if we like have a set of data, do we then ask these questions? +> > No, do we have data about what homeless veterans, like how they get media? Is that what you're asking? +> > Well, I mean -- +> > Like, how can we get to our audience? What sorts of things are they using that would be -- +> > Yeah, so these are, you know, this is a good list of potential audiences, right? And if we move on to the next question, what are their needs and we start to answer that, just out of our brain skulls, we are making wild assumptions, right? +> > Yes. +> > Those might be right or wrong occasionally, but we're not potentially actually learning anything that's going to help us make a better project. It's maybe going to help us brainstorm, but it's potentially dangerous assumptions if it's not backed up by any kind of research or data. +> > Well, let's go down there. Let's do an example. So let's say we want to talk to people who don't really know about veterans issues. +> > OK. +> > So what are their needs? +> > We don't know. We need to talk to them: +> > But then if you took and said what do you need to know about veterans issues? They're not going to know, so it's -- it's difficult, right? I mean you -- +> > What are the needs is probably the kind of the wrong way of saying it, but it's like what do they need to know. +> > Yeah, they'll need more context. +> > a degree of awareness there's a problem, right, like some statistics that set up a scene. +> > I see what you're getting at, like is this a backwards way of doing it. +> > Is the answer to who's the audience ever like let's look at demographic information of who lives in the center of Peoria? +> > It's just is sort of the ethnographic research, the early stage interviewing about with users, about their actual needs and understanding, those sorts of things. Are typically put on the wayside, and we do this sort of work in the abstract and then we move to start making things and then we sort of measure -- do qualitative research while we're doing user testing and stuff like that, but potentially we made the wrong thing because we didn't really understand what our users needed or wanted. +> > So what would be a better way of doing it? +> > Well, I mean you might -- you probably wouldn't do that at a project level, right, for something like this that you have to turn around in a he can week you're not going to be able to put together a fly on the wall investigations of user needs of very specific sets, but I think there is probably organizational level and brand level work that you can do on that, that you can start each project with. +> > Yeah, I mean NPR has a wide swath of data and statistics on NPR.org users, how they're coming to our content, what they're looking for, statistics about them. I've been actually pretty impressed by the service that kind of handles that for us. That's something that we always have at the back of our heads, like who's coming to NPR.org and I think that helps us when picking whether to do stories at all. +> > I feel like in a way this is very similar process to how reporters will craft stories, right? So part of it's intuitive, part of it is built from experience and kind of knowing what stories resonate and how that story gets put together, because data is great and it can inform a lot of things, but there's also a way of kind of telling people something that will grab their interest, you kind of have to surprise them, you have to do something they don't expect, so they're not going to feed you the exact information you need to build that. +> > Well, you wouldn't expect that in a human centered design process, either? Right? You wouldn't be able to expect people to tell you the thing that they don't know that you would make, right? The data is about informing your next step and whether it be qualitative or quantitative data, right? I'm not saying we need heavy demographics. +> > Yeah, I think if the time is there and the right opportunity is there, learning about your audience before you start is invaluable, but I think when we're doing two-week projects, this is as close as we can get this. Exercise for us is as close. It serves as a design constraint for us so we don't get feature crazy. We're thinking about this audience, let's think about what we can build for them instead of building for everybody. +> > It's part design exercise and part storyboarding exercise. For me what's helpful about this, is it puts a person in my head like a person, OK, I have to explain this to my uncle Joe, so how do I do that? So it's less like, you know, -- it's just an exercise, yeah, but I think that's -- you're raising an interesting point. +> > But maybe it's worth continuing down this rabbit hole, like let's try it. So why don't we listen -- let's do this for ten minutes: +> > I had a question about the process. +> > So you -- do you narrow it down from there or -- [inaudible] +> > Yeah, yeah. +> > So the next part of this is we can probably use it by table, right? So by table you're going to get one of these audience groups and you're going to decide whether what you need to make a story about this. And this is a story about homeless veterans. +> > Yeah, so let's say this is a story about homeless veterans, you have to relay information to a specific audience. You have access to any dataset that's relevant, and you also have a photographer and a reporter. Just to give some context, I was in San Diego last weekend at an event called stand down where San Diego VA brings veterans in off the street, convenience them up and we did a lot of portraits. OK, so you guys want to join forces. +> > Let's say Group 1, you're talking to homeless vets. +> > You look pained. +> > Homeless vets don't have devices. +> > Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. +> > Group 2, other veterans. Group 3, family members. Group 4, let's do policymakers, group 5, people in the community and group 6, people who don't know about vets at all. +> > I don't think there's a group 6. I think we're 5, yeah ... ... +> > [group activity] + +SESSION LEADER: So, what do you guys think? + +> > We figured it all out, so it totally works. +> > SESSION LEADER: Is there value in doing it this way? +> > I think so. Even for us on number one, we're doing homeless vets, and so I don't think any of us have any like direct, you know, exposure to what that experience is like, and so trying to understand what that is, we made a bunch of assumptions, came up with a bunch much ideas and tried to be thoughtful a about what that would be, but I think it would be like super difficult. +> > We don't really know what the problem is because we don't have that experience. +> > It seems like there might have to be some interaction with other parts of organization, like marketing, maybe in a sense of like where who's the audience those things intersect with the actual demographics of your visitors are, you make this thing for homeless vets, we sort of assume, OK, they're going to the library to look at this. How do we know that they know about the NPR website to go to the library to go and look at it. +> > +> > And I think when we do this exercise, we will probably not do homeless vets. I imagine we will do something else. +> > SESSION LEADER: That's interesting that you guys say that you don't know the experience. You need to talk to folks, right. +> > It's a really hard problem, it made us step way outside the box in terms of our experience. +> > Yeah, I think it might also give us some questions to ask. +> > Yeah, yeah. +> > [inaudible] +> > SESSION LEADER: Anyone else? +> > I think the tricky part is probably what comes next, because you're not making five separate interactives, it's when you're going to be thinking about all of these different audiences and then you try to find the intersections of what works for more than one of them. And there probably is plenty of crossover. +> > Did anybody start thinking about like what you would actually make? +> > We did. We thought about like, you know, like the last thing we were talking about is you all have that project about playgrounds, it's actually an ongoing resource and it's updated from time to time and it's nor homeless vets. Potentially part of this story will be like services and local charity and whatever, and making sure those are like making a resource for them that's updated and we were trying to figure out like how they would be accessing this, that it would be running to libraries, and that probably means [inaudible] +> > Yeah, I think that's like a really good example of, you know, that group was given a really diffuse case, something we probably wouldn't pick. It's like we're going to build a story about homeless vets for homeless vets and homeless vets don't have computers. So we're making a thing on computers for people who don't have computers. But then you start thinking about what they really need and they need something that helps them. Not just tells a story, but helps them and I don't think if you just approach a story like hey, please send a photographer out to help us get homeless data, you would never come to that conclusion without doing this exercise, I don't think. Anybody else? You guys said you -- +> > So our audience was other vets, so we thought it was not just about -- : [inaudible] generally older male, may also run internet explorer, so we started thinking about story design and that should be linear and minimal interaction, maybe not as many opportunities to get lost in data, but maybe guide them through so they understand the parts that we want: +> > Yeah, I mean depending on your audience, it could be a tool, it could be an explainer, it could be a documentary, and I think it's, you know, it's really important to think about, because we all know this, but it's an important thing about those things, because for those of us who work at sort of national news organizations it's often like America is our audience, but that's impossible. It's crippling, and your story is going to suffer because of it. This has been awesome, thanks for your feedback. +> > Actually I have a question. Did you do this exercise for the border lands thing and I'm just curious what you came up with for who's the audience for that? +> > Yeah, well, we did it for both the back data when we had it and we also did it for Steve Inskeep's radio story, and you know, basically what we decided is that it's -- it's for people who don't live in that area, and we wanted to -- and our mission was to explain that the border is like more a place than a line in the sand, so it's sort of people who don't live there. And again, that's like a huge audience. +> > +> > Coming from a reporting and editing background, it almost feels like it would be really valuable, so like as a reporter, I wouldn't -- I might start off with these questions, but I wouldn't necessarily know what it was I was going to write at this stage. Like going to Chris' point, I would go out and I would be asking these questions and doing interviews so I could come back and have sort of a more informed discussion about how that story gets structured and presented and I think this from that experience you'd have a better sense or your reporters and editors would have a better sense of what's the news or story we have here and which audiences is that going to resonate the most with, and then work from that angle. +> > Yeah. +> > You know, and I know that it has to be sore sort of iterative and you kind of have to be together but some of these questions aren't answerable until the reporting. +> > You're going to get something that's totally not what you thought and you should be able to go that way. +> > and I think in a lot of shops if you go too far down, you'll have others saying but we've already built we've already spent all this time there, and you might get trapped. +> > This is a before you go out in the field, let's talk about it, and then go out in the field, do whatever you have to do, and come back and let's see what you have. Yeah. So ... diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_22_Exoskeletons_for_Reporters.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_22_Exoskeletons_for_Reporters.md index a3849456..ce292380 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_22_Exoskeletons_for_Reporters.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_22_Exoskeletons_for_Reporters.md @@ -1,701 +1,683 @@ -Building Exoskeletons for Reporters -Session facilitator(s): Jeremy Bowers, Aaron Williams -Day & Time: Friday, 11am-1:30pm -Room: Haas - ->> We're going to wait a handful of more minutes and then we'll -start. Continue to talk amongst yourselves. We're giving them 3 -minutes. ->> Three minutes? Okay. ->> To let people straggle. ->> We're just waiting for Aman to show up. ->> Hello. I'm Aaron Williams. ->> I'm Jeremy Bowers of The New York Times. ->> We are going to try to talk about exoskeletons for two hours. -Just to let you know as far as how the session is broken up. The -first half we're going to explain the idea and do collaborative -talking about what an exoskeleton is and in the second half we're -going speck out an exoskeleton. So if you want to go to another -session that is fine. -In the beginning we want to talk about reporting and the -reporting process. Anybody in here been a field reporter? ->> Yes. ->> Anybody write stories? Written a story? Good. This makes me -happier. I'm fascinated by beat reporters. If I were to do that sort -of thing I would be excited that newspapers have this great pool of -people who are subject matter experts who are very, very good at -something. The unfortunate part is they're very, very bad at other -things. Somebody who is a night cop's reporter is not supergood at -Twitter or good at working on the CMS or marking up their stories so -they look nice on the web. -So the thing that occurred to me is that as technologists our job -is to build exoskeletons for our reports. An exoskeleton is -fascinating because all it does is what you do. If you're a reporter -who reads the crime blogger or spends time at the supreme court, you -need a piece of software that works with you and your behaviors. That -is why an exoskeleton is interesting. It's not a robot. It doesn't -work without you. It takes your behaviors and the things you do and -enhances them. It's not like an airplane. You do your normal -behavior and it automatically makes that stuff better. If you jump, -an exoskeleton makes you jump higher. If you lift things, an -exoskeleton makes you lift heavier things. It's a metaphor. It makes -us technology people think more carefully about who people are who are -going to use our stuff and how we should interact with them. That is -to say, very lightly. -At the very bottom the fundamental metaphor that I want to talk -about today is what are the behaviors that a reporter engages? Where -we can enhance them? Where we can make the things they're already -doing a little better or stronger? And, so, like, think about -reporters who write about warfare. They have to write in anecdotal -terms. A single instance of a bomb going off in an area but it's hard -for them to write in broad terms about this. The New York Times has -this problem. That was a strike in Yemen that killed 55 people and - - - - -The New York Times wrote the story and said it was the largest number -of casualties in several months. And that is wrong. It was the -largest number of casualties probably ever. They couldn't say that -because they don't know. The reporters only write these anecdotally -and nobody has the number of strikes and the people that died in them. -There are people that try to keep these statistics. The New America -Foundation keeps a handful but they're not always trusted sources and -they're not as fast as we would be. They work on a two or three-week -lag. This is one of those cases where a reporter is only able to do -their job anecdotally. Unable to do it with any broad understanding -of the subject area and that is frustrating to me. -The part that is very frustrating, it's not like reporters are -bad. They're very good. They're good about getting the White House -on the record. They have administrative sources. It's not their -obligation to go an extra mile and invent new structure data systems -for themselves to report. Because it's an opportunity cost. They -would have to stop doing some other things they're very good at and -maybe start doing this other thing they're bad at. This is our -thought experiment for the day. The arts and crafts portion of this -we're going to design exoskeletons for certain beats and break you -guys up into teams and give you scenarios and come up with what an -exoskeleton would look like for that. -In the short run I would like to go around and hear what you're -doing here and what things you do every day that you could conceivably -automate or someone that you know who needs something automated. -We'll start with Chris. ->> I was just thinking about what somebody might need. I'm Chris -Keller. I work in Los Angeles. Started out as a sport's writer. -Now, education mostly. We deal with the Los Angeles school districts. -Behind New York it's probably the second largest school district in -the country. Test scores have stopped coming, every year the test -scores and student performance come out, the report goes through, and -line by line checks to see what all the schools are doing. It should -be easy to structure that year after year and plug it into something -and have a set of queries that generate reports. That is once a year -or twice a year but it will save a lot of time. You're asking the -same question about every single school. ->> I'm a reporter for the Atlantic. There's a lot actually. -Without getting into like a library of babbles, let's keep track of -everything problem. Major staffing changes between large firms. -Internal statistics that get released intermittently and you have to -Google for how many monthly active users did it happen to as opposed -to the last time they announced it which would have been from 3 to 18 -months ago. Is it measuring the same thing. To basic financial data -which is hard to ad hoc kind of wrangle and compare across firms. -So there's a lot of stuff that ranges. I thought about things in -the past and can't think of them now. But many things. I find myself -wishing that there was something more powerful than a Wiki (ph.). -That might be more quantitative often. ->> My name is Fergus. Recently finished researching the census - - - - -in the context of journalism. One of the things -- I know this is -being not necessarily entirely worked on, doing things like just going -to all the cities that have this shops systems installed and following -up on the data. ->> Automation of the public records request. Following up on -data. ->> The interactions and the follow ups and knowing when -- -commissions this system. Knowing that vendor X gets to spend ... Oh, -they're going to install this system and we want to get that data on -that, for example. ->> I will be working at the Chronical of Higher Education. I -think kind of going off what he said, I think like using some type of -automation especially for the type of surveys, like the Chronical of -Higher Education sends out surveys to collect the data they have. -Again, I haven't started there yet. I'm starting on Monday. I think -it would be really helpful if you could automate sending out those -surveys and having people fill out the fields and actually submit it. -That would be ideal. I think that would be helpful. ->> Armand at the Los Angeles Times. I came into journalism -through international development and photography and video. Part of -it is building research and analytical tools for reporters. Like, -here's a database of arrests made by LAPD or some of the things that -Chris was talking about. And we like robots and part of the solution -to that is more robots. With beat reporters there are so many stories -and they spend so much time doing grinding bullshit reports. Like the -housing reporter, every month there is a housing report. It's the -same thing every month. There is a bubble, not a bubble, it's not as -big as we thought it was. Being able to automate that stuff away and -freeing up the reporters to go deeper, dig deeper, do more enterprise -stuff. Abstracting away a lot of the grind. ->> I'm Misty, I work for IBT Media. I'm a designer there. I've -been working on some projects that are templated. I thought this -would be a good session to come to because sometimes we're working on -bigger projects that are maybe more involved but the reports would -need smaller templates they could be using. I feel like the more that -I've been tacking to reporters the more I get ideas of what they do -need. ->> When you say templates, you mean templates for ... ->> When I say templates, a landing page, specific tables they can -put the data in. It's always going to be the same. It's just -updating it. Trying to figure out what they need and how I can help -make that happen. ->> I'm Al. I work at ProPublica. I have two ideas. One is -campaign finance. There is a ton of data in there for many agents -that reporters use all the time. And find sums and donors and find -recipients, consultants that campaigns are hiring and committees are -hiring. A lot of times those numbers are not added together, not -compiled. You have to do a lot of work to find how they combine and -find conclusions in them. Find new groups flying under the radar or -operating in a session of the tax code they shouldn't be operating in. - - - - -A tool for combining a lot of stuff together would be useful. ->> I'm Jason. I'm at VOX. The newsroom is very new to me but -I'm fascinated to be here. I'm really interested in automating I -guess sort of like ambient environmental data around where reporters -are and what they're doing. The writing and what were the conditions -around where they were writing. I think that information is useful -for the companies and that can be really interesting to put out into -the world in other forms. ->> Tracking when a reporter goes out. ->> Like the time and weather and everything around them that -could be sucked in. ->> Awesome. ->> David, I'm also newly at VOX. And just generally recently but -specifically in the last day I've been thinking about how reporting -down to the most granular level can be attached to specific bits of -content and particles. So research that flows through the reporting -stream. So if one article is used for a source as another article, as -we build that, as we build that reporting over time, being able to -track it back to the original source and pull out information from -- -if the original source changes or becomes unreliable how is the rest -of the reporting tainted throughout the series of papers. It's like -an interesting open data problem behind that in my head that I'm still -working through. ->> I'm Matt Perry. I work at Automatic. I'm not a reporter. -I'm not sure I have a specific idea. I think I'm going to pass on -that but these are all inspiring. In the past I've done work with -assembling, allowing reporters to assemble groups of reporters on -Twitter and monitor the experts automatically to sort of provide early -warning on the content. That is something I can go back to. But I -don't have a specific idea for today. ->> That sounds cool. ->> That's a pretty good "not" idea. ->> I'm mostly really into structured data. I don't report -specifically. I'm interested to know what kind of tools are discussed -and brought up in this conversation and if there is additional overlap -between those tools and maybe some of the things that might make good -exoskeletons for beat reporters make good exoskeletons for other -people. Because exoskeletons are awesome. ->> Allison, I'm at FiveThirtyEight. The big thing we've been trying to -figure out is working with our parent company to free data from video. -They have tons of good stuff but it's not cataloged or just a giant -... Video that has no things happen at certain points in time. ->> My name is Matt with The New York Times R and D lab. -Interested in two separate pieces as it relates to exoskeletons. -First is the possibility to extract structured data from reporters as -they're writing or reporting. Couple people have mentioned in -different stories where reporters have data they're building that -story off, there are ways to capture that at that time without adding -additional work flow to their lives and use it later on. -On a different tangent sort of in a literal way thinking of - - - - -exoskeletons as wearable technology that might enhance a reporter's -experience. Everything from a device that is recording audio and can -capture that gap the moment it's said and push it somewhere or is -taking photos or measuring ambient environment and situations and -figuring out how that ties back to the story. Different ways the -reporter can enhance their own capabilities of capture and awareness. ->> I'm at The New York Times R and D lab and Matt said the things -I was going to say. -But I mean specifically I've been thinking a lot about how we -move structured data, capture upstream into the reporting process. -There seems to be something really broken about the fact that we do -all that and retrospectively after an article has been written and -edited and we're doing it in many ways like computationally as if we -didn't have all these human beings in the newsroom that knew this -useful information about what they're writing. So trying to think -about ways that that kind of structured data could be -- could support -reporters in their process and also make their reporting more reusable -and flexible after it's been published. ->> I'm Daniel, currently between jobs and I don't have a really -good answer. I'm lurking for ideas. ->> I'm Adam. I walked in late. Sorry. I'm assuming what you've -asked is why I'm here and what I'm interested in. ->> What are you going to build? ->> We've been focusing a lot on the publishing side of -technology. I work for a network nonprofit organization. So I'm kind -of very interested in the non-CMS, non-publishing things and how to -- -we can better enable basically any reporter to do their jobs, kind of -like better. What needs built. What tools do -- should we build? ->> Well, from like a dev standpoint using an automation tool. -That is my exoskeleton, I guess. ->> Using pass runners and various tools. Automation to -development. ->> Yes. ->> It's good to capture a bunch of your ideas. These are going -to be the bits that influence us when we do our arts and crafts time -in a little bit. -Before we do arts and crafts I think we should talk about cases -where we're doing exoskeleton stuff in our newsrooms. Maybe poorly -but maybe well. So there's some examples in the ether pad if you want -to pull that up if you have working wifi? ->> Is there a link to the ether pad. ->> Yes. It's at the top. ->> Go to shoutkey.com/haywire. That's the link to it. -St easier than typing a bunch of letters. ->> There you go. That thing. ->> So there are some beats where this completely makes sense and -Al you can tell Scott I used his quote. He has a quote that makes me -happy. He says something like every beat that a journalist can do any -more involves structured data. It may not look like structured data -but it probably is. Crime, finance, education, sports, almost all of - - - - -these things involve real relationships between people and space. And -when we write stories we turn it into something anecdotal. If you're -not good at structured data on your beat you're going to get scooped -by one who is. -Someone who is much better at analyzing structured data than you -are. This makes sense if you're a night cop's reporter and you didn't -go to the crime log or the courthouse and get the crime log before you -left, you're going to get scooped by the person that did do that and -find out the star quarterback got arrested over night and failed an -alcohol test. You don't want to be the person losing out on stories -because you can't fire up your excel. -These beats make sense. But there are other places that we can -do better. Like politics. Tracking things that people say and hold -them accountable for it. A great idea of this is a local community -passes an ordnance to allow a gambling or something to show up in -their town. Every person has a quote about how many millions of -dollars this raises for the local economy and a year later we can find -out if it was true. This is structured data. You said it, there was -an effect and we can look back over time and see if you're correct. -It's one of the requirements of maybe our exoskeleton should do, -is aggregate public statements by officials. -There are other things that computers can do that we're bad at -which is seeing minute differences between things. A lot of these -things you mentioned. Finance, staffing changes, arrests, campaign -finance, these are the kinds of things where the numbers are very -large or happen very often. The result is it's hard for us to tell -the difference between things. -If a company's stock price increases slightly over time, the -number of people mentioned in a report decreases by two. You may not -notice it. There may not be a chief financial officer listed or you -may not notice arrests have been slightly increasing in a certain -neighborhood. Computers are good at noticing the difference between -things and we're bad at it as people. That is case where the -exoskeletons can do a little bit of work that we don't do nearly as -well. Highlight something that may maybe we don't see happening. -There are reporters that do this well but unfortunately have -stopped using tools. We have a guy at The New York Times, CJ Chivers. -He goes to war zones. Where there is conflict and something bad -happening and takes pictures of land mines and shell casings and tanks -and whatever he sees. He puts it on a Tumblr and Instagram. We don't -have something for him to put all of these weapons that he's been -looking at into. CJ knows in his mind that in Afghanistan there are -Soviet aero weapons systems that are upgraded to slightly newer -weapons. She has seen new shell casings and land mines that are post -cold war. All he can do is write a story or take a photo and put it -on Instagram. He doesn't have a way to demonstrate, I know there are -new weapons in Afghanistan. -This is unfortunate because Instagram never creates a drop-down -for CJ to allow him to pick the correct decade for a weapon that he -noticed. That is not in their core. It's nothing they would want to - - - - -do. But it's something that we might want to do for CJ. He knows -it's getting sloughed away when he does his reporting process. Thank -god he is taking the photos. We can go back over time and we can go -back and maybe add those things on. It's unfortunate that's something -we have to do retrospectively. It would be nice if our reporters had -something nicer. The equivalent of the big robotic arm to move up and -down. -Now that we have some of your ideas and we have a little better -understanding, I'd like to break into groups and start talking about -what to build. We're not going to talk about working code. We're -going to speck them. We're going to put those on GitHub for people in -the case that someone would like to build one. We'll have a list of -specification. There are a handful of questions that we want you to -answer. What behavior does a reporter engage in when they do certain -types of things. How would software need to interact with a reporter -in that case. What kinds of things would the software accumulate. -Would someone actually use it. -And we're going to allow you guys to judge the work that other -people are doing. ->> Is this limited to software? ->> No. Not limited to software. I'm glad that someone said -that. This is also within your purview. We have news organizations -and we have cell phones and sensors and things like that. If there -are ways to extend a reporter's reach, literally, then maybe that's -one of the things that we should include. So has it been -- we're -going to take like 10 minutes or something like that and let you get -water and go to the bathroom and we're going to prep the bits so you -can do your arts and crafts. -When you come back that is what we're going to do. We're going -to start with scenarios and work on these individual ones, too. Take -ten minutes. We'll see you in a minute. - - - - ->> We're going to start a little bit of arts and crafts now, I -think. -You guys are fantastic and came up with an infinity of very good -ideas. Rather than just let you say your ideas out loud we're going -to make you build something out of them. We have four questions that -we want you to answer basically when you spec out this exoskeleton -that you would build. -The four questions are what behaviors does your reporter engage -in? What does the person do, the motor functions you'll extend. -Two, how do you interact with the reporter. What bits will the -software of exoskeleton attach. -The third one, what are the capacities that you choose to enhance -in your reporter? What things that your reporter does that you have -decided to make better? -And what capacities have you decided not to enhance? What things -does the reporter do that you think should not be mechanized. -Build out what your exoskeleton would look like. Be artsy. -We're going to go into group of three. If you want to self-associate - - - - -that is fine. Let's get handfuls of two or three together on a team -and grab the green bits off the wall and grab the project you want to -build or two and get to building? ->> Can we do one of the examples that you have there? ->> Yes. We also have horrible examples that we're going to use -for discussion. You can use those. One is high school sports. Night -cops. Local politics. Southern California immigration. Et cetera. ->> As far as the technology, I mean sky is the limit. It's not -like you have to write our speck is this scraper in Python. Keep it -abstract unless you think that's what you want to use. If that's the -case, run with it. I'm not going to stop you. -Be creative. ->> I'm putting Sharpies and green paper up here. There is green -paper in the back and we have large sheets of this kind of paper. -Feel free to clear off your tables and get to work. - - - - -(group work). -... . ->> We have about 15 minutes left of the specking and talking and -after that we're going to do five-minute presentations. This is a 15 -minute warning. - - - - ->> All right. Time to get you guys to present. How do you want -to do this? Who wants to go first? -Great. Okay. You guys in the back. ->> What is your team name? ->> Oh god. ->> I think Spidey. We were looking at literal exoskeletons and -the problem that we're identifying is that reporters and photographers -in conflict areas need rapid realtime feed back about what is -happening around them. And in additionally that needs to be -inconspicuous. You can't wear a Google glass in a war zone. It needs -to be hands free ideally. If you're taking photos you can't take out -your phone. -We're proposing a haptic belt. The way this works, it's a belt -that has 8 vibrating motors embedded in it and it's connected to the -reporter's phone which then talks to a system at the news -organization's home office. This is a paired exercise. There is a -colleague who is at the news organization who is monitoring things -like realtime satellite feeds or wire services or Twitter feeds, -et cetera. -And basically has a map interface upon which they can drop -markers that then communicate back to the reporter's phone and -transmit vibrations to the belt. The vibrations happen in three -dimensions. The first is distance. So the intensity of the vibration -corresponds to how far away something is happening. -Directionality. Which motors vibrate correspond to where. If -it's in front of you, the ones in front vibrate. If it's in the back -the ones in the back vibrate. There are two vibration. A pulsing -vibration. Something interesting is happening over here you want to - - - - -go there to get the scoop. Or a sustained vibration, there is danger -there, get away from that. -Am I missing anything? I think that is about it. -There is also a button to dismiss the alert. It can be I got the -alert, fine. But if you leave it on it's a way to find what is -interesting. It can continue to vibrate so I know if I'm going in the -right direction. That's it? ->> Sweet. That is awesome ...(applause)... ->> Who wants to go next or who doesn't want to go next? ->> I'll talk. We don't have any drawings or show and tell. If -you scroll down to the bottom of the ether pad you can follow. We -talked about covering immigration in southern California. Some of -this extends to other areas. Finding the balance about available -structured data with unstructured anecdotal data with a reporter who -is well sourced and talks on the record about these things. -There is plenty of structured data out there, you can automate -that via records request or computationally. Legislation at the -local, state, and federal records. Court records, law enforcement, -the coast guard. Demographic data. Port records, education records. -The anecdotal evidence, the stuff that you talk face to face and -communicate with the people going across the border crossing and those -who help them could be structured or semi-structured. We looked at -known immigration routes if those things exist or crossing patterns -and trying to come up with ways to track the geography. -The different way points. Where the cities are. The people that -help them there. And the goal connecting to the structured data to -view over time education patterns, crime patterns in those area, -employment patterns, demographic information. -Satellite or drone images from these places. From an overview or -from a ground level with access to safe houses if you will or other -areas to help these folks make their way into the United States. -When you have that anecdotal stuff and the structured data you -can connect it and analyze it more quickly if you had all this -anecdotal stuff in notebooks and going back and researching and -connecting the dots that way. -Matt talked about his idea to pull up structured data from text. -There is some application there. The other aspect is building a -database of volunteer translators who might be able to help. And -Armand wants to build a exoskeleton that is C3PO but on your list but -able to communicate with people in 3 million languages. If it's an -iPhone app and you talk into your phone and ask somebody to put on -head phones and talk to them in any number of languages, it's -interesting the know how far we are away from something like that? ->> In the spirit of the hitchhiker's guide it should be a small -fish. Who wants to go next ... ...(applause)... yes. -Okay. What is your team? ->> Layered maps. ->> We talked about creating an exoskeleton for a reporter to find -human sources within certain geographic zones. So for example after a -disaster helping reporters find sources that were most affected by the - - - - -disaster. Basing this off something we did last year at Republica. -We looked at flood zones that FEMA already created versus where -hurricane sandy flooded and cross references that with the actual -disaster declarations for each -- sorry, the disaster findings for -each household. And printing out a map and having a reporter knock on -doors and find out what happened to you. Did this affect you. That -worked really, really well. That could be a tool where we can up load -as many maps in advance that we can and Crete zones to reporters can -print them out or get them on their phone and go out and find people -most affected. ->> The idea is reports would find a lot of sources immediately if -they knew who to connect on a specific block if they had the overlay -of a map in their hand. ->> For example you worked in the highest level of flood warning -but your house got flooded any way. That is the specific person you -want to talk to. It's abstractable. Zone A and zone B, the tool, -simply overlays zones and identifies spots. ->> And we also want to add a census overlay. Are people being -affected in the same socioeconomic level, demographics, race, how do -disasters affect those people. ->> It has applications for entertainment reporting. Overlaying -maps of things going on in Hollywood. We can see various reporters -wanting to use this data. ->> TMZ. ->> If you scroll to our entry ... I don't know if it's up or -down. ->> I think it's up. ->> Where is it at? ->> Scroll down. It's below the immigration one. -Go down more. ->> CL dot LOI link. This is the thing we did last year. We -found flood zones that were predicting where hurricanes would hit New -York and where sandy actually flooded and all of those building shapes -are buildings that FEMA had determined had been damaged. So we -printed this out and went out to those individual blocks and found -people that did not think their house would flood and their house -flooded. ->> The blue is where they said it would flood. The brown is -where it flooded. The building shapes are buildings that were -actually damaged. So those were the individual blocks that we sent -reporters out to do talk to people. ->> The blue is where they thought it would flood specifically for -sandy. ->> Where FEMA said it would flood. ->> Most people don't buy flood insurance. ->> Something like this but abstractable. -...(applause)... go team maps? ->> I feel like you waited so long. This team was done after like -7 minutes. So they are ready. Do you guys want to show off? ->> So this is a relatively kind of small contained problem that - - - - -has a lot of work maybe to solve it. The problem space is that what a -reporter is trying to do is find all the cities that have paid a -particular contractor. The behavior that the reporter does is looking -for public spending on company X in many places. So basically this is -a tool that automates going through public records and finding -- -shops (inaudible) system has gotten $200,000 from this city. The -reporter would simply go to probably something as simple as a web form -and say, this is the company that I'm looking for. These are the -cities that I'm interested in. -It's essentially a script, the work would be in modeling each -different city's publishing system and the construct of their website -and whatnot. Obviously you're going to run into -- ideally -- I think -the best organization to build this is something like a peak -organization that can source it, source all those models. Oakland, I -contribute the publishing model for Oakland. Nashville. I do it for -Nashville. There is a fair bit of work maintaining those models. -Some small towns I'm not going to publish their data in which case you -can either generate a form e-mail that a reporter can check and then -send off to the public records people or the name of a local reporter -who can go and you can contract the work out to or a task revenue if -you're in one of those kinds of cities. -So the parts of the reporters process it enhances is seeing a -change, repeat a process, remember what the process was across cities. -Make your process transparent and then also be able to share your -process with other people. We're obviously ignoring people's ability -to get bored because it's a dull process. We're not building in -analysis. We have a beautiful illustration of it down in the -left-hand corner. -That is it. It's kind of simply a problem with a simple tool to -use but with a lot of functionality and complexity under the hood. -...(applause)... ->> Sweet. All right. Team other table. ->> I don't know if you have every used Fred, the St. Louis Freds -storehouse of all things data. It's great if you want to see the -adults working in the population over time. If you're a reporter -working as much on a municipal beat and covering a limited number of -institutions where there is a limited number of data that isn't as -prevalent you don't have an option like that. -The idea is personal Fred or Freddy. Which does not take the -form of like a reporter's note pad. I see you're writing an -acquisition story, but which could. It's a desktop based tool for -reporters who are tracking between 5 and 25 institutions. It would -follow primarily a list of like a feed of press releases and look at -them by schema. So certain press releases you can basically tell -they're acquisition. Certain releases you can tell they're personnel -changes. Ones you can tell are there for a quarterly report and they -have monthly active users. It differs by institution but it's -reported across quarterly reports if they're a public institution. -Also if they're a media company you get rare glimpses into their -internal analytics, usually in like a break out time story but have no - - - - -other way of tracking that. The New Yorker.com got two million -uniques in April. The last time that number was reported was like -February 2011. It's good to have these in one place. -So at the end of the day the system would track all these various -press releases. At the end of the day it would give you a list of -bullet points in plain text of Facebook but start of X for Y million -dollars. You add it to you thing and have a time line for each of -these institutions of the certain number of variables you were looking -for. And then depending on what that variable was, would be able to -graph it in certain predictable and standardized ways. -It's not part of a larger institutional response and I think part -of the nugget behind the idea is it's aimed at reporters who are in -places which don't have these great data teams to back them up/who can -do a brew install. And maybe that's what they can do. So you can -guide them through that. But then after that things would be, if they -could give you an RSSV to point the tool at, then the system would -largely be able to kind of track and maintain itself with limited -help. -So personal Fred. -...(applause)... ->> All right. And last and certainly least, Ryan Murphy. On -team breaking news. ->> We were working on the breaking news one and kind of wanted to -address -- there is the common situation where producers, editors, and -reporters are in a breaking news situation collecting facts, reaching -out to sources. A lot of times they're in a hazy in between. Some -stuff is hearsay and some is from a source that you're iffy about. -And finding a way to collect all that together so it's not just a -something that is being spewed into a word doc and getting e-mailed -around and not really kept in a central location. -This is kind of meant for very much discreet situation, things -happening for a period of time and will end. The war in Syria. Not -going to do it for that. It's very much a thing that is covering a -long span of time. But this is for school shootings or a plane crash -or things like that. -It's inspired -- do you want me to explain MACAW quick? ->> It's a language in the Pacific Northwest called MACAW and the -verbs are built with evident eventually do something. If you saw -someone do something versus you heard it or saw it from a distance -that all changes the verb tense. We thought it would be great to have -eventuality built in. Like a green, yellow red. Very true, kind of -true, super-not true and how will you indicate those people since we -can't use verb texts. ->> Turning to some of the questions, like there is always this -situation of wanting to know how true is the statement and how to keep -track of it and deliver it to reporters. And then getting alerts you -may be pushing out or updates to stores you're trying to do. -In this situation what we're looking at doing is moving away from -keeping track of it in word docs and e-mails but a web form to keep -track of this stuff that everyone in the newsroom is able to see and - - - - -contribute to and view as it's updated and changes. -Being able to keep track of how confident we are of the source. -How many times has a fact been confirmed and we feel confident about -it. Sending out e-mails to staff or reporters and anyone you think -you're collaborating with one click. Alerts through mobile or -anything like that to obviously can be expanded to -- to your users at -the end of the day. -Being able to see after the fact, after the event happened what -facts came through, which ones are we sure about, which not. Generate -a report of that covering of that event. For the next day's story you -have a nice fact sheet and something to start with there. -Capacities to enhance. So in this situation it's moving -everything centrally located. And making it easier to make those -updates to that fact sheet and being able to track the differences -over time as things change, as more information is found or -information is discredited or found by other people. And being able -to aggregate all the sources in one place which is useful for working -on the story. -Things we're taking a pass on. This service is not meant to -handle the process of confirming a fact. We put it as we're not going -to build TRELLO into this. You're not making phone calls from this -web service. It's not going to FOIA machine keeping track of e-mails -you're sending out and formulating responses. It's up to the -reporters to make messages they're good with. Not going to do any -automated thresholds. You have enough people saying yes to this fact, -it's not going to say good to go. It's not going to take the control -away from the humans involved because a lot of that is going to be a -judgment call. -This is not meant to be a website or a CMS extension to publish -stories out of. It's very much focused on being a tool that helps you -pull these things together and then you take this information to the -places where you normally do that. Yeah? ->> Do you have a screen shot of the one that we developed for -NPR. I would love to show the room that. ->> We will find it today. ->> I mean it's just, we developed a prototype for something like -this and the idea -- it was like this but each fact was a card that -could live anywhere. NPR verified this fact and that fact could live -on The New York Times website as a discreet unit. And I really liked -that part of it. It made it so facts could travel around and they -were verified by somebody on staff. ->> And that prototype is available to affiliates. ->> We developed it with an API so we can feed this to affiliates -so during breaking news we're not doing it in texts. We built it and -we wanted time to build it but we can't get the time. ->> Look what we did. We made so many exoskeletons we solved all -the problems. ...(applause)... -If you have like physical objects bring them up here, we're going -to photograph them and put them up on the site or do other stuff with -them. And we'll create a GitHub repo. Make sure someone on the team -is following me on Twitter. We'll Tweet out the link. +Building Exoskeletons for Reporters +Session facilitator(s): Jeremy Bowers, Aaron Williams +Day & Time: Friday, 11am-1:30pm +Room: Haas + +> > We're going to wait a handful of more minutes and then we'll +> > start. Continue to talk amongst yourselves. We're giving them 3 +> > minutes. +> > Three minutes? Okay. +> > To let people straggle. +> > We're just waiting for Aman to show up. +> > Hello. I'm Aaron Williams. +> > I'm Jeremy Bowers of The New York Times. +> > We are going to try to talk about exoskeletons for two hours. +> > Just to let you know as far as how the session is broken up. The +> > first half we're going to explain the idea and do collaborative +> > talking about what an exoskeleton is and in the second half we're +> > going speck out an exoskeleton. So if you want to go to another +> > session that is fine. +> > In the beginning we want to talk about reporting and the +> > reporting process. Anybody in here been a field reporter? +> > Yes. +> > Anybody write stories? Written a story? Good. This makes me +> > happier. I'm fascinated by beat reporters. If I were to do that sort +> > of thing I would be excited that newspapers have this great pool of +> > people who are subject matter experts who are very, very good at +> > something. The unfortunate part is they're very, very bad at other +> > things. Somebody who is a night cop's reporter is not supergood at +> > Twitter or good at working on the CMS or marking up their stories so +> > they look nice on the web. +> > So the thing that occurred to me is that as technologists our job +> > is to build exoskeletons for our reports. An exoskeleton is +> > fascinating because all it does is what you do. If you're a reporter +> > who reads the crime blogger or spends time at the supreme court, you +> > need a piece of software that works with you and your behaviors. That +> > is why an exoskeleton is interesting. It's not a robot. It doesn't +> > work without you. It takes your behaviors and the things you do and +> > enhances them. It's not like an airplane. You do your normal +> > behavior and it automatically makes that stuff better. If you jump, +> > an exoskeleton makes you jump higher. If you lift things, an +> > exoskeleton makes you lift heavier things. It's a metaphor. It makes +> > us technology people think more carefully about who people are who are +> > going to use our stuff and how we should interact with them. That is +> > to say, very lightly. +> > At the very bottom the fundamental metaphor that I want to talk +> > about today is what are the behaviors that a reporter engages? Where +> > we can enhance them? Where we can make the things they're already +> > doing a little better or stronger? And, so, like, think about +> > reporters who write about warfare. They have to write in anecdotal +> > terms. A single instance of a bomb going off in an area but it's hard +> > for them to write in broad terms about this. The New York Times has +> > this problem. That was a strike in Yemen that killed 55 people and + +The New York Times wrote the story and said it was the largest number +of casualties in several months. And that is wrong. It was the +largest number of casualties probably ever. They couldn't say that +because they don't know. The reporters only write these anecdotally +and nobody has the number of strikes and the people that died in them. +There are people that try to keep these statistics. The New America +Foundation keeps a handful but they're not always trusted sources and +they're not as fast as we would be. They work on a two or three-week +lag. This is one of those cases where a reporter is only able to do +their job anecdotally. Unable to do it with any broad understanding +of the subject area and that is frustrating to me. +The part that is very frustrating, it's not like reporters are +bad. They're very good. They're good about getting the White House +on the record. They have administrative sources. It's not their +obligation to go an extra mile and invent new structure data systems +for themselves to report. Because it's an opportunity cost. They +would have to stop doing some other things they're very good at and +maybe start doing this other thing they're bad at. This is our +thought experiment for the day. The arts and crafts portion of this +we're going to design exoskeletons for certain beats and break you +guys up into teams and give you scenarios and come up with what an +exoskeleton would look like for that. +In the short run I would like to go around and hear what you're +doing here and what things you do every day that you could conceivably +automate or someone that you know who needs something automated. +We'll start with Chris. + +> > I was just thinking about what somebody might need. I'm Chris +> > Keller. I work in Los Angeles. Started out as a sport's writer. +> > Now, education mostly. We deal with the Los Angeles school districts. +> > Behind New York it's probably the second largest school district in +> > the country. Test scores have stopped coming, every year the test +> > scores and student performance come out, the report goes through, and +> > line by line checks to see what all the schools are doing. It should +> > be easy to structure that year after year and plug it into something +> > and have a set of queries that generate reports. That is once a year +> > or twice a year but it will save a lot of time. You're asking the +> > same question about every single school. +> > I'm a reporter for the Atlantic. There's a lot actually. +> > Without getting into like a library of babbles, let's keep track of +> > everything problem. Major staffing changes between large firms. +> > Internal statistics that get released intermittently and you have to +> > Google for how many monthly active users did it happen to as opposed +> > to the last time they announced it which would have been from 3 to 18 +> > months ago. Is it measuring the same thing. To basic financial data +> > which is hard to ad hoc kind of wrangle and compare across firms. +> > So there's a lot of stuff that ranges. I thought about things in +> > the past and can't think of them now. But many things. I find myself +> > wishing that there was something more powerful than a Wiki (ph.). +> > That might be more quantitative often. +> > My name is Fergus. Recently finished researching the census + +in the context of journalism. One of the things -- I know this is +being not necessarily entirely worked on, doing things like just going +to all the cities that have this shops systems installed and following +up on the data. + +> > Automation of the public records request. Following up on +> > data. +> > The interactions and the follow ups and knowing when -- +> > commissions this system. Knowing that vendor X gets to spend ... Oh, +> > they're going to install this system and we want to get that data on +> > that, for example. +> > I will be working at the Chronical of Higher Education. I +> > think kind of going off what he said, I think like using some type of +> > automation especially for the type of surveys, like the Chronical of +> > Higher Education sends out surveys to collect the data they have. +> > Again, I haven't started there yet. I'm starting on Monday. I think +> > it would be really helpful if you could automate sending out those +> > surveys and having people fill out the fields and actually submit it. +> > That would be ideal. I think that would be helpful. +> > Armand at the Los Angeles Times. I came into journalism +> > through international development and photography and video. Part of +> > it is building research and analytical tools for reporters. Like, +> > here's a database of arrests made by LAPD or some of the things that +> > Chris was talking about. And we like robots and part of the solution +> > to that is more robots. With beat reporters there are so many stories +> > and they spend so much time doing grinding bullshit reports. Like the +> > housing reporter, every month there is a housing report. It's the +> > same thing every month. There is a bubble, not a bubble, it's not as +> > big as we thought it was. Being able to automate that stuff away and +> > freeing up the reporters to go deeper, dig deeper, do more enterprise +> > stuff. Abstracting away a lot of the grind. +> > I'm Misty, I work for IBT Media. I'm a designer there. I've +> > been working on some projects that are templated. I thought this +> > would be a good session to come to because sometimes we're working on +> > bigger projects that are maybe more involved but the reports would +> > need smaller templates they could be using. I feel like the more that +> > I've been tacking to reporters the more I get ideas of what they do +> > need. +> > When you say templates, you mean templates for ... +> > When I say templates, a landing page, specific tables they can +> > put the data in. It's always going to be the same. It's just +> > updating it. Trying to figure out what they need and how I can help +> > make that happen. +> > I'm Al. I work at ProPublica. I have two ideas. One is +> > campaign finance. There is a ton of data in there for many agents +> > that reporters use all the time. And find sums and donors and find +> > recipients, consultants that campaigns are hiring and committees are +> > hiring. A lot of times those numbers are not added together, not +> > compiled. You have to do a lot of work to find how they combine and +> > find conclusions in them. Find new groups flying under the radar or +> > operating in a session of the tax code they shouldn't be operating in. + +A tool for combining a lot of stuff together would be useful. + +> > I'm Jason. I'm at VOX. The newsroom is very new to me but +> > I'm fascinated to be here. I'm really interested in automating I +> > guess sort of like ambient environmental data around where reporters +> > are and what they're doing. The writing and what were the conditions +> > around where they were writing. I think that information is useful +> > for the companies and that can be really interesting to put out into +> > the world in other forms. +> > Tracking when a reporter goes out. +> > Like the time and weather and everything around them that +> > could be sucked in. +> > Awesome. +> > David, I'm also newly at VOX. And just generally recently but +> > specifically in the last day I've been thinking about how reporting +> > down to the most granular level can be attached to specific bits of +> > content and particles. So research that flows through the reporting +> > stream. So if one article is used for a source as another article, as +> > we build that, as we build that reporting over time, being able to +> > track it back to the original source and pull out information from -- +> > if the original source changes or becomes unreliable how is the rest +> > of the reporting tainted throughout the series of papers. It's like +> > an interesting open data problem behind that in my head that I'm still +> > working through. +> > I'm Matt Perry. I work at Automatic. I'm not a reporter. +> > I'm not sure I have a specific idea. I think I'm going to pass on +> > that but these are all inspiring. In the past I've done work with +> > assembling, allowing reporters to assemble groups of reporters on +> > Twitter and monitor the experts automatically to sort of provide early +> > warning on the content. That is something I can go back to. But I +> > don't have a specific idea for today. +> > That sounds cool. +> > That's a pretty good "not" idea. +> > I'm mostly really into structured data. I don't report +> > specifically. I'm interested to know what kind of tools are discussed +> > and brought up in this conversation and if there is additional overlap +> > between those tools and maybe some of the things that might make good +> > exoskeletons for beat reporters make good exoskeletons for other +> > people. Because exoskeletons are awesome. +> > Allison, I'm at FiveThirtyEight. The big thing we've been trying to +> > figure out is working with our parent company to free data from video. +> > They have tons of good stuff but it's not cataloged or just a giant +> > ... Video that has no things happen at certain points in time. +> > My name is Matt with The New York Times R and D lab. +> > Interested in two separate pieces as it relates to exoskeletons. +> > First is the possibility to extract structured data from reporters as +> > they're writing or reporting. Couple people have mentioned in +> > different stories where reporters have data they're building that +> > story off, there are ways to capture that at that time without adding +> > additional work flow to their lives and use it later on. +> > On a different tangent sort of in a literal way thinking of + +exoskeletons as wearable technology that might enhance a reporter's +experience. Everything from a device that is recording audio and can +capture that gap the moment it's said and push it somewhere or is +taking photos or measuring ambient environment and situations and +figuring out how that ties back to the story. Different ways the +reporter can enhance their own capabilities of capture and awareness. + +> > I'm at The New York Times R and D lab and Matt said the things +> > I was going to say. +> > But I mean specifically I've been thinking a lot about how we +> > move structured data, capture upstream into the reporting process. +> > There seems to be something really broken about the fact that we do +> > all that and retrospectively after an article has been written and +> > edited and we're doing it in many ways like computationally as if we +> > didn't have all these human beings in the newsroom that knew this +> > useful information about what they're writing. So trying to think +> > about ways that that kind of structured data could be -- could support +> > reporters in their process and also make their reporting more reusable +> > and flexible after it's been published. +> > I'm Daniel, currently between jobs and I don't have a really +> > good answer. I'm lurking for ideas. +> > I'm Adam. I walked in late. Sorry. I'm assuming what you've +> > asked is why I'm here and what I'm interested in. +> > What are you going to build? +> > We've been focusing a lot on the publishing side of +> > technology. I work for a network nonprofit organization. So I'm kind +> > of very interested in the non-CMS, non-publishing things and how to -- +> > we can better enable basically any reporter to do their jobs, kind of +> > like better. What needs built. What tools do -- should we build? +> > Well, from like a dev standpoint using an automation tool. +> > That is my exoskeleton, I guess. +> > Using pass runners and various tools. Automation to +> > development. +> > Yes. +> > It's good to capture a bunch of your ideas. These are going +> > to be the bits that influence us when we do our arts and crafts time +> > in a little bit. +> > Before we do arts and crafts I think we should talk about cases +> > where we're doing exoskeleton stuff in our newsrooms. Maybe poorly +> > but maybe well. So there's some examples in the ether pad if you want +> > to pull that up if you have working wifi? +> > Is there a link to the ether pad. +> > Yes. It's at the top. +> > Go to shoutkey.com/haywire. That's the link to it. +> > St easier than typing a bunch of letters. +> > There you go. That thing. +> > So there are some beats where this completely makes sense and +> > Al you can tell Scott I used his quote. He has a quote that makes me +> > happy. He says something like every beat that a journalist can do any +> > more involves structured data. It may not look like structured data +> > but it probably is. Crime, finance, education, sports, almost all of + +these things involve real relationships between people and space. And +when we write stories we turn it into something anecdotal. If you're +not good at structured data on your beat you're going to get scooped +by one who is. +Someone who is much better at analyzing structured data than you +are. This makes sense if you're a night cop's reporter and you didn't +go to the crime log or the courthouse and get the crime log before you +left, you're going to get scooped by the person that did do that and +find out the star quarterback got arrested over night and failed an +alcohol test. You don't want to be the person losing out on stories +because you can't fire up your excel. +These beats make sense. But there are other places that we can +do better. Like politics. Tracking things that people say and hold +them accountable for it. A great idea of this is a local community +passes an ordnance to allow a gambling or something to show up in +their town. Every person has a quote about how many millions of +dollars this raises for the local economy and a year later we can find +out if it was true. This is structured data. You said it, there was +an effect and we can look back over time and see if you're correct. +It's one of the requirements of maybe our exoskeleton should do, +is aggregate public statements by officials. +There are other things that computers can do that we're bad at +which is seeing minute differences between things. A lot of these +things you mentioned. Finance, staffing changes, arrests, campaign +finance, these are the kinds of things where the numbers are very +large or happen very often. The result is it's hard for us to tell +the difference between things. +If a company's stock price increases slightly over time, the +number of people mentioned in a report decreases by two. You may not +notice it. There may not be a chief financial officer listed or you +may not notice arrests have been slightly increasing in a certain +neighborhood. Computers are good at noticing the difference between +things and we're bad at it as people. That is case where the +exoskeletons can do a little bit of work that we don't do nearly as +well. Highlight something that may maybe we don't see happening. +There are reporters that do this well but unfortunately have +stopped using tools. We have a guy at The New York Times, CJ Chivers. +He goes to war zones. Where there is conflict and something bad +happening and takes pictures of land mines and shell casings and tanks +and whatever he sees. He puts it on a Tumblr and Instagram. We don't +have something for him to put all of these weapons that he's been +looking at into. CJ knows in his mind that in Afghanistan there are +Soviet aero weapons systems that are upgraded to slightly newer +weapons. She has seen new shell casings and land mines that are post +cold war. All he can do is write a story or take a photo and put it +on Instagram. He doesn't have a way to demonstrate, I know there are +new weapons in Afghanistan. +This is unfortunate because Instagram never creates a drop-down +for CJ to allow him to pick the correct decade for a weapon that he +noticed. That is not in their core. It's nothing they would want to + +do. But it's something that we might want to do for CJ. He knows +it's getting sloughed away when he does his reporting process. Thank +god he is taking the photos. We can go back over time and we can go +back and maybe add those things on. It's unfortunate that's something +we have to do retrospectively. It would be nice if our reporters had +something nicer. The equivalent of the big robotic arm to move up and +down. +Now that we have some of your ideas and we have a little better +understanding, I'd like to break into groups and start talking about +what to build. We're not going to talk about working code. We're +going to speck them. We're going to put those on GitHub for people in +the case that someone would like to build one. We'll have a list of +specification. There are a handful of questions that we want you to +answer. What behavior does a reporter engage in when they do certain +types of things. How would software need to interact with a reporter +in that case. What kinds of things would the software accumulate. +Would someone actually use it. +And we're going to allow you guys to judge the work that other +people are doing. + +> > Is this limited to software? +> > No. Not limited to software. I'm glad that someone said +> > that. This is also within your purview. We have news organizations +> > and we have cell phones and sensors and things like that. If there +> > are ways to extend a reporter's reach, literally, then maybe that's +> > one of the things that we should include. So has it been -- we're +> > going to take like 10 minutes or something like that and let you get +> > water and go to the bathroom and we're going to prep the bits so you +> > can do your arts and crafts. +> > When you come back that is what we're going to do. We're going +> > to start with scenarios and work on these individual ones, too. Take +> > ten minutes. We'll see you in a minute. + + - - - + +> > We're going to start a little bit of arts and crafts now, I +> > think. +> > You guys are fantastic and came up with an infinity of very good +> > ideas. Rather than just let you say your ideas out loud we're going +> > to make you build something out of them. We have four questions that +> > we want you to answer basically when you spec out this exoskeleton +> > that you would build. +> > The four questions are what behaviors does your reporter engage +> > in? What does the person do, the motor functions you'll extend. +> > Two, how do you interact with the reporter. What bits will the +> > software of exoskeleton attach. +> > The third one, what are the capacities that you choose to enhance +> > in your reporter? What things that your reporter does that you have +> > decided to make better? +> > And what capacities have you decided not to enhance? What things +> > does the reporter do that you think should not be mechanized. +> > Build out what your exoskeleton would look like. Be artsy. +> > We're going to go into group of three. If you want to self-associate + +that is fine. Let's get handfuls of two or three together on a team +and grab the green bits off the wall and grab the project you want to +build or two and get to building? + +> > Can we do one of the examples that you have there? +> > Yes. We also have horrible examples that we're going to use +> > for discussion. You can use those. One is high school sports. Night +> > cops. Local politics. Southern California immigration. Et cetera. +> > As far as the technology, I mean sky is the limit. It's not +> > like you have to write our speck is this scraper in Python. Keep it +> > abstract unless you think that's what you want to use. If that's the +> > case, run with it. I'm not going to stop you. +> > Be creative. +> > I'm putting Sharpie�s and green paper up here. There is green +> > paper in the back and we have large sheets of this kind of paper. +> > Feel free to clear off your tables and get to work. + + - - - + +(group work). +... . + +> > We have about 15 minutes left of the specking and talking and +> > after that we're going to do five-minute presentations. This is a 15 +> > minute warning. + + - - - + +> > All right. Time to get you guys to present. How do you want +> > to do this? Who wants to go first? +> > Great. Okay. You guys in the back. +> > What is your team name? +> > Oh god. +> > I think Spidey. We were looking at literal exoskeletons and +> > the problem that we're identifying is that reporters and photographers +> > in conflict areas need rapid realtime feed back about what is +> > happening around them. And in additionally that needs to be +> > inconspicuous. You can't wear a Google glass in a war zone. It needs +> > to be hands free ideally. If you're taking photos you can't take out +> > your phone. +> > We're proposing a haptic belt. The way this works, it's a belt +> > that has 8 vibrating motors embedded in it and it's connected to the +> > reporter's phone which then talks to a system at the news +> > organization's home office. This is a paired exercise. There is a +> > colleague who is at the news organization who is monitoring things +> > like realtime satellite feeds or wire services or Twitter feeds, +> > et cetera. +> > And basically has a map interface upon which they can drop +> > markers that then communicate back to the reporter's phone and +> > transmit vibrations to the belt. The vibrations happen in three +> > dimensions. The first is distance. So the intensity of the vibration +> > corresponds to how far away something is happening. +> > Directionality. Which motors vibrate correspond to where. If +> > it's in front of you, the ones in front vibrate. If it's in the back +> > the ones in the back vibrate. There are two vibration. A pulsing +> > vibration. Something interesting is happening over here you want to + +go there to get the scoop. Or a sustained vibration, there is danger +there, get away from that. +Am I missing anything? I think that is about it. +There is also a button to dismiss the alert. It can be I got the +alert, fine. But if you leave it on it's a way to find what is +interesting. It can continue to vibrate so I know if I'm going in the +right direction. That's it? + +> > Sweet. That is awesome ...(applause)... +> > Who wants to go next or who doesn't want to go next? +> > I'll talk. We don't have any drawings or show and tell. If +> > you scroll down to the bottom of the ether pad you can follow. We +> > talked about covering immigration in southern California. Some of +> > this extends to other areas. Finding the balance about available +> > structured data with unstructured anecdotal data with a reporter who +> > is well sourced and talks on the record about these things. +> > There is plenty of structured data out there, you can automate +> > that via records request or computationally. Legislation at the +> > local, state, and federal records. Court records, law enforcement, +> > the coast guard. Demographic data. Port records, education records. +> > The anecdotal evidence, the stuff that you talk face to face and +> > communicate with the people going across the border crossing and those +> > who help them could be structured or semi-structured. We looked at +> > known immigration routes if those things exist or crossing patterns +> > and trying to come up with ways to track the geography. +> > The different way points. Where the cities are. The people that +> > help them there. And the goal connecting to the structured data to +> > view over time education patterns, crime patterns in those area, +> > employment patterns, demographic information. +> > Satellite or drone images from these places. From an overview or +> > from a ground level with access to safe houses if you will or other +> > areas to help these folks make their way into the United States. +> > When you have that anecdotal stuff and the structured data you +> > can connect it and analyze it more quickly if you had all this +> > anecdotal stuff in notebooks and going back and researching and +> > connecting the dots that way. +> > Matt talked about his idea to pull up structured data from text. +> > There is some application there. The other aspect is building a +> > database of volunteer translators who might be able to help. And +> > Armand wants to build a exoskeleton that is C3PO but on your list but +> > able to communicate with people in 3 million languages. If it's an +> > iPhone app and you talk into your phone and ask somebody to put on +> > head phones and talk to them in any number of languages, it's +> > interesting the know how far we are away from something like that? +> > In the spirit of the hitchhiker's guide it should be a small +> > fish. Who wants to go next ... ...(applause)... yes. +> > Okay. What is your team? +> > Layered maps. +> > We talked about creating an exoskeleton for a reporter to find +> > human sources within certain geographic zones. So for example after a +> > disaster helping reporters find sources that were most affected by the + +disaster. Basing this off something we did last year at Republica. +We looked at flood zones that FEMA already created versus where +hurricane sandy flooded and cross references that with the actual +disaster declarations for each -- sorry, the disaster findings for +each household. And printing out a map and having a reporter knock on +doors and find out what happened to you. Did this affect you. That +worked really, really well. That could be a tool where we can up load +as many maps in advance that we can and Crete zones to reporters can +print them out or get them on their phone and go out and find people +most affected. + +> > The idea is reports would find a lot of sources immediately if +> > they knew who to connect on a specific block if they had the overlay +> > of a map in their hand. +> > For example you worked in the highest level of flood warning +> > but your house got flooded any way. That is the specific person you +> > want to talk to. It's abstractable. Zone A and zone B, the tool, +> > simply overlays zones and identifies spots. +> > And we also want to add a census overlay. Are people being +> > affected in the same socioeconomic level, demographics, race, how do +> > disasters affect those people. +> > It has applications for entertainment reporting. Overlaying +> > maps of things going on in Hollywood. We can see various reporters +> > wanting to use this data. +> > TMZ. +> > If you scroll to our entry ... I don't know if it's up or +> > down. +> > I think it's up. +> > Where is it at? +> > Scroll down. It's below the immigration one. +> > Go down more. +> > CL dot LOI link. This is the thing we did last year. We +> > found flood zones that were predicting where hurricanes would hit New +> > York and where sandy actually flooded and all of those building shapes +> > are buildings that FEMA had determined had been damaged. So we +> > printed this out and went out to those individual blocks and found +> > people that did not think their house would flood and their house +> > flooded. +> > The blue is where they said it would flood. The brown is +> > where it flooded. The building shapes are buildings that were +> > actually damaged. So those were the individual blocks that we sent +> > reporters out to do talk to people. +> > The blue is where they thought it would flood specifically for +> > sandy. +> > Where FEMA said it would flood. +> > Most people don't buy flood insurance. +> > Something like this but abstractable. +> > ...(applause)... go team maps? +> > I feel like you waited so long. This team was done after like +> > 7 minutes. So they are ready. Do you guys want to show off? +> > So this is a relatively kind of small contained problem that + +has a lot of work maybe to solve it. The problem space is that what a +reporter is trying to do is find all the cities that have paid a +particular contractor. The behavior that the reporter does is looking +for public spending on company X in many places. So basically this is +a tool that automates going through public records and finding -- +shops (inaudible) system has gotten $200,000 from this city. The +reporter would simply go to probably something as simple as a web form +and say, this is the company that I'm looking for. These are the +cities that I'm interested in. +It's essentially a script, the work would be in modeling each +different city's publishing system and the construct of their website +and whatnot. Obviously you're going to run into -- ideally -- I think +the best organization to build this is something like a peak +organization that can source it, source all those models. Oakland, I +contribute the publishing model for Oakland. Nashville. I do it for +Nashville. There is a fair bit of work maintaining those models. +Some small towns I'm not going to publish their data in which case you +can either generate a form e-mail that a reporter can check and then +send off to the public records people or the name of a local reporter +who can go and you can contract the work out to or a task revenue if +you're in one of those kinds of cities. +So the parts of the reporters process it enhances is seeing a +change, repeat a process, remember what the process was across cities. +Make your process transparent and then also be able to share your +process with other people. We're obviously ignoring people's ability +to get bored because it's a dull process. We're not building in +analysis. We have a beautiful illustration of it down in the +left-hand corner. +That is it. It's kind of simply a problem with a simple tool to +use but with a lot of functionality and complexity under the hood. +...(applause)... + +> > Sweet. All right. Team other table. +> > I don't know if you have every used Fred, the St. Louis Freds +> > storehouse of all things data. It's great if you want to see the +> > adults working in the population over time. If you're a reporter +> > working as much on a municipal beat and covering a limited number of +> > institutions where there is a limited number of data that isn't as +> > prevalent you don't have an option like that. +> > The idea is personal Fred or Freddy. Which does not take the +> > form of like a reporter's note pad. I see you're writing an +> > acquisition story, but which could. It's a desktop based tool for +> > reporters who are tracking between 5 and 25 institutions. It would +> > follow primarily a list of like a feed of press releases and look at +> > them by schema. So certain press releases you can basically tell +> > they're acquisition. Certain releases you can tell they're personnel +> > changes. Ones you can tell are there for a quarterly report and they +> > have monthly active users. It differs by institution but it's +> > reported across quarterly reports if they're a public institution. +> > Also if they're a media company you get rare glimpses into their +> > internal analytics, usually in like a break out time story but have no + +other way of tracking that. The New Yorker.com got two million +uniques in April. The last time that number was reported was like +February 2011. It's good to have these in one place. +So at the end of the day the system would track all these various +press releases. At the end of the day it would give you a list of +bullet points in plain text of Facebook but start of X for Y million +dollars. You add it to you thing and have a time line for each of +these institutions of the certain number of variables you were looking +for. And then depending on what that variable was, would be able to +graph it in certain predictable and standardized ways. +It's not part of a larger institutional response and I think part +of the nugget behind the idea is it's aimed at reporters who are in +places which don't have these great data teams to back them up/who can +do a brew install. And maybe that's what they can do. So you can +guide them through that. But then after that things would be, if they +could give you an RSSV to point the tool at, then the system would +largely be able to kind of track and maintain itself with limited +help. +So personal Fred. +...(applause)... + +> > All right. And last and certainly least, Ryan Murphy. On +> > team breaking news. +> > We were working on the breaking news one and kind of wanted to +> > address -- there is the common situation where producers, editors, and +> > reporters are in a breaking news situation collecting facts, reaching +> > out to sources. A lot of times they're in a hazy in between. Some +> > stuff is hearsay and some is from a source that you're iffy about. +> > And finding a way to collect all that together so it's not just a +> > something that is being spewed into a word doc and getting e-mailed +> > around and not really kept in a central location. +> > This is kind of meant for very much discreet situation, things +> > happening for a period of time and will end. The war in Syria. Not +> > going to do it for that. It's very much a thing that is covering a +> > long span of time. But this is for school shootings or a plane crash +> > or things like that. +> > It's inspired -- do you want me to explain MACAW quick? +> > It's a language in the Pacific Northwest called MACAW and the +> > verbs are built with evident eventually do something. If you saw +> > someone do something versus you heard it or saw it from a distance +> > that all changes the verb tense. We thought it would be great to have +> > eventuality built in. Like a green, yellow red. Very true, kind of +> > true, super-not true and how will you indicate those people since we +> > can't use verb texts. +> > Turning to some of the questions, like there is always this +> > situation of wanting to know how true is the statement and how to keep +> > track of it and deliver it to reporters. And then getting alerts you +> > may be pushing out or updates to stores you're trying to do. +> > In this situation what we're looking at doing is moving away from +> > keeping track of it in word docs and e-mails but a web form to keep +> > track of this stuff that everyone in the newsroom is able to see and + +contribute to and view as it's updated and changes. +Being able to keep track of how confident we are of the source. +How many times has a fact been confirmed and we feel confident about +it. Sending out e-mails to staff or reporters and anyone you think +you're collaborating with one click. Alerts through mobile or +anything like that to obviously can be expanded to -- to your users at +the end of the day. +Being able to see after the fact, after the event happened what +facts came through, which ones are we sure about, which not. Generate +a report of that covering of that event. For the next day's story you +have a nice fact sheet and something to start with there. +Capacities to enhance. So in this situation it's moving +everything centrally located. And making it easier to make those +updates to that fact sheet and being able to track the differences +over time as things change, as more information is found or +information is discredited or found by other people. And being able +to aggregate all the sources in one place which is useful for working +on the story. +Things we're taking a pass on. This service is not meant to +handle the process of confirming a fact. We put it as we're not going +to build TRELLO into this. You're not making phone calls from this +web service. It's not going to FOIA machine keeping track of e-mails +you're sending out and formulating responses. It's up to the +reporters to make messages they're good with. Not going to do any +automated thresholds. You have enough people saying yes to this fact, +it's not going to say good to go. It's not going to take the control +away from the humans involved because a lot of that is going to be a +judgment call. +This is not meant to be a website or a CMS extension to publish +stories out of. It's very much focused on being a tool that helps you +pull these things together and then you take this information to the +places where you normally do that. Yeah? + +> > Do you have a screen shot of the one that we developed for +> > NPR. I would love to show the room that. +> > We will find it today. +> > I mean it's just, we developed a prototype for something like +> > this and the idea -- it was like this but each fact was a card that +> > could live anywhere. NPR verified this fact and that fact could live +> > on The New York Times website as a discreet unit. And I really liked +> > that part of it. It made it so facts could travel around and they +> > were verified by somebody on staff. +> > And that prototype is available to affiliates. +> > We developed it with an API so we can feed this to affiliates +> > so during breaking news we're not doing it in texts. We built it and +> > we wanted time to build it but we can't get the time. +> > Look what we did. We made so many exoskeletons we solved all +> > the problems. ...(applause)... +> > If you have like physical objects bring them up here, we're going +> > to photograph them and put them up on the site or do other stuff with +> > them. And we'll create a GitHub repo. Make sure someone on the team +> > is following me on Twitter. We'll Tweet out the link. diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_26_Diversify_Pipeline.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_26_Diversify_Pipeline.md index 22185a01..f4478a85 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_26_Diversify_Pipeline.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_26_Diversify_Pipeline.md @@ -1,160 +1,161 @@ -How to diversify the pipeline of journo-coders -Session facilitator(s): Emma Carew Grovum, Latoya Peterson -Day & Time: Friday, 12:30-1:30pm -Room: Franklin 2 - -LATOYA: All right. Welcome, how are you? ->> Great. -LATOYA: So we are all here presumably to talk about diversifying the line. And the funny joke about this. And by the way if you don't know me, I'm Latoya. -EMMA: I'm Emma. -LATOYA: I was going to introduce you! Anyway. Emma and I are great friends and I am friends with a lot of people in this room. But you might not know this. I run a site called Racial Issues and I got into this by essentially critiquing how this represented people and poor people of color. And a lot of things have changed now and now I'm at the place where I'm looking at how are we going to fix this problem that we have been talking about, you know, since I've been into it since 2008 and since the industry at large has started, right? You'll notice that this trend is not a trend that's unusual to journalists, right? Journalists have always had issues with the newsrooms. And there's a peak point in the 90s where things got better and then it all slid downhill. So the thing that I hate is that we all get together, and we have these talks that we need to diversify. But yet again year after year we're in the same spaces. The people who are least likely to need this talk is are here. And the people who are most interested in this talk have left. We're going to start out with the more traditional type tactics, what's going on? What's an ally? How do we talk to people about what's going on in the newsroom? But everybody's probably going to leave here with an action plan and maybe some Starbursts but we're leaving here with an action plan because we need to be tired of hoping that things are going to get better in terms of diversity. We need to stop pretending that if two of us are cool that our horribly toxic organization is going to get better. We need to stop pretending that every time we make a new friend, that's of color ask we try to get them to come over for something, we need to stop that, right? And each of us is going to commit to a very easy, very doable plan of action which means that a lot easier when we come back together, I. Don't know, Aaron what's your plans for next year? ->> We're making that tomorrow. -LATOYA: We're making that tomorrow? Awesome. ->> Tell us what you're thinking. -LATOYA: So I was thinking like you go to SRCCON and a lot of us tend to travel in a lot of the same circles. So I'm sure you're at least familiar with some of the people that you saw here, or met here., maybe we're all at certain types of conferences, you might go to OTHA, or South by Southwest, or you might meet people in all of these different places. And in next time we meet up. We. And we actually have an honest conversation about this. But you see, if not, actually it's not going to change. And this is actually a much bigger group than I anticipated, which is great because it's very easy to get ten people on the same page. But this is, like, 30, so we're going to do it the best we can. So I'm going to kick it off to the lovely and talented Emma Carew Grovum. Who's going to talk about the lovely outline and I'll come back to you guys with the secondhand plan. -EMMA: Kind of specific to the pipeline issue, falling into three major buckets. There's nobody to hire, there's not enough students coming out with these skills, not enough people to grab at interns to another entry level jobs. How do we fix that problem. And then the second problem is managers' hiring things. So a lot of these organizations, they may be have found those one or two interns, or found that one person. But by and large, the management, the people who are creating the jobs are older, probably white, probably male, probably not a lot happening there and then the third bucket would be speakers, conferences and events. How do you change that up? People being brought in as keynote speakers, or panelists and things who are reaching out and beyond, and not just asking Latoya to appear on any panel so that she can go home and enjoy her life. So I'm really curious what everybody else, like, thinks. Like, what have you seen as a problem? What is an issue that you personally have with, like, any of these, or like... yes? ->> Ten minutes ago I had a related thing. So we're doing admissions for a training program for boot camps, I guess that falls under students and I think that's great is that we have -- they made a scholarship for women, under-represented minorities, and service members. So we have this -- so we have this application in our pipeline and one of the reviewers is saying, I don't know about this girl, or woman -- I don't know about this application. And then the next comment was, well, we need more women in the funnel, so let's push her forward to an interview. And that, to me, it raises the question: Is that the best way to approach it? If we're lowering a bar, is that the best thing that we can do? Because that builds in the assumption that well, if we want to do this, we have to lower the bar. And I think an alternative is, we don't have the best reach, right? Not that many -- not the greatest percentage of the population at large knows that we exist. So, how could we, like, overrepresent those communities we want to retract in our outreach? So that is something that I would like to learn more about because you know, it would be a shame to have -- to do the bar-lowering when if there are people out there who would be fantastic and just haven't heard of us. -EMMA: I think the flip side of that it assumes that everybody who's not in those targeted groups also got their because they deserve to and I think that that is, like, a false assumption. Like, you could look at any company and any industry and there are people at every level of employment who are men, who are women, who are white, who are not white who got there on a favorite, who got there, you know, through their legacy, or they got there for some other reason besides their talent and I think a lot of people ask this question of well, whether do we want to lower the bar. Is it okay to take this person because they're of color but they're not quite what we're looking for? And I think a lot of people have asked that -- have answered that question but not explicitly answered that question when the candidates were of color, when the candidates weren't men. ->> I just want to build on that and say, we have some really solid research from the last ten years about things what happens when you submit the same resume with different names on it. It is passed up a lot faster if it's an anglicized, male name. So there is a lot of stuff when we talk about things like lowering the bar. You're getting into some pretty deep pulls. And there are some things that show the kind of bias that we're fighting. So I just want to, like, get that out there in the front of the conversation. -EMMA: Yeah, that's awesome. ->> I've experienced a lot of -- I mean, I don't think the answer's lowering the bar, you don't have to. A lot of us are out there. I've been a journalist for more than 20 years. A developer for 17. And if you're not -- at this point, over the last four years, it's a very closed circle. You only get hired if you're -- -EMMA: Sure. ->> -- if you know someone. -EMMA: So it's not just reach, it's prominence. ->> It's breaking into what is now a very closed circle. I mean, I've gotten passed over just dozens of times. I've always gotten an interview but I didn't ever -- I got passed over for somebody half my age and the opposite gender. -EMMA: Is anybody in the room doing hiring? Can we answer that? ->> I'd actually be interested to know -- sorry, you do that thing, first. -EMMA: Nope, go ahead. ->> I'd be interested to know how many people, their first jobs in journalism were sort of near their home town, or at least in -- I guess my point is, generally you start out with a smaller newspaper. Generally those are in less-diverse areas. I know for me I live and work in Maine, that's where I'm from and it's 98% white. And so you're -- -EMMA: The newsroom or the community? ->> The community. And, whitest state in the country. -LATOYA: Let me take that because it's really interesting and it's a good point, too. Because this happened to me out in the bay area when we were on Twitter, oh, my God there's no black people. Have you seen San Francisco? Like, Twitter's not hiring black people. We're not there. But there are many other people there, Latinos and Asians in particular. So you want to look at those rates. But region has a big role to play on how you can diversify. But at the same time I love your question because it gets to something I kind of hate about the first part of this pipeline, right, which is that people assume that there is one path to getting into, you know, journalism. And for many, many years, that was the case that you went and you did your small town stuff and then you worked on it and then you started going regional and you're hoping eventually in your career that you go national. Have you seen what's happening lately? That's been decimated. -EMMA: And I think that's especially amplified for technologists and coders anybody on the web. -LATOYA: Right and I would have never come in that part. And -- I'm in a good position, like, whoo, it's great but one of the things that I like to point out to people when they ask me questions. I look at your job and the first thing I go is, you ask for a four-year degree like Al Jazeera, a four year degree preferably from a prestigious school and that was their code for "Ivy." That was essentially it -- automatically off the bracket. It doesn't matter if you are actually looking for me. You just said in your job application you are not looking for me but the reason I got in at Al Jazeera was because the person who hired me was very, very familiar with what I was doing, what I was building, and what I bring to the brand and so she made an assumption of skills and she targeted everything around skills. So it didn't matter necessarily where people were coming from. She didn't go to recruit people generally for the stream. She went to place like kids who are doing foreign policy. She wants people who lived two years in Syria. She wanted people who speak six languages and I'll teach them the journalism part. She wanted people who were digital. She wanted people who were great on Twitter, great on Instagram, and pulled all of those people together and then taught them the skills that they needed. And I noticed that in that mindset that we're okay. This is kind of what we want, okay, and I think we can mold this person who what we need is. And that doesn't happen. We want everybody to be perfect out of the box just like how we get those unicorn job ads. That's one of my favorite things, looking at job ads and laughing at them because there's an organization that I love. I called them and they wanted a -- they want a front end and a back end developer. So these two different skill sets and I want you to be able to do all of our website, copy, good with Photoshop and good with jQuery and Python, and if you find that unicorn, and they will work for you for $80,000 a year, I will give you $400 out of my pocket 'cause that's bullshit and that's not going to happen. Anybody that can do both of those things is very high demand and they might love justice as much as I do but they're not going to deal with that. Front end developers have skills. And I understand the grant funding says this. I need to prioritize but, I think part of this is understanding kind of what you're looking for, what you're asking for. If you're just looking for students and interns, you're overlooking a big part of the workplace that maybe is self-taught, maybe has learned these skills. I did an informal poll on TLM, Tech Lady Mafia -- it's a really great ListServ. Feel free to talk to -- I don't know, Gene, Genie, she's the person you want to talk to, she wants to get on TLM. But I put on that ListServ, an informal poll how many people -- because I was reading a bunch of articles about the pipeline -- how many people basically majored in computer science or engineering with a four year degree program, right? And it was interesting. It was about half and half. People who did back end were more likely to have majored in computer science and stuff like that. And they were doing more complex code and can agile languages and more -- the folks that were in the careers I'm in, we're doing digital planning, storytelling and a lot of us pick that stuff up, right? We did weekend classes. You went to general assembly. You went to girl development. You did these things and you learned the stuff that you should to make the project look cool and now you can do it in the newsroom and figure out how to do it for cheap and things like that. So figuring out what's actually priority and what's nice to have. And being brutal about what the types that you want. And I would suggest that particularly for us many hiring positions start looking at people that you want to hire, sit down and interview them, and have coffee and ask them how they are because I could guarantee you that a lot of us didn't and through these traditional channels. I did two years under this person and then I took this official practices class. A lot of it was I was doing this one career and then there was the tech and there was the Internet, and here I am. So figuring out kind of the people that you would like to work with but the skills that they have in common, what traits they have in common, and then figuring that out. Anyway, back to Emma. -EMMA: Well, they're talking specifically about people in the pipeline. But for me, people existing in silos. I remember the age of Asian-American Journal Association. Robert is the manager for Hispanic -- to hire and Latoya is part of the National Association of Black Journalists and she's only looking for more black journalists to hire. Like, that is total bullshit and I think a lot of people are looking at one sum game whereas if I hire a straight black woman, then that means that you know, nobody else can hire that position and we're good. We're totally good. We've checked off all our boxes and we're good for the year. It's like are you hiring women? Are you hiring those who are LGBT? Are you hiring people who are multiracial and does your news organization have people who came from other areas? I'm in D.C. so a lot of people like, my entire staff went to Ivy Leagues except for me I went to public school and, like, that is it. And so are you looking at other things like that? Are you hiring people from the Midwest when you went to do your event planning or are all your speakers from New York and San Francisco? Like that is a real thing. So I think if we're thinking about diversity on the big picture like holisticly, that is like very important. Yes? We'll go this way. -EMMA: If you have something that's directly relevant to that? ->> I was going to say that it's also, you know, disability diversity, like, how many people have a blind person in their newsroom? How many people have a deaf person in their newsroom? Are we actually thinking about how would this tool used by a low vision user or a no-vision user? You know, odds are we have colorblind people now newsroom but do we actually know that we have colorblind users there? -EMMA: And becuse we have colorblind and our graphics and designs should be run through color code or something so that we're accessible to our readers and things because we're developing a newsroom and we're not just putting out content. It's -- -STAN: Can you slow down just a little bit? When you get going sometimes it's really hard to understand you. Sorry! -EMMA: So my joke at the beginning when I started was awkward public speaker. Yes. Somebody else? ->> I was just going to ask, also the importance of socioeconomic status of people in your newsroom and what that means in terms of the training and support that you need to offer to people in order to get them and the required investment for that, in that there's a lot of value in having someone who doesn't come from an Ivy League school but sometimes that means that you need to help them grow their skill set in order to succeed in that position because they come from different resources and access. -EMMA: How many people have worked for a newsroom that assumes that you come in with a smartphone, or assume that you have your own laptop at your own personal disposal to bring in to work with on the road or in the newsroom? For example, like my newsroom doesn't have enough computers for everybody, which is a problem. Sorry? ->> I have something sort of related to this skill question that you mentioned before, Latoya, but to the accessibility point, I went to a conference a couple of months ago it wasn't really journalism but they had an accessibility panel and everybody was like yeah, this is great. We should all enable ourselves to be accessible but I heard the developer behind me say, but nobody's going to pay for that, and how do you prove to your editors and everybody that that's worthwhile and to make sure that it satisfies all these accessibility requirements? How do you prove that out as being something that you need to invest in? And you said something about socioeconomic status, too. And I wanted to say that, I think it assumes that you're coming in with a smartphone or a computer that you paid for yourself, because the salary you're probably getting is not going to let you have an elaborate -- I'm assuming you're supposed to be a status that is all pretty, like, low, when I don't know what other people make in newsrooms but the salaries are pretty modest in most of the ones that I've been exposed to and when you're an intern, and you're volunteering your time, you need to come in with your own outside of that. -EMMA: -- hopefully not. ->> -- but to your skill point this is mostly women focused. And I worked for the New York-based Girl Develop It and so we have curriculum to help women to learn to code but we've had other female -- and, it's all about getting developers who are starting out to have those skills that populate your resume with things that people want to hire for. So like, writing and contributing to journals, or whatever, or open-sourcing projects and then speaking about your things. How do you pitch a proposal to your conference? How do you feel confident in your abilities as a developer to contribute to those and then the coding? How do you get your stuff out on GitHub to get it out there? You won't get hired necessarily for the elaborate insane stack of things that they expect but in an interview you can prove your utility by having all those ancillary experiences and I feel like there are very few conferences that focus on just developing those skills. And I think it's an intimidation point, you know? You didn't go to school for CS, you don't feel comfortable pitching ideas for conferences, you don't feel comfortable public speaking, or contributing to open-source, doing any of the other things that help out. -EMMA: Can I pick out on Genie because, I also wish I could go find Erika. I'm actually going to go grab her. ->> I actually think, I will also just say that I just gave a talk with for ONA Boston the night before I came here about diversity and online journalism. And, one of the points that I stressed heavily was that it requires a deep investment. And just like when you go to build a piece of technology, frequently it takes longer than you expect or more resources than you expect. So you can apply that to your strategy of diversifying in that, you know, there's a couple other things, too in terms of your -- you really need to have buy-in from your leadership in order for the strategy to succeed. So identifying ways that you can entice, or persuade leadership if they're not an already on-board with that. So it's kind of like a two-pronged thing because I've learned that even when leadership is totally on board, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're ready to invest in the development of moving into new spaces and expanding your community. And so what does that mean in order? That means that you have to work kind of extra hard to make that happen. And you also have to do a lot of landwork in terms of explaining the value of that and proving that to the leaders. -EMMA: There were some questions about how you did outreach to diversify speakers in the attendees of SRCCON? ->> Okay, there were a few types of outreach that we did. One was outreach to individuals, both people who we already knew were awesome and we wanted to participate as well as people to recommend other people on the registration for SRCCON. There is a question like, are there people who we may not already know who should be here? So like, asking explicitly was one piece of it. Um, I think another piece of it is just kind of um, like constant ongoing relationship-building. So it's not just that we like pop out of the sky and it's like, "Oh, there's the thing happening and we really need to find people." But we are in communication with people at other events, in other communities like, throughout the years so there is already is an existing relationship to say, "And now there's this other thing happening that we would really appreciate your help with." I think a few specific things there are people who had, like, written for SRC before. We reached out to those. folks. Or people who did MozFest. People who were involved with, we connected those people. So I think those were the two big things. Explicit asks and ongoing relationship-building is part of what really helped and then it was something that we were conscious of at every stage of the process in terms of selecting speakers, in terms of the makeup of the participants. It was something that we were explicitly conscious of and it wasn't, "Oh, well we'll figure it out later." I think one other element was we also had travel scholarships and part of the travel scholarships was for people who wouldn't otherwise be able to attend or are under-represented in journalism/technology, which is both in terms of racial and gender diversity, but also in terms of, as you heard in the opening, lots of people from the coasts. Not as many people from not from the coasts. So geographic diversity, types of organizations, types of organizations that may not even be news organizations. So all different types of diversity in terms of journalism/technology. ->> Can I just add one more thing, too? One strategy that we found really successful is foregrounding women and people of color. So part of that meant we made sure that after the event, the photos that went up were not just exclusively white so that you're inviting people to come to spaces. So for example at ONA, the first year that I was there, which was in 2010 there was a lot of push-back around, like, oh, this seems like it was just like mostly white people here. So the leadership really took that to heart. Robert Hernandez was on the board, and he was then -- he was one of the very active leaders in the board meeting saying, "This is important, we need to make this a priority," which meant that there wasn't a push-back when I said to our developer, "Hey, you have to dig a little bit further to make sure that you put a person of color on the front page of our site that people know that they're invited." -EMMA: But it's also -- like, it's organic. You didn't just collect the four people of color, make them pose in a picture -- ->> We had to Photoshop a black person. -EMMA: -- with the four people of color, being copied and pasted onto every single page. That's terrible but you didn't have that. ->> But the other thing is, identifying influencers in the community. So like, Robert is one and putting them in leadership position. Michelle Johnson from BU is one. That totally opens doors when you have a diverse student newsroom. Then all of a sudden this rising crowd of people feel like they're a part of this community and they want to come and join in, and they take a lot of pride in it. I mean, I had women from the student newsroom last year, like, coming up to me nearly in tears because they were so excited and overwhelmed to be a part of this experience and it was something -- it was a space that they had never been able to enter safely before. ->> I can add? Can I -- -EMMA: Yup, go ahead. ->> I think, adding on to what she said, I think that was one of the people who was a part of the newsroom last year, and I don't think that had I not had that opportunity, I had gone to ONA or even thought of moving into a -- to meet a lot of people who are here today. ->> It's both a top-down and a bottom-up strategy. ->> And I think because of that I spread the word to other students saying, hey you should -- other students who are either of under-represented backgrounds -- you should also apply to the student newsroom and get involved with ONA. ->> Um, we're talking a lot about hiring but, you know, in my experience as a journalist, up until about a year ago was almost exclusively as a freelancer. So I think there's an element there of, you know, if you don't have hiring power, or whatever, that's fine. Like, still maybe try to get assignments, you know, diversified a little bit even if it's for a small little thing. And the interesting thing that is, that counts as a credential for them -- even if you make the commitment to hire them and maybe they could work for your competitors, fine. You only threw, like, a low budget project at them. -EMMA: That's a really good point. What else? I'm curious what -- yes? ->> When you -- -LATOYA: Just a quick time check before your question. We're at 12:58 and we want to roll. Let's get the question and if there's any specific question that you want to toss out we can because we'll have time for questions when we start outlining the plans. But if there's a question that's bothering you, or there's a situation that happened like that Lorie so bravely shared because it's hard to say, hey, we tried. Now's the time to get that out because now's the time where we get into what we can do and start moving forward. ->> This is more of a little observation which I was set to write speak code and it was pretty eye-opening because women and men function differently in a work situation. And it almost every single woman. It became very clear. Women say "we" instead of I so the assumption is that you didn't do the work. Women aren't afraid to ask questions. For men, it's much more, "Ooh then I'm weak that I don't know." So women ask questions. And again, it's assumed that they don't know what they're doing. So... and women tend to be more collaborative and inclusive. It explains a lot of my work situation so... ->> Which kind of goes to what Lorie was saying was that sometimes it's not actually that your female applicants are less qualified it might be that you have attitudes that make them less qualified. So sometimes it's not strictly a resume thing. Sometimes you just kind of have to. You and your staff have to examine what your attitudes are, would I be feeling the same way if this was a man? ->> I think the biggest challenge with everybody is the imposter syndrome. The guy that was -- the first panel I went to, who are we missing? Tall, white dude. It was a developer and he and I were chatting afterwards and he said, I felt like I don't belong here. And I'm like, dude you belong here and it's not like -- it's just we all kind of feel like they're going to find out I'm full of shit any second now. -EMMA: For sure. When I showed up, the same thing. ->> And for me, too. And I've been in the industry for, like, ever. And it's really, the thing with this conference, I was behind the scenes pushing, like, have you thought about this person? Oh, they can volunteer. And my note is, don't put them in volunteer mode because that treats them like, you couldn't afford to be here. So trying to put that table there. And it is, even though, I mean like love this community, it is still very intimidating when you see, like, oh, shit, there's all of Brooklyn sitting at this table and I'm over here. How do I say hello? Someone was like, is there anybody here from the New York Times? I'm going to do a poll on this repo, and I want to talk to him first but I'm nervous about it. And I'm like, holy shit, has an. We all have that on different levels. That was like the biggest challenge. ->> But there was another thing to recognize, too, and that's that as we're seeing this sort of rise of stars in the industry which tend to be white and male and thinking about why they're rising, part of that is the how difficult it is -- how aggressive and violent it can sometimes be on the Internet for women and people of color and how challenging it is to rise above that, right? So like one example is a friend of mine just this week wrote a post that was slightly controversial where she was calling out sexism for something, and it had 1700 comments. These people, like, went into your Instagram feed and pulled out pictures of her son and started, like, threatening her and her son. And you know, these threats are very real except we don't make space to talk about them or address them in the newsroom at all but they are definitely big inhibitors in the rise and the success of these communities. -EMMA: And you guys are big horizontal loyalty people, right? So it's like, who are you promoting? Who are you constantly referring to and referencing and recommending for things? And do they just like you? Did they go to school with you and then you went to the same internship together and now you work together? What does your network look like and how do you change that? -LATOYA: Perfect, can we put a pin in the spark and I really want people to walk away with actions and things that we can be doing so that next year we can talk. Can you put a pin in the violence part? Because we need to share strategies on that. ->> The only thing that I was thinking about also is thinking about our attitude and our culture because I think things work best when -- because it's actually better to have. It's not like I want to do this because it's the right thing to do. It's actually better to have more viewpoints. It's actually fun to have different kinds of friends. And how do we, like -- while it's also fun to be doing that, and getting great results I think that's, like, the best of all worlds and is there a way to promote that? -LATOYA: And I think one thing that people might not realize particularly if you're in a more monochromatic space. So someone like me, if I walk is in and you tell me that you have an all-white newsroom. I'm automatically going to think that you're going to be hostile to me. And there have been very nice, high, grand organizations that I've been recording and the first thing that I was looking at, everybody who's of color here has left within a year. This is not a space for me. I'm not going to consider you. So that's also something that it might not be immediately apparent but also understanding how people of color would view this. It might be an accident, it might be happenstance that when your team came together and it's all guys. Or your team came together, and it's all white people or 50-plus of the similar background but that also sends a signal that's what you're most comfortable with. But we all have stories. But I want to get into the plan. So you are not automatically committed to the plan just because you're sitting there. Don't feel that I have to do all this stuff just because Latoya said so. If you're interested, though, because one of the things that I decided to do one evening, a poor person, you know, my stories were told incorrectly, and being a person of color I was like, okay I'm going to go into the media. So I started out. So I started out freelancing because that's exactly how I got in. You had friends that are reading you, doing you favors. Again, with my friends moved on they took me with them and then suddenly I was able to do in the running for being named publication despite the fact that I did not follow any path that would have been remotely recognizable as acceptable to a lot of people. And to this day, I generally do not send out resumes because they do not work for me. Generally, people who want to hire me, they will come to me directly. Me applying for a job, just generally doesn't work out so I almost never do. So we're going to talk about some things that -- what's up? ->> I said that's so true, I didn't realize that. ->> That's true for, like, almost everyone, though. -LATOYA: Almost everyone but everyone in a specific way. -EMMA: Not for people who don't have jobs. Barrier for underemployed. -LATOYA: There's a very big part of this that is also how do you get a job? And a lot of it is, we're doing it through connections: Who you know. But we're doing so much more that generally if you put up a resume by yourself, it's not going to stand up. There's a million reasons that someone's going to look at me and knock me out. Instead I go around, we have conversations, we make sure you keep things and then when something comes up they normally find a way to make those issues, the things that would make my resume a problem, go away. It's slightly different than the social networking that most people are asking for because if you do have all those qualifications it helps to me but you might still be able to compete. Whereas for me it's kind of like can you compete? Well, it depends on what the metric is. It depends on what they're looking for. If you're looking for someone with skills, I got it. If you're looking for someone who has pedigree, I don't. I'm also going to tweet it out. Because that's what I was writing for -- trying to write tweets for too long. Anyway, so one of the things that I've noticed particularly in my career when I started people asking how they got there was, there are some things that are in common that always seem to happen when somebody starts to rise, right? One, they have a lot of people watching their backs. They have a lot of people that are putting them in places that they probably shouldn't go and probably don't deserve to be. I went to two very transformational conferences, first was South by Southwest 2008, and Web of Change in 2009. And I went to both of those on an accident, on a whim. South by Southwest is supposed to be super techie. I can't go, I'm pregnant, you go. And I sat there, I met so many people. It took me straight from being I'm a writer to, "Oh shit I'm a technologist" because I was suddenly immersed. It so happened that this was the first time that South by Southwest had -- I was excited so we got 50 people. Fifty of us, right? And this was like a conference in 2000. It's like there are 50 of us and so they were looking for every single person that they might not know. They pulled us into a clip, it was an arching, warm space. And this is what agile development is. This is what you could be doing. This is where web standards are wrong. This is what you're thinking about. This is a person that you need to meet. Changed the outcome of my career dramatically. I had a friend who was on the board, Kenny who was like, you need to come to this conference. Web of Change, it's kind of like Politicos + tech retreat. It's where people design a lot of things for specific engagements and non-profits go to island way the hell out at the end of world, and you know, spend time together and spend four days, kind of just talking about best practices and what-have-you. So you get a lot of upfront close and personal time with these folks. I wasn't going to be able to afford to go and Kenny managed to do what no one had been able to have, she got me a scholarship. A stipend scholarship and a place to stay and whatever possible so that everyone can get a small subsidy to go. But I was like, yeah that knocks out people. I'm not going to be afford $17,000. So she made the argument and she really fought for me to be able to come there and me and as a result that was where I got my first job consulting with for media 'cause that's where I met Zack. And that was the first job when I met Matt, and Eli who works at Upworthy. And so it's these things that are very important. People that have your back and people that you share space with, too, sharing your knowledge. This is a big thing particularly in circles of color and circles of women. People are afraid to talk about what their salary is. You don't want to tell people how much money you make. There's all this judgment with it. Money, you don't want to deal with it. But at the same time when you find out that somebody that's close to you that works with you is being dramatically underpaid and you know how much somebody else pays, you should feel you have a responsibility that you at least need to make light of that information. But you can find things. So I've started over the years, kind of assembling things. There's a TCG Salary Guide that was sent out by Creative Careers where they did a poll and a benchmark. There's always places like Glass Door that help you be more anonymous about it. But listening in and figured out how people are New York Stating salaries. And making so much less the rest of their careers just because they did not negotiate hard enough, or they did not understand that they could negotiate in the first place. So talking about things like money, talking about things like how you got to a certain position. How did you get that title because a lot of us, we all admire somebody. We admire saying, "Damn how did you get that job?" But most of us don't have the courage to go up to everyone we know and say, "Hey how did you get that job?" So I think it's imperative for all of us here. Turn that around and here's how I got my job. If you want to make some time and we'll talk about the steps that it took me to get good at this stuff. I would love to. I am not a coder. I'm a kid who had enough friends. I could talk enough people into it and it works out. So my skills would actually be fairly low on the scale. I'm have very good organizing people to a certain shared goal. Which is an asset. -EMMA: And on the flip side of that is also asking uncomfortable questions, like I heard somebody at this conference talking about like their new start-up and they had only made a handful of hires but somebody immediately challenged them saying, "Have you hired any women?" Because I looked at your website and it was all dudes. And event's all mumble, mumble, mumble, I don't know, things, things, things. And she wouldn't drop it, and she said, "Wait, are you going to hire anybody?" Have you put out any -- "have you tried?" And me, I thought that was so cool. And that was the first time that I heard that in a cautiously holiday conversation over coffee. Those things probably happen over emails, and one-on-one. But this was public, other people could hear this. Other people could see and hear this conversation and I thought, that was super, super awesome. So I would say don't be afraid of those conversations and challenge that in your own newsrooms and challenge that, like, to your own peers. Like your friend hired somebody -- did you even look harder than that? Did you try 'cause you should try this group? Or you should try these people over here. -LATOYA: Right, and there's also a pinned thing. Yes, there's also a thing, just really quick on money, right, because is the thing that we also don't talk about this the room in terms of making risks and assessments. If you were to private the VC thing. You have $2 million and you have to make the start-up run and your staffing is limited. A lot of times you want to hire not only the people who have the skills that you need but the people that you trust because you might not have enough money to make this work. So there is a lot of tension around who we're hiring and why. So the idea is to figure out and get in the exact moment of, "Okay I need to hire somebody right now." ->> Yeah, I just -- when you're saying that, I just realize that in our workplace, we actually have completely transparent salaries. Like, we know what every single worker makes. And I realize that's radical. And I'm like, you can't just ask other people that and I started questioning that but it is like a structure that reinforces -- 'cause who would be at a disadvantage? People who were at an advantage everybody knows that what you make is private but is that something we can push against? -EMMA: Like in Gilman, if you're in a guild you pretty much have a baseline of what most of the people are making, really. 90% of the people but that's, like, pretty rare especially in smaller heed. -LATOYA: And there's also resources that people have confidentially cobbled together. There was a Tumblr going around, Who Pays Writers. It just went around in certain circles in terms of who was paying and what rates. And there was another poll that just happened with BuzzFeed where people were like, put your salary in and figure it out. And we'll do a poll of where people are, and how much it is. Pay attention to these. And it's really important because you don't get to the point where you're trying to transition levels you're trying to transition into a connected level and you don't have the history or the salary to hatch. It's an automatic red flag to people who are hiring. ->> I was going to go, I don't want to be -- when you were talking about the start-up hiring thing, I think when you have a company that can only have so many people and you're interviewing people or strangers, to someone's point said that you need people -- you basically need people who can come to the interview and say, I can do this, I can take on this huge weight on this project which is maybe a fourth of the work that needs to be done in the next four months. And I feel when I have been in interviews, in my previous tech company, we would get all kinds of applicants. We would get dudes right out of school who would come in and be like, I've never built oa real application but I know I could do it because it must be like the other languages. So yeah, even though you want three years of experience, we could do it and then we would have women come in saying, I have six years of experience. And I said, I took a battle. And I'm not sure, I was on sabbatical. Making all these self-depricating excuses and when you're in a interview, you're too nervous to even start talking about this. Like, I'm sorry. I have to go with a person who thinks they can do that. -EMMA: So how do you change that outside of the newsroom interview room? Do we need at these kinds of conferences? Do we need a session like how to go and be a badass in an interview? ->> But part of this is that is too. How do we change your mindset? That person who has imposter syndrome sitting there, that has six years experience isn't the one to hire than the man who doesn't? ->> I'm so for women in coding like, it's beyond. But it's hard to convince a whole team of people when you're like, I know if I could encourage her. Because then I'm taking ownership of her and if she can't do something because she's too nervous about it, I have to take ownership of that as well. So it's -- I think technology is incredibly meritocratic and I think that's awesome when you're on the Internet, if you can achieve androgyny, where you're judged based on your skills. People will give you so much credit in forums or whatever. I do respect too, though, that if you put up, like, a blog post upon your to your point before, you can get attacked brutally for it. But I was thinking the other day, I had some guy on a forum post accuse me of being some skinny white dude in an SS start-up once and I was thinking, "This is so complementary because that's not who I am and that is awesome." -EMMA: You've made it! ->> I've made it because I'm androgenous on the Internet. -LATOYA: -- and it's something that, again, when you're dealing with with that at the hiring level it's two things one we can assume that this person can do it and went it's imposter syndrome and they're scared in this interview but if they end up being a scared employee you have many, many more problems that have come for you as manager. So maybe one of the things that can help is maybe -- and one of the things that I want to suggest, one, is make them meet a buddy up. I want everyone in this room to make a new friend. If you don't have any friends of color, make a friend of color. If you don't have any older friends, make one of those friends because here's what happens. When you talk through with your friends, your friends are the ones who will be able to sit with you and say, "I don't think you come across as well as you do in this interview. You're hitting a wall." I made a new friend. She's, like, another black mom who was in media and we were like, "Holy shit." So we ended up being friends and she got rudely rebuffed by a big name news organization that I will not name because it's on the record but a big name news organization and in person who was hiring went back and essentially said, you don't look like you're interested in this kind of career because your resume says -- she didn't ask any other questions and was sort of upset. There's recruiters that come in NABJ. I know four people here. Let's figure out what just happened. Is it going to be your direct boss? Is it going to be somebody else? But I could do that because I have the connections and the know-how. So okay, you didn't get a good chance to adjust yourself. Quiz. Can we talk about this? Can we figure out what you sent? I had her send me the email so that I could read it over. Maybe you didn't want to mention this part. Maybe you want to explicitly state in your resume that you're transitioning out of television. But I feel like this in person, like, we're talking to each other. We're making friends, or whatever. That cannot be understated. It's my friend who got me here. You need to be somebody else's friend just like I tried to be friends with those who are young, starting a career. Maybe made a mistake. Where am I'm going to go now? Trying to be that person to swoop in, fix your portfolio, get you a god damn website, put that stuff up there, fix it because there were people who did that for me and that's what helps, right? So making new friends. -EMMA: The best advice that I got is, "You look like you're about to vomit when you interview" and I had like a mental AJ (phonetic) who we were doing mock interviews with and he was like, "Okay, like, you look really nervous and I'm legitimately afraid that you're going to barf on me." So you have to ring it in. You gotta try it little harder and that was very, very transformational for me in a lot of ways. Because who would know that you looked like that you were about to puke on somebody? So one friend who was very, very honest with you and grabbing people, in a way, that's helpful to them. Not like, "Hey you suck, go home." But I think if you can find somebody and because you see something in them whether it's you think that they could have good experience or they could be, you know, kind of taught and shaped into something. Grab that person and give them unsolicited advice to try to make them better. Like, that's awesome. -LATOYA: I was just going to push and say that we have like ten minutes left so if you want to have action plans and you know where the acquire I'm go to be a bit of a dick and say, we know a lot of these things. What else can we do? All right, bam. You want to run through the list and then do open conversation? -EMMA: We have ten minutes. -LATOYA: Let's just roll with it, all right? Last one, go. ->> The -- I think something that didn't exist maybe six months ago, I guess, when it came out was that grant story, Dr. V's Magic. I won't get into what exactly it was about but, you know, they didn't have anybody on staff that would have recognized the huge problems in this article about -- that addressed like trans issues or whatever. And then the woman actually killed herself as a result of it and it was just such a disaster for grant land that I think that everybody has a boss. Not everybody has hiring power. If you hit a wall where you sort of need to make the case that this is important, I think that the grant land thing was enough of a -- ->> It resonates. ->> It just kind of pointed it out and I use that example frequently. -EMMA: Okay, so who has a solution? ->> I like the plan of the mentor network thing. I think that's really helpful. My fiend Lea wrote an app about -- collaborating as mentors in technology, remotely. So you can sign up for a mentor. I think those are really helpful. -EMMA: Is that like a public resource that we can direct people to? ->> Rally? I think it's called rallyyourgoals.com or something. But Lea, she's based in Toronto and she has an app like that. But there are -- I'm sure there's -- there's ListServs, too for this kind of thing. Or we could set one up where you could join and have people post comments about what they need advice on. I think that's a solution, potentially. ->> I would say I've heard about this hiring -- or excuse me, diversifying your hiring team, especially for the technical parts of interviews. Because otherwise, you have the same people hiring the same people over and over again. -LATOYA: And one of the things that I like that the Knight Fellowship does, like, every single year is they have a core team of people who is always evaluating applications and then they call in a pool of friends and experts to come do the second rounds. So when they're doing in-person evaluations they have people who care about the Knight Foundation -- the Knight Fellowships but aren't necessarily affiliated, who are of a variety of backgrounds to help give perspectives on these candidates, right? So that way it's interesting. They help to take the things and then the final decision is still the same people. It's still Donald, Jim, and Pam. But it helps to get other voices without them actually being on staff. So that's something in a helps bring in the mix. ->> I know we all had a hardy chuckle at binders full of women but I would like to revisit the issue from the other side. So if it's a white dude saying, "Bring me a binder full of women," it's like, you're an asshole but if you are that start-up or you are that person's like, "Oh crap we've been so busy thinking about all these things about building this business but we want to give an opportunity to somebody else, we don't know anybody else." If there were a way that people knew about, well, okay, this is how you can start, you might not have made any decision that we wanted you to make because it was ten years ago. But sure, here's the binder full of women and everybody that you might want to hire. -EMMA: Fun fact. Fun fact. Robert and I work on this project with other people and it's called Diversify Journalism With Me and we started a couple of years ago and we're in the process of relaunching it and the idea is that it's a list. It's a profile base, not just a spreadsheet of names of people who we know. People who have been recommended to us. Who are of color, who are awesome, who should be hired, who should be on panels and it's public and all you have to do is, it's diversify.journalismwith.me. -LATOYA: Just Google "Journalism With Me." -EMMA: And like, it literally is just a list of people who are awesome who we have found through me, Robert. And there's like six other people. It's a total mix, right, there's -- we're a mix of gender or race, or like, types of things that we do. Some of us are educators, some of us are in the middle of marriage. And that was started and we're totally interested in expanding. And if you've never seen the list, and you need people, hit us up and we'll give you this whole bucket of people or a binder. They're not really a bucket. -LATOYA: The whole goal is to destroy the excuse, "I can't find these people." -EMMA: It is the Internet. It is the Internet. ->> Or that first thought of, "Shit can we do something?" Cool. And then the Trojan horse that goes into the inside. -LATOYA: But the other thing that I thought was interesting that you just brought up. This woman was having a problem work and she's like, I'm getting outspoken by all these alpha dudes where it's all white guys and it's me and it was interesting because that ListServ was, "Have you ever been late? Work with what you have" and challenging power. It was very different types of things but the overwhelming response that came back was find the alpha white dude, befriend him, and have him if forward your ideas. But at the same time -- -EMMA: You have to do it. ->> I was like. Let's twist that a little. What if we all decided here, everybody who's in here to befriend somebody that is an alpha white male and isn't thinking about these things and be that bug in that person's ear? ->> What if they don't want to be befriended by you? -LATOYA: Then find another one. There's a lot. It's our whole industry. -EMMA: There are a lot of white dudes out there. ->> I think we have like of the 30 people in this room, maybe seven. You guys actually are really important. -EMMA: Yes. So take that home with you and... and think on that in your hearts. ->> Did anyone see that video? ->> Don't you think there might be a little bit more match-making? -LATOYA: Match-making? That's good. ->> Because that's -- ->> I think that's one of the things that people forget, like, so I've been into those summits like Spark Camp where they hand-pick people and it's like, how do you have time to tweet or share your work and all that stuff. And introverts, people always forget about that. ->> I said this at the ONA panel the other day but I spoke to all the white people in the room and said that it's your responsibility to speak up. So even if you're not the hiring manager, you can express the importance of diversity as your values and the values of good journalism. And the more -- you know, and call it out when you see it in your industry, when you see hires that are totally homogenous and just say, "Hey, but what about this? Diversity is important" and remind them 'cause you know, no one -- these hiring managers don't want to be called racist, or sexist, and they don't want to see that. ->> I would avoid framing it that way. Here's some -- let me help you with some answers. Like, I'm part of -- we hired two digital professors. ->> Well, sometimes you need to sway people. ->> But you also need to know -- -LATOYA: A lot of people waiting to talk. Can we pass it? Boom and boom? ->> My suggestion is put some pressure on the news organizations to release their diversity or lack of diversity just like Google did. They were horribly embarrassed. Facebook and Twitter just released it too and it's like -- I mean, it's no surprise, the numbers. But, you know, it's -- it should be embarrassing to the news organizations. ->> Hey, this handy interactive came out yesterday, I saw. ->> The what? ->> Do you know anything about that? ->> If you guys are interested in this. -LATOYA: Oh, you did. You Make It, the project. ->> There's so much hype over data journalism and hype over diversity in the media that I did a data journalism infographic about diversity in the media. It ran on the Who Pays Writers blog yesterday. If you guys just search for "Diversity In Journalism" Twitter it'll come up. I just searched for it. It's broken on mobile browsers and I just can't deal with that right now. I'll bring it up on my computer but it's -- yes... -LATOYA: Ariel has been waiting. ->> A couple points. Is there an etherpad where I can add links to? Because I don't know about The Diversity Project but I know about the ArticleNet Network which, is a network of female speakers on technology. That's also a technology. There's also a speaker in dotwebapp.com where you can find people -- -EMMA: Just tweet them and use SRCCON and we'll collect them up. -LATOYA: We'll put a blast out on the etherpad. ->> And in also in New York -- it's New York specific or fenced, but there's an app that says "we can do better" which takes all the start-up's data about their public hiring practices and how diverse their teams are, and it makes it's a little G3 app where you can see where they stand on how diverse their teams are, and who you should apply to if you're working in technology and you want sympathetic team. So I'll put all those links on whatever. -EMMA: Just tweet them and use hashtag #university. -LATOYA: I have, like, 100 people I would add to that. Nice, we'll do it. And a quick idea to put out there. Do we need to do a match speed dating thing? I loved it at Wham where you can sit down with people who are in your industry fifteen minutes at a time. But just ask them any kind of questions that was on your mind. And people asked how to publish a book, how do I deal with the situation, or whatever you come up with and staff the booth. There's also, you know, I was reporting geek speed dating at the different cons at SDCC and the comic cons. Maybe we need to have a match-making for media careers -- speed dating. How do I get your career? How do I get your job? What skills do you have because I do this all the time informally? Because I just met somebody who's the head of NBC and he's an African-American man, been there for a long time. And just started on TV but he doesn't understand data and the Internet but I do. And I said, let's trade. We'll have coffee. I'll talk to you about how you understand the Internet and you talk to me about how I survive. But maybe making this more formalized and bringing the people to propose that this space always exists where we can, all right? Did we get anybody that hasn't already spoken? Is there somebody that -- ->> There's just one really simple thing just to post all your jobs or get management to do so. I think it's -- I mean, you were saying that sure not everyone goes in through a resume but there's zero possibility of getting new people if you don't actually make it public. -LATOYA: Good point, good point. Okay, and you had a comment? ->> Pay your interns and have resources to help them find cheap housing so that you can get people from out of the city. When you don't pay your interns and they aren't able to get housing then you limit your internships to who can afford to take an unpaid internship in another city that is a really -- -EMMA: And relocate your entry-level employees. Like, if you're in New York and you're only asking for people from New York and you won't relocate the kid from Iowa, then you can't hire that person as well. -LATOYA: So from a hiring manager's perspective, I always like to be devil's advocate. From a hiring manager's perspective, you have a show budget. And the budget is $5,000. You do all these things. We don't have interns at the moment because we can't afford them. -EMMA: And if you can't pay your interns, don't take interns. -LATOYA: It doesn't mean that we don't have work to get done. Okay, so we don't have $30,000 to pay with interns. After you get through the processing fees and all that shit, it's $30,000. Okay I don't have that money. We sponsor a week in our newsroom and bring them in here? Can we do a different structured fellowship? What can we do with $300? So we tend to look at the big money stuff, right, the things that are like, pay your interns, relocate people. That's a really big, really hard thing to sit there and fight for at the hiring level where you're like, well your budget's already cut three times. Figure this out. But one of the things that I try to advocate for the people in my newsroom is, okay, general assembly said this. Okay, it's $80. To me, this is nothing. To somebody that's just starting their career that's probably two days of work. Let me see if I can sponsor somebody. And you saw what happened with Hacker School. If you want cover your living responses if suddenly, bam they're at 50% like nothing ever happened, right? And that was $5,000 for each person from Etsy. All right, so for them, small investment, but for other people, it made the whole world, so figuring out on a whole scale, what we can afford to do. And I think also sharing resources. And we're going to run out of time. Sharing resources, internally. I loved how we had the etherpad, do you need a ride share? Do you need somewhere to stay? Can we help this out? Those of us who have means -- who needs help, and who needs can I commit? I'm going to give somebody a 5,000-dollar scholarship but I'm like, you just need a hotel? I'm going to help you out. Let me go ahead and pay that for you. It may be -- and being able to connect with folks who are at higher level in their careers where an expense of $200 is not going to make or break you. Figuring out how to connect to that. ->> I was thinking about Tyler Fisher had a Tumblr called newsnerdsfirst.tumblr.com. This was great kind of embracing and -- maybe we can do that for like nerds of color. ->> Two follow-ups. It's one thing to meet people I know that a lot of people, myself included have even more trouble with developing and cultivating and keeping those relationships so that they can actually bear fruit and the second thing was when we were on that internship conversation, I'm not like, are there grants? Are there third-party organizations that would be like, "Oh, we would love to?" We have people with lots of money to put it in places where these people that you're talking about could get that payment for that internship. So I mean, that's another thing that we may be need to do some. ->> Yeah and there are. -EMMA: I mean, there's tons of money in the world. ->> And how do you just con people to do the things that you want to do? -LATOYA: But actually building on that, I think that in terms of assessing your network right because what you're talking about like the W.K. Kellogg foundation, Ford Foundation. They give tons of money out just trying to figure stuff out. $35,000? Here. Just figure this out. ->> You gotta be in that circle. -LATOYA: Yeah, you have to be in the circle. ->> We weren't even thinking that way and if we're trying to think of solutions and that was something they went to. -LATOYA: So asking somebody to underwrite, or asking for favors. We can figure shit out but if we need to be able to -- but that's the last question that we want to end on. -EMMA: Anybody else or over? Anybody else who hasn't said anything? Go! Go! No? -LATOYA: We're on Twitter. We're on the Internet. Find us, talk to us, go forth, change the world. +How to diversify the pipeline of journo-coders +Session facilitator(s): Emma Carew Grovum, Latoya Peterson +Day & Time: Friday, 12:30-1:30pm +Room: Franklin 2 + +LATOYA: All right. Welcome, how are you? + +> > Great. +> > LATOYA: So we are all here presumably to talk about diversifying the line. And the funny joke about this. And by the way if you don't know me, I'm Latoya. +> > EMMA: I'm Emma. +> > LATOYA: I was going to introduce you! Anyway. Emma and I are great friends and I am friends with a lot of people in this room. But you might not know this. I run a site called Racial Issues and I got into this by essentially critiquing how this represented people and poor people of color. And a lot of things have changed now and now I'm at the place where I'm looking at how are we going to fix this problem that we have been talking about, you know, since I've been into it since 2008 and since the industry at large has started, right? You'll notice that this trend is not a trend that's unusual to journalists, right? Journalists have always had issues with the newsrooms. And there's a peak point in the 90s where things got better and then it all slid downhill. So the thing that I hate is that we all get together, and we have these talks that we need to diversify. But yet again year after year we're in the same spaces. The people who are least likely to need this talk is are here. And the people who are most interested in this talk have left. We're going to start out with the more traditional type tactics, what's going on? What's an ally? How do we talk to people about what's going on in the newsroom? But everybody's probably going to leave here with an action plan and maybe some Starbursts but we're leaving here with an action plan because we need to be tired of hoping that things are going to get better in terms of diversity. We need to stop pretending that if two of us are cool that our horribly toxic organization is going to get better. We need to stop pretending that every time we make a new friend, that's of color ask we try to get them to come over for something, we need to stop that, right? And each of us is going to commit to a very easy, very doable plan of action which means that a lot easier when we come back together, I. Don't know, Aaron what's your plans for next year? +> > We're making that tomorrow. +> > LATOYA: We're making that tomorrow? Awesome. +> > Tell us what you're thinking. +> > LATOYA: So I was thinking like you go to SRCCON and a lot of us tend to travel in a lot of the same circles. So I'm sure you're at least familiar with some of the people that you saw here, or met here., maybe we're all at certain types of conferences, you might go to OTHA, or South by Southwest, or you might meet people in all of these different places. And in next time we meet up. We. And we actually have an honest conversation about this. But you see, if not, actually it's not going to change. And this is actually a much bigger group than I anticipated, which is great because it's very easy to get ten people on the same page. But this is, like, 30, so we're going to do it the best we can. So I'm going to kick it off to the lovely and talented Emma Carew Grovum. Who's going to talk about the lovely outline and I'll come back to you guys with the secondhand plan. +> > EMMA: Kind of specific to the pipeline issue, falling into three major buckets. There's nobody to hire, there's not enough students coming out with these skills, not enough people to grab at interns to another entry level jobs. How do we fix that problem. And then the second problem is managers' hiring things. So a lot of these organizations, they may be have found those one or two interns, or found that one person. But by and large, the management, the people who are creating the jobs are older, probably white, probably male, probably not a lot happening there and then the third bucket would be speakers, conferences and events. How do you change that up? People being brought in as keynote speakers, or panelists and things who are reaching out and beyond, and not just asking Latoya to appear on any panel so that she can go home and enjoy her life. So I'm really curious what everybody else, like, thinks. Like, what have you seen as a problem? What is an issue that you personally have with, like, any of these, or like... yes? +> > Ten minutes ago I had a related thing. So we're doing admissions for a training program for boot camps, I guess that falls under students and I think that's great is that we have -- they made a scholarship for women, under-represented minorities, and service members. So we have this -- so we have this application in our pipeline and one of the reviewers is saying, I don't know about this girl, or woman -- I don't know about this application. And then the next comment was, well, we need more women in the funnel, so let's push her forward to an interview. And that, to me, it raises the question: Is that the best way to approach it? If we're lowering a bar, is that the best thing that we can do? Because that builds in the assumption that well, if we want to do this, we have to lower the bar. And I think an alternative is, we don't have the best reach, right? Not that many -- not the greatest percentage of the population at large knows that we exist. So, how could we, like, overrepresent those communities we want to retract in our outreach? So that is something that I would like to learn more about because you know, it would be a shame to have -- to do the bar-lowering when if there are people out there who would be fantastic and just haven't heard of us. +> > EMMA: I think the flip side of that it assumes that everybody who's not in those targeted groups also got their because they deserve to and I think that that is, like, a false assumption. Like, you could look at any company and any industry and there are people at every level of employment who are men, who are women, who are white, who are not white who got there on a favorite, who got there, you know, through their legacy, or they got there for some other reason besides their talent and I think a lot of people ask this question of well, whether do we want to lower the bar. Is it okay to take this person because they're of color but they're not quite what we're looking for? And I think a lot of people have asked that -- have answered that question but not explicitly answered that question when the candidates were of color, when the candidates weren't men. +> > I just want to build on that and say, we have some really solid research from the last ten years about things what happens when you submit the same resume with different names on it. It is passed up a lot faster if it's an anglicized, male name. So there is a lot of stuff when we talk about things like lowering the bar. You're getting into some pretty deep pulls. And there are some things that show the kind of bias that we're fighting. So I just want to, like, get that out there in the front of the conversation. +> > EMMA: Yeah, that's awesome. +> > I've experienced a lot of -- I mean, I don't think the answer's lowering the bar, you don't have to. A lot of us are out there. I've been a journalist for more than 20 years. A developer for 17. And if you're not -- at this point, over the last four years, it's a very closed circle. You only get hired if you're -- +> > EMMA: Sure. +> > -- if you know someone. +> > EMMA: So it's not just reach, it's prominence. +> > It's breaking into what is now a very closed circle. I mean, I've gotten passed over just dozens of times. I've always gotten an interview but I didn't ever -- I got passed over for somebody half my age and the opposite gender. +> > EMMA: Is anybody in the room doing hiring? Can we answer that? +> > I'd actually be interested to know -- sorry, you do that thing, first. +> > EMMA: Nope, go ahead. +> > I'd be interested to know how many people, their first jobs in journalism were sort of near their home town, or at least in -- I guess my point is, generally you start out with a smaller newspaper. Generally those are in less-diverse areas. I know for me I live and work in Maine, that's where I'm from and it's 98% white. And so you're -- +> > EMMA: The newsroom or the community? +> > The community. And, whitest state in the country. +> > LATOYA: Let me take that because it's really interesting and it's a good point, too. Because this happened to me out in the bay area when we were on Twitter, oh, my God there's no black people. Have you seen San Francisco? Like, Twitter's not hiring black people. We're not there. But there are many other people there, Latinos and Asians in particular. So you want to look at those rates. But region has a big role to play on how you can diversify. But at the same time I love your question because it gets to something I kind of hate about the first part of this pipeline, right, which is that people assume that there is one path to getting into, you know, journalism. And for many, many years, that was the case that you went and you did your small town stuff and then you worked on it and then you started going regional and you're hoping eventually in your career that you go national. Have you seen what's happening lately? That's been decimated. +> > EMMA: And I think that's especially amplified for technologists and coders anybody on the web. +> > LATOYA: Right and I would have never come in that part. And -- I'm in a good position, like, whoo, it's great but one of the things that I like to point out to people when they ask me questions. I look at your job and the first thing I go is, you ask for a four-year degree like Al Jazeera, a four year degree preferably from a prestigious school and that was their code for "Ivy." That was essentially it -- automatically off the bracket. It doesn't matter if you are actually looking for me. You just said in your job application you are not looking for me but the reason I got in at Al Jazeera was because the person who hired me was very, very familiar with what I was doing, what I was building, and what I bring to the brand and so she made an assumption of skills and she targeted everything around skills. So it didn't matter necessarily where people were coming from. She didn't go to recruit people generally for the stream. She went to place like kids who are doing foreign policy. She wants people who lived two years in Syria. She wanted people who speak six languages and I'll teach them the journalism part. She wanted people who were digital. She wanted people who were great on Twitter, great on Instagram, and pulled all of those people together and then taught them the skills that they needed. And I noticed that in that mindset that we're okay. This is kind of what we want, okay, and I think we can mold this person who what we need is. And that doesn't happen. We want everybody to be perfect out of the box just like how we get those unicorn job ads. That's one of my favorite things, looking at job ads and laughing at them because there's an organization that I love. I called them and they wanted a -- they want a front end and a back end developer. So these two different skill sets and I want you to be able to do all of our website, copy, good with Photoshop and good with jQuery and Python, and if you find that unicorn, and they will work for you for $80,000 a year, I will give you $400 out of my pocket 'cause that's bullshit and that's not going to happen. Anybody that can do both of those things is very high demand and they might love justice as much as I do but they're not going to deal with that. Front end developers have skills. And I understand the grant funding says this. I need to prioritize but, I think part of this is understanding kind of what you're looking for, what you're asking for. If you're just looking for students and interns, you're overlooking a big part of the workplace that maybe is self-taught, maybe has learned these skills. I did an informal poll on TLM, Tech Lady Mafia -- it's a really great ListServ. Feel free to talk to -- I don't know, Gene, Genie, she's the person you want to talk to, she wants to get on TLM. But I put on that ListServ, an informal poll how many people -- because I was reading a bunch of articles about the pipeline -- how many people basically majored in computer science or engineering with a four year degree program, right? And it was interesting. It was about half and half. People who did back end were more likely to have majored in computer science and stuff like that. And they were doing more complex code and can agile languages and more -- the folks that were in the careers I'm in, we're doing digital planning, storytelling and a lot of us pick that stuff up, right? We did weekend classes. You went to general assembly. You went to girl development. You did these things and you learned the stuff that you should to make the project look cool and now you can do it in the newsroom and figure out how to do it for cheap and things like that. So figuring out what's actually priority and what's nice to have. And being brutal about what the types that you want. And I would suggest that particularly for us many hiring positions start looking at people that you want to hire, sit down and interview them, and have coffee and ask them how they are because I could guarantee you that a lot of us didn't and through these traditional channels. I did two years under this person and then I took this official practices class. A lot of it was I was doing this one career and then there was the tech and there was the Internet, and here I am. So figuring out kind of the people that you would like to work with but the skills that they have in common, what traits they have in common, and then figuring that out. Anyway, back to Emma. +> > EMMA: Well, they're talking specifically about people in the pipeline. But for me, people existing in silos. I remember the age of Asian-American Journal Association. Robert is the manager for Hispanic -- to hire and Latoya is part of the National Association of Black Journalists and she's only looking for more black journalists to hire. Like, that is total bullshit and I think a lot of people are looking at one sum game whereas if I hire a straight black woman, then that means that you know, nobody else can hire that position and we're good. We're totally good. We've checked off all our boxes and we're good for the year. It's like are you hiring women? Are you hiring those who are LGBT? Are you hiring people who are multiracial and does your news organization have people who came from other areas? I'm in D.C. so a lot of people like, my entire staff went to Ivy Leagues except for me I went to public school and, like, that is it. And so are you looking at other things like that? Are you hiring people from the Midwest when you went to do your event planning or are all your speakers from New York and San Francisco? Like that is a real thing. So I think if we're thinking about diversity on the big picture like holisticly, that is like very important. Yes? We'll go this way. +> > EMMA: If you have something that's directly relevant to that? +> > I was going to say that it's also, you know, disability diversity, like, how many people have a blind person in their newsroom? How many people have a deaf person in their newsroom? Are we actually thinking about how would this tool used by a low vision user or a no-vision user? You know, odds are we have colorblind people now newsroom but do we actually know that we have colorblind users there? +> > EMMA: And becuse we have colorblind and our graphics and designs should be run through color code or something so that we're accessible to our readers and things because we're developing a newsroom and we're not just putting out content. It's -- +> > STAN: Can you slow down just a little bit? When you get going sometimes it's really hard to understand you. Sorry! +> > EMMA: So my joke at the beginning when I started was awkward public speaker. Yes. Somebody else? +> > I was just going to ask, also the importance of socioeconomic status of people in your newsroom and what that means in terms of the training and support that you need to offer to people in order to get them and the required investment for that, in that there's a lot of value in having someone who doesn't come from an Ivy League school but sometimes that means that you need to help them grow their skill set in order to succeed in that position because they come from different resources and access. +> > EMMA: How many people have worked for a newsroom that assumes that you come in with a smartphone, or assume that you have your own laptop at your own personal disposal to bring in to work with on the road or in the newsroom? For example, like my newsroom doesn't have enough computers for everybody, which is a problem. Sorry? +> > I have something sort of related to this skill question that you mentioned before, Latoya, but to the accessibility point, I went to a conference a couple of months ago it wasn't really journalism but they had an accessibility panel and everybody was like yeah, this is great. We should all enable ourselves to be accessible but I heard the developer behind me say, but nobody's going to pay for that, and how do you prove to your editors and everybody that that's worthwhile and to make sure that it satisfies all these accessibility requirements? How do you prove that out as being something that you need to invest in? And you said something about socioeconomic status, too. And I wanted to say that, I think it assumes that you're coming in with a smartphone or a computer that you paid for yourself, because the salary you're probably getting is not going to let you have an elaborate -- I'm assuming you're supposed to be a status that is all pretty, like, low, when I don't know what other people make in newsrooms but the salaries are pretty modest in most of the ones that I've been exposed to and when you're an intern, and you're volunteering your time, you need to come in with your own outside of that. +> > EMMA: -- hopefully not. +> > -- but to your skill point this is mostly women focused. And I worked for the New York-based Girl Develop It and so we have curriculum to help women to learn to code but we've had other female -- and, it's all about getting developers who are starting out to have those skills that populate your resume with things that people want to hire for. So like, writing and contributing to journals, or whatever, or open-sourcing projects and then speaking about your things. How do you pitch a proposal to your conference? How do you feel confident in your abilities as a developer to contribute to those and then the coding? How do you get your stuff out on GitHub to get it out there? You won't get hired necessarily for the elaborate insane stack of things that they expect but in an interview you can prove your utility by having all those ancillary experiences and I feel like there are very few conferences that focus on just developing those skills. And I think it's an intimidation point, you know? You didn't go to school for CS, you don't feel comfortable pitching ideas for conferences, you don't feel comfortable public speaking, or contributing to open-source, doing any of the other things that help out. +> > EMMA: Can I pick out on Genie because, I also wish I could go find Erika. I'm actually going to go grab her. +> > I actually think, I will also just say that I just gave a talk with for ONA Boston the night before I came here about diversity and online journalism. And, one of the points that I stressed heavily was that it requires a deep investment. And just like when you go to build a piece of technology, frequently it takes longer than you expect or more resources than you expect. So you can apply that to your strategy of diversifying in that, you know, there's a couple other things, too in terms of your -- you really need to have buy-in from your leadership in order for the strategy to succeed. So identifying ways that you can entice, or persuade leadership if they're not an already on-board with that. So it's kind of like a two-pronged thing because I've learned that even when leadership is totally on board, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're ready to invest in the development of moving into new spaces and expanding your community. And so what does that mean in order? That means that you have to work kind of extra hard to make that happen. And you also have to do a lot of landwork in terms of explaining the value of that and proving that to the leaders. +> > EMMA: There were some questions about how you did outreach to diversify speakers in the attendees of SRCCON? +> > Okay, there were a few types of outreach that we did. One was outreach to individuals, both people who we already knew were awesome and we wanted to participate as well as people to recommend other people on the registration for SRCCON. There is a question like, are there people who we may not already know who should be here? So like, asking explicitly was one piece of it. Um, I think another piece of it is just kind of um, like constant ongoing relationship-building. So it's not just that we like pop out of the sky and it's like, "Oh, there's the thing happening and we really need to find people." But we are in communication with people at other events, in other communities like, throughout the years so there is already is an existing relationship to say, "And now there's this other thing happening that we would really appreciate your help with." I think a few specific things there are people who had, like, written for SRC before. We reached out to those. folks. Or people who did MozFest. People who were involved with, we connected those people. So I think those were the two big things. Explicit asks and ongoing relationship-building is part of what really helped and then it was something that we were conscious of at every stage of the process in terms of selecting speakers, in terms of the makeup of the participants. It was something that we were explicitly conscious of and it wasn't, "Oh, well we'll figure it out later." I think one other element was we also had travel scholarships and part of the travel scholarships was for people who wouldn't otherwise be able to attend or are under-represented in journalism/technology, which is both in terms of racial and gender diversity, but also in terms of, as you heard in the opening, lots of people from the coasts. Not as many people from not from the coasts. So geographic diversity, types of organizations, types of organizations that may not even be news organizations. So all different types of diversity in terms of journalism/technology. +> > Can I just add one more thing, too? One strategy that we found really successful is foregrounding women and people of color. So part of that meant we made sure that after the event, the photos that went up were not just exclusively white so that you're inviting people to come to spaces. So for example at ONA, the first year that I was there, which was in 2010 there was a lot of push-back around, like, oh, this seems like it was just like mostly white people here. So the leadership really took that to heart. Robert Hernandez was on the board, and he was then -- he was one of the very active leaders in the board meeting saying, "This is important, we need to make this a priority," which meant that there wasn't a push-back when I said to our developer, "Hey, you have to dig a little bit further to make sure that you put a person of color on the front page of our site that people know that they're invited." +> > EMMA: But it's also -- like, it's organic. You didn't just collect the four people of color, make them pose in a picture -- +> > We had to Photoshop a black person. +> > EMMA: -- with the four people of color, being copied and pasted onto every single page. That's terrible but you didn't have that. +> > But the other thing is, identifying influencers in the community. So like, Robert is one and putting them in leadership position. Michelle Johnson from BU is one. That totally opens doors when you have a diverse student newsroom. Then all of a sudden this rising crowd of people feel like they're a part of this community and they want to come and join in, and they take a lot of pride in it. I mean, I had women from the student newsroom last year, like, coming up to me nearly in tears because they were so excited and overwhelmed to be a part of this experience and it was something -- it was a space that they had never been able to enter safely before. +> > I can add? Can I -- +> > EMMA: Yup, go ahead. +> > I think, adding on to what she said, I think that was one of the people who was a part of the newsroom last year, and I don't think that had I not had that opportunity, I had gone to ONA or even thought of moving into a -- to meet a lot of people who are here today. +> > It's both a top-down and a bottom-up strategy. +> > And I think because of that I spread the word to other students saying, hey you should -- other students who are either of under-represented backgrounds -- you should also apply to the student newsroom and get involved with ONA. +> > Um, we're talking a lot about hiring but, you know, in my experience as a journalist, up until about a year ago was almost exclusively as a freelancer. So I think there's an element there of, you know, if you don't have hiring power, or whatever, that's fine. Like, still maybe try to get assignments, you know, diversified a little bit even if it's for a small little thing. And the interesting thing that is, that counts as a credential for them -- even if you make the commitment to hire them and maybe they could work for your competitors, fine. You only threw, like, a low budget project at them. +> > EMMA: That's a really good point. What else? I'm curious what -- yes? +> > When you -- +> > LATOYA: Just a quick time check before your question. We're at 12:58 and we want to roll. Let's get the question and if there's any specific question that you want to toss out we can because we'll have time for questions when we start outlining the plans. But if there's a question that's bothering you, or there's a situation that happened like that Lorie so bravely shared because it's hard to say, hey, we tried. Now's the time to get that out because now's the time where we get into what we can do and start moving forward. +> > This is more of a little observation which I was set to write speak code and it was pretty eye-opening because women and men function differently in a work situation. And it almost every single woman. It became very clear. Women say "we" instead of I so the assumption is that you didn't do the work. Women aren't afraid to ask questions. For men, it's much more, "Ooh then I'm weak that I don't know." So women ask questions. And again, it's assumed that they don't know what they're doing. So... and women tend to be more collaborative and inclusive. It explains a lot of my work situation so... +> > Which kind of goes to what Lorie was saying was that sometimes it's not actually that your female applicants are less qualified it might be that you have attitudes that make them less qualified. So sometimes it's not strictly a resume thing. Sometimes you just kind of have to. You and your staff have to examine what your attitudes are, would I be feeling the same way if this was a man? +> > I think the biggest challenge with everybody is the imposter syndrome. The guy that was -- the first panel I went to, who are we missing? Tall, white dude. It was a developer and he and I were chatting afterwards and he said, I felt like I don't belong here. And I'm like, dude you belong here and it's not like -- it's just we all kind of feel like they're going to find out I'm full of shit any second now. +> > EMMA: For sure. When I showed up, the same thing. +> > And for me, too. And I've been in the industry for, like, ever. And it's really, the thing with this conference, I was behind the scenes pushing, like, have you thought about this person? Oh, they can volunteer. And my note is, don't put them in volunteer mode because that treats them like, you couldn't afford to be here. So trying to put that table there. And it is, even though, I mean like love this community, it is still very intimidating when you see, like, oh, shit, there's all of Brooklyn sitting at this table and I'm over here. How do I say hello? Someone was like, is there anybody here from the New York Times? I'm going to do a poll on this repo, and I want to talk to him first but I'm nervous about it. And I'm like, holy shit, has an. We all have that on different levels. That was like the biggest challenge. +> > But there was another thing to recognize, too, and that's that as we're seeing this sort of rise of stars in the industry which tend to be white and male and thinking about why they're rising, part of that is the how difficult it is -- how aggressive and violent it can sometimes be on the Internet for women and people of color and how challenging it is to rise above that, right? So like one example is a friend of mine just this week wrote a post that was slightly controversial where she was calling out sexism for something, and it had 1700 comments. These people, like, went into your Instagram feed and pulled out pictures of her son and started, like, threatening her and her son. And you know, these threats are very real except we don't make space to talk about them or address them in the newsroom at all but they are definitely big inhibitors in the rise and the success of these communities. +> > EMMA: And you guys are big horizontal loyalty people, right? So it's like, who are you promoting? Who are you constantly referring to and referencing and recommending for things? And do they just like you? Did they go to school with you and then you went to the same internship together and now you work together? What does your network look like and how do you change that? +> > LATOYA: Perfect, can we put a pin in the spark and I really want people to walk away with actions and things that we can be doing so that next year we can talk. Can you put a pin in the violence part? Because we need to share strategies on that. +> > The only thing that I was thinking about also is thinking about our attitude and our culture because I think things work best when -- because it's actually better to have. It's not like I want to do this because it's the right thing to do. It's actually better to have more viewpoints. It's actually fun to have different kinds of friends. And how do we, like -- while it's also fun to be doing that, and getting great results I think that's, like, the best of all worlds and is there a way to promote that? +> > LATOYA: And I think one thing that people might not realize particularly if you're in a more monochromatic space. So someone like me, if I walk is in and you tell me that you have an all-white newsroom. I'm automatically going to think that you're going to be hostile to me. And there have been very nice, high, grand organizations that I've been recording and the first thing that I was looking at, everybody who's of color here has left within a year. This is not a space for me. I'm not going to consider you. So that's also something that it might not be immediately apparent but also understanding how people of color would view this. It might be an accident, it might be happenstance that when your team came together and it's all guys. Or your team came together, and it's all white people or 50-plus of the similar background but that also sends a signal that's what you're most comfortable with. But we all have stories. But I want to get into the plan. So you are not automatically committed to the plan just because you're sitting there. Don't feel that I have to do all this stuff just because Latoya said so. If you're interested, though, because one of the things that I decided to do one evening, a poor person, you know, my stories were told incorrectly, and being a person of color I was like, okay I'm going to go into the media. So I started out. So I started out freelancing because that's exactly how I got in. You had friends that are reading you, doing you favors. Again, with my friends moved on they took me with them and then suddenly I was able to do in the running for being named publication despite the fact that I did not follow any path that would have been remotely recognizable as acceptable to a lot of people. And to this day, I generally do not send out resumes because they do not work for me. Generally, people who want to hire me, they will come to me directly. Me applying for a job, just generally doesn't work out so I almost never do. So we're going to talk about some things that -- what's up? +> > I said that's so true, I didn't realize that. +> > That's true for, like, almost everyone, though. +> > LATOYA: Almost everyone but everyone in a specific way. +> > EMMA: Not for people who don't have jobs. Barrier for underemployed. +> > LATOYA: There's a very big part of this that is also how do you get a job? And a lot of it is, we're doing it through connections: Who you know. But we're doing so much more that generally if you put up a resume by yourself, it's not going to stand up. There's a million reasons that someone's going to look at me and knock me out. Instead I go around, we have conversations, we make sure you keep things and then when something comes up they normally find a way to make those issues, the things that would make my resume a problem, go away. It's slightly different than the social networking that most people are asking for because if you do have all those qualifications it helps to me but you might still be able to compete. Whereas for me it's kind of like can you compete? Well, it depends on what the metric is. It depends on what they're looking for. If you're looking for someone with skills, I got it. If you're looking for someone who has pedigree, I don't. I'm also going to tweet it out. Because that's what I was writing for -- trying to write tweets for too long. Anyway, so one of the things that I've noticed particularly in my career when I started people asking how they got there was, there are some things that are in common that always seem to happen when somebody starts to rise, right? One, they have a lot of people watching their backs. They have a lot of people that are putting them in places that they probably shouldn't go and probably don't deserve to be. I went to two very transformational conferences, first was South by Southwest 2008, and Web of Change in 2009. And I went to both of those on an accident, on a whim. South by Southwest is supposed to be super techie. I can't go, I'm pregnant, you go. And I sat there, I met so many people. It took me straight from being I'm a writer to, "Oh shit I'm a technologist" because I was suddenly immersed. It so happened that this was the first time that South by Southwest had -- I was excited so we got 50 people. Fifty of us, right? And this was like a conference in 2000. It's like there are 50 of us and so they were looking for every single person that they might not know. They pulled us into a clip, it was an arching, warm space. And this is what agile development is. This is what you could be doing. This is where web standards are wrong. This is what you're thinking about. This is a person that you need to meet. Changed the outcome of my career dramatically. I had a friend who was on the board, Kenny who was like, you need to come to this conference. Web of Change, it's kind of like Politicos + tech retreat. It's where people design a lot of things for specific engagements and non-profits go to island way the hell out at the end of world, and you know, spend time together and spend four days, kind of just talking about best practices and what-have-you. So you get a lot of upfront close and personal time with these folks. I wasn't going to be able to afford to go and Kenny managed to do what no one had been able to have, she got me a scholarship. A stipend scholarship and a place to stay and whatever possible so that everyone can get a small subsidy to go. But I was like, yeah that knocks out people. I'm not going to be afford $17,000. So she made the argument and she really fought for me to be able to come there and me and as a result that was where I got my first job consulting with for media 'cause that's where I met Zack. And that was the first job when I met Matt, and Eli who works at Upworthy. And so it's these things that are very important. People that have your back and people that you share space with, too, sharing your knowledge. This is a big thing particularly in circles of color and circles of women. People are afraid to talk about what their salary is. You don't want to tell people how much money you make. There's all this judgment with it. Money, you don't want to deal with it. But at the same time when you find out that somebody that's close to you that works with you is being dramatically underpaid and you know how much somebody else pays, you should feel you have a responsibility that you at least need to make light of that information. But you can find things. So I've started over the years, kind of assembling things. There's a TCG Salary Guide that was sent out by Creative Careers where they did a poll and a benchmark. There's always places like Glass Door that help you be more anonymous about it. But listening in and figured out how people are New York Stating salaries. And making so much less the rest of their careers just because they did not negotiate hard enough, or they did not understand that they could negotiate in the first place. So talking about things like money, talking about things like how you got to a certain position. How did you get that title because a lot of us, we all admire somebody. We admire saying, "Damn how did you get that job?" But most of us don't have the courage to go up to everyone we know and say, "Hey how did you get that job?" So I think it's imperative for all of us here. Turn that around and here's how I got my job. If you want to make some time and we'll talk about the steps that it took me to get good at this stuff. I would love to. I am not a coder. I'm a kid who had enough friends. I could talk enough people into it and it works out. So my skills would actually be fairly low on the scale. I'm have very good organizing people to a certain shared goal. Which is an asset. +> > EMMA: And on the flip side of that is also asking uncomfortable questions, like I heard somebody at this conference talking about like their new start-up and they had only made a handful of hires but somebody immediately challenged them saying, "Have you hired any women?" Because I looked at your website and it was all dudes. And event's all mumble, mumble, mumble, I don't know, things, things, things. And she wouldn't drop it, and she said, "Wait, are you going to hire anybody?" Have you put out any -- "have you tried?" And me, I thought that was so cool. And that was the first time that I heard that in a cautiously holiday conversation over coffee. Those things probably happen over emails, and one-on-one. But this was public, other people could hear this. Other people could see and hear this conversation and I thought, that was super, super awesome. So I would say don't be afraid of those conversations and challenge that in your own newsrooms and challenge that, like, to your own peers. Like your friend hired somebody -- did you even look harder than that? Did you try 'cause you should try this group? Or you should try these people over here. +> > LATOYA: Right, and there's also a pinned thing. Yes, there's also a thing, just really quick on money, right, because is the thing that we also don't talk about this the room in terms of making risks and assessments. If you were to private the VC thing. You have $2 million and you have to make the start-up run and your staffing is limited. A lot of times you want to hire not only the people who have the skills that you need but the people that you trust because you might not have enough money to make this work. So there is a lot of tension around who we're hiring and why. So the idea is to figure out and get in the exact moment of, "Okay I need to hire somebody right now." +> > Yeah, I just -- when you're saying that, I just realize that in our workplace, we actually have completely transparent salaries. Like, we know what every single worker makes. And I realize that's radical. And I'm like, you can't just ask other people that and I started questioning that but it is like a structure that reinforces -- 'cause who would be at a disadvantage? People who were at an advantage everybody knows that what you make is private but is that something we can push against? +> > EMMA: Like in Gilman, if you're in a guild you pretty much have a baseline of what most of the people are making, really. 90% of the people but that's, like, pretty rare especially in smaller heed. +> > LATOYA: And there's also resources that people have confidentially cobbled together. There was a Tumblr going around, Who Pays Writers. It just went around in certain circles in terms of who was paying and what rates. And there was another poll that just happened with BuzzFeed where people were like, put your salary in and figure it out. And we'll do a poll of where people are, and how much it is. Pay attention to these. And it's really important because you don't get to the point where you're trying to transition levels you're trying to transition into a connected level and you don't have the history or the salary to hatch. It's an automatic red flag to people who are hiring. +> > I was going to go, I don't want to be -- when you were talking about the start-up hiring thing, I think when you have a company that can only have so many people and you're interviewing people or strangers, to someone's point said that you need people -- you basically need people who can come to the interview and say, I can do this, I can take on this huge weight on this project which is maybe a fourth of the work that needs to be done in the next four months. And I feel when I have been in interviews, in my previous tech company, we would get all kinds of applicants. We would get dudes right out of school who would come in and be like, I've never built oa real application but I know I could do it because it must be like the other languages. So yeah, even though you want three years of experience, we could do it and then we would have women come in saying, I have six years of experience. And I said, I took a battle. And I'm not sure, I was on sabbatical. Making all these self-depricating excuses and when you're in a interview, you're too nervous to even start talking about this. Like, I'm sorry. I have to go with a person who thinks they can do that. +> > EMMA: So how do you change that outside of the newsroom interview room? Do we need at these kinds of conferences? Do we need a session like how to go and be a badass in an interview? +> > But part of this is that is too. How do we change your mindset? That person who has imposter syndrome sitting there, that has six years experience isn't the one to hire than the man who doesn't? +> > I'm so for women in coding like, it's beyond. But it's hard to convince a whole team of people when you're like, I know if I could encourage her. Because then I'm taking ownership of her and if she can't do something because she's too nervous about it, I have to take ownership of that as well. So it's -- I think technology is incredibly meritocratic and I think that's awesome when you're on the Internet, if you can achieve androgyny, where you're judged based on your skills. People will give you so much credit in forums or whatever. I do respect too, though, that if you put up, like, a blog post upon your to your point before, you can get attacked brutally for it. But I was thinking the other day, I had some guy on a forum post accuse me of being some skinny white dude in an SS start-up once and I was thinking, "This is so complementary because that's not who I am and that is awesome." +> > EMMA: You've made it! +> > I've made it because I'm androgenous on the Internet. +> > LATOYA: -- and it's something that, again, when you're dealing with with that at the hiring level it's two things one we can assume that this person can do it and went it's imposter syndrome and they're scared in this interview but if they end up being a scared employee you have many, many more problems that have come for you as manager. So maybe one of the things that can help is maybe -- and one of the things that I want to suggest, one, is make them meet a buddy up. I want everyone in this room to make a new friend. If you don't have any friends of color, make a friend of color. If you don't have any older friends, make one of those friends because here's what happens. When you talk through with your friends, your friends are the ones who will be able to sit with you and say, "I don't think you come across as well as you do in this interview. You're hitting a wall." I made a new friend. She's, like, another black mom who was in media and we were like, "Holy shit." So we ended up being friends and she got rudely rebuffed by a big name news organization that I will not name because it's on the record but a big name news organization and in person who was hiring went back and essentially said, you don't look like you're interested in this kind of career because your resume says -- she didn't ask any other questions and was sort of upset. There's recruiters that come in NABJ. I know four people here. Let's figure out what just happened. Is it going to be your direct boss? Is it going to be somebody else? But I could do that because I have the connections and the know-how. So okay, you didn't get a good chance to adjust yourself. Quiz. Can we talk about this? Can we figure out what you sent? I had her send me the email so that I could read it over. Maybe you didn't want to mention this part. Maybe you want to explicitly state in your resume that you're transitioning out of television. But I feel like this in person, like, we're talking to each other. We're making friends, or whatever. That cannot be understated. It's my friend who got me here. You need to be somebody else's friend just like I tried to be friends with those who are young, starting a career. Maybe made a mistake. Where am I'm going to go now? Trying to be that person to swoop in, fix your portfolio, get you a god damn website, put that stuff up there, fix it because there were people who did that for me and that's what helps, right? So making new friends. +> > EMMA: The best advice that I got is, "You look like you're about to vomit when you interview" and I had like a mental AJ (phonetic) who we were doing mock interviews with and he was like, "Okay, like, you look really nervous and I'm legitimately afraid that you're going to barf on me." So you have to ring it in. You gotta try it little harder and that was very, very transformational for me in a lot of ways. Because who would know that you looked like that you were about to puke on somebody? So one friend who was very, very honest with you and grabbing people, in a way, that's helpful to them. Not like, "Hey you suck, go home." But I think if you can find somebody and because you see something in them whether it's you think that they could have good experience or they could be, you know, kind of taught and shaped into something. Grab that person and give them unsolicited advice to try to make them better. Like, that's awesome. +> > LATOYA: I was just going to push and say that we have like ten minutes left so if you want to have action plans and you know where the acquire I'm go to be a bit of a dick and say, we know a lot of these things. What else can we do? All right, bam. You want to run through the list and then do open conversation? +> > EMMA: We have ten minutes. +> > LATOYA: Let's just roll with it, all right? Last one, go. +> > The -- I think something that didn't exist maybe six months ago, I guess, when it came out was that grant story, Dr. V's Magic. I won't get into what exactly it was about but, you know, they didn't have anybody on staff that would have recognized the huge problems in this article about -- that addressed like trans issues or whatever. And then the woman actually killed herself as a result of it and it was just such a disaster for grant land that I think that everybody has a boss. Not everybody has hiring power. If you hit a wall where you sort of need to make the case that this is important, I think that the grant land thing was enough of a -- +> > It resonates. +> > It just kind of pointed it out and I use that example frequently. +> > EMMA: Okay, so who has a solution? +> > I like the plan of the mentor network thing. I think that's really helpful. My fiend Lea wrote an app about -- collaborating as mentors in technology, remotely. So you can sign up for a mentor. I think those are really helpful. +> > EMMA: Is that like a public resource that we can direct people to? +> > Rally? I think it's called rallyyourgoals.com or something. But Lea, she's based in Toronto and she has an app like that. But there are -- I'm sure there's -- there's ListServs, too for this kind of thing. Or we could set one up where you could join and have people post comments about what they need advice on. I think that's a solution, potentially. +> > I would say I've heard about this hiring -- or excuse me, diversifying your hiring team, especially for the technical parts of interviews. Because otherwise, you have the same people hiring the same people over and over again. +> > LATOYA: And one of the things that I like that the Knight Fellowship does, like, every single year is they have a core team of people who is always evaluating applications and then they call in a pool of friends and experts to come do the second rounds. So when they're doing in-person evaluations they have people who care about the Knight Foundation -- the Knight Fellowships but aren't necessarily affiliated, who are of a variety of backgrounds to help give perspectives on these candidates, right? So that way it's interesting. They help to take the things and then the final decision is still the same people. It's still Donald, Jim, and Pam. But it helps to get other voices without them actually being on staff. So that's something in a helps bring in the mix. +> > I know we all had a hardy chuckle at binders full of women but I would like to revisit the issue from the other side. So if it's a white dude saying, "Bring me a binder full of women," it's like, you're an asshole but if you are that start-up or you are that person's like, "Oh crap we've been so busy thinking about all these things about building this business but we want to give an opportunity to somebody else, we don't know anybody else." If there were a way that people knew about, well, okay, this is how you can start, you might not have made any decision that we wanted you to make because it was ten years ago. But sure, here's the binder full of women and everybody that you might want to hire. +> > EMMA: Fun fact. Fun fact. Robert and I work on this project with other people and it's called Diversify Journalism With Me and we started a couple of years ago and we're in the process of relaunching it and the idea is that it's a list. It's a profile base, not just a spreadsheet of names of people who we know. People who have been recommended to us. Who are of color, who are awesome, who should be hired, who should be on panels and it's public and all you have to do is, it's diversify.journalismwith.me. +> > LATOYA: Just Google "Journalism With Me." +> > EMMA: And like, it literally is just a list of people who are awesome who we have found through me, Robert. And there's like six other people. It's a total mix, right, there's -- we're a mix of gender or race, or like, types of things that we do. Some of us are educators, some of us are in the middle of marriage. And that was started and we're totally interested in expanding. And if you've never seen the list, and you need people, hit us up and we'll give you this whole bucket of people or a binder. They're not really a bucket. +> > LATOYA: The whole goal is to destroy the excuse, "I can't find these people." +> > EMMA: It is the Internet. It is the Internet. +> > Or that first thought of, "Shit can we do something?" Cool. And then the Trojan horse that goes into the inside. +> > LATOYA: But the other thing that I thought was interesting that you just brought up. This woman was having a problem work and she's like, I'm getting outspoken by all these alpha dudes where it's all white guys and it's me and it was interesting because that ListServ was, "Have you ever been late? Work with what you have" and challenging power. It was very different types of things but the overwhelming response that came back was find the alpha white dude, befriend him, and have him if forward your ideas. But at the same time -- +> > EMMA: You have to do it. +> > I was like. Let's twist that a little. What if we all decided here, everybody who's in here to befriend somebody that is an alpha white male and isn't thinking about these things and be that bug in that person's ear? +> > What if they don't want to be befriended by you? +> > LATOYA: Then find another one. There's a lot. It's our whole industry. +> > EMMA: There are a lot of white dudes out there. +> > I think we have like of the 30 people in this room, maybe seven. You guys actually are really important. +> > EMMA: Yes. So take that home with you and... and think on that in your hearts. +> > Did anyone see that video? +> > Don't you think there might be a little bit more match-making? +> > LATOYA: Match-making? That's good. +> > Because that's -- +> > I think that's one of the things that people forget, like, so I've been into those summits like Spark Camp where they hand-pick people and it's like, how do you have time to tweet or share your work and all that stuff. And introverts, people always forget about that. +> > I said this at the ONA panel the other day but I spoke to all the white people in the room and said that it's your responsibility to speak up. So even if you're not the hiring manager, you can express the importance of diversity as your values and the values of good journalism. And the more -- you know, and call it out when you see it in your industry, when you see hires that are totally homogenous and just say, "Hey, but what about this? Diversity is important" and remind them 'cause you know, no one -- these hiring managers don't want to be called racist, or sexist, and they don't want to see that. +> > I would avoid framing it that way. Here's some -- let me help you with some answers. Like, I'm part of -- we hired two digital professors. +> > Well, sometimes you need to sway people. +> > But you also need to know -- +> > LATOYA: A lot of people waiting to talk. Can we pass it? Boom and boom? +> > My suggestion is put some pressure on the news organizations to release their diversity or lack of diversity just like Google did. They were horribly embarrassed. Facebook and Twitter just released it too and it's like -- I mean, it's no surprise, the numbers. But, you know, it's -- it should be embarrassing to the news organizations. +> > Hey, this handy interactive came out yesterday, I saw. +> > The what? +> > Do you know anything about that? +> > If you guys are interested in this. +> > LATOYA: Oh, you did. You Make It, the project. +> > There's so much hype over data journalism and hype over diversity in the media that I did a data journalism infographic about diversity in the media. It ran on the Who Pays Writers blog yesterday. If you guys just search for "Diversity In Journalism" Twitter it'll come up. I just searched for it. It's broken on mobile browsers and I just can't deal with that right now. I'll bring it up on my computer but it's -- yes... +> > LATOYA: Ariel has been waiting. +> > A couple points. Is there an etherpad where I can add links to? Because I don't know about The Diversity Project but I know about the ArticleNet Network which, is a network of female speakers on technology. That's also a technology. There's also a speaker in dotwebapp.com where you can find people -- +> > EMMA: Just tweet them and use SRCCON and we'll collect them up. +> > LATOYA: We'll put a blast out on the etherpad. +> > And in also in New York -- it's New York specific or fenced, but there's an app that says "we can do better" which takes all the start-up's data about their public hiring practices and how diverse their teams are, and it makes it's a little G3 app where you can see where they stand on how diverse their teams are, and who you should apply to if you're working in technology and you want sympathetic team. So I'll put all those links on whatever. +> > EMMA: Just tweet them and use hashtag #university. +> > LATOYA: I have, like, 100 people I would add to that. Nice, we'll do it. And a quick idea to put out there. Do we need to do a match speed dating thing? I loved it at Wham where you can sit down with people who are in your industry fifteen minutes at a time. But just ask them any kind of questions that was on your mind. And people asked how to publish a book, how do I deal with the situation, or whatever you come up with and staff the booth. There's also, you know, I was reporting geek speed dating at the different cons at SDCC and the comic cons. Maybe we need to have a match-making for media careers -- speed dating. How do I get your career? How do I get your job? What skills do you have because I do this all the time informally? Because I just met somebody who's the head of NBC and he's an African-American man, been there for a long time. And just started on TV but he doesn't understand data and the Internet but I do. And I said, let's trade. We'll have coffee. I'll talk to you about how you understand the Internet and you talk to me about how I survive. But maybe making this more formalized and bringing the people to propose that this space always exists where we can, all right? Did we get anybody that hasn't already spoken? Is there somebody that -- +> > There's just one really simple thing just to post all your jobs or get management to do so. I think it's -- I mean, you were saying that sure not everyone goes in through a resume but there's zero possibility of getting new people if you don't actually make it public. +> > LATOYA: Good point, good point. Okay, and you had a comment? +> > Pay your interns and have resources to help them find cheap housing so that you can get people from out of the city. When you don't pay your interns and they aren't able to get housing then you limit your internships to who can afford to take an unpaid internship in another city that is a really -- +> > EMMA: And relocate your entry-level employees. Like, if you're in New York and you're only asking for people from New York and you won't relocate the kid from Iowa, then you can't hire that person as well. +> > LATOYA: So from a hiring manager's perspective, I always like to be devil's advocate. From a hiring manager's perspective, you have a show budget. And the budget is $5,000. You do all these things. We don't have interns at the moment because we can't afford them. +> > EMMA: And if you can't pay your interns, don't take interns. +> > LATOYA: It doesn't mean that we don't have work to get done. Okay, so we don't have $30,000 to pay with interns. After you get through the processing fees and all that shit, it's $30,000. Okay I don't have that money. We sponsor a week in our newsroom and bring them in here? Can we do a different structured fellowship? What can we do with $300? So we tend to look at the big money stuff, right, the things that are like, pay your interns, relocate people. That's a really big, really hard thing to sit there and fight for at the hiring level where you're like, well your budget's already cut three times. Figure this out. But one of the things that I try to advocate for the people in my newsroom is, okay, general assembly said this. Okay, it's $80. To me, this is nothing. To somebody that's just starting their career that's probably two days of work. Let me see if I can sponsor somebody. And you saw what happened with Hacker School. If you want cover your living responses if suddenly, bam they're at 50% like nothing ever happened, right? And that was $5,000 for each person from Etsy. All right, so for them, small investment, but for other people, it made the whole world, so figuring out on a whole scale, what we can afford to do. And I think also sharing resources. And we're going to run out of time. Sharing resources, internally. I loved how we had the etherpad, do you need a ride share? Do you need somewhere to stay? Can we help this out? Those of us who have means -- who needs help, and who needs can I commit? I'm going to give somebody a 5,000-dollar scholarship but I'm like, you just need a hotel? I'm going to help you out. Let me go ahead and pay that for you. It may be -- and being able to connect with folks who are at higher level in their careers where an expense of $200 is not going to make or break you. Figuring out how to connect to that. +> > I was thinking about Tyler Fisher had a Tumblr called newsnerdsfirst.tumblr.com. This was great kind of embracing and -- maybe we can do that for like nerds of color. +> > Two follow-ups. It's one thing to meet people I know that a lot of people, myself included have even more trouble with developing and cultivating and keeping those relationships so that they can actually bear fruit and the second thing was when we were on that internship conversation, I'm not like, are there grants? Are there third-party organizations that would be like, "Oh, we would love to?" We have people with lots of money to put it in places where these people that you're talking about could get that payment for that internship. So I mean, that's another thing that we may be need to do some. +> > Yeah and there are. +> > EMMA: I mean, there's tons of money in the world. +> > And how do you just con people to do the things that you want to do? +> > LATOYA: But actually building on that, I think that in terms of assessing your network right because what you're talking about like the W.K. Kellogg foundation, Ford Foundation. They give tons of money out just trying to figure stuff out. $35,000? Here. Just figure this out. +> > You gotta be in that circle. +> > LATOYA: Yeah, you have to be in the circle. +> > We weren't even thinking that way and if we're trying to think of solutions and that was something they went to. +> > LATOYA: So asking somebody to underwrite, or asking for favors. We can figure shit out but if we need to be able to -- but that's the last question that we want to end on. +> > EMMA: Anybody else or over? Anybody else who hasn't said anything? Go! Go! No? +> > LATOYA: We're on Twitter. We're on the Internet. Find us, talk to us, go forth, change the world. diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_27_Mobile_Sucks.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_27_Mobile_Sucks.md index fba9fc60..7cd54041 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_27_Mobile_Sucks.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_27_Mobile_Sucks.md @@ -1,146 +1,146 @@ -Mobile is the future / mobile sucks / the future sucks -Session facilitator(s): Alastair Coote -Day & Time: Friday, 4:30-5:30pm -Room: Franklin 1 - -OK, so we're round about 4:30, so we might as well start. See if anybody comes in a couple of minutes late. So hi, my name is Alastair Coote. I am a developer at the New York Times. I work on the interactive news team, often working with mobile, so I've spent way too much of my time staring at these stupid devices. And mobile is great in many ways, the things that we can do now, sort of everyone has our content in their pocket, that's fantastic, but the real truth is that actually developing for mobile is awful. It sucks. All the different devices, all the different browsers on those devices for a minute it felt like we had desktop browsers sorted out, even IE was relatively OK, and then suddenly we're thrown back into this wild west where everything is awful, so I thought we could come together in a sort of group therapy style and we could talk out our problems and hopefully those people in the room with questions and there will be some other people in the room with answers to these questions, even if we haven't gotten answers maybe we can demystify things a little bit. I don't know, we'll see. - -The way I'm hoping we're going to structure this is now or in a minute everyone is going to grab a post-it note or two and they're going to write down a problem they've had in working with mobile. It can be a technical thing or a philosophical thing or a conceptual thing, whatever you think. And then we'll talk about it in groups for a few minutes. Hopefully not for too long because I think it will be great to bring this back to a group discussion for a greater period of time. Step 1, everybody grab a post-it note and if you've worked on mobile and there's something that's annoyed you about it and my colleague, Tiff and I will be walking around and collecting the post-it notes. -[group activity] -... ... ... ->> OK, nobody has any others? We're all good? ->> ->> OK, so I've done my best, which is not great, at grouping these problems into some sort of topic areas or groups. Quite a few people mentioned testing, cross-device testing or testing in general. People mentioned doing both mobile and desktop at the same time. Lots of people talking with layout. Orientation changes. Landscape in phones is annoying, who uses it. A lot of people talking about multimedia as well, audio, video, both those presentations are quite difficult on mobile devices, particularly when iPhone won't play a video without you tapping it, so on and so forth. Lots of people talking about the restrictions on devices sort of just technologically: They're slow, that sort of the interactions tapping and clicking and battery life, connection speed, that sort of thing. All right. So that's five. ->> So what we're going to do, we're going to get everyone into five groups, so we've got five tables, but any of you guys in the back sort of join in that table there, and everyone will get a topic to talk about for about ten minutes or so, basically for you guys to talk about whether you have you've -- once everyone has talked about it in groups, we'll bring it back to the larger group, so each group can present what they were talking about, so maybe you can write on the sheet and add some more detail, but the hope is there might be someone who sat over there who is a great idea about testing so I want to bring it back to the group as a whole so they can still manage to give out an answer. Who wants to talk about desktop versus mobile. I'm just going to start assigning them to you, then. There you are, guys, desktop and mobile layout. -[group activity] -... ... ... : OK, about two minutes left. Maybe start thinking about one person per group who's going to talk about what you've been talking about ... : ->> OK, everybody ready to wrap up and talk to the group? All right. No, what I mean is you are ready to talk to the group. All right, well, what's what's up with you guys? ->> We're going first. ->> Yeah, it was always the way, I'm sorry. So you guys were talking about mobile and desktop and dealing with that as a sort of a situation. Anyway, you want to talk through what you talked about? ->> The first question is like the first question of apps versus web, and we all immediately concluded, responsive web, to start off there, but we kind of looked OK, let's force ourselves to think about when would you have a compelling argument for apps and there weren't that many, but there were some. The thing that we acknowledge is that the tools have changed that you can start publishing almost disposable apps, kindle singles or things like that that if you can had he hit that threshold but overall you're going to have bigger reach, more bang for your buck, bigger audiences with the smartphones. The next one was what features should you bring over. What should you optimize first and we didn't get too far into it but we talked about the guardian NSA files. I consumed it on my phone, this is freaking great on my phone, I actually read it soup to nuts all the way through and it turned out most of us had that experience and we went to desktop and there's bonus stuff on the desktop. It didn't feel like we got ripped off, which was great. Usually oh, you got the whack version of the story or oh, you don't have this plug-in go screw yourself. So that was a conscious great example, but that was a special project. That's not the daily stuff, so we just were about to hit that. ->> All right. ->> Anyone disagree? Anyone got anything they want to add? Well, that's easy. All right. ->> Yeah, you've done it. You guys were talking about layout, right? Yes, OK. Go. ->> ->> You have a person who's -- everyone needs to have a person who's going to talk. ->> We did not make a decision. - ->> We talked about the fact that there's not enough space on mobile and how do you deal with complicated graphics and tables and things that need a lot of space and the conclusion being largely that you have to start mobile first and design those things small to begin with which might mean a different form so a table might really be a list or card stacked type thing, and then you decide whether or not the investment in designing a progressively optimize the version that would go in a desktop would make since ... Business department has to change the way they deal with advertising outside of the scope of what the design can do. What else did we talk about? ->> No fixed headers or footers. ->> Does anyone disagree with that 1234 hovers doesn't work any more. So you probably just don't do it. ->> All right. ->> So that still doesn't fix my problem with the fact that people hand me PDFs and I've got to figure out some way to display them on a phone. ->>yeah, don't have a solution for that one. ->> ->> Read PDF one letter at a time. Yeah, that sounds like a dream. ->> So I think a lot of these problems we create ourselves in terms of speed, like as we add more stuff to the site, you know, we're just adding more problems for us in terms of speed, so just like keeping it simple, and you know, focusing on mobile first. There are some things that you might implement after the fact, like lazy loading and stuff like that, talked about responsible solutions and how this might help, as well as no animated GIFs, but then we decided we like animated GIFs. And whereas everyone else in the table says GIFs it's "JIFs". ->> I don't have to do a vote by hand, but I think you might be on the losing side of this. ->> I'm used to it. ->> Fighting the good fight. ->> And we also talked about there's two different types of speed. There's processing power, which you know is a big part of the Javascript stuff, animations and stuff like that, so you know, cutting that down to a minimum, and then there's also, you know, performance over network, and, you know, getting everything kind of in one but will or doing like high-priority CSS stuff like that up front and maybe in line to just like get that out of the and get stuff to people quickest. So there's those two things. We also talked about memory and hitting those in case it crashes. But mostly on those first two. ->> So who didn't want animated GIFs and why? It's interesting to know. ->> Sort of -- I didn't mean to use accusatory terms, but -- ->> Well, I mean animated GIFs are the. ->> It's a separate images for each frame of the -- and Twitter did go to video, as well, for their new GIFs. ->> So, yeah, they've heavy. ->> So that kind of leads into these guys with multimedia, because I know one of the reasons people use animated GIFs is because you can't play it on an iPhone. So great on a desktop, but it wouldn't work on a phone. ->> So you guys, whoever's talking? ->> Yeah, I mean the big sort of thread where video codecs, we can talk about solutions for, including the one that I use changes the service to manage all of your ... [inaudible] but you know, working with legacy things such as -- I call them legacies, but things such as Brett co, for example, APIs, not responsive, which is a lot of problems with that, and, you know, the good mobile players out yet. ->> Yeah, I guess tradeoffs between having a service like right cowhere the API is really tern but they can show you different versions of videos, versus hosting yourself and figuring out all that part. ->> One of the things we have in fact is right cohandles rather than putting through 8 different versions of your video. ->> But we also have audio or typography and web finds. These are still hard problems to solve, because with audio, depending on the size of the audio file, you've got to deal with that and of course you've got to have OGG and some other kind of format and if you want auto play that's another problem. So I feel honestly media on mobile is still really crappy. It's a hard problem to solve and I don't know who solves it or if it's solvable. ->> ->> Or like you could have a desk stop experience where you have all these things hooked up to a video, like events triggering when you get to certain parts and information popping up and then you get to mobile and you're like, oh, well, guess you can't have any of that. Plays a standard video. ->> You have the big yellow Brock that says this page was designed for desktop. ->> That's the solution, right? ->> Yeah, the solution out of this is that people should not use mobile: -[laughter]ra, so I mean we just complained about it, I don't know how much more there is to say. ->> It's group therapy, it's cathartic, you can just let out. I know we've got a couple of people from NPR here, I don't know if you guys work very much with the audio stuff. ->> Yeah, I'm on the visuals team. Does anyone here work on a video site that they have to do mobile? Damn damn. ->> I've done some like fancy builds where you have, yeah, video elements and stuff. ->> and so you just have to -- you. ->> Just cut back down to the bone and such. ->> Or even an image sometimes, if you have atmospheric video even in the background, you have to roll back to just an image. ->> OK. ->> All right, and last group, you guys were doing testing. ->> Yeah, we chose testing because that one's easy to have quite a long conversation about how much it sucks. ->> Yeah, everything is terrible. ->> So we want to do a really quick poll of the room, how many of you have a device lab and use it? ->> ->> ->> Yeah, which, yeah, well, I don't think -- well, you've used it, I don't even know which floor it's on, and then how many people tested on like threeish devices or so, routinely, like whatever you're working on you try to. OK, twoish devices. The device of you and like a good friend. ->> and how many people kind of have no time for mobile testing unless you're just really lucky. OK, that's honest. Appreciate that. ->> and then of course, like the cards that we got were like it sucks, it sucks, it sucks and too many devices which we all know has been on the landscape for a long time. One thing we were talking about oh, our other question who has ever done any testing for the windows phone. Not only do you say jiff, you also test on a windows phone. ->> We heard of you. ->> Statistical outlier. -[laughter] ->> Who's got a blackberry. ->> and so one of the other things we brought up was like what exactly is your build-test loop. One of my problems is ultimately especially if you want to test on multiple devices like how long does it take you to write something, figure out how you're going to test it and then like get back to like, you know, updating whatever it was that you're working on and Tiff had mentioned that sometimes in the newsroom you've got like one person who's got this particular build of phone that you know is hey, go check this. ->> I have a so you end up with, like, but that's not scalable across like a suite of apps, right? How many times do you get like pinged for like can you check out these three sites? ->> -[laughter] ->> This is definitely an NYT characteristic but it has to work on your boss' phone.Ing ... ->> and it's a little bit more challenging when you get an iOS simulator and actually running S code on your box or whatever. A lot of that is improving but not to the point that we briefly talked about with Chris: ->> I'm mostly curious whether Tiff was mentioning that the NYT has sort of a mobile like framework set of styles whatever for their site. Do other groups have that specifically that you have to like build your apps within? Because one of the things I'd never really thought about I should have a set essentially a base set of things that I know work on mobile and then like you just build things on top of that, and that is the sort of set of assumptions that you work with that you know will work. ->> In our site we call it the site chrome. We're usually working with those things on the page and they behave the way they behave. The challenging thing is I spend most of my time tweaking details. ->> We've somehow worked ourselves into an interesting situation with that a number of times. ->> I'd like to plug one of my favorite things, bootstrap. At the tribune we feed bootstrap in every possible way we could and just using when you stuck to whatever it gave out of the box as closely as possible, you often would end up with something that responded pretty well right away and then from there you would make your adjustments tand tweaks for your content what you would knock out a day's worth of writing: ->> So how many people use bootstrap? ->> That's good. Not a bad number. ->> So you mentioned browser stack? Who here has heard of browser stack? Uses browser stack? ->> Well, maybe you can talk a little bit about how you use it in your work. ->> Yeah, I mean we just -- they're adding some -- always adding more and more mobile custom capabilities, and the globe, the last time I was there, had like a whole setup of like basically every phone imaginable and running every different browser and basically all phones all at once and then swiped. That's basically browser styling and I believe the way browser stack does it is it's not emulation. ->> It's an aerial model where you own a time share of every phone? ->> Yeah. ->> Not like robot fingers that. -[laughter] ->> and also just to throw out there like if you go to -- ->> It's like 12 bucks a month. ->> If you go to modern . i.e, you'll get free three months of browser stack. ->> All right, so you mentioned testing a windows phone. I'm curious, how do you do it? I mean I'll start because actually both like Safari and the iOS and on android you can connect up to tools using a USB cable. ->> I just don't to websites on it. ->> It's not getting too nuanced. ->> Is there like a debugger. ->> Not that I've tried. This is not my primary phone, so, yeah, I'm mostly Mac-based. ->> OK, so here's another question, how many people have tested on a windows tablet. ->> Only once in my case but I have done one. ->> I really am amazed that Microsoft has done such a terrible job on that. Speaking of which, blackberry, is anyone here have a blackberry? Does anyone use one? Do you test on blackberry? How old is that? ->> It's actually great. I test on it because I it's the phone I use most often, and it is always -- it always works. ->> Is this the new blackberry. ->> It's the least finnicky platform. ->> It's a 10, yeah. ->> At what point do various people talk out support for devices and what percentage of user. ->> That is how productive our phone is. It actually works as a phone. Which actually to be fair it's actually on 26% battery so it's going to die in about an hour. ->> Does anybody have any input on deciding which phones to support? What is the threshold for when you stop caring. ->> We talked about that from a certainly word but a sociological angle and the device presentation versus people who were on handed-down devices and things like that and how a lot of times the testing suites specify the latest and greatest. But like a medium range device the experience on that is so terrible that we're losing audience that that might be their only consumption ability is through a less popular feature phone, but certainly a less popular smartphone. ->> and how would we even figure that out or test that. ->> I was going to ask like, so it's smartphone or nothing, or newest smartphone or nothing. So feature phones, you're SOL. ->> There might be -- I don't know NYT's -- ->> We have to develop all the way down to blackberry 4.6 and it's terrible. The testers are really bad. The emulators are really bad. ->> Which is why you switched teams. ->> That's an interesting question, who tests on android? Who tests on more than one android device? That's a decent number. So interesting to know which android devices you test on. ->> Chris has two. Are they all like android 4 and -- ->> Well, this is one of them and we have someone with a generation back. So that's the thing that's sort of interesting in what Tiff was saying, there's a lot of like low-range android phones that are slow and some of them are still running and Droid 2.3 and if you don't factor that in, actually, the lan Droid experience can be a lot more -- ->> Difference who tests on android tablet? ->> It's actually more than I expected to be honest with you. And I'm assuming -- ->> We find a bug and then it's low priority and then. -[laughter] ->> Mostly by wife bugs me because she has a Nexus 7. ->> That's like your boss' computer. ->> That's the Blackberry thing. Because somebody -- probably not your boss, but your boss' boss' boss, has an old Blackberry that they will never let go of: ->> I have a lower end phone by choice, it was cheap, I wanted it directly from the factory, but I'm curious, are you seeing socioeconomic divides, do you even care, does that factor into which phones you take into account for testing? ->> NPR.org -- I don't work for the product team, but they're very aggressive in dropping support, largely because NPR -- I mean we support IE 10 and up, and I don't even know what our -- I can't speak to exact numbers of when they -- ->> Yeah, I mean that I think it's largely a case of your audience, you know, NPR's audience is highly educated and tends to be fairly affluent, so we're able to do that. ->> Yeah, maybe that actually speaks to the media organization that are at something like this, the tier that we all are. This came up years ago, what does the world wrestling federation support, legitimately something that is catering towards middle class or even lower class culture, not to mention groups of people, I'm always really fascinated to see what their online effort is. ->> Do you get an answer for that because that is a really great metric for Nascar. Anyone know anyone? ->> I do have some cross-sectional perspective as DocumentCloud. No, not Nascar documents, but some news organizations are going to have a higher percentage of IE8 or whatever. ->> That's actually not possible at the chronicle of higher ed because we are mainly serving lots of universities with locked-down computers so we have to make sure it works, or something it doesn't have to look perfect, but it needs to be readable, you know? ->> Sort of the same thing getting back to sociological things is so I work with chronicle of higher education, you know, I don't know the mobile numbers, necessarily and how that breaks down, but I could see where there's probably a divide between younger adjunct faculty or freshly hired tenure track faculty using their new iPhones and android devices, and then the very old, been-there-a-while, tenured-for-20-years professor who reluctantly switched to a Blackberry a long time ago and won't touch anything else because he finally knows how this works and do we still support that, because hey, those people read our paper. ->> Isn't this what progressive enhancement was for, though, right? You design up from an extremely simple page that should fucking work everywhere. If I load it up on a feature phone I should at least be able to read the text on the page: If you open it up in an old phone you got a text area with a submit button. That was the whole point of progressive enhancement. It's still hard, like, this work is hard or there's a much bigger gap between that first thing you build and the big shiny glossy thing you might end up on a nice browser, but you still need to start with that foundation, should be able to start with some super simple, like any fucking device is going to be able to read. ->> Speaking of socioeconomics, I came from New Mexico from the paper that was right next to the Indian reservation and like 60% of them don't have electricity, but most of them have cell phones. We totally would rather keep the lap version because they could still read it and they actually a fairly large segment of our audience because we're kind of the only paper that served them, we eventually had to give it up because of the corporate contract because that was a large part of our audience so we wanted them to still read it. ->> There's a clear distinction between feature phones and the android device but the problem with the android device and you've got a phone that identifies as an android device and it's running chrome but it's got a quarter of the memory of another phone, right? This is one of the problems I've got with my mobile experiments with a document viewer. I can pretty easily crash an iPhone 5 if I want to, which is why I started testing on an iPhone 3 but I have no way to tell that your android device is going to crash until it crashes and I don't know what the way around that is. ->> But I think that gets back to what's actually important. The thing you were saying earlier, how do you make the PDF appear. It's different if somebody wants to put out a newspaper page, but if it's something like a document that oh, here's a public records request we just got, I think that's more important is to see the info that that's in a document. So here is full text, here's all that. Click here to see the document. For validity, verification, but it's important to read what's in the text. But what's actually important is that you be able to read the text. ->> ->> Instrumentation can help a little bit with that, because if it just crashes and doesn't: [inaudible] ->> A related issue is the speed of technological change adoption, so in the last four years on the desktop environment we've seen at a general interest site, the migration of users from internet explorer to in most cases Firefox, and that took a while, but the speed of moving from Firefox to Chrome has been much faster, much much faster, and I think we're going to see those speeds increasing, even on the mobile. ->> Right. Well, it is pretty much 5:30. So slightly a shame, because this has been going well and we could probably carry on for another 2 hours, but I believe there are some closing remarks going on downstairs, so everyone should go to that. So thank you very much ... ... ... +Mobile is the future / mobile sucks / the future sucks +Session facilitator(s): Alastair Coote +Day & Time: Friday, 4:30-5:30pm +Room: Franklin 1 + +OK, so we're round about 4:30, so we might as well start. See if anybody comes in a couple of minutes late. So hi, my name is Alastair Coote. I am a developer at the New York Times. I work on the interactive news team, often working with mobile, so I've spent way too much of my time staring at these stupid devices. And mobile is great in many ways, the things that we can do now, sort of everyone has our content in their pocket, that's fantastic, but the real truth is that actually developing for mobile is awful. It sucks. All the different devices, all the different browsers on those devices for a minute it felt like we had desktop browsers sorted out, even IE was relatively OK, and then suddenly we're thrown back into this wild west where everything is awful, so I thought we could come together in a sort of group therapy style and we could talk out our problems and hopefully those people in the room with questions and there will be some other people in the room with answers to these questions, even if we haven't gotten answers maybe we can demystify things a little bit. I don't know, we'll see. + +The way I'm hoping we're going to structure this is now or in a minute everyone is going to grab a post-it note or two and they're going to write down a problem they've had in working with mobile. It can be a technical thing or a philosophical thing or a conceptual thing, whatever you think. And then we'll talk about it in groups for a few minutes. Hopefully not for too long because I think it will be great to bring this back to a group discussion for a greater period of time. Step 1, everybody grab a post-it note and if you've worked on mobile and there's something that's annoyed you about it and my colleague, Tiff and I will be walking around and collecting the post-it notes. +[group activity] +... ... ... + +> > OK, nobody has any others? We're all good? +> > +> > OK, so I've done my best, which is not great, at grouping these problems into some sort of topic areas or groups. Quite a few people mentioned testing, cross-device testing or testing in general. People mentioned doing both mobile and desktop at the same time. Lots of people talking with layout. Orientation changes. Landscape in phones is annoying, who uses it. A lot of people talking about multimedia as well, audio, video, both those presentations are quite difficult on mobile devices, particularly when iPhone won't play a video without you tapping it, so on and so forth. Lots of people talking about the restrictions on devices sort of just technologically: They're slow, that sort of the interactions tapping and clicking and battery life, connection speed, that sort of thing. All right. So that's five. +> > So what we're going to do, we're going to get everyone into five groups, so we've got five tables, but any of you guys in the back sort of join in that table there, and everyone will get a topic to talk about for about ten minutes or so, basically for you guys to talk about whether you have you've -- once everyone has talked about it in groups, we'll bring it back to the larger group, so each group can present what they were talking about, so maybe you can write on the sheet and add some more detail, but the hope is there might be someone who sat over there who is a great idea about testing so I want to bring it back to the group as a whole so they can still manage to give out an answer. Who wants to talk about desktop versus mobile. I'm just going to start assigning them to you, then. There you are, guys, desktop and mobile layout. +> > [group activity] +> > ... ... ... : OK, about two minutes left. Maybe start thinking about one person per group who's going to talk about what you've been talking about ... : +> > OK, everybody ready to wrap up and talk to the group? All right. No, what I mean is you are ready to talk to the group. All right, well, what's what's up with you guys? +> > We're going first. +> > Yeah, it was always the way, I'm sorry. So you guys were talking about mobile and desktop and dealing with that as a sort of a situation. Anyway, you want to talk through what you talked about? +> > The first question is like the first question of apps versus web, and we all immediately concluded, responsive web, to start off there, but we kind of looked OK, let's force ourselves to think about when would you have a compelling argument for apps and there weren't that many, but there were some. The thing that we acknowledge is that the tools have changed that you can start publishing almost disposable apps, kindle singles or things like that that if you can had he hit that threshold but overall you're going to have bigger reach, more bang for your buck, bigger audiences with the smartphones. The next one was what features should you bring over. What should you optimize first and we didn't get too far into it but we talked about the guardian NSA files. I consumed it on my phone, this is freaking great on my phone, I actually read it soup to nuts all the way through and it turned out most of us had that experience and we went to desktop and there's bonus stuff on the desktop. It didn't feel like we got ripped off, which was great. Usually oh, you got the whack version of the story or oh, you don't have this plug-in go screw yourself. So that was a conscious great example, but that was a special project. That's not the daily stuff, so we just were about to hit that. +> > All right. +> > Anyone disagree? Anyone got anything they want to add? Well, that's easy. All right. +> > Yeah, you've done it. You guys were talking about layout, right? Yes, OK. Go. +> > +> > You have a person who's -- everyone needs to have a person who's going to talk. +> > We did not make a decision. + +> > We talked about the fact that there's not enough space on mobile and how do you deal with complicated graphics and tables and things that need a lot of space and the conclusion being largely that you have to start mobile first and design those things small to begin with which might mean a different form so a table might really be a list or card stacked type thing, and then you decide whether or not the investment in designing a progressively optimize the version that would go in a desktop would make since ... Business department has to change the way they deal with advertising outside of the scope of what the design can do. What else did we talk about? +> > No fixed headers or footers. +> > Does anyone disagree with that 1234 hovers doesn't work any more. So you probably just don't do it. +> > All right. +> > So that still doesn't fix my problem with the fact that people hand me PDFs and I've got to figure out some way to display them on a phone. +> > yeah, don't have a solution for that one. +> > +> > Read PDF one letter at a time. Yeah, that sounds like a dream. +> > So I think a lot of these problems we create ourselves in terms of speed, like as we add more stuff to the site, you know, we're just adding more problems for us in terms of speed, so just like keeping it simple, and you know, focusing on mobile first. There are some things that you might implement after the fact, like lazy loading and stuff like that, talked about responsible solutions and how this might help, as well as no animated GIFs, but then we decided we like animated GIFs. And whereas everyone else in the table says GIFs it's "JIFs". +> > I don't have to do a vote by hand, but I think you might be on the losing side of this. +> > I'm used to it. +> > Fighting the good fight. +> > And we also talked about there's two different types of speed. There's processing power, which you know is a big part of the Javascript stuff, animations and stuff like that, so you know, cutting that down to a minimum, and then there's also, you know, performance over network, and, you know, getting everything kind of in one but will or doing like high-priority CSS stuff like that up front and maybe in line to just like get that out of the and get stuff to people quickest. So there's those two things. We also talked about memory and hitting those in case it crashes. But mostly on those first two. +> > So who didn't want animated GIFs and why? It's interesting to know. +> > Sort of -- I didn't mean to use accusatory terms, but -- +> > Well, I mean animated GIFs are the. +> > It's a separate images for each frame of the -- and Twitter did go to video, as well, for their new GIFs. +> > So, yeah, they've heavy. +> > So that kind of leads into these guys with multimedia, because I know one of the reasons people use animated GIFs is because you can't play it on an iPhone. So great on a desktop, but it wouldn't work on a phone. +> > So you guys, whoever's talking? +> > Yeah, I mean the big sort of thread where video codecs, we can talk about solutions for, including the one that I use changes the service to manage all of your ... [inaudible] but you know, working with legacy things such as -- I call them legacies, but things such as Brett co, for example, APIs, not responsive, which is a lot of problems with that, and, you know, the good mobile players out yet. +> > Yeah, I guess tradeoffs between having a service like right cowhere the API is really tern but they can show you different versions of videos, versus hosting yourself and figuring out all that part. +> > One of the things we have in fact is right cohandles rather than putting through 8 different versions of your video. +> > But we also have audio or typography and web finds. These are still hard problems to solve, because with audio, depending on the size of the audio file, you've got to deal with that and of course you've got to have OGG and some other kind of format and if you want auto play that's another problem. So I feel honestly media on mobile is still really crappy. It's a hard problem to solve and I don't know who solves it or if it's solvable. +> > +> > Or like you could have a desk stop experience where you have all these things hooked up to a video, like events triggering when you get to certain parts and information popping up and then you get to mobile and you're like, oh, well, guess you can't have any of that. Plays a standard video. +> > You have the big yellow Brock that says this page was designed for desktop. +> > That's the solution, right? +> > Yeah, the solution out of this is that people should not use mobile: +> > [laughter]ra, so I mean we just complained about it, I don't know how much more there is to say. +> > It's group therapy, it's cathartic, you can just let out. I know we've got a couple of people from NPR here, I don't know if you guys work very much with the audio stuff. +> > Yeah, I'm on the visuals team. Does anyone here work on a video site that they have to do mobile? Damn damn. +> > I've done some like fancy builds where you have, yeah, video elements and stuff. +> > and so you just have to -- you. +> > Just cut back down to the bone and such. +> > Or even an image sometimes, if you have atmospheric video even in the background, you have to roll back to just an image. +> > OK. +> > All right, and last group, you guys were doing testing. +> > Yeah, we chose testing because that one's easy to have quite a long conversation about how much it sucks. +> > Yeah, everything is terrible. +> > So we want to do a really quick poll of the room, how many of you have a device lab and use it? +> > +> > Yeah, which, yeah, well, I don't think -- well, you've used it, I don't even know which floor it's on, and then how many people tested on like threeish devices or so, routinely, like whatever you're working on you try to. OK, twoish devices. The device of you and like a good friend. +> > and how many people kind of have no time for mobile testing unless you're just really lucky. OK, that's honest. Appreciate that. +> > and then of course, like the cards that we got were like it sucks, it sucks, it sucks and too many devices which we all know has been on the landscape for a long time. One thing we were talking about oh, our other question who has ever done any testing for the windows phone. Not only do you say jiff, you also test on a windows phone. +> > We heard of you. +> > Statistical outlier. +> > [laughter] +> > Who's got a blackberry. +> > and so one of the other things we brought up was like what exactly is your build-test loop. One of my problems is ultimately especially if you want to test on multiple devices like how long does it take you to write something, figure out how you're going to test it and then like get back to like, you know, updating whatever it was that you're working on and Tiff had mentioned that sometimes in the newsroom you've got like one person who's got this particular build of phone that you know is hey, go check this. +> > I have a so you end up with, like, but that's not scalable across like a suite of apps, right? How many times do you get like pinged for like can you check out these three sites? +> > +> > [laughter] +> > This is definitely an NYT characteristic but it has to work on your boss' phone.Ing ... +> > and it's a little bit more challenging when you get an iOS simulator and actually running S code on your box or whatever. A lot of that is improving but not to the point that we briefly talked about with Chris: +> > I'm mostly curious whether Tiff was mentioning that the NYT has sort of a mobile like framework set of styles whatever for their site. Do other groups have that specifically that you have to like build your apps within? Because one of the things I'd never really thought about I should have a set essentially a base set of things that I know work on mobile and then like you just build things on top of that, and that is the sort of set of assumptions that you work with that you know will work. +> > In our site we call it the site chrome. We're usually working with those things on the page and they behave the way they behave. The challenging thing is I spend most of my time tweaking details. +> > We've somehow worked ourselves into an interesting situation with that a number of times. +> > I'd like to plug one of my favorite things, bootstrap. At the tribune we feed bootstrap in every possible way we could and just using when you stuck to whatever it gave out of the box as closely as possible, you often would end up with something that responded pretty well right away and then from there you would make your adjustments tand tweaks for your content what you would knock out a day's worth of writing: +> > So how many people use bootstrap? +> > That's good. Not a bad number. +> > So you mentioned browser stack? Who here has heard of browser stack? Uses browser stack? +> > Well, maybe you can talk a little bit about how you use it in your work. +> > Yeah, I mean we just -- they're adding some -- always adding more and more mobile custom capabilities, and the globe, the last time I was there, had like a whole setup of like basically every phone imaginable and running every different browser and basically all phones all at once and then swiped. That's basically browser styling and I believe the way browser stack does it is it's not emulation. +> > It's an aerial model where you own a time share of every phone? +> > Yeah. +> > Not like robot fingers that. +> > [laughter] +> > and also just to throw out there like if you go to -- +> > It's like 12 bucks a month. +> > If you go to modern . i.e, you'll get free three months of browser stack. +> > All right, so you mentioned testing a windows phone. I'm curious, how do you do it? I mean I'll start because actually both like Safari and the iOS and on android you can connect up to tools using a USB cable. +> > I just don't to websites on it. +> > It's not getting too nuanced. +> > Is there like a debugger. +> > Not that I've tried. This is not my primary phone, so, yeah, I'm mostly Mac-based. +> > OK, so here's another question, how many people have tested on a windows tablet. +> > Only once in my case but I have done one. +> > I really am amazed that Microsoft has done such a terrible job on that. Speaking of which, blackberry, is anyone here have a blackberry? Does anyone use one? Do you test on blackberry? How old is that? +> > It's actually great. I test on it because I it's the phone I use most often, and it is always -- it always works. +> > Is this the new blackberry. +> > It's the least finnicky platform. +> > It's a 10, yeah. +> > At what point do various people talk out support for devices and what percentage of user. +> > That is how productive our phone is. It actually works as a phone. Which actually to be fair it's actually on 26% battery so it's going to die in about an hour. +> > Does anybody have any input on deciding which phones to support? What is the threshold for when you stop caring. +> > We talked about that from a certainly word but a sociological angle and the device presentation versus people who were on handed-down devices and things like that and how a lot of times the testing suites specify the latest and greatest. But like a medium range device the experience on that is so terrible that we're losing audience that that might be their only consumption ability is through a less popular feature phone, but certainly a less popular smartphone. +> > and how would we even figure that out or test that. +> > I was going to ask like, so it's smartphone or nothing, or newest smartphone or nothing. So feature phones, you're SOL. +> > There might be -- I don't know NYT's -- +> > We have to develop all the way down to blackberry 4.6 and it's terrible. The testers are really bad. The emulators are really bad. +> > Which is why you switched teams. +> > That's an interesting question, who tests on android? Who tests on more than one android device? That's a decent number. So interesting to know which android devices you test on. +> > Chris has two. Are they all like android 4 and -- +> > Well, this is one of them and we have someone with a generation back. So that's the thing that's sort of interesting in what Tiff was saying, there's a lot of like low-range android phones that are slow and some of them are still running and Droid 2.3 and if you don't factor that in, actually, the lan Droid experience can be a lot more -- +> > Difference who tests on android tablet? +> > It's actually more than I expected to be honest with you. And I'm assuming -- +> > We find a bug and then it's low priority and then. +> > [laughter] +> > Mostly by wife bugs me because she has a Nexus 7. +> > That's like your boss' computer. +> > That's the Blackberry thing. Because somebody -- probably not your boss, but your boss' boss' boss, has an old Blackberry that they will never let go of: +> > I have a lower end phone by choice, it was cheap, I wanted it directly from the factory, but I'm curious, are you seeing socioeconomic divides, do you even care, does that factor into which phones you take into account for testing? +> > NPR.org -- I don't work for the product team, but they're very aggressive in dropping support, largely because NPR -- I mean we support IE 10 and up, and I don't even know what our -- I can't speak to exact numbers of when they -- +> > Yeah, I mean that I think it's largely a case of your audience, you know, NPR's audience is highly educated and tends to be fairly affluent, so we're able to do that. +> > Yeah, maybe that actually speaks to the media organization that are at something like this, the tier that we all are. This came up years ago, what does the world wrestling federation support, legitimately something that is catering towards middle class or even lower class culture, not to mention groups of people, I'm always really fascinated to see what their online effort is. +> > Do you get an answer for that because that is a really great metric for Nascar. Anyone know anyone? +> > I do have some cross-sectional perspective as DocumentCloud. No, not Nascar documents, but some news organizations are going to have a higher percentage of IE8 or whatever. +> > That's actually not possible at the chronicle of higher ed because we are mainly serving lots of universities with locked-down computers so we have to make sure it works, or something it doesn't have to look perfect, but it needs to be readable, you know? +> > Sort of the same thing getting back to sociological things is so I work with chronicle of higher education, you know, I don't know the mobile numbers, necessarily and how that breaks down, but I could see where there's probably a divide between younger adjunct faculty or freshly hired tenure track faculty using their new iPhones and android devices, and then the very old, been-there-a-while, tenured-for-20-years professor who reluctantly switched to a Blackberry a long time ago and won't touch anything else because he finally knows how this works and do we still support that, because hey, those people read our paper. +> > Isn't this what progressive enhancement was for, though, right? You design up from an extremely simple page that should fucking work everywhere. If I load it up on a feature phone I should at least be able to read the text on the page: If you open it up in an old phone you got a text area with a submit button. That was the whole point of progressive enhancement. It's still hard, like, this work is hard or there's a much bigger gap between that first thing you build and the big shiny glossy thing you might end up on a nice browser, but you still need to start with that foundation, should be able to start with some super simple, like any fucking device is going to be able to read. +> > Speaking of socioeconomics, I came from New Mexico from the paper that was right next to the Indian reservation and like 60% of them don't have electricity, but most of them have cell phones. We totally would rather keep the lap version because they could still read it and they actually a fairly large segment of our audience because we're kind of the only paper that served them, we eventually had to give it up because of the corporate contract because that was a large part of our audience so we wanted them to still read it. +> > There's a clear distinction between feature phones and the android device but the problem with the android device and you've got a phone that identifies as an android device and it's running chrome but it's got a quarter of the memory of another phone, right? This is one of the problems I've got with my mobile experiments with a document viewer. I can pretty easily crash an iPhone 5 if I want to, which is why I started testing on an iPhone 3 but I have no way to tell that your android device is going to crash until it crashes and I don't know what the way around that is. +> > But I think that gets back to what's actually important. The thing you were saying earlier, how do you make the PDF appear. It's different if somebody wants to put out a newspaper page, but if it's something like a document that oh, here's a public records request we just got, I think that's more important is to see the info that that's in a document. So here is full text, here's all that. Click here to see the document. For validity, verification, but it's important to read what's in the text. But what's actually important is that you be able to read the text. +> > +> > Instrumentation can help a little bit with that, because if it just crashes and doesn't: [inaudible] +> > A related issue is the speed of technological change adoption, so in the last four years on the desktop environment we've seen at a general interest site, the migration of users from internet explorer to in most cases Firefox, and that took a while, but the speed of moving from Firefox to Chrome has been much faster, much much faster, and I think we're going to see those speeds increasing, even on the mobile. +> > Right. Well, it is pretty much 5:30. So slightly a shame, because this has been going well and we could probably carry on for another 2 hours, but I believe there are some closing remarks going on downstairs, so everyone should go to that. So thank you very much ... ... ... diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_29_Stop_Fighting_CMS.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_29_Stop_Fighting_CMS.md index c15165e8..7064ec30 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_29_Stop_Fighting_CMS.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_29_Stop_Fighting_CMS.md @@ -1,268 +1,271 @@ -We can stop fighting the CMS, a round-table discussion -Session facilitator(s): Chris Chang, Andrew Nacin -Day & Time: Friday, 3-5:30pm -Room: Franklin 2 - -ANDREW: All right. Welcome to "We Need To Stop Fighting The CMS: A Round-table Discussion." Like all of these sessions, my name is Andy Mason. I'm one of the lead developers for WordPress, which you may know. So I come with a background from someone who builds software but also has been in the newsroom. -CHRIS: I'm Chris Chang. We have our own in-house CMS based off of Django, and so I support users next to me as opposed to millions of years... -ANDREW: I prefer not to see them -- don't write that down! We're going to start. I think we'll start really quickly with some introductions because we kind of -- especially since this is not a huge group, which is good -- just a very quickly who you are, where you work, what do you use in your system, whether it's home-grown, or something else -- Django, or whatever. And what you do? In my case, Andy Mason, WordPress, and I build WordPress. So -- but if you guys -- if we can all just do that all quickly and if you're a developer versus a user I think that will help a little bit. We're going to start over here? ->> Sure. I'm Matt Perry, I work at Automatic and I use WordPress and I help a lot of other developers with WordPress, too. ->> I'm Laura, and I work at Vox Media and we use a home-grown platform called Course and I'm a product manager there. ->> I'm Matt, I'm currently an independent. I don't have a -- I'm non-denominational as far as the content-management systems including WordPress but I don't have a particular favorite. It might be WordPress. -ANDREW: To be clear, I don't want this to be a WordPress talk. ->> Neither do I. -ANDREW: Actually, I warned all the WordPress people here who are here to not use the word, if they can. ->> You broke your own rule. ->> You screwed that up right away. -ANDREW: Just to get an idea this is about fixing some of the bigger problems that we're going to go through. ->> I'm Ed, and I newly joined the Washington Post, and the Post uses Method as well as other tools that have been built in-house. ->> Django a little bit. -ANDREW: Python? ->> My name is Kyle. I'm a designer turned product manager. I work for a company called American City Business Journals and we use a home-grown CMS called Gizmo. ->> I'm Vijith, sorry. I work at the New York Times they use Scoop which I guess is their home-grown CMS. I'm a data viz, and CMS doesn't really matter to me but more of the backend stuff. It has been WordPress -- big on WordPress. ->> My name is Aaron Jordan I'm a technical architect at Conn/Mass. I pretty much use a popular CSS based -- of which I'm also a core contributor. Yeah... -ANDREW: Next... he's a developer. ->> I also do Node stuff as well. ->> Oh, right, stenographer. My name is Andrew Spittle, and I work at Automatic and I mostly use a software that helps you press words on the Internet. I'm not a developer; I lead our customer support stuff so I help kind of the everyday user on stuff. ->> I am AmyJo Brown. So a few years ago -- so a long story short, Top Twist Media helped design some of their newsrooms. So at the time I did work with Media Spin to hound news and -- and news engine. Out of that, I have a lot of opinions and that's sort of about how a CMS could ideally work, and now that I'm doing a start-up in Pittsburgh. So we're I think starting up through it. So I'm just really interested to hear the conversation. ->> I'm Jeremy. I'm among other things a developer at the New York Times. We use Scoop as was mentioned which is kind of a home-grown thing. There is some use of the CMS, and also, I support some suppose home-grown itty-bitty CMSs for various blog-like entities sites that tend to be in rails. ->> I'm David Schaeffer formally of Thunder Dome. I'm a WordPress guy, developer lightly but mostly on the strategy team and business side. ->> I'm Ben. I'm at the Washington Post, I guess I'm a developer, ish. Yeah, and I don't touch art CMSs, but it's a Frank -- Method is really the name, really, but other things. Anyways. ->> I'm Jake, I'm with the U.S. Open Institute. I don't know anything other than CMSs. I'm just a CMS fanboy, I've been a WordPress user for a long time, and I like how we've come full circle and we're producing static files again. ->> My name is Russel, I work at the Pew Research Center. We use WordPress and I do front end, backend stuff. ->> I'm Daniel, I do WordPress stuff. That's it. I want to use a different CMS. -ANDREW: Dude, I'm with you. -[ Laughter ] ->> I'm sick of WordPress. ->> I'm Trey, I'm at Fox Media where we use Chorus, which is our movie on rails platform and my role is, I lead the product team who works on that and launches the sites and does things. ->> I'm Kevin. I work for Automatic, which is WordPress -- which uses WordPress, I'm sorry. And I've worked broadly in customer service. ->> I'm Laura. I do UX for a home-grown platform in the Conde Nast Building working on other shared tools, potentially and future projects that might potentially have WordPress in them. ->> I'm Casey. I use a custom Django CMS as a copy editor of Source, which Ryan Pitts built and I have also built a lot of small sites on things like Stacy and Jekyll. And also I like, and also work for Out Of Its Books as a designer/developer/producer which is a hulking custom CMS. -ANDREW: Cool. ->> I'm the last one? I'm Holman and I'm the Chief Development Officer for Search Property and we develop our content management platform called Superlative (phonetic). It hasn't been released yet and I guess it's going to be soon. And it's different than WordPress in the sense that it's targeting more, like, news agencies. Like, we are developing actually with Australian WordPress. It's a Python-based -- ->> I'm David, I'm at Box Hound. And just recently we did Edittorily, which was not a CMS and our fingers are now -- our fingers and eyeballs are now looking at Corks which transcribed it. -ANDREW: Cool, so the way that we kind of want this to go is, there are, as you can see, there's this really elegantly-done thing that Chris did up on the left. A really terrible thing that I did on the right. The one on the left is questions that were -- that we want to think about. And we'll get to that in a moment. The thing on the right though is the exact same list. Who was here at the Friday session yesterday morning -- or Thursday session? A number of you. So next door, New York Times RND folks did this really nice talk basically about this but we want to take it a little step further. They only had about an hour and a lot of it was defining some of the problems which we also want to do but we actually want to go beyond that and actually come up with some solutions so we're going to see if we can find any missing topics here and also we're going to try and maybe tally other things that have been mentioned in the form of maybe some rants that people can throw out. Things like we need to stop fighting the CMS first. We need to yell at it for a little bit. So maybe one or two sentences. We can just kind of shout these out or go around for something that kind of really bothers you and needs to be fixed. It can be kind of one of the things that's already on here. We'll group as we go. Hopefully his handwriting is better than mine. So if anyone wants to start or I could -- anyone? ->> A failure to lead us away from, sort of print traditions and creating our own traditions for the web. -ANDREW: Failure to lead us away. ->> Print-centric. -ANDREW: Print-centric, that is a new one. ->> That works. I'm for that. -ANDREW: What else? ->> Previewing. Previewing content before it's published. Previewing changes before they get shared. Previews around in an easy way. -ANDREW: Okay. So that also gets into collaboration a little bit, as well. I can also add another piece of that would be WYSIWYG. And sometimes actually the preview experience isn't the best experience for writing actually, either. ->> What does "preview" mean? So is that really the desktop, the phone, the tablet? ->> Yes. ->> Your big screen? -ANDREW: All of those. ->> Google Glass? ->> Google Glass? Watch? ->> Responsiveness? -ANDREW: Responsiveness? ->> So having responsive content and being able to target based on. -ANDREW: And beyond responsive is content. We have these monolithic systems that produce monolithic product. It makes it hard to have things that are adaptive. This is similar to the design thing that's up there and similar to print-centric but the interface that you interact with is database riven. It looks the way the data is structured on the storage level rather than, necessarily how you would intuitively -- -ANDREW: So a lot of this may be the interface being too cadgy? "Cadgyness" might be a word to -- ->> But where the data needs to go on the storage level? ->> The UX? ->> Yeah, the UX in general. -ANDREW: Well, obviously UX is a whole another ball game, too. Anybody else have user complaints for CMSs? I'll be honest, does anybody like their CMS? Anyone? ->> Sometimes. ->> A little biased, though. ->> All those WordPress people raising their hand, and mine not going up. ->> It depends on what you mean by, "Liking your CMS" because I think there's this false equivalence of enjoying looking at the screen and typing in it, or interfacing with it, or using it and enjoying what it empowers about your work. So I think it's tricky when you start -- when you conflate those two things, and I think that's one of the things that gets confusing about -- about how to figure out how you solve these CMS problems. ->> I mean, I think -- ->> I mean, is it empowering, the creative process, or is it empowering the storage process? ->> I think that's a fair distinction. ->> And if you like it, it's relative to what you know before. Obviously what we have now is a lot better than what we've previously worked with. ->> Has anybody worked with CQ5? I've heard people say they're fine with that. ->> I think if we were going to come up with a metric to measure how much we like our CMS, which I don't like it a lot, if I need to accomplish whatever task, what amount of time it takes -- the average amount of time. And it's too long. And it's not about -- there's a lot of reasons it's too long and a lot of them are up on that list, but it's about, especially in journalism, shipping, and shipping quickly and we can't do that because conflation of 20 different factors. ->> And I mean, "liking it" is many different things. You might like writing in it or developing on top of it, but you might hate developing it in general. -ANDREW: Well this brings up a really good point in general. These aren't really much problems as much as what CMS needs to do. Ironically, those two are the same but we've been talking about roles, writing, developing. A lot of this -- I mean there was something that was written here yesterday on user privileges which doesn't really get at it. Really, Yuri was explaining this to me earlier today but it was more about role or use contexts. Not even use -- if you're a writer versus if you're a copy editor, versus maybe an assignment editor, or a developer, or an art director, or maybe a photographer, or that side of a designer. There's so many ways to interact with it. For the most part, CMSs only pick one. I mean, a lot of them will focus on maybe the developer-specific aspects of it, on the ease of maybe getting things together. Others will focus more on the user-centric aspects, the writer-centric aspects and it really opens up a can of worms when it has to be ease of use for five or ten different roles. ->> I was going to say that I feel whenever CMS is built, there's an idea that there is a workflow in newsrooms that goes from the person who produced the work to the copy editor to the other editors and that there always needs to be a place for each of those roles to exist and in the wild that remains to be seen. So what I think happens with news apps now is that they're outside of that process so there's a lot of content that's in news apps that's not going into that process because it's not inside the CMS. -ANDREW: So why isn't it inside the CMS? And you were getting at this as well. It's too painful to do. You have this issue where it's like, "Oh, well, do I have to either the this content here, and design a custom template." It's easier to spin up a separate thing because it's not monolithic. And then this came up yesterday -- then the content needs to be edited, and how does that work? Well, it's in this flat HTML file here. And a lot of the one-off that happened and the usability issues around that. ->> I mean, solutions exist for that. We have great version control in sort of the development world. And you know, it will work for prose, and especially with things becoming more integrated and editorial projects, maybe we're moving towards a world where things are -- ->> Does it get work for copy editors, though? -ANDREW: It tracks their changes well. But again this is about the roles -- is that the best experience for writers? ->> Not currently. But I think the protocol could work. You could build something around git that would work. ->> But does the model work? Does the writer brain -- the copy editor brain function in the way that the git model actually functions for that? -ANDREW: And can you build around the repository as if they were working with another system? ->> I mean, most new platforms for writing that are coming out, things like drafts have versioning built in. ->> Yeah, but it's not the same with what works in newsrooms. There's a lot more notification and assignments because again, with the speed at which we're working at there has to be that cue that you can see that it's your turn to edit: You're in, you're out. I think of news editing, which I think as far as that role is based is the most elegant way that I've seen that work but with draft, it still feels clunky to me in terms of knowing whose turn it is and there's a hierarchy. ->> And the editing process is less about, "I'm going to remove this sentence, pull it in, here's the diff." It's conversation about is this the right angle to take? What does this convey and the back and forth that needs to happen before the actual change in the body text. ->> And in news edit you can kind of insert that within the body and you can see in the comments and the strikethroughs. I mean, there's a sort of a way that you can have that conversation within the tool but I hadn't seen that with drafts any other option. ->> Well, even within an organization, there are all these different ways that people work. I mean the work that -- the beginning-to-end workflow exists in some places where there really is a finite endpoint that goes out, and that's the article of record for the moment and other times it's like, well you should go back and reopen that file instead of publishing that one, and go back and change things -- have to maintain things. And there are often things that are really lightweight that maybe the bloggers go straight to publishing but maybe other things that are considered more organizational. So even the concept of a workflow is tricky because it's different all over. -ANDREW: Question: Does everybody kind of avoid asset management, entirely? ->> What do you mean by that? -ANDREW: Like, does everyone kind of assume that asset management will always be terrible at a management level? ->> What do you mean? Define the term. -ANDREW: Dealing with photos and videos in some kind of structured manner versus "I've just hard coded this and I'm done." I don't even know if this has been used or referenced. This was kind of an ongoing problem. We were talking about Chorus and we were thinking that it was probably one of the weaker pieces of the system. I would argue one of the weaker pieces of any of the systems out there. ->> Asset management tends to live outside of the CMS entirely that exists on just type of server. That's what happened with The Seattle Times, the photo server. Everything was tacked and categorized by date there and we had a whole backup that was a whole roomful of filing cabinets and CDs. ->> But is that ideal? Because that does simplify the problem that you're handing to the content management system. If the asset management -- the photos, maybe it makes more sense to divorce those two things? ->> I don't think it makes sense at all. I'll be honest with you. It's just another form of content. We're just deciding that well, we're just going to deal with text because that's easy to get into in database and we can render out in the template. And I think that's bullshit. I think that's a hard problem to solve, there's no question. But I think if you think about how we're putting together stories like, if we're working backwards from you need to -- we need this to tell stories more effectively and we want to take all these pieces and we want them to work together. I actually think there's an interesting part of this whole conversation, right, that it's about you just use the term "asset management." And I'll just say that my big beef is that we call this system "content management system" -- it's the worst fucking acronym on earth and I've done this rant many times before and I'm sorry for anybody who's had to hear it but it just sounds like something the IT department came up. We've got a bunch of content. We're going to have to manage it. Let's make a system for it. But it's not -- it's actually not. That's clearly us, technology people solving the problem. It's not like it's the most obvious way to article that we weren't solving problems of the users or the business, right, and I think asset management is. That's why, I mean, even the fact that we think of calling it "asset management" is part of that, right? We're not thinking about about the ways that you're able to organize those. And the fact that we think of those contents as separate from the assets is funny too, right? And we, for Chorus, I think it really comes back to what problems you're trying to solve. Because for us, when we built, like, our asset management system, we would just take photos. For example, early on we were taking photo feeds from sports bloggers. So we were saying, "Oh, sweet." We bring in Getty and index it. And if we were writing about the Astros, we'll show you Astros photos and make it easy to crop it. But The Birds show up, and they say, "We take all our photos ourselves and we watermark them and we need them searchable," all of a sudden the system we used sucked really hard. And we didn't stop to redesign but I think we just need to reframe what we're trying to build here -- work backwards and think about it. I think the first part of this conversation, to me, was fascinating about, like, who likes it and why. Like, you know? I think a lot of, like, if you can build on it, you know, it's nice. Or you're having to build the platform itself or if you're the user of it, you know, who likes it? I think that really gets to the heart of this conversation. Like, who are we doing this for for what reason, you know? And work our way backwards from this and it allows us to get the print shit and allows us to get the stuff if we're working backwards from it. ->> So is there a term that you guys use originally that's not content management system? ->> I think vocabulary is tough but I think we call it "platform." -ANDREW: We call it "platform." That's as far as we go. ->> And sometimes not even publishing because sometimes they call it "content story." ->> Well, we don't even say content platform because we do a bunch of communities that's wrapped up, or a strategy that we organize all the content around. I think if you even start to segment it like that, it starts to get really difficult. If you're building something from scratch, you know, I think that you don't end up with a content management system in many cases, right? You end up with it in a different place. You end up with, like, different sets of tools and that's why it's hard. It's easy to call it a content management system because everybody knows what they think -- they think they know what that means. ->> I think that Trey's point about moving from the first version that does something for, like, sports editors to having to do something for, like, technology people, like, is also an interesting distinction for me that a lot of these problems are at, like, the organizational level. It's like they're not designer or interface software problem, it's like organization/design. Like, this tool is supposed to be used by too many different kinds of people that don't talk to each other and they all want the same tool. And the other potential approach it makes me think of is something that might be helpful is design patterns around the idea of what people like or, like, what works for people and why. I think to even, like, version control, like, what works for you and why, it's just an interesting thing to have -- research, or like a catalogue. ->> Yeah, I feel like the whole conversation about people wanting different goals is why everything's so segmented anyways, and the wrangling piece is, how am I going to get my photos for my partner, or for the photo desk or the copy editors, and search in their own world? And maybe the problem isn't "maybe we need one pool" or it's -- -ANDREW: Well, one of the big things with the wranglers yesterday was the term "monolithic." That word came up about ten times describing what most platforms are. At the same time, the issue is that maybe there's this one monolithic thing. There's this asset management thing over here or whatever people are managing through. ->> That's a job like wrangling all that content from all those disparate areas. -ANDREW: But part of the proposal is, in many cases, build these individual silos and then tie them together. ->> Yeah, I don't think there's a problem with having separate systems, just ideally there would be one wrapper, one interface. So like, I'm just thinking about the post. We might have a great tool where we can embed flat HTML but then you have to go into our other CMS, our main CMS so that SEO works and you have the main promo on the home page. So it doesn't because everything is siloed. It means that sometimes you have to go through multiple channels where having, like, a facet doesn't help because the facet only does some subset of the tasks that need to be done. So if you had one wrapper on one thing, you could still have that quick thing that also happened to access other systems because we can't, especially as a large organization, we can't tear everything down and rebuild it. That can't happen. I don't think it can. ->> Sure -- ->> -- do you want to do it? -ANDREW: Anybody else have, like, one-sentence rants? The longer ones are fine -- ->> They were compound sentences. -ANDREW: -- because we've already covered a lot. So here's the idea. The idea is after this we can break up into anywhere from groups in between, like, five and ten. There's five tables here but it doesn't really matter. Ideally, focus on one major area that is a problem whether that is talking about maybe more generally, like, how can we redefine what a platform or a CMS actually is? Or more specifically -- I mean, some of the stuff that we didn't even go near would be archiving, which is very unsexy, but there's a lot of different issues there. I mean, as an example for archiving we deal with, okay, well some of it is long term static stuff. Some of it is short term stuff. Some of it is dynamic news apps but then also maybe you have the issues of news dips and how does archive have to do with archiving changes? And you get into revisions and then version control and then it spirals from there. So what we want is to spend, ideally, maybe like 15 minutes on two different parts in groups. The first part would be the left side which we would essentially be evaluating. Pick the best implementations out there. If you're doing purely revisions, it's probably going to be Editorially. The next step would be, like, what makes them good? So actually describe them. So why is Editorially better than any other implementations that you've seen? Maybe if it's not implementations, you could talk about something else that you've experienced. The next one is, what's missing? As something as vision is, what should it be doing that it doesn't do other than "it's not working anymore?" And then the last piece would be, like, how to actually integrate. This kind of goes into the perspective of, okay, we had this one implementation, how does it need to interface with other aspects of the system? Revisions, of course. I was just getting into how it goes into archiving, and maybe publicly displaying those. Or this idea that you have to expose those and maybe potentially you might have to merge a few revisions together for public display, almost like rebase, or squashing commits on git, or narrating messages that normally editors would never do or think about. But maybe a narration to a change is a correction to that whole story. The second piece of it is recommendations and ideally mixed with what the recommendations could be is actually coming up with, not necessarily a spec, but what the best practices should be in this area for what needs to be built. Talking about, like, ideally drafting a plan to go forward and starting to come up with, like, specific solutions. And specifically, like, what can be built in this area, whether that's a WordPress plug-in, or a standalone system, or a prototype, if it doesn't exist yet. It's like, what can we actually do to make this better? And also the third one, there is also best use of money and effort. Where is the time best spent? Where is the money best spent? I mean, we can talk easily about something that never even came up at all. By the way is anything related to user comment? Comments, discussion, anything like that? And you guys probably know about the $4 million currently being spent. ->> They got that covered. -ANDREW: They got that covered. Problem solved. But honestly, where is the money? Where is the time best spent on how to make editing better -- what concrete thing that no one's really done well to make that experience better? Does that mean like mediums interface for everything or does that mean everything along those lines, as well? Does everyone feel comfortable with that? We can pick and randomly assign these and put you in groups but I think it might be better if everyone stands up in a moment and maybe starts talking about forming different groups. Three people forming to talk about SEO because that's what they want to do, that's fine. I'm just kidding. SEO joke. We don't care. But beyond that, though, if someone really wants to talk about, like, assets and by that I mean "photo management" then we can get into groups. ->> Can we boil it down from the list? -ANDREW: That's kind of the idea -- the big ones I would imagine. A lot of these are similar. Collaboration is really big if only it gets into revisions and tracking, and comments among users and things like that. I would tend to think that text editing and more larger, writing, is a big problem. It certainly seemed like assets is a whole issue, maybe in terms of how it's defined. Of course we didn't even really talk about workflows. Editorial workflows which is another big thing. ->> I have a question. Is anyone actually feeling ambitious enough not to use TinyMCE in their big production WYSIWYG. ->> What do you mean by that? -ANDREW: I mean, Course uses it, right? ->> Is anyone not using -- ->> We're actually underway on not doing that, so -- but I mean, that's a whole interesting conversation about, like -- -ANDREW: That may need to be discussed over drinks later. ->> I know some folks from Guardian here. It might be fun to shoot the shit with them, those who have embarked beyond the confines of CKEditor and TinyMCE, but it's definitely challenging. ->> The homebrew, it requires markdown and it has not any sort of WYSIWYG. -ANDREW: And that's not a great experience for writers. It's great for developers. What was that? ->> The back turns into asset management and embeds because I think a lot of what comes out of that is content portability and you're using a hard-coded image tag and it's not going to -- ->> I think anyone who tackles management is also going to be thinking about how -- so not just like, storing content. ->> Or content portability, we're talking about TinyMCE. That assumes HTML is the format that we want and, you know, there are many other formats that we -- ->> -- HTML for life! ->> DHTML! -ANDREW: Does anybody feel strongly that they would like to talk with someone more about a topic? We're going to try and do maybe two rounds of this. So if you want to spend 20 to 30 minutes on one, and then we can go ahead and talk about an each of those and, ideally, by the end of this time we can sit down and spell out maybe some real big solutions and next steps. Maybe so, when Knight comes around and they have $4 million, they can maybe fix another problem. I'm kind of serious too. We can really start to describe this in different ways. Does anybody want -- I really want to talk with the people about next -- yeah? ->> We have, for example, ways of divorcing content from presentation, CSS. And despite the buggy shit that you have to deal with, it's a system that works reasonably well. I would like to talk with people on divorcing content from structure because then you can have your editorial structure be different from content structure something that makes you not have to worry where the diffs are. -ANDREW: A lot of this maybe Circa would structure content along those lines. This is a quote, this is not equal. ->> I think content model is the thing that I'm most interested in. And I use that term broadly to describe, you know, thinking about -- that's another thing to talk about asset management married to content and thinking about, you know, more modular, you know, kind of chunks and how we mark those up, and how we attach metadata to them. -CHRIS: Is that the same thing? You spoke first, I'll give this to you. And you can form a group around this. -ANDREW: Anyone, next one? ->> I would follow up on the collaboration and the version control stuff because I'm curious about -- I'm curious about where people's heads are about that range. -ANDREW: Next one? Other people interested in that, by the way? Probably a decent amount of people. Is that another one? Next one? ->> I was going to say that I was under the collaboration one. -ANDREW: Another group? No one else interested? Just wanna talk about these two things, which is fine. Are these too big of problems for us to tear off? ->> Rolling asset management? -ANDREW: Content models? ->> It doesn't have to. It was just opinion. -ANDREW: You wanna talk about assets? ->> I want to start a company around assets, so if anyone else wants to... ->> You're going to be wrong, man. I'll tell you that now. -ANDREW: Your branding is off. ->> Asset management is dead! -ANDREW: So is everyone ultimately interested in these two things? Because we can literally split the room in half and talk about each of these if you want to. ->> What if you want to be in both conversations? Do we have to sit in the middle? -ANDREW: Is anyone not really interested in either of these? Which is an option. We can continue as a group but I think smaller groups is better instead of doing one of these after another. I would rather shrink the room down a little bit. ->> What was the other one besides the -- -ANDREW: Collaboration, version control, and content model. ->> They're complementary. -ANDREW: And maybe your group depending on who's in there. Can break it down into smaller groups if it's cool? ->> I think we may need to start with the big things and break it down. -ANDREW: Sounds good. This is flexible and we have time. - [ Group Work ] - Pick a side! ->> I feel the structure of the room. You guys should pick a side. -ANDREW: That corner is collaboration and version control stuff and it looks like the content model is, like, everything else. So you wanna go down and go over here? -[ Group Work ] -All right. Do you guys wanna start? ->> Does it make sense for us to start? -ANDREW: I think it might because you're talking about overall content and they're talking about breaking it down. Maybe we can have multiple people talking about it. I think we're probably going to talk at each other from this point on. Okay. Um, yeah, you wanna start? You're already -- you're already... now you're just making fun of me. ->> Ready? Summarize. ->> Summarize: Version control sucks. If you guys remember, you guys know how much version sucked on a very granular level but we sort of talked a little bit about what works for a specific use case, that's sort of a really important sort of way to think about this. So we're really talking about the newsroom and about trying to sort of fit with a use case. That is, how do you end up with really quality content that is really well sourced, really well edited? So there's a model for -- and ask, let's think with a linear perspective. You write a draft, they submit to a editor's pool. Someone reroutes it, sends it to copy edit and says ready to go, and ready for a sophisticated content model and/or decorate with blank tags and publish to the "Internets." Other folks in the universe are familiar with the content management system -- a version control system called Git but the complexity, the cognitive complexity of Git is maybe a little bit more than these folks need. And I certainly have seen that in my universe and so keeping it simple best implementation, best practice. Let's try and keep something simple where you know you don't lose your work. So your work is resilient that changes are auditable, attributable, and accountable, not just to the people in your organization but even to the public. So if I discover a problem with my writing or I misspell somebody's name, that error correction can be propagated out to a public-facing article. But also even thinking farther back in the line if you're basing your work on research or open data that you discover is wrong, that can be propagated through, so you can see those versions changed through time. Another interesting thing that we suggested was that -- discussed was that there is a version control system where each change attributable exposes interesting data within the organization about expertise. Who's getting involved with editing articles of different types? Who are the topic experts? Why is this workflow better than that workflow? So attributable changes expose a lot of data that can be really useful. So, linear, resilient model that's really, really good. Tracking changes, implementation detail. I'll put it out there that it seems like an implementation detail. A lot of it -- a lot of tracking changes can often just as often be well represented as retroactive. What happened? When did somebody do this? So newsrooms appear to be braced on a brigade model. So it's like, "To the captain." And the captain says, "To the colonel." And he says, "This goes out." So tracking changes, you have so respect the lines of authority. Note, merging prose sucks. So, we're not going to deal with a branching model. Again, the cognitive complexity of branching in Git. Raise your hands if the first time you used Git you thought it was really easy to understand. Thank you. ->> Much easier to understand. ->> All right, so, vocabulary's really bad. Hard-to-explain to a writer -- don't me a favor -- do me a favor just branch, do some work and I'll merge it later. You can approve the merge. No, branching sucks we're not going to do it. Check this out. Branching, trunk, tree, branch, branch, branch, branch. Keep it narrow, address each change, let them go one off, and let the writer be able to pick any one of these to this in this universe. So diffs, good visualization of diffs, that's useful, that tracks changes, reverts, those work. Interesting things that came up with collaboration. Where do you store your notes when your editor makes a note on your document? AmyJo just said that editors leave notes in line. Guess what, those are protected. They're not published. It's not possible for them to be published, they get excised from the document. And I think that's great. Editorially has an opinion about where those are stores but making a conversation about this is arguably a big part of it so that you're not walking to someone else saying, "What do you think of this?" So this is table stakes for version control, I think. That can be at the commit level if you're working in a inner granular model which I'll talk about in a second. It can be a milestone, it can be a mock on a diff. Any place where you can see something about a change, you should be able to say something about a change. Slugs suck. When you change your -- what is slug version control? That's what we're -- I hope you talk about that. Last thing, I'm not even addressing the core proposition but I think I'm answering all the questions. We've talked about all the questions. Collaboration models around working at the same time, three possible options. So U-Lock which means that if Erin is writing and I approach the document to write and I cannot write and I have to ask his permission, there is branching, we've discussed branching, and there's multi users, simultaneous users -- this gets to the question of the best use of money and effort. If you are doing operational transformation. Raise your hand if you've worked on a collaborative text editor how do you feel about operational transformation? It's a sophisticated thing. You can use other people's work. Like, ShareJS is a great example. I love ShareJS. It's not a great WYSIWYG editor so you have to make a tradeoff between user and developer in time. It may not be the best thing to do however. These things are stacked for a reason. There are other political and social reasons why locking systems exist. If a journalist is writing, maybe she doesn't want somebody coming in and writing at the same time. Because flying cursors kind of suck. I think technical writers love flying cursors. People writing manuals love flying cursors. People writing directions love flying cursors. But for this purpose if you can get to the point where you're building a simultaneous editing system with operational transforms in the background and you conceal that, and you present it as I'm storing XIFs, or you can store it as branching. That gives a lot of leeway in terms of how people use your version control system. I would propose that you keep it simple and you store diffs rather than implementing something super complex and super upfront, storing diffs. -ANDREW: Store the diffs or store the version and then diff them dynamically? ->> Well, that's a good question, right? Full disclosure, Editorially with every version that you saved, stored the entire text of your document as it was in that revision, right? Computer science-friendly, no, right? It's not sexy but was it easy to build? Double thumbs up, right? Was it easy to maintain? Is it auditable? Double thumbs up. I would -- the problem is that I don't think it scales as a storage system. That's my -- I'm only speaking for myself, right? That's why this is -- this is the little recoil. ->> Quick question at one point does it stop scaling? ->> What? At 1.. does it stop scaling? Is it a point that users going to hit on the regular? ->> It didn't stop scaling for us. -ANDREW: Sorry. ->> If you are talking about resilient work, how expensive is it to store that many versions? -ANDREW: But if you're storing only diffs then you can't necessarily do other kinds of comparisons. You're always comparing the first one preview one to the next one. You can't compare two sides of the branch. ->> You kind of can, actually. -ANDREW: You kind of work. But you have to reconstruct the original. ->> But you do what the Git -- version two is -- version three is that compiled version plus more diffs. ->> How do you do merge resolution, though? ->> You don't, you let people do it. ->> You just provide some interface that do you want this? Do you want this? ->> You say, here's had the two documents, here's the diffs between them does it makes sense but the fact of the matter is, it's like good news for brains is computers can't do this well. They cannot do it well when you get into a situation like this and you're comparing two distant revisions that works -- it's kind of like doing an octopus merge or three-way merge in pros is actually really, really complex and what you're trying to engender is trust and resilience, you don't want a computer to do it. You want a good UI. ->> And the other use case that we talked about we used the example of an academic paper just because it was the most likely to be shipped out to multiple people at once kind of thing before you you might ship out an academic paper to five people and you as a writer might want to take bits and pieces of each. Sometimes maybe one reviewer or two reviewers had feedback on the same two paragraphs. You're not wanting to merge anything but synthesize them yourself, originally, and put them into a meaningful -- a meaningful change to you rather than any sort of, like, merge between exact suggestions. ->> I don't think you ever want to collaborate a change. ->> I'm not convince that you'll want to -- I mean that's a -- so when you're looking at this. When you've got, like, if I've sent something to you to edit. I would love to be able to see that it's a diff off of my work off of a specific point but maybe it's not. Maybe it's just interlooped with my work. Maybe you get back to my in three weeks. As long as it's attributable to you and I can say where it came from, that might be enough. ->> Well, I also a use case in my job right now, where we have a CMS that doesn't allow for any kind of organized branching and what we end up doing is making, like, literally duplicating the same file three times to experiment with different things in a way that's not tracked and to me, it's like a complete nightmare and the use case that I think it actually has come up here a lot was this idea of, like, an art-directed editorial. It's what we're trying to do in this case and because there's no branching and because it requires a lot of, like, finicky exploration we -- um, I really miss that. ->> But you want to be able to start your work from a specific point in time, right? In three different ways? ->> Um, yeah. -ANDREW: Well they're always there. The branching of A, B, and C, I tend to agree. We don't really need to support that. But the other option though, something that's published and I'm scheduling, let's say or I'm working on a rewrite of it while I'm doing that, I then have to go back and fix a typo in the currently-published work. That's hypothetically a branch, you're still going to a point in time and making a change. I mean, maybe you're not really dealing with a separate fork as much as you're going back in time and immediately updating it, and also keeping that in some sort of a rested state and not published at all but there are some use cases that do require some kind of juggling. Of course, the problem there is that almost immediately unless you're using the command line, the user experience breaks down 'cause it's incredibly difficult to be like, "You can optionally schedule this change for tomorrow at 9:00 a.m." And you have your announcement or something like that. And that becomes a real pain in the ass. ->> It's, I think the place where things are breaking, which is great that you're approaching it this way. Like, we're thinking like developers and branching and merging and resolving conflicts with diffs and something like that. But at some point you need an editor, you need an editor or a journalist to make decisions about how in the words come together. So the breaking point seems to be... ->> It's social, right? These are social problems. There are technical solutions to social problems but there are also technical solutions for technical people for technical problems and I don't mean to be approaching it the wrong way, but it gets really tricky. ->> Good job, guys! ->> Silence... ->> We can go ahead and ship that, that would be cool. ->> Are we all done? Sweet. So we talked about content model. And we started off by really, just like, kind of thinking through. We started talking about assets a little bit and really, this whole chunk of things which was just like, some stream of consciousness that led to, I think one really big point. So we started -- we really started talking about, you know, the role of, like, the format in it. We started talking about atomic units of content. We started thinking about, you know, the very influential to the model. You know, do you have these reusable entities that are, like, equal to each other? You know, should entities be addressable and easily pulled together? We talked about some different examples of people who were thinking about content model but I think that the one big kind of revelation that I think is pretty interesting is, when you think about -- when you talk about this stuff in content management systems and we think about sort of the legacy that we've inherited and, um, you know, problems that we were specifically trying to solve and the way that we sort of approached it as we were, like, developers, like, making, you know, forum-based software. And bringing that to these problems is that we took the issue of, like, the user presentation and the article format, right, like whether it's like this is a story or it's a gallery or it's a video or it's a, you know, a set of updates in a live blog, whatever. We took the interface for creating those different types of formats and we tightly coupled these two things with the way that we represented that content in the data model, right? So, you know, the easiest way to think about this is we're like, it's an article, it has a headline and so -- it has a body, it has a byline and there's an author associated with that, et cetera, et cetera. That's the way that it looks. That's the thing that we're showing. So on the backend we're going to give you a tool, you update the let youline, you update the body, you update each of the individual things that we broke down. And in the database we have a whatever -- entries model that has, you know, a headline column and a body column and an author column and all these things and if we want to have, you know, separate ones, we'll just -- we'll recreate each of these three things separately each time because we have tightly coupled these things together, right? And the reason that we kind of came to this is because when you started thinking about things -- examples of things that people were doing, let's just say the Circa 1 for example, is that they may have started with, you know, this notion of the format itself, you know, like, these little chunks of information that they would push to you over time. I don't know if you're familiar with that app. And the editing is creating each one of those chunks in the system and the data model they probably have, like, each one of these chunks that they're attaching metadata to each one of those things but even if you think about building a gallery each one of these things is tightly coupled and one approach is to change the format completely. You know, redesign the experience on the front end and that will give you -- the result was that it would give you a more modular, atomic unit of content model and it would give you a tool that would do that as well. So what we started talking about was if this tight coupling is what's holding us back. How would you break these things up so that you would give yourself more flexibility in this, right, without compromising user experience of the user presentation is -- without compromising user experience of with editing this. So just starting with the editing one, like, we have this representation of a document that you're writing, right? Like the individual fields is difficult that way. But instead of, like, trying to expose that content model into the editing interface that you just allow people to edit these things and you figure out from that, what kind of the structure is underneath that. We figured that out. TinyMCE is actually doing that. Is HTML the right structure? And at the end of the day what's funny is, we take that structure and we shove it into the database anyway and we can try to resolve that by not doing HTML by saying, "All right, everybody has to do markdown." So there's no structure that we're shoving in there but what we're doing is sort of removing the structure problem that we would want to solve so that we would be able to kind of, reorganize these addressable chunks together. So kind of getting into the practical pieces that we started thinking about, a great experience of putting stories together in atomic units that would give you some flexibility in -- if you broke this out, and how you present it. But some of the ideas like, don't expose the model so much in the editor, right? Like they don't need to see that but potentially it's valuable as they're writing this to be able to say, here's what we're understanding the model of this document to be as you're going along. You can kind of light it up a little bit, right? Like right now, in TinyMCE, you flip over and see the HTML but for a lot of users that's not a really valuable way of saying this is how we understand the structure of this document, right? These chunks if you do create chunks, making them easy to find, this gets back to the asset model thing we were talking about taxonomy and things like this. When you do start creating these chunks and you want symbol things and you want to put them back together it has to be easy to be able to find those things. You have to organize them somehow, that search. Is there a taxonomy that you can organize this under? But that's an important part if you're going to break everything up, then you should make it easy to put it all back together, you know, and in using/attaching metadata to those units. But you know, the key thing here is that it should be easy to create these things, right? It shouldn't be extra hard just because we want to have this super sweet atomic content model to have different user presentations shouldn't mean that we, like, break those things up. And you know, it creates flexibility for these multiple formats and this common, basic UI was just a conversation about, you know, back to that one document thing. We still have that model and it's still useful for thinking about putting a story together. You don't have to couple that with what the presentation layer is, or what even, the content model is, if that's still an useful way to create this. So if we were to practically start to put some things together, these would be the guidelines with the notion that, maybe what we're trying to solve is decoupling these can, but not decoupling in a way that breaks up the user experience -- consuming content but also, like, creating it. -ANDREW: But creating would take place say in a single editor but it would the -- ->> And instead of the model that we have right now, it's like, there's all these, there's these 40 potential elements that we might want to use in the database and here's these 40 boxes be that you can fill in instead making sure I'm creating this thing. And as I go, I can optionally create the elements that I want, which is kind of an UX thing but it's also -- ->> Well, you have that WYSIWYG editor. But the problem with the WYSIWYG editor is that you have too many options. Really what you want are the six options and that can be rendered however, whatever you want and then you pre-process it so that it gets broken into it's pretty much like a WYSIWYG editor that breaks down into the elements that we want to use later but doesn't break down into the bold. Not just a list. But break it down to this is multimedia that you can use elsewhere. -ANDREW: I'm curious how it would feel like. Would it feel like a single white canvas that you would work on but as you hit a new paragraph, as you enter it would kind of show the new blogs. ->> Just real quick, what is an example of this. -ANDREW: Does it feel like what circa as a presentation in chunks? They might write that in one file. ->> I think you would expose that as you need it for whatever presentation you're about to put together, but like, we've been you know, David's -- shown up recently at Fox with Mandy and Jason, and they've been -- and reading those interviews are fascinating for this because I just think that, you know, people will -- they just when they're writing and when you're creating, you just don't want to think about that shit. You just want to get ideas out and you want to mess around, and you want to move them around. You're just not thinking in the content model because, why? It's fucking crazy. And you know, and that's the -- I think, you know, and when you hear people -- when you try to break down and ask people have this praise for media it's just because there's not a lot there and it's not exposing any of that. It doesn't even give you the option of to start doing any meta data of any -- -ANDREW: It's really easy to control when you only have five elements. ->> But that's even us as product people thinking about it. One of our writers just uses Medium to write. Just think about that for a second, the fucking purpose is to write. You're a writer and you're writing something, and you're taking all this other stuff and they have confidence that it's going to be there, that there's not all this extra stuff that it's not going to be screwed up or whatever, that they can grab this easy text and it's not about trying to solve all these other problems in the interface. ->> And the option if you're going to weave, like, probably debated for a long time is that the options are probably all different but I think kind of the point is to not make the writer think about all the options upfront. ->> Right, 'cause sometimes the reasons why writers hate CMSs is because there's a demand from the organization, you need to write an SEO headline, you need to add a tag, you need to do this, this and this. That's not what the writer stops but the organization requires it but all the writer wants to do is write to before they're mad at the CMS or the has had at the organization for wanting to be able to fulfill that... ->> We take -- we're like, these are the requirements? Great, put them all on the screen. Here are all the requirements. Here are all the things that you need to do. And I think it's a workflow thing of "what am I doing right now?" I'm writing. And those are real things that we have to do but when do you start to think about those? One of the things, just by the way -- sorry, that we were talking about that somebody mentioned that was pretty cool if it was doing this type of structure underneath the hood over time is that for version control what would be cool is that the chunks that it's creating some of those chunks you have permissions to be editing them, certain ones over time, or you could be interacting with different pieces, certain pieces could be locked while other ones aren't. But it's the first thing and I always understand that the first thing that I'm just writing up at the top is the headline. ->> So you want make sure that the social media expert is the one writing the head -- like you attach permissions to... ->> Well, I think that's where the use case that you brought up. Where something's been published, the writer's ripping it apart for a rewrite of things that need to be changed -- is where it comes into the issue of where this starts to come into play you can have version control at that module level in some way so that the module could have -- of course you wouldn't want to create resistance but something which could push that one existing model out to change that thing. ->> I said earlier, you know, that I was interested in sort of talking about a theoretical specification to decouple the structure from, you know, from the content? We went off in kind of a different direction, great. But in terms of an actual decision, I'm trying to bring it back to something tangible. I think it would be awesome to be able to have something like TinyMCE, a WYSIWYG editor but it goes back to HTML, it spits back sort of structural information about the piece, right? And you kind of, over -- wildly over-engineer your content and put it on the shelf and don't even worry about it and I just want an editor that the text structure and either publishes or it files above -- sorry, the model as currently implemented doesn't support this article that you're trying to do and then you just have your developers go and extend it a little bit because you can over-engineer things and never use them and you shouldn't have this for this theoretical thing that you're never going to do. And so if you have a development that needs it. You can just ping the process. -ANDREW: You were talking about what an atomic unit is, obviously a piece of a paragraph necessarily but could it also be, like, five paragraphs? Or would you normally -- ->> Well, you could do, like, sections could be one of your elements. -ANDREW: Or can units be nested? You have four blocks that goes before and then images that go inside it. ->> Imagining -- I don't know what this UI looks like exactly but imagine that you wrote a bunch of things, a bunch of paragraphs, and there was, maybe, whatever some action that you take that reveals, not in a overwrought kind of switched up the whole thing but it just says, well, this is the structure that we have. Like, sort of like, you know, interpreted from the thing that you've created and then gave you some easy way to expand or sort of contract, like, different chunks, right? And say, I actually want this chunk to actually all be here and then the other thing that would be interesting is, right, once it has determined the structure that it would also, you know, almost, like, simultaneous, like, understand, like, here's what the meaning -- we think this piece right here, we think that this is about you workout so you kind of turn it on and it starts to reveal what it knows about the thing but you can change that. You can overwrite both the structure and the meaning of that thing to kind of, like, say that. ->> There are all these elements but metadata attached to, metadata that helps the article, or other things that would help, or generate automatically? ->> What it ultimately matters -- it's not the atomic unit, it's the ultimate unit. It's what it was created and you know going back entirely too far. The atomic unit at some level is always going to be ones and zeros, so I guess really, maybe the best way to do this is to, you know, allow yourself to go all the way back but only dig as far as you need to. You know, you don't need to -- ->> Give me some baseline or something, right. Only as much as you need it to be. -ANDREW: I'm also thinking about it from the perspective thinking about in the limitation I have a 30 paragraph story, each of those is an atomic unit that's fine. I then have to revision -- let's say I'm storing them in a database and I guess it may be way more implementation than we want right now. Each one of them is an entity they're all stored in a group, diffing 30 elements. What's the benefit of diffing that? Version control of the elements as well. Version control can be based on in the order of these units or how these orders have changed and the other thing as well when we're dealing with presentation versus editing a block quote would be part of the content -- a unit but at the same time, a poll quote is not. A poll quote is presentation but its actual presentation in the document is more about presentation that it is about the content model. So it's something else to maybe think about as well opinion. ->> Well, you can get that in work flow because I think it is 'cause the crazy thing about poll quotes is that they are a presentation but they are such a statement content-wise, right? Like, what you decide to be the poll is really interesting you know? Which is why there's a whole verge poll quotes Twitter feed now. Lots of jokes. But that's, I think it's interesting. I think this is cool stuff. -ANDREW: Anybody have anything to adds to either of these about how they tie together or anything else? I mean, that was the summaries, so we have about 15 minutes left. I don't know how else we would close this out other than -- ->> When are you guys going to build it? I thought you were WordPress? ->> I shipped it five minutes ago while you were blabbing. That's. -CHRIS: One thing that I noticed was that we were trying -- we set out to just talk about two highly focused things but just by the may have of the CS being a monolith just talking about version control, and, like, there's a lot of cross -- similar communication. We talked about, like, all -- I started -- -ANDREW: Everything on here is who was discussed. -CHRIS: Pretty much. ->> So like what do you guys think is actually achievable? I mean we've kind of driven off of a cliff here. -ANDREW: So one thing that I normally end up seeing, at least in my line of work, is that a discrete piece of this looks achievable and then you either start building it and you start specing out and you start building this other thing and it spirals and then you come up with one of those and that, and you realize oh shit we have to do that as well. And at this point, this is obviously together, or even individually, these two ideas are way too big to be chewed on in any short length of time but ultimately, they are problems that need to be solved. I don't -- I mean, does anybody have any ideas how this can be broken down. So what are the next steps, what needs to be built on top of an existing system now to make something better? ->> You just keep it super fucking simple, right? I know it sounds absurd. So, actually Matt brought this up. Do we even bother integrating this? So does WordPress, does Chorus, do any of our CMSs embark on this or that to encode it into the monoliths that we currently work with? And I honestly think that it's much simply if you don't and you worry about -- so for example, let's say so you got this create content model, right, and it works really well and I've got an editor that speaks to it. And you know, I've solved these problems of how is it going to talk to this and it's really great, right? But then you're like, oh, but we have all these people who are -- they're -- we have a bunch of writers now, we have this site in India. We have a bunch of -- we have a bunch of rural subsistence farmers in India who all have great cell phones and they have no Internet but they can text articles to this content model, right? So now you have to figure out how to translate this into that. So Punt -- so say, here's this API, here's a means of translating. And this editor -- this cool, this sweet editor that we've worked on and translate it into this content model because honestly, it probably is TinyMCE, right? TinyMCE works great. It's a WYSIWYG editor that that we all simultaneously loathe and love. Do we all want to rebuild Medium? I don't know. So being able to dump that into the contented model is an A pickup API process thinking about what's the easiest way to do this, did coupling things, and not worry about how they relate to each other as one, let you go, monolithic project. ->> I think you ever to -- you have to decouple this stuff be decouple some of the, like, problems to solve, right, and then try to set yourself up with an architecture to be able to kind of layer these things on over time. ->> What is that architecture, what does it look like? And more importantly how can you do it so that people don't try to solve all the little things 100 different things so that it doesn't talk to each other? Okay, so Medium's built something that none of us can use? ->> I don't know, "Talk to each other?" I don't know. That's an interesting question. Like, I mean, we brought it up here. We were talking about, "Oh, we gotta find some standards or some interoperability." I think we put sometimes the standards before the solutions and we get ourselves into trouble with that, right? And I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to seek out the standards and try to get to these places but, I think, like, you know when you start to -- you know, for a long time, it seemed like there would be these ideas that we would all talk about and nobody would just go and try and do them and they would sort of get hung up on, "Oh, we're going to try and do the standard for it," or, "We're going to try to integrate this standard for this one thing" and that was one big requirement that we made for ourselves instead of trying to make something and show it where we can start to say, okay now we can start to open this up. And there may not be agreement on all that, but at least you have some proofs of concepts. And what I'm hopeful -- I get really excited because I see already folks working on, like, opening up their text editor stuff and I see a lot of -- there's more of these conversations happening than there's ever happened before. For a long time we would get credit for shit at Vox Media that we did instead of talking about it. And now, I think we're getting to a place where lots of people are doing some really cool projects and, like, showing them to each other. So one of the things that we're doing is we're actually barking on this type of work right now at Vox Media. And some of the stuff that we're thinking about is how do we start to share out what we're learning from that and how can we bite off what we chew for that. But we're making a big commitment right now to really be working, focusing a lot of effort, and energy and investment into the problem, right? So hopefully we'll find a way they can't if we do break it up, those are more shareable, and like, learnable from other folks but I think we just need to start -- those who can, should, you know? ->> And if we get -- if any of us does this and we, like, ship something at any of our organizations, right, it is much better to be perceived as having gotten it wrong and to have done it than have somebody come out can and say, "No, you're wrong and this is how you do it." And now you have two implementations to solve these problems that you could coalesce on time. That to me, that's huge. We've all worked in organizations for the longest time at least not for me, I'm really new for the journalism world. A lot these last two days have been great. I've loved this but every organization that I've worked in have said we've solved this problem and I'm tell you right now it's not landing a man on the moon and I'm not going to share it with anybody because it's secret sauce and like, get somebody out there. If you decouple it like this, you don't have to release the whole platform. Release a small part of it and have somebody come along and say, you're stupid or, like, this is not complete. All right, then make it complete, right? And, I think that's really, really exciting. ->> I think if there were more people doing experimentations in decoupling stuff in their systems. All of us are guilty of, like, doing these things 'cause it's easier to do things this way because if we start to break this up and start to think what it means to do that. I think that would be awesome and maintaining user experiences and sharing our success with that because I think this is what I see in every other model that I go out and look at right now and talk to people about doing things and share. Like, what I don't like about ours but this is what I don't like. And ours is relatively, like, it has some flexibility and some interesting stuff but it's just a layer up. We just focused on doing it from the direction of user presentation rather than, like, trying to decouple it. ->> So I have a question, and Chris maybe you can answer this, and it may be totally irrelevant because it was built years ago but what's the state of the Armstrong CMS and all the investment that was put into that? We had developers download it and try to use it and they said that it was incredibly buggy because it hadn't been updated for so long. Are those ideas even relevant today? Could they be built off of? -CHRIS: Well, the idea, one of the strange things that the Armstrong CMS has a lot of components and it's an a la carte pick and choose but the problems that the Armstrong CMSs was trying to solve was pretty much none of these. There were things like how do I sketch little articles to show up at a certain time of day? How do I get articles to render in a certain context? So it's kind of interesting that the problems that we ended up solving were not -- they were -- we were designed -- we were developing software for other developers; not for users. And there was some other strange things about the project, as well. There is, like, a -- there's a couple subprojects that are still being developed. And there's a there's basically a whole new base for about -- there's a small core of apps that are -- that have entirely new base underneath them. And so I'm still, like, ambivalent about the project. There's still a lot of components that I believe in but, like, the Node is a project for other Django developers but it's not designed for a variety of user experience. ->> And the Django thing I was wondering when we talk about content models, Vox builds rails which is very opinionated about its models. I was wondering if there's a point where building on top of a framework with a certain type of content model is not going to work? ->> I mean, it's relatively decoupled, I mean, it's somewhat opinionaid but we've started decoupling some of that stuff so I think the framework's -- I think what's happened with a lot of frameworks were the opinionated parts. You were, over time, you start to not rely on those opinions as much as you are. And I think it's true for a lot of folks in different frameworks and I think that's -- you know, you start to want to give yourself flexibility. You get, sort of, find yourself, like, stuck in those opinions and so, you wiggle your way out of them. And I think like, you know, a lot of the -- we're architecturing towards like, not not being concerned. We're just trying to get as much value out of rails being rails as we can but I just don't think that it's as much of an issue. I don't know how that applies to Django. I mean, it's like a -- -ANDREW: -- I think that's a separate one for sure. ->> 'Cause it's such a -- it's a -- it was more opinionated in a particular direction, solving a more -- -ANDREW: -- a higher level than Rails. PHP obviously for us is even lower than that. ->> Even lower. -CHRIS: There was actually two things about Django that I wanted to mention. One is that we've started rethinking the Django CMS. There is a protocol Django -- product called Django CMS. I'm not talking about that. But traditionally when you give your staff the Django CMS, they're the Django admin, which is a developer interface; not a user interface. So internally we started kind of rebranding that and saying, no, that's not the CMS. That's actually the developer admin. And the other thing that I wanted to mention is that, this past week I've been doing a lot of research with the -- with using WordPress as an interface for getting data into Django and so far, the experimentation's been -- have been -- ->> That's what we did at the Sunlight Foundation. -CHRIS: I talked to Jeremy. ->> Jeremy, cool. -CHRIS: So there's projects at the base level but I'm doing stuff at the base API. ->> Yahoo, it WordPress to whatever CMS they use to publish the site. ->> Yeah, shit's weird these days, man. What is even happening anymore? Cats and dogs, man. -ANDREW: It's weird because sometimes you see the content, WordPress is an example. Sometimes you see it as a content story, sometimes you see it only as an user interface. Schoolbook, which was this application in New York Times a few years ago. They used it purely for the backend. jQuery, like jquery.com and all their 25 sites, they don't use it for the backend; they use it for the theming. And all their content is stored in Git repos that is then adjusted and shoved into the database so they don't even touch the backend which is usually what host people if they were going to pick one piece they would use but everyone's using some other aspect, and you're not even using it for the content repository either you're using it for the dashboard and stuff like that. everything should start with the API. Anybody have any interesting concluding remarks, or should that be me...? -CHRIS: Have you heard of the horse radish project? ->> No. -CHRIS: It's something working on for -- Jeremy's working on for doing image management in WordPress. and I think it's in a state where it's internally useable at Sunlight. ->> For image management? -CHRIS: For WordPress, yeah. So it's got elastic search. ->> You weren't fast enough. ->> How do I find this on Google? -CHRIS: Lab/horseradish. ->> Sweet, I find a typo in the first thing, settings.py. -CHRIS: It's a Django app for managing WordPress. -ANDREW: Throw Ruby in there for a shell script. ->> Can we get some Perl? -ANDREW: It is now 5:30 thank you all for coming. This was fantastic. I was really -- we were both really nerves that we wouldn't come away with anything beyond a list of gripes and I think we have way more than that to work on. I know that we're working on a lot of these problems, and I know that obviously Vox is working on all of these problems, really everyone's trying to solve these things cool not having roadmaps but things of this nature is really awesome. I hope you enjoyed SRCCON, ask I hope to see you guys around and CMSs -- yeah! +We can stop fighting the CMS, a round-table discussion +Session facilitator(s): Chris Chang, Andrew Nacin +Day & Time: Friday, 3-5:30pm +Room: Franklin 2 + +ANDREW: All right. Welcome to "We Need To Stop Fighting The CMS: A Round-table Discussion." Like all of these sessions, my name is Andy Mason. I'm one of the lead developers for WordPress, which you may know. So I come with a background from someone who builds software but also has been in the newsroom. +CHRIS: I'm Chris Chang. We have our own in-house CMS based off of Django, and so I support users next to me as opposed to millions of years... +ANDREW: I prefer not to see them -- don't write that down! We're going to start. I think we'll start really quickly with some introductions because we kind of -- especially since this is not a huge group, which is good -- just a very quickly who you are, where you work, what do you use in your system, whether it's home-grown, or something else -- Django, or whatever. And what you do? In my case, Andy Mason, WordPress, and I build WordPress. So -- but if you guys -- if we can all just do that all quickly and if you're a developer versus a user I think that will help a little bit. We're going to start over here? + +> > Sure. I'm Matt Perry, I work at Automatic and I use WordPress and I help a lot of other developers with WordPress, too. +> > I'm Laura, and I work at Vox Media and we use a home-grown platform called Course and I'm a product manager there. +> > I'm Matt, I'm currently an independent. I don't have a -- I'm non-denominational as far as the content-management systems including WordPress but I don't have a particular favorite. It might be WordPress. +> > ANDREW: To be clear, I don't want this to be a WordPress talk. +> > Neither do I. +> > ANDREW: Actually, I warned all the WordPress people here who are here to not use the word, if they can. +> > You broke your own rule. +> > You screwed that up right away. +> > ANDREW: Just to get an idea this is about fixing some of the bigger problems that we're going to go through. +> > I'm Ed, and I newly joined the Washington Post, and the Post uses Method as well as other tools that have been built in-house. +> > Django a little bit. +> > ANDREW: Python? +> > My name is Kyle. I'm a designer turned product manager. I work for a company called American City Business Journals and we use a home-grown CMS called Gizmo. +> > I'm Vijith, sorry. I work at the New York Times they use Scoop which I guess is their home-grown CMS. I'm a data viz, and CMS doesn't really matter to me but more of the backend stuff. It has been WordPress -- big on WordPress. +> > My name is Aaron Jordan I'm a technical architect at Conn/Mass. I pretty much use a popular CSS based -- of which I'm also a core contributor. Yeah... +> > ANDREW: Next... he's a developer. +> > I also do Node stuff as well. +> > Oh, right, stenographer. My name is Andrew Spittle, and I work at Automatic and I mostly use a software that helps you press words on the Internet. I'm not a developer; I lead our customer support stuff so I help kind of the everyday user on stuff. +> > I am AmyJo Brown. So a few years ago -- so a long story short, Top Twist Media helped design some of their newsrooms. So at the time I did work with Media Spin to hound news and -- and news engine. Out of that, I have a lot of opinions and that's sort of about how a CMS could ideally work, and now that I'm doing a start-up in Pittsburgh. So we're I think starting up through it. So I'm just really interested to hear the conversation. +> > I'm Jeremy. I'm among other things a developer at the New York Times. We use Scoop as was mentioned which is kind of a home-grown thing. There is some use of the CMS, and also, I support some suppose home-grown itty-bitty CMSs for various blog-like entities sites that tend to be in rails. +> > I'm David Schaeffer formally of Thunder Dome. I'm a WordPress guy, developer lightly but mostly on the strategy team and business side. +> > I'm Ben. I'm at the Washington Post, I guess I'm a developer, ish. Yeah, and I don't touch art CMSs, but it's a Frank -- Method is really the name, really, but other things. Anyways. +> > I'm Jake, I'm with the U.S. Open Institute. I don't know anything other than CMSs. I'm just a CMS fanboy, I've been a WordPress user for a long time, and I like how we've come full circle and we're producing static files again. +> > My name is Russel, I work at the Pew Research Center. We use WordPress and I do front end, backend stuff. +> > I'm Daniel, I do WordPress stuff. That's it. I want to use a different CMS. +> > ANDREW: Dude, I'm with you. +> > [ Laughter ] +> > I'm sick of WordPress. +> > I'm Trey, I'm at Fox Media where we use Chorus, which is our movie on rails platform and my role is, I lead the product team who works on that and launches the sites and does things. +> > I'm Kevin. I work for Automatic, which is WordPress -- which uses WordPress, I'm sorry. And I've worked broadly in customer service. +> > I'm Laura. I do UX for a home-grown platform in the Conde Nast Building working on other shared tools, potentially and future projects that might potentially have WordPress in them. +> > I'm Casey. I use a custom Django CMS as a copy editor of Source, which Ryan Pitts built and I have also built a lot of small sites on things like Stacy and Jekyll. And also I like, and also work for Out Of Its Books as a designer/developer/producer which is a hulking custom CMS. +> > ANDREW: Cool. +> > I'm the last one? I'm Holman and I'm the Chief Development Officer for Search Property and we develop our content management platform called Superlative (phonetic). It hasn't been released yet and I guess it's going to be soon. And it's different than WordPress in the sense that it's targeting more, like, news agencies. Like, we are developing actually with Australian WordPress. It's a Python-based -- +> > I'm David, I'm at Box Hound. And just recently we did Edittorily, which was not a CMS and our fingers are now -- our fingers and eyeballs are now looking at Corks which transcribed it. +> > ANDREW: Cool, so the way that we kind of want this to go is, there are, as you can see, there's this really elegantly-done thing that Chris did up on the left. A really terrible thing that I did on the right. The one on the left is questions that were -- that we want to think about. And we'll get to that in a moment. The thing on the right though is the exact same list. Who was here at the Friday session yesterday morning -- or Thursday session? A number of you. So next door, New York Times RND folks did this really nice talk basically about this but we want to take it a little step further. They only had about an hour and a lot of it was defining some of the problems which we also want to do but we actually want to go beyond that and actually come up with some solutions so we're going to see if we can find any missing topics here and also we're going to try and maybe tally other things that have been mentioned in the form of maybe some rants that people can throw out. Things like we need to stop fighting the CMS first. We need to yell at it for a little bit. So maybe one or two sentences. We can just kind of shout these out or go around for something that kind of really bothers you and needs to be fixed. It can be kind of one of the things that's already on here. We'll group as we go. Hopefully his handwriting is better than mine. So if anyone wants to start or I could -- anyone? +> > A failure to lead us away from, sort of print traditions and creating our own traditions for the web. +> > ANDREW: Failure to lead us away. +> > Print-centric. +> > ANDREW: Print-centric, that is a new one. +> > That works. I'm for that. +> > ANDREW: What else? +> > Previewing. Previewing content before it's published. Previewing changes before they get shared. Previews around in an easy way. +> > ANDREW: Okay. So that also gets into collaboration a little bit, as well. I can also add another piece of that would be WYSIWYG. And sometimes actually the preview experience isn't the best experience for writing actually, either. +> > What does "preview" mean? So is that really the desktop, the phone, the tablet? +> > Yes. +> > Your big screen? +> > ANDREW: All of those. +> > Google Glass? +> > Google Glass? Watch? +> > Responsiveness? +> > ANDREW: Responsiveness? +> > So having responsive content and being able to target based on. +> > ANDREW: And beyond responsive is content. We have these monolithic systems that produce monolithic product. It makes it hard to have things that are adaptive. This is similar to the design thing that's up there and similar to print-centric but the interface that you interact with is database riven. It looks the way the data is structured on the storage level rather than, necessarily how you would intuitively -- +> > ANDREW: So a lot of this may be the interface being too cadgy? "Cadgyness" might be a word to -- +> > But where the data needs to go on the storage level? +> > The UX? +> > Yeah, the UX in general. +> > ANDREW: Well, obviously UX is a whole another ball game, too. Anybody else have user complaints for CMSs? I'll be honest, does anybody like their CMS? Anyone? +> > Sometimes. +> > A little biased, though. +> > All those WordPress people raising their hand, and mine not going up. +> > It depends on what you mean by, "Liking your CMS" because I think there's this false equivalence of enjoying looking at the screen and typing in it, or interfacing with it, or using it and enjoying what it empowers about your work. So I think it's tricky when you start -- when you conflate those two things, and I think that's one of the things that gets confusing about -- about how to figure out how you solve these CMS problems. +> > I mean, I think -- +> > I mean, is it empowering, the creative process, or is it empowering the storage process? +> > I think that's a fair distinction. +> > And if you like it, it's relative to what you know before. Obviously what we have now is a lot better than what we've previously worked with. +> > Has anybody worked with CQ5? I've heard people say they're fine with that. +> > I think if we were going to come up with a metric to measure how much we like our CMS, which I don't like it a lot, if I need to accomplish whatever task, what amount of time it takes -- the average amount of time. And it's too long. And it's not about -- there's a lot of reasons it's too long and a lot of them are up on that list, but it's about, especially in journalism, shipping, and shipping quickly and we can't do that because conflation of 20 different factors. +> > And I mean, "liking it" is many different things. You might like writing in it or developing on top of it, but you might hate developing it in general. +> > ANDREW: Well this brings up a really good point in general. These aren't really much problems as much as what CMS needs to do. Ironically, those two are the same but we've been talking about roles, writing, developing. A lot of this -- I mean there was something that was written here yesterday on user privileges which doesn't really get at it. Really, Yuri was explaining this to me earlier today but it was more about role or use contexts. Not even use -- if you're a writer versus if you're a copy editor, versus maybe an assignment editor, or a developer, or an art director, or maybe a photographer, or that side of a designer. There's so many ways to interact with it. For the most part, CMSs only pick one. I mean, a lot of them will focus on maybe the developer-specific aspects of it, on the ease of maybe getting things together. Others will focus more on the user-centric aspects, the writer-centric aspects and it really opens up a can of worms when it has to be ease of use for five or ten different roles. +> > I was going to say that I feel whenever CMS is built, there's an idea that there is a workflow in newsrooms that goes from the person who produced the work to the copy editor to the other editors and that there always needs to be a place for each of those roles to exist and in the wild that remains to be seen. So what I think happens with news apps now is that they're outside of that process so there's a lot of content that's in news apps that's not going into that process because it's not inside the CMS. +> > ANDREW: So why isn't it inside the CMS? And you were getting at this as well. It's too painful to do. You have this issue where it's like, "Oh, well, do I have to either the this content here, and design a custom template." It's easier to spin up a separate thing because it's not monolithic. And then this came up yesterday -- then the content needs to be edited, and how does that work? Well, it's in this flat HTML file here. And a lot of the one-off that happened and the usability issues around that. +> > I mean, solutions exist for that. We have great version control in sort of the development world. And you know, it will work for prose, and especially with things becoming more integrated and editorial projects, maybe we're moving towards a world where things are -- +> > Does it get work for copy editors, though? +> > ANDREW: It tracks their changes well. But again this is about the roles -- is that the best experience for writers? +> > Not currently. But I think the protocol could work. You could build something around git that would work. +> > But does the model work? Does the writer brain -- the copy editor brain function in the way that the git model actually functions for that? +> > ANDREW: And can you build around the repository as if they were working with another system? +> > I mean, most new platforms for writing that are coming out, things like drafts have versioning built in. +> > Yeah, but it's not the same with what works in newsrooms. There's a lot more notification and assignments because again, with the speed at which we're working at there has to be that cue that you can see that it's your turn to edit: You're in, you're out. I think of news editing, which I think as far as that role is based is the most elegant way that I've seen that work but with draft, it still feels clunky to me in terms of knowing whose turn it is and there's a hierarchy. +> > And the editing process is less about, "I'm going to remove this sentence, pull it in, here's the diff." It's conversation about is this the right angle to take? What does this convey and the back and forth that needs to happen before the actual change in the body text. +> > And in news edit you can kind of insert that within the body and you can see in the comments and the strikethroughs. I mean, there's a sort of a way that you can have that conversation within the tool but I hadn't seen that with drafts any other option. +> > Well, even within an organization, there are all these different ways that people work. I mean the work that -- the beginning-to-end workflow exists in some places where there really is a finite endpoint that goes out, and that's the article of record for the moment and other times it's like, well you should go back and reopen that file instead of publishing that one, and go back and change things -- have to maintain things. And there are often things that are really lightweight that maybe the bloggers go straight to publishing but maybe other things that are considered more organizational. So even the concept of a workflow is tricky because it's different all over. +> > ANDREW: Question: Does everybody kind of avoid asset management, entirely? +> > What do you mean by that? +> > ANDREW: Like, does everyone kind of assume that asset management will always be terrible at a management level? +> > What do you mean? Define the term. +> > ANDREW: Dealing with photos and videos in some kind of structured manner versus "I've just hard coded this and I'm done." I don't even know if this has been used or referenced. This was kind of an ongoing problem. We were talking about Chorus and we were thinking that it was probably one of the weaker pieces of the system. I would argue one of the weaker pieces of any of the systems out there. +> > Asset management tends to live outside of the CMS entirely that exists on just type of server. That's what happened with The Seattle Times, the photo server. Everything was tacked and categorized by date there and we had a whole backup that was a whole roomful of filing cabinets and CDs. +> > But is that ideal? Because that does simplify the problem that you're handing to the content management system. If the asset management -- the photos, maybe it makes more sense to divorce those two things? +> > I don't think it makes sense at all. I'll be honest with you. It's just another form of content. We're just deciding that well, we're just going to deal with text because that's easy to get into in database and we can render out in the template. And I think that's bullshit. I think that's a hard problem to solve, there's no question. But I think if you think about how we're putting together stories like, if we're working backwards from you need to -- we need this to tell stories more effectively and we want to take all these pieces and we want them to work together. I actually think there's an interesting part of this whole conversation, right, that it's about you just use the term "asset management." And I'll just say that my big beef is that we call this system "content management system" -- it's the worst fucking acronym on earth and I've done this rant many times before and I'm sorry for anybody who's had to hear it but it just sounds like something the IT department came up. We've got a bunch of content. We're going to have to manage it. Let's make a system for it. But it's not -- it's actually not. That's clearly us, technology people solving the problem. It's not like it's the most obvious way to article that we weren't solving problems of the users or the business, right, and I think asset management is. That's why, I mean, even the fact that we think of calling it "asset management" is part of that, right? We're not thinking about about the ways that you're able to organize those. And the fact that we think of those contents as separate from the assets is funny too, right? And we, for Chorus, I think it really comes back to what problems you're trying to solve. Because for us, when we built, like, our asset management system, we would just take photos. For example, early on we were taking photo feeds from sports bloggers. So we were saying, "Oh, sweet." We bring in Getty and index it. And if we were writing about the Astros, we'll show you Astros photos and make it easy to crop it. But The Birds show up, and they say, "We take all our photos ourselves and we watermark them and we need them searchable," all of a sudden the system we used sucked really hard. And we didn't stop to redesign but I think we just need to reframe what we're trying to build here -- work backwards and think about it. I think the first part of this conversation, to me, was fascinating about, like, who likes it and why. Like, you know? I think a lot of, like, if you can build on it, you know, it's nice. Or you're having to build the platform itself or if you're the user of it, you know, who likes it? I think that really gets to the heart of this conversation. Like, who are we doing this for for what reason, you know? And work our way backwards from this and it allows us to get the print shit and allows us to get the stuff if we're working backwards from it. +> > So is there a term that you guys use originally that's not content management system? +> > I think vocabulary is tough but I think we call it "platform." +> > ANDREW: We call it "platform." That's as far as we go. +> > And sometimes not even publishing because sometimes they call it "content story." +> > Well, we don't even say content platform because we do a bunch of communities that's wrapped up, or a strategy that we organize all the content around. I think if you even start to segment it like that, it starts to get really difficult. If you're building something from scratch, you know, I think that you don't end up with a content management system in many cases, right? You end up with it in a different place. You end up with, like, different sets of tools and that's why it's hard. It's easy to call it a content management system because everybody knows what they think -- they think they know what that means. +> > I think that Trey's point about moving from the first version that does something for, like, sports editors to having to do something for, like, technology people, like, is also an interesting distinction for me that a lot of these problems are at, like, the organizational level. It's like they're not designer or interface software problem, it's like organization/design. Like, this tool is supposed to be used by too many different kinds of people that don't talk to each other and they all want the same tool. And the other potential approach it makes me think of is something that might be helpful is design patterns around the idea of what people like or, like, what works for people and why. I think to even, like, version control, like, what works for you and why, it's just an interesting thing to have -- research, or like a catalogue. +> > Yeah, I feel like the whole conversation about people wanting different goals is why everything's so segmented anyways, and the wrangling piece is, how am I going to get my photos for my partner, or for the photo desk or the copy editors, and search in their own world? And maybe the problem isn't "maybe we need one pool" or it's -- +> > ANDREW: Well, one of the big things with the wranglers yesterday was the term "monolithic." That word came up about ten times describing what most platforms are. At the same time, the issue is that maybe there's this one monolithic thing. There's this asset management thing over here or whatever people are managing through. +> > That's a job like wrangling all that content from all those disparate areas. +> > ANDREW: But part of the proposal is, in many cases, build these individual silos and then tie them together. +> > Yeah, I don't think there's a problem with having separate systems, just ideally there would be one wrapper, one interface. So like, I'm just thinking about the post. We might have a great tool where we can embed flat HTML but then you have to go into our other CMS, our main CMS so that SEO works and you have the main promo on the home page. So it doesn't because everything is siloed. It means that sometimes you have to go through multiple channels where having, like, a facet doesn't help because the facet only does some subset of the tasks that need to be done. So if you had one wrapper on one thing, you could still have that quick thing that also happened to access other systems because we can't, especially as a large organization, we can't tear everything down and rebuild it. That can't happen. I don't think it can. +> > Sure -- +> > -- do you want to do it? +> > ANDREW: Anybody else have, like, one-sentence rants? The longer ones are fine -- +> > They were compound sentences. +> > ANDREW: -- because we've already covered a lot. So here's the idea. The idea is after this we can break up into anywhere from groups in between, like, five and ten. There's five tables here but it doesn't really matter. Ideally, focus on one major area that is a problem whether that is talking about maybe more generally, like, how can we redefine what a platform or a CMS actually is? Or more specifically -- I mean, some of the stuff that we didn't even go near would be archiving, which is very unsexy, but there's a lot of different issues there. I mean, as an example for archiving we deal with, okay, well some of it is long term static stuff. Some of it is short term stuff. Some of it is dynamic news apps but then also maybe you have the issues of news dips and how does archive have to do with archiving changes? And you get into revisions and then version control and then it spirals from there. So what we want is to spend, ideally, maybe like 15 minutes on two different parts in groups. The first part would be the left side which we would essentially be evaluating. Pick the best implementations out there. If you're doing purely revisions, it's probably going to be Editorially. The next step would be, like, what makes them good? So actually describe them. So why is Editorially better than any other implementations that you've seen? Maybe if it's not implementations, you could talk about something else that you've experienced. The next one is, what's missing? As something as vision is, what should it be doing that it doesn't do other than "it's not working anymore?" And then the last piece would be, like, how to actually integrate. This kind of goes into the perspective of, okay, we had this one implementation, how does it need to interface with other aspects of the system? Revisions, of course. I was just getting into how it goes into archiving, and maybe publicly displaying those. Or this idea that you have to expose those and maybe potentially you might have to merge a few revisions together for public display, almost like rebase, or squashing commits on git, or narrating messages that normally editors would never do or think about. But maybe a narration to a change is a correction to that whole story. The second piece of it is recommendations and ideally mixed with what the recommendations could be is actually coming up with, not necessarily a spec, but what the best practices should be in this area for what needs to be built. Talking about, like, ideally drafting a plan to go forward and starting to come up with, like, specific solutions. And specifically, like, what can be built in this area, whether that's a WordPress plug-in, or a standalone system, or a prototype, if it doesn't exist yet. It's like, what can we actually do to make this better? And also the third one, there is also best use of money and effort. Where is the time best spent? Where is the money best spent? I mean, we can talk easily about something that never even came up at all. By the way is anything related to user comment? Comments, discussion, anything like that? And you guys probably know about the $4 million currently being spent. +> > They got that covered. +> > ANDREW: They got that covered. Problem solved. But honestly, where is the money? Where is the time best spent on how to make editing better -- what concrete thing that no one's really done well to make that experience better? Does that mean like mediums interface for everything or does that mean everything along those lines, as well? Does everyone feel comfortable with that? We can pick and randomly assign these and put you in groups but I think it might be better if everyone stands up in a moment and maybe starts talking about forming different groups. Three people forming to talk about SEO because that's what they want to do, that's fine. I'm just kidding. SEO joke. We don't care. But beyond that, though, if someone really wants to talk about, like, assets and by that I mean "photo management" then we can get into groups. +> > Can we boil it down from the list? +> > ANDREW: That's kind of the idea -- the big ones I would imagine. A lot of these are similar. Collaboration is really big if only it gets into revisions and tracking, and comments among users and things like that. I would tend to think that text editing and more larger, writing, is a big problem. It certainly seemed like assets is a whole issue, maybe in terms of how it's defined. Of course we didn't even really talk about workflows. Editorial workflows which is another big thing. +> > I have a question. Is anyone actually feeling ambitious enough not to use TinyMCE in their big production WYSIWYG. +> > What do you mean by that? +> > ANDREW: I mean, Course uses it, right? +> > Is anyone not using -- +> > We're actually underway on not doing that, so -- but I mean, that's a whole interesting conversation about, like -- +> > ANDREW: That may need to be discussed over drinks later. +> > I know some folks from Guardian here. It might be fun to shoot the shit with them, those who have embarked beyond the confines of CKEditor and TinyMCE, but it's definitely challenging. +> > The homebrew, it requires markdown and it has not any sort of WYSIWYG. +> > ANDREW: And that's not a great experience for writers. It's great for developers. What was that? +> > The back turns into asset management and embeds because I think a lot of what comes out of that is content portability and you're using a hard-coded image tag and it's not going to -- +> > I think anyone who tackles management is also going to be thinking about how -- so not just like, storing content. +> > Or content portability, we're talking about TinyMCE. That assumes HTML is the format that we want and, you know, there are many other formats that we -- +> > -- HTML for life! +> > DHTML! +> > ANDREW: Does anybody feel strongly that they would like to talk with someone more about a topic? We're going to try and do maybe two rounds of this. So if you want to spend 20 to 30 minutes on one, and then we can go ahead and talk about an each of those and, ideally, by the end of this time we can sit down and spell out maybe some real big solutions and next steps. Maybe so, when Knight comes around and they have $4 million, they can maybe fix another problem. I'm kind of serious too. We can really start to describe this in different ways. Does anybody want -- I really want to talk with the people about next -- yeah? +> > We have, for example, ways of divorcing content from presentation, CSS. And despite the buggy shit that you have to deal with, it's a system that works reasonably well. I would like to talk with people on divorcing content from structure because then you can have your editorial structure be different from content structure something that makes you not have to worry where the diffs are. +> > ANDREW: A lot of this maybe Circa would structure content along those lines. This is a quote, this is not equal. +> > I think content model is the thing that I'm most interested in. And I use that term broadly to describe, you know, thinking about -- that's another thing to talk about asset management married to content and thinking about, you know, more modular, you know, kind of chunks and how we mark those up, and how we attach metadata to them. +> > CHRIS: Is that the same thing? You spoke first, I'll give this to you. And you can form a group around this. +> > ANDREW: Anyone, next one? +> > I would follow up on the collaboration and the version control stuff because I'm curious about -- I'm curious about where people's heads are about that range. +> > ANDREW: Next one? Other people interested in that, by the way? Probably a decent amount of people. Is that another one? Next one? +> > I was going to say that I was under the collaboration one. +> > ANDREW: Another group? No one else interested? Just wanna talk about these two things, which is fine. Are these too big of problems for us to tear off? +> > Rolling asset management? +> > ANDREW: Content models? +> > It doesn't have to. It was just opinion. +> > ANDREW: You wanna talk about assets? +> > I want to start a company around assets, so if anyone else wants to... +> > You're going to be wrong, man. I'll tell you that now. +> > ANDREW: Your branding is off. +> > Asset management is dead! +> > ANDREW: So is everyone ultimately interested in these two things? Because we can literally split the room in half and talk about each of these if you want to. +> > What if you want to be in both conversations? Do we have to sit in the middle? +> > ANDREW: Is anyone not really interested in either of these? Which is an option. We can continue as a group but I think smaller groups is better instead of doing one of these after another. I would rather shrink the room down a little bit. +> > What was the other one besides the -- +> > ANDREW: Collaboration, version control, and content model. +> > They're complementary. +> > ANDREW: And maybe your group depending on who's in there. Can break it down into smaller groups if it's cool? +> > I think we may need to start with the big things and break it down. +> > ANDREW: Sounds good. This is flexible and we have time. + + [ Group Work ] + Pick a side! + +> > I feel the structure of the room. You guys should pick a side. +> > ANDREW: That corner is collaboration and version control stuff and it looks like the content model is, like, everything else. So you wanna go down and go over here? +> > [ Group Work ] +> > All right. Do you guys wanna start? +> > Does it make sense for us to start? +> > ANDREW: I think it might because you're talking about overall content and they're talking about breaking it down. Maybe we can have multiple people talking about it. I think we're probably going to talk at each other from this point on. Okay. Um, yeah, you wanna start? You're already -- you're already... now you're just making fun of me. +> > Ready? Summarize. +> > Summarize: Version control sucks. If you guys remember, you guys know how much version sucked on a very granular level but we sort of talked a little bit about what works for a specific use case, that's sort of a really important sort of way to think about this. So we're really talking about the newsroom and about trying to sort of fit with a use case. That is, how do you end up with really quality content that is really well sourced, really well edited? So there's a model for -- and ask, let's think with a linear perspective. You write a draft, they submit to a editor's pool. Someone reroutes it, sends it to copy edit and says ready to go, and ready for a sophisticated content model and/or decorate with blank tags and publish to the "Internets." Other folks in the universe are familiar with the content management system -- a version control system called Git but the complexity, the cognitive complexity of Git is maybe a little bit more than these folks need. And I certainly have seen that in my universe and so keeping it simple best implementation, best practice. Let's try and keep something simple where you know you don't lose your work. So your work is resilient that changes are auditable, attributable, and accountable, not just to the people in your organization but even to the public. So if I discover a problem with my writing or I misspell somebody's name, that error correction can be propagated out to a public-facing article. But also even thinking farther back in the line if you're basing your work on research or open data that you discover is wrong, that can be propagated through, so you can see those versions changed through time. Another interesting thing that we suggested was that -- discussed was that there is a version control system where each change attributable exposes interesting data within the organization about expertise. Who's getting involved with editing articles of different types? Who are the topic experts? Why is this workflow better than that workflow? So attributable changes expose a lot of data that can be really useful. So, linear, resilient model that's really, really good. Tracking changes, implementation detail. I'll put it out there that it seems like an implementation detail. A lot of it -- a lot of tracking changes can often just as often be well represented as retroactive. What happened? When did somebody do this? So newsrooms appear to be braced on a brigade model. So it's like, "To the captain." And the captain says, "To the colonel." And he says, "This goes out." So tracking changes, you have so respect the lines of authority. Note, merging prose sucks. So, we're not going to deal with a branching model. Again, the cognitive complexity of branching in Git. Raise your hands if the first time you used Git you thought it was really easy to understand. Thank you. +> > Much easier to understand. +> > All right, so, vocabulary's really bad. Hard-to-explain to a writer -- don't me a favor -- do me a favor just branch, do some work and I'll merge it later. You can approve the merge. No, branching sucks we're not going to do it. Check this out. Branching, trunk, tree, branch, branch, branch, branch. Keep it narrow, address each change, let them go one off, and let the writer be able to pick any one of these to this in this universe. So diffs, good visualization of diffs, that's useful, that tracks changes, reverts, those work. Interesting things that came up with collaboration. Where do you store your notes when your editor makes a note on your document? AmyJo just said that editors leave notes in line. Guess what, those are protected. They're not published. It's not possible for them to be published, they get excised from the document. And I think that's great. Editorially has an opinion about where those are stores but making a conversation about this is arguably a big part of it so that you're not walking to someone else saying, "What do you think of this?" So this is table stakes for version control, I think. That can be at the commit level if you're working in a inner granular model which I'll talk about in a second. It can be a milestone, it can be a mock on a diff. Any place where you can see something about a change, you should be able to say something about a change. Slugs suck. When you change your -- what is slug version control? That's what we're -- I hope you talk about that. Last thing, I'm not even addressing the core proposition but I think I'm answering all the questions. We've talked about all the questions. Collaboration models around working at the same time, three possible options. So U-Lock which means that if Erin is writing and I approach the document to write and I cannot write and I have to ask his permission, there is branching, we've discussed branching, and there's multi users, simultaneous users -- this gets to the question of the best use of money and effort. If you are doing operational transformation. Raise your hand if you've worked on a collaborative text editor how do you feel about operational transformation? It's a sophisticated thing. You can use other people's work. Like, ShareJS is a great example. I love ShareJS. It's not a great WYSIWYG editor so you have to make a tradeoff between user and developer in time. It may not be the best thing to do however. These things are stacked for a reason. There are other political and social reasons why locking systems exist. If a journalist is writing, maybe she doesn't want somebody coming in and writing at the same time. Because flying cursors kind of suck. I think technical writers love flying cursors. People writing manuals love flying cursors. People writing directions love flying cursors. But for this purpose if you can get to the point where you're building a simultaneous editing system with operational transforms in the background and you conceal that, and you present it as I'm storing XIFs, or you can store it as branching. That gives a lot of leeway in terms of how people use your version control system. I would propose that you keep it simple and you store diffs rather than implementing something super complex and super upfront, storing diffs. +> > ANDREW: Store the diffs or store the version and then diff them dynamically? +> > Well, that's a good question, right? Full disclosure, Editorially with every version that you saved, stored the entire text of your document as it was in that revision, right? Computer science-friendly, no, right? It's not sexy but was it easy to build? Double thumbs up, right? Was it easy to maintain? Is it auditable? Double thumbs up. I would -- the problem is that I don't think it scales as a storage system. That's my -- I'm only speaking for myself, right? That's why this is -- this is the little recoil. +> > Quick question at one point does it stop scaling? +> > What? At 1.. does it stop scaling? Is it a point that users going to hit on the regular? +> > It didn't stop scaling for us. +> > ANDREW: Sorry. +> > If you are talking about resilient work, how expensive is it to store that many versions? +> > ANDREW: But if you're storing only diffs then you can't necessarily do other kinds of comparisons. You're always comparing the first one preview one to the next one. You can't compare two sides of the branch. +> > You kind of can, actually. +> > ANDREW: You kind of work. But you have to reconstruct the original. +> > But you do what the Git -- version two is -- version three is that compiled version plus more diffs. +> > How do you do merge resolution, though? +> > You don't, you let people do it. +> > You just provide some interface that do you want this? Do you want this? +> > You say, here's had the two documents, here's the diffs between them does it makes sense but the fact of the matter is, it's like good news for brains is computers can't do this well. They cannot do it well when you get into a situation like this and you're comparing two distant revisions that works -- it's kind of like doing an octopus merge or three-way merge in pros is actually really, really complex and what you're trying to engender is trust and resilience, you don't want a computer to do it. You want a good UI. +> > And the other use case that we talked about we used the example of an academic paper just because it was the most likely to be shipped out to multiple people at once kind of thing before you you might ship out an academic paper to five people and you as a writer might want to take bits and pieces of each. Sometimes maybe one reviewer or two reviewers had feedback on the same two paragraphs. You're not wanting to merge anything but synthesize them yourself, originally, and put them into a meaningful -- a meaningful change to you rather than any sort of, like, merge between exact suggestions. +> > I don't think you ever want to collaborate a change. +> > I'm not convince that you'll want to -- I mean that's a -- so when you're looking at this. When you've got, like, if I've sent something to you to edit. I would love to be able to see that it's a diff off of my work off of a specific point but maybe it's not. Maybe it's just interlooped with my work. Maybe you get back to my in three weeks. As long as it's attributable to you and I can say where it came from, that might be enough. +> > Well, I also a use case in my job right now, where we have a CMS that doesn't allow for any kind of organized branching and what we end up doing is making, like, literally duplicating the same file three times to experiment with different things in a way that's not tracked and to me, it's like a complete nightmare and the use case that I think it actually has come up here a lot was this idea of, like, an art-directed editorial. It's what we're trying to do in this case and because there's no branching and because it requires a lot of, like, finicky exploration we -- um, I really miss that. +> > But you want to be able to start your work from a specific point in time, right? In three different ways? +> > Um, yeah. +> > ANDREW: Well they're always there. The branching of A, B, and C, I tend to agree. We don't really need to support that. But the other option though, something that's published and I'm scheduling, let's say or I'm working on a rewrite of it while I'm doing that, I then have to go back and fix a typo in the currently-published work. That's hypothetically a branch, you're still going to a point in time and making a change. I mean, maybe you're not really dealing with a separate fork as much as you're going back in time and immediately updating it, and also keeping that in some sort of a rested state and not published at all but there are some use cases that do require some kind of juggling. Of course, the problem there is that almost immediately unless you're using the command line, the user experience breaks down 'cause it's incredibly difficult to be like, "You can optionally schedule this change for tomorrow at 9:00 a.m." And you have your announcement or something like that. And that becomes a real pain in the ass. +> > It's, I think the place where things are breaking, which is great that you're approaching it this way. Like, we're thinking like developers and branching and merging and resolving conflicts with diffs and something like that. But at some point you need an editor, you need an editor or a journalist to make decisions about how in the words come together. So the breaking point seems to be... +> > It's social, right? These are social problems. There are technical solutions to social problems but there are also technical solutions for technical people for technical problems and I don't mean to be approaching it the wrong way, but it gets really tricky. +> > Good job, guys! +> > Silence... +> > We can go ahead and ship that, that would be cool. +> > Are we all done? Sweet. So we talked about content model. And we started off by really, just like, kind of thinking through. We started talking about assets a little bit and really, this whole chunk of things which was just like, some stream of consciousness that led to, I think one really big point. So we started -- we really started talking about, you know, the role of, like, the format in it. We started talking about atomic units of content. We started thinking about, you know, the very influential to the model. You know, do you have these reusable entities that are, like, equal to each other? You know, should entities be addressable and easily pulled together? We talked about some different examples of people who were thinking about content model but I think that the one big kind of revelation that I think is pretty interesting is, when you think about -- when you talk about this stuff in content management systems and we think about sort of the legacy that we've inherited and, um, you know, problems that we were specifically trying to solve and the way that we sort of approached it as we were, like, developers, like, making, you know, forum-based software. And bringing that to these problems is that we took the issue of, like, the user presentation and the article format, right, like whether it's like this is a story or it's a gallery or it's a video or it's a, you know, a set of updates in a live blog, whatever. We took the interface for creating those different types of formats and we tightly coupled these two things with the way that we represented that content in the data model, right? So, you know, the easiest way to think about this is we're like, it's an article, it has a headline and so -- it has a body, it has a byline and there's an author associated with that, et cetera, et cetera. That's the way that it looks. That's the thing that we're showing. So on the backend we're going to give you a tool, you update the let youline, you update the body, you update each of the individual things that we broke down. And in the database we have a whatever -- entries model that has, you know, a headline column and a body column and an author column and all these things and if we want to have, you know, separate ones, we'll just -- we'll recreate each of these three things separately each time because we have tightly coupled these things together, right? And the reason that we kind of came to this is because when you started thinking about things -- examples of things that people were doing, let's just say the Circa 1 for example, is that they may have started with, you know, this notion of the format itself, you know, like, these little chunks of information that they would push to you over time. I don't know if you're familiar with that app. And the editing is creating each one of those chunks in the system and the data model they probably have, like, each one of these chunks that they're attaching metadata to each one of those things but even if you think about building a gallery each one of these things is tightly coupled and one approach is to change the format completely. You know, redesign the experience on the front end and that will give you -- the result was that it would give you a more modular, atomic unit of content model and it would give you a tool that would do that as well. So what we started talking about was if this tight coupling is what's holding us back. How would you break these things up so that you would give yourself more flexibility in this, right, without compromising user experience of the user presentation is -- without compromising user experience of with editing this. So just starting with the editing one, like, we have this representation of a document that you're writing, right? Like the individual fields is difficult that way. But instead of, like, trying to expose that content model into the editing interface that you just allow people to edit these things and you figure out from that, what kind of the structure is underneath that. We figured that out. TinyMCE is actually doing that. Is HTML the right structure? And at the end of the day what's funny is, we take that structure and we shove it into the database anyway and we can try to resolve that by not doing HTML by saying, "All right, everybody has to do markdown." So there's no structure that we're shoving in there but what we're doing is sort of removing the structure problem that we would want to solve so that we would be able to kind of, reorganize these addressable chunks together. So kind of getting into the practical pieces that we started thinking about, a great experience of putting stories together in atomic units that would give you some flexibility in -- if you broke this out, and how you present it. But some of the ideas like, don't expose the model so much in the editor, right? Like they don't need to see that but potentially it's valuable as they're writing this to be able to say, here's what we're understanding the model of this document to be as you're going along. You can kind of light it up a little bit, right? Like right now, in TinyMCE, you flip over and see the HTML but for a lot of users that's not a really valuable way of saying this is how we understand the structure of this document, right? These chunks if you do create chunks, making them easy to find, this gets back to the asset model thing we were talking about taxonomy and things like this. When you do start creating these chunks and you want symbol things and you want to put them back together it has to be easy to be able to find those things. You have to organize them somehow, that search. Is there a taxonomy that you can organize this under? But that's an important part if you're going to break everything up, then you should make it easy to put it all back together, you know, and in using/attaching metadata to those units. But you know, the key thing here is that it should be easy to create these things, right? It shouldn't be extra hard just because we want to have this super sweet atomic content model to have different user presentations shouldn't mean that we, like, break those things up. And you know, it creates flexibility for these multiple formats and this common, basic UI was just a conversation about, you know, back to that one document thing. We still have that model and it's still useful for thinking about putting a story together. You don't have to couple that with what the presentation layer is, or what even, the content model is, if that's still an useful way to create this. So if we were to practically start to put some things together, these would be the guidelines with the notion that, maybe what we're trying to solve is decoupling these can, but not decoupling in a way that breaks up the user experience -- consuming content but also, like, creating it. +> > ANDREW: But creating would take place say in a single editor but it would the -- +> > And instead of the model that we have right now, it's like, there's all these, there's these 40 potential elements that we might want to use in the database and here's these 40 boxes be that you can fill in instead making sure I'm creating this thing. And as I go, I can optionally create the elements that I want, which is kind of an UX thing but it's also -- +> > Well, you have that WYSIWYG editor. But the problem with the WYSIWYG editor is that you have too many options. Really what you want are the six options and that can be rendered however, whatever you want and then you pre-process it so that it gets broken into it's pretty much like a WYSIWYG editor that breaks down into the elements that we want to use later but doesn't break down into the bold. Not just a list. But break it down to this is multimedia that you can use elsewhere. +> > ANDREW: I'm curious how it would feel like. Would it feel like a single white canvas that you would work on but as you hit a new paragraph, as you enter it would kind of show the new blogs. +> > Just real quick, what is an example of this. +> > ANDREW: Does it feel like what circa as a presentation in chunks? They might write that in one file. +> > I think you would expose that as you need it for whatever presentation you're about to put together, but like, we've been you know, David's -- shown up recently at Fox with Mandy and Jason, and they've been -- and reading those interviews are fascinating for this because I just think that, you know, people will -- they just when they're writing and when you're creating, you just don't want to think about that shit. You just want to get ideas out and you want to mess around, and you want to move them around. You're just not thinking in the content model because, why? It's fucking crazy. And you know, and that's the -- I think, you know, and when you hear people -- when you try to break down and ask people have this praise for media it's just because there's not a lot there and it's not exposing any of that. It doesn't even give you the option of to start doing any meta data of any -- +> > ANDREW: It's really easy to control when you only have five elements. +> > But that's even us as product people thinking about it. One of our writers just uses Medium to write. Just think about that for a second, the fucking purpose is to write. You're a writer and you're writing something, and you're taking all this other stuff and they have confidence that it's going to be there, that there's not all this extra stuff that it's not going to be screwed up or whatever, that they can grab this easy text and it's not about trying to solve all these other problems in the interface. +> > And the option if you're going to weave, like, probably debated for a long time is that the options are probably all different but I think kind of the point is to not make the writer think about all the options upfront. +> > Right, 'cause sometimes the reasons why writers hate CMSs is because there's a demand from the organization, you need to write an SEO headline, you need to add a tag, you need to do this, this and this. That's not what the writer stops but the organization requires it but all the writer wants to do is write to before they're mad at the CMS or the has had at the organization for wanting to be able to fulfill that... +> > We take -- we're like, these are the requirements? Great, put them all on the screen. Here are all the requirements. Here are all the things that you need to do. And I think it's a workflow thing of "what am I doing right now?" I'm writing. And those are real things that we have to do but when do you start to think about those? One of the things, just by the way -- sorry, that we were talking about that somebody mentioned that was pretty cool if it was doing this type of structure underneath the hood over time is that for version control what would be cool is that the chunks that it's creating some of those chunks you have permissions to be editing them, certain ones over time, or you could be interacting with different pieces, certain pieces could be locked while other ones aren't. But it's the first thing and I always understand that the first thing that I'm just writing up at the top is the headline. +> > So you want make sure that the social media expert is the one writing the head -- like you attach permissions to... +> > Well, I think that's where the use case that you brought up. Where something's been published, the writer's ripping it apart for a rewrite of things that need to be changed -- is where it comes into the issue of where this starts to come into play you can have version control at that module level in some way so that the module could have -- of course you wouldn't want to create resistance but something which could push that one existing model out to change that thing. +> > I said earlier, you know, that I was interested in sort of talking about a theoretical specification to decouple the structure from, you know, from the content? We went off in kind of a different direction, great. But in terms of an actual decision, I'm trying to bring it back to something tangible. I think it would be awesome to be able to have something like TinyMCE, a WYSIWYG editor but it goes back to HTML, it spits back sort of structural information about the piece, right? And you kind of, over -- wildly over-engineer your content and put it on the shelf and don't even worry about it and I just want an editor that the text structure and either publishes or it files above -- sorry, the model as currently implemented doesn't support this article that you're trying to do and then you just have your developers go and extend it a little bit because you can over-engineer things and never use them and you shouldn't have this for this theoretical thing that you're never going to do. And so if you have a development that needs it. You can just ping the process. +> > ANDREW: You were talking about what an atomic unit is, obviously a piece of a paragraph necessarily but could it also be, like, five paragraphs? Or would you normally -- +> > Well, you could do, like, sections could be one of your elements. +> > ANDREW: Or can units be nested? You have four blocks that goes before and then images that go inside it. +> > Imagining -- I don't know what this UI looks like exactly but imagine that you wrote a bunch of things, a bunch of paragraphs, and there was, maybe, whatever some action that you take that reveals, not in a overwrought kind of switched up the whole thing but it just says, well, this is the structure that we have. Like, sort of like, you know, interpreted from the thing that you've created and then gave you some easy way to expand or sort of contract, like, different chunks, right? And say, I actually want this chunk to actually all be here and then the other thing that would be interesting is, right, once it has determined the structure that it would also, you know, almost, like, simultaneous, like, understand, like, here's what the meaning -- we think this piece right here, we think that this is about you workout so you kind of turn it on and it starts to reveal what it knows about the thing but you can change that. You can overwrite both the structure and the meaning of that thing to kind of, like, say that. +> > There are all these elements but metadata attached to, metadata that helps the article, or other things that would help, or generate automatically? +> > What it ultimately matters -- it's not the atomic unit, it's the ultimate unit. It's what it was created and you know going back entirely too far. The atomic unit at some level is always going to be ones and zeros, so I guess really, maybe the best way to do this is to, you know, allow yourself to go all the way back but only dig as far as you need to. You know, you don't need to -- +> > Give me some baseline or something, right. Only as much as you need it to be. +> > ANDREW: I'm also thinking about it from the perspective thinking about in the limitation I have a 30 paragraph story, each of those is an atomic unit that's fine. I then have to revision -- let's say I'm storing them in a database and I guess it may be way more implementation than we want right now. Each one of them is an entity they're all stored in a group, diffing 30 elements. What's the benefit of diffing that? Version control of the elements as well. Version control can be based on in the order of these units or how these orders have changed and the other thing as well when we're dealing with presentation versus editing a block quote would be part of the content -- a unit but at the same time, a poll quote is not. A poll quote is presentation but its actual presentation in the document is more about presentation that it is about the content model. So it's something else to maybe think about as well opinion. +> > Well, you can get that in work flow because I think it is 'cause the crazy thing about poll quotes is that they are a presentation but they are such a statement content-wise, right? Like, what you decide to be the poll is really interesting you know? Which is why there's a whole verge poll quotes Twitter feed now. Lots of jokes. But that's, I think it's interesting. I think this is cool stuff. +> > ANDREW: Anybody have anything to adds to either of these about how they tie together or anything else? I mean, that was the summaries, so we have about 15 minutes left. I don't know how else we would close this out other than -- +> > When are you guys going to build it? I thought you were WordPress? +> > I shipped it five minutes ago while you were blabbing. That's. +> > CHRIS: One thing that I noticed was that we were trying -- we set out to just talk about two highly focused things but just by the may have of the CS being a monolith just talking about version control, and, like, there's a lot of cross -- similar communication. We talked about, like, all -- I started -- +> > ANDREW: Everything on here is who was discussed. +> > CHRIS: Pretty much. +> > So like what do you guys think is actually achievable? I mean we've kind of driven off of a cliff here. +> > ANDREW: So one thing that I normally end up seeing, at least in my line of work, is that a discrete piece of this looks achievable and then you either start building it and you start specing out and you start building this other thing and it spirals and then you come up with one of those and that, and you realize oh shit we have to do that as well. And at this point, this is obviously together, or even individually, these two ideas are way too big to be chewed on in any short length of time but ultimately, they are problems that need to be solved. I don't -- I mean, does anybody have any ideas how this can be broken down. So what are the next steps, what needs to be built on top of an existing system now to make something better? +> > You just keep it super fucking simple, right? I know it sounds absurd. So, actually Matt brought this up. Do we even bother integrating this? So does WordPress, does Chorus, do any of our CMSs embark on this or that to encode it into the monoliths that we currently work with? And I honestly think that it's much simply if you don't and you worry about -- so for example, let's say so you got this create content model, right, and it works really well and I've got an editor that speaks to it. And you know, I've solved these problems of how is it going to talk to this and it's really great, right? But then you're like, oh, but we have all these people who are -- they're -- we have a bunch of writers now, we have this site in India. We have a bunch of -- we have a bunch of rural subsistence farmers in India who all have great cell phones and they have no Internet but they can text articles to this content model, right? So now you have to figure out how to translate this into that. So Punt -- so say, here's this API, here's a means of translating. And this editor -- this cool, this sweet editor that we've worked on and translate it into this content model because honestly, it probably is TinyMCE, right? TinyMCE works great. It's a WYSIWYG editor that that we all simultaneously loathe and love. Do we all want to rebuild Medium? I don't know. So being able to dump that into the contented model is an A pickup API process thinking about what's the easiest way to do this, did coupling things, and not worry about how they relate to each other as one, let you go, monolithic project. +> > I think you ever to -- you have to decouple this stuff be decouple some of the, like, problems to solve, right, and then try to set yourself up with an architecture to be able to kind of layer these things on over time. +> > What is that architecture, what does it look like? And more importantly how can you do it so that people don't try to solve all the little things 100 different things so that it doesn't talk to each other? Okay, so Medium's built something that none of us can use? +> > I don't know, "Talk to each other?" I don't know. That's an interesting question. Like, I mean, we brought it up here. We were talking about, "Oh, we gotta find some standards or some interoperability." I think we put sometimes the standards before the solutions and we get ourselves into trouble with that, right? And I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to seek out the standards and try to get to these places but, I think, like, you know when you start to -- you know, for a long time, it seemed like there would be these ideas that we would all talk about and nobody would just go and try and do them and they would sort of get hung up on, "Oh, we're going to try and do the standard for it," or, "We're going to try to integrate this standard for this one thing" and that was one big requirement that we made for ourselves instead of trying to make something and show it where we can start to say, okay now we can start to open this up. And there may not be agreement on all that, but at least you have some proofs of concepts. And what I'm hopeful -- I get really excited because I see already folks working on, like, opening up their text editor stuff and I see a lot of -- there's more of these conversations happening than there's ever happened before. For a long time we would get credit for shit at Vox Media that we did instead of talking about it. And now, I think we're getting to a place where lots of people are doing some really cool projects and, like, showing them to each other. So one of the things that we're doing is we're actually barking on this type of work right now at Vox Media. And some of the stuff that we're thinking about is how do we start to share out what we're learning from that and how can we bite off what we chew for that. But we're making a big commitment right now to really be working, focusing a lot of effort, and energy and investment into the problem, right? So hopefully we'll find a way they can't if we do break it up, those are more shareable, and like, learnable from other folks but I think we just need to start -- those who can, should, you know? +> > And if we get -- if any of us does this and we, like, ship something at any of our organizations, right, it is much better to be perceived as having gotten it wrong and to have done it than have somebody come out can and say, "No, you're wrong and this is how you do it." And now you have two implementations to solve these problems that you could coalesce on time. That to me, that's huge. We've all worked in organizations for the longest time at least not for me, I'm really new for the journalism world. A lot these last two days have been great. I've loved this but every organization that I've worked in have said we've solved this problem and I'm tell you right now it's not landing a man on the moon and I'm not going to share it with anybody because it's secret sauce and like, get somebody out there. If you decouple it like this, you don't have to release the whole platform. Release a small part of it and have somebody come along and say, you're stupid or, like, this is not complete. All right, then make it complete, right? And, I think that's really, really exciting. +> > I think if there were more people doing experimentations in decoupling stuff in their systems. All of us are guilty of, like, doing these things 'cause it's easier to do things this way because if we start to break this up and start to think what it means to do that. I think that would be awesome and maintaining user experiences and sharing our success with that because I think this is what I see in every other model that I go out and look at right now and talk to people about doing things and share. Like, what I don't like about ours but this is what I don't like. And ours is relatively, like, it has some flexibility and some interesting stuff but it's just a layer up. We just focused on doing it from the direction of user presentation rather than, like, trying to decouple it. +> > So I have a question, and Chris maybe you can answer this, and it may be totally irrelevant because it was built years ago but what's the state of the Armstrong CMS and all the investment that was put into that? We had developers download it and try to use it and they said that it was incredibly buggy because it hadn't been updated for so long. Are those ideas even relevant today? Could they be built off of? +> > CHRIS: Well, the idea, one of the strange things that the Armstrong CMS has a lot of components and it's an a la carte pick and choose but the problems that the Armstrong CMSs was trying to solve was pretty much none of these. There were things like how do I sketch little articles to show up at a certain time of day? How do I get articles to render in a certain context? So it's kind of interesting that the problems that we ended up solving were not -- they were -- we were designed -- we were developing software for other developers; not for users. And there was some other strange things about the project, as well. There is, like, a -- there's a couple subprojects that are still being developed. And there's a there's basically a whole new base for about -- there's a small core of apps that are -- that have entirely new base underneath them. And so I'm still, like, ambivalent about the project. There's still a lot of components that I believe in but, like, the Node is a project for other Django developers but it's not designed for a variety of user experience. +> > And the Django thing I was wondering when we talk about content models, Vox builds rails which is very opinionated about its models. I was wondering if there's a point where building on top of a framework with a certain type of content model is not going to work? +> > I mean, it's relatively decoupled, I mean, it's somewhat opinionaid but we've started decoupling some of that stuff so I think the framework's -- I think what's happened with a lot of frameworks were the opinionated parts. You were, over time, you start to not rely on those opinions as much as you are. And I think it's true for a lot of folks in different frameworks and I think that's -- you know, you start to want to give yourself flexibility. You get, sort of, find yourself, like, stuck in those opinions and so, you wiggle your way out of them. And I think like, you know, a lot of the -- we're architecturing towards like, not not being concerned. We're just trying to get as much value out of rails being rails as we can but I just don't think that it's as much of an issue. I don't know how that applies to Django. I mean, it's like a -- +> > ANDREW: -- I think that's a separate one for sure. +> > 'Cause it's such a -- it's a -- it was more opinionated in a particular direction, solving a more -- +> > ANDREW: -- a higher level than Rails. PHP obviously for us is even lower than that. +> > Even lower. +> > CHRIS: There was actually two things about Django that I wanted to mention. One is that we've started rethinking the Django CMS. There is a protocol Django -- product called Django CMS. I'm not talking about that. But traditionally when you give your staff the Django CMS, they're the Django admin, which is a developer interface; not a user interface. So internally we started kind of rebranding that and saying, no, that's not the CMS. That's actually the developer admin. And the other thing that I wanted to mention is that, this past week I've been doing a lot of research with the -- with using WordPress as an interface for getting data into Django and so far, the experimentation's been -- have been -- +> > That's what we did at the Sunlight Foundation. +> > CHRIS: I talked to Jeremy. +> > Jeremy, cool. +> > CHRIS: So there's projects at the base level but I'm doing stuff at the base API. +> > Yahoo, it WordPress to whatever CMS they use to publish the site. +> > Yeah, shit's weird these days, man. What is even happening anymore? Cats and dogs, man. +> > ANDREW: It's weird because sometimes you see the content, WordPress is an example. Sometimes you see it as a content story, sometimes you see it only as an user interface. Schoolbook, which was this application in New York Times a few years ago. They used it purely for the backend. jQuery, like jquery.com and all their 25 sites, they don't use it for the backend; they use it for the theming. And all their content is stored in Git repos that is then adjusted and shoved into the database so they don't even touch the backend which is usually what host people if they were going to pick one piece they would use but everyone's using some other aspect, and you're not even using it for the content repository either you're using it for the dashboard and stuff like that. everything should start with the API. Anybody have any interesting concluding remarks, or should that be me...? +> > CHRIS: Have you heard of the horse radish project? +> > No. +> > CHRIS: It's something working on for -- Jeremy's working on for doing image management in WordPress. and I think it's in a state where it's internally useable at Sunlight. +> > For image management? +> > CHRIS: For WordPress, yeah. So it's got elastic search. +> > You weren't fast enough. +> > How do I find this on Google? +> > CHRIS: Lab/horseradish. +> > Sweet, I find a typo in the first thing, settings.py. +> > CHRIS: It's a Django app for managing WordPress. +> > ANDREW: Throw Ruby in there for a shell script. +> > Can we get some Perl? +> > ANDREW: It is now 5:30 thank you all for coming. This was fantastic. I was really -- we were both really nerves that we wouldn't come away with anything beyond a list of gripes and I think we have way more than that to work on. I know that we're working on a lot of these problems, and I know that obviously Vox is working on all of these problems, really everyone's trying to solve these things cool not having roadmaps but things of this nature is really awesome. I hope you enjoyed SRCCON, ask I hope to see you guys around and CMSs -- yeah! diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_30_Small_Teams.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_30_Small_Teams.md index 6b219458..67035616 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_30_Small_Teams.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_30_Small_Teams.md @@ -1,143 +1,143 @@ -Making things happen with small teams -Session facilitator(s): Kaeti Hinck -Day & Time: Friday, 3-4pm -Room: Franklin 1 - ->> All right, guys, let's get started. ->> Hi, everyone ... ... OK, thanks for coming. I'm Kaeti Hinck, if you don't know me, I work at MinnPost, and we are a small team, and one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation with you, is just the collective wisdom of other people who are working on small teams and smaller organizations can really be of benefit to each other, so to start, I just want to quickly go around, just say your name, where you're working, where you're from, and just one sentence about something that you're hoping to get out of this session. And if that makes you really nervous, you don't have to do that, you can just say your name, where you're from. ->> Dan Herman, The Daily Record, just hoping to find tips on prioritizing things. ->> Emmy Crowell, I ... trying to figure out how to build small teams. ->> Jessica, I'm at Mashable, and I'm a team of two trying to build out a whole section, so I'm trying to figure out how I can best do that. ->> Emma. I work at foreign policy and I'm a small team in a small newsroom. ->> David Yanofsky, I'm a reporter at Quartz, and I'm on a team of two: ->> I'm Ryan Murphy, I'm at the Texas Tribune, and right now we're -- counting a couple fellows and an intern, we're a team of 6. ->> Tom S...., I work at Harvard Business Review, and I'm a team of one. ->> Caitlin I'm at Chicago Tribune news apps team, just again, another small team, in this case, working with a big newsroom and sometimes other newsrooms within a larger organization, so ... ->> Alan P. I work at MinnPost, as well, just want to hear what other people have to say. ->> There is no I in team, but there is a me, but so actually I've recently joined up with an intern. So I'm interested in figuring out how to go with somebody who manages his own work to work alongside someone else and have them have a beneficial experience. ->> I'm Evie from Internet KPCC, so I hope to find out how an entry level data journalist can find his or her position in the newsroom, like how to follow the leaders and do my job as well as I can. ->> Adam? ->> Oh, hi, I'm Adam. I work at INN, which is it's like 100 small teams, and I have a small team that supports all of these small teams. It's a lot of small teams. I'm actually very interested in especially like process, and sort of structure of small teams and how to kind of manage all of that. And the right amount of, I guess, like rigor around process management and structure. ->> ->> My name is Leon, I'm from Toronto, I just recently got into data journalism, sort of from a software development background, and the way I'm kind of doing it is by doing a lot of freelance work, I'm doing it all on my own, sort of depending on NICAR, listserv and other places for information, just trying to get a picture of where I might be able to fit in, what I'd be good at and how I could serve. ->> I'm Nelly with American Presence, too, and we do a lot of training with other newsrooms that are sometimes quite small, so looking to learn about processes on workload, but more importantly transferable processes on workloads. ->> Alexis, Center for Public Integrity on a team of like 6 people, but I'm the only news app guy on the team. So yeah, I'm interested in like how not to get swallowed by news organization, and ... Also we're hiring, so we're going to be working with new people. ->> I'm Sarah, I work for MarketWatch in New York. Team of one, wondering about working with an editor, not a developer, not a designer, is just kind of the head of a larger section and possibly growing into a team of two and how that division happens. Division of labor. ->> I'm Mike, Boston Globe, also interested in process and project management and how teams go about their work. ->> ->> I'm John, New York Times legal design, so nine of us in a newsroom, I think now that I'm living in sort of and trying to figure out what the right combinations of folks are and how to put them together and be successful in such a large place. ->> Sarah, Washington Post, I used to run a team of designers, and then I ran a larger team of the digital folks, and then I moved to New York and I'm starting a new team, and there's only one other person so far, so working on different-sized teams and figuring out how that works. ->> I'm Jacob Sanderson at Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I am often a team of one but often a member of another team or a series of teams that are not only across newsroom departments, but across business units in IT and things like that, sort of just across the entire company. So I go figuring out how to better work with them, how to prioritize my time, so that those teams are more successful. ->> We provide support for high traffic so our team is often: [inaudible] so I run a pretty small team and [inaudible] ->> Noah, WNIC data news team, with a team of five, I'm interested in how to avoid bottlenecks within our team. ->> I'm Ryan Mark, I'm from Vox Media, and we've just recently kind of changed the way our teams work so that we have a new team of about four or five, four and a half. That does stuff for a whole bunch of people onsite. ->> Brian, ProPublica, applications team of 8. Interested in how we could do things. ->> [inaudible] ->> I'm a freelancer: ->> I'm -- I work for -- David works with us, too, but he doesn't do anything, alas. I'm interested in seeing how small teams manage the tension between doing like long-term stuff and more time sensitive stuff, so yeah, ... - ->>Cool. So how we're going to structure this is first talking about obstacles and we're going to have you guys all write down individually one obstacle that you feel prevents you from doing the work you want to do or doing it as well as you wish you could. Because -- ->> I'm sorry, could you speak up a little? The cooling is really loud. ->> Yes, and I speak at the same frequency as it, so so I will try to project. After we write down obstacles, we can talk in our groups about those obstacles and write down very specific tactics or solutions, things that have worked for us or made that problem easier and then come back together at the end and do a group share around what works for us and what doesn't and ways we can work together as small teams. There are post-it notes on every table, grab one, and just take a minute to write down one obstacle that you've encountered in your work. -[group activity] -All right, if you haven't started already, feel free to share what you've written with your group at the table and then from there, pick one of the obstacles you might found overlap in what you've written, but start with one and just talk through a couple of questions like you know, what's made this easier for us in the past, what didn't work when we tried it and if somebody could be a note-taker for each group and just quickly a list of solutions and tactics that you come up with as you talk about specific obstacles. -[group activity] - ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ->> Let's take a couple more minutes and then wrap up and talk as a whole group. ->> -OK, let's circle back up, everyone, wrap things up: All right, so now I want to talk as a whole group, and kind of walk through some of the things that the smaller groups talked about, and write down some of those obstacles and solutions, and then hopefully we have a lot of things to take away with us, including being connected with this whole community of people. So if you guys want to start, what was one of the obstacles, you talked about? ->> ->> Time. ->> Time. ->> Mortality. -[laughter] ->> That limited resource, mortality. ->> So what are some of the solutions you talked about? The tactics? ->> So there was part of, like a lot of the time issues is not just us wanting to do our own work for our own teams, but also the work that we do to help other people in our organization, so identifying the things that could benefit from training other people in your organization, could benefit from finding some sort of power user or, you know, subject matter expert that you can deflect people to, or if it's a task that you're often doing, find a way to either automate it for yourself, or create a tool for those other people to use. ->> And like Chartbuilder. ->> Heard of that. ->> You have, really? -[laughter] ->> Did you talk about any others? ->> We talked about like just kind of interacting with people and when you feel like they're wasting your time or you're wasting their time, just having things like manners and using bribes or customer service language to kind of just like make that something that you know is like a bad interaction to overall just feel better about that, because if you are in a small newsroom and like, you know, people can see you. ->> Mm-hm. ->> ->> How about table in the back? ->> I think a big thing, oh, sorry, us? ->> Sure. ->> I think a couple a couple of us had talked about was not having other programmers with the same skills on your team, like just no one to go to with questions or just even just to talk shop with. ->> What were some of the ideas you talked about for that. ->> The internet. ->> Well, there was a suggestion of having a more robust like news nerd-specific IRC help situation. ->> What !? ->> We had the same conversation. ->> Yeah, we were talking about that, too. ->> There's an empty IRC room that nobody talks in. It's out there now. ->> ->> Any other tactics on that one? ->> Another one was that sometimes editorial isn't really aware of the possibilities, like the digital possibilities that you can provide, so the solutions. ->> Or, yeah, they're overly aware, but. ->> Yeah, they haven't found the sweet spot. ->> Exactly. And some of the solutions for that were including creating another exposure, making sure that you emphasize they should just send you if the problem is not enough exposure, they should loop you into pretty much everything and you can sort of winnow it down and let them know why you are and aren't taking on projects. ->> I think a lot of people in this room are inhabiting roles that are pretty new and everyone is still kind of figuring out like what works and what doesn't and how to fit in as part of a newsroom that might have, you know, decades of history of it its own behind it, and so just figuring out how do you integrate all this new stuff and the new processes that that entails with existing place. ->> Yeah, I definitely think the more we talk about it and don't just disappear into our corners and assume that editorial will come to us and the more integrated we can be, the better off we'll all be eventually. ->> I think we were also talking about have a checklist for reporters and editors before they pitch the ideas to us, so they don't present us immature or just impossible stuff and we have to say no. ->> ->> Yeah, I think that's great, the more we can kind of codify the process so they know what we need and we know what they need and enough time to actually get things done. ->> Kind of along that line and this goes back to the customer servicing we were talking about, maybe it should almost never be a definite no, but a that's a great idea I'm glad to see you're thinking about data, here's why that might not work because we don't have time to create a map for the entire United States. Have you thought about putting it into something that's more manageable and that way you put it back on them to think about data in general. ->> Yeah, we explain the whys behind the nos that we have to give, I think everybody is much happier and then understands how to come back and rethink the project. ->> It can still be an excited no. Not, "No, screw off," but just no, but ... -[laughter] ->> How about you guys? ->> ->> Talked about sort of a little bit related to the not having someone else with the same expertise, but having single points of failure and having knowledge that's just in one person's brain so when that person is not there, suddenly there's a big problem. And we talked about solutions sort of buddy system training with documentation as a required output of that training process: ->> Also, work flows that prevents the point of failure, so that one thing Ryan's team did was every week they had someone responsible for emergencies, so that the other -- like the team would stay focused and if there was like a fire or a breaking news situation or whatever, there was one person who was responsible for handling that and the rest of the team could stay working until they were pulled in for a certain reason. ->> Mm-hm. ->> Yeah, one thing that we've done with that redundancy problem is we've done a couple of small trainings where like, you know, Alan will have built a process and we'll sit with Tom and I who are the other members of the team and walk us through how he does it. We might never actually have to do that, but we know how, and we can access that if we need to, so we each are taking turns doing the skill-sharing thing so we always understand what the other team members are doing. ->> So, any other obstacles to talk about? ->> Getting requests and sort of like can't you do X questions. One thing that my team does is we try to funnel all of those requests through our morning standup, so we try to get people as much as possible to come when we're all there at the same time every morning at 10:30, talking through this, which helps to clarify what the request actually is, and helps us talk about different tradeoffs involved, and concerns. ->> ->> We also talked about having like a worksheet or a basic document that you know, outlines what a project should be, and what should be done and why, to kind of have a -- ->> ->> Have a maybe a document or something that explains what it is, and kind of is something that everybody can agree to. ->> And the scope of things, as well. ->> And then requiring something like that so people don't just kind of hop on a project and start making something about ... [inaudible] ->> We also talked about better processes at the very beginning for making sure that roles are clearly defined, and even allowing for some necessary overlaps, as you don't always want just one idea from one place, but also as much as possible narrowly defining who the stakeholders are, so it doesn't become this unwieldy, giant, out-of-control conversation. ->> So what do people do with the folks who jump in at the end of the conversation who, say, weren't part of the stakeholder group? ->> Give them lots of middle finger. -[laughter] ->> Maybe doesn't fit the manners one, but -- ->> I am ill-mannered ... How about you guys? On the view. ->> On the topic of the IRC, we were discussing maybe HipChat. ->> How many people in this room use Slack or HipChat? ->> ->> How many used IRC in the past week? ->> Fewer: ->> I wonder if it's something that maybe even Mozilla OpenNews couldn't run, it seemed like there was a lot of interest of having a channel for that for people to learn. ->> Yeah, it's important that we support each other and our peers at small organization, because as we figure things out, we can share ideas and failures, too, like hey, this did not work at all, but what have other people done and maybe it's even like a listserv or something, but yeah. ->> Mozilla OpenNews has an IRC channel. ->> I say large and small, like the people that are at this conference, the people that are in this community, are very open to helping the other people you meet, like you have met people here, you get them on Twitter, get their email addresses. I know of situations where people at very large publications have like woken up early every Thursday morning to teach people at other organizations to code Javascript, just because they, you know, want more people to be doing this, and I know I've had phone calls with, and sent emails to lots of people when I was having code problems or other issues and people are more than typically to help. Ooh. ->> Just a standard one place for people to go to. ->> I mean NICAR-L is an excellent place. ->> I've had hit or miss. It seems like it's either overtechnical or undertechnical or the listserv gets bombed. I feel everyone here is at least at the same level when it comes to code and what we're focused on. That's the community I'd rather reach out to other than people who either don't know how to do it or they can only tell you their one specific thing because they're very specific and very specialized. ->> It's a narrow universe but within that it's a lot of different type of folks which makes it interesting, but also people that have specific problems. I feel like what we really need is some sort of directory for each person who wants to offer help, like ask me about these things and I have a problem with X, who are the best people to go to about that and I think a lot of us anecdotally have that in our heads, who are the people we've crossed paths with that we can talk about these things. ->> And I also think, we've got a pay-it-forward thing, like we've all been helped by other organizations and other people as we've learned these skills and built out our team in an organization, and so do the time, don't wait for somebody to come to you necessarily but reach out to the people who are just getting started and facing the organization challenges that we've gone through: ->> Did you talk about any other obstacles? ->> We talked some of this burden of like project management versus getting actual work done and how much rigor and all that kind of stuff, and I think on the -- ->> We weren't very helpful. ->> I don't think we solved, I think that one. You know, because it varies, like, depending on the team, and in some cases, the answer hire a project manager, but it's always hard, I think, to sort of balance the like right amount of rigor, or the -- sort of correct way of doing the estimation for your like team and there's a lot -- I think, that we actually like can do around shared, common like language and how we just about talk about this and defining a process, and making sure everyone like buys into it and have that kind of defined and codified, that at least helps, you know, but doesn't solve the sort of like problem necessarily just depending on the team and like diversity of projects and everything else, right, in some cases the answer is like still probably that you actually like need a project manager. ->> Just out of curiosity, how many of you in the room have some sort of defined work flow or process for doing projects in your organization? how many of you wish you had that? So that's one thing where we can be a help to each other, too, like different processes work for different size organizations in different ways, like you know for a team of two or one, going through like a very rigorous software development process might not work for you, it might create more work instead of facilitating the ability to work more effectively. ->> But I do think it's helpful to be able to talk -- ->> I mean I'd say that you know it's even if you're a person -- if you're a single developer working, having a way to keep track of everything that's transparent to others is incredibly important. Like even if it's something you've come up with yourself, it's always easier to pick up a book and/or go and take a class and learn you know, how project management is done and kind of follow in the foot steps of other people who've been doing it and using that as a basis for how you manage stuff, but it's always going to help and as a developer myself who never did any sort of project management or worked in an environment with project management for like the first half of my career, like I always thought would be a big pain in the ass, and it is not something I like really enjoy doing. Like I don't like writing documents and I don't like entering tickets and keeping track of all that stuff, but it's just become an indispensable part of how I do my work. ->> The idea that you don't need something because you work on a small team is totally a red herring. I worked on a dev team with just two of us and we had a very strict methodology. I thought it was heavy handed but it was really useful. We got a lot of stuff done and we were accountable for all the stuff we did. ->> I think the transparency piece is very important if you're trying to convince the broader organization your value as a team and helping them understand what it means to build out a news application or whatever sort of development project you're working on, they need to know how you work and having some sort of clear process helps people sort that out and then they know what to bring you and how long it's going to take and all of that. ->> And then they can't accuse you of not doing anything, because then you can go back and say, look at all the things we did. I made a list of all the stuff that I did, and I checked it off as I did it and it can help prevent people from forcing a lot of work on you that you don't know how to do, you know, like, you can keep your workload under control. ->> When you're doing that, too, you're also documenting your problem solving, so it may be a pain in the ass in the moment to create those documents, but then you have a reference point, too, if you run into something similar again, you know, 18 months from now, three days from now, oh, crap, what do I do -- ->> Yeah, don't test my memory, ever ever. ->> Oh, right, on this project and you go back through it and there's the process. ->> That's a hard thing about a small team, also a new team, there is no institutional. Every time you try something, it's going to be the hard I am too, it's the first time and it's a little bit life-draining, and so balancing that out with like we want to do lots of things, lots of new things, but every time it's hard. Every time it's new documentation like that. ->> ->> And one thing we try to do, just to keep people in the loop about what we're, working on at the moment is we have a big white board that has our current projects, and we don't keep that like religiously updated but it gives people enough info who are in the newsroom as they walk by, they're be like oh, yeah, Alan is looking into doing a request on this, and Katie is working on the design and they just see that we're working on that in the projects that we're working on in the newsroom. ->> Also, good documentation is a great way to undercut lots of meetings. ->> Yes, and the more we can undercut meetings the better, right? ->> So we're over time, but I want to encourage you all -- I created an etherpad for this group, because it's sort of self- selected community of people who want to work. So add your info. I also posted it on my Twitter account did you phone want to write it down from there. I'll post all the notes and things that you talked about. So the note takers if you could either send me the notes or just leave them here if you did them handwritten, that would be awesome. And thank you so much for coming ... ... +Making things happen with small teams +Session facilitator(s): Kaeti Hinck +Day & Time: Friday, 3-4pm +Room: Franklin 1 + +> > All right, guys, let's get started. +> > Hi, everyone ... ... OK, thanks for coming. I'm Kaeti Hinck, if you don't know me, I work at MinnPost, and we are a small team, and one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation with you, is just the collective wisdom of other people who are working on small teams and smaller organizations can really be of benefit to each other, so to start, I just want to quickly go around, just say your name, where you're working, where you're from, and just one sentence about something that you're hoping to get out of this session. And if that makes you really nervous, you don't have to do that, you can just say your name, where you're from. +> > Dan Herman, The Daily Record, just hoping to find tips on prioritizing things. +> > Emmy Crowell, I ... trying to figure out how to build small teams. +> > Jessica, I'm at Mashable, and I'm a team of two trying to build out a whole section, so I'm trying to figure out how I can best do that. +> > Emma. I work at foreign policy and I'm a small team in a small newsroom. +> > David Yanofsky, I'm a reporter at Quartz, and I'm on a team of two: +> > I'm Ryan Murphy, I'm at the Texas Tribune, and right now we're -- counting a couple fellows and an intern, we're a team of 6. +> > Tom S...., I work at Harvard Business Review, and I'm a team of one. +> > Caitlin I'm at Chicago Tribune news apps team, just again, another small team, in this case, working with a big newsroom and sometimes other newsrooms within a larger organization, so ... +> > Alan P. I work at MinnPost, as well, just want to hear what other people have to say. +> > There is no I in team, but there is a me, but so actually I've recently joined up with an intern. So I'm interested in figuring out how to go with somebody who manages his own work to work alongside someone else and have them have a beneficial experience. +> > I'm Evie from Internet KPCC, so I hope to find out how an entry level data journalist can find his or her position in the newsroom, like how to follow the leaders and do my job as well as I can. +> > Adam? +> > Oh, hi, I'm Adam. I work at INN, which is it's like 100 small teams, and I have a small team that supports all of these small teams. It's a lot of small teams. I'm actually very interested in especially like process, and sort of structure of small teams and how to kind of manage all of that. And the right amount of, I guess, like rigor around process management and structure. +> > +> > My name is Leon, I'm from Toronto, I just recently got into data journalism, sort of from a software development background, and the way I'm kind of doing it is by doing a lot of freelance work, I'm doing it all on my own, sort of depending on NICAR, listserv and other places for information, just trying to get a picture of where I might be able to fit in, what I'd be good at and how I could serve. +> > I'm Nelly with American Presence, too, and we do a lot of training with other newsrooms that are sometimes quite small, so looking to learn about processes on workload, but more importantly transferable processes on workloads. +> > Alexis, Center for Public Integrity on a team of like 6 people, but I'm the only news app guy on the team. So yeah, I'm interested in like how not to get swallowed by news organization, and ... Also we're hiring, so we're going to be working with new people. +> > I'm Sarah, I work for MarketWatch in New York. Team of one, wondering about working with an editor, not a developer, not a designer, is just kind of the head of a larger section and possibly growing into a team of two and how that division happens. Division of labor. +> > I'm Mike, Boston Globe, also interested in process and project management and how teams go about their work. +> > +> > I'm John, New York Times legal design, so nine of us in a newsroom, I think now that I'm living in sort of and trying to figure out what the right combinations of folks are and how to put them together and be successful in such a large place. +> > Sarah, Washington Post, I used to run a team of designers, and then I ran a larger team of the digital folks, and then I moved to New York and I'm starting a new team, and there's only one other person so far, so working on different-sized teams and figuring out how that works. +> > I'm Jacob Sanderson at Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I am often a team of one but often a member of another team or a series of teams that are not only across newsroom departments, but across business units in IT and things like that, sort of just across the entire company. So I go figuring out how to better work with them, how to prioritize my time, so that those teams are more successful. +> > We provide support for high traffic so our team is often: [inaudible] so I run a pretty small team and [inaudible] +> > Noah, WNIC data news team, with a team of five, I'm interested in how to avoid bottlenecks within our team. +> > I'm Ryan Mark, I'm from Vox Media, and we've just recently kind of changed the way our teams work so that we have a new team of about four or five, four and a half. That does stuff for a whole bunch of people onsite. +> > Brian, ProPublica, applications team of 8. Interested in how we could do things. +> > [inaudible] +> > I'm a freelancer: +> > I'm -- I work for -- David works with us, too, but he doesn't do anything, alas. I'm interested in seeing how small teams manage the tension between doing like long-term stuff and more time sensitive stuff, so yeah, ... + +> > Cool. So how we're going to structure this is first talking about obstacles and we're going to have you guys all write down individually one obstacle that you feel prevents you from doing the work you want to do or doing it as well as you wish you could. Because -- +> > I'm sorry, could you speak up a little? The cooling is really loud. +> > Yes, and I speak at the same frequency as it, so so I will try to project. After we write down obstacles, we can talk in our groups about those obstacles and write down very specific tactics or solutions, things that have worked for us or made that problem easier and then come back together at the end and do a group share around what works for us and what doesn't and ways we can work together as small teams. There are post-it notes on every table, grab one, and just take a minute to write down one obstacle that you've encountered in your work. +> > [group activity] +> > All right, if you haven't started already, feel free to share what you've written with your group at the table and then from there, pick one of the obstacles you might found overlap in what you've written, but start with one and just talk through a couple of questions like you know, what's made this easier for us in the past, what didn't work when we tried it and if somebody could be a note-taker for each group and just quickly a list of solutions and tactics that you come up with as you talk about specific obstacles. +> > [group activity] +> > ... ... ... ... ... ... ... +> > Let's take a couple more minutes and then wrap up and talk as a whole group. +> > +> > OK, let's circle back up, everyone, wrap things up: All right, so now I want to talk as a whole group, and kind of walk through some of the things that the smaller groups talked about, and write down some of those obstacles and solutions, and then hopefully we have a lot of things to take away with us, including being connected with this whole community of people. So if you guys want to start, what was one of the obstacles, you talked about? +> > +> > Time. +> > Time. +> > Mortality. +> > [laughter] +> > That limited resource, mortality. +> > So what are some of the solutions you talked about? The tactics? +> > So there was part of, like a lot of the time issues is not just us wanting to do our own work for our own teams, but also the work that we do to help other people in our organization, so identifying the things that could benefit from training other people in your organization, could benefit from finding some sort of power user or, you know, subject matter expert that you can deflect people to, or if it's a task that you're often doing, find a way to either automate it for yourself, or create a tool for those other people to use. +> > And like Chartbuilder. +> > Heard of that. +> > You have, really? +> > [laughter] +> > Did you talk about any others? +> > We talked about like just kind of interacting with people and when you feel like they're wasting your time or you're wasting their time, just having things like manners and using bribes or customer service language to kind of just like make that something that you know is like a bad interaction to overall just feel better about that, because if you are in a small newsroom and like, you know, people can see you. +> > Mm-hm. +> > +> > How about table in the back? +> > I think a big thing, oh, sorry, us? +> > Sure. +> > I think a couple a couple of us had talked about was not having other programmers with the same skills on your team, like just no one to go to with questions or just even just to talk shop with. +> > What were some of the ideas you talked about for that. +> > The internet. +> > Well, there was a suggestion of having a more robust like news nerd-specific IRC help situation. +> > What !? +> > We had the same conversation. +> > Yeah, we were talking about that, too. +> > There's an empty IRC room that nobody talks in. It's out there now. +> > +> > Any other tactics on that one? +> > Another one was that sometimes editorial isn't really aware of the possibilities, like the digital possibilities that you can provide, so the solutions. +> > Or, yeah, they're overly aware, but. +> > Yeah, they haven't found the sweet spot. +> > Exactly. And some of the solutions for that were including creating another exposure, making sure that you emphasize they should just send you if the problem is not enough exposure, they should loop you into pretty much everything and you can sort of winnow it down and let them know why you are and aren't taking on projects. +> > I think a lot of people in this room are inhabiting roles that are pretty new and everyone is still kind of figuring out like what works and what doesn't and how to fit in as part of a newsroom that might have, you know, decades of history of it its own behind it, and so just figuring out how do you integrate all this new stuff and the new processes that that entails with existing place. +> > Yeah, I definitely think the more we talk about it and don't just disappear into our corners and assume that editorial will come to us and the more integrated we can be, the better off we'll all be eventually. +> > I think we were also talking about have a checklist for reporters and editors before they pitch the ideas to us, so they don't present us immature or just impossible stuff and we have to say no. +> > +> > Yeah, I think that's great, the more we can kind of codify the process so they know what we need and we know what they need and enough time to actually get things done. +> > Kind of along that line and this goes back to the customer servicing we were talking about, maybe it should almost never be a definite no, but a that's a great idea I'm glad to see you're thinking about data, here's why that might not work because we don't have time to create a map for the entire United States. Have you thought about putting it into something that's more manageable and that way you put it back on them to think about data in general. +> > Yeah, we explain the whys behind the nos that we have to give, I think everybody is much happier and then understands how to come back and rethink the project. +> > It can still be an excited no. Not, "No, screw off," but just no, but ... +> > [laughter] +> > How about you guys? +> > +> > Talked about sort of a little bit related to the not having someone else with the same expertise, but having single points of failure and having knowledge that's just in one person's brain so when that person is not there, suddenly there's a big problem. And we talked about solutions sort of buddy system training with documentation as a required output of that training process: +> > Also, work flows that prevents the point of failure, so that one thing Ryan's team did was every week they had someone responsible for emergencies, so that the other -- like the team would stay focused and if there was like a fire or a breaking news situation or whatever, there was one person who was responsible for handling that and the rest of the team could stay working until they were pulled in for a certain reason. +> > Mm-hm. +> > Yeah, one thing that we've done with that redundancy problem is we've done a couple of small trainings where like, you know, Alan will have built a process and we'll sit with Tom and I who are the other members of the team and walk us through how he does it. We might never actually have to do that, but we know how, and we can access that if we need to, so we each are taking turns doing the skill-sharing thing so we always understand what the other team members are doing. +> > So, any other obstacles to talk about? +> > Getting requests and sort of like can't you do X questions. One thing that my team does is we try to funnel all of those requests through our morning standup, so we try to get people as much as possible to come when we're all there at the same time every morning at 10:30, talking through this, which helps to clarify what the request actually is, and helps us talk about different tradeoffs involved, and concerns. +> > +> > We also talked about having like a worksheet or a basic document that you know, outlines what a project should be, and what should be done and why, to kind of have a -- +> > +> > Have a maybe a document or something that explains what it is, and kind of is something that everybody can agree to. +> > And the scope of things, as well. +> > And then requiring something like that so people don't just kind of hop on a project and start making something about ... [inaudible] +> > We also talked about better processes at the very beginning for making sure that roles are clearly defined, and even allowing for some necessary overlaps, as you don't always want just one idea from one place, but also as much as possible narrowly defining who the stakeholders are, so it doesn't become this unwieldy, giant, out-of-control conversation. +> > So what do people do with the folks who jump in at the end of the conversation who, say, weren't part of the stakeholder group? +> > Give them lots of middle finger. +> > [laughter] +> > Maybe doesn't fit the manners one, but -- +> > I am ill-mannered ... How about you guys? On the view. +> > On the topic of the IRC, we were discussing maybe HipChat. +> > How many people in this room use Slack or HipChat? +> > +> > How many used IRC in the past week? +> > Fewer: +> > I wonder if it's something that maybe even Mozilla OpenNews couldn't run, it seemed like there was a lot of interest of having a channel for that for people to learn. +> > Yeah, it's important that we support each other and our peers at small organization, because as we figure things out, we can share ideas and failures, too, like hey, this did not work at all, but what have other people done and maybe it's even like a listserv or something, but yeah. +> > Mozilla OpenNews has an IRC channel. +> > I say large and small, like the people that are at this conference, the people that are in this community, are very open to helping the other people you meet, like you have met people here, you get them on Twitter, get their email addresses. I know of situations where people at very large publications have like woken up early every Thursday morning to teach people at other organizations to code Javascript, just because they, you know, want more people to be doing this, and I know I've had phone calls with, and sent emails to lots of people when I was having code problems or other issues and people are more than typically to help. Ooh. +> > Just a standard one place for people to go to. +> > I mean NICAR-L is an excellent place. +> > I've had hit or miss. It seems like it's either overtechnical or undertechnical or the listserv gets bombed. I feel everyone here is at least at the same level when it comes to code and what we're focused on. That's the community I'd rather reach out to other than people who either don't know how to do it or they can only tell you their one specific thing because they're very specific and very specialized. +> > It's a narrow universe but within that it's a lot of different type of folks which makes it interesting, but also people that have specific problems. I feel like what we really need is some sort of directory for each person who wants to offer help, like ask me about these things and I have a problem with X, who are the best people to go to about that and I think a lot of us anecdotally have that in our heads, who are the people we've crossed paths with that we can talk about these things. +> > And I also think, we've got a pay-it-forward thing, like we've all been helped by other organizations and other people as we've learned these skills and built out our team in an organization, and so do the time, don't wait for somebody to come to you necessarily but reach out to the people who are just getting started and facing the organization challenges that we've gone through: +> > Did you talk about any other obstacles? +> > We talked some of this burden of like project management versus getting actual work done and how much rigor and all that kind of stuff, and I think on the -- +> > We weren't very helpful. +> > I don't think we solved, I think that one. You know, because it varies, like, depending on the team, and in some cases, the answer hire a project manager, but it's always hard, I think, to sort of balance the like right amount of rigor, or the -- sort of correct way of doing the estimation for your like team and there's a lot -- I think, that we actually like can do around shared, common like language and how we just about talk about this and defining a process, and making sure everyone like buys into it and have that kind of defined and codified, that at least helps, you know, but doesn't solve the sort of like problem necessarily just depending on the team and like diversity of projects and everything else, right, in some cases the answer is like still probably that you actually like need a project manager. +> > Just out of curiosity, how many of you in the room have some sort of defined work flow or process for doing projects in your organization? how many of you wish you had that? So that's one thing where we can be a help to each other, too, like different processes work for different size organizations in different ways, like you know for a team of two or one, going through like a very rigorous software development process might not work for you, it might create more work instead of facilitating the ability to work more effectively. +> > But I do think it's helpful to be able to talk -- +> > I mean I'd say that you know it's even if you're a person -- if you're a single developer working, having a way to keep track of everything that's transparent to others is incredibly important. Like even if it's something you've come up with yourself, it's always easier to pick up a book and/or go and take a class and learn you know, how project management is done and kind of follow in the foot steps of other people who've been doing it and using that as a basis for how you manage stuff, but it's always going to help and as a developer myself who never did any sort of project management or worked in an environment with project management for like the first half of my career, like I always thought would be a big pain in the ass, and it is not something I like really enjoy doing. Like I don't like writing documents and I don't like entering tickets and keeping track of all that stuff, but it's just become an indispensable part of how I do my work. +> > The idea that you don't need something because you work on a small team is totally a red herring. I worked on a dev team with just two of us and we had a very strict methodology. I thought it was heavy handed but it was really useful. We got a lot of stuff done and we were accountable for all the stuff we did. +> > I think the transparency piece is very important if you're trying to convince the broader organization your value as a team and helping them understand what it means to build out a news application or whatever sort of development project you're working on, they need to know how you work and having some sort of clear process helps people sort that out and then they know what to bring you and how long it's going to take and all of that. +> > And then they can't accuse you of not doing anything, because then you can go back and say, look at all the things we did. I made a list of all the stuff that I did, and I checked it off as I did it and it can help prevent people from forcing a lot of work on you that you don't know how to do, you know, like, you can keep your workload under control. +> > When you're doing that, too, you're also documenting your problem solving, so it may be a pain in the ass in the moment to create those documents, but then you have a reference point, too, if you run into something similar again, you know, 18 months from now, three days from now, oh, crap, what do I do -- +> > Yeah, don't test my memory, ever ever. +> > Oh, right, on this project and you go back through it and there's the process. +> > That's a hard thing about a small team, also a new team, there is no institutional. Every time you try something, it's going to be the hard I am too, it's the first time and it's a little bit life-draining, and so balancing that out with like we want to do lots of things, lots of new things, but every time it's hard. Every time it's new documentation like that. +> > +> > And one thing we try to do, just to keep people in the loop about what we're, working on at the moment is we have a big white board that has our current projects, and we don't keep that like religiously updated but it gives people enough info who are in the newsroom as they walk by, they're be like oh, yeah, Alan is looking into doing a request on this, and Katie is working on the design and they just see that we're working on that in the projects that we're working on in the newsroom. +> > Also, good documentation is a great way to undercut lots of meetings. +> > Yes, and the more we can undercut meetings the better, right? +> > So we're over time, but I want to encourage you all -- I created an etherpad for this group, because it's sort of self- selected community of people who want to work. So add your info. I also posted it on my Twitter account did you phone want to write it down from there. I'll post all the notes and things that you talked about. So the note takers if you could either send me the notes or just leave them here if you did them handwritten, that would be awesome. And thank you so much for coming ... ... diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_32_Own_Your_Analytics.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_32_Own_Your_Analytics.md index eb134a8d..3c7e4e5b 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_32_Own_Your_Analytics.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_32_Own_Your_Analytics.md @@ -1,885 +1,846 @@ -Own your analytics -Session facilitator(s): Brian Abelson, Michael Keller, Stijn Debrouwere -Day & Time: Friday, 3-5:30pm -Room: Garden 1 - ->> I think we're pretty full. If you want to talk from up here -and point at me when you want to switch. That's fine. -Maybe I'll give some background. -Welcome. This is own your analytics. Myself, Stijn and Michael -are currently working on a project with the Tau center at Columbia -we're calling news links and the idea is in part to create a suite of -open source tools and web interface for working with analytic data. -Sort of with the idea of investigative nonprofit news organizations, -sort of at the forefront. So there is more qualitative stuff that is -going to be incorporated but more generally anyone that wants to know -how their articles are performing, who is sharing them, where they're -getting linked to and from can sort of benefit from this. -I guess what the context for this session is that we've been -working with these tools on our own for, you know, many years now, I -don't know how long you've been doing analytic stuff. But myself at -least for two or three years. We're hoping to share some of that -knowledge with you, at least the gotchas and at the same time also -sort of help you think about all the possibilities that are out there -for learning more about your content by combining lots of different -APIs and that's the idea of own your analytics is not just rely on a -single, you know, not just rely on Google Analytics or rely on -Facebook insights or your Tweetdeck or whatever, but to be able to -combine them in intelligent ways and start to learn things that you're -interested in. So actually answer the questions that you're curious -about. -We also have Sonia here with us. She is our resident Facebook -insights expert. So she'll be talking about that data and the cool -things that she's done with it. The format is going to be, Stijn is -going to talk generally about stuff and then specifically about Google -Analytics. Sort of the different terminology, because it can be very -hard to grasp at first. Sonia is going to walk through Facebook -stuff. I'm going to talk very quickly about Twitter. I don't have -slides but just the things you can do with it and the most difficult -aspects of working with the Twitter API. -And then hopefully we're just going to maybe break out into -groups and we're pretty small. But the idea is to start playing -around with snippets of code we have or we can help you write your own -stuff and if you have access to your organization's Google Analytics -account, we can help you start to pull that data in. If you have -access to your organization's Facebook account and have insights -privilege, we can help you start working with that. And then also -Twitter stuff and then maybe even start to brainstorm how we can -combine these things together and what cool things we can do it with -whether it's alert systems or dash boards or just sort of ad hoc -analyses. - - - - -We have some data that we've already collected, too. Michael? ->> We're doing a research project, building this platform which -we're looking for beta testers for. We have some newsrooms -interested. You can go to news LYNX like the cat and there is a -survey there about the organization and you can fill that out and that -would be awesome. Etherpad.Mozilla.org, SRCCON ... ->> Here. Let's write this up here. ->> Etherpad.Mozilla.org/SRCCON/analytics. ->> I managed to download your stuff but thankfully ... (talking -amongst themselves). ->> Sorry for the delay in getting started. Like Brian said this -is own your analytics. It's sort of at a basic level, getting access -to the data and being able to export it. It's more out of owning your -data at a more fundamental level. What is annoying or what really -frustrates me about how people handle their analytic software is -instead of asking themselves what kind of data do I really need? What -kind of metrics do I really need? Most people log into their analytic -software and look at the numbers that are there and assuming that's -what's important just because it's there. -And the interesting thing is that the more you actually look sort -of one level deeper and you look at what kind of data is available in -all of these tools and all of the different tools that are available, -the more you get to ask yourself sort of more questions at a more -fundamental level like what kind of questions am I really asking? And -what kind of tools do I need to get them. -I think understanding these APIs is like a really sort of basic -skill that will help you sort of -- well -- think at that more -fundamental level about what you want to use your analytics for. -This is the part that we're still working on. ->> We'll do it later, man. Just get through. ->> There are already four of these sticks here. People who want -to code, there is some example packages, Python packages if you're a -Python programmer on there. That would be interesting. Also some -documentation and stuff, that would be useful. ->> We're using the memory sticks. ->> Inside the memory sticks are virtual machines with all the -dependencies built in and the vagrant distribution, right. So I don't -know if anyone's used vagrant. It's all documented, right, how to set -it up? ->> Yes, pretty much. -So basically for people that are not that interested in coding, -that's fine, too. What I'll start with -- I don't know how long it's -going to take but I figured between 15 and 30 minutes talking about -how the Google Analytics site works that is at a conceptual level -because there is a lot of terminology and stuff. That is really -useful to know if you want to use other analytics tools. -And after that we'll get more into, well, what can we actually do -now that we have this data and how can we combine data from different -APIs and how can we use these APIs? So at that point there's sort of -three options. One is we'll be at the end of the hour so you can - - - - -switch to a different session. Or you can start coding. Or the third -option is we can split up into groups and there can be groups that do -brainstorming and think about alternative metrics and those things -without necessarily coding them up. -But for those people that do want to code, we'll be here on hand -to help you out with that and troubleshoot. -We can skip over this actually. If the only thing you want from -your analytics is to get the data up, then most analytics tools have a -big export button. And that's actually a great way to get started. -Even though it sounds stupid but the thing is getting started with the -Google Analytics APIs and some of these different APIs it takes a -while. It takes a few days to really get up to speed but we're going -to try to kick start that process. -To get started, for example in Google analytics you construct -your query to get what you need and export it. When you quickly need -the data but the interface is too limited in how it allows you to -present that data, you have the right data but you want to display it -in a different way or different context, the export buttons are really -good. -That is not what we're going to talk about because we want to use -those APIs. -What are some of the advantages of using the APIs over using the -export buttons? I think there are sort of three main advantages. -It's mainly about sort of expanding the range of analysis. Most of -the analytics tools that you'll see and certainly Google Analytics, I -call it general awareness. Like you log into it and see some numbers. -Last week these were my page views, et cetera. And they're fine for -that. But if you want to do anything out of that sort of comfort zone -of what the user interface allows, then you're going to get into -trouble and that's when you want to use the API. -One is maybe you want to go deeper and drill deeper in the data -and combine it with other datasets. That is when you want to use an -API. Another one is maybe you want to analyze years worth of data. -Also when you probably want to get that data from the API. But also -sometimes you want stuff to just work really fast and for example -based on your analytics data you maybe want the change how your home -page looks or send out an alert to an editor or something. You can -have a script running that every 5 minutes or every 10 minutes checks -your analytics data and based off that sends out those alerts or -updates the dash board or stuff like that. -In those casings you don't want to be in the user interface of -Google Analytics every five minutes. No. You have a script that does -it for you. -The thing is in the interface it's really easy to sort of click -on buttons until you sort of have what you need. With the API you -really do need a mental model of how the data is stored before you can -get started because you need to transform your question to a query. -And yeah, that's what we'll be talking about. -So the first thing that is interesting is well, lets' start at -the very start, how does Google Analytics store data? And again, I'm - - - - -going to continue to talk about Google Analytics but 99 percent of -this applies to pretty much any other analytics tool that you will -find, stuff like mixed panel. -So you visit a page. Mauves you have probably sort of added -Google Analytics to a website so you know that you have to install -- -well, install, add this tracking code to your page. What that does, -every time someone visits that page, that little -- I guess it's a -pretty big script, the Google Analytics runs and what it does is it -will -- first it will register your visit. -There's three parts to it. One is, does Google Analytics know -you. Has it ever seen you before? If not, it will sort of in its -system log you as a user. So it will log you as a new user. If it -has seen you before it will associate your page view that was just -logged with your user. The second thing is there is not just a user -but a session. A session is not necessarily since you last opened -your browser. I think it's limited to have you been on the site in -the last 15 minutes or something like that. -If you haven't been, it will count that as a new session. A new -browsing session on that website. It will log that. And all of your -next page views during that session will be associated with that -session. So a lot of the interesting queries you can do with Google -Analytics are based on this idea of how many pages did someone visit -within a session or did someone within a session first go to this page -and then to that page? How many people did that? -And so there are those three levels. One is the event level. -The main event being the page view. But Google Analytics supports -many different types of events and you can add your own eventers. If -you want to add a bit of tracking code so every time someone click ons -a button or every time someone scrolls beyond a thousand pixels you -can register that as an event with Google Analytics. -So that's really interesting to do that custom tracking. But the -default tracking is page views. Every time you visit a page that is -registered as a page event. There is the event level and then the -session and the user levels. Those are the main ones. -Alongside those events, an event is not just one little piece of -data. It's not just like, hey, this is a page view. No, there is all -sorts of meta data associated with it. There is the user and the -session that is associated with it. But really many other things can -be associated with it as well. And even you can add custom variables -in Google Analytics so you can add your own data to these events. -In the database an event will be stored as a single row and it -will have all that meta data on it. Then we get to metrics. What is -a metric. A metric is a type of calculation or descriptive statistics -of an event. For example just your count of page views, the -calculation that is happening is you're counting all of your page -views. If your average pages per user per session, if that's 3 and a -half, well then that somehow had to be calculated off of these events. -So that is a metric. A page view is an event. Today's page views is -a metric or the average page views per session is a metric. -That is important terminology as well. - - - - -Now dimensions are sort of we talked before about the fact that -alongside an event, the main event being a page view you can store all -sorts of other meta data. One of the key pieces of meta data is the -date. Actually for every page view you need to know when did it -happen. So those are dimensions. All of those pieces of meta data. -Then there's segments. Segments are groups and they can be -groups of people, groups of users or they can be groups of sessions. -And one of the main ways that you filter the data. -The interesting thing to note about them is that they're not -exclusive. If you do a query in Google Analytics, you can have many, -many segments and those segments can all be overlapping. For example -a segment can be all of your users that are visiting from the United -States. That is a segment of your users. -Now segments are again, they can be user segment or session -segments but they're not event segments. They don't filter at that -level. That is why there is a separate kind of filtering that also -exists and that is called filters. -Those filters, the difference between a filter and a segment is a -filter filters at the individual row level. The individual event -level. First, your segments and then you have faster piece of -filtering and that's your filters. -Two other key terms are aggregation and sampling. The main thing -to know and a lot of people bitch about Google Analytics because all -of the metrics are aggregated metrics meaning they're calculations -that happen on all of these individual rows, all of these individual -page views and you never really get access to each individual event. -No, you only get access to the resulting calculations. So they're -aggregated measures. -And the second thing about Google Analytics is to speed things up -it will do those calculations not on the entire dataset but on a -sample of that dataset a lot of the time. It just makes the -calculations faster and really you don't really lose that much detail. -So the thing about this kind terminology or this kind of mental -model is that it really applies to almost any analytics package. If -you think about ChartBeat, they have basically the same way of storing -data. With Google Analytics sometimes you have to wait a couple of -hours before the data comes in. With ChartBeat you get it live. -Some kind of analytics are defined by what they don't have. -Facebook insights data. If you worked with it. You have a huge bunch -of numbers but no way to filter it or segment it by users beyond the -segments that Facebook provided for you. Even though people bitch -about Google Analytics you have a fancy filtering. You don't get -those with Facebook. -Some analytics software is different because it allows you to go -beyond the aggregates. With mixed panel you can run queries where you -ask what users haven't visited the site for a week and now give me -their e-mail addresses for logged in users, of course. And you can -have those individual e-mail addresses and based off those you can -reactivate those users by sending them an e-mail. You haven't visited -in a while. What's up? - - - - -Some of them are more flexible. And Heap and Keen are events -tracking systems. They have the same structure as Google Analytics -but more flexible reporting. Or AB testing. That is the same kind of -analytics again. The only exception is you do it against different -variants of the page or different variants of a title for an article. -Search logs are a kind of analytic too. They are a different -event. Instead of the page view eventer it's a search event. And -sometimes it's just the terminology. -I don't know if some people here use Adobe Omniture at work. If -you do I'll be happy to help you out with that later. Instead of -talking about dimensions to specify that meta data they talk about -elements. It's the same thing. -That's sort of a basic overview. -I guess my main piece of advice would be what I've seen so many -people do is they decide too soon that the free or cheap tools or -tools they're already using which a lot of the times is Google -Analytics because it's free, it's not enough and people search for -different tools that maybe make things easier for them. I think a -good strategy is to really try to get as much as you can out of Google -Analytics until you're really getting really, really frustrated and -really think you're not going to be able to get the data out of there -you need. And then think about there may be other tools that can do a -better job. -If you approach it that way you'll have a better idea of what you -need from those other tools. When you go to the feature pages of -analytics too, X, Y or Z you know I absolutely need this feature -because this has been blocking me for the past month in Google -Analytics and I cannot get that data out of it. -You'll be much better informed if you keep a little bit of that -frustration in there. -The second thing is think about return on investment because a -lot of these analytics tools are really, really expensive and a lot of -news organizations are experimenting with using five or six different -ones and the cost adds up. Why do you have these analytics? Because -you want a return on them. You want more users or more engaged users -and whatnot. You need to make a return on that investment and very -often you don't. -So on these memory sticks for people who want to use them, -there's some data that we've been using from various organizations. -There is some data from the guardian on there. Some data from the -Boston Globe that Sonia brought. Some other pieces of data. But I -guess a more interesting thing and what I hopefully most of you are -here is because you want to do something with your own data. -So that's sort of up to you. And I guess -- ->> Can we get a quick show of hands how many people have access -to their Google Analytics account who want to play with that today? -No? Does anyone have access to their Facebook account and has -insights? Wow. That's interesting. -Why -- I'm curious now. Wait ... ->> We don't really use Google Analytics. We have Omniture. - - - - ->> We have Omniture, too. ->> Any data not just -- you have Omniture. Would you like to -play with that data. ->> That is why you get the data out of Omniture. ->> I spent most of last year working at the guardian's Omniture -as well. It's a really ugly API to use but because of that, I spent -some time creating an API wrapper around it. So you can actually sort -of access the data in a fairly clean way. You may have to sort of -revisit it. -So I'd be happy to show that. Although we'll do that on an -individual level. People can work on what they want to work on. -So yeah, if you want to use your data and we hope you do, there -are two ways. One, you can export it if you want to do analysis in -excel and stuff. We can help you with that. Or we can troubleshoot -you as you try to get access to, for example the Google Analytics API, -well I guess nobody here wants to do that. -Or Omniture we can also help you get logged into that. -So yeah, everyone can sort of work individually the kind of data -they want. Whether you want to use the user interfaces or whether you -want to use the APIs or whether you want to use our data. Or if you -don't want to code, you don't feel like coding or you're not a coder, -then I think it would be great if there was a group or multiple groups -that can just do brainstorming around what kind of metrics do we need -in our newsrooms and what are we not getting? ->> We're small so maybe everyone can go around and give a 20 or -30 second spiel on why they're here, what they're interested in doing, -and what they need help with. We'll start over here with you. ->> I'm Sam. I'm at courts (ph.). I worked on a bunch of -different projects. I've been playing -- we don't have much in the -way of our own dash board at check out or anything like that. We've -been using ChartBeat. That is all they use. And then I've been -trying to put in a few extra things. I have a data display with -Tweets per hour. I have a Tweet that mentions courts. Parcels out -the ID of the link, you know or the post. And then match that up with -your data and calculates Tweets per hour for any of our articles. -So I would love to do the same thing with Facebook but I have not -found an easy way to do that? ->> To find everyone mentioning Facebook. ->> Likes per hour or something like that? ->> We can help you with that. ->> That would be awesome. ->> One thing that Stijn has built that will go into our project -is you can talk about it, it's called Pollster. It takes a stream of -URLs and counts up how many times they're being shared across many net -works. Twitter, Facebook, REVIT, dig. ->> Is it for all articles that are posted? ->> Yes. ->> Any URL. ->> You give it a feed of articles and it follows that and keeps -tracking it for two weeks after publication. - - - - ->> That is what I was playing with. Facebook, I can't get every -share. ->> Although Michael and I were just told about something, crowd -tangle. Crowd tangle. And apparently they can give you a sense of -the actual pages that you're content is showing up on. ->> Keep going around. ->> I'm Allison, I work at academics center at Princeton -university and we're looking to ramp up the accessibility of digital -work we have. Part of the reason we haven't been paying attention to -analytics, we wanted to find out who our audience is and segment it -out and understand more about what we can do given that information. ->> Great. What is your site like? ->> It's pretty bad. ->> Do you post content or is it like a service? ->> We'll be posting -- there's some content from courses and -articles, PDFs. ->> Cool. All right. Keep going. ->> I work for the international center for journalists. We're a -nonprofit based in D.C. We have a sister website that is published in -7 languages. We wanted -- we're going to be (inaudible) we've been -talking about it. We just want to know more like my dream would be to -have a tool that would tell me, I feed it a link and I would know when -it was shared, where, and then I can get it all, the metrics that are -important to me in one place. -We do Twitter searches, we search all the search media accounts -and whatnot but it's not as easy as having it all in one place? ->> Yes. Great. ->> I am Ringo and I work for the ICIDA. I have been working with -ETLs -- extraction ... ->> Okay. ->> And the ETL that I am using has some components to extract -data from the Google Analytics. I wanted to know what question can I -do? ->> We can help you with that. ->> Mostly I'm curious about which ... But I don't know anything -about the statistics anywhere. ->> I like to call what I do advanced applied counting. ->> Jessica Clark. I'm a media strategist so I need to know how -to work with my clients who are documentary film makers. I'm tracking -new impact tools at media impact wonders. ->> We've talked before. It's nice to meet you in person. I'm -sorry, hi. Michael is back there, too. ->> I'm here just to listen and learn. ->> Okay. ->> I am Adrian from Boston Globe. And I'm here -- it was just an -intellectual curiosity about what you've been working on. I also -manage a site at the globe called BC wired. It would be cool to get -better understanding of that. And I manage commenting and forums and -user engagement. So it would be nice to also start looking at how our -engagement has been changing over time. We went through a redesign - - - - -and everybody hates it of course. But they -- but our comments have -gone up even though we lost a huge percentage of our readership. It's -an anomaly that we have to look into. It would be nice not to log my -questions to the analytics team. ->> I'm Jeff. I run a group a called the American press -institute. We work with publishers on innovation issues. We built -some sort of metric software that helps publishers track this stuff at -the story level and pull it up in new ways. We're pulling Google -Analytics and only the social APIs. I'm generally curious are there -other things I can add to this mix. We're making this cocktail of -metrics from different places. -I have one particularly weird Omniture bug that I'm trying to -figure out that no one else will care about but I'll ask you? ->> Stijn can probably help. ->> My name is Fergus. We work with impact and metrics. These -guys are working on part of this. That is primarily why I'm here. ->> My name is Allison and I work -- I'm a web developer and I -work at the front line club and we underutilize our analytics -packages. We run 200 events open to the public every year and we -don't pay attention to engagement on our website. I'd like to learn -to hack around a bit with analytics. -I'm having horrible problems with my wireless. I can't get on -the network. If anybody is a networking GURU and wants to help me? ->> Is that a general problem. Does no one have wifi? ->> It's been coming and going. Working with APIs without the -internet. That is fun. ->> Maybe Sonia, would you want to start. ->> I wanted to get a sense of where we're at. There are some -people interested in Google. -Sonia is going to talk about Facebook stuff. Sonia was an open -news fellow last year with Stijn and I at the Boston Globe and did -incredible work with Facebook. ->> Another one is stories added. That means you may have (lost -internet connection). -(lost internet connection). -You can export 400 or 500 rows each time. If the newsroom -publishes a lot, it can only get ten days of data. If you use API -it's almost unlimited. You can get dates and all the posts from those -dates. -And the other is face query language. I can show you how to use -that later? ->> Aren't they getting rid of that with the version 2.0? ->> I just tried it. ->> I don't know if it's been depreciated. ->> I just tried it. ->> It works now but I was thinking ... ->> For a while it didn't work. ->> For the next year it's going to work and then it's ... ->> As long as you have it. ->> There are two typings of insights, one is page insights and - - - - -the other is post insights. Have you ever played with those two? Let -me try to distinguish them. Post insights is once you post something -there is a comments likes about this one post when the post was -published. -The page insights is aggregate. For you page you get 1 million -page views today or 100 comments today. It's highly aggregated. The -good thing about the insights you would have a better sense of your -audience. Where are they from? Or even in the city, say Texas or -Massachusetts. Or how many of the fans are online. They added that -last June. If you map out the curve, say if you try to divide the -fans per hour by the total fan number, you can get the percentage. -For instance during a peak you may have 30 percent of the fans online. -Following your advice you have to think about the session. Maybe it's -50 minutes or 30. No matter what that is a rough sense. If you're in -the peak you have 30 percent of your fans online. And then at night -you may have 10 percent but generally day after day it's a big curve? ->> Here I gave you some sense about very simple metrics combining -raw data. When I look online very often people talk about -conversational ratio. ->> Can you say the different between likes, shares, comments and -impressions as base book defines them. ->> Impressions are the unique, either it's unique or absolutely -total means I'm a very passionate user of Facebook. I will be counted -ten times a day. That will be, I get ten impressions of this -particular page today. -If you talk about unique user, I'm counted as only one user. I -don't contribute to that part. If you want to know, am I building up -my audience you look at a unique user. You see a rise or a decline. -But if you want to know if some of the stories are really popular or -not, you look at the total impressions. -Maybe some people, okay, I left a comment and want to come back -to debate with people. Then you look at impressions. -And also, likes, shares, and comments are just numbers. You can -see on the surface of Facebook, it's public. Not only you but -everybody can see it. The impressions you need the privilege with -Facebook insights. -Suppose you can see the number of impressions. And then if you -divide like, shares and comments with it, you can get a ratio. Very -often impressions can be one million or those can be one or two -hundred, at the most one thousand most of the time. And some people -give a name. That is conversational ratio. Even though this story -has reached a lot of people, are people engaged. -That is why some of you have mentioned that you want to -understand how people are engaged in some stories and then the next -question would be, why some stories are more engaging than others. -Next metric I want to talk about is diffusion ratio. There is a -dilemma here. Say the Boston Globe, I talked to associate editors -over there and a woman says go Sox. That works. You cater to your -core readers well. But a problem is nonfans wouldn't say go Sox. -They don't care about the story. The diffusion ratio will tell you - - - - -how many new readers you will get with this story. -Suppose you have the privilege, you can use the number of nonfans -impression divided by the total impression. I have this much amount -of impressions, part of it is from the fans and the other part is from -the nonfans. The nonfans are potential fans the next day. You want -to get a lot of them as well. -But if we -- so definitely this is less than one. If we use one -and then minus that ratio, you can get a shareable this story is. -Shareable ratio. We calculate this because sometimes some stories are -controversial but not sociable. On social media people share a story -that are very positive that will show your best side of yourself. Say -it's about fashion, fine art, interesting things, cool devices. So -people will share that. But if it's controversial, people will stay -within the post and comment on it. -We can measure the shareable ratio. Then another one is -likeable. Sometimes there is kind of like sentiment conflict. If -it's about disaster or war or murder, have often people say I cannot -like it. Even though I think the story is right, I just cannot like -it. -We will see some examples next. -Again, we tried to divide likes with engagement. Engagement is a -raw number given by Facebook. How many people have pegged this post -anywhere. That is engagement. -And another one this is a funny name. Tantalizing ratio. I -think that's funny. It's a link click. Link clicks is within the -insights. Divided by total clicks. -Sometimes it's a story, think about Huffington or Boston, five -things you should do in Philadelphia. Ten whatever, one hundred -whatever. That means the information is not complete on Facebook. -But they give you a -- if you click it, I'll let you see something. -But I'll never give you a full picture. That is why it's called -tantalizing. People say, that's interesting, I'm going to click it. -If you reverse it that is information completeness. How complete -the information is. If you publish a score of a game, two to one, -somebody won and somebody didn't. People won't click it. Why do you -click it, people know the result? ->> These are fantastic questions and ideas. Is this commonly -- -common language throughout the Facebook analytics community? Where is -this from. ->> Out of my head. ->> I'll try to write it as a blog post. ->> First conversational posts. In terms of the Boston Globes, -when you mention the Red Sox, people are like yeah. The next is -missed conversation. They're about politics and other things. People -don't share, don't comment, don't like. They're just like bombs that -go down. -Most shareable. Shareable things about social media are social. -You want to socialize with your peers through stories. And then of -course concerts and fashion and then -- they're very sociable and show -the best side of yourself. You may have another self online and also - - - - -the red Sox because it's positive and you would like to share good -news and also Paris Hilton, like gossip, I want to talk about with my -friends. -And then least shareable things are very often negative. -Allegations about a murder suspect. Accused of lying, guilty, -charges, justice and suspicion. When you have negative words people -don't want to share it. -Most likeable posts. They are very, very positive but there are -some subtle difference between the likeable stories and shareable -stories. Like is a cheap commodity on Facebook. Comment you have to -write. And share you have to click and share. Like is another -phenomenon on Facebook. Red Sox winning streak, losing streak. -That's the pattern of likeables. -The most tantalizing or the least information. Serious car crash -and what. Your have to click. And then critically acclaimed and then -you have to click. And 10 fastest or growing and declining. -This is kind of like (inaudible) you have to just keep in mind -this promise. -And find one near you. You have to click it. And no longer post -job listings. Why. That is weird. The story is not on Facebook. -And top things you have to do. That's not on Facebook. -Least tantalizing. That means the information is incomplete. -Which company, this company, what's the price, that's the price. Why -is it necessary to click the link. -This is the last two slides for the metrics. -Most diffused posts. People want to share it. That means reach -a lot of nonfans. Nonfans means they're not necessarily in Boston or -in the region. Because the Boston Globe is still a local newspaper. -That means if you cover some national news or international news, -other people will also pay attention to sex tape star. That is like -an international star. Red Sox and this is a game between two teams. -Fans from the other team would also pay attention to the story. The -wonder years. These are all names. Famous not only in Boston but in -the state, the country, and the world. That is why you have this -story diffused more than the others. -The least diffused means they are really favored by the fans. -Red Sox. That's the pattern. -Here we have the question of a social sharing dilemma and the -strategy. If you want to cater to core readers but nonfans may not -like the story. That is one problem. Another problem is either you -want engagement on Facebook or actually you want to get people to your -own website. That's another question. -And also you want to share some bad news in order to attract -attention. Or you want to share good news to attract likes and -shares. That is another dilemma. -Also we need to understand that we have to give the context to -the news stories. Stories perform differently. How we can give -appropriate credit to our journalists. -Last year this is a graduation where I wrote this post. The -previous metrics are mostly based on this post. I tried to quantify - - - - -the issues I was covering in this post? ->> I never noticed that picture. It's a nice picture. ->> Thank you. ->> After hearing about those metrics, do you have any ideas for -your own metrics? Likes, shares, any combination of things? Yes -please. ->> You left, well maybe it's not available on insights but which -people use Facebook is to get participatory creation. Post your -photos and we'll put them in this bank. ->> We don't do that at the globe. That's the short answer. ->> Other things you might be interested in. ->> I've noticed that base book recently offered insights into -video. Like how many segments people have watched. Some newsrooms -post a lot of video. You should check the time span. How much people -watch through this video. -And another thing is photo, photo views. Not only clicks but -photo views. Those things also would matter? ->> Know at some point you said you were trying to track when -people clicked the most? ->> Yes. ->> Have you gotten any farther in that? ->> I tried to analyze the data. I benefited from Brian's code. -The code to grab data every ten minutes and I built something upon it. -It's not only about Facebook but also You Tube. If a story takes up -within the first two or three hours you can see a sharp jump. And -probably the story will ... Later. If it doesn't take off, that will -just -- it will never take off. The same for You Tube. -The first jump is really important. Another thing is if you -share a story, it doesn't jump and you have confidence in the story, -this should be a popular story. Maybe you didn't share it right or -with the right picture or language on Facebook and try again after a -few hours. After a few hours it's almost like a new story. Facebook -would bury older stories? ->> Do they dock if you post the same link? ->> If it's too fast, yes. After a few hours it's okay. If the -story didn't talk off, base book will bury it any way. ->> One interesting metric that I experimented with at the -Guardian was you can get at the filtering based off of some of the -metrics that are on Facebook insights. So some posts are filtered out -more often. Facebook will hide them from more people and other posts -get shared with more people. ->> That's why the first couple of hours is really important. -Facebook I don't think has that kind of sophisticated algorithm to -recognize (inaudible) so what it depends on is people's behavior. If -a lot of people click share and like, Facebook goes that is -interesting and gives it a higher ranking to the story. That is -- -it's like self-reinforced and it goes up. ->> What I heard is Facebook, the way they handle it is to show -your post to a small subset of people that see your page. And -depending on how it performs in that small sample size, Facebook will - - - - -dictate how it disseminates it to your larger page audience. ->> There is a -- information flow there. At the first step only -the fans will see the story. ->> Only a small subset of those fans. ->> It depends on how many people are online at the moment. There -are many factors. That is why you should first look at the curve of -the fans online numbers and then decide which is the best hour for -you. ->> Cool. Thank you so much ...(applause)... -Stijn, what do you think. Should we break out. Should I talk -about Twitter? ->> Yes, I'm looking forward to it. ->> I didn't prepare much of anything but just talk about my -strategy working with Twitter and a couple of things I have learned. -I spend a lot of time working with the Twitter API. Whether it -be for work. -Twitter's API at least when we're talking about getting sort of -analytics-like data, I'm not going to go into how you make a bot or -Tweet. I'm going to talk about strategies you can use for getting -more value out of Twitter. -The first thing that is the coolest thing and Sam talked about -doing this is the streaming API. -What the streaming API lets you do is lets you search for -anything someone is sharing on Twitter in realtime. You can subscribe -as a feed and get every relevant Tweet. -There's some limitations to that. If you search for nothing, you -get 1 percent of everything on Twitter which is probably too much for -your computer to even handle. But if you search for something that -represents less than 1 percent you get everything that matches that -search term. -The easiest thing to do is doing like domain mentions. How does -this work? Well, you don't actually -- you can't actually search with -a period or like a slash on Twitter. So what you do is you create a -search term that looks like this. Say I was looking for NY times. -It's NY times space, com. You can get to the idea that this Tweet -will have NY times and com in it. If you're interested in the short -link you do NYTI MS. ->> Using a period -- am I doing something wrong? ->> It doesn't pay attention to the period. ->> If it ignores it, it's the same. ->> Yes. The problem with this, the problems is that there are -times that people use Bitly links. If they shorten it as a T code -link, the default Twitter link, you can search within that link. Even -if it shows up on the front end as T code blah, blah, blah, if you -search for NY times it will code that. If you search for a Bitly link -or whatever, you can't search for that. You can say give me every -Bitly link, too, and I'll figure out what to do with it later. You -might then go over 1 percent. -The other way -- obviously then you can search for anything you -want. You can search for mentions of your organization. The great - - - - -thing is then you can store this and analyze it after the fact. The -other thing is just a search. So you can do the same exact thing here -except in this case you can go backwards. So you can -- you say back -fill mentions of domains or something. You use the same syntax here. ->> That doesn't go back that far, does it? ->> I forget what the limits are. You can go back pretty far. It -might be up to like 1500. I'm not sure. I can't remember that. -One thing that I really like doing is working with lists. ->> Why would you do back fill instead of Topsy? ->> Topsy doesn't exist anymore. You don't have to pay. We're -doing free Twitter. You want to pay you can go to a licensed -provider. The biggest challenge with Twitter is trying to get data -from two years ago or something. We won't have to worry about that -when the library of congress gets involved. -Does anyone realize every time you Tweet that is going to the -library of congress. Everyone is in the library of congress now? ->> It's on tape. ->> Like micro film. I can go and look up my Tweets on micro -film. ->> They are not allowed to work with anyone externally on it. -You don't have to worry about that so much for now but it's all there. ->> The other thing I like doing with Twitter are lists. Lists -are cool because they're a nice hack for getting a lot of information -from Twitter without hitting the API limits. The way lists work is -you can have a bunch of users, right, and you can put them in a list. -And any time you want to get any Tweet from any user, that equals one -API call. -And I think the limits are that you can have as a user 2,000 -lists of 5,000 members. Which means you can get -- what is that -100,000? A million. I only do counting not multiplication. -That means like if I wanted to get every one of those users, I -would make a million API calls and now I only have to make 2,000 API -calls. So that's one reason it's cool. -The other reason it's cool is you can get this idea of -communities. So a lot of the hard work has been done here. There are -lists out there that people have created. Like journalists or every -journalist at The New York Times or every member of congress or -- I -don't know, every important person in the climate change scene. That -way you get an idea who are these communities of people. And then if -you team it up with like this sort of stuff, right, you can be like -when are people in congress Tweeting my articles. When are people in -the climate change community Tweeting my articles. -And that gets at something more valuable than just like a number. -It can give you sort of something more meaningful. -That's basically it. You can also get a whole user's time line -but I would recommend going with this. -The API rate limits are every 15 minutes you can do 180 calls. -So that boils down to I think like one call per 10 seconds. -And then what you have to do is you have a script, you have to -sleep for whenever your rate limit is met. But the library that I - - - - -wrote for working with this stuff is (trailed off ...) ->> What did you write it in? ->> Python. That is basically it. Any questions? Any things -that people have wondered about Twitter? The other thing is URL -unshortening is the absolute hardest thing. What you literally have -to do is you have to recursively open the URL until it doesn't look -like a short URL any more and that is a slow and error-prone process. -My library does that too. ->> What's the name of your library? ->> Bird feeder. It's on the news links repo. ->> You can use pearl for one line and shorten it. The creator of -pearl just put a comment -- blah, blah, blah and then space. Space in -the protocol is the last part of the URL that you use for that -request. The URL is based on the code. So the status code is not -200. It's 300 something, temporarily removed or redistricted. ->> I use the location header. That works. And it's not as heavy -as downloading a whole page. -Any other questions? ->> How do you translate this to editors? ->> We're just talking about getting the data. Things I do with -this ... Like being able to archive every single share of your -contact. Super useful. You can search through them. Sam has done -counts. ->> I was using it for a little while and the benefit wasn't that -great. But I set it up to match it up with each post and we knew who -the author was of each article and every author can log in and get a -list of all the Tweets that mentioned all of their articles. It's -before we had an annotation system. Twitter was the comments. And -then you could go on there and reply to people on Twitter. You can -add a watch list. ->> You can use Tweepdash to do this. The problem of course is -that data is gone. You don't store it anywhere. -The other thing that I like doing with Twitter, working off of -lists and also users is doing stuff like if you have a list of every -journalist in your newsroom, you can know how much your own -journalists are sharing your content. Which is I think a really -important approach because especially for something like courts. -Because so much traffic is being driven by social, if you have a team -of journalists, those are like, that is like your street team. It's -like a bunch of people that can go share your content. And when I was -working at The New York Times looking at that, it turns out that was -superimportant for how an article ultimately performed. Not even just -did the main account with 8 million followers share it, but did Chris -share it and all these other people share it and if those people share -other articles they would get traffic, too. -That is a nice way of extracting a little more value out of -Twitter than what is readily apparent? ->> That was part of the innovation report. They found out, they -wanted their journalists to share more than they were actually -sharing. - - - ->> And interact with users and stuff like that. Be kind of, I -don't know, spokes people for the organization. Okay. -On that note maybe let's start hacking if people aren't already -exhausted. We have like an hour? ->> More like half an hour. ->> No, it's 5:30. ->> So I mean I know Sam has something he is interested in. Who -likes codes and wants to learn some stuff right now? ->> Can we have a five minute break? ->> Yes. I want to know beforehand, if there's not many people -who code and don't want to work on stuff, then we'll figure out, maybe -let's figure out what's the most amazing way we can combine everything -we learned today into the super-dashboard of the future. ->> That's my dream. We should have a dashboard. ->> Of the future. ->> Let's take a break and come back and we'll do that. - - - - -Break - - - - -(doing individual work ...) -I guess we're kind of done. Thank you all for coming. - +Own your analytics +Session facilitator(s): Brian Abelson, Michael Keller, Stijn Debrouwere +Day & Time: Friday, 3-5:30pm +Room: Garden 1 + +> > I think we're pretty full. If you want to talk from up here +> > and point at me when you want to switch. That's fine. +> > Maybe I'll give some background. +> > Welcome. This is own your analytics. Myself, Stijn and Michael +> > are currently working on a project with the Tau center at Columbia +> > we're calling news links and the idea is in part to create a suite of +> > open source tools and web interface for working with analytic data. +> > Sort of with the idea of investigative nonprofit news organizations, +> > sort of at the forefront. So there is more qualitative stuff that is +> > going to be incorporated but more generally anyone that wants to know +> > how their articles are performing, who is sharing them, where they're +> > getting linked to and from can sort of benefit from this. +> > I guess what the context for this session is that we've been +> > working with these tools on our own for, you know, many years now, I +> > don't know how long you've been doing analytic stuff. But myself at +> > least for two or three years. We're hoping to share some of that +> > knowledge with you, at least the gotchas and at the same time also +> > sort of help you think about all the possibilities that are out there +> > for learning more about your content by combining lots of different +> > APIs and that's the idea of own your analytics is not just rely on a +> > single, you know, not just rely on Google Analytics or rely on +> > Facebook insights or your Tweetdeck or whatever, but to be able to +> > combine them in intelligent ways and start to learn things that you're +> > interested in. So actually answer the questions that you're curious +> > about. +> > We also have Sonia here with us. She is our resident Facebook +> > insights expert. So she'll be talking about that data and the cool +> > things that she's done with it. The format is going to be, Stijn is +> > going to talk generally about stuff and then specifically about Google +> > Analytics. Sort of the different terminology, because it can be very +> > hard to grasp at first. Sonia is going to walk through Facebook +> > stuff. I'm going to talk very quickly about Twitter. I don't have +> > slides but just the things you can do with it and the most difficult +> > aspects of working with the Twitter API. +> > And then hopefully we're just going to maybe break out into +> > groups and we're pretty small. But the idea is to start playing +> > around with snippets of code we have or we can help you write your own +> > stuff and if you have access to your organization's Google Analytics +> > account, we can help you start to pull that data in. If you have +> > access to your organization's Facebook account and have insights +> > privilege, we can help you start working with that. And then also +> > Twitter stuff and then maybe even start to brainstorm how we can +> > combine these things together and what cool things we can do it with +> > whether it's alert systems or dash boards or just sort of ad hoc +> > analyses. + +We have some data that we've already collected, too. Michael? + +> > We're doing a research project, building this platform which +> > we're looking for beta testers for. We have some newsrooms +> > interested. You can go to news LYNX like the cat and there is a +> > survey there about the organization and you can fill that out and that +> > would be awesome. Etherpad.Mozilla.org, SRCCON ... +> > Here. Let's write this up here. +> > Etherpad.Mozilla.org/SRCCON/analytics. +> > I managed to download your stuff but thankfully ... (talking +> > amongst themselves). +> > Sorry for the delay in getting started. Like Brian said this +> > is own your analytics. It's sort of at a basic level, getting access +> > to the data and being able to export it. It's more out of owning your +> > data at a more fundamental level. What is annoying or what really +> > frustrates me about how people handle their analytic software is +> > instead of asking themselves what kind of data do I really need? What +> > kind of metrics do I really need? Most people log into their analytic +> > software and look at the numbers that are there and assuming that's +> > what's important just because it's there. +> > And the interesting thing is that the more you actually look sort +> > of one level deeper and you look at what kind of data is available in +> > all of these tools and all of the different tools that are available, +> > the more you get to ask yourself sort of more questions at a more +> > fundamental level like what kind of questions am I really asking? And +> > what kind of tools do I need to get them. +> > I think understanding these APIs is like a really sort of basic +> > skill that will help you sort of -- well -- think at that more +> > fundamental level about what you want to use your analytics for. +> > This is the part that we're still working on. +> > We'll do it later, man. Just get through. +> > There are already four of these sticks here. People who want +> > to code, there is some example packages, Python packages if you're a +> > Python programmer on there. That would be interesting. Also some +> > documentation and stuff, that would be useful. +> > We're using the memory sticks. +> > Inside the memory sticks are virtual machines with all the +> > dependencies built in and the vagrant distribution, right. So I don't +> > know if anyone's used vagrant. It's all documented, right, how to set +> > it up? +> > Yes, pretty much. +> > So basically for people that are not that interested in coding, +> > that's fine, too. What I'll start with -- I don't know how long it's +> > going to take but I figured between 15 and 30 minutes talking about +> > how the Google Analytics site works that is at a conceptual level +> > because there is a lot of terminology and stuff. That is really +> > useful to know if you want to use other analytics tools. +> > And after that we'll get more into, well, what can we actually do +> > now that we have this data and how can we combine data from different +> > APIs and how can we use these APIs? So at that point there's sort of +> > three options. One is we'll be at the end of the hour so you can + +switch to a different session. Or you can start coding. Or the third +option is we can split up into groups and there can be groups that do +brainstorming and think about alternative metrics and those things +without necessarily coding them up. +But for those people that do want to code, we'll be here on hand +to help you out with that and troubleshoot. +We can skip over this actually. If the only thing you want from +your analytics is to get the data up, then most analytics tools have a +big export button. And that's actually a great way to get started. +Even though it sounds stupid but the thing is getting started with the +Google Analytics APIs and some of these different APIs it takes a +while. It takes a few days to really get up to speed but we're going +to try to kick start that process. +To get started, for example in Google analytics you construct +your query to get what you need and export it. When you quickly need +the data but the interface is too limited in how it allows you to +present that data, you have the right data but you want to display it +in a different way or different context, the export buttons are really +good. +That is not what we're going to talk about because we want to use +those APIs. +What are some of the advantages of using the APIs over using the +export buttons? I think there are sort of three main advantages. +It's mainly about sort of expanding the range of analysis. Most of +the analytics tools that you'll see and certainly Google Analytics, I +call it general awareness. Like you log into it and see some numbers. +Last week these were my page views, et cetera. And they're fine for +that. But if you want to do anything out of that sort of comfort zone +of what the user interface allows, then you're going to get into +trouble and that's when you want to use the API. +One is maybe you want to go deeper and drill deeper in the data +and combine it with other datasets. That is when you want to use an +API. Another one is maybe you want to analyze years worth of data. +Also when you probably want to get that data from the API. But also +sometimes you want stuff to just work really fast and for example +based on your analytics data you maybe want the change how your home +page looks or send out an alert to an editor or something. You can +have a script running that every 5 minutes or every 10 minutes checks +your analytics data and based off that sends out those alerts or +updates the dash board or stuff like that. +In those casings you don't want to be in the user interface of +Google Analytics every five minutes. No. You have a script that does +it for you. +The thing is in the interface it's really easy to sort of click +on buttons until you sort of have what you need. With the API you +really do need a mental model of how the data is stored before you can +get started because you need to transform your question to a query. +And yeah, that's what we'll be talking about. +So the first thing that is interesting is well, lets' start at +the very start, how does Google Analytics store data? And again, I'm + +going to continue to talk about Google Analytics but 99 percent of +this applies to pretty much any other analytics tool that you will +find, stuff like mixed panel. +So you visit a page. Mauves you have probably sort of added +Google Analytics to a website so you know that you have to install -- +well, install, add this tracking code to your page. What that does, +every time someone visits that page, that little -- I guess it's a +pretty big script, the Google Analytics runs and what it does is it +will -- first it will register your visit. +There's three parts to it. One is, does Google Analytics know +you. Has it ever seen you before? If not, it will sort of in its +system log you as a user. So it will log you as a new user. If it +has seen you before it will associate your page view that was just +logged with your user. The second thing is there is not just a user +but a session. A session is not necessarily since you last opened +your browser. I think it's limited to have you been on the site in +the last 15 minutes or something like that. +If you haven't been, it will count that as a new session. A new +browsing session on that website. It will log that. And all of your +next page views during that session will be associated with that +session. So a lot of the interesting queries you can do with Google +Analytics are based on this idea of how many pages did someone visit +within a session or did someone within a session first go to this page +and then to that page? How many people did that? +And so there are those three levels. One is the event level. +The main event being the page view. But Google Analytics supports +many different types of events and you can add your own eventers. If +you want to add a bit of tracking code so every time someone click ons +a button or every time someone scrolls beyond a thousand pixels you +can register that as an event with Google Analytics. +So that's really interesting to do that custom tracking. But the +default tracking is page views. Every time you visit a page that is +registered as a page event. There is the event level and then the +session and the user levels. Those are the main ones. +Alongside those events, an event is not just one little piece of +data. It's not just like, hey, this is a page view. No, there is all +sorts of meta data associated with it. There is the user and the +session that is associated with it. But really many other things can +be associated with it as well. And even you can add custom variables +in Google Analytics so you can add your own data to these events. +In the database an event will be stored as a single row and it +will have all that meta data on it. Then we get to metrics. What is +a metric. A metric is a type of calculation or descriptive statistics +of an event. For example just your count of page views, the +calculation that is happening is you're counting all of your page +views. If your average pages per user per session, if that's 3 and a +half, well then that somehow had to be calculated off of these events. +So that is a metric. A page view is an event. Today's page views is +a metric or the average page views per session is a metric. +That is important terminology as well. + +Now dimensions are sort of we talked before about the fact that +alongside an event, the main event being a page view you can store all +sorts of other meta data. One of the key pieces of meta data is the +date. Actually for every page view you need to know when did it +happen. So those are dimensions. All of those pieces of meta data. +Then there's segments. Segments are groups and they can be +groups of people, groups of users or they can be groups of sessions. +And one of the main ways that you filter the data. +The interesting thing to note about them is that they're not +exclusive. If you do a query in Google Analytics, you can have many, +many segments and those segments can all be overlapping. For example +a segment can be all of your users that are visiting from the United +States. That is a segment of your users. +Now segments are again, they can be user segment or session +segments but they're not event segments. They don't filter at that +level. That is why there is a separate kind of filtering that also +exists and that is called filters. +Those filters, the difference between a filter and a segment is a +filter filters at the individual row level. The individual event +level. First, your segments and then you have faster piece of +filtering and that's your filters. +Two other key terms are aggregation and sampling. The main thing +to know and a lot of people bitch about Google Analytics because all +of the metrics are aggregated metrics meaning they're calculations +that happen on all of these individual rows, all of these individual +page views and you never really get access to each individual event. +No, you only get access to the resulting calculations. So they're +aggregated measures. +And the second thing about Google Analytics is to speed things up +it will do those calculations not on the entire dataset but on a +sample of that dataset a lot of the time. It just makes the +calculations faster and really you don't really lose that much detail. +So the thing about this kind terminology or this kind of mental +model is that it really applies to almost any analytics package. If +you think about ChartBeat, they have basically the same way of storing +data. With Google Analytics sometimes you have to wait a couple of +hours before the data comes in. With ChartBeat you get it live. +Some kind of analytics are defined by what they don't have. +Facebook insights data. If you worked with it. You have a huge bunch +of numbers but no way to filter it or segment it by users beyond the +segments that Facebook provided for you. Even though people bitch +about Google Analytics you have a fancy filtering. You don't get +those with Facebook. +Some analytics software is different because it allows you to go +beyond the aggregates. With mixed panel you can run queries where you +ask what users haven't visited the site for a week and now give me +their e-mail addresses for logged in users, of course. And you can +have those individual e-mail addresses and based off those you can +reactivate those users by sending them an e-mail. You haven't visited +in a while. What's up? + +Some of them are more flexible. And Heap and Keen are events +tracking systems. They have the same structure as Google Analytics +but more flexible reporting. Or AB testing. That is the same kind of +analytics again. The only exception is you do it against different +variants of the page or different variants of a title for an article. +Search logs are a kind of analytic too. They are a different +event. Instead of the page view eventer it's a search event. And +sometimes it's just the terminology. +I don't know if some people here use Adobe Omniture at work. If +you do I'll be happy to help you out with that later. Instead of +talking about dimensions to specify that meta data they talk about +elements. It's the same thing. +That's sort of a basic overview. +I guess my main piece of advice would be what I've seen so many +people do is they decide too soon that the free or cheap tools or +tools they're already using which a lot of the times is Google +Analytics because it's free, it's not enough and people search for +different tools that maybe make things easier for them. I think a +good strategy is to really try to get as much as you can out of Google +Analytics until you're really getting really, really frustrated and +really think you're not going to be able to get the data out of there +you need. And then think about there may be other tools that can do a +better job. +If you approach it that way you'll have a better idea of what you +need from those other tools. When you go to the feature pages of +analytics too, X, Y or Z you know I absolutely need this feature +because this has been blocking me for the past month in Google +Analytics and I cannot get that data out of it. +You'll be much better informed if you keep a little bit of that +frustration in there. +The second thing is think about return on investment because a +lot of these analytics tools are really, really expensive and a lot of +news organizations are experimenting with using five or six different +ones and the cost adds up. Why do you have these analytics? Because +you want a return on them. You want more users or more engaged users +and whatnot. You need to make a return on that investment and very +often you don't. +So on these memory sticks for people who want to use them, +there's some data that we've been using from various organizations. +There is some data from the guardian on there. Some data from the +Boston Globe that Sonia brought. Some other pieces of data. But I +guess a more interesting thing and what I hopefully most of you are +here is because you want to do something with your own data. +So that's sort of up to you. And I guess -- + +> > Can we get a quick show of hands how many people have access +> > to their Google Analytics account who want to play with that today? +> > No? Does anyone have access to their Facebook account and has +> > insights? Wow. That's interesting. +> > Why -- I'm curious now. Wait ... +> > We don't really use Google Analytics. We have Omniture. + +> > We have Omniture, too. +> > Any data not just -- you have Omniture. Would you like to +> > play with that data. +> > That is why you get the data out of Omniture. +> > I spent most of last year working at the guardian's Omniture +> > as well. It's a really ugly API to use but because of that, I spent +> > some time creating an API wrapper around it. So you can actually sort +> > of access the data in a fairly clean way. You may have to sort of +> > revisit it. +> > So I'd be happy to show that. Although we'll do that on an +> > individual level. People can work on what they want to work on. +> > So yeah, if you want to use your data and we hope you do, there +> > are two ways. One, you can export it if you want to do analysis in +> > excel and stuff. We can help you with that. Or we can troubleshoot +> > you as you try to get access to, for example the Google Analytics API, +> > well I guess nobody here wants to do that. +> > Or Omniture we can also help you get logged into that. +> > So yeah, everyone can sort of work individually the kind of data +> > they want. Whether you want to use the user interfaces or whether you +> > want to use the APIs or whether you want to use our data. Or if you +> > don't want to code, you don't feel like coding or you're not a coder, +> > then I think it would be great if there was a group or multiple groups +> > that can just do brainstorming around what kind of metrics do we need +> > in our newsrooms and what are we not getting? +> > We're small so maybe everyone can go around and give a 20 or +> > 30 second spiel on why they're here, what they're interested in doing, +> > and what they need help with. We'll start over here with you. +> > I'm Sam. I'm at courts (ph.). I worked on a bunch of +> > different projects. I've been playing -- we don't have much in the +> > way of our own dash board at check out or anything like that. We've +> > been using ChartBeat. That is all they use. And then I've been +> > trying to put in a few extra things. I have a data display with +> > Tweets per hour. I have a Tweet that mentions courts. Parcels out +> > the ID of the link, you know or the post. And then match that up with +> > your data and calculates Tweets per hour for any of our articles. +> > So I would love to do the same thing with Facebook but I have not +> > found an easy way to do that? +> > To find everyone mentioning Facebook. +> > Likes per hour or something like that? +> > We can help you with that. +> > That would be awesome. +> > One thing that Stijn has built that will go into our project +> > is you can talk about it, it's called Pollster. It takes a stream of +> > URLs and counts up how many times they're being shared across many net +> > works. Twitter, Facebook, REVIT, dig. +> > Is it for all articles that are posted? +> > Yes. +> > Any URL. +> > You give it a feed of articles and it follows that and keeps +> > tracking it for two weeks after publication. + +> > That is what I was playing with. Facebook, I can't get every +> > share. +> > Although Michael and I were just told about something, crowd +> > tangle. Crowd tangle. And apparently they can give you a sense of +> > the actual pages that you're content is showing up on. +> > Keep going around. +> > I'm Allison, I work at academics center at Princeton +> > university and we're looking to ramp up the accessibility of digital +> > work we have. Part of the reason we haven't been paying attention to +> > analytics, we wanted to find out who our audience is and segment it +> > out and understand more about what we can do given that information. +> > Great. What is your site like? +> > It's pretty bad. +> > Do you post content or is it like a service? +> > We'll be posting -- there's some content from courses and +> > articles, PDFs. +> > Cool. All right. Keep going. +> > I work for the international center for journalists. We're a +> > nonprofit based in D.C. We have a sister website that is published in +> > 7 languages. We wanted -- we're going to be (inaudible) we've been +> > talking about it. We just want to know more like my dream would be to +> > have a tool that would tell me, I feed it a link and I would know when +> > it was shared, where, and then I can get it all, the metrics that are +> > important to me in one place. +> > We do Twitter searches, we search all the search media accounts +> > and whatnot but it's not as easy as having it all in one place? +> > Yes. Great. +> > I am Ringo and I work for the ICIDA. I have been working with +> > ETLs -- extraction ... +> > Okay. +> > And the ETL that I am using has some components to extract +> > data from the Google Analytics. I wanted to know what question can I +> > do? +> > We can help you with that. +> > Mostly I'm curious about which ... But I don't know anything +> > about the statistics anywhere. +> > I like to call what I do advanced applied counting. +> > Jessica Clark. I'm a media strategist so I need to know how +> > to work with my clients who are documentary film makers. I'm tracking +> > new impact tools at media impact wonders. +> > We've talked before. It's nice to meet you in person. I'm +> > sorry, hi. Michael is back there, too. +> > I'm here just to listen and learn. +> > Okay. +> > I am Adrian from Boston Globe. And I'm here -- it was just an +> > intellectual curiosity about what you've been working on. I also +> > manage a site at the globe called BC wired. It would be cool to get +> > better understanding of that. And I manage commenting and forums and +> > user engagement. So it would be nice to also start looking at how our +> > engagement has been changing over time. We went through a redesign + +and everybody hates it of course. But they -- but our comments have +gone up even though we lost a huge percentage of our readership. It's +an anomaly that we have to look into. It would be nice not to log my +questions to the analytics team. + +> > I'm Jeff. I run a group a called the American press +> > institute. We work with publishers on innovation issues. We built +> > some sort of metric software that helps publishers track this stuff at +> > the story level and pull it up in new ways. We're pulling Google +> > Analytics and only the social APIs. I'm generally curious are there +> > other things I can add to this mix. We're making this cocktail of +> > metrics from different places. +> > I have one particularly weird Omniture bug that I'm trying to +> > figure out that no one else will care about but I'll ask you? +> > Stijn can probably help. +> > My name is Fergus. We work with impact and metrics. These +> > guys are working on part of this. That is primarily why I'm here. +> > My name is Allison and I work -- I'm a web developer and I +> > work at the front line club and we underutilize our analytics +> > packages. We run 200 events open to the public every year and we +> > don't pay attention to engagement on our website. I'd like to learn +> > to hack around a bit with analytics. +> > I'm having horrible problems with my wireless. I can't get on +> > the network. If anybody is a networking GURU and wants to help me? +> > Is that a general problem. Does no one have wifi? +> > It's been coming and going. Working with APIs without the +> > internet. That is fun. +> > Maybe Sonia, would you want to start. +> > I wanted to get a sense of where we're at. There are some +> > people interested in Google. +> > Sonia is going to talk about Facebook stuff. Sonia was an open +> > news fellow last year with Stijn and I at the Boston Globe and did +> > incredible work with Facebook. +> > Another one is stories added. That means you may have (lost +> > internet connection). +> > (lost internet connection). +> > You can export 400 or 500 rows each time. If the newsroom +> > publishes a lot, it can only get ten days of data. If you use API +> > it's almost unlimited. You can get dates and all the posts from those +> > dates. +> > And the other is face query language. I can show you how to use +> > that later? +> > Aren't they getting rid of that with the version 2.0? +> > I just tried it. +> > I don't know if it's been depreciated. +> > I just tried it. +> > It works now but I was thinking ... +> > For a while it didn't work. +> > For the next year it's going to work and then it's ... +> > As long as you have it. +> > There are two typings of insights, one is page insights and + +the other is post insights. Have you ever played with those two? Let +me try to distinguish them. Post insights is once you post something +there is a comments likes about this one post when the post was +published. +The page insights is aggregate. For you page you get 1 million +page views today or 100 comments today. It's highly aggregated. The +good thing about the insights you would have a better sense of your +audience. Where are they from? Or even in the city, say Texas or +Massachusetts. Or how many of the fans are online. They added that +last June. If you map out the curve, say if you try to divide the +fans per hour by the total fan number, you can get the percentage. +For instance during a peak you may have 30 percent of the fans online. +Following your advice you have to think about the session. Maybe it's +50 minutes or 30. No matter what that is a rough sense. If you're in +the peak you have 30 percent of your fans online. And then at night +you may have 10 percent but generally day after day it's a big curve? + +> > Here I gave you some sense about very simple metrics combining +> > raw data. When I look online very often people talk about +> > conversational ratio. +> > Can you say the different between likes, shares, comments and +> > impressions as base book defines them. +> > Impressions are the unique, either it's unique or absolutely +> > total means I'm a very passionate user of Facebook. I will be counted +> > ten times a day. That will be, I get ten impressions of this +> > particular page today. +> > If you talk about unique user, I'm counted as only one user. I +> > don't contribute to that part. If you want to know, am I building up +> > my audience you look at a unique user. You see a rise or a decline. +> > But if you want to know if some of the stories are really popular or +> > not, you look at the total impressions. +> > Maybe some people, okay, I left a comment and want to come back +> > to debate with people. Then you look at impressions. +> > And also, likes, shares, and comments are just numbers. You can +> > see on the surface of Facebook, it's public. Not only you but +> > everybody can see it. The impressions you need the privilege with +> > Facebook insights. +> > Suppose you can see the number of impressions. And then if you +> > divide like, shares and comments with it, you can get a ratio. Very +> > often impressions can be one million or those can be one or two +> > hundred, at the most one thousand most of the time. And some people +> > give a name. That is conversational ratio. Even though this story +> > has reached a lot of people, are people engaged. +> > That is why some of you have mentioned that you want to +> > understand how people are engaged in some stories and then the next +> > question would be, why some stories are more engaging than others. +> > Next metric I want to talk about is diffusion ratio. There is a +> > dilemma here. Say the Boston Globe, I talked to associate editors +> > over there and a woman says go Sox. That works. You cater to your +> > core readers well. But a problem is nonfans wouldn't say go Sox. +> > They don't care about the story. The diffusion ratio will tell you + +how many new readers you will get with this story. +Suppose you have the privilege, you can use the number of nonfans +impression divided by the total impression. I have this much amount +of impressions, part of it is from the fans and the other part is from +the nonfans. The nonfans are potential fans the next day. You want +to get a lot of them as well. +But if we -- so definitely this is less than one. If we use one +and then minus that ratio, you can get a shareable this story is. +Shareable ratio. We calculate this because sometimes some stories are +controversial but not sociable. On social media people share a story +that are very positive that will show your best side of yourself. Say +it's about fashion, fine art, interesting things, cool devices. So +people will share that. But if it's controversial, people will stay +within the post and comment on it. +We can measure the shareable ratio. Then another one is +likeable. Sometimes there is kind of like sentiment conflict. If +it's about disaster or war or murder, have often people say I cannot +like it. Even though I think the story is right, I just cannot like +it. +We will see some examples next. +Again, we tried to divide likes with engagement. Engagement is a +raw number given by Facebook. How many people have pegged this post +anywhere. That is engagement. +And another one this is a funny name. Tantalizing ratio. I +think that's funny. It's a link click. Link clicks is within the +insights. Divided by total clicks. +Sometimes it's a story, think about Huffington or Boston, five +things you should do in Philadelphia. Ten whatever, one hundred +whatever. That means the information is not complete on Facebook. +But they give you a -- if you click it, I'll let you see something. +But I'll never give you a full picture. That is why it's called +tantalizing. People say, that's interesting, I'm going to click it. +If you reverse it that is information completeness. How complete +the information is. If you publish a score of a game, two to one, +somebody won and somebody didn't. People won't click it. Why do you +click it, people know the result? + +> > These are fantastic questions and ideas. Is this commonly -- +> > common language throughout the Facebook analytics community? Where is +> > this from. +> > Out of my head. +> > I'll try to write it as a blog post. +> > First conversational posts. In terms of the Boston Globes, +> > when you mention the Red Sox, people are like yeah. The next is +> > missed conversation. They're about politics and other things. People +> > don't share, don't comment, don't like. They're just like bombs that +> > go down. +> > Most shareable. Shareable things about social media are social. +> > You want to socialize with your peers through stories. And then of +> > course concerts and fashion and then -- they're very sociable and show +> > the best side of yourself. You may have another self online and also + +the red Sox because it's positive and you would like to share good +news and also Paris Hilton, like gossip, I want to talk about with my +friends. +And then least shareable things are very often negative. +Allegations about a murder suspect. Accused of lying, guilty, +charges, justice and suspicion. When you have negative words people +don't want to share it. +Most likeable posts. They are very, very positive but there are +some subtle difference between the likeable stories and shareable +stories. Like is a cheap commodity on Facebook. Comment you have to +write. And share you have to click and share. Like is another +phenomenon on Facebook. Red Sox winning streak, losing streak. +That's the pattern of likeables. +The most tantalizing or the least information. Serious car crash +and what. Your have to click. And then critically acclaimed and then +you have to click. And 10 fastest or growing and declining. +This is kind of like (inaudible) you have to just keep in mind +this promise. +And find one near you. You have to click it. And no longer post +job listings. Why. That is weird. The story is not on Facebook. +And top things you have to do. That's not on Facebook. +Least tantalizing. That means the information is incomplete. +Which company, this company, what's the price, that's the price. Why +is it necessary to click the link. +This is the last two slides for the metrics. +Most diffused posts. People want to share it. That means reach +a lot of nonfans. Nonfans means they're not necessarily in Boston or +in the region. Because the Boston Globe is still a local newspaper. +That means if you cover some national news or international news, +other people will also pay attention to sex tape star. That is like +an international star. Red Sox and this is a game between two teams. +Fans from the other team would also pay attention to the story. The +wonder years. These are all names. Famous not only in Boston but in +the state, the country, and the world. That is why you have this +story diffused more than the others. +The least diffused means they are really favored by the fans. +Red Sox. That's the pattern. +Here we have the question of a social sharing dilemma and the +strategy. If you want to cater to core readers but nonfans may not +like the story. That is one problem. Another problem is either you +want engagement on Facebook or actually you want to get people to your +own website. That's another question. +And also you want to share some bad news in order to attract +attention. Or you want to share good news to attract likes and +shares. That is another dilemma. +Also we need to understand that we have to give the context to +the news stories. Stories perform differently. How we can give +appropriate credit to our journalists. +Last year this is a graduation where I wrote this post. The +previous metrics are mostly based on this post. I tried to quantify + +the issues I was covering in this post? + +> > I never noticed that picture. It's a nice picture. +> > Thank you. +> > After hearing about those metrics, do you have any ideas for +> > your own metrics? Likes, shares, any combination of things? Yes +> > please. +> > You left, well maybe it's not available on insights but which +> > people use Facebook is to get participatory creation. Post your +> > photos and we'll put them in this bank. +> > We don't do that at the globe. That's the short answer. +> > Other things you might be interested in. +> > I've noticed that base book recently offered insights into +> > video. Like how many segments people have watched. Some newsrooms +> > post a lot of video. You should check the time span. How much people +> > watch through this video. +> > And another thing is photo, photo views. Not only clicks but +> > photo views. Those things also would matter? +> > Know at some point you said you were trying to track when +> > people clicked the most? +> > Yes. +> > Have you gotten any farther in that? +> > I tried to analyze the data. I benefited from Brian's code. +> > The code to grab data every ten minutes and I built something upon it. +> > It's not only about Facebook but also You Tube. If a story takes up +> > within the first two or three hours you can see a sharp jump. And +> > probably the story will ... Later. If it doesn't take off, that will +> > just -- it will never take off. The same for You Tube. +> > The first jump is really important. Another thing is if you +> > share a story, it doesn't jump and you have confidence in the story, +> > this should be a popular story. Maybe you didn't share it right or +> > with the right picture or language on Facebook and try again after a +> > few hours. After a few hours it's almost like a new story. Facebook +> > would bury older stories? +> > Do they dock if you post the same link? +> > If it's too fast, yes. After a few hours it's okay. If the +> > story didn't talk off, base book will bury it any way. +> > One interesting metric that I experimented with at the +> > Guardian was you can get at the filtering based off of some of the +> > metrics that are on Facebook insights. So some posts are filtered out +> > more often. Facebook will hide them from more people and other posts +> > get shared with more people. +> > That's why the first couple of hours is really important. +> > Facebook I don't think has that kind of sophisticated algorithm to +> > recognize (inaudible) so what it depends on is people's behavior. If +> > a lot of people click share and like, Facebook goes that is +> > interesting and gives it a higher ranking to the story. That is -- +> > it's like self-reinforced and it goes up. +> > What I heard is Facebook, the way they handle it is to show +> > your post to a small subset of people that see your page. And +> > depending on how it performs in that small sample size, Facebook will + +dictate how it disseminates it to your larger page audience. + +> > There is a -- information flow there. At the first step only +> > the fans will see the story. +> > Only a small subset of those fans. +> > It depends on how many people are online at the moment. There +> > are many factors. That is why you should first look at the curve of +> > the fans online numbers and then decide which is the best hour for +> > you. +> > Cool. Thank you so much ...(applause)... +> > Stijn, what do you think. Should we break out. Should I talk +> > about Twitter? +> > Yes, I'm looking forward to it. +> > I didn't prepare much of anything but just talk about my +> > strategy working with Twitter and a couple of things I have learned. +> > I spend a lot of time working with the Twitter API. Whether it +> > be for work. +> > Twitter's API at least when we're talking about getting sort of +> > analytics-like data, I'm not going to go into how you make a bot or +> > Tweet. I'm going to talk about strategies you can use for getting +> > more value out of Twitter. +> > The first thing that is the coolest thing and Sam talked about +> > doing this is the streaming API. +> > What the streaming API lets you do is lets you search for +> > anything someone is sharing on Twitter in realtime. You can subscribe +> > as a feed and get every relevant Tweet. +> > There's some limitations to that. If you search for nothing, you +> > get 1 percent of everything on Twitter which is probably too much for +> > your computer to even handle. But if you search for something that +> > represents less than 1 percent you get everything that matches that +> > search term. +> > The easiest thing to do is doing like domain mentions. How does +> > this work? Well, you don't actually -- you can't actually search with +> > a period or like a slash on Twitter. So what you do is you create a +> > search term that looks like this. Say I was looking for NY times. +> > It's NY times space, com. You can get to the idea that this Tweet +> > will have NY times and com in it. If you're interested in the short +> > link you do NYTI MS. +> > Using a period -- am I doing something wrong? +> > It doesn't pay attention to the period. +> > If it ignores it, it's the same. +> > Yes. The problem with this, the problems is that there are +> > times that people use Bitly links. If they shorten it as a T code +> > link, the default Twitter link, you can search within that link. Even +> > if it shows up on the front end as T code blah, blah, blah, if you +> > search for NY times it will code that. If you search for a Bitly link +> > or whatever, you can't search for that. You can say give me every +> > Bitly link, too, and I'll figure out what to do with it later. You +> > might then go over 1 percent. +> > The other way -- obviously then you can search for anything you +> > want. You can search for mentions of your organization. The great + +thing is then you can store this and analyze it after the fact. The +other thing is just a search. So you can do the same exact thing here +except in this case you can go backwards. So you can -- you say back +fill mentions of domains or something. You use the same syntax here. + +> > That doesn't go back that far, does it? +> > I forget what the limits are. You can go back pretty far. It +> > might be up to like 1500. I'm not sure. I can't remember that. +> > One thing that I really like doing is working with lists. +> > Why would you do back fill instead of Topsy? +> > Topsy doesn't exist anymore. You don't have to pay. We're +> > doing free Twitter. You want to pay you can go to a licensed +> > provider. The biggest challenge with Twitter is trying to get data +> > from two years ago or something. We won't have to worry about that +> > when the library of congress gets involved. +> > Does anyone realize every time you Tweet that is going to the +> > library of congress. Everyone is in the library of congress now? +> > It's on tape. +> > Like micro film. I can go and look up my Tweets on micro +> > film. +> > They are not allowed to work with anyone externally on it. +> > You don't have to worry about that so much for now but it's all there. +> > The other thing I like doing with Twitter are lists. Lists +> > are cool because they're a nice hack for getting a lot of information +> > from Twitter without hitting the API limits. The way lists work is +> > you can have a bunch of users, right, and you can put them in a list. +> > And any time you want to get any Tweet from any user, that equals one +> > API call. +> > And I think the limits are that you can have as a user 2,000 +> > lists of 5,000 members. Which means you can get -- what is that +> > 100,000? A million. I only do counting not multiplication. +> > That means like if I wanted to get every one of those users, I +> > would make a million API calls and now I only have to make 2,000 API +> > calls. So that's one reason it's cool. +> > The other reason it's cool is you can get this idea of +> > communities. So a lot of the hard work has been done here. There are +> > lists out there that people have created. Like journalists or every +> > journalist at The New York Times or every member of congress or -- I +> > don't know, every important person in the climate change scene. That +> > way you get an idea who are these communities of people. And then if +> > you team it up with like this sort of stuff, right, you can be like +> > when are people in congress Tweeting my articles. When are people in +> > the climate change community Tweeting my articles. +> > And that gets at something more valuable than just like a number. +> > It can give you sort of something more meaningful. +> > That's basically it. You can also get a whole user's time line +> > but I would recommend going with this. +> > The API rate limits are every 15 minutes you can do 180 calls. +> > So that boils down to I think like one call per 10 seconds. +> > And then what you have to do is you have a script, you have to +> > sleep for whenever your rate limit is met. But the library that I + +wrote for working with this stuff is (trailed off ...) + +> > What did you write it in? +> > Python. That is basically it. Any questions? Any things +> > that people have wondered about Twitter? The other thing is URL +> > unshortening is the absolute hardest thing. What you literally have +> > to do is you have to recursively open the URL until it doesn't look +> > like a short URL any more and that is a slow and error-prone process. +> > My library does that too. +> > What's the name of your library? +> > Bird feeder. It's on the news links repo. +> > You can use pearl for one line and shorten it. The creator of +> > pearl just put a comment -- blah, blah, blah and then space. Space in +> > the protocol is the last part of the URL that you use for that +> > request. The URL is based on the code. So the status code is not 200. It's 300 something, temporarily removed or redistricted. +> > I use the location header. That works. And it's not as heavy +> > as downloading a whole page. +> > Any other questions? +> > How do you translate this to editors? +> > We're just talking about getting the data. Things I do with +> > this ... Like being able to archive every single share of your +> > contact. Super useful. You can search through them. Sam has done +> > counts. +> > I was using it for a little while and the benefit wasn't that +> > great. But I set it up to match it up with each post and we knew who +> > the author was of each article and every author can log in and get a +> > list of all the Tweets that mentioned all of their articles. It's +> > before we had an annotation system. Twitter was the comments. And +> > then you could go on there and reply to people on Twitter. You can +> > add a watch list. +> > You can use Tweepdash to do this. The problem of course is +> > that data is gone. You don't store it anywhere. +> > The other thing that I like doing with Twitter, working off of +> > lists and also users is doing stuff like if you have a list of every +> > journalist in your newsroom, you can know how much your own +> > journalists are sharing your content. Which is I think a really +> > important approach because especially for something like courts. +> > Because so much traffic is being driven by social, if you have a team +> > of journalists, those are like, that is like your street team. It's +> > like a bunch of people that can go share your content. And when I was +> > working at The New York Times looking at that, it turns out that was +> > superimportant for how an article ultimately performed. Not even just +> > did the main account with 8 million followers share it, but did Chris +> > share it and all these other people share it and if those people share +> > other articles they would get traffic, too. +> > That is a nice way of extracting a little more value out of +> > Twitter than what is readily apparent? +> > That was part of the innovation report. They found out, they +> > wanted their journalists to share more than they were actually +> > sharing. + +> > And interact with users and stuff like that. Be kind of, I +> > don't know, spokes people for the organization. Okay. +> > On that note maybe let's start hacking if people aren't already +> > exhausted. We have like an hour? +> > More like half an hour. +> > No, it's 5:30. +> > So I mean I know Sam has something he is interested in. Who +> > likes codes and wants to learn some stuff right now? +> > Can we have a five minute break? +> > Yes. I want to know beforehand, if there's not many people +> > who code and don't want to work on stuff, then we'll figure out, maybe +> > let's figure out what's the most amazing way we can combine everything +> > we learned today into the super-dashboard of the future. +> > That's my dream. We should have a dashboard. +> > Of the future. +> > Let's take a break and come back and we'll do that. + + - - - + +Break - - - +(doing individual work ...) +I guess we're kind of done. Thank you all for coming. diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_34_Train_Your_Newsroom.md b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_34_Train_Your_Newsroom.md index 2777bb1e..814a6449 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_34_Train_Your_Newsroom.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2014/Session_34_Train_Your_Newsroom.md @@ -1,190 +1,190 @@ -How to train your newsroom -Session facilitator(s): Jaeah Lee, Tasneem Raja -Day & Time: Friday, 12:30-1:30pm -Room: Franklin 1 - ->>We're going to get started. Could somebody get the door maybe in the back? So we're here to talk about newsroom training. Just a couple of housekeeping things, if you want to open up the etherpad where we've put some burning questions, a little bit of a guide to what we're hoping to do in this conversation today, it's bit.ly/train-your-newsroom. So you can check that out. - -We wanted to start out here by introducing ourselves, telling you very briefly about what we do. And you know, as we said in the session discussion, we're really trying to learn from you guys, as well as sharing with you some of the things we've picked up as you go. Feel free to jump in. This is meant to be very participatory. - -My name is Jaeah, we're both at Mother Jones Magazine on the data team there, and I started in my job about two years ago, at which point there were still plenty of reporters and editors in our newsroom who did not know what a column or a row in a spreadsheet was, and so because we were fairly short-staffed, really short-staffed... ->> It's us. ->> Yeah, it's just the two of us. Two and a half for some time, and we're attempting to expand our team, but nonetheless, we have tons of ideas that come through the pipeline on a daily basis, so in trying to figure out ways to not have to constantly be churning out charts and behaving solely like a service desk, we tried to figure out ways early on, you know, and with Tasneem's leadership to seed these skills throughout the newsroom, and to start, you know, in somewhat sneaky ways, just saying, well, did you know that you could add these 10 columns not by hand but by using a very simple sum function, and it kind of started out from there and bloomed into more formal regular weekly skills training sessions where we -- Tasneem convinced the company to pay for pizza once a week. ->> Food! ->> And with free food we drew in more and more members of the newsroom to come and watch us, just go through some, you know, we the staked with very basic exercises, in Google spreadsheets and how to use Google docs to making charts in illustrator to how to use the command line and not be afraid of it, and now that series has been taken over by our public affairs department, which not just includes skills training from us, but from different departments throughout Mother Jones, so you know, sometimes our fundraising team will come in and talk to the rest of the company about the rest of the organization about how to -- how they do their work. Or it could be a reporter who focuses on long form journals and talking about deconstructing a piece that he had recently written, how he went about the reporting. So it's become something much larger than what our team started out offering, and it's just been a really beautiful thing and we've managed to train in bits and pieces now that we've been kind of able to lay a foundation for that. ->> One of the things I often say is what we really do, you know, I mean our job titles are I'm interactive editor, Jaeah is interactive producer, but I think the real secret superpower that we have brought to the newsroom is the training. And it's sort of the unseen thing, right? I feel it doesn't get talked about as much as it needs to be in these discussions of how we're doing the work we do. There's a lot of things that I think are common across all newsrooms, big and small. I mean training is training in a lot of ways, right, but I'm interested in hearing from you guys a little bit more about how you're tackling this, whether you're talking about training, maybe somebody knew that's come on to your team and getting them up to speed or maybe something like we did maybe at a much bigger space where you're trying to speed skills, maybe some basic checklist of skills which is something we're going to try to develop today, across like maybe not -- I guess maybe 20 people in our case, but maybe 50 people or even more, 100 people. So before we dive in, I'm going to take a quick survey from you guys, just so we can get a sense of what we're working with here. ->> I wanted to just ask a couple questions, and then tell you what we're hoping to walk away with, so just want to ask you guy, for how many of you -- the two choices here are going to be, is training like a key part of your mandate and mission? I mean your mandate from you know, your on high to what you believe you want to be doing? Or is it kind of like a nice to have, you know, something that you've felt either asked to contribute or you know, necessarily felt like if I don't do this, I can't do my job effectively, more of a nice to have. So for how many of you would you say training is, and you who are helping facilitate training is a part of your mandate or your mission? Oh, wow, OK. That's cool. And for how many of you is it more of like something that if you can get this, it's a nice to have? OK, that's really interesting. I was not expecting that. ->> and I also wanted to ask, for how many of you do you already have something that you're trying, whether it's formal or informal, you know, something really big or kind of small? Or are you starting from scratch here? So for how many of you already kind of have something that you're trying? ->> ->> OK. And so the rest of you are kind of starting from scratch? Is there anything else? Anything in between. ->> We have intentions. ->> That is a great place to start. ->> Yeah. -[laughter] ->> That's nice, I like that. ->> Two things we want to walk away with, here. Jaeah, if you want to talk about some of this stuff? ->> Yeah, so the first thing we'd love to sort of give you guys to walk away with and for us, really for selfish reasons, is a checklist of what do we think are the baseline skillset that everyone in the newsroom should have? And you know, I guess depending on where you work and what role you stand in, that could be every reporter editor or maybe it goes even further beyond the editorial team. And then secondly, you know, we definitely want to learn about what methods, tried and true or that have completely failed, that you guys have tested and just kind of talk about those lessons learned from each other, and any like tips for dos and don'ts for how to go about these things. ->> Yeah, so just wanted to start opening up the discussion to all of us, we'll throw out some questions just to keep things moving. One that we want to start with is hear from you guys what the obstacles are, like what's making it hard to fulfill those intentions of training and making them into a real problem, is this a culture problem, is this a technical problem, it's probably a little bit of both so we'd like to hear what some of you are up against. ->> Time problem. I don't think we really have a culture or technical problem, but just a time problem. ->> We absolutely had, like our team used to be for people -- we had a big meeting with the newsroom to talk about like what we're for, so that we were trying to get out of the service desk, thing, as well, and all the reporters from the newsroom were like yes, we would love training. Like everybody is hon board with this, our boss thinks it's a great idea. It's just we haven't had any time. ->> and it's because you're trying to do the day to day production of the stuff while also figuring out? ->> We do actually sometimes people come to us and say like, hey, can you help me with this spreadsheet and in some cases we'll say instead of just doing it for them, we'll say can I show you how to do this? So there's one or two people who are creeping along. ->> and is it also a problem of getting their time. ->> I don't know yet. ->> Yeah. ->> How does it usually work, like the mechanics of it? Do they approach you by email or phone or in person and say I have this dataset? What do they come to you with. ->> We have a standup every morning that we do our thing and it's open so the kind of practice that we've gotten people into is come to the standup and tell us what you're working on but we also just sometimes have people email us and say I've got this thing. ->> Kind of like a rule that we've sort of instituted is to think of every point of contact as a potential training opportunity. And figuring in how to subtly sneak in, it's like the kids how to eat their vegetables thing, oh, yeah, I want to show up the formula that I used to generate those numbers because I think you might be interested and then having them see it and practice a couple of times, I feel like that's so much of the hurdle. It's just that they've literally never looked at some of these interfaces and we've all been there, like it's kind of just having them look at it is so effective. ->> I work with different newsrooms who are onboarding their teams into word processing type of thing and I often ask how do you dies do it and I feel like many different ways and like one is just like people are curious and sort of one-on-one, where it's like oh, my gosh you're doing such cool stuff and how do you do that. And someone. Mails you and then they're like oh, show me how to do this. And the other thing is mass newsroom adoption where he's like one person he's designated editorial liaison, and he actually gets a room of like 20 computers and they sit down and they sign up together and they walk through it and it's like this huge process and they spend like weeks and weeks and people fly out to different cities to do this and on the flip side like we're writing some documentation, we're going to email it out to you and figure it out and that's the end of it and there's such a wide spectrum and it's so dependent on how corporate the newsroom or how grassroots the newsroom is or how we just don't give a shit, just figure it out on your own the newsroom is. ->> I feel like what you're getting at, too, is it's a cultural thing, it's a time issue, it's how much can you afford to spend on it, and you know, any time, I mean we spend a lot of time training and probably a little bit less so today, than we did two years ago. But I mean in large part it was for us I think a big hurdle is the perception issue, you know, kind of what you were getting at, people always thought that, oh, it's so difficult, like, whatever sort of data work I do, and they didn't want to mess with anything and so our job was to kind of almost tell a white lie and say, like this is so easy and cool and look how awesome it looks and you can do this, too, and there was a lot of hand-holding in the beginning to where eventually, you know, at some point people did realize that, OK, this isn't as easy as you made it out to be, but they kind of, at that point was convincing them to stick with it and you know, kind of telling them, all right, it's not going to be easy your first time, but if you keep doing this type of work, it will get easier. And enough people, I think we've kind of reached a critical mass where enough people have realized that to be true and so there's definitely less of a fear now. ->> and they're training each other. We see them training each other, it's really cute. Yeah. Yeah. For those of you who have programs of your own, we'd love to hear a little bit of what that looks like, you know in terms of what just what are the points of contact and so on. ->> I think that a big thing that is often missed is as you said before, kind of working into the -- a lot of times a journalist might say hey, come do this for me I don't know what I'm doing. And it's easier to say OK I'm going to do this quickly, right but in the long run it does make sense to say spend that time and say I'm not going to do this for you but I'll teach you. ->> and what does it look like for you to teach them, like physically? ->> I mean it's sometimes very messy. Right? Because you're having to -- you don't want to go too far and too deep down into the rabbit hole you at least want to give them that they should be able to reproduce it the next time they come across the problem. ->> and are you sitting at their desk or are they sitting at your desk or how do you do that? ->> It's just sitting down face to face, generally. ->> Yeah, for those of you who, you know, like I said, have programs, I'm curious to know, with like this WordPress model, does anybody have a hands-on training together type of thing? Does that work? ->> We did that at the Post; it did not work. You have to have interest from people. I mean if they're not into it, then like you're talking at a wall and they're going to get out of the room and they're going to ask you the same question over and over again because they never really take the time to learn it. We did tons of training at the Post, the Post is a massive program and they have tons of people who did training for all sorts of stuff, they tried brown bags, they tried paying for it, they tried bringing in outside people, you did the same training for us like ten times. ->> I did training. ->> -[laughter] ->> Yes, I was there for that. And like it just never like, some people they're real interested. ->> Voluntold problem. ->> Yeah, so I absolutely asked. So Wilson Anders used to work at the Post and I was up at the New York Times. I said how did you get your entire graphic staff to be doing coding and all this amazing stuff and he goes, well, that's just expected so when we were building Vox, we told every person during the interview you're going to come here and you're going to code and you're going to be doing graphs and we have screwed it up 100 times, but we're going to get it better. But it's constantly, working at that. ->> I can share another sort of story that I think is helpful to this. So at API, one of the things that we're working on now is we have this program where we help publishers develop more data-driven content strategies. We give them new metrics tools, we do some sort of consulting with them and then they come up with a new strategy for like here's what we're going to cover and how and here's how we're going to measure it. When they get there, so for one example one of these companies decided they needed to cover outdoors stuff. They were up in the Pacific northwest with these beautiful outdoor scenes and they didn't have anybody who covered the outdoors. They. So they also one is we need to cover outdoors, two is look around our newsroom, we don't have hunters and Fishers in our newsroom, like, we have 25-year-olds out of J school. So now we need to work with our community and get contributors and we need to use social media to like recruit post outdoors photos and so they came to us can you please teach us how to use social media to work with our community and we were like sure, we can do that, but that was totally different if we'd gone to them and said hey, would you like to use social media? So the lesson, I think is when they identify the problem themselves, they will then come to you and seek the training for it, versus if you just say hey, I would love to train you on how to do this and they were like oh, no, I don't need to know that. ->> I can back that up also from educational theory, like people learn things when this matters to them. When it's in a real context. So getting people together for a training when it's an abstract thing, that's when you have to do it ten times, whereas sitting down with somebody who's like I have this thing. You might have to do it again with them, but they have a lot more invested. ->> and I think that gets at partly what Steph said is it's got to be part of your culture, because if the newsroom expectation isn't that what you're doing in your job is going to be changing, hey, suddenly then we figure out how to reach out to community members. If the expectation is that the position and the skills required for it are static, then it's no surprise that nobody wants to come into a mass Washington Post newsroom training. What do they care, their job that is been static for 5 or 10 years. ->> Or 15. ->> ->> ->> Did you want to add something 1234. ->> Yeah, I just that I think to get them all in a room and train them on a specific thing in an hour or two hours is the same problem you have at a conference. It doesn't stick there, either. You go to a session for like an hour and it's like you're going to use Ruby because curriculum design is really hard and you have a wide range of people they have a wide range of how they're going to do it. ->> So would we, I would say. ->> I think one key lesson that we've picked up over in the course of our experience is that like definitely we realize that there has to be a need for it and that whatever skills we try to share, there has -- I mean we're not going to be able to fully train someone until there's a real project for them to work on it. So normally if we see an opportunity where a reporter comes to us and say we've got this dataset, I think it would make a great this kind of chart or this kind of table or whatever it is, we say perfect, like, let's sit together, let's do this together, or if it's quick turn around then we'll build it and say let's just sit down and spend 15 minutes talking about how I built this and you can do it too. And our skill-sharing has gone from a little bit more of a formal, you know, roll people in with free food and then teaching them actual skills and hoping they would walk away having learned something to now just showing them what's possible and like here's the result of things that we've built together with a reporter and it was like really a 50/50 effort and you can do this, too. When you have an idea, let's talk about it more seriously and we'll get into the weeds with it. And I think that's been a lot more effective for us. ->> I think it's helpful if it's kind of bite-sized and it's something you can use right away. I do training that's not in newsroom or related to news, but we used to do a really intense two days that taught them many different things, and then they would immediately start practicing. It was just like too much to like kind of sit in, so we've split it into kind of natural blocks and is what we're going to try now and do one one week and then later on we'll do like the next session. ->> and do they start practicing? Like do you see that happen. ->> We do, but it's not in a newsroom. At HUD, it's kind of necessary for them to use it right away. ->> We do training like that, it's two days and it's awesome. WordPress VIP training. ->> I think it would be helpful in a lot of cases to break it into a little bit that they can go use in the real world and then come back and build on that. Like do this little bit and use it in the world. It's always a problem when you stuff too much in a person's brain too fast. You get excited, you want to teach them so many things and they may even be excited when they're in it, OK, I'm learning, but until they go and do it. ->> My only experience in training is J school, in teaching other students how to code and I think -- I haven't thought about or I thought about -- I haven't figured out how to do this in a newsroom, but the most successful thing I did was at the night lab, we had what we called open lab hours and they were from like 6 to 9 or 7 to 10 or something, on a random week night, which works in college because you're always at the same place. ->> -[laughter] ->> But that doesn't work in a newsroom, but the thing that worked about that was that we have a physical space, and this is where you come to learn and work or your own project that may not be your day job, may not be your homework or whatever. But having a place where you are forced to get into that mind set is really important. People walk in, OK I'm here to learn for these three hours. And I think that runs counter to what we were saying. If you have a sort of collaborative space, I think -- I don't know -- ->> Where you can get more like one-on-one time, as well. Yeah, the evolution of ours, as Jaeah was saying, has really like dramatically changed over time where we as I said started with the get people in a room, you know, everybody follow along, hope the demo gods don't like strike us down. And it was not that effective, but I think for whatever reason, people still were like excited. And one thing that I have found to be really kind of like sneakily helpful for us is that we will actually take a byline oftentimes on pieces that we are really significantly helping out on the production and that, would because then they feel like A, they have both like a right and also like are accountable to giving you their time, because if you guys are sharing a by line, now, it's OK, oh, this is a model that they're familiar with. OK, we are coproducers on this thing, you need me to communicate with you, I need you to know that you know about X, Y, Z, you know? Because a lot of times things fall apart because we've spent all this time working with a reporter and we don't hear from them in a couple days and we're like, wait, what happened and they're like, oh, yeah, that got pulled and we weren't in that work flow. That's maybe not something that is going to be appropriate for what you chieve in your company, but in our case for people who are like hybrid journalists, taking abyline was A, not a problem at all, they're like oh, yeah, that makes total sense and B is this makes it journalism. You know, the way that you learn things from your sources and learn things from your research, is you've got to learn about how to make this stuff, too. ->> We've also started saying no to data handoffs, like if a reporter or anybody comes and pitches us a story and an interactive or a graphic component that should go into it, we'll totally agree. We used to say yes and take their data and do what we could with it. Nowadays we're like yes, and you're coming too for the whole ride and it's going to be awesome. You know, and just like you know, we try to make it fun for them and not to try and make this like teacher-student thing. We try to make it as collaborative as possible so that they feel like they have an equal stake and that our work and the kinds of skills that we're exercising to make these stories possible is no mystery to them. ->> I just want to put in another -- ->> Oh, sorry, it's Tyler, because hand, was like, OK... ->> Because if you think about how you learned programming, most of us learned programming, it was probably parried, right? And just pulling them along for the whole story, I think is so important. The handoff is destructive in a lot of ways. I think there's a work flow that I can envision for a lot of newsrooms that allows you to form sort of ad hoc teams. ->> Because we now one of the best things about paired programming is having people make mistakes and allowing them to watch you make mistakes that they have confessed that they would have felt dumb if they had made them on their own and seeing us make them is like oh, basically what we're teaching them is how to Google through their problems. No, really a Google query can be, why is my column doing this thing and no the that thing. You know, literally feeding it questions, that has been kind of a game-changer for us. ->> I like that you use the word "ride," because I like to use the metaphor of a police ride-along. ->> They aren't necessarily curious about the exact process or they would be the technical methods, but they are curious about the data that they have and they would get excited in seeing the way that you're starting to unlock them for them and it gives you a space to ask questions that they had but they've never really had a situation where they felt OK asking them. ->> and we have people who come to us that kind of like dump things in our laps or are a little demanding and I think, Noah can speak to this, as well, I think people are starting to pick up on the idea that we give more love to people who who are participating. ->> Yeah, totally. ->> One thing that we do in our team is that we try really hard to empower people to feel like they can train other people, so especially when new people are joining our team, we pair them up as buddies, and one of the buzzwords or words that we use a lot in our team is document it. Meaning like if you've learned something, go into our documentation and document it yourself, because in writing it, it will solidify for you, and then also, now when someone else asked that question, you can can then point them to it and the other thing that we do is when our teams get together for meetups, we do these flash talks and people are allowed to give talks on topics that they're not expert in. Meaning you will earn it to give a talk, so you're not an expert but you are share it and then that forces you to learn because as you know when you go up and make a presentation you have to prepare. So it forces people to look stuff up. ->> That's a great point. Also from educational theory, just reminded me something you said, there's like the concept of like learn it, teach it, do it, that's like the three steps to really learn something, and just, you know, I like bringing that learn something for the purpose of teaching it to others. ->> Yeah, exactly. ->> I'm curious about your team's kind of progression from what you said were like brown bag lunches to this kind of more free-flowing integrative process. What were kind of those check points or like goals or accomplishments that made you decide like the decision points that kind of changed your approach. ->> I mean we talk about this all the time. Like you know, it's been really helpful I think for us to just have somebody else who's as invested in making this happen so that we can just say what was energy like? Were people checking out? Have you seen anybody like actually work on this stuff after you know, you you did your panel? So a lot of I would say like daily tweaking and reconfiguring and thinking about and observing. A lot of it has just been observing. Like Jaeah said we kind of got company buy-in and we've been talking about top-down culture problems. We did not have that problem. When I was hired at Mother Jones, like it was very clear to me that this is going to be part of my mission. ->> So I already had that, and you know, our EICs like we have two editors in chief, they're totally awesome, they've done a really good job in these points of contact type places, like morning news meetings and so on and saying maybe you could cataract with Tasneem and she could talk to you, like maybe you guys to work on a map for that. They've subtlely dropped this stuff in and I know what they're doing. So in the beginning, you know, I didn't know people that well. Like I just started and so the brown bag just felt like OK, I don't have relationships here, I need to get these people in a room, like here's how I'm going to do this but really now we know what is far more effective is kind of like what you said, we show love to the people who are jazzed about this stuff and willing to go out on a limb and try something and it's been the relationships. You know, we're not tiny, I mean so our company altogether is like 75 people or something like that. 100. OK, so 100 people. Our editorial team is about half of that, and we've got two bureau, that's the other thing here we've got a bureau in San Francisco and a bureau in DC and figuring out how to, like first we were trying like webinars, you know, scaping them in, when we would do the in-person session in San Francisco. Forget it, like what we do now is the company sends us both out for like a week or two weeks a year, at different times, especially when somebody new has come on, and then we actually don't even have a program anymore, first we used to have a very formal program and 12 to 1 every day it's going to be brown bag. We don't even do that anymore. I kind of don't have a desk when I go. I'm just floating from you know, desk to desk being and being annoying and just sitting there like hey, what are you, working on. This is all about getting a little bit of face time with each person because it's incredible the amount you can impart in just like a 15-minute conversation in he recalls it of OK, here's how this spreadsheet works, by the way, did you know you could use table top and on and on and on. ->> I think in my mind the process sort of went like this, it started with us evangelizing and just saying, you know, this is awesome, you guys should do this and showcasing a few examples, like early examples where we had succeeded and you know, including an awesome chart that just like blew up trafficwise and showing those possibility, and trying to just tell people, you know, and convince them, not always successfully, that this was going to work and that they should do it too. And from then on, honestly from us I think it took very little convincing, we just kind of had to show one piece with a few charts and graphics in it up and people were like, whoa, I want to do that also and so then it became this huge flood of ideas. I mean we were getting bombarded nonstop and the problem at that point was that people still wanted to just hand off their data to us, and just say, like, cool, like, I want to do that, can you help me, here's my data. And we had to kind of start out, in the interest of time and deadlines, just doing it, producing it and sometimes it would fail and I think through a lot of failed projects, the projects that often failed were also the ones where the reporter was not as invested in the aspect that we were contributing, and so we kind of realized that we really have to like pull them even further into our process and just like force ourselves into theirs, and you know luckily we're likeable people and they didn't mind that too much, but there was a little bit of resistance at first, and you know, it's not perfect today, but you know, like Tasneem said, we do talk about it almost on an hourly basis, like she's like, oh, God, they're doing this again, and it's like let's not be frustrated, let's figure out a way like what in our process could solve this? ->> How much do you think about training people on just how to get it done like here's the tool to build your chart our your visualization versus teaching them the underlying technology? Like do I need you to understand how the programming library works? Do I need you to understand where the data comes from and what format it's in or do I really just need you to know, these are the buttons, this is how you export it. ->> ->> I'd love to hear, that's kind of a philosophy question that we do talk about a lot. Anybody want to get in on that? ->> I'm much more on like the teach technology, not the button side, but it's not like its actually any better. I think as I get better at my job, I get worse at teaching other people. So like two years ago some problem that I might have solved in excel I've forgotten, it's no longer how I would approach it. And so if I'm -- if its like a fusion tables map I'm also relearning what those buttons do so I end up talking more about the underlying stuff. I don't know if it's actually argute reason or it's a terrible reason. ->> When I used to work in a newsroom and I was like training people how to use like movable type that's how long ago this was. And I would teach them to drop in links and stuff, and this is really scary, people were like really terrified of it, and I would actually take like ten minutes and walk them through like explaining what HTML is, this is what CSS is, it makes it less scary. It doesn't mean they learn it, it just gives them some context of now they understand what this works when you look this stuff up. Now you know how to look at it. ->> I think it's super, super crucial. It's not even that you even need to write a line of Javascript. That's not what I'm showing you all I'm showing you is how my code is talking to the data on your spreadsheet and what that looks like on the page. And just that shows them the possibilities. That's actually much more -- I would say if there are two things we're trying to teach at the same time -- and we do rely on like gooey type things. There's a chart building tool called data wrapper. I'm sure some of you are familiar with it. We've done a custom install at MoJo. We've got that it's one that makes it easy to teach both data principles and like data visualization production at the same time, so I would say for me, it's maybe that I'm trying to teach principles of computational journalism and data visualization and just what is a chart, you know, why line graph and not bar graph, that kind of thing, more so than I would say the technology. ->> Because it's possible to make a really bad chart, a really misleading chart. ->> Yes, that said we have created a series of tutorials, where we can, especially for something like how to make a bar chart in Illustrator, that was a need that came up so often that we couldn't possibly be the ones making it every single time. So we started out with a tutorial that was very thorough, took you like from start to finish but it was almost too complicated and we realized that that wasn't working just like tossing them a link to the tutorial didn't actually work all that well, so these days I'd say it's kind of like, "Here's a thing that will help you get started, get it started, we'll get you through the rest of it," and even that has made a difference of taking some of the work off our table. ->> We've got them doing mapping in a bunch of different ways, you know, a couple of them, I think are trained on TileMill, the goal is to get more people trained on TileMill. Google spreadsheets out the wazoo, Illustrator, so there's this suite of tools that we have made kind of the onboarding process, but now we think in terms of drafts more so we say OK, I know you've done a chart in data wrapper before, go and send me a first draft. Go and get to where you get stuck and then hit me up on Skype, you know, or send me your finished thing and then we're going to sit and I'm going to tell you how to make this chart more effective, but you're going to do the actual hands-on work. ->> You see those people progress over time? ->> Yes. Totally. - ->> So that eventually they can get to step 3 and -- ->> And sometimes we're like, "Wait, when did Tom work on that?" We just see it on the website. It's like awesome. ->> One thing that's awesome about that, too, is when you start to use tools and you start to talk to people about it, you also improve the tools. A huge part of training is you just have bad stuff, like having to teach somebody in HREF versus having somebody click on an URL. But if you never actually go and talk to the people, you never hear those pain points and you can't empathize, because a lot of time it's my bad for creating crappy software. It's totally my fault that you don't understand this, and it's my bad. ->> That's a great point. ->> How much do you all have to worry about creating a house style for doing things so that you -- one person's not teaching one a different solution to the same problem and then oh, but she said I should do it this way, right? ->> Yeah, documentation for sure, like I mean you've given more thought to this, I would say. ->> Yeah, I mean we have -- so with charts for example, that's like probably the simplest example that we have, we started out just -- I mean if you look at our earlier work, it's all over the map. There is no consistent style. I think even the fonts, I don't know, I mean it was crazy times. But over time we realized OK, this is not working, let's just spend a day or two figuring out how to make style more consistent and for us our style guide kind of started with the print magazine and we talked with the art team about OK, what's our presence on the web. We kind of zoomed out a little bit and had a bigger discussion and from there worked with the art team to create a template for charts,. ->> It's an Illustrator file. ->> It's just an Illustrator file, yeah. So we've kind of been replicating that model as we go on with Datawrapper we'll be customizing it so it's adherent to a Mother Jones style, and I think just -- you know... ->> So visual style is one thing. ->> Oh, I see. ->> What about sort of process? Right? ->> Yeah,. -[laughter] ->> Good question. How do you handle that problem? -[laughter] ->> I don't have that problem. I don't work at a journalism organization, but -- ->> It's I don't know, I would say we're constantly just improving it, and reworking and kind of sometimes we have to go back to the drawing board and -- I don't know, it's also, I think, depending on the project and need, the process has to change along with it, so there's never one process that will be applicable to every single project. But that said, -- ->> We often think in terms of if there are two goals for this collaboration with a reporter and this is -- like literally we'll say, like, all right, we can -- it's that whole you can either have it cheap, fast, or successful or something like that, right it's that whole thing. You can either get them to you know, follow good data principles on this project, like really focus on that, and we can have it be something that's done in two hours, or we can use this as an opportunity to like really show them ways to like modify the code so that they could use it more. We're just like, what are the two things that we can achieve here and a lot of what we do is just letting some stuff go. Getting rid of this idea of like perfect and we definitely have put out crappy charts, like we definitely have, but like less and less and less over time. ->> Well, I think one thing you've always stressed is iteration, and just like we're going to let some things go and it's going to hurt, but let's just comfort ourselves by knowing that next time we do this, we know what the pain points were, and that's where we start. ->> Have you thought about tracking where people are at with their knowledge and making logical pathways to build? ->> Not really, I would say not really, again, because so much of this is like -- I mean we have a bit of like the CEO hit by the bus problem here. Like so much of this is just in our heads and when we're on vacation and stuff, like sometimes things don't, like, get done in good ways or they just don't happen as much as we would have liked, to see in that time, so no, not really. I think that that maybe is a next step for us, is like -- but then we kind of also are resisting reformalizing, you know? So I don't know, it's like a tradeoff. ->> So documentation, I'm wondering, we have been trying to document our own training things and how things should be done, but we're using GitHub, which no one can navigate. It's what a lot of people use. ->> We use WordPress and everyone edits it and contributes it and in our what you call the field guide you can see the faces of who's touched the document. ->> Are you using it pages or -- ->> Yeah, just pages. ->> This is a problem we've had. Like you know, so we've got a GitHub, it's GitHub.com/motherjones. We have a choose your own adventure plug-in, I think it's GitHub.com/motherjones/CYOA and we are always asking the reporters, like what was your pain point, blah blah blah, but then we have to be the ones to sit down and actually do it. ->> Yeah, but then they won't do it. It has to be a living document where everyone has access to it. And then a reporter figures it out and you're like go document it and then their face shows up and they own the change. ->> I don't know, yeah, that's definitely a problem we're having too. ->> I was going to try etherpad,. ->> Wait, so what WordPress tool are you using. ->> We use WordPress, it's a theme. Yeah. ->> Where everyone is an editor, so just go in and edit. ->> If you really wanted to, you can follow it so any time there's an edit, you can get an email. But there's 300 people in there, so you don't want that. ->> There's revision history with that, as well, so you can actually go back if somebody decides to like nuke it or breaks. ->> I do want to get back to this question of like the top-down culture problem, because I think that that is so key. And you know like Yuri, I know you've dealt with this. For those of you who felt where the obstacle is you this is a grassroots organization, you had this mandate, did it work, did it not work? What worked? -[laughter] ->> I can tell you a lot of things that did not work. You know, they put me in charge and I still couldn't push stuff through. For me, fighting up is a lot easier than fighting down. Because if it's not a shared mission, then it's hard. The things that really worked for me was one-on-one, and then you do that with like 10 people and you get like an evangelist and then they go and say check out this cool thing I did. When you get an evangelist, then it gets better, because then you have more and more evangelists and more and more people get excited. But there's still going to be one desk that you can't break in. I'll buy you lunch, I'll take you out for drinks. What do you want? You want a computer, here? You don't like it because it's a Mac? I mean, come on. -[laughter] ->> There's a corollary to evangelism which is sort of competition or jealousy in some certain newsroom environments. Like one reporter does some awesome thing with his story and the other reporter starts saying, how come I didn't do that? Why does he get to do that? ->> We present a friendly face but we are pretty devious behind scenes and we are on this. We get like a target. OK, Dave is our next target. We call it annexation, we have a list of people we have annexed, and it is a bit like Risk. ->> Do you keep score? ->> We should. I don't want to say easy get, but easy get for us has been our fellows, our interns, who are probably the most eager to pick up new skills. They're usually -- not always, but oftentimes -- coming from a journalism program, and just hungry, hungry for more. And so we try to start there, and the same sort of arc happened with the fellows, which is that we started with formal training except none of them had laptops. We tried walking through through sitting at their desks and training them that way, but even then we realized that a project by project training method was probably the most effective and starting there and in our experience they've been quick learners, so it usually just takes one project for them to now know how to make a chart, now know how to build a map, so the next time someone else comes to us and we don't have the bandwidth, we'll say let us pair you up with this person who has done it before and then you guys go along and have some fun and come to us when you get stuck. But also trying to just, yeah, I guess. ->> Annex. ->> Yeah, and just spread our skills as far as wide as possible, and kind of starting with the interns was kind of a smart move. ->> Show what about this checklist idea? Is this something people want to do? Maybe raise your hand if you think something like that would be useful for you? Maybe we can talk after. ->> I think it's a really good point when bringing new people in, if you can get them on board with the mission. I'm really lucky I work for a company where it's insanely how easy it is with people who I don't know how to get beyond that except for everybody come and work at Vox. ->> Do you have enough money for that? ->> But I mean like -- -[laughter] ->> My executive editor has more commits at GitHub than I do, and it's crazy. We get them to commit documentation. Don't complain, contribute. If you see a spelling error in documentation in code, you should have access to fix that and we want everybody to be part of this because we're all in it together, and if it tool doesn't work or a system is broken, that hurts us all. ->> That's kind of the byline philosophy for us, because they know that both of our names are going to be on the finished post here and that kind of breeds more of a sense of accountability for getting it right. ->> We give a byline to everyone that touches the story. We want everyone to get credit for their work and anything that's really, really great should have multiple bylines. ->> And kind of to Yuri's point a bit, how to approach it if your current culture isn't going to value it, like if you're in a position or the person who's asking you to, you know, emphasize training is in that position, some of it just starts with hiring. Like we just straight-up won't hire someone who's not interested in contributing in that. Like we work with people on a contract basis first and if they find stuff that's broken, they don't fix it, it's a nonstarter. And if you have an existing culture that isn't that way, like the best way to -- like one way to activate it, too is to change it for the new people you're bringing in, right? That's a pretty easy way to bring in more evangelists without having to fight existing culture. ->> Do you find that in those cases you do need the top-level buy-in from like the executive editor level. ->> I work at WordPress.com, not a newsroom, the top-level buy-in for us doesn't necessarily apply because there's not that many levels and it's an organizationally expected. ->> Right. ->> I do think buy-in is one thing, but there's this bigger question of what are the rewards for doing this, so one is I get to do a cool story, that's rewarding but there's other systems of rewards like is this important in my annual review, like am I measured based on do I know how to do this and do I use this skill. I think those are structures that help, too. People aren't going to learn something because oh, somebody said I have to, but the sense that the organization values this in many ways, not just they tell me I should do it is pretty important. ->> Right, like that's what's important about it, because it feeds things back into each other. ->> No, it kind of reminds know me, you know, you were asking that question about pathway and I wonder if there's sort of a way that we can work with our, you know, EICs to -- and maybe it's not a formally like broadcasted thing, but just, you know, to have sort of a sense of like what are the rewards for -- what are like the organizational feedback loops and rewards for the people who will like take that extra step to work with us on this, and then take the extra step to go do it at their desk by themselves and call us. Like, how are we rewarded that as a culture, not just that we're encouraging, but how are we recognizing and crediting and surfacing when it happens, because it's also demystifying for reporters to hear, it's like the competition thing you said, it's like also just oh, he can do it, I can do it, that kind of thing, so what are the points of contact at which you can do that kind of work. ->> Our organization does have learning goals as part of our annual review, and then we reset learning goals each er year. ->> Do people take them seriously? ->> ->> I don't think so. ->> -[laughter] ->> ->> I mean one of the ways was almost, not only are we kind of trying to seeds our skills at all levels, but also just, you know, buddying up with story editors who we know like if we get them to buy into it, then they like they'll almost just convince or just tell the reporter, this needs a chart component, you need to talk to these guys and the story is not complete until that's done. And you know, I think that's -- it's been a mixed bag, but we, you know, we have -- there's one senior editor in particular who was already very data-savvy and that was just like how he thought oftentimes, so that was a natural starting point for you, just working together with him, and then from then on out, I mean even Mike mechanic, who we never thought we would convince, and he's been very much on board, really. ->> It helped us, you know, talking about sort of what is the carrot and what's the stick kind of thing, it helped us tremendously that this editor Dave Gilson one of our colleagues who's totally awesome, had done this chart package thing about income inequality. It was our biggest item to date at like that moment. In terms of traffic and shares. And the fact that that had just happened, like one thing we always talk about is like you got to get things like fresh -- like reporters have short memories, editors have short memories, it's kind of like that what have you done for me lately, like the charts thing blew up and I could still kind of ride that enthusiasm even though it was like a few weeks out, and say yeah, remember Dave's awesome charts thing? Like what else could we do. And our main point of contact is this morning meaning. That everybody is dialing into it the editors over there, but everybody in SF is sitting in editorially and there are so much rich opportunities to just drop in something oh, yeah I'm seeing that post yesterday about immigrant detention centers is doing really well, man, I wish we could have done a map on that, and then just move on and nobody's getting singled out. Man, that's a great story, awesome, wish you could have also gotten a map in there. You know? It's almost 1:30. ->> OK. Any final like burning questions? Yeah? ->> ->> I hear a lot about devs teaching editors, but not a lot of about editors teaching devs. ->> Now we need another half hour. That's such a good question. Any of you guys want to jump in on that? ->> In our training sessions it's pretty much the whole west side of the office, which is devs and reporters, and it's pretty much an open topic for everyone, and so as developers, we get talks from about like how to dress for the camera. ->> -[laughter] ->> ->> Yeah, I think going back to just the whole collaboration model, I think as much as reporters and editors are learning from -- I mean we were for a long time working with one of our developers on the tech team half time, and eventually he was -- we were just having him pair up directly with the reporter. Rather than one of us being in there, and sort of liaising, and I think he learned as much about the editorial process and how reporters think, how editors think, as much as they did about you know, how he goes about his coding, and how his code is structured and you know, all those things. So I think it was very helpful, because as much as, you know, or nontechnical editorial folks might look at programmers in this very mystified light, the same happens on the other end and we found that you know with one of our developers, he was maybe resistant, I don't recall if he was resistant at first working direct think, he wanted this in between, us as a middle man to kind of translate, almost, you know, what they're asking for and how that transitions to exactly what he should build and how, and I think, you know, that -- so it definitely goes both ways, the sort of, you know, -- it's almost like a cultural exchange program. ->> Part of -- so we've been talking about how we're not doing the hands-on thing any more, but we are still doing the weekly skills thing and that has become much more like this, it's just there really weren't a lot of places in our company where like people from different departments were ever sitting in a room together and it not being a meeting, you know? So this is just like, you know, OK, Steve Katz, our publisher is going to do a lunch session on how fundraising at Mother Jones ever works, so if you've ever wondered about that, that's the time to come in and everybody is invited to this and there's food. I've been really excited to see like our tech team is so into, like they're always there at these sessions, like much more so than some of the edit stuff. I think the appetite is huge, they're really invested in really understanding editorial work flows, editorial concerns and priorities, so, yeah, like you know, I want to make it clear that we're still doing a weekly teaching, like program, but it's about conversation, and it's about -- it's not about hands on. And it's been, I think, like a really big way of making our whole company more cohesive. ->> Yeah? ->> I think some of it is about expectations. Like if you expect your developers to be journalists and to be part of the newsroom, they have to know how to write a story, they have to know ethics and they have to know copy edit. Programmers can be some of the craziest grammar Nazis, because all they deal with is logic. This is a wrong rule, you have a dangling modifier in that sentence, do you know know what that means? And at the Post, the developers at a different tore floor at Gannett/USA Today, they were in a different city and when we started moving people into the newsrooms and we said you're a journalist now, and you have to know how to do these things, I think that changed the mentality. ->> But how did the training flow the other way, though. ->> All right so when you bring them in and you have to teach them. Just like you do. These are the expectations, these are the ethics, you don't accept free stuff. And programmers go to conferences and it's like no, you can't do that anymore, you're in a newsroom. ->> and how do does that onboarding process like work? Is it like one sheet that you're handing them? Hey, we're five people, what are he we're going to do our spiel, what does that look like? ->> ->> Almost like any new employee, you go through a series of like ten training sessions, we sent the people to budget meetings, they worked a copy editing shift, they also would choose like headlines and do stuff like that, then they also did libel training, they met with the lawyers taught them how to not do libel. And just the same thing any new person would get, I mean any new reporter would get the same exact training and it's got to be ongoing. We're not going to touch that. That's another whole story. ->> It's kind of a startup, your first week, no matter what your job is, you have a support person and by the end of the week, you know like probably identified four bugs you wanted to fix and like a bunch of... ->> I think we're out of time. All right, thanks, guys, this has been really helpful. -[break] +How to train your newsroom +Session facilitator(s): Jaeah Lee, Tasneem Raja +Day & Time: Friday, 12:30-1:30pm +Room: Franklin 1 + +> > We're going to get started. Could somebody get the door maybe in the back? So we're here to talk about newsroom training. Just a couple of housekeeping things, if you want to open up the etherpad where we've put some burning questions, a little bit of a guide to what we're hoping to do in this conversation today, it's bit.ly/train-your-newsroom. So you can check that out. + +We wanted to start out here by introducing ourselves, telling you very briefly about what we do. And you know, as we said in the session discussion, we're really trying to learn from you guys, as well as sharing with you some of the things we've picked up as you go. Feel free to jump in. This is meant to be very participatory. + +My name is Jaeah, we're both at Mother Jones Magazine on the data team there, and I started in my job about two years ago, at which point there were still plenty of reporters and editors in our newsroom who did not know what a column or a row in a spreadsheet was, and so because we were fairly short-staffed, really short-staffed... + +> > It's us. +> > Yeah, it's just the two of us. Two and a half for some time, and we're attempting to expand our team, but nonetheless, we have tons of ideas that come through the pipeline on a daily basis, so in trying to figure out ways to not have to constantly be churning out charts and behaving solely like a service desk, we tried to figure out ways early on, you know, and with Tasneem's leadership to seed these skills throughout the newsroom, and to start, you know, in somewhat sneaky ways, just saying, well, did you know that you could add these 10 columns not by hand but by using a very simple sum function, and it kind of started out from there and bloomed into more formal regular weekly skills training sessions where we -- Tasneem convinced the company to pay for pizza once a week. +> > Food! +> > And with free food we drew in more and more members of the newsroom to come and watch us, just go through some, you know, we the staked with very basic exercises, in Google spreadsheets and how to use Google docs to making charts in illustrator to how to use the command line and not be afraid of it, and now that series has been taken over by our public affairs department, which not just includes skills training from us, but from different departments throughout Mother Jones, so you know, sometimes our fundraising team will come in and talk to the rest of the company about the rest of the organization about how to -- how they do their work. Or it could be a reporter who focuses on long form journals and talking about deconstructing a piece that he had recently written, how he went about the reporting. So it's become something much larger than what our team started out offering, and it's just been a really beautiful thing and we've managed to train in bits and pieces now that we've been kind of able to lay a foundation for that. +> > One of the things I often say is what we really do, you know, I mean our job titles are I'm interactive editor, Jaeah is interactive producer, but I think the real secret superpower that we have brought to the newsroom is the training. And it's sort of the unseen thing, right? I feel it doesn't get talked about as much as it needs to be in these discussions of how we're doing the work we do. There's a lot of things that I think are common across all newsrooms, big and small. I mean training is training in a lot of ways, right, but I'm interested in hearing from you guys a little bit more about how you're tackling this, whether you're talking about training, maybe somebody knew that's come on to your team and getting them up to speed or maybe something like we did maybe at a much bigger space where you're trying to speed skills, maybe some basic checklist of skills which is something we're going to try to develop today, across like maybe not -- I guess maybe 20 people in our case, but maybe 50 people or even more, 100 people. So before we dive in, I'm going to take a quick survey from you guys, just so we can get a sense of what we're working with here. +> > I wanted to just ask a couple questions, and then tell you what we're hoping to walk away with, so just want to ask you guy, for how many of you -- the two choices here are going to be, is training like a key part of your mandate and mission? I mean your mandate from you know, your on high to what you believe you want to be doing? Or is it kind of like a nice to have, you know, something that you've felt either asked to contribute or you know, necessarily felt like if I don't do this, I can't do my job effectively, more of a nice to have. So for how many of you would you say training is, and you who are helping facilitate training is a part of your mandate or your mission? Oh, wow, OK. That's cool. And for how many of you is it more of like something that if you can get this, it's a nice to have? OK, that's really interesting. I was not expecting that. +> > and I also wanted to ask, for how many of you do you already have something that you're trying, whether it's formal or informal, you know, something really big or kind of small? Or are you starting from scratch here? So for how many of you already kind of have something that you're trying? +> > +> > OK. And so the rest of you are kind of starting from scratch? Is there anything else? Anything in between. +> > We have intentions. +> > That is a great place to start. +> > Yeah. +> > [laughter] +> > That's nice, I like that. +> > Two things we want to walk away with, here. Jaeah, if you want to talk about some of this stuff? +> > Yeah, so the first thing we'd love to sort of give you guys to walk away with and for us, really for selfish reasons, is a checklist of what do we think are the baseline skillset that everyone in the newsroom should have? And you know, I guess depending on where you work and what role you stand in, that could be every reporter editor or maybe it goes even further beyond the editorial team. And then secondly, you know, we definitely want to learn about what methods, tried and true or that have completely failed, that you guys have tested and just kind of talk about those lessons learned from each other, and any like tips for dos and don'ts for how to go about these things. +> > Yeah, so just wanted to start opening up the discussion to all of us, we'll throw out some questions just to keep things moving. One that we want to start with is hear from you guys what the obstacles are, like what's making it hard to fulfill those intentions of training and making them into a real problem, is this a culture problem, is this a technical problem, it's probably a little bit of both so we'd like to hear what some of you are up against. +> > Time problem. I don't think we really have a culture or technical problem, but just a time problem. +> > We absolutely had, like our team used to be for people -- we had a big meeting with the newsroom to talk about like what we're for, so that we were trying to get out of the service desk, thing, as well, and all the reporters from the newsroom were like yes, we would love training. Like everybody is hon board with this, our boss thinks it's a great idea. It's just we haven't had any time. +> > and it's because you're trying to do the day to day production of the stuff while also figuring out? +> > We do actually sometimes people come to us and say like, hey, can you help me with this spreadsheet and in some cases we'll say instead of just doing it for them, we'll say can I show you how to do this? So there's one or two people who are creeping along. +> > and is it also a problem of getting their time. +> > I don't know yet. +> > Yeah. +> > How does it usually work, like the mechanics of it? Do they approach you by email or phone or in person and say I have this dataset? What do they come to you with. +> > We have a standup every morning that we do our thing and it's open so the kind of practice that we've gotten people into is come to the standup and tell us what you're working on but we also just sometimes have people email us and say I've got this thing. +> > Kind of like a rule that we've sort of instituted is to think of every point of contact as a potential training opportunity. And figuring in how to subtly sneak in, it's like the kids how to eat their vegetables thing, oh, yeah, I want to show up the formula that I used to generate those numbers because I think you might be interested and then having them see it and practice a couple of times, I feel like that's so much of the hurdle. It's just that they've literally never looked at some of these interfaces and we've all been there, like it's kind of just having them look at it is so effective. +> > I work with different newsrooms who are onboarding their teams into word processing type of thing and I often ask how do you dies do it and I feel like many different ways and like one is just like people are curious and sort of one-on-one, where it's like oh, my gosh you're doing such cool stuff and how do you do that. And someone. Mails you and then they're like oh, show me how to do this. And the other thing is mass newsroom adoption where he's like one person he's designated editorial liaison, and he actually gets a room of like 20 computers and they sit down and they sign up together and they walk through it and it's like this huge process and they spend like weeks and weeks and people fly out to different cities to do this and on the flip side like we're writing some documentation, we're going to email it out to you and figure it out and that's the end of it and there's such a wide spectrum and it's so dependent on how corporate the newsroom or how grassroots the newsroom is or how we just don't give a shit, just figure it out on your own the newsroom is. +> > I feel like what you're getting at, too, is it's a cultural thing, it's a time issue, it's how much can you afford to spend on it, and you know, any time, I mean we spend a lot of time training and probably a little bit less so today, than we did two years ago. But I mean in large part it was for us I think a big hurdle is the perception issue, you know, kind of what you were getting at, people always thought that, oh, it's so difficult, like, whatever sort of data work I do, and they didn't want to mess with anything and so our job was to kind of almost tell a white lie and say, like this is so easy and cool and look how awesome it looks and you can do this, too, and there was a lot of hand-holding in the beginning to where eventually, you know, at some point people did realize that, OK, this isn't as easy as you made it out to be, but they kind of, at that point was convincing them to stick with it and you know, kind of telling them, all right, it's not going to be easy your first time, but if you keep doing this type of work, it will get easier. And enough people, I think we've kind of reached a critical mass where enough people have realized that to be true and so there's definitely less of a fear now. +> > and they're training each other. We see them training each other, it's really cute. Yeah. Yeah. For those of you who have programs of your own, we'd love to hear a little bit of what that looks like, you know in terms of what just what are the points of contact and so on. +> > I think that a big thing that is often missed is as you said before, kind of working into the -- a lot of times a journalist might say hey, come do this for me I don't know what I'm doing. And it's easier to say OK I'm going to do this quickly, right but in the long run it does make sense to say spend that time and say I'm not going to do this for you but I'll teach you. +> > and what does it look like for you to teach them, like physically? +> > I mean it's sometimes very messy. Right? Because you're having to -- you don't want to go too far and too deep down into the rabbit hole you at least want to give them that they should be able to reproduce it the next time they come across the problem. +> > and are you sitting at their desk or are they sitting at your desk or how do you do that? +> > It's just sitting down face to face, generally. +> > Yeah, for those of you who, you know, like I said, have programs, I'm curious to know, with like this WordPress model, does anybody have a hands-on training together type of thing? Does that work? +> > We did that at the Post; it did not work. You have to have interest from people. I mean if they're not into it, then like you're talking at a wall and they're going to get out of the room and they're going to ask you the same question over and over again because they never really take the time to learn it. We did tons of training at the Post, the Post is a massive program and they have tons of people who did training for all sorts of stuff, they tried brown bags, they tried paying for it, they tried bringing in outside people, you did the same training for us like ten times. +> > I did training. +> > +> > [laughter] +> > Yes, I was there for that. And like it just never like, some people they're real interested. +> > Voluntold problem. +> > Yeah, so I absolutely asked. So Wilson Anders used to work at the Post and I was up at the New York Times. I said how did you get your entire graphic staff to be doing coding and all this amazing stuff and he goes, well, that's just expected so when we were building Vox, we told every person during the interview you're going to come here and you're going to code and you're going to be doing graphs and we have screwed it up 100 times, but we're going to get it better. But it's constantly, working at that. +> > I can share another sort of story that I think is helpful to this. So at API, one of the things that we're working on now is we have this program where we help publishers develop more data-driven content strategies. We give them new metrics tools, we do some sort of consulting with them and then they come up with a new strategy for like here's what we're going to cover and how and here's how we're going to measure it. When they get there, so for one example one of these companies decided they needed to cover outdoors stuff. They were up in the Pacific northwest with these beautiful outdoor scenes and they didn't have anybody who covered the outdoors. They. So they also one is we need to cover outdoors, two is look around our newsroom, we don't have hunters and Fishers in our newsroom, like, we have 25-year-olds out of J school. So now we need to work with our community and get contributors and we need to use social media to like recruit post outdoors photos and so they came to us can you please teach us how to use social media to work with our community and we were like sure, we can do that, but that was totally different if we'd gone to them and said hey, would you like to use social media? So the lesson, I think is when they identify the problem themselves, they will then come to you and seek the training for it, versus if you just say hey, I would love to train you on how to do this and they were like oh, no, I don't need to know that. +> > I can back that up also from educational theory, like people learn things when this matters to them. When it's in a real context. So getting people together for a training when it's an abstract thing, that's when you have to do it ten times, whereas sitting down with somebody who's like I have this thing. You might have to do it again with them, but they have a lot more invested. +> > and I think that gets at partly what Steph said is it's got to be part of your culture, because if the newsroom expectation isn't that what you're doing in your job is going to be changing, hey, suddenly then we figure out how to reach out to community members. If the expectation is that the position and the skills required for it are static, then it's no surprise that nobody wants to come into a mass Washington Post newsroom training. What do they care, their job that is been static for 5 or 10 years. +> > Or 15. +> > +> > Did you want to add something 1234. +> > Yeah, I just that I think to get them all in a room and train them on a specific thing in an hour or two hours is the same problem you have at a conference. It doesn't stick there, either. You go to a session for like an hour and it's like you're going to use Ruby because curriculum design is really hard and you have a wide range of people they have a wide range of how they're going to do it. +> > So would we, I would say. +> > I think one key lesson that we've picked up over in the course of our experience is that like definitely we realize that there has to be a need for it and that whatever skills we try to share, there has -- I mean we're not going to be able to fully train someone until there's a real project for them to work on it. So normally if we see an opportunity where a reporter comes to us and say we've got this dataset, I think it would make a great this kind of chart or this kind of table or whatever it is, we say perfect, like, let's sit together, let's do this together, or if it's quick turn around then we'll build it and say let's just sit down and spend 15 minutes talking about how I built this and you can do it too. And our skill-sharing has gone from a little bit more of a formal, you know, roll people in with free food and then teaching them actual skills and hoping they would walk away having learned something to now just showing them what's possible and like here's the result of things that we've built together with a reporter and it was like really a 50/50 effort and you can do this, too. When you have an idea, let's talk about it more seriously and we'll get into the weeds with it. And I think that's been a lot more effective for us. +> > I think it's helpful if it's kind of bite-sized and it's something you can use right away. I do training that's not in newsroom or related to news, but we used to do a really intense two days that taught them many different things, and then they would immediately start practicing. It was just like too much to like kind of sit in, so we've split it into kind of natural blocks and is what we're going to try now and do one one week and then later on we'll do like the next session. +> > and do they start practicing? Like do you see that happen. +> > We do, but it's not in a newsroom. At HUD, it's kind of necessary for them to use it right away. +> > We do training like that, it's two days and it's awesome. WordPress VIP training. +> > I think it would be helpful in a lot of cases to break it into a little bit that they can go use in the real world and then come back and build on that. Like do this little bit and use it in the world. It's always a problem when you stuff too much in a person's brain too fast. You get excited, you want to teach them so many things and they may even be excited when they're in it, OK, I'm learning, but until they go and do it. +> > My only experience in training is J school, in teaching other students how to code and I think -- I haven't thought about or I thought about -- I haven't figured out how to do this in a newsroom, but the most successful thing I did was at the night lab, we had what we called open lab hours and they were from like 6 to 9 or 7 to 10 or something, on a random week night, which works in college because you're always at the same place. +> > +> > [laughter] +> > But that doesn't work in a newsroom, but the thing that worked about that was that we have a physical space, and this is where you come to learn and work or your own project that may not be your day job, may not be your homework or whatever. But having a place where you are forced to get into that mind set is really important. People walk in, OK I'm here to learn for these three hours. And I think that runs counter to what we were saying. If you have a sort of collaborative space, I think -- I don't know -- +> > Where you can get more like one-on-one time, as well. Yeah, the evolution of ours, as Jaeah was saying, has really like dramatically changed over time where we as I said started with the get people in a room, you know, everybody follow along, hope the demo gods don't like strike us down. And it was not that effective, but I think for whatever reason, people still were like excited. And one thing that I have found to be really kind of like sneakily helpful for us is that we will actually take a byline oftentimes on pieces that we are really significantly helping out on the production and that, would because then they feel like A, they have both like a right and also like are accountable to giving you their time, because if you guys are sharing a by line, now, it's OK, oh, this is a model that they're familiar with. OK, we are coproducers on this thing, you need me to communicate with you, I need you to know that you know about X, Y, Z, you know? Because a lot of times things fall apart because we've spent all this time working with a reporter and we don't hear from them in a couple days and we're like, wait, what happened and they're like, oh, yeah, that got pulled and we weren't in that work flow. That's maybe not something that is going to be appropriate for what you chieve in your company, but in our case for people who are like hybrid journalists, taking abyline was A, not a problem at all, they're like oh, yeah, that makes total sense and B is this makes it journalism. You know, the way that you learn things from your sources and learn things from your research, is you've got to learn about how to make this stuff, too. +> > We've also started saying no to data handoffs, like if a reporter or anybody comes and pitches us a story and an interactive or a graphic component that should go into it, we'll totally agree. We used to say yes and take their data and do what we could with it. Nowadays we're like yes, and you're coming too for the whole ride and it's going to be awesome. You know, and just like you know, we try to make it fun for them and not to try and make this like teacher-student thing. We try to make it as collaborative as possible so that they feel like they have an equal stake and that our work and the kinds of skills that we're exercising to make these stories possible is no mystery to them. +> > I just want to put in another -- +> > Oh, sorry, it's Tyler, because hand, was like, OK... +> > Because if you think about how you learned programming, most of us learned programming, it was probably parried, right? And just pulling them along for the whole story, I think is so important. The handoff is destructive in a lot of ways. I think there's a work flow that I can envision for a lot of newsrooms that allows you to form sort of ad hoc teams. +> > Because we now one of the best things about paired programming is having people make mistakes and allowing them to watch you make mistakes that they have confessed that they would have felt dumb if they had made them on their own and seeing us make them is like oh, basically what we're teaching them is how to Google through their problems. No, really a Google query can be, why is my column doing this thing and no the that thing. You know, literally feeding it questions, that has been kind of a game-changer for us. +> > I like that you use the word "ride," because I like to use the metaphor of a police ride-along. +> > They aren't necessarily curious about the exact process or they would be the technical methods, but they are curious about the data that they have and they would get excited in seeing the way that you're starting to unlock them for them and it gives you a space to ask questions that they had but they've never really had a situation where they felt OK asking them. +> > and we have people who come to us that kind of like dump things in our laps or are a little demanding and I think, Noah can speak to this, as well, I think people are starting to pick up on the idea that we give more love to people who who are participating. +> > Yeah, totally. +> > One thing that we do in our team is that we try really hard to empower people to feel like they can train other people, so especially when new people are joining our team, we pair them up as buddies, and one of the buzzwords or words that we use a lot in our team is document it. Meaning like if you've learned something, go into our documentation and document it yourself, because in writing it, it will solidify for you, and then also, now when someone else asked that question, you can can then point them to it and the other thing that we do is when our teams get together for meetups, we do these flash talks and people are allowed to give talks on topics that they're not expert in. Meaning you will earn it to give a talk, so you're not an expert but you are share it and then that forces you to learn because as you know when you go up and make a presentation you have to prepare. So it forces people to look stuff up. +> > That's a great point. Also from educational theory, just reminded me something you said, there's like the concept of like learn it, teach it, do it, that's like the three steps to really learn something, and just, you know, I like bringing that learn something for the purpose of teaching it to others. +> > Yeah, exactly. +> > I'm curious about your team's kind of progression from what you said were like brown bag lunches to this kind of more free-flowing integrative process. What were kind of those check points or like goals or accomplishments that made you decide like the decision points that kind of changed your approach. +> > I mean we talk about this all the time. Like you know, it's been really helpful I think for us to just have somebody else who's as invested in making this happen so that we can just say what was energy like? Were people checking out? Have you seen anybody like actually work on this stuff after you know, you you did your panel? So a lot of I would say like daily tweaking and reconfiguring and thinking about and observing. A lot of it has just been observing. Like Jaeah said we kind of got company buy-in and we've been talking about top-down culture problems. We did not have that problem. When I was hired at Mother Jones, like it was very clear to me that this is going to be part of my mission. +> > So I already had that, and you know, our EICs like we have two editors in chief, they're totally awesome, they've done a really good job in these points of contact type places, like morning news meetings and so on and saying maybe you could cataract with Tasneem and she could talk to you, like maybe you guys to work on a map for that. They've subtlely dropped this stuff in and I know what they're doing. So in the beginning, you know, I didn't know people that well. Like I just started and so the brown bag just felt like OK, I don't have relationships here, I need to get these people in a room, like here's how I'm going to do this but really now we know what is far more effective is kind of like what you said, we show love to the people who are jazzed about this stuff and willing to go out on a limb and try something and it's been the relationships. You know, we're not tiny, I mean so our company altogether is like 75 people or something like that. 100. OK, so 100 people. Our editorial team is about half of that, and we've got two bureau, that's the other thing here we've got a bureau in San Francisco and a bureau in DC and figuring out how to, like first we were trying like webinars, you know, scaping them in, when we would do the in-person session in San Francisco. Forget it, like what we do now is the company sends us both out for like a week or two weeks a year, at different times, especially when somebody new has come on, and then we actually don't even have a program anymore, first we used to have a very formal program and 12 to 1 every day it's going to be brown bag. We don't even do that anymore. I kind of don't have a desk when I go. I'm just floating from you know, desk to desk being and being annoying and just sitting there like hey, what are you, working on. This is all about getting a little bit of face time with each person because it's incredible the amount you can impart in just like a 15-minute conversation in he recalls it of OK, here's how this spreadsheet works, by the way, did you know you could use table top and on and on and on. +> > I think in my mind the process sort of went like this, it started with us evangelizing and just saying, you know, this is awesome, you guys should do this and showcasing a few examples, like early examples where we had succeeded and you know, including an awesome chart that just like blew up trafficwise and showing those possibility, and trying to just tell people, you know, and convince them, not always successfully, that this was going to work and that they should do it too. And from then on, honestly from us I think it took very little convincing, we just kind of had to show one piece with a few charts and graphics in it up and people were like, whoa, I want to do that also and so then it became this huge flood of ideas. I mean we were getting bombarded nonstop and the problem at that point was that people still wanted to just hand off their data to us, and just say, like, cool, like, I want to do that, can you help me, here's my data. And we had to kind of start out, in the interest of time and deadlines, just doing it, producing it and sometimes it would fail and I think through a lot of failed projects, the projects that often failed were also the ones where the reporter was not as invested in the aspect that we were contributing, and so we kind of realized that we really have to like pull them even further into our process and just like force ourselves into theirs, and you know luckily we're likeable people and they didn't mind that too much, but there was a little bit of resistance at first, and you know, it's not perfect today, but you know, like Tasneem said, we do talk about it almost on an hourly basis, like she's like, oh, God, they're doing this again, and it's like let's not be frustrated, let's figure out a way like what in our process could solve this? +> > How much do you think about training people on just how to get it done like here's the tool to build your chart our your visualization versus teaching them the underlying technology? Like do I need you to understand how the programming library works? Do I need you to understand where the data comes from and what format it's in or do I really just need you to know, these are the buttons, this is how you export it. +> > +> > I'd love to hear, that's kind of a philosophy question that we do talk about a lot. Anybody want to get in on that? +> > I'm much more on like the teach technology, not the button side, but it's not like its actually any better. I think as I get better at my job, I get worse at teaching other people. So like two years ago some problem that I might have solved in excel I've forgotten, it's no longer how I would approach it. And so if I'm -- if its like a fusion tables map I'm also relearning what those buttons do so I end up talking more about the underlying stuff. I don't know if it's actually argute reason or it's a terrible reason. +> > When I used to work in a newsroom and I was like training people how to use like movable type that's how long ago this was. And I would teach them to drop in links and stuff, and this is really scary, people were like really terrified of it, and I would actually take like ten minutes and walk them through like explaining what HTML is, this is what CSS is, it makes it less scary. It doesn't mean they learn it, it just gives them some context of now they understand what this works when you look this stuff up. Now you know how to look at it. +> > I think it's super, super crucial. It's not even that you even need to write a line of Javascript. That's not what I'm showing you all I'm showing you is how my code is talking to the data on your spreadsheet and what that looks like on the page. And just that shows them the possibilities. That's actually much more -- I would say if there are two things we're trying to teach at the same time -- and we do rely on like gooey type things. There's a chart building tool called data wrapper. I'm sure some of you are familiar with it. We've done a custom install at MoJo. We've got that it's one that makes it easy to teach both data principles and like data visualization production at the same time, so I would say for me, it's maybe that I'm trying to teach principles of computational journalism and data visualization and just what is a chart, you know, why line graph and not bar graph, that kind of thing, more so than I would say the technology. +> > Because it's possible to make a really bad chart, a really misleading chart. +> > Yes, that said we have created a series of tutorials, where we can, especially for something like how to make a bar chart in Illustrator, that was a need that came up so often that we couldn't possibly be the ones making it every single time. So we started out with a tutorial that was very thorough, took you like from start to finish but it was almost too complicated and we realized that that wasn't working just like tossing them a link to the tutorial didn't actually work all that well, so these days I'd say it's kind of like, "Here's a thing that will help you get started, get it started, we'll get you through the rest of it," and even that has made a difference of taking some of the work off our table. +> > We've got them doing mapping in a bunch of different ways, you know, a couple of them, I think are trained on TileMill, the goal is to get more people trained on TileMill. Google spreadsheets out the wazoo, Illustrator, so there's this suite of tools that we have made kind of the onboarding process, but now we think in terms of drafts more so we say OK, I know you've done a chart in data wrapper before, go and send me a first draft. Go and get to where you get stuck and then hit me up on Skype, you know, or send me your finished thing and then we're going to sit and I'm going to tell you how to make this chart more effective, but you're going to do the actual hands-on work. +> > You see those people progress over time? +> > Yes. Totally. + +> > So that eventually they can get to step 3 and -- +> > And sometimes we're like, "Wait, when did Tom work on that?" We just see it on the website. It's like awesome. +> > One thing that's awesome about that, too, is when you start to use tools and you start to talk to people about it, you also improve the tools. A huge part of training is you just have bad stuff, like having to teach somebody in HREF versus having somebody click on an URL. But if you never actually go and talk to the people, you never hear those pain points and you can't empathize, because a lot of time it's my bad for creating crappy software. It's totally my fault that you don't understand this, and it's my bad. +> > That's a great point. +> > How much do you all have to worry about creating a house style for doing things so that you -- one person's not teaching one a different solution to the same problem and then oh, but she said I should do it this way, right? +> > Yeah, documentation for sure, like I mean you've given more thought to this, I would say. +> > Yeah, I mean we have -- so with charts for example, that's like probably the simplest example that we have, we started out just -- I mean if you look at our earlier work, it's all over the map. There is no consistent style. I think even the fonts, I don't know, I mean it was crazy times. But over time we realized OK, this is not working, let's just spend a day or two figuring out how to make style more consistent and for us our style guide kind of started with the print magazine and we talked with the art team about OK, what's our presence on the web. We kind of zoomed out a little bit and had a bigger discussion and from there worked with the art team to create a template for charts,. +> > It's an Illustrator file. +> > It's just an Illustrator file, yeah. So we've kind of been replicating that model as we go on with Datawrapper we'll be customizing it so it's adherent to a Mother Jones style, and I think just -- you know... +> > So visual style is one thing. +> > Oh, I see. +> > What about sort of process? Right? +> > Yeah,. +> > [laughter] +> > Good question. How do you handle that problem? +> > [laughter] +> > I don't have that problem. I don't work at a journalism organization, but -- +> > It's I don't know, I would say we're constantly just improving it, and reworking and kind of sometimes we have to go back to the drawing board and -- I don't know, it's also, I think, depending on the project and need, the process has to change along with it, so there's never one process that will be applicable to every single project. But that said, -- +> > We often think in terms of if there are two goals for this collaboration with a reporter and this is -- like literally we'll say, like, all right, we can -- it's that whole you can either have it cheap, fast, or successful or something like that, right it's that whole thing. You can either get them to you know, follow good data principles on this project, like really focus on that, and we can have it be something that's done in two hours, or we can use this as an opportunity to like really show them ways to like modify the code so that they could use it more. We're just like, what are the two things that we can achieve here and a lot of what we do is just letting some stuff go. Getting rid of this idea of like perfect and we definitely have put out crappy charts, like we definitely have, but like less and less and less over time. +> > Well, I think one thing you've always stressed is iteration, and just like we're going to let some things go and it's going to hurt, but let's just comfort ourselves by knowing that next time we do this, we know what the pain points were, and that's where we start. +> > Have you thought about tracking where people are at with their knowledge and making logical pathways to build? +> > Not really, I would say not really, again, because so much of this is like -- I mean we have a bit of like the CEO hit by the bus problem here. Like so much of this is just in our heads and when we're on vacation and stuff, like sometimes things don't, like, get done in good ways or they just don't happen as much as we would have liked, to see in that time, so no, not really. I think that that maybe is a next step for us, is like -- but then we kind of also are resisting reformalizing, you know? So I don't know, it's like a tradeoff. +> > So documentation, I'm wondering, we have been trying to document our own training things and how things should be done, but we're using GitHub, which no one can navigate. It's what a lot of people use. +> > We use WordPress and everyone edits it and contributes it and in our what you call the field guide you can see the faces of who's touched the document. +> > Are you using it pages or -- +> > Yeah, just pages. +> > This is a problem we've had. Like you know, so we've got a GitHub, it's GitHub.com/motherjones. We have a choose your own adventure plug-in, I think it's GitHub.com/motherjones/CYOA and we are always asking the reporters, like what was your pain point, blah blah blah, but then we have to be the ones to sit down and actually do it. +> > Yeah, but then they won't do it. It has to be a living document where everyone has access to it. And then a reporter figures it out and you're like go document it and then their face shows up and they own the change. +> > I don't know, yeah, that's definitely a problem we're having too. +> > I was going to try etherpad,. +> > Wait, so what WordPress tool are you using. +> > We use WordPress, it's a theme. Yeah. +> > Where everyone is an editor, so just go in and edit. +> > If you really wanted to, you can follow it so any time there's an edit, you can get an email. But there's 300 people in there, so you don't want that. +> > There's revision history with that, as well, so you can actually go back if somebody decides to like nuke it or breaks. +> > I do want to get back to this question of like the top-down culture problem, because I think that that is so key. And you know like Yuri, I know you've dealt with this. For those of you who felt where the obstacle is you this is a grassroots organization, you had this mandate, did it work, did it not work? What worked? +> > [laughter] +> > I can tell you a lot of things that did not work. You know, they put me in charge and I still couldn't push stuff through. For me, fighting up is a lot easier than fighting down. Because if it's not a shared mission, then it's hard. The things that really worked for me was one-on-one, and then you do that with like 10 people and you get like an evangelist and then they go and say check out this cool thing I did. When you get an evangelist, then it gets better, because then you have more and more evangelists and more and more people get excited. But there's still going to be one desk that you can't break in. I'll buy you lunch, I'll take you out for drinks. What do you want? You want a computer, here? You don't like it because it's a Mac? I mean, come on. +> > [laughter] +> > There's a corollary to evangelism which is sort of competition or jealousy in some certain newsroom environments. Like one reporter does some awesome thing with his story and the other reporter starts saying, how come I didn't do that? Why does he get to do that? +> > We present a friendly face but we are pretty devious behind scenes and we are on this. We get like a target. OK, Dave is our next target. We call it annexation, we have a list of people we have annexed, and it is a bit like Risk. +> > Do you keep score? +> > We should. I don't want to say easy get, but easy get for us has been our fellows, our interns, who are probably the most eager to pick up new skills. They're usually -- not always, but oftentimes -- coming from a journalism program, and just hungry, hungry for more. And so we try to start there, and the same sort of arc happened with the fellows, which is that we started with formal training except none of them had laptops. We tried walking through through sitting at their desks and training them that way, but even then we realized that a project by project training method was probably the most effective and starting there and in our experience they've been quick learners, so it usually just takes one project for them to now know how to make a chart, now know how to build a map, so the next time someone else comes to us and we don't have the bandwidth, we'll say let us pair you up with this person who has done it before and then you guys go along and have some fun and come to us when you get stuck. But also trying to just, yeah, I guess. +> > Annex. +> > Yeah, and just spread our skills as far as wide as possible, and kind of starting with the interns was kind of a smart move. +> > Show what about this checklist idea? Is this something people want to do? Maybe raise your hand if you think something like that would be useful for you? Maybe we can talk after. +> > I think it's a really good point when bringing new people in, if you can get them on board with the mission. I'm really lucky I work for a company where it's insanely how easy it is with people who I don't know how to get beyond that except for everybody come and work at Vox. +> > Do you have enough money for that? +> > But I mean like -- +> > [laughter] +> > My executive editor has more commits at GitHub than I do, and it's crazy. We get them to commit documentation. Don't complain, contribute. If you see a spelling error in documentation in code, you should have access to fix that and we want everybody to be part of this because we're all in it together, and if it tool doesn't work or a system is broken, that hurts us all. +> > That's kind of the byline philosophy for us, because they know that both of our names are going to be on the finished post here and that kind of breeds more of a sense of accountability for getting it right. +> > We give a byline to everyone that touches the story. We want everyone to get credit for their work and anything that's really, really great should have multiple bylines. +> > And kind of to Yuri's point a bit, how to approach it if your current culture isn't going to value it, like if you're in a position or the person who's asking you to, you know, emphasize training is in that position, some of it just starts with hiring. Like we just straight-up won't hire someone who's not interested in contributing in that. Like we work with people on a contract basis first and if they find stuff that's broken, they don't fix it, it's a nonstarter. And if you have an existing culture that isn't that way, like the best way to -- like one way to activate it, too is to change it for the new people you're bringing in, right? That's a pretty easy way to bring in more evangelists without having to fight existing culture. +> > Do you find that in those cases you do need the top-level buy-in from like the executive editor level. +> > I work at WordPress.com, not a newsroom, the top-level buy-in for us doesn't necessarily apply because there's not that many levels and it's an organizationally expected. +> > Right. +> > I do think buy-in is one thing, but there's this bigger question of what are the rewards for doing this, so one is I get to do a cool story, that's rewarding but there's other systems of rewards like is this important in my annual review, like am I measured based on do I know how to do this and do I use this skill. I think those are structures that help, too. People aren't going to learn something because oh, somebody said I have to, but the sense that the organization values this in many ways, not just they tell me I should do it is pretty important. +> > Right, like that's what's important about it, because it feeds things back into each other. +> > No, it kind of reminds know me, you know, you were asking that question about pathway and I wonder if there's sort of a way that we can work with our, you know, EICs to -- and maybe it's not a formally like broadcasted thing, but just, you know, to have sort of a sense of like what are the rewards for -- what are like the organizational feedback loops and rewards for the people who will like take that extra step to work with us on this, and then take the extra step to go do it at their desk by themselves and call us. Like, how are we rewarded that as a culture, not just that we're encouraging, but how are we recognizing and crediting and surfacing when it happens, because it's also demystifying for reporters to hear, it's like the competition thing you said, it's like also just oh, he can do it, I can do it, that kind of thing, so what are the points of contact at which you can do that kind of work. +> > Our organization does have learning goals as part of our annual review, and then we reset learning goals each er year. +> > Do people take them seriously? +> > +> > I don't think so. +> > +> > [laughter] +> > +> > I mean one of the ways was almost, not only are we kind of trying to seeds our skills at all levels, but also just, you know, buddying up with story editors who we know like if we get them to buy into it, then they like they'll almost just convince or just tell the reporter, this needs a chart component, you need to talk to these guys and the story is not complete until that's done. And you know, I think that's -- it's been a mixed bag, but we, you know, we have -- there's one senior editor in particular who was already very data-savvy and that was just like how he thought oftentimes, so that was a natural starting point for you, just working together with him, and then from then on out, I mean even Mike mechanic, who we never thought we would convince, and he's been very much on board, really. +> > It helped us, you know, talking about sort of what is the carrot and what's the stick kind of thing, it helped us tremendously that this editor Dave Gilson one of our colleagues who's totally awesome, had done this chart package thing about income inequality. It was our biggest item to date at like that moment. In terms of traffic and shares. And the fact that that had just happened, like one thing we always talk about is like you got to get things like fresh -- like reporters have short memories, editors have short memories, it's kind of like that what have you done for me lately, like the charts thing blew up and I could still kind of ride that enthusiasm even though it was like a few weeks out, and say yeah, remember Dave's awesome charts thing? Like what else could we do. And our main point of contact is this morning meaning. That everybody is dialing into it the editors over there, but everybody in SF is sitting in editorially and there are so much rich opportunities to just drop in something oh, yeah I'm seeing that post yesterday about immigrant detention centers is doing really well, man, I wish we could have done a map on that, and then just move on and nobody's getting singled out. Man, that's a great story, awesome, wish you could have also gotten a map in there. You know? It's almost 1:30. +> > OK. Any final like burning questions? Yeah? +> > +> > I hear a lot about devs teaching editors, but not a lot of about editors teaching devs. +> > Now we need another half hour. That's such a good question. Any of you guys want to jump in on that? +> > In our training sessions it's pretty much the whole west side of the office, which is devs and reporters, and it's pretty much an open topic for everyone, and so as developers, we get talks from about like how to dress for the camera. +> > +> > [laughter] +> > +> > Yeah, I think going back to just the whole collaboration model, I think as much as reporters and editors are learning from -- I mean we were for a long time working with one of our developers on the tech team half time, and eventually he was -- we were just having him pair up directly with the reporter. Rather than one of us being in there, and sort of liaising, and I think he learned as much about the editorial process and how reporters think, how editors think, as much as they did about you know, how he goes about his coding, and how his code is structured and you know, all those things. So I think it was very helpful, because as much as, you know, or nontechnical editorial folks might look at programmers in this very mystified light, the same happens on the other end and we found that you know with one of our developers, he was maybe resistant, I don't recall if he was resistant at first working direct think, he wanted this in between, us as a middle man to kind of translate, almost, you know, what they're asking for and how that transitions to exactly what he should build and how, and I think, you know, that -- so it definitely goes both ways, the sort of, you know, -- it's almost like a cultural exchange program. +> > Part of -- so we've been talking about how we're not doing the hands-on thing any more, but we are still doing the weekly skills thing and that has become much more like this, it's just there really weren't a lot of places in our company where like people from different departments were ever sitting in a room together and it not being a meeting, you know? So this is just like, you know, OK, Steve Katz, our publisher is going to do a lunch session on how fundraising at Mother Jones ever works, so if you've ever wondered about that, that's the time to come in and everybody is invited to this and there's food. I've been really excited to see like our tech team is so into, like they're always there at these sessions, like much more so than some of the edit stuff. I think the appetite is huge, they're really invested in really understanding editorial work flows, editorial concerns and priorities, so, yeah, like you know, I want to make it clear that we're still doing a weekly teaching, like program, but it's about conversation, and it's about -- it's not about hands on. And it's been, I think, like a really big way of making our whole company more cohesive. +> > Yeah? +> > I think some of it is about expectations. Like if you expect your developers to be journalists and to be part of the newsroom, they have to know how to write a story, they have to know ethics and they have to know copy edit. Programmers can be some of the craziest grammar Nazis, because all they deal with is logic. This is a wrong rule, you have a dangling modifier in that sentence, do you know know what that means? And at the Post, the developers at a different tore floor at Gannett/USA Today, they were in a different city and when we started moving people into the newsrooms and we said you're a journalist now, and you have to know how to do these things, I think that changed the mentality. +> > But how did the training flow the other way, though. +> > All right so when you bring them in and you have to teach them. Just like you do. These are the expectations, these are the ethics, you don't accept free stuff. And programmers go to conferences and it's like no, you can't do that anymore, you're in a newsroom. +> > and how do does that onboarding process like work? Is it like one sheet that you're handing them? Hey, we're five people, what are he we're going to do our spiel, what does that look like? +> > +> > Almost like any new employee, you go through a series of like ten training sessions, we sent the people to budget meetings, they worked a copy editing shift, they also would choose like headlines and do stuff like that, then they also did libel training, they met with the lawyers taught them how to not do libel. And just the same thing any new person would get, I mean any new reporter would get the same exact training and it's got to be ongoing. We're not going to touch that. That's another whole story. +> > It's kind of a startup, your first week, no matter what your job is, you have a support person and by the end of the week, you know like probably identified four bugs you wanted to fix and like a bunch of... +> > I think we're out of time. All right, thanks, guys, this has been really helpful. +> > [break] diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2015/SRCCON2015DatFlatsheet.txt b/_archive/transcripts/2015/SRCCON2015DatFlatsheet.txt index 4950756a..15fc0bab 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2015/SRCCON2015DatFlatsheet.txt +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2015/SRCCON2015DatFlatsheet.txt @@ -23,7 +23,7 @@ Room: Ski-U-Mah >> The session will start in five minutes! ->> So if you want to get started... Or actually... Talk in the mic. If you want to get started five minutes early, you can go to the URL, on the top there's two options, but to get started early -- the requirement, if you want to run it on your own machine, which is one of the options, I think it's the more fun and ambitious option, and I encourage it -- the only requirement is that you install the latest -- you have to have the latest version of either node.js or a fork of it called io.js. And there's instructions in the guide, but I'll add the URL right now. I recommend going to http://iojs.org and then just downloading the installer for your operating system, and get that installed now. If you want to do it on your own machine. If you don't want to install anything on your machine, we have an option for that too, but if you're feeling ambitious, and if you succumb to peer pressure -- I'm looking at all of you right now. You should install the latest version of io.js on your machine, and then you'll be ready to run everything. +>> So if you want to get started... Or actually... Talk in the mic. If you want to get started five minutes early, you can go to the URL, on the top there's two options, but to get started early -- the requirement, if you want to run it on your own machine, which is one of the options, I think it's the more fun and ambitious option, and I encourage it -- the only requirement is that you install the latest -- you have to have the latest version of either node.js or a fork of it called io.js. And there's instructions in the guide, but I'll add the URL right now. I recommend going to https://iojs.org and then just downloading the installer for your operating system, and get that installed now. If you want to do it on your own machine. If you don't want to install anything on your machine, we have an option for that too, but if you're feeling ambitious, and if you succumb to peer pressure -- I'm looking at all of you right now. You should install the latest version of io.js on your machine, and then you'll be ready to run everything. >> Is it the latest major of io? diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2015/SRCCON2015ModernizingProjects.txt b/_archive/transcripts/2015/SRCCON2015ModernizingProjects.txt index 1ee4bc6e..d19de7a3 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2015/SRCCON2015ModernizingProjects.txt +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2015/SRCCON2015ModernizingProjects.txt @@ -27,7 +27,7 @@ Room: Minnesota >> You're going to stop talking about government. ->> Yeah. But, like, it's really interesting how trying to invest modern services into these projects can actually help. I posted here -- this might frame discussions. It might not. We did a really cool thing called the US Digital Services playbook at http://playbook.cio.gov. It's got 13 plays. My favorite is the last one, defaulting to open, which depends on how much of the stack you're able to build in the open. And then there's number 7, bring in experienced teams. Which might not be a possibility in many cases. It might not be a play you can execute on. So how can you fix that? So that said, I would love to hear about crazy projects that you've worked on. This can be a little bit of group therapy. But we would then like to kind of bring it back and maybe help try and talk through some of these. And if no one volunteers, I'm volunteering Yuri. +>> Yeah. But, like, it's really interesting how trying to invest modern services into these projects can actually help. I posted here -- this might frame discussions. It might not. We did a really cool thing called the US Digital Services playbook at https://playbook.cio.gov. It's got 13 plays. My favorite is the last one, defaulting to open, which depends on how much of the stack you're able to build in the open. And then there's number 7, bring in experienced teams. Which might not be a possibility in many cases. It might not be a play you can execute on. So how can you fix that? So that said, I would love to hear about crazy projects that you've worked on. This can be a little bit of group therapy. But we would then like to kind of bring it back and maybe help try and talk through some of these. And if no one volunteers, I'm volunteering Yuri. >> Oh, man, that's just a sad story. diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2015/SRCCON2015NewsOverHTTPS.txt b/_archive/transcripts/2015/SRCCON2015NewsOverHTTPS.txt index 30a83fcb..0001eb7f 100755 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2015/SRCCON2015NewsOverHTTPS.txt +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2015/SRCCON2015NewsOverHTTPS.txt @@ -120,7 +120,7 @@ Room: Minnesota >> ProPublica is currently actually in that phase where you can hit our website via HTTP. >> Does anyone -- or anyone want me to explain what a protocol route URL is? >> You can explain it. Let me see if I can find an example. ->> Normally URLs, you think of them as starting with http://, like this. But, you know, sometimes you put HTTPS, like Mike was showing you, you actually don't need this anymore. You can just start with the slash slash. And this has been supported for way longer than people have been using it. We've been using it for four years but browsers started using it a long time ago. But people just didn't use it. So if I'm on a HTTPS page, give me the HTTPS version. If I'm on a http page, give me the HTTP version. What this is most useful for is for iframes. Where if there's communication between the iframe and the parent, it has to match. That stops them from using. Normally it's best to use HTTPS URLs for everything so even if you have an HTTP page if you can load your Javascript over HTTPS, or some of your images over HTTPS, that's still a good thing to do because at least you're insuring nourishing the integrity of those requests even if the overall page itself isn't protected. +>> Normally URLs, you think of them as starting with https://, like this. But, you know, sometimes you put HTTPS, like Mike was showing you, you actually don't need this anymore. You can just start with the slash slash. And this has been supported for way longer than people have been using it. We've been using it for four years but browsers started using it a long time ago. But people just didn't use it. So if I'm on a HTTPS page, give me the HTTPS version. If I'm on a http page, give me the HTTP version. What this is most useful for is for iframes. Where if there's communication between the iframe and the parent, it has to match. That stops them from using. Normally it's best to use HTTPS URLs for everything so even if you have an HTTP page if you can load your Javascript over HTTPS, or some of your images over HTTPS, that's still a good thing to do because at least you're insuring nourishing the integrity of those requests even if the overall page itself isn't protected. >> We're starting to switch over to that now. >> Let me tell you, the protocolless URLs don't work with email clients so if you get lazy and you are, like, writing a template for something that you can just do that. >> They also don't work locally, either. diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-accessibility.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-accessibility.md index 18301068..1f32d5a8 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-accessibility.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-accessibility.md @@ -1,19 +1,19 @@ Accessibility in media Session facilitator(s): Joanna S. Kao, John Burn-Murdoch Day & Time: Thursday, 4-5pm -Room: Classroom 305 +Room: Classroom 305 -JOHN: Hey, folks. So -- +JOHN: Hey, folks. So -- -JOANNA: So we're really excited that you're here, we're going to be talking about accessibility media, and we're not going to be talking at you for a whole hour, so don't worry. We're going to talk for maybe five minutes to set the tone for what we mean by accessibility, what we think about it, and how we should be thinking about it, and then splitting up into groups, and then coming back and talking about the groups. +JOANNA: So we're really excited that you're here, we're going to be talking about accessibility media, and we're not going to be talking at you for a whole hour, so don't worry. We're going to talk for maybe five minutes to set the tone for what we mean by accessibility, what we think about it, and how we should be thinking about it, and then splitting up into groups, and then coming back and talking about the groups. -So I guess I'll introduce myself first, I'm Joanna S. Kao, I work at the FT, along with John Burn-Murdoch. And I think we're going to start by maybe having everyone around the room say your name and what you do. Maybe start here. +So I guess I'll introduce myself first, I'm Joanna S. Kao, I work at the FT, along with John Burn-Murdoch. And I think we're going to start by maybe having everyone around the room say your name and what you do. Maybe start here. -JOHN: You can say where you work if you want to, but main thing is who you are and what you generally consider your job to be. +JOHN: You can say where you work if you want to, but main thing is who you are and what you generally consider your job to be. -JOANNA: Yeah, and if you don't want to be transcribed, just say off the record, and our wonderful transcriber wil transcribe it. +JOANNA: Yeah, and if you don't want to be transcribed, just say off the record, and our wonderful transcriber wil transcribe it. -JOHN: So in that context, I'm John, and I'm data visualization journalist, so dealing with audios and visuals. +JOHN: So in that context, I'm John, and I'm data visualization journalist, so dealing with audios and visuals. PARTICIPANT: I'm Dana, I'm an interactive designer from Dallas. @@ -21,7 +21,7 @@ PARTICIPANT: I'm Brittany, I am a developer with the interactive graphics team a PARTICIPANT: I'm a graphics developer craft team. -PARTICIPANT: I work for a tech organization called smart Chicago where I combine a program usability. +PARTICIPANT: I work for a tech organization called smart Chicago where I combine a program usability. PARTICIPANT: I'm Taylor with the news fund, we have a internship program but my job is all things creative for the Web, social media, and programs. @@ -35,7 +35,7 @@ PARTICIPANT: I work at the Texas tribe union on data visuals. PARTICIPANT: I'm Brian, I run a website at New York Times. -JOANNA: Around here. +JOANNA: Around here. PARTICIPANT: I'm Audrey, I'm a news apps developer for the Seattle times. @@ -53,99 +53,99 @@ PARTICIPANT: I'm Stephanie, I manage a team of engineers and customer support. PARTICIPANT: I'm Helga, I'm a special media producer at the Seattle times. -JOHN: Awesome and two that just joined us. +JOHN: Awesome and two that just joined us. PARTICIPANT: I work at fusion, I work as an engineer. -PARTICIPANT: I'm Steve. I'm the investigative and director manager editor. +PARTICIPANT: I'm Steve. I'm the investigative and director manager editor. -JOHN: Cool. +JOHN: Cool. -JOANNA: Sounds like we have a really diverse group of people that do a lot of different things. So that should work out really well when we break out. +JOANNA: Sounds like we have a really diverse group of people that do a lot of different things. So that should work out really well when we break out. -JOHN: So sorry. That wasn't purely to make everyone stand out. Just to get an idea of our specialties and stuff. +JOHN: So sorry. That wasn't purely to make everyone stand out. Just to get an idea of our specialties and stuff. -JOANNA: So basically our session, we're just going to spend a couple of minutes talking about what accessibility is, what our definition is, so we can kind of set the tone for what your conversation's going to be like. We're going to break out into groups and talk about within different design developments or social media or content, or how you guys want to break up of different issues of accessibility that we see in our news organizations, either as a connoisseur or someone working in news. We're going to talk about it and then second session we're going to talk about solutions we've found or solutions that other people have talked about and that's mostly it. +JOANNA: So basically our session, we're just going to spend a couple of minutes talking about what accessibility is, what our definition is, so we can kind of set the tone for what your conversation's going to be like. We're going to break out into groups and talk about within different design developments or social media or content, or how you guys want to break up of different issues of accessibility that we see in our news organizations, either as a connoisseur or someone working in news. We're going to talk about it and then second session we're going to talk about solutions we've found or solutions that other people have talked about and that's mostly it. -We will at the end of this—at the end of this talk, we have a mailing list that we've set up. So for people who are interested in talking—continuing to talk about accessibility and media particularly in journalism, and stay in touch and also like to share resources. At your tables, you guys should have a sheet of resources and tips. So if accessibility is something you've never thought about before, you can look there to get a sense of are what are some of the prompts and questions you can be thinking about. Otherwise take it home, or you can also find it online at our GitHub interactive.GitHub/accessibility. +We will at the end of this—at the end of this talk, we have a mailing list that we've set up. So for people who are interested in talking—continuing to talk about accessibility and media particularly in journalism, and stay in touch and also like to share resources. At your tables, you guys should have a sheet of resources and tips. So if accessibility is something you've never thought about before, you can look there to get a sense of are what are some of the prompts and questions you can be thinking about. Otherwise take it home, or you can also find it online at our GitHub interactive.GitHub/accessibility. -JOANNA: We both tweeted it out. So if you follow us on tweeter, you'll find it there. +JOANNA: We both tweeted it out. So if you follow us on tweeter, you'll find it there. -JOHN: Et cete. +JOHN: Et cete. -Cool. Yeah, so to save everyone, now I'm going to go through a very overview of what accessibility is or at least what—the difference between what what—the terms of accessibility is audio, visual, and ability and the issues they might throw up. So you can't read it on a screen if you're a screen reader or podcast you can't actually see. And to give you an idea of the numbers of people affected by that, about 15% of people in America have some kind of auditory ability issue, which means they can't hear either at all or properly. +Cool. Yeah, so to save everyone, now I'm going to go through a very overview of what accessibility is or at least what—the difference between what what—the terms of accessibility is audio, visual, and ability and the issues they might throw up. So you can't read it on a screen if you're a screen reader or podcast you can't actually see. And to give you an idea of the numbers of people affected by that, about 15% of people in America have some kind of auditory ability issue, which means they can't hear either at all or properly. -2 or 3% of all U.S.—the whole U.S. population has visual impairment whether that's complete blindness, an ability to recognize, contrast, or colorblindness. But if you look at people age of over 65, that goes to 7 or 8%. So coming from the Financial Times where most of our readers are that kind of age. Something we have to be particularly worried about. And then, yea. Essentially so those are the core physical ability groups that most people think about, when they think about accessibility. But the key thing we're trying to say is that actually extends—accessibility extends far beyond that. +2 or 3% of all U.S.—the whole U.S. population has visual impairment whether that's complete blindness, an ability to recognize, contrast, or colorblindness. But if you look at people age of over 65, that goes to 7 or 8%. So coming from the Financial Times where most of our readers are that kind of age. Something we have to be particularly worried about. And then, yea. Essentially so those are the core physical ability groups that most people think about, when they think about accessibility. But the key thing we're trying to say is that actually extends—accessibility extends far beyond that. -So think about just as I'm talking, think about times when you've had to—I don't know maybe you've been on a crowded, like, metro, and you want to watch a video, but you can't fumble out to put your earphones and this video is playing and you've got sound. In that environment, there's an accessibility there that's affecting you. Similarly there might be something you have a coffee in one hand, and you're trying to tap the phone screen with the other one and the tap bar is too small. That's another one. +So think about just as I'm talking, think about times when you've had to—I don't know maybe you've been on a crowded, like, metro, and you want to watch a video, but you can't fumble out to put your earphones and this video is playing and you've got sound. In that environment, there's an accessibility there that's affecting you. Similarly there might be something you have a coffee in one hand, and you're trying to tap the phone screen with the other one and the tap bar is too small. That's another one. -Really simple one. Think about when you're designing something for a mobile phone rather than for desktop. That's an accessibility issue. You may just think about it as a core part of your design process, but it's an accessibility issue. It's about making sure that people in certain scenarios and environments are able to access your journalism easier. +Really simple one. Think about when you're designing something for a mobile phone rather than for desktop. That's an accessibility issue. You may just think about it as a core part of your design process, but it's an accessibility issue. It's about making sure that people in certain scenarios and environments are able to access your journalism easier. -And even that is still thinking about quite technical terms. So there's a really, really great series on the foundation website at the moment about much more diverse meaning of accessibility. So translation. +And even that is still thinking about quite technical terms. So there's a really, really great series on the foundation website at the moment about much more diverse meaning of accessibility. So translation. -If you've written a piece which has very important insights in it for people from a country that for most of us here going to be a country where people don't necessarily speak English, translating that not necessarily Google translate, again, is a accessibility. So that people watching the story can understand it fully. +If you've written a piece which has very important insights in it for people from a country that for most of us here going to be a country where people don't necessarily speak English, translating that not necessarily Google translate, again, is a accessibility. So that people watching the story can understand it fully. -You can even go into the representation of different communities in stories. How do you make this story accessible to someone who isn't necessarily empathetic and the people using the story. So interviewing people from minorities and that kind of thing to make sure that a person from a minority is reading a piece can more easily register what you're writing. +You can even go into the representation of different communities in stories. How do you make this story accessible to someone who isn't necessarily empathetic and the people using the story. So interviewing people from minorities and that kind of thing to make sure that a person from a minority is reading a piece can more easily register what you're writing. So, yeah, there's huge realms of stuff on accessibility comes into play, and hopefully that gives you an idea of examples of an issue, what exactly we're talking about. -JOANNA: So do you guys have any questions, first of all, before we kind of break up into groups? No? Okay. +JOANNA: So do you guys have any questions, first of all, before we kind of break up into groups? No? Okay. -So we're going to try to break you guys up into groups either by what you can on or what you're interested in. Hopefully in the sense you'll be able to take back what you guys talk about as a group back to your newsrooms. So off the top of our heads, we were thinking of design group, develop worker, social media group, and audio and video group. And then people who work on product or QA. Does that seem—is there someone in here who doesn't feel like they could pick one of those five groups? Awesome. Okay. So let's try to do—let's do like a design table here, let's do a developer table here, social media table back there, what else? +So we're going to try to break you guys up into groups either by what you can on or what you're interested in. Hopefully in the sense you'll be able to take back what you guys talk about as a group back to your newsrooms. So off the top of our heads, we were thinking of design group, develop worker, social media group, and audio and video group. And then people who work on product or QA. Does that seem—is there someone in here who doesn't feel like they could pick one of those five groups? Awesome. Okay. So let's try to do—let's do like a design table here, let's do a developer table here, social media table back there, what else? -JOHN: Product. +JOHN: Product. -JOANNA: Product QA, like, there. So if you're a manager, maybe try to do the product QA group. +JOANNA: Product QA, like, there. So if you're a manager, maybe try to do the product QA group. -JOANNA: Feel free to switch around if you need to. +JOANNA: Feel free to switch around if you need to. -JOANNA: Okay. So we're going to spend about ten minutes in the first small group talking about issues of accessibility that you've seen within your categories. So this is kind of the design developer group, behind there is project manager—product team, project manager, QA, and social media. Talking about some issues that you've seen in your own work and also issues you've seen as a consumer of news. You can actually take inspiration also from news, you can take it from fear or museums or education. But, yeah, we're just going to give you about ten minutes. So when it turns 4:23, we're going to come back and talk about what you guys have discussed. If you have nothing to talk about, we have tips in the resource sheet, so you can start there. Otherwise, go for it. +JOANNA: Okay. So we're going to spend about ten minutes in the first small group talking about issues of accessibility that you've seen within your categories. So this is kind of the design developer group, behind there is project manager—product team, project manager, QA, and social media. Talking about some issues that you've seen in your own work and also issues you've seen as a consumer of news. You can actually take inspiration also from news, you can take it from fear or museums or education. But, yeah, we're just going to give you about ten minutes. So when it turns 4:23, we're going to come back and talk about what you guys have discussed. If you have nothing to talk about, we have tips in the resource sheet, so you can start there. Otherwise, go for it. [Group collaboration] -JOANNA: So we're going to take five minutes to talk about what you guys talked about in your groups. The purpose is to share the differences in your own groups and then the second breakout session is going to be talking about some solutions. +JOANNA: So we're going to take five minutes to talk about what you guys talked about in your groups. The purpose is to share the differences in your own groups and then the second breakout session is going to be talking about some solutions. So let's start, who wants to start? -JOHN: We'll start here. Should we do group by group or one by one? +JOHN: We'll start here. Should we do group by group or one by one? -JOANNA: By group. +JOANNA: By group. -JOHN: So give us -- +JOHN: So give us -- -PARTICIPANT: So we have, like—yeah, a lot. Like, three whole sheets. We'll go through a couple of them I guess. The fact that because there's a lack of awareness or knowledge of the issue, it doesn't really come up in planning meetings around when we make new products or stories basically. We have discussion about if you have okay. Well, what's your responsibilities to the subscriber in accessibility issues. +PARTICIPANT: So we have, like—yeah, a lot. Like, three whole sheets. We'll go through a couple of them I guess. The fact that because there's a lack of awareness or knowledge of the issue, it doesn't really come up in planning meetings around when we make new products or stories basically. We have discussion about if you have okay. Well, what's your responsibilities to the subscriber in accessibility issues. Text formatting is a big pet peeve for a lot of us includi low contrast of light. -JOHN: Anything about your background. +JOHN: Anything about your background. PARTICIPANT: Yeah. -JOHN: Cool. Let's get started. +JOHN: Cool. Let's get started. -JOANNA: We'll go to the social media group. +JOANNA: We'll go to the social media group. -JOHN: Social mediaish group. Issues that came up? +JOHN: Social mediaish group. Issues that came up? -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Well, we talked a lot about two of us, at least two of us have angry tweets—spreading to the culture that we're not a trustworthy site or newsworthy organizati let them read our stuff or it should be free or we can find the news elsewhere. But also a cultural problem because a lot of times coworker or superiors don't see the necessity of social media and how things are changing. So it's kind of, like, navigating that and teaching them why this is important and how to think differently about it and that kind of thing. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Well, we talked a lot about two of us, at least two of us have angry tweets—spreading to the culture that we're not a trustworthy site or newsworthy organizati let them read our stuff or it should be free or we can find the news elsewhere. But also a cultural problem because a lot of times coworker or superiors don't see the necessity of social media and how things are changing. So it's kind of, like, navigating that and teaching them why this is important and how to think differently about it and that kind of thing. -JOHN: Cool. +JOHN: Cool. -JOANNA: You want to go? +JOANNA: You want to go? -PARTICIPANT: We discussed a lot of things too. I'm going to say one thing that we discussed w accessibility for people who were visually impaired or hard-of-hearing. And how they are able to access things. So if you don't code things correctly or if you don't—yeah, if you don't code things correctly then, you know, the screen readers won't pick it up, and it's no longer accessible to people like that. +PARTICIPANT: We discussed a lot of things too. I'm going to say one thing that we discussed w accessibility for people who were visually impaired or hard-of-hearing. And how they are able to access things. So if you don't code things correctly or if you don't—yeah, if you don't code things correctly then, you know, the screen readers won't pick it up, and it's no longer accessible to people like that. -We also talked about—oh, I guess—well, this is like a we thing but a must in this culture now. Mobile responsive design. The majority of your—the majority of your readers are, like, you know, accessing information online, editors or writers are accessing on the desktop all day. Like, how do you—how do you explain sense of urgency that this is an accessibility issue for the majority of the people who, you know, you're catering to. +We also talked about—oh, I guess—well, this is like a we thing but a must in this culture now. Mobile responsive design. The majority of your—the majority of your readers are, like, you know, accessing information online, editors or writers are accessing on the desktop all day. Like, how do you—how do you explain sense of urgency that this is an accessibility issue for the majority of the people who, you know, you're catering to. -PARTICIPANT: One other thing I guess is the lack of knowledge all together about what these people need. I don't know what a screen reader looks like. And we can use plugins and things but is that real? Is that going to be an accura representation of what's happening? Can I go out and find someone in the world who uses those and needs them? We don't do that enough, and it's not something that we really do. +PARTICIPANT: One other thing I guess is the lack of knowledge all together about what these people need. I don't know what a screen reader looks like. And we can use plugins and things but is that real? Is that going to be an accura representation of what's happening? Can I go out and find someone in the world who uses those and needs them? We don't do that enough, and it's not something that we really do. -PARTICIPANT: Also, like, on the website incorporating interactive developments or, for example, video. And we've seen a lot more companies use closed captions because sometimes—just normal person doesn't have the capability of like being on the train and a really loud version of someone talking, you kno? They prefer to read it. So that—I mean just being aware of, like, where your -- +PARTICIPANT: Also, like, on the website incorporating interactive developments or, for example, video. And we've seen a lot more companies use closed captions because sometimes—just normal person doesn't have the capability of like being on the train and a really loud version of someone talking, you kno? They prefer to read it. So that—I mean just being aware of, like, where your -- -PARTICIPANT: Even questioning how much your activity should be, like, translated from desktop to mobile. And at this point not in an accessible way. Just better ways using your fingers instead of a mouse and have a smaller screen. Just -- +PARTICIPANT: Even questioning how much your activity should be, like, translated from desktop to mobile. And at this point not in an accessible way. Just better ways using your fingers instead of a mouse and have a smaller screen. Just -- -JOANNA: The last group. +JOANNA: The last group. -PARTICIPANT: We were talking about something similar too because we're design and development. But in addition, sometimes people will set their own for not size in the browser, so not turning off the ability to zoom on mobile or using the recommended set of pixels to allow people to do that. +PARTICIPANT: We were talking about something similar too because we're design and development. But in addition, sometimes people will set their own for not size in the browser, so not turning off the ability to zoom on mobile or using the recommended set of pixels to allow people to do that. And then also another one that we should take into account more is no JavaScript or, like, allowing people to have ad blockers to, you know, some people turn off data on their plans because they don't have data plans. @@ -153,85 +153,78 @@ PARTICIPANT: The content is not accessible. PARTICIPANT: Graphics, nontaxonomies. -JOANNA: Awesome. It sounds like you guys talked about a lot of different things. +JOANNA: Awesome. It sounds like you guys talked about a lot of different things. -JOHN: That was awesome. Amazing stuff there. A. I think there's an interesting point raiseddish about how closed-captioning is becoming bigger and bigger thing and how it's funny or not funny how that seems to be happening, but it can affect more normal people. But this wasn't something people particularly focused on until it was, like, yeah, I'm in the train in the morning and I can't hear something. It's just funny that's the classic thing we fix until the project manager is, like, yeah, you're right all along. We should do something about this. +JOHN: That was awesome. Amazing stuff there. A. I think there's an interesting point raiseddish about how closed-captioning is becoming bigger and bigger thing and how it's funny or not funny how that seems to be happening, but it can affect more normal people. But this wasn't something people particularly focused on until it was, like, yeah, I'm in the train in the morning and I can't hear something. It's just funny that's the classic thing we fix until the project manager is, like, yeah, you're right all along. We should do something about this. Until about five minutes before the session started, we realied that the for not size wasn't suitable on our tip sheet as well. -JOANNA: Yeah, so we just want to move into another ten minutes where you guys will talk within your groups about some of the solutions to some of the issues that you guys have been raising. So the solution that you guys have been doing at your own news organizations or some solutions that you've seen other people do. I would encourage you guys to be looking at that side of the news as well because the news industry often doesn't—isn't at the forefront of accessibility, but others are. So I think we're going to let you guys talk for ten minutes. Does anyone have any questions before we break off again? +JOANNA: Yeah, so we just want to move into another ten minutes where you guys will talk within your groups about some of the solutions to some of the issues that you guys have been raising. So the solution that you guys have been doing at your own news organizations or some solutions that you've seen other people do. I would encourage you guys to be looking at that side of the news as well because the news industry often doesn't—isn't at the forefront of accessibility, but others are. So I think we're going to let you guys talk for ten minutes. Does anyone have any questions before we break off again? -JOHN: And by all means, think about solutions that have come up and problems you've dealt with accessibility. +JOHN: And by all means, think about solutions that have come up and problems you've dealt with accessibility. -Cool. Ten minutes on that. +Cool. Ten minutes on that. [Group collaboration] -JOHN: Let's start with this table this time. +JOHN: Let's start with this table this time. -JOANNA: What was something you guys talked about as a group? +JOANNA: What was something you guys talked about as a group? -PARTICIPANT: One of the last things of rendering content including the page. So just load the content and pulling the content from the server. So that's one. And also a benchmark, the si. And different performance, JavaScript and CSS. +PARTICIPANT: One of the last things of rendering content including the page. So just load the content and pulling the content from the server. So that's one. And also a benchmark, the si. And different performance, JavaScript and CSS. PARTICIPANT: And also nontechnical levels, having check with things, projects to have easier at the beginning but also at the end to address all of these points. -JOHN: Cool. And to you guys. +JOHN: Cool. And to you guys. -PARTICIPANT: One of the things I thought sort of more accessible ways for everyone to present especially data stories. Like look three times to get to things. It shouldn't be a puzzles or something. We should make it clear instead of having it really complicated, like, map that has dots. We should just fling it out in a more accessi and not putting it out to the viewer to do the work. +PARTICIPANT: One of the things I thought sort of more accessible ways for everyone to present especially data stories. Like look three times to get to things. It shouldn't be a puzzles or something. We should make it clear instead of having it really complicated, like, map that has dots. We should just fling it out in a more accessi and not putting it out to the viewer to do the work. PARTICIPANT: Certain plugin and tool that you can use if you know something's accessible to somebody. -PARTICIPANT: So, like, priorities that seem to be the—use the tools. And then a large for around, like, using the CLS to send content to the users to record, like, what they should be doing. So have hard checks on th CMS prevent or software. +PARTICIPANT: So, like, priorities that seem to be the—use the tools. And then a large for around, like, using the CLS to send content to the users to record, like, what they should be doing. So have hard checks on th CMS prevent or software. -We also had some ideas around making people feel the pain. So—what was it? +We also had some ideas around making people feel the pain. So—what was it? [Laughter] -PARTICIPANT: I didn't say poke. It was someone else. +PARTICIPANT: I didn't say poke. It was someone else. PARTICIPANT: I said poke. -PARTICIPANT: We became more structured of the same way you do device testing. Do, like, mandatory, like, colorblindness and, like, no volume on the computer and low contrast, make the font really small. +PARTICIPANT: We became more structured of the same way you do device testing. Do, like, mandatory, like, colorblindness and, like, no volume on the computer and low contrast, make the font really small. -PARTICIPANT: Put headphones on them, start shaking them as they're trying to read. Do everything ann +PARTICIPANT: Put headphones on them, start shaking them as they're trying to read. Do everything ann -JOHN: This will be good. +JOHN: This will be good. [Laughter] -PARTICIPANT: Something I learned in groups is that Google does a little bit preferencal treatment for that. Users care about it. +PARTICIPANT: Something I learned in groups is that Google does a little bit preferencal treatment for that. Users care about it. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. We also talked a little bit about other programs that have—we're not doing it, having indicators of we have with this type of program. So we're not doing it, but there's a clear path to help. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. We also talked a little bit about other programs that have—we're not doing it, having indicators of we have with this type of program. So we're not doing it, but there's a clear path to help. -JOANNA: How big the social group? +JOANNA: How big the social group? PARTICIPANT: So we were talking about—so the problem for us is some of the ideas the user trying to engage the and years also being anti rather than holding the story and getting more out of the story to hold your trust and engagement. -PARTICIPANT: I'm sorry I know this is social media. It's actually something that happened. So apparently a lot of people do have content, put it out there into the world, people want to share it, but they don't want to take the time to share it. It's just inconvenient for them to retweet. So there's tools that could be use to click the tweet. Like, an e-mail blast or something like that and they don't care about it. +PARTICIPANT: I'm sorry I know this is social media. It's actually something that happened. So apparently a lot of people do have content, put it out there into the world, people want to share it, but they don't want to take the time to share it. It's just inconvenient for them to retweet. So there's tools that could be use to click the tweet. Like, an e-mail blast or something like that and they don't care about it. -JOANNA: Does anyone have any thoughts on anyone else's group? +JOANNA: Does anyone have any thoughts on anyone else's group? -PARTICIPANT: I just had one thing. On the client server side is good. On the client server side, I think a lot of the visualizations is interactive, more complex nonwords idea has been done on the blind side in the past purchase and there's more ways to move to the server to render a lot of what we've done, and I think a little bit especially for that. +PARTICIPANT: I just had one thing. On the client server side is good. On the client server side, I think a lot of the visualizations is interactive, more complex nonwords idea has been done on the blind side in the past purchase and there's more ways to move to the server to render a lot of what we've done, and I think a little bit especially for that. So I think moving more over to the server I think will allow us to more advance work and -- -JOHN: D3 add-on, which if you've got large loads of data -- +JOHN: D3 add-on, which if you've got large loads of data -- -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And we have one at NBC news, we've sort of open sourced, and we're working with that as well. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And we have one at NBC news, we've sort of open sourced, and we're working with that as well. -JOHN: Awesome. Cool. +JOHN: Awesome. Cool. -JOANNA: We've got nine minutes left. So mostly just wanted to wrap up and talk about how we bring all of these ideas forward. So the tip sheet is online. So feel free to—also on GitHub. So if you want to add things to it, we have a list of resource at the end, so if this organization has accessibility guidelines or blog post about it, feel free to add a poll request so that we can add to the tip sheet and also on the tip sheet, there's a link to join the mailing list. Hopefully throughout the mailing list, we'll be sharing solutions or ideas that we had on that that we've seen. And hopeful we'll be able to get those solutions out. +JOANNA: We've got nine minutes left. So mostly just wanted to wrap up and talk about how we bring all of these ideas forward. So the tip sheet is online. So feel free to—also on GitHub. So if you want to add things to it, we have a list of resource at the end, so if this organization has accessibility guidelines or blog post about it, feel free to add a poll request so that we can add to the tip sheet and also on the tip sheet, there's a link to join the mailing list. Hopefully throughout the mailing list, we'll be sharing solutions or ideas that we had on that that we've seen. And hopeful we'll be able to get those solutions out. -JOHN: Yeah, the main part as well as on the tip sheet. We'll try without stopping you as much as possible. So, yeah. And stuff develops on this. Really maybe initiative is that it would be great to hear this stuff developing and successful. +JOHN: Yeah, the main part as well as on the tip sheet. We'll try without stopping you as much as possible. So, yeah. And stuff develops on this. Really maybe initiative is that it would be great to hear this stuff developing and successful. -So cool. Yeah. Thanks for coming. +So cool. Yeah. Thanks for coming. [Applause] - - - - - - - diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-better-analytics.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-better-analytics.md index 52045a5f..53886d4a 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-better-analytics.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-better-analytics.md @@ -1,187 +1,187 @@ Better Analytics: Why You Have to Define Success Before You Use Analytics—And How To Do It Session facilitator(s): Tyler Fisher, Sonya Song Day & Time: Friday, 2:30-3:30pm -Room: Classroom 305 +Room: Classroom 305 -TYLER: Hey, everyone. Everybody, we're going to get started. Welcome to better analytics, why you have to define success before you use analytics and how to do it. Very robust discussion title. +TYLER: Hey, everyone. Everybody, we're going to get started. Welcome to better analytics, why you have to define success before you use analytics and how to do it. Very robust discussion title. -We have a huge number of people, which is awesome. We're going to be doing a lot of group discussion, so feel free to speak up, especially because we're having a live transcript in here. So make sure to have your voices heard. Also I know when people talk, they get a little bit squirrly in public. I would encourage you not to fear it. But you have any problems about that, you can also go off the record if you don't want to have it in the live transcript, you're free to make that private. +We have a huge number of people, which is awesome. We're going to be doing a lot of group discussion, so feel free to speak up, especially because we're having a live transcript in here. So make sure to have your voices heard. Also I know when people talk, they get a little bit squirrly in public. I would encourage you not to fear it. But you have any problems about that, you can also go off the record if you don't want to have it in the live transcript, you're free to make that private. So I'm Tyler Fisher, I work at NPR, and we have Sonya who works at chartbeat. So we're going to talk—both of us are going to do a little bit of what we've done so that you know where we're coming from in terms of big analytics work we've done in the past and what we might be able to help you with. -Quickly there's links to the etherpad, which is shoutkey.com/date, and slides shoutkey.com/does. If anyone wants to take notes, that would be great. Don't feel pressure to. +Quickly there's links to the etherpad, which is shoutkey.com/date, and slides shoutkey.com/does. If anyone wants to take notes, that would be great. Don't feel pressure to. -Yeah, so I'm Tyler, my name without the E on the social networks. And developer at NPR, used to be at northwestern University Knight lab and Chicago Tribune. And most of the work I do is learning how—figuring out how we can learn from the storytelling. Most of what I do is visual projects, visual story left leg or election time, or things that aren't necessarily reproducible. But we still want to learn things about their audience from those scenarios. So I'm usually instrumenting analytics on those sort of special projects and trying to design a experience useful going forward. +Yeah, so I'm Tyler, my name without the E on the social networks. And developer at NPR, used to be at northwestern University Knight lab and Chicago Tribune. And most of the work I do is learning how—figuring out how we can learn from the storytelling. Most of what I do is visual projects, visual story left leg or election time, or things that aren't necessarily reproducible. But we still want to learn things about their audience from those scenarios. So I'm usually instrumenting analytics on those sort of special projects and trying to design a experience useful going forward. We had a story, for slide shows, also audio or other forms of media and we track them in very similar ways about two years we were doing it. -So each of these stories began with a title card and a big begin button. So I tracked it to begin with. How many people landed on the page actually clicked to begin. +So each of these stories began with a title card and a big begin button. So I tracked it to begin with. How many people landed on the page actually clicked to begin. -And sometimes when we had audio in the story, we had a thing that said put on your headphones with just a little headphone icon. And we found—not a huge sample size but the bottom four right here are ones on the best performing. Even the best didn't have a great begin rate. So that's tosh that we're losing some of our audience by signaling audio. So that means would you stop using audio? Well-- well, I'll get there. We'll come back with my question. +And sometimes when we had audio in the story, we had a thing that said put on your headphones with just a little headphone icon. And we found—not a huge sample size but the bottom four right here are ones on the best performing. Even the best didn't have a great begin rate. So that's tosh that we're losing some of our audience by signaling audio. So that means would you stop using audio? Well-- well, I'll get there. We'll come back with my question. -I did another thing. So thes shows, some of them are really long, some of them are shorter, and I wanted to know was there a relationship between the number of slides and completion rate. And I found that there is slight negative relationship and that's mostly driven by that outlie at the beginning by the crazy 130 slide piece that we did, which was frankly too long. But—especially if you take out the outliers, that was a relationship. I was curious to see if we could build the piece as long as we wanted to build it and that the sort of slide show format, people click through it if your story's compelling. And I would say the top in my opinion are the most compelling stories we told. +I did another thing. So thes shows, some of them are really long, some of them are shorter, and I wanted to know was there a relationship between the number of slides and completion rate. And I found that there is slight negative relationship and that's mostly driven by that outlie at the beginning by the crazy 130 slide piece that we did, which was frankly too long. But—especially if you take out the outliers, that was a relationship. I was curious to see if we could build the piece as long as we wanted to build it and that the sort of slide show format, people click through it if your story's compelling. And I would say the top in my opinion are the most compelling stories we told. -So, yeah. And then back to the audio things. So the other two things I was really tracking a lot was completion rate and then what I call engaged user completion rate. Which was the people who actually clicked begin. So we're getting bounces and things like that. How many of those people finished the story. And I found that our audio pieces—so I can't. This is an image, so I can't flip the sorting. But you see if you flip the sorting of this table, the audio ones are a little lower when you check regular completion rate. But engages, they move up to the closer to the top. +So, yeah. And then back to the audio things. So the other two things I was really tracking a lot was completion rate and then what I call engaged user completion rate. Which was the people who actually clicked begin. So we're getting bounces and things like that. How many of those people finished the story. And I found that our audio pieces—so I can't. This is an image, so I can't flip the sorting. But you see if you flip the sorting of this table, the audio ones are a little lower when you check regular completion rate. But engages, they move up to the closer to the top. -So we're finding while we're losing a larger portion of our audience when we—the ones who actually want to hear it, are more engaged users. So that's sort of a catch 22. Is your goal, like, just getting a ton of people to finish the story? Then you don't want audio. If you want to have engagement with people who are actually interested, audio is a good—if you have audio, and at NPR, we do, it's a really good thing to include for us. +So we're finding while we're losing a larger portion of our audience when we—the ones who actually want to hear it, are more engaged users. So that's sort of a catch 22. Is your goal, like, just getting a ton of people to finish the story? Then you don't want audio. If you want to have engagement with people who are actually interested, audio is a good—if you have audio, and at NPR, we do, it's a really good thing to include for us. -So that's some of the work I've done. I've also published a lot of things on our app, and there's some independents I'm working on. That's all I've got as a interim. +So that's some of the work I've done. I've also published a lot of things on our app, and there's some independents I'm working on. That's all I've got as a interim. -SONYA: My name is Sonya Song, I'm a media researcher. Before I worked with—open news fellow, I worked with the Boston globe and before I joined chart chartbeat, I worked at other institutes as well. So my background is media psychology. So to analyze what people would read on Facebook and publish it on e-mail lab called sharing fast and slow, research you can still find it. I tried to plug in as many theories as possible why do people share, why do people click without sharing? Go to the next slide. Yeah. +SONYA: My name is Sonya Song, I'm a media researcher. Before I worked with—open news fellow, I worked with the Boston globe and before I joined chart chartbeat, I worked at other institutes as well. So my background is media psychology. So to analyze what people would read on Facebook and publish it on e-mail lab called sharing fast and slow, research you can still find it. I tried to plug in as many theories as possible why do people share, why do people click without sharing? Go to the next slide. Yeah. -So here I want to show you some examples that I some results generated by target data. So I want to show you that stories perform differently on different platforms through social search. So that's why sometimes we just cannot expect some stories because you don't have such nature. So this is one example. I like to have breaking news. On the top you see some labels, Paris attacks, Thanksgiving, San Bernardino shooting, debate on Republicans, Democrats, and Christmas. So here's the volume of traffic from Google, Facebook, and Twitter. And then we see that for the Paris attacks, roughly the volume. And then for the shootings, yes, went up a lot. So this so this is, you know, expected; right? No matter from which stories, the volume went up simply because there's surprises over there. And then if you go to the next slide, this is kind of like we clean up the data and then we remove some daily, weekly cycles, then here gives a variety. Which means a number of different +So here I want to show you some examples that I some results generated by target data. So I want to show you that stories perform differently on different platforms through social search. So that's why sometimes we just cannot expect some stories because you don't have such nature. So this is one example. I like to have breaking news. On the top you see some labels, Paris attacks, Thanksgiving, San Bernardino shooting, debate on Republicans, Democrats, and Christmas. So here's the volume of traffic from Google, Facebook, and Twitter. And then we see that for the Paris attacks, roughly the volume. And then for the shootings, yes, went up a lot. So this so this is, you know, expected; right? No matter from which stories, the volume went up simply because there's surprises over there. And then if you go to the next slide, this is kind of like we clean up the data and then we remove some daily, weekly cycles, then here gives a variety. Which means a number of different -articles people would actually read during those moments. So here we see for the Paris attacks, for the shooting, we see actually the line down. That means people didn't necessarily read more articles. During those moments, people would read fewer number of articles. Is that means the news consumption is targeted. If you look at survey data, people say no matter where I got news first, I would go to those brand name news organizations for updates. CNN, BBC, et cetera,. +articles people would actually read during those moments. So here we see for the Paris attacks, for the shooting, we see actually the line down. That means people didn't necessarily read more articles. During those moments, people would read fewer number of articles. Is that means the news consumption is targeted. If you look at survey data, people say no matter where I got news first, I would go to those brand name news organizations for updates. CNN, BBC, et cetera,. -And then of course during Christmas people would read fewer articles. That's if we could. +And then of course during Christmas people would read fewer articles. That's if we could. -So this is one example that shows stories just perform differently. So think about how to define your success, maybe we should first understand where we will find the benchmark, you kn? What categories, what kind of metrics are you comparing against? +So this is one example that shows stories just perform differently. So think about how to define your success, maybe we should first understand where we will find the benchmark, you kn? What categories, what kind of metrics are you comparing against? -And then the next one is, you know, this is a scatter plot. One is social, one is search. So, you know, this is too complicated, I will talk about it later if we have time. So that just shows that stories perform differently on search and social. So this is, again, another example. +And then the next one is, you know, this is a scatter plot. One is social, one is search. So, you know, this is too complicated, I will talk about it later if we have time. So that just shows that stories perform differently on search and social. So this is, again, another example. -TYLER: Cool so we have a brief introduction from some of our work so you know where we're coming from if you have any questions about how we're instrumenting these kinds of things. But mostly we want to make this about you in the spirit of SRCCON. So we're going to do three things. We're going to have a large group discussion about just generally news stories and success and what that means to you. We're going to have a small group activity about—we're going to assign groups like specific types of stories and define success for that type of story and how you would measure it and how you would report to your user and things. And then we'll come back together and regather all the work. +TYLER: Cool so we have a brief introduction from some of our work so you know where we're coming from if you have any questions about how we're instrumenting these kinds of things. But mostly we want to make this about you in the spirit of SRCCON. So we're going to do three things. We're going to have a large group discussion about just generally news stories and success and what that means to you. We're going to have a small group activity about—we're going to assign groups like specific types of stories and define success for that type of story and how you would measure it and how you would report to your user and things. And then we'll come back together and regather all the work. -So let's start with our group discussion. We're going to keep this to 15 minutes so we have a little timer here. But just brief introduction. So I want everybody to think about, like, at your news organization, what's your average story? What's the thing you're publishing? The kind of thing you're publishing every day? Is it a breaking news update? Is it—I don't know is it a feature story? Is it, like, a sports game recap, you kknow? Stuff like that. It's different for everybody. +So let's start with our group discussion. We're going to keep this to 15 minutes so we have a little timer here. But just brief introduction. So I want everybody to think about, like, at your news organization, what's your average story? What's the thing you're publishing? The kind of thing you're publishing every day? Is it a breaking news update? Is it—I don't know is it a feature story? Is it, like, a sports game recap, you kknow? Stuff like that. It's different for everybody. But when you think about those things, and we'll work through these questions as you think about that kind of—your average story. -So if everybody can't see. The first question we're going to talk about is what does success look like for your everyday story? What does it mean to your news organization. So anybody off the top of your head have thoughts about what success looks like for your average story? +So if everybody can't see. The first question we're going to talk about is what does success look like for your everyday story? What does it mean to your news organization. So anybody off the top of your head have thoughts about what success looks like for your average story? PARTICIPANT: It grew our audience reach. -TYLER: Sure. So audience reach. How do you measure audience reach? +TYLER: Sure. So audience reach. How do you measure audience reach? -PARTICIPANT: Page views, content views across all platforms, not just our platform. By segments of types of audience. So, like, audience not just in terms of sheer volume, but we want to reach more women, so looking demographically. +PARTICIPANT: Page views, content views across all platforms, not just our platform. By segments of types of audience. So, like, audience not just in terms of sheer volume, but we want to reach more women, so looking demographically. -TYLER:. Cool. +TYLER:. Cool. PARTICIPANT: Paid views and then being tweeted or shared by someone famous or someone influential. -TYLER: Yeah,. So when you're thinking about success, are you thinking, oh, we want to get 100,000 page views. Or is it—you know, do you set, like, quantitative expectations? Is it a more qualitative, like, success, we want to reach, you know, we did a story about criminal justice, and we want to reach criminal justice advocates. Yeah, in the back. +TYLER: Yeah,. So when you're thinking about success, are you thinking, oh, we want to get 100,000 page views. Or is it—you know, do you set, like, quantitative expectations? Is it a more qualitative, like, success, we want to reach, you know, we did a story about criminal justice, and we want to reach criminal justice advocates. Yeah, in the back. PARTICIPANT: Comments in particular, comments that get recommended by users or big tweets that aren't just using automated tags or headlines, but premium asking comments on the stories. -TYLER: Sure so you're analyzing what people are saying about the story and doing qualitative analysis about that. Yeah,. Cool. +TYLER: Sure so you're analyzing what people are saying about the story and doing qualitative analysis about that. Yeah,. Cool. -SONYA: Also cover the second question. So how do you measure your success? So we don't think about technical constraints. Just in an ideal world, what kind of metrics would you use to measure your success; right? +SONYA: Also cover the second question. So how do you measure your success? So we don't think about technical constraints. Just in an ideal world, what kind of metrics would you use to measure your success; right? PARTICIPANT: We compare, like, performance of one story against other stories of that type because not all stories are created equal. -TYLER: Sure. Uh-huh. So what—I guess what—when you're measuring your success, what kinds of tools are people using? Chart, Google analytics. +TYLER: Sure. Uh-huh. So what—I guess what—when you're measuring your success, what kinds of tools are people using? Chart, Google analytics. -SONYA: Parsley.Armature. +SONYA: Parsley.Armature. -SONYA: Very aeasy to use. Or do you also have some kind of developed tools like what Tyler would do at NPR, no? +SONYA: Very aeasy to use. Or do you also have some kind of developed tools like what Tyler would do at NPR, no? PARTICIPANT: We have a thing called billboards that aggregates from chart our own internal measuring thing calls provenance and our data scientists have built a series of algorithms that I don't understand that make projections and recommendations. -SONYA: Oh,. Okay. Recommend to put on the front page or to change the positions? Or on social? What kind of recommendations. +SONYA: Oh,. Okay. Recommend to put on the front page or to change the positions? Or on social? What kind of recommendations. -PARTICIPANT: Data recommendations and then an AV testing headline tool that it recommends against as well for, like—I don't really know. I'm not in that workflow every day but to optimize headlines against -- +PARTICIPANT: Data recommendations and then an AV testing headline tool that it recommends against as well for, like—I don't really know. I'm not in that workflow every day but to optimize headlines against -- -SONYA: Okay. Cool. +SONYA: Okay. Cool. -TYLER: Let's see. So—y. So—yeah. People are typically using, you know, I'm hearing a lot of the popular tools, Google analytics, parsley, armature, so I guess when you sit down and think about success, if you've had this conversation, is there ever a discussion—and this is sort of a leading question. But is there ever discussion of something, like, Google analytics doesn't give you out of the box? We talk about page views because it's the easiest metric to get; right? It's the top of the report. So that's what we think about. +TYLER: Let's see. So—y. So—yeah. People are typically using, you know, I'm hearing a lot of the popular tools, Google analytics, parsley, armature, so I guess when you sit down and think about success, if you've had this conversation, is there ever a discussion—and this is sort of a leading question. But is there ever discussion of something, like, Google analytics doesn't give you out of the box? We talk about page views because it's the easiest metric to get; right? It's the top of the report. So that's what we think about. -Are people ever thinking about, like, okay. Well, page views are maybe not our goal here and, like, we want to use something else that's hid or something we can build ourselves that actually -- +Are people ever thinking about, like, okay. Well, page views are maybe not our goal here and, like, we want to use something else that's hid or something we can build ourselves that actually -- -PARTICIPANT: Giving away all my secrets, but we want to build something that basically asks is this good journalism? Is this something you want to read? +PARTICIPANT: Giving away all my secrets, but we want to build something that basically asks is this good journalism? Is this something you want to read? -TYLER: What does that mean to you? +TYLER: What does that mean to you? -PARTICIPANT: We want to ask that question. We want to get to that story and ask you a simple yes or no question like a reaction question. We want your feedback. But in a structured way. +PARTICIPANT: We want to ask that question. We want to get to that story and ask you a simple yes or no question like a reaction question. We want your feedback. But in a structured way. TYLER: . -PARTICIPANT: I was going to say something super similar, like, we don't have anything in the works, but I would love to have something that does that same thing. Like, if you know a lot about this topic that we wrote about, do you feel that we covered it adequately? Or totally missed the boat? Similarly we have a columnist that gets a large amount of traffic and people are always, like, oh, hey, you've got such traffic. But it's all hate traffic. They're reading it so that they can share it and say this guy's an idiot. So is that success? +PARTICIPANT: I was going to say something super similar, like, we don't have anything in the works, but I would love to have something that does that same thing. Like, if you know a lot about this topic that we wrote about, do you feel that we covered it adequately? Or totally missed the boat? Similarly we have a columnist that gets a large amount of traffic and people are always, like, oh, hey, you've got such traffic. But it's all hate traffic. They're reading it so that they can share it and say this guy's an idiot. So is that success? -TYLER: Right. Right. +TYLER: Right. Right. -PARTICIPANT: Not really. But how do you measure that? +PARTICIPANT: Not really. But how do you measure that? -TYLER: Yeah, it's a tough thing. The sort of qualitative, like, was this good? Like, did we satisfy our expectations as an audience member? It's tough to measure. But I think it's important to, like, think about to stop and—you know, not just take what I IT team has bought for you and, like, just take what it gives you. I think there's work to be done. And everything I've done, everything I've showed you from my end is Google analytics. That's what I do. But you can do so much custom work with it, you can build what you want and learn what you want to learn with reason. +TYLER: Yeah, it's a tough thing. The sort of qualitative, like, was this good? Like, did we satisfy our expectations as an audience member? It's tough to measure. But I think it's important to, like, think about to stop and—you know, not just take what I IT team has bought for you and, like, just take what it gives you. I think there's work to be done. And everything I've done, everything I've showed you from my end is Google analytics. That's what I do. But you can do so much custom work with it, you can build what you want and learn what you want to learn with reason. PARTICIPANT: To your question of measuring success, I think most organizations are determined by income, money still. -TYLER: Right. +TYLER: Right. -PARTICIPANT: So, yes, you send your publications and try to get that kind of success. But the simplest answer is we're still measuring success by traffic I think. Mostly the high level success rate. +PARTICIPANT: So, yes, you send your publications and try to get that kind of success. But the simplest answer is we're still measuring success by traffic I think. Mostly the high level success rate. -SONYA: So with different departments your newsroom can find success in the same way consistently. So that's another question. +SONYA: So with different departments your newsroom can find success in the same way consistently. So that's another question. -TYLER: Right. . So the business end argument of it is one I ignore. +TYLER: Right. . So the business end argument of it is one I ignore. [Laughter] -Which is a bad thing. But—so are people working with, like, ad view—a lot of operating on hits; right? Like, did you get 100,000 people to see this thing? Are people having to work with a viewability? We need this X-amount of people to see the ad for ten seconds or whatever. How does that change? +Which is a bad thing. But—so are people working with, like, ad view—a lot of operating on hits; right? Like, did you get 100,000 people to see this thing? Are people having to work with a viewability? We need this X-amount of people to see the ad for ten seconds or whatever. How does that change? -PARTICIPANT: We are. I'm with ESPN undefeated, and ad rolls usually for video clips and trying to get people to watch videos. Monetizeation is pretty -- +PARTICIPANT: We are. I'm with ESPN undefeated, and ad rolls usually for video clips and trying to get people to watch videos. Monetizeation is pretty -- -TYLER: Yeah, so how does that change. The other thing is view; right? It just launched. How did that conversation of success is we need to get this many people to see this ad. How does that change? Have you thought about it this way? How you built it? +TYLER: Yeah, so how does that change. The other thing is view; right? It just launched. How did that conversation of success is we need to get this many people to see this ad. How does that change? Have you thought about it this way? How you built it? -TYLER: Okay. But from the beginning, we're going to do preroll because that's how we're going to get enough people to see this. +TYLER: Okay. But from the beginning, we're going to do preroll because that's how we're going to get enough people to see this. -PARTICIPANT: It's a legacy. A legacy preroll. If there was a better way to do ads, maybe investment. But right now it seems to be the best way overall. +PARTICIPANT: It's a legacy. A legacy preroll. If there was a better way to do ads, maybe investment. But right now it seems to be the best way overall. -TYLER: Okay. Cool. +TYLER: Okay. Cool. PARTICIPANT: Time on page. -TYLER: Sure. +TYLER: Sure. -PARTICIPANT: And time on-site as well. So did someone just bounce out of the site or did they go to something else? It's not a measure of success of that story, but it's a measure of something. +PARTICIPANT: And time on-site as well. So did someone just bounce out of the site or did they go to something else? It's not a measure of success of that story, but it's a measure of something. [Laughter] I guess it's a measure of probably of the UX of promotion of stories around it. -TYLER: Right so how are you—in your corpus of work, how are you using metrics like data time on-site? So when you're trying to see, like, what did well? How do you know? +TYLER: Right so how are you—in your corpus of work, how are you using metrics like data time on-site? So when you're trying to see, like, what did well? How do you know? PARTICIPANT: We use time on-site -- -TYLER: And do you have sort of—you know what's good and bad, like, what are good and bad numbers just -- +TYLER: And do you have sort of—you know what's good and bad, like, what are good and bad numbers just -- -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Kind of. I mean but it goes back to this thing, like, if your story at a certain time, and you can compare like. So long form pieces of that content with lots of time put into them or whatever. People are going to stay longer. But they cost a lot more. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Kind of. I mean but it goes back to this thing, like, if your story at a certain time, and you can compare like. So long form pieces of that content with lots of time put into them or whatever. People are going to stay longer. But they cost a lot more. -TYLER: Sure. Yeah,. So the story in an underserve audience. Being reached. You can see it's very skewed and skewed old. There's an effort to try to address that how they do that exactly I guess is probably just -- +TYLER: Sure. Yeah,. So the story in an underserve audience. Being reached. You can see it's very skewed and skewed old. There's an effort to try to address that how they do that exactly I guess is probably just -- -TYLER: Yeah, and Google Analytics at least tries because they have this massive ad network, and they know everything about you tries to tell you your user. It's, like, age, Democrat, location, and things like that. They do a pretty decent job. Yea? +TYLER: Yeah, and Google Analytics at least tries because they have this massive ad network, and they know everything about you tries to tell you your user. It's, like, age, Democrat, location, and things like that. They do a pretty decent job. Yea? -PARTICIPANT: I heard a couple of people mention. And I do it effectively. It's, like, confident way to know consistent way to know. Somehow metadata is there, and I don't know how to do it. +PARTICIPANT: I heard a couple of people mention. And I do it effectively. It's, like, confident way to know consistent way to know. Somehow metadata is there, and I don't know how to do it. -TYLER: So how are other people doing that? Like, to comparison? What's your taxonomy? How is that structured? +TYLER: So how are other people doing that? Like, to comparison? What's your taxonomy? How is that structured? PARTICIPANT: We haven't started doing this yet, but I'm hoping to work with parsley to add some tags that don't show up publicly on our site but do get fed into parsley and we can tag things breaking versus enterprise versus multimedia, so then we would be able to pull out data and say if it's breaking and sports, which just comes from the section taxonomy, or if it's enterprise, then it's entertainment or whatever, so then we can segment. -SONYA: You have categories. +SONYA: You have categories. PARTICIPANT: Right. -SONYA: Best country singer or something like that. +SONYA: Best country singer or something like that. -TYLER: So I think—I know York on main analytics team, we have a whole separate team for that. But I know because I have to integrate with their system that when we track the page view, the initial hit, we're tracking all of this to Google Analytics, and we can do that filtering immediately. So we can take a look at all the politic stories and all the technology stories and all of that. +TYLER: So I think—I know York on main analytics team, we have a whole separate team for that. But I know because I have to integrate with their system that when we track the page view, the initial hit, we're tracking all of this to Google Analytics, and we can do that filtering immediately. So we can take a look at all the politic stories and all the technology stories and all of that. PARTICIPANT: With the audio or video, maybe somebody has the bandwidth to do it or on Wi-Fi. -TYLER: Yeah, always. +TYLER: Yeah, always. PARTICIPANT: So maybe you convert a lot better if you looked at it from a full Wi-Fi or available network. -TYLER: Yeah, that's a good one to know for our work. +TYLER: Yeah, that's a good one to know for our work. -PARTICIPANT: This is in terms of the last question. No. The reporter, everyone has a different way of measuring, at the end of the month you have a general page view or visit the goal or reporters want to measure impact. Also, I forgot what I had entire measurements based on the actual audience. Like, a very specific audience. They want a specific audience that makes this much money or this and this place. And the only way to measure that is a mixture of location and this whole learning about the audience and subscriber information. +PARTICIPANT: This is in terms of the last question. No. The reporter, everyone has a different way of measuring, at the end of the month you have a general page view or visit the goal or reporters want to measure impact. Also, I forgot what I had entire measurements based on the actual audience. Like, a very specific audience. They want a specific audience that makes this much money or this and this place. And the only way to measure that is a mixture of location and this whole learning about the audience and subscriber information. -TYLER: Uh-huh. Yeah, actually I do want to get this question in the last few minutes. A lot of us are measuring success and what that means to us, and we have our measurements. When you communicate it to the newsroom, is it acted on? I find this is a struggle at NPR, we struggle with this, we have priorities, and we're measuring them. But communicating them to, like, your everyday reporting and making that a part of the editorial decision to make, how do others—I'm curious if others have statistics or not or if this is a sticking point to everybody? +TYLER: Uh-huh. Yeah, actually I do want to get this question in the last few minutes. A lot of us are measuring success and what that means to us, and we have our measurements. When you communicate it to the newsroom, is it acted on? I find this is a struggle at NPR, we struggle with this, we have priorities, and we're measuring them. But communicating them to, like, your everyday reporting and making that a part of the editorial decision to make, how do others—I'm curious if others have statistics or not or if this is a sticking point to everybody? -PARTICIPANT: Try to manage what success is across the country. But it comes out in an e-mail every day. So I guess hitting their daily number for the day. +PARTICIPANT: Try to manage what success is across the country. But it comes out in an e-mail every day. So I guess hitting their daily number for the day. PARTICIPANT: What was the comment? -PARTICIPANT: Just a daily e-mail that segments our goals for the month. And tracks the progress throughout the month. So that we can see what the expectations are. +PARTICIPANT: Just a daily e-mail that segments our goals for the month. And tracks the progress throughout the month. So that we can see what the expectations are. -SONYA: So what's your company if you don't mind. +SONYA: So what's your company if you don't mind. PARTICIPANT: Fusion. @@ -191,117 +191,117 @@ PARTICIPANT: Hundreds of millions. PARTICIPANT: Of page views? -PARTICIPANT: There's a lot of different ones. Yeah,. Across social, page views, time on-site,. +PARTICIPANT: There's a lot of different ones. Yeah,. Across social, page views, time on-site,. -TYLER: But it's volume of traffic kinds of thing? +TYLER: But it's volume of traffic kinds of thing? -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. It just gives you aboverall target for the end of the month and how you're moving on a daily basis. So it can be shares on Facebook, signups, or time spent, so there's a couple of them. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. It just gives you aboverall target for the end of the month and how you're moving on a daily basis. So it can be shares on Facebook, signups, or time spent, so there's a couple of them. -SONYA: Yeah, so who sets the goal? The manag. They work in different newsrooms, and they found, at gawker, that is the metrics or the thing that was measure their performance. So all the reporters are under pressure they have to have page reviews, shares, and even reporters at New York Times don't have access to the dashboard, and they have to listen to their editors and then show their editorial rather than guide it by audience preferences. +SONYA: Yeah, so who sets the goal? The manag. They work in different newsrooms, and they found, at gawker, that is the metrics or the thing that was measure their performance. So all the reporters are under pressure they have to have page reviews, shares, and even reporters at New York Times don't have access to the dashboard, and they have to listen to their editors and then show their editorial rather than guide it by audience preferences. -So there are different ways to measure success. +So there are different ways to measure success. -PARTICIPANT: By contrast, I have to shove analytics down the throats of people at my—not the ad team. The ad team is all analytics. But the writers are, like, very resistant. +PARTICIPANT: By contrast, I have to shove analytics down the throats of people at my—not the ad team. The ad team is all analytics. But the writers are, like, very resistant. -TYLER: They just don't want to hear it? +TYLER: They just don't want to hear it? -PARTICIPANT: They don't want to be driven by analytics and the editors—we're a newspaper, so people are very print mentality as well. I think. But people are pretty, like, intentionally oblivious I think. But I think they're scared the one off blog post they're going to do are going to be their best article ever and nobody is going to read stuff that they spent three months on. +PARTICIPANT: They don't want to be driven by analytics and the editors—we're a newspaper, so people are very print mentality as well. I think. But people are pretty, like, intentionally oblivious I think. But I think they're scared the one off blog post they're going to do are going to be their best article ever and nobody is going to read stuff that they spent three months on. -Which isn't really the case. But they're—they don't want to -- +Which isn't really the case. But they're—they don't want to -- TYLER: . -PARTICIPANT: I send out reports to them, and they do get a little competitive. But I think there is a very resistant analytics resistance. +PARTICIPANT: I send out reports to them, and they do get a little competitive. But I think there is a very resistant analytics resistance. -SONYA: Yeah,. +SONYA: Yeah,. -PARTICIPANT: I mean I find that I've worked with editors and contextualize page views, but something like time on page, contextualizeing that for them and a more narrative story of how that equates to their success. Sort of has helped remove some of that fear in places where I've worked. +PARTICIPANT: I mean I find that I've worked with editors and contextualize page views, but something like time on page, contextualizeing that for them and a more narrative story of how that equates to their success. Sort of has helped remove some of that fear in places where I've worked. -In fact, to the point where they are—their desires to get their hands on the analytics because they're interested in how—it's not a story about, like, how many people did you get the site, it's a story of how engaged your readership is what you're working on. And when you talk to editors that way, sometimes that can help the problem. At least that's what IYeah, I think that's really great advice. Frame it in a way that's about journalism, like, about the success of your journalism. +In fact, to the point where they are—their desires to get their hands on the analytics because they're interested in how—it's not a story about, like, how many people did you get the site, it's a story of how engaged your readership is what you're working on. And when you talk to editors that way, sometimes that can help the problem. At least that's what IYeah, I think that's really great advice. Frame it in a way that's about journalism, like, about the success of your journalism. PARTICIPANT: We have an engagement team in the newsroom with the journalists, and it's run bis by a journalist. -TYLER: Yeah, we have something similar. +TYLER: Yeah, we have something similar. -PARTICIPANT: There's a data guy that runs it with her. But I think you need that level of buying into the audience engagement team and creation view to filter through to be something that was—and so they will tweak headlines and tweak stories in realtime on the basis of what we're seeing in the analytics. So they'll change headlines or develop the page and get the most out of their stories based on realtime analytics. +PARTICIPANT: There's a data guy that runs it with her. But I think you need that level of buying into the audience engagement team and creation view to filter through to be something that was—and so they will tweak headlines and tweak stories in realtime on the basis of what we're seeing in the analytics. So they'll change headlines or develop the page and get the most out of their stories based on realtime analytics. -TYLER: Yeah. That's a model I think a lot of users are deciding to replicate. +TYLER: Yeah. That's a model I think a lot of users are deciding to replicate. -PARTICIPANT: But it's new. It's a new thing. +PARTICIPANT: But it's new. It's a new thing. -TYLER: Yeah, and I think it's a powerful one. +TYLER: Yeah, and I think it's a powerful one. -All right. We're going to move on to the group activity. This is an enormous group. So this might be a little tricky. But—so what we want to—whoops. Y. That's right. So what we want to do is we want, like, so groups at tables I guess people have to sort of—and groups on the floor I guess. So we want you to pick specific story type. And we had some ideas, so you don't have to go—where is my mouse? +All right. We're going to move on to the group activity. This is an enormous group. So this might be a little tricky. But—so what we want to—whoops. Y. That's right. So what we want to do is we want, like, so groups at tables I guess people have to sort of—and groups on the floor I guess. So we want you to pick specific story type. And we had some ideas, so you don't have to go—where is my mouse? -You have to go completely—oh, well. I had some specific stories. Things like you could pick like a breaking news story, you could pick an investigative long form piece, you could pick a feature story, a vid video, you could pick a social media-native video, auto playing video kind of deal. Anything that a news organization might publish. Sports game recap, you know? Things like that. +You have to go completely—oh, well. I had some specific stories. Things like you could pick like a breaking news story, you could pick an investigative long form piece, you could pick a feature story, a vid video, you could pick a social media-native video, auto playing video kind of deal. Anything that a news organization might publish. Sports game recap, you know? Things like that. -And what we want you to do with that story type as a group is define success for that story. And that doesn't necessarily mean we want to get 100,000 page views, that means something more like, you know, we want to reach a community of this type people or something that's a little bit less about the number and more about quality. +And what we want you to do with that story type as a group is define success for that story. And that doesn't necessarily mean we want to get 100,000 page views, that means something more like, you know, we want to reach a community of this type people or something that's a little bit less about the number and more about quality. -And then define how you're going to measure that. Like, how are you going to find out you were successful in that? And then how are you going to report it back to your user. Does that make sense sort of to everybody? +And then define how you're going to measure that. Like, how are you going to find out you were successful in that? And then how are you going to report it back to your user. Does that make sense sort of to everybody? -So we have some paper and sharpies and things on the tables if you want to write stuff down. But let's try to consolidate this enormous group into a bunch of different groups and see how it goes. You're going to have 20 minutes. +So we have some paper and sharpies and things on the tables if you want to write stuff down. But let's try to consolidate this enormous group into a bunch of different groups and see how it goes. You're going to have 20 minutes. [Group activi -TYLER: Everybody, you have five minutes left. +TYLER: Everybody, you have five minutes left. -Okay. Everybody, time is up. Wrap up your conversations. We're going to all report back as a large group. +Okay. Everybody, time is up. Wrap up your conversations. We're going to all report back as a large group. -Okay. So we're going to go around to each group and then share what success is, the success statement, the success measurement, and their success report. We've got ten minutes left total. So two minutessish for each group. +Okay. So we're going to go around to each group and then share what success is, the success statement, the success measurement, and their success report. We've got ten minutes left total. So two minutessish for each group. -PARTICIPANT: We misunderstood the statement part of that and we wrote three pages of success. So we're going to speed read. +PARTICIPANT: We misunderstood the statement part of that and we wrote three pages of success. So we're going to speed read. -TYLER: Go for it. +TYLER: Go for it. PARTICIPANT: Okay. PARTICIPANT: I'll be going first? -Okay. The type of story we did was, like, a big project. Three-month, six-month, whatever. Year project story. Some statements of success would be that it affected change where people took action, built brand or company awareness, started influential conversations and strong relationships. We reached new audiences and strengthened loyalty in existing audiences. Tried something innovative or experimental. It inspired or educated others in the newsroom internally. Turned readers into promoters, attracted advertisers, had a long shelf life. Okay. That's not all of them. But those are the big ones. +Okay. The type of story we did was, like, a big project. Three-month, six-month, whatever. Year project story. Some statements of success would be that it affected change where people took action, built brand or company awareness, started influential conversations and strong relationships. We reached new audiences and strengthened loyalty in existing audiences. Tried something innovative or experimental. It inspired or educated others in the newsroom internally. Turned readers into promoters, attracted advertisers, had a long shelf life. Okay. That's not all of them. But those are the big ones. -And how do we measure those things? The story was talked about in policy situations or reference. You know, in city hall or on TV or on the websites. Measure the paid views, whether they're new or existing readers. Did we reach a demographic that we don't traditionally reach? Do user testing or focus groups referrals stay high? Did we get event tracking on letters like newsletter signups? +And how do we measure those things? The story was talked about in policy situations or reference. You know, in city hall or on TV or on the websites. Measure the paid views, whether they're new or existing readers. Did we reach a demographic that we don't traditionally reach? Do user testing or focus groups referrals stay high? Did we get event tracking on letters like newsletter signups? -Define the experimental, define what the fact experiment is. And how do you measure it? Number of times the story was referenced somewhere else online and later referenced that story. And measure reshares, e-mail, completion rates, so forth. +Define the experimental, define what the fact experiment is. And how do you measure it? Number of times the story was referenced somewhere else online and later referenced that story. And measure reshares, e-mail, completion rates, so forth. And then the number of unique commentators, and not just th commenters on the site, but not having two people -- -And how do we report that? This was much less because we ran out of time. But the key points here is that you just can't e-mail out a report, you can't hand out a report saying here's how it did. It has to be in real life, in person with context of what does this all mean? And then there has to be take aways from it. So what did we learn? What are we going to do the same? What different next time instead of just, hey, we did great. Next. +And how do we report that? This was much less because we ran out of time. But the key points here is that you just can't e-mail out a report, you can't hand out a report saying here's how it did. It has to be in real life, in person with context of what does this all mean? And then there has to be take aways from it. So what did we learn? What are we going to do the same? What different next time instead of just, hey, we did great. Next. -TYLER: Yeah, that's great. Thank you. Really thorough. Great. Next group. +TYLER: Yeah, that's great. Thank you. Really thorough. Great. Next group. -PARTICIPANT: Sure. We also picked an investigative story. So a lot of us were similar. We picked a topic, it would be coverage of lead in water maybe. So we said there's a text-driven story interacted and see how it affects. +PARTICIPANT: Sure. We also picked an investigative story. So a lot of us were similar. We picked a topic, it would be coverage of lead in water maybe. So we said there's a text-driven story interacted and see how it affects. -So one of the things we thought would help measure the success would be whether or not it influences policy changes, whether it was reshared by the influences and circles. Whether or not we reputable refers and refer to your story. Whether or not it's mentioned in the speeches. We also talked about whether or not if we would look at—if we got higher traffic or more time to spend on-site in a highly affected area, we would consider that a measure of success. +So one of the things we thought would help measure the success would be whether or not it influences policy changes, whether it was reshared by the influences and circles. Whether or not we reputable refers and refer to your story. Whether or not it's mentioned in the speeches. We also talked about whether or not if we would look at—if we got higher traffic or more time to spend on-site in a highly affected area, we would consider that a measure of success. -Also if there was an interactive, it helped you understand how—people spend more time with the story after having used that interactive I think would be a good thing. If other people were—wrote about your story, also we would love to hear on your performance from the brand but also if a promotion was given. And maybe if your story got covered on TV. +Also if there was an interactive, it helped you understand how—people spend more time with the story after having used that interactive I think would be a good thing. If other people were—wrote about your story, also we would love to hear on your performance from the brand but also if a promotion was given. And maybe if your story got covered on TV. -So those are the list of the success metrics. In terms of how it got recorded, we talked a little bit about how things can impact the numbers and whether or not there was, you know, time of day or the weather outside or whether or not Kardashian was there that day and stole the Internet. So we rolled it up into this elementary school style it needs improvement, it was good. +So those are the list of the success metrics. In terms of how it got recorded, we talked a little bit about how things can impact the numbers and whether or not there was, you know, time of day or the weather outside or whether or not Kardashian was there that day and stole the Internet. So we rolled it up into this elementary school style it needs improvement, it was good. [Laughter] -And then three bullet points, this is why it was good. And then it wouldn't be e-mailed to you, it would be discussed directly to you with your manager or editor, someone who has context of higher coverage of initiative over time. +And then three bullet points, this is why it was good. And then it wouldn't be e-mailed to you, it would be discussed directly to you with your manager or editor, someone who has context of higher coverage of initiative over time. -And we thought that would work because investigative story isn't necessarily—it has a longer burn, so you don't need those numbers at the moment. You might talk about quickly as long as it's getting traffic. +And we thought that would work because investigative story isn't necessarily—it has a longer burn, so you don't need those numbers at the moment. You might talk about quickly as long as it's getting traffic. -TYLER: Awesome. Great. The group in the back. +TYLER: Awesome. Great. The group in the back. PARTICIPANT: Us? -TYLER: Sorry. The group without a table. +TYLER: Sorry. The group without a table. -PARTICIPANT: We to be honest we didn't brief. But we did talk about measurement, and how we really track the amount of time, whether or not that's relevant and the metrics around what it was that demonstration people were really engaged with. We went around with sharing or saving stories. Do people come back and save them? We talked about—help me out. +PARTICIPANT: We to be honest we didn't brief. But we did talk about measurement, and how we really track the amount of time, whether or not that's relevant and the metrics around what it was that demonstration people were really engaged with. We went around with sharing or saving stories. Do people come back and save them? We talked about—help me out. -PARTICIPANT: Contextual information about stories. Did it succeed on the home page? Or because it was tweeted out from an account? Or quality. +PARTICIPANT: Contextual information about stories. Did it succeed on the home page? Or because it was tweeted out from an account? Or quality. -PARTICIPANT: We also talked about kind of how success across an organization sometimes you can focus too micro on the story level. So that may be on its own is a—isn't tremendously valuable and how sometimes little pieces about how that—how you can put that in your narrative as a whole and a little bit of that focus groups and how it's not just about numbers, it's about putting those in context and getting a broader narrative around blogging. We trust it, we're getti verbatim stuff around the stories. +PARTICIPANT: We also talked about kind of how success across an organization sometimes you can focus too micro on the story level. So that may be on its own is a—isn't tremendously valuable and how sometimes little pieces about how that—how you can put that in your narrative as a whole and a little bit of that focus groups and how it's not just about numbers, it's about putting those in context and getting a broader narrative around blogging. We trust it, we're getti verbatim stuff around the stories. -And essentially what we also mentioned is the narrative going back to sponsor the story. So if you've got people who write it out, how do you get back to them, the success or failure of that story? And then one other thing that we mentioned is that this is assignments at the end of the day. And you have to kind of listen to the editorial and response to the story. Maybe you didn't get the numbers but everybody is recognizing. Maybe did get the numbers. And—but people still aren't convinced that it was a great piece of journalism. And there's value in that as well. +And essentially what we also mentioned is the narrative going back to sponsor the story. So if you've got people who write it out, how do you get back to them, the success or failure of that story? And then one other thing that we mentioned is that this is assignments at the end of the day. And you have to kind of listen to the editorial and response to the story. Maybe you didn't get the numbers but everybody is recognizing. Maybe did get the numbers. And—but people still aren't convinced that it was a great piece of journalism. And there's value in that as well. -TYLER: Uh-huh. We've got three more groups and three more minutes. So. +TYLER: Uh-huh. We've got three more groups and three more minutes. So. -PARTICIPANT: We decided to do—look at the story type of live video story. And—yeah, specifically because he had live Facebook video on our site. So what we want to find success for was viewers, full or close to full length engagement, social lift, and long tail success. So adding subscribers through Twitter, Facebook, or e-mail newsletter. The metrics that we decided on was the full video watch of time on page versus time of video. And full video watch of time of riv versus time to completion of the video. +PARTICIPANT: We decided to do—look at the story type of live video story. And—yeah, specifically because he had live Facebook video on our site. So what we want to find success for was viewers, full or close to full length engagement, social lift, and long tail success. So adding subscribers through Twitter, Facebook, or e-mail newsletter. The metrics that we decided on was the full video watch of time on page versus time of video. And full video watch of time of riv versus time to completion of the video. -For referrals, we want to know where people are coming from, the amount of traffic, so throughout long periods of video, we share this is happening on the video stream, does that bring people in? How many people does it bring in? What particular platforms are more successful at bringing people in? Watches after the completion of the event. So when people when I'm on a page to replay the event after we have completed it. Then we talked about after the event was completed, we pull down the file, upload that in our home player in place, and look at scrubbing the particular video to particular locations. I realied I was going slow. Points at people exit the live video, social media shares, video hashtag, so if you have a hashtag associated with the video, track the social conversation. Cut a long line of video to track highlights and track success on those. Newsletter field, you need track unfollow buttons, and highlights versus live stream viewer counts. +For referrals, we want to know where people are coming from, the amount of traffic, so throughout long periods of video, we share this is happening on the video stream, does that bring people in? How many people does it bring in? What particular platforms are more successful at bringing people in? Watches after the completion of the event. So when people when I'm on a page to replay the event after we have completed it. Then we talked about after the event was completed, we pull down the file, upload that in our home player in place, and look at scrubbing the particular video to particular locations. I realied I was going slow. Points at people exit the live video, social media shares, video hashtag, so if you have a hashtag associated with the video, track the social conversation. Cut a long line of video to track highlights and track success on those. Newsletter field, you need track unfollow buttons, and highlights versus live stream viewer counts. And we report with a live stream discussion and our editor of viewing our analyst person. @@ -311,31 +311,22 @@ PARTICIPANT: On Facebook. Social engagement report that we send out, tracks realtime, we have a Slack bot that would pop up every time it exceeded x-number of viewers and a live dashboard catized analytics events. -TYLER: Wow. Thorough. Wow. +TYLER: Wow. Thorough. Wow. [Laughter] PARTICIPANT: We had a lot of time. -TYLER: Next group. +TYLER: Next group. -PARTICIPANT: So basically we had everything they mentioned. We were just talking the normal stuff that I think everybody talked about impactful, it's getting traction, we've thrown audience maybe. We've—the measures were, like, e-mail, feedback, longevity, the amount of people talking about it. If it actually affected change or started a movement? And my favorite was it does not have been to be viral in order to be successful. That being, like, it did reach the audience and it—the influences for that specific topic are talking about it or referencing. Also the qualitative data on it might be shore more than the quantitative data. How that it might have trended into a different topic. +PARTICIPANT: So basically we had everything they mentioned. We were just talking the normal stuff that I think everybody talked about impactful, it's getting traction, we've thrown audience maybe. We've—the measures were, like, e-mail, feedback, longevity, the amount of people talking about it. If it actually affected change or started a movement? And my favorite was it does not have been to be viral in order to be successful. That being, like, it did reach the audience and it—the influences for that specific topic are talking about it or referencing. Also the qualitative data on it might be shore more than the quantitative data. How that it might have trended into a different topic. +PARTICIPANT: Okay. So we decide to do a story to a follow-up of a specific story. A follow-up, like, three months later. Not a update but the story is—we started our conversation the difference between product view success and measures that versus reporters in the newsroom. So we got a little off track, but I'll see what we have. But we basically learned that that product had success differently and we had a whole discussion about how story types are different there. +TYLER: Hugely important. -PARTICIPANT: Okay. So we decide to do a story to a follow-up of a specific story. A follow-up, like, three months later. Not a update but the story is—we started our conversation the difference between product view success and measures that versus reporters in the newsroom. So we got a little off track, but I'll see what we have. But we basically learned that that product had success differently and we had a whole discussion about how story types are different there. +PARTICIPANT: But what we wanted—when we wanted to look at this we compare the original numbers of the first story to see if we're reaching or updating the original audience of the story. Also more mentions of the general outlets whether on our story or the topic in general if we're bringing the story back into the conversation saying—we return the topic to attention. Looking to traffic story as referrals from this one. So now original story traffic covering, you know, three months ago from this date on. So people coming out just for the first time or wanting a backup and wh happened. And then generally what everyone else talked about respectful organizations or more follow on multiple social brands, commentary general that we spend a lot of time discussing and sentiment, what the story is. Negative because it's not necessarily about us, it's—negative because that sucks. That's bad news. And then talk about the general impact. Anything else? -TYLER: Hugely important. - -PARTICIPANT: But what we wanted—when we wanted to look at this we compare the original numbers of the first story to see if we're reaching or updating the original audience of the story. Also more mentions of the general outlets whether on our story or the topic in general if we're bringing the story back into the conversation saying—we return the topic to attention. Looking to traffic story as referrals from this one. So now original story traffic covering, you know, three months ago from this date on. So people coming out just for the first time or wanting a backup and wh happened. And then generally what everyone else talked about respectful organizations or more follow on multiple social brands, commentary general that we spend a lot of time discussing and sentiment, what the story is. Negative because it's not necessarily about us, it's—negative because that sucks. That's bad news. And then talk about the general impact. Anything else? - -TYLER: Thank you. Yeah, so we're a little over time so thank you, all, for coming. I would just some themes I heard. A lot of you were talking about investigative—and a lot of you are not talking about page views. You're talking about qualitative impact. And I think when you go into your next conversation to define success, think about those things and don't talk about 100,000 page views. If you got anything out of this, I hope it's that. +TYLER: Thank you. Yeah, so we're a little over time so thank you, all, for coming. I would just some themes I heard. A lot of you were talking about investigative—and a lot of you are not talking about page views. You're talking about qualitative impact. And I think when you go into your next conversation to define success, think about those things and don't talk about 100,000 page views. If you got anything out of this, I hope it's that. [Applause] - - - - - - - diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-bots-need-humans.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-bots-need-humans.md index 0589e5f9..1e52e232 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-bots-need-humans.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-bots-need-humans.md @@ -1,17 +1,17 @@ -Why your bot is nothing without a human +Why your bot is nothing without a human Session facilitator(s): Millie Tran, Stacy-Marie Ishmael Day & Time: Friday, 10:30-11:30am -Room: Innovation Studio +Room: Innovation Studio -PARTICIPANT: Hello! It is 10:30 and we're starting on time, very robotically. So my name is Stacey Marie Ishmael, Millie Tran, and that's. We are going to talk to you today about. We have about seven different titles to this presentation. It's why your bot is nothing without a human. Your bots are bad, stop building them. Which should give you some sense of where we're going with thi me mostly. What we're hoping to achieve is that by the end of this, you'll have a better understanding of what are some of the things that we, particularly we in the newsroom sense, are doing when we're writing and creating bots that are driving our audiences insane and how we can stop doing that and create better user experiences with them. We would like this to be as interactive as possible, because none of us like talking at people, so if you have questions in between, yell them, you know, we'll listen. All right, let us begin. +PARTICIPANT: Hello! It is 10:30 and we're starting on time, very robotically. So my name is Stacey Marie Ishmael, Millie Tran, and that's. We are going to talk to you today about. We have about seven different titles to this presentation. It's why your bot is nothing without a human. Your bots are bad, stop building them. Which should give you some sense of where we're going with thi me mostly. What we're hoping to achieve is that by the end of this, you'll have a better understanding of what are some of the things that we, particularly we in the newsroom sense, are doing when we're writing and creating bots that are driving our audiences insane and how we can stop doing that and create better user experiences with them. We would like this to be as interactive as possible, because none of us like talking at people, so if you have questions in between, yell them, you know, we'll listen. All right, let us begin. Why did we get into bots? I spent up until extremely recently working at BuzzFeed news, building the BuzzFeed news app and having strong opinions about notifications. Millie was also on my team and she is now the Director of adaptation at BuzzFeed. She builds various things that she will talk to you about, as well, but one of the things that unites us, other than general nerdiness, is we all, the three of us really think about bots as user experiences, bots as interface, and bots as life hacks, which is generally in contrast to how newsrooms have started to approach bots, which is to say, and here is another way that we can broadcast what we think is important back at our audiences without necessarily thinking about why would somebody who has taken the time to find a bot, download it and say yes, you can send me things, actually do that we're not always giving them anything meaningful. I'm going to start with a question. How many of you use bots? How many of you have built one? How many of you have never installed Facebook messenger bot, because it's too hard and too annoying? Yes? So if you have not yet installed a Facebook messenger bot. I would invite you to try. Let me know if you succeed by the end of this session. They don't make it easy. -We built one which we're extremely biased towards, but anyway, one of the problems that we had when we were coming up with this session is definitions. Right? When we talk about bots, what do we mean and this is something that I think has been a point of confusion, as well, for many of us from the perspective of why do we want to create this? We've been through a period where we—I'm not going to ask any of you how old you are. Do you remember IRC bots? OK, cool, people over 22. We've had a conflation of bots as interfaces with bots as apps, with bots as ways of sending information out into the world that is just triggered by one specific thing. When we think about bots as interfaces we're like, OK, what do do we have? We have Alexa on Amazon echo. We have Siri, we have Google now, but most commonly when newsrooms think about bots, they're thinking of ooh, this kind of chat-like messengery thing where you can type something in that's really cool. It will be human and therefore people will be likely to engage, because it feels like something a friend would send them, well, what we've done in practice is we've taken something that works pretty well when it's a voice user interface and turned it into something that is incredibly annoying when it is text-based because I have an Amazon echo and I love her very much, but she drives me insane sometimes, because I have a weird accent, and so I'll say things like, Alexa, what's the temperature and she'll be like? Excuse me? And this is even more frustrating when I'm trying to interact with the CNN bot and I'll tell the CNN bot, hello and it will say, I don't understand you and you have to try 17 different key configurations that nobody has bothered to define. +We built one which we're extremely biased towards, but anyway, one of the problems that we had when we were coming up with this session is definitions. Right? When we talk about bots, what do we mean and this is something that I think has been a point of confusion, as well, for many of us from the perspective of why do we want to create this? We've been through a period where we—I'm not going to ask any of you how old you are. Do you remember IRC bots? OK, cool, people over 22. We've had a conflation of bots as interfaces with bots as apps, with bots as ways of sending information out into the world that is just triggered by one specific thing. When we think about bots as interfaces we're like, OK, what do do we have? We have Alexa on Amazon echo. We have Siri, we have Google now, but most commonly when newsrooms think about bots, they're thinking of ooh, this kind of chat-like messengery thing where you can type something in that's really cool. It will be human and therefore people will be likely to engage, because it feels like something a friend would send them, well, what we've done in practice is we've taken something that works pretty well when it's a voice user interface and turned it into something that is incredibly annoying when it is text-based because I have an Amazon echo and I love her very much, but she drives me insane sometimes, because I have a weird accent, and so I'll say things like, Alexa, what's the temperature and she'll be like? Excuse me? And this is even more frustrating when I'm trying to interact with the CNN bot and I'll tell the CNN bot, hello and it will say, I don't understand you and you have to try 17 different key configurations that nobody has bothered to define. -When we talk about humans and the reap that humans is part of this presentation is because the things that make all of those different kinds of bots successful, whether we're thinking about those interfaces or triggers or newsroom hacks for engravesment is the script, right? A bot is a decision tree and it's a decision tree that in an ideal world would be more akin to a super obvious user friendly choose your own game. But is usually an exercise in 0 to swear words in under 10 seconds because you can't figure out what are the triggers for this thing and how do you get a way to interact with it and that is, and here I'm showing my bias, often a consequence of them being entirely written who think in loops, and not necessarily conversation, hi, greetings, salutations, where we don't necessarily think about building these things in ways that somebody would actually talk to something, because we're only designing the back end and we're assuming that the back end and the front end are the same and this has been a really common thing that we've noticed in some of the bots that we're going to take a look at and describe to you. Here's a good example. This is someone interacting with the 1-8 hundred-flowers bot. Because according to Facebook it is much easier to send 72 different messages to something you could achieve in 2 seconds on one of the websites. One of the points of frustration is here. Is like hey, I am in Canada, what is your address? Canada. Do you deliver to Canada? What? And then the person enters a series of leave me alone loops. Quit, I don't want to hear from you anymore, unsubscribe, please stop talking to me, and the bot keeps replying, because it's doing what it's supposed to do. It's like oh, here's a trigger that I don't know how to respond to so I'll ask another question that hopefully this person can figure out. +When we talk about humans and the reap that humans is part of this presentation is because the things that make all of those different kinds of bots successful, whether we're thinking about those interfaces or triggers or newsroom hacks for engravesment is the script, right? A bot is a decision tree and it's a decision tree that in an ideal world would be more akin to a super obvious user friendly choose your own game. But is usually an exercise in 0 to swear words in under 10 seconds because you can't figure out what are the triggers for this thing and how do you get a way to interact with it and that is, and here I'm showing my bias, often a consequence of them being entirely written who think in loops, and not necessarily conversation, hi, greetings, salutations, where we don't necessarily think about building these things in ways that somebody would actually talk to something, because we're only designing the back end and we're assuming that the back end and the front end are the same and this has been a really common thing that we've noticed in some of the bots that we're going to take a look at and describe to you. Here's a good example. This is someone interacting with the 1-8 hundred-flowers bot. Because according to Facebook it is much easier to send 72 different messages to something you could achieve in 2 seconds on one of the websites. One of the points of frustration is here. Is like hey, I am in Canada, what is your address? Canada. Do you deliver to Canada? What? And then the person enters a series of leave me alone loops. Quit, I don't want to hear from you anymore, unsubscribe, please stop talking to me, and the bot keeps replying, because it's doing what it's supposed to do. It's like oh, here's a trigger that I don't know how to respond to so I'll ask another question that hopefully this person can figure out. -Here's another example: This was a perfectly good text messaging service. I really enjoyed using it when it just sends us text messuages and here you have an example of Millie trying to interact with poncho saying hey, what's the weather? Are you on a boat? Why is poncho asking, after you tried to give them like a config, why are they asking are you on a boat? It's because somebody got overly clever with the script, right? One of the things I've noticed with bots is they're either super clever, weirdly passive-aggressive or completely useless and there are only a few examples of interactions that you're like, oh, I actually solved my problem more quickly than I could have solved that same problem either by Googling or firing up a browser or using an app. +Here's another example: This was a perfectly good text messaging service. I really enjoyed using it when it just sends us text messuages and here you have an example of Millie trying to interact with poncho saying hey, what's the weather? Are you on a boat? Why is poncho asking, after you tried to give them like a config, why are they asking are you on a boat? It's because somebody got overly clever with the script, right? One of the things I've noticed with bots is they're either super clever, weirdly passive-aggressive or completely useless and there are only a few examples of interactions that you're like, oh, I actually solved my problem more quickly than I could have solved that same problem either by Googling or firing up a browser or using an app. PARTICIPANT: Millie: I would like to see someone try to install or interact with a bot right now. Spend the next three minutes interacting with something and let us know how that goes. @@ -31,7 +31,7 @@ PARTICIPANT: I did. The Yahoo weather bot. PARTICIPANT: You work phoria hoo. -PARTICIPANT: No, I just said weather, that's the thing I experience daily so I should maybe install this. And now it wants me to caption my weather and share it with a PARTICIPANT: The request to caption was puncturated with lots of emojis which made me feel pleasant: *. +PARTICIPANT: No, I just said weather, that's the thing I experience daily so I should maybe install this. And now it wants me to caption my weather and share it with a PARTICIPANT: The request to caption was puncturated with lots of emojis which made me feel pleasant: \*. PARTICIPANT: Like as a place that is very fond of emojis, I can tell you that emojis are not a substitute for actual emotions. @@ -39,9 +39,9 @@ PARTICIPANT: Here's Millie interesting with tech crunch. Which is one of the ear PARTICIPANT: So tech crunch was one of the launch partners when Facebook launched their messenger platform and it is the one that is the most rage quit after people ha successfully installed it for these reasons. -PARTICIPANT: This is at least a month of tolerance, by the way, and then just -- +PARTICIPANT: This is at least a month of tolerance, by the way, and then just -- -PARTICIPANT: No matter what you do, no matter what you you've told tech crunch, it will just send you things, all the time. And this I think is one of the clearest examples of the conflation of bot with notification with utility, when none of those words are in fact justified by the use case presented here. She eventually made it stop. She's like are you sure you want to completely unsubscribe, type yes, and it went away. So here's the thing with bots. Even more than apps, they have a discover ability problem, they have a retention problem and they have an inspiring rage quit emotion in your audiences problem. So we are taing a piece of technology, an approach to our audiences that is very recent and we're managing to piss off even the power users right out of the gate which generally does not bode well for widespread adoption. And it's the kind of thing that when we hired people who can actually write the sentences to do the scripts for these. But by then everybody else has moved on to the next thing already. So the goal is to say we are in the positions in newsrooms where we can stop this from happening. This does not have to be us and we can do better and I'm going to give you some reasons and descriptions for how. +PARTICIPANT: No matter what you do, no matter what you you've told tech crunch, it will just send you things, all the time. And this I think is one of the clearest examples of the conflation of bot with notification with utility, when none of those words are in fact justified by the use case presented here. She eventually made it stop. She's like are you sure you want to completely unsubscribe, type yes, and it went away. So here's the thing with bots. Even more than apps, they have a discover ability problem, they have a retention problem and they have an inspiring rage quit emotion in your audiences problem. So we are taing a piece of technology, an approach to our audiences that is very recent and we're managing to piss off even the power users right out of the gate which generally does not bode well for widespread adoption. And it's the kind of thing that when we hired people who can actually write the sentences to do the scripts for these. But by then everybody else has moved on to the next thing already. So the goal is to say we are in the positions in newsrooms where we can stop this from happening. This does not have to be us and we can do better and I'm going to give you some reasons and descriptions for how. PARTICIPANT: Millie. Not yet, though. @@ -59,33 +59,31 @@ PARTICIPANT: Millie: It gets better. PARTICIPANT: Stacey-Marie: Yes, we will find the 17 people who know how to use them, we will try to get them to do interesting things, but we're constrained both by the platform and the fact that the expectations that people have for interacting with things aren't aligned. There are two really interesting blog posts on this subject. We will send all of these links around at the end. One is by Fanny Brown and it's about how bots in general are incredibly gendered and the way that people talk to Alexa and the people talk to Siri tends to reflect a fetch me darling attitude. There is another post by a name named Sandy ... because the second you give somebody that has the appearance of being conversational, they assume it' all-knowing. They're like whatever I ask you you should be able to deal with, you are clearly Google, right and so people will try throwing things at bots and we have nothing to give them and not all of us are as transparent as howdy is. So this is—I tried to interact with something called beta bot. I was like, all right, start, begin, I can't, I'm sorry. I don't know how to handle the command begin, right? Like? Like, throw a thesaurus with words that aligned with start and stop and unsubscribe. Because when even the very first interaction with your bot is some things are too complicated for a simple bot like myself, including what do you do? We have not thought through how we want these interactions to work. -PARTICIPANT: This is script—this is something that happened to me with Alexa. So Alexa is very sensitive. +PARTICIPANT: This is script—this is something that happened to me with Alexa. So Alexa is very sensitive. -[laughterAnd you can—so you can say, Alexa play Spotify, it's usually play lemonade, and at some point, my phone rang and take the calls, and it was like pause, it didn't. No. Alexa play, Alexa stop, Alexa was just no, never mind. I call this the rage escalation. Which how do I go from a state where I asked you to solve a simple problem and you don't and in not solving my problem, you also are not giving me ways to figure out what do I need to change to get you to understand me, and that is a probe, right? I am a power user and therefore I'm willing to adjust my behavior, because I'm an early adopter of things and I expect things to not work. But we keep designing interfaces and putting them out in front of our non-power-user audience, and also expecting those people to change their behavior. We're not giving them contextual cues, we're not helping them understand what went wrong. You know, it's the equivalent of like error. Most of our bots just error. And we don't tell them how to solve the problem. We don't tell them what the problem is. We don't give them any off-ramps so that they can go and figure out, OK, fine, if this is a dead end, where should I turn to instead? +[laughterAnd you can—so you can say, Alexa play Spotify, it's usually play lemonade, and at some point, my phone rang and take the calls, and it was like pause, it didn't. No. Alexa play, Alexa stop, Alexa was just no, never mind. I call this the rage escalation. Which how do I go from a state where I asked you to solve a simple problem and you don't and in not solving my problem, you also are not giving me ways to figure out what do I need to change to get you to understand me, and that is a probe, right? I am a power user and therefore I'm willing to adjust my behavior, because I'm an early adopter of things and I expect things to not work. But we keep designing interfaces and putting them out in front of our non-power-user audience, and also expecting those people to change their behavior. We're not giving them contextual cues, we're not helping them understand what went wrong. You know, it's the equivalent of like error. Most of our bots just error. And we don't tell them how to solve the problem. We don't tell them what the problem is. We don't give them any off-ramps so that they can go and figure out, OK, fine, if this is a dead end, where should I turn to instead? PARTICIPANT: Vigit: That's actually a emoji ... PARTICIPANT: Stacey-Marie: So how do we get to here, to creaing bots that are frictionless, proactive and context aware? Frictionless, somebody can find them, they can figure out how to use them and they can figure out how to make them go away when they don't want to use them anymore. Proactive, you don't need to hand-hold your bot into giving you the information that you want. You don't need to say, no, media company, I don't want this irrelevant story about chocolate, I was asking about Belgium. Please give me the story about Belgium that I'm trying to find instead. - - Context aware. What's the weather shouldn't need to be what's the weather in Canada today, because that's where I am. What team won last night shouldn't need to be I'm talking about basketball and I want to know like what's happening with the warriors or whoever your team is at the moment. Again, nontrivial problems that we are trying to solve in many other places, with many other resource—many resources—well, some resources. Millie: Those are also all things we worked on when we worked Ong the BuzzFeed lab. Just trying to look at it through this lens, what does frictionless mean? What does proactive mean? It means you knowing that your audience is going to be context aware enough to know that your audience is going to want to know about the notification of a new Beyonce video, so we've been thinking about these problems for a long time and this is just another format to do that. -PARTICIPANT: So now we have some good news. Which is it it is in fact possible to achieve this. Here's an example. This is sous-Chef bot. This one has a couple of things I want to highlight. First is it gives you further cues, right? So like I am I'm looking for a recipe for Gaz patcho. Here are some * options, did I solve your problem? Yes, no, something that somebody had to think through and offer what those different trees would send someone to and the person who thought it through needed to know a little bit about food and recipes and what some of the alternatives were, and what a good, completed, yes you've solved my problem I'm going to go off and cook this, feels like. +PARTICIPANT: So now we have some good news. Which is it it is in fact possible to achieve this. Here's an example. This is sous-Chef bot. This one has a couple of things I want to highlight. First is it gives you further cues, right? So like I am I'm looking for a recipe for Gaz patcho. Here are some \* options, did I solve your problem? Yes, no, something that somebody had to think through and offer what those different trees would send someone to and the person who thought it through needed to know a little bit about food and recipes and what some of the alternatives were, and what a good, completed, yes you've solved my problem I'm going to go off and cook this, feels like. -Millie: Something that I also wanted to highlight that I thought was really good was defiing the input. And it gives you a variety of things, like cuisine, ingredient. So it gives you a guideline, which is set expectations.PARTICIPANT: Stacey-Marie: How many of you use Purple? It's a quasi bot, I will explain quasi in a moment. Which starts in a way to alert in our gripping, gripping electoral cycle and it's run by a person with a team of others but it's formatted in such a way that you might think you're interacting with a bot, but but you're actually interacting with a human. It's not perfectly scalable. But it will send you a text message that says yesterday was pretty historic, we have the first woman nominee in a major political party. And in that text message there will be a word that is in all caps. Which is a pretty subtle cue that you should do something with that word and they you send that word back, that gives you further cues, so the person behind it or the team of people behind it, are even within the message, they're giving you a cues for how to use the medium. And that, the previous one was sous-Chef bot did something very similar and it's a good example of what Facebook does allow you to do, which is signal to your audience with some of your options are and make those very clear and very discoverable. +Millie: Something that I also wanted to highlight that I thought was really good was defiing the input. And it gives you a variety of things, like cuisine, ingredient. So it gives you a guideline, which is set expectations.PARTICIPANT: Stacey-Marie: How many of you use Purple? It's a quasi bot, I will explain quasi in a moment. Which starts in a way to alert in our gripping, gripping electoral cycle and it's run by a person with a team of others but it's formatted in such a way that you might think you're interacting with a bot, but but you're actually interacting with a human. It's not perfectly scalable. But it will send you a text message that says yesterday was pretty historic, we have the first woman nominee in a major political party. And in that text message there will be a word that is in all caps. Which is a pretty subtle cue that you should do something with that word and they you send that word back, that gives you further cues, so the person behind it or the team of people behind it, are even within the message, they're giving you a cues for how to use the medium. And that, the previous one was sous-Chef bot did something very similar and it's a good example of what Facebook does allow you to do, which is signal to your audience with some of your options are and make those very clear and very discoverable. -But before we go any further, I want to go back a little bit. How did we get here? How can we get to a point where people are raising money for bot startups, you're at a presentation about bots at SRCCON and essentially somebody went to Japan, somebody went to China and it was like ooh, messengers, interesting. How do we get in on this action? And this goes back to what I said at the beginning about the conflation of a series of different trends in media and technology. There is the messenger trend, right? The platform trend, and the hacking engagement trend. How do you get people to care about what you are sending them? And that last bit is the most important. The reason that so many of our newsrooms are so excited about bots is because we think that we can get through that valley of oh, it's from a news organization, I don't care, but it's kind of cool and kind of like a human because I do. Because I care about my friends. Bots aren't our friends, yet, I don't suppose. So what we've done is we've thought these messenger apps are super successful, they have incredible retention. Everybody who uses them is obsessed with them. But what everybody who uses them is obsessed with is their friends, right? Like, the reason that those platforms are so sticky is because something like 85 to 95% of the interactions on platforms like mine are with other human beings, and the other 5% is like the ancillary services that they've built up around those human beings. Now that you've spent talking about your movie tickets, with your friends, do you want to buy some movie tickets? Do you want to make dinner reservations? We have taken away the humanness of these platforms, that's part of the problem. The thing that actually drives people to them. I want to talk to somebody, I want to feel like I'm having a conversation, in a way that's accessible and interesting, but taking the people out of it. Whether it's in terms of the actual scripts that we're writing, the language that we're using, or how hard we're making it for people in the first place. But I promised you some good news. +But before we go any further, I want to go back a little bit. How did we get here? How can we get to a point where people are raising money for bot startups, you're at a presentation about bots at SRCCON and essentially somebody went to Japan, somebody went to China and it was like ooh, messengers, interesting. How do we get in on this action? And this goes back to what I said at the beginning about the conflation of a series of different trends in media and technology. There is the messenger trend, right? The platform trend, and the hacking engagement trend. How do you get people to care about what you are sending them? And that last bit is the most important. The reason that so many of our newsrooms are so excited about bots is because we think that we can get through that valley of oh, it's from a news organization, I don't care, but it's kind of cool and kind of like a human because I do. Because I care about my friends. Bots aren't our friends, yet, I don't suppose. So what we've done is we've thought these messenger apps are super successful, they have incredible retention. Everybody who uses them is obsessed with them. But what everybody who uses them is obsessed with is their friends, right? Like, the reason that those platforms are so sticky is because something like 85 to 95% of the interactions on platforms like mine are with other human beings, and the other 5% is like the ancillary services that they've built up around those human beings. Now that you've spent talking about your movie tickets, with your friends, do you want to buy some movie tickets? Do you want to make dinner reservations? We have taken away the humanness of these platforms, that's part of the problem. The thing that actually drives people to them. I want to talk to somebody, I want to feel like I'm having a conversation, in a way that's accessible and interesting, but taking the people out of it. Whether it's in terms of the actual scripts that we're writing, the language that we're using, or how hard we're making it for people in the first place. But I promised you some good news. -Millie: I'm the representative of good news. S meekan is one of my favorite Slack bots. This message says OK, this just came up, proactive. So context aware. I'm at work. This is useful, I don't want overlapping meetings. The meetings were my no meetings block and an animals brainstorm because I work at BuzzFeed. So it will ask you if you want to delete or reschedule. Sometimes I will interact in here. Sometimes I'll just go in my calendar, because I am calendaring, but, yeah, this is I think one example of what can be really useful and where we can go toward. And this is another good thing. Humans shouldn't do what a bot can do, it's weird, I'm quoting Stacey as she's standing flexion to knee me. Stacey-Marie: This is from a BuzzFeed slack room where we had just created all the integrations in the world apartment integrations were a thing like if a breaking news thing lad happened in the news team Slack we would get Reuters and breaking news. If somebody was going to be away from the office that day, we'd get like a calendar reminder in the thing and the goal of that is most journalists have too many tabs open and so we should bring some of their information that makes their job easier to them. Proactive. Frictionless, context away, news, right, like we were very specific about the things that we weren't setting up. But this is very responsive that somebody was doing, not necessarily yelled at, but chastised. And I was like, oh, this is stupid, nobody should have to go to Instagram, see what the last thing we posted was. So we scheduled an if this, then that trigger, that every time we posted something on Instagram, it would be it would spit something out into the room. Because somebody was getting stressed out every single day that they were forgetting to check Instagram, right? But this is a very different bot experience, this isn't something that somebody is interacting with. This is something that is solving a problem in the background and bots that solve problems in the background and bots that are interfaces and bots that solve problems in the foreground are three totally separate categories of things that we have allowed to blend together confusingly, in the way that we are generally writing them, talking about them, and attempting to get people to use them. And so the key thing that I want to emphasize here is we need to be much more focused on what is the exact problem that we are trying to solve for either us internally or for the people who have to interact with it externally, when they use this thing. +Millie: I'm the representative of good news. S meekan is one of my favorite Slack bots. This message says OK, this just came up, proactive. So context aware. I'm at work. This is useful, I don't want overlapping meetings. The meetings were my no meetings block and an animals brainstorm because I work at BuzzFeed. So it will ask you if you want to delete or reschedule. Sometimes I will interact in here. Sometimes I'll just go in my calendar, because I am calendaring, but, yeah, this is I think one example of what can be really useful and where we can go toward. And this is another good thing. Humans shouldn't do what a bot can do, it's weird, I'm quoting Stacey as she's standing flexion to knee me. Stacey-Marie: This is from a BuzzFeed slack room where we had just created all the integrations in the world apartment integrations were a thing like if a breaking news thing lad happened in the news team Slack we would get Reuters and breaking news. If somebody was going to be away from the office that day, we'd get like a calendar reminder in the thing and the goal of that is most journalists have too many tabs open and so we should bring some of their information that makes their job easier to them. Proactive. Frictionless, context away, news, right, like we were very specific about the things that we weren't setting up. But this is very responsive that somebody was doing, not necessarily yelled at, but chastised. And I was like, oh, this is stupid, nobody should have to go to Instagram, see what the last thing we posted was. So we scheduled an if this, then that trigger, that every time we posted something on Instagram, it would be it would spit something out into the room. Because somebody was getting stressed out every single day that they were forgetting to check Instagram, right? But this is a very different bot experience, this isn't something that somebody is interacting with. This is something that is solving a problem in the background and bots that solve problems in the background and bots that are interfaces and bots that solve problems in the foreground are three totally separate categories of things that we have allowed to blend together confusingly, in the way that we are generally writing them, talking about them, and attempting to get people to use them. And so the key thing that I want to emphasize here is we need to be much more focused on what is the exact problem that we are trying to solve for either us internally or for the people who have to interact with it externally, when they use this thing. -Because I haven't seen any good examples of any bots that successfully combined those three. I have seen good examples of hyperfocused hypertargetted things, like sous-Chef, like meekan but generally we get too ambitious with these things if we try to blend all of those into one. This is not exactly a manifesto. But some thoughts. I'll read out because it's really small. All bots are decision trees, these trees should make it as easily as possible for someone to provide a response that triggers something meaningful to them and useful to us. If we are building these things and we are not learning from them, what is the actual point? Right, there are a bunch of people that I asked, if you're building bots how often are you looking at your bots? This is like the early freaking days of push notifications, we can't be sending things out into the world and not looking at how are the different ways that people are interacting with them, what are some conditions that we haven't thought of, how do we need to make our scripts better? Because we are in the service of providing useful tools and useful experiences to our audiences or at least we should be, but yet we're treating bots like OK, we built it, it's out there, we can let it keep doing what it's been doing. The next one is about friction. If your bot makes it a more painful experience for a user to publish a given task than anything else, your bot is bad and should go away. And this is what I mean. If it takes me longer to get Alexa to play my Spotify list than it takes me to take my phone out and press Spotify and play my list. And too many of these bots create more complexity to accomplish a task that was previously simple in another medium. However, if your bot makes it possible to seamlessly integrate multiple workflows or reduce the steps in a given workflow, keep going. It's like like meekan and howdy in general. Don't confuse, this is cool with this is useful. Just like, those are not the same. They feel like the same to us, but they are so not the same, OK? Cool and useful, if they are the same, you've won and you like don't even need to be here anymore and you can carry on. But in the meantime we have too many examples of here is a cool thing I built that is useful only to the part of my brain that needs to tinker, versus here is a thing that is generally useful with the people who have taken the time to go through all the steps to figure out how to interact with it. +Because I haven't seen any good examples of any bots that successfully combined those three. I have seen good examples of hyperfocused hypertargetted things, like sous-Chef, like meekan but generally we get too ambitious with these things if we try to blend all of those into one. This is not exactly a manifesto. But some thoughts. I'll read out because it's really small. All bots are decision trees, these trees should make it as easily as possible for someone to provide a response that triggers something meaningful to them and useful to us. If we are building these things and we are not learning from them, what is the actual point? Right, there are a bunch of people that I asked, if you're building bots how often are you looking at your bots? This is like the early freaking days of push notifications, we can't be sending things out into the world and not looking at how are the different ways that people are interacting with them, what are some conditions that we haven't thought of, how do we need to make our scripts better? Because we are in the service of providing useful tools and useful experiences to our audiences or at least we should be, but yet we're treating bots like OK, we built it, it's out there, we can let it keep doing what it's been doing. The next one is about friction. If your bot makes it a more painful experience for a user to publish a given task than anything else, your bot is bad and should go away. And this is what I mean. If it takes me longer to get Alexa to play my Spotify list than it takes me to take my phone out and press Spotify and play my list. And too many of these bots create more complexity to accomplish a task that was previously simple in another medium. However, if your bot makes it possible to seamlessly integrate multiple workflows or reduce the steps in a given workflow, keep going. It's like like meekan and howdy in general. Don't confuse, this is cool with this is useful. Just like, those are not the same. They feel like the same to us, but they are so not the same, OK? Cool and useful, if they are the same, you've won and you like don't even need to be here anymore and you can carry on. But in the meantime we have too many examples of here is a cool thing I built that is useful only to the part of my brain that needs to tinker, versus here is a thing that is generally useful with the people who have taken the time to go through all the steps to figure out how to interact with it. -One other caveat about transpareny: Most times when you're interacting with a bot, and this includes things like Purple, you don't know it's a gender. You don't know who's behind it, you don't know what information is being collected. There's not necessarily an institutional voice, so there isn't even a personal voice and one of the things that we've started to realize at BuzzFeed is people appreciate when we tell them who is doing the talking, right? Like these notifications are brought to you by BuzzFeed news and this is the team behind it. And a lot of these bots you're like, ooh, I don't even know who built this, and they're asking you all these questions, who are you, where do you live, how do you feel today and you're like, oh, you creep, I don't need to tell you all that. That is something that we need to build in. What are we are increasingly asking people to trust these things without giving them any sense about what we're doing with the stuff that they're telling us on the other side. +One other caveat about transpareny: Most times when you're interacting with a bot, and this includes things like Purple, you don't know it's a gender. You don't know who's behind it, you don't know what information is being collected. There's not necessarily an institutional voice, so there isn't even a personal voice and one of the things that we've started to realize at BuzzFeed is people appreciate when we tell them who is doing the talking, right? Like these notifications are brought to you by BuzzFeed news and this is the team behind it. And a lot of these bots you're like, ooh, I don't even know who built this, and they're asking you all these questions, who are you, where do you live, how do you feel today and you're like, oh, you creep, I don't need to tell you all that. That is something that we need to build in. What are we are increasingly asking people to trust these things without giving them any sense about what we're doing with the stuff that they're telling us on the other side. And finally to the point about learning, please review your logs. I know that is an incredibly old school thing to say but it is the only place where you get a sense of what is your 0 to swearing threshold. There are some of the ideas that they have for you that you aren't even seeing and how might you get that. That's the formal presentation. Questions? @@ -99,26 +97,23 @@ David: As in the skills, right, like sometimes you'll have a great bot li meekan PARTICIPANT: Stacey-Marie: I think this is especially relevant for news organizations. It was a little troublesome in a while in who was allowed to tweet. We've sort of loosened up in social media. We don't always think about how our user experience undermines the trust and credibility of what we're trying to build. So we will obsess over typos, or at least I obsess over typos. We will obsess over, is this the best art. We don't think about if somebody is swearingality the bot that we have built for them, are they ever going to come back to us in. And I think that is the problem. It's also the problem with bots as platforms, it's like if you have one bad experience with Facebook messenger bots, what is your experience that you might have with the next that might be the sous-chef. If you don't say, I hear you, we're not giving you the tools that you need either to solve those problems.PARTICIPANT: Most of the bots you've talked about are really applications and since a lot of us are here with media intentions, I've been trying to disentangle how you address content desires with a bot, with something that's less transactional than a bot is. How do news organizations use bots if what people want is less information and more like services or functions? -Stacey-Marie: I think we have to go back to we are less at the stage where bots can provide that. I think we are most comfortable in the information purveying business, but are increasingly in the emotional labor of services business and how do we recognize the fact that most of the tools that we've built and most of the infrastructure that we have is optimized for that information-conveying and not the "are you having a bad day?" kinds of questions. We said we were going to talk about the BuzzFeed bot and we're going to. One of the people who's directly responsible for it is sitting right in this room. So if I get anything wrong, she can tell me immediately. So the BuzzFeed news bot came about to ask people how they were interacting with the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. What it did extremely well is it sounded—it hit the right balance of here is useful stuff, presented in a way that you would expect it from BuzzFeed and we stole this completely from the BuzzFeed news app. The same people were responsible for coming up with the language for the BuzzFeed news bot. This morning I got a notification from buzz bot that says, before they unplug me, will you send me some feedback about how I've performed? And it was a little bit mars rovery. Remember, when Mars rover sent that tweet that well, guys, it was nice, now I'm going to die, but it felt like yes, I empathize here, I actually feel like they've created an experience that is more of that emotional connection, more of that thing, but in ha way that was both useful to me, right? * like my opinion is very important before news organizations do anything, they should ask me. So you consulted me, you said how did I do? They did well and also it gave me a sense of closure. It has served its purpose and I felt like I had good interactions with it. But that was all in the language. It was all in the way that they thought about what are the kinds of questions that are likely to prompt the kinds of responses that are useful to the journalists on the other end, but that don't feel like work for the people who are sending replies in, because too often it feels like work. There's a section on Amazon echo that's like, train it to recognize your voice. Do you have any idea how much time I've spent trying to get Alexa to recognize my accent and so it feels like work when I interacted with it. But what the BuzzFeed thing did, it would ask questions, did did you watch Hillary Clinton's speech? OK, you watch it, what emoji represents how you felt about it? Like a very, very low friction way of providing a response. And then they follow up like saying, here are the most commonly used responses or here are the most common responses we got from this question. So you got a feeling of oh, it wasn't me, like other people who shared had these things to offer. So it did a very good job of closing loops. It closed emotional loops, it closed content loops and it closed experience loops in a way that never made me feel I had to enter the rage spiral. Any other questions? +Stacey-Marie: I think we have to go back to we are less at the stage where bots can provide that. I think we are most comfortable in the information purveying business, but are increasingly in the emotional labor of services business and how do we recognize the fact that most of the tools that we've built and most of the infrastructure that we have is optimized for that information-conveying and not the "are you having a bad day?" kinds of questions. We said we were going to talk about the BuzzFeed bot and we're going to. One of the people who's directly responsible for it is sitting right in this room. So if I get anything wrong, she can tell me immediately. So the BuzzFeed news bot came about to ask people how they were interacting with the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. What it did extremely well is it sounded—it hit the right balance of here is useful stuff, presented in a way that you would expect it from BuzzFeed and we stole this completely from the BuzzFeed news app. The same people were responsible for coming up with the language for the BuzzFeed news bot. This morning I got a notification from buzz bot that says, before they unplug me, will you send me some feedback about how I've performed? And it was a little bit mars rovery. Remember, when Mars rover sent that tweet that well, guys, it was nice, now I'm going to die, but it felt like yes, I empathize here, I actually feel like they've created an experience that is more of that emotional connection, more of that thing, but in ha way that was both useful to me, right? \* like my opinion is very important before news organizations do anything, they should ask me. So you consulted me, you said how did I do? They did well and also it gave me a sense of closure. It has served its purpose and I felt like I had good interactions with it. But that was all in the language. It was all in the way that they thought about what are the kinds of questions that are likely to prompt the kinds of responses that are useful to the journalists on the other end, but that don't feel like work for the people who are sending replies in, because too often it feels like work. There's a section on Amazon echo that's like, train it to recognize your voice. Do you have any idea how much time I've spent trying to get Alexa to recognize my accent and so it feels like work when I interacted with it. But what the BuzzFeed thing did, it would ask questions, did did you watch Hillary Clinton's speech? OK, you watch it, what emoji represents how you felt about it? Like a very, very low friction way of providing a response. And then they follow up like saying, here are the most commonly used responses or here are the most common responses we got from this question. So you got a feeling of oh, it wasn't me, like other people who shared had these things to offer. So it did a very good job of closing loops. It closed emotional loops, it closed content loops and it closed experience loops in a way that never made me feel I had to enter the rage spiral. Any other questions? You still have 15 more minutes. - - PARTICIPANT: Just a question more on the technical side. What user experience, like applications are using to build up the—like the intelligent side of the bot? - PARTICIPANT: Stacey-Marie: So Facebook has a mostly documented series of approaches that you can use for this. I've seen people do just like a hack automaer scripts and I'm going to ask this gentleman over here to give a little more context about some of the things that he's been working on. -PARTICIPANT: Well, I think in general, a problem that arises with bots that are sort of transactional and have that input from the user, you know, as oppoed to sort of generative bots that are just publishing things, is that we're not really—you know, the point about reviewing the input logs, I think it goes deeper than just reviewing the input logs. I think you could do engineering around that, and I think that a lot of the time the resources, the engineering resources that go into building bot-like applications are focused on decision trees and and how can we get to pushing something out, whereas, you can—I mean really, the split in a lot of cases should be a lot more like right down the middle. More going into the analysis of the input so that you can make the bot smarter over time but that's not something that's immediately evident in terms of like, you know, more updates, more content, so I think that's something we tend to skimp on a lot. +PARTICIPANT: Well, I think in general, a problem that arises with bots that are sort of transactional and have that input from the user, you know, as oppoed to sort of generative bots that are just publishing things, is that we're not really—you know, the point about reviewing the input logs, I think it goes deeper than just reviewing the input logs. I think you could do engineering around that, and I think that a lot of the time the resources, the engineering resources that go into building bot-like applications are focused on decision trees and and how can we get to pushing something out, whereas, you can—I mean really, the split in a lot of cases should be a lot more like right down the middle. More going into the analysis of the input so that you can make the bot smarter over time but that's not something that's immediately evident in terms of like, you know, more updates, more content, so I think that's something we tend to skimp on a lot. PARTICIPANT: If any of you are interested in building bots, some of the best documentation I've seen is kick. Kick has a DevTools site where they kind of go through how you can build a bot. Facebook is application pending approval so you can build one but you can't actually use it unless they white list you. Slack bots are pretty easy for varying degrees of easy to build and configure and then figure out how you can do more useful things with them and if you've never ued if this, then that is, but you're interested in the basics of automation, that's a good place to start. -PARTICIPANT: I just wanted to throw out because of the particular circumstances of trying to run a live beta demo during th RNC. We skipped the part where we usually start code before we even run it so we've still got our code under wraps because we're spooked. But the DNC is over and we will be publishing the code early next week as soon as we confirm that there aren't any like token still in there. But so if you're interested in building that and like take a look, we will be posting it, and if anybody wants to talk sort of like what we learned and what we experimented request. I run the open lab at BuzzFeed. We built the bot, secret truth it's not entirely true that the news curation team wrote the content. I mostly had to write the content myself. But we spent the last two weeks really actively demos, how could we use a Facebook messenger bot to engage people. To get people to share stories with us, to get people to tell how we cover the conventions and not surprisingly the second convention went a lot better than the first because we had a little bit better sense of what we were doing, but I'm happy to talk about some of the things that we figured out about what we could get from people and what we couldn't in that kind of breaking news context. +PARTICIPANT: I just wanted to throw out because of the particular circumstances of trying to run a live beta demo during th RNC. We skipped the part where we usually start code before we even run it so we've still got our code under wraps because we're spooked. But the DNC is over and we will be publishing the code early next week as soon as we confirm that there aren't any like token still in there. But so if you're interested in building that and like take a look, we will be posting it, and if anybody wants to talk sort of like what we learned and what we experimented request. I run the open lab at BuzzFeed. We built the bot, secret truth it's not entirely true that the news curation team wrote the content. I mostly had to write the content myself. But we spent the last two weeks really actively demos, how could we use a Facebook messenger bot to engage people. To get people to share stories with us, to get people to tell how we cover the conventions and not surprisingly the second convention went a lot better than the first because we had a little bit better sense of what we were doing, but I'm happy to talk about some of the things that we figured out about what we could get from people and what we couldn't in that kind of breaking news context. Any other questions? -PARTICIPANT: And then I want somebody to tell me an aming experience. What you learned about.... +PARTICIPANT: And then I want somebody to tell me an aming experience. What you learned about.... PARTICIPANT: I guess I'm curious about the extent to which the frameworks, you know, bot kit, etc., the frameworks around building these bots, ends up affecting their language and their agendas, and the way in which if multiple organizations are using the same frameworks to use things, like, what does it mean to build a language from the ground up and how will they be similar and should there be a common framework or should like, you know, BuzzFeed's bot have nothing to do agendawise or frameworkwise with another organization's bot? How will that grow? @@ -126,9 +121,9 @@ PARTICIPANT: Stacey-Marie: So I think about that in a couple of ways. I think ab PARTICIPANT: Stacey-Marie: There have been a couple of interesting sessions here. There was one yesterday about you're the reason my name is on Google. There's one today. I think this is also true with bots. There was a fusion piece from sept of 2015, about about that was extremely popular in main land China that was in fact recording every single keystroke that people typed into there and other places and keeping that and it was mostly owned by the Chinese government and you can think about the implications of, you know, yet more surveillance from a government that might not be super into what you're typing in the bot. I think this is real. I'm answering your questions in reverse. This goes back to the disclosure point. We are asking people for a lot of things, we're not necessarily giving anything back and we need to flip that relationship a little bit and be a little bit clearer about, most people don't read privacy policies. But they are grateful about changes, as long as that change is not by the way this is mandatory arbitration. So I do think that's important to consider. -You have almost no information, other than extremely explicit actions that people are ting and those explicit actions aren't always like meaningful and allow you to do that. So with Facebook, you can get the stuff out, it's not easy, and it's not necessarily fun to parse, because it's there. With and as you've experienced with Slack, you can't really say,—it's not easy to say how many times did somebody trigger this and what did they do after or those kinds of feedback loops and this reflects the fact that a lot of these services are very top-down, and we are the down. Right? Like we are the ones that are having to work around the constraints, but we don't necessarily have a way of feeding back to them. It would make my life easier if you were doing this and I use that analogy very specifically because it's like getting an app approved in the App Store. They say you have to jump really high and you're like sure, because I really want you to approve my app and if they say we're not going to tell you anything useful but if you want to be here that's how you have to play. That's where we are. But I think it's still early enough that if media organizations got our shit together and pushed back a little bit more, we still have the room to ask for those things. Because most of the time it's not like malicious information hoarding. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it was just like I didn't think this was useful to be. Like this isn't a use case that we've ever had before and we've had some success pushing back and getting some great information as a result. +You have almost no information, other than extremely explicit actions that people are ting and those explicit actions aren't always like meaningful and allow you to do that. So with Facebook, you can get the stuff out, it's not easy, and it's not necessarily fun to parse, because it's there. With and as you've experienced with Slack, you can't really say,—it's not easy to say how many times did somebody trigger this and what did they do after or those kinds of feedback loops and this reflects the fact that a lot of these services are very top-down, and we are the down. Right? Like we are the ones that are having to work around the constraints, but we don't necessarily have a way of feeding back to them. It would make my life easier if you were doing this and I use that analogy very specifically because it's like getting an app approved in the App Store. They say you have to jump really high and you're like sure, because I really want you to approve my app and if they say we're not going to tell you anything useful but if you want to be here that's how you have to play. That's where we are. But I think it's still early enough that if media organizations got our shit together and pushed back a little bit more, we still have the room to ask for those things. Because most of the time it's not like malicious information hoarding. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it was just like I didn't think this was useful to be. Like this isn't a use case that we've ever had before and we've had some success pushing back and getting some great information as a result. -PARTICIPANT: If you're playing with ... reaching bots. It's like if you took parts of Facebook, parts of Twitter, and Facebook messenger and like the text messages and a payments app and shoved them all into one thing and then put about 800 million people on it, so you use it for just getting around in China, and there's like lots of bots that you use like to check into a hostel and it's partially automaed and then when it struggles because the cost of labor is lower, it goes to a person. It struggles a lot with my responses because my Mandarin is shitty. Do you think there's a possibility of like these like quasi-bots appearing or just is the labor cost too high here? +PARTICIPANT: If you're playing with ... reaching bots. It's like if you took parts of Facebook, parts of Twitter, and Facebook messenger and like the text messages and a payments app and shoved them all into one thing and then put about 800 million people on it, so you use it for just getting around in China, and there's like lots of bots that you use like to check into a hostel and it's partially automaed and then when it struggles because the cost of labor is lower, it goes to a person. It struggles a lot with my responses because my Mandarin is shitty. Do you think there's a possibility of like these like quasi-bots appearing or just is the labor cost too high here? PARTICIPANT: I mean these are phone banks, right? This approach is what we've done with customer service, it's what we've done sometimes in newsrooms, where we're like, escalate to the most senior editor. I do think that the resource cost is something that we continue to underestimate. Like if we want to build really good experiences we need to throw more people at the problem and we're currently approaching bots at throwing fewer people at the problem and there's a short-term gain that leads to a long-term problem which is something that I'm sure is very familiar to all of you in this room and that is where that we've made the mistake. Like we see this as a way of cutting people out of the process and being like if somebody wants to know what the top three headlines are, they can be just like what's the top three headlines and we don't have to do anything. True, but they could also go to your website or use your app or do something else, so if we're going to put dev resources into building something that are editorial information, that editorial information has to be manifestly better, easier to get to and somehow more convenien than all of the other places that other people are. And if we get to services and get people escalate and do things that they can't get other places, if we get into the expectation that there is going to be a human at the other end of this or if there's going to be a bot so good we don't need a human, are we in fact able to deliver on that? @@ -137,10 +132,3 @@ PARTICIPANT: Millie: I think that's it. We're out of time. PARTICIPANT: Stacey-Marie: There's also an etherpad with like 10,000 links that we found, and we're all on Twitter, so say hi. Up to you. Thank you for coming ... ... [applause] - - - - - - - diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-documentation-culture.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-documentation-culture.md index e2bf778a..c164be0b 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-documentation-culture.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-documentation-culture.md @@ -1,7 +1,7 @@ How can teams build a consistent culture of documentation? Session facilitator(s): Kelsey Scherer, Lauren Rabaino Day & Time: Friday, 4-5pm -Room: Innovation Studio +Room: Innovation Studio Lauren: If you all end up being the only people here, you're all going to have to group together, to do one group activity: @@ -15,19 +15,19 @@ Lauren: Hello! Thank you for sticking with us for the very last session. And I k Kelsey: And I'm Kelsey designer on the storytelling studio. -Lauren: So a little bit of context about why we do spend so much time thinking about this at Vox. Especially our team is one that is incredibly cross disciplinary. So like many of the teams that you probably work with, we have engineers, designers, editors, analysts, project managers, people from all different parts of the organization, who speak in different languages and need to have a sense of shared literacy, around a lot of the stuff that we do. We also work with many different departments and we have a unique challenge of having eight different brands that we work with, so they all have their different goals and ways of interacting with our team in different ways. We're also working on multiple projects at a time. Small projects, big projects, in a very fast-paced environment, so these are all probably problems that you all have, as well, but we're not going to stand up here and talk to you. We have a lot of opinions about documentation and the best way to make that happen and be a part of a team culture, but Vox Media is—it's become very clear at this conference that we are in sort after different sphere of operation than a lot of people and what we have to share about this is not going to be directly applicable to the way that your organizations are structured and the people you have to put behind stuff, so we're—we've crafted and user-tested a wonderfully designed activity arc for you all to participate in, so the people that are sitting at your, tables, those are the people you're going to be working with. But we we're hoping that you all, together, can sort of define what this means for you all, and walk away with a good plan for how to make this happen. So Kelsey is going to talk through goals and first activity. +Lauren: So a little bit of context about why we do spend so much time thinking about this at Vox. Especially our team is one that is incredibly cross disciplinary. So like many of the teams that you probably work with, we have engineers, designers, editors, analysts, project managers, people from all different parts of the organization, who speak in different languages and need to have a sense of shared literacy, around a lot of the stuff that we do. We also work with many different departments and we have a unique challenge of having eight different brands that we work with, so they all have their different goals and ways of interacting with our team in different ways. We're also working on multiple projects at a time. Small projects, big projects, in a very fast-paced environment, so these are all probably problems that you all have, as well, but we're not going to stand up here and talk to you. We have a lot of opinions about documentation and the best way to make that happen and be a part of a team culture, but Vox Media is—it's become very clear at this conference that we are in sort after different sphere of operation than a lot of people and what we have to share about this is not going to be directly applicable to the way that your organizations are structured and the people you have to put behind stuff, so we're—we've crafted and user-tested a wonderfully designed activity arc for you all to participate in, so the people that are sitting at your, tables, those are the people you're going to be working with. But we we're hoping that you all, together, can sort of define what this means for you all, and walk away with a good plan for how to make this happen. So Kelsey is going to talk through goals and first activity. -Kelsey: Yeah, so Lauren touched on this a bit, but the ultimate goal is for everyone to be able to walk out of here and understand the importance of documentation for your team, whatever that means for you. And be able to go back to your team and advocate for like it's important, and maybe, like if we're being ambitious, start a plan and like, go back to your team and be like this is how we're doing it and this is what we should do or maybe we should do this. Just going to jump in. Like Lauren said we're going to group you with your tables, we're going to do lots of sketching and sharing within your group, but no real, like, share with the whole group. So get comfortable with your friends. The first ice breaker activity is going to be conceptual sketching. So each person, for two minutes, I want you to sketch two different scenarios on paper wit sharpies or pens or whatever is at your table and we'll set a timer for two minutes. Draw the time that you felt really clear about what you were doing, and it can be really fast, like a really quick sketch, and then also draw a time where you had no idea what you were doing, like, absolutely clueless, everything is confusing and terrible, and sort of draw those two scenarios really quickly. You have two minutes. And go. +Kelsey: Yeah, so Lauren touched on this a bit, but the ultimate goal is for everyone to be able to walk out of here and understand the importance of documentation for your team, whatever that means for you. And be able to go back to your team and advocate for like it's important, and maybe, like if we're being ambitious, start a plan and like, go back to your team and be like this is how we're doing it and this is what we should do or maybe we should do this. Just going to jump in. Like Lauren said we're going to group you with your tables, we're going to do lots of sketching and sharing within your group, but no real, like, share with the whole group. So get comfortable with your friends. The first ice breaker activity is going to be conceptual sketching. So each person, for two minutes, I want you to sketch two different scenarios on paper wit sharpies or pens or whatever is at your table and we'll set a timer for two minutes. Draw the time that you felt really clear about what you were doing, and it can be really fast, like a really quick sketch, and then also draw a time where you had no idea what you were doing, like, absolutely clueless, everything is confusing and terrible, and sort of draw those two scenarios really quickly. You have two minutes. And go. [group activity] -Lauren: And if you forgot what we said, there is an instruction sheet on every table. If you were like tweeting or something. +Lauren: And if you forgot what we said, there is an instruction sheet on every table. If you were like tweeting or something. [group activity] 45 seconds left. -Lauren: Time! OK. Time's up. They didn't have to be works of art. Although it looks like some of you got really into it. Everyone's now at each table choos note-taker. So we're going to do about 8 to 10 minutes of this, so make sure you account for timing as you go around and share, but share your drawings, talk about what you drew, and like the defining point that made one scenario different than the other and the note-taker should just write down the themes that are discussed. Go![group activity]All right, so it seems like you all got through that activity. I'm not going to have you share back, because I'm tired of doing that today. Even though this doesn't soom directly related to documentation, hopefully you've tarted to think about some of the things that contribute to your sense of understanding, your understanding of purpose and clarity and knowing the difference between when you do have that sense of purpose and when you don't. So next activity,. +Lauren: Time! OK. Time's up. They didn't have to be works of art. Although it looks like some of you got really into it. Everyone's now at each table choos note-taker. So we're going to do about 8 to 10 minutes of this, so make sure you account for timing as you go around and share, but share your drawings, talk about what you drew, and like the defining point that made one scenario different than the other and the note-taker should just write down the themes that are discussed. Go![group activity]All right, so it seems like you all got through that activity. I'm not going to have you share back, because I'm tired of doing that today. Even though this doesn't soom directly related to documentation, hopefully you've tarted to think about some of the things that contribute to your sense of understanding, your understanding of purpose and clarity and knowing the difference between when you do have that sense of purpose and when you don't. So next activity,. Kelsey: Yup, the next activity is meant to built on the previous one, not directly reled but we're going to take ten minutes and do a group brainstorm but for this session you're going to use a big piece of paper and maybe have a different note-taker from the first time. So this one has a scenario. Imagine it's your first day on the job and no one is around to help you. Or tell you your project. Imagine, it's never happened before. So. @@ -65,21 +65,19 @@ PARTICIPANT: So I think win counterpoint to that this I struggle with a little b Lauren: Yeah, so I think that speaks to having an owner/facilitator to actually assign. Did anyone talk about peer reviewing? That's something we think about a lot because there are many ways of doing things and often when you're documenting something like process, for example, people have differing opinions how to do it which is why it's good to document it. Think about who reads this, how do they revise it, it's basically user testing your documentation, right, to make sure it's clear for yourself, for stakeholders. What about when to write it. Throwing at someone 5 p.m. probably isn't the best way to do it, it should be built into whatever structure you have. Any opinions worth sharing? I can talk about what we do. So you want to? -PARTICIPANT: I can. So we don't have a lot of—in my team we don't have a lot of process and we don't have a lot of structure because everyone is coming from very differen back disciplines. So the process I try to encourage is for people to write personal docs every day to get in the habit of thinking about what they learned that they didn't know before, that they had to look up, and how they would share that, even with their future selves. And then it—I think that's sort of like an incremental step towards getting people ready to document things in process, or post-process. But just getting people able to identify what something is that needs to be documented. +PARTICIPANT: I can. So we don't have a lot of—in my team we don't have a lot of process and we don't have a lot of structure because everyone is coming from very differen back disciplines. So the process I try to encourage is for people to write personal docs every day to get in the habit of thinking about what they learned that they didn't know before, that they had to look up, and how they would share that, even with their future selves. And then it—I think that's sort of like an incremental step towards getting people ready to document things in process, or post-process. But just getting people able to identify what something is that needs to be documented. PARTICIPANT: Yeah. - - PARTICIPANT: I think if you're doing programming or engineering, the—there's some differences of opinion about this, but especially if it's something that you're going to have—you're going to monitor use later or somebody else is going to need to fix later, the time to do it is when you're doing it, like commenting your code well and making sure that it's easy to not do it because it's becoing a laborious process but making sure that this is what's happening in this block or this is cribbed from this project or that project and pointing to other directions and then as you're going along, adding those comments in, there's times when I haven't done that and I increasingly do do that over time, and now I can copy my stuff so much easier and jump back into it. But as a programmer when you're a project you understand its flow and how the functions are working together. But once you leave that and you're going back into content writing or going into something, another discipline and you got to go back into that, it can be really, really hard to read what you wrote before, and I'm like, what the hell did I do? Why is there four loops in the middle of each other. So comment your code. Lauren: Yeah, that's a really important piece of it is commentating your code. PARTICIPANT: Really quickly pigging backing off of that, I've also learned to like, especially when I do like analysis, I try and like I'll li back to the page where I found the formula or something, because I find that that's helpful for, like, other people to think and understand, like where I got the idea from. -Lauren: One thing that we've found is when you try to say, hey, this week try to document that thing, that that always falls off people' radar, because the more important things will always trump that. So what we have we've been doing for about a year and a half is doing regular documentation days where it's a required day, nobody is doing any work, but sitting in a room together, documenting like headphones on, peer-reviewing each other's stuff so that you're forced to do it, you can't just let, oh, this bug just popped up and I have to do it and I can't document right now, because it's really easy to let that be a last priority. Another idea I've often heard is—I've talked about this with people, is just building into a sprint if you're on a sprint cycle so like Friday every two-week sprint is documentation day. +Lauren: One thing that we've found is when you try to say, hey, this week try to document that thing, that that always falls off people' radar, because the more important things will always trump that. So what we have we've been doing for about a year and a half is doing regular documentation days where it's a required day, nobody is doing any work, but sitting in a room together, documenting like headphones on, peer-reviewing each other's stuff so that you're forced to do it, you can't just let, oh, this bug just popped up and I have to do it and I can't document right now, because it's really easy to let that be a last priority. Another idea I've often heard is—I've talked about this with people, is just building into a sprint if you're on a sprint cycle so like Friday every two-week sprint is documentation day. -PARTICIPANT: I was going to say we're definitely talking about product development cycles and documentation therein. We were also talking about you know, sometimes you're just talking with your colleagues or your coworkers about what's working or not working or other things like that where it's not as regimented or process-based so I think it's important to think about what's working even if it's not formalized or something, and just write it down or something like that, and take the extra time to think about it, yeah. +PARTICIPANT: I was going to say we're definitely talking about product development cycles and documentation therein. We were also talking about you know, sometimes you're just talking with your colleagues or your coworkers about what's working or not working or other things like that where it's not as regimented or process-based so I think it's important to think about what's working even if it's not formalized or something, and just write it down or something like that, and take the extra time to think about it, yeah. PARTICIPANT: We've actually—we're very project based and at the end of each project, just sort of it's like our version of a sprint, we have like—and we have a really small team, but we'll do basically we'll basically do that as a group, like what's working and what can we do better next time and then any other sort of things and that's really helped husband keep track of where our own claims are and where our thinking is. @@ -91,18 +89,12 @@ PARTICIPANT: Georgia? PARTICIPANT: All right, I think one point that I will definitely take away from this is how to organize your docs, so Justina was talking about how they have some pinne high-level docs, so if somebody wanted to get an overview of a project or you're trying to onboard somebody, wherever you're storing your docs, and then you have your working docs and another point that she made that I really appreciated was that sometimes documentation is not going to live past you writing the doc and it's a way for you to get your thoughts out on paper and process exactly what doing a project in certain tasks means and is, and yeah. ->> +> > Lauren: Good, awesome. Any last thoughts on this before—Rebecca? PARTICIPANT: So one of the ways that we discussed documenting ising screen cast, actually as a problem comes up, so that you're capturing the issue and your solution in the background and you're not taking time away from creating the solution, but that is still a good resource, so that you can go back to later, or even like fast forward it so you can have like the highlighted parts for others to use if they also come up with that same issue. - Lauren: Are there any other questions or any other things we want to discuss? OK. So that wraps up our little series of activities. So the way that we've been thinking about this is like that first document, the thematic document where you had a note-taker sort of write down the differences between when you felt clarity and when you didn't, like, everyone pass that around, take a photo of i t, that is how we came up with our manifesto. That second, the post-it note thing that we just did, take photos of that, too, because we hope that can be the basis of your plan for like, how might one go about like actually planning the documentation day? Where does it go? We did this activity when we started planning out how we would do documentation days and build that into our team culture. We have—did something similar and came up with a plan for like house this going to pan out? What is the process we're going to use, and then continue to iterate on it. So I want everyone to take like the last few minutes here, if you have more questions or conversation, like we can do that, but take photos of the stuff, like write it down, tweet the photos if you feel comfortable sharing, because I'm going to be aggregating everything into a blog post, just about the ideas that came out of this, because we do it in a very set way, which actually during the session we published a blog post eh post on on exactly the process that we use on soliciting the ideas, deciding how to document, how we set up a Spotify for listening for all of the same music in different offices but I'm going to do a recap and Kelsey is going to do that with me of some of the best ideas because there are ways that we can also improve on this. So I hope there's something actionable that you can actually take back with you. Any other comments, questions? PARTICIPANT: All right, tweet on the SRCCON hashtag. Thank you ... ... - - - - - diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-ecology-newsroom-software.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-ecology-newsroom-software.md index 33a517f1..58861820 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-ecology-newsroom-software.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-ecology-newsroom-software.md @@ -3,14 +3,9 @@ Session facilitator(s): Ted Han, Mike Tigas Day & Time: Thursday, 2:30-3:30pm Room: Classroom 310 - TED: And I'm Ted Han, I run DocumentCloud. Some of you may know know. - - -MIKE: Ask this talk is titled The Ecology of Newsroom Software. So he uses software as part of your job in the newsroom? We all news computers. He all news, like, phones and use the Internet. Some of us build stuff that goes on the Internet on one of these devices. Sort of part of this session is, like, different places use, like, different software. AOU you know, there's different attributes to them, and reasons why we use them, and having different conversations with people, we wanted to have a conversation about why we use certain things, or why certain organizations want to use certain things, or, you know, there is no one size fits all for a lot of problems in news. - - +MIKE: Ask this talk is titled The Ecology of Newsroom Software. So he uses software as part of your job in the newsroom? We all news computers. He all news, like, phones and use the Internet. Some of us build stuff that goes on the Internet on one of these devices. Sort of part of this session is, like, different places use, like, different software. AOU you know, there's different attributes to them, and reasons why we use them, and having different conversations with people, we wanted to have a conversation about why we use certain things, or why certain organizations want to use certain things, or, you know, there is no one size fits all for a lot of problems in news. TED: Especially, since over the past five years, there's so much experimentation on what we're using, how we are using it, and why we should be be using it. And we're to the point where we're not sure to do for best practices, really, before you can start to see the consequences of the decisions that are made five years ago, and people are still having to use this, right? So part of that, right, I've been working at DocumentCloud for almost five years now, and there's been a whole lot of change. But still people are using DocumentCloud which is helpful but even yesterday I was able to find a project that that we've done at the Chicago Tribune and it works even to this day, right? So there's a cost being able to maintain and figure out all these pieces of software. And so, I haven't—and so what we were thinking about when we were talking about this session was how can we start to catalog some of the aspects of, you know, the decision-making processes that we go through. Well... yeah. That we go through in order to, yeah, and we've got a fall-back in case the Internet doesn't work. When we're making decisions about how we're going to deploy software in the newsroom, who's going to be responsible for it. You know, how long are they going to be there? What happens if they get hit by a bus? And all these sorts of decisions go into whether you can actually successfully use a piece of software in the newsroom or not. @@ -18,500 +13,252 @@ And so, the way that we wanted to kind of go about doing that was starting out w So... the room is actually large enough that we probably would use up all of the time if we actually went around asking where everyone is from. - - -MIKE: We can do it by a show of hands. Who here works in a newsroom? - - +MIKE: We can do it by a show of hands. Who here works in a newsroom? TED: Who here works on a team with more than five people? Oh, that is actually a lot. Okay. Who here is responsible for maintaining software in the newsroom? Okay. That's most of them. How many were able to sign in to this etherpad? Okay. We're probably going to have to use the notepads. Let me pull up what I had on that line on my notepad on my phone so that we can continue. We have a bunch of notepads here. And the thing we're curious about, I'll hand them out on the tables, is name a piece of software that you've had to work on, or that you've used recently and then we'll go from there. It could be any piece of software that you use, as long as it involves your job. If you can't get to the etherpad, go for it... otherwise... You can, like, put your software suggestions in the etherpad. If you're still having issues getting on the Internet, that's fine, too. - - TED: Okay. Has everybody basically managed to get into the etherpad there? Their entries into the etherpad here? Anybody else want to... okay. Yeah, I'm interested in this list because a lot of this stuff is operations stuff, basically. - - MIKE: Who could name one thing that all these things have in common? - - PARTICIPANT: They're pieces of software? - - PARTICIPANT: POS. - - TED: Okay. Is there a piece of software on here that you've used that hasn't pissed you off at some point? - - PARTICIPANT: Pokémon Go? - - PARTICIPANT: Pokémon Go is at the top of the list. - - PARTICIPANT: It's not so much that it pissed me off. It's that it disappointed me. - - PARTICIPANT: It annoyed me. - - MIKE: So for some people in this room, there's definitely things up on that list, you know, that you—you know, you personally, or you at your organization, you'll see some things up here, I can't use that because I don't have the resources to do that, or the technical ability to do that, or I just don't have the time to switch to a new thing. So, like, you know, how many people have, like, they see a thing on this list that they literally just cannot use at work. That's probably most of us, right? Like, there's probably some reason why at least one thing on this thing is not... - - PARTICIPANT: An option. - - MIKE:... an option. Correct. - - -TED: Yeah, and so, the things that Mike and I were talking about when planning for this session, we're trying to figure out, like, what aspects that—even we've had to deal with because Mike and I, essentially have to maintain software that's often written by other people, and that is deployed and that we have to figure out how to keep running, right? I have a pathological case that all of my software is open source, that other people try to install it and run it, which means that oftentimes I have to figure out, how much of my time do I dedicate to support for other people's platforms as opposed to running our own, and making sure that, you know, journalists have these tools available to use, right? And so figuring out for somebody who runs open source projects like Mike and I do, what the intended support is going to be, and how we can actually architect our support so that we know what the support paths are going to be, what deployment stacks are going to be look like, and those sorts of things has changed, for me, dramatically over the past few years, particularly with the appearance of software like Docker, for example. So part of, you know, what we'd like to do is actually is, sort of, prototype an exercise here where we start to catalogue what are the dimensions that actually go into how dimensions were made in your newsroom to use and run a particular piece of software, or, you know, if you were thinking about using a particular piece of software, how would you know, what questions would you ask in order to put it into practice in your newsrooms, what the upsides and downsides would be, and, um, what sorts of things you need to be able to document so that other people, for example, can run it in your newsroom. And so, the way that we were talking about doing this is basically by trying to come up with a series of yes or no questions for how—for describing any piece of software and I'll explain where we're going with this. How many of you remember hunch.com? Okay. Literally zero. Excellent. No, this is important. So hunch.com was a company that was started bring Katerina Fake, and Chris Dixon and was sold to eBay for a very large sum of money and that was in 2012. But what they were claiming is figure out a taste map for any question. So basically they did that by doing a game of 20 questions. So you would do yes, no, so long as you could come to a decision point. And so this is fairly easy for us because it's would you use this piece of software? Would it be good in the context in which you're using it? Yes or no? And then the question is what are the aspects and the decision points that you would use, and what we hope to do with this, is put together an app that allows us to say, hey, you're interested in DocumentCloud, you know, what's the size of your organization? Can you pay for software? Would other people on your team use this? And basically be able to answer a bunch of yes/no questions and then figure out, and we know we can use machine learning to figure out which of these aspects are actually most important for your type of organization, or the particular piece of software. So what we would like your help is, basically brainstorming questions that you can answer with a yes or no about pieces of software that you've used in your newsroom in order to be able to, essentially, diagnose whether a tool would be useful for your type of organization. So that's why we asked you to list a bunch of pieces of software that you've used, and that the next exercise is actually, if you go through, and ask yourself: With these pieces of software, who decided, like, you know, whose approval do you need for these things, or any of these sorts of things. So we'll give you ten minutes to take questions into the etherpad here, or on notepads and you can't get into the etherpad. - - +TED: Yeah, and so, the things that Mike and I were talking about when planning for this session, we're trying to figure out, like, what aspects that—even we've had to deal with because Mike and I, essentially have to maintain software that's often written by other people, and that is deployed and that we have to figure out how to keep running, right? I have a pathological case that all of my software is open source, that other people try to install it and run it, which means that oftentimes I have to figure out, how much of my time do I dedicate to support for other people's platforms as opposed to running our own, and making sure that, you know, journalists have these tools available to use, right? And so figuring out for somebody who runs open source projects like Mike and I do, what the intended support is going to be, and how we can actually architect our support so that we know what the support paths are going to be, what deployment stacks are going to be look like, and those sorts of things has changed, for me, dramatically over the past few years, particularly with the appearance of software like Docker, for example. So part of, you know, what we'd like to do is actually is, sort of, prototype an exercise here where we start to catalogue what are the dimensions that actually go into how dimensions were made in your newsroom to use and run a particular piece of software, or, you know, if you were thinking about using a particular piece of software, how would you know, what questions would you ask in order to put it into practice in your newsrooms, what the upsides and downsides would be, and, um, what sorts of things you need to be able to document so that other people, for example, can run it in your newsroom. And so, the way that we were talking about doing this is basically by trying to come up with a series of yes or no questions for how—for describing any piece of software and I'll explain where we're going with this. How many of you remember hunch.com? Okay. Literally zero. Excellent. No, this is important. So hunch.com was a company that was started bring Katerina Fake, and Chris Dixon and was sold to eBay for a very large sum of money and that was in 2012. But what they were claiming is figure out a taste map for any question. So basically they did that by doing a game of 20 questions. So you would do yes, no, so long as you could come to a decision point. And so this is fairly easy for us because it's would you use this piece of software? Would it be good in the context in which you're using it? Yes or no? And then the question is what are the aspects and the decision points that you would use, and what we hope to do with this, is put together an app that allows us to say, hey, you're interested in DocumentCloud, you know, what's the size of your organization? Can you pay for software? Would other people on your team use this? And basically be able to answer a bunch of yes/no questions and then figure out, and we know we can use machine learning to figure out which of these aspects are actually most important for your type of organization, or the particular piece of software. So what we would like your help is, basically brainstorming questions that you can answer with a yes or no about pieces of software that you've used in your newsroom in order to be able to, essentially, diagnose whether a tool would be useful for your type of organization. So that's why we asked you to list a bunch of pieces of software that you've used, and that the next exercise is actually, if you go through, and ask yourself: With these pieces of software, who decided, like, you know, whose approval do you need for these things, or any of these sorts of things. So we'll give you ten minutes to take questions into the etherpad here, or on notepads and you can't get into the etherpad. MIKE: And feel free to talk to your neighbors, to the people that you're at, if there's a particular piece of software that's your favorite. If there's something that really pissed you off on a piece of software, what was frustrating, or what disappointed you about that piece of software? Sort of talk out, like, why are you using this, and why do I feel this way about this thing that we're using, right? Or something like that. So definitely, like, talk to people at your table, too. So to, sort of, help brainstorm and you know... Pokémon Go, right? But, like, lots of people are using it, right? Why is that? - - TED: Yeah, and if there are questions about this, feel free to ask them. Otherwise we'll just keep talking. - - MIKE: And then you can, as you're talking in your groups, you can, sort of, avoid the specifically yes or no question because you can, sort of, circle around back to that, too. - - PARTICIPANT: And you have to say yes or no? You can't say, "Sometimes?" - - TED: That works, too. So the answer should be like, yes or no, or something discrete. It could be yes, no, maybe. But the more concrete that you can make it, the better. For example... was there a particular question that you had in mind? - - PARTICIPANT: Well, I was just going through the whole thing. Well, at it running on your computer? Yes. And just the tool, and I was just thinking of all the tools that we have in our company interim. Well, some of them are, and some of them aren't. So that's why I'm saying sometimes. - - TED: So the goal is to be able to apply this to a piece of software at a particular time. So at the end you could say Document Cloud doesn't run on your personal computer, no. Does it run on your company intranet? Only if you're determined. Readers can't access the tool, would other people on your team use this tool. Whereas if you talk about something like, Agate, for example, does it run on your computer, yes. Can your readers access this tool? Most likely not. And, you know, it is an open source tool, in that case. Your entire organization probably wouldn't use it. And but once it comes down to somebody saying, "Hey, would I, or should I use Agate, what are the things that you want to be able to tell them really quickly, or what are the questions that they would be able to ask themselves that we would be able to fill in for them?" So as you guys are filling this out, I'm curious whether there are pieces of software that are deployed in your newsroom that you have regrets about deploying. Like do people have, like, examples? - - PARTICIPANT: Slack. - - PARTICIPANT: So the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, our publisher, John Robinson Block purchased THEUFRL called STKPWOEB are a kisses which is a deviation from what we had before, which was an Adobe DTI and most of our designers in the newsroom did pages designed in InDesign, and it was great because we would just navigate it through all the way up we got the paper out but when we went with this LibrKiss CMS, and the Toledo Blade which is our sister, was using it at the time and they said that it was going to be great. And it was terrible. And there was cursing. And there's still complications, obviously. - - TED: Are you still using it? - - PARTICIPANT: Yes, it's his. - - TED: So that's sort of an example of top down. So you probably recommend not using that piece of software? - - PARTICIPANT: I recommend not buying it. - - MIKE: Anybody else have a software regret story? - - PARTICIPANT: I did not make this decision but merely suffering the consequences of it but merely using the Drupal CMS system, and the ecosystem therein that be challenging. - - PARTICIPANT: Hear, hear. - - TED: Are there pieces of software that people have chose to use and then regretted it? - - MIKE: Like somebody else didn't choose it for you. You decided to use it yourself. - - TED: Because I'm sure most people here particularly don't like their CMS. Well, that's an important part of about the decision-making process. When you pick a piece of software to deploy now, are you thinking about who's going to maintain that software in five years, or who's going to hate you in the future? - - PARTICIPANT: The person that hates me the most is me when I write stuff and discover that it's terrible when I have to support it. - - PARTICIPANT: Future you hates you so much. - - PARTICIPANT: We made schemas and designs for this, and it's like, this is terrible. This is really overcomplicated and now, we can't figure out how to change it to get rid of that because you've got a model that's based around that complexity. - - PARTICIPANT: Well, I was just going to say, we're in a situation, I work at USC, and the situation that we were in is, like, if a developer had been there at the beginning at the table when these choices were being made, like it would have been so helpful because I came on, and I was like, guys, you can't BS me. I know how this stuff works and you people don't. And you made this decision. And, like, you're going to hate me because I'm going to write my own system in three months because I'm frustrated with what we're using. And so I think, also, like, knowing who should be at the table when these kinds of decisions are made, you can't also create a CMS without reporters' input because they'll hate you for life, because they're like, why is this so hard to do? And I think that's a consideration. How are people actually going to use there is this, and how is it going to be implemented on all these different things? - - TED: Yeah, I think the decision-making process on a lot of this stuff is interesting and complicated, right? Especially just seeing the people around the room here, I know that all of us are on different parts of the board. Their people who work on the platform stuff here, their people that are in the newsroom, there are people who are educators working on different sorts of teams, and, you know, one of the complicated parts about all these is what is the decision-making process around how this works, how thoughtful are people being at, you know, when they're deciding to use a piece of software and putting it into TPHROEUPLT, is it someone just saying, this stuff looks cool, can I get it online quickly? Do you want to talk about the process of Dockerrizing all the stuff. And what development was like before and after that? - - MIKE: We still have ten different ways that we put out our news apps and our interactives on the Internet at ProPublica. Everything is still, you know, I'm trying to fix a lot of the technical issues that we've had because as we go gone through the years, we've done things a different ways each project and it's one of these frustrations in use, you know, we're publishing a thing and then we're moving straight to the next thing and then we don't always consider how's this going to keep running because it sort of goes to the other problem of being able to archive the work that we do. You know, there are lots of—you can see, like, the first issue of the New York Times, like on microfilm before there's, like, interactives that have been made in the past year that you cannot see anymore. It's like really weird. And those are, like, software problems, I think. Like part of that problem is like the stuff that, like, these interactives were built on. You know, somebody decided we're not going to support it anymore and then what the hell happens to the content, right? - - PARTICIPANT: With Docker, say, does it feel to other people like we're still, like, a few years away from actually having the system that works like we would want? Or do people—some people feel like no, we've nailed it. - - - - - - MIKE: Does anybody feel like the piece of software that you've used has, like, nailed it? - - PARTICIPANT: I really like our elections stack this year. I know it's not fair. It's not fair but it's... - - MIKE: In a year. In four years from now. In four years from now do you think you're going to feel that way? You're the only one with any visible reaction so I wanted to pick on you. - - TED: You know, there's some things like for a certain set of problems I'm like, yeah, go ahead and use Tabula, yeah, that's a thing that I can actually go tell people to do. But this happened to me yesterday. Let's pull up the DocumentCloud tweets. Where somebody was like hey, does DocumentCloud know this thing and I was like... uh, no. And then had to have a conversation about, you know, what was the appropriate piece of software to use let's figure out where this stream of tweets started. That's not letting people, is it? - - MIKE: Does DocumentCloud have a tool to text compare? Yes. - - TED: And the answer to that was well, not really. But, you know, she was able to then go find some pieces of software that she used to do the dif, and then, navigating Twitter is not... well... that ended up being the solution. But she did end up using DocumentCloud to solve part of that problem, and where did she actually... one day ago. Um, yeah, and then actually mark up the document and do some cool stuff with pointing out the differences. So knowing how to get from—I've got a question to yeah, I can use that, it's helpful to know but also figuring out what the problem is, and who else has that problem. I mean, the Docker stuff for me was kind of interesting because I had first heard of Docker, and heard where a few other people had used it, but it wasn't until I started having conversations with Mike and a few people from MIT, where I was like, I think I can actually deploy this, and, of course, Ryan here. So we've got one of our apps running up on Docker and I think that that was probably the right decision. And I don't regret it yet. So what I'm trying to figure out is, when will I regret it, or how soon will I regret it? - - MIKE: There must be some law of software, or, like, given infinite time, like, you will eventually regret some decision you made in that software. And I think it's, you know, part of, like, us trying to enumerate, like, the different properties of software, and why we use them is to figure out is there a way for us to mitigate how soon that happens. - - TED: And you can talk about this from a technical perspective but there are also, as you mentioned, decision-making processes that take place, and in your newsroom, or in your organization about did management buy this thing without consulting anybody and say, "Yes, we're going to use this." That is a particular kind of regret and misery. But being able to, sort of, articulate those when you're actually making a case for why this thing needs to be abandoned, other than, you know, the fact that it was only bought because of somebody in management, or whatever, that becomes, sort of, like a, you know—I happen to have the autonomy where I can make the decisions technically but that's not the case for everybody in all organizations. - - MIKE: I think there's a question in the back. - - PARTICIPANT: So we're using Django, for example, and I regret if if we don't update every half couple of years? And when we do, it's actually nice because you get new features, and you need put in work, right, if you let software rot, you'll regret it after a while. If you keep working on it, it kind of keeps getting better with you, and this is something that I've known. So if there's a new version, you upgrade as soon as possible, otherwise you're left behind. - - PARTICIPANT: I think the trend has been, ever since GitHub, it's made version control a lot easier and if you're in a situation where you can iterate, then you can, you know, kind of sometimes navigate away from the mistakes, whereas in the old model, you bought the license, you installed it, and if you had to do the install, you bought the new software, and you had to do all the backups and you will these huge other pain points but once you're able to iterate because the software that I work with every day that I hate the most is the least iteratable. It's done, it's sunset. But the money-making machine is built on that dirt. But, you know, I think—and I think software as a service 'cause even now with Adobe, you don't care. it just sort of updates under the hood. And I think the more you get that kind of thing, the less regret you get. - - PARTICIPANT: I would strongly, I feel that sentiment. I think that I feel like the lesson that I always go back to—the best lessons was early on in my career, oh, my God, Postgres is so good, just so much better a database than MySQL, and so we switched the project that we were working on over to Postgres and then I was the only one that could maintain the database. - - PARTICIPANT: That's so true. - - PARTICIPANT: And I was like, this is objectively worse. And so we switched back to MySQL, and then I, from then on, made MySQL is the way. But I think the lesson for me there is that software, I think is essentially, I think which is what you're saying, basically a faction industry. You don't want to be wearing bellbottoms in 1998 because, you know, they're, like, goodbye, you're uncool, and building momentum around those things is really difficult. And I look at, you know, I think we've got a lot of—there's a comment like, are we just choosing this because this is the new hot mess but I look at the ecology of npm module and if I need to do something with some sort of modern technology, it's probably not npm from using, like, enterprise, probably I have to build it myself. Yeah. - - PARTICIPANT: To that point, I just want to say something. I mean, 'cause this seems like a couple people here in here use Drupal and I've used Drupal, too. And I think there's also unlike certain problems. I mean, yes, you want to stay up-to-date, especially when new versions come out, but at the same time, when you're using open source software, an example, Drupal, and your organization has, sort of, like,, you know, configured it like all these different modules and blocks that are, like, sort of customized for that, like, particular version and then you have to switch, you know, like, no one wants to, like, do all of that again, spend all this money, you know go to the community, get assistance, or something, you know, when it does, like, come out again. So I feel like, you get those problems—I mean, and not so much when it's proprietary stuff over, like, things that you create, but with open source software, it's sometimes hard to, like, do that version control because, you know, you can't—unless, you know, it's perfect for you every single time they come out with a new version. - - MIKE: There's a lot of stuff that we don't update because we have a plugin that doesn't support the new version. This is just, sort of, the way that it works. And we have to live with it but you know... we have one over there. - - PARTICIPANT: Sort of related to that when we make informed bad decisions and we deliberately make decisions like we're going to use a crummy, we're going to use version one of jQuery because we have this really good plugin that's running on this part of the site. - - PARTICIPANT: Right. Right. - - PARTICIPANT: But it's really difficult to write this thing. Or, like, I use Mongo a lot. And there are lots of objective reasons why that is terrible and dev ops will hate me, and it's going to cause me problems later. Let's weed it out. But I'm interested in how do you identify, evaluate our criteria for making bad decisions. - - MIKE: Yeah, so part of the exercise we're trying to come up with these yes or no questions, or whatever is to, sort of, try to, sort of, find a set of traits about software, or how we use them, and I don't know, maybe it's a decision tree. Maybe it's not. Maybe we're, sort of, missing the point entirely by coming up with these questions and traits but we're just sort of interested in, what are all the ways that our decisions some sort of software can fail—how can we mess up that decision? - - TED: Well, part of this also is, as Ian was also mentioning, how do you know what's appropriate when, right? And part of the problem is a lot of the stuff changes and the context into which you're deploying might be different, or the intended—or the actual use ends up being different from the intended use. So some of those you can't predict, and you have to know what the parameter space is, right, and what things are going to be problematic once you get to that point. So when what you're optimizing for, when, and arbitraging against for borrowing from the future. - - PARTICIPANT: I was actually going to say very much the same thing and more generally, you know, time is a factor here, not just with these questions, I think this is a fascinating idea but some of these questions could be more or less important over time. And the needs of the business in the newsroom, specifically could change over time, as well. - - TED: Yeah, we're kind of cheating a little bit with trying to generate this list because I think it does, sort of, flatten down the spaces, right? You could ask questions about this, but a lot of this is part of who you are, what your organizations look like, what's coming up for you, what space are you in, not just what space this particular piece of software fits in, right? And some of that, you could encode in yes/no questions and that's where I was thinking of going with some of this. But how do you get at, sort of, the richness of what is the decision-making process inside of your organization. Whose authorization do you need in order to do something, right? It's one thing to say, "It's just going to take my time in order to be able to adopt this piece of software and put it into practice because it's open source," versus, "I need to a budget to buy this software, so I'm not spending time doing this thing, right?" and how and when does that happen? You know, is that solely dependent on the size of your team, the size of your organization? All those sorts of questions. And, I mean, you know, I bet all of us have had points at which we decided not to use a piece of software because of, like, budget, right? That's a really easy one to pick out. But are there, I'm curious if there are particular things where you decided not to use a piece of software because of something really well defined, right? Does anybody have, like, an example that have where you said, "I absolutely can't use this piece of software because..." Because I know, like, for example, I've heard, you know, just running DocumentCloud, the Electronic Frontier Fund Foundation passed on using DocumentCloud because we have a pixel tracker on that goes with documents. So that way we can calculate a bunch of things and help reporters out, but they were concerned about any tracking whatsoever, which was sort of an interesting set of constraints for me because I kind of have to like am trying to read everybody's minds to try to figure out what their problem space was, which is why I was interested in this particular problem. Anybody think of...? - - PARTICIPANT: Licensing. Along the same lines, like GPL, and MIT, I think a lot of organizations, they're very concerned about that. - - TED: You have one? Okay. Are there—do any of you have any licensing restrictions specifically as to, like, can... I suppose I should—should I just ask how many people have used GPL? How many people here have deployed GPL software? How many of you have made modifications to GPL software? - - PARTICIPANT: Nope... - - MIKE: Do you want to explain what the GPL is? - - TED: How many people know what GPL means? There's a series of—you know, part of open source and the spirit of sharing was the idea that you could put software out there and other people could use it but one of the concerns were that—well, a concern particularly was that companies would just steal the work and incorporate it into your products and just use it, right? So a bunch of people got together and developed a software license that says specifically, if you make modifications, or if you incorporate a piece of software, a piece of GPL piece of software into your product, you have to make sure that anybody who uses your product can also access the source code for the open source part of it. And there are concerns about GPL, particularly, over whether or not the license is viral, which is basically that if you use it, suddenly you have to actually make all of your source video available. And so as a consequence, there are a lot of companies that decided not to use anything that had a GPL license, which was sort of a shame since there's so much software out there that is GPL licensed, and actually, for DocumentCloud, that's—the decision that we made to really sell our software under the MIT software was that anybody can use it so long as you preserve the copyright notice and you notify users that you're using one of our pieces of software, was specifically so that newsrooms and other people could use DocumentCloud's tools without any of those concerns or baggage. So we have 15 minutes left. I don't want to continue just monologuing. So are there any questions at this point? We can kind of go through a few different things. Are there things that people were particularly interested in, either from this list of a particular piece of software that you're using? - - PARTICIPANT: I think one concern that keeps coming up for us is whether we can get the data back out, and how easily and how quickly if we're putting it down somewhere, or similarly if it has an API that we can work with it easily. But we've had issues people not giving the data back that we've used with these services. So I don't know if that's a—that counts as a challenge. - - TED: Is that operational data that you need for other purposes? - - PARTICIPANT: Yes, sometimes. Yeah. And I think the first question whenever we were talking to a vendor, or whatever we were looking at software is how easy will it be to get away from your service? Which is sort of a morbid question but a necessary one. - - TED: Right, what's the necessary question for this one? - - MIKE: Who here builds software? Builds software on the Internet, who here is surprised at a use case of your software, looking at the questions here, have you ever been surprised with someone coming to you with a comment about your software about the way that you make it. Is that everybody's hands, basically? I think part of this conversation, I feel like is to also help people who make software make better decisions about what their future users might be like. Yeah... there was, like, I think a hand right there earlier right before I started talking. - - PARTICIPANT: I just had a question for the group because I'm interested in, you know, there are tradeoffs, there's some third party softwares where I feel like upper level executives get involved in the decision-making in terms of whether or not we use it, right? But then there are many other things that happen behind the scenes that they probably don't realize that decisions are being made about. So do you—how many newsrooms actually have a process for choosing software, and then what are the levels of permissions you have, in terms of do I add a plugin here, versus, sign a contact with Legacy.com, or something like that, do you know what I mean? In terms of making those software choices, how does the oversight of that work? - - TED: Yeah, so — - - PARTICIPANT: In newsrooms? - - TED: Yeah, so that's exactly the problem with a lot of these things because it probably depends on what the piece of software is. Because if you've got a news apps team and the way that they're deploying software, that's going to be different than, say, you're overhauling your platform. So I guess how many folks here have control over installing software on your computer? Okay. Basically everyone. Everybody. But not everybody. - - PARTICIPANT: But don't tell the sysadmin that I said that. - - TED: How many of you have the authority to deploy to a public server that readers could get to? - - PARTICIPANT: I just did right now. - - [ Laughter ] - - - - - - TED: Yeah, so would you have to go—for people who said they could actually do that. Would you have to go through anybody else to get approval to do that, or you can just...? - - PARTICIPANT: Maybe I should... I know somebody on my team, there's communication that you know what's publicly deployed. - - PARTICIPANT: Not if it worked. - - - - - - MIKE: I want to go back to the comment just a moment ago, that was like, if anybody here has an organization that some hose policy about how you go through that decision-making process, and acquiring software, deciding what to use, I would love to hear about it just because that is, like, so vastly different from every other experience I've had. - - PARTICIPANT: So we're starting to, I'm with Condé Nast and trying to define some of this right now. And I think our approach—this is not written in stone, there hasn't been a approach. It's a whole different brands, and they don't know what they want. And increasingly, they're starting to, like, pull together, and starting to make these central decisions. But I was going to say, there's a really good post from a guy who used to be the CTO of Etsy called Kellen McCray on technical debt, and if you think about technical debt, that's a bad thing to take on. But if you think of it as an inevitability, start to broach the problem very differently. And so, as I'm thinking about, like, how do we, as an organization approach this question, it's sort of like we're big enough that each individual should just make whatever decision they think is appropriate but sort of like sense check it with people, and try and make sure that there's kind of an architectural plan, and, you know, some kind of, you know, this is generally the direction that we're heading. And, like, little—not everyone has to use exactly the same tools because, you know, people need different tools. They need to try different experiments. We need to try and take on some of the technical debt to see what works, and doesn't work, otherwise we'll never find that out. And it's really just saying if you're going to go and take—if you're going to implement something that's going to take us in a totally different direction, then we should talk about that, and have some sense of where we're going before we do that. And that's sort of—that's kind of as far as we're looking at defining this stuff. I don't know about that. - - PARTICIPANT: So I have an organization of to people, we have 20 developers. So my goal is to keep the stack really type. To keep whatever language on the server side, like if it's Python. It's bringing people, people, saying, we're working this way because we now deploy, I don't know, Node.js, Ruby, and Haskell, and Closure, as well. In two years, we can't work with that, right? Because no one knows what's going on. So that's basically we're restricting ourselves to one server-side language. And there have been experiments. We're trying, basically to keep our main infrastructure very homogeneous. - - - - - - TED: So discounting front end JavaScript, how many people here work in multilanguage environments? That's actually a lot, right? I think that's interesting, right? I think that's one of those things that you have to reinforce with culture, or by hiring...? - - PARTICIPANT: Do you see that as an advantage, or a disadvantage? - - MIKE: It depends on, like, the way your organization works and how long you intend to maintain, sort of, the projects and whatnot. Maybe you, like, don't care that, like, a project that you wrote a year ago, you know, needs to be updated on the software side, then, sure, everybody can, sort of, use whatever language they want, and you can keep a report, and never look back, which is weird but... I think it depends. - - -PARTICIPANT: I've definitely made mistakes, be like leading a project but trying to be accommodating, being liberal with that whole thing. Even with coding standards but it's totally bitten me PWH*EF ended up with very different opinions even within a team on how to handle things. And it's more awkward to change things, and even differently. You think you've said it okay, but, like, the number of spaces we're using, but still people will have different differences and then their practices for naming things, and then it gets awkward over time, but as time goes on, it gets slightly awkward. - - +PARTICIPANT: I've definitely made mistakes, be like leading a project but trying to be accommodating, being liberal with that whole thing. Even with coding standards but it's totally bitten me PWH\*EF ended up with very different opinions even within a team on how to handle things. And it's more awkward to change things, and even differently. You think you've said it okay, but, like, the number of spaces we're using, but still people will have different differences and then their practices for naming things, and then it gets awkward over time, but as time goes on, it gets slightly awkward. MIKE: I think there was one more comment. - - PARTICIPANT: I was going to say, I just left the finance industry where it's completely different, where there's, like, 20 steps to ever put anything on the public server, or a certain piece of software has to get cleared by ten different teams before you use it. So there there's always too much, as well. So it's nice seeing the whole other side of it, too. - - PARTICIPANT: I think that one of the things like when you're talking about are you using multiple languages or how you're—how are you making these decisions, do people know that making these decisions is, like, all of these questions, to me, are, like, a privilege to ask. Because, to me, as somebody who works on in a newsroom on my own, I'm struggling to, as an interactive person on my own, I'm struggling to get stuff out fast enough just because I'm working. Basically there's the cost up front is so high to vet software super well. And to not just do what you can do, when you can do it. That it becomes really easy to take shortcuts, right? And so you learn that really early on in your career and then it comes back to bite you later. But it's like, oh, man, I wished I could ask these sorts of questions. Because I'm trying to get stuff down and out the door but then you realize that, I didn't actually set myself up for the future. - - TED: Who do you ask—do you have somebody that you have to go to, how do I get this up and out the door? - - PARTICIPANT: I mean, sometimes, it's Google, so I mean, it depends on what kind of question. Sometimes if you're asking software types of questions, I'm asking Twitter, or the Slack channel that I'm on with a bunch of individual different coders for newsrooms but sometimes you're just asking Google, and praying, do you know what I mean? Everything is held together with ducttape behind the scenes sometimes. But that's just the way that you have to do it if you want to be on a deadline, right? - - TED: Yeah, totally. I think the commitments are different—Mike said, some of the stuff, you can just sunset and go. But DocumentCloud's API, I've had to keep consistent for five years, right? And there's things that I can't do to them without screwing up other stuff. So that's why I'm always curious about who people are asking, what level of competence there needs to be to be able to say yes, I'm going to deploy this successfully, or it's going to cost me six months, or six weeks, or whatever. Yeah. - - PARTICIPANT: I guess, another thing to consider is your organization able to train people on this piece of software. We do a lot of Scalas, and we have Scalas classes for anyone who starts. So do you have that ability to train people on that new tool, or the CMS that you choose, I think that's important. - - TED: That actually Dovetails with one of the other sessions. How many people works with an organization that actually has an onboarding process. Okay. I mean, like that's one of the really awkward parts about particularly this industry that I've seen. And depending whether you're on the software side or not, right, and even joining DocumentCloud, right? I joined DocumentCloud and then within a week, I was like, I'm deploying code that the New York Times runs on their website, I better not screw anything up. But that was, like, the introduction into it, basically. And yeah, definitely scary. And but that also affects who you can hire, and how, right? Because if you have to only hire people who you know understand the problem set and you can trust to do something like that, that potentially narrows down who you can hire, who your teammates can be, and all that sort of stuff. - - PARTICIPANT: That's where training comes in. You can hire other people, other backend engineers that know Java. You can train them. - - PARTICIPANT: And it seems that it makes it hard to hire less experienced people and maybe get the value of learning from them, and then them learning. - - MIKE: We have a couple of minutes left. Is there any other part of how you interact with software in your work that hasn't been brought up as part of this conversation? - - TED: That you really want to know from somebody else? - - MIKE: Or is there, like, walking into this session, a conversation that you thought that you would be having that we didn't have in this session? Was that a hand? - - PARTICIPANT: To me, it was interesting that, for some of my colleagues, we write articles, and articles kind of don't have technical debt, right? They're published, and when I write software, I can't do the same. So that's why we have somehow different interests in how we spend our time. And we have lots of conflicts in that regard, and I found that very interesting. That was, like, the first time—I work in a newsroom for about two years, and it was very interesting to see this dynamic unfold. Has anyone else had that? Maybe in different newsrooms, there's a software department and a news department but I feel like that's... - - TED: I think it's interesting that you think that articles don't have technical debt. I think there's a lot of aspects to that, you know, journalists fear and loathe having to do corrections, right? Or, you know, there are ways that stories can go up. Maybe somebody wants to out your sources. You know, there, I think there are aspects to the writing process, which are fraught. And even, you know, DocumentCloud has to deal with that. People post public documents and then we get to shoulder their debt because people will say, hey, that document has my personal address and my phone number in it. Who's going to fix that problem. So I think that maybe there is some technical debt there. But... - - PARTICIPANT: But instead of updating the article, they write a new one. They don't care about the old one. - - PARTICIPANT: That's one of our big pushes is constantly updating content that you can keep reusing. - - PARTICIPANT: Do you give them new URLs? - - PARTICIPANT: No, because we want the SEO and the trackers to keep going. But we keep pushing out the same articles over and over again. - - PARTICIPANT: The reason she raised that question, I'm wondering how many people actually actively retired software. - - TED: Who's actually actively turned off a piece of software rather than just letting it, especially bitrot? Have I? - - PARTICIPANT: It feels good. - - MIKE: All right. I think that's all the time we have, actually. We're already about a minute over. Thank you guys so much for coming. And... text and thank you very much for filling this out. We will encode this into a thing. Pretty much. - - -[ Applause ] \ No newline at end of file +[ Applause ] diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-editorial-audience-development.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-editorial-audience-development.md index 0da5a451..b7851fec 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-editorial-audience-development.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-editorial-audience-development.md @@ -1,202 +1,201 @@ Break Down that Wall: Why Editorial and Audience Development Need to Work Together Session facilitator(s): Sarah Moughty, Pamela Johnston Day & Time: Friday, 10:30-11:30am -Room: Classroom 305 +Room: Classroom 305 -PAMELA: Can you guys see back there? It's a tough room. If you want to be closer, feel free. +PAMELA: Can you guys see back there? It's a tough room. If you want to be closer, feel free. -PAM: Let's start. So people will probably be still tricing in because we're first. So thank you, guys, for joining us. Come on in. There's a lot of really cool stuff happening, like, right now. So thank you for being here. We're excited to be here. This has been an awesome conference. And we're here to talk about breaking down the wall. An audience and editorial work together in six steps, my name is Pamela Johnston, I work at the front line—come on in. +PAM: Let's start. So people will probably be still tricing in because we're first. So thank you, guys, for joining us. Come on in. There's a lot of really cool stuff happening, like, right now. So thank you for being here. We're excited to be here. This has been an awesome conference. And we're here to talk about breaking down the wall. An audience and editorial work together in six steps, my name is Pamela Johnston, I work at the front line—come on in. -SARAH: The poles are kind of hard to see, so there's lots of chairs over here. +SARAH: The poles are kind of hard to see, so there's lots of chairs over here. -PAM: Yeah, come close. Come on. +PAM: Yeah, come close. Come on. -SARAH: We don't have a ton of slides. We have a few. +SARAH: We don't have a ton of slides. We have a few. -PAM: And then we're going to have a conversation. +PAM: And then we're going to have a conversation. SARAH: . -PAM: So we want to get us together. +PAM: So we want to get us together. -SARAH: So I'm Sarah Moughty, and I run our digital team at front line, and you guys are here, it's early, and there's a lot of great stuff going on. So I'm excited you came to see us. This is one of the sessions that's being transcribed, if you want to go off the record, that's no problem, just say off the record, and remember you want to say on the record when you're done. And our goal here today is to have a conversation about development and what it means in your newsrooms, and we want to hear what you do. We'll talk about what we do at front li, and hopefully you feel empowered to make small changes in your newsroom. +SARAH: So I'm Sarah Moughty, and I run our digital team at front line, and you guys are here, it's early, and there's a lot of great stuff going on. So I'm excited you came to see us. This is one of the sessions that's being transcribed, if you want to go off the record, that's no problem, just say off the record, and remember you want to say on the record when you're done. And our goal here today is to have a conversation about development and what it means in your newsrooms, and we want to hear what you do. We'll talk about what we do at front li, and hopefully you feel empowered to make small changes in your newsroom. -PAM: Absolutely. +PAM: Absolutely. -SARAH: So now that you know who we are, I want to know who you guys are. +SARAH: So now that you know who we are, I want to know who you guys are. -PAM: So anyone in the team on the audience team? Hello, my people. I also do audience. Welcome. Come on in. Come on in. So a couple of audien Thanks for coming. +PAM: So anyone in the team on the audience team? Hello, my people. I also do audience. Welcome. Come on in. Come on in. So a couple of audien Thanks for coming. -SARAH: And how many of you guys work on a editorial or kind of reporting team? That's awesome. +SARAH: And how many of you guys work on a editorial or kind of reporting team? That's awesome. -PAM: That's great. +PAM: That's great. -SARAH: Ask anybody who's not one of those things -- +SARAH: Ask anybody who's not one of those things -- -PAM: Product? Tech? +PAM: Product? Tech? -SARAH: Okay. Cool. +SARAH: Okay. Cool. -PAM: Okay. +PAM: Okay. -SARAH: If you guys want to come up, there's plenty of chairs up here. It's weird to see in this room. +SARAH: If you guys want to come up, there's plenty of chairs up here. It's weird to see in this room. -PAM: Come join. Because we do want to have a conversation about the audience. +PAM: Come join. Because we do want to have a conversation about the audience. -SARAH: So here's the thing about this question. +SARAH: So here's the thing about this question. -PAM: So actually this was a trick question. +PAM: So actually this was a trick question. -SARAH: A trick question. +SARAH: A trick question. [Laughter] -PAM: You guys are all on team audience. So congratulations, welcome to my team. Raise your hand proudly. Welcome to the audience team. We're going to tell you why that's true. And hopefully you'll leave feeling empowered by that. +PAM: You guys are all on team audience. So congratulations, welcome to my team. Raise your hand proudly. Welcome to the audience team. We're going to tell you why that's true. And hopefully you'll leave feeling empowered by that. -SARAH: So I don't know how many of you guys are stam with frontline, but we started a long time ago on a video like this, we are a documentary series that's on PBS. +SARAH: So I don't know how many of you guys are stam with frontline, but we started a long time ago on a video like this, we are a documentary series that's on PBS. -PAM: 35 years. And really for most of our history, this is how people found us, and this might be what you think of when you think of front line. But in the last four to five years, there's been a lot of change at front line and hopefully now we look something like this. We're going to show you a quick video just because that's what we do. +PAM: 35 years. And really for most of our history, this is how people found us, and this might be what you think of when you think of front line. But in the last four to five years, there's been a lot of change at front line and hopefully now we look something like this. We're going to show you a quick video just because that's what we do. [Video played] +PAM: So I don't know if you saw at the end, FRONTLINE experience your way. That's a huge change for FRONTLINE. For 30 years, we were on PBS, we expected people to come t. So that's a monumental change. Such a change that we baked it into our brand trailer. So that mattered in a big, big way. Getting our culture to change getting multimedia. Over the last years has been a huge change but actually it's been successful as well. -PAM: So I don't know if you saw at the end, FRONTLINE experience your way. That's a huge change for FRONTLINE. For 30 years, we were on PBS, we expected people to come t. So that's a monumental change. Such a change that we baked it into our brand trailer. So that mattered in a big, big way. Getting our culture to change getting multimedia. Over the last years has been a huge change but actually it's been successful as well. +SARAH: Yeah, I mean how many of you guys watch appointment television on a actual television? Anyone? -SARAH: Yeah, I mean how many of you guys watch appointment television on a actual television? Anyone? - -PAM: Anyone? Does anyone have a TV? How many people still have a TV? +PAM: Anyone? Does anyone have a TV? How many people still have a TV? [Laughter] But, yeah, the world has changed dramatically in the last few years and -- -SARAH: Yeah, so -- +SARAH: Yeah, so -- -PAM: We had to think about where people were and what kind of content they wanted and transform ourselves and we'll get into that shortly. But, like, that really mattered to us when we started on a audience development four years ago, our idea was to grow our audience everywhere. So we've been able to do—this is just the last year and a half. But we really care about meeting people where they are, that's mostly on social where our Web visits are up, doing all kinds of new content, VR, podcast, streaming, and our broadcast viewership is actually super healthy as well, and that continues to matter to us. So the transition has been pretty successful for us. But the big question we're really here to talk to you guys about and have a conversation to see what's happening in your newsroom, it's, like, how do you go from that to that? Whether it be in four years or less? +PAM: We had to think about where people were and what kind of content they wanted and transform ourselves and we'll get into that shortly. But, like, that really mattered to us when we started on a audience development four years ago, our idea was to grow our audience everywhere. So we've been able to do—this is just the last year and a half. But we really care about meeting people where they are, that's mostly on social where our Web visits are up, doing all kinds of new content, VR, podcast, streaming, and our broadcast viewership is actually super healthy as well, and that continues to matter to us. So the transition has been pretty successful for us. But the big question we're really here to talk to you guys about and have a conversation to see what's happening in your newsroom, it's, like, how do you go from that to that? Whether it be in four years or less? -SARAH: So the answer is actually that we made a conscious choice to disrupt ourselves from the inside out. And I know that sounds like, like, really super -- +SARAH: So the answer is actually that we made a conscious choice to disrupt ourselves from the inside out. And I know that sounds like, like, really super -- -PAM: Really big. +PAM: Really big. -SARAH: And we were lucky because we do have an executive producer who cares about this and who actually tasked us of doing this and hired our first audience development director, which used to be our publicity department, so that was a big change. But we saw what was happening. Like, we're no dopes. We saw what was happening on newspaper and YouTube everything was disrupting our traditional model, so we had to figure out how to disrupt ourselves. +SARAH: And we were lucky because we do have an executive producer who cares about this and who actually tasked us of doing this and hired our first audience development director, which used to be our publicity department, so that was a big change. But we saw what was happening. Like, we're no dopes. We saw what was happening on newspaper and YouTube everything was disrupting our traditional model, so we had to figure out how to disrupt ourselves. -PAM: And also, guys, you know, I felt some of this yesterday, and we continue to feel it in journalism and in media. You were really scared. It's scary. And we were worried about dying. So when it comes to, like, live or die, like, you've got to change. So that's where the disruption came from. Like, yes, absolutely we watch what was happening to our newspaper. But we didn't want to die. +PAM: And also, guys, you know, I felt some of this yesterday, and we continue to feel it in journalism and in media. You were really scared. It's scary. And we were worried about dying. So when it comes to, like, live or die, like, you've got to change. So that's where the disruption came from. Like, yes, absolutely we watch what was happening to our newspaper. But we didn't want to die. -SARAH: So really at the heart of our disruption, we changed entirely about our audience. +SARAH: So really at the heart of our disruption, we changed entirely about our audience. -PAM: The truth is FRONTLINE, again, I said before because we were low on the tile, we've been around for so long, it's PBS, and it's trusted, and people came to us in droves. FRONTLINE never really thought about audience. We thought about journalism. And it was traditional publicity and reaching media critics, which don't exist in the world really anymore. And getting our—a write-up in The New York Times, that really mattered. But audience wasn't even discussed. So, again, from our executive producer from the top, let's talk about audience, let's find out more about where they are, where they live, and what they're watching and who we want our future audience to be. Brand-new conversation at FRONTLINE. Just four years ago. +PAM: The truth is FRONTLINE, again, I said before because we were low on the tile, we've been around for so long, it's PBS, and it's trusted, and people came to us in droves. FRONTLINE never really thought about audience. We thought about journalism. And it was traditional publicity and reaching media critics, which don't exist in the world really anymore. And getting our—a write-up in The New York Times, that really mattered. But audience wasn't even discussed. So, again, from our executive producer from the top, let's talk about audience, let's find out more about where they are, where they live, and what they're watching and who we want our future audience to be. Brand-new conversation at FRONTLINE. Just four years ago. -SARAH: Yeah, and that's what Pam started doing, doing an assessment of who our current audience was. Where did they live? What did they do? And thinking about our future audience, what they do. And why they might like us. +SARAH: Yeah, and that's what Pam started doing, doing an assessment of who our current audience was. Where did they live? What did they do? And thinking about our future audience, what they do. And why they might like us. -So the thing that we're really lucky is that we are public media. So actually our audience is our bottom line. You know, we have a very different business model than a lot of the for profit media organizations. We wanted to acknowledge that because it is—it makes our challenges different. +So the thing that we're really lucky is that we are public media. So actually our audience is our bottom line. You know, we have a very different business model than a lot of the for profit media organizations. We wanted to acknowledge that because it is—it makes our challenges different. -PAM: So disrupt your news organization. Change everything. Work together with—like you can do this. You're, like, I'm sure, like, I was too, like, I can't do this alone, like, I'm just one person. Yes, I would like to get my content out in the world—yeah, that all sounds great. Disrupting your newsroom sounds great. You had a boss that wanted that. What am I supposed to do? And what we're here to tell you is that each and every one of you can do th change, can be an audience development person if you start small. And follow six really simple steps. We promise you can do this. +PAM: So disrupt your news organization. Change everything. Work together with—like you can do this. You're, like, I'm sure, like, I was too, like, I can't do this alone, like, I'm just one person. Yes, I would like to get my content out in the world—yeah, that all sounds great. Disrupting your newsroom sounds great. You had a boss that wanted that. What am I supposed to do? And what we're here to tell you is that each and every one of you can do th change, can be an audience development person if you start small. And follow six really simple steps. We promise you can do this. -SARAH: Yeah, we did it. We're proof. +SARAH: Yeah, we did it. We're proof. -PAM: So here we go. These are the six steps for your information. +PAM: So here we go. These are the six steps for your information. -SARAH: First one. Find your ally. That's my ally. +SARAH: First one. Find your ally. That's my ally. -PAM: Here we are. +PAM: Here we are. -SARAH: We actually sat next to each other, we were back-to-back and when Pam started, we started talking because we were next together and talked about what we were working on and what our goals were and what our thoughts were and everything, and we really liked each other, which was a bonus. But as we started to understand what each other was trying to do, we realized we would be better if we aligned our goal. +SARAH: We actually sat next to each other, we were back-to-back and when Pam started, we started talking because we were next together and talked about what we were working on and what our goals were and what our thoughts were and everything, and we really liked each other, which was a bonus. But as we started to understand what each other was trying to do, we realized we would be better if we aligned our goal. -PAM: We're better together. I joined FRONTLINE as a audience development director, audience development didn't exist, I never heard the before, we didn't really know what it meant, so we were, like, okay. Grow new audience. How do we do that? And we did have traditional publicity department. That meant—it was church and state. And here's my friend and my colleague, and she's doing really cool stuff in the audience. I really don't know about it until it's ready to go out in the world unless I listen to her conversations on the telephone, which I did. And so we started, like, talking about stuff early. Like, this really happened organically despite being interested in each other's stuff. So we just started talking to each other. And I was really excited about what she was doing. And she was really excited about having her stuff reach more people. It gets—it really kind of—it worked in the beginning, trust each other. +PAM: We're better together. I joined FRONTLINE as a audience development director, audience development didn't exist, I never heard the before, we didn't really know what it meant, so we were, like, okay. Grow new audience. How do we do that? And we did have traditional publicity department. That meant—it was church and state. And here's my friend and my colleague, and she's doing really cool stuff in the audience. I really don't know about it until it's ready to go out in the world unless I listen to her conversations on the telephone, which I did. And so we started, like, talking about stuff early. Like, this really happened organically despite being interested in each other's stuff. So we just started talking to each other. And I was really excited about what she was doing. And she was really excited about having her stuff reach more people. It gets—it really kind of—it worked in the beginning, trust each other. -PARTICIPANT: No, ma'am. Nutshell, can you tell us what was your role at the time and your background? +PARTICIPANT: No, ma'am. Nutshell, can you tell us what was your role at the time and your background? -PAM: Good question. +PAM: Good question. -SARAH: So I ended up—I oversaw all of our editorial recording everything that began in a space I oversaw designers, develop. So we make stuff online, it can be anything from a short film to longer film to whatever we dream up. +SARAH: So I ended up—I oversaw all of our editorial recording everything that began in a space I oversaw designers, develop. So we make stuff online, it can be anything from a short film to longer film to whatever we dream up. -PAM: And I spent 15 years in local TV news as a producer, an executive producer, and news director. And then my television station went out of business because I worked for one of those Tribune stations, and I found myself loving social media, and I worked in social media for a couple years with big institutions. And I fell into this new job at FRONTLINE and it was having a new institution, a new life, and it worked. I have no marketing or PR background at all. I only have a journalism and social media background. So they took a big risk on me too. But I should say one thing, and you were probably just going to say this is that our boss and our leadership really believes that everyone who works at FRONTLINE in capacity should be a journalist. So my audience team is filled with journalists. +PAM: And I spent 15 years in local TV news as a producer, an executive producer, and news director. And then my television station went out of business because I worked for one of those Tribune stations, and I found myself loving social media, and I worked in social media for a couple years with big institutions. And I fell into this new job at FRONTLINE and it was having a new institution, a new life, and it worked. I have no marketing or PR background at all. I only have a journalism and social media background. So they took a big risk on me too. But I should say one thing, and you were probably just going to say this is that our boss and our leadership really believes that everyone who works at FRONTLINE in capacity should be a journalist. So my audience team is filled with journalists. -SARAH: And I've been at FRONTLINE for my whole career, but welders this a few years in is that I started on the promotion side. +SARAH: And I've been at FRONTLINE for my whole career, but welders this a few years in is that I started on the promotion side. -PAM: Any other questions? That was a good one. +PAM: Any other questions? That was a good one. -SARAH: And don't hesitate to jump in if you have any. +SARAH: And don't hesitate to jump in if you have any. -So the next step is pick a great project. And what this really means is pick a winner. Like, if you're going to try something, like, place your bet -- +So the next step is pick a great project. And what this really means is pick a winner. Like, if you're going to try something, like, place your bet -- -PAM: And you all know what the winners are. Like, you guys who are creators, who are, like, cooking up something cool. You know that they're, like, the great projects that you have a potential to reach a lot of people and make a change. And there are, like, smaller projects that go along. We're saying if you're going to do this, and you find an ally, you pick a project that you know is great and that people will care about or that you really believe in something passionate that I wouldn't wait and try to settle small projects. Go for a great, big, awesome—go big or go home. Go for an awesome project because you know what that is, and that has your best chance for impact. +PAM: And you all know what the winners are. Like, you guys who are creators, who are, like, cooking up something cool. You know that they're, like, the great projects that you have a potential to reach a lot of people and make a change. And there are, like, smaller projects that go along. We're saying if you're going to do this, and you find an ally, you pick a project that you know is great and that people will care about or that you really believe in something passionate that I wouldn't wait and try to settle small projects. Go for a great, big, awesome—go big or go home. Go for an awesome project because you know what that is, and that has your best chance for impact. -SARAH: Yeah, set yourself up for success basically. +SARAH: Yeah, set yourself up for success basically. PA. -SARAH: So we've got kind of lucky because we had this film that came shortly after—I guess. +SARAH: So we've got kind of lucky because we had this film that came shortly after—I guess. -PAM: A year. +PAM: A year. -SARAH: We knew it was coming. It was called league of denial and it was about the NFL and how they possibly miss handled -- +SARAH: We knew it was coming. It was called league of denial and it was about the NFL and how they possibly miss handled -- -PAM: What they do and how they do it. When it comes to head injuries and brain injuries and football players. +PAM: What they do and how they do it. When it comes to head injuries and brain injuries and football players. -SARAH: We do films on Yemen, a lot of films on Yemen. So for us we were, like, whoa this has a massive appeal that's unusual. +SARAH: We do films on Yemen, a lot of films on Yemen. So for us we were, like, whoa this has a massive appeal that's unusual. -PAM: Yeah, this is the NFL. You cannot go bigger. It could not be more important to, like, more people. We never get this opportunity at FRONTLINE to go this big and to reach this many people, and we had a partner in ESPN, and we had booked, and we had a lot of people who cared about this topic. So we were, like, let's do league of denial. Let's try this whole new method of league of denial. It was the big—in the four years I've been at FRONTLINE, still remains one of the biggest projects we've tackled. +PAM: Yeah, this is the NFL. You cannot go bigger. It could not be more important to, like, more people. We never get this opportunity at FRONTLINE to go this big and to reach this many people, and we had a partner in ESPN, and we had booked, and we had a lot of people who cared about this topic. So we were, like, let's do league of denial. Let's try this whole new method of league of denial. It was the big—in the four years I've been at FRONTLINE, still remains one of the biggest projects we've tackled. -SARAH: Yeah. +SARAH: Yeah. -So then the next thing we do is we think about our goals and we don't necessarily broadcast throughout the news o, we just set them with each other. Like, who do we want to reach with each project? From my perspective because I run editorial, it doesn't mean—people get very uncomfortable about this line between, you know, editorial and marketing or promotion or audience or whatever you want to call it. For me, this doesn't change the stories we're going to tell. Like, those we're journalists and still going to tell stories and FRONTLINE isn't Kardashian central. changes—it might change the way we decide to tell stories to the world. So we start talking early on about it okay. These are the stories we want to tell. +So then the next thing we do is we think about our goals and we don't necessarily broadcast throughout the news o, we just set them with each other. Like, who do we want to reach with each project? From my perspective because I run editorial, it doesn't mean—people get very uncomfortable about this line between, you know, editorial and marketing or promotion or audience or whatever you want to call it. For me, this doesn't change the stories we're going to tell. Like, those we're journalists and still going to tell stories and FRONTLINE isn't Kardashian central. changes—it might change the way we decide to tell stories to the world. So we start talking early on about it okay. These are the stories we want to tell. -PAM: These are the—so I think it's really—this is a really important line. The editorial side decides what stories we tell. The audience side does not. We launch these stories into the world, we figure the audiences we want to reach, we set goals around them, we do not decide what stories we want to tell to reach the biggest audience. We get the journalism from the journalists, and we launch it together. So that's our really important goal because we see in a lot of companies, a lot of media companies. You know, go to other direction. Like, how do I reach the most people? Back in my day, that's not the direction we're going in. We're creating the best journalism, the best stories we possibly can, and then we're finding creative ways to reach audiences to care about the stories. +PAM: These are the—so I think it's really—this is a really important line. The editorial side decides what stories we tell. The audience side does not. We launch these stories into the world, we figure the audiences we want to reach, we set goals around them, we do not decide what stories we want to tell to reach the biggest audience. We get the journalism from the journalists, and we launch it together. So that's our really important goal because we see in a lot of companies, a lot of media companies. You know, go to other direction. Like, how do I reach the most people? Back in my day, that's not the direction we're going in. We're creating the best journalism, the best stories we possibly can, and then we're finding creative ways to reach audiences to care about the stories. -So for this one, the NFL was the first and only time, maybe—there's a couple—to say everyone. But particularly what I wanted—yeah, we wanted to reach everybody who cares about football. But then we want a little bit more narrow because that's not just a measurable goal, and we went for moms. Moms with kids who are potentially playing football. Or thinking about playing football who are worried about head injurie because where the moms go and the kids go when they play football is the future of the NFL. And also not really an audience that regularly tunes into FRONTLINE, not our core audience, moms. So it was a new opportunity to expose our wrapped and journalism to a brand-new audience, a really cool, memorable story. +So for this one, the NFL was the first and only time, maybe—there's a couple—to say everyone. But particularly what I wanted—yeah, we wanted to reach everybody who cares about football. But then we want a little bit more narrow because that's not just a measurable goal, and we went for moms. Moms with kids who are potentially playing football. Or thinking about playing football who are worried about head injurie because where the moms go and the kids go when they play football is the future of the NFL. And also not really an audience that regularly tunes into FRONTLINE, not our core audience, moms. So it was a new opportunity to expose our wrapped and journalism to a brand-new audience, a really cool, memorable story. -SARAH: So the next step is develop a plan. We came up with this detailed timeline, like, where we were going to launch, when we were going to launch, this was a part that became very uncomfortable because we were talking about taking some of the moments from our film—we do this a lot now. But this is one of the first times we did it. You know, we picked the best moments, the ones that when we watch the film together we were, like, oh, my god. Like, we thought the moments whatever. Find those moments, and then we put them out into the world. And we put them out in the world sometimes on other platforms before we own platforms. And at first we were, like, hold up. I want that traffic. I want it to be on our website. I want us to own it. What are we doing? And—but we had goals. And our goals were to reach -- +SARAH: So the next step is develop a plan. We came up with this detailed timeline, like, where we were going to launch, when we were going to launch, this was a part that became very uncomfortable because we were talking about taking some of the moments from our film—we do this a lot now. But this is one of the first times we did it. You know, we picked the best moments, the ones that when we watch the film together we were, like, oh, my god. Like, we thought the moments whatever. Find those moments, and then we put them out into the world. And we put them out in the world sometimes on other platforms before we own platforms. And at first we were, like, hold up. I want that traffic. I want it to be on our website. I want us to own it. What are we doing? And—but we had goals. And our goals were to reach -- -PAM: New audiences. +PAM: New audiences. -SARAH: And we wanted to reach everyone and specifically moms. And, unfortunately, everyone and moms are not necessarily looking at the FRONTLINE website every single day. So it was, you know—and going back to find your ally, you want to find somebody that you can kind of bring into this discomfort with because it is uncomfortable sometimes, and we can have really honest conversations and angry at each other about, like, what about my needs? We can talk about that. +SARAH: And we wanted to reach everyone and specifically moms. And, unfortunately, everyone and moms are not necessarily looking at the FRONTLINE website every single day. So it was, you know—and going back to find your ally, you want to find somebody that you can kind of bring into this discomfort with because it is uncomfortable sometimes, and we can have really honest conversations and angry at each other about, like, what about my needs? We can talk about that. -PAM: I think that this is uncomfortable if you're—this is really uncomfortable. And there was a healthy tension about, like, trying to—letting go and trying new stuff and breaking the mold. This—this is where we changed our culture. Because as we started to, like, push into each other, you ? Others got to see that too. So, like, all of this is going to lead into, like, a bigger impact. But it's okay to have those—especially if you find your ally—to have those really difficult conversations about, like, I don't want to do it this way. And, like, convince me otherwise. +PAM: I think that this is uncomfortable if you're—this is really uncomfortable. And there was a healthy tension about, like, trying to—letting go and trying new stuff and breaking the mold. This—this is where we changed our culture. Because as we started to, like, push into each other, you ? Others got to see that too. So, like, all of this is going to lead into, like, a bigger impact. But it's okay to have those—especially if you find your ally—to have those really difficult conversations about, like, I don't want to do it this way. And, like, convince me otherwise. -So this was not easy. This was difficult. We had a lot of heart to heart. So we tried things along the way, some that worked and some that didn't. But -- +So this was not easy. This was difficult. We had a lot of heart to heart. So we tried things along the way, some that worked and some that didn't. But -- -SARAH: We knew what the goals were together. We set those goals together. So as long as we went back whoever could make the best case that met our goals, that's -- +SARAH: We knew what the goals were together. We set those goals together. So as long as we went back whoever could make the best case that met our goals, that's -- -PAM: That's actually how we ended up working. As Sarah think said, our goal was to bring people to our website. How do we do that? +PAM: That's actually how we ended up working. As Sarah think said, our goal was to bring people to our website. How do we do that? -PARTICIPANT: Who was involved in all of these conversations? Was it just your departments? +PARTICIPANT: Who was involved in all of these conversations? Was it just your departments? -PAM: We each had small teams. +PAM: We each had small teams. SARAH:. -PAM: So it started with us, we did bring our teams into the mix. But it was pretty much happening here. And then our teams were executing on it in new ways, and we brought cohesive excitement to this new way of doing things and model that we were doing it together. But it was at this point mostly us and our small teams who helped us execute it, and got excited about it too. +PAM: So it started with us, we did bring our teams into the mix. But it was pretty much happening here. And then our teams were executing on it in new ways, and we brought cohesive excitement to this new way of doing things and model that we were doing it together. But it was at this point mostly us and our small teams who helped us execute it, and got excited about it too. -SARAH: We're at the point now where, like, everybody on our teams is like this. So you can see two random people, a developer and, you know, an audience person kind of hooking up an idea together or figuring out how to tell a story. +SARAH: We're at the point now where, like, everybody on our teams is like this. So you can see two random people, a developer and, you know, an audience person kind of hooking up an idea together or figuring out how to tell a story. PARTICIPANT: For the reporters on the project, how much did they know or interact with this whole system? -SARAH: That's a great question. This was kind of a unique project. So at FRONTLINE our films are made by outside producers. So we had kind of independent filmmakers part of our internal audience. And—internal audience development is also important. We'll get to that. And then we also have reporters that actually work on the digital team that do their own independent stories that are related to the film but, you know, they're reporting it out on their own. +SARAH: That's a great question. This was kind of a unique project. So at FRONTLINE our films are made by outside producers. So we had kind of independent filmmakers part of our internal audience. And—internal audience development is also important. We'll get to that. And then we also have reporters that actually work on the digital team that do their own independent stories that are related to the film but, you know, they're reporting it out on their own. -In this case we had a filmmaker—the filmmaker come to us a year ahead of time on the project because they were keeping an internal spreadsheet of every concussion they saw that year and they're, like, we have this, do you want to do something with it? So we made a website called concussion watch, and we've done it for four years now, and we tracked every concussion in the NFL, and we can tell you, like, wide receivers are the ones getting the most concussions, we can tell you which teams are reporting the most or the least. We have this whole dataset that had never been public information before. +In this case we had a filmmaker—the filmmaker come to us a year ahead of time on the project because they were keeping an internal spreadsheet of every concussion they saw that year and they're, like, we have this, do you want to do something with it? So we made a website called concussion watch, and we've done it for four years now, and we tracked every concussion in the NFL, and we can tell you, like, wide receivers are the ones getting the most concussions, we can tell you which teams are reporting the most or the least. We have this whole dataset that had never been public information before. Did that answer your question? PARTICIPANT: Well -- -PAM: Like, the reporters and how they felt about it? We're, like, we're going to take your best moment and put it on GMA? +PAM: Like, the reporters and how they felt about it? We're, like, we're going to take your best moment and put it on GMA? -SARAH: On GMA. +SARAH: On GMA. -PAM: Right there's—there continues to be some healthy discomfort around, like, this process from producers and reporters. What I will tell you is in the next step what we're going to talk about is shout out your goals. When you do something successful, and you create an impact, and you get more people to watch this reporter's journalism, they know—they un that. So it's hard to get the buy in early. But now once you have a track record of success, and they've seen how it works, all of a sudden what happened is, like, I want whatever you did with league of denial, I want that. Do that to my show. +PAM: Right there's—there continues to be some healthy discomfort around, like, this process from producers and reporters. What I will tell you is in the next step what we're going to talk about is shout out your goals. When you do something successful, and you create an impact, and you get more people to watch this reporter's journalism, they know—they un that. So it's hard to get the buy in early. But now once you have a track record of success, and they've seen how it works, all of a sudden what happened is, like, I want whatever you did with league of denial, I want that. Do that to my show. -SARAH: I think that comes back to picking a great project and kind of part of that is, you know, if you're lucky to get something like league of denial but also thinking about who we're going to be working with and who is the person that might be the most forward leaning in terms of thinking digital at this stage. Because you want it to be as loud as possible. Sometimes we worked with filmmakers and digital things that we had to drag them kicking and screaming along because they just did not know what to do, and then they were super psyched at the end when they saw the results. +SARAH: I think that comes back to picking a great project and kind of part of that is, you know, if you're lucky to get something like league of denial but also thinking about who we're going to be working with and who is the person that might be the most forward leaning in terms of thinking digital at this stage. Because you want it to be as loud as possible. Sometimes we worked with filmmakers and digital things that we had to drag them kicking and screaming along because they just did not know what to do, and then they were super psyched at the end when they saw the results. -So I always like to use the kind of strategy or tactic of being, like, oh, did you like that? We can do that. If you find somebody that you can work with that's excited about it, other people are, like, wait a minute. How do you do that? +So I always like to use the kind of strategy or tactic of being, like, oh, did you like that? We can do that. If you find somebody that you can work with that's excited about it, other people are, like, wait a minute. How do you do that? -PAM: Did that answer your question? +PAM: Did that answer your question? PARTICIPANT: Yes. PARTICIPANT: For those of us who are not an audience -- -SARAH: You are. +SARAH: You are. [Laughter] @@ -206,319 +205,314 @@ P. PARTICIPANT: So maybe you can be a little bit more concrete of what was this plan? -PAM: For sure. +PAM: For sure. -PARTICIPANT: How did you hold yourself accountable? What form did it take? How did you do the research to know that it was the right plan that you cou execute -- +PARTICIPANT: How did you hold yourself accountable? What form did it take? How did you do the research to know that it was the right plan that you cou execute -- -PAM: Yeah. Absolutely. So there's something that I like to talk about and it started with this prong, which is, like, we produce our buzz now at FRONTLINE. We think of what the content is, what the goals are and be W be and this plan how we're going to produce our buzz so that as many people as possible are talking about our project and want to watch it on Tuesday nights at 10:00. Like, that's still a hard thing that we have to accomplish. Or stream it on our website. +PAM: Yeah. Absolutely. So there's something that I like to talk about and it started with this prong, which is, like, we produce our buzz now at FRONTLINE. We think of what the content is, what the goals are and be W be and this plan how we're going to produce our buzz so that as many people as possible are talking about our project and want to watch it on Tuesday nights at 10:00. Like, that's still a hard thing that we have to accomplish. Or stream it on our website. -SARAH: So I think the early stage would be we know kind of what the film is. The first thing we'll learn about is what the topic of our film is. At some point we'll see a rough cut. It's actually more close to broadcast than you probably think. Sometimes it's only, like, a week or two out. You know, and then we'll see the fine cut. But usually at the rough cut stage is when our digital team starts talking about, like, okay. What projects do we want to do around this film? +SARAH: So I think the early stage would be we know kind of what the film is. The first thing we'll learn about is what the topic of our film is. At some point we'll see a rough cut. It's actually more close to broadcast than you probably think. Sometimes it's only, like, a week or two out. You know, and then we'll see the fine cut. But usually at the rough cut stage is when our digital team starts talking about, like, okay. What projects do we want to do around this film? -So then we'll know okay. We'll add these, this series of four or five and tell the stories that we're reporting on online. You know, it doesn't—nowadays it's not—or back in the denial days, we weren't doing as much kind of distributed content. But we are now. So at this point we'll talk about, like, is there a Facebook moment in here? Is there a kind of -- +So then we'll know okay. We'll add these, this series of four or five and tell the stories that we're reporting on online. You know, it doesn't—nowadays it's not—or back in the denial days, we weren't doing as much kind of distributed content. But we are now. So at this point we'll talk about, like, is there a Facebook moment in here? Is there a kind of -- -PAM: A share graphic. +PAM: A share graphic. -SARAH: A share graphic. An engagement campaign around this film. So once we have the general lay of land that we want to do, we time them out and think about okay. If we're going to do an engagement campaign, do we want to lead into this story? Do we want to launch it with this story to then kind of see the campaign before we get to the broadcast? Do we do it after the broadcast? We start really thinking strategically about timing and then we get into the nitty-gritty of what Pam was talking about produc the. +SARAH: A share graphic. An engagement campaign around this film. So once we have the general lay of land that we want to do, we time them out and think about okay. If we're going to do an engagement campaign, do we want to lead into this story? Do we want to launch it with this story to then kind of see the campaign before we get to the broadcast? Do we do it after the broadcast? We start really thinking strategically about timing and then we get into the nitty-gritty of what Pam was talking about produc the. -So we think about okay. Where is the first place we want to launch this? So if it's a Yemen film, it's going to be a blog about Yemen, if it's league of denial, we're going to go to Good Morning America and Yahoo. +So we think about okay. Where is the first place we want to launch this? So if it's a Yemen film, it's going to be a blog about Yemen, if it's league of denial, we're going to go to Good Morning America and Yahoo. So we think tacklely where is the audience that love this story or love this project actually live. -PAM: And what are our assets; right? Like, what can produce our buzz that others would share? And more and more we're owning our buzz ourselves and distributing on our Facebook page or YouTube channel. But we also create promotional partnerships with media outlets. And that was part of the stuff, like, why are we giving Good Morning America our best moment in the film to talk about, like, this concussion. It's—well, because it's great content for GMA. It turns out that they really want it. Like, no one ever picked up the phone and tried this before. And it drives people to watch us. +PAM: And what are our assets; right? Like, what can produce our buzz that others would share? And more and more we're owning our buzz ourselves and distributing on our Facebook page or YouTube channel. But we also create promotional partnerships with media outlets. And that was part of the stuff, like, why are we giving Good Morning America our best moment in the film to talk about, like, this concussion. It's—well, because it's great content for GMA. It turns out that they really want it. Like, no one ever picked up the phone and tried this before. And it drives people to watch us. -So what are your assets? What are those moments? And get—create a partnership, call Yahoo. Call up—people that you're meeting here at SRCCON and creating relationships and see if you want to see some sort of content share. And all we ask—and we give content away to partners now all the time. And all we ask in the very first sentence is you can talk about when FRONTLINE is on and have a link. +So what are your assets? What are those moments? And get—create a partnership, call Yahoo. Call up—people that you're meeting here at SRCCON and creating relationships and see if you want to see some sort of content share. And all we ask—and we give content away to partners now all the time. And all we ask in the very first sentence is you can talk about when FRONTLINE is on and have a link. -And we didn't ever do that before. But that, like, really helps. And that's actually more standard procedure for a lot of journalists. We're all becoming a lot more collaborative, et cetera, from sport journalism. But we're all finding that shared audience is better for all of us. +And we didn't ever do that before. But that, like, really helps. And that's actually more standard procedure for a lot of journalists. We're all becoming a lot more collaborative, et cetera, from sport journalism. But we're all finding that shared audience is better for all of us. -So, like, finding out what our assets are, figuring out when the thing's on the air, what the goal was. So if we have an opportunity, look at what time that happens. What day that happens. What content they get. How they'll talk about us and what we hope to achieve on broadcast day. +So, like, finding out what our assets are, figuring out when the thing's on the air, what the goal was. So if we have an opportunity, look at what time that happens. What day that happens. What content they get. How they'll talk about us and what we hope to achieve on broadcast day. PARTICIPANT: And did you have a working—do you just have an existing knowledge of, like, who uses what platforms and. -PAM: So we've done some research on that. +PAM: So we've done some research on that. PARTICIPANT: Okay. -PAM: And we have a general idea. +PAM: And we have a general idea. -SARAH: We also have reporters in these conversations too. +SARAH: We also have reporters in these conversations too. PA. -SARAH: So whoever is doing the deep dive into Yemen, we're, like, oh, you want to talk to this person and this person and and this person. And, you know, maybe—we spent a lot of time on Twitter actually. We do a viewing party for every film that we do, and we invite influential people to live tweet along with us. And they hadn't seen the film. So it—you know, they could not like it. And that's the risk that we take. +SARAH: So whoever is doing the deep dive into Yemen, we're, like, oh, you want to talk to this person and this person and and this person. And, you know, maybe—we spent a lot of time on Twitter actually. We do a viewing party for every film that we do, and we invite influential people to live tweet along with us. And they hadn't seen the film. So it—you know, they could not like it. And that's the risk that we take. -But, again, influential means within the audience that we're trying to reach. So I always pick on poor Yemen. But, like, you know, there are Yemen tweeters out there and those are the ones that—again, we love to get, like, Lady Gaga tweet about it. But we focus our efforts on the Yemen people. +But, again, influential means within the audience that we're trying to reach. So I always pick on poor Yemen. But, like, you know, there are Yemen tweeters out there and those are the ones that—again, we love to get, like, Lady Gaga tweet about it. But we focus our efforts on the Yemen people. -PAMFinding influencers on Twitter is actually part of this. And there's actually a research element for all audience to find—if you're going to reach an audience, like, how do you do that? You have to—the audience person specialty is. So that's where the relationship is super important. And the roll out plan for us, like, to be very specific talks about asset, date, time, desired goal. +PAMFinding influencers on Twitter is actually part of this. And there's actually a research element for all audience to find—if you're going to reach an audience, like, how do you do that? You have to—the audience person specialty is. So that's where the relationship is super important. And the roll out plan for us, like, to be very specific talks about asset, date, time, desired goal. -And this plan for league of denial started I think actually on the Friday before the Tuesday it So Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday is a hugely important day for us after the walk, everybody from the store website, so what are we going to do there? And how are we going to keep people engaged? And how are we going to get them to share so that more people know about it? So that actually is a timing thing, it's a partner thing, it's an asset thing. +And this plan for league of denial started I think actually on the Friday before the Tuesday it So Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday is a hugely important day for us after the walk, everybody from the store website, so what are we going to do there? And how are we going to keep people engaged? And how are we going to get them to share so that more people know about it? So that actually is a timing thing, it's a partner thing, it's an asset thing. -SARAH: And also the day where we can kind of capture the buzz and turn it into buzz. So we've done things where we've done, like, this was the skeeb everybody was talking about last night. And we put it out. So try to create a little bit of -- +SARAH: And also the day where we can kind of capture the buzz and turn it into buzz. So we've done things where we've done, like, this was the skeeb everybody was talking about last night. And we put it out. So try to create a little bit of -- -PARTICIPANT: Are people asking questions about—like within an organization, asking questions about if someone's clicking on that link that's, like, you can watch it at FRONTLINE here? Is there a goal -- +PARTICIPANT: Are people asking questions about—like within an organization, asking questions about if someone's clicking on that link that's, like, you can watch it at FRONTLINE here? Is there a goal -- -PAM: Referring traffic? +PAM: Referring traffic? PARTICIPANT: Yeah. -PAM: We report on that. +PAM: We report on that. ->. +> . -PAM: We absolutely report on that. And that's part of what we going to talk about in the next two steps. But, yea. You have to -- +PAM: We absolutely report on that. And that's part of what we going to talk about in the next two steps. But, yea. You have to -- -SARAH: The other thing too is we're broadcast as well as digital, so you can watch us on air, you can watch us online. So there's that, like, do we know if people saw it on GMA, do they watch it on the broadcast? We can't actually track that. But we can look at the numbers and be, like, well, that was better than normal. +SARAH: The other thing too is we're broadcast as well as digital, so you can watch us on air, you can watch us online. So there's that, like, do we know if people saw it on GMA, do they watch it on the broadcast? We can't actually track that. But we can look at the numbers and be, like, well, that was better than normal. -PAM: And you can from the website. +PAM: And you can from the website. -SARAH: Y. +SARAH: Y. -PAM: You can see if they have something on their website, what the referring traffic looked like, how that worked, or who's a good partner really. +PAM: You can see if they have something on their website, what the referring traffic looked like, how that worked, or who's a good partner really. PARTICIPANT: Ye. -PARTICIPANT: So I work with Lena at reveal and one of the challenges we have is on a partner level, definitely content partners, there's buy in to coordinate social, promo on the editorial side, you know, what's the roll out, what's running on your site, what's running ours? Our business challenge, we have an audience with local stations that carry us, and we offer them assets, we offer them phone calls, all kinds of outreach, but they don't have the bandwidth to distribute and promo or even coordinate, hop on the phone. +PARTICIPANT: So I work with Lena at reveal and one of the challenges we have is on a partner level, definitely content partners, there's buy in to coordinate social, promo on the editorial side, you know, what's the roll out, what's running on your site, what's running ours? Our business challenge, we have an audience with local stations that carry us, and we offer them assets, we offer them phone calls, all kinds of outreach, but they don't have the bandwidth to distribute and promo or even coordinate, hop on the phone. So I was just curious if you guys have run up against that and maybe what are some, like, successful solutions that you found. -PAM: Yeah, I feel your pain. I do. And, you know, we work with the station systems as well and they're with the one of our greatest assets and distributors, you know, on paper. But they're completely strapped and, you know, underresoed and underfunded in many cases and don't of each have someone that can put this thing on their website. We do make toolkits with stations where we come up with video, suggested language. Like, we make it as easy as possible, and we send it along. We make sure it's the right person. We assure they actually got it and then what we do after that after making it as easy as possible is something that they use but we can't control. And some stations are great at it. And we'll work with them even more closely. +PAM: Yeah, I feel your pain. I do. And, you know, we work with the station systems as well and they're with the one of our greatest assets and distributors, you know, on paper. But they're completely strapped and, you know, underresoed and underfunded in many cases and don't of each have someone that can put this thing on their website. We do make toolkits with stations where we come up with video, suggested language. Like, we make it as easy as possible, and we send it along. We make sure it's the right person. We assure they actually got it and then what we do after that after making it as easy as possible is something that they use but we can't control. And some stations are great at it. And we'll work with them even more closely. And others it's just a frustrating part of the system that we're working in. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. We just see them as, lik an up tapped bridge to the audience of digital hopefully. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. We just see them as, lik an up tapped bridge to the audience of digital hopefully. -PAM: Yea. +PAM: Yea. PARTICIPANT: But it's not happening at that level. -SARAH: Maybe we can talk more at this session because this is very public in the room. But we just had a really revealing meeting with the station person recently talking about how overwhelmed they were—we were, like, you want our direct contact? And they were, like, no. We get so many e-mails, like, we actually come here and have stations relations. +SARAH: Maybe we can talk more at this session because this is very public in the room. But we just had a really revealing meeting with the station person recently talking about how overwhelmed they were—we were, like, you want our direct contact? And they were, like, no. We get so many e-mails, like, we actually come here and have stations relations. PARTICIPANT: We give them stuff that they can just copy and paste. -SARAH: Yeah, we do too I am not we'll talk more about that. We have ideas. +SARAH: Yeah, we do too I am not we'll talk more about that. We have ideas. -PAM: Number five is so important for some of us. And this is where change happens. This is where your culture changes. When you finish this, and you've gotten great buzz or audience something amazing happened that you created in this plan, you need to tell your bosses. You need to tell the world. And this makes us all very super comfortable. If you want to do this where your ally can come in. Your bosses need to know that you did something really cool and really different. And you grew your—like they want you to be successful too. They need to know about these successes. We're not good at sharing our successes. +PAM: Number five is so important for some of us. And this is where change happens. This is where your culture changes. When you finish this, and you've gotten great buzz or audience something amazing happened that you created in this plan, you need to tell your bosses. You need to tell the world. And this makes us all very super comfortable. If you want to do this where your ally can come in. Your bosses need to know that you did something really cool and really different. And you grew your—like they want you to be successful too. They need to know about these successes. We're not good at sharing our successes. -SARAH: You're producing your buzz really. +SARAH: You're producing your buzz really. -PAM: Yeah, produce your own buzz. You need this so that your next reporter wants to work with and your colleagues are seeing something cool is happening, and you're doing something different, and it's actually having a really cool result. This is where it built for Sarah and I move beyond, like, this little thing we were cooking up ourselves really across our teams and got baked into our culture. This is where we completely change because we talked about our successes. And that this was really changing us, and we were reaching new people. And, like, we were going, like, mainstream in some cases around FRONTLINE that had, like, never happened. I think we were an entertainment weekly. +PAM: Yeah, produce your own buzz. You need this so that your next reporter wants to work with and your colleagues are seeing something cool is happening, and you're doing something different, and it's actually having a really cool result. This is where it built for Sarah and I move beyond, like, this little thing we were cooking up ourselves really across our teams and got baked into our culture. This is where we completely change because we talked about our successes. And that this was really changing us, and we were reaching new people. And, like, we were going, like, mainstream in some cases around FRONTLINE that had, like, never happened. I think we were an entertainment weekly. [Laughter] -This never happens. Like, that's a huge win for us. So we needed the world to know that. Our boss was so psyched to tell her bosses. +This never happens. Like, that's a huge win for us. So we needed the world to know that. Our boss was so psyched to tell her bosses. -SARAH: Yeah, this is really internal propaganda. That's what we're talking about and, you know, if you haven't shared your goals, this is the point that you share them because. +SARAH: Yeah, this is really internal propaganda. That's what we're talking about and, you know, if you haven't shared your goals, this is the point that you share them because. PARTICIPANT: Yes, we did plan, and we did execute flawlessly. -PARTICIPANT: I'm just curious what else was a success for you? Specifically entertainment weekly. +PARTICIPANT: I'm just curious what else was a success for you? Specifically entertainment weekly. -PAM: In this particular case? So, like, GMA, we were never on GMA. We got DMA, we got Yahoo, morning edition I think two hits. We had dead spin, we had all the sports sites I can't name right now. +PAM: In this particular case? So, like, GMA, we were never on GMA. We got DMA, we got Yahoo, morning edition I think two hits. We had dead spin, we had all the sports sites I can't name right now. -PAM: We had one of the biggest days ever on our website. Our audience broadcast, we broke records. We grew our social media audience. All the indicators, the particulars, the time on-site, all of them were record-breaking. We trended nationally. We trended nationally on Twitter with our hashtag. Everything worked. +PAM: We had one of the biggest days ever on our website. Our audience broadcast, we broke records. We grew our social media audience. All the indicators, the particulars, the time on-site, all of them were record-breaking. We trended nationally. We trended nationally on Twitter with our hashtag. Everything worked. -SARAH: And we had stories kind of coming out the rest of the week from other media would say, like, I think this happened with the patriots that some local sports reporter asked, you know, Tom Brady about this. So every time something like that happened and, you know, they cited our film, we would write it up and actually put a story and show that we were having some impact here. +SARAH: And we had stories kind of coming out the rest of the week from other media would say, like, I think this happened with the patriots that some local sports reporter asked, you know, Tom Brady about this. So every time something like that happened and, you know, they cited our film, we would write it up and actually put a story and show that we were having some impact here. -PAM: And we had a whole story on our website of five current playing members of the NFL were quoted talking about "League of Denial" in the days afterwards. So we created a story out of that. That just never happens. So the story didn't end when the broadcast—or stream. Like, we kept—we're still telling the story today. +PAM: And we had a whole story on our website of five current playing members of the NFL were quoted talking about "League of Denial" in the days afterwards. So we created a story out of that. That just never happens. So the story didn't end when the broadcast—or stream. Like, we kept—we're still telling the story today. -SARAH: Yeah, last fall we broke a story about the new number of people that had bee CTE and, like, it was the first time that I sat in our newsroom and then I looked over at the TV and, like, something we published on our website was on CNN. And I was, like, whoa we built a real credibility on the subject. We had people willing to talk on our digital reporters who were, like, explayers and things that are, like, I don't really want to talk about this, but I'll talk to you guys because I trust that. +SARAH: Yeah, last fall we broke a story about the new number of people that had bee CTE and, like, it was the first time that I sat in our newsroom and then I looked over at the TV and, like, something we published on our website was on CNN. And I was, like, whoa we built a real credibility on the subject. We had people willing to talk on our digital reporters who were, like, explayers and things that are, like, I don't really want to talk about this, but I'll talk to you guys because I trust that. -So there are all sorts of levels of wins here from the very strategic promotional level to a cultual level to a reporting level. Yeah? +So there are all sorts of levels of wins here from the very strategic promotional level to a cultual level to a reporting level. Yeah? -PARTICIPANT: What sort of extras are you providing around your content to give an interview with the person behind the film or side content. Because for a broadcast schedule, you could expand beyond that and drive more targeted content to those people. +PARTICIPANT: What sort of extras are you providing around your content to give an interview with the person behind the film or side content. Because for a broadcast schedule, you could expand beyond that and drive more targeted content to those people. -SARAH: Yeah, absolutely we do a written reported stories, we do a concussion watch that has now happened for four years. With "League of Deni," we do—just like any newspaper would kind of keep on a story, we, you know, keep checking with the researchers, what have you found that's new? All sorts of things. +SARAH: Yeah, absolutely we do a written reported stories, we do a concussion watch that has now happened for four years. With "League of Deni," we do—just like any newspaper would kind of keep on a story, we, you know, keep checking with the researchers, what have you found that's new? All sorts of things. -For the broadcast, we did push a lot of news people that interviewed for the film, and we actually published video interviews, so you could watch them. Probably, like, you know, 30 to 40 minutes long on average, which is—pretty unusual. Concussion watch has been a big -- +For the broadcast, we did push a lot of news people that interviewed for the film, and we actually published video interviews, so you could watch them. Probably, like, you know, 30 to 40 minutes long on average, which is—pretty unusual. Concussion watch has been a big -- -PAM: Also in this case we worked with two reporters at ESPN who were on OTL and we're pretty close with the OTL team, and we had content, and we had that to cross produce and help raise the visibility of this project. Like, there was a lot of stuff that was happening on the journalism side that we could use to kind of, like, flow to our documentary. +PAM: Also in this case we worked with two reporters at ESPN who were on OTL and we're pretty close with the OTL team, and we had content, and we had that to cross produce and help raise the visibility of this project. Like, there was a lot of stuff that was happening on the journalism side that we could use to kind of, like, flow to our documentary. -PARTICIPANT: And with those collaborations, there might be rights issues. So did you work out the rights issues ahead of time? +PARTICIPANT: And with those collaborations, there might be rights issues. So did you work out the rights issues ahead of time? -PAM: . +PAM: . PARTICIPANT: And when you're stepping out of the conversation especially to be able to broadcast in social media. -PAM: Yeah, this is something we've learned the hard time a couple of times with the rights issues and the licensing and the partnerships. I don't know, like, what ended up happening at the very end, like, two weeks before we were going on air with this particular "League of Denial" is ESPN backed out. They saw our trailer and they were, like, what? What are you saying? They're in bed with the NFL, literally they're a business partner. They bailed on us, which was quite something. And that had to do with our—it actually I thought was amazing for us. It was, like, gave us a whole new realm from our audience from my executive producer didn't think it was so great but I was, like, this is awesome. +PAM: Yeah, this is something we've learned the hard time a couple of times with the rights issues and the licensing and the partnerships. I don't know, like, what ended up happening at the very end, like, two weeks before we were going on air with this particular "League of Denial" is ESPN backed out. They saw our trailer and they were, like, what? What are you saying? They're in bed with the NFL, literally they're a business partner. They bailed on us, which was quite something. And that had to do with our—it actually I thought was amazing for us. It was, like, gave us a whole new realm from our audience from my executive producer didn't think it was so great but I was, like, this is awesome. -Everybody was talking about it. A real media story. But that was because we weren't all buttoned up with our contract and our licensing and everybody wasn't on the same page, we were moving too fast, and it was new for us. So it technically blew up but in my world it was awesome; right? +Everybody was talking about it. A real media story. But that was because we weren't all buttoned up with our contract and our licensing and everybody wasn't on the same page, we were moving too fast, and it was new for us. So it technically blew up but in my world it was awesome; right? PARTICIPANT: Otherwise you would be watching it on ESPN probably. -PAM: Well, all it did was took note -- +PAM: Well, all it did was took note -- -SARAH: This was a FRONTLINE film. +SARAH: This was a FRONTLINE film. -PAM: This was a FRONTLINE film based on their reporters writing. They took their logo off of it. They didn't do all the promotion that they were going to do around. That's part of the big collaboration that's going to help us reach other audiences. And so we didn't get that ultimately because there's so much talk about it. +PAM: This was a FRONTLINE film based on their reporters writing. They took their logo off of it. They didn't do all the promotion that they were going to do around. That's part of the big collaboration that's going to help us reach other audiences. And so we didn't get that ultimately because there's so much talk about it. -SARAH: So the last step in this process is measure, rinse, repeat. And this is where you shouted out your wins, you've been successful, everybody knows it. But then you go back to your ally and you're, like, okay. Let's be honest here. Not that you weren't honest before but, like, are there things that maybe weren't so successful that we want to talk ab why? And whether we want to try again, whether we want to tweak it. Looking at our wins, were there things that we could have done to make it even better? This is really kind of—again, this is something that you have to make time for because usually we're onto the next thing. But it's time well spent. +SARAH: So the last step in this process is measure, rinse, repeat. And this is where you shouted out your wins, you've been successful, everybody knows it. But then you go back to your ally and you're, like, okay. Let's be honest here. Not that you weren't honest before but, like, are there things that maybe weren't so successful that we want to talk ab why? And whether we want to try again, whether we want to tweak it. Looking at our wins, were there things that we could have done to make it even better? This is really kind of—again, this is something that you have to make time for because usually we're onto the next thing. But it's time well spent. -PAM: And I think that this is where you look at the referring traffic and the data and the growth and you really are honest about, like, who was a good partner? GMA, that makes a lot of sense. They're huge; right? Those people who watch TV, do they come to our website? Can we tell if we can't measure, should we do it? All of those questions, we ask ourselves pretty quickly after it happened so that we can dash we can take the spikes and really lean into those spikes, and we kind of prune away the things that we're just not sure about or wasn't worth the effort. Created a lot of beautiful amazing shared graphics that weren't shared. Like, don't do that anymore. +PAM: And I think that this is where you look at the referring traffic and the data and the growth and you really are honest about, like, who was a good partner? GMA, that makes a lot of sense. They're huge; right? Those people who watch TV, do they come to our website? Can we tell if we can't measure, should we do it? All of those questions, we ask ourselves pretty quickly after it happened so that we can dash we can take the spikes and really lean into those spikes, and we kind of prune away the things that we're just not sure about or wasn't worth the effort. Created a lot of beautiful amazing shared graphics that weren't shared. Like, don't do that anymore. -SARAH: One of the things that Pam started when we started FRONTLINE was buzz report. So that comes out after every broadcast or after every big digital project, and it's actually a physical record of our strategy, our tactics, how we executed it, how we did it, the metrics, and we do this whether it was successful or not. Like, it gives us an opportunity to document, you know, all of this. And I don't know if any you guys—I know some of you work in nonprofits if you have to write reports or something. These things are invaluable. +SARAH: One of the things that Pam started when we started FRONTLINE was buzz report. So that comes out after every broadcast or after every big digital project, and it's actually a physical record of our strategy, our tactics, how we executed it, how we did it, the metrics, and we do this whether it was successful or not. Like, it gives us an opportunity to document, you know, all of this. And I don't know if any you guys—I know some of you work in nonprofits if you have to write reports or something. These things are invaluable. -PAM: So we create the buzz. +PAM: So we create the buzz. -REPORTER: For distribution across FRONTLINE so that we have a real physical report on the reality of what we did and how we did it and how successful or unsuccessful we were. But also it's just good practice for any of you if you're creating content, if you're a content creator to remember what you did and w worked. Because we all were doing so much so often that you forget the great tactics that you did six months ago. Sometimes six weeks ago. And this is kind of a really great document for you for your reviews if anybody has annual reviews. You're, like, oh, my god do you remember that thing that I did? Just to document, the work that you did, the successes that you had, the audience that you grew. Your bosses want this data. And we forget it. So—document it. +REPORTER: For distribution across FRONTLINE so that we have a real physical report on the reality of what we did and how we did it and how successful or unsuccessful we were. But also it's just good practice for any of you if you're creating content, if you're a content creator to remember what you did and w worked. Because we all were doing so much so often that you forget the great tactics that you did six months ago. Sometimes six weeks ago. And this is kind of a really great document for you for your reviews if anybody has annual reviews. You're, like, oh, my god do you remember that thing that I did? Just to document, the work that you did, the successes that you had, the audience that you grew. Your bosses want this data. And we forget it. So—document it. -SARAH: Your memory is a little bit hazy and you document it and you're, like, oh, wow. +SARAH: Your memory is a little bit hazy and you document it and you're, like, oh, wow. -PAM: Until just four years ago, we were measuring our success at FRONTLINE based on who wrote about our documentaries in The New York Times, what our generating was, and what other kind of, like, media quotes we got. Our world is completely different now. Now we talk really about who's talking about us on Twitter? What happened with our hashtag? How many people, like, came to our website? Did we grow across social? Did we get new subscribers to our e-mail? Like, all of those are indicators of success. So take a global look and teach your bosses, like, that's important. That matters. That's audience. That's growth. That's impact for your journalism. +PAM: Until just four years ago, we were measuring our success at FRONTLINE based on who wrote about our documentaries in The New York Times, what our generating was, and what other kind of, like, media quotes we got. Our world is completely different now. Now we talk really about who's talking about us on Twitter? What happened with our hashtag? How many people, like, came to our website? Did we grow across social? Did we get new subscribers to our e-mail? Like, all of those are indicators of success. So take a global look and teach your bosses, like, that's important. That matters. That's audience. That's growth. That's impact for your journalism. PARTICIPANT: Do you make a plan and report your steps for every weekly show? -PAM: Well, I mean so the simple answer yes. But the real answer, I'm not going to go off the record. The real answer is the big "League of Denial" moments are—get everything. They get, like, the full-court press. And the smaller Yemen films get a smaller touch because there's only—we only do have a small team, and we only have the ability to really go big a couple of times a year. So we go through this process for each and every project not just the digital projects, but every. +PAM: Well, I mean so the simple answer yes. But the real answer, I'm not going to go off the record. The real answer is the big "League of Denial" moments are—get everything. They get, like, the full-court press. And the smaller Yemen films get a smaller touch because there's only—we only do have a small team, and we only have the ability to really go big a couple of times a year. So we go through this process for each and every project not just the digital projects, but every. -We're just a team of three or four people. So we can't do everything for everyone. So we measure that. But we do—everything gets a little bit of a touch for sure. +We're just a team of three or four people. So we can't do everything for everyone. So we measure that. But we do—everything gets a little bit of a touch for sure. -SARAH: So we just wanted to move into a line of questions now and talk about, you know, we would love to hear from you guys about how you do audience development, what challenges you're facing, what successes you want to shout out. We just want to have it open. +SARAH: So we just wanted to move into a line of questions now and talk about, you know, we would love to hear from you guys about how you do audience development, what challenges you're facing, what successes you want to shout out. We just want to have it open. -PAM: I think Sarah and I were having a really interesting conversation at breakfast with some colleagues here at SRCCON, it's a real lightning rod and a lot of newsrooms, specifically the more traditional newsrooms. And really what we're here to say is that we all need—we all if you're a journalist, and you want to reach audiences, you have to take a role in this too. It's part of your job. Don't hand it off. Find a partner and work with them. +PAM: I think Sarah and I were having a really interesting conversation at breakfast with some colleagues here at SRCCON, it's a real lightning rod and a lot of newsrooms, specifically the more traditional newsrooms. And really what we're here to say is that we all need—we all if you're a journalist, and you want to reach audiences, you have to take a role in this too. It's part of your job. Don't hand it off. Find a partner and work with them. -So is that something that you think is actually doable where you were? Is that something that you guys think that you could achieve, or are you doing it and would love to hear about what you guys think. +So is that something that you think is actually doable where you were? Is that something that you guys think that you could achieve, or are you doing it and would love to hear about what you guys think. -Does anybody else in the audience development diffe? Does it work? +Does anybody else in the audience development diffe? Does it work? -PARTICIPANT: I think we can benefit with more collaboration while the editorial was actually being created. Because right now it seems like there's a little bit of audience development involvement at the very beginning when we're putting together, say, an editorial calendar for the year; right? What our cover story is going to be. What are our topics? But then they don't really get involved again until after, you know, you print after the HOA comes out and after it goes on the Web. And we get a report, hey, that story did well. And that's useful; right? But it seems like the cycle is very long. Because by the time you get any feedback from the development, all we're doing is then I guess planting the next year's worth of stories. +PARTICIPANT: I think we can benefit with more collaboration while the editorial was actually being created. Because right now it seems like there's a little bit of audience development involvement at the very beginning when we're putting together, say, an editorial calendar for the year; right? What our cover story is going to be. What are our topics? But then they don't really get involved again until after, you know, you print after the HOA comes out and after it goes on the Web. And we get a report, hey, that story did well. And that's useful; right? But it seems like the cycle is very long. Because by the time you get any feedback from the development, all we're doing is then I guess planting the next year's worth of stories. -So having that collaboration in the moment as they're putting the stories together in, like, more granular way I think it would be really helpful. It would be a huge cultal change because our editors are not used to having to work with anybody else in the course of putting their stories together. But it would be really useful to have audience development there to say, like, okay. Well, these are the stories that you're doing. Especially not just cover stories. But, you know, deeper down in the magazine or deeper down in digital features, you know, it's, like, they can brainstorm who is that audience? How can we reach them? You know, and kind of provide more instant feedback on that. And maybe you could influence the way that the story is either written or presented or something in a way that they know, well, you know -- +So having that collaboration in the moment as they're putting the stories together in, like, more granular way I think it would be really helpful. It would be a huge cultal change because our editors are not used to having to work with anybody else in the course of putting their stories together. But it would be really useful to have audience development there to say, like, okay. Well, these are the stories that you're doing. Especially not just cover stories. But, you know, deeper down in the magazine or deeper down in digital features, you know, it's, like, they can brainstorm who is that audience? How can we reach them? You know, and kind of provide more instant feedback on that. And maybe you could influence the way that the story is either written or presented or something in a way that they know, well, you know -- -PAM: Yea. No,—that's what we talked about. That's what we're talked about. +PAM: Yea. No,—that's what we talked about. That's what we're talked about. PARTICIPANT: This is the point where one of the editors would look at me and how dare you insinuate change what we write about. -SARAH: Except you're not. +SARAH: Except you're not. -PARTICIPANT: Your headline might be different or deck might be different and that could make the difference between 20,000 page reviews 100,000 page views. +PARTICIPANT: Your headline might be different or deck might be different and that could make the difference between 20,000 page reviews 100,000 page views. -SARAH: Exactly. We call this our mantra and actually we put some tips and tricks in the ether pad, some more tactical ideas. +SARAH: Exactly. We call this our mantra and actually we put some tips and tricks in the ether pad, some more tactical ideas. -PAM: It's a perfect segue actually. +PAM: It's a perfect segue actually. -SARAH: Yeah, and what we talk about—and we consider ourselves one team. Like, audience Yeah, so it sounds like the audience people wherever you work work some place else. +SARAH: Yeah, and what we talk about—and we consider ourselves one team. Like, audience Yeah, so it sounds like the audience people wherever you work work some place else. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. They are. Corporate. So each magazine of ours does not have a audience development person. We have a corporate audience department that keeps an eye on everything. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. They are. Corporate. So each magazine of ours does not have a audience development person. We have a corporate audience department that keeps an eye on everything. -SARAH: Interesting. +SARAH: Interesting. PARTICIPANT: So implementing this change would be a shift. -PAM: Radical. . +PAM: Radical. . -SARAH: So we talk about on our team that everybody's responsible for—our mantra is what stories do we want to tell? How do we want to tell them? And how are we going to put them out into the world? And everybody should be thinking about all three of those things. +SARAH: So we talk about on our team that everybody's responsible for—our mantra is what stories do we want to tell? How do we want to tell them? And how are we going to put them out into the world? And everybody should be thinking about all three of those things. -PAM: We're all responsible. +PAM: We're all responsible. -SARAH: Some people their job may be more compliment to put it up in the world. Or to develop, hey, this feels like we want to look at how a bunch of states are looking at solitary confinement because, you know, we have this focus on main system. And somebody addressed it, well, why not do it as a podcast, and I thought why would we do it as a pod Katz. And then we thought, yeah, that would be interesting. So part of the conversation so here's how we're going to distribute it and the audience we're going to get it in front of. So we're concoctioning it. And we have a daily stand-up that our teams go to that have grown. So from our internal propaganda the production team is there. Or somebody might pop by and be, like, hey, I have an idea, did you think about this? And we watch the films together, we have a rough cut stage and talk about the film together and talk about it afterwards. As human beings what resonated, what didn't? What questions do we have? And that helps +SARAH: Some people their job may be more compliment to put it up in the world. Or to develop, hey, this feels like we want to look at how a bunch of states are looking at solitary confinement because, you know, we have this focus on main system. And somebody addressed it, well, why not do it as a podcast, and I thought why would we do it as a pod Katz. And then we thought, yeah, that would be interesting. So part of the conversation so here's how we're going to distribute it and the audience we're going to get it in front of. So we're concoctioning it. And we have a daily stand-up that our teams go to that have grown. So from our internal propaganda the production team is there. Or somebody might pop by and be, like, hey, I have an idea, did you think about this? And we watch the films together, we have a rough cut stage and talk about the film together and talk about it afterwards. As human beings what resonated, what didn't? What questions do we have? And that helps with what we want to tell and how we want to tell them. -PAM: And it all these ensures these wow moments that you talk about, we're lucky because you watch something in a group, just like going to a movie theater, and you hear it, you feel it, and the energy, and the work is done for us. Honestly that's moment. That's it. We certainly have conversations around how we want to launch that moment after viewing together. But that's another kind of just simple thing that we started to do rather than everybody watching our rough cut individually with headphones on at the desk, we get together. We work as one team. We talk about stuff after. Those—all those steps led up to a really big change with how we see each other and how we work together. But, again, just for each of you just started with, like, this in one project. +PAM: And it all these ensures these wow moments that you talk about, we're lucky because you watch something in a group, just like going to a movie theater, and you hear it, you feel it, and the energy, and the work is done for us. Honestly that's moment. That's it. We certainly have conversations around how we want to launch that moment after viewing together. But that's another kind of just simple thing that we started to do rather than everybody watching our rough cut individually with headphones on at the desk, we get together. We work as one team. We talk about stuff after. Those—all those steps led up to a really big change with how we see each other and how we work together. But, again, just for each of you just started with, like, this in one project. -SARAH: And it was four years ago. It takes a long time. We don't want to be, like, it's easy. +SARAH: And it was four years ago. It takes a long time. We don't want to be, like, it's easy. -PAM: Right. It's not easy. And it was—it was uncomfortable—it has been uncomfortable for everyone; right? So it was uncomfortable—Sarah talked about some of her discomfort, my boss had major questions. There's actually, you know, times where we gave stuff away, and it didn't do anything for us. +PAM: Right. It's not easy. And it was—it was uncomfortable—it has been uncomfortable for everyone; right? So it was uncomfortable—Sarah talked about some of her discomfort, my boss had major questions. There's actually, you know, times where we gave stuff away, and it didn't do anything for us. -So it's hard. And the world is changing so quickly and that platforms are changing, the audience is changing, like, what we're creating—but when you have an ally, and you decided, like, we're going to work together and my audience team isn't going to a—like that's hard. Like, if that's just the format that your culture is in. I just don't—you've got to find someone who cares about it that you care about I think in order to just start one little project. +So it's hard. And the world is changing so quickly and that platforms are changing, the audience is changing, like, what we're creating—but when you have an ally, and you decided, like, we're going to work together and my audience team isn't going to a—like that's hard. Like, if that's just the format that your culture is in. I just don't—you've got to find someone who cares about it that you care about I think in order to just start one little project. PARTICIPANT: I think it's a matter of communication. -PAM: Yeah, it really is. +PAM: Yeah, it really is. -PARTICIPANT: If you can find a way of talking to our edits that gets their gears turning without to think about what they do through that lens. As you were saying. Some of these ideas are going to be organic; right? Like, they're going to be thinking about their audience. And as soon as you get them to do that, then, you know, they're going to have ideas. +PARTICIPANT: If you can find a way of talking to our edits that gets their gears turning without to think about what they do through that lens. As you were saying. Some of these ideas are going to be organic; right? Like, they're going to be thinking about their audience. And as soon as you get them to do that, then, you know, they're going to have ideas. -SARAH: So if you can find the one editor that you think you might have some wiggle room with, that's where I would start with. +SARAH: So if you can find the one editor that you think you might have some wiggle room with, that's where I would start with. PARTICIPANT: Yeah, that's a good point. -SARAH: Sophisticated digitally. +SARAH: Sophisticated digitally. . -PARTICIPANT: Your talk is very inspiring especially to the boss report. I was wondering how often do you file that? Do you find it's very tedious but also wait you talk about it, it sounds like it's very important; right? +PARTICIPANT: Your talk is very inspiring especially to the boss report. I was wondering how often do you file that? Do you find it's very tedious but also wait you talk about it, it sounds like it's very important; right? -PAM: Ye. +PAM: Ye. -PARTICIPANT: I work with buzz feed—no, not buzz feed. Chart feed because we have the data. Who mentioned you, whether we're trending on Facebook or Twitter. So I was wondering if it's worthwhile for us to automate a report for future stories. No matter no for one minute documentaries, you know, for future stories on the New York Times. I was wonderin how much you want this. +PARTICIPANT: I work with buzz feed—no, not buzz feed. Chart feed because we have the data. Who mentioned you, whether we're trending on Facebook or Twitter. So I was wondering if it's worthwhile for us to automate a report for future stories. No matter no for one minute documentaries, you know, for future stories on the New York Times. I was wonderin how much you want this. -PAM: So I—when -- +PAM: So I—when -- -SARAH: You want to make a buzz -- +SARAH: You want to make a buzz -- -PAM: Yes, so the more I think the data we have, the smarter we are, the more effective we can be at achieving our goals. +PAM: Yes, so the more I think the data we have, the smarter we are, the more effective we can be at achieving our goals. PARTICIPANT: Okay. -PAM: Yeah, you can get—you can drowned in data. I think we're starting from zero. +PAM: Yeah, you can get—you can drowned in data. I think we're starting from zero. PARTICIPANT: Right. -PAM: At FRONTLINE whereas a lot of the digitally native media outlets have a ton of built in data and very data he is centric. We're not. We're always looking for ways to tell a story around. Because there are stories that we can tell stories to our bosses that sometimes works. More data is better, "As long as I can understand it easily. +PAM: At FRONTLINE whereas a lot of the digitally native media outlets have a ton of built in data and very data he is centric. We're not. We're always looking for ways to tell a story around. Because there are stories that we can tell stories to our bosses that sometimes works. More data is better, "As long as I can understand it easily. PARTICIPANT: Right. -PAM: And communicate it effectively to. Which is a problem because right now I'm piece mailing everything together. +PAM: And communicate it effectively to. Which is a problem because right now I'm piece mailing everything together. -SARAH: And we would be willing to share. +SARAH: And we would be willing to share. -PAM: Ye. Of course. +PAM: Ye. Of course. PARTICIPANT: How do you do that? -PAM: And it is tedious and make it on a PowerPoint. +PAM: And it is tedious and make it on a PowerPoint. -PARTICIPANT: So this is a long and ranty question. I have a feeling that the reports—generally, like—so I think I worked with you a little bit I used to be at the investigating workshop. Your audience, you have potentially a national audience; right? And when a story catches fire, it's really clear to you because there's a lot more—a lot more users; right? But the other thing is you are nationally focused, like, publication. That's a really different experience than a media outlet that has a local focus because, you know, all—like people who drive by users from other places going viral is valuable. Also not valuable in the same way of reaching the core audience; right? +PARTICIPANT: So this is a long and ranty question. I have a feeling that the reports—generally, like—so I think I worked with you a little bit I used to be at the investigating workshop. Your audience, you have potentially a national audience; right? And when a story catches fire, it's really clear to you because there's a lot more—a lot more users; right? But the other thing is you are nationally focused, like, publication. That's a really different experience than a media outlet that has a local focus because, you know, all—like people who drive by users from other places going viral is valuable. Also not valuable in the same way of reaching the core audience; right? -SARAH: . +SARAH: . -PARTICIPANT: And when you think about how much money has been spent electronically to reach minorities, to reach known people. I think it's often really good. But the amount of information we have now like this particular story is reaching. The target demographic we want to reach in this story is not available and that's not a thing that's easy to find. I actually had dinner with—the performance CEO, and I couldn't get him to come up with a way that I could get that information. I I'm pretty sure if I'm buying ads on paper, I have better demographic information than the people who are writing the stories. And it seems like this is also an opportunity, but I'm just wondering if you guys have—is there some tool out there. Some methodology that you have? Because what I really want to have is, hey, look, this story isn't reaching just the usual suspects; right? This is bringing in people; right? Or these are people. +PARTICIPANT: And when you think about how much money has been spent electronically to reach minorities, to reach known people. I think it's often really good. But the amount of information we have now like this particular story is reaching. The target demographic we want to reach in this story is not available and that's not a thing that's easy to find. I actually had dinner with—the performance CEO, and I couldn't get him to come up with a way that I could get that information. I I'm pretty sure if I'm buying ads on paper, I have better demographic information than the people who are writing the stories. And it seems like this is also an opportunity, but I'm just wondering if you guys have—is there some tool out there. Some methodology that you have? Because what I really want to have is, hey, look, this story isn't reaching just the usual suspects; right? This is bringing in people; right? Or these are people. -SARAH: I completely agree with your rant. We don't have that very specific data. We do—for us, audience development is about connecting with audience, engaging with audience, and so -- +SARAH: I completely agree with your rant. We don't have that very specific data. We do—for us, audience development is about connecting with audience, engaging with audience, and so -- -PAM: And growing our audience. +PAM: And growing our audience. -SARAH: And growing our audience. So when we have those really kind of buzzy moments, we know they're every couple of years. But if that means that, you know—talk about our buzz report we've got X new Facebook followers this week or X new subscriptions to our newsletters because these are the people that we can message over and over about what's coming up on FRONTLINE, what we do. All of that good stuff and hopefully bring them closer to our community. So we can't necessarily, like, track it in a way that you want to track it. +SARAH: And growing our audience. So when we have those really kind of buzzy moments, we know they're every couple of years. But if that means that, you know—talk about our buzz report we've got X new Facebook followers this week or X new subscriptions to our newsletters because these are the people that we can message over and over about what's coming up on FRONTLINE, what we do. All of that good stuff and hopefully bring them closer to our community. So we can't necessarily, like, track it in a way that you want to track it. -PARTICIPANT: In some ways, it's great to know something, and have the experience of it. But also it's ordinal. +PARTICIPANT: In some ways, it's great to know something, and have the experience of it. But also it's ordinal. -SARAH: It's all fuzzy. I mean—I mean data has never been good; right? Like, ratings are based on seven minutes of a quarter of an hour. +SARAH: It's all fuzzy. I mean—I mean data has never been good; right? Like, ratings are based on seven minutes of a quarter of an hour. -PAM: Ratings are the worst. +PAM: Ratings are the worst. -SARAH: So I feel like sometimes people get so mad about digital analytics and I'm, like, what analytics—in newspaper, yeah, they can dull Tull the demos, but but they can't tell you if someone read your story. +SARAH: So I feel like sometimes people get so mad about digital analytics and I'm, like, what analytics—in newspaper, yeah, they can dull Tull the demos, but but they can't tell you if someone read your story. PARTICIPANT: And the analytics need to sell ads, they want to optimize something. -PAM: Yes? +PAM: Yes? -PARTICIPANT: To respond a little bit, my answer is to not care about your data. You went to most of your leadership, they all know. They've been working on big margins for a long time and there's a conversation I had this morning with some people and so in a way you kind of -- +PARTICIPANT: To respond a little bit, my answer is to not care about your data. You went to most of your leadership, they all know. They've been working on big margins for a long time and there's a conversation I had this morning with some people and so in a way you kind of -- -PAM: Yeah, I think that that's actually. That's a big piece of what we're advocating is you're ultimately doing it yourself. Figuring out what your own goals are. What audience you're trying to reach, you're doing it, you're measuring yourself. There are no great tools out there, and there's not a lot of really great metrics. +PAM: Yeah, I think that that's actually. That's a big piece of what we're advocating is you're ultimately doing it yourself. Figuring out what your own goals are. What audience you're trying to reach, you're doing it, you're measuring yourself. There are no great tools out there, and there's not a lot of really great metrics. -PARTICIPANT: I. I was just saying working with full-time development for years. You know, like, just buying data. The way if you were doing ad or tracking. That's the thing that, like,—but, you know, you can do a lot of things. But specifically things about age and minorities; right? Which I think we've been getting from Facebook maybe. But there's no unified way saying all right. Is this actually breaking through? I'm a user, I want to know. Are there people under 65 viewing this? Like, an LED comes on. +PARTICIPANT: I. I was just saying working with full-time development for years. You know, like, just buying data. The way if you were doing ad or tracking. That's the thing that, like,—but, you know, you can do a lot of things. But specifically things about age and minorities; right? Which I think we've been getting from Facebook maybe. But there's no unified way saying all right. Is this actually breaking through? I'm a user, I want to know. Are there people under 65 viewing this? Like, an LED comes on. PARTICIPANT: It sounds like your guys' report is muc more analytic. -PAM: Yeah, I don't have to worry about a bottom line like that like ads. Again, our goals are—our—we have multifaceted goals but it's really about impact, growth, and engagement. So we can create a report around those goals where it doesn't have to be am I reaching the right audience because I'm monetizing it, and I want to continue to fill that funnel? I'm grateful for that piece of it. So many of us do in the media. It is a busy. So, yea. Ours is pretty organic. +PAM: Yeah, I don't have to worry about a bottom line like that like ads. Again, our goals are—our—we have multifaceted goals but it's really about impact, growth, and engagement. So we can create a report around those goals where it doesn't have to be am I reaching the right audience because I'm monetizing it, and I want to continue to fill that funnel? I'm grateful for that piece of it. So many of us do in the media. It is a busy. So, yea. Ours is pretty organic. PARTICIPANT: Some Facebook moments in the video, so can you share some examples according to the experience, what are those Facebook Cheryl moments? -PAM: We have had—I'm sure you guys too. We've had such an interesting ride with—we're real lucky because we're video; right? So Facebook video and playing with that and going through long, deep thought provoking journalism into two-minute moments that get you to watch more—without any audio, you kn? And lower thirds on there has been transformative for us. We're finding surprisingly play a lot over the course of Facebook video. And our assumption where it would be very kind of, like, domestic and consumer friendly and about, you know, we have this amazing documentary last year where we really started to think about Facebook video and trends and these young kids who were transitioning puberty, and it was special. And then right after that, we tried our next project, and it did really well. And our next project was about ISIS and confronting -- +PAM: We have had—I'm sure you guys too. We've had such an interesting ride with—we're real lucky because we're video; right? So Facebook video and playing with that and going through long, deep thought provoking journalism into two-minute moments that get you to watch more—without any audio, you kn? And lower thirds on there has been transformative for us. We're finding surprisingly play a lot over the course of Facebook video. And our assumption where it would be very kind of, like, domestic and consumer friendly and about, you know, we have this amazing documentary last year where we really started to think about Facebook video and trends and these young kids who were transitioning puberty, and it was special. And then right after that, we tried our next project, and it did really well. And our next project was about ISIS and confronting -- -SARAH: Escaping ISIS. +SARAH: Escaping ISIS. -PAM: Escaping ISIS. And it was very intense. And about—I mean there was the cell phone video about men, ISIS members or soldiers, like, sex slaving women and very disturbing content. And we're, like, I don't know how this is going to go over in Facebook. But we're going to try. But we've learned over the course of the year that our Facebook audience is hungry for really intense, thought provoking, international, important news content, which we couldn't be more grateful for because that's what we have. And our content around Yemen or ISIS in particular or Syria, Saudi Arabia, does phenomenally well. Because there's actually a real hunger in the world today for great international role of recording. So people on Facebook and off want that and want to be informed and we're actually finding that our Facebook video is the most important and wide reaching thing that we do to get people to watch. Referring traffic. +PAM: Escaping ISIS. And it was very intense. And about—I mean there was the cell phone video about men, ISIS members or soldiers, like, sex slaving women and very disturbing content. And we're, like, I don't know how this is going to go over in Facebook. But we're going to try. But we've learned over the course of the year that our Facebook audience is hungry for really intense, thought provoking, international, important news content, which we couldn't be more grateful for because that's what we have. And our content around Yemen or ISIS in particular or Syria, Saudi Arabia, does phenomenally well. Because there's actually a real hunger in the world today for great international role of recording. So people on Facebook and off want that and want to be informed and we're actually finding that our Facebook video is the most important and wide reaching thing that we do to get people to watch. Referring traffic. -SARAH: So I think real tactically—we have a partnership with Facebook, so they tell us—we don't just take a lift from a film and put it out, we make it specifically for that platform. So it has the text on screen, we don't just use captions, we actually design it because we want—our video is our product, so we want it to look really good. We imagine the use cases of phone and you're scrolling. So what's going to stop you in your tracks? What's going to make want you to watch? Everything we put out on Facebook, we want it to be shareable. So we actually—we test each other on that. Like, why would I share that? +SARAH: So I think real tactically—we have a partnership with Facebook, so they tell us—we don't just take a lift from a film and put it out, we make it specifically for that platform. So it has the text on screen, we don't just use captions, we actually design it because we want—our video is our product, so we want it to look really good. We imagine the use cases of phone and you're scrolling. So what's going to stop you in your tracks? What's going to make want you to watch? Everything we put out on Facebook, we want it to be shareable. So we actually—we test each other on that. Like, why would I share that? -PAM: And here's a real practical tip. That's our goal for Facebook video, that's our goal for a standard on Facebook, and at the end of the video we added a big graphic that said share this video. And that really works. That really works. People don't think to do it. Like, ask your audience to do whatever it is you want them to do to do. These obvious things. If you want them to subscribe. If you want them to like you, ask them to do it. They're your fans, they want to do it. They're bombarded too by all kinds of messages. So that really works, and I think we're out of time. +PAM: And here's a real practical tip. That's our goal for Facebook video, that's our goal for a standard on Facebook, and at the end of the video we added a big graphic that said share this video. And that really works. That really works. People don't think to do it. Like, ask your audience to do whatever it is you want them to do to do. These obvious things. If you want them to subscribe. If you want them to like you, ask them to do it. They're your fans, they want to do it. They're bombarded too by all kinds of messages. So that really works, and I think we're out of time. -SARAH: Yeah, we're out of time. We'll stick around. +SARAH: Yeah, we're out of time. We'll stick around. [Applause] -PAM: Thank you so much for coming. - - - - - +PAM: Thank you so much for coming. diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-ethics-public-data.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-ethics-public-data.md index 7613fe95..c6e5d452 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-ethics-public-data.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-ethics-public-data.md @@ -1,17 +1,17 @@ You're The Reason My Name Is On Google: The Ethics Of Publishing Public Data Session facilitator(s): Ryan Murphy Day & Time: Thursday, 10:30-11:30am -Room: Classroom 305 +Room: Classroom 305 -PARTICIPANT: Okay. Sorry about that. We had to figure out the projector. +PARTICIPANT: Okay. Sorry about that. We had to figure out the projector. -Hi, everybody. Sorry about the couple of minute delay there, had some challenges with the projector. But now we're good. So welcome and welcome to SRCCON, exciting to be one of the first panel or sessions of the day. +Hi, everybody. Sorry about the couple of minute delay there, had some challenges with the projector. But now we're good. So welcome and welcome to SRCCON, exciting to be one of the first panel or sessions of the day. -So my name is Ryan Murphy, and I work at the Texas Tribune, I'm on the data visuals team, and we're the team that's responsible for doing many things. But one of the major tasks that we have is maintaining and kind of iterating on our major databases. +So my name is Ryan Murphy, and I work at the Texas Tribune, I'm on the data visuals team, and we're the team that's responsible for doing many things. But one of the major tasks that we have is maintaining and kind of iterating on our major databases. -So this includes the salary database, which we'll talk a little bit about, prisoner database, and a number of others. So there's the reason that I initially pitched this talk was—I had come up on I guess it was over six years now. I kind of had the salary database dropped on my lap as an intern when I started intern with the Tribune back in 2010. And one of the things that has been kind of an ongoing kind of internal and external conversation is kind of, like, are we doing this in the best way? And what is the proposition of taking this information, which was certainly public information and broadcasting it to the world? And kind of what are the ramifications of that? And kind know, how to fairly and effectively manage kind of the—you know, all the people that are suddenly finding themselves whenever they look for their names. +So this includes the salary database, which we'll talk a little bit about, prisoner database, and a number of others. So there's the reason that I initially pitched this talk was—I had come up on I guess it was over six years now. I kind of had the salary database dropped on my lap as an intern when I started intern with the Tribune back in 2010. And one of the things that has been kind of an ongoing kind of internal and external conversation is kind of, like, are we doing this in the best way? And what is the proposition of taking this information, which was certainly public information and broadcasting it to the world? And kind of what are the ramifications of that? And kind know, how to fairly and effectively manage kind of the—you know, all the people that are suddenly finding themselves whenever they look for their names. -I'm, you know, we'll stress that by no means am I giving this talk because I'm an expert on this. This is very much—this is one part kind of therapy session for me. Because this is something that I've struggled with and I've had many conversations with both inside organization and out. And, you know, I think that—and, any sitting right here in front has too. And I think this has been a good opportunity to have this conversation. I think we've seen variations of this both kind of in our sense where we're taking public data and putting out there. But you also see it in datasets that aren't so much on the nose kind of, like, straightforward, we've asked for our agency to give us. +I'm, you know, we'll stress that by no means am I giving this talk because I'm an expert on this. This is very much—this is one part kind of therapy session for me. Because this is something that I've struggled with and I've had many conversations with both inside organization and out. And, you know, I think that—and, any sitting right here in front has too. And I think this has been a good opportunity to have this conversation. I think we've seen variations of this both kind of in our sense where we're taking public data and putting out there. But you also see it in datasets that aren't so much on the nose kind of, like, straightforward, we've asked for our agency to give us. Let me see if I can find how to advance the slide, I'll keep going. @@ -19,67 +19,67 @@ If you didn't see the schedule, there is an—I probably shouldn't promise, but PARTICIPANT: I'll take them. -PARTICIPANT: Thank you we'll also at some point kind of move into groups and get a little bit closer. It probably—the tables may be okay for it already. But the plan is kind of to kind of touch on kind of walk through some of the scenarios that we've experienced. Again, of what applies to our situation. But it kind of go through and see, you know, kind of get crowd source kind of the reaction to some of those. A lot of the e-mails we tend to receive. +PARTICIPANT: Thank you we'll also at some point kind of move into groups and get a little bit closer. It probably—the tables may be okay for it already. But the plan is kind of to kind of touch on kind of walk through some of the scenarios that we've experienced. Again, of what applies to our situation. But it kind of go through and see, you know, kind of get crowd source kind of the reaction to some of those. A lot of the e-mails we tend to receive. -So from our—you know, as I was kind of trying to go through and try to find good examples of this, the one—I reason that I pitched this is that the ones we have are the ones that we've produced. And for us, like, if you've ever heard the story of the Tribune, it usually is the first thing you usually hear someone say is they have that salaries database, and it's half their traffic. +So from our—you know, as I was kind of trying to go through and try to find good examples of this, the one—I reason that I pitched this is that the ones we have are the ones that we've produced. And for us, like, if you've ever heard the story of the Tribune, it usually is the first thing you usually hear someone say is they have that salaries database, and it's half their traffic. -I would say half of the traffic is not true anymore, but it's not that far off. But it certainly is kind of one of our I guess you could say claims to fame in things that people usually think when they're there, you know, talking about. Kind of like that filibuster and those are our things. +I would say half of the traffic is not true anymore, but it's not that far off. But it certainly is kind of one of our I guess you could say claims to fame in things that people usually think when they're there, you know, talking about. Kind of like that filibuster and those are our things. -We also have the prison database, which is our interface on top of the Texas criminal justice's dataset of the prisoners that are in their system at this time. They also have a search tool that is not great, but it's technically there. Which was one of the initial kind of pushes for us to spin off and do our own thing. +We also have the prison database, which is our interface on top of the Texas criminal justice's dataset of the prisoners that are in their system at this time. They also have a search tool that is not great, but it's technically there. Which was one of the initial kind of pushes for us to spin off and do our own thing. -I will say that this two predate pretty much that's at the Tribune right now. So there's some kind of—when they came to be that we were not there for. +I will say that this two predate pretty much that's at the Tribune right now. So there's some kind of—when they came to be that we were not there for. -More recent ones include faces of death row, which is a prison off the database, went through a lot of pain staking work to get the criminal justice t the—who's on death row. To look through and constantly updated as the numbers change. +More recent ones include faces of death row, which is a prison off the database, went through a lot of pain staking work to get the criminal justice t the—who's on death row. To look through and constantly updated as the numbers change. -And more recently we did was in our borderline security series, which was looking at the cases of convictions of border guards and others along the border that have essentially kind of taken advantage of their position and then kind of went through and categorized all of the different things that they have done. Behind this photo of this guy here is actually the story behind it as well. +And more recently we did was in our borderline security series, which was looking at the cases of convictions of border guards and others along the border that have essentially kind of taken advantage of their position and then kind of went through and categorized all of the different things that they have done. Behind this photo of this guy here is actually the story behind it as well. But another kind of recent example of what we've taken into the sense that are about individuals and putting them online. -I think other, it's easy to find examples of doing awesome things. But I think they have really great, their own kind of version of this exactly with the docs, which is showing all the kind of doctors and what companies they're getting monies from. And I think it's the more recent prescriber checkup, which is a variation of that, which is looking at kind of what doctors are prescribing certain medicines and what the money that gets involved with that as well. +I think other, it's easy to find examples of doing awesome things. But I think they have really great, their own kind of version of this exactly with the docs, which is showing all the kind of doctors and what companies they're getting monies from. And I think it's the more recent prescriber checkup, which is a variation of that, which is looking at kind of what doctors are prescribing certain medicines and what the money that gets involved with that as well. -And I think this is probably the oldest example of a lot of this, again, not claiming to be an expert on the history of doing this. But you see this along with mug shot galleries. Same kind of idea. Tampa Bay.com of course one of the ones that was kind of I won't say with certainty it led the charge, but prominent examples of that. But it's not uncommon to find in many, many papers and dedicated sites doing this and all kinds of layers of interesting legal things to that. +And I think this is probably the oldest example of a lot of this, again, not claiming to be an expert on the history of doing this. But you see this along with mug shot galleries. Same kind of idea. Tampa Bay.com of course one of the ones that was kind of I won't say with certainty it led the charge, but prominent examples of that. But it's not uncommon to find in many, many papers and dedicated sites doing this and all kinds of layers of interesting legal things to that. -And I think that, you know, one thing that kind of, again, part of the therapy session is that one thing I always kind of have internal kind of rangling with is how do you keep these things both journalism and not let them creep into borderrism? I think—I did not when I named the paper, but you've already seen it. But this is on their home page. +And I think that, you know, one thing that kind of, again, part of the therapy session is that one thing I always kind of have internal kind of rangling with is how do you keep these things both journalism and not let them creep into borderrism? I think—I did not when I named the paper, but you've already seen it. But this is on their home page. -Like, here you can pick our games, look at our data guide, or our booking mug shots. And it's kind of where—how do we find that balance between, you know, yes, the data's out there, yes, it's public. There's not any legal thing that's stopping you from doing it. But where's the point do we stop and go okay. What's the end-all here? And I think for us at the Tribune with many of our things, that's a conversation we've had to step back and have and think about. +Like, here you can pick our games, look at our data guide, or our booking mug shots. And it's kind of where—how do we find that balance between, you know, yes, the data's out there, yes, it's public. There's not any legal thing that's stopping you from doing it. But where's the point do we stop and go okay. What's the end-all here? And I think for us at the Tribune with many of our things, that's a conversation we've had to step back and have and think about. -And you see other variations of this, there's more stuff that came out that headline as well because I grabbed this a while ago. But you also see this in the bulk data bump situation as well. You know, there's—we've not really done a version of it but kind of the here's this big dataset, we don't know what's in it. You know, help us look through it together. Or here's this big dataset, we don't know what's in it, but it's probably something in there good, let's go. And the challenges that come with that in terms of, you know, what potentially. You know, people that may be in there that aren't of interest for that story but just as a by-product of their communications, now suddenly out there as being a part of it. And I do also open up. Sorry. Just—are there any other examples of this? Again, I've no expertise in collecting these, but I would be curious for just a second if anyone had any other good examples of -- +And you see other variations of this, there's more stuff that came out that headline as well because I grabbed this a while ago. But you also see this in the bulk data bump situation as well. You know, there's—we've not really done a version of it but kind of the here's this big dataset, we don't know what's in it. You know, help us look through it together. Or here's this big dataset, we don't know what's in it, but it's probably something in there good, let's go. And the challenges that come with that in terms of, you know, what potentially. You know, people that may be in there that aren't of interest for that story but just as a by-product of their communications, now suddenly out there as being a part of it. And I do also open up. Sorry. Just—are there any other examples of this? Again, I've no expertise in collecting these, but I would be curious for just a second if anyone had any other good examples of -- -PARTICIPANT: I'm doing a database basically people subsidies. Kind of like 2 million, and we treat them the same way and that's -- +PARTICIPANT: I'm doing a database basically people subsidies. Kind of like 2 million, and we treat them the same way and that's -- -PARTICIPANT: That's a great example. Go ahead. +PARTICIPANT: That's a great example. Go ahead. PARTICIPANT: The most important example here is the gun permits. PARTICIPANT: Yeah. -PARTICIPANT: Because that I think illustrates for real, the real talk; right? Was it New York paper that got the list of heralds and legislature responded by it and making the information private. And that is one of the downside. There's ethics, which some people care about. But there's also, like, are we going to get this data? +PARTICIPANT: Because that I think illustrates for real, the real talk; right? Was it New York paper that got the list of heralds and legislature responded by it and making the information private. And that is one of the downside. There's ethics, which some people care about. But there's also, like, are we going to get this data? -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. That's a very, very good one. . And to kind of your thing, that's your point about the size differential as well. That's definitely something in the salary database as well. The big sell is look at how much coat makes but there's also thousands of other people that that's not the kale that they're at but they're in there because that's a bulk request. Yes? +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. That's a very, very good one. . And to kind of your thing, that's your point about the size differential as well. That's definitely something in the salary database as well. The big sell is look at how much coat makes but there's also thousands of other people that that's not the kale that they're at but they're in there because that's a bulk request. Yes? -PARTICIPANT: So when I think about a lot is voter registration data. And not publishing all of it but publishing some of it. +PARTICIPANT: So when I think about a lot is voter registration data. And not publishing all of it but publishing some of it. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I don't know if anyone—in Texas it's—I'm sure it's not unique to us, but a favorite thing to do is on the registration season, dredge up the voting records of every reporter and that's always enjoying. And people should vote. But, like, in Texas, it's interesting because you have to choose. You have to choose a side in the primary. You can't just—you have to register as Democrat or Republican. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I don't know if anyone—in Texas it's—I'm sure it's not unique to us, but a favorite thing to do is on the registration season, dredge up the voting records of every reporter and that's always enjoying. And people should vote. But, like, in Texas, it's interesting because you have to choose. You have to choose a side in the primary. You can't just—you have to register as Democrat or Republican. PARTICIPANT: And in some places you have to pay for it. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah, there are instances where it gets used as a weapon or trying to make a point of some sort with that. That's a very good example too. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah, there are instances where it gets used as a weapon or trying to make a point of some sort with that. That's a very good example too. -PARTICIPANT: California publishes data about people who don't pay their taxes. So they give you a notice and then after several months if you don't pay, it's basically, like, the top hundred or something like that in terms of income. So it's, like, a shaming technique they do to try to get people to pay eventually. +PARTICIPANT: California publishes data about people who don't pay their taxes. So they give you a notice and then after several months if you don't pay, it's basically, like, the top hundred or something like that in terms of income. So it's, like, a shaming technique they do to try to get people to pay eventually. -PARTICIPANT: I'm from Germany, very privacy aware. So all of these things are, like, wow. You've got all of that data. +PARTICIPANT: I'm from Germany, very privacy aware. So all of these things are, like, wow. You've got all of that data. -But, for example, what we have and what I find shocking is bankruptcy data. If someone goes bankrupt, it's public in Germany. Because I don't know to protect debtors or people they owe money to. So I've received a couple of requests, for example, from people who are bankrupt somewhere that should please remove that from Google because, you know, it's not nice if you search the name, and it says bankrupt, they don't get any kind of business connections. +But, for example, what we have and what I find shocking is bankruptcy data. If someone goes bankrupt, it's public in Germany. Because I don't know to protect debtors or people they owe money to. So I've received a couple of requests, for example, from people who are bankrupt somewhere that should please remove that from Google because, you know, it's not nice if you search the name, and it says bankrupt, they don't get any kind of business connections. ->. We'll kind of get to here with some of the scenario kind of talks. But we have a variation of that too with salary database, which is, like, people will show up in it and they're, like, oh, trying to get a job. It shows me over here making this and the first thing someone does when I try to get a job is type my name in Google and the first thing is you and is that fair to me? Is that, you know, what value is being provided by potentially making that. +> . We'll kind of get to here with some of the scenario kind of talks. But we have a variation of that too with salary database, which is, like, people will show up in it and they're, like, oh, trying to get a job. It shows me over here making this and the first thing someone does when I try to get a job is type my name in Google and the first thing is you and is that fair to me? Is that, you know, what value is being provided by potentially making that. -Your example about the California thing also reminded me of—I know—I see this in unique in Texas but see it in a lot of Texas cities, which is the access to water usage, which is the fun stories all the time. Look how much water Lance Armstrong uses. But it's also, like, again, a lot of people at the data asset Seth that are not at his level who live in a nice house in west Austin that show up that potentially are kind of a—that you know tool of kind of, like, being able to look up your neighbor and see where they stand next to you. +Your example about the California thing also reminded me of—I know—I see this in unique in Texas but see it in a lot of Texas cities, which is the access to water usage, which is the fun stories all the time. Look how much water Lance Armstrong uses. But it's also, like, again, a lot of people at the data asset Seth that are not at his level who live in a nice house in west Austin that show up that potentially are kind of a—that you know tool of kind of, like, being able to look up your neighbor and see where they stand next to you. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. They're—the reason I remember that one is because I think there are some pro social—there's a lot of terrible uses of this information, it's really bad. But in some cases, like, that one in California, it's pretty big revenue generator for the state, and it's important to them. And there are people that should pay in Texas. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. They're—the reason I remember that one is because I think there are some pro social—there's a lot of terrible uses of this information, it's really bad. But in some cases, like, that one in California, it's pretty big revenue generator for the state, and it's important to them. And there are people that should pay in Texas. PARTICIPANT: There's also that campaign finance example with that guy who made that Twitter bot for Donald Trump for all the people who donated to his campaign. -PARTICIPANT: I haven't seen that. That sounds awesome. +PARTICIPANT: I haven't seen that. That sounds awesome. PARTICIPANT: It was not as awesome as it could have been. @@ -87,51 +87,51 @@ PARTICIPANT: Did everyone hear that one? It was the—do you want to say it again? -PARTICIPANT: Oh, sorry. So somebody made a Twitter bot of all the people who donated to Donald Trump's campaign. So the tweet it basically tweets out the person's name and how much they donated. I think what their job is, what they do for a living, and where they live. +PARTICIPANT: Oh, sorry. So somebody made a Twitter bot of all the people who donated to Donald Trump's campaign. So the tweet it basically tweets out the person's name and how much they donated. I think what their job is, what they do for a living, and where they live. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Essentially just a copy of what—online. Yeah? +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Essentially just a copy of what—online. Yeah? -PARTICIPANT: Going back on the water database, I think one of the things as journalists we have to consider is sometimes I think just slapping up a database without any context. But that's where I kind of have those ethical questions. So you may have somebody that shows up as the top water user, but they also might have the largest property. So is it by square footage? Or maybe you want to use that data—for like in Portland here where I live, or in Austin, there are a lot of leak certified buildings. So are they using it before they were leak certified? There are ways we can put that data up there but not necessarily just throw up a dataset with names and numbers without any context. I think that's where you need to I think that's where we need to move closer to that context. +PARTICIPANT: Going back on the water database, I think one of the things as journalists we have to consider is sometimes I think just slapping up a database without any context. But that's where I kind of have those ethical questions. So you may have somebody that shows up as the top water user, but they also might have the largest property. So is it by square footage? Or maybe you want to use that data—for like in Portland here where I live, or in Austin, there are a lot of leak certified buildings. So are they using it before they were leak certified? There are ways we can put that data up there but not necessarily just throw up a dataset with names and numbers without any context. I think that's where you need to I think that's where we need to move closer to that context. PARTICIPANT: Yeah. -PARTICIPANT: I think one of the things that has to happen especially with data in this day in sage why am I putting up this data? And is there an actual reason that I can speak to the person who might be exposed to why this was important? +PARTICIPANT: I think one of the things that has to happen especially with data in this day in sage why am I putting up this data? And is there an actual reason that I can speak to the person who might be exposed to why this was important? -Because too often Incas journalists we say something is newsworthy and what we mean is that it might pique an interest, but we're not seeing what it makes. So someone's water usage is, like, okay. We're in a drought and this is a problem and this is not being regulated, so a person could actually answer what's happening. Someone who just got a mug shot for shoplifting because they don't have enough food. Why is that newsworthy? And there's that relationship of kind of how often does it come into it? Especially when we just throw up databases that is—that is really lost. And especially with what happened with WikiLeaks in Turkey. People didn't know enough Turkish to understand what's in those e-mails. So there was complete lack of this is newsworthy but what are they saying? What is the news? So people don't know and no one has an answer outside of you thought it was good and all information should be free. +Because too often Incas journalists we say something is newsworthy and what we mean is that it might pique an interest, but we're not seeing what it makes. So someone's water usage is, like, okay. We're in a drought and this is a problem and this is not being regulated, so a person could actually answer what's happening. Someone who just got a mug shot for shoplifting because they don't have enough food. Why is that newsworthy? And there's that relationship of kind of how often does it come into it? Especially when we just throw up databases that is—that is really lost. And especially with what happened with WikiLeaks in Turkey. People didn't know enough Turkish to understand what's in those e-mails. So there was complete lack of this is newsworthy but what are they saying? What is the news? So people don't know and no one has an answer outside of you thought it was good and all information should be free. PARTICIPANT: Yeah. -PARTICIPANT: To me, there's the equivalent of, you know, when it comes to reporting our stories, we take great in what information we put out there. We haven't done something and put that context around. And I think there are has been this, like—let's just put a database up online because we can. Without that context. And I think that that's the key because if we add the context around it, newsworthy justification, if we actually vetted it and looked at the data and kind of responsibly put it up, then I think that strengthens our case to the public for why we did what we did. And I think that that is also extremely important because I think often about you have so many states with evolving public record laws and we do more and more in the data work, those laws are going to catch up because right now most laws don't even address some of this work. +PARTICIPANT: To me, there's the equivalent of, you know, when it comes to reporting our stories, we take great in what information we put out there. We haven't done something and put that context around. And I think there are has been this, like—let's just put a database up online because we can. Without that context. And I think that that's the key because if we add the context around it, newsworthy justification, if we actually vetted it and looked at the data and kind of responsibly put it up, then I think that strengthens our case to the public for why we did what we did. And I think that that is also extremely important because I think often about you have so many states with evolving public record laws and we do more and more in the data work, those laws are going to catch up because right now most laws don't even address some of this work. So if they keep seeing us put things up here responsibly or there are legit criticism over why we might do something, that might hurt a lot of longer—have longer effects where we might not be able to do some good journalism and get this data because state laws will change as a result. -For me, that's the fear. If we put this out and state law changes because of it, is it worth it? Is it worth publishing it in this context if it means somewhere it might mean you don't have access to that data anymore? +For me, that's the fear. If we put this out and state law changes because of it, is it worth it? Is it worth publishing it in this context if it means somewhere it might mean you don't have access to that data anymore? -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Just kind of the point the gun permit stuff as well. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Just kind of the point the gun permit stuff as well. PARTICIPANT: Yeah. -PARTICIPANT: Like, you know, the dataset that did it just kind of lose that. Or we see that in Texas, again, that's, like, there's been a lot of pushes to not let birthdays of any public employees get out. Which, like, you know, at the face of it, I get, and it's a by-product of a lot of the just kind of interesting—just the fact that it's thrown out there. Which a lot of times, that's a data point and, you know, a security request he. Or validating who a person is when you're trying to get a password back. And whether that's distributed that way is another conversation. But, you know, that's the kind of thing that we're seeing. We see in Texas that, like, you know. At one hand, it helps as a check of, like—in that kind of verification. But one bad actor is going to remove that level of—go ahead. +PARTICIPANT: Like, you know, the dataset that did it just kind of lose that. Or we see that in Texas, again, that's, like, there's been a lot of pushes to not let birthdays of any public employees get out. Which, like, you know, at the face of it, I get, and it's a by-product of a lot of the just kind of interesting—just the fact that it's thrown out there. Which a lot of times, that's a data point and, you know, a security request he. Or validating who a person is when you're trying to get a password back. And whether that's distributed that way is another conversation. But, you know, that's the kind of thing that we're seeing. We see in Texas that, like, you know. At one hand, it helps as a check of, like—in that kind of verification. But one bad actor is going to remove that level of—go ahead. -PARTICIPANT: The data birthing just drives me crazy. I'm pro data birth. I'm a news researcher, I've been looking at public records for 20 years. And without a date of birth, I don't know how to verify people. +PARTICIPANT: The data birthing just drives me crazy. I'm pro data birth. I'm a news researcher, I've been looking at public records for 20 years. And without a date of birth, I don't know how to verify people. -But I understand what you're saying. I think the biggest issue is the identity theft. And I would like us as a society to sort of, like, move to not necessarily okay. Let's not put any of this information out there but kind of come up with different checks or different ways to just stop creating IDs based on a date of birth and name. Does that make sense? +But I understand what you're saying. I think the biggest issue is the identity theft. And I would like us as a society to sort of, like, move to not necessarily okay. Let's not put any of this information out there but kind of come up with different checks or different ways to just stop creating IDs based on a date of birth and name. Does that make sense? PARTICIPANT: Yeah. -PARTICIPANT: I mean the old way used to be okay. You went to the library, and you look, and you get someone who died their name. As far as law enforcement or technology or hacking, we also need to—that needs to be the next discussion. It's not so much—the answer isn't pulling the information it's -- +PARTICIPANT: I mean the old way used to be okay. You went to the library, and you look, and you get someone who died their name. As far as law enforcement or technology or hacking, we also need to—that needs to be the next discussion. It's not so much—the answer isn't pulling the information it's -- PARTICIPANT: Just the bigger intention of our usage of it, but what systems are in place to make that more -- -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I grew up in Massachusetts, and it used to be that your social security was your driver's license numbe And so they kind of got to that point of huh this probably isn't the best thing to have, so they changed that and made it a little bit more difficult or the breaking news became aware of it. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I grew up in Massachusetts, and it used to be that your social security was your driver's license numbe And so they kind of got to that point of huh this probably isn't the best thing to have, so they changed that and made it a little bit more difficult or the breaking news became aware of it. -Driver's license are completely different issue, whether or not that should be public record. But I think just having that change is a nice example of ways that we can adapt without restricting completely. If I'm making any sense. I have anemia and half of coffee. +Driver's license are completely different issue, whether or not that should be public record. But I think just having that change is a nice example of ways that we can adapt without restricting completely. If I'm making any sense. I have anemia and half of coffee. -PARTICIPANT: And another thing I want to bring to discussion is maybe something is newsworthy today but maybe not in five years and it still will be online. And what we've had a discussion in Europe right now is the right to be forgotten where court of justice ruled that something like that can be removed from search engines. +PARTICIPANT: And another thing I want to bring to discussion is maybe something is newsworthy today but maybe not in five years and it still will be online. And what we've had a discussion in Europe right now is the right to be forgotten where court of justice ruled that something like that can be removed from search engines. -And now there's the question of, like, can small, normal people but also lobbyists are moving between licenses, also possible for that. And the other aspect is some people pay companies to do participation management and then their results will drowned in page five and basically are no longer visible. And those who cannot afford that or don't have means, but they still stay up and that's also. +And now there's the question of, like, can small, normal people but also lobbyists are moving between licenses, also possible for that. And the other aspect is some people pay companies to do participation management and then their results will drowned in page five and basically are no longer visible. And those who cannot afford that or don't have means, but they still stay up and that's also. -PARTICIPANT: We could build this in technology; right? There's things like blogging and all of the systems that we could build that things are automatically disposed of; right? We could do that, but we don't. So I think that's another point in the discussion that there are technology solutions that we could be applying and pushing for, and I'm coming from the tech space definitely on this side. That we could be doing, and it's not happening yet for sure. +PARTICIPANT: We could build this in technology; right? There's things like blogging and all of the systems that we could build that things are automatically disposed of; right? We could do that, but we don't. So I think that's another point in the discussion that there are technology solutions that we could be applying and pushing for, and I'm coming from the tech space definitely on this side. That we could be doing, and it's not happening yet for sure. PARTICIPANT: Yes? @@ -145,75 +145,75 @@ PARTICIPANT: So I try to think about, like, what I'm doing in that sort of large PARTICIPANT: Yes? -PARTICIPANT: I think similar to that, the idea of unanimous datasets that are really easy to recover the real identity of people, and I think that's—those of us here understand a lot better. If somebody doesn't have a lot of experience in tech or whatever has a dataset. If I type in social security numbers in alphabet, and what could be scarier from a individual privacy perspective is the thing that could be reconstructed with the next dataset that comes out; right? And we have no way of knowing what that's going to be. The story I read recently was New ride share records, anonymous records that are linked together. Women were at more risk because they used the system less. +PARTICIPANT: I think similar to that, the idea of unanimous datasets that are really easy to recover the real identity of people, and I think that's—those of us here understand a lot better. If somebody doesn't have a lot of experience in tech or whatever has a dataset. If I type in social security numbers in alphabet, and what could be scarier from a individual privacy perspective is the thing that could be reconstructed with the next dataset that comes out; right? And we have no way of knowing what that's going to be. The story I read recently was New ride share records, anonymous records that are linked together. Women were at more risk because they used the system less. So you can figure out what station the person who had just left on a bicycle was going to with, like, 60% probability. PARTICIPANT: Yeah. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I mean, like—oh, I was just saying -- +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I mean, like—oh, I was just saying -- PARTICIPANT: I keep making sure I try to peek behind that problem. -PARTICIPANT: There was one case where Google Maps had recording service, it was an amazing piece of recording where their URL was too short like five characters it was goo.gl/abcde and they're, like, that's not that many combinations, we'll just make every possible URL and see what the maps are. And it was, like, 123 Broadway street directions to the abortion clinic. Huh I wonder if—we basically figured out who went and had an abortion and all we had to do was guess a five letter code and now, like, your address and the fact you went to a abortion clinic is available to anybody. And they were, like, hey, Google, fix this, and Google actually fixed it. They made it too long to be able to guess the code. But there's probably—if Google made that mistake. +PARTICIPANT: There was one case where Google Maps had recording service, it was an amazing piece of recording where their URL was too short like five characters it was goo.gl/abcde and they're, like, that's not that many combinations, we'll just make every possible URL and see what the maps are. And it was, like, 123 Broadway street directions to the abortion clinic. Huh I wonder if—we basically figured out who went and had an abortion and all we had to do was guess a five letter code and now, like, your address and the fact you went to a abortion clinic is available to anybody. And they were, like, hey, Google, fix this, and Google actually fixed it. They made it too long to be able to guess the code. But there's probably—if Google made that mistake. PARTICIPANT: Others. PARTICIPANT: The most popular mapping service in the world, there's probably so many these technology things that are in. -PARTICIPANT: And your point about the anonymousizing, it's kind of almost in the sphere, but I think it was a buzz feed story where they did the tennis cheating and anonymousized it and someone said we reversed and entered that quickly. We know exactly who you're pointing out here. That was the same kind of thing where even kind of your point about, like, Google even had this happen even our attempts to make anonymous, there's still the risk that we missed a step, and we considered it good to go. Again, tennis is a little bit different, sorry, but kind of the same spirit of that. The due diligence is done but even in that case, it's not enough. +PARTICIPANT: And your point about the anonymousizing, it's kind of almost in the sphere, but I think it was a buzz feed story where they did the tennis cheating and anonymousized it and someone said we reversed and entered that quickly. We know exactly who you're pointing out here. That was the same kind of thing where even kind of your point about, like, Google even had this happen even our attempts to make anonymous, there's still the risk that we missed a step, and we considered it good to go. Again, tennis is a little bit different, sorry, but kind of the same spirit of that. The due diligence is done but even in that case, it's not enough. -So we kind of touched on some of this. But I think—I'm happy we jumped ahead to some degree. But we—especially in our experience, we get a lot of—we get a lot of perspectives on it, and these are kind of are the—they're the major ones that come through. And none of these have a positive or negative assigned to them implicitly. People say through business in both good and bad way. But I think to the point that somebody made about kind of the power structure that's there, you know, that's something that kind of is very interesting to me because we in the media and in these kinds of situations, are we, you know, for kind of the point about the bankruptcy data and even in our salary database, there's a lot of different people that show up in those things that are much more, you know, have more knowledge about, like, okay. Here—this would be the steps I take to get out of this and people have no clue. And have no clue that, you know,—who don't know the media agency +So we kind of touched on some of this. But I think—I'm happy we jumped ahead to some degree. But we—especially in our experience, we get a lot of—we get a lot of perspectives on it, and these are kind of are the—they're the major ones that come through. And none of these have a positive or negative assigned to them implicitly. People say through business in both good and bad way. But I think to the point that somebody made about kind of the power structure that's there, you know, that's something that kind of is very interesting to me because we in the media and in these kinds of situations, are we, you know, for kind of the point about the bankruptcy data and even in our salary database, there's a lot of different people that show up in those things that are much more, you know, have more knowledge about, like, okay. Here—this would be the steps I take to get out of this and people have no clue. And have no clue that, you know,—who don't know the media agency , people think we are a state agency and think that we are an extension of that and contact us with those kinds of questions. -So we've touched on this to some degree, but I will, you know, briefly open it up real quick if what other, you know, perspectives on these kinds of things do you all have? And it's okay if we don't. We've jumped around pretty good. +So we've touched on this to some degree, but I will, you know, briefly open it up real quick if what other, you know, perspectives on these kinds of things do you all have? And it's okay if we don't. We've jumped around pretty good. PARTICIPANT: Have you guys thought all about the anonymousizing the data and—so that you can understand the trends was the data without being able to look at the individual records? -PARTICIPANT: We've thought about it. That third point is what makes that hard. And and the answer to that is the people are above me. So I agree with you. But it's kind of that. I think especially for our dataset, this is where we have echoes of the mug shot galleries that it—it becomes lucrative to the point where the perspective changes. And that is a challenge. It just seems like—I mean, you know, I don't even like saying it out loud but it's the truth. +PARTICIPANT: We've thought about it. That third point is what makes that hard. And and the answer to that is the people are above me. So I agree with you. But it's kind of that. I think especially for our dataset, this is where we have echoes of the mug shot galleries that it—it becomes lucrative to the point where the perspective changes. And that is a challenge. It just seems like—I mean, you know, I don't even like saying it out loud but it's the truth. -And so that's the—again, kind of why I want to have this conversation. Someone? -- +And so that's the—again, kind of why I want to have this conversation. Someone? -- -PARTICIPANT: You bring up journalism, but profit is that third piece of the triangle where it gets really muddy. It would be interesting to see how do you guys have this discussions to her point earlier, we have a mug shot, somebody makes a choice or whatever, something happens at one point in their life and now that's searchable, and you have issues of criminal justice equity and you're, like—how do you guys in the newsroom make that choice on whether this is journalism really good for profit or all three? +PARTICIPANT: You bring up journalism, but profit is that third piece of the triangle where it gets really muddy. It would be interesting to see how do you guys have this discussions to her point earlier, we have a mug shot, somebody makes a choice or whatever, something happens at one point in their life and now that's searchable, and you have issues of criminal justice equity and you're, like—how do you guys in the newsroom make that choice on whether this is journalism really good for profit or all three? -PARTICIPANT: And the good point on the mug shots too is that quite often that's actually not, like—they've not been convicted. They're there—they just got a picture taken of them at the sheriff's office, at the police station. Like, that's kind of—all the examples I found, I have this big disclaimer on the bottom, which I linked the Tampa Bay one, and I'll put others in there too. And all of them have a big disclaimer in them, by the way. +PARTICIPANT: And the good point on the mug shots too is that quite often that's actually not, like—they've not been convicted. They're there—they just got a picture taken of them at the sheriff's office, at the police station. Like, that's kind of—all the examples I found, I have this big disclaimer on the bottom, which I linked the Tampa Bay one, and I'll put others in there too. And all of them have a big disclaimer in them, by the way. -So that's to that point of, like, you know, they put it up and people came. And that changed that dialogue entirely. +So that's to that point of, like, you know, they put it up and people came. And that changed that dialogue entirely. -For us, you know, I think that we've and as I said, we'll have to go through them quickly. But some of the scenarios that we've actually, realistic ones we've been in. You know, I think it comes with good and bad. You know, we've seen, you know, people who want out for all different reasons, and we've had contacts who is this dataset helped me equalize pay. People say this dataset made everyone aware that the superintendent was laundering money. +For us, you know, I think that we've and as I said, we'll have to go through them quickly. But some of the scenarios that we've actually, realistic ones we've been in. You know, I think it comes with good and bad. You know, we've seen, you know, people who want out for all different reasons, and we've had contacts who is this dataset helped me equalize pay. People say this dataset made everyone aware that the superintendent was laundering money. -Like, it's their—there are layers to it that get kind of interesting. And then, like, to the point of—I mean they kind of validation or verifying it. That's kind of the thing that we also struggle with because there are more people there than we could ever individually go through, you know? So there's kind of that extra layer to it of, oh, well, we would have probably never known this mid-sized school district in north Texas, you know, had this issue until someone looked—from that district looked at it and goes, hey, he's making a lot more than his contract actually says. And then that was kind of a story that blossomed out of that. +Like, it's their—there are layers to it that get kind of interesting. And then, like, to the point of—I mean they kind of validation or verifying it. That's kind of the thing that we also struggle with because there are more people there than we could ever individually go through, you know? So there's kind of that extra layer to it of, oh, well, we would have probably never known this mid-sized school district in north Texas, you know, had this issue until someone looked—from that district looked at it and goes, hey, he's making a lot more than his contract actually says. And then that was kind of a story that blossomed out of that. So, yeah, there's that—there's a lot of that gray area that gets hairy. -PARTICIPANT: I also have a quick question to ask, how much more does a person have to be—how much more personal data does a person have to release to counteract or interact with this information? And I think that's a new question that's been coming up now. Because now that the right social media centers of so much what happens in your life is tried in the court of public opinion, you have to counteract the narrative. And what do you have to do to do so? So if you're on the water list, do you—are you using the largest, most water that you now have to release possibly justification for why? You have seen to release maybe a water main broke at your house, and you didn't have enough to spend it. What do you have to do to make this data neutral again as opposed to serving whatever objective that had. +PARTICIPANT: I also have a quick question to ask, how much more does a person have to be—how much more personal data does a person have to release to counteract or interact with this information? And I think that's a new question that's been coming up now. Because now that the right social media centers of so much what happens in your life is tried in the court of public opinion, you have to counteract the narrative. And what do you have to do to do so? So if you're on the water list, do you—are you using the largest, most water that you now have to release possibly justification for why? You have seen to release maybe a water main broke at your house, and you didn't have enough to spend it. What do you have to do to make this data neutral again as opposed to serving whatever objective that had. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And kind of to that point too, we were talking about this before it started. But, like, not everyone has an extremely common name. That battle to, like, step out to counteract that for some people is so much harder. Because if you -- +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And kind of to that point too, we were talking about this before it started. But, like, not everyone has an extremely common name. That battle to, like, step out to counteract that for some people is so much harder. Because if you -- -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. There ies aren't they? +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. There ies aren't they? -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I will never have that issue. But that's not the case for everyone, you know? +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I will never have that issue. But that's not the case for everyone, you know? So that kind of power level comes into it, comes into play there. -PARTICIPANT: So as I've been—I'm working a lot right now with public data and linking it to create profiles of people. And I think, you know—and I've worked on a mug shot database that we put up in Arkansas as well. +PARTICIPANT: So as I've been—I'm working a lot right now with public data and linking it to create profiles of people. And I think, you know—and I've worked on a mug shot database that we put up in Arkansas as well. -So I feel like the thing I'm starting to land on and I'm starting to get comfortable with the idea is the idea of practical obscurity. So it's make it available, but don't make it easily available. So, for example, for the jail one that we put up in Arkansas. That was behind our wall and then we had stacks, we only put people to it who were charged for felony, and then it expired after 60 days off the site. We captivated that so that we still had it. We weren't making it disappear from our own records, but it got removed off the site after 60 days. So the justification there is there's still public value in seeing that whole picture so that you can see, you know, who's getting booked? And how regularly—kind of get a picture of your local law enforcement community that you can't get otherwise. +So I feel like the thing I'm starting to land on and I'm starting to get comfortable with the idea is the idea of practical obscurity. So it's make it available, but don't make it easily available. So, for example, for the jail one that we put up in Arkansas. That was behind our wall and then we had stacks, we only put people to it who were charged for felony, and then it expired after 60 days off the site. We captivated that so that we still had it. We weren't making it disappear from our own records, but it got removed off the site after 60 days. So the justification there is there's still public value in seeing that whole picture so that you can see, you know, who's getting booked? And how regularly—kind of get a picture of your local law enforcement community that you can't get otherwise. But you had to go want to know that, and you had to jump through hoops to sort of access that; right? PARTICIPANT: Yeah. -PARTICIPANT: With what I'm working on in Pittsburgh, we have a tiered subscription model. So if you want to access certain information about these folks that are in our database, you have to really want to go out of your way. It's not a perfect solution, you know? It's—but I feel like it's—for me, it's making me more comfortable with making some of these decisions that we're making. +PARTICIPANT: With what I'm working on in Pittsburgh, we have a tiered subscription model. So if you want to access certain information about these folks that are in our database, you have to really want to go out of your way. It's not a perfect solution, you know? It's—but I feel like it's—for me, it's making me more comfortable with making some of these decisions that we're making. -PARTICIPANT: If you don't mind me asking, is the—how did the conversation around that start? Like, in terms of, like—I guess I'm asking the frame of, like, what levels of buy in did you have to secure for that? +PARTICIPANT: If you don't mind me asking, is the—how did the conversation around that start? Like, in terms of, like—I guess I'm asking the frame of, like, what levels of buy in did you have to secure for that? PARTICIPANT: For what we're working on now? PARTICIPANT: Yeah. -PARTICIPANT: Well, we're the startup founders. So -- +PARTICIPANT: Well, we're the startup founders. So -- PARTICIPANT: That will work. @@ -221,27 +221,27 @@ PARTICIPANT: We're working on it on our own. Because we're linking a lot of public records in these profiles, so we basically want to man anyone who has influence in Pittsburgh and put it in a profile. -There are things like home addresses. Like, we want to mad kind of where money is flowing from different districts and areas. How we want to get it. We want the home addresses for our database to people to look up, but we decided that's one clear line that we've created is we're not releasing the exact public home addresses of the people within our profiles. +There are things like home addresses. Like, we want to mad kind of where money is flowing from different districts and areas. How we want to get it. We want the home addresses for our database to people to look up, but we decided that's one clear line that we've created is we're not releasing the exact public home addresses of the people within our profiles. -Again, there are other ways because we're linking a lot of data power. There are just other ways. +Again, there are other ways because we're linking a lot of data power. There are just other ways. -PARTICIPANT: I'm curious in the room if anybody has ever seen an ethical hard line that promotes counter valence as a neutral playing field. So, for example, if you're a news outlet, and you decide to report on mug shots or whatever, mug shot data. Obviously you're a very opinionated source and single source community. But would it even be the job of the journalistic entity to say, like, we're not going to release this until we have a counter surveillance, like, balanced thing on the scale where we're letting the community—for every mug shot we release, we'll release one photo of the police officer in the community, or probably something along those lines. That's not the best example but something that's tit for tat or you're neutrally because you ethically encoded into your dataset some at least balance metric that you're aspiring to. +PARTICIPANT: I'm curious in the room if anybody has ever seen an ethical hard line that promotes counter valence as a neutral playing field. So, for example, if you're a news outlet, and you decide to report on mug shots or whatever, mug shot data. Obviously you're a very opinionated source and single source community. But would it even be the job of the journalistic entity to say, like, we're not going to release this until we have a counter surveillance, like, balanced thing on the scale where we're letting the community—for every mug shot we release, we'll release one photo of the police officer in the community, or probably something along those lines. That's not the best example but something that's tit for tat or you're neutrally because you ethically encoded into your dataset some at least balance metric that you're aspiring to. -I've been hearing a lot of people talk about counter valence as a policy for general data management on social networks and stuff like that. Where, like, if you give Facebook your photos and Facebook should allow you every time to know they mine your photos, for example. And the users can fight for those kinds of policies for, like, hey, you can make money off of my thing, but just let me know what you're deriving. Every time you access my information, I should know about it. And I wonder if there's potential for, like, innovation there around—plus not take the easy source that the police produce, and we know that they're paid to do it. Let's, like, raise the bar a little bit and produce the dataset. +I've been hearing a lot of people talk about counter valence as a policy for general data management on social networks and stuff like that. Where, like, if you give Facebook your photos and Facebook should allow you every time to know they mine your photos, for example. And the users can fight for those kinds of policies for, like, hey, you can make money off of my thing, but just let me know what you're deriving. Every time you access my information, I should know about it. And I wonder if there's potential for, like, innovation there around—plus not take the easy source that the police produce, and we know that they're paid to do it. Let's, like, raise the bar a little bit and produce the dataset. -Do people generally take user generated content and put it next to official government produced content? Is that still -- +Do people generally take user generated content and put it next to official government produced content? Is that still -- PARTICIPANT: I would be really uncomfortable doing that. PARTICIPANT: Yeah. -PARTICIPANT: You know? There's a reason that we get—like the government database is—there's a probability in terms of how they're publishing it, and you can kind of analyze it. That's a lot harder to do with the data. +PARTICIPANT: You know? There's a reason that we get—like the government database is—there's a probability in terms of how they're publishing it, and you can kind of analyze it. That's a lot harder to do with the data. -So I feel there's still a responsible process that's made to kind of evaluate the government data whereas in another sense not as much. That's just my first gut reaction to that. +So I feel there's still a responsible process that's made to kind of evaluate the government data whereas in another sense not as much. That's just my first gut reaction to that. PARTICIPANT: Yeah. -PARTICIPANT: I think also if I had to guess what we had and tried to pitch that in our newsroom, the legal smoke screen that, oh, it isn't ours, it's the government, even though you're the one collecting it from the user. So I think as far as the sales pitch to the folks running the show, I think it would be harder to get sustained BGC on—depending on subject matter. +PARTICIPANT: I think also if I had to guess what we had and tried to pitch that in our newsroom, the legal smoke screen that, oh, it isn't ours, it's the government, even though you're the one collecting it from the user. So I think as far as the sales pitch to the folks running the show, I think it would be harder to get sustained BGC on—depending on subject matter. PARTICIPANT: Yeah. @@ -249,81 +249,74 @@ PARTICIPANT: It might work for, like, you know, places that the city hasn't plow But when it comes to shootings or criminal applications against law enforcement, I imagine that would be a harder sell. -PARTICIPANT: The blatant lies that are in there. But it's a start. +PARTICIPANT: The blatant lies that are in there. But it's a start. -PARTICIPANT: There's also a big question of what is actual battles? And is just putting a cop who has misbehaved poorly next to a mug shot actually balance? Because people have very different opinions, and you say the government has this, and we have researched this, is that an actual balance? +PARTICIPANT: There's also a big question of what is actual battles? And is just putting a cop who has misbehaved poorly next to a mug shot actually balance? Because people have very different opinions, and you say the government has this, and we have researched this, is that an actual balance? -PARTICIPANT: But that's not—there's no direct answer to that. You just have to find your plan. +PARTICIPANT: But that's not—there's no direct answer to that. You just have to find your plan. PARTICIPANT: The fact there's an objective answer to it, doesn't mean you shouldn't necessarily ask the question. -PARTICIPANT: Oh, sure. We have to answer for ourselves. +PARTICIPANT: Oh, sure. We have to answer for ourselves. -PARTICIPANT: We have to actually look to at some points of what might be the thing we need to do. Because things that have often happened with, like, crime is one of the first things people look for whether or not they have anything to do with what happened that when the crime was committed or when the person was attacked. But there's this kind of thing, well, if I release someone's juvenile record, that can be an excuse as to why they were murdered. But if we say this person was drunk all the time, and it doesn't affect anything, we've now exposed more data. +PARTICIPANT: We have to actually look to at some points of what might be the thing we need to do. Because things that have often happened with, like, crime is one of the first things people look for whether or not they have anything to do with what happened that when the crime was committed or when the person was attacked. But there's this kind of thing, well, if I release someone's juvenile record, that can be an excuse as to why they were murdered. But if we say this person was drunk all the time, and it doesn't affect anything, we've now exposed more data. -And I think that's the thing—because I do believe data should be exposed, but what I constantly wrestle with is it becomes a contest of data. Like, we're just more and more and more and more and this data will do this and if this data doesn't do what I think it does, you're getting to the point where you're living your entire life as a performance piece, and it doesn't work for everyone that way. So now you're going back to—you're basically now with lack of, like, privacy having the replication of the same issues beforehand. Except now your identity -- +And I think that's the thing—because I do believe data should be exposed, but what I constantly wrestle with is it becomes a contest of data. Like, we're just more and more and more and more and this data will do this and if this data doesn't do what I think it does, you're getting to the point where you're living your entire life as a performance piece, and it doesn't work for everyone that way. So now you're going back to—you're basically now with lack of, like, privacy having the replication of the same issues beforehand. Except now your identity -- -PARTICIPANT: And it goes back to what we were saying earlier in terms of why are we putting that data setup? What's the value? What's the purpose? There has to be some newsworthy justification and I don't think that's just because we can. +PARTICIPANT: And it goes back to what we were saying earlier in terms of why are we putting that data setup? What's the value? What's the purpose? There has to be some newsworthy justification and I don't think that's just because we can. -I don't think there's a balancing act, there's a deeper reason why you're putting that data up there, and then it goes back to the responsibility of what's the context again around where we're doing this? It shouldn't just purely become data for the—data in and of itself grow a record, you know, it doesn't have enough context to provide the whole story behind it. And I think that we got sort of caught up in this idea that you just by putting out a spreadsheet, we've done journalism, and I don't think we have. There's a much bigger responsibility around how that data is presented, how it's accessed. The context that it's presented in. And then we need to—start thinking about your data is your story. So, yeah, it's really big, but still how is that packaged? +I don't think there's a balancing act, there's a deeper reason why you're putting that data up there, and then it goes back to the responsibility of what's the context again around where we're doing this? It shouldn't just purely become data for the—data in and of itself grow a record, you know, it doesn't have enough context to provide the whole story behind it. And I think that we got sort of caught up in this idea that you just by putting out a spreadsheet, we've done journalism, and I don't think we have. There's a much bigger responsibility around how that data is presented, how it's accessed. The context that it's presented in. And then we need to—start thinking about your data is your story. So, yeah, it's really big, but still how is that packaged? PARTICIPANT: I just have another follow-up question on that idea of curation and being able to say—like I was thinking about we only show the last 60 days of the data, but then we don't show the other data that we're keeping maybe off the Internet or, you know, whatever. -So is there—like what's the calculation there? Like—I'm asking more about the risk assessment of if you—if you get hacked and all of it gets taken anyway. So I was thinking about the DNC e-mails; right? The value of deleting your stupid e-mails. And, yeah, how does that factor into the conversations about the curation? +So is there—like what's the calculation there? Like—I'm asking more about the risk assessment of if you—if you get hacked and all of it gets taken anyway. So I was thinking about the DNC e-mails; right? The value of deleting your stupid e-mails. And, yeah, how does that factor into the conversations about the curation? -PARTICIPANT: So I don't think it ended up—that's a long time ago. I suspect that they're not even keeping that data honest, even though that was the idea. +PARTICIPANT: So I don't think it ended up—that's a long time ago. I suspect that they're not even keeping that data honest, even though that was the idea. -I think now what they're looking at now as reporters, it's about building our library. We want to have access so that we can continue to do our reporting and research. It's helpful to us. But I think the security aspect is huge. And I don't know that—that might be another place, but we need to start thinking about what are the protocols? What are our standards? How do we—you know, what is the right strategy for hanging onto all of this data? Because once we are starting to link all of that, we're doing something much more powerful than the government is itself. +I think now what they're looking at now as reporters, it's about building our library. We want to have access so that we can continue to do our reporting and research. It's helpful to us. But I think the security aspect is huge. And I don't know that—that might be another place, but we need to start thinking about what are the protocols? What are our standards? How do we—you know, what is the right strategy for hanging onto all of this data? Because once we are starting to link all of that, we're doing something much more powerful than the government is itself. -PARTICIPANT: So just to give you, like, more European perspective of the database from booking system is mind-boggling to Europeans. That would never happen. I mean what it basically does—it's reinforcing a racist police system and basically their perspective on the whole thing. Most of these pictures—I don't know. It's just crazy that the society allows that. And we would never have that. And it's also against the press codes in Germany to publish these pictures of—if they're taken ethical journalism perspective, it's not journalism because you're not providing any context, you're relaying public data, I don't understand why it is public. Why in the society that it happened to someone who made a mistake, put their picture up online. I think there's a legislation that makes it easier to remove these. This discussion, it's mind-boggling to me. +PARTICIPANT: So just to give you, like, more European perspective of the database from booking system is mind-boggling to Europeans. That would never happen. I mean what it basically does—it's reinforcing a racist police system and basically their perspective on the whole thing. Most of these pictures—I don't know. It's just crazy that the society allows that. And we would never have that. And it's also against the press codes in Germany to publish these pictures of—if they're taken ethical journalism perspective, it's not journalism because you're not providing any context, you're relaying public data, I don't understand why it is public. Why in the society that it happened to someone who made a mistake, put their picture up online. I think there's a legislation that makes it easier to remove these. This discussion, it's mind-boggling to me. PARTICIPANT: If I'm searching data, like, in France, and I'm looking at the outer, and I start seeing a color change as you—who's being, you know, if I want to search, I want to look at the shades of the people who are being arrested, couldn't I also look at racist policing practices by seeing it in a more accessible way as opposed to getting lost in the data or not? -PARTICIPANT: Why does it need to be a picture, for example? Why does it need to have a name associated? Why can't just records—I don't know some attribute of color or -- +PARTICIPANT: Why does it need to be a picture, for example? Why does it need to have a name associated? Why can't just records—I don't know some attribute of color or -- PARTICIPANT: My follow-up, because it's easier for journalists and nontechnical people to get to those answers. -PARTICIPANT: Also for devils advocate perspective, the face is also more compelling than the name written. People are more—the same reason why we get pictures of dead children and run them is because it's heartbreaking to hear that a 3-year-old dies, but it's really heartbreaking of a 3-year-old who you can see their face who died. That's been forever also, but it doesn't make it less true that human faces are less compelling than the name and the age and the neighborhood that they're from doesn't have the same emotional residence, good or bad. You could use it either way, or it can be used either way. But the consequences of it aside, pictures are really interesting. +PARTICIPANT: Also for devils advocate perspective, the face is also more compelling than the name written. People are more—the same reason why we get pictures of dead children and run them is because it's heartbreaking to hear that a 3-year-old dies, but it's really heartbreaking of a 3-year-old who you can see their face who died. That's been forever also, but it doesn't make it less true that human faces are less compelling than the name and the age and the neighborhood that they're from doesn't have the same emotional residence, good or bad. You could use it either way, or it can be used either way. But the consequences of it aside, pictures are really interesting. -PARTICIPANT: But a journalistic responsibility—you shouldn't just go for the shock or the—there's a bit more to it. I'm not a journalist by training actually. I'm a computer science. This—it's just a different culture, let's assume that. +PARTICIPANT: But a journalistic responsibility—you shouldn't just go for the shock or the—there's a bit more to it. I'm not a journalist by training actually. I'm a computer science. This—it's just a different culture, let's assume that. -PARTICIPANT: Well, some states are not even—like some states, New York d release the mug shots and some jurisdictions don't give it to you, even if you want to have it. So in some ways, when the information became public, you can get people's names and home addresses if they own a gun or if they immediately changed the law, people said enough bad stuff about something, when it was bad when it became open, maybe they would change it and understanding it not usable anymore. Some people say they released mug shots with that awful website where they released naked pictures and if you wanted it off, you had to pay them, it was black mail. If you feel strongly enough about something you would take action, which is an act of journalism inadvertently. +PARTICIPANT: Well, some states are not even—like some states, New York d release the mug shots and some jurisdictions don't give it to you, even if you want to have it. So in some ways, when the information became public, you can get people's names and home addresses if they own a gun or if they immediately changed the law, people said enough bad stuff about something, when it was bad when it became open, maybe they would change it and understanding it not usable anymore. Some people say they released mug shots with that awful website where they released naked pictures and if you wanted it off, you had to pay them, it was black mail. If you feel strongly enough about something you would take action, which is an act of journalism inadvertently. -PARTICIPANT: I think what you said, though, is really important is the idea of—and when we get into releasing data looking at how we use data now. Is it actually having the effect we want it to have? Is it doing the thing we want it to do? Because if we're actually hoping, well, I want to—if I may tell a quick personal because this was a real—it was, like, a mind boggling read. I got into a bit of a Twitter fight with the editor of the New York Daily News about his decision to publish the face of the body of Alton Sterling. And his response was this will make people see. This is going to make people actually feel a thing. It has a emotional resonance. And my response was this has happened for years, and it hasn't helped. So what is your actual goal of this? +PARTICIPANT: I think what you said, though, is really important is the idea of—and when we get into releasing data looking at how we use data now. Is it actually having the effect we want it to have? Is it doing the thing we want it to do? Because if we're actually hoping, well, I want to—if I may tell a quick personal because this was a real—it was, like, a mind boggling read. I got into a bit of a Twitter fight with the editor of the New York Daily News about his decision to publish the face of the body of Alton Sterling. And his response was this will make people see. This is going to make people actually feel a thing. It has a emotional resonance. And my response was this has happened for years, and it hasn't helped. So what is your actual goal of this? -And the data point is important. Someone died. It's questionable. There's police brutality. But that image, what did it do? And data I think itself can function like that because we can see these records and all of these things. But if we're trying to find out what our journalistic inquiry is, I want us to think hoar responsible about we use water and force and violence. We also have historical models that show the addition of data—the addition of these things don't help. Like, a lot of times I think especially when we're dealing with technological journalism because data is now easier for us to quantify and compute pretending it hasn't been there before. So we've had historical models for these things before. We've had practices, that's why journalism has practices and we've seen what has and hasn't worked. With things like dead bodies of kids, dead bodies of people, it has that gut-wrench human reaction. But I don't think it ofte expresses what people are trying for, which is scope. +And the data point is important. Someone died. It's questionable. There's police brutality. But that image, what did it do? And data I think itself can function like that because we can see these records and all of these things. But if we're trying to find out what our journalistic inquiry is, I want us to think hoar responsible about we use water and force and violence. We also have historical models that show the addition of data—the addition of these things don't help. Like, a lot of times I think especially when we're dealing with technological journalism because data is now easier for us to quantify and compute pretending it hasn't been there before. So we've had historical models for these things before. We've had practices, that's why journalism has practices and we've seen what has and hasn't worked. With things like dead bodies of kids, dead bodies of people, it has that gut-wrench human reaction. But I don't think it ofte expresses what people are trying for, which is scope. -So, yes, you get that quick thing, but what you're thinking about is 20,000 people with an emotional react to scope rather than shock. Which data can do now, but it doesn't match. So could a graphic be better than a picture? Could this—could an info graph be better than everybody's address? And how do you start thinking about that? +So, yes, you get that quick thing, but what you're thinking about is 20,000 people with an emotional react to scope rather than shock. Which data can do now, but it doesn't match. So could a graphic be better than a picture? Could this—could an info graph be better than everybody's address? And how do you start thinking about that? -PARTICIPANT: I think that's the question of the story. Is it about this trend or is it about this one person? And I think a lot of times that's what data people are there for. Like, I feel like reporters are often trying to report on an individual narrative and trying to find a human, a person or some story they have. +PARTICIPANT: I think that's the question of the story. Is it about this trend or is it about this one person? And I think a lot of times that's what data people are there for. Like, I feel like reporters are often trying to report on an individual narrative and trying to find a human, a person or some story they have. -But we're more trying to find a trend and look at a broader picture, as you said, a scope. Sometimes they're not always—but I think that's also the question of context too. If it's not context, you feel it's more of the narrative, like, where are we going, sure, we can say this person used a lot of water. Yeah, but it's not really the story that you're trying to tell with all the data. That's the big question. And that's the point that you have to drive home when you get angry e-mails from people who are, like, I'm mad because my salary's up here, and I haven't worked there in two weeks, but you still have me listed there. +But we're more trying to find a trend and look at a broader picture, as you said, a scope. Sometimes they're not always—but I think that's also the question of context too. If it's not context, you feel it's more of the narrative, like, where are we going, sure, we can say this person used a lot of water. Yeah, but it's not really the story that you're trying to tell with all the data. That's the big question. And that's the point that you have to drive home when you get angry e-mails from people who are, like, I'm mad because my salary's up here, and I haven't worked there in two weeks, but you still have me listed there. -PARTICIPANT: But just to push back on the idea if we're going with water is if the actual goal of the story is saying this municipality is overusing water to a degree, and you have someone who was, like, I had a disaster in my house and that put me over the top rather than someone who just doesn't give and has been overwatering their lawn. That person has been swept up in the trend is still not the story. +PARTICIPANT: But just to push back on the idea if we're going with water is if the actual goal of the story is saying this municipality is overusing water to a degree, and you have someone who was, like, I had a disaster in my house and that put me over the top rather than someone who just doesn't give and has been overwatering their lawn. That person has been swept up in the trend is still not the story. -PARTICIPANT: Right. But I think it's hard to differentiate that when you have the one person who is saying that out of the greater story. But not that their experience is important. But I think that that's hard to pull them out from the e-mail that you get from people. +PARTICIPANT: Right. But I think it's hard to differentiate that when you have the one person who is saying that out of the greater story. But not that their experience is important. But I think that that's hard to pull them out from the e-mail that you get from people. -PARTICIPANT: Then I think that's the thing we need to work on. How do you start giving people ways to pull themselves out? But also in pulling themselves out, they generate more content. They generate more connection. They might generate better connections for us, if there are people who say this is how you see me in the trend and this is how not. It's not necessarily connected to all their personal data, but it is about the back and forth because another thing that's simple for data stories is that it's very hard to get in contact with anyone specific. You always have to just generally hit the paper, not a person. +PARTICIPANT: Then I think that's the thing we need to work on. How do you start giving people ways to pull themselves out? But also in pulling themselves out, they generate more content. They generate more connection. They might generate better connections for us, if there are people who say this is how you see me in the trend and this is how not. It's not necessarily connected to all their personal data, but it is about the back and forth because another thing that's simple for data stories is that it's very hard to get in contact with anyone specific. You always have to just generally hit the paper, not a person. PARTICIPANT: Right. -PARTICIPANT: So we've hit 11:30. I don't know when someone kicks us out of here. But I think—yeah, I wish we had another 30 minutes to go into that because I think that point about, like, what are your steps to exit something like that is something that we definitely see as well in terms of just—I mean that, to me, is always what the power kind of play of it to me. Which is every person that's e-mailing you saying, hey, I don't think I should be in there, there are probably 100 others that have no clue that that's even a path that they could take. And, like, how—you know, how to normalize that and take that into account when there's something being—when you're putting that big dataset online and acknowledging that there shouldn't be a venue for dispute. +PARTICIPANT: So we've hit 11:30. I don't know when someone kicks us out of here. But I think—yeah, I wish we had another 30 minutes to go into that because I think that point about, like, what are your steps to exit something like that is something that we definitely see as well in terms of just—I mean that, to me, is always what the power kind of play of it to me. Which is every person that's e-mailing you saying, hey, I don't think I should be in there, there are probably 100 others that have no clue that that's even a path that they could take. And, like, how—you know, how to normalize that and take that into account when there's something being—when you're putting that big dataset online and acknowledging that there shouldn't be a venue for dispute. -But didn't get to scenarios, but I think the conversations that we had instead were easily more interesting than the scenarios I had written up. So totally fine. Thank you, all. I really appreciate coming and hanging out first session this morning. And, Anne, you have some notes. +But didn't get to scenarios, but I think the conversations that we had instead were easily more interesting than the scenarios I had written up. So totally fine. Thank you, all. I really appreciate coming and hanging out first session this morning. And, Anne, you have some notes. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I took some notes. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I took some notes. PARTICIPANT: I'm going to try to grab links of some of the other examples people mentioned and put them in there as well. -PARTICIPANT: I wrote them down. Or if you want to add them as well. It can be found in the schedule. +PARTICIPANT: I wrote them down. Or if you want to add them as well. It can be found in the schedule. -PARTICIPANT: All right. Thank you. +PARTICIPANT: All right. Thank you. [Applause] - - - - - - - diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-fixing-ad-tech.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-fixing-ad-tech.md index 4c5432ca..81d29175 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-fixing-ad-tech.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-fixing-ad-tech.md @@ -1,277 +1,270 @@ Skipping the blame game and working across teams to fix newsroom Ad Tech Session facilitator(s): Aram Zucker-Scharff, Jarrod Dicker Day & Time: Thursday, 12-1pm -Room: Classroom 305 +Room: Classroom 305 -Aram: Hello, everyone, you are in skipping the game blame working across teams to fix newsroom ad tech. Hopefully you're in the right place. We're going to quickly go through who we are and some of the challenges that we are facing as newsrooms that need to continue making money so that we can all stay in business. And then we're going to try to break into some sort of back and forth, some conversations about challenges you face, metrics that you love but can't seem to turn into money and also opportunities for projects that may be you see or that we can help think of together. +Aram: Hello, everyone, you are in skipping the game blame working across teams to fix newsroom ad tech. Hopefully you're in the right place. We're going to quickly go through who we are and some of the challenges that we are facing as newsrooms that need to continue making money so that we can all stay in business. And then we're going to try to break into some sort of back and forth, some conversations about challenges you face, metrics that you love but can't seem to turn into money and also opportunities for projects that may be you see or that we can help think of together. So I am Aram Zucker-Scharff, I work with the Salon media group as a full developer. Jarrod: I'm Jarrod Dicker, I run all technology operations at the Washington Post. -I'm going to quickly go into the mentality of how we successfully—so just back on. I worked in newsrooms, and I've run in technology at the Huffington post, a couple of startups and now Washington Post. It's never easy. Especially when you're trying to work across different teams, and you have the mentality that ads suck, they slow the site down, everything's terrible, and you continue on that route. +I'm going to quickly go into the mentality of how we successfully—so just back on. I worked in newsrooms, and I've run in technology at the Huffington post, a couple of startups and now Washington Post. It's never easy. Especially when you're trying to work across different teams, and you have the mentality that ads suck, they slow the site down, everything's terrible, and you continue on that route. -So putting this new mentality, we've been successful in doing that, especially at the Washington Post. And what I'm going to basically go through is how we change our mind-set when it comes to creating new ad prospects and technology. +So putting this new mentality, we've been successful in doing that, especially at the Washington Post. And what I'm going to basically go through is how we change our mind-set when it comes to creating new ad prospects and technology. -So I start with this Jeff Bezos quote often when I talk about things, he owns the Washington Post, which I'm sure everyone in here is familiar with, and this is completely out of context from how I look at it. But what he's basically saying is everyone is focusing on what's going to happen and how to get there. But no one really focusing on what's not going to change and what hasn't changed. And then that realm, it's really been ad technology and product in this space. You look back on how we deliver news and content to our consumers, on desktop, or mobile, it's flexible, it's responsive, we still hav 350 for as long as anyone can remember. And there's no building in that realm. Even today when you see what Google's done with amp where they want it to be fast, they want to bridge fast to the publishers, yet they don't address the whole side of double-click and how we distribute throughout all of our publisher site. So no one says, hey, let's fix that foundational layer +So I start with this Jeff Bezos quote often when I talk about things, he owns the Washington Post, which I'm sure everyone in here is familiar with, and this is completely out of context from how I look at it. But what he's basically saying is everyone is focusing on what's going to happen and how to get there. But no one really focusing on what's not going to change and what hasn't changed. And then that realm, it's really been ad technology and product in this space. You look back on how we deliver news and content to our consumers, on desktop, or mobile, it's flexible, it's responsive, we still hav 350 for as long as anyone can remember. And there's no building in that realm. Even today when you see what Google's done with amp where they want it to be fast, they want to bridge fast to the publishers, yet they don't address the whole side of double-click and how we distribute throughout all of our publisher site. So no one says, hey, let's fix that foundational layer -while also simultaneously bringing us into the new wave. It was, no, let's ignore it and keep ignoring it and keep pushing this way. +while also simultaneously bringing us into the new wave. It was, no, let's ignore it and keep ignoring it and keep pushing this way. So the main construct when I'm talking to my newsroom and across the entire word is main we can be the thought generator of pushing into this direction. -What's been amazing in my field was the introduction of ad blockers, viewability, and these issues that have forced everyone to actually deal with the problem, you know? For years and years and years, we've known that these have been key issues that all of our ad servers and the creative and working with clients was a way that we made money, but it was a sacrifice, it slowed the sites down, we were where we needed to get to go, but we had to do it. But it got with the point with ad blocking where if we're speaking to clients in particular, they don't need to spend money with us. It was always, hey, how do you get 5% or 10% of this media buy? Well, now it's if your ad blocking ratings are up, we're not going to pay for it or spend money with you. +What's been amazing in my field was the introduction of ad blockers, viewability, and these issues that have forced everyone to actually deal with the problem, you know? For years and years and years, we've known that these have been key issues that all of our ad servers and the creative and working with clients was a way that we made money, but it was a sacrifice, it slowed the sites down, we were where we needed to get to go, but we had to do it. But it got with the point with ad blocking where if we're speaking to clients in particular, they don't need to spend money with us. It was always, hey, how do you get 5% or 10% of this media buy? Well, now it's if your ad blocking ratings are up, we're not going to pay for it or spend money with you. -So the whole entire organization, speaking to the Washington Post directly and Aram can speak along that too, now the whole company is, like, okay. Let's fix this problem. +So the whole entire organization, speaking to the Washington Post directly and Aram can speak along that too, now the whole company is, like, okay. Let's fix this problem. -And we've been very lucky, you know? Personally speaking at the post, we've actually had a dedicated team that we call red if anyone's interested on learning more into the postdocs that only focuses on ad technology, working across the newsroom, recognizing the trends, recognizing things that our editors are doing well and how can we package them and deliver them? We're not working anymore on driving ads and viewers to our site, we're actually selling technology. 95% of the ad tech is shared, I'm sure there are a lot of publishers in here but the New York Times and Washington journal and Washington Post and buzz feed, we all call our products something different but they're all powered by the same. So there's no differentiation. And if we're in this world, we have to have organic. And that's what has gotten our teams excited in this space and kind of how we've led change throughout the industry as well as working with publishers and with clients alike. +And we've been very lucky, you know? Personally speaking at the post, we've actually had a dedicated team that we call red if anyone's interested on learning more into the postdocs that only focuses on ad technology, working across the newsroom, recognizing the trends, recognizing things that our editors are doing well and how can we package them and deliver them? We're not working anymore on driving ads and viewers to our site, we're actually selling technology. 95% of the ad tech is shared, I'm sure there are a lot of publishers in here but the New York Times and Washington journal and Washington Post and buzz feed, we all call our products something different but they're all powered by the same. So there's no differentiation. And if we're in this world, we have to have organic. And that's what has gotten our teams excited in this space and kind of how we've led change throughout the industry as well as working with publishers and with clients alike. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. That because the advertising industry is changing, because the Web is in such bad shape, we have an opportunity. Everything is changing, and we can lead that change from the newsroom side. The question that sort of brought this idea forward is that the economy of our media organizations is something that exists around editorial. But editorial is what our companies produce. That's what we're about. Making journalism. So we need to ask ourselves, how can advertising value editorial, when it does not share the values of our editorial, and this is what we need to start building for. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. That because the advertising industry is changing, because the Web is in such bad shape, we have an opportunity. Everything is changing, and we can lead that change from the newsroom side. The question that sort of brought this idea forward is that the economy of our media organizations is something that exists around editorial. But editorial is what our companies produce. That's what we're about. Making journalism. So we need to ask ourselves, how can advertising value editorial, when it does not share the values of our editorial, and this is what we need to start building for. So the first question that I'm hoping we can talk with you all about is what editorial values and metrics are not reflected in the advertising that surrounds it? -In preparation for this session, one of the things that we talked about to start us off in this discussion is authors as a value. If you've ever had to implement an advertising unit, you know that author may be a tag that gets send out to the admin. But nobody's building on that. There's no standardized way accepted across all of these news organizations, across all websites, across all social that will designate the author. +In preparation for this session, one of the things that we talked about to start us off in this discussion is authors as a value. If you've ever had to implement an advertising unit, you know that author may be a tag that gets send out to the admin. But nobody's building on that. There's no standardized way accepted across all of these news organizations, across all websites, across all social that will designate the author. -So what would it look like if we built an ad product around authorship? We could understand audiences very differently if we built that as our center of metric. And that's just one example. I would like to take a moment. This is hopefully going to be a discussion. A lot of us build stuff for newsrooms obviously. And a big piece of that is just building out traffic so that's our reporters, our editors, our journalists knows what's being successful, knows what's going on. +So what would it look like if we built an ad product around authorship? We could understand audiences very differently if we built that as our center of metric. And that's just one example. I would like to take a moment. This is hopefully going to be a discussion. A lot of us build stuff for newsrooms obviously. And a big piece of that is just building out traffic so that's our reporters, our editors, our journalists knows what's being successful, knows what's going on. -So are there metrics that you here have built or enjoyed looking at that you don't pass off to the sales team? That the sales team doesn't know about or doesn't value? Or that you don't understand to add value to the sales team because we're here to maybe change that. +So are there metrics that you here have built or enjoyed looking at that you don't pass off to the sales team? That the sales team doesn't know about or doesn't value? Or that you don't understand to add value to the sales team because we're here to maybe change that. -So let's go around the room. What is your favorite newsroom metric? Let's start with that. Anyone at this table? We're going to come back. Keep thinking. Newsroom metric. I've given you authorship. There's a great plugin run by fusion that also includes who edits the story and who is the photographer and allows you to build dashboards off of that. Is there any favored metrics? And I can keep talking all day but—there we go. +So let's go around the room. What is your favorite newsroom metric? Let's start with that. Anyone at this table? We're going to come back. Keep thinking. Newsroom metric. I've given you authorship. There's a great plugin run by fusion that also includes who edits the story and who is the photographer and allows you to build dashboards off of that. Is there any favored metrics? And I can keep talking all day but—there we go. -PARTICIPANT: The metric is engagement, engaging with the story, how far they're reading down, how much time they're spending on it. And I know preppie has done a lot of work around that. But still rarely most common metric on the actual data. +PARTICIPANT: The metric is engagement, engaging with the story, how far they're reading down, how much time they're spending on it. And I know preppie has done a lot of work around that. But still rarely most common metric on the actual data. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. So engagement or viewability are big ones. Viewability for those of you are not familiar is a metric in the ad space right now that is 50% of an ad should be in frame for at least one second. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. So engagement or viewability are big ones. Viewability for those of you are not familiar is a metric in the ad space right now that is 50% of an ad should be in frame for at least one second. -That's a nice idea. But in practice, it doesn't work very often. And in newsrooms, if 50% of our content is in view for one second, that's a failure; right? So how do we understand engagement and viewability from editorial perspective? And then sell it? There's opportunity of look at how many paragraphs people are reading, what is the length of article people are reading. All of these are great metrics of great examples that once we know, we can see that these are articles that have increased engagement. And then you can reach across the aisle and say to the sales team, maybe we can build a product that says sell ads on our most engaging content. +That's a nice idea. But in practice, it doesn't work very often. And in newsrooms, if 50% of our content is in view for one second, that's a failure; right? So how do we understand engagement and viewability from editorial perspective? And then sell it? There's opportunity of look at how many paragraphs people are reading, what is the length of article people are reading. All of these are great metrics of great examples that once we know, we can see that these are articles that have increased engagement. And then you can reach across the aisle and say to the sales team, maybe we can build a product that says sell ads on our most engaging content. -So that's a great example. Is there any other stuff? We'll keep going. +So that's a great example. Is there any other stuff? We'll keep going. PARTICIPANT: Track facts. -PARTICIPANT: Track facts. Yeah, that's a good one. People who are linking back to you. The flip side is there's all of this social media stuff that's giving us information. So people who are looking back to us has a lot of value. There's things about interaccepting of where sources of traffic are coming from to better understand what your audience is and also better understand by advertising. That's a great opportunity as well to reach out to your sales team and say, hey, we know that ought of people that are linking to—we know politico are linking to us frequently. Those people who are coming to us are very fast movers, so we need to drop our interspecial that we're running. And maybe there's an ad that would better serve that particular audience. Maybe there's a geoaspect; right? A lot of the people might be coming in from DC. That's an opportunity to look at those metrics and pass them along and to build new products around them. +PARTICIPANT: Track facts. Yeah, that's a good one. People who are linking back to you. The flip side is there's all of this social media stuff that's giving us information. So people who are looking back to us has a lot of value. There's things about interaccepting of where sources of traffic are coming from to better understand what your audience is and also better understand by advertising. That's a great opportunity as well to reach out to your sales team and say, hey, we know that ought of people that are linking to—we know politico are linking to us frequently. Those people who are coming to us are very fast movers, so we need to drop our interspecial that we're running. And maybe there's an ad that would better serve that particular audience. Maybe there's a geoaspect; right? A lot of the people might be coming in from DC. That's an opportunity to look at those metrics and pass them along and to build new products around them. -So this is a big part of it. We're talking about taking those metrics, taking those things that you find to be making successful journalism and creating successful journalism and reaching out across the floor to the sales room. This is pretty important for a lot of reasons. Like I said this means that we can build a sales funnel, a sales room, and a sales practice that reflects the values of editorial. We don't have a situation where the Church of Scientology is running a native ad on our site; right? That happens, then the sales team doesn't know or share our values. +So this is a big part of it. We're talking about taking those metrics, taking those things that you find to be making successful journalism and creating successful journalism and reaching out across the floor to the sales room. This is pretty important for a lot of reasons. Like I said this means that we can build a sales funnel, a sales room, and a sales practice that reflects the values of editorial. We don't have a situation where the Church of Scientology is running a native ad on our site; right? That happens, then the sales team doesn't know or share our values. -We got authorship, we've got reading time, and word count was another thing we mentioned. So those are major metrics. So we're going to talk about some of the things that have been done in practice. +We got authorship, we've got reading time, and word count was another thing we mentioned. So those are major metrics. So we're going to talk about some of the things that have been done in practice. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. So I'm sure everyone in here is somewhat involved, you know, in building. But does anyone actually work across or connecting dots between ad teams, edit teams, core engineering teams? Oh, cool. Awesome. Awesome. I thought I was alone. Great. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. So I'm sure everyone in here is somewhat involved, you know, in building. But does anyone actually work across or connecting dots between ad teams, edit teams, core engineering teams? Oh, cool. Awesome. Awesome. I thought I was alone. Great. -So something that we've really practiced and that we found to be very valuable is that everyone likes to be tied to revenue, you know? Personally I've always tied product and engineering, and I do both product and engineering, and I like to stay closer to revenue so that I keep my job because where the money is I usually get to stay. But what's been really interesting is that I found a lot of people really tie themselves to the values to be able to keep that company going. +So something that we've really practiced and that we found to be very valuable is that everyone likes to be tied to revenue, you know? Personally I've always tied product and engineering, and I do both product and engineering, and I like to stay closer to revenue so that I keep my job because where the money is I usually get to stay. But what's been really interesting is that I found a lot of people really tie themselves to the values to be able to keep that company going. -And the main reason there's been such disconnect is products haveose. So basically what you mentioned, when you build product about consumer editorial, it's about engagement, it's about what's being shared, who's going to see it. All of these sunshine-type metrics. When it's ads it's, like, how do we collect data? How do we retarget? How do we reach the user? I'll talk about a product later where we basically opened it up to all of our users and asked what they thought about the ads and it's I already bought those sheets and that's because, well, shit the technology we use will follow and follow you and make you buy them twice. +And the main reason there's been such disconnect is products haveose. So basically what you mentioned, when you build product about consumer editorial, it's about engagement, it's about what's being shared, who's going to see it. All of these sunshine-type metrics. When it's ads it's, like, how do we collect data? How do we retarget? How do we reach the user? I'll talk about a product later where we basically opened it up to all of our users and asked what they thought about the ads and it's I already bought those sheets and that's because, well, shit the technology we use will follow and follow you and make you buy them twice. -So what's been a major shift and what works is really finding the right people to work across and to bring those values together, you know? We learned this with native advertising, which I think many people are familiar with. But basically the content that advertisers created and gets to users on our site, it has a gray box that says don't touch that. And the main benefit of what that has been is not so much, hey, we can offer clients editorial tools or we can offer them a way to reach our users the way that, you know, our editorial team reaches them. Which is of course a benefit, but that's the obvious one. +So what's been a major shift and what works is really finding the right people to work across and to bring those values together, you know? We learned this with native advertising, which I think many people are familiar with. But basically the content that advertisers created and gets to users on our site, it has a gray box that says don't touch that. And the main benefit of what that has been is not so much, hey, we can offer clients editorial tools or we can offer them a way to reach our users the way that, you know, our editorial team reaches them. Which is of course a benefit, but that's the obvious one. -The thing that's most amazing is that build products like that that leverage newsroom intelligence and value has opened up a conversation with advertisers now. So it's not, like, hey, here's our ad, run it. Or here's a video, run it. It's, hey, this is the message we want to get across, you know your users, how do we best leverage these products to reach your users in a very authentic way? +The thing that's most amazing is that build products like that that leverage newsroom intelligence and value has opened up a conversation with advertisers now. So it's not, like, hey, here's our ad, run it. Or here's a video, run it. It's, hey, this is the message we want to get across, you know your users, how do we best leverage these products to reach your users in a very authentic way? -And that started in native, but that's because products haven't built to solve all of these existing products. People ad block and display is dead, well, it's a 30 billion-dollar business in this industry. From the client's point of view, they're spending millions of dollars in the TV commercial, they spent 1% of that to reach the entire population across the United States across desktop display. So it's not going anywhere, but we can make it better, or make video better or products better. +And that started in native, but that's because products haven't built to solve all of these existing products. People ad block and display is dead, well, it's a 30 billion-dollar business in this industry. From the client's point of view, they're spending millions of dollars in the TV commercial, they spent 1% of that to reach the entire population across the United States across desktop display. So it's not going anywhere, but we can make it better, or make video better or products better. And that comes to the effect when the entire organization is working together. -So I'm going to talk about a couple of examples where we leverage editorial tools to build new product. Again, on the post talks I'll link tolts tools. Many of them are open source, so we can kind of collaborate together. The goal of this is if you're in this room, you're actually interested in this, and there's not that many people interested in it yet. They will be once they realize that their businesses are more and more at risk. But all of us together could help make this change. And at least at the Washington Post, we've seen a ton of success in doing this. +So I'm going to talk about a couple of examples where we leverage editorial tools to build new product. Again, on the post talks I'll link tolts tools. Many of them are open source, so we can kind of collaborate together. The goal of this is if you're in this room, you're actually interested in this, and there's not that many people interested in it yet. They will be once they realize that their businesses are more and more at risk. But all of us together could help make this change. And at least at the Washington Post, we've seen a ton of success in doing this. -So the first one quickly I've been talking ab Bandito and blind testing. Beta testing has always been crucial in how we deliver to our user on the site. And that should be same for native as well. And testing always works. You want to double down on what works best, in the advertising world, it was always all right. Well, there's two different creative and whatever creative clicks on most, let's double down on that to go from .07 or .09. We can do better if we allocate to it. +So the first one quickly I've been talking ab Bandito and blind testing. Beta testing has always been crucial in how we deliver to our user on the site. And that should be same for native as well. And testing always works. You want to double down on what works best, in the advertising world, it was always all right. Well, there's two different creative and whatever creative clicks on most, let's double down on that to go from .07 or .09. We can do better if we allocate to it. -What happened in Bandito is one of the best methods to leverage our newsroom to get our users to reach them and click them in areas that they want to be reached. And Bandito, which basically stands for the name was taken from bandit, like a one-armed bandit in a slot machine meaning when you pull that slot machine and hit that slot machine and hit gold, you're going to win. +What happened in Bandito is one of the best methods to leverage our newsroom to get our users to reach them and click them in areas that they want to be reached. And Bandito, which basically stands for the name was taken from bandit, like a one-armed bandit in a slot machine meaning when you pull that slot machine and hit that slot machine and hit gold, you're going to win. But you need to take a bunch of different risks and factors in order to find out what that rotation is to win. -So Bandito was built within our content management system and the idea is that when editors create content, they have the option to create, like, a ton of different headlines and different images—sorry. And be able to double down on what's working best without them having to worry about it. +So Bandito was built within our content management system and the idea is that when editors create content, they have the option to create, like, a ton of different headlines and different images—sorry. And be able to double down on what's working best without them having to worry about it. -So in the newsroom as much as in the ad product side, there's been a ton of difficulty to get our editors to think about technology. They're journalists, they just want to create content, they're not as focused as much on it. So we have to build the tools to do this. So what we did was we saw a huge success in the editorial of our content. +So in the newsroom as much as in the ad product side, there's been a ton of difficulty to get our editors to think about technology. They're journalists, they just want to create content, they're not as focused as much on it. So we have to build the tools to do this. So what we did was we saw a huge success in the editorial of our content. -So we said, hey, let's leverage this Bandito-type algorithm when it comes to not just our content but our display ads as well. And what we do is work with clients and take their measures. And what we've done is a lot of them have 300 by 250 ad tags, very standard placements, but they want to be content or consuming our content and reach our users. If you put it simply, a lot of our—or all of our consumers coming to all of our publishing because the want to read our content. Advertisers are advertising with us because they want to read our content. +So we said, hey, let's leverage this Bandito-type algorithm when it comes to not just our content but our display ads as well. And what we do is work with clients and take their measures. And what we've done is a lot of them have 300 by 250 ad tags, very standard placements, but they want to be content or consuming our content and reach our users. If you put it simply, a lot of our—or all of our consumers coming to all of our publishing because the want to read our content. Advertisers are advertising with us because they want to read our content. -So this really brings in two different levels. One is with all standard display-type units, we leverage the Bandito editorial news tool to make a 300 by 250 banner and a 300 by 600 pulling in relative content based on what that user is interested in on the page. +So this really brings in two different levels. One is with all standard display-type units, we leverage the Bandito editorial news tool to make a 300 by 250 banner and a 300 by 600 pulling in relative content based on what that user is interested in on the page. -And what we've seen is our users are actually engaging more with our ads on our site because what used to be a 300 by 250 ad, which now is bringing in relative content beneath it for the user, the consumer is associated that with something, like, you know, the most popular content or related content. So they're bringing a value and a different utility. And that comes through what we're learning here. +And what we've seen is our users are actually engaging more with our ads on our site because what used to be a 300 by 250 ad, which now is bringing in relative content beneath it for the user, the consumer is associated that with something, like, you know, the most popular content or related content. So they're bringing a value and a different utility. And that comes through what we're learning here. So bridging these gaps, we're finding that leveraging Bandito and AD testing on headlines and ads are both bringing higher engagement rates to our content as well as engagement to our clients as well. -Oh, and then I'll go quickly again. Did you want to say anything? +Oh, and then I'll go quickly again. Did you want to say anything? -PARTICIPANT: I mean the idea as we're going through these is just let's—these are sort of to seat us for the next half of the session, which will be to pick up some of these ideas to implement on our own. You take this one, I'll take the next. +PARTICIPANT: I mean the idea as we're going through these is just let's—these are sort of to seat us for the next half of the session, which will be to pick up some of these ideas to implement on our own. You take this one, I'll take the next. -PARTICIPANT: So I think another huge issue besides working across our newsrooms and really being able to say okay. How do we work together to build better experiences on the revenue and moderation side is having to build on top of all of these old stacks. You know, one being double-click. Is anyone from double-click or Google in here? Okay. So we can talk freely. We can stay on the record. It's fine. +PARTICIPANT: So I think another huge issue besides working across our newsrooms and really being able to say okay. How do we work together to build better experiences on the revenue and moderation side is having to build on top of all of these old stacks. You know, one being double-click. Is anyone from double-click or Google in here? Okay. So we can talk freely. We can stay on the record. It's fine. -So building on top of legacy tools. We're in a space right now where our clients are very comfortable with what they're getting. You know, they want viewability, you know? They want high engagement rates, they want to reach certain users. They have their creative. So anyone who has worked with the client knows maybe not so much in the native world but on the owner side, they'll deliver us creative that has 50 different ad qualities all verifying all of the sudden scripts that are measuring all the things that are valuable to them. But with that becomes very heavy ads, poor user experience, but it's hard for us to go back and say, hey, if you change this or optimize this, that would be great, and they would say, no, we're running somewhere else. And then you're at risk. +So building on top of legacy tools. We're in a space right now where our clients are very comfortable with what they're getting. You know, they want viewability, you know? They want high engagement rates, they want to reach certain users. They have their creative. So anyone who has worked with the client knows maybe not so much in the native world but on the owner side, they'll deliver us creative that has 50 different ad qualities all verifying all of the sudden scripts that are measuring all the things that are valuable to them. But with that becomes very heavy ads, poor user experience, but it's hard for us to go back and say, hey, if you change this or optimize this, that would be great, and they would say, no, we're running somewhere else. And then you're at risk. So we had to work within the confines of what's already existing out there to help build and optimize tools that are even outside our control. -So one example that we've done, and I encourage everyone to check it out. Is we built a progressive Web app through Google. So we went all in on Google when it first came out, which allows anyone in search to search our content and same with Facebook. +So one example that we've done, and I encourage everyone to check it out. Is we built a progressive Web app through Google. So we went all in on Google when it first came out, which allows anyone in search to search our content and same with Facebook. -But what we recognized early on, and this was, again, in collaboration with the newsroom and the advertising side. Is that no one fixed it for ads. So I mentioned it earlier. Amp was great. For the two months that amp was out, you could read a whole article without seeing one ad. So we weren't getting paid, there were issues on the advertising side, but it wasn't addressed. And I've had frequent conversations where with other publishers where it's, like, well, this is an issue, but it's Google's to fix, you know? Or Facebook's to fix. But at that point we're losing money. And if we're becoming a distributed world more and more, and you want to on the opt in because we want to be where the users are and we're not fixing these problems injunction that, in conjunction with. It's our dot-com, we launched progressive Web app, so go to Washingtonpost.com/PWA, and it's live right now if you want to check it out. And we worked editorially with Google to build our progressive Web +But what we recognized early on, and this was, again, in collaboration with the newsroom and the advertising side. Is that no one fixed it for ads. So I mentioned it earlier. Amp was great. For the two months that amp was out, you could read a whole article without seeing one ad. So we weren't getting paid, there were issues on the advertising side, but it wasn't addressed. And I've had frequent conversations where with other publishers where it's, like, well, this is an issue, but it's Google's to fix, you know? Or Facebook's to fix. But at that point we're losing money. And if we're becoming a distributed world more and more, and you want to on the opt in because we want to be where the users are and we're not fixing these problems injunction that, in conjunction with. It's our dot-com, we launched progressive Web app, so go to Washingtonpost.com/PWA, and it's live right now if you want to check it out. And we worked editorially with Google to build our progressive Web -app and what does that really mean? It's the taking of amp and also PWA, which is a new tool to be able to build a new Washington Post. And you have to be secure to do it, and it was a beta program. If you go to our site, our site loads in 80 milliseconds, and amp loads at 400 milliseconds. So that's great and the editorial team gets excited, but we can't move everything over there unless we can make money off of it. And ads load in four, eight, sometimes 15 seconds, and you make content faster, that's going to feel like 40, 50 seconds. So we were building on top of legacy tools. +app and what does that really mean? It's the taking of amp and also PWA, which is a new tool to be able to build a new Washington Post. And you have to be secure to do it, and it was a beta program. If you go to our site, our site loads in 80 milliseconds, and amp loads at 400 milliseconds. So that's great and the editorial team gets excited, but we can't move everything over there unless we can make money off of it. And ads load in four, eight, sometimes 15 seconds, and you make content faster, that's going to feel like 40, 50 seconds. So we were building on top of legacy tools. -And what we did within the PWA environment, we one pushed Google. So the one amazing thing you can do is fight the monetization methods, if your team is progressive, you can go to Google and all the partners that you're working with on both sides of the coin and say, look, we're moving this way, and we need you to push and go this way, otherwise we're not going to be able to work with you. There's enough competition out there where we're all feared. +And what we did within the PWA environment, we one pushed Google. So the one amazing thing you can do is fight the monetization methods, if your team is progressive, you can go to Google and all the partners that you're working with on both sides of the coin and say, look, we're moving this way, and we need you to push and go this way, otherwise we're not going to be able to work with you. There's enough competition out there where we're all feared. But what we've done as well is we've worked with Google, and we basically built on top of double-click to satisfy the needs of our company and does is going to be open source as well. -But we built a development within the ad server which basically allows us to load a script, load the initial ad script immediately as the page loads so that two to three seconds that used to go through the hierarchy, we're able to eliminate that within what we call our PWA server, but it's on top of double-click, so it's not new, not proprietary. With Google, they'll load ads and lazy loading and all of the benefits of that but also other things where you can predict when an ad's going to come into view, and you can load it and so on. +But we built a development within the ad server which basically allows us to load a script, load the initial ad script immediately as the page loads so that two to three seconds that used to go through the hierarchy, we're able to eliminate that within what we call our PWA server, but it's on top of double-click, so it's not new, not proprietary. With Google, they'll load ads and lazy loading and all of the benefits of that but also other things where you can predict when an ad's going to come into view, and you can load it and so on. And what we've been able to do very early on is cut our ad load times in half, we're going to Google and building ad around it and Google wants to bring that to everyone else. -So what's interesting is we found when you dedicate time to do these things, you have time to be flexible, this space and our advertisers are excited about it, and we can have those conversations. And there was a great conversation last week when the product came out because they're basically saying our clients need to be creative a certain way. There needs to be a certain set of scripts on that creative and so on. +So what's interesting is we found when you dedicate time to do these things, you have time to be flexible, this space and our advertisers are excited about it, and we can have those conversations. And there was a great conversation last week when the product came out because they're basically saying our clients need to be creative a certain way. There needs to be a certain set of scripts on that creative and so on. -So I wouldn't—I guess the main thing I want to get just out of this example is one we built on top of it, and I'll share with you. But two you shouldn't be kind of slowing down or feeling discouraged because of what's already out there. There's companies that are already competing with these, and there is the opportunity to push and build on top of it. You may be able to celebrate for a minute before Google says, oh, that's cool and take it. But then at least we're all helping each other, you know? The one great thing about that and everyone has their own feelings is that before publishers used to compete and work and keep our tech within our own and not want to share it, now what I think has happened is we've had conversations like happened here but also happening around, like, back at home where I'm sitting down with the New York Times now and other publishers in the space and say, well, how can we make everything better because this is our news source and so on. +So I wouldn't—I guess the main thing I want to get just out of this example is one we built on top of it, and I'll share with you. But two you shouldn't be kind of slowing down or feeling discouraged because of what's already out there. There's companies that are already competing with these, and there is the opportunity to push and build on top of it. You may be able to celebrate for a minute before Google says, oh, that's cool and take it. But then at least we're all helping each other, you know? The one great thing about that and everyone has their own feelings is that before publishers used to compete and work and keep our tech within our own and not want to share it, now what I think has happened is we've had conversations like happened here but also happening around, like, back at home where I'm sitting down with the New York Times now and other publishers in the space and say, well, how can we make everything better because this is our news source and so on. -PARTICIPANT: I'm going to quickly as well—so these are some things that have already happened as we're going into the second half, I want you to think about what sort of things we can build. If you go to the session page, we do have already a document up with a whole bunch of links and resources and some nice, blank pages. +PARTICIPANT: I'm going to quickly as well—so these are some things that have already happened as we're going into the second half, I want you to think about what sort of things we can build. If you go to the session page, we do have already a document up with a whole bunch of links and resources and some nice, blank pages. -So one of the ideas that we wanted to talk about if you are lacking in ideas to com complement and get to this session is exclusions and tags. When you tag something for SEO reasons, within your media, within your journalism, those may be great for helping the readers find your stuff. But sometimes you may end up with the wrong ads next to it. +So one of the ideas that we wanted to talk about if you are lacking in ideas to com complement and get to this session is exclusions and tags. When you tag something for SEO reasons, within your media, within your journalism, those may be great for helping the readers find your stuff. But sometimes you may end up with the wrong ads next to it. -So ideas that will allow us to send specific tags to advertisements as opposed to just general ones. And sometimes tabs that may not be readers but for advertisements. +So ideas that will allow us to send specific tags to advertisements as opposed to just general ones. And sometimes tabs that may not be readers but for advertisements. That is a way to coordinate and think about our taxonomies alongside the sales department. -Another thing we can look at is how do we reach out to our users? They are having bad experiences. If you've ever been on one of your sites mailboxes that deal with users sending feedback, you've probably heard about probably in detail. So is there an opportunity to build a tool that makes reporting bad ads easier? All of us are probably running on very similar advertising platforms. So if we can build a tool that can do this, it helps us all. +Another thing we can look at is how do we reach out to our users? They are having bad experiences. If you've ever been on one of your sites mailboxes that deal with users sending feedback, you've probably heard about probably in detail. So is there an opportunity to build a tool that makes reporting bad ads easier? All of us are probably running on very similar advertising platforms. So if we can build a tool that can do this, it helps us all. And there's opportunities as well to talk about what ads use that we don't want them to use. -So a great example of that is how many of you in your current sites are using the JavaScript document.write. We've got one. Two? +So a great example of that is how many of you in your current sites are using the JavaScript document.write. We've got one. Two? PARTICIPANT: Probably. -PARTICIPANT: Probably. Well, don't. But it's understandable. That said, after you've used it, you don't want advertisements to use it. One of the major problems in advertisements is they will hijack gauges using document.write. So can we override that function on our pages with a very simple line of JavaScript? We totally can. +PARTICIPANT: Probably. Well, don't. But it's understandable. That said, after you've used it, you don't want advertisements to use it. One of the major problems in advertisements is they will hijack gauges using document.write. So can we override that function on our pages with a very simple line of JavaScript? We totally can. So this is an opportunity to talk about how ads create bad experiences technically and finally to intercept those options and disable. -And if we come up with a common set of scripts there, that's another place all of us can use it. I know that I personally have been—had my browser hijacked on a many number of sites. +And if we come up with a common set of scripts there, that's another place all of us can use it. I know that I personally have been—had my browser hijacked on a many number of sites. So the last thing is talk about the questions, the problems that we're solving in building this technology. -When you break it down, your average user who comes to your average news website is earning for your site an ad revenue $6 a month. This is not a huge number. It's not an amazingly large obstacle to overcome. If we're building new technology that comes out of the newsroom, that's the value that we solve for to break even on coming away from the old stuff. +When you break it down, your average user who comes to your average news website is earning for your site an ad revenue $6 a month. This is not a huge number. It's not an amazingly large obstacle to overcome. If we're building new technology that comes out of the newsroom, that's the value that we solve for to break even on coming away from the old stuff. -So as we're thinking about this, sometimes you look at the advertisement situation on your site, if you've ever been to Salon.com, you know we have a lot of advertising, and it seems overwhelming. But it doesn't have to be. What we're solving for, those numbers per user, the value that we have to ask of our readers in order to keep ourselves in business is not that large when it comes right down to it. +So as we're thinking about this, sometimes you look at the advertisement situation on your site, if you've ever been to Salon.com, you know we have a lot of advertising, and it seems overwhelming. But it doesn't have to be. What we're solving for, those numbers per user, the value that we have to ask of our readers in order to keep ourselves in business is not that large when it comes right down to it. So those are the things that we are aiming to solve for. -Before we break out into hopefully some ideas on programs we develop in code, I know a lot of you are working in newsrooms, working with journalists. I work a lot with ad tech, you work in ad ops. This is your opportunity if you have any questions about ad tech to ask people who work with it pretty much every day. +Before we break out into hopefully some ideas on programs we develop in code, I know a lot of you are working in newsrooms, working with journalists. I work a lot with ad tech, you work in ad ops. This is your opportunity if you have any questions about ad tech to ask people who work with it pretty much every day. -So is there any questions before we go into the next session? The next part of this session rather. Go for it. +So is there any questions before we go into the next session? The next part of this session rather. Go for it. -PARTICIPANT: Can you talk a little bit about how you monitor and track, like, ad load times? It's one of the things my team is having a bit of trouble with is having reliable, consistent data. +PARTICIPANT: Can you talk a little bit about how you monitor and track, like, ad load times? It's one of the things my team is having a bit of trouble with is having reliable, consistent data. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Yeah, so I can speak to that directly. We've been working a lot on that. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Yeah, so I can speak to that directly. We've been working a lot on that. -So one is I think that a big struggle for really measuring the ads and their speed and latency and we say should we use this header? Should we use this integration and you pull it back, you lose 50 grand in one day and your boss freaks out. And you're, like, I don't want to take that risk. +So one is I think that a big struggle for really measuring the ads and their speed and latency and we say should we use this header? Should we use this integration and you pull it back, you lose 50 grand in one day and your boss freaks out. And you're, like, I don't want to take that risk. -The things that you can control and you can't control. So the things that we can control are initial load time and building products on a better experience post click. So, for example, we launch something called fuse, which we dubbed as the Facebook instant for ad advertising. So once that ad loads, if someone spends at a certain level, when they click the level, we already have the post cache loaded, it doesn't load a creative URL, which was a huge problem. +The things that you can control and you can't control. So the things that we can control are initial load time and building products on a better experience post click. So, for example, we launch something called fuse, which we dubbed as the Facebook instant for ad advertising. So once that ad loads, if someone spends at a certain level, when they click the level, we already have the post cache loaded, it doesn't load a creative URL, which was a huge problem. We can control with Google's help of course because we're on double-click, but double-click is obviously the most common one, we can control initial load a bit by working through the hierarchy of our load times but also building those elements on talk, and I'll talk to you and show you after what we did so that you can take that back. -But there's things we can't control. So you can measure initial load, we do use internal monitors, we also use Ph.D. tests and a few others to kind of see that issue. But the thing we can't control, which is the biggest problem with the advertising industry at large is what the clients are providing to us. +But there's things we can't control. So you can measure initial load, we do use internal monitors, we also use Ph.D. tests and a few others to kind of see that issue. But the thing we can't control, which is the biggest problem with the advertising industry at large is what the clients are providing to us. -So I was talking to someone earlier where okay. That's great that Google amp has ad requirements so tha antesser wants to advertise, they're not putting all of that on double-click. So when your clients are buying on your sites, we're supposed to be measuring and regulating it. But even those regulations are high, and we can't control what's going through that, special problematic and so on. +So I was talking to someone earlier where okay. That's great that Google amp has ad requirements so tha antesser wants to advertise, they're not putting all of that on double-click. So when your clients are buying on your sites, we're supposed to be measuring and regulating it. But even those regulations are high, and we can't control what's going through that, special problematic and so on. -So I would say focus on what you can work on control. We found success on that and cut down on 50% of our ad load times. It's good to have a Dev environment and testing environment to do that. It's hard to do that on a live site. I would measure that so that function those preinitial load times because our 200 by 350 is loading at 1.4 second with header bidders in there. Without header bidders, it would be 400 milliseconds. You can see who the violator and speak to them about that. But if you do have a test, that's the main indicator because it would be hard to see which variables are affecting it on your current site. +So I would say focus on what you can work on control. We found success on that and cut down on 50% of our ad load times. It's good to have a Dev environment and testing environment to do that. It's hard to do that on a live site. I would measure that so that function those preinitial load times because our 200 by 350 is loading at 1.4 second with header bidders in there. Without header bidders, it would be 400 milliseconds. You can see who the violator and speak to them about that. But if you do have a test, that's the main indicator because it would be hard to see which variables are affecting it on your current site. -PARTICIPANT: And AV testing in particular so that you can test a small section of your audience and see their response. You can look at using tools like Chromes, developer tools to black box particular scripts and see how that affects your site. +PARTICIPANT: And AV testing in particular so that you can test a small section of your audience and see their response. You can look at using tools like Chromes, developer tools to black box particular scripts and see how that affects your site. -When we know about particular scripts that we're running in our partner advertising firms that we're concerned they are the cause of a delay, we can use tools to disable a particular script and see how that changes our site. And of course there's the ability to ad some JavaScript hooks around various files loading and metrics being sent out while you know what they are. +When we know about particular scripts that we're running in our partner advertising firms that we're concerned they are the cause of a delay, we can use tools to disable a particular script and see how that changes our site. And of course there's the ability to ad some JavaScript hooks around various files loading and metrics being sent out while you know what they are. -Of course you don't always know what they are. And there's opportunities DFP has a sandbox mode if you're using DFP. And so that can also allow you to test some safer versions of the ads and perhaps provide some push back. +Of course you don't always know what they are. And there's opportunities DFP has a sandbox mode if you're using DFP. And so that can also allow you to test some safer versions of the ads and perhaps provide some push back. -More questions going around the room. We've got one. +More questions going around the room. We've got one. -PARTICIPANT: So I'm in a smallish newsroom, and we don't have much expertise right now, we're looking to hire what sort of skills do we look for in ad ops developer, engineer as compared to editorial or platform person? And how does it overlap with performance and security experts? +PARTICIPANT: So I'm in a smallish newsroom, and we don't have much expertise right now, we're looking to hire what sort of skills do we look for in ad ops developer, engineer as compared to editorial or platform person? And how does it overlap with performance and security experts? -PARTICIPANT: Yeah, so there's a couple of things. I mean one I think he's perfect to ask because he doesn't even work in ad tech, but he's been forced to because they're small; right? So that's a great example. You need him. So if he's looking. But, yeah, I mean I think it really depends. I think the question before raises something that's extremely important that during the breakout session, we should focus on which the way it works now, it's wrong—it's not working; right? And we're identifying all the ways current advertising and ad logistics do not work, but we're still trying to work within the confines of what it is because that's how our clients get there. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah, so there's a couple of things. I mean one I think he's perfect to ask because he doesn't even work in ad tech, but he's been forced to because they're small; right? So that's a great example. You need him. So if he's looking. But, yeah, I mean I think it really depends. I think the question before raises something that's extremely important that during the breakout session, we should focus on which the way it works now, it's wrong—it's not working; right? And we're identifying all the ways current advertising and ad logistics do not work, but we're still trying to work within the confines of what it is because that's how our clients get there. -So the main thing we have to do is come up with new ideas and Ren rich the ideas to drive that revenue, but we need to do that together. Publishers didn't always work together with this. At least when we're looking for talent within the ad ops space, you want people who are fluent in a lot of products, a lot of ad ops products are proprietary, so you want someone who's fluent in double-click, you want someone who's fluent in other exchanges and program-type bidders that if you're smaller is how you're going to make a lot of your money working with the ad Xs and then others out there. There's great tools like prebit.JS that helps you with those load times and stuff like that. But that's a big company like Washington Post what we look with someone in those expertise of the relationships someone working with those. Now, you -- +So the main thing we have to do is come up with new ideas and Ren rich the ideas to drive that revenue, but we need to do that together. Publishers didn't always work together with this. At least when we're looking for talent within the ad ops space, you want people who are fluent in a lot of products, a lot of ad ops products are proprietary, so you want someone who's fluent in double-click, you want someone who's fluent in other exchanges and program-type bidders that if you're smaller is how you're going to make a lot of your money working with the ad Xs and then others out there. There's great tools like prebit.JS that helps you with those load times and stuff like that. But that's a big company like Washington Post what we look with someone in those expertise of the relationships someone working with those. Now, you -- -PARTICIPANT: I mean I would say also you want someone who's a partner who understands the front-end well enough to optimize for what your needs are. And just, like, a quick short cut if your hire can explain header bidding to you, you've probably got a solid person because that is not a large pool. +PARTICIPANT: I mean I would say also you want someone who's a partner who understands the front-end well enough to optimize for what your needs are. And just, like, a quick short cut if your hire can explain header bidding to you, you've probably got a solid person because that is not a large pool. Any other questions? -PARTICIPANT: I'm just curious. So I might have missed this. But what are you doing differently on your PWA site? +PARTICIPANT: I'm just curious. So I might have missed this. But what are you doing differently on your PWA site? -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. So basically when we were building amp, you know, we found a lot of the caching functionalities that we were able to use, we could take off our site. So the Washington Post when Bezos bought the company three years ago, he wanted the site to load in one second. I've only been there ten months. But for the past three years, we have a meeting with him, and we tell him how much it loads, and it's always over one second, and he's just dissatisfied. So the whole goal has always been how do we make things faster? And advertising has been the biggest restriction. And what PWA really came out of was we saw the value in amp, and we started asking the question, well, why can't we just do that on our own? And to go back to what I said earlier, it's hard to pull back. Our ad is pretty fast and has tons of celebrations with the video players, so there's a ton of variables within there. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. So basically when we were building amp, you know, we found a lot of the caching functionalities that we were able to use, we could take off our site. So the Washington Post when Bezos bought the company three years ago, he wanted the site to load in one second. I've only been there ten months. But for the past three years, we have a meeting with him, and we tell him how much it loads, and it's always over one second, and he's just dissatisfied. So the whole goal has always been how do we make things faster? And advertising has been the biggest restriction. And what PWA really came out of was we saw the value in amp, and we started asking the question, well, why can't we just do that on our own? And to go back to what I said earlier, it's hard to pull back. Our ad is pretty fast and has tons of celebrations with the video players, so there's a ton of variables within there. -But we knew that we weren't able to make that faster than we've already made that. So PWA is—and I encourage anyone who is interested to talk to your Google partner about it. But what it enabled us to do is one we were a secure site. So I don't know how many of you are HTTPS. Great. So we went secure last year, and that opened a ton of opportunities for us, besides the obvious ones of not being hijacked. And what that did is through the app integration there is Google had a testing thing called PWA. So what it means is progressive Web app, it's on the URL, but it behaves like an app. So the beauty of is it's pulling in all the content, the hierarchy it will pull the text first and then the titles, and then the images. So if we lose Internet or you don't have service, you can still read content because ed. So it behaves like an app, but it's on the Web I'm going to do that add something. I think there are a number of smaller publications here that may not +But we knew that we weren't able to make that faster than we've already made that. So PWA is—and I encourage anyone who is interested to talk to your Google partner about it. But what it enabled us to do is one we were a secure site. So I don't know how many of you are HTTPS. Great. So we went secure last year, and that opened a ton of opportunities for us, besides the obvious ones of not being hijacked. And what that did is through the app integration there is Google had a testing thing called PWA. So what it means is progressive Web app, it's on the URL, but it behaves like an app. So the beauty of is it's pulling in all the content, the hierarchy it will pull the text first and then the titles, and then the images. So if we lose Internet or you don't have service, you can still read content because ed. So it behaves like an app, but it's on the Web I'm going to do that add something. I think there are a number of smaller publications here that may not -have as good of a relationship with Google. Also along those lines, like, the stuff Google does for PWA and amp involves a lot of progressive loading techniques. And that's an option that you can do without having to go to Google. React is a library that's particularly good at it. The idea is to understand your page and we're talking about the metrics before. To understand what are the most important parts of your page to the readers, and what is the most important parts of the page to continue to stay in business, and figure out a way to optimize how to serve those first. And then you can use JavaScript in the case of something like React to essentially hold on loading pieces of your page. +have as good of a relationship with Google. Also along those lines, like, the stuff Google does for PWA and amp involves a lot of progressive loading techniques. And that's an option that you can do without having to go to Google. React is a library that's particularly good at it. The idea is to understand your page and we're talking about the metrics before. To understand what are the most important parts of your page to the readers, and what is the most important parts of the page to continue to stay in business, and figure out a way to optimize how to serve those first. And then you can use JavaScript in the case of something like React to essentially hold on loading pieces of your page. -Amp is open source. I'm not as big of amp as they are at Washington Post, but that said, open code, it's out there, it's useful, maybe it's useful to you. There are a number of others out there if you Google search progressive Web design out there as well. And we lost the thing. +Amp is open source. I'm not as big of amp as they are at Washington Post, but that said, open code, it's out there, it's useful, maybe it's useful to you. There are a number of others out there if you Google search progressive Web design out there as well. And we lost the thing. -I don't want to cut anyone off, but I do want to give us some time to think about projects. And what we can start building. +I don't want to cut anyone off, but I do want to give us some time to think about projects. And what we can start building. -So this is a link if you're not already there to the ether pad for this session where we can type in projects. In addition, everyone should have paper and pen and some little sticky note-type things on their desks. +So this is a link if you're not already there to the ether pad for this session where we can type in projects. In addition, everyone should have paper and pen and some little sticky note-type things on their desks. -Basically what I'm hoping we can talk about is there's some examples in there, and we've gone over some stuff. Is if you are going to come out of this session with something beyond this ether pad and the wonderful transcript that's going on here, the thing we want to take back is some projects you can bring back to your newsroom, and you can start development on them, and you can reach out to your sales team with and start a collaboration. And not only that, but also to start a collaboration with each other. +Basically what I'm hoping we can talk about is there's some examples in there, and we've gone over some stuff. Is if you are going to come out of this session with something beyond this ether pad and the wonderful transcript that's going on here, the thing we want to take back is some projects you can bring back to your newsroom, and you can start development on them, and you can reach out to your sales team with and start a collaboration. And not only that, but also to start a collaboration with each other. -Everybody is on the ether pad now hopefully. I would encourage you to at the end of it add Twitter information, your GitHub, any of that. But also as we come out of this, to think about whatever the tool that you're going to be building if you're going to be building a tool or workflow or a way that you can keep those communication channels open between you and your sales team to put that in the open. At this point, the—what is it? The percent of ads buy that goes to Google and Facebook? 75%. 75% of ad buys go to Google and Facebook. We are all in this together as news organizations. Perhaps not by choice, but definitely because we need to be. +Everybody is on the ether pad now hopefully. I would encourage you to at the end of it add Twitter information, your GitHub, any of that. But also as we come out of this, to think about whatever the tool that you're going to be building if you're going to be building a tool or workflow or a way that you can keep those communication channels open between you and your sales team to put that in the open. At this point, the—what is it? The percent of ads buy that goes to Google and Facebook? 75%. 75% of ad buys go to Google and Facebook. We are all in this together as news organizations. Perhaps not by choice, but definitely because we need to be. If as news organizations, we need to survive, we need to think about new ways of doing things, which is this is about, and we need to cooperate, which is what SRCCON is about but also hopefully what comes out of this. -So what I would like you to do is maybe join the smaller tables together if you're, like, two people and start thinking about some ideas. You don't have to start writing code right now. But please write, like, maybe an outline of what you think it should do. We'll bring it up here at the end and have some discussions, and let's just break out. +So what I would like you to do is maybe join the smaller tables together if you're, like, two people and start thinking about some ideas. You don't have to start writing code right now. But please write, like, maybe an outline of what you think it should do. We'll bring it up here at the end and have some discussions, and let's just break out. -I will be here and walking, and you will be as well. If you have any questions, or would like some feedback on a idea. The slide show, did we put it in the thing? The ether pad? We'll put the slide show in the ether pad. +I will be here and walking, and you will be as well. If you have any questions, or would like some feedback on a idea. The slide show, did we put it in the thing? The ether pad? We'll put the slide show in the ether pad. -PARTICIPANT: Yes. It's in there. +PARTICIPANT: Yes. It's in there. -PARTICIPANT: It's in there? So that the slide ideas are there. And then let's talk. Let's think about some ideas that we can break out together. Metrics for your newsrooms. Ways to talk to sales. +PARTICIPANT: It's in there? So that the slide ideas are there. And then let's talk. Let's think about some ideas that we can break out together. Metrics for your newsrooms. Ways to talk to sales. -PARTICIPANT: Just a little relating plug. I work at night foundation, and I love this idea of coming up with collaborative ideas because it's looking to something we're also wanting to support. And Friday we're having a lunchtime discussion around newsroom technology. Exactly this type of thing. So I invite you all to come to Friday lunch. And if you're interested, let me know, and I would love to stay in touch with you. +PARTICIPANT: Just a little relating plug. I work at night foundation, and I love this idea of coming up with collaborative ideas because it's looking to something we're also wanting to support. And Friday we're having a lunchtime discussion around newsroom technology. Exactly this type of thing. So I invite you all to come to Friday lunch. And if you're interested, let me know, and I would love to stay in touch with you. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I think what we need actually is basically a corral project for ad tech. We need to ing on bringing newsroom values to sales and using those to make more profit. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I think what we need actually is basically a corral project for ad tech. We need to ing on bringing newsroom values to sales and using those to make more profit. -So, yeah, we've got the time. Let's talk to each other in groups hopefully. +So, yeah, we've got the time. Let's talk to each other in groups hopefully. [Group discussions] -PARTICIPANT: Okay. There are great discussions going on, and I hate to interrupt them, but we've got five minutes left, and I would like to hear from your tables what sort of stuff you've come up with. I highly encourage you to continue these conversations afterwards. We are going to lunch, which means you've got some time. You don't have to rush to the next session. So please feel free to stay here and continue this discussion. But first, let's just go to each table and get some—some stuff that was on top of mind. So let's start with this table here. +PARTICIPANT: Okay. There are great discussions going on, and I hate to interrupt them, but we've got five minutes left, and I would like to hear from your tables what sort of stuff you've come up with. I highly encourage you to continue these conversations afterwards. We are going to lunch, which means you've got some time. You don't have to rush to the next session. So please feel free to stay here and continue this discussion. But first, let's just go to each table and get some—some stuff that was on top of mind. So let's start with this table here. PARTICIPANT: One thing -- -PARTICIPANT: If everyone could just pause for a moment. I know it's very exciting for safety journalism. But I invite you all to hear from each other. +PARTICIPANT: If everyone could just pause for a moment. I know it's very exciting for safety journalism. But I invite you all to hear from each other. -PARTICIPANT: So one thing we talked about is there's been some issues with advertisers backing out after they have some content of some sort. So at the times we have something called tragedy that's super simple next to content or. It's part of essentially open data that goes through all of the systems, works on the Web, works everywhere. And so we have not had those issues. The only issue in fighting between advertising is what if something were a tragedy were to happen? But usually it happens well. +PARTICIPANT: So one thing we talked about is there's been some issues with advertisers backing out after they have some content of some sort. So at the times we have something called tragedy that's super simple next to content or. It's part of essentially open data that goes through all of the systems, works on the Web, works everywhere. And so we have not had those issues. The only issue in fighting between advertising is what if something were a tragedy were to happen? But usually it happens well. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I would say on top of that, we—when I was at the Huffington post, like, four or five years ago, we would do the exclusion, inclusion tagging. And what was amazing is that the editors were okay with our project managers going into the CMS and these tags that were at tags, and they weren't on the front-end at all. So that sort of collaboration worked. We also tried to, like, build our own server within one of our applications where that was actually really hard to build. So that was one good thing with the double-click relationship is that they aren't thinking about those things, even though there's a ways to go there being able to connect with those and having communication is key. That's a good one. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I would say on top of that, we—when I was at the Huffington post, like, four or five years ago, we would do the exclusion, inclusion tagging. And what was amazing is that the editors were okay with our project managers going into the CMS and these tags that were at tags, and they weren't on the front-end at all. So that sort of collaboration worked. We also tried to, like, build our own server within one of our applications where that was actually really hard to build. So that was one good thing with the double-click relationship is that they aren't thinking about those things, even though there's a ways to go there being able to connect with those and having communication is key. That's a good one. -PARTICIPANT: Actually brings us—is that—good? Okay. Moving on. I know one of the ideas over discussed at this table. Would you also like to talk about things you talked about? Shuttering has we talked about two main ideas, one of which was the fact there's no lightweight sort of publisher focus ad server, whatever; right? A lot of tools are way overkill a small, niche organization know who you're selling to effective approximately sop what are the tools out there that would help with that? Or should something exist in order to implement that into CMS or whatever your workflow is. +PARTICIPANT: Actually brings us—is that—good? Okay. Moving on. I know one of the ideas over discussed at this table. Would you also like to talk about things you talked about? Shuttering has we talked about two main ideas, one of which was the fact there's no lightweight sort of publisher focus ad server, whatever; right? A lot of tools are way overkill a small, niche organization know who you're selling to effective approximately sop what are the tools out there that would help with that? Or should something exist in order to implement that into CMS or whatever your workflow is. -And the other thing we talked about is essentially ad validators for—so that you can—if you've got work with or you can say, hey, does this ad actually meet the criteria? Is it secure? How fast is it? Like, why are we having to check this on the back end rather than when the ads are actually being ingested into the system or whatever. +And the other thing we talked about is essentially ad validators for—so that you can—if you've got work with or you can say, hey, does this ad actually meet the criteria? Is it secure? How fast is it? Like, why are we having to check this on the back end rather than when the ads are actually being ingested into the system or whatever. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. So smart. I mean when we went through the HTTPS migration, the amount of work that had to be focused on just resetting off our end equals and working with our clients was manual labor. So those kinds of technologies are key. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. So smart. I mean when we went through the HTTPS migration, the amount of work that had to be focused on just resetting off our end equals and working with our clients was manual labor. So those kinds of technologies are key. -PARTICIPANT: Some good ideas. Next table. +PARTICIPANT: Some good ideas. Next table. -PARTICIPANT: Okay. So we talked about a lot of things. But I think last thing that we came down to was there's trying to balance for user experience that keeps people coming back to the site instead of going somewhere else with better user experience. We talked about trying to come up with a tool that lets the particular ad. With the effect that had on the page so that when the CEO is saying you need to get the $7 per click auto play video to go back. And say, well, we'll run these ads, we'll lose half of our audience. +PARTICIPANT: Okay. So we talked about a lot of things. But I think last thing that we came down to was there's trying to balance for user experience that keeps people coming back to the site instead of going somewhere else with better user experience. We talked about trying to come up with a tool that lets the particular ad. With the effect that had on the page so that when the CEO is saying you need to get the $7 per click auto play video to go back. And say, well, we'll run these ads, we'll lose half of our audience. -PARTICIPANT: Right. More from that table? Okay. We're good? Awesome. +PARTICIPANT: Right. More from that table? Okay. We're good? Awesome. -PARTICIPANT: So on our end, our conversation sort of centered on client sophistication. How, you know, when you're working with big corporations or, you know, fancy agencies or whatever, that's one thing. But in my case at least, art sales teams are working with pretty unsophisticated clients who do most of their ad design in-house. And sometimes more often than you would think, they're not very good at it. And so that took off what we see from display ads. We get a lot of terrible display ad period and a lot of narrative period. And that's a problem that I know sort of stretches across the industry that even, like, "The New York Times" has studio specifically to create content for their clients because their clients can't figure out how to do it for themselves. +PARTICIPANT: So on our end, our conversation sort of centered on client sophistication. How, you know, when you're working with big corporations or, you know, fancy agencies or whatever, that's one thing. But in my case at least, art sales teams are working with pretty unsophisticated clients who do most of their ad design in-house. And sometimes more often than you would think, they're not very good at it. And so that took off what we see from display ads. We get a lot of terrible display ad period and a lot of narrative period. And that's a problem that I know sort of stretches across the industry that even, like, "The New York Times" has studio specifically to create content for their clients because their clients can't figure out how to do it for themselves. -So if those types of clients are having problems, then our types of clients in local, regional markets definitely are going to have those problems. So trying to come up with ways of, you know, building tools that might be able to mediate that problem, you know, where clients can come in and potentially, you know, put in the key words, put in the information that they want to convey to their, you know, to the visitor and, you know, suggesting, like, this is what a good ad might look like; right? These are the key words that you have to focus on and stuff like that. +So if those types of clients are having problems, then our types of clients in local, regional markets definitely are going to have those problems. So trying to come up with ways of, you know, building tools that might be able to mediate that problem, you know, where clients can come in and potentially, you know, put in the key words, put in the information that they want to convey to their, you know, to the visitor and, you know, suggesting, like, this is what a good ad might look like; right? These are the key words that you have to focus on and stuff like that. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And I think that's a great thing also it's something that can be sold as an addition. Like a design fee for an ad. An optimization fee. And local is an opportunity in that there's an entirely different set of requirements that can be coiled into building native ads for specific local use cases that come around like social media, campaigns, we talked about classified some of these tables, all those types of things are aspects that can be pulled in specifically for local advertisers. A different use case than national. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And I think that's a great thing also it's something that can be sold as an addition. Like a design fee for an ad. An optimization fee. And local is an opportunity in that there's an entirely different set of requirements that can be coiled into building native ads for specific local use cases that come around like social media, campaigns, we talked about classified some of these tables, all those types of things are aspects that can be pulled in specifically for local advertisers. A different use case than national. -PARTICIPANT: Absolutely. . I think there's a lot of opportunity there. +PARTICIPANT: Absolutely. . I think there's a lot of opportunity there. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And I think something big that we're all kind of speaking about right now that's huge to recognize is that prior—like in the past ten years, we never really sat together and came up with these ideas to solve these problems, again, with suitability we're now forced to on all different levels, and I think you kind of look back at product innovation that we all kind of laugh at because we're, like, this content doesn't make sense. But because publishers make it together to solve that problem, someone else came in and now we all pay for it. And while we laugh at it, we're getting a ton—at least the Washington Post at a larger scale, but others are getting revenue from that. And ad tech, we can wait for others to solve the problem or come up with ideas and make them scalable and not have to wait for someone else. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And I think something big that we're all kind of speaking about right now that's huge to recognize is that prior—like in the past ten years, we never really sat together and came up with these ideas to solve these problems, again, with suitability we're now forced to on all different levels, and I think you kind of look back at product innovation that we all kind of laugh at because we're, like, this content doesn't make sense. But because publishers make it together to solve that problem, someone else came in and now we all pay for it. And while we laugh at it, we're getting a ton—at least the Washington Post at a larger scale, but others are getting revenue from that. And ad tech, we can wait for others to solve the problem or come up with ideas and make them scalable and not have to wait for someone else. -On the flip side, there's all of this talk about how Google and Facebook are going to house our content but they don't know how our editors work or how to sell advertising. So these tools that are built can be placed on Facebook and Google and other programs. Because as much as it seems they're taking everything from us, they don't know exactly everything that we know and everything that we've gone through. So by working together and building these sort of things, we can then come to market and not just ourselves but the industry and also help partners that are hopefully helping us with the distribution and stuff like that as well. +On the flip side, there's all of this talk about how Google and Facebook are going to house our content but they don't know how our editors work or how to sell advertising. So these tools that are built can be placed on Facebook and Google and other programs. Because as much as it seems they're taking everything from us, they don't know exactly everything that we know and everything that we've gone through. So by working together and building these sort of things, we can then come to market and not just ourselves but the industry and also help partners that are hopefully helping us with the distribution and stuff like that as well. -PARTICIPANT: I think an important financial aspect of that is that every third party platform piece of software, tracking code that's between the ad being served and your site is biting into money that will be potentially argue. The more stuff that we're building ourselves, the more the pie that we can grab and the more profitable we will be. +PARTICIPANT: I think an important financial aspect of that is that every third party platform piece of software, tracking code that's between the ad being served and your site is biting into money that will be potentially argue. The more stuff that we're building ourselves, the more the pie that we can grab and the more profitable we will be. When an ad is coming to you with 30 different trackers on it, not only do those trackers slow down your site and make for a terrible user experience, but each of the trackers are getting a little tiny piece of money that could have gone to your budget and your journal and your technology. -So we are out of time. I think there was a lot of great ideas. We already saw that within this room there were things that were so important there was a little bit of overlap. There are ideas in the ether pad, hopefully you put into the ether pad that SRCCON has provided. To remind you, that is on the session paid. Hopefully you all will roll call no matter if you feel comfortable doing so and give us your information so that we can collaborate. +So we are out of time. I think there was a lot of great ideas. We already saw that within this room there were things that were so important there was a little bit of overlap. There are ideas in the ether pad, hopefully you put into the ether pad that SRCCON has provided. To remind you, that is on the session paid. Hopefully you all will roll call no matter if you feel comfortable doing so and give us your information so that we can collaborate. -And in addition, it would be great to hear some of the platforms or ideas come reality, prototypes, all of that sort of stuff. And if that happens, you should bring it out there, talk about it, and Twitter promote it to this group, promote it to GitHub, promote it to all the wonderful things that are happening out there that are being used to talk about the great things we're doing to make good stories. +And in addition, it would be great to hear some of the platforms or ideas come reality, prototypes, all of that sort of stuff. And if that happens, you should bring it out there, talk about it, and Twitter promote it to this group, promote it to GitHub, promote it to all the wonderful things that are happening out there that are being used to talk about the great things we're doing to make good stories. But not as often talking about the things that are happening that are great to keep us in business. -So this has been a great session. I hope a lot of questions were answered. Our contact information is of course on Twitter, on ether pad, all that stuff. If you have additional questions, I'm here for the entire time. You can ask me. Now, you're only here until the end of the day, but we'll be glad to sort of delay our lunches to talk more. And please keep in touch and start building out these things. Take the lessons from the session, bring them back to your newsrooms, talk to your sales rooms, start breaking down some silos. We all need to work together because we're all in it together. +So this has been a great session. I hope a lot of questions were answered. Our contact information is of course on Twitter, on ether pad, all that stuff. If you have additional questions, I'm here for the entire time. You can ask me. Now, you're only here until the end of the day, but we'll be glad to sort of delay our lunches to talk more. And please keep in touch and start building out these things. Take the lessons from the session, bring them back to your newsrooms, talk to your sales rooms, start breaking down some silos. We all need to work together because we're all in it together. -And that is it. Thank you for coming. +And that is it. Thank you for coming. [Applause] - - - - - - - diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-friday-closing.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-friday-closing.md index 7ddd8634..996cab4b 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-friday-closing.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-friday-closing.md @@ -5,68 +5,38 @@ Room: Commons DAN: Hey, everyone. Wow. That's loud. Somehow, there are many people here right now, than at any point. It's unbelievable. Thank you all for sticking around. And thank you—thank you for SRCCON. Thank all of you for being here, you know, and not just physically here, but really, I mean, it's two long days, you know? But two invigorating days. And thank you all for sticking through all of it. You know? We certainly have been to conferences before where the final session is a few people standing with suitcases and everyone else jetted a long time ago. And, um, it's really wonderful to see all of you here, and kind of overwhelming. I think I already told Brian Brennan, that I'm going to totally fucking cry up here, but I'm going to totally cry at some point. So just spoiler alert on that. But really, thank all of you for coming. Thank you to the facilitators who really, without SRCCON, would be nothing. The facilitators put in an incredible amount of work. All of them bought tickets to come here. You know. And so if you were in a good session today, just gives those folks a round of applause. - - [ Applause ] - - Thanks also to Bea, and Danny, and all the staff at the PNCA who have been incredibly welcoming to us, and allow this Motley Crew take over a this session over the last couple of days. They have been an amazing partner and the space that they shared with us, is really, just an incredible space. - - [ Applause ] And thanks to the folks at Crave Catering, who, not only did they do a wonderful job of feeding all of us but by the fact that we didn't eat all of it, we did a pretty wonderful job of feeding other folks. Again, all of the uneaten food went to the Mission downtown to help feed people there yesterday and today. So thanks, Crave for doing that. - - [ Applause ] - - A special shout-out. I think she's downstairs packing up, but to Liz, our amazing coffee person who helped all of you... help all of you brew and drink well over 600 cups of coffee. So thank you, Liz. Thanks to Norma and Stan and Chase, the incredible stenographers. - - [ Applause ] - - And thanks to Paul, the videographer who's been around interviewing some of you, and capturing this event. And thanks to the folks who are not here but are over there, taking care of your kids at Kiddie Corp who have done just an amazing job that for those of us who are parents can be over here, and not worry—that our kids were in good hands. So thanks to them. - - [ Applause ] - - And thanks to the OpenNews staff. Erika and Erin and Ryan are easily the best team I have ever worked with, and Erik, who makes SRCCON happen and it's just—it's an honor to be able to work with them and these things could not have happened with them. I'm just some asshole. It's them that make this incredible. So thank you all. - - [ Cheers and Applause ] - - And thanks to the many red-shirted volunteers who helped all of this run smoothly, especially a shout-out to Sarah, who, literally, like, read our minds over the last couple of days, and, of course, to Cody, our first volunteer and our greatest volunteer, and to Roosevelt, our youngest volunteer. - - [ Cheers and Applause ] - - And most importantly, thanks to, again, to all of you for being open, and sharing, and willing to put in the work these last couple of days. SRCCON is really—is really about all of you, and all of the people that you represent. So thank you all. And I said it yesterday, but it's well worth repeating. Doing something like this, is an incredible amount of people involved but it is also an incredible amount of money involved. But we are grant funded but the cost of OpenNews—or sorry, the cost of SRCCON versus the line item in the OpenNews budget for SRCCON is about 10:1 and it only really happens because of sponsors, so thank you, Condé Nast, our lead sponsor, thank you WordPress VIP, who covered scholarships for people to get here. Thank you to the New York Times to covered the costs of our transcribers physiology thanks to the JFK fellowships who covered child care. Thanks to MailChimp who covered the coffee and tea hack. And Google and news lab. Thanks to the Dow Jones news fund and Vox Media who are news sponsors and to civil comments who's our local sponsor and also our supporting sponsors, Alley Interactive why can and Mapbox and the CUNY school of journalism. I'm not a great salesperson. And it turns out that sponsorships to SRCCON are really easy to sell. And that's because many of these folks are represented here by people who wanted to be here, right, whose the value in this, and, you know, they put real money in to make sure that this happens. So thanks to all of our sponsors for making this happen. - - [ Applause ] - - I said it earlier today but we really do want write-ups of sessions and, also, of the ideas that grow out of your sessions. We want those for source, which is again src.onews.org. And we also want you to be able to talk to this on our community call which happens every other week, the next one is August 11th. You know, source and community calls, is this, happens year round. And year round is what matters. These conversations can't begin and end at SRCCON. And we really don't want them to and we know that you don't want them to. Remember that, within the schedule, every session had an etherpad attached to it, which is a place that notes went into. During the session, before the session, and, potentially, after the session, you're going to be able to pull all those pads up, as you look through the schedule, which will remain up for perpetuity. Next year, it will be at 2016.srccon.org. But it will still be there. Additionally, the job board emergeent and apparently has gotten quite a lot of play. Source has source jobs and we will make an effort to make those jobs reflected on the board that is already on source. And just as a reminder that are already on jobs, that's there. And we know you want jobs because we know you want to fill them. One last thing. Much of how we run SRCCON, we all learned from the Mozilla Festival, which is an amazing participatory festival. It happens in London every year. We run the journalism track at MozFest. The same set of participatory sessions that you experienced here happen there. And the deadline to pitch them is this coming Monday at Mozillafestival.org. We would love to see some of you in London and have seen some of you in London in the past. So please do take a moment and think about proposing in. @@ -75,27 +45,17 @@ All right. News is a unique calling for a lot of reasons, right? But part of wha You know, 2016 couldn't possibly be a bigger reminder... - - [ Laughter ] - - ... of the fact that something can happen at any moment that we didn't know. And that we, as journalists, are the first line in helping people to understand what just happened, even when we're struggling with it ourselves. You know, the—we choose to do this work, you know? We choose a calling that is all about embracing the unknown. And, yet, the industry is full of unknowns, as well, right? How many of you were in a news organization this year that had layoffs or reorg? Just raise your hands really fast? How many—keep your hands up, how many didn't do that had a news org did a strategy rethink, or had a rename from Whatever Publishing, to something else? - - [ Laughter ] - - So we aren't just an industry that covers unknowns; we're an industry that is something of an unknown, too. And that's hard, right? Like, constantly being on the edge of your seat, either because you're worried that a bomb is going to go off in the world, or a bomb is going to go off—a metaphorical bomb is going to go off in your industry is a hard place to be. It is hard, yet we all do it. And we do it because we know that it's important. But we also do it because we know something really important, which is the only way to face the unknown, right, the only way that we can actually go into the future is because we go in together. - - - You know, you know that on your flight back tonight, if something happens in the world, you'll hit the ground and there'll already people that you know you can rely on to have gotten the ball that far before you can pick it up and take it that much further. We all know that we have teams that we can turn to and we know that we all have colleagues that we can turn to. And we know that around this room, there's a community we can turn to. +You know, you know that on your flight back tonight, if something happens in the world, you'll hit the ground and there'll already people that you know you can rely on to have gotten the ball that far before you can pick it up and take it that much further. We all know that we have teams that we can turn to and we know that we all have colleagues that we can turn to. And we know that around this room, there's a community we can turn to. To embrace the future together. You know that the ideas that you're having have people, here in the room, that can help make them happen, right? You know that the problems that you're facing have people here, and the people represented by the people here that can help you overcome them. This community, you know, this community that we've spent two days among, it's here for you. We don't navigate that future alone—or at least we shouldn't, right? We navigate it together. So, this time—so this is it. @@ -109,14 +69,8 @@ So I am gonna say goodbye but that's not the end of this close, right? I'm going So, goodbye. - - [ Applause ] - - [ Cheers and Applause ] - - -Think, talk, and then head out to this beautiful city on a warm night. \ No newline at end of file +Think, talk, and then head out to this beautiful city on a warm night. diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-humane-news-apps.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-humane-news-apps.md index 5afe9f6c..474e0b72 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-humane-news-apps.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-humane-news-apps.md @@ -1,37 +1,37 @@ Building news apps for humanity Session facilitator(s): Thomas Wilburn Day & Time: Thursday, 12-1pm -Room: Innovation Studio +Room: Innovation Studio -So if you're just coming in, if you want to fill in this table here, that would be great OK, hey, I'm going to go ahead and get started. Just real quick and then people can trickle in, but I did want to cover some real simple like preliminary material. This is welcome, by the way, to building news apps for humanity. I'm Thomas Wilburn. I did want to call attention. This is one of the rooms where we are we've got our wonderful transcription taking place, which is fantastic. I wanted to go over a few notes about it. If you are going to talk and this is mostly going to be a discussion-focused session, please introduce yourself, say your name, and it says affiliation. I don't know if you want to network that hard, but you know, go for it, I guess.[laughter]For the transcriber. If you need to go off the record, so if you're going to say something that you're worried about being transcribed and then your boss reading it later as they are browsing through the SRCCON transcripts as they, I'm sure will do, please feel free to say the next comment is off the record, don't transcribe it, and then when you're done, let them know, let Norma know that it is back on the record so that she can start writing it back down again. And then also, please remember that because this is being recorded, don't speak at a glacial pace, so take your time and that way we can make sure that everything gets captured. So let's go ahead. I did want to start out with a brief kind of introduction to kind of focus and figure out where that discussion is going to go and direct it a little bit. So what we've got here is in 2014, there's a guy called Eric meyer, he's tremendously influential in the web. In 2014, his daughter, Rebecca died of cancer. She was 6 years old. It was unbelievably tragic and at the end of the year, Facebook showed him this: Here's what your year looked like, with party balloons and partygoers and his daughter, who had died of cancer, right? So this is not a thing where Facebook meant to be cruel, but he described this as inadvertent algorithmic cruelty, right? The people at Facebook had never assumed that your year in review would be anything other than celebratory, right, that would be anything other than people surrounded by partygoers, so when this hit him, he wrote a post about it and he started thinking about how is it that as we build these systems that are auThomasated or that are not necessarily human-controlled, how do we make sure that this kind of inadvertent algorithmic cruelty is not a constant going forward? +So if you're just coming in, if you want to fill in this table here, that would be great OK, hey, I'm going to go ahead and get started. Just real quick and then people can trickle in, but I did want to cover some real simple like preliminary material. This is welcome, by the way, to building news apps for humanity. I'm Thomas Wilburn. I did want to call attention. This is one of the rooms where we are we've got our wonderful transcription taking place, which is fantastic. I wanted to go over a few notes about it. If you are going to talk and this is mostly going to be a discussion-focused session, please introduce yourself, say your name, and it says affiliation. I don't know if you want to network that hard, but you know, go for it, I guess.[laughter]For the transcriber. If you need to go off the record, so if you're going to say something that you're worried about being transcribed and then your boss reading it later as they are browsing through the SRCCON transcripts as they, I'm sure will do, please feel free to say the next comment is off the record, don't transcribe it, and then when you're done, let them know, let Norma know that it is back on the record so that she can start writing it back down again. And then also, please remember that because this is being recorded, don't speak at a glacial pace, so take your time and that way we can make sure that everything gets captured. So let's go ahead. I did want to start out with a brief kind of introduction to kind of focus and figure out where that discussion is going to go and direct it a little bit. So what we've got here is in 2014, there's a guy called Eric meyer, he's tremendously influential in the web. In 2014, his daughter, Rebecca died of cancer. She was 6 years old. It was unbelievably tragic and at the end of the year, Facebook showed him this: Here's what your year looked like, with party balloons and partygoers and his daughter, who had died of cancer, right? So this is not a thing where Facebook meant to be cruel, but he described this as inadvertent algorithmic cruelty, right? The people at Facebook had never assumed that your year in review would be anything other than celebratory, right, that would be anything other than people surrounded by partygoers, so when this hit him, he wrote a post about it and he started thinking about how is it that as we build these systems that are auThomasated or that are not necessarily human-controlled, how do we make sure that this kind of inadvertent algorithmic cruelty is not a constant going forward? -PARTICIPANT: And then he wrote a book about it that's really good, called design for real life and I read that book. And I started thinking about it. Like for me, this is really interesting, because as journalists, like 90% of what we do is bad news, and so we kind of have this—we're in this situation a lot of times where what we're giving people is we're telling them about disasters, we're telling them about bad things. How do we think about how to do that in ways that are humane? In ways that are not going to be inadvertently cruel and then the other question is, as we start to move towards a future according to people who pontificate about the future of news, where it's going to be increaingly auThomasatic, it's going to be increasingly fed by all of this different data, how do we make sure that we don't run into all the same problems that Facebook did? How do we keep from having all of that cruelty and stress? And I think that news should be to some extent stressful, I believe very strongly in the aeffect the you uncomfortable part of our mission, but * I don't think we ought to be cruel about it is my goal here. So one of the things they talk about in the book is stress cases, you shouldn't think of things as edge cases because edge cases are dismissible, but if you think in terms of stress cases that allows you to empathize with your users a lot more and they take for example that when they were redesigning content for a home repair big box store, and then all of the material for this store was kind of phrase in this very peppy, like, oh, yay, you're redoing your kitchen kind of way and then when they talked to cusThomasers, they realized that people who go to like a Home Depot are stressed and pissed off, right, like their water heater just exploded or they just had a hole knocked in the door or they have per mites, right? They're not in a * mood for someone to be peppy at them. They want simple and clear instructions and they want things to be broken down for them and so it was a different way of thinking about that in a systematic many way and that I think we could think about how we disclose stuff in a systematic way. I said in a session a little while back with our crime team and I was thinking about: And they have rules about how they disclose names and descriptions of suspects. And they talk about the rule for them is that they release physical descriptions of suspects which includes things like racial identity and gender, they do that, they say, when it's a suspect who's—like this is a crime that's ongoing. If somebody is still on the loose and the theoretical idea behind that is that oh, well, then they could avoid or capture that person. And setting aside whether or not you think that's realistic, and I kind of have opinions on that, I thought that was an interesting question, where they had kind of sidled into this question of this is information that's going to cause stress, what are the guidelines that we have around that? Are those good guidelines? Maybe not, but they have at least started thinking about it, just not really in these terms. +PARTICIPANT: And then he wrote a book about it that's really good, called design for real life and I read that book. And I started thinking about it. Like for me, this is really interesting, because as journalists, like 90% of what we do is bad news, and so we kind of have this—we're in this situation a lot of times where what we're giving people is we're telling them about disasters, we're telling them about bad things. How do we think about how to do that in ways that are humane? In ways that are not going to be inadvertently cruel and then the other question is, as we start to move towards a future according to people who pontificate about the future of news, where it's going to be increaingly auThomasatic, it's going to be increasingly fed by all of this different data, how do we make sure that we don't run into all the same problems that Facebook did? How do we keep from having all of that cruelty and stress? And I think that news should be to some extent stressful, I believe very strongly in the aeffect the you uncomfortable part of our mission, but _ I don't think we ought to be cruel about it is my goal here. So one of the things they talk about in the book is stress cases, you shouldn't think of things as edge cases because edge cases are dismissible, but if you think in terms of stress cases that allows you to empathize with your users a lot more and they take for example that when they were redesigning content for a home repair big box store, and then all of the material for this store was kind of phrase in this very peppy, like, oh, yay, you're redoing your kitchen kind of way and then when they talked to cusThomasers, they realized that people who go to like a Home Depot are stressed and pissed off, right, like their water heater just exploded or they just had a hole knocked in the door or they have per mites, right? They're not in a _ mood for someone to be peppy at them. They want simple and clear instructions and they want things to be broken down for them and so it was a different way of thinking about that in a systematic many way and that I think we could think about how we disclose stuff in a systematic way. I said in a session a little while back with our crime team and I was thinking about: And they have rules about how they disclose names and descriptions of suspects. And they talk about the rule for them is that they release physical descriptions of suspects which includes things like racial identity and gender, they do that, they say, when it's a suspect who's—like this is a crime that's ongoing. If somebody is still on the loose and the theoretical idea behind that is that oh, well, then they could avoid or capture that person. And setting aside whether or not you think that's realistic, and I kind of have opinions on that, I thought that was an interesting question, where they had kind of sidled into this question of this is information that's going to cause stress, what are the guidelines that we have around that? Are those good guidelines? Maybe not, but they have at least started thinking about it, just not really in these terms. PARTICIPANT: Another thing that immediately comes to mind for me is ads, right? If you are most publishers I think probably the biggest auThomasaed system on your site that you don't think about is your advertisements. -And you can feel about that in different ways. I just for reference, this slide ued to be titled ads will murder us all, so you can maybe guess how I feel about it. But ads are complicated, right? For example, I'm from Seattle, and we are undergoing a homeless crisis. We have declared a state emergency, homelessness is a serious problem, but homeless people don't buy ads, so you end up in a situation like this where there's a shooting in our largest homeless encampment over drugs and money and also you can win a dream house raffle. That's fun, that's a great juxtaposition. This kind of thing happens a lot or this is maybe a less extreme case. This story on a motorcycle killed on the I5 crash brought to you the Seattle auto system motor show. We don't have a system at the Times to do anything other than turn ads off or on. There's not been any thought given in the system that we need to have more control over this system on a story or topic basis. We haven't planned for stress cases except in really the most brutal way. It's as if we're a doctor and our only prescription is just kill you basically when we get sick. We don't have any palliative measures and for me that's really frustrating. +And you can feel about that in different ways. I just for reference, this slide ued to be titled ads will murder us all, so you can maybe guess how I feel about it. But ads are complicated, right? For example, I'm from Seattle, and we are undergoing a homeless crisis. We have declared a state emergency, homelessness is a serious problem, but homeless people don't buy ads, so you end up in a situation like this where there's a shooting in our largest homeless encampment over drugs and money and also you can win a dream house raffle. That's fun, that's a great juxtaposition. This kind of thing happens a lot or this is maybe a less extreme case. This story on a motorcycle killed on the I5 crash brought to you the Seattle auto system motor show. We don't have a system at the Times to do anything other than turn ads off or on. There's not been any thought given in the system that we need to have more control over this system on a story or topic basis. We haven't planned for stress cases except in really the most brutal way. It's as if we're a doctor and our only prescription is just kill you basically when we get sick. We don't have any palliative measures and for me that's really frustrating. -Moving forward. I don't know how many of you ar familiar with Tay which was the bot that Microsoft put togethers and immediately the internet taught it to be a Nazi. So this was a bot that they released into the wild and it's something that we, I believe there's even a couple of session here, right, we're going to use bots, we're going to robots into the newsroom, Facebook is starting to push this hard, the Washington Post just rolled out pots for people to talk to, and I think we should be asking ourselves * how this can go wrong. There's a really good motherboard article where I will link to where they actually asked people who built pots how do you stop your bot from being raisist? And it turns out that they spend a lot of time thinking about this. Has your newsroom spent a lot of time thinking about this? I guarantee you that ours has not if we were building bots, like that's just not going to happen. And *. +Moving forward. I don't know how many of you ar familiar with Tay which was the bot that Microsoft put togethers and immediately the internet taught it to be a Nazi. So this was a bot that they released into the wild and it's something that we, I believe there's even a couple of session here, right, we're going to use bots, we're going to robots into the newsroom, Facebook is starting to push this hard, the Washington Post just rolled out pots for people to talk to, and I think we should be asking ourselves _ how this can go wrong. There's a really good motherboard article where I will link to where they actually asked people who built pots how do you stop your bot from being raisist? And it turns out that they spend a lot of time thinking about this. Has your newsroom spent a lot of time thinking about this? I guarantee you that ours has not if we were building bots, like that's just not going to happen. And _. -And then this one. Is anyone here from BuzzFeed? Oh, thank God, that was going to be awkward. I'm not really picking on them. This is just—this is where this happened. There was a writer called Kate Leth. She wrote on Twitter, she said, all I want is a check box that says do not embed this tweet on BuzzFeed, because she wrote a series of tweets about a super hero costume. She's a writer on a couple of different coic books, and she wrote these things, and then BuzzFeed did what BuzzFeed does was that they aggregate them and put snarky little—not snarky, like cute little posts in between them. And it's supposed to be a feel-good story, but the problem is that a Twitter embed is active, right, it sends people right to that tweet and right to the profile. So she was immediately swamped by the kind of people who taught Tay to be a Nazi, right? That just happened. This is something that social networks really want us to do, they really, really want us to feed into their network and to make their products better by us it and embedding it. +And then this one. Is anyone here from BuzzFeed? Oh, thank God, that was going to be awkward. I'm not really picking on them. This is just—this is where this happened. There was a writer called Kate Leth. She wrote on Twitter, she said, all I want is a check box that says do not embed this tweet on BuzzFeed, because she wrote a series of tweets about a super hero costume. She's a writer on a couple of different coic books, and she wrote these things, and then BuzzFeed did what BuzzFeed does was that they aggregate them and put snarky little—not snarky, like cute little posts in between them. And it's supposed to be a feel-good story, but the problem is that a Twitter embed is active, right, it sends people right to that tweet and right to the profile. So she was immediately swamped by the kind of people who taught Tay to be a Nazi, right? That just happened. This is something that social networks really want us to do, they really, really want us to feed into their network and to make their products better by us it and embedding it. -But as we all know, like social networks are also like really, really bad at fighting harassment, and when you put somebody in front of your size audience, are you actually like helping them? Is that beneficial? Are you giving them exposure? People die of exposure, right? Like that's the saying and it's true or are you basicallysicking your Saudens on them? And if * you think about your commentsers, are those people that you want going after you? Because I personally would not touch them with a ten foot pole, right? That's terrifying. +But as we all know, like social networks are also like really, really bad at fighting harassment, and when you put somebody in front of your size audience, are you actually like helping them? Is that beneficial? Are you giving them exposure? People die of exposure, right? Like that's the saying and it's true or are you basicallysicking your Saudens on them? And if \* you think about your commentsers, are those people that you want going after you? Because I personally would not touch them with a ten foot pole, right? That's terrifying. -And that brings me to the last thing that I've been talking about. Is we have comment system at the Times and it's a cesspool. The thing that ed to moderate it left and bad moderation is no moderation, because people just circulate and as a result we're kind of having this conversation, but one of the things that's been really interesting that I've been hearing from reporters and photographers is actually they go out and people don't want to talk to the Times at all because of the comments. Like, people actually come in and they'll say to our reporter, oh, I don't want to talk to you, because I don't want your—like your comments are so nasty that it's like too toxic. I don't want to be involved, I don't want my name in your paper. I don't want those people approaching me. I don't know how widespread that is, but I've heard that from multiple people which really surprises me. It's another one of those cases where you've let this happen. You put a system in place where people could publish sort of whatever they want, maybe there's a flagging mechanism if somebody catches it or maybe there's whatever, but you've just hoped that they would police themselves. Is that actually something that you're able to maintain? Is that something that you can keep away from cruelty, or do we need to think about that in a way that prevents abuse, right? So Zoe Quinn, the infamous Zoe Quinn fame, Gamergate and all that crap, said, and I think this was very true, right? It's 2016, if you're not asking yourself how could this be used to hurt someone when you design a product or a web page or a news app, you've failed. +And that brings me to the last thing that I've been talking about. Is we have comment system at the Times and it's a cesspool. The thing that ed to moderate it left and bad moderation is no moderation, because people just circulate and as a result we're kind of having this conversation, but one of the things that's been really interesting that I've been hearing from reporters and photographers is actually they go out and people don't want to talk to the Times at all because of the comments. Like, people actually come in and they'll say to our reporter, oh, I don't want to talk to you, because I don't want your—like your comments are so nasty that it's like too toxic. I don't want to be involved, I don't want my name in your paper. I don't want those people approaching me. I don't know how widespread that is, but I've heard that from multiple people which really surprises me. It's another one of those cases where you've let this happen. You put a system in place where people could publish sort of whatever they want, maybe there's a flagging mechanism if somebody catches it or maybe there's whatever, but you've just hoped that they would police themselves. Is that actually something that you're able to maintain? Is that something that you can keep away from cruelty, or do we need to think about that in a way that prevents abuse, right? So Zoe Quinn, the infamous Zoe Quinn fame, Gamergate and all that crap, said, and I think this was very true, right? It's 2016, if you're not asking yourself how could this be used to hurt someone when you design a product or a web page or a news app, you've failed. And so that's what I kind of want to open this up now, and bring it to the room, and have a discussion about this. How can we make sure that the things that we build are not going to be harmful? They're not going to be used to hurt someone and I wanted to focus maybe on these three questions, and we can work our way through there and if it drifts off, that's cool, too. So first, what are the worst case scenarios that we're not thinking about? So are there—is there stuff in here that I have not put up here, but that are uniquely vulnerable or are intrinsically vulnerable to design that's inhumane? Second what are the mistakes and successes we can learn from and if this is the part where if you have to be, like, I have to go off the record because I'm going to talk about something stupid that my employer did, that's cool. But I'm curious where are the cases where your organization has gone over this, and what have you learned and I'm really interested in how I can learn from you all on how to make this work and lastly how can we make that empathy a process. I know a lot of us have an intake process when we're working as part of a newsroom dev team or in the newsroom itself. How can we make this a part of what we're thinking about when we pitch stories, when we develop them, and when we publish them? How do we make sure that they are carrying forward those ideals? PARTICIPANT: So we don't—we've got a fair number of people. I'm going to try and just kind of make it a reasonably fluid discussion. I'm going to have to try not to have to pass the mic around but if you feel like you need the mic, feel free to raise your hand, and yeah, does anyone want to get started, like are there any worst-case scenarios that you want to bring up? -PARTICIPANT: I can just talk about—the area where we've—hi my name is Lauren I work at Vox Media, and we have stopped ourselves from putting a few different tools out into the world. Like up until recently one of the teams that I worked with was a tools team. That made it easier for a reporter to throw a title around something, define a context around it and embed an interactive thing into their articles and we built a really cool tool that allowed you to define a foreground and then the user could cusThomas upload the background image and we thought about different ways of ing that like the verge is our tech site when the Amazon dash came out with a button just as a funny jokey way, there are a lot of different examples of this but we've stopped ourself every time from putting like that kind of user engagement style product out into the world. I guess we weren't intentionally thinking about this but we just knew that somebody is going to put a penis on this and it's going to have Vox Media's logo on it. We don't know how to prevent against that. So I guess that's the context I'm thinking about it this is user generated content or allowing the community to be creative, like how do you do that in a way that the Nazis don't come and take over your system?PARTICIPANT: I'm Audrey Carlson. I also work at the Seattle Times and just to give --She's a plant. +PARTICIPANT: I can just talk about—the area where we've—hi my name is Lauren I work at Vox Media, and we have stopped ourselves from putting a few different tools out into the world. Like up until recently one of the teams that I worked with was a tools team. That made it easier for a reporter to throw a title around something, define a context around it and embed an interactive thing into their articles and we built a really cool tool that allowed you to define a foreground and then the user could cusThomas upload the background image and we thought about different ways of ing that like the verge is our tech site when the Amazon dash came out with a button just as a funny jokey way, there are a lot of different examples of this but we've stopped ourself every time from putting like that kind of user engagement style product out into the world. I guess we weren't intentionally thinking about this but we just knew that somebody is going to put a penis on this and it's going to have Vox Media's logo on it. We don't know how to prevent against that. So I guess that's the context I'm thinking about it this is user generated content or allowing the community to be creative, like how do you do that in a way that the Nazis don't come and take over your system?PARTICIPANT: I'm Audrey Carlson. I also work at the Seattle Times and just to give --She's a plant. -PARTICIPANT: I'm here of my own free will. Thomas was talking about the example of poorly juxtaposed ads on a page, so for instance when you have this big breaking news story about a shooting in a homeless encampment and then the ads surrounding it were all about this dream home raffle. I think for me, that was in some ways a worst case scenario because we all noticed it pretty quickly and it stayed up for the next 24 hours on our site, because that was a special takeover ad section that had been planned, you know, weeks or months in advance, and the ad seller was even consulted about it, and they—they knew the context and they chose not to take it down, and so from within—I guess it wasn't the newsroom but within our own marketing department, the decision was made to defer to that decision, and the new rooms had no say. So as the days rolled out we had new stories about this same shooting, we had to just keep keep living with the fact that all of that was showing up with those ads. So sort of the second step is once you identify it, there aren't even ways to fix it on the fly.PARTICIPANT: I'm M I work at the Intercept. As far as again the you know, the ads topic is concerned, like one thing that really irks me is when I'm at a news site and there's an ad for a politician, so recently, you know, you read the Times and like you know, Hillary banners were all over the place. They were on the right team, I guess, but that's good, but still it kind of feels weird that this is a news organization, which is supposed to be you know, like an objective, balanced place, but if the Hillary campaign is like funding, like you know, some part of it. Is of course, this is a bigger discussion, but I feel like that it almost makes me feel that there should be some rules about what types of ads news organizations should be, you know, be willingly, you know, like putting on their sites, and I think, you know, political ads, like it may not be one of those. Or should not be one of those.Thomas: So I don't want to—one of the nice things and these are really good points. I was a little bit worried, because everybody loves to bitch about ads and so I kind of maybe thought about whether or not I should even introduce it. I do want to—I want to bring up one of the successes that I've seen lately, actually and maybe that would trigger other people to think about it. One of the things that I saw lately was that Breaking News kind of rolled out that kind of inform your area that there's a breaking news interface but they didn't allow you to type your own description of what it is, you could just choose an emoji, so it was kind of presanitized, like oh, these are the options we're going to give you, like, they may carry implication, but A, we can preselect them and then B, we're not going to let you fill out so that you can use this to cause a riot or incite some sort of mass rampage or a mass evacuation, right? We're going to sanitize that down, but then it still flags it for the newsroom and for users. I thought that was a really smart way of taking user input that you might be worried about, and putting it behind a translation layer that would keep it from being too toxic. And I don't know if anyone has done other stuff like that that would be a way of—I think a lot of the concerns that we have are around user-generated content and one of the ways that we've maybe tried to keep that from sinking into the abyss. +PARTICIPANT: I'm here of my own free will. Thomas was talking about the example of poorly juxtaposed ads on a page, so for instance when you have this big breaking news story about a shooting in a homeless encampment and then the ads surrounding it were all about this dream home raffle. I think for me, that was in some ways a worst case scenario because we all noticed it pretty quickly and it stayed up for the next 24 hours on our site, because that was a special takeover ad section that had been planned, you know, weeks or months in advance, and the ad seller was even consulted about it, and they—they knew the context and they chose not to take it down, and so from within—I guess it wasn't the newsroom but within our own marketing department, the decision was made to defer to that decision, and the new rooms had no say. So as the days rolled out we had new stories about this same shooting, we had to just keep keep living with the fact that all of that was showing up with those ads. So sort of the second step is once you identify it, there aren't even ways to fix it on the fly.PARTICIPANT: I'm M I work at the Intercept. As far as again the you know, the ads topic is concerned, like one thing that really irks me is when I'm at a news site and there's an ad for a politician, so recently, you know, you read the Times and like you know, Hillary banners were all over the place. They were on the right team, I guess, but that's good, but still it kind of feels weird that this is a news organization, which is supposed to be you know, like an objective, balanced place, but if the Hillary campaign is like funding, like you know, some part of it. Is of course, this is a bigger discussion, but I feel like that it almost makes me feel that there should be some rules about what types of ads news organizations should be, you know, be willingly, you know, like putting on their sites, and I think, you know, political ads, like it may not be one of those. Or should not be one of those.Thomas: So I don't want to—one of the nice things and these are really good points. I was a little bit worried, because everybody loves to bitch about ads and so I kind of maybe thought about whether or not I should even introduce it. I do want to—I want to bring up one of the successes that I've seen lately, actually and maybe that would trigger other people to think about it. One of the things that I saw lately was that Breaking News kind of rolled out that kind of inform your area that there's a breaking news interface but they didn't allow you to type your own description of what it is, you could just choose an emoji, so it was kind of presanitized, like oh, these are the options we're going to give you, like, they may carry implication, but A, we can preselect them and then B, we're not going to let you fill out so that you can use this to cause a riot or incite some sort of mass rampage or a mass evacuation, right? We're going to sanitize that down, but then it still flags it for the newsroom and for users. I thought that was a really smart way of taking user input that you might be worried about, and putting it behind a translation layer that would keep it from being too toxic. And I don't know if anyone has done other stuff like that that would be a way of—I think a lot of the concerns that we have are around user-generated content and one of the ways that we've maybe tried to keep that from sinking into the abyss. Yeah? Yeah, if you don't mind. -PARTICIPANT: Hi. I'm Lynn with sib il, and you know, we * sat around thinking all day about how to m comment section better and one of the things that surprised us is we were focusing on how to you get your community to police itself. We put in a pause. Whenever somebody's making a comment, because we were realizing that whenever you're out in the real world, your social interactions are very different than your online interactions, to say the least, right? And you know, just kind of by happen chance when people were making a comment we put in a pause where we asked them, is your comment civil? And we weren't really expecting much to happen with that, except what we found out is that by putting that pause in, and when when you're online, everything—you want everything to be faster and I think when you're on a news site, you want to make your site as fast as possible. Everything needs to be fast and then suddenly this person who just wants to shoot from the hip and make a comment is asked to think, like to stop and we found to our total surprise, 25% of users in their first five comments, 25% of them went back and rewrote their comment when we asked them to sit and think for a minute about what they're writing and we were just floored and we're seeing it time and time again, so you know, to have people actually self-policing, whenever you ask them hold on a second, before you sling that mud, is that really what you want to say? And it was just an interesting observation, you know, again contrasting with how we try to do everything faster. Are there other ways in the newsroom that you can put that pause in with your audience? +PARTICIPANT: Hi. I'm Lynn with sib il, and you know, we \* sat around thinking all day about how to m comment section better and one of the things that surprised us is we were focusing on how to you get your community to police itself. We put in a pause. Whenever somebody's making a comment, because we were realizing that whenever you're out in the real world, your social interactions are very different than your online interactions, to say the least, right? And you know, just kind of by happen chance when people were making a comment we put in a pause where we asked them, is your comment civil? And we weren't really expecting much to happen with that, except what we found out is that by putting that pause in, and when when you're online, everything—you want everything to be faster and I think when you're on a news site, you want to make your site as fast as possible. Everything needs to be fast and then suddenly this person who just wants to shoot from the hip and make a comment is asked to think, like to stop and we found to our total surprise, 25% of users in their first five comments, 25% of them went back and rewrote their comment when we asked them to sit and think for a minute about what they're writing and we were just floored and we're seeing it time and time again, so you know, to have people actually self-policing, whenever you ask them hold on a second, before you sling that mud, is that really what you want to say? And it was just an interesting observation, you know, again contrasting with how we try to do everything faster. Are there other ways in the newsroom that you can put that pause in with your audience? And get them to think before they act or before they react? Thank you. @@ -43,11 +43,11 @@ PARTICIPANT: No, it's fine. I've got a big voice. So it's a platform where when Thomas: Do you do anything—like I think about one of the things that has come out a little bit is self-care and if you're a person who maintains the comment section, right, you're face to face with that a lot and it's really draining, is there a worry that—like, is there a prefilte keep -- -PARTICIPANT: Yes. Yeah. It's kind of like, you know, the best of—the best of the algorithms, plus the human intervention, and you know, when you put the bot up there, I had to laugh, because if you could bot your way out of this, like Google and Facebook and all of these smart companies would have done it by now, but I feel like there's an environment where human interaction i isn't a part of their DNA, so they're just trying to bot back a solution and I think by adding that human piece, you know, the worst of the worst is filtered out, all the spam and make all this money when you you work from home. So that's all filtered out from the beginning and all of your obvious stuff that's going to be really awful to look at. But it's more like, you know, human language is so nuanced that how do you deal with racism and misogyny and you know, those are the things that come through, you know, or even things like doxing, you know, a lot of people online, in smaller communities where everybody knows each other's pseudonym and knows each other's handle. It's like they don't realize that most that there is really against the rules. And so we find that having that attached to t you're able to police a community that is so desperately wanting to be policed and moderated. Like they want this level of moderation, so that they can keep contributing. +PARTICIPANT: Yes. Yeah. It's kind of like, you know, the best of—the best of the algorithms, plus the human intervention, and you know, when you put the bot up there, I had to laugh, because if you could bot your way out of this, like Google and Facebook and all of these smart companies would have done it by now, but I feel like there's an environment where human interaction i isn't a part of their DNA, so they're just trying to bot back a solution and I think by adding that human piece, you know, the worst of the worst is filtered out, all the spam and make all this money when you you work from home. So that's all filtered out from the beginning and all of your obvious stuff that's going to be really awful to look at. But it's more like, you know, human language is so nuanced that how do you deal with racism and misogyny and you know, those are the things that come through, you know, or even things like doxing, you know, a lot of people online, in smaller communities where everybody knows each other's pseudonym and knows each other's handle. It's like they don't realize that most that there is really against the rules. And so we find that having that attached to t you're able to police a community that is so desperately wanting to be policed and moderated. Like they want this level of moderation, so that they can keep contributing. Thomas: OK, thank you. OK. Excellent. Yeah. -PARTICIPANT: I will not try and project. So my name is Marie, I also work at Vox Media on the platform team, and I'm on the team building what we don't call exactly the content management system, a publishing platform, there we go. And my job is really communicating to all of the people who use that platform, and helping them learn about ne features and how we're kind of rolling things out and when I first started we had basically one way of doing that within the app itself, and it was a big kind of like flash message at the top. And the voice early on, the app was like really fun and cool, and so I was like, I don't know, it was the second day, oh, cool, we released a new feature and I get to be funny quirky and I get to do this in my new job and the next day my boss came in and she was like, hey, this is like OK, but maybe think about what it's gonna look like for somebody who's opening the app and they are run writing about story about something that is not fun and goofy at all. And after also reading Eric and Sarah's book which if you haven't read it it's phenomenal, it really got me thinking about, OK, every time we're communicating even internally within our newsroom and we have some brands that are really kind of fun and goofy and we have some brands that are talking about—all of them ultimately are talking about serious issues at some point or another. You know, what is that tone that we're talking when we're trying to let people know and how do you sort of inform people in a way that's interesting, but also respectful of the fact that sometimes, some really heavy shit is happening, a lot of times now. And you know, one of the things that we ended up doing, again, you can't always solve the problem right in the moment. Remove those notifications so they're not so disruptive so you do get to have that choice. And we've also talked about how do we expand that and make that something that our editorial teams can access, as well, so that when they have—you know, either kind of more day to day mundane things, or when there's say, a situation where you want to let everybody know, like, hey, let's put a pause on our social updates while this kind of breaking news situation unfolds and we doesn't want to be in the middle of it, you have that medium to kind of communicate to people. So it's interesting think about it. There are lots of things you can do. +PARTICIPANT: I will not try and project. So my name is Marie, I also work at Vox Media on the platform team, and I'm on the team building what we don't call exactly the content management system, a publishing platform, there we go. And my job is really communicating to all of the people who use that platform, and helping them learn about ne features and how we're kind of rolling things out and when I first started we had basically one way of doing that within the app itself, and it was a big kind of like flash message at the top. And the voice early on, the app was like really fun and cool, and so I was like, I don't know, it was the second day, oh, cool, we released a new feature and I get to be funny quirky and I get to do this in my new job and the next day my boss came in and she was like, hey, this is like OK, but maybe think about what it's gonna look like for somebody who's opening the app and they are run writing about story about something that is not fun and goofy at all. And after also reading Eric and Sarah's book which if you haven't read it it's phenomenal, it really got me thinking about, OK, every time we're communicating even internally within our newsroom and we have some brands that are really kind of fun and goofy and we have some brands that are talking about—all of them ultimately are talking about serious issues at some point or another. You know, what is that tone that we're talking when we're trying to let people know and how do you sort of inform people in a way that's interesting, but also respectful of the fact that sometimes, some really heavy shit is happening, a lot of times now. And you know, one of the things that we ended up doing, again, you can't always solve the problem right in the moment. Remove those notifications so they're not so disruptive so you do get to have that choice. And we've also talked about how do we expand that and make that something that our editorial teams can access, as well, so that when they have—you know, either kind of more day to day mundane things, or when there's say, a situation where you want to let everybody know, like, hey, let's put a pause on our social updates while this kind of breaking news situation unfolds and we doesn't want to be in the middle of it, you have that medium to kind of communicate to people. So it's interesting think about it. There are lots of things you can do. What was the book you mention in. @@ -55,9 +55,7 @@ Marie: It's design for real life. And I'll put a link to that. Thomas: Anyone else before I take it back to Lauren? - - -Lauren: I would just say the first obvious thing that we should all be thinking about when it comes to designing for these types of use cases or like specifically the thing that you pulled up is just think about hiring diversely. Like the more diverse people that you have who are contributing to the actual act of creating the stuff are going to know about the nuances that a team of white men would not know how this thing is really gendered. I'm not going to—no offense to you. But having a diverse staff, a diverse collection of contributors to the things that you're building and the second one that we think a lot about when we do product design, and now my team is doing more about part of my studio is user testing, I know that's hard to do with breaking news on the fly or something with like Facebook situation where it's dynamically generated and it's going to be personalized for every single person, but the more that you can low-fi test it on people before it goes out to the public, or small beta, the more you're going to catch something that you didn't think about previously. +Lauren: I would just say the first obvious thing that we should all be thinking about when it comes to designing for these types of use cases or like specifically the thing that you pulled up is just think about hiring diversely. Like the more diverse people that you have who are contributing to the actual act of creating the stuff are going to know about the nuances that a team of white men would not know how this thing is really gendered. I'm not going to—no offense to you. But having a diverse staff, a diverse collection of contributors to the things that you're building and the second one that we think a lot about when we do product design, and now my team is doing more about part of my studio is user testing, I know that's hard to do with breaking news on the fly or something with like Facebook situation where it's dynamically generated and it's going to be personalized for every single person, but the more that you can low-fi test it on people before it goes out to the public, or small beta, the more you're going to catch something that you didn't think about previously. Thomas: So that leads, actually kind of indirectly to something that I had, I think, come up, and a lot of this for me is I'm really interested in breaking news, because I think it's really easy to screw this stuff up when you don't have time to think about it. Which is part of why I think we want it to be a part of the process, but also I think it's instructive to kind of think about the ways for it—like, so for example we have a breaking news system that is built to send out alerts to email, to the mobile app and stuff, and is the language in there chosen so that it's going to be relatively neutral towards whatever it is? Because we send out breaking news alerts for natural disasters, but also for things that are more positive, and so it might be easier to assume, one way or the other. I think it might be more interesting to think about it the other way, what if your whole breaking news system is engineered foredoom and gloom, and then you send out puppies and it seems like they're puppies of doom. So that's what I would kind of like to avoid. @@ -65,7 +63,7 @@ So lets, if you don't mind, I'm interested in kind of continuing this forward. I PARTICIPANT: Yeah. -PARTICIPANT: Well, I'm Martin McClellan and I work at Breaking News, so the feature that you are were talking that we tall tipping is something that we've thought about from beginning to end exactly in those terms. Can we allow people to upload photos? Well, if we do, they're going to send us pictures of their penis. Can we allow people to upload photos that we can filter somehow and how do we know that they're actually current photos that they're witnessing or are they fake. There's a lot of takes that come up, you see them again and again and again of a particular type. It's like the storm clouds over New York or the crowds riding or same over and over and over, and a lot of times people believing they are real and retweeting them or sending them along. So that was one of the things that we decided when we went to the emojis, the emojis is a method of the user. We would never use as part of our editorial style an emoji, so it sets them apart immediately. Actually it then gives the user a little bit of a voice but without too much and it makes it so that we don't have to edit them except for abusers which we can catch in another way, so ... +PARTICIPANT: Well, I'm Martin McClellan and I work at Breaking News, so the feature that you are were talking that we tall tipping is something that we've thought about from beginning to end exactly in those terms. Can we allow people to upload photos? Well, if we do, they're going to send us pictures of their penis. Can we allow people to upload photos that we can filter somehow and how do we know that they're actually current photos that they're witnessing or are they fake. There's a lot of takes that come up, you see them again and again and again of a particular type. It's like the storm clouds over New York or the crowds riding or same over and over and over, and a lot of times people believing they are real and retweeting them or sending them along. So that was one of the things that we decided when we went to the emojis, the emojis is a method of the user. We would never use as part of our editorial style an emoji, so it sets them apart immediately. Actually it then gives the user a little bit of a voice but without too much and it makes it so that we don't have to edit them except for abusers which we can catch in another way, so ... Thomas: It's interesting for me that for at least several people, like the process of selling this thinking to management has been let's avoid dick picks, which is I guess one way that people take it seriously in a newsroom, but also seems kind of terrifying to me, that that's the way that we have to actually get this out. Does anyone have kind of like times when this has not been a part of your newsroom process and you wish that had been? @@ -77,21 +75,21 @@ Lauren: I'll say that Vox Media has had some pretty public examples of stories t And what was I going to say? Something else? I'm done talk -PARTICIPANT: My name is Bea Cordelia. The last place I was at was an environmental nonprofit that had a quarterly magazine, so we weren't doing break news, but our staff was, as most environmental nonprofits are, very, very white and very, very middle class. So one of the things that I did wags we were going through a redesign and we did, we did our dem graphic in that analysis, and I start creating * user personas that were for people who weren't our basic constituency. So I was putting in lower-class women, communities of color, and I was giving those personas to all of our content creaors, including all of our writers and editors and telling them, OK, when you're coming up with a new issue, think about whether you're talking to these people and whether or not you're not talking to these people. And that is starting to actually change how they write. And it's nice that not every story is only going to a 65-plus middle class woman, or which is what environmentalism generally targets.This is Audrey again. I think this brings up a really interesting point, too, of like what do we consider to be cruel? Because I don't think that's, you know, a completely well defined thing or that we would all agree on that. Something like Thomas' first example I think everyone would have that cringe moment, but there are other things that people would say, oh, they're being too sensitive about it. There's kind of a disconnect there between maybe some actual hurt being felt versus the person who chose the headline or chose the picture to go with the—like whatever it is. Media isn't taking that seriously and I think that's also an interesting point to all of this and I think that goes back to what Lauren was saying is having different perspectives in the room can bring different ideas of when something is okay, and when it's not and can catch the things before they go out the door and I think that's a really important part of a process that's trying to avoid or creating these like stress-free environments as much as possible, is that we all have a different definition of what's going ob stressful or hurtful or cruel or negatively impact different groups that we may or may not be thinking about. And it's one thing to be thinking about oh, building these apps that maybe just accidentally juxtapose things. A robot isn't going to have that same sort of judgment that we could make, so we have to go in there and put in those catches, but then the side of it the cruelty or the hurt comes in as us as humans not thinking about it from someone else's perspective, I think is maybe something that is a little—well, I was going to say it's easier to tackle but sometimes it's also a lot harder to tackle because it involves a lot more, I think actual conversations and trying to understand people from different perspectives and what might be considered OK or not. +PARTICIPANT: My name is Bea Cordelia. The last place I was at was an environmental nonprofit that had a quarterly magazine, so we weren't doing break news, but our staff was, as most environmental nonprofits are, very, very white and very, very middle class. So one of the things that I did wags we were going through a redesign and we did, we did our dem graphic in that analysis, and I start creating \* user personas that were for people who weren't our basic constituency. So I was putting in lower-class women, communities of color, and I was giving those personas to all of our content creaors, including all of our writers and editors and telling them, OK, when you're coming up with a new issue, think about whether you're talking to these people and whether or not you're not talking to these people. And that is starting to actually change how they write. And it's nice that not every story is only going to a 65-plus middle class woman, or which is what environmentalism generally targets.This is Audrey again. I think this brings up a really interesting point, too, of like what do we consider to be cruel? Because I don't think that's, you know, a completely well defined thing or that we would all agree on that. Something like Thomas' first example I think everyone would have that cringe moment, but there are other things that people would say, oh, they're being too sensitive about it. There's kind of a disconnect there between maybe some actual hurt being felt versus the person who chose the headline or chose the picture to go with the—like whatever it is. Media isn't taking that seriously and I think that's also an interesting point to all of this and I think that goes back to what Lauren was saying is having different perspectives in the room can bring different ideas of when something is okay, and when it's not and can catch the things before they go out the door and I think that's a really important part of a process that's trying to avoid or creating these like stress-free environments as much as possible, is that we all have a different definition of what's going ob stressful or hurtful or cruel or negatively impact different groups that we may or may not be thinking about. And it's one thing to be thinking about oh, building these apps that maybe just accidentally juxtapose things. A robot isn't going to have that same sort of judgment that we could make, so we have to go in there and put in those catches, but then the side of it the cruelty or the hurt comes in as us as humans not thinking about it from someone else's perspective, I think is maybe something that is a little—well, I was going to say it's easier to tackle but sometimes it's also a lot harder to tackle because it involves a lot more, I think actual conversations and trying to understand people from different perspectives and what might be considered OK or not. Thomas: Oh, sorry. Yeah. Absolutely PARTICIPANT: Lisa Wilkins and Martin knows that I'm always playing devil's advocate, so I will play it here. There's a part of me that wants people to be sensitive to people's backgrounds, and where they come from and who they are, and gender and race and all that, and there's another side of me that's like, well, the story is the story, and you can kind of make it a sensitive story to the people who are reading t but you also realize that there's just the story here. So like you were talking about the Vox Media article where it was talking about how did this guy go wrong? That's really important. There are a lot of guys or you know, people who go wrong and I think that story is valuable. The other side of that—well, not the other side, but what kind of—what causes you to maybe unpublish a story like that is that knee-jerk reactionary Twitter mob or the universe that comes out and is like, I can't believe you just said that and it's like, well, these are all very different viewpoints. I mean the story is the story. You can't just eliminate some facts or give it like a nice Rosy polish because you don't want to insult somebody. It's like, it's news, it's happening. So I would rather get all of the facts and maybe be offended, than have some things held back and not get the full version of what's going on. -Thomas: No, I think that's a good point to make. * I would want to distinguish, I think, a little bit between inadvertent cruelty and I don't want to say vertant cruelty. Because I think sometimes the way you're telling a story is the way you mean to tell it that way. I more worry about the things that you didn't mean to to tell it that way. +Thomas: No, I think that's a good point to make. \* I would want to distinguish, I think, a little bit between inadvertent cruelty and I don't want to say vertant cruelty. Because I think sometimes the way you're telling a story is the way you mean to tell it that way. I more worry about the things that you didn't mean to to tell it that way. -PARTICIPANT: But you're not thinking about it and it happens and you're not intending it to, you will still have the wrath of the Twitter verse on you, regardless and then you're pretty much blackballed, you know? * it can really destroy a person when they're not intending to do something, they do, and then they are ape wondering what shit storm did I just pull up there. *. +PARTICIPANT: But you're not thinking about it and it happens and you're not intending it to, you will still have the wrath of the Twitter verse on you, regardless and then you're pretty much blackballed, you know? _ it can really destroy a person when they're not intending to do something, they do, and then they are ape wondering what shit storm did I just pull up there. _. Thomas: Sure: Yeah. It's an interesting questio we had a thing a little while back at Times where we wrote a headline unintentionally in a way that turned out to really offend the person that the headline was about. And I'm really less concerned about the fact that we wrote the headline, although it bothers me a little bit. And I'm more concerned with the fact that it took us eight hours to acknowledge that the headline might not have been a good idea. So I think that's a good point. I'm trying to figure out—what I'd like to do now, is since we've got about 15 to 20 minutes left, oh, I'm sorry. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah, I just—I wanted to make a question. I'm Sandra. I work at ... [inaudible] I'm not a journalist. I work with ... but I'm not a journalist. But so I think that after your comment I will make some question because I maybe think that all of you are journalists. So this honesty that's being brought with for example the Vox story, I mean where is the honesty in your articles or in your writing? Wa where is the border between that and where you're just like provoking your audience? I would ask that. Because I mean if we are talking about a story about someone being raped and you're writing about the story of the rapist instead of the victim, so that's OK, I'm OK with it, but then you would have to be hon et and say I'm like telling the story of the rapist, not the victim, right? So where is the line for that with you when you go on content online. So you said for example there's like limits in how you subjectively gauge something as cruel or not, but I don't know, I'm from Mexico, so for me there's various lines of what cruelty means in media, like having people without heads in the media all the time, for example. So for me, I think that there's like human guidelines, and this is my view as just a consumer of news because I'm not a proceed cueser, would he I so ask you as journalists, how do you get * human empathy? Is that something that you think about or is it just like, OK, I want my story and I don't get anything about empathy with other people or other countries or other cultures, or I would like to ask that and open that conversation, too, like what's your—what's your border or your front line for deciding what to publish or what not? I mean what's the ethics of the stories and the breaking news and this kind of thing? Like, is it subjective, or do you think like—like journalists have like an ethic general ethics or how is it? Thanks. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah, I just—I wanted to make a question. I'm Sandra. I work at ... [inaudible] I'm not a journalist. I work with ... but I'm not a journalist. But so I think that after your comment I will make some question because I maybe think that all of you are journalists. So this honesty that's being brought with for example the Vox story, I mean where is the honesty in your articles or in your writing? Wa where is the border between that and where you're just like provoking your audience? I would ask that. Because I mean if we are talking about a story about someone being raped and you're writing about the story of the rapist instead of the victim, so that's OK, I'm OK with it, but then you would have to be hon et and say I'm like telling the story of the rapist, not the victim, right? So where is the line for that with you when you go on content online. So you said for example there's like limits in how you subjectively gauge something as cruel or not, but I don't know, I'm from Mexico, so for me there's various lines of what cruelty means in media, like having people without heads in the media all the time, for example. So for me, I think that there's like human guidelines, and this is my view as just a consumer of news because I'm not a proceed cueser, would he I so ask you as journalists, how do you get \* human empathy? Is that something that you think about or is it just like, OK, I want my story and I don't get anything about empathy with other people or other countries or other cultures, or I would like to ask that and open that conversation, too, like what's your—what's your border or your front line for deciding what to publish or what not? I mean what's the ethics of the stories and the breaking news and this kind of thing? Like, is it subjective, or do you think like—like journalists have like an ethic general ethics or how is it? Thanks. -Thomas: I think that's a really good question, and maybe to broaden it or consider as people are thinking about how they want to answer, whether people have this written down or whether it's just like a thing that they do, like in our discussion with the crime team, there was a lot of times there was a really general feeling in the room of oh, this is the policy. But then everybody kind of had the wrong take and there was no written policy of this is when we publish an address, this is when we publish a subject description. Like, it wasn't nailed down in a really specific documented way, which gave people a little bit of leeway, and sometimes that slipperiness is concerning, right? So does anyone have a case where like you've got that written down or where you've tried to create a policy specifically for that? I've notice that had for me, management is often very nervous about writing these things down. There's a lot of nervousness around legal responsibility that you would have if you had a policy towards these kinds of things, and so there's often a lot of these concerns that surround this kind of question of what do we do with people's information, that that will be used as a tactic to not introduce that into the discussion. For me at least. +Thomas: I think that's a really good question, and maybe to broaden it or consider as people are thinking about how they want to answer, whether people have this written down or whether it's just like a thing that they do, like in our discussion with the crime team, there was a lot of times there was a really general feeling in the room of oh, this is the policy. But then everybody kind of had the wrong take and there was no written policy of this is when we publish an address, this is when we publish a subject description. Like, it wasn't nailed down in a really specific documented way, which gave people a little bit of leeway, and sometimes that slipperiness is concerning, right? So does anyone have a case where like you've got that written down or where you've tried to create a policy specifically for that? I've notice that had for me, management is often very nervous about writing these things down. There's a lot of nervousness around legal responsibility that you would have if you had a policy towards these kinds of things, and so there's often a lot of these concerns that surround this kind of question of what do we do with people's information, that that will be used as a tactic to not introduce that into the discussion. For me at least. I don't think you have any taers. I'm sorry. @@ -101,21 +99,14 @@ Thomas: But it's good. I think that's a really good question to ask. What I'd li [group activity>> -PARTICIPANT: OK you're all having really intense conversations which I think is really a good thing. I'm going to be really cruel and cut them off but I hope you'll continue these conversations outside. Given that these are really intense, I wanted to open it up. We've got three minutes before we're technically done here. If there was anything that came up at your table that you think was really interesting, would anyone want to report out to like the whole kind of group about what you've been discussing or what it is that you're trying to fix as far as this goes? Yes. Thank you. +PARTICIPANT: OK you're all having really intense conversations which I think is really a good thing. I'm going to be really cruel and cut them off but I hope you'll continue these conversations outside. Given that these are really intense, I wanted to open it up. We've got three minutes before we're technically done here. If there was anything that came up at your table that you think was really interesting, would anyone want to report out to like the whole kind of group about what you've been discussing or what it is that you're trying to fix as far as this goes? Yes. Thank you. -PARTICIPANT: OK, so this didn't really wasn't really the discussion on the table, but I feel like this was—I think as we get drowned in like software, we are off-loading a lot of decisionmaking to like computer programs, and software is never going to be good at making these, like, you know, complicaed, you know, decisions about very subtle things, right? And I think as media companies get heavily influenced by Silicon Valley and try to turn themselves into like software companies and less and less as like news organization, I think this is one thing that they need—like, we need to keep in mind, right? Because like in our goal is to provide information and news on a lot of times very like, you know, sensitive issues and if we just mimic ourselves. Like, for example, recently, some huge VC on Twitter about how—oh, that you know, there should be a startup thinking about an app to solve police shootings, right? And that was a valid. That was a—that was a good idea that he thought that he should tweet out so that you know, like, you know, people in Silicon Valley could start making apps about that. And I think it's that kind of thinking that will lead us in like, you know, horrible direction, so I wanted to make that spiel. OK. +PARTICIPANT: OK, so this didn't really wasn't really the discussion on the table, but I feel like this was—I think as we get drowned in like software, we are off-loading a lot of decisionmaking to like computer programs, and software is never going to be good at making these, like, you know, complicaed, you know, decisions about very subtle things, right? And I think as media companies get heavily influenced by Silicon Valley and try to turn themselves into like software companies and less and less as like news organization, I think this is one thing that they need—like, we need to keep in mind, right? Because like in our goal is to provide information and news on a lot of times very like, you know, sensitive issues and if we just mimic ourselves. Like, for example, recently, some huge VC on Twitter about how—oh, that you know, there should be a startup thinking about an app to solve police shootings, right? And that was a valid. That was a—that was a good idea that he thought that he should tweet out so that you know, like, you know, people in Silicon Valley could start making apps about that. And I think it's that kind of thinking that will lead us in like, you know, horrible direction, so I wanted to make that spiel. OK. Thomas: OK, thank you. Anyone else want to report out from what you were discussing at your table? No? OK, OK. Someone over here. Haven't heard from. -PARTICIPANT: I think one of the things I'm interested in is—so I do a lot of visual journalism, so creing visualizations or charts or whatever based on some underlying dataset is how do you not surgeon something into just an abstraction, whether that's just a lot of points or little cartoon figures or something, * in a high number. How do you keep stories humane when you're using visualizations which is just sort of lines and dots and things like that. +PARTICIPANT: I think one of the things I'm interested in is—so I do a lot of visual journalism, so creing visualizations or charts or whatever based on some underlying dataset is how do you not surgeon something into just an abstraction, whether that's just a lot of points or little cartoon figures or something, \* in a high number. How do you keep stories humane when you're using visualizations which is just sort of lines and dots and things like that. -Thomas: OK, cool, so technically it's now 12:59. Lunch will start in half an hour for the lunch conversations, nobody has told me that you can't all sit here, so if you're having a good time continuing the discussion, feel free to continue that and if you have anything in mind that you want to share with the group, please keep in mind that we do have the etherpad for the session so you can share links or ideas that you have problems that you've solved or run into that you want to share there. I really appreciate all of you joining me here today. Thank you. +Thomas: OK, cool, so technically it's now 12:59. Lunch will start in half an hour for the lunch conversations, nobody has told me that you can't all sit here, so if you're having a good time continuing the discussion, feel free to continue that and if you have anything in mind that you want to share with the group, please keep in mind that we do have the etherpad for the session so you can share links or ideas that you have problems that you've solved or run into that you want to share there. I really appreciate all of you joining me here today. Thank you. [applause] - - - - - - - diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-juggling-expectations.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-juggling-expectations.md index 929b647b..c2dda7f7 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-juggling-expectations.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-juggling-expectations.md @@ -1,9 +1,9 @@ -Every day I'm juggling: Managing managers, peer expectation, and your own project ideas +Every day I'm juggling: Managing managers, peer expectation, and your own project ideas Session facilitator(s): Gina Boysun, Justin Myers Day & Time: Friday, 12-1pm -Room: Innovation Studio +Room: Innovation Studio -Gina. We'll wait just a couple of minutes to see if there's any stragglers, but then we'll get going right away. My name is Jonah Boysun I'm an online editor i Spokane, I'm a manager of a team of a couple of news dev and a couple of producers, and I have a boss right now who knows nothing about tech and I have some peers who know a lot about tech and I have some reporterrers who know not very much so kind of how this bubbled up for me is ideas for how we can pitch ideas, help people to learn, how to help our bosses be advocates for us up the chain and it's nice in this room that most of us are that already. We're all tech and we know what we're doing, so it's kind of nice to be among my people, but really back at home, we're special unicorns in a department full of people who do journalism. Maybe know a little bit of tech. There's a whole spectrum of ability. And so what we're going to talk about today is some strategies and I am we're going to break up into small groups, too, but some strategies for how you can most effectively tell stories, set expectations for projects, how to fail successfully when you have made a mistake and learn from that, and so I'll hand it off to Justin and he'll talk a little bit and we'll go from there. +Gina. We'll wait just a couple of minutes to see if there's any stragglers, but then we'll get going right away. My name is Jonah Boysun I'm an online editor i Spokane, I'm a manager of a team of a couple of news dev and a couple of producers, and I have a boss right now who knows nothing about tech and I have some peers who know a lot about tech and I have some reporterrers who know not very much so kind of how this bubbled up for me is ideas for how we can pitch ideas, help people to learn, how to help our bosses be advocates for us up the chain and it's nice in this room that most of us are that already. We're all tech and we know what we're doing, so it's kind of nice to be among my people, but really back at home, we're special unicorns in a department full of people who do journalism. Maybe know a little bit of tech. There's a whole spectrum of ability. And so what we're going to talk about today is some strategies and I am we're going to break up into small groups, too, but some strategies for how you can most effectively tell stories, set expectations for projects, how to fail successfully when you have made a mistake and learn from that, and so I'll hand it off to Justin and he'll talk a little bit and we'll go from there. Justin: Hey, everybody, so I'm Justin Myers, I work for the Associated Press as the news automation editor, so on one hand I have editor on my title, on the other hand, all my direct reports are robots, so coming ou of this from a little different perspective up the reporting chain than Gina is. @@ -15,7 +15,7 @@ OK. Cool. Designers? OK. Cool. So it looks like we have a nice mixture. I'm going to give like the sort of things that I struggle with and we're going to kind of invite people to break into small groups and talk about some of your own experiences and then together kind of problem-solve or the goal is to come out of this with sort of a toolkit or an arsenal of here's the best way that we can approach this, pitching a project, or solving a problem, and then kind of report that back, either put in our etherpad or provide it to Justin or I and we can put it in there. So a specific example that I'm dealing with right now, and this is off the record immediately. (Off the record). -PARTICIPANT: Let's see, and just sort of as a seed example from my side of things, the AP is a really big place, (this is Justin. I work on an entirely remote team. Theres' 10 or 11 of us in, I think, six different cities, just on the data team. That's not counting other few thousand that work for the broader organization all throughout the world and so there's this sense, like it's really easy, especially in sort of a newsroom tech role, to sort of feel off in your own corner, and like even the people you're working with directly don't necessarily see what you're doing at any given time and what, you know, how to help. One of the other approaches that is interesting to me is just visibility, right? What do you do? How do you do it? How can I help you? And so if anybody wants to take that approach to things. That's also welcome. +PARTICIPANT: Let's see, and just sort of as a seed example from my side of things, the AP is a really big place, (this is Justin. I work on an entirely remote team. Theres' 10 or 11 of us in, I think, six different cities, just on the data team. That's not counting other few thousand that work for the broader organization all throughout the world and so there's this sense, like it's really easy, especially in sort of a newsroom tech role, to sort of feel off in your own corner, and like even the people you're working with directly don't necessarily see what you're doing at any given time and what, you know, how to help. One of the other approaches that is interesting to me is just visibility, right? What do you do? How do you do it? How can I help you? And so if anybody wants to take that approach to things. That's also welcome. How big do we want to try to make groups here or do we just keep everybody at their tables and see how this goes? @@ -25,13 +25,11 @@ PARTICIPANT: Justi: Any questions before we get started? All right. Have at it. [group activity] - Justin: OK, everybody, we're going to give you about another minute or so, so if you've got something you want to share with the broader group, that would be great. There are some post-it notes there, so another minute or so ... - Justin: All right, if I can get everybody back for a second. So, it sounds like there was a lot of good conversation going on. Gina and I were sort of going around from table to table. Does anybody sort of want to kick things off and share something that their group came up with the rest of the room? -PARTICIPANT: OK, so I'll pick three of—what we were talking about over here? We were talking about, at this group, like when people come in and try to—well, what we were mostly talking about how not to be a service desk. Like, how do you balance the difference between ting requests versus what you think about being proactive with is right. In a country that doesn't get data journalism yet. And the three things that we—or four things that we came up with, spend 80% of the time on the 20% that matters and spend 20% of the time on the thing management wants and the side note that that I will not endorse, but that was said here, is to lie about how long it takes to do the 20%, so they don't know the 80% is actually being spent on the other things. +PARTICIPANT: OK, so I'll pick three of—what we were talking about over here? We were talking about, at this group, like when people come in and try to—well, what we were mostly talking about how not to be a service desk. Like, how do you balance the difference between ting requests versus what you think about being proactive with is right. In a country that doesn't get data journalism yet. And the three things that we—or four things that we came up with, spend 80% of the time on the 20% that matters and spend 20% of the time on the thing management wants and the side note that that I will not endorse, but that was said here, is to lie about how long it takes to do the 20%, so they don't know the 80% is actually being spent on the other things. [laughter] @@ -39,7 +37,7 @@ Data trumps the hippo in the room, hippo being the highest paid person's opinion We can't just expect it to work or expect that people understand how we work. We have to collaborate. And then always get to go the why. And this is mostly to the question of like people coming to you and just saying, like, make it blue or like make it bigger or like build this thing for me. Talking about what the value added is who is the user, why would your user care, putting the user first and really focusing on why what you're doing is important and that usually resolves to an understanding of either your thing isn't important or there's another issue that you should be solving and there's a better way to solve it.PARTICIPANT: Thanks. Anybody else? -PARTICIPANT: So we went through a couple, but one of the one that really stood out to me is when you have, like, a couple sort of micromanaging editors going over like what shade of blue, you send them off into their own room, and have one of them report back to say what the decision is. Because like this is purely tactical, and it happens to all of us, and it was absolutely brilliant. I—haha—um, how can I read my handwriting? Another one is like for all—I'm paraphrasing this, sorry. We're all sort of—we're experts in our particular domains, be it like data visualization, or programming, and editors are experts in their domains, and sometimes they don't really understand that our expertise is just as involved in our domains as theirs, so you have to take the time to teach and train them and that takes a while, but like, you have to send a blog post articles, and eventually they'll start to understand that there's depth to the things we do. +PARTICIPANT: So we went through a couple, but one of the one that really stood out to me is when you have, like, a couple sort of micromanaging editors going over like what shade of blue, you send them off into their own room, and have one of them report back to say what the decision is. Because like this is purely tactical, and it happens to all of us, and it was absolutely brilliant. I—haha—um, how can I read my handwriting? Another one is like for all—I'm paraphrasing this, sorry. We're all sort of—we're experts in our particular domains, be it like data visualization, or programming, and editors are experts in their domains, and sometimes they don't really understand that our expertise is just as involved in our domains as theirs, so you have to take the time to teach and train them and that takes a while, but like, you have to send a blog post articles, and eventually they'll start to understand that there's depth to the things we do. Third one is putting together like a women impact reports on the stuff that we just finished, to feed back to the editors, and producers, like immediately after a thing happens, so it's not 6 months later that they go oh, this work or this did it. It's like next week, or two weeks later, and that way they can understand immediately how their decisions affect how good the product is. And I don't think I can read the last one. @@ -47,7 +45,6 @@ Third one is putting together like a women impact reports on the stuff that we j Justin: Thanks. Anybody from one of the other tables? - PARTICIPANT: So yeah, we covered a lot of this stuff, too, so I'll just pick some of them. One thing that I really liked when we talked about getting people outside of our team to use our communication tools was like getting them on Slack by having sort of channels that offer them vicarious, some of them are statistics on how stories are doing, so reporters will come on because they want to see their names and they want to see positive things and pieces like that. I'll grab some to see what she wrote down. Yeah, talked about in the technical world how you'll ask people to file tickets as user stories, where you say something like, you know, as an editor I want this, so that if blank and how that can be applied for in the newsroom because when you force people to think through what the end product of the story is, maybe it will help them that it doesn't need to be a big graph OK why are maybe you guys can work out the situation that can be the right one. Helps them to solve a core problem or tell a story they're trying to tell. Oh, yeah, so to kind of show progress for maybe nontechnical managers, maybe just teach them how to look at some of the existing tools, so one example is a new manager never managing a technical team, just show them how to look at a commit history so maybe if they don't understand exactly how to see the code, you can see that you're pushing commits regularly, you're working on this problem, not just messing around. @@ -66,11 +63,9 @@ PARTICIPANT: Thanks, and back over here while I work my way back over there. PARTICIPANT: Yeah, I guess there were a couple of things. But Michael was talking about the fact that often it didn't seem to feel like you had much influence on what is actually working, or people aren't really listening to the ideas. So the suggestion was that I've been actually aed to do is to do one-on-ones regularly for half an hour each week, that people will schedule that and have that scheduled in your calendar, and that can move, but the point that you have it scheduled means that you're given some time for your direct reports to actually talk on you and the idea for the one-on-one is not for you to talk but to see how they're feeling about your issues and if you do this regularly enough then it's not you as a manager talking down, but you as a manager to really get a feeling for how people are feeling, and that can be really beneficial. And also the fact that it's scheduled, gives the person who's having the one-on-one with you, makes them feel like you are actually are making time for them. Which is beneficial in itself. So that was one aspect. - - -There's another about the manager micromanaing in a way, or just wanting to -- +There's another about the manager micromanaing in a way, or just wanting to -- -PARTICIPANT: Yeah, so I guess we were talking about how good management is about being supporting the people who report to you, more than telling them what to do, so much. And that's something that I think a few of us have encountered managers who see, that they justify that position by making decisions or telling you to do things in a way and trying to figure out how to work around that without creaing a confrontation or bruising their ego, and we talked about maybe just ways of saying yes to the suggestions without actually having to do them. And saying yes, that's a great idea, and we're really going to take that on board and coming back maybe with something else that you did that you were always going to do and say how much their idea inspired you and just sort of make them feel like you're not confronting them, but still they feel important somehow. Which you shouldn't have to do, but the reality is that bad managers seem to be quite prevalent. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah, so I guess we were talking about how good management is about being supporting the people who report to you, more than telling them what to do, so much. And that's something that I think a few of us have encountered managers who see, that they justify that position by making decisions or telling you to do things in a way and trying to figure out how to work around that without creaing a confrontation or bruising their ego, and we talked about maybe just ways of saying yes to the suggestions without actually having to do them. And saying yes, that's a great idea, and we're really going to take that on board and coming back maybe with something else that you did that you were always going to do and say how much their idea inspired you and just sort of make them feel like you're not confronting them, but still they feel important somehow. Which you shouldn't have to do, but the reality is that bad managers seem to be quite prevalent. Thanks. Anybody else in the room got anything they want to share or does everybody just want to eat? @@ -85,7 +80,3 @@ Gina: Yeah, I guess the only ore thing I would say is that there were a lot of d Justin: All right, thanks everybody. Go eat. [applause] - - - - diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-media-science-fiction.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-media-science-fiction.md index a5f9b935..e27f4b79 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-media-science-fiction.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-media-science-fiction.md @@ -1,17 +1,17 @@ Through an iPhone darkly: Media and networks through the lens of science fiction Session facilitator(s): Joe Germuska Day & Time: Friday, 2:30-3:30pm -Room: Innovation Studio +Room: Innovation Studio -PARTICIPANT: Good afternoon, we are waiting for one more person to show so I'll do a little preface. Hopefully you've read the session thing. This is not just me filling your brains about stuff. We actually have a handful of wonderful volunteers who will each share 0 sort of science fictional story that has something that they want to nerd out about you with you. So this is all about just enjoying the ideas of science fiction stuff. So as soon as Gerald comes, or maybe a minute before and there's going to be time. Like if we all do our talks in five minutes or less. +PARTICIPANT: Good afternoon, we are waiting for one more person to show so I'll do a little preface. Hopefully you've read the session thing. This is not just me filling your brains about stuff. We actually have a handful of wonderful volunteers who will each share 0 sort of science fictional story that has something that they want to nerd out about you with you. So this is all about just enjoying the ideas of science fiction stuff. So as soon as Gerald comes, or maybe a minute before and there's going to be time. Like if we all do our talks in five minutes or less. -PARTICIPANT: OK, I thought I saw you—I didn't see you. OK, we're all here. So let me get started. You are at the session through an iPhone darkly, which I think this got picked just because of the name. That's what Ryan said. But again, basically I have this one story that I think is really cool and I wanted to nerd out about it with some people and I figured I could do that for at least five minutes and if I could recruit some other people, we could have fun. So the real goal is for people to say, hey, stories are cool and they inspire us to get excited about stuff and some of us are prepared to share some things but I'm hoping we have time for people in the audience who are game to stand up and say, here as an awesome one that I think are cool and hopefully at the end of the day we'll end up with an etherpad. So I also welcome anyone who's game to help -P sort of scribe stuff in our etherpad, because they turn out to be really good records of what happens. And in fact I already started like two other things that I will talk about if there's time. If nobody's game after we do all our talks, then I may. But that's basically the idea. So hopefully that's what you're here for and if it's not, and you sneak out, I won't take it too personally, so ... +PARTICIPANT: OK, I thought I saw you—I didn't see you. OK, we're all here. So let me get started. You are at the session through an iPhone darkly, which I think this got picked just because of the name. That's what Ryan said. But again, basically I have this one story that I think is really cool and I wanted to nerd out about it with some people and I figured I could do that for at least five minutes and if I could recruit some other people, we could have fun. So the real goal is for people to say, hey, stories are cool and they inspire us to get excited about stuff and some of us are prepared to share some things but I'm hoping we have time for people in the audience who are game to stand up and say, here as an awesome one that I think are cool and hopefully at the end of the day we'll end up with an etherpad. So I also welcome anyone who's game to help -P sort of scribe stuff in our etherpad, because they turn out to be really good records of what happens. And in fact I already started like two other things that I will talk about if there's time. If nobody's game after we do all our talks, then I may. But that's basically the idea. So hopefully that's what you're here for and if it's not, and you sneak out, I won't take it too personally, so ... OK, I guess we'll start. -PARTICIPANT: So I'm Joe Germuska, and I work at Northwestern ... but I also have been a nerd for a long time and in fact and in fact our story starts in—all right. Bay village, Ohio. At the library. Not the old library, where—does anyone have a ter by the way? I won't go long, but time me, yeah, five minutes. Month at the old library where when I was four or five I got locked in because I was reading quietly in the back room and they closed the library not knowing I was there. That's a story for another time. But instead the new library. When I was in middle school conveniently the new library was in the same block as our middle school. I spent a lot of time there. We also played top secret. The spy role-playing game, but also hanging out with books because that's what you did if you were me, I suspect a lot of you because you're here. Especially science fiction was really my jam. It was a small town, less than 5,000 people so you can imagine that I was pretty excited when the librarian set up a little feature here's a bay village author. I promptly started reading Kevin O'Donnell Jr, not to be confused with a musician I thought one of them really stuck with me, Oracle. In fact, you can see my very bat copy. Another little piece came off on the way here. It's really in. +PARTICIPANT: So I'm Joe Germuska, and I work at Northwestern ... but I also have been a nerd for a long time and in fact and in fact our story starts in—all right. Bay village, Ohio. At the library. Not the old library, where—does anyone have a ter by the way? I won't go long, but time me, yeah, five minutes. Month at the old library where when I was four or five I got locked in because I was reading quietly in the back room and they closed the library not knowing I was there. That's a story for another time. But instead the new library. When I was in middle school conveniently the new library was in the same block as our middle school. I spent a lot of time there. We also played top secret. The spy role-playing game, but also hanging out with books because that's what you did if you were me, I suspect a lot of you because you're here. Especially science fiction was really my jam. It was a small town, less than 5,000 people so you can imagine that I was pretty excited when the librarian set up a little feature here's a bay village author. I promptly started reading Kevin O'Donnell Jr, not to be confused with a musician I thought one of them really stuck with me, Oracle. In fact, you can see my very bat copy. Another little piece came off on the way here. It's really in. -They don't live in tron, despite what the picture looks like, they live in towers, like this, but because th dacks are dangerous. Everything you need, so don't have to go out and get shot by the dack, the point being that this is the world where people live in 2188. So at the beginning of the story our protagonist goes out and his dach watch has failed. So he encounters one of these things. It almost kills him, he kills it and then later he finds out that somebody sabotaged his alarm and the whole plot of the book is basically trying to murder alia lady who's our protagonist. Now, notice the punctuation. There's a colon put in there. It's opinions research and device computer linked experts and this was the first thing that I—it was focused in 1983, so ALS is a CLE, a computer linked expertise and his expertise is 1500 to 2,000 China, and this is basically what you think of now as the gig economy. So he lived in this world for scholars and say I I have this question and he would get hooked up and answer the questions and he'd get paid some money and he had the same sort of uncertainty in his income and stuff that people in the gig economy have, so this is his thing. The other thing that I thought was really, really cool about this book is this is really washed out but this is basically every chapter begins with the headlines of the day. So you can see that maybe there would be micro-payments. You can probably barely see it. Each story costs 20 cents, 15, 10. But I love this stuff. But throughout the book are narrative things. So this guy really develops the world to sort of surprising levels. But a lot of it's sort of tucked in and if you read it, it flushes it all out. So there's other weird ones as you can see, this one here about courtesy titles gets into the ID dress, which are sort of like names but they're different. Social Security numbers crossed with names so our ALL80 our protagonist. But it gets into the partisan nature of news so you can see this news bank is run by the Muslim Republican party and the headline here is the Muslim Republicans to the rescue again. And each chapter has a headline of a different party. I just listed them for fun. These are the different parties. +They don't live in tron, despite what the picture looks like, they live in towers, like this, but because th dacks are dangerous. Everything you need, so don't have to go out and get shot by the dack, the point being that this is the world where people live in 2188. So at the beginning of the story our protagonist goes out and his dach watch has failed. So he encounters one of these things. It almost kills him, he kills it and then later he finds out that somebody sabotaged his alarm and the whole plot of the book is basically trying to murder alia lady who's our protagonist. Now, notice the punctuation. There's a colon put in there. It's opinions research and device computer linked experts and this was the first thing that I—it was focused in 1983, so ALS is a CLE, a computer linked expertise and his expertise is 1500 to 2,000 China, and this is basically what you think of now as the gig economy. So he lived in this world for scholars and say I I have this question and he would get hooked up and answer the questions and he'd get paid some money and he had the same sort of uncertainty in his income and stuff that people in the gig economy have, so this is his thing. The other thing that I thought was really, really cool about this book is this is really washed out but this is basically every chapter begins with the headlines of the day. So you can see that maybe there would be micro-payments. You can probably barely see it. Each story costs 20 cents, 15, 10. But I love this stuff. But throughout the book are narrative things. So this guy really develops the world to sort of surprising levels. But a lot of it's sort of tucked in and if you read it, it flushes it all out. So there's other weird ones as you can see, this one here about courtesy titles gets into the ID dress, which are sort of like names but they're different. Social Security numbers crossed with names so our ALL80 our protagonist. But it gets into the partisan nature of news so you can see this news bank is run by the Muslim Republican party and the headline here is the Muslim Republicans to the rescue again. And each chapter has a headline of a different party. I just listed them for fun. These are the different parties. And they also this also get into the proposition of government because in these towers they contracted the different parties for like garbage service and transportation, too, so that's kind of a weird tidbit. And then the Dac killer, he's in the headlines there. So sometimes it's that, sometimes it's turned into words but it takes you a while to figure out that they're the same thing. @@ -21,17 +21,17 @@ Another book it's a space column nization ones, and it's generations and generat And now. -PARTICIPANT: I'm just pulling this up here. Hi everybody. I'm here to talk about the—how many of you have read the da gauge. OK, a few of you. You can tell me how wrong I am on this. So I'm talking about a kneel Stevenson book called the diamond age and this was a book published 1995, which is interesting because there's a whole lot of stuff there. It is a book about a nano technological civilization, maybe near future, mid future, but none of this is about space. It's about the earth. It's about the connections that different people have and the nature of media is very core to the story, but first the substrate of what world this takes place in. Humans have nanotechnology, they can build things and a society has evolved past nation states into sort of communities of interest which are referred to as claves, and one of these claves, the new Victorian actually have matter compilers and this has radically changed the way difficultlization works, where they have created new * land masses off the coast of China. This—you know, I'm not going to give you the full detail but the book is really fascinating for the world that it describes, including the fact that they've got this basic in common of living in a post scarcity world allows anybody to have access to at least the basic resources that one needs. The question is, how much matter are you paying to—what's the through-put for the matter that can come through your matter compiler. So in a post scarcity world, what are the things that actually control the destiny of an individual and where they will end up in society? And that's really what the book is about. You know, there is some goofy examples of the way that media is used, like now everybody just gets media on screens, only the richest of the rich actually have content published to them and delivered to their doorstep, but the crux of the book is about one of these neoVictorian, who, not satisfied with his lot in life he ended up with a software architect and matters more for his daughter, and is approached by one of these rich entrepreneurs who also is not satisfied with where his sort of wishes for his children, wants more for his grandchildren and essentially licenses this software architect or this artifice to create a book for his granddaughter and this book is something essentially magic. It is a book that will grow with these children. And will help—it able to read what the environment around them is like, adapt to what the child is interested in, and over time, help mold, shape the child in response to what their interests are. And the way that this is set up is really fascinating, because it's—there's a point in the book which talks about, sure, you could make pseudointelligences and sort of provide some sort of illusion of interactivity with this child, but for this rich entrepreneur, he licenses actual actresses who essentially work in sort of a mechanical Turk-like environment, where the book itself is the interface for these children. There is an actress that provides a lot of the interactivity for this. The child never knows who's actually on the other end of this. +PARTICIPANT: I'm just pulling this up here. Hi everybody. I'm here to talk about the—how many of you have read the da gauge. OK, a few of you. You can tell me how wrong I am on this. So I'm talking about a kneel Stevenson book called the diamond age and this was a book published 1995, which is interesting because there's a whole lot of stuff there. It is a book about a nano technological civilization, maybe near future, mid future, but none of this is about space. It's about the earth. It's about the connections that different people have and the nature of media is very core to the story, but first the substrate of what world this takes place in. Humans have nanotechnology, they can build things and a society has evolved past nation states into sort of communities of interest which are referred to as claves, and one of these claves, the new Victorian actually have matter compilers and this has radically changed the way difficultlization works, where they have created new \* land masses off the coast of China. This—you know, I'm not going to give you the full detail but the book is really fascinating for the world that it describes, including the fact that they've got this basic in common of living in a post scarcity world allows anybody to have access to at least the basic resources that one needs. The question is, how much matter are you paying to—what's the through-put for the matter that can come through your matter compiler. So in a post scarcity world, what are the things that actually control the destiny of an individual and where they will end up in society? And that's really what the book is about. You know, there is some goofy examples of the way that media is used, like now everybody just gets media on screens, only the richest of the rich actually have content published to them and delivered to their doorstep, but the crux of the book is about one of these neoVictorian, who, not satisfied with his lot in life he ended up with a software architect and matters more for his daughter, and is approached by one of these rich entrepreneurs who also is not satisfied with where his sort of wishes for his children, wants more for his grandchildren and essentially licenses this software architect or this artifice to create a book for his granddaughter and this book is something essentially magic. It is a book that will grow with these children. And will help—it able to read what the environment around them is like, adapt to what the child is interested in, and over time, help mold, shape the child in response to what their interests are. And the way that this is set up is really fascinating, because it's—there's a point in the book which talks about, sure, you could make pseudointelligences and sort of provide some sort of illusion of interactivity with this child, but for this rich entrepreneur, he licenses actual actresses who essentially work in sort of a mechanical Turk-like environment, where the book itself is the interface for these children. There is an actress that provides a lot of the interactivity for this. The child never knows who's actually on the other end of this. -And so the world in which all this takes place is undergrowing this shift through control of who has the capability and the access to be able to determine their own future and help shape what the future will be like to come, and one of these books ends up not in the hands of one of these neoVictorians, but a girl whose family is on basic income, and the book essentially watches her path and development through the events of the books, culminaing in a fundamental shift in the way that nanotechnology is delivered to populations outside of the neoVictorians who control the feed and who have amassed this great amount of wealth. So that's 15 seconds. And I'll stop there.[applTiff: Hi, I'm Tiff. I'm here to give a book report about China immediate Evals, the city and the city as if I'm in kindergarten. Some of you are probably familiar with China Miavle's work. He's sword sort of this genre-hopping experimental fiction madman. I can give or take a lot of his stuff but I love this book. How many of you have read his realm of stuff. OK, a handful. He's also written quite a bit for the gardian around the protests * you might have read that in a journalistic context, as well. +And so the world in which all this takes place is undergrowing this shift through control of who has the capability and the access to be able to determine their own future and help shape what the future will be like to come, and one of these books ends up not in the hands of one of these neoVictorians, but a girl whose family is on basic income, and the book essentially watches her path and development through the events of the books, culminaing in a fundamental shift in the way that nanotechnology is delivered to populations outside of the neoVictorians who control the feed and who have amassed this great amount of wealth. So that's 15 seconds. And I'll stop there.[applTiff: Hi, I'm Tiff. I'm here to give a book report about China immediate Evals, the city and the city as if I'm in kindergarten. Some of you are probably familiar with China Miavle's work. He's sword sort of this genre-hopping experimental fiction madman. I can give or take a lot of his stuff but I love this book. How many of you have read his realm of stuff. OK, a handful. He's also written quite a bit for the gardian around the protests \* you might have read that in a journalistic context, as well. -So the city in the city is eeffectively mayville who had done a sci-fiish Moby dick steam punk novel. It's like four is not one of his books, thank. OK, the city in the city is detective police procedural quasi-noire wrapped up in sci-fi. But it's a little bit of a different twist. This one has to do with ciies that are overleaved into each other or interleaved into each other. So the city in the city is actually one city but they are two cities that were created in the same place. And they've created this imaginary divide about how you can't go one in. The you start out this is also set somewhere near the Crimea black sea as a little bit of an allegory for effectively the—into the cold war and how Berlin was effectively split up with a line down the middle, but these two cities are cross-stitched into each other. The interesting thing is that the detective or some of the characters actually believe there's a third city in the seam between the two cities. There's this entire conspiracy theory paganist nonsense. Which is interesting ... Another factor that comes from that is there's this emergent police force called the breach so if you cross from one city to the other, even if you just look at someone who lives in the other city, breach will know and they just sort of materialize, not in they just only appear. They were there the whole time but you just didn't notice them because you were trained to not notice them in some way. So this is an extra judicial police force and all the citizens are raised to be not able to see the other city because they choose not to. So all the distinctions between the two cities those distinctions are held together by the populace, and this is what I find interesting about the store as sort of a communication device is how much of the thought training is implied in all the citizens will intentionally go to the trouble of unseeing the other city once they've seen it. To the point where like traffic laws he's describing down the street to go to a crime scene and the crux of the crime is it happened in one city but the body ended up in the other, so high jinx. And he's * intentionally not noticing he's stuck in a car in the other city. And so he's got to observe all the traffic laws of the other city and the other car and what it's doing, but he's just trying to drive to the crime scene. So there's all this crazy stuff that happens including at one point a really lovely standoff scene that he's pacing alongside a guy who he suspects has done something terrible. He's all noirey and stuff and has a black trench coat and whatever. So they're like feet apart but the other guy is in the other city and so they have this whole cat and mouse chase while navigating spaces and the thing that kind of brings the novel to the part of where it kind of flips to beginning to tidy up some details is he has decided to act if he's going to cross the barrier and go into breach to get the villain who's in the other city. It's delightful as a book. It's a really neat concept. It's a great detective story. It's really good as an audio book. One city has kind of a Arabic derived naming scheme, and then the other one is very much Cyrillic-Slavic, perfect. Can recommend. +So the city in the city is eeffectively mayville who had done a sci-fiish Moby dick steam punk novel. It's like four is not one of his books, thank. OK, the city in the city is detective police procedural quasi-noire wrapped up in sci-fi. But it's a little bit of a different twist. This one has to do with ciies that are overleaved into each other or interleaved into each other. So the city in the city is actually one city but they are two cities that were created in the same place. And they've created this imaginary divide about how you can't go one in. The you start out this is also set somewhere near the Crimea black sea as a little bit of an allegory for effectively the—into the cold war and how Berlin was effectively split up with a line down the middle, but these two cities are cross-stitched into each other. The interesting thing is that the detective or some of the characters actually believe there's a third city in the seam between the two cities. There's this entire conspiracy theory paganist nonsense. Which is interesting ... Another factor that comes from that is there's this emergent police force called the breach so if you cross from one city to the other, even if you just look at someone who lives in the other city, breach will know and they just sort of materialize, not in they just only appear. They were there the whole time but you just didn't notice them because you were trained to not notice them in some way. So this is an extra judicial police force and all the citizens are raised to be not able to see the other city because they choose not to. So all the distinctions between the two cities those distinctions are held together by the populace, and this is what I find interesting about the store as sort of a communication device is how much of the thought training is implied in all the citizens will intentionally go to the trouble of unseeing the other city once they've seen it. To the point where like traffic laws he's describing down the street to go to a crime scene and the crux of the crime is it happened in one city but the body ended up in the other, so high jinx. And he's \* intentionally not noticing he's stuck in a car in the other city. And so he's got to observe all the traffic laws of the other city and the other car and what it's doing, but he's just trying to drive to the crime scene. So there's all this crazy stuff that happens including at one point a really lovely standoff scene that he's pacing alongside a guy who he suspects has done something terrible. He's all noirey and stuff and has a black trench coat and whatever. So they're like feet apart but the other guy is in the other city and so they have this whole cat and mouse chase while navigating spaces and the thing that kind of brings the novel to the part of where it kind of flips to beginning to tidy up some details is he has decided to act if he's going to cross the barrier and go into breach to get the villain who's in the other city. It's delightful as a book. It's a really neat concept. It's a great detective story. It's really good as an audio book. One city has kind of a Arabic derived naming scheme, and then the other one is very much Cyrillic-Slavic, perfect. Can recommend. Hi, everybody. I'm Martin McClellan, and I cofounder of Seattle review books, so if you love books, some read Seattle review books, please. That's my pitch. And I'm going to talk about an Alfred bester book. Anybody read Alfred bester? He wrote a book called the demolish man in 1952. And then published in 1959 and it won a Hugo award which is notable because it was the very first Hugo award given out. So it's a well known book. But he wrote another one which tends to be the one that gets all the attention. But the demolish man is a little more small and more driven and I find its interesting because it's about one single thing. Which is a businessman wakes up and decides he wants to kill another businessman head of another company and that's the entire book is I'm going to kill that guy but there are some complications one of the complications being that ESP is a thing. Where you can't commit a crime, because if you think like the precogs that came later, influenced, I think by bester, you can't actually think I'm going to go kill somebody and then go kill them because they're going to catch you because you're thinking about killing them. So it's a little bit of a logistical puzzle how am I going to go and kill that guy that I want to kill and not get caught for it and that's basically the sum of this book. -Why I like this book is because it answers a really fundamental question in fiction in a very specific and driven way. And that's, well, there was a screenwriter Todd alcot. He wrote the movie ants which was th not-Pixar ant movie that came out. he is he has this meeting where he's going to pitch Jeffrey catsen berg when Jeffrey catsen berg wasn't a owner of a studio. OK, we have this ant and's' going into this New York play writer explanation of what this ant is and Jeffrey catsen Berger got really mad at him and he started pounding the table and said what does the guy want? What does the guy want? And today Al cot was really well, that really freaked me out but then afterwarts he * started thinking, this is nothing nothing really new, it's like the protagonist, was what's the protagonist want? Protagonist walks over there and gets blocked somehow. That's modern storytelling, 101, like base level. But I love this expression. Instead of a guy he makes up what does the protagonist want. And how are they getting blocked along the way of doing it and why is this interesting to me especially in this book, which is just propulsive and it's one of those books you pick up and you'll be done with it in two hours and you won't know where the time went. Is because as like a news point of view, how do you look at somebody who is that driven towards something? Like what perspective do you have, let's say if you're one of the ESP people who's trying to see what they're doing or you're a journalist who's investigating a politician who's really driven on something but is key, like part of their fundamental aspect of what they're doing is to block you from having too much information from what they're doing. Which kind of seems relevant to what we're looking at now in our country. So I am also it's a fun read. A really big caveat of course it's written in 195 it, and the gender roles are 1952. He was incredibly prescient, there's a character named Atkins and the at is like an @ symbol. So that aside, I couldn't recommend it enough. Alfred bester, demolished man, thank you very much. +Why I like this book is because it answers a really fundamental question in fiction in a very specific and driven way. And that's, well, there was a screenwriter Todd alcot. He wrote the movie ants which was th not-Pixar ant movie that came out. he is he has this meeting where he's going to pitch Jeffrey catsen berg when Jeffrey catsen berg wasn't a owner of a studio. OK, we have this ant and's' going into this New York play writer explanation of what this ant is and Jeffrey catsen Berger got really mad at him and he started pounding the table and said what does the guy want? What does the guy want? And today Al cot was really well, that really freaked me out but then afterwarts he \* started thinking, this is nothing nothing really new, it's like the protagonist, was what's the protagonist want? Protagonist walks over there and gets blocked somehow. That's modern storytelling, 101, like base level. But I love this expression. Instead of a guy he makes up what does the protagonist want. And how are they getting blocked along the way of doing it and why is this interesting to me especially in this book, which is just propulsive and it's one of those books you pick up and you'll be done with it in two hours and you won't know where the time went. Is because as like a news point of view, how do you look at somebody who is that driven towards something? Like what perspective do you have, let's say if you're one of the ESP people who's trying to see what they're doing or you're a journalist who's investigating a politician who's really driven on something but is key, like part of their fundamental aspect of what they're doing is to block you from having too much information from what they're doing. Which kind of seems relevant to what we're looking at now in our country. So I am also it's a fun read. A really big caveat of course it's written in 195 it, and the gender roles are 1952. He was incredibly prescient, there's a character named Atkins and the at is like an @ symbol. So that aside, I couldn't recommend it enough. Alfred bester, demolished man, thank you very much. -PARTICIPANT: Hi. Hello. I feel like—I feel underprepared. My book is China mountain Zang. Literally nobody that's amaing. It's Maureen F McHugh. The book is wonderful. If you're looking for a book that is about a single thing, that is not the book for you. It's basically a series of character studies where some of the character studies are about the same character at a different point in their life. So it starts off with one character Zhang, who at some point crosses paths with Zang and then it goes back to another one and Zang is it like, it's science fiction, it takes place in a future in which China is the preeminent power and there's space travel. But that doesn't matter. A feature of the book or like one of the stories of the book or something that happens that exists in this world, is this concept of kite racing and that's what I thought was relevant to this talk, so kite racing is not just flying kites and running along with them. You're actually hooked into the kites, sort of mentally but also it affects your body so if you crash the kite while you're flying it, it feels like you're flying it and you'll die and you're hooked into that. It's the most important sport so a lot of people watch it. It's in union square's Washington park and back and people would go on rooftops and physically watch the races but you could also synch in so you're experienced in flying with them and I think you're getting at the lower sensory emotion of what they're getting, but so kite racing is deadly so people will die sometimes when they're kite racing and one of the kite racers is I have a quote it's like I— well, people can be self-conscious about it. I wonder briefly how many people are synched with me. I used to be self-conscious about people who were tied in, experiencing what I'm experiencing when I fly. Now I don't think about them anymore. If the numbers get high enough. so there's a concept of sponsorship who people who actually get more people to watch them. In order to get people to watch them, they have to do more dangerous flying which will increase the chances they'll die. I wonder how many people are synched in to me, waiting that I die. They're cut off a nanosecond before the person was actually killed and there's a lot of people who go on and watch this, hoping that that's going to happen and that reminds me of Facebook live and periscope, people who just go on and watch for tragedies and so that's what I was thinking about and we're getting to the point where VR is getting better and cheaper, that those experiences are going to be more and more high definition, and it's like, you know, exciting and terrifying. But I mainly just became because I want to promote this book that not enough people have heard of or read and you should go read it. It's great. I'm going to cut early. +PARTICIPANT: Hi. Hello. I feel like—I feel underprepared. My book is China mountain Zang. Literally nobody that's amaing. It's Maureen F McHugh. The book is wonderful. If you're looking for a book that is about a single thing, that is not the book for you. It's basically a series of character studies where some of the character studies are about the same character at a different point in their life. So it starts off with one character Zhang, who at some point crosses paths with Zang and then it goes back to another one and Zang is it like, it's science fiction, it takes place in a future in which China is the preeminent power and there's space travel. But that doesn't matter. A feature of the book or like one of the stories of the book or something that happens that exists in this world, is this concept of kite racing and that's what I thought was relevant to this talk, so kite racing is not just flying kites and running along with them. You're actually hooked into the kites, sort of mentally but also it affects your body so if you crash the kite while you're flying it, it feels like you're flying it and you'll die and you're hooked into that. It's the most important sport so a lot of people watch it. It's in union square's Washington park and back and people would go on rooftops and physically watch the races but you could also synch in so you're experienced in flying with them and I think you're getting at the lower sensory emotion of what they're getting, but so kite racing is deadly so people will die sometimes when they're kite racing and one of the kite racers is I have a quote it's like I— well, people can be self-conscious about it. I wonder briefly how many people are synched with me. I used to be self-conscious about people who were tied in, experiencing what I'm experiencing when I fly. Now I don't think about them anymore. If the numbers get high enough. so there's a concept of sponsorship who people who actually get more people to watch them. In order to get people to watch them, they have to do more dangerous flying which will increase the chances they'll die. I wonder how many people are synched in to me, waiting that I die. They're cut off a nanosecond before the person was actually killed and there's a lot of people who go on and watch this, hoping that that's going to happen and that reminds me of Facebook live and periscope, people who just go on and watch for tragedies and so that's what I was thinking about and we're getting to the point where VR is getting better and cheaper, that those experiences are going to be more and more high definition, and it's like, you know, exciting and terrifying. But I mainly just became because I want to promote this book that not enough people have heard of or read and you should go read it. It's great. I'm going to cut early. PARTICIPANT: It's my first lightning talk, come on. @@ -39,28 +39,27 @@ Heyyyyyy!What? Bring it, bring it, you all know this movie, you know it. So I'm One of the cool things about sci-fi in journalism so you kind of think about it they're both these forms of expression from like the current day about the future, you know, we're thinking about what's coming up next, and you know, when you design, you want to try and harken back to the old days, you think about iPads, hate 'em, but you have the page flip or your camera has a little shutter thing. But also, you know, Apple has their little Apple times newspaper emoji. Bootstrap if you're a designer has a little newspaper icon. We have these iconography and these visual clues of newspapers, yet er we're losing that and I feel that we're losing something dear that the iPad still does not have. I've been trained on newspapers, and this is crazy hypothesis here but if you know about articles, people love reading ten things about their cats and they also love reading like a really awesome marshal project ProPublica, the story of rape. You want the short thing, before the jump what happened at the DNC last night and you want to read after the jump what the hell is going on in Turkey, it's crazy, right? I think there's a lot of unease we're going to Facebook instant articles, we're talking about Snapchat stories at SRCCON, all these things are not ours, they're not our platform, we can't really control them like we could a newspaper. If we wanted to do a full crazy Front Page, we were able to. And I feel like part of that is we're losing something when we lose a little bit of that. It kind of reminds me of this Simpson's episode where with each platform we're coming out we're stepping on rakes over and over and over again, and you see like, damn it, it's just one thing after another, man, so where am I really going with all of this stuff? First of all if you're from Gannet, give me money for this, please, I live in San Francisco and it's expensive, but what I also wanted to talk about, too, is the future. Thinking about this, as you go home, and everything, think about how we can bring the back to the future of news. You know, when you think about news, what we're doing right now is we're trying to redescribe this experience of reading a paper in another language. Literally in HTML and CSS and Javascript, they're shitty languages. We cannot fully comprehend and get all that awesomeness into it. So what does this matter? I say go back to the future of news, enjoy it, pick up your paper, subscribe. Thank you. - plaus. +plaus. -PARTICIPANT: Thank you, so I intentionally didn't want to pack the session that full, but I don't really know how the discussion part happens, but I guess if anybody has questions, we can do questions. Also, if anybody is inspired, even to get up and say in two sentences some story that you think is awesome that we should all know about, I'll pass the mic around or if we don't have that much to say, we could be donePARTICIPANT: So I realized actually this morning that there's another one that I wanted to quickly mention. Which is a book by Charles straws. How many people here have read anything about Charles Strauss. Charles Strauss is awesome. There are two stories that you should have should go read, but one in particular is called halting state which is about MMO, alternated reality, and espy imagine. And it takes place in a world * where it—it all takes place in Scotland and the series is supposed to be a trilogy but the third book is on indefinite hiatus, because the reality has caught up with the first two books and the first book is about people going out in the world playing these augmented reality games that just are integrated into their daily life as something you go do, and it turns out that you know, Secret Services have infiltrated some of these systems and are actually using them in order to move around packages and do dead drops and things like that as you know, just tasks that you do in the game and you get points for effectively. And that seemed particularly topical the number of people I've been seeing playing Pokemon Go and it's been interesting to see the nascent world that that he described coming forth. And as you go out and play these games, what can you do for other people and what are you doing for other people is the question.PARTICIPANT: So we're not going to just I'm not going to ramble for the rest of the time but I do have a couple of other ones that I will mention. I put this in the etherpad actually when Martin was giving his talk it reminded me of a really cool book. Not so much about this media stuff but it's tall deadly silence and it's by this sort of obscure author called Lee kilo, and it's set in a world where the native culture is telepathic and when the humans arrive through space travel, the unmanaged din of human thought deafened a subset of this culture and killed their telepathy, they were both deafened and muted so people doesn't read their minds. So the humans come and try to set up a police force as sort of a pay-back of you know, we're sorry that we caused this problem in your community so we're going to help you do policing and the book unfolds as the interplay between some people who read other people's minds and other people. It's a really neat book. And also the another book called the doppelganger gambit. It's another police procedural set in Lawrence, Kansas, sometime in the not too distant future where basically this guy shouldn't be able to commit a murder. He's able to set up an alibi for committing a murder by having somebody else go spend money on his credit account with the apparently unforgable fingerprint that's part of completing the transaction. So these people have a way of faking fingerprints, and that sets up this situation where this guy should have an iron-clad alibi and the pair of politics it's sort of like a little bit of a lethal well onpolice duo with some other overlay, have to figure out what happened there. Somebody else must have. I think we'll go in order. So I'll let Joel start. +PARTICIPANT: Thank you, so I intentionally didn't want to pack the session that full, but I don't really know how the discussion part happens, but I guess if anybody has questions, we can do questions. Also, if anybody is inspired, even to get up and say in two sentences some story that you think is awesome that we should all know about, I'll pass the mic around or if we don't have that much to say, we could be donePARTICIPANT: So I realized actually this morning that there's another one that I wanted to quickly mention. Which is a book by Charles straws. How many people here have read anything about Charles Strauss. Charles Strauss is awesome. There are two stories that you should have should go read, but one in particular is called halting state which is about MMO, alternated reality, and espy imagine. And it takes place in a world \* where it—it all takes place in Scotland and the series is supposed to be a trilogy but the third book is on indefinite hiatus, because the reality has caught up with the first two books and the first book is about people going out in the world playing these augmented reality games that just are integrated into their daily life as something you go do, and it turns out that you know, Secret Services have infiltrated some of these systems and are actually using them in order to move around packages and do dead drops and things like that as you know, just tasks that you do in the game and you get points for effectively. And that seemed particularly topical the number of people I've been seeing playing Pokemon Go and it's been interesting to see the nascent world that that he described coming forth. And as you go out and play these games, what can you do for other people and what are you doing for other people is the question.PARTICIPANT: So we're not going to just I'm not going to ramble for the rest of the time but I do have a couple of other ones that I will mention. I put this in the etherpad actually when Martin was giving his talk it reminded me of a really cool book. Not so much about this media stuff but it's tall deadly silence and it's by this sort of obscure author called Lee kilo, and it's set in a world where the native culture is telepathic and when the humans arrive through space travel, the unmanaged din of human thought deafened a subset of this culture and killed their telepathy, they were both deafened and muted so people doesn't read their minds. So the humans come and try to set up a police force as sort of a pay-back of you know, we're sorry that we caused this problem in your community so we're going to help you do policing and the book unfolds as the interplay between some people who read other people's minds and other people. It's a really neat book. And also the another book called the doppelganger gambit. It's another police procedural set in Lawrence, Kansas, sometime in the not too distant future where basically this guy shouldn't be able to commit a murder. He's able to set up an alibi for committing a murder by having somebody else go spend money on his credit account with the apparently unforgable fingerprint that's part of completing the transaction. So these people have a way of faking fingerprints, and that sets up this situation where this guy should have an iron-clad alibi and the pair of politics it's sort of like a little bit of a lethal well onpolice duo with some other overlay, have to figure out what happened there. Somebody else must have. I think we'll go in order. So I'll let Joel start. PARTICIPANT: Hey, guys, my name is Joel, I work at the WSJ. I'm going to talk about some blindingly obvious one, Arthur R. Clark, right author. Short story of his called the star. The premise is it's some astronauts who are exploring and they come across a planet the equivalent of Pluto. And on it they find a temple that's a monument to a civilization that used to live in this solar system. They realized their star was going to go super Nova in a century or so, so all they could do was build a big monument to their civilization and go extinct. Then there's a twist that I won't spoil but it's a great read. The second one is Isaa Asimov who I assume most people have read. The first law of robotics.Tures first law, the concept that no robot should do harm to a human or allow humans to come to harm. Second law, establishing that robots always have to do what humans tell them. Back in the 40s and 50s, these ground rules were laid out and they make a lot of sense. When you think about them, you think, yeah, that is how technology should function in a real world and now we're at the point from Tesla autopilot to drones in the skies flying in Afghanistan or Pakistan to internet of things, our computers, our refrigerators, our laptops, we have these things that break our rules on a regular basis. They don't allow what we want them to do, they allow humans to come to harm either through intentionality or poor programming or whatever else and I find that fascinating that the rules are so relatively simple and yet we seem to forget them and/or ignore them on a daily basis. Many. - PARTICIPANT: Hi, I just got super-nervous because I realied that I broke the rules. I don't have a book. I have a movie and it's not a sci-fi movie, it's a romantic comedy. -[laughterBut, OK, so like one night I was watching Netflix at maybe like 3 in the mornings, because that's what I do, and I came across a movie and I watched it and it was so great. This was before I worked in journalism and I thought that it was so relevant to everything that was going on. The movie was called desk set. And it was made in 1957. Starring Catherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. And I will just read the synopsis of the plot. Bunny Watson, Catherine kep burn, is a library reference clerk stuck in a dead-end relationship with a boring television executive. Her life is thrown into turmoil when computer expert Richard Sommers, Spencer Tracy, enters it. He has been assigned with automating her department and she is fearful that Sommers' new computers will automate her out of a job. But the most interesting part about this is the weird parallel and the fact that, you know, despite everything we say about computers and everything, the formidable Catherine Hepburn cannot be beaten by AI. So I would like all of you to take that lesson away. +[laughterBut, OK, so like one night I was watching Netflix at maybe like 3 in the mornings, because that's what I do, and I came across a movie and I watched it and it was so great. This was before I worked in journalism and I thought that it was so relevant to everything that was going on. The movie was called desk set. And it was made in 1957. Starring Catherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. And I will just read the synopsis of the plot. Bunny Watson, Catherine kep burn, is a library reference clerk stuck in a dead-end relationship with a boring television executive. Her life is thrown into turmoil when computer expert Richard Sommers, Spencer Tracy, enters it. He has been assigned with automating her department and she is fearful that Sommers' new computers will automate her out of a job. But the most interesting part about this is the weird parallel and the fact that, you know, despite everything we say about computers and everything, the formidable Catherine Hepburn cannot be beaten by AI. So I would like all of you to take that lesson away. [applause] [laughter] -PARTICIPANT: I also am going to talk about a R OM COM, foundation by icic Asimov, you've heard of it. +PARTICIPANT: I also am going to talk about a R OM COM, foundation by icic Asimov, you've heard of it. -[laughter] +[laughter] -Develops a field called psycho history. Kind of identify inflection points where the galaxy might need particular advice and so he records messages, that are kind of held in this vault and there's this date, they open up the vault, they get the message from Harry, they can respond to it so the thing that I think is interesting about this and kind of relates it back to the media and journalism is kind of embedded in this is that he's making long-term predictions and then he would be held accountable. Is he right about the situation when they open the vault, this message that he's delivering? And we as journalists cover people all the time who are predicting all sorts of things, many of them over longer terms than we tend to think in, you know, like tomorrow's deadline or next week's magazine or whatever. For example, a few years ago in Washington State where I live, there was a ballot measure to privatize the liquor industry which had previously been controlled by the state. Costco dumped a whole bunch of money into this ballot initiative. They won. They wanted to sell liquor through Costco. The message that they gave to everyone was, it's going to cost you less out of pocket to buy whiskey, if you pass this measure were they right? I don't know. I don't think any of us really know if—well, we know why Costco wanted this to pass, but were they telling the truth? +Develops a field called psycho history. Kind of identify inflection points where the galaxy might need particular advice and so he records messages, that are kind of held in this vault and there's this date, they open up the vault, they get the message from Harry, they can respond to it so the thing that I think is interesting about this and kind of relates it back to the media and journalism is kind of embedded in this is that he's making long-term predictions and then he would be held accountable. Is he right about the situation when they open the vault, this message that he's delivering? And we as journalists cover people all the time who are predicting all sorts of things, many of them over longer terms than we tend to think in, you know, like tomorrow's deadline or next week's magazine or whatever. For example, a few years ago in Washington State where I live, there was a ballot measure to privatize the liquor industry which had previously been controlled by the state. Costco dumped a whole bunch of money into this ballot initiative. They won. They wanted to sell liquor through Costco. The message that they gave to everyone was, it's going to cost you less out of pocket to buy whiskey, if you pass this measure were they right? I don't know. I don't think any of us really know if—well, we know why Costco wanted this to pass, but were they telling the truth? Did they actually have that effect? Like as journalists, I don't know who has held, you know, these predictions to account so that's kind of like a thing that I would love to see us as an industry do more of, is to come back to these politicians, to these corporations whoever are making these predictions and saying, you know, were they right, and you know, we ought to be thinking about these things. So foundation, rom-com. @@ -68,19 +67,18 @@ Snoop hey, everybody, so this inspired me to talk about a novel I really like it [applause] -PARTICIPANT: Hi, Nicole hencely, I work at the New York Daily News and I work overnight. It's kind of unique. It will be about 2 in the morning, I still have four hours to go in my shift and the lights kind of dim into this weird dystopian energy-saving atmosphere and I only started thinking of blade runner and you can be a hater, but I like the movie way he ever more than the book and I started going onto these weird little like deep dives, rabbit holes into images and photos, and videos where I'm just sitting there and muttering to myself, in my head, enhance, enhance! Zooming in and like what is in this photo, what can I find? What nugget of information is yet to be found? Is there the ID on this snake skin that will lead me to the killer? Instead, I find the other little treasures that will help me in my news gathering, for instance, during the Brussels airport attack, finding the location, what side of the airport was hit just based on a single photo, is this real? Is this instant, did this really happen? There are three aspects of that photo that made me go forward, one people running, looking terrified as hell, shattered windows above the entrance, and smoke. These are three things in a single photograph that make me think, hm, maybe, and also I went on Google street view and started driving through the airport, I'm like what side are we on? OK, we're on this entrance and judging by that, I can go look at the map in the airport and know which desks are by that entrance and start sending out emails to each of those airlines for statements and that's just one example and then when I'm enhancing again, enhance, enhance, and I'm' tracking down YouTube videos and I just want to know, where is he? He's all these places. He's in Texas, he's in Louisiana now, where is he? He's driving and he's ranting and he's talking and suddenly I pause, there's a street sign, and enhance, enhance, and I keep hitting space bar, space bar as he's driving. Suddenly I see a business sign and that's not too far from one of his stops. I pinpoint on a map, and I'm on Google street view, am I going backwards to where he was just in a minute in the drive and I find a location where he stopped to go hand out his book to this guy, and there's no street sign. It's an inconspicuous building, you don't really know what's there. But you know what, I forward it to the runner, the stringer down there and maybe, just maybe you find the guy that talked to this guy. You might learn something so whenever I'm gathering news I just think of sitting in the dark and I'm in my dystopian newsroom, enhance, enhance. +PARTICIPANT: Hi, Nicole hencely, I work at the New York Daily News and I work overnight. It's kind of unique. It will be about 2 in the morning, I still have four hours to go in my shift and the lights kind of dim into this weird dystopian energy-saving atmosphere and I only started thinking of blade runner and you can be a hater, but I like the movie way he ever more than the book and I started going onto these weird little like deep dives, rabbit holes into images and photos, and videos where I'm just sitting there and muttering to myself, in my head, enhance, enhance! Zooming in and like what is in this photo, what can I find? What nugget of information is yet to be found? Is there the ID on this snake skin that will lead me to the killer? Instead, I find the other little treasures that will help me in my news gathering, for instance, during the Brussels airport attack, finding the location, what side of the airport was hit just based on a single photo, is this real? Is this instant, did this really happen? There are three aspects of that photo that made me go forward, one people running, looking terrified as hell, shattered windows above the entrance, and smoke. These are three things in a single photograph that make me think, hm, maybe, and also I went on Google street view and started driving through the airport, I'm like what side are we on? OK, we're on this entrance and judging by that, I can go look at the map in the airport and know which desks are by that entrance and start sending out emails to each of those airlines for statements and that's just one example and then when I'm enhancing again, enhance, enhance, and I'm' tracking down YouTube videos and I just want to know, where is he? He's all these places. He's in Texas, he's in Louisiana now, where is he? He's driving and he's ranting and he's talking and suddenly I pause, there's a street sign, and enhance, enhance, and I keep hitting space bar, space bar as he's driving. Suddenly I see a business sign and that's not too far from one of his stops. I pinpoint on a map, and I'm on Google street view, am I going backwards to where he was just in a minute in the drive and I find a location where he stopped to go hand out his book to this guy, and there's no street sign. It's an inconspicuous building, you don't really know what's there. But you know what, I forward it to the runner, the stringer down there and maybe, just maybe you find the guy that talked to this guy. You might learn something so whenever I'm gathering news I just think of sitting in the dark and I'm in my dystopian newsroom, enhance, enhance. [applause>> Stand right in front of the thing and talk. All right, I don't have a specific story but I just wanted to call out one of the groups that's going through madder VC right now, it's called scout.AI and I think they're doing a weekly or monthly dispatch, which is a combination of like a highly technical social story, and then science fiction written around it that sort of explores the issues, and then calling on a community to sort of interact on that. So scout.ai, I think it would be of interest to the group. Check it out. -PARTICIPANT: So the technology review from MIT has done a couple of volumes that they publish to look like old science fiction magazines that are commissioned from current-of-current science fiction writers to do near-term predictions. I think it's a little bit the way that Scout is taking on their fiction side. We've almost done. We have a couple of more minutes so I'm happy to cede the mic. But I have a couple of other things. One is a great movie, how many know of a movie called sleep deeper? So it's kind of obscure but it won this thing called the Alfred P Sloan prize at Sundance. It won, I think in 2008. But it's a really cool story about drones. The filmmaker is Mexican American. I highly recommend, it's got a lot of topical things. Projected a little bit further in the future and the last one I'll close on. I know there's probably a lot of Star Trek next generation fans here? Yeah? So I actually -- +PARTICIPANT: So the technology review from MIT has done a couple of volumes that they publish to look like old science fiction magazines that are commissioned from current-of-current science fiction writers to do near-term predictions. I think it's a little bit the way that Scout is taking on their fiction side. We've almost done. We have a couple of more minutes so I'm happy to cede the mic. But I have a couple of other things. One is a great movie, how many know of a movie called sleep deeper? So it's kind of obscure but it won this thing called the Alfred P Sloan prize at Sundance. It won, I think in 2008. But it's a really cool story about drones. The filmmaker is Mexican American. I highly recommend, it's got a lot of topical things. Projected a little bit further in the future and the last one I'll close on. I know there's probably a lot of Star Trek next generation fans here? Yeah? So I actually -- -I don't sake sides and I respect it but I don't have a lot of knowledge. But how many know the episode that's called shocko when the walls fell? And also it has part of it that seems to have crept into culture that I just encountered recently is a phrase called dar mock and Johnod at tan agra. And I learned about it boastless a meme of Hillary and Barack embraing with—yeah, and there was Hillary and Bernie. It probably would have been—anyway, embracing with that sort of impact font over it. And but what plays back to is the nature of the story ask pi card and the Enterprise crew find that the translation card has failed. Everything they say is a reference, they basically name some people and places that within that culture are clear references back to some story, perhaps like side show Bob stepping on a rake and the whole story plays out what it can be communication by reference. I thought it was really interesting to imagine a whole story based on this thing that we now do routinely with meme images. And just to put a weird spin on it yesterday I dropped back to the hotel during the session, I was coming back here and I was walking by the hotel at 10 H. and something and she had a t-shirt that said tar: What does this mean? But it blew my mind. +I don't sake sides and I respect it but I don't have a lot of knowledge. But how many know the episode that's called shocko when the walls fell? And also it has part of it that seems to have crept into culture that I just encountered recently is a phrase called dar mock and Johnod at tan agra. And I learned about it boastless a meme of Hillary and Barack embraing with—yeah, and there was Hillary and Bernie. It probably would have been—anyway, embracing with that sort of impact font over it. And but what plays back to is the nature of the story ask pi card and the Enterprise crew find that the translation card has failed. Everything they say is a reference, they basically name some people and places that within that culture are clear references back to some story, perhaps like side show Bob stepping on a rake and the whole story plays out what it can be communication by reference. I thought it was really interesting to imagine a whole story based on this thing that we now do routinely with meme images. And just to put a weird spin on it yesterday I dropped back to the hotel during the session, I was coming back here and I was walking by the hotel at 10 H. and something and she had a t-shirt that said tar: What does this mean? But it blew my mind. PARTICIPANT: I think there is this is interesting is there's a podcast called reply all and they get Alex Blumberg to find something they don't understand and get the host of the show to explain it. Which is exactly that thing. It's interesting to see the way that it propagates, because there are subcultures through which it goes and some people understand it and the other it becomes a form of self-identification, how does that stuff get mediaed. PARTICIPANT: So my hope is in the future, you will just say through an iPhone darkly, and it will have some reference back to this session and you'll say, oh, yeah, through an iPhone darkly. Thank you for coming. Have a great afternoon. [applause] - diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-newsroom-onboarding.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-newsroom-onboarding.md index a027113d..c0923916 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-newsroom-onboarding.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-newsroom-onboarding.md @@ -1,69 +1,69 @@ The good and bad of newsroom on-boarding processes (and how can we make them better) Session facilitator(s): Sandhya Kambhampati Day & Time: Thursday, 2:30-3:30pm -Room: Classroom 305 +Room: Classroom 305 -PARTICIPANT: I think I'm going to get started just because I want to talk about on boarding and offboarding. If people trickle in, they can come in and take a seat at the tables or whatever. +PARTICIPANT: I think I'm going to get started just because I want to talk about on boarding and offboarding. If people trickle in, they can come in and take a seat at the tables or whatever. -So I'm Sandhya Kambhampati, I'm open news field i Berlin, and I'm currently working on warding and off warding processes, which is why I presented this session. I started this research actually at myfellowship, and I started off originally asking the question on Twitter and about people's newsrooms having an on warding or offwarding process that they're particularly proud of or have in general. And basically what I found was that a lot of these rooms don't really have processes or if they do, they're just strong together by one person that's nicely passed on to the next person and then keeps on forwarding and then there's no real process. +So I'm Sandhya Kambhampati, I'm open news field i Berlin, and I'm currently working on warding and off warding processes, which is why I presented this session. I started this research actually at myfellowship, and I started off originally asking the question on Twitter and about people's newsrooms having an on warding or offwarding process that they're particularly proud of or have in general. And basically what I found was that a lot of these rooms don't really have processes or if they do, they're just strong together by one person that's nicely passed on to the next person and then keeps on forwarding and then there's no real process. So, for me, I really like implementation, so this is troublesome, so my goal is to talk about new ways so that's our news agencies can incorporate on boarding and off boarding into their workflow. -So a little bit more background, I—so I wanted to talk a little bit about my experience with on boarding and off boarding. So in prior positions, we had people in the newsroom writing down documentation and having some people read through it. Sometimes detailed, sometimes not. +So a little bit more background, I—so I wanted to talk a little bit about my experience with on boarding and off boarding. So in prior positions, we had people in the newsroom writing down documentation and having some people read through it. Sometimes detailed, sometimes not. -And before I left my last job, I also documented my job and put together a list of links, organizations that I contact, acronyms, basics that we often use. And things that in general that people might be interested to know about my job or would be helpful for them to know when they start their job. +And before I left my last job, I also documented my job and put together a list of links, organizations that I contact, acronyms, basics that we often use. And things that in general that people might be interested to know about my job or would be helpful for them to know when they start their job. -And when I'm reflecting on that, I think about—I wish I would have had a better structure for stor FOI is, so I think a lot of people have different ways of attracting the FOI is I's and when people leave the newsroom, maybe they don't tell everyone that they have 15FO I's out, and maybe they just don't think about it, or maybe they do. So I'm really interested from you guys how your newsroom deal with on boarding and off boarding processes. And we'll put together a just a basic outline from that. +And when I'm reflecting on that, I think about—I wish I would have had a better structure for stor FOI is, so I think a lot of people have different ways of attracting the FOI is I's and when people leave the newsroom, maybe they don't tell everyone that they have 15FO I's out, and maybe they just don't think about it, or maybe they do. So I'm really interested from you guys how your newsroom deal with on boarding and off boarding processes. And we'll put together a just a basic outline from that. -So that's the background on me. And I also wanted to give you a little bit more background. +So that's the background on me. And I also wanted to give you a little bit more background. -In the ether pad, there's a link about m research. So I started a survey. And as of July 21st, I have 115 users have responded out of 163 people. So there's people who have worked in the same newsroom or work in the same newsroom and different departments and as a result of that that's why there's 115. +In the ether pad, there's a link about m research. So I started a survey. And as of July 21st, I have 115 users have responded out of 163 people. So there's people who have worked in the same newsroom or work in the same newsroom and different departments and as a result of that that's why there's 115. So, yeah, a lot of people say they don't have a formal on boarding or off boarding process for their newsroom and some people say they have e-mails or notes, and I find that problematic. -The other thing I also found is that a lot of people write that they don't want to share their institutional knowledge because then they won't be unique anymore because the person who takes their job will have the same skills as them. Which I think is a stupid and dumb thing to even think about. So I would agree with it if anyone wants to challenge me on that please. I would love to hear the counter to it because I don't get it. Ye? +The other thing I also found is that a lot of people write that they don't want to share their institutional knowledge because then they won't be unique anymore because the person who takes their job will have the same skills as them. Which I think is a stupid and dumb thing to even think about. So I would agree with it if anyone wants to challenge me on that please. I would love to hear the counter to it because I don't get it. Ye? PARTICIPANT: I'm not a counter argument but something to keep in mind when you're figuring out how to off board is what happens when someone leaves to go to the competition and of course they don't want to pass on all their knowledge because they want to take it with them to their next job. -PARTICIPANT: Absolutely. Ye. So that's the thing that I found with people that do national security and politics and some other—they're protective with their sources, and that I can totally understand. But when there's things that's common newsroom knowledge, I feel they should be shared with the rest. +PARTICIPANT: Absolutely. Ye. So that's the thing that I found with people that do national security and politics and some other—they're protective with their sources, and that I can totally understand. But when there's things that's common newsroom knowledge, I feel they should be shared with the rest. And the other thing that I found is that reviews are usually helpful but only in the changes they make. -So I want to do some brainstorming, so everyone has some Post-Its on your tables, and I have some questions here that I wanted to just get everyone started. We're going to take about 15 minutes since there's two groups here to kind of think through these questions. And I have two big Post-Its here. So any part of the newsroom on boarding, off boarding processes that are using or problem areas or what your ideal on boarding, off boarding would include. And also what's the worst, best experience with on boarding and off boarding that you've had. +So I want to do some brainstorming, so everyone has some Post-Its on your tables, and I have some questions here that I wanted to just get everyone started. We're going to take about 15 minutes since there's two groups here to kind of think through these questions. And I have two big Post-Its here. So any part of the newsroom on boarding, off boarding processes that are using or problem areas or what your ideal on boarding, off boarding would include. And also what's the worst, best experience with on boarding and off boarding that you've had. Keep in mind, I should also say that if anything you are saying or writing, you don't want it to be on the record, please just say it ahead of time because the session is being live transcribed. PARTICIPANT: Are we supposed to discuss the ideas with our group? -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. So you can discuss now. 15 minutes to discuss in your -- +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. So you can discuss now. 15 minutes to discuss in your -- PARTICIPANT: Can we turn on the lights in here? -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Sorry. You can all just sit in a group. I wasn't—I didn't. We can all sit in a group and talk if you guys would prefer that, or we can sit in two separate tables. Whatever everyone prefers. We can just do a big group. That would work. Yeah. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Sorry. You can all just sit in a group. I wasn't—I didn't. We can all sit in a group and talk if you guys would prefer that, or we can sit in two separate tables. Whatever everyone prefers. We can just do a big group. That would work. Yeah. -All right. So those are the questions that I have have. But I guess we can just go around in how many of you guys have had on-boarding or off-boarding experiences that are, like, in good, bad—what was, like, good or bad about it? +All right. So those are the questions that I have have. But I guess we can just go around in how many of you guys have had on-boarding or off-boarding experiences that are, like, in good, bad—what was, like, good or bad about it? -So on-boarding is basically when you start a job with what things you're given when you start the job. That might help you to be the job. They could include documents of passwords or documents of notes from the prior recorder or news developer. And—then off-boarding refer to the notes that you take during your job and then what stuff you need to document over the next person. +So on-boarding is basically when you start a job with what things you're given when you start the job. That might help you to be the job. They could include documents of passwords or documents of notes from the prior recorder or news developer. And—then off-boarding refer to the notes that you take during your job and then what stuff you need to document over the next person. PARTICIPANT: So it's not just -- -PARTICIPANT: It can include training. So a lot of newsrooms have, like, the HR training and then the managerial training. And I found a lot of people just have the HR training and then they get thrown into the editorial process. And then they don't really get told anything. So, yeah, I don't know. That's been my experience. I want to know what your guys' experience is. +PARTICIPANT: It can include training. So a lot of newsrooms have, like, the HR training and then the managerial training. And I found a lot of people just have the HR training and then they get thrown into the editorial process. And then they don't really get told anything. So, yeah, I don't know. That's been my experience. I want to know what your guys' experience is. -PARTICIPANT: I think a few examples of what not to do. Because I have samples of how to do it well. +PARTICIPANT: I think a few examples of what not to do. Because I have samples of how to do it well. -One is I was just doing some databases, we lost our data editor recently, a couple of months ago, and I was looking through the databases trying to figure out what we need to do, what's going on here. And he had left variable notes, so I looked back at the notes that this predecessor had left and she said, oh, I have all of these notes, really good e-mail explaining what's where and everything. And then I go, and it's been now two years since she was gone. Her user folder in the network. So somewhere around two years to disrupt that. So that's all -- +One is I was just doing some databases, we lost our data editor recently, a couple of months ago, and I was looking through the databases trying to figure out what we need to do, what's going on here. And he had left variable notes, so I looked back at the notes that this predecessor had left and she said, oh, I have all of these notes, really good e-mail explaining what's where and everything. And then I go, and it's been now two years since she was gone. Her user folder in the network. So somewhere around two years to disrupt that. So that's all -- -So that's one. And a similar—not—well, I guess not that similar. But I caution that to only off-boarding when someone is leading but to kind of have a constant alter of documentation is that we had an editor who died unexpectedly and knew everything and had not informed everybody. And then there are things now three years later, like, oh, he used to do this? No wonder. +So that's one. And a similar—not—well, I guess not that similar. But I caution that to only off-boarding when someone is leading but to kind of have a constant alter of documentation is that we had an editor who died unexpectedly and knew everything and had not informed everybody. And then there are things now three years later, like, oh, he used to do this? No wonder. -PARTICIPANT: And is there anything in particular that like what I find that's also interesting is a lot of newsrooms have one person or two people that know everything. And then when those—that one or two people leave the newsroom, then it's scrambling, so you find the next person that might not know an inch of knowledge of that stuff. So how can we work in newsrooms to think about these possibly earlier on? How would this work for different roles? So, for example, with news apps developers, is this something that we do with code? Or, like, documenting our code or for data reporters to be—I don't know take notes in a certain way or—how does this work? +PARTICIPANT: And is there anything in particular that like what I find that's also interesting is a lot of newsrooms have one person or two people that know everything. And then when those—that one or two people leave the newsroom, then it's scrambling, so you find the next person that might not know an inch of knowledge of that stuff. So how can we work in newsrooms to think about these possibly earlier on? How would this work for different roles? So, for example, with news apps developers, is this something that we do with code? Or, like, documenting our code or for data reporters to be—I don't know take notes in a certain way or—how does this work? -PARTICIPANT: So I think in my experience it's always really difficult to say what you did; right? To be, like, oh, on this project—I have no idea what I did. Or when I was coming into an organization, I don't remember. But now that, like, I've been through a process purchase. +PARTICIPANT: So I think in my experience it's always really difficult to say what you did; right? To be, like, oh, on this project—I have no idea what I did. Or when I was coming into an organization, I don't remember. But now that, like, I've been through a process purchase. -So previously, I was on a team that had a lot of turnover. So when you read a lot of peoples -- +So previously, I was on a team that had a lot of turnover. So when you read a lot of peoples -- PARTICIPANT: Notes. -PARTICIPANT: Well, sometimes it's—I'm not, like, talking about your notes in particular. But, like -- +PARTICIPANT: Well, sometimes it's—I'm not, like, talking about your notes in particular. But, like -- PARTICIPANT: Just -- @@ -71,35 +71,35 @@ PARTICIPANT: Just -- PARTICIPANT: Full disclosure, all three of us worked together previously, so there was a lot of turn over in our -- -PARTICIPANT: And sometimes it's just so hard to constantly think about, like, okay. How can I write something is that someone else can read it later without being, like, you know—to get the data, go to this website, click file—like, without giving detailed instructions. But to constantly comment and—so this is not even necessarily, like, I'm talking to the person who will have my position. But to be thoughtful about, like, while you're doing something to kind of explain it as you go so someone else can comment and look at it if they have to. And understand what's going on. +PARTICIPANT: And sometimes it's just so hard to constantly think about, like, okay. How can I write something is that someone else can read it later without being, like, you know—to get the data, go to this website, click file—like, without giving detailed instructions. But to constantly comment and—so this is not even necessarily, like, I'm talking to the person who will have my position. But to be thoughtful about, like, while you're doing something to kind of explain it as you go so someone else can comment and look at it if they have to. And understand what's going on. PARTICIPANT: I think a big part of it is documenting as you go and not try to rely or, like, three years down the line. -AndSo when I got my extension, there was nothing. And people told me things, like, this exists. But there was—it was on the server, which had, like, smoked literally. So we could not rephrase it. So what I'm doing now seems to be -- +AndSo when I got my extension, there was nothing. And people told me things, like, this exists. But there was—it was on the server, which had, like, smoked literally. So we could not rephrase it. So what I'm doing now seems to be -- PARTICIPANT: You think there was no backups of that data anywhere else? -PARTICIPANT: Not that anybody knows of. And this is, like, a lot of call. +PARTICIPANT: Not that anybody knows of. And this is, like, a lot of call. PARTICIPANT: Is it back on the record now? -PARTICIPANT: But that's, like, the worst experience; right? So now what I'm doing is trying to avoid all of that. And it's not about letting another person know who's currently there, it's about just documenting as we go so that whoever is taking over your goal eventually is not going to be. In the newsroom, you need someone who can assimilate very fast. +PARTICIPANT: But that's, like, the worst experience; right? So now what I'm doing is trying to avoid all of that. And it's not about letting another person know who's currently there, it's about just documenting as we go so that whoever is taking over your goal eventually is not going to be. In the newsroom, you need someone who can assimilate very fast. PARTICIPANT: Does anyone—actually that's—does anyone's newsroom have an on-boarding process since you put together or parts of the process that you actually that are happy and proud of. -PARTICIPANT: We tried to start one. We lost somebody who I was, like, pulling teeth to get things that I had started to learn. We had different roles, but I wanted to learn more about what he was doing just in general for collaboration. And then he left so it was, like, tell me all the things that I need to know. But it's not what I'm looking for. +PARTICIPANT: We tried to start one. We lost somebody who I was, like, pulling teeth to get things that I had started to learn. We had different roles, but I wanted to learn more about what he was doing just in general for collaboration. And then he left so it was, like, tell me all the things that I need to know. But it's not what I'm looking for. -So I'm really interested in the culture of how you just do that. Because looking ahead in two positions it's, like, well, we're having people come in fresh, and I'm being able to look forward to say this is how we do things, like, to start from that point. Because a lot of times it can be hard if you don't—either it's not their instinct, or they don't start doing it one way. They give people to start to change their habits. Even if they've not done it for years. Like, if they had to start this job doing it, I think it could be a good way. Okay. This is just how this is done here in this role. So. +So I'm really interested in the culture of how you just do that. Because looking ahead in two positions it's, like, well, we're having people come in fresh, and I'm being able to look forward to say this is how we do things, like, to start from that point. Because a lot of times it can be hard if you don't—either it's not their instinct, or they don't start doing it one way. They give people to start to change their habits. Even if they've not done it for years. Like, if they had to start this job doing it, I think it could be a good way. Okay. This is just how this is done here in this role. So. -PARTICIPANT: I think that's a good thing to think about because also when you're dealing with Web producers or data reporters, they all have such different roles, and I don't think there's one way that you could say the on-boarding has to be done. So with that, I wonder, like, what—what is the demographic of the people here if you guys don't mind sharing what you do so that maybe we can have, like, a discussion about certain groups. That might be actually helpful for you guys. Do you want to start? +PARTICIPANT: I think that's a good thing to think about because also when you're dealing with Web producers or data reporters, they all have such different roles, and I don't think there's one way that you could say the on-boarding has to be done. So with that, I wonder, like, what—what is the demographic of the people here if you guys don't mind sharing what you do so that maybe we can have, like, a discussion about certain groups. That might be actually helpful for you guys. Do you want to start? PARTICIPANT: Sure I'm a reporter, but I also do a little bit of development stuff. -PARTICIPANT: I'm a software engineer, so a lot of code reviews. But also I contribute to our blog for writing, so we have kind of a flow to onboard people for that. +PARTICIPANT: I'm a software engineer, so a lot of code reviews. But also I contribute to our blog for writing, so we have kind of a flow to onboard people for that. PARTICIPANT: Okay. -PARTICIPANT: Sorry. I am the assistant editor of a small magazine, and I oversee projects. +PARTICIPANT: Sorry. I am the assistant editor of a small magazine, and I oversee projects. PARTICIPANT: I'm the director of a journal fellowship at Stanford. @@ -117,41 +117,41 @@ PARTICIPANT: I'm a data analyst. PARTICIPANT: I'm a newsroom digital director so some of the breaking news reporters. -PARTICIPANT: I run a team of five, managing. I actually wanted to share a little bit. Because you're asking things that work well. But off the record. Thank you. +PARTICIPANT: I run a team of five, managing. I actually wanted to share a little bit. Because you're asking things that work well. But off the record. Thank you. [Off the record 2:52] -[Back on the record 2:58] +[Back on the record 2:58] -PARTICIPANT: So I wrote down who we have here. So we have, like, one reporter with one engineer, three data reporters, one news apps developer, two editors, two directors with one designer, one project manager. +PARTICIPANT: So I wrote down who we have here. So we have, like, one reporter with one engineer, three data reporters, one news apps developer, two editors, two directors with one designer, one project manager. -So I'm going to—why don't we do, like, three different things. Like, reporting, managing, and data. With news apps people is that . This is on the record. +So I'm going to—why don't we do, like, three different things. Like, reporting, managing, and data. With news apps people is that . This is on the record. -So let's go through. So for an editor job, what would be—or any of these jobs, what would be the things that you guys would want included? When you start a job, what would be the notes or documentation that you would want? +So let's go through. So for an editor job, what would be—or any of these jobs, what would be the things that you guys would want included? When you start a job, what would be the notes or documentation that you would want? -PARTICIPANT: The on-boarding thing just includes sharing knowledge; right? So working at the visuals team and what they did was write a blog post about what you need to install when you come to this team. And it's actually a blog post open for everybody. The setup. So that's from my things. +PARTICIPANT: The on-boarding thing just includes sharing knowledge; right? So working at the visuals team and what they did was write a blog post about what you need to install when you come to this team. And it's actually a blog post open for everybody. The setup. So that's from my things. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I agree. Other data teams, like,—so, like, part of the on-boarding is just, like, installing things or getting more familiar and types apps that you have. But—and some of that is proprietary. But the open stuff is, like, L.A. Times on GitHub has different functions for doing math and stats in Python. It's called calculating. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I agree. Other data teams, like,—so, like, part of the on-boarding is just, like, installing things or getting more familiar and types apps that you have. But—and some of that is proprietary. But the open stuff is, like, L.A. Times on GitHub has different functions for doing math and stats in Python. It's called calculating. -So part of my on-boarding is going through all those functions and, like, first Python—learning Python. But also, like, importing that and, like, learning the way that they do, like, different types of data analysis. And that's open for everyone too. +So part of my on-boarding is going through all those functions and, like, first Python—learning Python. But also, like, importing that and, like, learning the way that they do, like, different types of data analysis. And that's open for everyone too. PARTICIPANT: What's it calle. -PARTICIPANT: It's called calculated. For things like calculating coefficients and stuff like that. +PARTICIPANT: It's called calculated. For things like calculating coefficients and stuff like that. -PARTICIPANT: I'll find the link. Anyone else? +PARTICIPANT: I'll find the link. Anyone else? PARTICIPANT: Understand the path to be published and is approval process. -PARTICIPANT: So what would—a chart of some type or details explanation? Or -- +PARTICIPANT: So what would—a chart of some type or details explanation? Or -- -PARTICIPANT: Sign off on this on live and I think they'll do—and then there's a common where we have a glorious or style guides. So here's the knits you're going to get on your writing and save yourself from getting this knits over time or seeing how we capitalize terms. +PARTICIPANT: Sign off on this on live and I think they'll do—and then there's a common where we have a glorious or style guides. So here's the knits you're going to get on your writing and save yourself from getting this knits over time or seeing how we capitalize terms. -PARTICIPANT: Similar to the publication chart. A newsroom organization chart at their official title and official role. So a little bit more about how all those people fit together and who's the one that you really need to go to if this is what you want instead of just this is your team and, oh, six months from now people still don't know who he is. +PARTICIPANT: Similar to the publication chart. A newsroom organization chart at their official title and official role. So a little bit more about how all those people fit together and who's the one that you really need to go to if this is what you want instead of just this is your team and, oh, six months from now people still don't know who he is. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And it's too late to and him what his name is. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And it's too late to and him what his name is. -PARTICIPANT: Exactly. Awkward. +PARTICIPANT: Exactly. Awkward. [Laughter] @@ -161,25 +161,25 @@ PARTICIPANT: Sure. PARTICIPANT: Like, they're okay with that? -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. It's much easier to the person at the beginning than, like -- +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. It's much easier to the person at the beginning than, like -- PARTICIPANT: Anyone else? -PARTICIPANT: All the tools that people use to say, like, this works with our system or, hey, these are the event events, look at these things work. Just to sort of introduce you to the universe. Just like the calculate. Here are things that we have or are available. Or here's the preferred way of doing it. Just to save you time or effort, figuring things out. +PARTICIPANT: All the tools that people use to say, like, this works with our system or, hey, these are the event events, look at these things work. Just to sort of introduce you to the universe. Just like the calculate. Here are things that we have or are available. Or here's the preferred way of doing it. Just to save you time or effort, figuring things out. -PARTICIPANT: What about for reporters? Would it be helpful to have some type of notes on like what the previous person did to start making contacts with the local police department or -- +PARTICIPANT: What about for reporters? Would it be helpful to have some type of notes on like what the previous person did to start making contacts with the local police department or -- -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Contact list is huge. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Contact list is huge. -PARTICIPANT: That's the most problematic, though, especially for reporters. We're going to similar -- +PARTICIPANT: That's the most problematic, though, especially for reporters. We're going to similar -- -PARTICIPANT: Right. If you force everybody to do it, it's just, like -- +PARTICIPANT: Right. If you force everybody to do it, it's just, like -- PARTICIPANT: Yeah. -PARTICIPANT: But how do we deal with that; right? So if there's a national security reporter, they're not want to give you their contacts. +PARTICIPANT: But how do we deal with that; right? So if there's a national security reporter, they're not want to give you their contacts. -PARTICIPANT: The same people who can fill in the gap. But from a data point of view also, it's, like, for instance, if there are FO I's, make the list of the FOIi out there and that kind of information, how many, like, when do you expect the data back? Because sometimes I found there's a lineament desk. +PARTICIPANT: The same people who can fill in the gap. But from a data point of view also, it's, like, for instance, if there are FO I's, make the list of the FOIi out there and that kind of information, how many, like, when do you expect the data back? Because sometimes I found there's a lineament desk. PARTICIPANT: Or follow up. @@ -187,7 +187,7 @@ PARTICIPANT: Yeah, it's been two weeks. PARTICIPANT: Simple spreadsheets. -PARTICIPANT: I think we've started to develop, we call it the data archive, but it's not just data. It's all the FO I's, who the contact person is for that FOI, what format they're in, and then for data. Like, what data bases we're working with, here's where the original, here's where they're contacting people with the information. +PARTICIPANT: I think we've started to develop, we call it the data archive, but it's not just data. It's all the FO I's, who the contact person is for that FOI, what format they're in, and then for data. Like, what data bases we're working with, here's where the original, here's where they're contacting people with the information. PARTICIPANT: Also release dates as well. @@ -197,23 +197,23 @@ PARTICIPANT: Can I say it off the record? PARTICIPANT: Yes. -I've been in several newsrooms that, like, call this person, okay. Catastrophic some sort of newsroom Rolodex, and he said, yeah, it's called a phone number. And I was, like, yeah, that's really helpful. Just seemed like it would be a level above that. Not the same level of sources for that kind of stuff but people that should be and could be contacted. +I've been in several newsrooms that, like, call this person, okay. Catastrophic some sort of newsroom Rolodex, and he said, yeah, it's called a phone number. And I was, like, yeah, that's really helpful. Just seemed like it would be a level above that. Not the same level of sources for that kind of stuff but people that should be and could be contacted. -PARTICIPANT: So something I noticed in the survey that I've gotten, some newsrooms do have that Rolodex but the problem is they don't have someone updating it. So when the police officer or the PIO or FOI officer changes, no one updates it, and they call and the person no longer works there, and it's a goo hunt to find the other person. So I'm wondering what you guys think of how to deal with that type of person. Like, what contacts are no longer in that position. So, for example, for CMS when you change your CMS or someone on the job. +PARTICIPANT: So something I noticed in the survey that I've gotten, some newsrooms do have that Rolodex but the problem is they don't have someone updating it. So when the police officer or the PIO or FOI officer changes, no one updates it, and they call and the person no longer works there, and it's a goo hunt to find the other person. So I'm wondering what you guys think of how to deal with that type of person. Like, what contacts are no longer in that position. So, for example, for CMS when you change your CMS or someone on the job. -PARTICIPANT: I think you have to have someone responsible to make sure those things are kept up to date. Even if they're not the one that's doing all the updating, they're the ones checking to see that it's still up to date. It doesn't have to be one person or process. But for different processes, one person maintains the Rolodex of contacts. And another person that maintains the CMS. Posts different lists and spreadsheets that should be assigned a different person. +PARTICIPANT: I think you have to have someone responsible to make sure those things are kept up to date. Even if they're not the one that's doing all the updating, they're the ones checking to see that it's still up to date. It doesn't have to be one person or process. But for different processes, one person maintains the Rolodex of contacts. And another person that maintains the CMS. Posts different lists and spreadsheets that should be assigned a different person. -PARTICIPANT: Distribution lists. Like, distribution list to go out to a number of people. On my team, especially plant based and stuff, all my e-mails are logged with clients internally in a system so that if someone happens to be out -- +PARTICIPANT: Distribution lists. Like, distribution list to go out to a number of people. On my team, especially plant based and stuff, all my e-mails are logged with clients internally in a system so that if someone happens to be out -- PARTICIPANT: You can see around. -PARTICIPANT: You can assign stuff but, yeah, the client. For example, I'm here right now, so the client needs me urgently, can e-mail no matter and we have someone monitoring that at all times, always get back to them. +PARTICIPANT: You can assign stuff but, yeah, the client. For example, I'm here right now, so the client needs me urgently, can e-mail no matter and we have someone monitoring that at all times, always get back to them. PARTICIPANT: What you just mentioned are amazing ideas and never work -- -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I just don't have the capability for it. And also because this level of secrecy or not really secrecy but -- +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I just don't have the capability for it. And also because this level of secrecy or not really secrecy but -- -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. For sure. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. For sure. PARTICIPANT: These contacts. @@ -229,33 +229,33 @@ PARTICIPANT: People in newsroom switch to Slack.can't -- PARTICIPANT: I think the documentation. -PARTICIPANT: Oh, no. No. If it's somewhere accessible to everybody like you said. So I think that's a grea idea. +PARTICIPANT: Oh, no. No. If it's somewhere accessible to everybody like you said. So I think that's a grea idea. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I mean for sure. Like, all my e-mails with my clients, internal stuff you can obviously. You can already use Slack for it, why not just log it and searchable and have little -- +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I mean for sure. Like, all my e-mails with my clients, internal stuff you can obviously. You can already use Slack for it, why not just log it and searchable and have little -- -PARTICIPANT: We mark our resources. So if someone that was described that's no longer relevant, sometimes the edit date is used as an indicator. Oh, this was slashed out in 2013, so maybe it's not the current version. Someone can similarly say this is still relevant. +PARTICIPANT: We mark our resources. So if someone that was described that's no longer relevant, sometimes the edit date is used as an indicator. Oh, this was slashed out in 2013, so maybe it's not the current version. Someone can similarly say this is still relevant. PARTICIPANT: A person who changes the documents or the person who is supposed to be on boarded. Describe tools using, like, all the new people who would onboard or change the blog post if it doesn't work for an operation system. -PARTICIPANT: So what about—how would this differ for. So you mentioned, like, people reading the documents over and then updating them. Now, if you're an editor, how would this work for you? What would you have to be your editor. +PARTICIPANT: So what about—how would this differ for. So you mentioned, like, people reading the documents over and then updating them. Now, if you're an editor, how would this work for you? What would you have to be your editor. PARTICIPANT: Like, what would you onboard an editor? PARTICIPANT: Yes. -PARTICIPANT: Because we have about 15 minutes left. So we spent quite a bit of time talking about reporters and data people. So I'm going to also make sure that we cover the editors in the room. +PARTICIPANT: Because we have about 15 minutes left. So we spent quite a bit of time talking about reporters and data people. So I'm going to also make sure that we cover the editors in the room. -PARTICIPANT: I think in that case, I mean I've never been an editor, but I'm just speculating here that it might be helpful to—I don't know whether it would be, like, people working under the editor or for the previous person to say this is kind of what they might expect from you. Whether or not that's what you decide to follow through, but to have some level of, like, as an editor, I read every single one of their stories and—I don't know. Always there to, like, double-check the numbers so that when, you know, I give my stuff to an editor, and he's, like, yeah, it's fine. But I'm expecting something else, like, maybe that doesn't get lost somehow. Like, basically my expectations as far as their expectations for the job. So I feel there's more room when you're in charge of other people to have more people, like, not on the same page. +PARTICIPANT: I think in that case, I mean I've never been an editor, but I'm just speculating here that it might be helpful to—I don't know whether it would be, like, people working under the editor or for the previous person to say this is kind of what they might expect from you. Whether or not that's what you decide to follow through, but to have some level of, like, as an editor, I read every single one of their stories and—I don't know. Always there to, like, double-check the numbers so that when, you know, I give my stuff to an editor, and he's, like, yeah, it's fine. But I'm expecting something else, like, maybe that doesn't get lost somehow. Like, basically my expectations as far as their expectations for the job. So I feel there's more room when you're in charge of other people to have more people, like, not on the same page. -PARTICIPANT: I thi what we've already talked about is just as relevant for anyone else. Might not be the one who is actually hands on calling the source or. +PARTICIPANT: I thi what we've already talked about is just as relevant for anyone else. Might not be the one who is actually hands on calling the source or. PARTICIPANT: Sure. -PARTICIPANT: Manipulating the data. But you're managing people who are, so you need to know those things too. +PARTICIPANT: Manipulating the data. But you're managing people who are, so you need to know those things too. -PARTICIPANT: Also what you said about boarding in the newsroom. I wonder if it's sometimes a culal thing. It's always tough to onboard, for me it was tough, and for everyone else it's going to be tough. Like, tough it out. +PARTICIPANT: Also what you said about boarding in the newsroom. I wonder if it's sometimes a culal thing. It's always tough to onboard, for me it was tough, and for everyone else it's going to be tough. Like, tough it out. PARTICIPANT: Great old school. @@ -263,11 +263,11 @@ PARTICIPANT: I had to figure it out. PARTICIPANT: It needs to be easier for people. - a very, like, we're going to throw you in, you're going to figure it out. +a very, like, we're going to throw you in, you're going to figure it out. PARTICIPANT: Swim or sink. -PARTICIPANT: It's dumb. It wastes -- +PARTICIPANT: It's dumb. It wastes -- PARTICIPANT: It is. @@ -281,11 +281,11 @@ PARTICIPANT: Well, that's why I said -- PARTICIPANT: You already have that so -- -PARTICIPANT: But I guess if you were to make—because I feel the same exact way with the people just throwing you in and saying, well, this is what I had to deal with too. So sucks for you. You've got to do it too. But who would be the person to, like, be the keeper of this information? Or is it kind of on a team by team basis that this information -- +PARTICIPANT: But I guess if you were to make—because I feel the same exact way with the people just throwing you in and saying, well, this is what I had to deal with too. So sucks for you. You've got to do it too. But who would be the person to, like, be the keeper of this information? Or is it kind of on a team by team basis that this information -- PARTICIPANT: It depends on the size of the organization. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. It does. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. It does. PARTICIPANT: I think it would be nice to have one kind of point person in the room on boarder or off boarder or trainer or so forth. @@ -297,53 +297,53 @@ PARTICIPANT: You can think of it as, like—I'm sorry. PARTICIPANT: No, go ahead. -PARTICIPANT: We think of it as a system. But, like, when I first became an editor, I had an editor who was supposed to mentor me. She was, like, teaching me about the culture, teaching me about the expectations, and I think that is really what happened. +PARTICIPANT: We think of it as a system. But, like, when I first became an editor, I had an editor who was supposed to mentor me. She was, like, teaching me about the culture, teaching me about the expectations, and I think that is really what happened. PARTICIPANT: That's a really good idea. -PARTICIPANT: Especially the—it's not something you would want to develop. Even if you have a shine bigly, but I'm not knowing. Have the rotation that can be overkill I think. +PARTICIPANT: Especially the—it's not something you would want to develop. Even if you have a shine bigly, but I'm not knowing. Have the rotation that can be overkill I think. -PARTICIPANT: The nice thing about a mentor system, you get the things that you wouldn't necessarily want documented or the—well, this is the way it's supposed to happen. But so-and-so let's this slip through the cracks, so you have to be careful that kind of—those are the things that you just—you just either learn on your own . No one's ever writing that down. +PARTICIPANT: The nice thing about a mentor system, you get the things that you wouldn't necessarily want documented or the—well, this is the way it's supposed to happen. But so-and-so let's this slip through the cracks, so you have to be careful that kind of—those are the things that you just—you just either learn on your own . No one's ever writing that down. -PARTICIPANT: But if you want to follow projection head the first week you're on the job because no one oriented you to that culture, as a editor, that has the opportunity to super curtail you. Especially in the management systems is very, very -- +PARTICIPANT: But if you want to follow projection head the first week you're on the job because no one oriented you to that culture, as a editor, that has the opportunity to super curtail you. Especially in the management systems is very, very -- -PARTICIPANT: And other jobs like you said rotating. But even at the beginning even if you don't have culture of rotating jobs, you just shadow some other departments before you start to see how you fit into the bigger picture I think is really useful. I love hiring people from small weekly papers that put down everything because they get all of that. And it's a huge—that there's more out there than just your pieces of the puzzle. +PARTICIPANT: And other jobs like you said rotating. But even at the beginning even if you don't have culture of rotating jobs, you just shadow some other departments before you start to see how you fit into the bigger picture I think is really useful. I love hiring people from small weekly papers that put down everything because they get all of that. And it's a huge—that there's more out there than just your pieces of the puzzle. -PARTICIPANT: So when I—I work at the Chicago Tribune for a couple of years and for some reason it was all the HR stuff, it took days. It was not fun. But then I had an editor who was super thought of thoughtful about taking me around and letting me sit in on all the different meetings and meet everybody. +PARTICIPANT: So when I—I work at the Chicago Tribune for a couple of years and for some reason it was all the HR stuff, it took days. It was not fun. But then I had an editor who was super thought of thoughtful about taking me around and letting me sit in on all the different meetings and meet everybody. -So that allows you to—if you need to do something, you know who to ask. Oh, like, if I have a production question, I'm going to ask Nile, if I have a photo request question, I'm going to ask Jen. It lets you get your shit down. That's not something it's going to be documentation. There's going to be a mix of, like, documentation and then real life kit. +So that allows you to—if you need to do something, you know who to ask. Oh, like, if I have a production question, I'm going to ask Nile, if I have a photo request question, I'm going to ask Jen. It lets you get your shit down. That's not something it's going to be documentation. There's going to be a mix of, like, documentation and then real life kit. -PARTICIPANT: Although I think there could be expectations set out for the on boarders of, like, this is what you do. You take them through every single one of your meetings for the first week. +PARTICIPANT: Although I think there could be expectations set out for the on boarders of, like, this is what you do. You take them through every single one of your meetings for the first week. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I think that's. A lot of this is just having a good manager or having managers who are thoughtful people. And, like, you know, that doesn't always happen. So if somebody is naturally—people just -- +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I think that's. A lot of this is just having a good manager or having managers who are thoughtful people. And, like, you know, that doesn't always happen. So if somebody is naturally—people just -- -PARTICIPANT: The personal direction was a good point too. When I started, my boss took me around. It's a DC bureau, she took me around to all the reporters and told interest or, like, they're really good about this, like, right there. And that was super helpful, and we had an intern who was a data reporter intern, and we don't do exactly the same thing but I help them because we were the most similar into the roles. And I did the same thing when he started. I took them around to everybody you possibly, like, need to know, like, who they are or what they do to work with, so. +PARTICIPANT: The personal direction was a good point too. When I started, my boss took me around. It's a DC bureau, she took me around to all the reporters and told interest or, like, they're really good about this, like, right there. And that was super helpful, and we had an intern who was a data reporter intern, and we don't do exactly the same thing but I help them because we were the most similar into the roles. And I did the same thing when he started. I took them around to everybody you possibly, like, need to know, like, who they are or what they do to work with, so. PARTICIPANT: Where do you agree. -PARTICIPANT: Kolache. They're a DC bureau. +PARTICIPANT: Kolache. They're a DC bureau. PARTICIPANT: How big is it? -PARTICIPANT: Like, 50 people. When I was at Post, you couldn't meet everybody. But within a section of department, it can be really helpful. Because especially doing it early on is helpful. Because if your first interaction is a person versus e-mail, it makes a difference, like, who is this new person e-mailing me asking me stuff? It's not the best way to start a working relationship versus, oh, this person I met them, they were interviewing. My boss did that for me too. In my interview, she had me meet with a bunch of reporters, like, for me to get a sense of, like, them and have them ask me questions and—so, like, I came in and, like, I already knew those people plus the people I already knew, and then she took me to meet other people. So she's really great. She worked—she's all about leadership. +PARTICIPANT: Like, 50 people. When I was at Post, you couldn't meet everybody. But within a section of department, it can be really helpful. Because especially doing it early on is helpful. Because if your first interaction is a person versus e-mail, it makes a difference, like, who is this new person e-mailing me asking me stuff? It's not the best way to start a working relationship versus, oh, this person I met them, they were interviewing. My boss did that for me too. In my interview, she had me meet with a bunch of reporters, like, for me to get a sense of, like, them and have them ask me questions and—so, like, I came in and, like, I already knew those people plus the people I already knew, and then she took me to meet other people. So she's really great. She worked—she's all about leadership. PARTICIPANT: But, again, this is about personality thing. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And the culture too. But that expectation is there. And sometimes for her, it just came from, like, she kind of from that point in the culture. But but so many other times it was, like, this is how it is, welcome. Ideally from the top, but it could also come from the bottom. For me, to have the person that I was working with that was not data sharing but to push them in that direction or, like, for that person's or place. But now it's like this person will be doctrinated into the verge of control, everything's documented. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And the culture too. But that expectation is there. And sometimes for her, it just came from, like, she kind of from that point in the culture. But but so many other times it was, like, this is how it is, welcome. Ideally from the top, but it could also come from the bottom. For me, to have the person that I was working with that was not data sharing but to push them in that direction or, like, for that person's or place. But now it's like this person will be doctrinated into the verge of control, everything's documented. -PARTICIPANT: So we talked a lot about on-boarding, but we'll have a few minutes to talk about off-boarding. Is there anything that's not in the on-boarding process. So I have something sharing your knowledge. Familiarity with the types of apps the newsroom has. Understanding the pa. +PARTICIPANT: So we talked a lot about on-boarding, but we'll have a few minutes to talk about off-boarding. Is there anything that's not in the on-boarding process. So I have something sharing your knowledge. Familiarity with the types of apps the newsroom has. Understanding the pa. -PARTICIPANT: And who isry, style guide, contact list, expectations, and introduce new people. Is there anything you think it would be helpful to have in the off bothering process for them to document before they leave besides those things? +PARTICIPANT: And who isry, style guide, contact list, expectations, and introduce new people. Is there anything you think it would be helpful to have in the off bothering process for them to document before they leave besides those things? -PARTICIPANT: One thing I would is HR does exit interviews, but HR has that information. It's good to have that newsroom, especially if you're in a small place with low turn over, they're going to say, hey, people over and over. It's one person. Like, no, they're not going to say, oh, so-and-so said this about you. +PARTICIPANT: One thing I would is HR does exit interviews, but HR has that information. It's good to have that newsroom, especially if you're in a small place with low turn over, they're going to say, hey, people over and over. It's one person. Like, no, they're not going to say, oh, so-and-so said this about you. PARTICIPANT: Yeah. -PARTICIPANT: So having some sort of newsroom exit your view where you can say what do you wish we would have done differently? Or, you know, had questions that they ask in HR. But actually doing it. +PARTICIPANT: So having some sort of newsroom exit your view where you can say what do you wish we would have done differently? Or, you know, had questions that they ask in HR. But actually doing it. -PARTICIPANT: For us to have to be better about documenting the access is granted. And sometimes as the tools become more ad hoc, like, what's on a Google drive? So if we have a better process for granting, we'll review and take that away from people. +PARTICIPANT: For us to have to be better about documenting the access is granted. And sometimes as the tools become more ad hoc, like, what's on a Google drive? So if we have a better process for granting, we'll review and take that away from people. -PARTICIPANT: Similar—well, kind of the same thing. But keeping a checklist, like, when someone leaves, I have to go through the Twitter lists and—so I have a check with -- +PARTICIPANT: Similar—well, kind of the same thing. But keeping a checklist, like, when someone leaves, I have to go through the Twitter lists and—so I have a check with -- PARTICIPANT: Tweet at teams. @@ -351,29 +351,29 @@ PARTICIPANT: What are all those things that are happening that they have access PARTICIPANT: So, like, passwords they might have. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Or taking them off your contact list page, things like that too that aren't access per se. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Or taking them off your contact list page, things like that too that aren't access per se. -PARTICIPANT: What's going to happen to the e-mails then? Is it just a fail? Going to go to the manager? +PARTICIPANT: What's going to happen to the e-mails then? Is it just a fail? Going to go to the manager? PARTICIPANT: Or does it go to someone else? -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Working with IT and what happens in the voice mail and e-mail. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Working with IT and what happens in the voice mail and e-mail. -PARTICIPANT: One recent example from my new firm that was helpful is we had somebody leave who was a bit of a Jack-of-all-trades person. A lot of animated videos and all sorts of things. And as he's leaving, he sent an e-mail out to all awl staff that said if there was anything that I helped you with or anything that you're going to think how would I do this without this person, e-mail me back and let me know. And so I thought that was a good way to just kind of—he had a good sense of what he did most frequently. But I'm sure there were a lot of things that he did that were, like, one off that the newsroom wouldn't be able to do anymore. So it was a good way to make sure -- +PARTICIPANT: One recent example from my new firm that was helpful is we had somebody leave who was a bit of a Jack-of-all-trades person. A lot of animated videos and all sorts of things. And as he's leaving, he sent an e-mail out to all awl staff that said if there was anything that I helped you with or anything that you're going to think how would I do this without this person, e-mail me back and let me know. And so I thought that was a good way to just kind of—he had a good sense of what he did most frequently. But I'm sure there were a lot of things that he did that were, like, one off that the newsroom wouldn't be able to do anymore. So it was a good way to make sure -- PARTICIPANT: How much, like, -- -PARTICIPANT: I would say probably like two weeks. Maybe a week. +PARTICIPANT: I would say probably like two weeks. Maybe a week. -I would have to and him. I don't know. I know he had a couple.that wasn't part of the process, just something -- +I would have to and him. I don't know. I know he had a couple.that wasn't part of the process, just something -- -PARTICIPANT: It can be either people that leave voluntarily or people that are—well, I think if you're fired, it's kind of a different experience. But, yeah, I guess most of the time people that are voluntarily leaving or taking time out. +PARTICIPANT: It can be either people that leave voluntarily or people that are—well, I think if you're fired, it's kind of a different experience. But, yeah, I guess most of the time people that are voluntarily leaving or taking time out. -PARTICIPANT: Well, I mean voluntarily. If you're fired, security escorts you out the building. +PARTICIPANT: Well, I mean voluntarily. If you're fired, security escorts you out the building. PARTICIPANT: Then there's no off-boarding. -PARTICIPANT: But voluntarily, oh, yeah, you know, go for it. But volunteer I'm going to work really hard to establish versus voluntarily as in, like, I kind of hate my job. I need to find something else. Oh, I found it. Great. Now I have, like, zero motivation to care about what I'm doing because I found a great job, what is my incentive to, like, be helpful? Like, I actually don't really plan to do that. +PARTICIPANT: But voluntarily, oh, yeah, you know, go for it. But volunteer I'm going to work really hard to establish versus voluntarily as in, like, I kind of hate my job. I need to find something else. Oh, I found it. Great. Now I have, like, zero motivation to care about what I'm doing because I found a great job, what is my incentive to, like, be helpful? Like, I actually don't really plan to do that. PARTICIPANT: I think the idea would be that off-boarding would be something that happens continuously, like, you always think about. @@ -381,17 +381,17 @@ PARTICIPANT: Like it's a formalized process, and it's mandatory that you have to PARTICIPANT: Did you ever talk to anybody? -PARTICIPANT: Yeah, so there's some newsrooms that have old guide books. But there's also newsrooms that are small and have nothing, and they have, like, two e-mails, and they send me those. And it's literally just, like, talk to Jim Smith in this -- +PARTICIPANT: Yeah, so there's some newsrooms that have old guide books. But there's also newsrooms that are small and have nothing, and they have, like, two e-mails, and they send me those. And it's literally just, like, talk to Jim Smith in this -- PARTICIPANT: A forward chain, like, ten -- -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And then the next thing that says talk to Heidi whatever and then the next one is, like, talk to this person. And by the time you get to the end of it, there's a small thing and then that person already left too and it's a useless e-mail. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And then the next thing that says talk to Heidi whatever and then the next one is, like, talk to this person. And by the time you get to the end of it, there's a small thing and then that person already left too and it's a useless e-mail. PARTICIPANT: One of the things that I have to add is that you have to make sure that you give people time t it. PARTICIPANT: So how much people would you say to give for off-boarding? -PARTICIPANT: I mean I guess it depends on how complicated the job is and how well documented it is, but maybe that's something you negotiate when you give you notice. So it's, like, I'm going full force doing my job and then, oh, now I don't—oh, whoops. See you. You have to do your job. +PARTICIPANT: I mean I guess it depends on how complicated the job is and how well documented it is, but maybe that's something you negotiate when you give you notice. So it's, like, I'm going full force doing my job and then, oh, now I don't—oh, whoops. See you. You have to do your job. PARTICIPANT: But documenting as you go but -- @@ -405,45 +405,38 @@ PARTICIPANT: Office hour be with so be without the preparation, I have to be ava PARTICIPANT: That's a great idea. -PARTICIPANT: Have you tried that? And has it worked? +PARTICIPANT: Have you tried that? And has it worked? -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And it's also included wanting to talk about why that person was leaving if you wanted to come by for that. And that can be part of the announcement that they're leaving. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And it's also included wanting to talk about why that person was leaving if you wanted to come by for that. And that can be part of the announcement that they're leaving. -PARTICIPANT: Anyone else? We have about three minutes. So is there anything else that anyone really wanted to talk about on boarding and off-boarding so that we can help you with? +PARTICIPANT: Anyone else? We have about three minutes. So is there anything else that anyone really wanted to talk about on boarding and off-boarding so that we can help you with? -PARTICIPANT: So for the off-boarding, the exit interviews and also having some people write up their thoughts. You want to have people continuously document but there's also the value of people looki cumulatively to offer, you know, thoughts. Not just making sure, like, is this updated to be, like, correct but also, like, you know, if we were to do this over again, I think we should do it this way or things like that that sort of last thoughts. +PARTICIPANT: So for the off-boarding, the exit interviews and also having some people write up their thoughts. You want to have people continuously document but there's also the value of people looki cumulatively to offer, you know, thoughts. Not just making sure, like, is this updated to be, like, correct but also, like, you know, if we were to do this over again, I think we should do it this way or things like that that sort of last thoughts. PARTICIPANT: Or this was really worth doing and this we spent a lot of time, and it wasn't. -PARTICIPANT: The one thing I'm curious about is not people who leave permanently but transition planning like medical leave. How do you make it so that they can sort of be kept with things while they're away and have a process for them to be able to come back in? +PARTICIPANT: The one thing I'm curious about is not people who leave permanently but transition planning like medical leave. How do you make it so that they can sort of be kept with things while they're away and have a process for them to be able to come back in? PARTICIPANT: Any thoughts? -PARTICIPANT: I went on leave from my last job, and I just talked to people, like, in the last half or quarter of the period to catch up. There wasn't a formal process. But I think that could be helpful. It's not the most formal thing, but it just sort of, like, reporting on, you know, keeping comprised of what's going on. But more formal would be helpful. +PARTICIPANT: I went on leave from my last job, and I just talked to people, like, in the last half or quarter of the period to catch up. There wasn't a formal process. But I think that could be helpful. It's not the most formal thing, but it just sort of, like, reporting on, you know, keeping comprised of what's going on. But more formal would be helpful. PARTICIPANT: So a checklist of some sort? -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Just, like—I mean I would also just follow public announcements because it's a bigger newsroom and who was hired, what jobs? Who left? Who departed? A farewell list, making sure that—so I guess one thing could be making sure that people still had access to the systems and things like that to be able to proactively sort of keep up with it. So. Would have been nice. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Just, like—I mean I would also just follow public announcements because it's a bigger newsroom and who was hired, what jobs? Who left? Who departed? A farewell list, making sure that—so I guess one thing could be making sure that people still had access to the systems and things like that to be able to proactively sort of keep up with it. So. Would have been nice. -PARTICIPANT: I didn't even think about that. That' a good question. +PARTICIPANT: I didn't even think about that. That' a good question. -PARTICIPANT: I try to set up someone who knows how to get ahold of me if need be. And I trust them that they know how to escalate appropriately. Because that's the problem is that someone says I need to know this information, and I want to interrupt your vacation or your medical leave for various pieces that you have planned so someone says they need a particular piece of information, to manage it well. +PARTICIPANT: I try to set up someone who knows how to get ahold of me if need be. And I trust them that they know how to escalate appropriately. Because that's the problem is that someone says I need to know this information, and I want to interrupt your vacation or your medical leave for various pieces that you have planned so someone says they need a particular piece of information, to manage it well. -PARTICIPANT: Anyone have good—you said earlier documenting a process as you go. I just wonder how to do that best or what are the best practice recommended -- +PARTICIPANT: Anyone have good—you said earlier documenting a process as you go. I just wonder how to do that best or what are the best practice recommended -- -PARTICIPANT: I will say as a promo for another session today, for tomorrow, there's a session on tomorrow that's on documenting your processes and how to do them. I'm going. And they have really awesome documentation because I've read it. So that might be a good resource. Anyone else? +PARTICIPANT: I will say as a promo for another session today, for tomorrow, there's a session on tomorrow that's on documenting your processes and how to do them. I'm going. And they have really awesome documentation because I've read it. So that might be a good resource. Anyone else? PARTICIPANT: So your research project, would it be a list of suggestions? -PARTICIPANT: Yes. So in the ether pad if you guys are all interested, I also have a survey in here. It' Bitly/newsroom on-boarding. And I'm still taking people's on-boarding, off-boarding experiences. So you don't have to put your name, you can say you're a journalist and just say your newsroom. I would love to hear from you, and I'm hoping to—so the month of August, I'm submitting applications. So September I will be looking through this data and doing more documentation on it. So I'm hoping to publish something in December. +PARTICIPANT: Yes. So in the ether pad if you guys are all interested, I also have a survey in here. It' Bitly/newsroom on-boarding. And I'm still taking people's on-boarding, off-boarding experiences. So you don't have to put your name, you can say you're a journalist and just say your newsroom. I would love to hear from you, and I'm hoping to—so the month of August, I'm submitting applications. So September I will be looking through this data and doing more documentation on it. So I'm hoping to publish something in December. -I was doing a lot of one-on-one interviews with people, asking them in different roles what the—how their on-boarding is and how they're dealing with institutional knowledge, which I think is really problematic. So, yea. I appreciate you guys all coming out. I don't want to take any more of your time. It's 3:32. But, yeah, if you have anything else, like, I'm around, and if you would love to fill out the survey, there's a survey. And also a write-up on pointer on my research, which gives you, like, the basics of what I found so far. But, yeah. Thank you. +I was doing a lot of one-on-one interviews with people, asking them in different roles what the—how their on-boarding is and how they're dealing with institutional knowledge, which I think is really problematic. So, yea. I appreciate you guys all coming out. I don't want to take any more of your time. It's 3:32. But, yeah, if you have anything else, like, I'm around, and if you would love to fill out the survey, there's a survey. And also a write-up on pointer on my research, which gives you, like, the basics of what I found so far. But, yeah. Thank you. [Applause] - - - - - - - diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-participatory-algorithms.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-participatory-algorithms.md index f4435cfb..52345850 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-participatory-algorithms.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-participatory-algorithms.md @@ -1,43 +1,43 @@ Designing participatory algorithmic decisionmaking processes Session facilitator(s): Tara Adiseshan, Linda Sandvik Day & Time: Thursday, 2:30-3:30pm -Room: Innovation Studio +Room: Innovation Studio PARTICIPANT: Welcome, everybody. I think folks are still trickling down from lunch, but I think we're going to go ahead and get started. I'm a little sick right now so I might b sitting down for part of the session but my name is Tara and this is Linda and we're really excited to have you all here. -This session title was called designing participator algorithmic decisionmaking processes, which is quite a mouthful. What are we talking about when we talk about algorithmic decisionmaking and algorithm as you folks may or may not know can mean really like a step by step set of operations, often that's used to solve problems. We're going to be talking about algorithms, so like procedures that are used to input data into specific outputs in ways that make decisions about your experience. So this is anything from web services or apps you might use to experiences in the analog world that are also based on a set of procedures. +This session title was called designing participator algorithmic decisionmaking processes, which is quite a mouthful. What are we talking about when we talk about algorithmic decisionmaking and algorithm as you folks may or may not know can mean really like a step by step set of operations, often that's used to solve problems. We're going to be talking about algorithms, so like procedures that are used to input data into specific outputs in ways that make decisions about your experience. So this is anything from web services or apps you might use to experiences in the analog world that are also based on a set of procedures. And when we talk about participatory algorithmic decisionmaking really we're talking about thinking about centering agency both at individual and community level, and trying to think about what that value prioritization looks like. Let's see. -I started thinking about some of these questions. I was an Mozilla fellow on the coral project and for the folks who don't know, it's the collaboration between the New York Times, Washington Post and Mozilla trying to think about build tools and I was doing some initial research on the project and started thinking about what tools could be ed for managing trolling or abusive behavior, and I started coming to all these questions around what it meant to identify trolls, or build tools that were based on identifying trolls, so things that might reduce visibility of folks, if they had particular patterns of behavior, and this all seemed great and really necessary until I started thinking about what it meant for me to be thinking about defining what—how to detect a troll, basically and the ways in which that might limit somebody's participation in an important online space, and I think comment sections are one place in which we think about participation, but as more and more algorithmic systems are used in perhaps higher-stakes areas of our lives, Linda and I thought for a variety of reasons that it would really be important to start thinking about these and learning with community. +I started thinking about some of these questions. I was an Mozilla fellow on the coral project and for the folks who don't know, it's the collaboration between the New York Times, Washington Post and Mozilla trying to think about build tools and I was doing some initial research on the project and started thinking about what tools could be ed for managing trolling or abusive behavior, and I started coming to all these questions around what it meant to identify trolls, or build tools that were based on identifying trolls, so things that might reduce visibility of folks, if they had particular patterns of behavior, and this all seemed great and really necessary until I started thinking about what it meant for me to be thinking about defining what—how to detect a troll, basically and the ways in which that might limit somebody's participation in an important online space, and I think comment sections are one place in which we think about participation, but as more and more algorithmic systems are used in perhaps higher-stakes areas of our lives, Linda and I thought for a variety of reasons that it would really be important to start thinking about these and learning with community. PARTICIPANT: Linda: And yeah, I did a degree in philosophy and computer science, so from the start, we we were kind of told how to ask questions, and you know, the computer was invented by philosophers, so it goes together, but yeah, ethics was mandatory and I'm thinking that maybe it should be mandatory for more people. [laughter] -And I also started a company called hood club where we teach primary school children how to program, and after like a couple of years of doing that, I realized that it's really not enough to teach people how to write code. We really need to be teaching them how these programs are changing the world, how they're shaping the world, and whereas there's a lot of money in teaching people how to code so that they can, you know, make profit for companies, there's not as much effort being put into teaching people basically how the world works now. Because it shapes so much of how the world works. And yeah, so, Tara discovered this amazing reading list and posted it on Slack and I was like, oh, yeah, I want to read all of those books, but also knowing me, I'm like, I'm never going to get around to reading all of these books, unless you have some motivation. So we started a reading club, book club, to read all these books. Like, if I get, I don't know, ten other people to read this book, that's going to force me to read it, right? That was the idea. So yeah, we started algorithm club which is a Twitter book club. Basically what it means is we find an interesting piece, and we come up with some questions, and people turn in using our club hashtag, and you know, yeah, we just take the discussion from there. So we've been reading, things like unwanted bias in search engines, and how, like, basically how search engines get a lot of power, and should we be granting that much power to search engines, things like have you ever modified your behaviors to change the way an algorithm like things about you? I certainly have. I have a Google phone, so I frequently have to go and delete things that Google knows about me. And yeah, just what are our responsibilities as individuals working at companies that maybe uses a bit more shady data collection. +And I also started a company called hood club where we teach primary school children how to program, and after like a couple of years of doing that, I realized that it's really not enough to teach people how to write code. We really need to be teaching them how these programs are changing the world, how they're shaping the world, and whereas there's a lot of money in teaching people how to code so that they can, you know, make profit for companies, there's not as much effort being put into teaching people basically how the world works now. Because it shapes so much of how the world works. And yeah, so, Tara discovered this amazing reading list and posted it on Slack and I was like, oh, yeah, I want to read all of those books, but also knowing me, I'm like, I'm never going to get around to reading all of these books, unless you have some motivation. So we started a reading club, book club, to read all these books. Like, if I get, I don't know, ten other people to read this book, that's going to force me to read it, right? That was the idea. So yeah, we started algorithm club which is a Twitter book club. Basically what it means is we find an interesting piece, and we come up with some questions, and people turn in using our club hashtag, and you know, yeah, we just take the discussion from there. So we've been reading, things like unwanted bias in search engines, and how, like, basically how search engines get a lot of power, and should we be granting that much power to search engines, things like have you ever modified your behaviors to change the way an algorithm like things about you? I certainly have. I have a Google phone, so I frequently have to go and delete things that Google knows about me. And yeah, just what are our responsibilities as individuals working at companies that maybe uses a bit more shady data collection. -Yeah Tara. So we're eventually going into a design exercise, but first we wanted to talk about some of the things about some of the readings and conversations we've had in algorithm club, as well as some excellent research that's been done about some of these issues suggests. And I think it's important to think before we even start thinking about algorithms and the decisions we might make for them, what makes it into an index in the first place. Meaning when I first started get Mo are into data vis Houleization, data science, is that there is * no such thing as raw data. There are always assumptions baked into those procedures, and sometimes what's left out in those data collection processes is as important as what is actuallily collected after it's collected it's categorized and claimed to be used in whatever format it's put in. I think one example that is very well known is in 2009, Amazon marked, I think over 57,000 books, many of which had BT themes as adult books and they vanished from the sales list. So the takeaway there is not that Amazon is against queer folks in any way, shape, or form, but there were two underlying processes there that had to happen, which is one, that LGBT books were marked as adult, and a lot of consumers did not know that adult books were being removed from the sales list. So the problem there was not necessarily that it happened as much as it was not tested for or some of these things were not known, I guess internally or externally be able to think of what such an outcome might look like. This is another well known example an engineer found that his friend was tagged as a gorilla, and this could be due to many things. It could be reflective of the fact that perhaps Google didn't have the right kind of initial sample data, or it could be reflective of the fact that 2% of workforce are black. It could be reflective of the fact also that at the end of the day, in addition to this being political, it's a product failure, right? If a certain portion of your market or the folks who are going to be using your tool are not being served and the test cases that might include them are not being included in a bunch of ways, this is something that we need to be thinking about both in a way to ask critical questions, but also, what does debugging, testing or QA look like for systems that we might not be able to predict some of these outcomes. I think the takeaways from a lot of these examples is not that these things are intentional, but I think more in this day and age we need to be thinking about what the worst possible outcomes or unintended consequences of some of these technologies might be. +Yeah Tara. So we're eventually going into a design exercise, but first we wanted to talk about some of the things about some of the readings and conversations we've had in algorithm club, as well as some excellent research that's been done about some of these issues suggests. And I think it's important to think before we even start thinking about algorithms and the decisions we might make for them, what makes it into an index in the first place. Meaning when I first started get Mo are into data vis Houleization, data science, is that there is \* no such thing as raw data. There are always assumptions baked into those procedures, and sometimes what's left out in those data collection processes is as important as what is actuallily collected after it's collected it's categorized and claimed to be used in whatever format it's put in. I think one example that is very well known is in 2009, Amazon marked, I think over 57,000 books, many of which had BT themes as adult books and they vanished from the sales list. So the takeaway there is not that Amazon is against queer folks in any way, shape, or form, but there were two underlying processes there that had to happen, which is one, that LGBT books were marked as adult, and a lot of consumers did not know that adult books were being removed from the sales list. So the problem there was not necessarily that it happened as much as it was not tested for or some of these things were not known, I guess internally or externally be able to think of what such an outcome might look like. This is another well known example an engineer found that his friend was tagged as a gorilla, and this could be due to many things. It could be reflective of the fact that perhaps Google didn't have the right kind of initial sample data, or it could be reflective of the fact that 2% of workforce are black. It could be reflective of the fact also that at the end of the day, in addition to this being political, it's a product failure, right? If a certain portion of your market or the folks who are going to be using your tool are not being served and the test cases that might include them are not being included in a bunch of ways, this is something that we need to be thinking about both in a way to ask critical questions, but also, what does debugging, testing or QA look like for systems that we might not be able to predict some of these outcomes. I think the takeaways from a lot of these examples is not that these things are intentional, but I think more in this day and age we need to be thinking about what the worst possible outcomes or unintended consequences of some of these technologies might be. -And lastly, just before we head into your design exercise, oftentimes, I think a challenging aspect of having conversations around decisionmaking system is that algorithms are frequently thought of, I guess at least in conversation as neutral or objective. When they're reflective frequently of organizational principles, even down to when we're thinking about how something is recommended or how something is popular or trending. A lot of times these algorithms are proprietary for good reason, it's very tied to a business model, and there are frequently cases being made for the ways in which folks might game the system if this were to be more transparent. But in systems where I think we want to have more conversations about transparency, I think there needs to be a conversation also about what interpret ability looks like, because often it's not so much that there's knowledge on the inside that the engineers know and are hiding from the rest of the world. Interpretability has to do a lot more with what it means to take data that is being used and make that a little bit more understandable both for folks internally working on systems, as well as for end users. +And lastly, just before we head into your design exercise, oftentimes, I think a challenging aspect of having conversations around decisionmaking system is that algorithms are frequently thought of, I guess at least in conversation as neutral or objective. When they're reflective frequently of organizational principles, even down to when we're thinking about how something is recommended or how something is popular or trending. A lot of times these algorithms are proprietary for good reason, it's very tied to a business model, and there are frequently cases being made for the ways in which folks might game the system if this were to be more transparent. But in systems where I think we want to have more conversations about transparency, I think there needs to be a conversation also about what interpret ability looks like, because often it's not so much that there's knowledge on the inside that the engineers know and are hiding from the rest of the world. Interpretability has to do a lot more with what it means to take data that is being used and make that a little bit more understandable both for folks internally working on systems, as well as for end users. -And yeah, just one more thing about the last slide. Like, what can we do as journalists to try to expose bias in algorithms, and especially in the US, if you try to reverse engineer the algorithm, you could actually be accused of espy onage, like, getting the trade secrets. That's what the large corns are hiding behind that no, we can't tell you what we're doing, this is our trade secret and businesses have incredibly high protection. Which brings me to this line. I live in the UK and I just wanted to have a slide that shows how much I love the Eu. The eU has been great work, we still believe in the EU. Are there any other Europeans here? Yay! , so in the EU, we do have better rights, I would say, than the US, in a the love ways. For instance, we have the right to access information about ourself and we have the right to be forgotten. That is, if—a corporation or a somebody has information about you, you can ask them to delete it and they have to do it. So you have the right to find out free of charge if an individual or organization has information about them, they need to tell you what information they have about you and why they have that information. Like not just how they collected it, but what they are going to use it for. And then you can also request to have all of that deleted. The EU thinks that that applies to all corporations that have data on you sentences, corporations like Facebook and Google does not think that. So that's still being worked out. +And yeah, just one more thing about the last slide. Like, what can we do as journalists to try to expose bias in algorithms, and especially in the US, if you try to reverse engineer the algorithm, you could actually be accused of espy onage, like, getting the trade secrets. That's what the large corns are hiding behind that no, we can't tell you what we're doing, this is our trade secret and businesses have incredibly high protection. Which brings me to this line. I live in the UK and I just wanted to have a slide that shows how much I love the Eu. The eU has been great work, we still believe in the EU. Are there any other Europeans here? Yay! , so in the EU, we do have better rights, I would say, than the US, in a the love ways. For instance, we have the right to access information about ourself and we have the right to be forgotten. That is, if—a corporation or a somebody has information about you, you can ask them to delete it and they have to do it. So you have the right to find out free of charge if an individual or organization has information about them, they need to tell you what information they have about you and why they have that information. Like not just how they collected it, but what they are going to use it for. And then you can also request to have all of that deleted. The EU thinks that that applies to all corporations that have data on you sentences, corporations like Facebook and Google does not think that. So that's still being worked out. -But in April, they actually had a new resolution voed in. Which it's going to call go into two years from April of this year, so 2018, and the first one is the data subjects shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her, and basically what this means is, an algorithm is not allowed to make a decision that affects you negatively. +But in April, they actually had a new resolution voed in. Which it's going to call go into two years from April of this year, so 2018, and the first one is the data subjects shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her, and basically what this means is, an algorithm is not allowed to make a decision that affects you negatively. -I mean that's pretty big. Like, in terms of profiling and amount of profiling that that a lot of—even just like the police, right? They do a lot of profiling. Like, they wouldn't be allowed to do tha in the EU and also, and I think even more significantly, maybe, a data subject has the right to an explanation of the decision reached after algorithmic assessment. So all the corporations have to not just tell you what data they have about you, but they have to tell you what their algorithms are doing in a way that you can understand it. And I think this is going to be really hard for people like me who write the algorithms, it's hard enough to even explain it to people in my team, right? But I think it's really good that they made this law. I think it's great, because it's an acknowledgment that when algorithms are deployed in society, they shouldn't just be efficient, they should be unbiased and fair and transparent. +I mean that's pretty big. Like, in terms of profiling and amount of profiling that that a lot of—even just like the police, right? They do a lot of profiling. Like, they wouldn't be allowed to do tha in the EU and also, and I think even more significantly, maybe, a data subject has the right to an explanation of the decision reached after algorithmic assessment. So all the corporations have to not just tell you what data they have about you, but they have to tell you what their algorithms are doing in a way that you can understand it. And I think this is going to be really hard for people like me who write the algorithms, it's hard enough to even explain it to people in my team, right? But I think it's really good that they made this law. I think it's great, because it's an acknowledgment that when algorithms are deployed in society, they shouldn't just be efficient, they should be unbiased and fair and transparent. And also, yeah, it just highlights that, you know, the decisions aren't really technical. Like we want to believe that algorithms are neutral and it's so far for it. And this kind of says that we have to hold the algorithms to the same standards that we people. Like, people are not allowed t discriminate. Algorithms should not either. S so -- PARTICIPANT: Tara: Yeah, in thinking about our session, our goal was to sa it was not to say that analysis or decisions based on data is a bad thing. But it's also important for us to ask some of these questions and incorporate this into our work, what that would look like. I personally was not able to find a ton of examples of current I guess folks who are thinking about how to make things more interpretable. But this is a screenshot from my roommate's Netflix with their consent. Are folks familiar with group lens by any chance? So they're a University of Minnesota research group and movie lens is a recommender system that I think for me was really helpful to comparing two Netflix or recommendation systems. I think initially it looks very similar in that there are top picks and recent releases, but one example of they actually let you change your recommender and not only do they let you change your recommender or try to explain to you what those decisions mean, they also reference papers that if you are interested in reading, you can. Which is really exciting for me to see. -And I think Netflix does a certain extent of this, as well, but also there's a little bit more of very direct control of how you're assigned points and the ways that you're able to change the recommendations that you're getting. So with that as an example, we wanted to start thinking about identiifying some processes that we all experience that * our experiences are shaped by algorithms, and thinking about ways in which we could come up with some guidelines around either transparency or interpretability, ideally if there's at least one group per person who can take notes on the etherpad so we all kind of have a record of this and can share this out, that would be great. So I think it looks like—sometimes that might mean like you splitting tables. So pick three or four folks around you and maybe take two minutes to exchange names and pronouns with those folks. +And I think Netflix does a certain extent of this, as well, but also there's a little bit more of very direct control of how you're assigned points and the ways that you're able to change the recommendations that you're getting. So with that as an example, we wanted to start thinking about identiifying some processes that we all experience that \* our experiences are shaped by algorithms, and thinking about ways in which we could come up with some guidelines around either transparency or interpretability, ideally if there's at least one group per person who can take notes on the etherpad so we all kind of have a record of this and can share this out, that would be great. So I think it looks like—sometimes that might mean like you splitting tables. So pick three or four folks around you and maybe take two minutes to exchange names and pronouns with those folks. [group activity] -OK, if folks can either pick one or have like a top two, that would be great, because we're going to start sharing out very quickly. Also a quick note, if folks have the etherpad up, I know some folks have made groups so we can have shared notes afterwards, and if you all don't mind picking one person to share out what y'all are thinking about as an experience? +OK, if folks can either pick one or have like a top two, that would be great, because we're going to start sharing out very quickly. Also a quick note, if folks have the etherpad up, I know some folks have made groups so we can have shared notes afterwards, and if you all don't mind picking one person to share out what y'all are thinking about as an experience? -OK, can folks, can you raise your hand if you have one experience that you want to work on? Great, we have another two minutes to go from the conversations you had to picking one. Great. +OK, can folks, can you raise your hand if you have one experience that you want to work on? Great, we have another two minutes to go from the conversations you had to picking one. Great. [group activity] @@ -55,7 +55,7 @@ PARTICIPANT: We're either going to talk about Netflix recommendations or somethi PARTICIPANT: Tara: Cool. -PARTICIPANT: We're still decided. We're talking about experiences but we haven't decided yet, so we should focus. We were talking about like your phone knowing where your home is, telling you it's going to take you 20 minutes to go to your home, and like doing an investigate on a special topic and then Google recommended you ads from that topic that you were only investigating about. +PARTICIPANT: We're still decided. We're talking about experiences but we haven't decided yet, so we should focus. We were talking about like your phone knowing where your home is, telling you it's going to take you 20 minutes to go to your home, and like doing an investigate on a special topic and then Google recommended you ads from that topic that you were only investigating about. PARTICIPANT: Tara: Cool, thank you. @@ -67,7 +67,7 @@ PARTICIPANT: Tara: Tronc! I guess. PARTICIPANT: We're going to talk about presidential sampling ads. -PARTICIPANT: Oh, look, we are also talking about advertisements, particularly thinking about the implications of retargeting and when there are organizations that are maybe doing harm, so kind of the example that our target ot our table is casinos, and not big targeting, but particularly that they think you're big spenders, that becomes problematic if you have a gambling addiction. Where is responsibility in that algorithmic decisionmaking? +PARTICIPANT: Oh, look, we are also talking about advertisements, particularly thinking about the implications of retargeting and when there are organizations that are maybe doing harm, so kind of the example that our target ot our table is casinos, and not big targeting, but particularly that they think you're big spenders, that becomes problematic if you have a gambling addiction. Where is responsibility in that algorithmic decisionmaking? PARTICIPANT: We're going to talk about an algorithm that's existed long before computers and continues, which is how to match college roommates. @@ -77,9 +77,9 @@ PARTICIPANT: Aming. I wish I had known more about that before I went to college. PARTICIPANT: Tara: OK, 7 minutes are up. And this time I'm going to start from the back and just a couple of sentences of several things you thought about where moments are obscured or you can have more agency. -PARTICIPANT: All right, so we were talking about the college roommates matching, and a lot of the obscurity is kind of like what the school does with the data, if they even use it, how they might weight things, how they make their decision, and then, so like the—you people actually do have a lot of their own free agency these days of like submitting their own roommates ahead of time, so basically taking the school out of the equation. And then, yeah, I guess another thing that some places do is like they let you pick your—so like on the initial questions, what you're looking for, similar to how OK cupid does on dating apps, and actual actually started brainstorming on the dating apps, so yeah, obscurity. +PARTICIPANT: All right, so we were talking about the college roommates matching, and a lot of the obscurity is kind of like what the school does with the data, if they even use it, how they might weight things, how they make their decision, and then, so like the—you people actually do have a lot of their own free agency these days of like submitting their own roommates ahead of time, so basically taking the school out of the equation. And then, yeah, I guess another thing that some places do is like they let you pick your—so like on the initial questions, what you're looking for, similar to how OK cupid does on dating apps, and actual actually started brainstorming on the dating apps, so yeah, obscurity. -PARTICIPANT: So we talked about the replication of ads, so like when you go on Amazon and you shop for one thing i like an iPhone charger, or something, all of a sudden, even though you already bought that iPhone charger, that ad follows you around everywhere and it's an interesting disconnect because on the one hand it's a pretty innocuous to have an I-phone charger around or another thing that's like a health-related thing, or something that's borderline ethical. We were talking about the implications of like casinos chasing you around. And on the other hand it's curious that the biggest search engine that we all use is mastering behind all of that but there is a page in which if you go to your Google profile, you can find and remove certain topics, and that actually most people don't filter out all ads, so we were talking about that, and then just the where is the boundary between something that is like innocuous to show, like iPhone chargers or clothing or furniture, versus something that's a health product or something like that. And, you know, that's just an exploratory kind of open for discussion thing.PARTICIPANT: Thank you. Yeah. I had never heard the casino example before, so I was fascinated by that. +PARTICIPANT: So we talked about the replication of ads, so like when you go on Amazon and you shop for one thing i like an iPhone charger, or something, all of a sudden, even though you already bought that iPhone charger, that ad follows you around everywhere and it's an interesting disconnect because on the one hand it's a pretty innocuous to have an I-phone charger around or another thing that's like a health-related thing, or something that's borderline ethical. We were talking about the implications of like casinos chasing you around. And on the other hand it's curious that the biggest search engine that we all use is mastering behind all of that but there is a page in which if you go to your Google profile, you can find and remove certain topics, and that actually most people don't filter out all ads, so we were talking about that, and then just the where is the boundary between something that is like innocuous to show, like iPhone chargers or clothing or furniture, versus something that's a health product or something like that. And, you know, that's just an exploratory kind of open for discussion thing.PARTICIPANT: Thank you. Yeah. I had never heard the casino example before, so I was fascinated by that. PARTICIPANT: So as a reminder, we were talking about campaign and voer history was something that people don't always understand is public. Like we know if you vote in a primary, like it will go to the record that you voted in the democratic or Republican or green party party in this city and with that when you go to the general election, it's pretty easy to know where and when you voted and people are like, that's a secret ballot and that's true, but it doesn't seem like it in that term. So that was what we discussed. @@ -95,12 +95,10 @@ PARTICIPANT: Yeah, cool. PARTICIPANT: I got really interested in my Spotify discover weekly and Spotify shuffle a while back and I found that there are actually a lot of conspiracy theories around iTunes shuffle and Spotify shuffle and whether or not these companies are actually being paid. Lots of very interesting forum discussions if you want to check them out. -PARTICIPANT: So we picked the iPhone or Android travel estimate feature, where it will suggest to you, you know, oh, you're 20 minutes away from home, you're 15 minutes away from work, and you know, areas where that experience is obscured or where the user could have more agency is just, you know, a great deal of uncertainty about where that data is being collected from, particularly in cases where, you know, you might not have even given your address to your phone. It just sort of knows that you're in the same place every night and it just goes ahead and says that's home. It knows whether you drive or whether you walk, and they have all this information, know, it's not quite clear what they're doing it. If it's available to anybody else. In some cases like in the iPhone, that information is available to you and you can see exactly what's being tracked, but there are ethical implications of that, also. Because what if, you know, like a jealous partner or God knows who, is on your phone and then who, it's snapping +PARTICIPANT: So we picked the iPhone or Android travel estimate feature, where it will suggest to you, you know, oh, you're 20 minutes away from home, you're 15 minutes away from work, and you know, areas where that experience is obscured or where the user could have more agency is just, you know, a great deal of uncertainty about where that data is being collected from, particularly in cases where, you know, you might not have even given your address to your phone. It just sort of knows that you're in the same place every night and it just goes ahead and says that's home. It knows whether you drive or whether you walk, and they have all this information, know, it's not quite clear what they're doing it. If it's available to anybody else. In some cases like in the iPhone, that information is available to you and you can see exactly what's being tracked, but there are ethical implications of that, also. Because what if, you know, like a jealous partner or God knows who, is on your phone and then who, it's snapping We expanded a little bit from just gender mistargetting to more like gender interest in weddings and targeting and I think this set of questions we came up with is we don't even know if the ad itself is targeted. We don't know who they intend to target it. We don't know what we're doing that gives them the id that we want to see this ad. We don't know what we've told them about ourselves that's shaping this or if they're drawing conclusions from something else. We don't know if they're storing those conclusions or sharing that information with anyone, and to echo what somebody else was saying, it seems like our only real agency is to correct the record and give them more information about ourselves, which doesn't feel like it's helping our privacy at all. - - PARTICIPANT: We're not talking about Netflix, we're talking about how some police agencies use data to assign where patrols go. There are private companies that create these datasets around historical crime data, time of day, that kind of thing. That data is difficult for people that live in those communities to get access to, necessarily. How police agencies choose to use that data is often opaque, and it's difficult to know how living in a certain neighborhood is affected by this other piece of data that you really don't have a lot of control over. Is that a fair -- PARTICIPANT: Yeah. @@ -113,8 +111,6 @@ What's obscured is the weighting, like how they weight the things they recommend PARTICIPANT: Cool. - - PARTICIPANT: Thank you all. For our last piece, some of you already started talking about some of this, but what would it look like for this experience to be more transparent or interpretable and to maintain your agency within it and I think we have a lot of collective knowledge in the room both from folks who work on this from a technical standpoint but folks who experience about this in other ways, as well, and I think it would be great to start thinking about what kinds of resources would be necessary to actually make some of these changes, understanding that it's not always incentivied and if you were working on this systems, what is the same or needed in your own work to be able to do some of these things? Probably also 7 minutes. Yes. And that will be our last part of the design exercise. [group activity>> @@ -137,18 +133,10 @@ PARTICIPANT: We were doing presidential ads and we just said, tell me what you k PARTICIPANT: We were talking about ad targeting and we were talking about how if you could opt in to different ad topics or advertisi topics, so like, for example, Hulu, sometimes they'll give a choice, you can choose between two add experiences or two different kinds of ads. -PARTICIPANT: OK, so we were talking about the roommate matching in college, and I think one of the things that we setted on is this idea that instead of having like a standard questionnaire, that people would be not able to only create their own questions, but rate how important the answer to that question is. So you might not care. You might be a messy person but not care what the other person is like, or you might be clean and not care, or you might care a lot. So giving people the opportunity to weight how important they think attributes are is really important.PARTICIPANT: I think the big thing is some sort of interface to allow you to change what's being recommended to you, whether it's being able to widen your algorithm to include more things or just being like to change the mix of different content pieces. - +PARTICIPANT: OK, so we were talking about the roommate matching in college, and I think one of the things that we setted on is this idea that instead of having like a standard questionnaire, that people would be not able to only create their own questions, but rate how important the answer to that question is. So you might not care. You might be a messy person but not care what the other person is like, or you might be clean and not care, or you might care a lot. So giving people the opportunity to weight how important they think attributes are is really important.PARTICIPANT: I think the big thing is some sort of interface to allow you to change what's being recommended to you, whether it's being able to widen your algorithm to include more things or just being like to change the mix of different content pieces. PARTICIPANT: We talked about a reset button, as well, just being able to like get rid of the stuff that everything you read last year and start anew. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah, thank you. Sorry that we ran out of time and we didn't have tim to hear about all of your brilliant ideas so if you didn't have a chance to say it, just put it in the etherpad. That's it from us. Obviously you should all do an algorithm club, and also, if you're interested in working more on this, and maybe develop a set of guidelines for how to do this, please get in touch with us, and, yeah: +PARTICIPANT: Yeah, thank you. Sorry that we ran out of time and we didn't have tim to hear about all of your brilliant ideas so if you didn't have a chance to say it, just put it in the etherpad. That's it from us. Obviously you should all do an algorithm club, and also, if you're interested in working more on this, and maybe develop a set of guidelines for how to do this, please get in touch with us, and, yeah: PARTICIPANT: Thank you, everybody. - - - - - - - diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-peer-review-data-stories.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-peer-review-data-stories.md index 7417da05..edcb8853 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-peer-review-data-stories.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-peer-review-data-stories.md @@ -5,31 +5,21 @@ Room: Boardroom ARIANA: Okay. If everyone could start to take their seats. If we get get your attention. Hello. Thank you, Justin. Okay, so I'm Ariana Giorgi, and I'm a computational journalist at the Dallas Morning News. And I work on visualizations and, also, analysis Christine? - - CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Zhang and I'm a Knight-Mozilla OpenNews fellow at the New York Times. I do a lot of analysis for data-driven stories. - - ARIANA: So you are in the session how can we peer review our data stories. And I think the way that we came about thinking of this session was, I know, for me, personally, I had been in situations before when—and so, just to give you an idea, I come from a background, I studied motto and physics in my undergrad, and so I had had some math exposure before, maybe not as stats heavy. So when I was doing, I was working on a story one time, and I wasn't sure if the stats that I was approaching were the right approaches. And I wanted to talk to someone about it without, like, picking up the phone, and cold calling a statistician and being like, "Help me. This is why you should help me." And just relying on somebody's kindness and generosity and time out of their schedule to help me. And I've also found luck with other people, other organizations with backgrounds in math and JavaScript, than I do to go to them for their advice but I just really am interested in hearing about how other people go can about doing this, and how we can streamline the process, so that it's not just, every time I have a question, I announce something on the Nycar ListServ, which is what I think it turns into. So how can we make this an easier process. - - CHRISTINE: And I, before this fellowship started this year, I didn't work in journalism at all. I worked more of an academic their think tank type of world, where peer review wasn't a concept that we do before publishing any, sort of, piece or story, or report, and we would openly share everything that we were doing, even before we openly publish everything. Sometimes we even give too much information and people don't want to listen to us. And I found that in journalism it's hard to do that, to share that, because, you know, if I have a question, it's really hard to share with the type of story that I'm working on because it's just inherently not in the nature of a secretive journalist to do that. And so I'm struggling with ideas on how to make that better or how to think through ways to get around that. So with that, let's get started. So how can we peer review our data stories. I guess you're here because you believe that this should happen. So I'm not going to go through the pitch of why we should do this. Traditional journalism: Make sure that information is verified. - - ARIANA: Also, very quickly, these slides are available on the etherpad link. - - CHRISTINE: It's attached to the session description on SRCCON. So if you look at the schedule, and you click on "session," you should see this link but if you have any questions, you should raise your hand. So I just wanted to go some things, a couple of data stories and what peer review kind of means to us. So here's a data story from the New York Times. It's called the voting habits of Americans like you. And I really like this piece. It was visual, it was cool. You can kind of put in your age and your gender, and you can see, like, how, somebody like you voted in the previous elections. But, actually, like, in the footnote to this, it's hard to read, but it says that, like, the figures on this page are imperfect estimates because the data is secret, blah, blah, blah. Truth is unknowable. So they had to find a way to use survey data to adjust the election results. So what they ended up doing, which is on the next slide if I can... get it... okay. Was that they had a model that they ran, which was basically a support model, I guess, using general and overlap—sorry, whatever, generalized linear model and you get this by going to their GitHub website. So, like, the point is, this story involved a lot of statistical analysis that you don't see, like, on the page itself, but it happens, right? And they posted this code up, and so they get a point for transparency. But the question, in my mind, would be, like, oh, did you ask, like, some political scientist before you did this statistical adjustment, or not? And maybe you did but, like, I don't know about that. So that's, like—that's kind of on my mind because it seems like actually a weird thing to do. But it was a news story. This was another example from the New York Times but I will move on to other places. And keep in mind, I'm not trying to say that this is a bad thing, or a good thing. I'm just giving examples of what I've seen in data stories so far. This is a piece by 538 about the kidnapping of girls in Nigeria that was in the news in 2014 because of inform incidents and so they mapped daily kidnappings, and used a data source called GDelt, I can't remember the acronym. But the problem with this piece was that the data source actually only includes media reports of kidnappings, not actual kidnappings. So the increase over time, could be due to an increase in the media reporting things, rather than it being an actual change. And so, a lot of people wrote responses to this like, this has no context. It's not meaningful. Source. Which was the OpenNews site, had a post on what they did wrong. And I thought this sentence was really interesting. For data journalists covering violent conflict, the imperfection of a dataset like GDelt places an additional burden on analytical transparency. So to their credit, they actually posted an editor's note saying that the piece was updated to reflect these criticisms, and probably shouldn't have been there in the first place. -And I don't want to pick on 538; I actually really like them. I was looking a lot for stories that are data stories that have had this type of criticism, and then were updated and revised afterwards. +And I don't want to pick on 538; I actually really like them. I was looking a lot for stories that are data stories that have had this type of criticism, and then were updated and revised afterwards. And this was almost the only one that I found. Like, usually when you see corrections in the stories, you see them because somebody misquoted somebody, or somebody put, like, somebody's name wrong, or just like spelled something incorrectly. You rarely ever see corrections due to data type errors. And I think it's kind of telling that this is one of the only ones that I could find. And then the other one that I did find was a one by the Economist which we can also talk about. It was a ranking of their—it was a ranking economists due to media influence. And they said, "We analyze influence online. We looked at a list of 500 economists, plus some. We chose ourselves." And, like, this was a listing of the most influential economists in 2014. And it got a lot of criticism because people said it didn't include women. And people were just generally confused about the methodology, probably because there was no methodology posted with that listing, like, beyond that small paragraph that I showed you. @@ -37,16 +27,10 @@ And so, then, this was, like, similar to the 538 thing. They posted, like, a fol Then there's also the post-publication portion of peer review, which is something that academia doesn't do enough. So here's, like, where journalism can, like, really get a one-up on that. Like, post-publication, like, making your analysis transparent, and making that reproducible after the fact, like posting it online. Like you could run their code if you want to, right, and take a look at their model. So yeah, those were, like, the two elements. And for our discussion, we wanted to go through, like, some of the fundamental questions that pertain to these two questions. - - ARIANA: So our goal today is for you to walk away from this, not necessarily, okay, before every story, I have to go through these 20 steps before I publish, you know, nothing would be ever be published on time. But what we do want you to have is a better sense of what needs to happen in certain situations. What kind of stuff is required? What kind of stuff is not required? And it's hard because, I think, as we get, you know, as our data sources grow, we get more—we've gotten more and more access to, especially large datasets, more interesting datasets over the years, and as we start to write more stories that are accusational, or, you know, could definitely harm someone if we published them, we need to hold ourselves accountable in a different kind of way, not just throwing out, you know, as you eat more pancakes, your hair gets longer. So things that would actually be useful published. So what we want to do—and also, if you walk away, too, with a better network of hey, I met this person who's really good at math things, or stat things, that would be really useful. So what we're going to be do right now, is break out into groups of three or four. And I would try and mix with people who you usually don't work with, right? Because the people who you usually work with probably have the same ideas as you. So... - - CHRISTINE: So I'll come around with paper and things to write on. - - ARIANA: And we're just going to run through these questions. And you don't have to have—we're just giving you paper, so you see jot down thoughts. But we're going to discuss the answers to these questions after, or not—obviously, the hard answer because there are no hard answers but, just to get other people's thoughts. So we're thinking about things: What should be peer reviewed? Obviously, that might be, like, an easy question but there's some—there's going to be some stories that are just kind of, like, it's unclear—do I really have to ask people about this, can I just do it myself, and be okay? How do we peer review it? What does that actually mean? Who are our peers? @@ -55,444 +39,224 @@ And an interesting problem is, like, what if you're the only one in the newsroom So how much peer review do we give? Like I said, like, it's not worth spending, like, a week on something if it's timely, right? And are there guidelines for it that—this question's a little bit more general but, like, where do you think the lines in the sand are? And then, the fourth question kind of deals with post-publication. So what is the ideal level of transparency after the fact? Right, there's, like, one extreme where I give you the whole run-down of every regression that I made, and, you know, I tried this, and it didn't work. I tried this, and it didn't work, and I posted my code to GitHub and I'll give you all many I data so you can reproduce it. But sometimes that's not—that's easier said than done, right? Like, you don't necessarily want to give all your data, or you don't think your readers would understand if I go through the whole process. So what is the ideal level of transparency? That's obviously going to move per story, right? So I going to give yourself five to ten minutes to talk about this, and then we'll rediscuss and put some of our answers up on the board. So... - - - [ Group Work ] - - +[ Group Work ] All right. Another three minutes or so. - - CHRISTINE: Hi, hello. So thanks for discussing. I hope that you guys have had fruitful talks. So now, we're going to just try to kind of map this out, and write down some bullet points. Clearly, this board is very hard to see from here, even. But, Ariana will type it in the etherpad as we go along, and I'll just write it down so I have something to do, too. So yeah, I guess we can just start from the beginning. Like, I see, like, the first two questions as, like, part of the prepublication grouping. So what, you know, what's the criteria of the types of stories that should be peer reviewed? What—does anybody want to give—summarize their thoughts on this question? - - PARTICIPANT: Okay. So we kind of broadly charted out everything from, like, hey, just normal copy that has the numbers in it, at the one end. So smaller, standalone charts, graphics, that are their own thing. And then large scale, investigative analysis, that are consistently grounded in data. And those would be peer reviewed. - - CHRISTINE: Okay. So numbers, charts, and investigative stuff. Yeah. - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah. - - PARTICIPANT: Sew, sort of, looked at it less about types of stories, and more about types of claims, right? If your entire story hangs on a claim, maybe you should double-check it. If it's something that's more incidental, more just of a detail, you know, check it if you have the time, but if your entire story rests on this, and you're going to have to retract the whole thing if it's wrong, make sure it's not wrong. - - PARTICIPANT: So a use case example that we worked on, that Jeremy came up with was that if there are sources that are telling you that crime rate has gone up in a certain region, this is something that can be verified by data. So how can we verify that rather than using those two sources. - - CHRISTINE: Okay. So when your data is not the only source. - - PARTICIPANT: So comes from sources that can be verifiable by data. - - CHRISTINE: Okay. Does anybody else have thoughts on this? Yup. Rachael? - - PARTICIPANT: We also had a category that involved modeling our prediction. - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, so we talked about how it was coming up with a lot more things where it's not like the claim might be right or wrong. It's, sort of, like there might be lots of ways to perceive it, so what way are you presenting it? - - CHRISTINE: Wait. So sorry. Back to the data not being the only source for the story. And you have, like, humans who would verify the data. So in that data, would the story need to be quote-unquote, peer reviewed? - - PARTICIPANT: Yes. - - CHRISTINE: And then, what are people's thoughts on how we should go about doing this? - - ARIANA: This is the more difficult question. - - CHRISTINE: What is the format that it would take. And how have people done in the past using your own stories as an example? - - PARTICIPANT: A human double checking a spreadsheet. - - ARIANA: And what human is that? Is that someone you work with? - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, another reporter basically, just going through, and when you're collecting your own data, it's just someone else kind of looking through, and basically copy editing you, just to make sure your numbers and all that are adding up, and doing spot checking on various things. - - PARTICIPANT: You could also do something in R, or someone else could do it in Python and do it in pairs, and see if we can get the same result. - - CHRISTINE: Yeah, so somebody using a different method to hopefully get the same result? - - ARIANA: So two people saying, like, okay, let's both try and figure out what neighborhood has the highest crime rate? Like, let's not talk to each other about it; let's just try and approach it different ways because I think that would also, if you're both, like, let's use this regression, right? That would still pose a problem, no matter what language you're doing it in. - - PARTICIPANT: I'm just following up on your point now. I think it was an interesting question about methodology, as well. Because yeah, you could both run the same analysis, and run the same R script and get the same answer but if you run the wrong regression method, that's a problem. So I think there's a problem with methodology, with a certain dataset, what types of analysis do I have to do. That's difficult. And then you need to have somebody who has training in this, or a friendly academic, or something. - - PARTICIPANT: I think I'm actually okay with two people inadvertently writing the same type of analysis, as long as they came to that conclusion independently. Right, if two people have chosen the same method, to me, that at least somewhat backs up that choice of that method. - - PARTICIPANT: Sure. - - PARTICIPANT: And it still guards against like oh, I passed the wrong arguments to this method, right? You know, our equivalent of typos. - - CHRISTINE: How often do you think it happens that two people work in parallel on the same question, in different ways? Because what I'm picturing is like... - - PARTICIPANT: Don't have time for that. - - PARTICIPANT: Never. - - CHRISTINE: I don't even think it happens in academia. Like, I would imagine what somebody says, your challenge is to answer this question about our crime rates correlated with something else. Go! And then, two people would, like, you know, sit independently in two rooms and, like, do this, parallel, and then they would compare. Like I feel that doesn't happen. - - PARTICIPANT: Actually, it does happen in journalism. That's because all different newsrooms are trying to independently reach the same conclusion. So it's a whole bunch of different polling predictive models that the newsrooms have launched and in theory that's what we're describing, people trying to independently reach the same conclusion, and pretty much always arriving at different answers. - - PARTICIPANT: But I can put up a great example because in the state of Wisconsin, a handful of newspapers, everyone with the same sort of, with the election coming up, everyone gets the same campaign finance data and so we'll try to get our information out as quickly as possible but what we'll do is look at the other Wisconsin newspapers the following day and say, how'd you get there? Do they have the same conclusions that we did, and do they have the same people in the top, and stuff. And we'll compare and that's not something that we do ahead of time, because we're competing to get the data out. But afterwards we'll say, how'd you get there? - - CHRISTINE: Okay. So that's interesting. So you have the competition, which makes it independent, and then afterwards, you do, like, a post-mortem, who was the best, and who wants to talk about it type of thing? - - PARTICIPANT: Someone wants to talk about it. - - PARTICIPANT: So one other idea, the way that my team usually handles this is not independent of limitations, but sometimes pair programming and writing it together. Sort of depends on the project, but at least a sanity check where somebody else who didn't do this steps through, and says, oh, yeah, those decisions make sense. - - ARIANA: And so, going off that question, I bet a few of you here, and I know the people that I talked to are the only people in the newsroom who know how to do this, right? And so sometimes it doesn't make sense to obviously ask someone in your newsroom because they're just going to be, like, yeah, that sounds right. And that's not the kind of answer that you want. And sometimes, you might not feel comfortable calling someone up, and being like, hello, I don't know you don't know me. But I was wondering if you were able to help me out on this project that you probably don't have time for. So what have—and if you don't have this, if you have, like, an example of an instance that you don't want transcribed, or you don't want to leave this room, we can respect that. - - PARTICIPANT: Does anyone in here use the stats.org journalism help? Have you used it? - - PARTICIPANT: I just used it for a project that I worked on. - - PARTICIPANT: What is that? - - PARTICIPANT: So stats—so I just saw it recently. It's through stats.org, and there's a journalism web. It's like a web form where you can write, like, a question and use it. - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, I used it because we got some data. So I work in Germany, and the data that I work in is a different language. So for me, that's a limitation. But the project that I recently worked on, one programmer I did it in R, and he did it in Python. And we brought it to the stats.org folks, and they took two weeks to take a look at it, and I think it's pretty valuable. But the only thing is that they obviously have to have the time and you have to have the time, too. So we didn't have a deadline so I think that was beneficial. - - CHRISTINE: So stats.org, the link to stats.org is in the resources section of the etherpad, and if anyone else has other resources that they would like to share, feel free to add that in. - - PARTICIPANT: My only experience with them is I took a stats class with with them, and I think one of them, actually the head of it was in my — - - - - - - CHRISTINE: Rebecca Goldman from GMU? - - PARTICIPANT: No, Michael Levine. But I really liked him, and his ability to explain in human terms what is happening in stats. So that's a personal reference. Take it for what it's... - - ARIANA: So we also talked to Rebecca, who's one of the professors who is on this kind of open panel who, they make themselves available. And she said another way that they can be used, and I think it sounds like the most common way that they're currently using it is for being like, if there's a study and you want to say, and you want to write about it, am I even interpreting it right, right? Like, that's something else that someone else did, and you're not even doing any analysis on it. You're just trying to put it into common terms, but sometimes, even the abstract is so dense with jargon that you can't—like, how do I word this in a way that not only stats people can understand. So maybe even just saying, hey, can you look over this really fast, and make sure that I make sense when I'm talking about it? And to have another set of eyes being like, "Yes, that's what I was trying to say." Or that's what was someone else was trying to say is really helpful. - - CHRISTINE: And Rebecca did say that, primarily, though, stats.org is, right now, focused more on statistical literacy. Like, they go around to newsrooms to train people in the use of statistics, and in basic stats methods. But there is a portion of their work that's dedicated to journalists asking those sorts of consultancy questions, whether it's somebody that's covering a story that has some report with statistical analysis and they need to ask stats.org, is this even, like, valid. Or it's somebody doing their own data piece. But stats.org, she expressed probably just doesn't have enough resources to, like, what if all of you suddenly, tomorrow, used stats.org? Like that's not... like it's great that there's a network out there. It's not enough. So yeah. I guess the solution on how to peer review would be to phone a friend, being stats.org, or your friendly stats professor from the outside, right? Is that, like, what we've come to? Yeah...? - - PARTICIPANT: I think so. I sort of wonder what the role is of non-data, non-stats subject matter experts in our research organizations, right? Like if I'm doing something about climate, should I ask a science reporter, who may be hasn't worked with client data directly but at least has a sense of how these things are supposed to work, and might, in turn know who to ask. - - ARIANA: Right. So that was actually one thing that I had in mind when I was thinking about this, is that I often, there's, like, a really helpful Slack group that I'm a part of, where it's some people who have more math knowledge than me. A lot of people who have more JavaScript knowledge than me. But it's really easy to sometimes turn to them and be like, hey, I trust you. I've seen your work before. And what would you do if you were me? You know, like don't walk me through the process. Don't be like, here's the SQL query you need to run. But what method might you go about using it? Does anyone else have, like, a similar group of people who they turn to? Would it be useful if there was one, like, maybe in the Newsnerd Slack? And keep in mind that these forums exist. But at least I haven't found one that's specific enough for, like, let's talk about things we're unsure about. Right, there's things that are just like here, let's just discuss whatever. And that's, I think, where it's like NYCAR gone wrong. It's like, where someone sends out a question, and, like, 30 million people respond. And also, like, when you don't want—if your story is really time sensitivity, or if your story is actually, the matter of it is time sensitive and I don't want to tell a thousand people what my topic is because, like, I want to make sure no one else covers it, how do I confide in someone? - - PARTICIPANT: So I'm not in the newsroom but we have a weekly meeting at my company called Math Time, which is where we, like, sit down and discuss our stats problems, and, like, modeling problems. Just as like—or if we don't have problems to discuss, we discuss interesting new methods that we're interested in. And it's been a pretty effective way of spot-checking my modeling work with my coworkers. And, like, by just designating an hour a week, it's typically a Friday, an hour at lunch for us, where this is where we're going to nerd out about stats stuff that's been really useful. - - CHRISTINE: So how many of you can turn to people you work with to check your stats data work? And how many of you don't have anyone to turn to inside your organization? Okay. Interesting. So, okay. When do you actually not want to talk to the people who you work with, and you want to talk to outside people? And if that happens, who do you turn to since you guys seem to be the majority already, the people who have insiders to talk to? Yeah? - - PARTICIPANT: So I have an example. So I work on campaign finance. And I would say that I have two asset organizations that I talk to all the time that are very different. They cover in a very different way. So I'm at the New York Times, we cover it in sort of general like one story a month about campaign finance but, like, right away, I'm pretty general. ProPublica writes it in the very broad sense. They might have their everyday thing but they might write one story a year about it. And then story public writes everything about campaign finance. And because of that, we're basically, there are things that I cannot talk to them about, but very few because for the most part, we just have totally different focus and totally different audience. And that has been, like, super helpful. So I guess the general advice there would be like find people who are working on the same thing but at a different granularity. - - ARIANA: And I think you're right. I think it's very rare that you probably have—you might be competing for the same story. And, in that case, it's nice to, like, help each other out. - - PARTICIPANT: But I don't talk to Election Post about it. - - CHRISTINE: Yeah, so no—so this is interesting to me. So even if the Washington Post and the New York Times both are talking about campaign finance, and the LA Times, I mean — - - PARTICIPANT: I mean, everybody, yeah. - - CHRISTINE: Everybody does this. But we never actually talk to each other about it, ever. - - PARTICIPANT: Well, certainly not in realtime. But not on a Friday night. - - PARTICIPANT: The thing that I can't get out of my head is that, peer review works really well after you publish because everyone wants to jump on your analysis and tell you you're wrong. - - PARTICIPANT: Right. - - CHRISTINE: Yes. Yeah. - - PARTICIPANT: And it's great that you can correct it, but at the same time it means that for a day or two, you have wrong analysis published, right? I mean, that's not ideal. So how can you almost prepublish for a few select group of people, and let them jump on it and rip that apart, maybe people that generally disagree with your analyses, how can we do something like that, and get the people who like to jump on you, jump on you before. - - -PARTICIPANT: We've talked about this at NPR on how hard it is to find an advers ary. So this is one of the things that's nice about competitors. Instead of people saying, this is good for for you, congratulations, nice job. No, we don't want that. We want someone who's super mad at us because that's what we're trying to fight TKPW*EPBTS. Because being wrong is easy. That's black and white. But the thing that I'm working on is coming to a conclusion that is unnecessary, or silly, or orthogonal to, like, the thing that I need to be going to. What's the most important thing in the story. What is the core? `and that's the thing that we differ from our competitors because we'll look at the exactly same dataset and then we'll come to a conclusion of what's important about it. But the part that's so hard about it is how do you decide what's the most salient point, what was the most salient thing. And that's where we would have the most trouble. We would have to most adversarial response. We focus on Trump, or some backreferences. Or we focus on some other thing. But that's not right at all. We focused on some entirely other thing. - - +PARTICIPANT: We've talked about this at NPR on how hard it is to find an advers ary. So this is one of the things that's nice about competitors. Instead of people saying, this is good for for you, congratulations, nice job. No, we don't want that. We want someone who's super mad at us because that's what we're trying to fight TKPW\*EPBTS. Because being wrong is easy. That's black and white. But the thing that I'm working on is coming to a conclusion that is unnecessary, or silly, or orthogonal to, like, the thing that I need to be going to. What's the most important thing in the story. What is the core? `and that's the thing that we differ from our competitors because we'll look at the exactly same dataset and then we'll come to a conclusion of what's important about it. But the part that's so hard about it is how do you decide what's the most salient point, what was the most salient thing. And that's where we would have the most trouble. We would have to most adversarial response. We focus on Trump, or some backreferences. Or we focus on some other thing. But that's not right at all. We focused on some entirely other thing. CHRISTINE: But if you prepublish your false and say, this is what we're thinking about. That's almost revealing your secret. - - PARTICIPANT: How's that different from editorial judgment, too? I mean, that's what newspapers do all the time, data or not. And that's part of what makes you better or not than the competitors. - - CHRISTINE: So ProPublica did? - - PARTICIPANT: So ProPublica had this big project last year, the surgeon's scorecard. And so, they did—one of the things they were talking about in our group over here, which was if you would need to write up some methodology, or some, you know, paper to defend yourself against criticism, try to write it up front so that you're not writing it on deadline later. But then, also, once you have that, consider passing it around. And so, like, I know ProPublica wrote this 40 or 50 page white paper on the search and analysis they did for scorecard, and one of the things they had was, before publication, they shared this with some physicians' groups. - - CHRISTINE: So before publishing this story, they published the white paper? - - PARTICIPANT: Right, so saying, here's what we did. Here's the analysis we must and why we made the decisions that we did. Does this make sense to you? - - CHRISTINE: Okay. - - ARIANA: So but to a select group of people. So not just like, hey, everyone, I want to know your opinion. Because that's like opening up the flood gates. - - PARTICIPANT: So I thought that was a really smart way to do that. And I mean, that was, sort of, the extreme version of the Nerdbox. Because a lot of us have written these methodologies and stories but I don't think that any of us usually write them to 50 pages long. But I thought it was a nice level of detail for the kinds of people who would be coming at them. And I guess that's what gets to the editorial judgment point, you know, some stories warrant that treatment, and others don't. - - PARTICIPANT: So I'm curious, in that white paper, did they reveal the results of their analysis, or was it, basically, here's just our process for how we would have come to this conclusion and you're just kind of the — - - PARTICIPANT: I forget. I think there were some examples, right, like, so after we did this, this person at this hospital had this result. You know, I don't think this included the full, you know, list that they were ranking people off of or anything. But... - - ARIANA: That's kind of an interesting — - - PARTICIPANT: Here's some example outcomes. - - ARIANA: That's an interesting point, though, but I think some—it kind of reminds me of a situation, where if you've ever done those tests, where it's like, pick which views you like, and at the very end, it tells you which candidate you match up with. So, this is why it's kind of like, here's what I wound about doing. And then someone else is like, okay, that makes sense. As opposed to being like, I came at this conclusion, and this is how I did it, because people can, right away, oh, I don't like that conclusion, and it's kind of like pre-biasing themselves to the way that they did it. So maybe explaining it first, and saying, I went about doing it this way, and do you go anything wrong with that? - - CHRISTINE: I really like that. I really like the idea of presenting the method and forgot even revealing the conclusion, or how we got it. Because then people comment on the method, not the result. - - PARTICIPANT: Now, I've done this with federal statistical agencies where it's like, hey, I'm working with your data, here's where I queried against it to try and answer this kind of question. Right, I didn't tell them what my answer was. But I told them what I did, and why I was doing it. And sometimes they told me, that's a good idea. And sometimes they told me, no, that's really dumb. Do this other thing instead. - - ARIANA: So I kind of want to just—since we're almost talking about it, I want to push us over the edge and talk about transparency and the ideal level. So this is less of like—we talked a lot about, and I think we hit the third point on how we went about drawing, and how we should do peer review. But I want to us talk about the peer review after the fact, how much transparency do we allow? And obviously, this will change on both stories. As someone made the point earlier. You know, you could have a basic story and a chart story, and, like, a really intensive investigation. And probably in your investigation, you should give more of your methodology than, like, the numbers one where I took the proportion of people... you know, you don't need to go that in-depth. But how do we make sure that people can appropriate criticize us, but also, when they do, do we write notes? I mean, obviously, there's going to be, like—there can be one angry person for every story that you write but you're not going to rewrite your whole story to appease that one angry person. But at one point are you, like, okay, I probably did something wrong. Let me go back and start to walk through this. And then, in that case, do you start to call people, maybe people that you didn't call before and you're like, did I do this right, what could I have done better? So has anyone been in that situation, or did anyone talk about it within the groups? - - PARTICIPANT: I think we talked about it, when maybe not a methodology, at least what's your code, or what you have done. That's the first step. - - CHRISTINE: So a human readable version? Not code. - - PARTICIPANT: Even if it's a sentence. Even if it's a sentence, we analyzed blah, blah, blah dataset, here's where you can get enough of the data that you can recreate this piece. - - CHRISTINE: So that's a good. The minimum. Yeah. So, actually, since we only have five minutes, and I know you have lots to say on transparency, Dan, and I are going to the Stanford Computational Journalism Symposium where we want to ask questions about how often do newsrooms publish their data and code. And if you are so inclined, you can take our survey. The link is here. It's also on the etherpad. But we're... like we're doing a survey about when and how newsrooms publish their data behind their data stories and we're looking at, like, GitHub and things like that. So that was my plug. - - ARIANA: And since again, this is kind of like a sidestep on peer review. So I don't want to go, like, too into the weeds but then how do we—like, do you publish all your stuff on GitHub just all the time, or do you... basically what do you open up to other people so that they can criticize? Well, being courteous to both yourself and to other people. - - PARTICIPANT: My professors just published their datasets upon request. So they'll be, like, oh, if you want to learn about all my methodologies and entire codebase, and methods and anything, I'm happy to walk you through it, even over a phone call, or something like that. But you're not going to let any Joe Schmoe dig around it. - - CHRISTINE: Hm. That's interesting because half the time, I have—at the Times I had a similar conversation with someone because we got an email from, like, somebody and they were like, can you give me your data for this story. And the person who got that email ended up writing the whole methodology and data segment on the LA Times website based on this story and I was like why didn't you do that because you could have done that with the guy with the data. I think it was more than one guy. But he said, well, I don't want to be viewed as `, like, favoring one person, and only giving one person the data. So if I'm going to give this person the data, I should give it to everyone. Which I thought was a very democratic viewpoint. - - PARTICIPANT: I'll push back a little for economic or institutional reasons. Like, so I work for the AP. Like, we absolutely want to play favorites with some of these things, in the sense that, like, there are a lot of national data stories where we'll help other organizations write local versions of them. But only if they're AP customers, right? Like, if they're already people that are paying us for that national story, we will gladly help them and give them access to what we've done, or who did it. - - ARIANA: Right, so I'm going to play devil's advocate. So if I'm an independent reporter and I don't have enough money to purchase the AP dataset, like, if I call you, and I'm like, "Hey, I think what you did is wrong. I want to double-check. Can you walk me through what you did?" - - PARTICIPANT: In a correction context, we would probably do that. I'm not the editor for my team to I'm not making that call. - - ARIANA: I'm just throwing that around. - - PARTICIPANT: Before at least in terms of the prepublication stuff that we were talking about, where we're working with people, and at least, sort of, giving them the opportunity to make their own versions of this, like, that is stuff that we like to keep limited to a particular group of people. - - PARTICIPANT: And I think sometimes there's personally identifiable information you don't necessarily want to give that out to people. Even if it's anonymized, they're anonymized enough that you can identify it with like someone in this zip code has this health infliction or whatever. You can absolutely identify them like that. - - PARTICIPANT: That reminds me of BuzzFeed's tennis story about tennis players that were rigging their data. And BuzzFeed is always really open about their data and their investigations. And so they wanted to show how they calculated, through betting odds, who did what, and then I remember some students in Stanford, I think, where the first, like, based on the betting odds they used could identify the first 15 players they named. And BuzzFeed had made an editorial decision not to name the people they thought rigged it. So there is a lot. Even the favorite—even just publishing betting odds, it gets difficult because you're crossing certain things when you do that. - - PARTICIPANT: Interestingly, as a direct result of those players being identified, as well, someone was able to take one of those players that BuzzFeed wrote flat and shared that none of their stuff was actually suspicious. So by being lax with their data, debugged their own stories. - - CHRISTINE: Well, that's, like, the pitfall of transparency, right? - - ARIANA: But also, it helped, right, and I guess, and you could be like, well, actually maybe we were wrong. I don't know, right. - - CHRISTINE: I almost put that story up, but it's so complicated that I thought it would be hard to talk through. But it's an interesting case. - - PARTICIPANT: It's still a good lesson, though, I think, because it essentially proves that by putting data out there, you will find out things that you could have done differently or better even though in this case it was maybe to their detriment. Like, it's a good thing to know. - - CHRISTINE: Yeah, imagine if, like, everybody did put up their data, how many different things we could discover. I don't know. Not even wrong things. Just different angles or whatever. - - ARIANA: So since we pretty much are running out of time... - - CHRISTINE: Take my survey! Or come talk to me, or Dan, or Ariana what you think about these issues, we'd love to hear your perspectives, especially since there's another conference coming up. And it's certainly an interesting topic that I would like some more systematic knowledge about. - - ARIANA: Yeah, and so in the etherpad, it's pretty much all, like, the bullet points that we've listed. I also think, it seems like taking away from this conversation, it might be useful to have a place where... you know, maybe that's a, you know, Slack channel or something where, if you are working on campaign finance data, but, like, as a certain organization, and you say, you know, it would be really helpful for me to talk to someone else who's in campaign finance. So maybe the question you ask, like, to find someone else is, hey, is anyone else dealing with campaign finance also, as opposed to hey, I'm dealing with campaign finance, and this is my question that I announce to, you know, all the people who are on this Slack also. So that's something that could possibly be set up in the future. And if anyone else has any other ideas about, you know, ways that we can do a better job of implementing this, like, implementing to facilitate the peer-review process and put you in touch with people who can help, I would encourage you to go into the etherpad and write, you know, actually maybe we use the etherpad to say, hey, I have a degree in math, and if anyone has any math questions, definitely give me a shout-out. Or hey, I remember talking to somebody who needed help in environmental studies and I studied environment. Maybe, like, just feel free to make it your own is what I would encourage. And I hope that this session was useful for everyone because it definitely was for me, I know. - - CHRISTINE: Thanks. - - ARIANA: Thank you. - - -[ Applause ] \ No newline at end of file +[ Applause ] diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-people-data-stories.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-people-data-stories.md index 86b76fd1..6ff66a21 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-people-data-stories.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-people-data-stories.md @@ -9,562 +9,296 @@ There's 30 profiles there, so I think everyone here will be able to get their ow So first off, introductions. Hi, I'm William, I works at the CBC. I'm a newsroom developer there but we're a very small team of six people. So we tend to be half editors, half project managers, half designers, half all of those things wrapped into one. So we try to be jack of all trades, so when a project like this comes along, it can be really challenging to, sort of, how to figure out how to tell these stories well and keep people on the forefront of them. So on the etherpad right now, the etherpad is that link, there's a list of 30 piles. So if you're joining us, open those profiles on the electronic device of your choice. And for the duration of this hour, you are the advocate of that person in your profile. You are representing their interests in this room. You are their only voice in this world of journalism. So any time that we say something that might run counter to your person's interests, any time we propose a story idea that would render your person invisible, any time that we present a data viz idea that will not include your person, or that your person is impossible to include in that, throw up your hand, be there advocate, be there voice, be there person because they are not here to represent themselves. So full disclosure: This is—all of these people are missing or murdered women and girls in Canada of aboriginal descent. So as a result of that, there could very well be unfortunate stories shared here today. So if there's triggering elements of these, if you need to take some time, knock yourself out, if you need to say, off the record, because there's uncomfortable moments, say, "Off the record." We can totally handle that. But basically, what we want to do is take all these profiles—these are 30 of more than 250 that we were researching as part of a big project we were working on. And we wanted to talk about ways we could maintain their humanity, their stories, their , while also talking about the systems that failed them. While also talking about why they're so relevant to the storytelling experience. So what I'm going to do over the course of all this is go over couple of a screen capture of our early design experiments, our early brainstorming, starting with a pitch, a spreadsheet idea, and going through all of our different ideas, the demands from our stakeholders, our investigative journalists across the country. And every time we present a new idea, I want to sort of throw it around the room, to see what people think, where are we failing, what could we be doing better, and what better ideas that we could be sharing with each other. So kick things off, I want to go around the room if you had a chance to read these profiles. These are all real people. None of these are made up. All the photos provided for you are provided by their family and friends. And all the interviews are with interviews of family, and friends, and police. So there's an element of reality throughout the room today. But I want you to go around the room, and read a detail that you feel particularly struck you, that this person needs this part of their story told. So we'll start here, and we'll go clockwise around. - - PARTICIPANT: While there's a sentence that says, she's been found, her parents are being told that it might have been suicide but they're thinking that there's evidence in the case but police are ignoring that. So that's a fact that needs to have some light shown on it. - - PARTICIPANT: That's really similar to mine where this person, who was found dead, the police also think it's a suicide. And her sister doesn't believe that and is having trouble getting information from them. So the police aren't willing to interactive with the person, it seems. - - PARTICIPANT: So I think mine, this person—around her death but not much was known when she was found but they didn't find any evidence preemptively. - - PARTICIPANT: The person that I chose detail that was resonant with me was that she was found in the snow, and killed by blunt-force trauma, just thinking about the last moments of her life, and, you know, being in a really cold environment in Alberta. And killed in a way that wasn't necessarily humane. - - PARTICIPANT: The detail mine that I think would be important to service is that she was a child. She was 17. It actually says that she was 15 or 17. So that, I think, adds another even sadder thing that we don't even know. But she was a child. - - PARTICIPANT: My person was found dead and it just—I think the detail that I would bring up is that it just took a really long time for them—like, for her family to get a report into why she was—why she died and what happened exactly. - - PARTICIPANT: My person is named Josephine, and she was also young. She was 17 years old. And the coroner says that she died of exposure, cuts and bruises but the case is being looked into. - - PARTICIPANT: My person was also very young, her name was Jamie. And she was celebrating her 20th birthday and her case was being passed between four different police forces and now it sounds like a private investigation that has been taken over. But a very mundane, harmless person that was celebrating her case has been passed along so many times. - - PARTICIPANT: My person was found beaten and stabbed to death in an alley. - - PARTICIPANT: My person was pregnant with her second child when she died. - - PARTICIPANT: My person left to run errands with her grandmother and I kept thinking about how after she was killed, there might have been no one to keep her grandma company anymore. - - PARTICIPANT: My person's name is Roxanne. And she was the mother of two kids, and she was trying to get her life on track because she was, like, battling addictions. And she was killed with another man she was seeing. - - PARTICIPANT: The person I had was a 20-year-old who was found dead and the cops say it's not a criminal offense. But there were three 911 calls that went unanswered before her death. - - PARTICIPANT: My person is a mother to four and the year before she went missing, her sister was murdered, and her body wasn't found until ten years later. - - PARTICIPANT: The woman from my profile is a 22-year-old. Police says that her death showed no evidence of suspicion but her family and friends say that she was pushed out of the window for failing to pay drug debt. - - PARTICIPANT: My woman, her body was found naked in the ditch near the dump. - - WILLIAM: So these are really, really brutal stories. And one of the core issues that we are asked to explore with this investigation is the element that racism plays in women whose cases—all of these women are of aboriginal descent in Canada, and Canada has a really strong problem, right now, with our history of residential schools—sorry—how many people are Canadian in this room? Okay. -In the early 1900s, the government of Canada set up a residential schools program to pull aboriginal children out of off the territories, to educate them in HRA*EURPBLG largely church run and government run schools basically anglicise them. Most of these were abusive environments. A lot of them died, health care was rarely provided and the last one was shut down in the '90s. So this is the history upon which where this is starting to come out. People who finished their residential schools went back to their families often suffered from addictions, mental illness, and a lot of PTSD. And as a result of that, they're basically abandoned in their communities, and this stuff happens. But because of racism in the police force, as well, it's a running theme, a lot of their families don't believe their friends and loved ones received the investigations that their cases merited. Starting next week, actually, there's a federal inquiry into how police investigate cases of missing aboriginal women. So this is now the big running story that's going to be the focus of Canadian news for the next new months until the federal inquiry gets underway. So this was the project that came to us about a year ago, actually, almost two years ago, with, as so many of our data projects do, a spreadsheet. So literally, this is what we started with in our pitch meeting, was we have a spreadsheet. We've been trying to get data from police forces, from private investigation groups, from the federal police force, from the government, trying to figure out how many cases of missing aboriginal girls there are in the country. Because there's no central database for it. So the investigation unit that were searching for this, said that we might create a wall of faces. - - +In the early 1900s, the government of Canada set up a residential schools program to pull aboriginal children out of off the territories, to educate them in HRA\*EURPBLG largely church run and government run schools basically anglicise them. Most of these were abusive environments. A lot of them died, health care was rarely provided and the last one was shut down in the '90s. So this is the history upon which where this is starting to come out. People who finished their residential schools went back to their families often suffered from addictions, mental illness, and a lot of PTSD. And as a result of that, they're basically abandoned in their communities, and this stuff happens. But because of racism in the police force, as well, it's a running theme, a lot of their families don't believe their friends and loved ones received the investigations that their cases merited. Starting next week, actually, there's a federal inquiry into how police investigate cases of missing aboriginal women. So this is now the big running story that's going to be the focus of Canadian news for the next new months until the federal inquiry gets underway. So this was the project that came to us about a year ago, actually, almost two years ago, with, as so many of our data projects do, a spreadsheet. So literally, this is what we started with in our pitch meeting, was we have a spreadsheet. We've been trying to get data from police forces, from private investigation groups, from the federal police force, from the government, trying to figure out how many cases of missing aboriginal girls there are in the country. Because there's no central database for it. So the investigation unit that were searching for this, said that we might create a wall of faces. PARTICIPANT: Wendy has no picture. - - WILLIAM: Can't do a wall of faces. Two people don't have faces. Three people don't have faces. Okay. Hole number one. So what if we did silhouettes? Generic, background silhouettes where we don't have a face, and then we can do a map. Everyone likes maps. - - PARTICIPANT: I don't know where my person is from. - - WILLIAM: How many people don't know where the person's from? It's not in there? Couple people? Three people? So you're looking at a subset. So you're looking at 255 profiles, and you're looking at 10%, there's no information for location. A lot of them were taken at a young age, and a lot of them were dropped off in the city where they lived transient lifestyles. We don't really know. Sometimes they weren't even reported missing until months later. Someone would say, oh, yeah, have you seen Colleen? Actually now that you mention it, I haven't seen her for a really long time. I wonder if she left town. Few years later, they find her body. So we don't have location information for a lot of these people. Before as you're in data land and in development land, your stakeholders always want maps. Everyone appears wants a—could we put this on a Google map? What if we just put all the data on the map and let people sort through it themselves. So this is what a sample profile page would look like if we could interview their family and friends, if we could interview the people that knew them, the police, we could make a profile for each of them. Profiles might look like this, create a database, show people the impact of it. Create longer profiles. Start to tell their stories. Have a little data section over here, age 15, home status, the year they were found, or the year they were killed. - - PARTICIPANT: Are we going to have specific information about where the cases ended, where they were found. So my person, it's an ongoing investigation and there's a code case against the police department filed by the family. And that's important detail. - - WILLIAM: Absolutely an important detail because the family says one thing and the police says another thing. - - PARTICIPANT: And it's an ongoing investigation. - - WILLIAM: Exactly. - - -PARTICIPANT: So that needs to be a major part of it. - - +PARTICIPANT: So that needs to be a major part of it. WILLIAM: So now we have a subset of people who were murdered before their cases aren't resolved yet. - - PARTICIPANT: In the previous screen where you have the grid of images, how so that being sorted initially? - - WILLIAM: This one is being sorted by the order in which they were entered into the database. So essentially not. - - PARTICIPANT: I worry that my person is going to be so far downstream that nobody's gonna click on her image. - - WILLIAM: And why do you worry about that? - - PARTICIPANT: Because I think it's really difficult—this is a really difficult topic matter and I imagine that users would have a certain sense of fatigue from exploring even just a couple of these. - - WILLIAM: Ah, okay. So we have five cases right here. And so if I click on one, click on the other, and click on a third, and I'm reading long profiles for each of them, how many of them am I actually likely to get through as a reader? And by the time I hit three of them I've read about 1200 words about missing and murdered people. Am I going to go through 250 of them? - - PARTICIPANT: Short summaries? - - WILLIAM: Short summaries. That could help. - - PARTICIPANT: Just like a couple lines. - - WILLIAM: So our stakeholders really, really, really wanted the map. And so they said, "What if we had it like lines drawn across the map to show where they're born, and where they went missing and where their body was found?" What if we could show their progress across the country and have a little animated pin at their last known location? How many people would that break for? At least three or four in this room? We found that we didn't have location information for 30% of cases. So this was version one that got published. This was published February 2015. So just about a year and a half ago. And it's quite literally, there's some filtering. So you can see filter by missing and murdered. Over 18, under 18, filter by province. Over a decade, under a decade. Search by cases and name. And hovering over the page gives you information whether they're missing, whether they're murdered, their name, their age, and their province. Clicking on one of them delivers you to that page in a new tab. What's the biggest problem with this right now? - - PARTICIPANT: Well, Wendy's still missing because she has no picture—one is still missing because she has no picture. - - WILLIAM: So we have people with no photo at all. In this version that was published, they get a silhouette, a generic, .png silhouette, and you don't get a name until you hover on it. So the silhouettes really are fully anonymous. - - PARTICIPANT: What's the reverse scenario where they maybe found someone who they didn't have any information for. So, like, they have a person with no identifying information? - - WILLIAM: There are some cases that we had to add retroactively like that. One case was, actually, I think she might be in one of your profiles. She was found dead of exposure in a ditch. And the family came forward and said, we think that might be our mother. We're not sure. And police said, well, your mother was never reported missing. And the family came forward and said, well, you wouldn't accept the missing person's case. Well, that's because someone saw her. Well, the family said, could we do some dental records and DNA tests just to be sure. And then that came back, and yeah, their mother was dead in a ditch and the police refused to accept that report. So in some cases, it's only family advocacy that leads to that link they made. So then retroactively we add them to this database as that information becomes available. But yeah, that's absolutely a thing that happens. Traffic-wise, this version failed miserablely. Nobody paying attention to this. ` I think in the first week, it did 15,000 page views. Didn't generate much discussion. Most of these page views were of the friends and family of the woman viewed in the profile. So this was when way sort of had the option to abandon it, or redesign, figure out what broke, and dive forward with it. And thankfully, we chose option two. So family members said, this feels like a police website. This feels like we just visited the RCMP website and visited their missing persons tab. It feels corporate. It feels ugly. It doesn't feel like we're actually talking about people; it feels like we're talking about cases. So that's where we led our design route. And so, they wanted the map again. What if we had a map? So the first thing we did is we brought their names out. So the hover effect. We have people who don't have photos available. These are really poor communities. Especially going—there are some cases going back to the '50s and '60s, cameras not exactly the easiest thing to come by, let alone family photoal alumnus. So a lot of family photos, especially for these just aren't there. So we bring the names, ages, details out of the hover effect and bring them into the main face wall. - - PARTICIPANT: For the map part, is there geographic data that's really meaningful, or revealing a pattern? Like, do a lot of them happen in the same place, or something like that? - - WILLIAM: Yes, and they tend to be focused around the locations of those old residential schools. But because we don't have data for 30% of the cases, it's not representative enough. And the data that they were able to provide through their research was only city-level data. So we would just have a hundred pins on City Hall. And, especially with an interactive map, you zoom in, okay, so they disappeared from City Hall, or maybe we have a home address. Oh, are we going to give away people's home addresses now when they're vulnerable populations, possible sex workers? Seems like a terrible idea. - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, it has all those problems, and right now, it's at a very common part of the page, like, right now, that's the first thing you see. - - WILLIAM: Exactly. And how many people in this room know which part of the country we're looking at right now? Pffft. - - PARTICIPANT: Did you ever get at why people were so compelled by maps? Was it just like something they had seen before, or was there something that was, like, a more emotional, like, attachment to that location information? - - WILLIAM: It was basically what they had seen before. The editors in charge of the project were not—I am going to use the term web native. They're old print journalists for the most part. And they had seen interactive maps that would worked very well by other organizations. So they had in their heads that a many people was a good way of showing individuals across the country. And so we ended up doing some mobsing like this of what might include a map, mostly to show them why it doesn't work. As we can see, we did that a couple of times. - - PARTICIPANT: Regarding details, are you showing just the official report, or what the families are saying? - - WILLIAM: Both. Where the police would speak to us, where including their details in official reports. And there's sometimes links to PDFs of official reports. But families would speak to us, and especially where that information would contradict the police information, both are included. - - PARTICIPANT: What type of detail is included in this page? - - WILLIAM: This page is literally, first name, last name, age, province, and whether they're missing or murdered. Then it got into their head we could show a graphic with lines showing the moving across the country from place-to-place. Okay. We can't show city-level information because that was just be silly on a map. We can't show home addresses because that would be silly. What if we showed them moving between provinces and general regions on a map. But it's not a map; it's a graphic showing the arcs of their travel. - - PARTICIPANT: That sounds backwards. There's no faces. You've turned them into metadata, basically. - - WILLIAM: Exactly. So we — - - PARTICIPANT: Also, you've lost your narrative about what's happened, what was moving around. There's no—it's not clear that there's been an unjustice that has been done. - - WILLIAM: How many people are represented by that line? Everyone who moved between Winnipeg and Smiths Falls. Just this one person? What about everybody else? ` So we thought county level. People who are in Winnipeg, people who are in Sioux Falls. It goes back to your earlier point, as well. And looking at what it might look like as a smartphone app. What if we took those filter ideas from the first, show them as murders unsolved, filter by year, age, and you could actually bring out details of individuals as a smartphone app, browser browsing through it as a web app? What do you think about that idea? - - PARTICIPANT: Too many images for a phone. - - WILLIAM: Way too many. At this point in the game, we're dealing about 240 cases—240 people. So here we have full name, age, their status, their home reserve, their communities. So it's the Sekani Creek First Nation. So the time they were last seen, their home province. Any of your profiles invisible to this idea? - - PARTICIPANT: That has to be a lot of text that you would have to be reading, you know, the full story, and what the police say, and just to read that on your phone and want to keep going, it's hard enough on a desktop to do that. - - WILLIAM: Yeah, was there another contradiction back there? Yeah, so we come back to the same thing of, okay, if we want to focus on people, how do we make the leap from providing access to all the reporting around all these people to individual stories and humanity and emotional hits, to then extrapolate back to the data. And of course, be able to facilitate back and forth between all of this. And so we thought about a rotator. What if we could rotate through as a slide deck, as an embed inside of the big investigative stories that we're telling, we could rotate through pieces of data. One in 7692 aboriginal Canadian women are missing. That's four times the average for non-aboriginal women in Canada. Source: Statistics Canada 2006. - - PARTICIPANT: It's a very weird number. Like... - - PARTICIPANT: But the perspective is also, sort of, minimized in part, I mean, the important part is, this is so much more prevalent among aboriginal women than not. - - - - - - WILLIAM: Yeah, so for this you want to take that four and a half and make that the big part. Swap those numbers around. And if we did that, and then put it in a story that's your typical investigative feature: Lead, paragraph, paragraph, paragraph, slide deck of interesting stats, paragraph, paragraph, paragraph... face wall of people? How's that work for presentation layer, to allow people, sort of, grasp the scale of what we're talking about? How many of you believe that your profiles in front of you would be adequately featured? That the families of the people in front of you would feel like their story had been told. - - PARTICIPANT: I mean, reducing it to statistics, again, eliminates the humanity from it, especially if you're putting the humanity down—so far down the page. - - WILLIAM: Yeah. So we figured, what if we combined those, and we created an interactive that allowed you to filter the face wall while seeing the data summaries at the top of it. So you could select missing or murdered, age range, province, decade or year, search by new location by name, and then see missing on the top, murdered on the bottom, year by year on the columns, see, where individual cases placed in time and case type. So you could see prevalence, you could see a little bit more about perspective for this type of case. You could see—and where an individual placed on this page. - - PARTICIPANT: Tons of blocks and photos. - - WILLIAM: So too difficult to, sort of, take in all at once to, sort of, understanding what you're looking at? - - PARTICIPANT: The bottom line also, sort of, looks like a police website. Like, that's the same way a mugshot lineup is displayed. It doesn't look like a memorial because you're going to have to scroll to the right endlessly. - - PARTICIPANT: When you have a problem each of those individually, you just combine those into a bigger piece where you have both of those realizations together. So one looks like a police site, and the other looks like a graph that's just like dehumanizing. - - WILLIAM: So you're sort of like the worst of both worlds, right? - - PARTICIPANT: I mean, this is a problem, whenever you're using filters, you're mals values for each person. Almost every one of these here. - - WILLIAM: Yes, exactly. And that's one of the biggest problems that we had to overcome with this. `okay, under 18, and over 18. The age here was ambiguous. I mean, the range provided for the case was all under the age of 18. But there are some people that were just poorly documented that we just don't know sometimes. So how do we categorize them? Take a best shot? It's ultimately what we had to do, is get friends and family to say, well, how old do you think she was? And they would say, I don't know, 19, 20, I think, probably? I mean, she got carded sometimes. Filter by province. Home province? Province where she was found? Which province? Which one matters? What are people expecting when they use that filter? So then we came up with the idea that representative cases who were emblematic of larger systemic issues: Young people, police ignoring the initial reports, ignoring 911 calls, people who were found decades after they had died, that they could be put up in the top rotator, with emotional quotes from friends and family that outlined their frustrations and their issues. - - PARTICIPANT: Like, I kind of—I mean, I don't want to call it a boring case but she was found strangled, and they found right away. She's not going to be emblematic, she's not going to be representative at all. And her family is talking to the police. And probably not you, given that. - - WILLIAM: Actually that family was really open to us. There was a lot of distrust with the police. One of the women on this project was a woman that I amed Connie Walk and she grew up in Saskatchewan. And chefs say that when police came to the community, they would hide in the she said, they would hide, because they couldn't trust the police, that's who brought pain and suffering in the world. And when their families go missing and they say tell us what happened, nope, but journalists who were born and from the communities where they were raised, tell us what happened, we tend to get a little more results that way. So in her case, her family talked a lot to us, actually. This is version two that went live. ` So this is Leah Anderson, she was murdered in 2015. And featured is a long interview with her aunt about what this 13-year-old wanted to do with her life, what she feels the police failed to do in her case. And then below that, you can sort of see that we have a headline. And this is the starting of about four paragraphs outlining the nature of the project, who we spoke to, how we gathered the data, and who's featured. So there's about 15 different cases that are featured in this top rotator right now, each of which, clicks through to a lead profile. - - PARTICIPANT: Where are the rest of the profiles on that first page? How do you access them? - - WILLIAM: Further down. As you scroll down, this is what you get. Sorry, that's a design mock. So as you—below that, you get the wall of faces. We actually also published that square graphic that allowed you to filter and, sort of, see the graphing. That was part of version two. And then, clicking on each one of these, pushes down these profiles and inserts mini profiles which, I think someone on the side mentioned as an idea of scrolling through, and they can be tapped with the keyboard, or clicked through to see more of them as you scroll through. The big goal with this was exploration, discoverability. The big problem with the first one was that you couldn't dive into any more details. You couldn't see anything more about them. And we spoke to a few of the families, we spoke to the reporters and their frustrations with it and the big thing that they wanted us to take away from that was that you could learn something about these women, about these trends just by browsing through it. So browsing capability was the number one thing, so you could move from Charise, To Don, to Delane. So actually what you're looking in front of you is essentially just a quick rework of these. - - PARTICIPANT: Hey, did you how many people were actually sharing these on social because there are pretty prominent buttons. - - WILLIAM: We did. It was a pretty small number. Most of the shares came when we were promoting the cases of individuals when they came into the news when we were sharing them a lot when they were featured on a nightly broadcast of this person's still missing, do you know anything? Or police may lead. But we also coordinated with the social media team so that every two hours, one of these is posted across social, and so that would promote some interest in that particular case. But overall, sharing on this initial Facebook one was relatively low. - - PARTICIPANT: So you featured a certain number at the top, right? - - WILLIAM: 15, yeah. - - PARTICIPANT: So what went into deciding which of those 15 those would be? - - WILLIAM: Those were found out by the investigative lead on the project. She decided basically, the cases that had the most information about it, so when you clicked through them, you got least 800 words about their case, about what went wrong, what failed them, so that you can dive in really deep with a lot of information. And also, public interest. If there had been a lot of interest in their case when it first happened. Leah's case developed as a national story when it happened because she just disappeared. She was young. She was adorable. She was very photogenic, and she was studying to be a pilot. And then she was found dead. So it generates a lot of interest when you take off those public interest boxes. So when you do it in a long form way in the boxes, that was another reason to put them in the top row. Problems with that? I mean, clearly but... - - PARTICIPANT: I think it's still a good solution, though, because people are not going to be absorb 30 faces, or a hundred faces like before. But to see one face, you have a little more time with just one person. - - WILLIAM: Yeah. - - PARTICIPANT: Were the features being cycled through, or same 15 for a duration? - - WILLIAM: It was the same 15 for a six month period but they were randomized on load. So if you were visiting the page, you were unlikely to see the same person at the top of the page twice. - - PARTICIPANT: Was there specific attention paid to people that—where there was some kind of a police misconduct or where the investigation just fell through, and then they found out that the cops didn't respond to 911 calls in that case? - - WILLIAM: That was exactly what the folks on phase three was about. Which, thank you for that lovely segue. So yeah, after we published this, we have a lot of interest. And, actually, three national media outlets in Canada were all focusing on the same project, at the same time, this really, sort of, started a really big national conversation. And about a year after we first published version one, we published version two, labor day of 2015. So almost a year ago. And by Christmas 2015, the federal government had announced that they were going to launch an inquiry into missing aboriginal women with a focus on police—the quality of police investigations around these cases. And a focus on systemic issues that have failed them that allowed these cases to go unresolved for so long. So with that, phase three of our investigation was to focus specifically on police, where the police had said, "This case is unresolved." Sorry, the police said, "There's no foul play suspected here." And the family said... yeah, there is. You ignored this, this, this, and this. And the police would say, "Nope. The case is closed? How many does that apply to around this room?" How many of you, based on whether the profile in front of you have serious questions about the police, and how many of you are sitting there going, ehh, maybe this is just like family trauma and you just don't want to believe it. - - PARTICIPANT: Serious question with the police. - - WILLIAM: Anyone in camp two? - - PARTICIPANT: Maybe I just don't have all the information but it's harder to tell that. - - WILLIAM: Yeah, and sometimes it is. So does where we had to go, we're not going to trust every police officer who comes in with a report but, at the same time, we are going to recognize that there are some systemic inequities that are promoting poor work. So this is one of the mobsing we built for the phase three launch, which is really `building on the initial launch that would maintain a consistent brand idea. This is now a project that has been live for a year and a half. But what we wanted to do was bring these leader profiles into a more interactive space, so that you didn't have to onto another profile page to read them. They're leaders for a reason. And you can click on this drawer to pull down. You can also click to see how many are up there. And these are all cases that have been labeled unresolved. Police have said they're resolved. The families don't believe that. And so we're investigating further on their behalf. We refined the stylings and refined the face wall to make it more easily navigable. Work on more or devices. Actually, now, I could just bring it up since that's the live version. So my question for you right now is: Still today, who is invisible? Whose stories are not being told yet? - - PARTICIPANT: I mean, the lack of photos is really insurmountable in a lot of ways. I'm just not going to identify with the ones that I can't see. And then now I could back to 1950, or whatever. - - WILLIAM: Cheryl was 15. She disappeared in 1987. But there aren't photos, there aren't photos. Now, I mean, is there a better way to produce these? I mean, our designer made a generic silhouette that looks like it could be anybody. It doesn't look fake like a bathroom image. But it's also very generic. Is there a better way to handle that? I mean, we could assign a sketch artist to visit a family. - - PARTICIPANT: Or maybe if they have some detail—some small—I guess long hair, or short hair. Yeah... - - PARTICIPANT: I also think that, like, indicating somehow showing the age in the silhouette. So this person the age was 15, is that correct? So she is a lot younger, or she's in the younger half of the group. I think somehow showing that in the silhouette might be—might work better. - - WILLIAM: Yup. We could definitely modify that. What other pieces of data are missing from your people that you feel is really a crucial bit of information that could omit them from storytelling? - - PARTICIPANT: Do you mean missing from there, or missing from the profiles, the information that we don't have? - - WILLIAM: Missing from the people in front of you. - - PARTICIPANT: Well, we don't know anything about who they really are, or what they were doing. - - WILLIAM: They were pursuing their dreams? Could we include that in some way? I mean, you're right. Dawn here is 17. She was murdered in 1987. Someone was accused, there was a trial, the person was acquitted. That's literally all we know about Dawn. She's a 17-year-old, police accused somebody, it didn't work out, eh, I guess that's done now. Is there a way that we could approach—and this is—we don't have any answers here. Is there any way that we could approach the lack of data as a datapoint. We go to work, telestart throwing up data. This is the messiest data that you could imagine. Where we assign 15 people to go out, and start families. And we built a backend CMS just to handle it all. Nothing is consistent about this. No two people are alike. No two cases are alike. Sometimes we have the most basic information like a first name and a last name. In this case here, we don't have a first name, or a last name. It was just a baby—7 months old. So we can't search her by name. She's listed in the databases as, "Baby girl." So this is the discussion that I want to have. And in the last ten minutes we are here is, when we're faced with a lack of data with people, how do we represent their interests when we're faced with other people competing for the same stories that have so much data? Yeah? - - PARTICIPANT: I mean, I think you could, like, really randomize the presentation of the ordering of somebody's profile, and so when you have somebody who doesn't have any data, they're featured. And there is, in place of a narrative of their life, maybe, sort of, an explanation about all the factors that make it so hard for them for, you know, to know about it. And so, that those gaps are the systemic things that prevent us knowing them are as prominent as somebody who has a very identifiable story. - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, kind of going off of that, like, what we did in here today, even people who got profiles that didn't have a picture, maybe felt more connected with whatever profile you're paired with. So something like that is, every time you visit the page, you have one person. And it might be that they don't have a picture but you still like... - - WILLIAM: So present, like, assigning the reader to a profile. - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, and randomly. - - WILLIAM: Yeah. Yeah, so finding a way of introducing them to a random person on the page and saying this is a person that you have to care about right now instead of allowing them to browse through, forcing that situation upon the reader. - - PARTICIPANT: Maybe. - - WILLIAM: That's an interesting idea. I like it. - - PARTICIPANT: I mean, I'm going to remember this person that's in front of me. She's been in front of me—I'm going to look at your product, but this is what I'm still going to come away with, that's just the reality of it. - - WILLIAM: Yeah. - - PARTICIPANT: I also think that it's really important when you have an explanation to explain why they don't have it. We just did that was not exactly like this, but it was, like, 150 mug shots of people. And we had a few narratives on them. And there was a few that we did have it on. And we asked the government for this information. And they refused to give it to us. - - WILLIAM: And the Washington Post presentation today yesterday did about how many FOIAs they filed. And how many were denied. - - PARTICIPANT: I like the idea of making the unidentified person as a part of 15, so you would go through, and it doesn't have information, and then you have the opportunity to tell the reader that clearly, there's a lack of data for this connect, or say, like, you know, how many people out of the group doesn't have a lot of information to kind of share and tell that story. - - WILLIAM: Yeah, that's a great idea. Too. - - PARTICIPANT: I wonder if the answer is not so much about the data, or the reporting or the lack of data is a racial issue, and a discrimination issue. - - WILLIAM: That was actually a side story along the way, especially when the residential schools were closed down, a bunch of their records were destroyed, which is one of the subjects of this inquiry is, destroying government records, that's not a good thing. But yeah, absolutely. Being transparent about tactics, as well as, transparent about what's available from where is a really good idea. So I would say—did I see a hand on this side? Maybe making that up out of my head. Cool. One of the things that we've also had a lot of luck with is this sidebar that exists on every homepage. There's now three spots on the homepage is a call to action—if you know anything else. This feature was passed around a lot of First Nations communities, and a lot of families and friends of people. And that email address became a very active source of tips and extra information for these communities. So while page views didn't necessarily reflect, like, this wasn't the most successful feature that we had ever run if traffic is our only measure of success. But in terms of providing closure and providing a resource, and providing an outlet to friends and family of the people who are profiled here, it was an enormous success. And there's a—we're working on a spinoff feature for this fall based on an email that came into that email address that—all it just said was, "I know who killed her." And it was one of the unresolved cases. And then the person sending the email turned out to be a retired police officer who worked on the case. And he just couldn't find the evidence to put this person away, but he's 90% sure he knows who did it. So that's what we're working on—that story right now, it's probably going to release this fall. But having those call to actions on the sidebar turned out to be an enormously powerful thing into furthering the reporting. Does anyone here use SecureDrop at all? Is everyone familiar with it? Cool, just for everybody else, it's also a thing that we just set up in the past year. But, essentially, it's anonymous-to-anonymous secured document leaks. So if you're a government employee, or a corporate employee, and you want to leak documents but you don't want to make yourself known as the source of the leak, it's an encrypted two-way communication system that allows you to leak a vast number of documents. And even the reporter receiving the documents doesn't know who you are. It sets up pseudonyms between them, and pseudonym email addresses between the two people communicating with each other. So as a reporter, you would only know, you got you just got a link from platypus 67. And based on the quality of the documents that you received, you have you decide whether to trust them. populate + 67 only knows that they're dealing with dolphin68. And they have to deal with you, and trust you based on your organizational affiliation. So the facilitates that two-way communication so that you can leak information anonymously, and securely. - - PARTICIPANT: Did you get a lot of people that wanted to contact you through that versus the email address? - - WILLIAM: It wasn't expressly requested for this project. But it was `one of the ways that we received some of the Panama Papers. So it's been used in the past to great success. Sadly, I didn't get to work on that project. - - PARTICIPANT: Can I come back to the social button because they kind of like... - - WILLIAM: That's a continuous war, so I'm fully open to all feedback. - - PARTICIPANT: They're kind of just like—they're very, especially given a story of this magnitude, and kind of this, you know, where the—where, you know, the content is so serious, like, putting Facebook, Twitter buttons kind of, can become make it devalue the, you know, enormity of, like, you know, the seriousness of each of these cases, and I don't know, they just look very happy, these buttons, right? And if they're not that popular, like not a lot of people are, like, using them, they shouldn't be there. But, of course, I'm sure that you can find this... - - WILLIAM: Yeah, this was the war between our team as the developers on this particular project, and the product team, managing the look and feel, and branding of the website as a whole. We are constantly in a push-and-pull war of what branding limits we're allowed to push against, and what branding limits we're completely, 100% bound to. The social media buttons were a rather fierce war that we lost wholeheartedly. Right now we're incorporating VF4 and social into all our long form social pages like that. That's something we're bound by and it's unfortunate. I agree with you. It breaks the tone of the page. And since they're not being used, we could use that space for better information like a call to action. - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, absolutely. - - PARTICIPANT: So were you able to release these different versions because there was new reporting coming out, and so it was an opportunity to do a new version? - - WILLIAM: Yes. Essentially, we released version one, and there was recognition within the company that it was not as well done as it could have been. The lead developer who was working on it also quit his job halfway through the development of this, and so that's how I became the lead developer on it. And so that also, sort of, changed our approach rather significantly as we sort of had to pivot partway through. He took a lot of expertise when he left. But then yeah, once we released version two, that was mostly our team lead on the news interactives desk that really fought for version two to show what we could be capable of if given free rein over a project like this. And then after version two was released, we started winning a lot of awards for it. And other news organizations were winning a lot of awards for their projects and then the National Inquiry was announced, partially inspired by our coverage and other news organizations' coverage, Global Mail, and the Star did enormous coverage on this file. And once the federal inquiry was announced, we were encouraged to continue because we were getting results, basically. So, it's never been a traffic success with us. But it's been a results and journalism success for us. And so that was worth pursuing. We have two minutes left if anyone has any closing ideas or questions or queries. Yeah? - - PARTICIPANT: Did you ever feel like you had to—I guess I'm curious, I think a lot of times, in journalism there's, like, a sense of being separate. You know, separate from the interests of your sources, and apart from them. But it sounds like—I mean, for this project to be successful, you really have to be empathic to people who are advocating for these stories. But even advocate whether it's within our own design process, or whether with a—with editors. How do you, like, balance those concerns? - - WILLIAM: Um, exactly as you said. Actually, I was reminded a couple of times during working on this project about the dark Knight where Commissioner Gordon gives up that kid, Joseph Joseph Gordon Levitt, saying you're a kid now, you're not allowed to believe in those perspectives. We took the belief that this isn't about objectivity anymore. This isn't about trying to find the middle of the road. We're advocates on their behalf. They were systematically ignored by the systems that were put into place to ignore them and subjugate them. They were placed in these schools to erase their identities. That was the stated purpose. And so we decided that that bears no middle of the roading. We're just going to be advocates on their behalf. We're going to tell their stories and that's the stated goal of the project. We largely gave up on the idea of being objective around it. - - PARTICIPANT: So one thing that you said early on is that one of your reporters was a First Nations person who led and was really helpful in doing that. Do you think that the story has changed the way—you guys aren't—the way that the organization hires? - - WILLIAM: There's been more focus on diverse hiring practices. Her experiences with this project in particular have definitely been a really enormous success story to saying, like, oh, no, when your entire newsroom isn't filled with white men, you actually get really, really good results for a number of reasons. So anyone who's looking for a reason to believe that now has a really solid case. But it's been a stated objective for a number of years. But I think, I think this, sort of, added a little adrenaline to it, for sure. - - PARTICIPANT: What's the next steps for this project now that's going to be inquiry and just like reports that are going to be released, I think? - - WILLIAM: Yeah, the inquiry is launching next week, and they're stated to deliver their first report in October. So, right now, we're pursuing more detail on these cases that are—whether there's a discrepancy in the quality of the police investigation, we're trying to get more details on that. And we're pursuing those individual cases right now. It's a research project right now and we're keeping the database updated. It's not clear if we're going to get the resources to do another design refresh on this. But when they release the report, depending on what that looks like, we may find the resources to do that. Cool. Well, thanks, everybody. If anyone's having any other ideas, feel free to approach me later on. But thanks for coming. - - -[ Applause ] \ No newline at end of file +[ Applause ] diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-photojournalism-future-news.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-photojournalism-future-news.md index 1dbbc511..4eadc4c9 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-photojournalism-future-news.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-photojournalism-future-news.md @@ -1,94 +1,94 @@ Where does photojournalism fit in the future of news? Session facilitator(s): Neil Bedi Day & Time: Friday, 12-1pm -Room: Classroom 305 +Room: Classroom 305 -NEIL: It looks like we're going to have a tiny group, so everyone can -- -Hi, everyone, I'm Neil. I'm a technologist, but I first got into photojournalism through journalism. I was first a photojournalist. And because of that I have a lot of close friends that are photojournalists. So on a regular basis, I know how tough it is to be a photojournalist right now. Not a lot of people are hiring, most people are firing. It's not a good place. +NEIL: It looks like we're going to have a tiny group, so everyone can -- +Hi, everyone, I'm Neil. I'm a technologist, but I first got into photojournalism through journalism. I was first a photojournalist. And because of that I have a lot of close friends that are photojournalists. So on a regular basis, I know how tough it is to be a photojournalist right now. Not a lot of people are hiring, most people are firing. It's not a good place. -So the first time I pitched this was how can we help save photojournalism? But that was a shitty title. +So the first time I pitched this was how can we help save photojournalism? But that was a shitty title. [Laughter] -But what it came down to was as a technologist, even though it's hard to get a job, newspapers are hiring more technologists because they see it as a investment in their future; right? Because technology is the future. So if you're a newspaper, and you want to be around five, ten years from now, you have technologists now. -Whereas at least from what I can tell, most newspapers don't see that with photojournalists. And that's the big gap I've noticed. Why hire photojournalist when you can get an image subscription? Or why hire photojournalists when we can have a reporter with an iPhone for local stuff? So I really wanted to just talk about where can photojournalism fit into the future of news? And does it even belong in the future of news? +But what it came down to was as a technologist, even though it's hard to get a job, newspapers are hiring more technologists because they see it as a investment in their future; right? Because technology is the future. So if you're a newspaper, and you want to be around five, ten years from now, you have technologists now. +Whereas at least from what I can tell, most newspapers don't see that with photojournalists. And that's the big gap I've noticed. Why hire photojournalist when you can get an image subscription? Or why hire photojournalists when we can have a reporter with an iPhone for local stuff? So I really wanted to just talk about where can photojournalism fit into the future of news? And does it even belong in the future of news? -So you're allowed to be here and say, no, like, it's the end. Maybe we'll have a few, but it will never be as big as it once was. +So you're allowed to be here and say, no, like, it's the end. Maybe we'll have a few, but it will never be as big as it once was. -So I hate talking, and I'm happy it's a small group because it's a lot easier to manage. But my entire introduction is just discussion points. +So I hate talking, and I'm happy it's a small group because it's a lot easier to manage. But my entire introduction is just discussion points. -So I have a few to start. Anyone want to list some of their favorite pieces they remember recently? +So I have a few to start. Anyone want to list some of their favorite pieces they remember recently? I'll tell you my recent favorite piece of photojournalism, and you're allowed to be flexible about what photojournalism is or isn't. -But my favorite one recently is Tampa Bay times did their huge mental health investigation, and their lead was a narrated lead. And it was about a woman who was working at one of these facilities who ended up getting stabbed multiple times in the face by a patient, and it was because the facilities weren't set up correctly, and it was a bunch of errors. +But my favorite one recently is Tampa Bay times did their huge mental health investigation, and their lead was a narrated lead. And it was about a woman who was working at one of these facilities who ended up getting stabbed multiple times in the face by a patient, and it was because the facilities weren't set up correctly, and it was a bunch of errors. -But you go through this lead and they have the photo of the woman what she looked like after the stabbing. And it had eyebrow, and it listed the stabbings. And that worked really well for me. So a flexible term. And flexible meaning newspaper, Instagram photos. +But you go through this lead and they have the photo of the woman what she looked like after the stabbing. And it had eyebrow, and it listed the stabbings. And that worked really well for me. So a flexible term. And flexible meaning newspaper, Instagram photos. -PARTICIPANT: A couple of years ago, we had a photographer who studied the anybody line of our marathon and took close up photos of people's expressions at the finish line, and he did a 100 maybe. It was amazing to see the reaction on people's faces, and it was really -- I've never seen that kind of thing out of a marathon. +PARTICIPANT: A couple of years ago, we had a photographer who studied the anybody line of our marathon and took close up photos of people's expressions at the finish line, and he did a 100 maybe. It was amazing to see the reaction on people's faces, and it was really -- I've never seen that kind of thing out of a marathon. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Cool. Anyone else? +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Cool. Anyone else? -PARTICIPANT: Brian in this northwest region did a series on the Ten Commandments. He did pictures of each commandment, and it was really cool to see the things -- he chose a false idol, like, one of them was Elvis Presley and Santa Claus. +PARTICIPANT: Brian in this northwest region did a series on the Ten Commandments. He did pictures of each commandment, and it was really cool to see the things -- he chose a false idol, like, one of them was Elvis Presley and Santa Claus. -NEIL: Cool. Anyone else? +NEIL: Cool. Anyone else? H -ow do you all work with photojournalists? And possibly it could be zero. You haven't ever spoken to a photojournalist in your current job. I'm really looking at the entire range. So you can have an answer if you haven't. +ow do you all work with photojournalists? And possibly it could be zero. You haven't ever spoken to a photojournalist in your current job. I'm really looking at the entire range. So you can have an answer if you haven't. -PARTICIPANT: I work extremely closely on our visuals team. And our solution has been combine technologists and photojournalists, like, actually put them on the same team. So our team is half designer and developers, I'm one of them, ask the other half is photo editors, researchers, and photojournalists. It's about six and six. And that's been really effective. So we can talk about more when -- +PARTICIPANT: I work extremely closely on our visuals team. And our solution has been combine technologists and photojournalists, like, actually put them on the same team. So our team is half designer and developers, I'm one of them, ask the other half is photo editors, researchers, and photojournalists. It's about six and six. And that's been really effective. So we can talk about more when -- -NEIL: It has been very effective. Anyone else? Anyone from the other side of the spectrum? +NEIL: It has been very effective. Anyone else? Anyone from the other side of the spectrum? -PARTICIPANT: I'm the other side of the spectrum. York -- we don't do photojournalism that much. +PARTICIPANT: I'm the other side of the spectrum. York -- we don't do photojournalism that much. -NEIL: Sure. When you do use photos, what are they from? +NEIL: Sure. When you do use photos, what are they from? -PARTICIPANT: Typically what I'm thinking of when I have some shots mixed around us. But we also send people out to festivals and things like that and that's telling the story of the festival. But as far as me as a developer, I don't really interact with those -- we get a dump of pictures and then that's it. So we don't know back and forth.That's kind of why I'm here. I want to get more of a perspective of how that relationship works or should work. +PARTICIPANT: Typically what I'm thinking of when I have some shots mixed around us. But we also send people out to festivals and things like that and that's telling the story of the festival. But as far as me as a developer, I don't really interact with those -- we get a dump of pictures and then that's it. So we don't know back and forth.That's kind of why I'm here. I want to get more of a perspective of how that relationship works or should work. -PARTICIPANT: Sounds good. Anyone else? +PARTICIPANT: Sounds good. Anyone else? -PARTICIPANT: We currently don't work with photojournalists. We're from the Cornell project. One of the tools we're building is the UGC tool, so one of the things that we're currently does not but we will be trying to collect photos. So we want to learn some lessons photojournalism instead of how to best create galleries to tell stories with those photos. +PARTICIPANT: We currently don't work with photojournalists. We're from the Cornell project. One of the tools we're building is the UGC tool, so one of the things that we're currently does not but we will be trying to collect photos. So we want to learn some lessons photojournalism instead of how to best create galleries to tell stories with those photos. -NEIL: Sounds good. +NEIL: Sounds good. PARTICIPANT: So I just walked in, and I'm doing photojournalism. -NEIL: And how is photojournalism right now? +NEIL: And how is photojournalism right now? -PARTICIPANT: So I mean I really like it obviously. I think me personally I'm focusing a lot on the photo journal side, but there's a lot of upgrading for the multimedia side as well. There's an MPPA workshop here so it's a bunch of visual journalism, and there's people who have been in the business for 30 years just learning how to do video. So it's a lot of mixing. If you're doing photojournalism, you're doing multimedia with it. +PARTICIPANT: So I mean I really like it obviously. I think me personally I'm focusing a lot on the photo journal side, but there's a lot of upgrading for the multimedia side as well. There's an MPPA workshop here so it's a bunch of visual journalism, and there's people who have been in the business for 30 years just learning how to do video. So it's a lot of mixing. If you're doing photojournalism, you're doing multimedia with it. -NEIL: Yeah, I've noticed a lot of people having to expand their expertise because photojournalism just isn't enough anymore. +NEIL: Yeah, I've noticed a lot of people having to expand their expertise because photojournalism just isn't enough anymore. -PARTICIPANT: I'm a computer programmer, but I'm interested in how to get into photography and also the cameras and everything. And I saw a really cool talk by someone who works on the camera systems for Androids who has been working on cameras for 30 years. And it's actually super, super super complicated. And that's obviously going to get better. And you don't have a lens mount on your Android, so photographers won't get it. But the fact of it that's why we're here. There's a dedicated photographer and that's the one person that is going to capture the moment in a world that is an interesting topic I think. So, yeah, that's my angle on the photojournalist. But I have a camera with me all the time, and I take photos that I want to be able to contribute to those photos in a way. But I don't identify as a photojournalist. I think there's a cultural barrier between the traditional you're a designated photographer, you have to go out with a mission in capturing this. Versus there's so many hobby photographers now and thinking about capturing what they already have and giving them a voice. +PARTICIPANT: I'm a computer programmer, but I'm interested in how to get into photography and also the cameras and everything. And I saw a really cool talk by someone who works on the camera systems for Androids who has been working on cameras for 30 years. And it's actually super, super super complicated. And that's obviously going to get better. And you don't have a lens mount on your Android, so photographers won't get it. But the fact of it that's why we're here. There's a dedicated photographer and that's the one person that is going to capture the moment in a world that is an interesting topic I think. So, yeah, that's my angle on the photojournalist. But I have a camera with me all the time, and I take photos that I want to be able to contribute to those photos in a way. But I don't identify as a photojournalist. I think there's a cultural barrier between the traditional you're a designated photographer, you have to go out with a mission in capturing this. Versus there's so many hobby photographers now and thinking about capturing what they already have and giving them a voice. -NEIL: Yeah, that's another question but that's a very real part of what photojournalism is becoming right now. Smartphones in general has changed the game, and you see a lot of old photojournalists that are pissed off about it. +NEIL: Yeah, that's another question but that's a very real part of what photojournalism is becoming right now. Smartphones in general has changed the game, and you see a lot of old photojournalists that are pissed off about it. -PARTICIPANT: Well, even -- I got a full frame camera for $700 used. And it's, like -- I mean that's crazy. +PARTICIPANT: Well, even -- I got a full frame camera for $700 used. And it's, like -- I mean that's crazy. -NEIL: I have friends. Photojournalists don't make much off of that. But I've had friends who have had to have like 10-K worth of gear just to -- +NEIL: I have friends. Photojournalists don't make much off of that. But I've had friends who have had to have like 10-K worth of gear just to -- PARTICIPANT: Yeah. -NEIL: And it's weird I guess 10-K does push you over the line of separating you from other people. But before that, smartphone can compete with a lot of cameras now. Anyone else? +NEIL: And it's weird I guess 10-K does push you over the line of separating you from other people. But before that, smartphone can compete with a lot of cameras now. Anyone else? -PARTICIPANT: So I do bigger long-term projects at our newsroom. So I work with photojournalists and photographers. Pretty extensively through the project, and we involve them very early on in discussing the stories and what we're going to do and all of that. But there's basically two problems. One is this often very chicken and egg problem of the photographer want a direction of what you want him to go and capture and the designer or me as the editor not really knowing what -- how you're going to structure the whole thing until you can see what you thought. So go out and shoot some basic stuff, come back, take a look at it, and then decide this is what we're going to finally do and then get the proper stuff but also resource and time that never, ever happens. So that's one of the big problems. And then the other problem is we're a pretty big newsroom, but we still only have one staff photographer. So he is, like, literally the only guy I can go and have these longer term relationship and longer term discussion on the project. But the problem is that, like, he has a very distinctive style as a photographer; right? Really narrow field and everything. He's the only guy I've got, and I can't be having these questions with freelance photographers. +PARTICIPANT: So I do bigger long-term projects at our newsroom. So I work with photojournalists and photographers. Pretty extensively through the project, and we involve them very early on in discussing the stories and what we're going to do and all of that. But there's basically two problems. One is this often very chicken and egg problem of the photographer want a direction of what you want him to go and capture and the designer or me as the editor not really knowing what -- how you're going to structure the whole thing until you can see what you thought. So go out and shoot some basic stuff, come back, take a look at it, and then decide this is what we're going to finally do and then get the proper stuff but also resource and time that never, ever happens. So that's one of the big problems. And then the other problem is we're a pretty big newsroom, but we still only have one staff photographer. So he is, like, literally the only guy I can go and have these longer term relationship and longer term discussion on the project. But the problem is that, like, he has a very distinctive style as a photographer; right? Really narrow field and everything. He's the only guy I've got, and I can't be having these questions with freelance photographers. So those are two things. -NEIL: That sounds very real. +NEIL: That sounds very real. -PARTICIPANT: I actually manage our photo department. Not the day-to-day assignments but the next level up. I've had similar issues as to what Robin said. We have two and a half photographers. Two full-time, one part-time. So they're always strapped for time and they don't have time to come up with their own ideas, so they're basically, like, order takers, which is frustrating for both them and us. Because it feels like you have to, like, give out all of these instructions of what exactly you're looking for and everything instead of being, like, can you and the reporter just go out and use your brains and figure it out? But they're never in the office, they don't talk to each other, so we just have this cycle going of where I think we're not using them to the fullest. +PARTICIPANT: I actually manage our photo department. Not the day-to-day assignments but the next level up. I've had similar issues as to what Robin said. We have two and a half photographers. Two full-time, one part-time. So they're always strapped for time and they don't have time to come up with their own ideas, so they're basically, like, order takers, which is frustrating for both them and us. Because it feels like you have to, like, give out all of these instructions of what exactly you're looking for and everything instead of being, like, can you and the reporter just go out and use your brains and figure it out? But they're never in the office, they don't talk to each other, so we just have this cycle going of where I think we're not using them to the fullest. -NEIL: And I don't know if you want to speak to that. But NPR seems to solve. +NEIL: And I don't know if you want to speak to that. But NPR seems to solve. -PARTICIPANT: So we're uniform; right? We're a radio company. So the times we use anything beyond a wire photo is rank. And so we're able to sort of treat our photojournalists with -- at the end of the year we had someone who was killed in Afghanistan. He went to Afghanistan every year. Incredible. Even all those who go to Afghanistan or any other place. +PARTICIPANT: So we're uniform; right? We're a radio company. So the times we use anything beyond a wire photo is rank. And so we're able to sort of treat our photojournalists with -- at the end of the year we had someone who was killed in Afghanistan. He went to Afghanistan every year. Incredible. Even all those who go to Afghanistan or any other place. And that works because we didn't need it for a while -- PARTICIPANT: You can be choosier about what they want. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. We don't have to take those, so it's kind of what our own photo resources. But, yeah. If you can find a way to -- and this gets harder and harder. But if you can -- wire photos are great, they're a wonderful resource. So if you can sort of get good photo editors. Photo editors are a huge piece. Huge, huge piece of making photojournalism. So get good photo editors, you can take good wide photos and go from there and use your photojournalists as people who can, like, really hammer out your best work. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. We don't have to take those, so it's kind of what our own photo resources. But, yeah. If you can find a way to -- and this gets harder and harder. But if you can -- wire photos are great, they're a wonderful resource. So if you can sort of get good photo editors. Photo editors are a huge piece. Huge, huge piece of making photojournalism. So get good photo editors, you can take good wide photos and go from there and use your photojournalists as people who can, like, really hammer out your best work. PARTICIPANT: Can I add something to that? -NEIL: Sure. +NEIL: Sure. PARTICIPANT: We have -- we're working on that approach and the push back we get from the photo department is that the stories that the wire services cover are the marquee stories. @@ -98,109 +98,109 @@ PARTICIPANT: And they feel like they're being left out or punished or whatever i PARTICIPANT: Certainly. -NEIL: Sure. Does photojournalism work better print or online right now? +NEIL: Sure. Does photojournalism work better print or online right now? PARTICIPANT: I strongly believe online. -PARTICIPANT: To counter that, I think it is not good in neither necessarily. Or as good as it could be and specifically talking about the online part, coming from a perspective of someone who builds online all the time. I'm, like, very disappointed in the state of sharing photos online. There's, like, a bunch of different services that offer it, but they're usually ridden with ads or they aren't designed for public consumption. And, for instance, Google photos has three different ways to view photos. Two different ways on Google photos and on your Google drive. And it's confusing about what the right way to share your photos is and none of them involve sharing them publically in a easy way. And flicker is opposite. Flicker has been reskinned all of these different times, and it's okay sharing photos publically. But then you hit certain parts of the interface, and it's a flashback to 2003. And I feel like obviously there's a Facebook and Instagram but you're constraint on Instagram 1,024 pixels. There's something about a full size photo that that's really where, like, photojournalism shines to me is when you get the maximum resolution. Like, that's where the magic is. And a small meta photo in a picture is not good. And in general I'm sad how crappy photo ads are today. Especially when they pop up in photo galleries that are, like, using one fifth of your screen space. You know, like -- I, like, want it to be better, nicer, bigger, faster, more resolution on the Web. +PARTICIPANT: To counter that, I think it is not good in neither necessarily. Or as good as it could be and specifically talking about the online part, coming from a perspective of someone who builds online all the time. I'm, like, very disappointed in the state of sharing photos online. There's, like, a bunch of different services that offer it, but they're usually ridden with ads or they aren't designed for public consumption. And, for instance, Google photos has three different ways to view photos. Two different ways on Google photos and on your Google drive. And it's confusing about what the right way to share your photos is and none of them involve sharing them publically in a easy way. And flicker is opposite. Flicker has been reskinned all of these different times, and it's okay sharing photos publically. But then you hit certain parts of the interface, and it's a flashback to 2003. And I feel like obviously there's a Facebook and Instagram but you're constraint on Instagram 1,024 pixels. There's something about a full size photo that that's really where, like, photojournalism shines to me is when you get the maximum resolution. Like, that's where the magic is. And a small meta photo in a picture is not good. And in general I'm sad how crappy photo ads are today. Especially when they pop up in photo galleries that are, like, using one fifth of your screen space. You know, like -- I, like, want it to be better, nicer, bigger, faster, more resolution on the Web. -PARTICIPANT: I think that when you're talking about online here, though, that kind of what he's saying. Kind of have to split it in two experiences because you have the desktop experience and mobile experience. And the mobile experience, it sucks. You don't get the impact because you're looking on your phone, and you don't get this nice, big right sized photo or whatever. So you have to zoom in and out on stuff that's interesting in the picture or try to absorb or whatever you're trying to convey on the screen. And it's just really hard to get that. But that's where we're going now is mobile now so it's how to get the impacts on your phone. +PARTICIPANT: I think that when you're talking about online here, though, that kind of what he's saying. Kind of have to split it in two experiences because you have the desktop experience and mobile experience. And the mobile experience, it sucks. You don't get the impact because you're looking on your phone, and you don't get this nice, big right sized photo or whatever. So you have to zoom in and out on stuff that's interesting in the picture or try to absorb or whatever you're trying to convey on the screen. And it's just really hard to get that. But that's where we're going now is mobile now so it's how to get the impacts on your phone. -NEIL: And that's tough because smaller screens since most readers use mobile now. One of the photos in print on the home page of the website, which has the bigger impact? And when were photojournalists more important? +NEIL: And that's tough because smaller screens since most readers use mobile now. One of the photos in print on the home page of the website, which has the bigger impact? And when were photojournalists more important? -PARTICIPANT: I don't know about bigger impact, but maybe this is -- on most home pages, the display photo is the same shape and size always, regardless of how that photo should be framed. And the newspaper you have the flexibility to run whatever shape and size it should be for what the content is. Which is very frustrating. +PARTICIPANT: I don't know about bigger impact, but maybe this is -- on most home pages, the display photo is the same shape and size always, regardless of how that photo should be framed. And the newspaper you have the flexibility to run whatever shape and size it should be for what the content is. Which is very frustrating. PARTICIPANT: Throughout the day more artists and -- -PARTICIPANT: Maybe playing off what works better in offline or this day I get my news off Twitter. I'm seeing Seattle times posted this really cool march, and I'm seeing these really cool photos, and I'm stopping to look at them and also coming from a different state where I have a different appreciation for them. So, in my opinion, it's working better online just because of access and whatnot. But I do agree, like, the difference of seeing a photo this small and then walking into a gallery and seeing it this big is a completely different feel. But at the end of the day how many people are doing that? +PARTICIPANT: Maybe playing off what works better in offline or this day I get my news off Twitter. I'm seeing Seattle times posted this really cool march, and I'm seeing these really cool photos, and I'm stopping to look at them and also coming from a different state where I have a different appreciation for them. So, in my opinion, it's working better online just because of access and whatnot. But I do agree, like, the difference of seeing a photo this small and then walking into a gallery and seeing it this big is a completely different feel. But at the end of the day how many people are doing that? -NEIL: Yeah, the reader has completely changed now. +NEIL: Yeah, the reader has completely changed now. -PARTICIPANT: It reminds me, I'm a drummer, and I like to listen to drum solos. But when I talk to nondrummers, they hate drum solos. And I think photojournalism is the same. It's the same problem where, like, if you're a photographer, you only like photos in their fullest experience. But then most people are, like, I don't care. +PARTICIPANT: It reminds me, I'm a drummer, and I like to listen to drum solos. But when I talk to nondrummers, they hate drum solos. And I think photojournalism is the same. It's the same problem where, like, if you're a photographer, you only like photos in their fullest experience. But then most people are, like, I don't care. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And just like even if you're on Twitter, and you're scrolling past, like, yeah, you're going to stop. Most of the time readers want to read something when there's something, like, a visual appearance. Like, that's what's grabbing them and entering them into it. If you had a newspaper that had zero photos next to one that was -- had images all over. I'm sure we can all guess which one the reader is going to pick. But I think it has to do with, like, yeah, I have a different experience going through the photos than some people. But those photos also might be the same reasons on the story. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And just like even if you're on Twitter, and you're scrolling past, like, yeah, you're going to stop. Most of the time readers want to read something when there's something, like, a visual appearance. Like, that's what's grabbing them and entering them into it. If you had a newspaper that had zero photos next to one that was -- had images all over. I'm sure we can all guess which one the reader is going to pick. But I think it has to do with, like, yeah, I have a different experience going through the photos than some people. But those photos also might be the same reasons on the story. PARTICIPANT: Actually I have a question where you guys learned doing this? -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. We had a series of the visual stories. They were usually presented as sort of really fancy photo slide shows, like, they often integrated -- this is my case. If you have resources that do this. But you're able to integrate different forms of media. So allow them -- some of them are told, like, what are tasks and use it to take out more interesting and just capturing and use it as a narrative builder. -And sometimes we use audio, but not in like a video slide show kind of way, sort of a keeping them, like, they're own -- anyway we learned that. If you took out the text of these stories, 2- 3,000 word stories that are in depth, we see completion hits of those of 40, 50%. So they are really effective and effective for people to read through the story that is really long, and they wouldn't normally read. So, yeah. That's my case for online. But it is resources. We extend resources. That's not something everyone has the luxury of doing, and I recognize that. And the thing you're talking about flipping through, the person who wants to tell a story with a photo, yeah, we're still struggling with that. That's really hard. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. We had a series of the visual stories. They were usually presented as sort of really fancy photo slide shows, like, they often integrated -- this is my case. If you have resources that do this. But you're able to integrate different forms of media. So allow them -- some of them are told, like, what are tasks and use it to take out more interesting and just capturing and use it as a narrative builder. +And sometimes we use audio, but not in like a video slide show kind of way, sort of a keeping them, like, they're own -- anyway we learned that. If you took out the text of these stories, 2- 3,000 word stories that are in depth, we see completion hits of those of 40, 50%. So they are really effective and effective for people to read through the story that is really long, and they wouldn't normally read. So, yeah. That's my case for online. But it is resources. We extend resources. That's not something everyone has the luxury of doing, and I recognize that. And the thing you're talking about flipping through, the person who wants to tell a story with a photo, yeah, we're still struggling with that. That's really hard. There's a world of difference between the world. -NEIL: Going to a harder question. Photojournalism jobs are shrinking. Does it matter? Or maybe they should shrink right now. +NEIL: Going to a harder question. Photojournalism jobs are shrinking. Does it matter? Or maybe they should shrink right now. -PARTICIPANT: So I've been thinking besides, and I definitely think that photojournalism jobs are just changing. So like I was saying, like, you know, like, now you're kind of being expected more for these people to do the multimedia pieces and can you -- anything that's a little bit more interactive than it was before. So I definitely think they're shrinking, but more than anything, I just think they're changing. And you of course have -- all the people, you can take your iPhone out now and, like, do these things. So it's making it a lot harder for the people who are, like, you spend three years in a degree and working towards it. But you can probably see the difference of just, like, the thought -- like there is some things when you shoot a photo that are going to make an extreme difference. The angle you're at, how close, how intimate the feel is, and I think people are going to have to adapt to those photos rather than what someone can take on a iPhone. +PARTICIPANT: So I've been thinking besides, and I definitely think that photojournalism jobs are just changing. So like I was saying, like, you know, like, now you're kind of being expected more for these people to do the multimedia pieces and can you -- anything that's a little bit more interactive than it was before. So I definitely think they're shrinking, but more than anything, I just think they're changing. And you of course have -- all the people, you can take your iPhone out now and, like, do these things. So it's making it a lot harder for the people who are, like, you spend three years in a degree and working towards it. But you can probably see the difference of just, like, the thought -- like there is some things when you shoot a photo that are going to make an extreme difference. The angle you're at, how close, how intimate the feel is, and I think people are going to have to adapt to those photos rather than what someone can take on a iPhone. -NEIL: Anyone else? +NEIL: Anyone else? -PARTICIPANT: I personally don't care what someone calls themself, a photojournalist or full-time or part-time, it matters what results they get. Probably one of our best photographers right now actually was trained as a reporter and then just recently started moving into doing photos for us. I would say he's still, like, maybe 20% of the time doing photojournalism, and he's just as good as our guys who have been doing it for 20 years. So photojournalism matters and those jobs matter, but I think we shouldn't get so hung up on how you were trained, and what you've always done, and how you call yourself, and things like that. +PARTICIPANT: I personally don't care what someone calls themself, a photojournalist or full-time or part-time, it matters what results they get. Probably one of our best photographers right now actually was trained as a reporter and then just recently started moving into doing photos for us. I would say he's still, like, maybe 20% of the time doing photojournalism, and he's just as good as our guys who have been doing it for 20 years. So photojournalism matters and those jobs matter, but I think we shouldn't get so hung up on how you were trained, and what you've always done, and how you call yourself, and things like that. -NEIL: Switching it up a bit. There have been quite a few -- not quite a few. But a few papers that have fired their entire photojournalism staff recently. Does that matter? Do you think that's the right choice? Wrong choice? +NEIL: Switching it up a bit. There have been quite a few -- not quite a few. But a few papers that have fired their entire photojournalism staff recently. Does that matter? Do you think that's the right choice? Wrong choice? -PARTICIPANT: I don't know it's just one of those things where I mean it's going to suck either way. But, like, when you're audience is changing, how your all by yourself audience is getting information changing, like, if you can't change with the change, it's no one's fault but your own. Photojournalism is not what it was, so you need -- you wanting to do this need to make the changes to just do it in any way that it's working with the time. +PARTICIPANT: I don't know it's just one of those things where I mean it's going to suck either way. But, like, when you're audience is changing, how your all by yourself audience is getting information changing, like, if you can't change with the change, it's no one's fault but your own. Photojournalism is not what it was, so you need -- you wanting to do this need to make the changes to just do it in any way that it's working with the time. -PARTICIPANT: I would ask, like, if I can make one point. Are any newspapers without photojournalists, are they successful? +PARTICIPANT: I would ask, like, if I can make one point. Are any newspapers without photojournalists, are they successful? -NEIL: The papers? +NEIL: The papers? -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I can only think of the Chicago times. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. I can only think of the Chicago times. -NEIL: Before they fired them off, they had photojournalists that have done incredible work. But are they successful now? That's a good question. +NEIL: Before they fired them off, they had photojournalists that have done incredible work. But are they successful now? That's a good question. -PARTICIPANT: Well, and I think -- so me personally, like, I'm, like, yeah, what I'm told is I don't really want to work in the newspaper, I'm not really sure. But I'm told that's boot camp. You need to do it because it's boot camp. And then from there, you have, like, personal projects that you're working on that your people are applying for grants for, and you're going to start working maybe, like, with actual companies doing other things that you want to do. So then you don't get stuck with people who don't want to go out and do those things because those people are only doing the things that they want to do. And hopefully they're getting involved. +PARTICIPANT: Well, and I think -- so me personally, like, I'm, like, yeah, what I'm told is I don't really want to work in the newspaper, I'm not really sure. But I'm told that's boot camp. You need to do it because it's boot camp. And then from there, you have, like, personal projects that you're working on that your people are applying for grants for, and you're going to start working maybe, like, with actual companies doing other things that you want to do. So then you don't get stuck with people who don't want to go out and do those things because those people are only doing the things that they want to do. And hopefully they're getting involved. -NEIL: Cool. +NEIL: Cool. -PARTICIPANT: Just one thing which is that oftentimes working with an outside freelancer doesn't necessarily actually end up saving you. It actually ends up being more work. So not to do with photographers but illustrators, we had a project recently we needed illustration, and we went outside to work with a freelance illustrator and to make it really good, we actually putting one of our in-house designers full-time with liaising with the illustrator, so it ended uptaking two people's time rather than if I had a really good in-house illustrator. So two people ended up doing maybe one person in-house could have done. You get whatever you get. +PARTICIPANT: Just one thing which is that oftentimes working with an outside freelancer doesn't necessarily actually end up saving you. It actually ends up being more work. So not to do with photographers but illustrators, we had a project recently we needed illustration, and we went outside to work with a freelance illustrator and to make it really good, we actually putting one of our in-house designers full-time with liaising with the illustrator, so it ended uptaking two people's time rather than if I had a really good in-house illustrator. So two people ended up doing maybe one person in-house could have done. You get whatever you get. -NEIL: Anything else? +NEIL: Anything else? -PARTICIPANT: I think some of the BBC documentaries, they probably still do it this way. But there was one in 1994 called the world of cats I think, and they literally went to five continents to make a one-hour cat documentary. And they gave one person basically probably nine months, they flew them literally five -- they went to Egypt, they went to Rome, they went to, like, China, they went to, like -- it was insane. And, like, they didn't make, like, 5'1" hour. They made one one hour. And I was, like, okay. That's rad that the BBC does that. But at the same time, like, with the same amount of money and budget now, what could you do on a similar scale getting a bunch of small things out to individual artists with their voices? As opposed to doing one big project? And I wonder if photojournalism is going to go for, like, there's a professional who gets to do big projects to, like, there's a bunch of small individual artists that get to do -- support themselves doing small projects and see it decentralize a little bit. And I would like to see more people who are upstarts where they don't have to plan the big job. I wonder if because the job is going away that means it will just get replaced by a bunch of smaller distributed things and not even through traditional news outlets. But people just starting their own. And I think documentary is an interesting medium because it's still stuck in the world where you make a documentary, and you get, like, an advancement on production company, and they own the rights and distribute it in physical theaters. And then after the theater runs in, you get DVDs. And I'm, like, Netflix is doing it as it's happening. That's what Netflix is doing, we don't have to go through physical distribution or DVDs or our in-house computers. It doesn't make sure anymore. But someone making those documentaries is still doing that. And it's sad because, like, look at how Napster was and what happened with Spotify and streaming. That hasn't happened for videos and photos yet, in my opinion, in terms of storytelling. Anyway I want to see more direct consumer to individual and less big jobs with big assignments where you get, like, a million dollars to make a one-hour video. +PARTICIPANT: I think some of the BBC documentaries, they probably still do it this way. But there was one in 1994 called the world of cats I think, and they literally went to five continents to make a one-hour cat documentary. And they gave one person basically probably nine months, they flew them literally five -- they went to Egypt, they went to Rome, they went to, like, China, they went to, like -- it was insane. And, like, they didn't make, like, 5'1" hour. They made one one hour. And I was, like, okay. That's rad that the BBC does that. But at the same time, like, with the same amount of money and budget now, what could you do on a similar scale getting a bunch of small things out to individual artists with their voices? As opposed to doing one big project? And I wonder if photojournalism is going to go for, like, there's a professional who gets to do big projects to, like, there's a bunch of small individual artists that get to do -- support themselves doing small projects and see it decentralize a little bit. And I would like to see more people who are upstarts where they don't have to plan the big job. I wonder if because the job is going away that means it will just get replaced by a bunch of smaller distributed things and not even through traditional news outlets. But people just starting their own. And I think documentary is an interesting medium because it's still stuck in the world where you make a documentary, and you get, like, an advancement on production company, and they own the rights and distribute it in physical theaters. And then after the theater runs in, you get DVDs. And I'm, like, Netflix is doing it as it's happening. That's what Netflix is doing, we don't have to go through physical distribution or DVDs or our in-house computers. It doesn't make sure anymore. But someone making those documentaries is still doing that. And it's sad because, like, look at how Napster was and what happened with Spotify and streaming. That hasn't happened for videos and photos yet, in my opinion, in terms of storytelling. Anyway I want to see more direct consumer to individual and less big jobs with big assignments where you get, like, a million dollars to make a one-hour video. -PARTICIPANT: And that's kind of what I was kind of saying. Like, you're going to end up with a lot more people just focusing on the things that they want to focus on and, like, having a good idea is half the battle of making a good project like that. +PARTICIPANT: And that's kind of what I was kind of saying. Like, you're going to end up with a lot more people just focusing on the things that they want to focus on and, like, having a good idea is half the battle of making a good project like that. PARTICIPANT: Yeah. -NEIL: Cool. Sorry. These are almost done. Photojournalist versus a reporter with a smartphone? Can newspapers have a journalist with a smartphone and never have to hire a photojournalist? Bad? Good? What do they lose? What do they gain? +NEIL: Cool. Sorry. These are almost done. Photojournalist versus a reporter with a smartphone? Can newspapers have a journalist with a smartphone and never have to hire a photojournalist? Bad? Good? What do they lose? What do they gain? -PARTICIPANT: I think it really depends. I definitely think you can send a reporter out to a smartphone with a car accident and doing all of that stuff, and you can run it, and be fine. But I don't know if I was doing let's same I'm an editor that has a feature story on this professional soccer player, I probablimented want to send my reporter out with him with a smartphone to snap a couple of head shots. So I think it depends on the story and the daily news and stuff like that. Like, why not? They're already there, and they can do it, then why not? But then when you have bigger projects maybe like feature stories and long-term things, like, that might be the time you would want someone. +PARTICIPANT: I think it really depends. I definitely think you can send a reporter out to a smartphone with a car accident and doing all of that stuff, and you can run it, and be fine. But I don't know if I was doing let's same I'm an editor that has a feature story on this professional soccer player, I probablimented want to send my reporter out with him with a smartphone to snap a couple of head shots. So I think it depends on the story and the daily news and stuff like that. Like, why not? They're already there, and they can do it, then why not? But then when you have bigger projects maybe like feature stories and long-term things, like, that might be the time you would want someone. -PARTICIPANT: We assign stories basically by their impact and by the difficulty. So if all you're looking for is a glorified head shot. A reporter can probably do that. But if you're going into a sensitive situation. We recently did a story about a 5-year-old who was transgender, and we were not allowed to show her face. And so someone had to go in and not only gave them the trust of this little girl and the family, but then also know how do I show someone visually without ever showing the front of her? That's not something I think a reporter would have been able to do. -So we make those decisions based on where is the photo going to play? Is it going to be black and white? Is it a difficult just shot to frame? What's the access like? And then decide from there how much skill and resources do we want to put into that? +PARTICIPANT: We assign stories basically by their impact and by the difficulty. So if all you're looking for is a glorified head shot. A reporter can probably do that. But if you're going into a sensitive situation. We recently did a story about a 5-year-old who was transgender, and we were not allowed to show her face. And so someone had to go in and not only gave them the trust of this little girl and the family, but then also know how do I show someone visually without ever showing the front of her? That's not something I think a reporter would have been able to do. +So we make those decisions based on where is the photo going to play? Is it going to be black and white? Is it a difficult just shot to frame? What's the access like? And then decide from there how much skill and resources do we want to put into that? -PARTICIPANT: I also want to, like, underestimate the impact on the reporter doing the job out there to do originally, which is, like, to get the information. So if suddenly they have to think about I'm going to talk to this person but, no, I'm going to shoot the photo as well, shit, I have to record the audio. The more tasks you stack onto what a reporter has to do in what is often a really, really brief period of opportunity they have, you might end up using some other stuff as well. +PARTICIPANT: I also want to, like, underestimate the impact on the reporter doing the job out there to do originally, which is, like, to get the information. So if suddenly they have to think about I'm going to talk to this person but, no, I'm going to shoot the photo as well, shit, I have to record the audio. The more tasks you stack onto what a reporter has to do in what is often a really, really brief period of opportunity they have, you might end up using some other stuff as well. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And that's another thing we take into account. Like, what's their access? Is it one shot you've got to be in and out? Or can you do, like, I'm going to do my reporting and now can we sit and do a portrait? +PARTICIPANT: Yeah. And that's another thing we take into account. Like, what's their access? Is it one shot you've got to be in and out? Or can you do, like, I'm going to do my reporting and now can we sit and do a portrait? -PARTICIPANT: And coming from I've done that multiple times, and it's absolutely horrible. Just because it's so -- it seems like it should be so easy to go out and take a photo, but it's not at all. And to be -- I don't know who in here does that. But it's a completely -- you're asking all of these questions but, like, the photojournalism, you're taking pictures of the questions with the answers. I don't know. So it's, like -- and then half the time you're trying to do this and do this where both things end up being sub par instead of one really good. +PARTICIPANT: And coming from I've done that multiple times, and it's absolutely horrible. Just because it's so -- it seems like it should be so easy to go out and take a photo, but it's not at all. And to be -- I don't know who in here does that. But it's a completely -- you're asking all of these questions but, like, the photojournalism, you're taking pictures of the questions with the answers. I don't know. So it's, like -- and then half the time you're trying to do this and do this where both things end up being sub par instead of one really good. -NEIL: I would like to skip the last one because I do technically have an activity. -Split into groups. Let's do two groups of four and then the third five people. -So why did I think of this? People don't view photojournalism in the future view in their heads. And because of that no one is thinking about how to utilize the craft of photojournalism for a lot of the modern problems we're dealing with. So your task at hand today is to take -- each group is going to take whatever monetary problem they want. I put a list of them up there. Things like push notifications or social media posts or even you guys can take the project and think about that. And the task isn't to make the most successful idea. It's to make the most photo centric idea. +NEIL: I would like to skip the last one because I do technically have an activity. +Split into groups. Let's do two groups of four and then the third five people. +So why did I think of this? People don't view photojournalism in the future view in their heads. And because of that no one is thinking about how to utilize the craft of photojournalism for a lot of the modern problems we're dealing with. So your task at hand today is to take -- each group is going to take whatever monetary problem they want. I put a list of them up there. Things like push notifications or social media posts or even you guys can take the project and think about that. And the task isn't to make the most successful idea. It's to make the most photo centric idea. -So you want to use the craft of photojournalism to the highest extent possible while doing this. So I'll be a lot happier if you come up with something that no one would ever want to look at. But somehow just uses photos the entire process. -Second rule, I guess should be technically possible. I don't want holograms. But you're allowed to stretch that if you know that the technology sort of there, you would need a lot of money but pretend you have all the money in the world. +So you want to use the craft of photojournalism to the highest extent possible while doing this. So I'll be a lot happier if you come up with something that no one would ever want to look at. But somehow just uses photos the entire process. +Second rule, I guess should be technically possible. I don't want holograms. But you're allowed to stretch that if you know that the technology sort of there, you would need a lot of money but pretend you have all the money in the world. -Avoid ideas similar to work you've done in the past. Sorry, Tyler. And do draw mockups. We're going to look at this afterwards. So have an idea of the topic you chose. What specific aspect of that topic are you looking to improve? And draw mockups and be able to explain how you think your idea solved that. And so the one example I had was photo galleries. Are you general that photo galleries suck because it's a bit contradictive to photos? Or swiping through your phone, so you've lost impact. -I don't know why I said that. But hate how people were digesting music, assign to museums, never sold it. But I was thinking what if we just put photo galleries in massive VR getups where you actually walk through a museum to see a photo essay. So obviously nobody would ever want to do that. But that's the extent of I'm enhancing photo experience, I'm enhancing -- fixing what's wrong with photo galleries right now. And it's technically possible. We could technically do that right now. +Avoid ideas similar to work you've done in the past. Sorry, Tyler. And do draw mockups. We're going to look at this afterwards. So have an idea of the topic you chose. What specific aspect of that topic are you looking to improve? And draw mockups and be able to explain how you think your idea solved that. And so the one example I had was photo galleries. Are you general that photo galleries suck because it's a bit contradictive to photos? Or swiping through your phone, so you've lost impact. +I don't know why I said that. But hate how people were digesting music, assign to museums, never sold it. But I was thinking what if we just put photo galleries in massive VR getups where you actually walk through a museum to see a photo essay. So obviously nobody would ever want to do that. But that's the extent of I'm enhancing photo experience, I'm enhancing -- fixing what's wrong with photo galleries right now. And it's technically possible. We could technically do that right now. S -o for first three to four, five minutes if you're done introducing yourselves, pick a topic and what you want to do about it. I'll time you and then after five minutes, we should have a topic. And then you'll have about ten minutes to brainstorm and actually come up with a full -- not a full mockup, but a drawing and an idea. So have at it. +o for first three to four, five minutes if you're done introducing yourselves, pick a topic and what you want to do about it. I'll time you and then after five minutes, we should have a topic. And then you'll have about ten minutes to brainstorm and actually come up with a full -- not a full mockup, but a drawing and an idea. So have at it. [Group activity] -NEIL: Everyone should have a topic by now. Eight minutes to come up with an idea. +NEIL: Everyone should have a topic by now. Eight minutes to come up with an idea. [Group activity] -PARTICIPANT: So we kind of were talking about that people have to, like, interact with photos every couple of seconds and you can't just chill and have the content delivered to you like in a video how easy it is to Netflix or TV to just be passive. So we had obviously there's opportunities in VR to make it a little bit more interactive and then -- but then we started talking about, like, less revolutionary ideas that VR would just approve. -And we talked about what if we did a video of the future but have photos interspersed in the in the video and have a video that is a video but then you have photos on top. It's basically you have a photographer, but you're also a videographer. The thing that I have seen that does this okay is there's this street photographer on YouTube called street hunter, and he walks around, and he'll be walking -- it's, like, completely uncut half an hour of him walking through an area. And when he has a shot, he'll superimpose the final edited shot on the video. But as you're watching it, it's sort of like watching a TV channel walking through his process, and then you see the photo, which is way better than the video. But the video also makes the photo better because you get the context and the storytelling. And you can always skip ahead if you're bored. +PARTICIPANT: So we kind of were talking about that people have to, like, interact with photos every couple of seconds and you can't just chill and have the content delivered to you like in a video how easy it is to Netflix or TV to just be passive. So we had obviously there's opportunities in VR to make it a little bit more interactive and then -- but then we started talking about, like, less revolutionary ideas that VR would just approve. +And we talked about what if we did a video of the future but have photos interspersed in the in the video and have a video that is a video but then you have photos on top. It's basically you have a photographer, but you're also a videographer. The thing that I have seen that does this okay is there's this street photographer on YouTube called street hunter, and he walks around, and he'll be walking -- it's, like, completely uncut half an hour of him walking through an area. And when he has a shot, he'll superimpose the final edited shot on the video. But as you're watching it, it's sort of like watching a TV channel walking through his process, and then you see the photo, which is way better than the video. But the video also makes the photo better because you get the context and the storytelling. And you can always skip ahead if you're bored. So there's that idea of sort of, like, instead of having to scroll through a bunch of videos or swipe through a bunch of photo galleries, like, do the work of making published timeline thing. -And then talking about the hybrid of the two where you have a photo capturing a period of time. And that's as far as we got. But we felt like videos are inevitable. Or generally not video but interactive passive yet still interactive experiences where you're not forced to scroll through a bunch of photos or swipe through a bunch of photos to see it. You can choose to skip ahead if you want, but you can also take a passive role. So use the option of being passive or active rather than forcing them to be active. +And then talking about the hybrid of the two where you have a photo capturing a period of time. And that's as far as we got. But we felt like videos are inevitable. Or generally not video but interactive passive yet still interactive experiences where you're not forced to scroll through a bunch of photos or swipe through a bunch of photos to see it. You can choose to skip ahead if you want, but you can also take a passive role. So use the option of being passive or active rather than forcing them to be active. -NEIL: Cool so extend photojournalism past its static form. +NEIL: Cool so extend photojournalism past its static form. -PARTICIPANT: Yeah, like a hybrid media form. Video and photo. +PARTICIPANT: Yeah, like a hybrid media form. Video and photo. PARTICIPANT: What's the name? @@ -208,24 +208,24 @@ PARTICIPANT: Street hunters. PARTICIPANT: Similar of you walk through a neighborhood, and you get a push notification with a picture. -PARTICIPANT: So, yeah, I was talking about mobile app but future in the iOS you're going to have the ability to 3D touch or force top and a frame will pop up and anything can be in that frame. It could be a photo. So if you're walking around and you have the app installed, you walk by some building. Here's a photo of what it looked like 50 years ago, and you can press it and get the photo. And I don't know what happens to the app if it goes to full screen, but if it did launch in the app. +PARTICIPANT: So, yeah, I was talking about mobile app but future in the iOS you're going to have the ability to 3D touch or force top and a frame will pop up and anything can be in that frame. It could be a photo. So if you're walking around and you have the app installed, you walk by some building. Here's a photo of what it looked like 50 years ago, and you can press it and get the photo. And I don't know what happens to the app if it goes to full screen, but if it did launch in the app. -NEIL: Cool. Pokémon Go for -- +NEIL: Cool. Pokémon Go for -- -PARTICIPANT: Kind of. Yeah. +PARTICIPANT: Kind of. Yeah. -NEIL: Cool and you guys. +NEIL: Cool and you guys. -PARTICIPANT: So we kind of came up with, like, one of the points of the daily newsletter, so we started thinking about how do we get photo newsletter e-mail images. But our idea was essentially a photojournalist essay a day kind of aggregator where you get one big, beautiful image that will then take you to the Washington Post or NPR or whatever where you can start to explore. And then the idea being that you can also provide photo journals. They're starting to do a little bit earlier. But people doing stuff on their own. They don't have an outlet where they're trying to get it. But we be that outlet, we can aggregate all of these different places and exposure hopefully to, you know, through the idea being that you get an image every day that propels you to -- you don't have to worry about cultivating experience because however they choose to present their story. Something in front of somebody every day. +PARTICIPANT: So we kind of came up with, like, one of the points of the daily newsletter, so we started thinking about how do we get photo newsletter e-mail images. But our idea was essentially a photojournalist essay a day kind of aggregator where you get one big, beautiful image that will then take you to the Washington Post or NPR or whatever where you can start to explore. And then the idea being that you can also provide photo journals. They're starting to do a little bit earlier. But people doing stuff on their own. They don't have an outlet where they're trying to get it. But we be that outlet, we can aggregate all of these different places and exposure hopefully to, you know, through the idea being that you get an image every day that propels you to -- you don't have to worry about cultivating experience because however they choose to present their story. Something in front of somebody every day. -PARTICIPANT: And then we talked about either having a comment view or, like, having an interactive place once you are on the site and looked at the photo. Kind of slow down the process. Liked it maybe there's a little point you can pick at, and you can find out, like, pick the person you want to learn more about them, you click on the garden that's there or the crop, and you learn a bit about the crop and how, like, maybe they just went through a drought or whatever maybe the farm belonged to their grandfather. So each photo it gives a context of why that's chose kind of to implement that there. So that means people can slow down and enjoy it a little bit more. +PARTICIPANT: And then we talked about either having a comment view or, like, having an interactive place once you are on the site and looked at the photo. Kind of slow down the process. Liked it maybe there's a little point you can pick at, and you can find out, like, pick the person you want to learn more about them, you click on the garden that's there or the crop, and you learn a bit about the crop and how, like, maybe they just went through a drought or whatever maybe the farm belonged to their grandfather. So each photo it gives a context of why that's chose kind of to implement that there. So that means people can slow down and enjoy it a little bit more. -NEIL: Cool. I think it has a little bit interactive. +NEIL: Cool. I think it has a little bit interactive. -PARTICIPANT: There's a service called thing that does that. But it puts -- it puts markers over the photos, so you can't just, like, enjoy the photo. +PARTICIPANT: There's a service called thing that does that. But it puts -- it puts markers over the photos, so you can't just, like, enjoy the photo. -NEIL: I'm out of time. But. Please keep continuing to talk. +NEIL: I'm out of time. But. Please keep continuing to talk. PARTICIPANT: Thank you. -[Applause] \ No newline at end of file +[Applause] diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-platforms-web-storytelling.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-platforms-web-storytelling.md index 88588edc..ef8de64a 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-platforms-web-storytelling.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-platforms-web-storytelling.md @@ -5,12 +5,8 @@ Room: Boardroom DAVID: This is momentous. It's the last session of SRCCON. I'm overwhelmed by a lot of the things that I've sat in on the last couple of days, and I'm sure you have, as well. It's been an interesting opportunity to the think about in this talk, on what I've seen, in the course of the last 24 hours, I've probably had my colleague help me figure out how does this fit in line with what we've heard this week. So I'm just going to frame the conversation first. I'm going to ask you a little bit, who you are. And I'm going to set expectations about this talk because this is a really, really big topic that I called in my notes, get you a CMS that can do both. Which I think is a great title. And... - - [ Laughter ] - - Yeah, I hope you y'all do, too. That's why I'm here. The topic, primarily being that we all probably, or many of us have worked on CMSes or have built them, or used them, that suit the in our websites, while we live in a reality that's increasingly pivoting towards publishing anywhere, everywhere, depending on the stories that you're producing and the journalism that you're producing. So let me came from things a little bit first with my magic little keynote device. So first of all, actually first let me actually start. Let's skip slides. I want to find out who we are so I know who we've been talking to. And I've done this a number of times. So I'm going to get there. If you're an engineer, please raise your hand. Yup, CMS talk. Okay. @@ -25,12 +21,8 @@ And that was easy when it it was the web because you said okay, well, I'm doing Scott and Dan, yesterday, are either of you here? Okay. Scott and Dan! Gave a talk yesterday that is kind of similar to this one, which is about how you would take a story and think about how it would be shown on Facebook AMP, or Google articles. Now, here's a question for you, who knows about Google AMP, or Facebook instant articles? Thank you. You're very connected in the world. Who has not? There's no shame. Thank you. And thank you. This is important. So Google AMP, which is accelerated mobile pages, or accelerated mobile products? - - PARTICIPANT: Products now. - - DAVID: Well, okay there you go. And Facebook Instant Articles are essentially a play to get stories to load instantly on your mobile device when you either search for them on Google on your phone, or you visit them on the Facebook mobile app. And this is something we talked a little bit yesterday, well, what does it look like when it goes to Facebook Instant Articles normally? Do you have to strip out all of your ad strips, and strip ought all of your imperatives and that's hard to design for. Before these problems are not fundamentally dissimilar to RSS feeds. It's syndication. We've done this before. It's frustratingly harder and the formats are not always aligned as simply as RSS was. But it's a syndication problem. So what I want to talk about are these other platforms. And I'm going to sort of set some expectations here. How do we publish to these other platforms and how do we create CMSes and how do we solve CMS problems and human system problems to allow us to publish to any other platforms that are not syndication platforms, that are fundamentally different formats? Whether or not they provide APIs? We're going to talk about this in the context, first, as soon as I stop talking, of what's stopping us. So what's the difficulty that we have as an industry, and as systems to doing this work, and then we're going to talk a little bit about inventions and questions about these inventions. We are not going—so I'm going to be completely honest with you. The other night I was totally freaking out because I was like, how am I going to arrive at solutions for this stuff. And I think—and I've talked a little bit about this last year, my goal—I think our goal in this is to come up more with questions, and to be able to take this back to our newsrooms and to our product organizations and think well, here are the problems that we have to solve. And I didn't realize the scale of the problems, so let's see if we can establish the scale of the problems as an outcome of these talks. Just as a reminder, that I've put this slide that your purpose is to speak the truth. Let's talk about the players. So I just came up with this as a rough list. We can talk about—I'm sure you'll look at this, and say, well, you're forgetting such and such platform. And it just wouldn't fit in my single-column table. Things—most places that your stories can end up that are not a desktop web experience, or if you're lucky, a responsive mobile web experience, RSS feeds, Facebook Instant Articles, and Google AMP which I just talked about, news letters, tweets, Facebook posts, Facebook video, YouTube video, they're very different. They're formed very differently and they're structured very differently when you're doing them right. Snapchat, podcasts, and I've left this one on here even though I went to—I went to a talk earlier about why robots are not content platforms but I left the robots thing in here, story, Stacy. @@ -41,822 +33,412 @@ So, because of the shape of this room, I am probably not going to do small group So let's call out some examples of ingredients. Some obvious examples of ingredients of stories and I'm going to write them on the board. What goes into a story that you include on the web that you would remix into some other platform? - - PARTICIPANT: Words. - - PARTICIPANT: Headline. - DAVID: In the beginning, there was the word. Thank you. Mandy Brown. The world's foremost proponent of words. - - PARTICIPANT: Headlines? - - DAVID: Headlines. We could talk about structural components as well as semantic structures. - - PARTICIPANT: Pictures. - - DAVID: Pictures, thank you. - - PARTICIPANT: Descriptions of pictures. - - DAVID: Captions. - - PARTICIPANT: Amplified, a byline or an author. - - DAVID: Okay. Authorship. - - PARTICIPANT: Date. - - DAVID: Date. - - PARTICIPANT: Version. - - DAVID: Versions. - - PARTICIPANT: Third party embeds. - - DAVID: We're getting really meta. Thirty party embeds. - - PARTICIPANT: Some sort of tracking mechanism? - - PARTICIPANT: Topics, tags, categories? - - - - - - DAVID: Thank you. Video? Moving images. - - PARTICIPANT: Audio. - - DAVID: Audio. Thank you. - - PARTICIPANT: Comments. - - DAVID: Ooh! Oh-ho-ho. - - PARTICIPANT: Related content? - - DAVID: Related content? - - PARTICIPANT: Metadata? - - DAVID: What kind of metadata? - - PARTICIPANT: That's just a big category. - - PARTICIPANT: And you've got topics and descriptions. - - DAVID: Yeah, no, that's... me-ta-data. - - PARTICIPANT: Do you want everything? - - DAVID: What I'm trying to do is sort of arrive at? There was one thing that no one mentioned. And it's interactives, and this is kind of what we talked about yesterday in the Commons. Who was in Scott's and Dan's talk yesterday? Okay. We talked a little bit about interactives. There are obvious constraints there, right? So these are all, sort of, ingredients and structures of the story. So this is how—these are the tools that we use, today, to write our stories. It's—what I want to think about, and just I don't even know if something that we can talk about right now. I mean, we're going to talk about this in a second. So assuming that you've got a hub and-spoke-model. You have a heart of a story, a concept. In many cases, in almost all cases, that starts with words, that expresses itself in these different places. ` So the question is: What is the spirit of the story? It could be as small as a tweet like what if your system—what if you didn't assume that everything was going to end up as a full-fledged story? It was just going to be a tweet. That's the spirit of your story. That's the heart of your story. So I want to think of this as we embark into the next—second next couple of sections. And this is going to be, sort of, more of a discussion now. I want to talk about what's broken. So if we're going to talk about how we're gonna publish to all these different spaces, assuming that we don't want to repeat our work. Assuming that we don't want to hire a million extra people... we don't have the money to hire a million extra people, what systems the place today are breaking down, whether that's in our CMS, or in our newsrooms, what about the systems today are insufficient to the task of publishing to, in some cases, five or six different places from the heart of the same story. From that spirit of that same story. And what's rigid or repetitive? So let's leap off from that. What's broken today? - - PARTICIPANT: Required fields. - - DAVID: Required fields. Wow. - - [ Laughter ] - - The star... - - PARTICIPANT: Internal modularity of content types. So if you're taking something, and putting it to Facebook, for example, in Instant Articles, the content block in most CMSes is just a block but if we understand it as a series of modules, it would be easier to turn it into whatever Facebook modules needs, or whatever AMP needs. - - DAVID: So the fact that it's a monolithic body field. - - PARTICIPANT: Yes. - - DAVID: Does everyone agree the idea of having a single, cohesive body to the article is a bit of a barrier to what we want to achieve? - - PARTICIPANT: I would actually disagree with that, just to borrow from the example that you have, in WordPress, like, shortcodes but the problem is valid, it's just that people are copy and pasting markup rather than structuring parsable data within the content field. - - DAVID: Got it. So lack of structure to the story. - - PARTICIPANT: I think a related notion with that, though, is that friction between the value in having structured data, and the needs of the editorial experience. - - DAVID: So they're fundamentally—they can be fundamentally at odds. - - PARTICIPANT: They can be. - - DAVID: Complexity is a bad thing, sometimes. Yes? - - PARTICIPANT: The fact that both the creation experience and the preview experience are desktop focused when so many of these things are mobile. - - DAVID: Yes. Desktop preview. Is it fair to say that the—that a web-centric preview experience itself is problematic? Is that something that... - - PARTICIPANT: Not if you have other CMS options. - - PARTICIPANT: That can be both a CMS default problem, but also, like, a cultural problem. Right, everyone's still thinking desktop's as the atomic ideal of the thing. - - DAVID: Yes - - PARTICIPANT: Is you start pushing out, you write by the least common denominator by all the shared platforms because you can't guarantee it's going to be there unless you're really limiting yourself. - - DAVID: Yes, to that. - - PARTICIPANT: Not engineering. Design for impact. So things that look really impactful on the web, or things that look really impactful on Facebook or Twitter when you're trying to push them out to other things they lose that kind of context. - - DAVID: Or the context itself may be part of the actual message. - - PARTICIPANT: Collaboration. Lack of. At least with ours. - - DAVID: As a practice—or...? That's actually, this is a big thing. So let's talk a little bit more about what's failing our collaborative practices. - - PARTICIPANT: Well, a one person can be in our post at a time and it's just not practical. And what locks it up, who has it open, who went home, and left it locked. - - - - - - PARTICIPANT: I would say complexity of adding new features because you have to support so many platforms and different things at this point. - - DAVID: Adding features. Yes? - - PARTICIPANT: It's really hard to have broader context. Like, not just related to content but related social context. - - DAVID: Unpack that. - - PARTICIPANT: Um, say, we have an article on the demographic makeup of people at the RNC. No one has made a good way of, within that article, or as related content to that article, looking at how the demographic makeup at RNC 2012, in 2008, and how that shifts looking at the broader context of the history of that event. - - DAVID: So historic context means that our stories need an explanation. Yes? - - PARTICIPANT: We also tend, I don't think we've figured out how to write to different need states. We assume that one article that's written once and published everywhere is the best for all the platforms instead of thinking that you have a user on mobile who only has three minutes to get caught up on the DNC is different than the user who has 30 minutes to really dive into, really go in-depth and try to figure out how to do that in one place. - - DAVID: Platforms need programming prerogatives. Every platform is slightly different. - - PARTICIPANT: How do you accommodate the newsroom's desire to make your project look special? - - DAVID: All right... - - [ Laughter ] - - Let's do, because we have a lot of designers in the room. I think this is very interesting, right? Your feature template. - - PARTICIPANT: They let you throw the designer under the bus. - - DAVID: I know! Some of my best friends are designers! - - [ Laughter ] - - You should see my party flyer designs from 1996. I do want to unpack that, though, a little bit. - - PARTICIPANT: So I'm that guy who's always asking for something special and there are a lot of people like me. But how do you plan for the fact that, you know, we want to be able to, sort of, brand projects on their own? And make that scalable, which I understand hasn't. - - DAVID: So I'm going to respond to that with a question. Are these decisions mutually exclusive? Do we have to decide between—and I don't know the answer—actually, I don't have an answer for this. I don't have a clearance for this. Do we have to decide between a structure, a system that permits for flexibility and remix, and distribution, and a high-touch expression of that, you know, that lives in maybe, a desktop experience or something like that. Where do we stand on that? - - PARTICIPANT: Is he saying it only lives on the desktop experience? I'm not sure if he's saying that. - - - - - - DAVID: Is that what you're thinking, or is there a high-touch version, for example, of a Snapchat experience? - - PARTICIPANT: I mean, if it would be great to have a system that would accommodate reoptimization of multiple platforms if we so desire. - - PARTICIPANT: So, like, branding persists across all the channels? - - DAVID: You had a question in the back. - - PARTICIPANT: Well, I'm really curious about the idea that kind of relates to this of what we invest in, and how long we're expecting our investment to return anything in terms of, you know, let's say I'm a newspaper, I'm going to buy a printing press or I'm going to invest that linotype machine, and it's a knowable investment with no return but if you're investing in CMS, essentially you can do anything, right, because we can all dream of those things we can do, but what you're applying always is a set of limitations and tradeoffs. And, oftentimes, in newsrooms, it's up to the developer who can do what they can don't, and they leave, and somebody with a different set of skills comes in, then they're going to want to change. So what are we investing in, and how long does it last? - - DAVID: Very good question. Let's take that and leap off of that. So, thank you for thinking of my experience as an engineer in terms of building this fantastic new CMS that fixes all of these things. But I also want to talk about—and this is more important. I put the CMS part first,ic, because we're all interested in the CMS pat because this is how I titled this talk, that's my bad. What's broken about the people situation? `what's broken about the newsroom itself, right? - - PARTICIPANT: Oh, boy. - - DAVID: What does my newsroom look like? What are the titles of people in my newsroom, right? How different are those titles from the people who were essentially putting newspapers and having them—having small children yell at you to buy them? Like, what's broken or not broken? What is a limitation of the current people systems that we have in place, whether it's newsrooms, or newsrooms and product going together, that preclude us doing that work there? - - PARTICIPANT: Different scales of time. So, for example, newsrooms tend to work on a daily or weekly cycle. - - PARTICIPANT: Hourly. - - PARTICIPANT: Hourly cycle. Minute cycle if we're tweeting, and products and development tend to work on months, yearlong sort of experiences. - - DAVID: Right. So fundamentally, that's a fundamental problem in general even with what we're doing here today. Mandy? - - PARTICIPANT: I was going to say, the skill set, what makes someone really good at writing articles or feature essays is not the same thing that helps, makes you really good at creating snaps, or Instagrams. - - DAVID: Reporting is not Snapchatting. Yes? - - PARTICIPANT: Patterns of behavior or workflows are inflexible and resistant to change. - - DAVID: Who's inflexible? Why are we inflexible? - - PARTICIPANT: I think a big piece of it is those different skill sets. It sounds like, to me, like those three things, what the question is, it's not that there should be multiple people, in general, on the same story, but one person covering one skill set in your story all at once, right? So your Snapchat person, your Facebook person, your Twitter person can be accessing it and writing the tweet, Facebook, or whatever version along with the editor who's doing the copyediting and clean-up. - - PARTICIPANT: There's also a lack of tools supporting it, right? So we have, like, decades of text editor experience. Like, everyone has multiple text editors at their fingerprints but we don't have a lot—we've had Snapchat for, like, two minutes. We don't have a lot of tools to help us be good at that. - - DAVID: Yes? - - PARTICIPANT: Even the concept of a draft implies that there is a state of being published. And maybe the thing that you're creating goes directly out into the world. So what does a Twitter editor look like? Does it need versioning? If it's a thing that you've just published, the draft doesn't exist until it's been published. So what does that mean for the test editor for that draft? - - DAVID: In the end draft, what does it mean to decide that you want to do it six different ways? - - TED: Lack of context or sophistication by the audience about how stuff is produced. So people have misconceptions or context collapse around if something does have flaws or a problem, people just end up like, "Journalism sucks!" And to the extent that transparency is produced, it's not a thing, especially when we're looking at common issues that gives you context for what happened, right? - - DAVID: Right. Is there a jack of all trades master problem in play here? - - TED: Well, yeah. It takes more of the context collapse problem, right? And whether people have an understanding of what an article or a snap, or any of these things are. And the extent to which, like, a CMS, or a system is responsible for tracking any of that, or making that transparent, or whether it's just the end product the thing that you're delivering. - - DAVID: Right. Yes? - - PARTICIPANT: The flip side of that is simply the fact that we need to publish to all of these different platforms, and, yet, and require different people to do it. It's now three or five, or ten different newsrooms in one. And we haven't maybe quite realized that we need ten times the resources of ten years ago? - - DAVID: That's the big one, right? Like, if you look at newsrooms—just to use as an example of where I work at at Vox. You have engagement, or you may call them social media editors, or whatever. You have people who are responsible for this vast swath of stuff, that I'm sure, whose title was not that. Their title was reporter. Is it even realistic to assume, or what can we do—and this is probably a good segue into unless somebody has a really pressing example of this that broke. And there's a lot of things that broke, and this is their cathartic, so thank you. What can we do to mitigate this problem that we have to staff up to do a million different things? Hopefully, we're going to—this is a lot of stuff. I'm going to going to make us walk through it. This is a lot of questions that we can ask here, that we can talk about. Primarily, it's—I want to, sort of, think about—so all these things that we've talked about here, that's a lot of stuff. I'd like to think about strategies, radical strategies, in some cases to rethink how our human systems and our technical systems create stories. So coming back to the core architecture of these stories, like, how would you think about a content management system, how would you think about a newsroom that was able to do all this stuff without being a million people large, and just completely collapsing under its own weight? Joe? - - PARTICIPANT: So I don't know if this is where you're going but you were talking about the spirit of the story and a lot of times we're talking about, in terms of different forms. Someone up here was talking about, you have to write differently for things, hast the common denominator? Well, what is the atom of content that we're managing? Maybe, we don't understand that, too, right now. - - DAVID: I mean, that, you've successfully uncovered my biggest worry/concern/question. And Mandy, and I, just to telegraph, Mandy and I have talked a lot about this, we thought a lot about how this would work. And you know, I think it comes down to this: What is the central conceit of a story. Like, how can we structure this so that we could address that? - - PARTICIPANT: Well, to me, one of the big problems is that, it's actually the spirit of the story changes story-to-story. And that a lot of our systems are currently built with an expectation of, "You will start here, and you will do this, and then you will do this." Rather than the conception of, "You can start anywhere and then move from there." - - DAVID: So non-linear—I'm going to say non-linear reporting and that sounds very cool, but that's obviously not right. That's not what we're talking about. It's not linear. - - PARTICIPANT: I think there's, I think there's also a certain problem in the fact that the term "story" means different things to, like, reporters and editors versus CMS. To a reporter a story is something that happens, or an event that needs to be reported on, that's not going to change tomorrow and it will be a new post in the CMS. So the idea of, like, the story as a unit doesn't really work on both sides. - - DAVID: Yes, words—words—words are horrible. And story is a great example, and we've definitely read into this. Everybody in here is, like, okay. So atom so this atom. So let's talk about this concept as an atom. Let's get out of the story realm. Let's get out of the story mode and let's get into starting to talk about atoms. How do we leap off from that in a way—so let's start with the angle of how do we reduce repetitive effort? So the example of a newsroom that has—of a CMS that supports ten different platforms, ten different types of atoms, or expressions of atoms, doesn't necessarily require ten separate people. And a classic example of this is if I'm going to create a CMS that allows me to publish to both YouTube and Facebook, do I have to upload two videos, right? Let's give us license to think that these things are possible—that it's possible to create a CMS that allows us to not duplicate effort. What are the ways in which we can reduce the duplication effort and the need to staff up for one person one end platform to make this happen - - PARTICIPANT: I would start with intelligent defaults if you have a summary, it would probably work over a number of platforms right off the bat but if you want to then go in and tweak and change that, then by all means, you have the ability to do that. Like, I don't have a separate RSS summary. I don't have a separate summary for the homepage—actually I do—but if I don't do any extra level effort, that stuff will carry over to the homepage, that would carry over to the the let's say, Facebook section, or the SEOs and I can intervene as necessary. - - DAVID: So smarter defaults? - - PARTICIPANT: There's probably a term for it. - - PARTICIPANT: So one of the interesting things that you said was some of these challenges represent the conflict between the creation and the optimization of distribution. And if you have that point on the board like what about a CMS system and a asset management system, and the problem is that most of them are created for creation but we're using them for STK-BGS because if you're optimizing for headlines, that's a distribution thing. And likely, we would make those more aligned with each other, or recognize that they are different things and split them out but right now, we have a weird mish-mash in the middle. - - DAVID: Let me ask a question, how much in the newsroom, the reporters and editors, how much should you be thinking about that this would be in ten different platforms. How much would you let that get in the way of distribution. - - PARTICIPANT: If—you're thinking where this is going to live with varying degrees of success.Tory newsrooms, where the headlines of their news stories are totally different teams so... - - -DAVID: So... `so you've got somebody else who can worry about that. I'm just going to worry about my atom and I'm going to let somebody else figure out how to allow it to gratefully degrade, or—gracefully TKPWRA*E deCabaretted, and turn that into a high touch experience into any platform. It's optimized for that platform. - - +DAVID: So... `so you've got somebody else who can worry about that. I'm just going to worry about my atom and I'm going to let somebody else figure out how to allow it to gratefully degrade, or—gracefully TKPWRA\*E deCabaretted, and turn that into a high touch experience into any platform. It's optimized for that platform. PARTICIPANT: So you need transparency for that platform, if you're one person, you need to be able to see what's going on on Twitter, to see what's going on on Twitter, and Snapchat, and so on and so forth. So visibility, so if you're going to understand things that are you don't understand in that context, and be able to produce context for these platforms, you have to see what's going on on all of them and not have 40 different applications open across three different devices in order to just prop what's going on with your stuff? - - DAVID: Like, is it actually being expressed in these contexts? - - PARTICIPANT: And what—and, you know, what does a Snapchat look like and what if it's going out next to other things? You know, most of our reporters probably have, even though they're writing the headlines, they don't have a sense of what that looks like when it dispose up on the home page. But you may not have the same visibility with the end number of platforms, necessarily. Which headaches it harder for you to take care of them, or do them well because you can't see it. - - DAVID: A preview question. - - PARTICIPANT: It's the preview but it's also the context of what's going on. A tweet doesn't live all by itself. It's in the context of other things that are being said and responded to. - - PARTICIPANT: So we shouldn't schedule a story around breaking news. - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, and I think—um... I think to be idealistic/utopic, you know, I think we can build tools from the, sort of, journalist tech side of things. We can build those tools to bring those contexts in. But what if we could apply political pressure on, you know, the various platforms and say, like, hey, if you're going to consume my content, why can't we be the place where that social activity happens? I don't know what that looks like but, sort of, rather than fragmenting the conversations across all of these places, actually start to be aggregating points for those conversations. - - DAVID: Yeah, and I appreciate you being utopic about it, and just as a reminder to everyone, we should be utopic. - - PARTICIPANT: I think maybe there should be a way for us to quickly highlight, sort of, the nucleus of the atom, be very, very main point of the story. And, from there, extract it, and figure out a way to do something with it, whatever that means. - - DAVID: So maybe you don't start with the nucleus. Maybe you arrive at the nucleus after you've done your work. - - PARTICIPANT: Making it easier to get help from other people in your organization. If you don't know the best way for Snapchat, or best way to close a tweet, maybe getting some kind of advice. - - PARTICIPANT: Also, analytics, they could give you feedback on how well you're doing. - - DAVID: Right. There's a... we can't all be experts in everything. Joe? - - PARTICIPANT: So this might be going out on a limb that might break under me. But I'm feeling like the atom metaphor is problematic because, like, we all don't know about water and atoms, right? Because seriously, I think Mr. You're talking about modules instead of a monolithic body content blog and I think that maybe we need to think in terms of more like different expressions of stories, and maybe, you know, some other metaphor of structure and layers is more valuable so that, I don't know, something that allows for the fact that you're going to recompose elements of a thing that is an expression as an article, or a Snapchat, those—the things within that might be more like atoms. I mean, not to belabor the metaphor but I think that it's something to be very careful about because we, otherwise, we get back into this situation where we have a monolithic body get try to serve multiple purposes and run into the lowest common denominator problem. And as we go, we should try to figure that out. - - DAVID: Stay modular. - - PARTICIPANT: To add onto that, it sounds almost the best metaphor is like a Photoshop file. You have a set of layers, and each layer might be added or subtracted in a particular context. But they're all in there, but you might not see them if a particular context which is what I was going to say, if you're going to share this story, different pieces to different platforms, then you're going to need different URLs as you share different things but, they need to be centrally managed for your center story. So there needs to be some sort of unique IDing system for collections of components within a story. - - DAVID: Right. So... okay. Cool. - - [ Laughter ] - - Right. Cool, dude. That's awesome! Right? Right. So I just want to highlight that, right, it's like maybe what you're doing is, you have this sort of scratchpad of modular content. You have all these ingredients and you, sort of, compose them together and what we've been calling a story, perhaps erroneously, is actually a repository of related, semantic-related content in that sense. Did you have a question? - - PARTICIPANT: I was going to say, one thing that's really great about the monolithic body is you can copy paste from the Google doc into it. And so how do he create admin experiences that are comfortable for composition. And modular systems are great and I think everyone from, like, the front end side love that, but a lot of those tools, people don't actually want to use, like, the really complicated quiz tool that takes you 20 minutes to do the thing when you would rather write and do a Google doc and paste it out. I think metadata formats in body, like RGML, and shortcode formats, that's an interesting way of maintaining a comfortable composition experience without having—there's a lot on both sides. - - PARTICIPANT: I was saying, well, what would be a good tool for that is decomposing tools. So you have a monolithic text field. You paste in your Google doc and everywhere there's a line break there's a button that says, break into a different atom here, and then you separate out that story into pieces. - - PARTICIPANT: But prose is not like npm modules. And so I feel like if the hard thing is the research, purely hypothetical, but if the hard thing is the research, make it easy to get access to the research, or make it easy to get access to the things that have been said before, and make it easy to compose, and get rid of all of the faff. The number of times that I've seen production managers who have spreadsheets, who need to be—you know, who need to check with every single person who's doing one partner a story to get a story together. And it's just this massive coordination problem. Like, remove all the faff, and make it easy just to do the writing because that may be the... - - DAVID:... the thing that you're doing. I'm going to stop for a second and I'm going to call out the reporters in the room. Raise your hand. What do y'all think about this? - - [ Laughter ] - - What we just got to, what we just got to, how does this make you feel? Does this make you feel excited? Does this make you feel stressed out? How many of you have called an engineer and said, I've had a problem copying and pasting from word and it looks bad in the CMS. Okay? How does—we've gone a long way here. Where are we at with respect to people who are in the newsroom? - - PARTICIPANT: So I think that there does need to be, sort of, this separation between the writing and drafting process, and then, I like the idea of decomposing it sort of after the fact, or tagging it, or structuring it kind of after the fact, or kind of creating a project almost after the fact, where all these other elements can kind of come together. I think the writing and the drafting and in the thinking of what that narrative is, and how everything works, kind of needs to sit outside of this, in a way and then as it is sort of the matter of storing, and parsing, and being able to take those components apart. And so what we've been talking about in building this, we're kind of thinking through how to build this, we want to take a lot of structured content out of stories such as notable quotes. We want to kind of be able to capture who the main characters are, the secondary characters, and all that. And I think that all needs to happen not by the reporter, necessarily but we're talking about the idea of librarians as being this whole sort of new group of people who might be serve—it might be just the natural evolution of the copyeditor role where they're sitting and saying, how do we parse this and structure this? And there might be automation that helps make that easier but that might be an actual librarian that's helping you figure out how all these parts get named and categoryized so that they were elsewhere, and also in your archives. ` I mean, there's so many considerations that I don't think that you can put all that on the reporter and the editor. - - DAVID: That's interesting. I hadn't even thought about that. - - PARTICIPANT: It's like a producer role almost. - - DAVID: It's like discerning entities and discerning structures inside reporting that doesn't infringe on the skills of the people who are doing, let's face it, the hard work, the really, really, really hard work. Yes? - - PARTICIPANT: I think one of the things that's really sort of constraining progress in a way with some of this stuff is pressures that are sort of—constricting pressures that are in place by software that is—has nothing to do with the CMS. Like, to use your example of publishing a video to Facebook and to YouTube, if you want to do slightly different edits, maybe it's just the title cards, or something like that, well, now you have you need to be hooked into the rendering process. You need to be hooked into Final Cut, and are we rendering the CMS platform like a video editing software? - - DAVID: That's a good question. When you're talking about a CMS that can do both. We definitely we want to end up in a situation with one monolithic system that does everything. I think it's interesting to think of decouple those and think of them in the same way. - - PARTICIPANT: Well, not just video editing management. I just mean, they want to use Avid, they want to use Final Cut. They're better tools for that and they want to be able to use that. So I think the ability to hook into those systems that automate things is pretty limited. - - DAVID: Be constrained in what the role of the software is. You had your hand up. - - PARTICIPANT: Speaking, speaking from a former manager, I like the idea of the atom forcing my reporters down to three words that are the magic that's... you know... but the reality—I've kind of realized, a lot of times we'll be publishing things standalone, things that we learned along the way that aren't the main point. And maybe, we just published them as stuff that's interesting, independent of the atom So I think something closer to something modular makes sense, you know, it doesn't necessarily have to hook back to the atom. - - DAVID: Right, but we don't start with the root. Maybe not everything is tied back to this one, central conceit. What are we—sorry. - - PARTICIPANT: Putting both of your comments together... if we separate out the creation process from the, kind of, management, and we build a really good creation process that includes research management, then, suddenly, all our reporters have all their research together in the same place, and they can collaborate, historically, with their own work and their newsroom's work, and like, all of the research that the rest of the newsroom has done in the past suddenly becomes one central library to do more research. - - DAVID: Right so we're going to get... - - PARTICIPANT: Bibliographic tools. - - DAVID: What were you saying? - - PARTICIPANT: Bibliographic tools. Getting underneath the final draft, right? We're not just storing the finished piece. I'm so proud of that piece, we're getting underneath that piece a little bit. Yes? - - PARTICIPANT: One comment from an editor's perspective. This is going to take a really long time. One of the biggest challenges that we have with our CMS, like a major thing has happened in the world, fuck, I can't publish this because I don't have an image. And CNBC is like two minutes, we have an image. And the most important thing is to get the news in front of the people who need the news, right? And all of these things only happen when you have the luxury of time. And this isn't usually something that you have in the process. - - DAVID: We're going to dive into that in one second. What if your audience is—what if your audience for that and this gets at the breaking news stuff that Alison talked about what if that audience is not on your owned and operated website? What if the best place for that audience is — - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, because the team that I was running, that's how we thought about things, if this is a news event, then we tweet it, but it has to go to the homepage, and we figured out how could we deconstruct the individual elements so that it can go out into the places that it could go out. When the reality is your social audience and your homepage isn't the same and we can't underserve one in that particular context. - - DAVID: Ooh, so that—so I feel the same way. But I wonder if I'm wrong. Can we—is it okay to serve—because, historically, obviously, we have underserved—and again, I'm not an apologist for social media of these other platforms. We've served these platforms because those platforms have not allowed us to publish in any reasonable way, and to be honest, still don't to be honest. Like this CMS we're inventing here is not possible. Some day it might be possible. It's not possible today. What if—is it okay to think about serving an audience that is not your web audience as the initial touch, or possibly, the forever touch, right? - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, I mean, we would send a notification before we had a story. Which was not ideal. But we would do it. I think it's like, we don't think of underserving as much of the temporality but what is the experience we're giving to them. So thinking of the lowest common denominator of the experience, we have to think about where is this going to make the biggest impact and sometimes when it's breaking news or anonymouses, the biggest news or Twitter notifications, or homepage flush but if it's a major piece, or investigative report that you've had six months TKWORBG it to work on, the exact thing is definitely affected by what is the audience that the needs to get in front of most aggressively. And I don't think we have one answer to that, very much. - - DAVID: Yeah, because we are all audience here in some sense but we haven't really think about—we've talked a little bit about the audience experience but literally only one thing but in the seven minutes that we have remaining, what are some of the other things that we aren't talking about with respect to this? ` - - PARTICIPANT: To that point, I think it's also—I mean, news is a large portion of, I think, what a lot of the people here work on, but, a content management system is also about more types of stories than just news, as well, and I think that's important to remember that, that that can lead into different paths. - - DAVID: Is there anybody in here whose system is not related to news? Content management system is not related to news? Yes,. Could you talk about—would it be okay, if you talked a little bit how this is related to your work? - - PARTICIPANT: I work for a public radio station that focuses on music and arts programming. - - DAVID: And how—well, you're here, so I'm going to assume that it's of interest to you. How is this thought process that we've been engaging in relate or not relate to your work? - - PARTICIPANT: Well, I think, you know, you have to—we have to consider publishing to other platforms, and, of course, we want to but with limited resources, you know, it's impossible. So I think we try to focus on what our strengths are. And so, you know, we can't publish to all these extra platforms because we just don't have the manpower for that. And so, I think it's important to focus on the things that you actually can do rather than on focusing on everything, and not doing anything well. - - DAVID: Right. So there's a core assumption here that we have to remind ourselves, I'm thinking, that we shouldn't try to imagine this story with relevance to—that all stories are relevant to all places. - - PARTICIPANT: Most places that publish news publish a lot of other things that aren't news. Like, a ton of Vox Media's content is not news. There's been... - - PARTICIPANT: Vox Media has a lot of animals. - - PARTICIPANT: Excluding watermelons, that's not those. But it's produced by the same people on the same platform in the same hour as people that run news. - - PARTICIPANT: I run something that's essentially a document CMS, right? Which is sometimes news but... - - DAVID: And it is often used in the service of news. - - PARTICIPANT: I'm just going to add, there's nothing there about how to make money doing all of that. - - DAVID: We have five minutes to solve the revenue problem! - - [ Laughter ] - - That's true. That is true. And I'm going to put this—wait, we have to put this down. - - PARTICIPANT: Also, you never said the word, "Print." - - DAVID: Right, we did not say the word print. That's okay. We did not do that. Sedit first. - - PARTICIPANT: There's also the question, what exactly does our editorial problem strategies look like and is that part of the problem of why we're having this problem? Are we continually working in outdated modes? Like our social audience, our reading audience, et cetera, et cetera, yes, sometimes they're distinct but they're not that distinct and they expect different things in what we give them credit for. So sometimes if in point is to get out this information and get them to the stronger websites for the longer read, then do that but how can we actually consider the communities that we're pushing into, or are we kind of running into them ahead with the assumption of what they want. - - DAVID: That—so this is an example, right? In the context of trying to come up with this talk, the realization—we came at the realization that this is not a technical problem, right? This is a people—this is fundamentally a people problem, right? It's like how do reporters need to change the word? We don't even have a strategy—like if I gave you a CMS, the open source CMSes that ports different platforms. I don't know how I'm supposed to, I don't have a Snapchat strategy. How do you put people in positions to solve these problems that had to the technical tools to solve them? Yes? - - PARTICIPANT: Sort of related to that and tying back to the money piece is someone said before about how do you justify the investment in a tool? How do you measure success against, in terms of business objectives, against investing in a tool, or set of tools? How do you show that you're helping the business by devoting all this time and energy into this tool that's supposed to do all these amazing things. - - DAVID: Not just in building the tool, but using the tool, like, what's the return on investment on publishing on these platforms. - - PARTICIPANT: And how do you do that on platforms that are emergent that your company doesn't know how to leverage in the first place. - - PARTICIPANT: And also, it would be the case that you're reinvesting in those tools and you're going to have to do the cut that you did before, or they're always going to be using the latest versions, so even if you're using instant articles, or AMP, you have to use the latest versions in those things because they've proven their value and you want to keep up-to-date on those things. - - DAVID: Maintenance costs times n. It's hard enough. We're in a really encouraging place here. - - PARTICIPANT: Our CMS has a very young feature that allows reporters to track qualitative outcomes from stories. And so thinking about how you build out a system that, like, oh, your story was mentioned on the floor of congress. This is really important for fundraising. How do you build systems that allow people to understand impact after something's published, and after, like, the bulk of the traffic comes in? Because those qualitative events, especially for big news stories have much more impact than patrons, potentially. - - DAVID: Analysis—trying to come up with a centralized pool of analysis, that, among other things reflects impact. - - PARTICIPANT: So where does the CMS sit within that broader organizational challenge? - - DAVID: You first then... no,. My finger is really fat. Sorry. You first. - - PARTICIPANT: So to that point I'm thinking, is that analytics and analysis a third stage after publishing, is that a third moment or is it part of the...? - - DAVID: Research... publishing analysis. I'm sorry, my handwriting is bad and it's, like, a minute from being done. Amy? - - PARTICIPANT: So to your point about this being a people problem. I think that it is fundamentally a business problem and you have to figure out your revenue model and what it is you're trying to do because we're trying to do everything to everybody and have one solution. And I don't think that that's possible. So, like, this is working the wrong direction. It has to work from what are the business pools. Is it reach? Are we doing advertising? Is it eyeballs, is that through third party revenue, or is that direct revenue? Are we just not going to worry about this? Are we going to look at other methods or other wins and then you build to those models. But I think until we settle on a model, or various models, you can't build a tool like this that, ultimately, serves the good of the organization. I mean, that's just... - - DAVID: Right, the question is: Do we bet the farm based on what we—how infected with existential dread are we that we want to bet the farm on all this? That's a good point. We have to ask ourselves if even this is a worthwhile effort to engage in. That's a really good point and question to ask. It is... okay. It's 5:00. We've solverred this! We'll solve this. We have a lot of engineers in the room. This is the spec. We're going to do this. I'm really sorry. I am really sorry that, you know, what we are leaving here are is really—and I've been telling people this over the course of this week, like the last two SRCCONs for me, I felt like I've been ticking boxes off, okay, well, that question's answered, that question's answered. And I came into this talk really overwhelmed because this SRCCON has been about adding questions and concerns and, like, trying to solve problems, and walking out into branches that might actually break underneath me. Like, this is really hard stuff. So there is an etherpad. I don't know if anyone took notes on the etherpad. But — - - PARTICIPANT: There's transcripts. - - DAVID: There's transcripts, thank you, Stan. You see, there's transcripts, thank you, Stan. But thank you, thank you all. Especially so late in the conference for being so thoughtful and helping to, sort of, think through these issues. I hope this has been useful to you. I'll go back to my Twitter account in case y'all want to talk about this any further. And, again, thanks to—thanks to everybody for showing up, and thank you to Mandy Brown for talking me off the ledge of this talk. But thank you, and congratulations. Great SRCCON! - - [ Applause ] - diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-remote-mentorship.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-remote-mentorship.md index 8c29903e..8f45b84c 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-remote-mentorship.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-remote-mentorship.md @@ -7,522 +7,262 @@ JULIA: And on that note we want to talk about office hours and mentorship. So I' Cool? Sweet. Okay. So people here, how many of you have taken advantage of someone else's office hours? - - PARTICIPANT: In college. - - JULIA: Yeah, that counts. That counts. Okay. Okay. Good. And how many of you have hosted your own office hours? Perfect. Cool. - - PARTICIPANT: Feel free to reach out any time, does that count as office hours? - - JULIA: Yeah. - - PARTICIPANT: And failure count? I have failure office hours. - - JULIA: Oh, me too. And that's what we're here to fix. So it's perfect and important information. Okay. So... we'll start with some notes, I think. So, who needs office hours, like, from the user perspective. Like, why would you want to go to someone and look for advice, or feedback? - - PARTICIPANT: You don't have a local or immediate resource for whatever topic you're talking about. - - JULIA: No local resource other reasons? - - PARTICIPANT: You have no idea what you're doing. - - JULIA: No idea. - - PARTICIPANT: Support external to your organization? - - JULIA: No support external to your organization? - - PARTICIPANT: So trying to get support from someone external to your organization. - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, like your organization doesn't have the expertise, sort of? - - PARTICIPANT: Or you have a job that's sensitive that you think would be too vulnerable in your working environment? - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, if you want a purpose on that have same thoughts. - - PARTICIPANT: Perhaps talking to people who do what you do, where your working environment doesn't have many of those kinds of people. Just, if the community is very distributed. - - JULIA: So sort of like a lonely coder sort of... - - PARTICIPANT: If you want to get a new perspective on something that—when you're trying to find new perspective but there's no one near you. - - PARTICIPANT: I find that as a freelancer, I find that there's only one person like me in every project I work on. - - PARTICIPANT: Maybe adjacent to that, knowing that you have a safe space to go ask questions because a lot of times, people are putting put out into the universe, but knowing there's someone dedicated to answering that question. And that's why that space exists. - - PARTICIPANT: People don't have, like, a so aren't plugged into a community. Like, if you're changing careers or communities, right, you don't know where to go and so having something where it's like, oh, you can go here is important. - - PARTICIPANT: Like first starting point kind of...? - - PARTICIPANT: What about, like, if you're a remote person, and you don't get that sort of hang out time that people who work at an office get, where it's not even, there's not even a goal; there's just like... - - JULIA: Just sort of like face to face. - - PARTICIPANT: Just like literally any contact with your teammates. That's one thing that I'm interested in 'cause I work on a remote team and I just wondered if there needs to be a "let's hang out time." Because things will eventually come up, even if you don't know what the point of the thing is. When you go to lunch with somebody it's not like let's go out to lunch and discuss this topic. They come up because you're around each other. - - JULIA: Exactly. Anything else? Or, like, in general? Okay. So that's for the—we'll just call it the user. And then for the host, what's the host trying to get from office hours, usually? - - PARTICIPANT: Preventing people from, like, feeling isolated? Like, it's kind of like if you never give yourself—if you never, like, create a space where you know people can ask questions if they're not comfortable asking in whatever other settings that you have, like, you're, sort of, you might miss cases where people feel alone, or feel like they aren't supposed to be there, and then they eventually—that gets—they get too far gone. I don't know, if "rage quit" is the right word. Before... - - JULIA: We know what you mean. - - PARTICIPANT: I don't know if it's selfish but making sure that the community grows they hire, particularly so that the people they hire aren't the same candidates all the time. And I think it would be really helpful, healthy for the industry if, like, if we had a better way of—I feel like we have a couple programs going that are educational programs, and it starts to feel very like, oh, all of our shining stars came in through the same path. And I'd like to stop that. - - JULIA: So, like, new recruitment paths? - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah. - - JULIA: I have horrible handwriting. Other reasons? Even things like trying to have one specific set time for people to talk? - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, that it's a good one, actually. I hate scheduling when I'm alone. So I like office hours because it's only a one way scheduling. It's like you don't have to do a back and forth in email. - - PARTICIPANT: Illusion of openness? - - JULIA: Yeah. - - [ Laughter ] - - No, seriously, we want all these reasons, right? Like, we're going to fix them the same. - - PARTICIPANT: I think it also inherently helps with openness, the diversity because people know that there's a space they can go where they don't have to feel threatened about organizing with someone higher up the food chain or cause and purposes, or it's less intimidating. - - PARTICIPANT: I agree but I disagree in that I still feel like it's a better strategy to go out to people. - - PARTICIPANT: I agree, yes. - - PARTICIPANT: But otherwise... - - PARTICIPANT: But nothing like where the onus is on the individual to, like, knock on the door of someone higher up the food chain in order to do something that might feel a little awkward and overbearing. I think that plays out differently in that event scenario. But, of course, as an organization, if you care, you would be going out and making sure. - - JULIA: So actual openness? - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah. - - PARTICIPANT: Illusion of openness and actual openness. - - JULIA: It's nice that the illusion comes first. - - PARTICIPANT: I think, just in general, it's actually, we can talk about it in terms of paying it forward. But if you've benefited from other people's mentorship, it's a natural course to kind of, like, pay that forward and help other people. It's specific to the fields but it's about finding people to work with, and also if you like what you do, you can see more problems out there, and understand the industry and see what's going on and open up the possibility of making a new connection that might be professional and valuable and things like that. - - JULIA: That was a handful of reasons. - - PARTICIPANT: One for seven. Just like visibility into your industry, or into the industry. - - PARTICIPANT: Do you mean building relationships? - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, building relationships. And also, I think just kind of like a—you're inviting, like, a serendipitous relationship that you otherwise couldn't—especially with just like generic open office hours, like, you would never go and find that person, but that person might come to you. So you're opening up that level of serendipitous relationship that, you know, is kind of... - - JULIA: I think that's a good reason. - - PARTICIPANT: Opening up the possibility for a relationship. - - PARTICIPANT: I think we mentioned that office hours can be both internal and external, so you can be speaking to a much broader community than the one that you're paid to look after. - - PARTICIPANT: It's actually just a really nice challenge, too. I feel like people who contact me and want help with stuff, like, it makes me think about—it was the one thing that I really liked about teaching, was that I had to figure out how to explain stuff to other people, and then they would come to. Like, I had to really know it because I was always scared to death that I wouldn't be able to answer the question. So I would then learn everything about whatever they asked, and it was great for me. - - JULIA: So, like, becoming the expert you claim to be? - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah. Other notes? Cool. So now, I think we'll sort of go through these lists and talk about the things that prevent people from achieving these goals. And then we'll get to the designers, which is better than plea talking. That would be great, too. So what might prevent someone from finding another—how would you phrase that? What's the opposite of a local resource? - - PARTICIPANT: Having a local resource? - - JULIA: So what inhibits that. Like, time zones or something? - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, like, time zones, or you're working in small organizations. Or you're working in organizations where you're one-of-a-kind or your community, like, if you live in certain portions of America, I imagine, that the tech/journalism community doesn't exist outside of you. - - PARTICIPANT: Even if—I mean on the west coast, I've noticed that a lot, just because the distances are greater. There's some level that we've moved past, and the level of community that's on the east coast where you've got, like, D.C. and New York, and these other does hes that are relatively close to each other, we don't really have that as much. So, like, even if there are a lot of journalists, like, we're not talking to each other as much. - - PARTICIPANT: The time zones is significant, actually. I mean, even for Slack groups and that kind of thing. Because on the west coast, too, you log in, and a lot of stuff is already done and gone and by the time you want to talk about things, people aren't there. So it's a legitimate issue. - - PARTICIPANT: I mean, I think about the—communities. You're going from five people in a pub somewhere to a few hundred community. And that creates a really different access to information if there's only three people who are doing what you do regardless of which organization you're in. That can be really hard to transfer information. Especially if you're competitors, right? So if if the only three people who do what you do in the city are your competitors, they aren't necessarily going to talk about certain things. Just like processes or... - - JULIA: And then so if you're trying to organize office hours, what sort of things would you want it to do to solve those problems? - - PARTICIPANT: You would have to evangelize these communities where these people live. - - PARTICIPANT: So I guess, are you asking asking why sometimes people don't answer them? So I'll answer that because I know a lot about open office hours, including yours. I've never done it. And part of it is, especially for some of those things out there, when you're an outsider, some people are really good at asking for help, and other people are really terrified of wasting other people's time, especially somebody you don't know. And there's always that issue of, like, as open and inviting as you ever can be, it's still—it can never be enough for some people who are just like, don't—or, like, when they say everyone do they really mean me? I mean, that's how a lot of people will always react is, like," but do they really mean me?" - - PARTICIPANT: You can't create this if you get a positive feedback loop in the community. If you positively feedback one human being, and then they commit to evangelizing their positivity, then they probably can afford to engage in that community. - - PARTICIPANT: I guess that brings up another idea: One way getting around it is doing the more traditional type of marketing case studies. If you think this isn't for you, this is some other people that have felt that way, and then got a lot out of it. Not that you don't want to spend any more time marketing, but that's potential way that that person is actually like me, or whatever, yeah, testimonials. - - PARTICIPANT: Maybe seeing whether kind of your call for office hours out there, it was kind of an idea saying, you don't have to have specific questions, or you don't have to have super exciting things that you want to talk about, if you'd like to show up and talk about whatever you're working on this week, I'm open to talking about what you're working on this week, trying to lower the bar, or the perceived bar of needing something amazing to bring to the table. - - PARTICIPANT: You could publish what you have seen or what kind of topics get covered. - - PARTICIPANT: We can talk about explain and see kind of thing. - - PARTICIPANT: Oh, feel free to come to us with these data things come to us with your data things, or you can come to us if you're — - - JULIA: So kind of advertise your expertise specifically? Or by way of what you've done before? - - PARTICIPANT: Well, I guess that is an interesting point, like, for me. Like, as someone who's an outsider, it's not clear necessarily what the outcomes of these office hours are supposed to be. Like, what does this office hour do? Like, how do people use it? What happens? Like, what is it? - - PARTICIPANT: It's kind of scary. - - JULIA: Sure. So defining outcomes? - - PARTICIPANT: Yup. Yup, and but if by one hour we will have created the illusion of openness. - - JULIA: Okay. So how about now outcomes from the other side? When you're hosting office hours, what are you hoping the outcome will be? - - PARTICIPANT: Anyone shows up. Like, I have tried to do it—I run a remote team. And because of, like, I said, it's hard to schedule individual time to meet with everyone in different time zones. We try to do something where at a designated time, somebody would be in a Hangout, and somebody would be coming in, asking questions who's literally on your same team. And people hadn't been taking advantage of it. And we didn't do it again. And we tried it again in a couple of weeks and I think it was because of unclear goals. Like, sort of, we didn't know how to further encourage people to feel comfortable doing it, even though we knew them and paid them. And so we kind of tried with a failed experiment. But we want to keep trying again how to make people feel comfortable showing up to something where they don't know what they're going to be asking necessarily. So I don't want to feel like I'm forcing people to do it. I only want to do it if they want to do it. But for some reason there's, like, a mismatch of goals. It's hard. - - JULIA: And how about when people do show up, what makes it successful, maybe? - - PARTICIPANT: They're not crying at the end? - - PARTICIPANT: I mean, I've done this once. And the times that it felt successful were like, oh, I mentored this person and they feel comfortable enough that they can come back to me later, which, I put out this call and I was like hey, I'm interested in mentoring people, and I got a flurry of things and almost none of them I heard from again and I felt like that's where the failure of its, right? Because I was trying to set up, like, a support network, or act as a way to introduce those people into a support network. And it didn't work for most of them but there were a few of them where it was like, objection, this person came back to me. It was like, oh, how can you help me connect, and that was one of the things that felt successful where it was like, oh, this is a mentorship relationship now. - - PARTICIPANT: I did one for public—not for the team a couple times where it was like a Google Hangout. And anyone could come on and ask questions. And the positive feedback I got from that from people was, it helped them, at least a little bit, overcome their imposter syndrome in that specific subcommunity, even though it was a, like, a fairly niche project. And there wasn't, like, any big organization behind it. People were still intimidated because there was still an us-versus-them thing about it, when all you see is these people's activities online and you never see their faces, or them talking about it, but just seeing the people involved in the project casually talking to each other, that they're also called to ask questions on, I got positive fine from people like whoa it's really cool to see all the people in the same place and being included in that. So getting people to overcome their fear about not being part of the cool kids' club. In reality we want every to get in our club. It's really not about being cool at all but that's the perception that people naturally form, I think. - - PARTICIPANT: Prior to my role in the Coral Project, I worked in education and diversity and inclusion. And a lot of academics in law school. So there was a lot of these people trying to go to office hours and take advantage of stuff. But a lot of it was also mentoring. And I saw a lot more accessing when we were I having folks who needed help and then inviting them to speak with me. And we had developed these relationships. So it was always, like, the mantra that we spend 90% of our time on 10% of students. But you can't be super upset that you're not—you have to find tremendous value and find. So I think it's also, like, a paradigm shift is it one person that you're really helping out, or a handful, and where are you helping them outdoor? - - PARTICIPANT: And if I approach people based on that kind of judgment, you're saying, you don't want to say it out loud, that you need someone helping you, how do you kind of couch that mentorship to avoid kind of having the initial kind of judgment on the person from coming across. - - PARTICIPANT: I think a lot of it, too is in some ways, I casually got to get a landscape. So what I did a lot was the way I worked specifically with, like, minority student organizations. So I got—I had a lot of face time with them initially. And just paying attention to the questions that they had. And it was just very casual, just starting conversations with them about their experience. And that kind of—drawing from there a little bit. And so, now, similarly, why this was very interesting to me was that when I transitioned into design, it was also because I did an online boot camp. And all of that was through a mentorship, as well. So now we do pay it forward and we also have a Facebook group. And as I see folks struggle here and there, then I'll message them privately on Slack and then hey, the question, whatever but it's rare, hey, if anyone needs help, message me. No one does that. But once you can identify someone who maybe is kind of putting into the universe that they are slightly struggling. And that also takes a lot of courage. I think a lot of that is folks in law schools, or these folks in these communities are like, hey, here's my weakness, I'm pronouncing it out for all to see. I think that's hard. - - PARTICIPANT: Is it different if you approach it by topic like saying you came to office hours, we were going to specifically address this person's... do you think people are more likely to come through? - - PARTICIPANT: Not necessarily. I mean, this was a very—in education, it's a very limited context, also, because there's so many different things going on, and the students are just—a lot of times, just tuning out these kinds of things. So I think this is just a very limited instance but... - - PARTICIPANT: I participate right now in a coding mentorship where I'm a mentor through a non-profit that I'm involved in. And I think what makes it work in that case, and I've talked about it before was that, the mentee, and the mentor make a commitment to each other at the beginning. We do it in three-month sprints. So I have to show up once a week, no matter when we figure out the time. But I'm showing up for that person and they're showing up for me and it's a mutual commitment that we make, we're set on a time and I've also, I mean, I was a TA for a while in grad school and I had office hours and people would show up but that felt like a very different kind of relationship where it wasn't that kind of thing, with the role commitment. - - JULIA: Yeah, that's a really good point. - - PARTICIPANT: But it's also scale, right? Is it one to one or one to a few? - - PARTICIPANT: This scales to only a couple people. - - JULIA: Okay. So we've mentioned the things that are important, or, like, goals, outcomes, commitment, and feeling comfortable. Like, generating a feel of a relationship between the two parties. So how about what are the technical problems when you're trying to deal with this, especially remotely? - - PARTICIPANT: I have one, which is that I hate discussing things in text like, in general. I don't like to discuss, specifically in texts. And I always try to get us to stop discussing things in text when we could have, like, a video call. Like, GitHub issues is a good example, or, like, Slack is another good example. And Twitter is the canonical, horrible example. It's the worst possible place to discuss something. - - JULIA: Right. - - PARTICIPANT: So my dream would be to be able to lock a GitHub issue comment until someone had a video call with the other person. And after they've had the video call with each other, then we could open it up for comments again, for example. - - PARTICIPANT: Can you say more about what makes that...? - - PARTICIPANT: Well, it's not a toxic bad. It's like a time waste for a lot of people, and then it also, a lot of people complain that, then, they get overwhelmed with the amount of backlog that they have to read. And I just don't think that for something that you have to—anything that you have to hash out or explain or, like, I don't know, it's hard. It's, like, face to face is just so nice for so many reasons. But I feel like we're—there's always this barrier in a remote setting where it's like, well, I can type when I'm not wearing pants and I'm in bed still. And I could type right now. And I have to, like, schedule a call, and make sure I'm presentable, and get on whatever, you know, then it's like a barrier. And so, if there was a way to solve the scheduling issue and ingrain it into our existing communication tools in a way where it's like low barrier and not intimidating to ask someone to get on a call with you, and not aggressive about it. But if it was baked in as a virtue, hey, we've identified a complicated topic, let's talk about it. As opposed to chat about it, which is kind of frustrating. - - JULIA: Sure. - - PARTICIPANT: With a remote team, that lack of face-to-face is just magnified, right? Because you want to have those normal humanizing interactions so that it becomes—that text communication is even more glaring in terms of, like, the context that it's missing. - - PARTICIPANT: And also, the key is to recognize when that is starting to happen. Because sometimes text is fine but there's that point, this probably should have been done already. Where it's like, okay, it's time for video and then hit the video link and finish it up. - - PARTICIPANT: I think the only cost, at least where I work, where we're totally remote, the costs to be cognizant about this is a lack of permanent record. You can't read through the conversation if it's not permanently in text. So that's what stood out for me but I get totally where you're going. - - PARTICIPANT: One of the things that we tried to do with the tech team that we work with is if we talk about and if anything comes out of it, we try to figure out where that issue needs to live. Maybe it lives on GitHub, maybe it's some documentation. Maybe it's them bringing it back to the Slack for the internal channel, or the tech talk channel, or whatever. And if something is said verbally, that should have a longer life, or be for more people. Then we figure out where it should live and someone will just transcribe it there. - - JULIA: So now I'm thinking, now, let's try to design some solutions. So I'm thinking workflows. Sort of, the ask, like, what the process is for the ask, the actual meeting, and then a resolution to, sort of, resolve those problems to try them from coming back. Like what you could do with those three pieces of the puzzle, to just improve the whole open office hours, sort of, setup. Sound cool? Do we want to do, like, two groups, three groups? One big group? I figured it might be better with scheduling or something, you know? - - PARTICIPANT: Smaller groups seems like it would make sense. - - JULIA: Cool. - - [ Group Work ] - - PARTICIPANT: Hey, quit having good ideas over there. - - JULIA: So do you guys want to talk about what you were talking about, and then we'll...? - - PARTICIPANT: Sure. Anybody want to summarize? - - PARTICIPANT: So we were trying to figure out, I think, in part, like how you address the problem of getting people into—how to combat the uncomfortableness of the pin-drop problem, right? How do you make it they're not the only ones who chime it, make it more welcome. - - PARTICIPANT: We called it the pin drop problem because it feels like you're the only person asking the question. - - PARTICIPANT: And my grand stupidity will be revealed. - - PARTICIPANT: Look upon my works in dismay. So the idea was to have, like, a slackbot or something that would take an anonymized message, and so you send a question, and it would be anonymous, and it wouldn't release those questions until a certain time during office hours. And then the person would answer then. But a person could answer at any time, and it would just queue up for that to be answered. It wouldn't force people to put their names, or force to put their names out there directly and publicly on what they think is a stupid question. - - PARTICIPANT: It also lets you ask the question at the moment you're stuck, and not two weeks later at office hours when you've forgotten. - - PARTICIPANT: Okay so a good question to be asked over long periods of time and leading up to the office hours. - - PARTICIPANT: So find, like, the office hours person, there's a bot on there on Slack all the time. Everyone has access to it. And they can shove questions right away into a queue, and then later I read those questions and then anonymously answer them. I don't know how I would answer them, through video, or text, or whatever. And there's no reason for people not to show up live, and not answer them more, but it queues up the questions sort of. - - JULIA: That's a cool idea. Thanks. Annabel, do you want to...? You've got the notes? - - PARTICIPANT: We were also thinking about using Slack as a vehicle for engagement. And we were talking about Calend.ly in talking about how people might engage in office hours, or how people might be free. And then thinking of reminders as a mechanic to get commitment out of your community. We thought about the kind of vulnerability, as well, that people might feel in asking questions and we thought about how you might build reputation and trust. Maybe producing resource materials at the back of any questions that were asked so that people could look at resources, as well, come to actual people, maybe as a reference to you are not alone in asking these questions that you have. And also, buffering that you probably get asked the same question 20 times. Anything that I missed? - - PARTICIPANT: How would the Calendly part work? - - PARTICIPANT: We didn't really explore. But we mentioned that people with time would list their time, and people could claim it. - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, I think the other part was that, we got into that by talking about how to get the fact that you're available out there. I mean, we kind of looked at the idea that it's probably best to find an already-existing community that is kind of is of your community, like a news generator, for example, and then talk to the people that run that community and say hey, could we at least have a channel for mentorship availability and then it drops a link in there, and maybe some kind of a reminder system that goes on. So kind of compress this idea that you're available into a link, that you can put it into a place, or into a community where people are likely to be able to see that. - - PARTICIPANT: And welt of ways of prompting topics or reminders of specific kinds of collaboration or... yeah. - - PARTICIPANT: The question is: What would you love to do professionally, question mark? Let's talk about it. Or, I'm, you know, I'm—if you're experiencing these languages in different industries and these things, that's also a two-way street because also the people who are looking for help could put in the same exact mirror image needs as that one. - - JULIA: Cool. Well, we're out of time so thanks for a great discussion. - - PARTICIPANT: Yay! - - [ Applause ] - - PARTICIPANT: I assume we can contact you at any time with questions? - - -JULIA: I'm available Fridays from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. central. \ No newline at end of file +JULIA: I'm available Fridays from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. central. diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-technical-ideas.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-technical-ideas.md index 3911b03e..0dd17c72 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-technical-ideas.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-technical-ideas.md @@ -7,112 +7,58 @@ BO: Does everyone have, like, markers? There's not enough paper. Welcome. Welcom So being the very first session, I think it is appropriate to do some introductions. So just, like, your name, and if you want to say, like, where you work, or what you do, and whatnot, but I'm interested in your name, and how you use data visualizations in your life. So I'll go ahead and get started. My name is Bo. I make data visualizations for a living but not necessarily for a wide audience like you might. I make visualizations specifically for clients, so that is an interesting, kind of, twist in that, often, I'm making these graphs, and dashboards, and web apps, and things like that. And throughout, I'm able to ask them, "Does this make sense?" Can you understand this?" versus, it's a luxury of making a very specific thing, for very specific people versus a wider audience. So that's me. I want to go around and let's start with you. - - PARTICIPANT: I'm Marie Connelly, and how do I do an introduction? I don't so much right now, but I would like for that to change. I do community work with a book team at Vox Media and a lot of my job is communicating to people who use our platform. So folks who are writing for us, and may contain technical information—putting in technical information is sometimes a hard challenge in my day to day job. - - PARTICIPANT: I'm B. Cordelia. I use data visualizations to teach people who don't really understand technical things—technical things. So my last one that I was really proud of was, like, a completely physical poster that was interactive that I could move around to teach people the publishing process, and the digital publishing process. - - PARTICIPANT: Hi, everyone, my name is Jeff. And I'm with the Coral Project. I currently don't use data visualizations a lot but I do have a background with data on the store side. So building databases and things like that. And I'm actually interested in getting more into the visualizing data. In particular, wanting to know, how can you take arbitrary datasets and recommend intelligent visualizations for users up front and allow them to customize those as needed. - - PARTICIPANT: Hi, my name is Pietro, and I'm one of the first ones this year. I'm with Vox Media, and I'm working with video tools so really won't with visualizations and I'm trying to see if there's any overlap with the things that I know. - - PARTICIPANT: Hi, my name is Anu and I'm a data reporter with the Washington Post, and usually I use data visualizations to kind of understand a bunch of numbers, and to make sense of those quickly. - - PARTICIPANT: I'm Shaelyn, and I'm another Simple Commons, and I use data visualizations mostly for analytics to see how people are using our website. - - PARTICIPANT: I'm Lydia, and I'm also Simple. And I use data visualization in similar ways—just understanding massive amounts of numbers, and, kind of, seeing overall patterns in those. - - PARTICIPANT: Hi, I'm Brittany. I'm with the Blue Bird Graphics Team. I use data visualizations for storytelling and for exploration, too, with data science. - - PARTICIPANT: Hi, I'm Kanya, and I'm with Studio Networks and I make data visualizations, and tools for data visualizations. - - PARTICIPANT: Hi, I'm Josh. I'm a freelance journalist and web developer, and I do data visualization, oftentimes, maybe less-well-defined data. So I'm interested in, like, better ways to visualize more qualitative data that isn't necessarily well standardized in commerce networks. - - PARTICIPANT: Hi, I'm Anna I work in Product at Condé Nast. I don't currently use data visualizations and I'm really interested in how you can communicate really technical ideas to a really non-technical audience and I'm interested in how you can use data visualization to help do that. - - PARTICIPANT: I'm Dawn Garcia, and I'm with the Joules Fellowship at Stanford. And I don't do data visualizations but I'm a fan of visualizations. And I'm trying to understand how to better story tell with data. - - PARTICIPANT: I'm Andrew Tran, I'm a data—we use visualizations to distill and communicate effectively, and delightfully if we can. - - PARTICIPANT: I'm Hunter Owens. I use data visualizations to help teachers and students to understand how they're learning. - - PARTICIPANT: I'm Michael Andre, I'm a developer at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newsroom and I use virginses to help reporters understand the data they have. - - PARTICIPANT: I'm Josh, and I'm just getting into data visualizations excited about the wealth of information that's available to them, both in exploring open data in San Francisco, and actually analyzing data, and meeting up. - - PARTICIPANT: I'm Melly, I'm a software engineer at Mapbox, so I use data visualizations to basically map. So I use it a lot. And yeah, I'm interested in how maps can help us tell their stories. - - PARTICIPANT: Hi, I'm Madeline, and I'm an editor at The Guardian mobile lab. I don't use visualizations, but we're compiling a map, figuring out how we're going to implement it. - - PARTICIPANT: I'm Lydia. I don't personally use data visualizations. But we use a lot of data. So I'm interested in learning how we could use visualizations for our team. - - PARTICIPANT: My name is Emily Withrow, and I'm faculty at Northwestern University. I teach primarily in the Night Lab but I also teach information design for our grad students. - - PARTICIPANT: My name is Katie Park. I make graphics at NPR Visuals. And, I use data viz both for my own reporting and analysis purposes but also, primarily for storytelling and presentation. - - PARTICIPANT: I'm Brian. I work for a culls called Boucoup. We have a great data visualization team that I'm not on. So I mostly admire from the sidelines. So I use it to derive joy and information when it's well done, and anger and frustration when it's not. - - PARTICIPANT: I'm Patty Reeves. I'm a UX developer at Alley Interactive, which is a web development company for publishers, I, in a previous life was an audience editor at a metro newspaper, Main. So I did a lot of data visualizations on explaining our audience data to the rest of our company, and when needed, explaining stories our audience. - - PARTICIPANT: Hi, I'm Juan, I work as a web app developer at NPR, Visuals, and I use data SREURPBGS mainly for explore tore analysis and for presentation storytelling. - - PARTICIPANT: Hi, I'm Martha, I'm a software developer, when I use data visualization, it's just to understand the mounds of data that I have, and I don't know exactly what I have, so I look for patterns and I look for information out of the data. - - PARTICIPANT: I'm Ariana Giorgi, I'm a computational journalist at the Dallas Marine News, and most of my job is to make data viz for storytelling purposes. - - BO: Cool. Well, thank you, everybody for sharing. So it seems like about half the room may be already doing graphics or data visualizations, or even teach visualization. So you probably know more than me. And I would love it for you all to learn from you folks. So I will try to incorporate some things equally in the activity portion but in the after-discussions to kind of had illuminate some of that. So here's how it's going to go. For the next 45 minutes or so, we are going to have two parts. Okay. So the first part is this activity session in which you are all going to be data science consultants. Where your project is to create a series of "data"—pretend you have data—visualizations with these markers, and papers, and things like that. And then—so after a couple of minutes of breaking off into groups and doing that, I will alot, like, 15 minutes for the drawing portion. Then each team of, like, three or four people, however you want to divide amongst yourselves, will present. And each individual will present if you want, or if you feel comfortable doing that, at least as a team. And then, finally, I'll do some discussion on how our team actually did the visualization, and what we learned, and what we didn't learn. Does that sound like a good plan? @@ -123,236 +69,126 @@ Okay. So you're all data scientists at Datascope. Welcome. Your client, their na Or oftentimes, it seems like things are being booked, but people are not using the space. They just book a full day because, you know, space is rare. So does everyone, like, understand that kind of general prompt? So this Sensors Inc. is developing this app that is designed to hopefully solve this meeting room/booking problem. So they're building—they've built a prototype like a mobile app in which you, like, go to a room, and you can say, live-book it right now. Or it tells you realtime, Meetings are going on, and what's not going on. And how many—what capacity your meeting room size is versus how many people you need in your meeting room, and things like that. And they do that realtime thing by having sensors in the room. So it's a mobile app but it's also, like, physical sensors in the room that can tell you if the room is occupied or empty. So they built this prototype stuff. And they've built the prototype sensors, and they're testing it on their client, let's call it Busybee, LLC. So let's pretend—I just, like, made this up, obviously—this is Busybee's office space. And there's different bookable rooms in different sizes and capacities, and things like that. And so Sensors, Inc. has installed sensors in each room, and also with the mobile app that they've developed, they can track who's meeting. Again, it's all anonymized, and there's no privacy issues. So Sensors Inc. lets people realtime see, and book the rooms. -So this was—so now, Sensors, Inc. is coming to you, data scientist, data viz experts, to use data visualizations to explore one of these questions. In real life we had to explore, like, a whole list, and it was a multi, several-week project. But for 15 minutes, I want you to break off into groups of three or four, and then within your groups, within your group of data science/data viz experts, choose one of these questions, and then try to use the next 15 minutes to draw out some solutions. And then we'll share at the end of 15 minutes. So let's go over each of your questions to try to see what you're trying to answer. One, how might we help facilities managers at Buzzbee, LLC match demand with available space by providing actionable recommendations. So the actual clients, the people that you're showing these data visualizations to are facilities managers at Busybee. And so it's very accommodating for groups of companies of at least a hundred or more, they have staff, or a group of staff that are managing. There's meeting rooms. And it's put really easy to tear down walls and rearrange the rooms and things like that. So that's your audience. They don't have data background. Often, the last math class they took, probably in high school, or something like that. So keep that in mind when you're designing for facilities managers at Busybee. Two, how might we infer social dynamics from a product usage. If this product is successful and build out to many people, they may be able to infer more population-wide social dynamics from certain types of companies, you know? And so they're trying to collect data from this, but also, the audience for this might be a more general audience. You know, anybody who might be interested in, like, social dynamics within a office space as meeting rooms are booked and unbooked in a way. So that's the wider audience and you don't know exactly who that audience is going to be yet. And number three, how might we demonstrate to Sensors, Inc. how this prototype app/product helps to improve workplace performance? And this was real. Sensors Inc. came to us—or Sensors Inc. is coming to you wanting to develop this prototype app. But they have the or own analysts. So they have their own technical analysts that think these are more quantitative, and with a more quantitative background. And they want to use data viz to show whether this app is even helping this supply and demand technical audience. So that's your audience. The additional constraint is that you're not coding this up in a web app or anything. This is a low-budget thing. And so they want the deliverables to be on paper, of course. So for printable reports. And this was true, too. They wanted something not where you can click around and zoom out and zoom in, but, like, they want printable reports. Okay. So does this make sense? Do you have any questions so far? - - +So this was—so now, Sensors, Inc. is coming to you, data scientist, data viz experts, to use data visualizations to explore one of these questions. In real life we had to explore, like, a whole list, and it was a multi, several-week project. But for 15 minutes, I want you to break off into groups of three or four, and then within your groups, within your group of data science/data viz experts, choose one of these questions, and then try to use the next 15 minutes to draw out some solutions. And then we'll share at the end of 15 minutes. So let's go over each of your questions to try to see what you're trying to answer. One, how might we help facilities managers at Buzzbee, LLC match demand with available space by providing actionable recommendations. So the actual clients, the people that you're showing these data visualizations to are facilities managers at Busybee. And so it's very accommodating for groups of companies of at least a hundred or more, they have staff, or a group of staff that are managing. There's meeting rooms. And it's put really easy to tear down walls and rearrange the rooms and things like that. So that's your audience. They don't have data background. Often, the last math class they took, probably in high school, or something like that. So keep that in mind when you're designing for facilities managers at Busybee. Two, how might we infer social dynamics from a product usage. If this product is successful and build out to many people, they may be able to infer more population-wide social dynamics from certain types of companies, you know? And so they're trying to collect data from this, but also, the audience for this might be a more general audience. You know, anybody who might be interested in, like, social dynamics within a office space as meeting rooms are booked and unbooked in a way. So that's the wider audience and you don't know exactly who that audience is going to be yet. And number three, how might we demonstrate to Sensors, Inc. how this prototype app/product helps to improve workplace performance? And this was real. Sensors Inc. came to us—or Sensors Inc. is coming to you wanting to develop this prototype app. But they have the or own analysts. So they have their own technical analysts that think these are more quantitative, and with a more quantitative background. And they want to use data viz to show whether this app is even helping this supply and demand technical audience. So that's your audience. The additional constraint is that you're not coding this up in a web app or anything. This is a low-budget thing. And so they want the deliverables to be on paper, of course. So for printable reports. And this was true, too. They wanted something not where you can click around and zoom out and zoom in, but, like, they want printable reports. Okay. So does this make sense? Do you have any questions so far? PARTICIPANT: What factors do these sensors collect, or can we make that up? - - BO: You can make it up. Yeah. In real life, the sensors only collected whether the room was occupied or unoccupied. So somebody's—at least one person is in the room, or it's totally empty. And that was a binary thing. But for the purposes of this exercise, just pretend that they can collect, like, whatever you wanted to account for. Any other questions before we get started? Is this exercise clear? - - PARTICIPANT: Mm-hmm. - - BO: Okay. Great. Well, break off amongst yourselves and I'll set a timer for 15 minutes and then we'll present at the end of 15 minutes. - - [ Group Work ] - - If you have haven't already, you should start drawing. Five minutes. All right! - - PARTICIPANT: Hey, YO! You're welcome. - - BO: All right. That was actually, like, 18 minutes because what I forgot to say was, in addition to talking amongst yourselves about which question and what your angle's going to be, also, this is the time to draw. So I think every group has a couple of graphs and visualization sets. So let's go this way. Where each group, and hopefully, each individual, but at least each group will present their thought process within their brainstorming session. Let's start with those groups who did number one. Did anybody talk a little more? Does your team want to start, and then we'll go onto the next one? - - PARTICIPANT: Do you want me to start? - - PARTICIPANT: So okay. So we were trying to decide on a way that we could, like, present this to someone, so that it would be useful to them, in a way that they could visualize the room. We thought about the way that it's conveyed, but in addition to how often, how many people are using the room, and, in addition to that, when are people using this room. And so we tried to put it in the simplest format that we could think of. And so, on this side, we have all the rooms and they're actually... ideally, they would be organized by popularity. So we have a few just floating around. And they also, they're drawn by size. So you would be able to, like, get a feel for how big that space is. And then, over here, this would be, like, a histogram of how many people were using the room at a certain time. And so you could see if the people were using the room in the morning, or in the afternoon. And also, we decided to put in this, down the line at the top for, what the capacity of the room actually is. And, that way, if there's, like — - - PARTICIPANT: In that case, right? In that case, you would see that this is, like, occupied throughout the day. But we, the people that are in that room are under usage, under capacity of that room. So you could create actionable things, like, create a threshold that would be allow you to book that big room for two people that want to use that room, or kind of like that. Another thought would be, I don't know if you want to — - - -PARTICIPANT: With the national park example, we see that, that means that we should be able to see what's happening in that room, maybe it's too hot in the morning, or too cold in the morning. Or something like that. So change based on what time you start during the day. - - +PARTICIPANT: With the national park example, we see that, that means that we should be able to see what's happening in that room, maybe it's too hot in the morning, or too cold in the morning. Or something like that. So change based on what time you start during the day. PARTICIPANT: Yeah, so we thought this would be a good first hit of which ones would be popular, and it would be good to help them with that, and even with the office spaces. - - PARTICIPANT: Even for room number one, that's occupied, and is, like, near full capacity, you could even poll your employees and say why is this room so popular. Like, if you were going to move to another building, try to make the rooms as that one because people like it, right? So that was our thought. - - BO: Great. Anyone have any questions for this group? Cool. It's interesting that you say that there are certain rooms which are only booked in the afternoon, or something. That actually happened and it turns out exactly like what you said, this room was actually, at certain times too hot to do anything. And they found that out. And there were other things that if the room was consistently under-utilized, the actionable insight was to cut the room in half, make two tiny meeting rooms, because from the calendar data we actually see that the rooms are actually being used for one-on-one meetings. So if you have a ton of, like, two-person meetings, then why do you have so many ten person meetings, in a big room like this? Who was the other group that did number one? - - PARTICIPANT: We did. - - BO: Both did? - - PARTICIPANT: We were four. - - BO: Four. Okay. Got it. Why don't you guys go. - - PARTICIPANT: So we made two different graphs that kind of had the same approach where we wanted to chart the usage of the rooms over the work day. And so I have a graph of people walking in and out of this room. And so we were, like, the biggest meeting is usually in the morning, and there's a bunch of people meeting in this it enperson room. And we know we imagined, like, having a 40 person room, and then finding out that they only use it on conference days. So it's usually only two people hanging out in there, and then usually everyone goes in there for lunch. - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, and so we figured that we could use that information, and make some proposed shifts for what the room's capacities would be. So you would go from something like this, where you have one room just being used way more than the others, and then if you kind of shift things around, you have a lot more consistent usage in all of the rooms. - - PARTICIPANT: So the patterns denote, like, the room capacity. So if you saw that the really highly used rooms are the same capacity, clearly we need more of those, versus the ones that no one's using. - - BO: Very nice. Anybody have any questions or comments? - - PARTICIPANT: No, that was not a comment. We were saying, we did the same question, too. - - BO: Why don't you? - - PARTICIPANT: Well, if nobody else has questions. - - [ Laughter ] - - I don't want to hijack the whole table. All right. Yeah, so the main assumption we made is that the actionable items, whoever the facilities manager is reconfiguring the room makes sure that they're dynamically sized and the occupancy, or the size of the room is configurable. So we kind of ended up with this, like, ten where it's the days of the week, and three time zones—time slots, morning, afternoon, and evening. And it's just a preferred configuration of the rooms. So on Monday mornings, you probably need more small rooms, and then on Friday, you have sort of all hands sort of thing, with bigger things. So it's based on usage data and usage history. - - BO: That's interesting because there's, like, a thing that some office facilities managers, companies are doing where there are, like, movable walls. So it's actually—that's something that, you know, might be useful for you. Others? - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, I think, like, checking the different times, like, sometimes if—when you are, like, exploring information, the time span that you grasp, or that you take is important. It shows you patterns that they don't show you. Like, if you go to a week, then you see some patterns and usage. But if you go to a day, you don't see things like that. So sometimes... I mean, when you do that, like, for real, you need, like, to say, let's do it for months, let's do it for weeks, let's do it for days, let's do it for hours. Something like that. - - PARTICIPANT: I think also, keeping in mind the intended user for this, I think we ended up with something similar because we felt a lot of the dynamic planning and optimization shouldn't be on the facilities person, right? Like, that's done on the background. That's the analytics part. Like, they don't want to have to, like, kind of constantly, like, use this. It's just like these configurations that are preset are going to get you 90% through your day. - - BO: Um, okay. Which, actually, so in response to that, all of these questions kind of bleed into each other. They're not completely independent, right? So the next one, social dynamics talks exactly about that. So maybe for whatever meme people, nobody wants Monday-morning meetings. I don't know why anybody would want that. Maybe you shouldn't have meeting rooms, or something like an open space or something. So did anybody talk about number two? - - PARTICIPANT: We did. - - BO: How about your team goes first, and then your team. - - PARTICIPANT: So we did see some overlap with the kinds of questions that you were looking at. One of them was looking at which rooms are used most often with kind of a heatmap display. But we were kind of—we were trying to ask questions about the social dynamics of, like, who's involved in booking meetings and participating in meetings, and how do certain patterns of equality play out, or efficiency. So we looked at small multiples for who's booking meetings. So asking, like, what level of seniority are they at, what is their gender, what team are they on, to try to see if there are any sort of patterns. One thing that Emily noted was that a lot of times women are asked to book meetings, or do, like, administrative tasks more often. We were wondering about efficiency. As you have, like—so do your meetings get more or less efficient with the number of senior managers that are involved? - - [ Laughter ] - - Possibly, this curve could have been a little steeper. Who knows. - - [ Laughter ] - - Seeing when people prefer to meet, which is kind of related to some of the first questions. And I really liked this idea of, I don't know if this is an effective visualization, but the kind of distribution of floorspace, or floor time. So, depending on your meeting size, or the makeup of your meeting, are people speaking with, like, an equal duration, or are they speaking in a certain order? - - PARTICIPANT: We imagined that the sensors could differentiate between the voices of the room. So, it's sort of the... yeah. - - PARTICIPANT: Did we leave anything out? - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, and this one is team performance plotted against frequency of meetings. - - [ Laughter ] - - ... which is not what—this is not the positive... yeah. - - [ Laughter ] - - That's a leading question. - - PARTICIPANT: We also talked about, like, if you had, like, you know, more data about the employees, a personality test, if you could ask any of those questions against that kind of data. - - BO: Yup. Cool, in the interest of time I want to move on to the next group who did social dynamics. - - PARTICIPANT: Okay! Here we go. All right. So we did some very similar things in terms of thinking about, you know, looking at this space that's being used over time, and how many, you know, people were supposed to be in that meeting, how many people actually showed up, who was using the space when a meeting is not scheduled, that might start to show you about how people are kind of working together, both officially, and unofficially, I don't know, informally? There you go. And then thinking about that, over the course of, again, not just a day, a week, but also look quarterly, you know, depending on the type of organization that you work for. Maybe there are things like, oh, everybody's slammed into meeting at the end of quarter, because it's crunch time, what could we do about that, or the end of the year, if you're in parts of media organizations, are there certain times of the year, or certain events that, I don't know, political conventions that either bring people into this space and encourage them to collaborate, or disperse everybody and encourage them to be staring at and working on their computers, working. We were also looking at if you were tied into the calendar system, and you could see what's the meeting invite subject, you can start to get... this would be more challenging on paper than dynamically, but you could start to get a sense of what are the—what's the meeting about? Or when are people kind of having all their one-on-ones, versus having some planning sessions, versus other kinds of things. There was more to this. We did also talk about, sort of, like, team, you know, looking at it team-by-team, who is in meetings, maybe a lot? And, you know, both as an indication of who's collaborating across teams, but also, as an indication of, oh, is this team constantly just in meetings, and maybe not hitting some of the things, you know, their deliverables are, or whatever, you know, they're supposed to be accomplishing, or are they in meetings all the time, still getting a lot of shit done, which would be exciting. I think that was... - - BO: That actually speaks to a point that I wanted to address, which was that, when we are making visualizations, it's really important, not only to understand who the audience—of course, that's already kind of implied in these three points because I very specifically told you who the audience may or may not be, but also, what the audience is interested in. So a lot of you were looking in, oh, are people more efficient if you have different types of meetings, or frequencies or meetings, or things like that. That is clearly something that somebody from a place like Busybee would want to know. So using a visualization answering a more complicated question, they would want to read it even if it's multidimensions or not. So anybody else who did the social one? Let's do the last but not least final one for Sensors, Inc. - - PARTICIPANT: All right. So we kind of thought about, after using all these particular insights and getting information about each of these rooms, this is, like, a big presentation, you give to the execs at the end saying, oh, well, this justifies the cost for this particular service. So who we want to do is include this in—distill it down to two kind of concepts, to save you money. So the way that we thought the way that we would illustrate that was measuring out and averaging out the duration of the meeting time to see when a service comes into effect and people were learning from the analytics from all the conference rooms. And then, on top of that, whether the occupancy of the room, of the spaces actually increases, as well. So you could kind of say, okay, well, the duration of the meetings, they shrink maybe, like, 30 minutes, and then divide that by the median amount, or the salary per hour, and so that saves you this much money over time. And then you can say, because you realized that you know putting not enough people in to fill these rooms, and then divide that in half, and so you spend—you saved this much money by putting people more efficiently into the space, and you got rid of half, of the cost constraints. And you save this much money. So it's kind of an over-time comparison. - - BO: Yeah, the Sensors, Inc. loved seeing, like, well, how many dollars are we saving here? So that, also, keeping that in mind is also a good point. Did anyone else go? - - PARTICIPANT: We did the third one, as well. - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, we started by asking similar questions that I think many of us asked. Like, what is the average time length of the meeting, how many people are in a room at a given time. Like, if it's a big room and there's a bunch of people in it, you could be using a smaller room, the percentage of reservations that use all of the scheduled time. How many people need the room but there is no availability. And then we kind of came up with this idea that we could do this in room capacity measures. So instead of looking inside a room, it's tied in with, I've got three people who have to go to this meeting, I have three meeting rooms available. So it eliminates that problem, you've got a meeting for four people but there's only the teeny tiny room available. So it kind of solves for that. And we basically, well, we arbitrarily decided that the best capacity for the meeting rooms at all times is 85% full, so we made a distribution graph to show what an ideal spread would look like. So it would show the executive of the board, or the committee, or whatever company it is you want to have your prototype app, what they could be getting with your app. - - BO: Especially for the analysts at the Sensors, Inc. group, they loved seeing the distributions. But the people, the facilities managers at the Busybee Corporation, they didn't care, they wanted the simple bar graphs and everything. But the simple bell curves was something that they liked. We have two minutes left. It's 11, 28. If you leave now, I won't be offended at all. I know that's the time we have. But the last slides we have are the real mock-ups of what we ended up doing. This was a separate client. One thing that I wanted to... Yes, so the heatmap idea, we absolutely did. This was one of our first examples. So the floorplan, everything is made up. All the data is made up. This was before we had the data. This was part of our brainstorming deliverable action. So there's a concept of how many people can fit in a room, and how many people are actually in the room, and then the percentage full, right? @@ -363,26 +199,14 @@ Another thing. A lot of their facilities managers really loved this concept. So So your brain is not that really good at determining whether a pie slice like this is bigger or smaller than a pie slice like this, or this. Certainly, much less so when the pie slices are stacked like this. Can you tell if the red one, or the light purple one is bigger, or smaller. Maybe, but by how much. But it's very difficult. So unless you have a really good reason for wanting a pie chart, generally not a good idea, in our experience. This is much clearer, and if you guys disagree, I would love to hear your thoughts, too. But this is my... I think this is better. Another final idea, this was tracking for certain people on the app. Like, I wanted an extra large room in the small room at different times of the day, and then there's a heatmap regarding the number of searches and things like that. And again, for the analyst, this was really exciting to see, because you can explore different types of room demand versus time of day, or day of week, and things like that, but, actually, a lot of people just thought that this was too much for—you know, your brain only has a certain capacity to, like, process things before it's able to make conclusions before they forget, okay, what were the axes again? So accounting for that, especially if you're wanting to deliver this in a report that they skim, unless you circle something like this, which was okay. Like we... this was a more complicated diagram which we offered to walk them through, step by step. Okay, this is the x-axis, this is the y-axis, this is the actionable thing, where small rooms across the board are searched for higher. More people want smaller rooms whatever time of day it is. That's fine. So, like, stepping through a visualization they liked. But they didn't want to just see it and explore it for themselves. Some people liked to explore it for themselves, and some people really don't. And so that—those were the types of the I think so that we wanted to say. And, just really quickly, the real final thing that I wanted to show you was this was, like, a completely different client, completely different use case, but this was, like, a—and it was the actual words are kind of anonymized out. But this was, like, a heatmap that was multidimensional. And you had to really read it. It took, like, five minutes to really read this. But this particular client really liked that because, they were then able to present this, and once everybody in the room was able to understand it. They were, like, oh, that's what that deep red rectangle means, and it was really insightful. And it really showed that our client was the expert in the room. And so that was a completely different use case which we learned, and I was completely surprised about that because we wanted, something that was really insightful but if anybody else saw it without her, they wouldn't understand. - - [ Laughter ] - - Which is true. A lot of people want that, and find it useful and a lot of their presentees, might find that useful, as well. So yeah, are there any other points that you wanted to discuss before the conclusion of this? - - PARTICIPANT: Thank you. - - BO: Great. Well, thank you so much for attending my session and I hope to see you future sessions today and tomorrow. - - PARTICIPANT: Okay. Thank you. - - -[ Applause ] \ No newline at end of file +[ Applause ] diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-threat-modeling-code.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-threat-modeling-code.md index 17afd081..f94d2f07 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-threat-modeling-code.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-threat-modeling-code.md @@ -1,27 +1,27 @@ Threat Modeling for Code: When is Bad Code the Better Solution? Session facilitator(s): Julia Wolfe, Ivar Vong Day & Time: Thursday, 10:30-11:30am -Room: Innovation Studio +Room: Innovation Studio Julia: Hello, I'm Julia Wolfe, I work at the Wall Street Journal as a news app developer and I am presenting with Ivar. He's at the Marshall Project and seems like that's all he wants to say. So welcome to threat modeling for code: When is bad code going to s on the screen? When is bad code a better solution? Ivar and I both—we talk a lot about the overlap betwe editorial. We have strong feelings about when they should and shouldn't overlap and. So just a couple of quick things before we get started. We are being transcribed for this talk by the lovely Norma who's siting straight ahead of me. So when we start get nothing discussion, we're going to try our pass to pass around a mic, just to make it a little easier for her to hear u means that if you'd like to go off the mic, please say so, because otherwise, everything you say will get written down. -And when you do get the mic, please speak closely to it or we will get a lot of feedback and in room, it will be especially horrible. So keep that in mind. Because we are especially cruel. We want to start this morning by geting you all up and moving a little bit. If you like, hopefully We're going to do a little bit of that. We're going to some straw polls, kind of get a feel for the room, get a sense of who we all are, where we have stand in this kind of battle of product and editorial, so we're going to some simple yes or no questions. We're going to ask questions and if the answer is yes, we'd like to you stand over this side of our space, and if the answer is no, to this side: There's a lot of people which is super-cool, so we might get a little close, but that's SRCCON, right? +And when you do get the mic, please speak closely to it or we will get a lot of feedback and in room, it will be especially horrible. So keep that in mind. Because we are especially cruel. We want to start this morning by geting you all up and moving a little bit. If you like, hopefully We're going to do a little bit of that. We're going to some straw polls, kind of get a feel for the room, get a sense of who we all are, where we have stand in this kind of battle of product and editorial, so we're going to some simple yes or no questions. We're going to ask questions and if the answer is yes, we'd like to you stand over this side of our space, and if the answer is no, to this side: There's a lot of people which is super-cool, so we might get a little close, but that's SRCCON, right? So, yeah, how you guys feel about standing up? Moving on forward a little bit. -Yes, yes, I appreciate this. Yeah, so let's get everybody up into here, and then we're going to ask a series of questions. Perfect. We're going to ask a series of questions. Yes is to the window. No is to the wall. And we're going to try Yes to the window, no to the wall. And do we do we need to move the table there so people can this is a great journout, which is a good problem to have but -- +Yes, yes, I appreciate this. Yeah, so let's get everybody up into here, and then we're going to ask a series of questions. Perfect. We're going to ask a series of questions. Yes is to the window. No is to the wall. And we're going to try Yes to the window, no to the wall. And do we do we need to move the table there so people can this is a great journout, which is a good problem to have but -- -AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think we can squeeze. +AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think we can squeeze. Ivar: All right. So we've got like what, 8 questions? Julia: Yeah we've got eight questions -Ivar: I have broken something in production. Yes to the window, no to the wall, and I think we have ... +Ivar: I have broken something in production. Yes to the window, no to the wall, and I think we have ... [laughter] @@ -31,19 +31,19 @@ Which is go, we've all broken something in production. I have talked to someone CMS and no is you've never -- -AUDIENCE MEMBER: If I have, I've forgotten. +AUDIENCE MEMBER: If I have, I've forgotten. -Ivar: This is actually surprising to me. +Ivar: This is actually surprising to me. PARTICIPANT: We have a dedicateed build server for graphics. -So yes is you have something that may it looks like a—Julia: I'd like to add, if the answer to any of these questions is I don't know, which is We can go to the no/no dedicateed category. +So yes is you have something that may it looks like a—Julia: I'd like to add, if the answer to any of these questions is I don't know, which is We can go to the no/no dedicateed category. -Ivar: So this, you know, everyone, +Ivar: So this, you know, everyone, well, we've got 80% are on the no side. The people on the yes side are v lucky people, I guess, to have dedicateed build server graphics. Into Norma, how are you? -NORMA: You're doing awesome. +NORMA: You're doing awesome. PARTICIPANT: I have launched something if if I don't know if it works on mobile. This is a safe space. Be honest here @@ -59,19 +59,19 @@ Meaning tools we build for yourself to make your lives easier is not what we're PARTICIPANT: Wow. There's a lot of yess. That's awesome. Does anyone want to share a cool tool? -Ivar: Yeah, this is fascinating. So we're going to do -- +Ivar: Yeah, this is fascinating. So we're going to do -- Julia: Somebody built a where's my conference room -Ivar: OK, this is great, we're going to try to pass the mic in situations li So it's easier for our transcription friend, but—sure. There we go. Yeah, where is my conferenc It started. I wrote this in like 30 minutes at the end of the day on Friday, several years ago, when somebody sent me a PDF of all of the conference rooms, max, and I was like, holy shit, this So I threw it together. It's a quick locateer map where you had a drop-down and it turned into this huge news room tool that I now burdened wi whenever they move desks on any floor. But it's the most popular thing I've ever built, but, yeah. +Ivar: OK, this is great, we're going to try to pass the mic in situations li So it's easier for our transcription friend, but—sure. There we go. Yeah, where is my conferenc It started. I wrote this in like 30 minutes at the end of the day on Friday, several years ago, when somebody sent me a PDF of all of the conference rooms, max, and I was like, holy shit, this So I threw it together. It's a quick locateer map where you had a drop-down and it turned into this huge news room tool that I now burdened wi whenever they move desks on any floor. But it's the most popular thing I've ever built, but, yeah. -PARTICIPANT: All right, so I built a—this is a whole excuse me. I built a D3 sortable for our gear department, but they ended up using it twice. But the thing that I -- +PARTICIPANT: All right, so I built a—this is a whole excuse me. I built a D3 sortable for our gear department, but they ended up using it twice. But the thing that I -- PARTICIPANT: Can I ask that people say their names? PARTICIPANT: oh, yeah, I'm Lowe and I'm at wired. And that was psychiatrist -PARTICIPANT: hi I'm Yuri Victor at Vox, and built meme tool that is useed by I think close to 600 different newsrooms and organizations now. Yeah, cool, hey, everybody. +PARTICIPANT: hi I'm Yuri Victor at Vox, and built meme tool that is useed by I think close to 600 different newsrooms and organizations now. Yeah, cool, hey, everybody. so I'm not going to talk about @@ -101,7 +101,7 @@ I have a totally different perspective. Ivar: What's that? -PARTICIPANT: so, I'm Eric and I work on open source tools and I run a site called redocs, which does documentation for lots and lots of software and we actually built our own in-house party system. Is it echoing backwards? OK, better. So we just built our first party in-house ad H it's inspired by the deck, which is a Mac and designer and kind of. We run first-party ads, we don't do any third-part. We basically built the network that feels good for programers. And because we have a targeted audience we're able to kind of build a product for them that they will actually enjoy and like, because we're not a mass consumer thi And we can sell that as part of the story and we can sell it as ethical advertiseing. You're a tech company, you want to reach programers, you want to use ethical advertiseing that they can agree with so you can tell the story about being a as well as being a good partner to open source and software, so -- +PARTICIPANT: so, I'm Eric and I work on open source tools and I run a site called redocs, which does documentation for lots and lots of software and we actually built our own in-house party system. Is it echoing backwards? OK, better. So we just built our first party in-house ad H it's inspired by the deck, which is a Mac and designer and kind of. We run first-party ads, we don't do any third-part. We basically built the network that feels good for programers. And because we have a targeted audience we're able to kind of build a product for them that they will actually enjoy and like, because we're not a mass consumer thi And we can sell that as part of the story and we can sell it as ethical advertiseing. You're a tech company, you want to reach programers, you want to use ethical advertiseing that they can agree with so you can tell the story about being a as well as being a good partner to open source and software, so -- PARTICIPANT: The next question is, I have written internal documentation, yes to the window, no to the wall. @@ -129,7 +129,6 @@ Ivar: OK, so where's the line here? There's a like a continuing—which is OK. B PARTICIPANT: I have a story, but not a good one. - Ivar: good story as in positive story? Julia. No. No. Ivar: Like a story that you're like check so—out of the people on the no side, just a show of hands, how many do write HTML email templates? @@ -158,7 +157,7 @@ So let's keep that going. I'm going to switch to the etherpad which was posted i Ivar: So just to provide a starting point, I think the tension between CMS product teams, for lack of a better des editorial teams that need to publish in like an hour, right, we found all different solutions. -PARTICPANT: Some are you create your own mini CMS, some are like trying to build really sophisticated UI interfaces in web browseers for less technical useers to build content. Hashtag content. So I'm curious, just to continue the story front. And we can use HTML email newsletters, it might be a little bit better to talk abbased visual storytelling and I'm curious how people solved this problem at their news organizations. Some people do subdough people build really sophisticated subdomains. Does anyone want to speak to how you solve that problem today hello I'm Gideon and I stole this story. We do similar things where I work. I know so a friend of mine who useed to work with me, he works on this BBC tasteer thing, so it's lots of speculative th projects useing new hip stuff but the one thing is they have an expirey date on everything. And it says this thing runs for 62 days and it just disappears after that. So a declaration of what you're doing that's ephemeral, rather than maintain blob for some promise that that thing is going to last, when there's an argument that you're not building stuff that's maintainable in the same way as an art room. So I'm just puting that out there. Just try and maintain it. Just kill it. +PARTICPANT: Some are you create your own mini CMS, some are like trying to build really sophisticated UI interfaces in web browseers for less technical useers to build content. Hashtag content. So I'm curious, just to continue the story front. And we can use HTML email newsletters, it might be a little bit better to talk abbased visual storytelling and I'm curious how people solved this problem at their news organizations. Some people do subdough people build really sophisticated subdomains. Does anyone want to speak to how you solve that problem today hello I'm Gideon and I stole this story. We do similar things where I work. I know so a friend of mine who useed to work with me, he works on this BBC tasteer thing, so it's lots of speculative th projects useing new hip stuff but the one thing is they have an expirey date on everything. And it says this thing runs for 62 days and it just disappears after that. So a declaration of what you're doing that's ephemeral, rather than maintain blob for some promise that that thing is going to last, when there's an argument that you're not building stuff that's maintainable in the same way as an art room. So I'm just puting that out there. Just try and maintain it. Just kill it. Ivar: That's fascinating. I think most people think for archiving, right, is how do we make this stuff survive ten years from now. And you saable? @@ -168,7 +167,7 @@ One is based on WordPress, well, not for long. We have something that's called F Julia: I think the feature builder a lot of newsrooms have experience with. I know I've experienceed those things kind of growing out of control, so I don't know if some people have stories to try to figure out how those nice immerseive experiences that don't quite balloon. For people up close, too, if you don't want to talk and up don't want-to-wait for the mic to come, you can just run up to this one. -PARTICIPANT: Hello. I'm Daniel. I want to throw a concept out there so everyone has a familiarity with it. I think in the last few years services for runing what are called integration tests automatically against your codebase cropping up for from or very cheap and recently there's been some services cropping up that offer visual regression testing as a service for like free or very cheap. For me personally it's always been the holy grail. A system that goes back and takes screenshots of all of your old content and then will alert you if any of that ever changes. You might want to consider looking into that for the more expensive to produce features, asserting that they always retain that original form. Will. We're going through this right now abuse we're trying to move to CSS and trying to maintain the fidelity of our archives while we're doing that, many, many different postings is certainly a job. And I'm wondering, it certainly got me thinking about this and I'm wondering if anybody has really clamped down on arbitrary HTML and doesn't allow it or get us as close as possible to not allow it. We've got a lot of ways to include arbitrary HTML into our website right now. +PARTICIPANT: Hello. I'm Daniel. I want to throw a concept out there so everyone has a familiarity with it. I think in the last few years services for runing what are called integration tests automatically against your codebase cropping up for from or very cheap and recently there's been some services cropping up that offer visual regression testing as a service for like free or very cheap. For me personally it's always been the holy grail. A system that goes back and takes screenshots of all of your old content and then will alert you if any of that ever changes. You might want to consider looking into that for the more expensive to produce features, asserting that they always retain that original form. Will. We're going through this right now abuse we're trying to move to CSS and trying to maintain the fidelity of our archives while we're doing that, many, many different postings is certainly a job. And I'm wondering, it certainly got me thinking about this and I'm wondering if anybody has really clamped down on arbitrary HTML and doesn't allow it or get us as close as possible to not allow it. We've got a lot of ways to include arbitrary HTML into our website right now. yeah, so I work at Vox Media and I'm working on a beta editor that's going to replace our existing editor. Which is a tiny tiny V box that you write into and it sucks and it inserts horrible shit into your HTML arbitrarily, blah, blah, blah, so what we're doing now at least is storing everything as rich text and that gets interpreted into HTML when it needs to. It can idealy press a button and grows to Apple news and or you can press a button and it can turn into a script. So that's what we're doing and that's why we had the need for the ability to insert arbitrary, but ugly-looking blocks of HTML and have that be separate essentially because also you're—it's going to be stored as Richard text, it's HTML. So that's what we're doing. I don't know if that answers or speaks to what you're saying. @@ -210,7 +209,7 @@ I was at an iOS shop that made ads for magazines and it was so small that for a Ivar. Platformization. -PARTICIPANT: So at the Texas Tribune we're working on of the site. We built a tool that if you want to embed a video, if you want to embed a quote, we're still iterateing on what styles we want to do already, so we basically have a news house tool that they can quickly change the code that's being grabbed but otherwise the editors take the code and paste it in. It's not ideal but we're able to track the click events and that sort of thing and see what's working for both reporters and and that's going to inform the redesign. +PARTICIPANT: So at the Texas Tribune we're working on of the site. We built a tool that if you want to embed a video, if you want to embed a quote, we're still iterateing on what styles we want to do already, so we basically have a news house tool that they can quickly change the code that's being grabbed but otherwise the editors take the code and paste it in. It's not ideal but we're able to track the click events and that sort of thing and see what's working for both reporters and and that's going to inform the redesign. PARTICIPANT: My name is Will. I work in CBC in Toronto. And one of my old employers, the barrier to actually solving all of these problems is actually on the political side of the organization, because newsroom developers were actually bared from useing the c FTP. So from two to three years, ever component we made was actually hosted on personal Google drive folders. And a that in about six weeks, there are literally dozens o interactives across that organization that will stop working overnight. I don't think they know that yet. @@ -220,13 +219,13 @@ Large Canadian company that we won't name that owns all the newspapers. We had t Yuri: Yeah, I can talk about process in this stuff. -I work at the storytelling studio at Vox, and we're editorial. So we work directly with editorial, the whole process is with them, the collaboration, the communication, the meetings. And I think there's two styles, right, like you have the long-term thinking and then the short-term and we have to experiment, like, this is where journalism failed for ten years and we're just geting back to being like, you know, fuck it, let's do it on robing eu. And I think that's really important * for doing stuff. And so you have do have that. And so we kind of take the mode like, yeah, sometimes let's do an experiment. +I work at the storytelling studio at Vox, and we're editorial. So we work directly with editorial, the whole process is with them, the collaboration, the communication, the meetings. And I think there's two styles, right, like you have the long-term thinking and then the short-term and we have to experiment, like, this is where journalism failed for ten years and we're just geting back to being like, you know, fuck it, let's do it on robing eu. And I think that's really important \* for doing stuff. And so you have do have that. And so we kind of take the mode like, yeah, sometimes let's do an experiment. Let's build it once and let's see how it works and take those tests and decide if we're going to build it again. But never fucking build something twice, like never, ever build something twice, because I don't like repeating myself. I really just want to do something once and so we always, whatever way is easiest to do that, whether it's doing it in a Django app that's bespoke or a node app that somebody launched to do a bot. We do that once and then we come up with a platform or a better way to do that, so that we're never ever just recycling that thing where I've seen so many developers go in and copy the code from their old thing and paste it into their new thi and it's like I'm too, I don't know, lazy to do that. so just always coming up it a system to make that happen and to have the larger tools like auto tune or a graphics rig or something like that, to make it really easy to do that. -Julia: So one thing that we were talking about trying to do for the kind of last part of this session was look at some of these stages that we all go through as newsrooms, kind of from th, whether you're a small upstart newsroom or you're a big newsroom kind of experimenting in a new medium with a new forum, to kind of look at what those stages look like from small, you know, doing it live, to giant, stand-alone server, you know, full formalized deploy process and what stages are, to give us all kind of a roadmap for where we're headed, how you might be to get there. So I think we might transition to that a little bit. +Julia: So one thing that we were talking about trying to do for the kind of last part of this session was look at some of these stages that we all go through as newsrooms, kind of from th, whether you're a small upstart newsroom or you're a big newsroom kind of experimenting in a new medium with a new forum, to kind of look at what those stages look like from small, you know, doing it live, to giant, stand-alone server, you know, full formalized deploy process and what stages are, to give us all kind of a roadmap for where we're headed, how you might be to get there. So I think we might transition to that a little bit. and go back to the mic. This time we'll actually do that in the notes. I think hopefully there's some things that got added in there, but k start from a one to five stage of what that might look like when you're in that upstart stage and what is this kind of holy grail process that we're all trying to work towards. @@ -238,7 +237,7 @@ Ivar: I think we should talk about if you're at one. Do you build a task runner? Yuri. does that ever -Ivar: I have not worked on that system. Yuri ... everybody that says yes, walk walk up there and anyone? +Ivar: I have not worked on that system. Yuri ... everybody that says yes, walk walk up there and anyone? Ivar: But if there's another framework that would be more productive, that's fine, but I think trying to find what we collaborateed, we think the incremental process is on that, right? From maybe the first 1.1 is you want a tool to a to production, right? Maybe after that you want a separate stageing server, right, where you can preview things. So we're going to go back to passing the mic around. @@ -248,7 +247,7 @@ PARTICIPANT: hi, I'm so glad that all of you have been talking about front-end s Ivar: I don't have a phone. What time is it? -AUDIENCE MEMBER: Quarter past 11. +AUDIENCE MEMBER: Quarter past 11. Ivar: Great, so we have 15 minutes? Julia: Yeah, you can talk about whatever you like. If you want to speak to something you want to put in one of these stages. @@ -260,7 +259,7 @@ Yuri: I would say maybe that's Stage 3. Because Stage 2 is probably like you jus PARTICIPANT: My name is John and I work at a small paper in Oregon and I think probably the way to get you through the steps is you—I would like to think you have a sense of what smells, and you know, and if you feel a little less bad each time, and a little bit better, then you know you're going in the right direction. But as a concrete example, I think for us an excellent gateway drug has been tar bell, because you can put things i know Google docs, it separates the content from the styling so that the developers can style. -You know, you don't have to go through all that database setting up and if you know enough about the templateing, you can pretty much output JSON, you can output a lot of flavors and it kind of—it also kind of gets you in a lot of good habits because when you started it asks you ab and it also has kind of built-in to nudge you towards having a production. For us when we want to do something crazy, that kind of the thing that lately we've been going for. +You know, you don't have to go through all that database setting up and if you know enough about the templateing, you can pretty much output JSON, you can output a lot of flavors and it kind of—it also kind of gets you in a lot of good habits because when you started it asks you ab and it also has kind of built-in to nudge you towards having a production. For us when we want to do something crazy, that kind of the thing that lately we've been going for. so like static site generation as an on-ra yeah, then you are get to the problem that Jeremy has of the piles. It doesn't solve you having that problem, but I think if you at least have an idea where those piles are, you're in a good spot, because you know, a lot of times you don't even know where they are until you shut one off and then a week later you get an email. @@ -270,7 +269,7 @@ Yuri: Yeah, I would say solid Stage 4 is like full integration, so you're not us Ivar: Well, hopefully we'll all climb that hill together, with open source tools. Maybe. Julia, can you talk about the way the Wall Street Journal does? -Julia: Yeah, so we've actually transitioned, I've been at the journal only about nine months and we've had some big jumps in that time. So when I started we were useing a command line tool for our employment and of kind of go-to dev person on our team has built a great deploy dashboard, so we have a dashboard for all of our projects and you can go into the dashboard, see the projects, get some basic information about the GitHub repo, where what the promos are, if we're useing RTML where the original Google docs are that were built into that. You can see the GitHub commits to the project and. Besides the obvious workflow ease, it's very quick to fix a problem, if you actually gly a bug to product, not that I've ever done that. You can just immediately deploy the commit before, without having to revert in your git file, which has been a really fantastic tool. I don't know if Chris or Joel want to speak anything to the journal's process. * yeah. +Julia: Yeah, so we've actually transitioned, I've been at the journal only about nine months and we've had some big jumps in that time. So when I started we were useing a command line tool for our employment and of kind of go-to dev person on our team has built a great deploy dashboard, so we have a dashboard for all of our projects and you can go into the dashboard, see the projects, get some basic information about the GitHub repo, where what the promos are, if we're useing RTML where the original Google docs are that were built into that. You can see the GitHub commits to the project and. Besides the obvious workflow ease, it's very quick to fix a problem, if you actually gly a bug to product, not that I've ever done that. You can just immediately deploy the commit before, without having to revert in your git file, which has been a really fantastic tool. I don't know if Chris or Joel want to speak anything to the journal's process. \* yeah. so the process you just described of kind of going from the quick fix way to like the really robust stage 5 way, stage 5 is a terrible, you know, heh-heh that we just did with RTML in a pretty short timeline, where Julia and I were the first to kind of latch on to we need this, and it took a little bit of convinceing within our team to tell people why we needed sort of this separate CMS from an internal tool that we also use called narrator which does something similar but is far for structured and harder to customize, but really quickly and it's been really accelerateed in the last few weeks that theres' been so many breaking news spots that we've been in but with RTML, we quickly went from having a low-goal RTML environment where we're just kind of testing things on a desktop to now we have this full integrated dash board where we are—we quickly set up the Google doc, we can then share that email address, share that with the designated email address which then just populates the RTML into the dashboard for all of our RTML docs, each one of those on the dashboard has two buttons associateed with it, so you can publish JSON to production and publish JSON for dev and all of a sudden we have this like really robust kind of make shift CMS that is completely separate from what we're using from insig @@ -282,7 +281,7 @@ from when that was createed which was several years ago, right, can you talk abo PARTICIPANT: Um, we over the years have experimented with we sStage 1 like everyone else and -have gone through the years to find out what are the repeatable things that we do again and again to cause ourselves pain and one of the things is you know what we're useing Google docs to write text and some people at the end of the day was copying and paste it go over into an HTML document and we said we should figure out that some way to from Google docs. And that's led to the of arish ML.org. +have gone through the years to find out what are the repeatable things that we do again and again to cause ourselves pain and one of the things is you know what we're useing Google docs to write text and some people at the end of the day was copying and paste it go over into an HTML document and we said we should figure out that some way to from Google docs. And that's led to the of arish ML.org. how many folks here use are chi ML? @@ -290,7 +289,7 @@ so there's maybe 10 or 15 hands for people who use. ... -Yuri: One thing with these stages is I think these are awesome, but I think that there has Pab a parallel track with the larger holistic organization that is moving alongside with this. And so that when you—the only way to get to Stage 3 and 4 is if you have, you know, the actual like platform teams building out those, you know, the APIs, that you're going to need to connect all of these things together. Things are modular so that if you want to fire up these bespoke pages, it's really easy to add something like comments or really easy to add something like user integration or photo uploads and that comes with having an entire like separate track of the actual whole team, knowing that in 6 months we're going to need to be here, we're going to need those APIs to meet us when we're there. We're going to need those modular things, because we try to thmassive beamoth thing. * +Yuri: One thing with these stages is I think these are awesome, but I think that there has Pab a parallel track with the larger holistic organization that is moving alongside with this. And so that when you—the only way to get to Stage 3 and 4 is if you have, you know, the actual like platform teams building out those, you know, the APIs, that you're going to need to connect all of these things together. Things are modular so that if you want to fire up these bespoke pages, it's really easy to add something like comments or really easy to add something like user integration or photo uploads and that comes with having an entire like separate track of the actual whole team, knowing that in 6 months we're going to need to be here, we're going to need those APIs to meet us when we're there. We're going to need those modular things, because we try to thmassive beamoth thing. \* you also have to have the space and to be inefficient, essentially, because when you're making your tools better you're not useing your tools. If you're in Stage 1, then no one can publish without you. In order to step back to make it so that other people can publish things you're not publishing things. So that space to make the system better is not present on really small teams sometimes, and it can happen for years, so that's another thing that has to happen so you can move to the stages. @@ -302,7 +301,7 @@ got about 7 minutes. so for people that have either experienceed this or are currently in the situation, what are some strategies for building out more sophisticated systems? -Julia. I mean I'll try to speak. I've been in quite a few newsrooms in the past few years so I've definitely experienceed different kinds of buy-in and I know definitely the pain that some people feel coming from places where you can feel like you have none. I think I found actually when I realizeed that I don't have a lot of buy-in that I might kind of enjoy living in the shadows a little bit. That sometimes there's a little bit of freedom when the rest of the organization doesn't pay a lot of attention to you. That allows you the ability to experiment a little bit. Allows you the ability to use the tools that you want to use and I think the way to make the most of that in my experience was to try to look back on some of the decisions that I made about why to support and if they worked, why that was, but more importantly, P if they didn't, what I had learned from that and what I could bring to a different kind o have helped me in the newsroom where I have more buy-in in, where I've been on a two-person team where we've had to make all the calls and I've seen where this leads. One thing we've talked about these stages, I don't mean you're a Stage 2 organization or a Stage 4. The Wall Street Journal is a huge organization with a ton of great tools and a ton of things we need to work on. We definitely have Stage 1 in our workflow and maybe even some of the stage 5. It's great to kind of see what sort of things can we look forward to, so that's hopefully the way that we're trying structure there, to help you see, looking ahead a little bit in some areas you can work on. If you need your platform team, you can do it, how do you get there? +Julia. I mean I'll try to speak. I've been in quite a few newsrooms in the past few years so I've definitely experienceed different kinds of buy-in and I know definitely the pain that some people feel coming from places where you can feel like you have none. I think I found actually when I realizeed that I don't have a lot of buy-in that I might kind of enjoy living in the shadows a little bit. That sometimes there's a little bit of freedom when the rest of the organization doesn't pay a lot of attention to you. That allows you the ability to experiment a little bit. Allows you the ability to use the tools that you want to use and I think the way to make the most of that in my experience was to try to look back on some of the decisions that I made about why to support and if they worked, why that was, but more importantly, P if they didn't, what I had learned from that and what I could bring to a different kind o have helped me in the newsroom where I have more buy-in in, where I've been on a two-person team where we've had to make all the calls and I've seen where this leads. One thing we've talked about these stages, I don't mean you're a Stage 2 organization or a Stage 4. The Wall Street Journal is a huge organization with a ton of great tools and a ton of things we need to work on. We definitely have Stage 1 in our workflow and maybe even some of the stage 5. It's great to kind of see what sort of things can we look forward to, so that's hopefully the way that we're trying structure there, to help you see, looking ahead a little bit in some areas you can work on. If you need your platform team, you can do it, how do you get there? Yuri: I think that no matter the size of your organization, if you find yourself at Stage 4 consistent think you're not experimenting enough. @@ -318,7 +317,7 @@ Julia: I want to say 3, I want to say as soon as you have tools, you should have so I've thought a lot about this. I actually run a conference. You should write documentation when you design software, because it helps you build better software. Writing kind of the read me example interface, all of the kind of user faceing parts of software should be written before the software, because that allows the API to inform the decisions you make on implementation, rather than implementing a bunch of crap and then thinking at the end, oh, how are people going to use this and then building a layer on top for humans that doesn't actually match the design of the software? So I really, really do highly recommend at least thinking through the documentation of that stuff first, before embarking on any kind of user faceing project. -Ivar: So as we kind of work our way towards the completion of this conversation, one of the things that occurs to me is it's amazeing how much our t And that process, going from having a process, documenting it, building tools to automate that process, and then from that point, next time that you build a project you're sort of building it based on the tools that you already have, which we've always been doing, but the evolution of that is at least at the journal, we've gone from this philosophy of building these kind of stand alone application, right, Javascript application, traditional what we think of as news applications to now we are very much, in the last 6 months, we've very much shifted in the mentality of building stories and building pages. But we're doing that more and more, because we've built these tools that allow us to do this, right by this in particular at the New York Times where we sort of like watched from afar and wondered, how do they—like they've definitely, the Times has been in this mentality, I think, for a while where they're building less and projects, or at least you see many more static pages and static graphics, and I think that I would guess that in a large part that's driven by prevalence of AI to HTML and Archie ML where you are in a position where you can build graphics, you can build s graphics quick and you can integrate the quickly. And that leads to this long scrolling concept instead of presenting one interactive version of the map that allows you to see it four or more ways. In other words, you know, just the tools end up informing the way that you make content. +Ivar: So as we kind of work our way towards the completion of this conversation, one of the things that occurs to me is it's amazeing how much our t And that process, going from having a process, documenting it, building tools to automate that process, and then from that point, next time that you build a project you're sort of building it based on the tools that you already have, which we've always been doing, but the evolution of that is at least at the journal, we've gone from this philosophy of building these kind of stand alone application, right, Javascript application, traditional what we think of as news applications to now we are very much, in the last 6 months, we've very much shifted in the mentality of building stories and building pages. But we're doing that more and more, because we've built these tools that allow us to do this, right by this in particular at the New York Times where we sort of like watched from afar and wondered, how do they—like they've definitely, the Times has been in this mentality, I think, for a while where they're building less and projects, or at least you see many more static pages and static graphics, and I think that I would guess that in a large part that's driven by prevalence of AI to HTML and Archie ML where you are in a position where you can build graphics, you can build s graphics quick and you can integrate the quickly. And that leads to this long scrolling concept instead of presenting one interactive version of the map that allows you to see it four or more ways. In other words, you know, just the tools end up informing the way that you make content. so I just want to say quickly we're at 11:30. We've got half an hour before the next session, so people are more than welcome to stay and chat with each other. I don't know if that—any of that will be transcribed, as well as mic'd, but just in case you want to get out and enjoy your half an hour @@ -329,4 +328,3 @@ in between, nobody will get offended if you get up and walk out right now. Ivar: I think we should do one more applause for Norma. [applause] - diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-thursday-welcome.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-thursday-welcome.md index 5a56a2fe..d1cf658d 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-thursday-welcome.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-thursday-welcome.md @@ -5,46 +5,30 @@ Room: Commons DAN: Hello! This is very low. Yes, I do. Hey, everyone. I'm Dan. And welcome to Portland, and welcome to SRCCON! - PARTICIPANT: Whoo! [ Applause ] - There are so many of you here! This is nuts. When we were figuring out this room, Erika said, you know, we need to have more chairs than people, so that there isn't that last-chair-in-the lunchroom thing and we're so close to last chair in the lunch room. There's almost 300 of us here today. This is our third SRCCON, and by far, our biggest. This is actually twice the size of the first SRCCON in Philly. We've put on SRCCON because we know the way that this community grows best is when it grows together. We've learned, in the years that we've run Opennews and that we've done SRCCON, that the biggest challenge facing journalism today is not technology, right? And it's certainly not the Internet, right? It's people. It's understanding each other. It's getting buy-in from above for the work that we do, it's building more diverse and inclusive teams. We know that the best tech stack means nothing if you don't have teams and institutions that actually work. SRCCON is an opportunity for all of us to share our struggles and our triumphs and the talk, and to work, and to collaborate across newsrooms and across borders. It's an opportunity to learn from each other, and to help strengthen this community. We've got two packed days. And a ton of things to think about. And I want to invite my colleagues up to talk a little bit more about how to think about the next two days. Ryan? - - RYAN: Hey, SRCCON. I'm going to talk to you, real quickly, the structure of our days at SRCCON. We've really tried to build this event in a way that makes everyone feel like they can have a productive and inclusive experience. That all starts with the schedule. On each floor, you'll find broad sheets that have, like, a loose description of the schedule. It's also at schedule.srccon.org. You'll notice we start a little later in the morning. There's a nice long lunch break 30 minutes every session. We don't want you to worry about when you're going to find time to check email, find time to go to the restroom. A lot we want to you continue versusing those conversations on your way out on the sessions because you're in that moment. You'll also see a lot of meals on the schedule. We will feed you, we will feel you well, we will caffeinate you. We do not want you worrying about where's my next meal going to come from, oh, God where is the caffeine? We want that out of your heads. We want you to feel present and focused on the conversations that you're having. Conversations are a big part of SRCCON and that feeds into the structure of our day, as well. We have conversational settings during lunch today and tomorrow, and in the evening we want to make sure that we're supporting open and honest talk among everyone here about the problems that we're all working on. We also want to leave room for emergent topics. If you look at Tiff back there, there is a grid. That represents the conversational sessions that we have today during lunch, and tonight, and tomorrow during lunch. There'll it is Post-It notes, and sharpies up there. And have a conversation that you want to have. Some of those conversations will take plays tonight, Thursday night. Our program is a big part of SRCCON, as well. We want to build stronger relationships in the community. And that means spending time together. Being relaxed, focusing more on the life side of the work-life balance. So we're so excited to see you here. Before we start the Thursday programs, we have a few things. And I'm going to turn it over to Erika and she's going to talk about to have a great session. - - ERIKA: Hello. So sessions are where you can spend a lot of that time collaborating, and sharing with each other. And we've structured them to be interactive, to really allow you to share what you've learned, to learn from your peers, and rather than just having one person, or a panel of people at the front of the room speaking, pontificating, it's an opportunity for you to learn, as much as those people at the front of the room as the other people in the room together. And to start building a network with each other. You don't have to just ask a follow-up question to the presenter, you'll have an opportunity to follow up with the people that you meet up in the sessions together. So we want to help the settings also to create that session create that space, and build that community, and space together guard. You'll also see that there's a mix of topics and types of sessions that we have, and that reflects that you probably don't change do one thing in your job. You're probably not just interested in one topic. So as people with lots of different interests. Lots of different roles that we play, the scale of the SRCCON schedule reflects those interests and needs that you have to talk about, and to dig into with your peers. So we also want to make sure that you're able to participate in a lot of different ways. There might be some conferences where you go to, and you're only speaking. Maybe you're giving five sessions at some conferences that you go to, and don't get to spend as much time learning from each other. So we've really tried to structure the sessions in such a way that you both get to teach, and get to learn, and then bring that information back to your newsroom, back to your organizations. And in thinking about that kind of full-human, full view of the work that you do, Erin's going to go more into the structure behind that. - - [ Applause ] - - ERIN: There's so many of you. Yeah, so we work on inclusion and set expectations for conduct here so that everybody can do what Ryan and I are going to be talking about, focusing on the sessions, focusing on the conversations, be present. Especially for folks who may not have had great experiences around the world, or at work events, or other of those things. So the most obvious piece of this is our code of conduct. You've seen our emails, we talk about it a lot. It's on the front page of our website right now. Every piece of what we send on you. So do take a second to read it. I will also do the TL; DR for you. Which is, watch out for each other, take care of each other, and actively respect boundaries. Everything else is written down in there. So take a look. Talking about boundaries. The kind of thing we mean are on the lanyards that we're all wearing. You know, you heard about this stuff. Those will be respected by anyone who's taking pictures for us, officially, also, if you are taking pictures unofficially, keep an eye on that. Our videographer, who's over here, this is Paul, hey! He's great. He's going to be taking video. But not audio. Your conversations are safe! And if you get trapped in a shot, he will edit it out later if you are wearing a red or yellow lanyard, so don't worry about that. We also have things like pins, pronoun pins this year to help folks communicate how they want to be addressed. There is an off the record process that your session facilitators will talk through if you don't want something to be transcribed, or tweeted, or recorded in any way. Say, "I'd like to go off the remember to say that I'd like to go back on the record later so that isn't lost. But we want that open process. My colleague Erika will be talking more about things like the food but if you've noted that you have a food allergy, or you have any kind of special dietary need, we've set yours aside, so no one eats them by mistake. So speak to us, our awesome catering folk. And underlying all this stuff, that is the part that shows under the water is, underneath is the safety plan which we've done with our staff, the volunteers, catering, everyone in the building, which is the way we keep honest. I mean, we can give you a code of conduct, but the safety plan work that we do is what — so we have a process. If you come to us, we will be able to help you, or we will be able to get you help. -So please don't hesitate. There's, on the back of your badge, there is our help line. You can text or call at any time throughout SRCCON. That also means at night. It means when you leave the building. When you are at a bar, if something happens, when you, presumably are with other SRCCON folks. You can still let us know. So our code of conduct everything from now until we are done and Dan Sinker says, "Go home." So keep that in mind. Talk to anyone of us, with SRCCON on our shirts. We will either help you on the spot, or find someone who will. Now to talk about the many details of this amazing space and everything that comes with it is my colleague, Erik Westra. - - +So please don't hesitate. There's, on the back of your badge, there is our help line. You can text or call at any time throughout SRCCON. That also means at night. It means when you leave the building. When you are at a bar, if something happens, when you, presumably are with other SRCCON folks. You can still let us know. So our code of conduct everything from now until we are done and Dan Sinker says, "Go home." So keep that in mind. Talk to anyone of us, with SRCCON on our shirts. We will either help you on the spot, or find someone who will. Now to talk about the many details of this amazing space and everything that comes with it is my colleague, Erik Westra. ERIK:. They've all welcomed you. I will also welcome you. It's really amazing to have you all here. Especially so many new people here. For those of you who have been to SRCCONs in the past, our goal, when we're looking for spaces is to find spaces that appeal to humans. Like, we're not looking at hotel conference rooms because they make me really sad... - - [ Laughter ] - - I just imagine that that is a universal meaning. So our goal in that search is to find interesting places. For instance, like look, there's light, natural light in here. Which is amazing. And almost all of the rooms have natural light. The only one that's a little iffy is the boardroom but you can still see through these windows. It's a really beautiful space and we're really excited to be here. This is not the kind of event that usually happens here. So that's something that I want people to keep in mind. This is a functioning art college. So there are actually classes happening while we are here. This is not our space. We are using part of the space and I'm very excited that this is happening alongside all of these other pieces. There's people who are on staff and students here who are very excited to have us here. But I want to make sure that we keep in mind that, um,, you know, to have respect for that. When you're walking through the hallways, especially in the classroom section of the — so the third floor — there are other classes happening. They know we're here, and I want you to know that they're here. So when you're walking through the hallways, just respect that. And also, it's kind of funny... but when we were doing our setup yesterday Bee, who's our contact here at PNCA told us, even if you think you understand, always try to ask yourself, "Is this art?" And she told us a story that she was in a meeting, and there was, like, a big, like, yellow, sort of, stain on the wall that went down to the newer. And she was about to call to get it cleaned up. And she was like, "Is this art?" And it turned out to be... art. And so it was a good way that she didn't clean it up. So down in the Innovation Studio, you'll see, like, there's some beams on the ground and I thought they were just for, like, setup but no. It's not. It's art. So that's really exciting to me. So just keep that in mind when you're cruising around in the space. There are really amazing actual things up in the museum — the galleries downstairs, that's the word I want, "Galleries," that you're welcome to go and look at. If something looks cordoned off, don't go in there. If it looks like doors are closed to you, or has a sign that says, you know, "class in session," don't go in there. So we just want to be respectful of this space because we're very happy that they're letting us do this here because it is such a cool fit for what we are doing. We have these gigantic news paint posters which are maps of the space. They're only maps of the floors that you need to worry about. There are a lot more spaces and floors. But these are everywhere. And they have little fluorescent "X's" on the maps next to where you are, if you're thing trying to figure out how to get to someplace. In addition to that, there are volunteers working everywhere. They have the lighter red shirts on, and staff have the maroon, the darker red shirts on. You can come up to any one of us, and we will help you to get to where you go. And I want to stress this: We're here to help you not have to worry about things other than participating, enjoying, being a part of this event. I don't want you to worry about the other stuff. So for dietary restrictions, like Erin said you can talk to us, the caterers, and this includes, if you said you're vegetarian, if you're vegetarian, we have sandwiches set aside for you, we have banh-mi today. And it's through a company called Creative Catering. And everything is on their farm, which is great. So there is a bathroom, which is gender neutral on this floor. And you can see which one that is on the maps. Otherwise, there are bathrooms and things all over, as well, in tiers. I think that's it. I think I'm getting a "he's encroaching on my space." @@ -63,4 +47,4 @@ All right. It's impossible to stop it once it starts. Focus back up for one seco So this is SRCCON in a nutshell, you know? You meet someone new, and you can't stop talking to them, and you can't stop learning from them. And that's how this works, you know, throughout the next two days, and tonight, as well, you're going to underneath meet, fascinating, brilliant, amazing people, just like you. And also, totally not like you, and it's awesome. -So this is what it's about. It's about meeting, and it's about learning, and it's about growing this community together. We want you to have an amazing SRCCON. Sessions start at 10:30. So there's still time to have some conversations but it is going to take you a moment to orient yourself in this building. So do give yourself enough time to mildly get lost. You will not mildly be lost after you've completed a circuit of sessions, I assure you, and there's lots of maps, and we have even more, if you find pain points with lots of maps. Thank you all. Have an amazing, amazing, amazing SRCCON! Go! \ No newline at end of file +So this is what it's about. It's about meeting, and it's about learning, and it's about growing this community together. We want you to have an amazing SRCCON. Sessions start at 10:30. So there's still time to have some conversations but it is going to take you a moment to orient yourself in this building. So do give yourself enough time to mildly get lost. You will not mildly be lost after you've completed a circuit of sessions, I assure you, and there's lots of maps, and we have even more, if you find pain points with lots of maps. Thank you all. Have an amazing, amazing, amazing SRCCON! Go! diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-tools-document-search.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-tools-document-search.md index e978279d..98073455 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-tools-document-search.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-tools-document-search.md @@ -1,7 +1,7 @@ Tools to securely search millions of documents remotely and across borders Session facilitator(s): Miguel Fiandor Day & Time: Thursday, 4-5pm -Room: Classroom 310 +Room: Classroom 310 MIGUEL: Okay. Let's start. I'll leave this open. Somehow if someone wants to come in. Sorry. I wasn't watching the time. Okay. So I'm Miguel Fiandor and I'm a data apps developer at ICIJ. And I'm going to show you what are the tools we have been using, some of them, how has the communication been for the Panama Papers, how is the thing working, and how is the link a little bit, and I prepared two posts that it would be nice if you could answer, so we see the opinion about us. We discuss about it. And if we have time at the end, I'll show you some data, and stuff we use, and I also prepared a fake leak of data so we can simulate what you would do if you receive some kind of leak, similar, and what kind of things we can start doing with it. @@ -17,260 +17,142 @@ So without linking the structure of the database, HTMS thing, and you look at th What happens if you get a bigger leak in two years? You will need a lot of power to work on a process with a team. And that's why we have people who work on this specifically, right? And I know the future of our work, the daily work is that you need to be fast, and you need to repeat what you do a lot of times. It's not that you do one thing perfectly, and your done. Your tasks are going to be repeated several times. In our case, and not really—in our case, we received the whole leak, the whole 2.6 terabytes at once. We received the whole thing at once. That means that the task that you create on the in the methods that you develop, you probably have to run it later on. So say, you find something with a task that's very difficult to develop, and you can say, okay, I can develop it manually. I can go over these records kind of manually, and I'm not fast this time. But in two weeks, you will be regretting because it will come up, something that has to be run again. So I encourage to automate on most of the process. - - PARTICIPANT: Just a question on the time, when did the deadline come from? - - MIGUEL: It didn't come at the beginning. It was much less. We were expecting to publish. Like, this was started on April, something like that. And they were thinking, considering to publish on November. And there was no—it was impossible. And then we went—I don't know if it was time thinking of February, I think when we had to do it again. So I think it was, at the end, you end up in a year, or something like that. So this ends up being the flow, or the stack that we, and the applications that we used, especially for indexing, and also admin. We use a text—sorry for the colors. I'm missing the... no, maybe? So we are using Apache Solr, which is an indexer. And we use Tesseract for the documents, and you almost end up using cool applications like this time, Solr but you'll probably end up using something common line, or you'll evaluate a tool. So that's why we usually end up doing. We end up using a very strong application. We construct a little later, a thing that we can automate, the use of the other one. And—or managed to, we managed to start with Solr on the cloud, and we use Collaborate HQ to send the OCR in, the jobs, and then they construct the indexer of the whole thing with Solr. If you ever tried Solr, it is, like, a very unfriendly, unfriendly interface. We couldn't deliver this to the journalists, no, in the Consortium. So we needed to created a layer on top of this, and we were quite happy because it exists, something like Blacklight. Blacklight is a web application based on Rails, which is based on Ruby, and the whole thing is super flexible. And what this is, it's super—if you have a layer of user management, and the connectivity to the Solr API, so you can... yeah, go ahead. - - PARTICIPANT: I'm curious as to why you chose Solr as opposed to ElasticSearch. - - MIGUEL: I wanted to talk about that afterwards. No, I'm not sure why about why my methods chose to use Solr instead of ElasticSearch. I was actually looking at the comparison about them. They are pretty similar. Like, very, very pretty similar. I wouldn't say, I'm not sure, that choosing Solr, it would be also because it goes well with Tika, which, Tika, is, is another tool from Imagine. And it gives you a lot of more information about the files that are being indexed. Also, `it was easy to pass through the Tesseract with Apache. So, and then we have Blacklight on top of it because, on top of, now you'll have any many tools on top of ElasticSearch, as well. But I will say that those could be the reasons. So this is the web interface that Blacklight gives you. Very. And Google works, search works. And over there, you search there. You can custom your facets over there. You can still use proximity search. You can put, on top of it, any section that the custom section that you want, you know? But over there is, we're finding things, so you see a structure laid out over here, this is completely related to Blacklight. You can custom Blacklight as you want. We were handling our structure—the structured data to our journalists, using management. We can call our manuals, PDFs for internal use. But this we created on top of Blacklight to run batch searching. So our journalists get a list of name, instead of going one-by-one, instead of saying, all politics from Spain, we get that in a CSV, and we run it over there, and we run a batch search in Solr, and we return a CSV to you with all the findings. So you receive a leak. What do you think you would do first? What do you think would be in your first tasks. What you would do is a leak? - - PARTICIPANT: Count how many things we have? - - MIGUEL: That's good, yes. - - PARTICIPANT: Security? - - PARTICIPANT: Check it for viruses? - - MIGUEL: Hey, that's good. That's good, too. - - PARTICIPANT: Just how to understand how to open that safely in the first place. - - MIGUEL: That's maybe very good to start. Um, yeah. I'm not looking for the best answer; I am looking for many answers, you know? So you need to get an address. That would be nice. At least when we're working on that kind of site. So you need to come, you need to organize it. How is it organized? It's not normally one folder thing. Inside, you get into a folder app, it probably has a minimum of documents, and then you freeze your laptop, or something like that. So it is not a very simple task to just say, search only that, and then trying to find only that, how it is, no? And then also to look for identifying and looking for names. You will look for dates. And you will look for structured data like a CSV if you're lucky. Or if you're searching HTML, you should look for tables, you should look for headers for fields, dates, whatever. And then you should also load them, what kind of files are needed to make OCR because OCR is other than management, the most time consuming task: Processing the data. And that's very important, if you have many documents to OCR. About OCR, again, it's good to know how many languages. Do you have your documents that your documents have. Why? Because the OCR is super expensive. You tell it you could get different languages. And in this way, we have it at least in English and in Spanish. So it's more likely, or it's a lot easier to find. So if you have fairly good connections, it would be nice that we could go to a—this is a very bad color. There's a link over there. and I will make a poll that would be really nice and we could have everyone play with it and see what are your opinions. I have it over here. But can you open it, someone? Do you have the connection? Is it fine? It's bad? - - PARTICIPANT: No. - - MIGUEL: Um... - I wanted to gather our opinions. And I wanted to see if we could get statistics but if we don't have good connections. I also tweet. I tweet it. So if you answer later, I could publish a tweet with kind of your most frequent opinions. - - +I wanted to gather our opinions. And I wanted to see if we could get statistics but if we don't have good connections. I also tweet. I tweet it. So if you answer later, I could publish a tweet with kind of your most frequent opinions. PARTICIPANT: You can put it in the etherpad, and I can put it the link into the polls for whoever wants to jump in. - - MIGUEL: But yeah, otherwise, if you're going to—I will tweet whatever you're going to say later. Because it's not working, no? It worked fine. - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, it is working. - - MIGUEL: Oh, it is. Fine. - - PARTICIPANT: Whoever's connected can do it. - - MIGUEL: Okay. So I will go to this. What do you think would be the most important actions on that data? - - PARTICIPANT: Search. - - PARTICIPANT: Link or connect? - - MIGUEL: Would you consider that, when you get a leak, that you would need to link items? Link documents? What are you thinking about that? Good. About sharing. Sharing might sound stupid but I mean sharing among the people you're working, and I would consider this quite powerful, and it has been super used in our communication platforms. We probably end up finding a lot of things that you need but someone is good. And the good point here is that we have so many colleagues. I have Spanish colleagues saying to, Argentinian, saying, or from other places saying like, I got this. We would probably look at that. It's good for you. Okay. What do you think would be best for you on the platforms and applications like you would use for searching? What kind of helpful? - - PARTICIPANT: Seamless search because it's very hard to do—do the search, and it does similar things. - - MIGUEL: Yeah, like the auto-completion thing. - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah. - - MIGUEL: Good. - - PARTICIPANT: Sharing searches so that you can collaborate with others. Two more and then I answer. Give me two more. You get a leak, or did you work with some kind of leak before? Batch search or batch search, it is—it has been quite—it makes us quite happy when publish that thing. - - PARTICIPANT: Can you describe what that is, a bulk search? - - MIGUEL: It's like searching a lot of things at once. Or you submit a list of terms that you want to search, and you don't go one-by-one, you know? - - PARTICIPANT: So several search terms—so several searches all of them? - - MIGUEL: Not like they use to—they would need to be all together. But, you know, you normally, in a search application, you would have, like, an input box, like the Google search input box here. And so we did this here, we did a section where you submit a CSV with a list of terms that you want to search. My term would be, like, all the political parties of Spain, or all the major countries. I don't know how many parties in the United States it would be. Sometimes you found what you want but sometimes you found something that you don't. So it was pretty interesting to do bulk search. - - PARTICIPANT: Okay. - - MIGUEL: If you are answering over there, it is very... let's say, ah, yeah. This is kind of interesting. They ask, how do you trust something. So would you trust an external service provider? It's not like... - - PARTICIPANT: It depends more on what's the leak about, right? So if the leak is about some politicians in the UK, I would trust them with something. If it's something that's a leak about the United States, I wouldn't be sure about, right? - - MIGUEL: So you also would consider political facts like where he comes from and what is the extent of service from them? - - PARTICIPANT: Against the politician. - - MIGUEL: That's a good point. - - PARTICIPANT: Would you—could you say more about data custody and where—yeah, you used Amazon. - - MIGUEL: Why we chose Amazon? - - PARTICIPANT: Or more specifically, where in Amazon—what—where within Amazon's jurisdiction. - - MIGUEL: We have legal contracts that you would get with Amazon. And they will consider that we will be free of risk storing it there and, especially, in terms of load, in terms of let's say getting these data, okay, and then the other risk that you could get is some technician of Amazon will find it, and they will—or with that, with Amazon, it's pretty easy to encrypt a disk. You just take a disk, and say I want this encrypted, and everything in there is encrypted. - - PARTICIPANT: But also, I mean, have you considered the Amazon region? Would you say U.S. west one or...? Do you consider Amazon? - - MIGUEL: Legally, that hasn't been a reason. The reason to choose over another about that, one has been, we're putting it on Amazon. There's one we choose one over the other is the proximity and the latency because we were uploading a lot of stuff. And sometimes, it takes days, sometimes, it breaks the connection, and... - - PARTICIPANT: But for your purposes, but within—or the equivalent? - - MIGUEL: Within the U.S., I don't think they didn't care which jurisdiction. - - PARTICIPANT: But just as opposed to putting it overseas, do you think the legal conditions are more favorable. I don't know if it's really—who knows, it's all on the Internet. - - MIGUEL: Yeah, you know, I mean, I think we considered that it was secure enough. Yeah. And it will, also, if it was the best option. So what is it we can do, not much more, right? Not too much more. - - PARTICIPANT: It's kind of hard to get 35 giant servers. Didn't you have 35 large servers working on that? - - MIGUEL: But not continuously. Not continuously. So they are all off by now. They are off by now. Okay. I will go faster because we're half the way. Graph relationships, it doesn't sounds as important as graphing and searching. But we include this kind of technology. Why we use it? Well, the first reason is because our data is super connected the final groups, the final visualizations we made are like this, no? And over here, we have users, clients, companies, banks, addresses, and they usually use different tables. If they will be in a traditional database. And that will be good if we're going to use an external database, it would take quite a lot long. And we have databases that are much faster. And this is the second reason that we graph the database. The one that we're using is Neo4J. And for that kind of queries, it would be much faster, no? It's not only about time, it's also as a writing as a developer and that kind of thing. This is the stuff for—and you don't know how many relations and qualities you will end up writing for the application because you don't know how many entities you're going to find. If you, in the next two months later, you get a new entity, you release that, and you end up making this worse. In graph elements, this is much clearer, more lateral. And, actually, the presentation of your database looks like it is, like natural looking. It is very similar to the final—the other graph, no? This is, like, the design of the database. This is the company on green, and address, over there, and then in the end, an officer. And just how they are related. And that's how it is stored in the database. And it's—this seems kind of not relevant, but I went to here for a talk, and I said, a good point for this, you would use this for a natural way, the way you use for your model, the way you use your data is not the way that you've designed the tool. And I say sometimes, this is not a point but everyone was saying the same. They use the same viewpoint. So we all feel the same. - - PARTICIPANT: So, I mean, in order to do that, you have to do some sort of engineering fashion. Were you using own Open Calet. Or entity extracters. Given the text, you extracted entities, did you use Open Tele for that, or did you write your own? - - MIGUEL: For starting this, they say that—by "entities" you mean, like, doing entity structuring? - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah. - - MIGUEL: No, to build this kind of database, we didn't need to do entity extraction. `we've done entity extraction for other things. - - PARTICIPANT: So you're basing that off of structured data? - - MIGUEL: We were doing with HTML, to create them, and then from HTML from a CSV database — - - PARTICIPANT: So you had this data. - - MIGUEL: It wasn't to extract it. It belonged to the database, those HTMLs. It belonged to the database, to the real structure of the company. - - PARTICIPANT: So you had to scrape it, but there was no NLB. - - MIGUEL: We had to scrape it but we didn't do any NLB process on it. Good point. But we did run entity extraction for another process like finding beneficiary_ofs. The whole point of this, the biggest point was finding the beneficiary_ofs. That was, like, the main task of it. For that, we did run some entity extractors. We created—there was point of the Blacklight, that we could create a separate section completely non-related to the Solr thing. And we did a section of it for—entity extraction, visualizing the find of beneficiary_ofs. @@ -289,134 +171,70 @@ So this is approximately, you have to decide. I would say yes. We actually have Do you use any of you, encrypted emails? Yup. Good. You have it installed? I mean, you don't have to use it to write to your family, you know. But at least are you ready for using it? And at least, as far as I know is that, if you really want to ever, kind of see leaked data, the leakers guys, they want you to be secure. They don't want to be found out by a journalist, right? So this is what an encrypted email looks like. This is a nice Google app in Chrome that you can install on the browser. And it's as simple as inclusiving your destination or public key, and then you can write the email and encrypt it, and then it will encrypt it with this key and send it. It works with this, and the website that you want to use it, it's quite friendly. So these are kind of our tools we use to talk, no? To communicate. Also in Slack. It's mandatory, it seems to be is Slack. More communication usings Cyan and WhatApp. And at least it's encrypted otherwise you're not saying sensitive things. But we'll do never trust any of these communication channels. Are you feeling that it's not too secure thing, we're risking ourselves and data? - - PARTICIPANT: Well, Slack is an encrypted server. - - MIGUEL: Totally, but we don't say things we shouldn't. At least we try not. Especially, we have to, for that, doing errors for that. You should write down, shouldn't we say online. And, of course, not usernames and passwords. There's something else important for us, which is the URLs. Same thing but your own Internet applications, URLs, that's also risky, especially since we publish. Once we publish, we also, and especially in the days we publish, it was so popular. And we were afraid of being—having our video found out and this data, no? That's it. I have created another poll over here. And this one... so some of the questions I already did: Would you store your data on Google drive? With the bank? Do you think it's not safe on there? Someone who would never, never put it on Amazon? - - PARTICIPANT: What do you mean not safe? - - MIGUEL: That someone else will take it. - - PARTICIPANT: Depends on your threat. What is the threat level? What is the data, what do you feel? Like, Amazon is probably not a problem if it's a Russian Mafia. - - MIGUEL: Well, in this case, for instance, Amazon was already sued—not sued by authorities about using offshore companies long time ago. We will say—what would happen if Amazon is in there? We didn't know in advance. Amazon could have been a potential entity interested in working in there. And actually, they end up calling us for offering more support for free, and things like that. Yeah, the technician service was great with us. - - PARTICIPANT: I mean, I wouldn't be afraid of Amazon, the company, probably. I would be afraid of the U.S. Government. - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, the U.S. Government. - - MIGUEL: That's a good comment. I'm getting some questions about that. You can do some things with that still using Amazon. So let's say yes, and about putting it on the cloud and this. How about here? - - PARTICIPANT: When you do that, since you pressed yes, did you put this on the slide? - - MIGUEL: The slides? - - PARTICIPANT: About the Panama Papers, did that end up on Google drive? - - MIGUEL: The presentation. - - PARTICIPANT: No, sorry, the actual data, you pressed yes because it definitely wouldn't go to a Google drive. - - MIGUEL: Oh, sorry. - - PARTICIPANT: Because the secure doesn't — - - MIGUEL: Here... you are right. Good point. - - PARTICIPANT: If it said — - - MIGUEL: You are right. And that's—opens up another question. For one of our applications, it was called Power Players. We had to document a lot of stuff. Journalists needed to work on stories. And when they work on stories, they create a lot of documentation, and a lot of information. And they need to communicate with a lot of people. Like, we have reporter, we have an editor, we have translator, we have an advocate, and we have many people. And it was a chain of politicians with this story, no? That would create a humungous number of images and, of course, documentation. Because it's not only the platform when you store the data, it's also the platform that you work to work with this. What we end up using is a good site system is Confluence. Do you know Confluence? It's a product of Alasian. It's like Google Docs but from other guys, I think Osis, and I think this software, you can style it in your own servers, we style it in our own servers and it is super powerful. And it is very nice. It stores history changes with documents. - - PARTICIPANT: What were you saying? - - MIGUEL: Confluence. It's nice. It's not a trivial installation but it's a good tip if you're in ONT, application to go with. Would you host your leak data—this is related to what you were saying you were afraid of American Service, and things like that. For that, you probably would like to go with Tor. My mates they would be like, what the hell, you use Tor? Why not? In Amazon, you can put an instances to work with Tor, and your service behind this. You would be safer against governments because the government could say, give me where is the server with this data and take it down. With Tor, you can create that security layer. Yeah. - - PARTICIPANT: Would you also add extra protection like VPN restrictions? - - MIGUEL: VPN is—that's—there is a debate on that. At some point, you cannot create all the security layers. It takes so much time this is not our purpose of the time. And finally, users, journalists would get crazy, and never use it, so they need to work on this. You can work with Vivian, you can add client certificates, you could add Tor, too, and Google authenticator. VPN has a very bad design on that. Like, if one of the journalists is hacked, he can get into the whole network—hack it. So it is not an option. They don't log into our systems with a VPN. Only terminal. - - PARTICIPANT: At the end, it's trusting the people you work with. Have you had a case—has it been the case in this project that you have to keep out somebody from this project because something happened? - - MIGUEL: No. - - PARTICIPANT: Okay. - - MIGUEL: No, we didn't have to. Not like locking out forever. No, yeah. We had some problem, maybe... there was one study where we knew we were sure that we needed to repeat the URL. So for that time, for a while, no one could log in into the social network in any of the systems. Things like that. But every measure that you can take is, okay, if you find that this guy, he's sane, and healthy, then you give him access again later on and see, but yeah? - - PARTICIPANT: How about phones? Do you have a phone or, like, Skype or something? - - MIGUEL: Yeah, we had some conversation with Skype sometimes. - - PARTICIPANT: Before do you consider that secure? - - MIGUEL: Secure? - - MIGUEL: Depends on what you say. They could also listen to you, yeah. I mean, we have it. But only by hearing us, the project is, to me. And even by hearing the conversation, I'm talking to ten people for half an hour, it's very difficult to really get the whole project to be done, or... yeah. I think it is. We didn't have a conversation where if someone is hearing, it would be at the end of the whole point. I think that always happens. So that's why I think that, usually, most of the communication channels are not answered here as you think. Of course, if you give a password but with normalization. Using is like, for instance, we can talk quite a lot about the data work. No passwords, no URLs, no things like that. But when I come to work today, authentication, the project is continuous. It's not so—and we are producing—there has to be a lot of people talking about this. Okay. I will, I will now remains only five minutes. So I will talk about the data. You have that because you have the questions over there, and you can answer. I give you a data folder with our CSVs from our project, Panama Papers. That is, you can find that on the website. You can play with that. That's if you want to play it, and import it into whatever system you like. Then you have fake leaked data which I cannot reproduce a similar leak for what we have received, that you have structured fake leak data, you have images, thousands of images. So it would be nice if you decide to, okay, how to link the emails and serve them on time. How many there were, send, or who is the most frequent sender of emails. Who received the most, who's the most important guy of those emails, and things like that. @@ -429,80 +247,42 @@ And this is all the relations between the graphs, nodes in our database. You wou You know, this is an installation of the package. You have to, because there is one for Mac, and one for Windows. And I found it pretty nice to have this straight ahead and start like that. It was very convenient to get your hands on. I think that's the whole USB thing I gave you. Any other questions and any other tools that you would...? - - PARTICIPANT: This is just a general question: How do you establish who you end up working with? Is it like—how do news organizations become part of this? Do you select? - - MIGUEL: What I have, I inherit because I'm part of the IT, the data unit, so I don't decide much that. But I know is, they know from each other, they have work from before. They agree on publish everything on one day. And there was a—I don't have much more left but... there was something—yeah, one of the requirements was follow up on—on months and dates, and trust to share at work. If we find out that one of the parts is, they may be are working, they are not in the whole community, probably, it's not—probably he won't be called next time. Yeah. But... you first? - - PARTICIPANT: Have you ever looked into trying to figure out what the dataset is if it's a complete dataset, otherwise from... I mean, is it one server, or several servers, or is it a computer where the original data comes from? And is there any way, because I don't know much about data in that way but is there any way to figure out if it's complete before something is sold out, before...? - - MIGUEL: Yes, we try to go and analyze the whole leak. And if we are missing identifiers, missing unique numbers of companies, for instance, and we are missing some stuff, about the data, no? But that doesn't change much anything. Like, we couldn't get more if we want. We wouldn't. We could notice that the guy who gave us is hiding something. That could happen. But we cannot do much about it, you know, if it happens. - - PARTICIPANT: No, no. It's more about the — - - MIGUEL: And which platform the leak that has been stolen, yeah, like, my main link with the data unit, we look for which kind of server they were using, but that's kind of for fun, okay? Like we have stolen from this platform, mainly if you have it, right? But that's just a curious thing. - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it might tell something in—yes, I have to be — - - MIGUEL: Yeah, probably because they will not use that platform anymore. - - PARTICIPANT: So you're saying any sort of technical architecture, you start out with some things and then you fiddle with it, and then you change some things. I'm just wondering in terms of the technical part of this, are there things that you started out and disregarded, and that you recommend that we also don't do because it didn't work for you? - - MIGUEL: From experience, most notes, the thing—when we consider where to work on these Power Play stories, all the journalists would be documenting stuff. We were considering using our custom documenting application like using—in the lab. And then we decided to go with a platform. Apart from that, we haven't decided anything. - - PARTICIPANT: And if you were to do it a second time, would you change anything if you were using it now? - - MIGUEL: We would consider using that for that purpose. But for any other things, it's not convenient. Every time you should reconsider what you would use. Yeah. - - PARTICIPANT: When you're going through the initial dataset, how much of it is, like, manual review versus, like, why you're using scripts to parse stuff. How much of the initial dump is manual, so like opening at files and looking at it, versus writing scripts to try and figure out what's in the data. - - MIGUEL: How much has been manually repeated? - - PARTICIPANT: Or, like, do you have journalists who's basically looking at file-by-file? - - MIGUEL: Well, they're opening when they search for something. We keep track of the results. You have an email system, and also docs, or emails with docs, or PDFs over there, and then they open whatever. I had no idea what they—how much it was—has been looked into automating—well, we automated the whole thing because the whole thing has been indexed. But manually, no idea. No idea. That's a good question I was making myself to on Atom, on our platform, how much have we visited, in opening the whole thing? That, we don't know. - - PARTICIPANT: You said earlier that you think you're going to get larger leaks? How do—why do you think that? - - MIGUEL: At some point it will beat us. For sure. I've been thinking about that, too. But probably not the next one, and not the next, and the following one. But, at some point, we will get—we will get some heavier things, for sure, yes. But the good point, and that's what I wanted to make with this time. We never came to a workshop with a fake leaked data. And it was—what I wanted to do is like start setting down the tasks that we should do with a leak. Like, standardize this kind of work and tasks. I think we haven't done that before either. And I think it's an interesting thing to do for the next month because, every time, everyone, NSAA will get the leak and we'll have to go through the same job. Yeah. This is over. So thanks. - - -[ Applause ] \ No newline at end of file +[ Applause ] diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-user-research-toolkit.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-user-research-toolkit.md index ef818c17..b9221653 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-user-research-toolkit.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-user-research-toolkit.md @@ -1,13 +1,13 @@ Let's build a user research toolkit Session facilitator(s): Emily Goligoski, Andrew Losowosky Day & Time: Thursday, 4-5pm -Room: Innovation Studio +Room: Innovation Studio -Andrew: Hello! , hello, hello, welcome to the session on hungry for audience insights? Hello, I'm Andrew L and I'm Emily. If you can't hear, it's because we have a microphone, if you can't hear us we should definitely use it, so just raise your hand if you can't hear it and say a thing and we will do that while we're talking about voices and amplification, SRCCON is per experimenting if with some sessions and recording some of them. If anyone is uncomfortable with that, just raise your hand and we'll switch it off. If that changes during the session, just let us know, that is totally fine and I think do we have a transcriber in this session? +Andrew: Hello! , hello, hello, welcome to the session on hungry for audience insights? Hello, I'm Andrew L and I'm Emily. If you can't hear, it's because we have a microphone, if you can't hear us we should definitely use it, so just raise your hand if you can't hear it and say a thing and we will do that while we're talking about voices and amplification, SRCCON is per experimenting if with some sessions and recording some of them. If anyone is uncomfortable with that, just raise your hand and we'll switch it off. If that changes during the session, just let us know, that is totally fine and I think do we have a transcriber in this session? And similarly for the transcriber, if there's something you want off the record, not to be transcribed, then please start by saying can we make this off the record and then remember to say when you're back on the record again. So that—our transcriber whose name is I'm sorry? -NORMA: Norma. +NORMA: Norma. Norma can get it all. All right s we've going to be making a DIY user research toolkit so what that looks like and how that works will depend a little bit on who is in the room and what we want to work, but what we're aiming towards is to get to a point where we have, collectively through our experiences and ideas, come up with a series of tools that we can then go and use to improve our user research and how we use it in our projects. We're going to be using the etherpad for this, so if you have your laptop with you and you want to use it, go to the schedule and go to this session and you'll see a link to the etherpad in there. We've got the URL up but it's really long, so if you just go to the schedule it's LinkedIn there. And in fact, when we'll be moving to group discussion, so we'll be prepared we're going to ask each table to nominate a transcriber, who will be writing some notes about your. It doesn't have to be line by line. Just notes about some of your conversation. We're getting ahead of ourselves. Emily. @@ -17,13 +17,13 @@ Great, OK, so about half of the people. And then the way that I think of user research is conversations with people beyond your team, not just sort of navel-ging, but thinking about what you can learn from people beyond your organization that can help inform the products and the services that you offer. And when it comes to research, you know, a lot of in-person and remote technologies that we use to basically bring data, bring qualitative data back to our organizations that helped inform our decisionmaking and so that we're not just operating from instinct or making decisions based on what we think is best, but really going out into the world, talking to people about that work before you ship, or to make continuous improvements to your product. -So what we would love to have you do in your small groups, go ahead and just introduce yourself. First name is totally fine. I you want to share any organizational affiliation and share with the people that you'll be working with what it is you want to get out of this time together. Is it that you love to go back to work on Monday, with sort of a sense of how to get started with user research? Are you just looking to make good connections? Just sort of share quickly why it is that you came here at 4 p.m. +So what we would love to have you do in your small groups, go ahead and just introduce yourself. First name is totally fine. I you want to share any organizational affiliation and share with the people that you'll be working with what it is you want to get out of this time together. Is it that you love to go back to work on Monday, with sort of a sense of how to get started with user research? Are you just looking to make good connections? Just sort of share quickly why it is that you came here at 4 p.m. [laughter] -Andrew: Yeah, you don't need a note-taker on this one. +Andrew: Yeah, you don't need a note-taker on this one. -[group activity] +[group activity] Emily: All right, thank you for introducing yourselves. And just quickly, I would love to open it up to the whole group, sort of the question of what is user research good for and what types of questions is it really well suited to address? And I also realize that Andrew and I didn't introduce ourselves. So my name is Emily. I work in user research in the New York Times newsroom very crucially finding out when they're not with us, what are they spending time doing, really trying to build out a robust understanding of what their news and information diets look like. And Andrew. @@ -55,7 +55,7 @@ Andrew: Identifying assumptions and counteracting biases. Emily: To the first point about actually watching site behaviors, I wanted to just quickly take a moment to talk about different methods that sort of fall under a research or audience development umbrella, just so that we can sort of thinking about all the tools that are available at a news organize's disposal, and really just sort of knowing what—when it is worth calling on one method over another, because there is so much that's available? -I really think that user research is fantastic when you want to find out about information needs about preferences, about motivations, all of the things that you maybe can't get through, you know, just understanding site traffic. However, what site traffic and data analytics are really good for are understanding patterns and propensities. What are things that a likely to happen again with certain types of visitors to your site? And I know a lot of organizations—and we just mentioned this with front line, also engaged in market research, so using third-party tools to really understand, you know, where do I fit within other organizations of my size or that report on stories similar to the ones that I * undertake. +I really think that user research is fantastic when you want to find out about information needs about preferences, about motivations, all of the things that you maybe can't get through, you know, just understanding site traffic. However, what site traffic and data analytics are really good for are understanding patterns and propensities. What are things that a likely to happen again with certain types of visitors to your site? And I know a lot of organizations—and we just mentioned this with front line, also engaged in market research, so using third-party tools to really understand, you know, where do I fit within other organizations of my size or that report on stories similar to the ones that I \* undertake. so all along, the way, you know, saying that user research is especially good at helping us think about what are the things that I can't get through data analytics and I can't get just through market research or kind of like desk research? And so going out and talking to people really can help you get that—those motivations, those unmet needs, those really rich design spaces. @@ -69,18 +69,17 @@ PARTICIPANT: So we talked about the concept of data-driven versus data informed And we had experiences from Sybil, I' sorry—Lynn, but they had this extra data and trying to validate how this type of data would be—[inaudible] interesting. -Andrew: That's terrific, so we have data-driven versus data what was the word you ued? Informed, thank you, yes, and quantitative and qualitative. That's great. I'm afraid we can't pass the microphone around, because it gets feedback in this room, but yeah, there were some great pointers there. How about the table that is in front of them, towards—so yes? The people there? +Andrew: That's terrific, so we have data-driven versus data what was the word you ued? Informed, thank you, yes, and quantitative and qualitative. That's great. I'm afraid we can't pass the microphone around, because it gets feedback in this room, but yeah, there were some great pointers there. How about the table that is in front of them, towards—so yes? The people there? PARTICIPANT: Let's see, we talked about interviews we did with people who were online sleuths trying to solve murder cases, we did a project where we tried to help them use a government website that wasn't very good. Partially because we had a narrow time to develop it, we told our staff that we were going to listen to these people and not to you, essentially, and because of the first time period, they actually listened to that and we got amaing feedback that we never would have expected on our designs just by talking to the people who use it. Let's see. Oh, we talked about how like every time—or that at Vox every time they tried to do some testing, it doesn't happen a long time, but it doesn't take that long if you actually get to it, and so it—a lot of us said that we wished we did it more. -Andrew: Great we'll come back to that, that sesting doesn't take long once you actually get started. So tips and tricks to make that happen. Yes we will get to that, for sure. And how about the table there that * has Emma on it? How about your grou - +Andrew: Great we'll come back to that, that sesting doesn't take long once you actually get started. So tips and tricks to make that happen. Yes we will get to that, for sure. And how about the table there that \* has Emma on it? How about your grou PARTICIPANT: Well, we had—we have a lot of stories of data being ignored for personal preference, basically trying to figure out you know, more about the buy-in and what's driving this local either ignoring it or kind of willfully misinterpreting the data. Basically kind of—many anecdotes about that. Or actual think we had an instance of user—user feedback on it, in-house, you know, in a newsroom CNS change that was initially ignored, and then they went to the nonuers and then when they dealt with that, they went back to the user again. Who found out that that was probably a better way to go. To really, I guess, give it a second shot, talk to the people that were going to be using it, because they really did know stuff about how it should be. -Andrew: Who'd have thought the uers know something about how to use it. So data-driven and data informed and data ignored. And one thing that I heard on one table was about the difficulties that they faced around trying to get user research to happen in lots of projects. One project it worked and others it doesn't. So one thing we have to think about is how to tell the stories of the work we have done and are doing within the newsrooms and outside the newsrooms to help fuel the opportunity to keep doing it. +Andrew: Who'd have thought the uers know something about how to use it. So data-driven and data informed and data ignored. And one thing that I heard on one table was about the difficulties that they faced around trying to get user research to happen in lots of projects. One project it worked and others it doesn't. So one thing we have to think about is how to tell the stories of the work we have done and are doing within the newsrooms and outside the newsrooms to help fuel the opportunity to keep doing it. Emily: One quick thing I'd love to do is just get a show of hands for meme who feel that their news organizations have all the resources they would like to use when it comes to research. If you really feel that way? @@ -102,10 +101,9 @@ Andrew: So yes, start with specifics about your jobs and where you are, and then Andrew: One more minute and then we'll move on to the final piece. -Emily: All right. In the interest of time, we're going to have you go ahead and just jump into the last question, which is: What do you wish more people knew about user research? And the challenge which I'll give you here in just a second, really is the emphasis is what are things that you could design that could actually help you? So instead of thinking global, really think about the problems that your team is faing, so that we're designing things that feel scrappy and kind of hackable. What we'd like to ask you to do is to come up with an exercise that you'd like to introduce to your team that could help them conduct some phase in the product or feature design process and you'll pick amongst yourselves. We just threw out some of the areas that you could design exercises for are during concepting, so before there's even a line of code is written, during development, when you're actually building the thing you want to release. During product testing, when you're actually going out and doing sort of a road show and collecting a lot of feedback, or post-release, when you're trying to make improvements. So we've put paper and post-its in front of you. Please leave us with some kind of artifact that really can help us—have a little bit of a roadmap for what it is that you'd like this exercise to look like. We will be going around, and but the—again, the idea here is what is something that could be a very first component to a design research toolkit, an exercise that we could try to introduce, and polish and put out into the world? - +Emily: All right. In the interest of time, we're going to have you go ahead and just jump into the last question, which is: What do you wish more people knew about user research? And the challenge which I'll give you here in just a second, really is the emphasis is what are things that you could design that could actually help you? So instead of thinking global, really think about the problems that your team is faing, so that we're designing things that feel scrappy and kind of hackable. What we'd like to ask you to do is to come up with an exercise that you'd like to introduce to your team that could help them conduct some phase in the product or feature design process and you'll pick amongst yourselves. We just threw out some of the areas that you could design exercises for are during concepting, so before there's even a line of code is written, during development, when you're actually building the thing you want to release. During product testing, when you're actually going out and doing sort of a road show and collecting a lot of feedback, or post-release, when you're trying to make improvements. So we've put paper and post-its in front of you. Please leave us with some kind of artifact that really can help us—have a little bit of a roadmap for what it is that you'd like this exercise to look like. We will be going around, and but the—again, the idea here is what is something that could be a very first component to a design research toolkit, an exercise that we could try to introduce, and polish and put out into the world? -PARTICIPANT: And this could be for what do you want for your team directly, so write down who it is it's for, so it might be for developers, it might be for the journalists. It might also—I've heard a lot of people talking about their bosses an publishers and the trouble has been trying to get people to understand the value of doing research or data. So it might be for your publisher or for your boss so write down who it's for and what is a step that you could take towards that and discuss it towards the group, so see if you can get other people's feedback, think about it for yourself and then share it with the group and see if you could help improve each other's OK? So is that clear? Who is it for? Your developers and your team, your boss, your designer, somebody else? And then what is this idea and keep it small and practical and just compact. OK? Great, go! +PARTICIPANT: And this could be for what do you want for your team directly, so write down who it is it's for, so it might be for developers, it might be for the journalists. It might also—I've heard a lot of people talking about their bosses an publishers and the trouble has been trying to get people to understand the value of doing research or data. So it might be for your publisher or for your boss so write down who it's for and what is a step that you could take towards that and discuss it towards the group, so see if you can get other people's feedback, think about it for yourself and then share it with the group and see if you could help improve each other's OK? So is that clear? Who is it for? Your developers and your team, your boss, your designer, somebody else? And then what is this idea and keep it small and practical and just compact. OK? Great, go! [group activity] @@ -113,7 +111,6 @@ Emily: Last minute to get your ideas down ... Emily: All right, everyone. So just quickly, Andrew and I are planning to stay after this session, and read through the ideas and sort of begin to synthesize some of what you've shared. If you have a little time and you're interested, please, you're very welcome to grab an adult beverage and come and join us in that process. Before we break as a big group, I'd love to hear just one example or one exercise idea, per table, the thing that maybe is the waciest idea that you all came up with. Go ahead and take us through. First table? - PARTICIPANT: Well, I mean, like I think a lot of us are just trying to figure out what is that process. Like, what question should be asked, you know, really general. Andrew: So the thing was just trying to figure out the questions to ask. So what is the process, so coming up with ways to analyze that big question, what is the process. This table here? @@ -122,7 +119,7 @@ PARTICIPANT: We were talking about a toolkit for paper prototing. So just kind o Andrew: Great, something that has mobile genes that you can cut out and just slide the paper through with the different screens. That sounds great. Yes, this table here? -PARTICIPANT: Well, we should, a lot of these are research. We didn't get into the desig part, but we're using a new data roll as data journalism roll at the Washington Post as a sort of study, case study, to think about sort of like what the kinds of things—what we want it and where the pipelines should be, between data research and—... Andrew: Great, what the pipelines would look like. The table in front of you. +PARTICIPANT: Well, we should, a lot of these are research. We didn't get into the desig part, but we're using a new data roll as data journalism roll at the Washington Post as a sort of study, case study, to think about sort of like what the kinds of things—what we want it and where the pipelines should be, between data research and—... Andrew: Great, what the pipelines would look like. The table in front of you. PARTICIPANT: The only thing that we came up with was a sticky note that says clip me for user research. Like Microsoft Clippy. @@ -142,15 +139,8 @@ Andrew: Great just have a nonjournallist user to get to the article and how woul PARTICIPANT: And based on that do a content and design audit. -Andrew: Yeah, fantastic, test the assumptions as David said. We've really just scratched a surface with another hour or so we would have gotten much deeper and much more depth in terms of that. I think this is exactly what we want from this. It's a quick and dirty, some ideas to help you. We will then, what we'll do is we'll pull it all together and put a LinkedIn the etherpad and also circulate it around online, SRCCON will tweet it out and share it, too, if you want to leave your email address, too, inside the etherpad, we can send you link to it, if you're interested in developing this further, let us know. This is a start of a conversation of how we can get more people in the newsroom, understanding the value of research and also participating in it, and this is just the beginning. +Andrew: Yeah, fantastic, test the assumptions as David said. We've really just scratched a surface with another hour or so we would have gotten much deeper and much more depth in terms of that. I think this is exactly what we want from this. It's a quick and dirty, some ideas to help you. We will then, what we'll do is we'll pull it all together and put a LinkedIn the etherpad and also circulate it around online, SRCCON will tweet it out and share it, too, if you want to leave your email address, too, inside the etherpad, we can send you link to it, if you're interested in developing this further, let us know. This is a start of a conversation of how we can get more people in the newsroom, understanding the value of research and also participating in it, and this is just the beginning. Emily: Thank you all for coming. Hope you'll stay. Give yourselves a big round of applause. [applause] - - - - - - - diff --git a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-video-captioning.md b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-video-captioning.md index c9fbc029..e2dbceb4 100644 --- a/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-video-captioning.md +++ b/_archive/transcripts/2016/SRCCON2016-video-captioning.md @@ -9,606 +9,312 @@ And one of the things that's really hard to persuade people to do is to caption So yeah, so I don't know if any of you want to share similar kinds of things at this point. But what I was kind of thinking was what was interesting is that lots and lots of captioned videos started popping up all of a sudden because Facebook and other sites started auto-playing videos with sound off. And suddenly, all those kinds of "buts" magically started to disappear and people started captioning videos. And I think it's an interesting phenomenon. It's not hard to research because you just open your app and you see these videos everywhere. And so it was a really interesting research that I had to do. But it's a really interesting phenomenon, I think, and it's kind of interesting to talk about. So I wanted to, if people are up for that, the first half of the session I've got some kind of examples and we're going to kind of look critically at this new type of format, like, these kinds of silent videos and what works on those platforms and what's special about them versus the way that people have traditionally done, like, news clips. And then the second half of the session, I was planning to do a bit more into too long. So how people are actually making the captioning, can we do that faster, can we do it more cheaply, what are some of the tools on you the there for doing that? Cool. So this is more interactive and fun. You get to watch some videos in this part. So it's like being in a fun film studies lecture, hopefully. So I've invented this game. It's called "being a social media editor." So this was a real documentary that aired in the UK. It's called Grayson Harry: All man. He's often commenting on contemporary issues. So this was, like, a three-part series where he's looking at masculinity. Different aspects of masculinity. And so I think the first episode, he looked at cage fighting, like, amateur cage fighters in the north of England. And then the second episode was about gangs and police who were also people in prison, and those, most of them all men. And then the third one, bankers. And so he visits these series of groups and then at the end makes some artwork to comment on what he's seen. So that's a bit of background. So I've found some different kinds of clips of this show and that's the game, it's called Be a Social Media Editor. So we're going to watch these videos, and then afterwards, we're going to have a couple minutes to discuss if they would work. On social media and what parts you would take and how you would edit it to make it better. So this was a trailer for the third episode about investment bankers and just to simulate the kind of Facebook stuff, I'm going to play it with sound off. So it might be a little hard work. At least you'll kind of get that experience, and then we'll talk about it after. And I will put these links up on the etherpad after, if you have an urge to come back and look at that. Okay. Here we go. - - [ Video ] - - So if you want, just take one minute and chat to the person next to you. So you have to imagine, you're the social media editor. Is there anything that you would want to use in that footage if you wanted to make a more social clip that would work better without sound at the beginning and do you want to talk a little bit about the way that it was kind of designed. So yeah, so take a minute and we'll kind of report back. You'll get to watch it with sound after. It would make more sense. - - PARTICIPANT: Can you replay it since there's no sound? - - GIDEON: There's no sound, so you're welcome to chat as you go about, yeah, what you think. Okay. Cool. So yeah, so everyone's had a couple of minutes. So should we just go around. And if you've got comments. And Annabel can write because I have very bad handwriting. So, I guess, I'm very interested in what you would use from this, and what you thought about it as a kind of start of the video. Any kind of thoughts? - - PARTICIPANT: There's no story without textual content or voices. - - GIDEON: So you have no idea what's going on? - - PARTICIPANT: I take this as, like, we have a scene for like whatever you want. You don't know what I'm talking about. It can be anything. So there's no story to that aspect. - - PARTICIPANT: Well, there is the title. - - PARTICIPANT: Well, the title still tells me nothing. - - PARTICIPANT: Investment bankers discuss masculinity. - - PARTICIPANT: Our version of it was that either it was scheduled, or maybe mysterious. He got picked up by a helicopter to get brought to this, like, exclusive group of investment bankers based on the title. And then, like, they're, you know, discussing some issue that's important. I guess the title's a suggestion. But at that point, it becomes very unclear, as soon as they get into the dialogue, I have no idea. It doesn't seem confrontational. - - PARTICIPANT: We were talking about if we were doing some a social video, we would do establishing shots and then maybe doing a shot of them getting picked up in helicopters because helicopters are cool. And then maybe a shot of them talking but we have no idea what they're talking about. - - PARTICIPANT: It seems like there's a difference between them and him. I haven't listened to the video yet. I'm just predicting. But maybe there's a moment of, like, oh, cool, you have a helicopter, maybe. And then having one quote there. And then moving onto this dialogue going into this boardroom, where I assume they're talking about their differences because look how relaxed he is compared to everyone else, that is going to be, like, here's me, here's you, that's going to be two, three quotes tops. And of course, for social you have to edit it down to 30, or 40 seconds. How long is this video? - - PARTICIPANT: To me, it seems like it's trying to communicate excess, and the difference between them and the viewer. You know, so you get all of these shots of them finishing off their beers. And thousand nicely their dressed. And I might be projecting, but a smug entitlement looks on their faces. So maybe that would be preserved. But I think it kind of visually communicates what I think they're talking about pretty well, which is you should be slightly shocked by the excess of these guys here. - - GIDEON: Yeah, so one thing I—so for me this is quite typical documentary or news report stuff footage. So they're kind of deliberate, those background shots of buildings and stuff, right? They're not accidental but they don't mean a lot on their own. But if you watch a lot of news reports, it's like, here's an apple, and people are walking through, and we'll have people talking through. It's pretty standard stuff. But it was pretty hard. It was pretty hard to keep your attention for three minutes watching that without sound. Now it should be much easier, many fun because we'll watch it with sound and hopefully we'll have other versions that would be a little bit easier as we go. So see, you're now going to really appreciate this now with the sound. I hope this works. So yeah, let's watch it again and we'll see if any of your assumptions were right, or how the experience is different this time. Is the sound going to work? - - [ Video ] - - PARTICIPANT: I'm spending time with the man of the city of London. I want to make art about what it feels like to be a man, and what it's still to judge from statistics, a bastion of male power. It's a secretive world, and then they got quite caged when I raised the topic but some opened up to me. Independent city manager, Tom is based in Monaco. - - PARTICIPANT: If there is a point where you think that I have enough money. - - PARTICIPANT: It's not so simply a financial mindset. I think it's just... you know, I feel especially now like the first day I walked on to do training for London. - - PARTICIPANT: On a visit to London, Tom took me for drinks Mayfair with friends, investment manager Jack, and risk manager, Hussein. - - PARTICIPANT: There's this figure of the macho, super successful, capitalist. - - PARTICIPANT: That just doesn't exist, though. That generally does not exist. Like, there's no—it's got a lot more—it's got a lot more dumb. - - PARTICIPANT: It's a lot more about carefully managing what you're doing, and making sure your clients are making money. And I'm very, very sorry to stay. Most people in the cities — - - PARTICIPANT: Of course, there's discriminatory behavior, of course, there's discrimination. But those are small pockets of any industry. I think that that isn't—you can't just generalize that into the financial industry. - - PARTICIPANT: The fact is that, you know, anybody flying out of London, all they see is this great big encampment of great big glass cocks POEBGDZ out of the city. And the heads of most of those things are probably men. - - PARTICIPANT: Twenty, thirty years ago, that might have been the case but in especially in the last ten years, there's been a strong change for the city, especially for women. - - PARTICIPANT: The rise of women in the city. Do you think it's changing it? Or is the culture still the same? - - PARTICIPANT: The culture's changed. Women have risen. - - PARTICIPANT: Has it changed because men have been called out, or has it changed because they've come along and had more power? - - PARTICIPANT: The role is evolving every day, so, of course, the banking industry and the finance industry goes with it. People want masculinity. I think it's being condensed as it's evolved. - - PARTICIPANT: Condensed into what? - - PARTICIPANT: We've devolved into this thing called sensitive masculinity. - - PARTICIPANT: What do you mean? Do you kind of widen your brief on... - - PARTICIPANT: I think we all have, because just masculinity isn't enough. You need to be sensitive to other things. - - GIDEON: Okay. Cool. So how was this watching this a second time? - - PARTICIPANT: A lot different. - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, I feel like this one is a really translate to that format because so much of it is conversation based. It's not something that you could pull one quote from and really get the sense of what they're talking about at all. - - PARTICIPANT: Yes, obviously, this is edited for a specific kind of type of case. And yeah, there's other footage in the show that you don't see. So we've got some other season, other kind of stuff in the show. So if you just had to rate that clip... sorry, go on. - - PARTICIPANT: I was just going to say, I find this happens to me a lot of times with online video but I got the point in about 30 seconds, and then I started to zone out. So, normally, I would have hit the "X" button and moved on. But I felt they could have been a lot more concise with it with the overall point. I'm not sitting down and watching that documentary. - - PARTICIPANT: I think that's what's so seductive about the X format, though. It's short, and it gets you the feeling of reading an article, where you skim it, versus watching a video, and sit there, and watch the conversation unfold. The pacing feels very different. - - GIDEON: Okay. If you had to rate that video for social out of ten, say... - - PARTICIPANT: Social potential? That if you cut it up to 30 seconds? - - GIDEON: I suppose as it stands. - - - As it stands. - - +As it stands. PARTICIPANT: One or two. I think it's just too long. - - PARTICIPANT: I think it would still be a really hard one to succeed on social just because it's more about nuance than, you know, some really straightforward storyline like the kitten gets rescued at the end. Those are easy. - - GIDEON: Cool. So you're going to see this video, too. It's the trailer for the series, which I think was used kind of online. And because they're constrained by likely, of how long they're allowed to make these things. So it's shorter, and it's covering more ground. So if it's all right, I'm going to do the same thing again, without sound so you get an idea of how that experience is. - - [ Video ] - - Okay. Cool. So yeah, do you want to just take a second and talk about that one for a little bit, just with the person next to you? Maybe a comparison to the first one? How you found it. Okay. Cool. So yeah, how did people feel about this one to watch without sound? How was it? - - PARTICIPANT: Much better. - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, a lot more effective at, you know, keeping you watching it until the end, for sure. I think the power of the progress bar is actually really strong. Like, truly, if I'm looking down, and I notice it's only 30 seconds long, like you said, cool, I'll finish this. But the trailer format, it keeps your attention. It's designed to keep your attention. But even that piece, it already has a story in it. Here's what you expect, here's a twist at the end, and here's not to expect. So I think that's already a cool effective bit of editing. - - PARTICIPANT: It communicates the topic very clearly, even with just a few words. It doesn't take much. But that's enough to... you know what's going on, and you know what the show's going on. - - PARTICIPANT: The tran reveals tight, they can you tell bits out along the shot. So they, sort of, fast forwarded in a way, and jumped to a point. It was compressed from something that was longer to something that was short. ` - - - - GIDEON: I think the whole show is pirated on YouTube. So that was actually taken from the title sequence. I think there's a whole slow motion of him putting on more—kind of dressing up. So that's a big part. So yeah, they've taken a tiny fragment of that. But it's probably enough with the label to tell you about that. But that communicates quite a bit that you didn't get at all in the first clip, right? That's important to get in the trailer. 'Cause this was used for on-demand catch-up, they were expecting people to turn the sound off, because they would turn the sound off during the adverts. So I think they may have thought about that use case. So seeing it again with the sound so you can see it kind of in that way. - - [ Video ] Okay. And so they go. The sound add a lot for you this time, or less? - - PARTICIPANT: Didn't do much for me. I think the only meaningful thing was the last sentence of, you know, saying what he was doing. But that could have been done with text. - - PARTICIPANT: But even that, that's kind of the impression you get. It just kind of reinforces what you already... - - PARTICIPANT: They also had sort of macho music. - - PARTICIPANT: I found it kind of aggravating as long as you get the sense of what... - - PARTICIPANT: And at the start there's a bit that you didn't get as well. Like what he said at the end, but at the start they were talking. - - GIDEON: It's quite hard to play, I can try and play it from the beginning. It's like saying, what is a man, or something. He's asking them in the council state. - - PARTICIPANT: Are you talking about the dialogue between the actual people on the screen? Or...? - - PARTICIPANT: The start is people on the street talking. - - PARTICIPANT: I couldn't understand. - - PARTICIPANT: Even with the audio up. - - PARTICIPANT: What's a real man? [Inaudible] - - GIDEON: So that's talking from the north of England. So I think that was, like, in that episode, they go to a town that used to be, like, known more for coal mining. And the coal mining industry's kind of gone. And so, he's talking to these people about what makes them masculine. Some of these have become kind of these MMA-style amateur cage fighters. But yeah, that's the Northern English accent might be hard to translate. But they really do need subtitles if they sold that show abroad. So yes. Okay. So this is the third and final example you're going to get now. So this is what they actually put out on social media. Or in fact, sorry, do you want to rate that one out of ten as, like, a social experience to watch with the sound off? - - PARTICIPANT: I would still be kind of surprised to see that on Facebook because it seems much more traditional advertisement. - - PARTICIPANT: Right. - - PARTICIPANT: But it would probably be more effective. But it doesn't seem like—yeah. It still doesn't seem like a style made for social. - - GIDEON: Okay. Cool. So we're saying six or something? - - PARTICIPANT: Seven? - - PARTICIPANT: I would say six. - - PARTICIPANT: I would say seven. - - PARTICIPANT: Six. - - GIDEON: Okay. So we've gone from about one to six. So we're going to play this cart which they actually played on Facebook and see what you think. So I'm going to turn the sound off again, and then we'll see. So yeah, this is what they actually used on Facebook. And so that's, like, the head of the—like the head of finance for the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer so there you go. So yeah, take a sec and talk to us what do you think of that version. One minute, 48. Okay. Cool. So yeah, I guess very quite different from the first two. Any thoughts, especially if someone hasn't spoken so far? - - PARTICIPANT: Um, we thought it was kind of weird how they jumped from the captioning on the bottom, and then, like, the big, kind of, idea captioning. It was kind of jarring a lot. - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, I would have stopped watching it, as soon as the captions were small, and then went to the dialogue. That was not interesting. But towards the end, when it went back to the sculpture, I found that more interesting. Interesting to see, because now on Facebook Live you can see audience engagement. - - PARTICIPANT: We thought that—okay. They say that one quote saying these financial guys think he's wrong, they don't like the sculpture. But they don't actually talk about what they don't like about it. This is impossible to do post-production if they didn't get the footage of saying, "I think it sucks." That's the quote I want afterwards. In other words, not them bickering on the phone. There's too much B roll, too wordy to a point. It should be, if it started with the sculpture, it should be believe tied in, and not loosely fragmented. Sort of following the structure of the argument. - - PARTICIPANT: I don't remember what I said. - - GIDEON: So in the actual show, yeah, you do get—so what happens in the show the a, so he goes, and he talks to the city, and at the end, he invites them all to the Chard, which is one of those giant glass tall buildings in London and then makes a big reveal. There's actually big artworks that you makes in the city. There's the penis, and then there's the bull kind of trampling the terrain, different stuff. But yeah, he gets their reactions. So the bankers he talks to, he invites them back, and yeah, so they do say that. I don't know why they didn't include that. Maybe it wasn't punchy enough, or it's quite lengthy, and nuanced there, the explanation. But yeah, you do get that in the actual show. So they would have had that footage if they wanted. And any other thoughts about it? - - PARTICIPANT: I just thought it was too long, again. I don't think there was any need to put half of the stuff that was in it that was in it. - - GIDEON: So you think you could have cut it down. So that was 1:48 or something? - - PARTICIPANT: I know, Anna and I discussed this, 48, I think that's right half the time. But I think somebody said, the captions aren't that appealing. There's better ways of titles stuff, and maybe captions are a lot smaller. I don't know. I didn't think they were great. - - GIDEON: Yeah, so that's actually one of the things that you get with these videos like you were saying is, you get a mix of these kind of traditional kinds of captions at the bottom and then these kind of overlay explaining text. I don't know what the correct word for this. Reuters call this all a texted video. I don't know. But yeah, part of this format tends to be captions, and then the explanatory overlays and that's just the style because you can explain a lot with words. But maybe style it better. - - PARTICIPANT: I think it all comes back down to the content the they style in it, because if they're going to make you read something, you better get something out of it that's really profound and I didn't get that when I was reading. And it probably just comes to, like, I would have wanted, like, 16 seconds, not, like, an hour—not like a minute or 16 or whatever. It felt really long. - - PARTICIPANT: I was going to say the format was the format was clearly the best of the three formats. - - PARTICIPANT: Seems like the captions in the videos, captions are kind of like the bag of facts, when you treated, you're like oh, I learned something in each and every single caption. - - GIDEON: Yeah, that's interesting. I've got an example after this, that's more example of that style of format. In guardian, we call those explainers, I think that's something that we've made up, but it's video with text on it that tries you teach you very quickly. Vox may have similar things but different made-up words for it. But I've got some examples of that stuff. Do you think this stood out as opposed to the others? Those were more trailers, and this was more pitched like a news story. Do you think it told its story on its own? Would you watch the show after? Or...? - - PARTICIPANT: I felt this told the most complete story. But it didn't make me more interested. It was like, all right. Now I know the gist of things. Now, I don't need to hear more from that guy. - - GIDEON: So it tells you the whole story. It's pitched a bit different, like, a beginning, and middle, and end. Like, I'm still interested for the bits in between. And that seems to be quite common social style when you compress your whole story. So you don't just make it a pitch and say, "Click here to watch the video," the full thing. And that is a challenge. So for publishers, they actually want you to go to their site or TV want you to watch their show. But that's less satisfying, if you watch the trailer, you don't feel like you've watched the content. Say, at The Guardian, if we have a long documentary do we have a short version that tells the whole story, or do we have a trailer and you feel fobbed off because you have to go somewhere else. And that's a really hard problem if anyone's got any thoughts about that. But yeah, that's a challenge that publishers are kind of wrestling with. But just like the other ones, I'm going to play this back with sound so you can see kind of get an idea how that was can you tell, as well. - - [ Video ] - - There you go. Is it much different with the sounds? Did it add anything? - - PARTICIPANT: No, I don't think so. - - GIDEON: Okay. Cool. So I hope that was kind of interesting examples. How would you rate that one out of ten as a kind of—would you share it? I guess that's the key barometer, right, because they probably want you to do that at the very least. - - PARTICIPANT: I wouldn't share it. - - GIDEON: Okay. So just for context, yeah, it's got half a million views in the UK, which is really good. It might be that it's less of interest to a U.S. audience, maybe. Just to give some context. But it definitely—so the other trailers kind of only had a few thousand views on Facebook. So you can see how it scales on Facebook. And you can see if it works, it drives up traffic. - - PARTICIPANT: I wonder if—I'm sorry—I wonder if people shared it in the first 15 to 20 seconds, where it had humor and a dick joke. And maybe they didn't finish it. And we're sitting there, having watched it three times, and so we're bored. But when you watch it and hit the share button. - - PARTICIPANT: It's the novelty in concept. It's still a show that's better in video than it is in text. - - PARTICIPANT: Do they track that, at what time stamp somebody shared it? - - GIDEON: I'm not sure if that's available. I'm sure Facebook knows that. All we know is that on Facebook, a play means you saw it for three seconds. It didn't mean you clicked on it. It means you saw it for three seconds. - - PARTICIPANT: Wow. - - GIDEON: So yeah. And I think on Facebook—or YouTube, sorry. You have to be 30 seconds watching the video on the video page. And so it's quite a different measure of a view. But maybe, yeah, it's kind of telling what you're saying about—so it's kind of an emotional—there's some emotional hook like there's the thing that's interesting about a giant penis, and they show that right up front, right? They don't wait until the big reveal at the end. Because you might only see it for three seconds. And you might share it after 15 seconds. And yeah, that would be interesting to note. Cool. Yeah, the last example I've got, it's a bit more like you were saying—yeah, these kind of explainer formats that teach you something. So, we do a lot of that in Guardian, that's, like, one of our standard things these days, like, since this new kind of format came up. So I just want to show you an example of that and see what you think of it. It's really short because that's the nature of the format. And so this one is 50 seconds. So you can see, maybe it's too long. But we'll see. So, so same thing. I'll play it with the sound off. - - [ Video ] - - Cool. That's it. - - PARTICIPANT: Can you play it again? - - GIDEON: Yeah, I can repeat it. - - PARTICIPANT: It makes me angry. - - GIDEON: Yeah, have a lot of that clip. - - PARTICIPANT: The fact that we just wanted to watch that again. I think that says something. - - PARTICIPANT: Like I feel like I would probably stop watching there, honestly, if I was actually going through Facebook. - - PARTICIPANT: It feels like, I want a KitKat. - - GIDEON: It's going to make you hungry, right? - - PARTICIPANT: It looks like one of the effective techniques is to hint at a lot more content that they've distilled down to something. Would you think this one feels distilled and the last one feels stretched. I didn't feel like okay, there's all this stuff that they've condensed this for me. I feel like that one had one thing that stressed. But this is—they have a mountain of stuff that they've taken off the top for me. For some reason, that makes me more likely to watch it. - - PARTICIPANT: It feels more dense. Than traditionally, you're getting less out of the video without the sound. - - GIDEON: So how would you rate it out of ten as a social network kind of thing? - - PARTICIPANT: An eight? - - PARTICIPANT: A nine? - - PARTICIPANT: I can't think of a different format that I would rather experience that story. - - GIDEON: So you think it's really well suited to the format? - - PARTICIPANT: I feel like I've seen a million videos like that go by my Facebook stream. And so, people share that. It seems like it's pretty successful. I don't because I don't like sharing things. - - PARTICIPANT: But if I saw that, I would at least look at it, to find out what the key—what's going to happen. - - PARTICIPANT: I feel like in addition to being quick to consume, it takes this really important—the issue about it isn't really about chocolate. It's about Brexit, and the economy, which is an incredibly important topic. So I feel like it takes this important topic and puts it in a consumable, like, chocolate coating that makes it easy to share. - - GIDEON: Right. And I don't know if you can see, there's yeah, there's, like, a humorous caption. And I think that goes to what you're saying. I realize that it's a serious topic but it's a jokey kind of tone. Especially first in a—so I think the assumption is that the readers will be upset, or the people—it's enticing those types of people. - - PARTICIPANT: Can I have you look up another example? - - GIDEON: Sure. Yeah. - - PARTICIPANT: 'Cause I just realize that it's from The Guardian and I realized that it was it was one that I had watched and thought, wow, I would have watched it if it wasn't in this text format. And I just Google, "Refugees reunited with cat." - - GIDEON: So yeah, if you've got examples and you want to put it in the etherpad, that's cool, as well. If you paste it in there, that's just nice that people have the reference. - - PARTICIPANT: And it's on YouTube, which makes it easier to find. - - PARTICIPANT: Or are there any examples of shareable video? - - PARTICIPANT: Yeah, that's the one, right at the top. It was just the first time that I noticed myself watching the video, and the text, and realizing that I was continuing to watch it specifically because of that. - - GIDEON: Yeah, so this, we would probably call an explainer, as well. You can see kind of the similar kind of font and lettering and stuff like that. Although, it's a bit—yeah, that's right. So we can see if there's sound on this one. I think there is some. - - PARTICIPANT: In a Burberry bag? That's kind of... weird. - - [ Video ] - - PARTICIPANT: I'm a huge sucker for that kind of stuff. - - GIDEON: Well, what's interesting, maybe it shares with the last video is there's an emotional kind of hook into a topic. So you can have a really intellectual way of looking at Brexit, or what tends to work well in social is some sort of emotional hook. If you see, there's a report on the etherpad, that talks about work on social, and usually, texted, and having an emotional hook, is something you can see in common. Maybe the giant cock thing is a similar thing where you get some sort of reaction. It may not be the same warm, fuzzy reaction, and they're trying to get some sort of reaction out of you. Cool. So yeah, that's been a really interesting discussion. So we have a few minutes left so we're not going to look at tools or anything. Are any of you working on this stuff, or are you currently captioning, or you want do more, or you want to do more but you don't have the time, or resources. But I don't know. So, right now, these processes are really manual. I've seen how they do it. So Guardian, we have templates in Premier, we just templates, and it's really clunky. Same with the subtitles, there they might have a transcription of that, and they're typing it in. And it's hard to scale. And that's maybe why people aren't scaling this to Facebook. But now it's imperative and other social media sites. But there are, in the etherpad, there's links to different tools like Trint that Mark worked on, that do automated transcripts. So if you're looking to get started, it might be nice to look at one of these tools to help making captions for your videos. So captions kind of come in two different ways, where you can toggle them on and off where it's like side loading and overlay, and these kind of style where it's burned in, where it's a part of the video. So you might want different styles for different things. So yeah, now let me see if I can... - - PARTICIPANT: As a side note, I feel like probably worth looking at what the Hillary Campaign is doing for the campaign. I feel like the cutting edge of shareable videos in the United States would be good to look at it. - - PARTICIPANT: There's a link to AJ Lusser on the etherpad. - - GIDEON: And not just on Facebook, or Instagram and that's your thing. So yeah, if you want to look more kind of into what works, and doesn't. Then you can get started. And if there's other channels that you know, then you can add links there. So yeah, and there's links to captioning tools and stuff if you want to get started and do more stuff yourself. I'll quickly show you Trint in one second. So I've uploaded one of the Guardian videos. And it does automatic speech-to-text. So this is completely unedited. And what's impressive, it gets some of these terms like Teresa Menus, who's the prime minister. So there's got some things where he's making this kind of northern noise, it struggles with that. But you can go in, and you can just make corrections here so you can see he's got this northern A there, which is kind of wrong, so you can just go in, and I can edit that out. And like this, where it's already texted in the video, I can just remove that out. So it's using a text editor. And I can export this, as well as, highlight, as a subtitle format, and upload it straight to Facebook. I don't know if I have time to show you that now. But you can export it as this subret format. - - PARTICIPANT: You can also export as captions. We haven't gotten it so that it puts all the bits together yet but we had it working once. - - GIDEON: So yeah, I can take this and then I can—I think, it just did. So if I go to options here, and I edit this video, so yeah, I can here upload .srt file. It has to be like this special format like this filename.en_gb.srt. Evening this is clunky but I think this will improve over time. But for now, you have to get the special format because I think so that it knows what language it's in. So we'll call this for now, OJ, and it has to be .EN_GB, which is British English. So I can just take that, and I can upload it. Yeah... and then... save that. So normally, I would have gone through and made more corrections. So it's quite easy. I think they're a bit short than what you would probably want. But for the effort it's pretty good. So yeah, and there's a trial link that you can use on the etherpad if you want to try this out. So it's really cool, a lot less labor than doing it manually. So they go—I think we're kind of out of time. I hope it's been interesting, and really good examples. And kind of thinking about next steps if you're doing video stuff yourselves. That's it. Thanks. - - [ Applause ] - - PARTICIPANT: Do you know if you've associated a subtitle file with your video. Facebook, when they auto-play do they auto-have the captions turned on? - - GIDEON: I think that's on. And I think if you play a Facebook advert, they'll have in beta—I think that's not. Live for everyone yet. But I think they've got their own automated service plus human editing. So I imagine, maybe, in a year or two, that would be just available for everyone. So Facebook will provide this kind of thing. - - PARTICIPANT: One quick announcement. I don't know if anyone here knows Ben Moscowitz, he was previously in New Zealand, and he was doing all sorts of crazy things but he and I are working on a course at NYU with video remixing specifically as it pertains to U.S. political—the presidential elections. So I'm just throwing a shout-out. This is an open course that we're building. And so anyone that is interested in either, like, being engaged and trying one of our assignments or helping us design one of the assignments—it doesn't have to be a huge time commitment—or, you know, helping with some of the open source tools that we're using like Hyperaudio, or Popcorn, or things like that and we're building out, too, for. I'm Dana Schultz... - - -GIDEON: And I approve this message! \ No newline at end of file +GIDEON: And I approve this message! diff --git a/_config.yml b/_config.yml index 8497a9e0..5a03acaf 100644 --- a/_config.yml +++ b/_config.yml @@ -4,7 +4,19 @@ kramdown: smart_quotes: lsquo,rsquo,ldquo,rdquo plugins: - jekyll-redirect-from -exclude: ['*.yml'] +exclude: + [ + "*.yml", + "tasks/*", + "tmp/*", + "temp/*", + "TROUBLESHOOTING.md", + "LICENSE", + "package*", + "Rakefile", + "README.md", + "*.json", + ] collections: transcripts: output: true @@ -13,14 +25,29 @@ collections: output: true permalink: /:collection/:slug/ +# Deployment vars - used by `rake deploy:*` tasks and GitHub Actions +deployment: + bucket: srccon.org + staging_bucket: staging.srccon.org + cloudfront_distribution_id: ECMNG6UKQITLL + defaults: - scope: path: "" values: - layout: layout_hub + # layout options: layout | layout_hub + layout: layout_hub # `layout` is fairly out of date for content circa 2026 + # logo options logo: /media/img/srccon_logo_angle_512.png - title: SRCCON Events — Change how your journalism works + # sitewide title tag default + title: SRCCON 2026 — July 8 & 9 in Minneapolis + # sitewide description tag default -- can be overridden on a per-page basis description: SRCCON events are participatory, interactive conferences and workshops centered on the challenges that news technology and data teams encounter every day. + # link to the schedule for the current SRCCON event -- used in the _layout files + latest_srccon_program: https://2026.srccon.org/program/ + # google_analytics_id: set this value to your GA4 measurement ID (format: G-XXXXXXXXXX) + # Leave empty to disable Google Analytics tracking + google_analytics_id: "" - scope: path: "" type: "transcripts" @@ -33,4 +60,4 @@ defaults: values: layout: layout_hub section: share - description: Exercises and tipsheets to help you get the most out of a journalism event, then share what you learned when you get back home. \ No newline at end of file + description: Exercises and tipsheets to help you get the most out of a journalism event, then share what you learned when you get back home. diff --git a/_config/production/s3_website.yml b/_config/production/s3_website.yml deleted file mode 100644 index 9a44cca1..00000000 --- a/_config/production/s3_website.yml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,5 +0,0 @@ -s3_id: <%= ENV['AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID'] %> -s3_secret: <%= ENV['AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY'] %> -s3_bucket: <%= ENV['AWS_S3_BUCKET'] %> -cloudfront_wildcard_invalidation: true -cloudfront_distribution_id: <%= ENV['CLOUDFRONT_DISTRIBUTION_ID'] %> \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_config/staging/s3_website.yml b/_config/staging/s3_website.yml deleted file mode 100644 index 4b646c7a..00000000 --- a/_config/staging/s3_website.yml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3 +0,0 @@ -s3_id: <%= ENV['AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID'] %> -s3_secret: <%= ENV['AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY'] %> -s3_bucket: <%= ENV['AWS_S3_BUCKET_STAGING'] %> diff --git a/_data/proposals.yaml b/_data/proposals.yaml index b0913071..b6efa1b8 100644 --- a/_data/proposals.yaml +++ b/_data/proposals.yaml @@ -1,1200 +1,1200 @@ [ - { - "cofacilitator": "Alex Tatusian", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Sometimes the well of ideas runs dry and we find ourselves stuck in a creative rut. If we can't move past it, let's try thinking sideways. Drawing inspiration from Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, a card-based system that offers pithy prompts for creative thinking, we'll discuss ways to shift our perspective in the process of brainstorming, designing and problem-solving. Some of Schmidt and Eno's one-line strategies include:\n\n\"Not building a wall but making a brick.\"\n\"Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place.\"\n\"You can only make one dot at a time.\"\n\nWe'll look at projects that emerged from unconventional sources of inspiration, share our favorite methods of breaking creative block and then develop our own list of \"oblique strategies\" that we'll publish online after the session.", - "facilitator": "Katie Park", - "facilitator_twitter": "katiepark", - "id": 2355668, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T19:17:08.293Z", - "title": "\"Abandon normal instruments\": Sideways strategies for defeating creative block" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "This year we launched the project Desconfio in which we have developed a methodology to analyze distrust electoral information. This allowed us to create indicators and establish a ranking of confidence in the news that we would like to share in the event.", - "facilitator": "Adrian Pino", - "facilitator_twitter": "adrianpino22", - "id": 2355773, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:51:46.697Z", - "title": "A method to Distrust about electoral news" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "The 2020 census is a year away, but chances are you’ve already heard about it. The census is making headlines because several states are suing the Trump administration over its plans to include a citizenship question. But much of the news glosses over why the census is important and how it affects everyone’s lives. Congressional representation is at stake, along with $800 billion in federal funds that will get disbursed for state, county, and community programs over the next decade.\n\nWhen KPCC conducted human-centered design research into the census and the opportunities for public service journalism, one finding stood out: We can’t assume educated news consumers know the stakes or the mechanics of the census. There was a very low level of census knowledge among the people we interviewed, including current NPR listeners. How can we address this knowledge gap? We have some ideas. Let's talk.", - "facilitator": "Ashley Alvarado", - "facilitator_twitter": "ashleyalvarado", - "id": 2338108, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-10T20:34:54.842Z", - "title": "A playbook for reporters interested in reaching people at risk of being undercounted" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Troy Thibodeaux", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "If you've used or ever wanted to use parts of the agile method for news gathering and dissemination (as opposed to product/platform development) we want to hear your ideas and share ours.\n\nIn this session, we'll use a discussion format called a fishbowl to compare notes, hear success stories and brainstorm ways we can adapt agile tools and methods to help ease the pain of newsroom chaos and deadlines.", - "facilitator": "George LeVines", - "facilitator_twitter": "rhymeswthgeorge", - "id": 2356049, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:44:13.403Z", - "title": "Agile in the newsroom: successes, failures and shades of gray" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "In the relentless news cycle for journalists and feelings of content overconsumption by people, what can news comedy formats like Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert teach us about engaging audiences and editorial discretion.", - "facilitator": "Ha-Hoa Hamano", - "facilitator_twitter": "hahoais_", - "id": 2355979, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T02:56:27.886Z", - "title": "Are you not entertained? When to make fun of the news" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "In a post-Gamergate world, how should we think about personal data in our reporting and our research? What responsibilities do we have to the privacy of the communities we report on? While many journalists have [struggled with this question](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T71OE4fm4ns0ugEOmKOY4xF4H9ikbebmikv96sgi16A/edit), few newsrooms have an explicit ethics policy on how they retain, release, and redact personally-identifiable information. Let's change that, by drafting a sample PII ethics policy that can be adopted by organizations both large and small.", - "facilitator": "Thomas Wilburn", - "facilitator_twitter": "thomaswilburn", - "id": 2351440, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-15T17:27:09.359Z", - "title": "Assembling the Scramble Suit" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Dave Stanton", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Conferences may be educational and inspirational for you, but also expanding value to your team and organization should be at the top of your mind. Having a process to help in preparing, attending, and post-event knowledge sharing can help focus your attention to maximize the time you spend at conferences. In this session, we will define the common types of conference attendees and map to activities before, during, and after conferences to provide a solid framework for making conferences a must-fund part of your team’s budget. If you’ve ever come back from an event inspired and excited, but unsure how to take the next step, this session is for you.", - "facilitator": "Emma Carew Grovum", - "facilitator_twitter": "Emmacarew", - "id": 2353845, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T19:25:31.582Z", - "title": "Bang for your buck: how to help your newsroom get the most out of SRCCON (or any journalism event)" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "It’s often assumed there’s a difference between being part of an innovation team and working a beat in a traditional newsroom setting. There is much that is transferable between the two jobs. This session would explore similarities between two seemingly different functions in the modern newsroom and try to answer the following questions: How do you bring the level of exploration and experimentation to your beat? What lessons might folks with a product manager/design background be able to share with fellow journalists to make the return easier?", - "facilitator": "André Natta", - "facilitator_twitter": "acnatta", - "id": 2351499, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:31:23.131Z", - "title": "Beat as a product: Lessons from product innovation for the newsroom" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Tina Ye", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "We use a bazillion code words to describe how decisions are made—data-driven, data-informed, consensus-based, human-centered, testing-driven, “design by committee”, KPIs, micromanagement, the list goes on—but they all tend to gloss over the messy parts of what is actually happening between humans and the thought process behind them. How do we make sure we make the correct decision? How do we do it in a way that is collaborative and where everyone on the team is heard and bought in?\n\nHow do we make sure product managers and designers and developers are all on the same page? How do we make sure they’re thinking the same thing as the editors, product owners and everyone else? What do we do when there are cultural differences? How do we deal with disagreements and power dynamics within the org? Different communication styles? How do we change our minds as we learn new things? How do we center voices from historically marginalized communities? How do we go one step further and include the communities we serve in decision-making?\n\nJoin Tina and Cordelia as we take a stroll through some of the theory behind facilitation methods and figure out how to make it fit into our processes.", - "facilitator": "Cordelia", - "facilitator_twitter": "thebestsophist", - "id": 2338195, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:18:08.876Z", - "title": "“Because the Boss Said So”: How the h*ck do we make decisions anyway?" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "We really love journalism. We really love tech, and what it can do. We’re not so sure it’s sustainable for us in the long term or maybe even the short. We want to brainstorm ways to stay help connected and useful, even if /when that means running for the hills.\n\nHow can we support this necessity of a good world and not sacrifice ourselves.", - "facilitator": "Sydette Harry", - "facilitator_twitter": "Blackamazon", - "id": 2353723, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T14:04:01.964Z", - "title": "Before I Let Go: Leaving The Business without Leaving the Work" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "We have an obligation to our teams and our companies to bring great new people into our work who can help push our teams forward, and yet interviewing candidates can feel extracurricular and rote. We need to discuss what we might be doing wrong, what the consequences are, and how to better focus our efforts when we are interviewing the people who want to work alongside us. \n\nLet’s talk about how to create safe and respectful spaces in a job interview. Let’s think deeply and critically about how we spend the thirty to sixty minutes we have in the company of potential colleagues to ensure we’re learning the right things, in the right ways, for the right reasons. Let’s discuss different approaches to advocating for a candidate you believe in, finding the person behind the candidate, questioning unconscious bias as you observe it, and teaching others how to do likewise.\n\nThis session is designed for both for seasoned interviewers and folks who have never done it before. Using actual interviews as a practice space and group discussion about foibles and tactics, we hope to walk away from this session with renewed focus and better, more respectful tools for getting to know a potential colleague and doing the hard work of bringing them into our newsrooms.", - "facilitator": "David Yee", - "facilitator_twitter": "tangentialism", - "id": 2355903, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T00:25:02.103Z", - "title": "Being in the room: the hard work of interview-based hiring" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Since ancient times, humans have used fasting as a powerful tool to enhance mental acuity. We see this from people like Hippocrates, Plato, and Benjamin Franklin, all strong supporters of fasting, to the great mathematician Pythagoras, who required that his students fast to maximize their focus. Fasting has been shown to reduce brain-fog, increase memory, improve mood, and even resist aging. This completely free technique takes no time nor effort to do, and yields great benefits. \n\nThe ritual of eating 3 meals per day was introduced relatively recently, as the product of a colonial attempt to appear more “civilized.” Break free from wasted time day-dreaming about lunch. Break free from 3pm slumps where all you can think about is a nap. Learn to harvest the focus and zen that comes from fasting, and channel it into your passions. \n\nThis session will be focused on learning how incorporating fasting into your lifestyle can help you get the most out of your day.", - "facilitator": "Jennie M Shapira", - "facilitator_twitter": "jennieshapira", - "id": 2355610, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:54:35.964Z", - "title": "Better than Coffee: Fasting as a Fuel for Focus" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Political intimidation threatens media practitioners worldwide and disinformation campaigns destabilize public trust. Journalists are under surveillance, are increasingly hacked, doxxed and harassed. Over the last several years, numerous journalists and news organizations have reported incidents in which their communications have been hacked, intercepted, or retrieved (Der Spiegel staff, 2015; Wagstaff, 2014). When journalists’ digital accounts are vulnerable to hacks or surveillance, news organizations, journalists, and their sources are at risk. These risks vary and can include financial loss, physical threats, or sources’ unwillingness to share information for fear of related consequences (FDR Group & PEN America, 2013, 2015). \n\nDespite these myriad concerns, many newsrooms lack the resources necessary to build robust and resilient security cultures. This session will address these concerns by documenting the needs of participants and their newsrooms. Drawing on guides like OpenNews’s “Field Guide to Security Training in the Newsroom,” participants will articulate what has worked and what hasn’t – from information security technologies to data policies – in order to identify core themes and challenges. Participants will walk away with a co-created best practices document that they can use as a starting point in their newsrooms to foster robust security cultures in a time of increasing doxing attempts, labor precarity, financial constraints, and decreasing trust in the media.", - "facilitator": "Jennifer Henrichsen", - "facilitator_twitter": "JennHenrichsen", - "id": 2355710, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T02:22:24.849Z", - "title": "Breaking Through the Ambivalence: The Future of Security Cultures in the Newsroom" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Innovation is freedom to experiment. Innovation is creative and fast. Innovation is not production. Innovation in the newsroom is all of those things for BBC News Labs. As News Labs grew from a small experimental team to a full multidisciplinary team, the flexibility of \"innovation\" reduced our ability to communicate with each other. Will innovation be restricted by structure, when it demands flexibility to try out ideas? Is cultural change possible when the ideology of the team is synonymous to what is problematic? This session will explore these questions and how re-introducing structure - Objective Key Results (OKRs) - helped us break silos in our team.", - "facilitator": "Eimi Okuno", - "facilitator_twitter": "emettely", - "id": 2353162, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T14:31:55.994Z", - "title": "Breaking silos - how OKRs helped our team communicate and drive innovation" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Gulp? Grunt? NPM? 😱😱😱You're not the only one in over your head. Tools are rapidly changing, and what works for one team might be too opinionated for a lonely coder working on their own. On top of this, when do we find time to learn (let alone build) these tools while on aggressive deadlines?\n\nBring your rigs, your successes, your failures, and your questions. We will show off tools we have built and compare notes about where to begin, what to prioritize, and what to avoid.", - "facilitator": "Daniel Wood", - "facilitator_twitter": "danielpwwood", - "id": 2355521, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-29T17:09:57.576Z", - "title": "Build Tools: We're all making it up as we go along" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Mike Rispoli", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "RispoliMike", - "description": "Developing sources is standard practice, but what about developing collaborators? Community members have so much more to offer than choice quotes and timely expertise. What if we developed the capacity of our audience to pitch stories, design distribution strategies, report, analyze, and disseminate the news?\n\nLet’s flesh out the resources that exist among our audience & within our communities, and the possibilities to invest in those resources so that the community invests in our journalism.\n\nFree Press plans to partner with a newsroom or community partner to facilitate this session.", - "facilitator": "Madeleine Bair", - "facilitator_twitter": "@madbair", - "id": 2355594, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-29T17:43:37.160Z", - "title": "Building newsroom capacity by tapping into expertise outside the newsroom" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Emma Carew Grovum", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "In this session, we’ll collaboratively create ways to help folks from historically privileged backgrounds be better allies to their colleagues from minority and marginalized backgrounds. The goal is to advocate for fair and comprehensive coverage and a more inclusive newsroom culture. The method by which we get that done is up to us, but will aim to result in a community that continues beyond SRCCON.\n\nIt’s time for the people with privilege to do the hard work of making things right. This might be a messy and awkward process, but our work, our workplaces and our lives will be better for it.", - "facilitator": "Hannah Wise", - "facilitator_twitter": "hannahjwise", - "id": 2355291, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T14:21:32.860Z", - "title": "Calling All Media Diversity Avengers: Now’s the time to act." - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "In the modern political landscape truth is a challenging concept to fully grasp but one that is heard about from all angles. What is considered truthful, what is considered falsehoods, and how to tell one from the other, is discussed ad infinitum on TV, in op-eds, journalism schools and the halls of power. Since 2016 the words “fact checking” have been thrown about as a panacea to all of our woes, but the reality of fact checking, its actual process, and how technology is coming up to assist with it, is, mostly, fundamentally misunderstood.\n\nI want to shed light on this vaguely opaque and still nascent form of journalism. How does it differ from the fact checkers that newspapers and magazines have employed for decades? How are these decisions reached? How, and if, technology and modern concepts such as artificial intelligence and machine learning can play a role in holding politicians and public figures to account. This will be the place to ask questions, figure out where different expertises can assist in the problem, and maybe even get a bit of hope for the future.", - "facilitator": "Christopher Guess", - "facilitator_twitter": "Cguess", - "id": 2355717, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T20:43:01.275Z", - "title": "Can Computers be Fact Checkers?" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "In the thick of relentless news cycles, it’s easy to forget to take the time to celebrate and acknowledge the truly great work that we are doing to serve our communities on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. In this session, we’ll focus on the need to celebrate wins – both large and small – as individuals and members of a team. We’ll examine different styles of celebrating and recognizing each other, and we’ll look at examples of how workplaces emphasize joy and gratitude as well as collective celebration. Participants will work with each other to craft a plan for how they want to mark important milestones in their own work. In the immortal words of Kool and the Gang, “Bring your good times, and your laughter too.”", - "facilitator": "Amy L. Kovac-Ashley", - "facilitator_twitter": "terabithia4", - "id": 2355677, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:19:24.890Z", - "title": "Celebrate good times, come on!" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Being a journalist is hard these days and awards aren't a bad thing. But data I've compiled shows that the best work of the year is often backloaded into November and December, when most contest deadlines come due. But this is also likely the least ideal time for big impactful work to come out as regular people and those with power to effectuate change leave work for the holidays. Let's have a discussion about how we can change that, to be able to fete our peers while also remaining true to our mission.", - "facilitator": "Stephen Stirling", - "facilitator_twitter": "sstirling", - "id": 2345683, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-12T18:13:02.088Z", - "title": "Changing journalism's awards culture" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "What if your audience could give you data on the issues you’re reporting on? Whether it’s investigating pollution levels in a community by using air quality monitors, or figuring out how stressed out we feel about politics by doing saliva tests, or tracking the urban heat island effect using temperature and humidity sensors. \n\nA research partner is indispensable, and the results are somewhere between journalism and science. But the experience can reveal the inner workings of scientific research. It’s engagement where you — usually along with your audience — explore in a hands-on way the ideas you’re covering in your stories. \n\nI’ll dig into the challenges and joys of partnering with researchers, and the thrills and frustrations in reporting on data from an activity you organized. \n\nI'd also guide them through a brainstorming on a scientific or research collaboration they might do. Everyone will then share their projects and get some feedback.", - "facilitator": "Elaine Chen", - "facilitator_twitter": "elainejchen", - "id": 2355024, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T14:48:42.547Z", - "title": "Citizen Science As Engagement" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Nozlee Samadzadeh", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "So much career advice revolves around mentorship, but many of us struggle to build mentorship relationships. How do you even find a mentor? And what do you do once you get one? It can feel intimidating and overwhelming to even get started, especially if you’re the only person with your title in the newsroom. Enter peer mentorship. As coworkers from different disciplines, we’ve found that peer mentorship has helped us grow in our careers, navigate the day-to-day challenges of life at work, and get shit done. We’ll talk about how you can identify potential peer mentors in your midst, what the peer mentorship relationship is and isn’t, and share some tips for structuring that relationship successfully. As a bonus, you might even leave the session with a potential peer mentor from the SRCCON community!", - "facilitator": "Marie Connelly", - "facilitator_twitter": "eyemadequiet", - "id": 2355895, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:00:04.172Z", - "title": "Conversations with friends: developing strong peer mentorship relationships" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Many of us work for organizations focused on the production and distribution of news and information via printed and digital formats. One thing we don't often consider is the space this work is consumed within or the impact our work could have on the physical world. This session would focus on a deeper conversation about the role the physical world should play in how we approach the development of and distribution of news.", - "facilitator": "André Natta", - "facilitator_twitter": "acnatta", - "id": 2351927, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T14:30:54.737Z", - "title": "Creating the Space for Journalism" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Jaimi Dowdell", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Teaching data journalism in newsrooms and at universities has forced us to come up with creative techniques. We wrote The SQL Song to help one group of boot camp attendees understand the order of commands. In an attempt to help students fine-tune their programs, we did a game show called Query Cash. To make string functions make more sense, we’ve created silly, but useful performances. To make this session interactive, we propose inviting attendees to bring their ideas. We also will pose some problems and have teams work out creative solutions.", - "facilitator": "Jennifer LaFleur", - "facilitator_twitter": "@j_la28", - "id": 2355574, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T16:28:15.813Z", - "title": "Creative ways to teach complex issues" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Will automated journalism compete with human journalists? Is it a way to cut costs and replace human journalists? or would it complement quotidian journalism and journalists? These are the questions this practical and conversational session seeks to answer. In the past few years, algorithms have been used to automatically generate news from structured data. In 2014 Associated Press, started automating the production of its quarterly corporate earnings reports. \n\nOnce developed, not only can algorithms create thousands of news stories for a particular topic, they also do it more quickly, cheaply, and potentially with fewer errors than any human journalist. Unsurprisingly, this efficiency has fueled journalists’ fears that automated content production will eventually eliminate newsroom jobs, however some experts see the technology’s potential to improve news quality with a human-machine alliance.", - "facilitator": "Blaise Aboh", - "facilitator_twitter": "@aimlegend_", - "id": 2343491, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-12T07:28:52.141Z", - "title": "DATA AND THE NEXT REPORTING REVOLUTION" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Leza Zaman", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Two women working at The New York Times in digital innovation share their recommendations, and facilitate conversations, rooted in their lived experience in corporate culture. Through discussion and exercises we hope the session gives you a starting point and a few tips and ticks to start designing a culture of diversity and inclusion. We plan to facilitate conversations around three core pillars to help employees at their company, whether big or small, no matter what industry: Structure, Conversation, and Assessing Success when designing culture and cultural change.\n\n“Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.” - Jacqueline Woodson", - "facilitator": "Angelica Hill", - "facilitator_twitter": "Angelica_Hill", - "id": 2354678, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T21:38:21.573Z", - "title": "Designing a Culture of Inclusivity and Diversity" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Brittany Mayes", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Over the past few decades, newsroom technologists have pushed the field of journalism forward in countless ways. As we approach a new decade, and arguably a new era of digital journalism, how must newsroom technologists evolve to meet new needs? And how do we center technology in a newsroom while also fixing the problems news organizations have long had regarding diversity, representing their communities, speaking to their audiences, etc.?\n\nIn this session, we will start with a set of hypotheses to seed discussion.\n\nFor journalism to succeed in the next decade:\n- Newsroom technologists must have real power in their organizations.\n- Experimentation and product development must be central to how a newsroom operates.\n- News organizations must be radically inclusive of their communities.\n- Cultivating positive culture and interpersonal relationships is key to developing sustainable newsrooms.\n\nGiven these hypotheses, what skills do we need to grow in newsroom technologists? What must we think about more deeply in our daily work? What tools do we need to develop? How must this community evolve? Together, let’s brainstorm these questions and leave with ideas to explore and deepen newsroom technology and culture beyond SRCCON.", - "facilitator": "Tyler Fisher", - "facilitator_twitter": "tylrfishr", - "id": 2349146, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T19:24:16.957Z", - "title": "Designing the next phase for newsroom technologists" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Journalism is a tougher job mentally than most people realize. Deadlines and the high-pressure to achieve perfection are part of it. But we are often on the front lines in experiencing the worst of humanity. Lately, we're targets simply for doing our job. Now, more than ever, we need each other.\n\nWe can take a moment to lean on each other to discuss tips for taking care of our mental health, from simple ideas such as developing good habits in our self-care to deeper situations which may involve medical help. What are the signs to be aware of? What safety nets exist for us to turn to? How can we be a good colleague in making sure those struggling around us are not being ignored? \n\nIn this off-the-record session, let's share our shoulders for crying and our personal stories for inspiration.", - "facilitator": "Erin Brown", - "facilitator_twitter": "embrown", - "id": 2355346, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T18:32:04.044Z", - "title": "Developing good habits in our self-care" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Democracy is a word that gets thrown around a lot as a by-product of journalism. But when was the last time you took a moment to really interrogate what democracy is and how to measure it? What is our relationship to democracy and how do we cultivate more of it? \n\nThis session follows a session from SRCCON:POWER where participants developed consensus definitions for democracy and brainstormed ways to cultivate a more thoughtful democratic practice in their work. (Read more about it here: https://medium.com/@simongalp/5-ways-to-make-your-workplace-more-democratic-730aa1fdc87f). We'll work with those definitions and your own to develop metrics for measuring how your work cultivates democracy. This will be a highly participatory session. Participants will leave the session with an understanding of democracy as a practice and approaches to measuring and articulating their own democratic impact.", - "facilitator": "Simon Galperin", - "facilitator_twitter": "thensim0nsaid", - "id": 2353506, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T19:00:38.626Z", - "title": "Developing your democracy metrics" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "How would you tackle a 100 million pages of PDFs? That's a question we've been thinking a lot about ever since DocumentCloud and MuckRock merged last year and we get increasingly close to that milestone. We're working on finding new ways to help analyze, categorize, search, sort, and otherwise help journalism tackle larger and larger documents sets in a way that supports the journalism we want to do. Come learn about our new crowdsourcing and machine learning efforts. More importantly, share your hairiest document analysis problems as we explore where the future of collaborating, analyzing, and reporting on massive document sets needs to go.", - "facilitator": "Michael Morisy", - "facilitator_twitter": "morisy", - "id": 2355715, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:19:42.184Z", - "title": "Document Dumpster Diving: Using Crowdsourcing and ML to Turn PDFs into ~Data~" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Maxine Whitely (Rebecca Halleck and Umi Syam would be great additions, if possible)", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Writing good documentation is hard, so let’s write some together in a low-pressure environment! This session isn’t just about writing documentation to go with SRCCON; it’s an opportunity to learn how to improve documentation at your organization and perhaps take-away a prototype install of Library, too.\n\nWe’ll start by collaborating on successful approaches to writing and sharing documentation in a newsroom, then use Library to collect useful documentation for all SRCCON attendees.\n\nLibrary is an open-source documentation tool released by the New York Times in collaboration with Northwestern University’s Knight Lab earlier this year. Because every page in Library is a Google Doc, you already know how to use it!", - "facilitator": "Isaac White", - "facilitator_twitter": "TweetAtIsaac", - "id": 2355283, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T23:09:53.353Z", - "title": "Document this conference! An introduction to Library." - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "[cue Star Wars scroll ...]\n\nHeading into 2019, Chicago faced a historic election. For the first time in decades, the mayor's office was up for grabs with no incumbent and no heir apparent to the 5th floor of City Hall. Meanwhile, the clerk, treasurer and entire 50-seat City Council were up for election. Competition was fierce.\n\nSmall newsrooms faced the daunting task of covering all of these races. More than 200 candidates were running for local office -- including more than a dozen for mayor -- from complete unknowns to career pols. All of this was taking place in a news environment where media often struggles to engage voters and help them make informed decisions.\n\nWith these challenges in mind, a group of five local independent newsrooms decided to pool their resources and work together to create a one-stop resource to serve voters. In a matter of days, the Chi.vote Collaborative was founded, launching a website with candidate profiles, articles, voter resources and other information. The collaborative grew to 10 partners and traffic to the website surged heading into the February election and eventual April runoff. We literally built the car as we drove it, rolling out new features as fast as we could develop them. All while publishing new stories and information daily. \n\nWe quickly learned a lot about collaborating, building on each other's strengths and overcoming challenges. Here are our takeaways, what worked and what didn't, along with tips, insights and all the key technical details that could help you and your collaborators cover the next election.", - "facilitator": "Matt Kiefer", - "facilitator_twitter": "@matt_kiefer", - "id": 2355759, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T22:40:05.072Z", - "title": "Don't compete, collaborate: Lessons learned from covering the 2019 Chicago municipal elections" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Vinessa Wan", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "(Subtitle: How The New York Times is Moving Towards a Culture of Growth and Accountability Through Blamelessness.)\n\nCo-facilitator: Vinessa Wan (who will be submitting her own form today, too.)\n\nIncidents and outages are a normal part of any complex system. In recent years The New York Times adopted a collaborative method for discussing these events called Learning Reviews. We'd like to give a brief introduction to Learning Reviews—where they originated, why they're called Learning Reviews, what they are—followed by a few exercises with the attendees. Some of these group exercises would focus on communicating the idea of complexity and how that impacts our ability to predict the future. In doing so, we'd also communicate how complex systems have a degree of impermanence and how this contributes to outages. This segues into the theme of the discussion, how do we look back on an event in a way that prioritizes learning more about our systems and less about finding fault with a human? We'll go over the importance of language and facilitation in this process.", - "facilitator": "Joe Hart", - "facilitator_twitter": null, - "id": 2355136, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T15:20:40.448Z", - "title": "Engineering Beyond Blame" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Journalism can feel like a bit much in this social media age, but it doesn't have to be. How can you promote meaningful, ethical, public powered journalism in a sea of noise? What needs to change about focus and culture in journalism? This session will attempt to answer those questions and exchange ideas.", - "facilitator": "Alex Veeneman", - "facilitator_twitter": "alex_veeneman", - "id": 2355068, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T15:10:38.870Z", - "title": "Ethical journalism in an information overload age" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "At most organizations, different departments all work on different timelines. News may think 36 hours is a long time, video features may think of a month as a short turnaround, and fundraising or ad sales needs to know NOW what is happening.\n\nHow do you balance the interests of a news team that makes last-minute decisions and works with a quick turnaround? How do you keep everyone in the know without compromising programming deadlines and managing time and resources? \n\nLearn how public radio's Science Friday successfully implemented an organization-wide editorial calendar and discover new tools to implement your own.", - "facilitator": "Christian Skotte", - "facilitator_twitter": "el_skootro", - "id": 2355091, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T15:41:33.378Z", - "title": "Everyone Together to the Calendar Table" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Shady Grove Oliver", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "In a 2013 survey of doctors, researchers found that 88.3% of doctors wish to “forego high-intensity treatments” and decline resuscitation, choosing different end-of-life care for themselves than their patients. The study states “it is likely that doctors recurrently witness the tremendous suffering their terminally ill patients experience as they undergo ineffective, high intensity treatments at the end of life and they (the doctors) consequentially wish to forego such treatments for themselves.” What does journalism look like under such a lens? How would we cover the next shooting? The next devastating natural disaster? A personal tragedy? A public embarrassment? When it is us, our families, our lives, how do we want our colleagues to conduct themselves? How do we want our stories told?\n\nWe’ve combined our backgrounds in narrative medicine, local journalism, ethics and access research into a project examining the parallels in how health care and journalism have evolved in the U.S. Across both fields, practitioners often cite the appeal of service to others as why they do the work, but are communities truly being served? The very practices of health care and journalism are shaped, challenged, and even threatened by the compromises created by the conflict between delivering a service and seeking revenue. They both have become industries that suffer from lack of access for local or rural communities, are distorted by the drive for profit or financial influence (like insurance companies and hedge-fund owners), deeply ingrained problems with diversity and representation and questions of agency, ethics, autonomy and participation from the people on the other side of the pen and stethoscope.\n\nJoin us for a frank group discussion and brainstorming session around the parallels between medicine and journalism and to push toward solutions that make our communities healthier—physically, emotionally and intellectually.", - "facilitator": "Heather Bryant", - "facilitator_twitter": "HBCompass", - "id": 2355782, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:31:12.885Z", - "title": "Extraordinary Measures: Learning from the parallels of journalism and health care to improve both" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Screenwriters use many techniques to distribute information throughout a film: building context to create goals and desires, withholding knowledge to create intrigue, planting clues to create suspense, and revealing discoveries to create surprise. By establishing rhythms of expectation, anticipation, disappointment, and fulfillment, a well-written screenplay keeps us captivated as it directs us through all the plot points and to the heart of the story.\n\nData journalism shares a similar goal. Are there lessons from screenwriting we can use to write engaging, data-driven stories, so we don’t end up with an info dump? Let’s find out together.\n\nIn this session, we’ll participate in a writers’ room to discuss how screenwriters use different strategies to jam-pack information into scenes while building a narrative and keeping pace. Then we’ll try out different screenwriting approaches to see how we can best break down complex data sets in our reporting, guide readers to the story, and keep their attention. Wipe down the whiteboards, grab some Post-its, and let’s “break” a story!", - "facilitator": "Phi Do", - "facilitator_twitter": "phihado", - "id": 2353008, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:23:12.759Z", - "title": "Fade In: What Data Journalism Can Learn from Screenwriting" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Kika Gilbert", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Feed-based architectures have long been the primary drivers of engagement for social media companies and online-first publishers. On the other hand, the digital offerings of older more mature publishers still mirror their print counterpart: Content is ordered by section and readers have no control over what they see. In this session, we want to explore if and how customizable feeds can work within a more traditional news website or app. \n\nHere are some questions we want to discuss: How does one build a feed to begin with? How can users personalize it to their interests? By adopting the feed concept, are we just one step closer to trapping our readers inside their own filter bubbles? How may we responsibly use algorithms to improve the relevance of a news feed? How, if at all, can we involve editors in the process? What is good data to collect in order to power a valuable feed for readers\n\nIn this session, we’ll share how we’ve started to answer some of these questions at The New York Times and how organizations can begin to program the most relevant journalism for their readers.", - "facilitator": "Anna Coenen", - "facilitator_twitter": null, - "id": 2355693, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T19:35:56.196Z", - "title": "Feed your readers’ curiosity: building a customizable (news) feed for publishers" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "As contributors, we walk a fine line with feedback. Often we want constructive criticism but don't know how to ask the right people to invest in our work. Alternatively, when asked for feedback, we only celebrate the strong parts and ignore critical issues. Occasionally even compliment sandwiches lose their border bread and become toxic. We're left just wanting to turn off the comments.\n\nIn this session, we'll identify how to frame feedback- both when soliciting and giving. We'll explore how to build healthy systems of feedback within organizations, communities, and as a freelancer. Optionally, come with something you are working on- design, code, text, concepts, or anything in between- and we will practice our feedback superpowers. Join us as we learn to more meaningfully communicate and build!", - "facilitator": "Kevin Huber", - "facilitator_twitter": "kevinahuber", - "id": 2355935, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:02:38.769Z", - "title": "Feedback Loop: How to separate from the noise and build healthy communities of feedback" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "\"Audience growth\" optimizes for engagement, but who is advocating for the wellbeing of news audiences? As more and more people in the U.S. are exposed to trauma, how can the journalism we produce meet audiences where they are and help them not only stay informed but process and heal? How can we establish a relationship with news audiences built on empathy and listening? How can we make room for complexity and nuance, even when there is no succinct nutgraf or sweepy headline?", - "facilitator": "Kelly Chen", - "facilitator_twitter": "chenkx", - "id": 2356123, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T05:33:59.902Z", - "title": "Feel your feelings" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "In many newsrooms, analytics are a reactive tool. We propose a more proactive method: treating analytics as real-time results of intentional editorial experiments. That takes a mindset shift, from waiting for answers to actively searching for them. \n\nIn this session, we’ll start with a short presentation on some of the innovative ways newsrooms have used data for experimentation. Then we’ll break into small groups to build out our newsroom experiments using Mad Libs-style brainstorming. The more unusual the ideas, the better; we want this discussion to throw out any constraints you’ve felt in the role analytics *should* play and think about other ways you *can* use analytics to improve your newsroom processes.", - "facilitator": "Shirley Qiu", - "facilitator_twitter": "callmeshirleyq", - "id": 2355102, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T18:40:22.790Z", - "title": "Fill in the blanks: Designing newsroom experiments using analytics" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Stephanie Snyder and/or Bridget Thoreson of Hearken", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "We are all too aware that the 2020 election is coming up. But do our community members feel empowered by the coverage we’re producing? Unlikely. Typically it starts with the candidates and what they have to do to win, rather than the voters and what they need to participate. We should flip that. \n\nIf we let the needs of community members drive the design of our election coverage, it would look dramatically different – and be dramatically better for our democratic process and social cohesion, we think. Bonus: those community members will be pretty grateful to you for unsexy coverage like explaining what a circuit court judge does. At a time when we’re pivoting to reader revenue, this public service journalism model is not just good karma – it should be seen as mission critical. \n\nWe’ll explore the “jobs to be done” in election reporting, how to ask questions that will give you a deeper understanding of voters’ information needs, the tools at our disposal to do that, and the ways that newsrooms can ensure they have enough feedback from actual voters to resist the siren call of the latest campaign gaffe or poll results.", - "facilitator": "Ariel Zirulnick", - "facilitator_twitter": "azirulnick", - "id": 2355770, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:38:40.976Z", - "title": "Fix your feedback loop: Letting people, not polls, drive your election coverage" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "You've acquired the skills you came to learn, now what? Brown bag it? Demo? Lecture...? In this interactive session, you'll learn how to use techniques from the classroom to teach and engage your team or workshop participants. This session will give you the tools to teach anyone, anything, anywhere.", - "facilitator": "Kathy Trieu", - "facilitator_twitter": null, - "id": 2355661, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T19:02:59.261Z", - "title": "From the Classroom to the Newsroom" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Joseph Lichterman", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Too often, tips and suggestions for email newsletters at newsrooms can take a “one size fits all” approach. We’ve seen that the way a newsletter is made at a newsroom can enormously vary based on the size, resources and purpose of any given newsroom. \n\nIn this session, we’ll create a card-based strategy game that will guide small groups of participants through the process of creating a new newsletter product that meets an outlet’s editorial and business outcomes. Groups will have to develop a strategy that meets specific goals and will have to overcome hurdles and challenges that we throw in their way. \n\nThroughout the simulation, we’ll present then guide the room through a series of discussion topics and exercises based around the key worksteams of an email newsletter at a newsroom: user research, content creation, workflows, acquiring new email readers, and converting readers to members or donors.", - "facilitator": "Emily Roseman", - "facilitator_twitter": "emilyroseman1", - "id": 2355937, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:04:46.363Z", - "title": "Game of Newsletters: A song of inboxes and subject lines" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Nobody goes into journalism for the money, but sometimes we have to leave the industry because of it. :( Many of us have shifted from a certain beat, moved up the corporate ladder or left completely. And yet we still long for the experiences which made us love the business in the first place.\n\nThomas Wolfe was wrong. You *can* go home again!\n\nLet's discuss strategies for identifying and finding outlets for our skills and expertise; managing time to pursue our passion projects; and plan for the catches that often come with a side-gig.", - "facilitator": "Erin Brown", - "facilitator_twitter": "embrown", - "id": 2354652, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-22T16:17:18.922Z", - "title": "Getting Back in the Game: Journalism as a Side Project" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Technology intersects with nearly every aspect of our lives, and based on the number of digital sabbath services and \"I'm leaving social media for good this time (probably!)\" posts that have been published, our relationship to technology feels out of control. \n\nBut our brains aren't what's broken, they're working exactly as they evolved to work. Technology has just evolved much, much faster. And that tech is affecting our emotional and physiological well being. Media companies and platforms have capitalized on our innate psychological and neurological vulnerabilities to make money and keep us hooked. But there have to be better ways to build community and share information on the web. Let's dig into the systemic issues (cough, capitalism) that have led to tech that makes us miserable and then design/brainstorm what humane platforms could look like.", - "facilitator": "Kaeti Hinck", - "facilitator_twitter": "kaeti", - "id": 2355551, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T16:28:29.461Z", - "title": "Ghosts in the Machine: How technology is shaping our lives and how we can build a better way" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "As an industry, we've struggled to get beyond \"Save journalism! And democracy!\" when it comes to helping readers understand the merits of supporting our work financially. Learn how to write timely, topical appeals that rally support around your newsroom’s most impactful work. The work featured may have had an impact on a particular reporting subject or community, or it may simply be something that your team is really proud of. During this session, you’ll draft concise language that may be used to promote membership or subscriptions across your website, social media and email.", - "facilitator": "Rebecca Quarls", - "facilitator_twitter": null, - "id": 2355096, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:29:59.906Z", - "title": "Go beyond “Save journalism!” when making the case for membership" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "What happens when you post your code to GitHub and people actually start using it?\n\nWhat makes for success in open source? How can you get your code noticed? Encourage contributions? Develop process? Reap the rewards of thousands of users using, testing and PR-ing to your work?\n\nBut also: what happens when it goes too far? How do you manage the chaos? Set expectations? Ensure you \"code\" responsibly (oh, and leave enough time for your day job)?", - "facilitator": "Jared Novack", - "facilitator_twitter": "jarednova", - "id": 2354624, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-22T15:20:33.960Z", - "title": "Great/Terrible News! Everyone's Using Your Open Source Library!" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Amanda Hicks", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "The Washington Post’s Research, Experimentation and Development (RED) team was established four years ago with the mission to build better ad tech. RED took its baby steps operating as a startup within a large media organization but has undergone a transformation to triple in size. This session will follow the team’s progress from a ragtag group of engineers through its awkward teenage phase when growing pains made project prioritization difficult to current day when the group is hitting its stride as an adult member of the Post. \n\nThe two presenters, both of whom joined the team in its early phases, will talk about the types of projects they developed early on, the challenges they encountered and what made them switch from individual solutions to more sustainable platforms. They will track the adoption of an agile development mindset and discuss when it does and does not work. Finally, they will showcase the Post’s user testing lab and how the results from periodic qualitative feedback have shaped the development roadmap. This is a session for attendees who want a peek inside the Post’s research advertising arm and those who want to know how to manage a development team through significant growth. We also will discuss how R&D groups at other publications can partner with RED in the ad tech and journalism space.", - "facilitator": "Aram Zucker-Scharff", - "facilitator_twitter": "Chronotope", - "id": 2343173, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T20:22:26.474Z", - "title": "Growing a team from scrappy startup to software powerhouse" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Karissa Cummings", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Ever worked on a horrible team? Same. Teams are the atomic unit of many organizations, and while we often consider how best to work, we don’t necessarily think about how to work together. We talk about team success as an outcome of psychological safety, team culture, or synergy, but what do those things actually mean and how do you cultivate them? \n\nJoin us to talk about building collaborative and cross-disciplinary teams that are actually fun to work on. We’ll use Tuckman’s Model for Group Development as a framework to understand how teams grow and share some of our best practices. We’d also love to hear how you help your teams build mutual respect, establish a shared mission, and continuously improve.", - "facilitator": "Caroline Cox-Orrell", - "facilitator_twitter": null, - "id": 2355261, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T21:39:25.604Z", - "title": "Herding Cats: Strategies to build and nurture successful teams" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "A meetup for those who are new to the world of journalism. For those just starting their career or for people who have shifted from a different industry. A casual time to discuss observations of the industry and trying to fit in with our seasoned newsroom colleagues.", - "facilitator": "Christopher Schwing", - "facilitator_twitter": null, - "id": 2343104, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-11T16:57:41.287Z", - "title": "Hi! I'm new(s) here." - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "It's been amazing to see how the news nerd community has grown and evolved over the decades, and as we've gotten to meet in person over the last 5 years of SRCCONs. We have data about who is part of the news nerd community, and through various Slacks and events like this one, we've seen how members of this community support and care for one another. Let's take a moment to reflect on this community (with the support of an outside facilitator): who is a part of this community? Who is not (or is not yet) included? What are our responsibilities to each other? What does our collective future hold? We'll explore what we need to create that future, together.", - "facilitator": "erika owens", - "facilitator_twitter": "erika_owens", - "id": 2338033, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T22:57:55.747Z", - "title": "How are we in community together?" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Kayla Christopherson", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "While journalists talk a lot about having an impact, we're not as forthcoming on how we can be more deliberate and active in informing structural change in our communities. Our work is often geared to spark surface-level outcomes (a law was passed, an official was held accountable, etc.), but even when media organizations are equipped to do deeper investigative work, they often don’t invest in longer-term strategies that can illuminate pathways for citizens to create more equitable, healthy systems.\n\nUsing a practice called systems thinking – a holistic approach to grappling with complex issues – journalists can develop more collaborative frameworks that help people build power and resiliency to address some of our most deeply rooted problems. Through the lens of systems thinking, we'll open a discussion about some of the big ideas and questions that a change-oriented approach holds for journalists: What new roles can journalists play to help evaluate and facilitate opportunities for social change? How do we negotiate traditional journalistic principles and standards while working to actively dismantle oppressive systems? How can we better communicate and act on our values?\n\nWe'll offer ideas from the systems thinking playbook, discuss examples of journalists who are actively rooting their practice in systems change and lead a visioning exercise to imagine new possibilities.", - "facilitator": "Cole Goins", - "facilitator_twitter": "@colegoins", - "id": 2342800, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T22:11:21.723Z", - "title": "How can newsrooms be more active catalysts for change?" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "In this session will open up the conversation to knowledge share successful open source strategies, drawing on participants questions and experience. \n\nAt BBC News Labs we recently open sourced a transcript editor component (https://github.com/bbc/react-transcript-editor) using a “code in the open” / “open source from the start” approach we engaged a community around the project. This has helped us to improve the project beyond what we had initially anticipated. \n\nBiggest discovery was that a lot of the key to a successful open source strategy was around the so called “soft skills”. Curating the project and communication within the contributors, drafting\ndocumentation, guides, ADR (architecture decision record), as well as talking to contributors and learn more about their use cases, online and offline.\n\nWe also discovered that it was instrumental in transferring our project to a production team to scale it to the rest of the organization.\n\nWill discuss what has worked, and what hasn’t worked for participants, and divide into groups to knowledge share potential open sourcing strategies.\n\nThis session welcomes both people who have no open source experience and are curious about how to get started as well as seasoned open source contributors/maintainers and anything in between.", - "facilitator": "Pietro Passarelli", - "facilitator_twitter": "pietropassarell", - "id": 2355743, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:16:25.179Z", - "title": "How open sourcing your project can help scale it to the the rest of the organisation" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Heather Chin", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "In this session, I’ll provide a comprehensive review of how you can bring a community together to build a podcast and why audio content can be valuable to local communities. \n\nWe’ll discuss how to focus on the news impacting your communities. You want to build trust with your listeners through respectful collaboration and give mis/underrepresented voices in the city a place where they can be heard. We’ll go over the methodologies that can build this mission into your organizational structure. Participants will learn how to create a mission statement and begin a series of task force meetings, along with how to:\n-Create a listener advisory board\n-Hold monthly meetings throughout neighborhoods in settings relevant to the discussion \n-Welcome locals to attend these meetings to come and share their ideas and insights for stories that the podcast should tell about their community\n-Invite locals to contribute their expertise and share their experience \n\nIt’s important to research how your community digests news. Really think about the neighborhoods you want to cover: Who is the audience you want to build? And who is reporting it? It helps if reporters are living in that area and/or reflect the identities of that area. \n\nThis session will also explore how you can incorporate your listeners into the storytelling.", - "facilitator": "Jordan Gass-Poore'", - "facilitator_twitter": "jgasspoore", - "id": 2356005, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T02:21:04.758Z", - "title": "How to Bring a Community Together to Build a Podcast" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Kate Rabinowitz", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Your newsroom has a rigorous process for editing words and traditional reporting. How can data journalists ensure that we’re editing data analysis with the same rigor? How can we take lessons from research and other fields and apply them to a fast-paced newsroom? \n\nIn this session, we’ll talk about how newsrooms are already doing this work—and how we can up our game. What are some of the challenges in adding new steps to existing workflows? How can you do this work if you don’t have a dedicated data editor? And how do you get the rest of the newsroom on board? We’ll share among participants the successes and challenges we’ve had, and try to find the ideal data editing process together.", - "facilitator": "Hannah Recht", - "facilitator_twitter": "hannah_recht", - "id": 2355655, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T19:39:25.514Z", - "title": "How to edit data as seriously as we edit words" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Carolyn Gearig (and potentially another person from another newsletter)", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "We’ve made dozens of iterations on our daily e-mail newsletters because of user feedback and resource constraints, business considerations and technological and design efficiency. To get smarter about what our users want and how we can work more efficiently to give it to them, we’ve used the “Jobs To Be Done” framework to define what each newsletter section does for our users. We asked several other newsletter writers we admire how they would use the Jobs To Be Done framework for their newsletters, and here’s what we learned.", - "facilitator": "Anika Anand", - "facilitator_twitter": "anikaanand00", - "id": 2355173, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T19:43:51.519Z", - "title": "How to iterate on a newsletter product with a \"Jobs To Be Done\" framework" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "In newsrooms, as in other workplaces, most are given power leadership through title and job description. But many of us operate in spaces where there is no one above you who can edit you. Let's explore how to lead your newsroom without the title and exert power over the things you care deeply about. And let's explore the ways you can acquire power by playing within the system.", - "facilitator": "Steven Rich", - "facilitator_twitter": "dataeditor", - "id": 2355671, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T00:32:02.064Z", - "title": "How to lead without power" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "In the last two years, I have organized conferences and have been invited at several others to speak and lead sessions. I have often been invited last minute to give a \"female\" perspective on issues and panels. I have been told how it has been very hard to find women data journalists. I have also reported about diversity in technology companies and have heard about how there is deficiency in the pipeline for hiring women of color. I'd like to share my approach to planning and organizing a diverse conference. This workshop will talk about strategies to find and recruit diverse speakers, creating a safe and inviting space for bringing perspectives from different backgrounds and walking through the process and challenges of building a diverse community.", - "facilitator": "Sinduja Rangarajan", - "facilitator_twitter": "cynduja", - "id": 2351500, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T02:26:20.305Z", - "title": "How to plan a kickass, diverse conference" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Amanda Yarnell", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "At SRCCON:WORK, I talked about re-building our newsroom org charts to reflect the work we’re doing today and to prepare us for where we’re going. Joined now with C&EN’s editorial director, Amanda Yarnell, we’ll show you how we built a product team and re-structured our newsroom around it in one year. \n\nIf you’re interested in building a newsroom-wide roadmap, streamlining and prioritizing newsroom ideas, creating and managing a sprint-based product team, and growing stakeholder alignment across business units, join us. In this session, we’ll share our blueprint, our successes, and our challenges, so you can do it faster.", - "facilitator": "Jessica Morrison", - "facilitator_twitter": "ihearttheroad", - "id": 2355555, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T16:39:02.638Z", - "title": "How to re-org your newsroom around product without breaking it" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "From photo inundation in stories about social media, to seemingly “visual-less” financial reporting, how do you spot a visual story? We’re interested in everything from photo/illustration, graphics, interactives, and online audio productions. We’ll share a few examples for inspiration to kick off discussion, but we’re mainly interested in hearing from everyone how they keep generate ideas and how they read drafts for potential. How do you think about the visual purpose? E.g. visuals as evidence, for empathy, or an emotional journey? We also want to hear everyone’s favorite tactics for visual research: how to get the visuals or the information to make them, from crowd-sourcing, open datasets, records requests, Google Earth, to interview tips. Finally, as we all know, visual stories tend to take more time than standard stories. What’s your process? How does your newsroom think about planning, setting expectations, and scoping (and the fact that it’s possible to rush edit a half-finished text into publishable form in a day if needed but not possible to hack a half-finished code project into functional form in a day)?", - "facilitator": "agnes chang", - "facilitator_twitter": null, - "id": 2355071, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T15:03:58.229Z", - "title": "How to spot and ship visual stories" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Swetha Kannan", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Technology is constantly changing the way we tell stories. But is it always for the best? Let’s take a look at how virtual reality and augmented reality tools have evolved, discuss when and how they can improve our stories, and learn some tricks to start using this technology.", - "facilitator": "Andrea Roberson", - "facilitator_twitter": "andyroberson22", - "id": 2355228, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T20:34:34.129Z", - "title": "How to use VR / AR to tell a story" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Let's enter the Data Team Time Machine and go back to our old graphics and long-ago code. Even the biggest superstars have a first project or an outdated framework that seems quaint now. In this session, we'll unearth some ancient work and talk about how we'd approach it differently with our current-day toolbox, whether that's refactoring some code, building with some modern-day software or scrapping it and starting again. Come to this session if you want to feel better about how far you've come and if you want some inspiration to look at your projects in a new light.", - "facilitator": "Erin Petenko", - "facilitator_twitter": "EPetenko", - "id": 2345883, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-12T19:23:37.566Z", - "title": "If I knew then what I know now" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Technology is a primary focus of innovation in data visualization and visual storytelling. So, what happens if we step away from our screens and instead create interactive visualizations without computers? Examples of non-digital interactive visualizations exist in many disciplines, from scale models used to get feedback about architectural plans to activist bake sales where women pay a different price than men to draw attention to pay disparities, as well as data art and installations. In this session, we’ll think about how to use objects, conversations and the built environment to show a visual story in an unexpected way, and then make physical interfaces in small groups to test interactions and identify principles that can translate back to digital spaces.", - "facilitator": "Lisa Waananen Jones", - "facilitator_twitter": "lisawaananen", - "id": 2356046, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:58:38.717Z", - "title": "Interactivity IRL: Creating interactive visualizations without computers" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "News organizations large and small are focused on the conversion of audiences to subscribers as a primary source of revenue in order to remain sustainable. It may already be time for them to think about what happens when this approach is no longer viable as a primary one. It may help to do so while approaching the issue by thinking about how your community is consuming and receiving their news and information.", - "facilitator": "Brent Hargrave", - "facilitator_twitter": "brenthargrave", - "id": 2355753, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T22:18:30.447Z", - "title": "Journalism post-subscriptions: What’s next?" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "What are the common traits among newsrooms with strong membership programs? How can your newsroom watch—and react to—metrics that move the needle for membership? The News Revenue Hub has built a first-of-its-kind Key Performance Indicator (KPI) report and benchmarking system for the 35-plus newsrooms it serves. We'd love to share what we've learned so far; but, moreover, we'd love for participants to contribute their own ideas for refining these tools and advancing the digital news industry’s membership model for fundraising.", - "facilitator": "Rebecca Quarls", - "facilitator_twitter": null, - "id": 2355630, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T20:24:30.170Z", - "title": "Key Performance Indi-what? How to watch—and react to—metrics that move the needle for membership" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Anyone who writes code has been here before: you know the code you want to write, you know you've written it before, but you've been searching your library for nearly 30 minutes now and you're ready to just give up and write the damn thing all over again.\n\nAnd you've probably been here before too: you processed the data by hand the first time around because it was just quicker to pivot table than it was to pandas. But it's a year later now and your editor wants you to update the story because new data were released but you cannot for the life of you remember what you did because you are always overworked and you can't even remember what you had for breakfast yesterday.\n\nLet's talk about writing and organizing reusable code so that we can avoid ever being in either one of those situations ever again.", - "facilitator": "Alexandra Kanik", - "facilitator_twitter": "act_rational", - "id": 2351366, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-29T16:58:42.916Z", - "title": "Lather, Rinse, Repeat: How to write and sustain reusable code in the wild" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "It can feel as though you have to have a journalism degree in order to be taken seriously in a newsroom. However, it’s long been a common practice for people to enter the profession from another one, often bringing new approaches and mindsets to it. Join journalists who’ve entered the profession from all walks of life as we navigate a wide-ranging conversation about what these hyphenates bring to the table and how they can help shape the future of the profession.", - "facilitator": "Faye Teng", - "facilitator_twitter": "FayeTeng3", - "id": 2355680, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:11:51.964Z", - "title": "Lessons from outside of journalism" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Let's sketch out the boundaries of our collective newsroom practices in working with documents. One document or many, many, _many_ documents – there is much to talk about in how we help with the work. Our expectations may touch on vocabulary, degrees of technological sophistication, project scale, evergreen collections, learning curves, workflows, etc. I'd love to discuss supporting shared tools, custom approaches and the inherent challenge that unites any doc-rich project: \"wow, that's a lot of documents, where do we start?\" (Are we looking for ammo to help guide own newsroom? Yes, we are. And we could really use your help!)", - "facilitator": "Tiff Fehr", - "facilitator_twitter": "tiffeh", - "id": 2353982, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-20T03:22:23.997Z", - "title": "Let's Find the Boundaries of our Documents Practices" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "The dream of the 90s is alive with static sites! The JAM stack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) is a new twist on an old idea. Making static webpages has many benefits for newsrooms in terms of cost and long term maintainability. In this session, we will go through the basics of the static site generation landscape and participants will deploy their own custom static site, like GeoCities never died but with a data driven twist.", - "facilitator": "Carl Johnson", - "facilitator_twitter": "carlmjohnson", - "id": 2345204, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-12T14:58:30.506Z", - "title": "Let's JAMstack! How to Make Data-driven Static Sites" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "The world of online advertising has been under a lot of fire. Online advertising has been used to target disenfranchised groups, those deemed manipulatable, and to push political disinformation. The economies of scale, having the many different types and origins of advertising, has made it even more difficult to prevent bad actors on different platforms. The question then arises, what makes an ethical ad? What can we do on our publications and platforms to help promote more ethical advertising?", - "facilitator": "Ian Carrico", - "facilitator_twitter": "iamcarrico", - "id": 2355189, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T13:30:25.313Z", - "title": "Let's build some ethical advertising" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism has been engaged in a multi-faceted Local News Initiative for the last year, looking for opportunities to help local news organizations find ways to thrive. We've conducted big data analysis of the web reading behavior of paying subscribers, and we're exploring ways to introduce students to media product development methods and seeing how we can boost their work with Knight Lab's development staff. We have some other projects starting to take shape, and we'll be seeking more funding to continue the work and extend it to new partners and different environments.\n\n In this session, we'll talk about what we've done so far, but, more importantly, we want to talk with people working in local news to get direct perspectives on the challenges and opportunities they are experiencing. After a brief presentation about the project, we'll use some structured conversation methods to learn about what's needed and identify interesting opportunities for us to help.", - "facilitator": "Joe Germuska", - "facilitator_twitter": "JoeGermuska", - "id": 2355339, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T02:23:24.565Z", - "title": "Local News Initiative Road Show and Listening Tour" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Daily Bruin's data journalism blog, The Stack, started in 2015. It's gone through many ups and downs since its founder, Neil Bedi (a Pulitzer finalist this year) started it. The Stack is the one-stop shop for students interested in the intersection of data insights, coding and storytelling at UCLA. When I joined as a contributor in Fall 2017, the section had lost some of its best contributors and struggled in leadership and productivity for a whole academic year. There was a lack of camaraderie and need for collaboration which hindered the ability to produce much output as well, which took a long time to rework. Ensuring that data sections still work well and are adapting to the world around them is a tough deal.\n\nI hope to discuss not only the challenges of starting a student-run data journalism section, but ensuring its continuity and sustaining the content it produces for the community it serves. I'm interested in talking about how to engage with the local data journalism community (having LAT Data Desk employees who used to work at Daily Bruin to train students, for example) was crucial for boosting morale. Pushing to hire diverse students with varied skill sets and different backgrounds allowed for sensitive stories and working with data and sourcing in a more human-centered way. Working with senior leaders to incorporate data literacy and accessibility in small ways, as well as working with sensitive data (for example an interactive map allowing students to document their personal experiences with sexual violence anonymously) helps push boundaries and is worth investing in, in student newsrooms.", - "facilitator": "Henna Dialani", - "facilitator_twitter": "hennadialani", - "id": 2354124, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T22:34:07.600Z", - "title": "Longevity of a student-run data journalism section" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "There are many resources out there for managers leading remote teams. Similarly, there are plenty of resources for the people on those teams to work, communicate and collaborate effectively. There are also plenty of arguments that have been made for how remote work improves employee effectiveness and satisfaction, why it has economic benefits for employers, and on and on. \n\nAnd yet, national news organizations concentrate their staff in the most expensive cities in the country. Let's try to figure out why that is and help make the case for supporting a more remote-friendly workforce.\n\nIn this session we'll try to come up with as many of the common objections raised by hiring managers when they insist that a given position be based in a particular location and then come up with a playbook of effective arguments to overcome those objections.\n\nAdditionally, we'll come up with some high level talking points regarding how supporting remote work can improve the fundamental economics of journalism while improving the lives of employees and the communities they serve.", - "facilitator": "Adam Schweigert", - "facilitator_twitter": "aschweig", - "id": 2351494, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T23:58:59.036Z", - "title": "Making The Case For Remote Work" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Art vs Science. Creativity vs Deadlines. Leading a team at a news organization requires a lot of switching between left and right brain to get meetings scheduled but to coax the best ideas out of the team. But what happens if you get a boss who trends more to one side than the other? \n\nIt's more common than you think. Especially as newsrooms create more roles that straddle technical and editorial lines. So sometimes you may need a boss to get in there and wrestle with the material with you, but they’re busy overseeing a team of 20 people. Or you want someone who will go up the chain to argue that workflow changes are needed, but they would rather code review and tweak wording. \n\nIf any of this sounds familiar, let’s uncover the patterns in the way we interact with our higher-ups in order to have a strategy going forward. Without judgement, let’s take stock of ourselves and the people we report to in order to find ways that lead to better work relationships.", - "facilitator": "Lauren Flannery", - "facilitator_twitter": "LaurenFlannery3", - "id": 2355891, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T00:09:52.486Z", - "title": "Manager vs Editor: Navigating your boss’s management style to get you both where you need to go" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Bach Bui", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Marking up is the process of adding editorial context to content. Anyone who works with content does this, in ways both intuitive (like making notes in a margin) and unintuitive (like writing html). Because we do this constantly it’s easy to overlook how unintuitive our digital markup systems can be. How can we markup content in a way that both we and our digital systems can understand, while preserving our editorial intent for the future?\n\nIn this session, you’ll work in groups using arts and crafts to add an editorial voice to stories. You can bring your own story (please print it out!) or we’ll provide one for you. After, we'll discuss how the choices made by technology might limit what you can express and how long your markup will last in an archival state. We have some ideas of how to balance these needs, but would like to hear your ideas as well!", - "facilitator": "Tim Evans", - "facilitator_twitter": "@timmyce", - "id": 2352364, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:42:23.113Z", - "title": "Mark(er)ing up stories" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Sarah Shenker", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "At the BBC, we’re now focussing on how to best present our storytelling to younger audiences aged 16-35. So our big question is ‘what is the metric for reading experience?’\n\nHow do we judge whether a feature is successful? How do we compare two features to prioritise which to build next? How do we know that users are getting any value from us continuing to develop the product? Are the product and the storytelling able to be separated in terms of measuring the effectiveness of the output?\n\nAn interactive session exploring ideas for metrics, how they can help and how they can be misused - with a hope that we can take the first steps to finding a meaningful way to measure our storytelling ability.", - "facilitator": "Jim Johnson-Rollings", - "facilitator_twitter": null, - "id": 2355721, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T20:37:22.353Z", - "title": "Measuring the quality of the reading experience" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Heather Bryant (Project Facet)", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "This will be an interactive and honest conversation about how management can be improved in local newsrooms. We’ll break the subject into a few key conversation starters -- the factors that lead to promotion of non-transferable skill sets, the dramatic industry disruptions that lead to a chaotic situation for management, and how we tackle those big issues through human resource development. \n\nOne of the keys early on in the session will be to have people identify themselves as managers and former managers, versus our typical worker-bee reporters. We’ll encourage dialogue between the managers who are willing to talk about their fears and shortcomings, and worker bees who are willing to talk about how they want to be managed. We want to embrace this vulnerability, allowing managers and worker bees to speak with each other and come to better understandings of their counterparts.", - "facilitator": "Erin Mansfield", - "facilitator_twitter": "_erinmansfield", - "id": 2356004, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T02:32:50.301Z", - "title": "Meeting management challenges in local newsrooms" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Ariel Zirulnick and Simon Galperin", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Let's work together to build a membership model that is inclusive (meaning all the things you think that means and also accounts for things like skills as an entry point). Membership should be more than a monetary transaction and early access to Wait Wait tickets. It should be a gateway to the communities we serve. \n\nImportant: There will be LEGO’s in this session!", - "facilitator": "Candice Fortman", - "facilitator_twitter": "cande313", - "id": 2355063, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T15:29:43.726Z", - "title": "Membership Has its Privileges (and They Are Not Just for the Privileged)" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Launching a membership program is like eating an elephant. How do you do it? One bite at a time. From launch campaign planning to pressing send on your first email, learn how newsrooms are launching membership programs with fanfare. You’ll walk away from this session with an action item list, member level framework, launch campaign copywriting template and tips for assessing campaign performance.", - "facilitator": "Rebecca Quarls", - "facilitator_twitter": null, - "id": 2351814, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:28:30.418Z", - "title": "Membership launch 101: How to launch a membership program with fanfare" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Anna Smith, Amy Sweeney, Norel Hassan", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "We all have innovative ideas, but how do we effectively leverage them to bring creative solutions and unique perspectives to light in order to solve our business and user problems? Enter the mini design sprint. In this session, we’ll leverage an abridged (read: 2 hours or less) design sprint format to promote rapid idea generation through problem alignment and sketching.\n\nWe’ll go over the goals, ground rules and best practices for planning and facilitating mini design sprints, including the use of How Might We statements and personas. We’ll also introduce different methodologies and exercises you can use to support ideation, including effective ways to sketch individually and in groups. Finally, we’ll do a mini design sprint of our own so you can see it all in action, and touch on the best methods for synthesis and sharing post-sprint. Walk away with the confidence to plan and run your own design sprints.", - "facilitator": "Ranu Rajkarnikar", - "facilitator_twitter": "lanuchan", - "id": 2354668, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T18:09:15.891Z", - "title": "Mini Design Sprints: Generating Lots of Ideas in a Little Time" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Chances are you may be one of a handful of people in your newsroom tasked with creating and moderating an online community—maybe it’s a Facebook group, a subReddit, a chatroom (are those still a thing?), or creating conversation in the comments section of a specific beat/story. Maybe you’ve run a Facebook page or a social account before, but how do you foster a meaningful community, set appropriate guidelines, and moderate sensitive conversations?\n\nLet’s have a conversation about how to build a community from scratch, create support systems for yourself and your team (moderating is emotionally exhausting!), and run through some moderation scenarios and workshop ways to respond. Moderating discussion online isn’t just about making sure there’s no profanity in a posts—it’s become a tricky landscape that involves recognizing misinformation and disinformation tactics and checking your own biases. We hope you’ll come away from the session armed with tips on how to create strong community guidelines and ways to tackle tough conversations.", - "facilitator": "Kanyakrit Vongkiatkajorn", - "facilitator_twitter": "yukvon", - "id": 2355310, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T00:03:35.606Z", - "title": "Moderating An Online Community For the First Time? Here’s How to Dive In (And Stay Sane)" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Maya Miller", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "People are dying and it’s up to you to figure out why. In Queens, New York the percentage of people who die after suffering a heart attack is on the rise. Join our collaborative investigative team to solve the mystery and enact change.\n\nA la a murder mystery party or the world’s shortest LARP, you’ll play a character—perhaps a journalist, data analyst, EMS first responder, public housing resident, graphic designer, professor, city council member, hospital administrator, or community activist. Like any good mystery, you won’t be able to solve it alone.\n\nAt the end we’ll return to our everyday selves and discuss what we learned about working collaboratively, in and outside of journalism.", - "facilitator": "Laura Laderman", - "facilitator_twitter": "Liladerm", - "id": 2355398, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T14:32:31.653Z", - "title": "Murder Mystery: Collaborative Journalism Edition" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Let's all show each other our CMSes and workflows! A lineup of people involved in the development or operation of their CMS demos several key workflows and how different newsroom users accomplish the same tasks. Each demo will follow the same structure and show the same tasks for easy comparability.", - "facilitator": "Albert Sun", - "facilitator_twitter": "@albertsun", - "id": 2355631, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T17:41:35.936Z", - "title": "Mutual CMS Demos" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Kai Teoh... I think he's applied but if he hasn't maybe we can pull him in anyway because he's really responsible for a lot of this idea", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Many of us are overworked, lonely coders. How do we accomplish every day editorial projects and also dedicated time to learning new technologies and documenting workflows that we spend so much time implementing and testing? With all this newfangled tech, what’s noise and what’s signal?\n\nLet's talk about devising coping and filtering mechanisms for the onslaught of newness so we can all actually benefit from it.", - "facilitator": "Alexandra Kanik", - "facilitator_twitter": "act_rational", - "id": 2355911, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:06:25.896Z", - "title": "Noise & Signal: Knowing when to adopt new tech, and when to ignore it" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Journalists can learn so much from other practices, industries and fields. Approaches to public health, art, community organizing, critical theory, science and more can all carry valuable lessons for our work. Let's talk about the ideas we've gathered from texts, experiences and sources outside media and how they've affected the way we do journalism.\n\nBring one example of a reading, artwork, speech, event, interaction or anything that has deeply inspired your journalism practice and had nothing to do with journalism. We'll share our examples with each other and generate a list of sources that we can continue to build for others to draw from.", - "facilitator": "Cole Goins", - "facilitator_twitter": "colegoins", - "id": 2355367, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T14:22:57.191Z", - "title": "Outside Sources: Sharing inspiration from beyond journalism" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "\"Parachute journalism\" is the practice of national outlets or freelancers flying into local communities they're not a part of to report a story, then leaving again. It's a part of our journalistic economy, as the money and power in journalism is focused in just a few geographic locations--but it can also be damaging to local communities, and it can lead to misrepresentation, distrust and resentment. Often, national journalists appear in a community in times of trauma and elections, and report stories with insufficient context, while local journalists struggle to access equivalent resources for necessary ongoing reporting. This session will explore our collective experiences with parachute journalism as both insiders and outsiders to a community, in order to produce good ideas about how to do harm reduction, increase accountability, and shift power dynamics. We'll ask: Are there situations where it's better if this story just doesn't get told? How do we evaluate that? What can national media outlets and freelancers do to connect and collaborate with local journalists and local communities? What are the ethics of accountable partnerships? In what ways do local and regional/national media needs differ, and how can journalists collaborate to produce stories that better address the needs of all involved? All of this will be driving at a larger question: What does justice and accountability look like in the practice of journalism?", - "facilitator": "Lewis Raven Wallace", - "facilitator_twitter": "lewispants", - "id": 2355308, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T00:22:42.837Z", - "title": "Parachute Journalism: Can outsiders report accountably on other people's communities?" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "News organizations produce massive amounts of content every single day. The current political climate means relentless breaking news about the government. Newsrooms are also producing short novels' worth of non political news, cultural criticism and other feature pieces that are not only great journalism but also important counter programming to the political coverage. At The Times, all this journalism exists online and in the paper but promoting a story on the web home page or on social really boosts a story's reach. For many readers, the articles chosen to appear on those platforms become their main understanding of our report.\n\nHow do news organizations best surface content to readers? How can we use technology to aid what is ultimately an editorial decision about what stories go on the limited real estate that exists in those platforms (the home page, Twitter and FB)? As we retool our home page programming tools at The Times (and other platform programming tools soon too!), personalization and machine learning/AI to suggest content for promotion are things that have been talked about and experimented with. We want to make sure new readers get new news every time they visit our site but we also don't want new people to miss big news. We want a good balance of politics and feature writing. And we want all of this to look and feel consistent across mobile, tablet and desktop despite the vast differences in those device displays. Mindful use of technology can help reduce the amount of friction required to keep platforms up to date and curated. But what does that look like in practice? And what are some things to be cautious about in this space?\n\nIn this session, we'll walk through some simple examples of using technologies like machine learning to classify news tonally and surface content intelligently as both a technical exercise and a thought experiment. Then we'll have a conversation. What excited you about the potentials of these technologies? What concerns do you have about applying these technologies to programming the news?", - "facilitator": "Angela Guo", - "facilitator_twitter": null, - "id": 2354906, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:58:32.935Z", - "title": "Programming The News: What Content Do We Surface Where, and Why?" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "As newsrooms and product teams, we face some important organizational challenges: Create time and space to report on an exponentially more chaotic 24-hour news cycle, make our organizations more representative of the communities around us, find new ways to sustain our craft and businesses. These problems require radical change, but change is scary, so we often make that change in incremental ways. But incremental change tends to yield negligible benefits.\n\nInstead of picking the low hanging fruit, what if we assumed there was no cost to taking immediate, decisive, and thorough action—what would we do? What if we dropped everything? In this session, we’ll air the most radical possible solutions to the problems we face and use a mental framework to pull slightly back from the impossible to the merely audacious (instead of slightly forward from the status quo). We’ll talk about how to find real opportunities to turn a corner in organizational work, create actionable plans for proposing it, and find allies and license to try it.\n\nWe will walk away with a conversational framework for evaluating audacious changes, a shared willingness to propose it, and—hopefully—a few radical and compelling solutions to tricky problems.", - "facilitator": "David Yee", - "facilitator_twitter": "tangentialism", - "id": 2355502, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T14:35:52.739Z", - "title": "Proposing the impossible: Approaches for advancing real change" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Hannah Birch", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "One of the most frequently cited reasons (https://medium.com/jsk-class-of-2018/news-nerd-salaries-2017-2c83466b994e) journalists in digital roles leave their jobs is lack of promotion and career advancement opportunities. At the same time, journalists with a nontraditional mix of skills, who sit at the intersection of roles, departments or teams — we call them platypuses — are proving to be pivotal to the future of news. So how can newsrooms use the people they have to push their digital initiatives forward? \n\nThis session brings together digital journalists and managers to discuss career growth within the newsroom, especially for people with a nontraditional blend of skills. A lot of growth in digital careers is uncharted territory, but through our empathy interviews we will bring together tips and frameworks for how digital journalists can fit into forward-thinking newsrooms.\n\nWe’ll share success stories and lessons learned, and we’ll workshop tactics that could work in participants’ newsrooms. This session is meant to be a launchpad for conversations and plans to better empower and grow newsroom digital talent — and not lose them to other newsrooms and industries.", - "facilitator": "Vignesh Ramachandran", - "facilitator_twitter": "VigneshR", - "id": 2353502, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-18T23:21:24.705Z", - "title": "Proud to be a Platypus: Finding Your Own Innovative Role in News" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Engagement, public powered journalism can make an impact - not only in informing and engaging audiences, but also restoring trust. But where does an individual reporter start with a project like this and navigate the challenges of an ingrained media culture? This session is designed to help answer those questions and be a guide to help with any new projects, thanks to insight from reporters who have done these projects and the editors that support them.\n\nHave an idea? Share it! Wanting to integrate a project into a beat or subject? Ask about it! When this session is done, you'll not only have a better understanding of where to start in beginning engagement journalism projects, but have ideas in the works to help make journalism better.", - "facilitator": "Alex Veeneman", - "facilitator_twitter": "alex_veeneman", - "id": 2351787, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T18:40:24.728Z", - "title": "Seek Truth, Report and Engage" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Karissa Cummings", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Many members of underrepresented groups in engineering — women, people of color, LGBTQ individuals, and others — find themselves on agile teams where they are the only member of their or, indeed, any minority group. \n\nEfforts to recruit, retain, and advance more underrepresented people in engineering are critical, as are ongoing unconscious bias and psychological safety trainings. But in the meantime, there are some straightforward practices engineering teams can adopt immediately that, on the surface, have more to do with building a strong, healthy engineering culture than encouraging underrepresented engineers to thrive — but whose result is just that. One of us, an engineer, learned this through observing and reflecting on the practices of the all-male team where she made meaningful contributions and grew from a junior to a mid-level engineer. The other of us, a program manager and a leader of an interest group for Women in Tech, has experienced both teams that did and didn’t do this well. We’ll share our experience and engage in exercises and conversation to exchange ideas on what others have seen that works and doesn’t. You’ll leave this workshop with actionable ideas to bring back to your team.", - "facilitator": "Jacquelyn Wax", - "facilitator_twitter": null, - "id": 2355129, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T16:49:57.365Z", - "title": "So you’re the minority on your team: Building an agile team where anyone can thrive" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Last year, The New York Times tech org launched a Sponsorship program with the specific goal of promoting underrepresented groups into leadership positions. Those are both management and individual contributors positions. \n\nEach Sponsee is matched with an executive sponsor (Executive Director to CTO) specifically tasked to help them get larger positions. \n\nIn the first year we've already had 80% of the participants promoted, while retaining our rigorous promotions process. No free rides! Each promotion is well earned. \n\nThere was a ton of discussion, planning, and hard decisions that went into building this program. The goal of this session is to provide you with everything that we learned in making is successful, and give you all the tool you need to bring a nearly fully-baked proposal back to you your company. \n\nThis session will take you through:\n\n- How we determined the scope of the program\n- Who was ultimately brought in, and promoted\n- The structures that we invested in to make it work (trainings, facilitators, executive outreach, and internal Sponsor recruitment)\n- Q&A on the challenges faced and what we needed to make it work", - "facilitator": "James Rooney", - "facilitator_twitter": "jamesrooney", - "id": 2355897, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T00:25:02.302Z", - "title": "Sponsorship: Promoting Underrepresented Groups into Leadership." - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "jesikah maria ross", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "A lot of data journalism takes place in front of a computer, but there is a lot to be gained by creating data together with your community. As part of a documentary project about a culturally diverse, low-income community, we recently invited residents to map their neighborhood — not online, but with paper and pens at in-person gatherings. We not only generated unique data, but also stories and context we never would have heard if we hadn’t met people where they lived. \n\nMore and more, journalists are experimenting with community engagement practices to accurately reflect and represent people’s lived experiences. We can do the same by taking an analog approach to creating data, including our community in the stories we tell about them. This helps verify the data by collecting it ourselves and having subject matter experts (your community!) vet it along the way. It also makes our reporting process more transparent and creates a group of people invested in our work. \n\nWe’ll share what we did and what we learned in our neighborhood mapping experiments, and invite a discussion on other ways to weave community engagement into data reporting. Our goal: draft a starter kit of ideas for doing data journalism IRL that you can take back to your newsroom.", - "facilitator": "Christopher Hagan", - "facilitator_twitter": "chrishagan", - "id": 2354731, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T23:03:19.743Z", - "title": "Spreadsheets IRL: The How and Why of Making Data With Your Community" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Disha Raychaudhuri", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "Disha_RC", - "description": "In recent years, many news organizations have published their diversity reports to educate folks in the industry about their challenges with diversity and to indicate that they are taking newsroom diversity seriously. This has also led to a number of conversations in the Journalists of Color slack and at other in-person settings about diversity committees at news organizations trying to figure out what their diversity report should cover and how they can convince management to publish effective indicators of diversity.\n\nIn this session we would like to facilitate a conversation around the topic of diversity reports. We will start with a quick survey of recent diversity reports published by prominent journalism outlets and then move to a discussion/group activity to work out what measures should be included in diversity reports to further the actual goals of increasing diversity in newsrooms.", - "facilitator": "Moiz Syed", - "facilitator_twitter": "moizsyed", - "id": 2355357, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T18:24:32.225Z", - "title": "State of Newsroom Diversity Reports" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "It seems everyone is talking about ethics in technology these days. Examples abound of poor decisions leading to unintended harm, of planned exploitation and avoidance of consent, of prioritization of financial gain over literally everything else. What’s the ethically-minded technologist to do? This session will be an open, off the record conversation among designers, developers, and journalists about the things that keep us up at night: the ways our work can cause harm, the systems driving us to do the wrong thing, the incentives that make it hard to even know what’s right. We’ll work from a vantage point that assumes good intentions, recognizes that impacts matter more than plans, and acknowledges the impossibility of perfect solutions: no matter what we do, we are all complicit. But we are not alone, and we are not without the ability to effect change.", - "facilitator": "Mandy Brown", - "facilitator_twitter": "aworkinglibrary", - "id": 2355070, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:39:31.876Z", - "title": "Staying with the trouble: Doing good work in terrible times" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Subscriptions and memberships are doom to save our industry, our jobs, democracy, and more. Ok, maybe that’s a bit much, but let’s be real. How much do we actually know about subscriptions? In this session, we will explore together the subscriptions and retentions business model. We will share and discuss different subscriptions options. We will look into the ones that our industry is offering. We will explore success and failure stories, and we will try to build the perfect subscription.\nThe idea of this session is to understand what is suppose to save our industry, explore its variances, recognize flaws and limitations, and discuss what could the industry be doing better.", - "facilitator": "Marcos Vanetta", - "facilitator_twitter": "malev", - "id": 2355941, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:44:29.684Z", - "title": "Subscriptions, a new hope" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Step 1: Learn a bunch of time[read: sanity] saving shortcuts in your text editor. Step 2: Profit. I've been using Sublime for 5+ years, and only have begun to really understand its power. Whether its batch editing like a boss, using regex's to find exactly what you're looking for in source code, or quickly tabbing to the line of code you want, modern text editors are chock-full of Easter eggs and hidden tricks to enhance your workflow. \n\nBring your favorite text editor and hacks, and share them with your fellow SRCCONster. We'll walk through some monstrous source-code puzzles and discuss clever ways to tackle them.", - "facilitator": "Daniel Wood", - "facilitator_twitter": "danielpwwood", - "id": 2351349, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-29T17:13:18.582Z", - "title": "Supercharge your text editor with a few time saving commands" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "A guide to supporting journalism in a journalism adjacent capacity. Everyone can help improve and solidify journalism even if they aren't a journalist. Actually, we NEED people outside of newsrooms to enrich journalism. This session will explore how you can support the journalism world and why it's crucial for these support structures to exist in order to make journalism better. Some examples: promoting open data and transparency, building tools, technically supporting solo developers in newsrooms, build opportunities for collaborations, provide resources to smaller newsrooms, writing guides, and so much more!", - "facilitator": "Lo Bénichou", - "facilitator_twitter": "lobenichou", - "id": 2338064, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-10T19:22:59.663Z", - "title": "Supporting Journalism from the outside" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "We don't talk about it a lot in the newsroom, the fact that we see and hear things all the time in our jobs that likely affect us in ways it's hard to describe to someone else. One of the first roles for most reporters and photographers is covering breaking news - chasing the police scanner from one traumatic event to the next. Our newsroom might have to cover a traumatic event on a larger scale - a mass shooting, a devastating brush fire, hurricane or tornado. We take care to tell the stories of those affected, to make sure their voices and their grief are heard. But we also need to take care of ourselves and our colleagues in these moments. What should you be looking for to make sure you're protected and feel empowered to speak up for yourself when you don't feel comfortable or need help? What are some things you could do if you are the editor to take care of your staff? What types of services could news organizations offer that would help in these situations?", - "facilitator": "Kristyn Wellesley", - "facilitator_twitter": "kriswellesley", - "id": 2355666, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T19:34:30.680Z", - "title": "Take care: The Importance of Self-Care in the Newsroom" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Diversity initiatives are popping up in most companies these days. Newsrooms are talking about gender and race representation, re-examining how we cover stories and how we create space for employees of all genders and races. We laud ourselves for being aware and being inclusive. However, noticeably missing from the conversation, at least for those who identify as such, are people with disabilities. \n\nThe New York Times has employee lead initiatives to help correct that. From the tech task force that turned into a team designated with making our site more accessible, to the internal panel on employees with disabilities that turned into an employee resource group the disabled community and their allies at the times are standing up and taking space. \n\nDuring this session we will examine how the disability community is represented in newsrooms and institutions, discuss what has been done, and set a framework for how to take action now. We will work together to figure out what ally-ship looks like and what it means for diversity initiatives to include people with disabilities, and how they miss the mark when they don’t -- both for employees and our coverage.", - "facilitator": "Katherine McMahan", - "facilitator_twitter": "katieannmcmahan", - "id": 2353768, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T16:06:37.651Z", - "title": "Taking Up Space: Making Room for People with Disabilities at The Times" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Natasha Khan", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Our unique skillsets as data journalists and developers can sometimes earn us more money, but they also earn us more responsibility. Especially when it comes to communicating what we do to managers and other reporters. \n\nLet's brainstorm ways we can better communicate with our newsrooms in order to get the respect and support we need to write data-driven stories and build awesome tools.", - "facilitator": "Alexandra Kanik", - "facilitator_twitter": "act_rational", - "id": 2352051, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-29T17:05:00.894Z", - "title": "Talking In Code: How to help non-technical coworkers understand you" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "In broad terms web page performance can be thought of as the time it takes from entering a web address in the browser to when the reader thinks the page is ready.\n\nIt really should be that simple but there is so much to disagree on that its hard to know where to start. \n\nHow do we even measure performance? How do you measure that? When you account for all the different ways that people access the same articles and news sites with different hardware, browsers, and connection speeds, internet congestion, and from different parts of the globe - the question and answer get thornier. We'll go deep on that.\n\nSetting that aside, why should you care? What are the user-experience implications and the business implications between slow and fast pages? What are the consequences to the reader? Short answer: Lots of good reasons. \n\nWe'll give you a broader understanding of the issues and guidance on common issues. Also relevant for those who built interactives and standalone pages and have data-heavy visualizations.", - "facilitator": "Michael Donohoe", - "facilitator_twitter": "donohoe", - "id": 2355690, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T20:27:53.094Z", - "title": "The Evils of Web Page Performance" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "News nerds came of age in newsrooms that were hostile to their efforts. But now, the geeks are running the show. There are few holdouts left. Winning was easy. Governing is harder.\n\nWhat should the agenda of the nerds be in newsrooms where they are finally winning territory and mindshare? How will we use our positions to further our agenda?", - "facilitator": "Jeremy Bowers", - "facilitator_twitter": "jeremybowers", - "id": 2353430, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-18T19:38:56.833Z", - "title": "The Geeks Won: Now What?" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Kevin O'Gorman", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "SecureDrop is an open source whistleblowing platform under the stewardship of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. It’s designed for the most extreme Internet surveillance conditions imaginable, to protect the privacy and anonymity of whistleblowers who use it. Source protection, however, is dependent on several factors before and after a document is leaked to the press. In this session, we discuss what some of those factors are, and the challenge of creating a guide for potential sources to using SecureDrop with these external factors in mind.", - "facilitator": "David Huerta", - "facilitator_twitter": "huertanix", - "id": 2354829, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-22T22:49:46.448Z", - "title": "The Impossible Task of Creating a SecureDrop Whistleblower Guide in 2019" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "The work of journalists, therapists and clergy can look very similar: \n- Listening intently \n- Suspending judgment or at least trying to remain objective\n- Searching for truth\n- Being fair-minded\n- Synthesizing complex information to find meaning\n- Encouraging people to right wrongs and move forward\n\nWe don't of course talk about our jobs as being in a continuum of healing alongside these other professions. But what might we learn if we did? Also: what might we learn from how we bring our spiritual practices to work, or transform our work into a spiritual practice. At this session, bring on the woo-woo and the heart.", - "facilitator": "Jennifer Brandel", - "facilitator_twitter": "@JenniferBrandel", - "id": 2355195, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T19:14:45.608Z", - "title": "The Spiritual Dimensions of Journalism" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "The New York Times Crossword is serious business. With over 450,000 paying subscribers, the Games Team at The Times works tirelessly to keep our solvers happy while driving significant revenue to support great journalism. With serious solvers comes the need for serious technology. See how the Games Team drives innovation at The Times with the most cutting edge tools and infrastructure.", - "facilitator": "Darren McCleary", - "facilitator_twitter": "darren_out", - "id": 2348654, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-14T17:39:52.013Z", - "title": "The Technology Behind The New York Times Crossword" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "A conversation about incident management in a cloud centric world. Why it's important, how to be prepared, all while having fun and learning new things (like knots).\n\nHow leveraging experience as a volunteer firefighter, along with years of service within technology led to the blending of both worlds. Inspired by the National Incident Management System (NIMS), we created an Incident Management Process for The New York Times and fun ways to learn about it.", - "facilitator": "David Porsche", - "facilitator_twitter": null, - "id": 2355548, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T15:50:27.901Z", - "title": "The Website is Knot Down: An interactive, hands-on approach to Incident Management readiness @ NYT" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "CALLING ALL ENGLISH MAJORS & ENGINEERS, YOU’RE COLLABORATIVE EFFORTS ARE NEEDED! Behind the hype of AR,VR & XR, a spatial c̶o̶m̶p̶u̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ communications revolution is coming. \n\nWith this revolution will come: new ways to document our world; a new visual language for expressing narrative and non-narrative data; questions about ownership of public space, privacy, data overlay; opportunities for disruption and most importantly AN OPPORTUNITY TO ASSERT JOURNALISTIC VALUES!\n\nIn an effort to create some common ground for the session, we'll quickly share what we've learned about XR so far, what we hope for and what we worry about. \n\nNext we'll break out into topic groups. We're specifically leaving room for groups to spontaneously coalesce, but some of the areas we’d love to mind-meld on are: a glossary of XR Journalism terms; a set of ethical guidelines for 6DoF journalism; a list of open-source (or otherwise accessible) tools & resources; a reference list of influential XR journalism pieces, hot-topics for spatial computing as a beat.\n\nWe’ll finish up with lightning-style report backs to the bigger group, and we’ll leave enriched with a public document that should help guide XR journalism newcomers, inform future conversations and maybe even inspire our newsrooms!", - "facilitator": "Ben Connors", - "facilitator_twitter": "BCatDC", - "id": 2355833, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:08:32.737Z", - "title": "The ‘cyber’ is leaking into the ‘space,’ Journalists assemble! Let’s crowdsource a guide to XR for journalists." - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "How has science fiction helped you understand the world? Yourself? Justice? Let's talk about the role of SF, and how it's taught us to be better makers, teammates and people. ***Bring a book to swap!***", - "facilitator": "Brian Boyer", - "facilitator_twitter": "brianboyer", - "id": 2353714, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T14:04:14.075Z", - "title": "Things the future taught us" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "There's a joke I often hear journalists make: Our job is to clearly communicate information to our audience, and yet we're terrible at communicating with each other in our newsrooms. That's partly because we don't use the right tools or frameworks to encourage clear and consistent communication. At WhereBy.Us we've used three tools– user manuals, weekly team health checks and personal OKRs– that help every person in our organization share with their colleagues how they work best with others, how they're feeling at the end of a week, and what personal goals they want to work toward. This session will help attendees learn more about these tools and potentially adapt them for their own workplaces. I would also love to learn from others who have used tools like these to help their colleagues feel more heard and satisfied in their newsrooms.", - "facilitator": "Anika Anand", - "facilitator_twitter": "anikaanand00", - "id": 2351418, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-29T17:17:06.363Z", - "title": "Three tools we use to help our team feel heard" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Bo Morin", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Attempts to increase representation in news organizations often come from the bottom-up. Sometimes it can be an individual, sometimes it can be several people. That’s how things happened where we work. Scattered efforts led to mixed degrees of success. But coalescing these efforts into a more formal grassroots team has been a game-changer. Our group — the Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (DIB) team — started with just a few employees. Since last summer, it has grown to include volunteers from most departments, representatives from HR and recruiting, and support from the company founders. With this session we’ll share lessons from our experience, but primarily hear from others what has worked well and what hasn’t.\n\nOur goal is for participants to leave this session energized with actionable ideas and plans to increase diversity, inclusion, belonging and equity within their own organizations. If they want to, we hope this will give them the foundation to launch their own DIB initiative or take their current DIB efforts to the next level. We will also compile everyone’s lessons into a short guide that can be shared widely.", - "facilitator": "Greg Linch", - "facilitator_twitter": "greglinch", - "id": 2343016, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:50:45.717Z", - "title": "Transforming grassroots diversity/inclusion/belonging efforts into a sustainable, organized team" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Ranu Rajkarnikar and Amy Sweeney", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "You’ve filed the story, finished the project, or launched the latest iteration of your feature, so your work is done, right? Not so fast! Consider the retrospective, an agile tool that helps you and your team celebrate what went well, troubleshoot what didn’t, and identify and commit to changes you’d like to make for your next adventure together.\n\nWe’ll discuss the different frameworks, tools, tips, and tricks that you can use to facilitate a productive discussion with your cross-functional team, regardless of the type of project you’ve worked on, and we’ll stress test them by running a mini-retrospective in real time. Emerge from this session with the resources you need to ensure that each of your projects is better than the last.", - "facilitator": "Anna Smith", - "facilitator_twitter": null, - "id": 2355590, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T20:58:40.885Z", - "title": "Using Retrospectives to Learn From Your Past Mistakes. No, Really This Time." - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "From the folks who brought you “how to do a double-opt in introduction” and “please stop asking busy people to pick their brain, what are you, a zombie?” This interactive session will equip you with some specific tips, recommendations, and strategies to help you stand out for all the right reasons.", - "facilitator": "Stacy-Marie Ishmael", - "facilitator_twitter": "@s_m_i", - "id": 2351370, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-29T17:30:11.565Z", - "title": "We can’t fix your life, but we can fix your [CV, LinkedIn, cover letter, interview approach, negotiating tactic]" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "We often come across percentages in journalism, simple numbers that convey a powerful amount of information. But a percentage can obscure crucial information. If one ZIP code has 30 homeless individuals out of 100, and another has 30,000 homeless out of 100,000, the percentages indicates similarity, but the two geographies will have vastly different times dealing with the homeless population. When looking at a list of percentages, we should endeavor to find those that are distinct. Tools from statistical theory can help us tease out what's unusual and what isn't. It doesn't require much complicated math, just a little algebra.", - "facilitator": "Ryan Menezes", - "facilitator_twitter": "ryanvmenezes", - "id": 2353889, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T21:42:57.842Z", - "title": "We should rethink the way we think about percentages" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Alex Tilsley", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Finding the right data can be a big hurdle for journalists who are on deadline. Meanwhile, think tanks and academics have the time and money to agonize over research and data collection. At the Urban Institute, we've spent the last few months building (what we hope is) a simple tool for extracting custom snippets from massive (and often inscrutable) education databases. We think its extremely powerful, but does it meet your needs?\n \nIn this session, we will explore ways to democratize data together. We'll brainstorm tools and partnerships, and pull apart existing examples. You'll design your ideal data tool. By the end, we hope to move toward an understanding of how journalists and researchers can work together to ensure that the best research and data is informing fast, high-quality reporting that holds institutions accountable and drives change.", - "facilitator": "Daniel Wood", - "facilitator_twitter": "danielpwwood", - "id": 2355561, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:12:44.376Z", - "title": "We've got a crapload of high quality data...is anyone going to use it?" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Starting a new job is sort of like the first day of school, if everyone else had already been at school together for a long time without you. Whether you thrive on the social and logistical challenge of navigating a new workplace, or are driven to anxiety just thinking about it, we can all agree that a lot of workplaces throw new folks into the deep end of the pool without much structure or forethought.\n\nThis session is about bringing more intentionality to new team member onboarding, integration, and inclusion. Even if we're not in a position of official hiring authority at work, we almost all have some part in the experience of newcomers to our teams and organizations.\n\nFirst, we'll share as a large group some of our own experiences and ideas about how to best facilitate the integration of new members of our own teams.\n\nThen, we'll break up into a few fictional \"companies\" -- each with its own norms, culture, and inside jokes -- and a develop proactive program to onboard our new people. Finally, we'll see how our ideas work by switching tables and going through another \"company's\" process.", - "facilitator": "Matt Johnson", - "facilitator_twitter": "xmatt", - "id": 2353519, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T22:16:47.695Z", - "title": "Welcome aboard! First impressions matter and we can all make a better one" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Ajay Chainani", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "ajayjapan", - "description": "Many news organizations are investigating how to apply artificial intelligence to the practice of journalism. Meanwhile many individuals and organizations are funding advancements in the field of news and AI. Do we take into consideration unconscious bias when developing algorithms and methods to build these new digital tools? How can they be best applied? What does the application of AI mean for newsrooms and the public they serve?", - "facilitator": "Sarah Schmalbach", - "facilitator_twitter": "schmalie", - "id": 2355772, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T22:10:54.019Z", - "title": "What happens to journalism, when AI eats the world?" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "During the 2018 election, micro-financing of campaigns up-and-down the ticket exploded. Small dollar donations have been a dominant force in politics since the Obama campaign in 2008, but in 2018, that finally reached the local level (from congressional races to district attorney races and everything in-between) in a real way. Powered by grassroots groups, candidates began to draw a high volume of donations of $50 and less from people that live nowhere near the areas they represent.\n\nJournalism has lessons to learn from the 2018 election. Principally, in the hunt for new revenue, identifying small dollar donors that care about your mission can be a potential outlet for financing journalism in markets around the country. Is there a way for locally-focused organizations to build up an audience of revenue-generating customers that live outside of the areas they serve? If so, what can we learn from how political organizations and campaigns have operated?", - "facilitator": "Charlie Rybak", - "facilitator_twitter": "charlierybak", - "id": 2355909, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:06:37.395Z", - "title": "What the 2018 Election Can Teach Us About Funding Journalism" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Companies often lament that they are trying to hire a more diverse community of engineers, but that they struggle to find strong candidates. But if companies want to hire more diverse candidates, they need to be open to the idea of hiring people with diverse educational backgrounds: people without college degrees, people who are self-taught, and people who went to a boot camp.\n \nNewsrooms and product organizations that are reluctant to hire candidates from non-traditional educational backgrounds eliminate a host of candidates right off the bat. How can teams and managers become more confident in non-traditionally educated engineers? If employers were better aware of what knowledge these engineers may not have, they could prepare both these new engineers and their current team, fostering an environment more easily able to absorb this kind of talent.\n \nI want to talk with engineers from non-traditional educational backgrounds about the things they encountered that “everyone seemed to know”. What did they get stuck on starting their first job but were too embarrassed to ask? I want to talk with hirers about their experiences hiring first time professional engineers, and some of the things that have held them back from doing so. What support did they think they needed to have in place to take them on? I hope for people to leave with a greater understanding of each other’s fears and new ideas for how to onboard more diverse groups of engineers.", - "facilitator": "Sierra Saitta", - "facilitator_twitter": null, - "id": 2353716, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T02:18:30.290Z", - "title": "What to expect when you're expecting a new engineer." - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "With continuous evolution in newsrooms comes the periodic introduction of new roles that involve new technologies and ways of working. Many of us have probably been the first person to hold a position within our organizations - or will be that person at some point in our careers. For example: An editor who once focused on text may now be involved in audience development or audio. A product manager working on a traditional CMS now may start overseeing strategy for voice-activated devices or AI. \n\nSo when you’re breaking new ground in a newsroom or starting something that’s new to you, how do you best get your head around the new technologies, frameworks for decision-making or ways of working that become central to the new role you’re taking on? How do you do so quickly and thoroughly enough to have a good understanding without spending too much time going down rabbit holes or making yourself crazy in the pursuit of a ‘complete’ body of knowledge? \n\nLet's brainstorm about ways to self-educate for new work situations that might help with these beginnings -- and what kinds of support we might ask for from the people we work with and the organizations we work in. Come with any examples of what's helped you -- or what hasn't -- when taking on something new.", - "facilitator": "Sasha Koren", - "facilitator_twitter": "sashak", - "id": 2355958, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:03:22.910Z", - "title": "What's better than cramming? Self-educating with intention for a new job or focus." - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Have you ever heard the saying that you're the average of the five people that you spend the most time with? Well, that may or may not be true, but it does prompt some useful reflection. Who do you spend the most time with while at work (in person, or remotely), and do they support you? Also what if you thought really hard and couldn't even come up with a list of five people? Well, you pitch a SRCCON session of course, and ask people to help you and others discuss ways to find (and keep) your work crew.\n\nIn this session we'll discuss:\n\n* If you don't already have \"your people\", what can you do about it? Where are they and how can you find them?\n* What if you do have a network, but you don't reach out to them enough because you're worried about \"bothering\" them? Are they really your people then?\n* If you don't already have people, who do you vent to? Who do you learn from? Who do you take cues from?\n* And further, should you ever strong-arm your way into an existing group? How does that go? Is it even a good idea? \n* What if you've recently moved, switched jobs or taken on a new role inside your company? Do you find new people, keep your old crew, or maintain both?\n\nThese topics and more will be discussed, and people can share their experiences, best (and worst!) practices for finding their network and finally realizing that everyone belongs somewhere (phew!)", - "facilitator": "Sarah Schmalbach", - "facilitator_twitter": "schmalie", - "id": 2355589, - "submitted_at": "2019-05-01T16:06:32.411Z", - "title": "Where the sidewalk starts: How to find your people in a sea of well-meaning, super busy news nerds." - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Joe Germuska", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "More than a decade ago, much of the web world was infatuated by the promise of the “semantic web,” a vision of seamless connections between data on independent systems. But before long, that vision seemed caught up in overly-complex abstractions and doomed to obscurity.\nMeanwhile, a combination of technology growth and recalibrated expectations may have set the stage for a new approach to achieving these goals. Wikipedia, better known for its collaborative, volunteer-written articles, has also incorporated its sister project Wikidata for structuring data in its pages and disambiguating names with stable identifiers. And, the Schema.org standards group has come up with simpler ways for web publishers to make their intentions explicit, empowering application developers to work with that information without needing Google-scale resources.\nIn this session, we’ll look at these two developments. We’ll provide a practical introduction to working with Wikidata and its related APIs and datasets, and, we’ll discuss what might be possible if structured data was more completely baked into our research, articles, or web applications.", - "facilitator": "Isaac Johnson", - "facilitator_twitter": "_isaaclj", - "id": 2353057, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T17:09:41.711Z", - "title": "Why do people look at me funny when I say “semantic web?”" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Jun-Kai Teoh", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "How would we do journalism differently if we were to think about impact — real-world change — at the brainstorming stage, before we started to write or shoot? If we knew something needed to happen to make things better, could we identify a few levers to pull that’d make that something more likely? Would we frame the story differently? Share the data openly? Talk to different sources? And how do we do all of this without going too far, without crossing into advocacy journalism? Now more than ever, with more nonprofit newsrooms forming, more for-profit newsrooms turning to consumer revenue (on the sales pitch that journalism matters) and trust at a crisis point, we need to measure and show why our work matters. This session will cover published examples and studies but is meant to be a discussion about what we can do — and what’s going too far — to make a difference. We might also, using design thinking strategies, prototype a project designed for impact.", - "facilitator": "Anjanette Delgado", - "facilitator_twitter": "anjdelgado", - "id": 2355593, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:42:02.486Z", - "title": "Why it matters — Designing stories for impact" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Work/life balance is impossible - most of us \"work\" more than we \"life,\" and a lot of us are lucky enough to love that work. Trying to balance it all leads to burnout, resentment and ideals and expectations that never get met. There's a better metaphor, one that takes into account all the elements of your life, helps you figure out what drives you and come up with strategies to protect it. It's called work/life chemistry.", - "facilitator": "Kristen Hare", - "facilitator_twitter": "@kristenhare", - "id": 2354629, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-22T15:46:12.489Z", - "title": "Work/Life Balance is a myth. Try this instead." - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Jonathan Stray", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Workbench is an open source tool that puts all stages of the data journalism process in one workspace, including scraping, cleaning, monitoring, and visualization -- all without coding, and all reproducible. \nIn this hands-on tutorial, you'll learn how to use Workbench for several different newsroom tasks. Clean and explore data, monitor sources, create live embeddable charts that update when new data is released, or automate useful queries and workflows that other journalists can use to report. Workbench is built to help make data tasks accessible to more people in the newsroom.\nThis session is good for journalists of all skill levels.", - "facilitator": "Pierre Conti", - "facilitator_twitter": "pierreconti", - "id": 2356045, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:36:09.983Z", - "title": "Workbench: Reproducible data work without coding" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Cheryl Phillips", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Come join Big Local News for a discussion on how newsrooms can work together to grow regional and national datasets from local reporting. We are in the midst of building out a platform for newsrooms to share not only data, but story recipes and methodologies. We want to use the great work being done in data-driven, accountability journalism to inspire others in small and large newsrooms throughout the country.\n\nWe’ve already begun. Earlier this year Big Local News released an update to a database of police traffic stops, collected and standardized from dozens of different police agencies around the country. The release was the result of a partnership with the Stanford Computational Policy Lab and timed to around a pre-NICAR workshop where we taught journalists how to analyze the data to uncover patterns in racial disparity.\n\nWe also started a conversation at NICAR centered around a coordinated effort to collect more police data. We want to expand on that conversation now. What other datasets can we be collecting in health care, education and other important local topics? How can we help local newsrooms not only collect data, but analyze and archive it for others to work with? And how do we incentivize such efforts? What obstacles are there to building a cooperative environment where data is shared freely between newsrooms and how do we overcome them? And lastly, what features would you like to see in a platform that would facilitate this effort?\n\nCome help us answer these questions and build a network to collect and sharing data for use in accountability journalism. And if you have data to share, bring that too.", - "facilitator": "Eric Sagara", - "facilitator_twitter": null, - "id": 2338035, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-10T18:33:35.447Z", - "title": "Working together to grow local data into big data" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Akil Harris", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "There are a few examples of web development, design, non-profit and advocacy organizations that have non-traditional organizational structures but almost all digital newsrooms have adopted organizational structures that mimic the traditional top-down structures of old. These structures mimic the problems of old media organizations, problems that come from when people in power thrive on telling as little as possible to their employees before making significant editorial or business choices.\n\nIn this session, we want to have a conversation with SRCCON participants about what other organizational structures should be explored that could encourage the decision-making power to be shared equally amongst the members of the organization. \n\nWe want to talk about the pros and cons of building a newsroom co-op where every member could have an equal-voting power to make editorial and financial decisions. Such an organization would also have its own limitations and we want this discussion to be a frank conversation about what those could be and how we could work around them.\n\nFor a part of the session, we want to break into small groups to think about how they would organize their ideal organization. How will they be structured, what their goals and missions be, how will they be funded and what topics would they cover. We want the participants of this session to leave with a sense of hope that another world is possible.", - "facilitator": "Moiz Syed", - "facilitator_twitter": "moizsyed", - "id": 2355095, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T21:23:06.415Z", - "title": "You work in a newsroom; but what if you ran one? Let’s talk about Newsroom Co-ops." - } -] \ No newline at end of file + { + "cofacilitator": "Alex Tatusian", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Sometimes the well of ideas runs dry and we find ourselves stuck in a creative rut. If we can't move past it, let's try thinking sideways. Drawing inspiration from Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, a card-based system that offers pithy prompts for creative thinking, we'll discuss ways to shift our perspective in the process of brainstorming, designing and problem-solving. Some of Schmidt and Eno's one-line strategies include:\n\n\"Not building a wall but making a brick.\"\n\"Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place.\"\n\"You can only make one dot at a time.\"\n\nWe'll look at projects that emerged from unconventional sources of inspiration, share our favorite methods of breaking creative block and then develop our own list of \"oblique strategies\" that we'll publish online after the session.", + "facilitator": "Katie Park", + "facilitator_twitter": "katiepark", + "id": 2355668, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T19:17:08.293Z", + "title": '"Abandon normal instruments": Sideways strategies for defeating creative block', + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "This year we launched the project Desconfio in which we have developed a methodology to analyze distrust electoral information. This allowed us to create indicators and establish a ranking of confidence in the news that we would like to share in the event.", + "facilitator": "Adrian Pino", + "facilitator_twitter": "adrianpino22", + "id": 2355773, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:51:46.697Z", + "title": "A method to Distrust about electoral news", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "The 2020 census is a year away, but chances are you’ve already heard about it. The census is making headlines because several states are suing the Trump administration over its plans to include a citizenship question. But much of the news glosses over why the census is important and how it affects everyone’s lives. Congressional representation is at stake, along with $800 billion in federal funds that will get disbursed for state, county, and community programs over the next decade.\n\nWhen KPCC conducted human-centered design research into the census and the opportunities for public service journalism, one finding stood out: We can’t assume educated news consumers know the stakes or the mechanics of the census. There was a very low level of census knowledge among the people we interviewed, including current NPR listeners. How can we address this knowledge gap? We have some ideas. Let's talk.", + "facilitator": "Ashley Alvarado", + "facilitator_twitter": "ashleyalvarado", + "id": 2338108, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-10T20:34:54.842Z", + "title": "A playbook for reporters interested in reaching people at risk of being undercounted", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Troy Thibodeaux", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "If you've used or ever wanted to use parts of the agile method for news gathering and dissemination (as opposed to product/platform development) we want to hear your ideas and share ours.\n\nIn this session, we'll use a discussion format called a fishbowl to compare notes, hear success stories and brainstorm ways we can adapt agile tools and methods to help ease the pain of newsroom chaos and deadlines.", + "facilitator": "George LeVines", + "facilitator_twitter": "rhymeswthgeorge", + "id": 2356049, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:44:13.403Z", + "title": "Agile in the newsroom: successes, failures and shades of gray", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "In the relentless news cycle for journalists and feelings of content overconsumption by people, what can news comedy formats like Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert teach us about engaging audiences and editorial discretion.", + "facilitator": "Ha-Hoa Hamano", + "facilitator_twitter": "hahoais_", + "id": 2355979, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T02:56:27.886Z", + "title": "Are you not entertained? When to make fun of the news", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "In a post-Gamergate world, how should we think about personal data in our reporting and our research? What responsibilities do we have to the privacy of the communities we report on? While many journalists have [struggled with this question](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T71OE4fm4ns0ugEOmKOY4xF4H9ikbebmikv96sgi16A/edit), few newsrooms have an explicit ethics policy on how they retain, release, and redact personally-identifiable information. Let's change that, by drafting a sample PII ethics policy that can be adopted by organizations both large and small.", + "facilitator": "Thomas Wilburn", + "facilitator_twitter": "thomaswilburn", + "id": 2351440, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-15T17:27:09.359Z", + "title": "Assembling the Scramble Suit", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Dave Stanton", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Conferences may be educational and inspirational for you, but also expanding value to your team and organization should be at the top of your mind. Having a process to help in preparing, attending, and post-event knowledge sharing can help focus your attention to maximize the time you spend at conferences. In this session, we will define the common types of conference attendees and map to activities before, during, and after conferences to provide a solid framework for making conferences a must-fund part of your team’s budget. If you’ve ever come back from an event inspired and excited, but unsure how to take the next step, this session is for you.", + "facilitator": "Emma Carew Grovum", + "facilitator_twitter": "Emmacarew", + "id": 2353845, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T19:25:31.582Z", + "title": "Bang for your buck: how to help your newsroom get the most out of SRCCON (or any journalism event)", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "It’s often assumed there’s a difference between being part of an innovation team and working a beat in a traditional newsroom setting. There is much that is transferable between the two jobs. This session would explore similarities between two seemingly different functions in the modern newsroom and try to answer the following questions: How do you bring the level of exploration and experimentation to your beat? What lessons might folks with a product manager/design background be able to share with fellow journalists to make the return easier?", + "facilitator": "André Natta", + "facilitator_twitter": "acnatta", + "id": 2351499, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:31:23.131Z", + "title": "Beat as a product: Lessons from product innovation for the newsroom", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Tina Ye", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "We use a bazillion code words to describe how decisions are made—data-driven, data-informed, consensus-based, human-centered, testing-driven, “design by committee”, KPIs, micromanagement, the list goes on—but they all tend to gloss over the messy parts of what is actually happening between humans and the thought process behind them. How do we make sure we make the correct decision? How do we do it in a way that is collaborative and where everyone on the team is heard and bought in?\n\nHow do we make sure product managers and designers and developers are all on the same page? How do we make sure they’re thinking the same thing as the editors, product owners and everyone else? What do we do when there are cultural differences? How do we deal with disagreements and power dynamics within the org? Different communication styles? How do we change our minds as we learn new things? How do we center voices from historically marginalized communities? How do we go one step further and include the communities we serve in decision-making?\n\nJoin Tina and Cordelia as we take a stroll through some of the theory behind facilitation methods and figure out how to make it fit into our processes.", + "facilitator": "Cordelia", + "facilitator_twitter": "thebestsophist", + "id": 2338195, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:18:08.876Z", + "title": "“Because the Boss Said So”: How the h*ck do we make decisions anyway?", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "We really love journalism. We really love tech, and what it can do. We’re not so sure it’s sustainable for us in the long term or maybe even the short. We want to brainstorm ways to stay help connected and useful, even if /when that means running for the hills.\n\nHow can we support this necessity of a good world and not sacrifice ourselves.", + "facilitator": "Sydette Harry", + "facilitator_twitter": "Blackamazon", + "id": 2353723, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T14:04:01.964Z", + "title": "Before I Let Go: Leaving The Business without Leaving the Work", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "We have an obligation to our teams and our companies to bring great new people into our work who can help push our teams forward, and yet interviewing candidates can feel extracurricular and rote. We need to discuss what we might be doing wrong, what the consequences are, and how to better focus our efforts when we are interviewing the people who want to work alongside us. \n\nLet’s talk about how to create safe and respectful spaces in a job interview. Let’s think deeply and critically about how we spend the thirty to sixty minutes we have in the company of potential colleagues to ensure we’re learning the right things, in the right ways, for the right reasons. Let’s discuss different approaches to advocating for a candidate you believe in, finding the person behind the candidate, questioning unconscious bias as you observe it, and teaching others how to do likewise.\n\nThis session is designed for both for seasoned interviewers and folks who have never done it before. Using actual interviews as a practice space and group discussion about foibles and tactics, we hope to walk away from this session with renewed focus and better, more respectful tools for getting to know a potential colleague and doing the hard work of bringing them into our newsrooms.", + "facilitator": "David Yee", + "facilitator_twitter": "tangentialism", + "id": 2355903, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T00:25:02.103Z", + "title": "Being in the room: the hard work of interview-based hiring", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Since ancient times, humans have used fasting as a powerful tool to enhance mental acuity. We see this from people like Hippocrates, Plato, and Benjamin Franklin, all strong supporters of fasting, to the great mathematician Pythagoras, who required that his students fast to maximize their focus. Fasting has been shown to reduce brain-fog, increase memory, improve mood, and even resist aging. This completely free technique takes no time nor effort to do, and yields great benefits. \n\nThe ritual of eating 3 meals per day was introduced relatively recently, as the product of a colonial attempt to appear more “civilized.” Break free from wasted time day-dreaming about lunch. Break free from 3pm slumps where all you can think about is a nap. Learn to harvest the focus and zen that comes from fasting, and channel it into your passions. \n\nThis session will be focused on learning how incorporating fasting into your lifestyle can help you get the most out of your day.", + "facilitator": "Jennie M Shapira", + "facilitator_twitter": "jennieshapira", + "id": 2355610, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:54:35.964Z", + "title": "Better than Coffee: Fasting as a Fuel for Focus", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Political intimidation threatens media practitioners worldwide and disinformation campaigns destabilize public trust. Journalists are under surveillance, are increasingly hacked, doxxed and harassed. Over the last several years, numerous journalists and news organizations have reported incidents in which their communications have been hacked, intercepted, or retrieved (Der Spiegel staff, 2015; Wagstaff, 2014). When journalists’ digital accounts are vulnerable to hacks or surveillance, news organizations, journalists, and their sources are at risk. These risks vary and can include financial loss, physical threats, or sources’ unwillingness to share information for fear of related consequences (FDR Group & PEN America, 2013, 2015). \n\nDespite these myriad concerns, many newsrooms lack the resources necessary to build robust and resilient security cultures. This session will address these concerns by documenting the needs of participants and their newsrooms. Drawing on guides like OpenNews’s “Field Guide to Security Training in the Newsroom,” participants will articulate what has worked and what hasn’t – from information security technologies to data policies – in order to identify core themes and challenges. Participants will walk away with a co-created best practices document that they can use as a starting point in their newsrooms to foster robust security cultures in a time of increasing doxing attempts, labor precarity, financial constraints, and decreasing trust in the media.", + "facilitator": "Jennifer Henrichsen", + "facilitator_twitter": "JennHenrichsen", + "id": 2355710, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T02:22:24.849Z", + "title": "Breaking Through the Ambivalence: The Future of Security Cultures in the Newsroom", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": 'Innovation is freedom to experiment. Innovation is creative and fast. Innovation is not production. Innovation in the newsroom is all of those things for BBC News Labs. As News Labs grew from a small experimental team to a full multidisciplinary team, the flexibility of "innovation" reduced our ability to communicate with each other. Will innovation be restricted by structure, when it demands flexibility to try out ideas? Is cultural change possible when the ideology of the team is synonymous to what is problematic? This session will explore these questions and how re-introducing structure - Objective Key Results (OKRs) - helped us break silos in our team.', + "facilitator": "Eimi Okuno", + "facilitator_twitter": "emettely", + "id": 2353162, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T14:31:55.994Z", + "title": "Breaking silos - how OKRs helped our team communicate and drive innovation", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Gulp? Grunt? NPM? 😱😱😱You're not the only one in over your head. Tools are rapidly changing, and what works for one team might be too opinionated for a lonely coder working on their own. On top of this, when do we find time to learn (let alone build) these tools while on aggressive deadlines?\n\nBring your rigs, your successes, your failures, and your questions. We will show off tools we have built and compare notes about where to begin, what to prioritize, and what to avoid.", + "facilitator": "Daniel Wood", + "facilitator_twitter": "danielpwwood", + "id": 2355521, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-29T17:09:57.576Z", + "title": "Build Tools: We're all making it up as we go along", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Mike Rispoli", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "RispoliMike", + "description": "Developing sources is standard practice, but what about developing collaborators? Community members have so much more to offer than choice quotes and timely expertise. What if we developed the capacity of our audience to pitch stories, design distribution strategies, report, analyze, and disseminate the news?\n\nLet’s flesh out the resources that exist among our audience & within our communities, and the possibilities to invest in those resources so that the community invests in our journalism.\n\nFree Press plans to partner with a newsroom or community partner to facilitate this session.", + "facilitator": "Madeleine Bair", + "facilitator_twitter": "@madbair", + "id": 2355594, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-29T17:43:37.160Z", + "title": "Building newsroom capacity by tapping into expertise outside the newsroom", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Emma Carew Grovum", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "In this session, we’ll collaboratively create ways to help folks from historically privileged backgrounds be better allies to their colleagues from minority and marginalized backgrounds. The goal is to advocate for fair and comprehensive coverage and a more inclusive newsroom culture. The method by which we get that done is up to us, but will aim to result in a community that continues beyond SRCCON.\n\nIt’s time for the people with privilege to do the hard work of making things right. This might be a messy and awkward process, but our work, our workplaces and our lives will be better for it.", + "facilitator": "Hannah Wise", + "facilitator_twitter": "hannahjwise", + "id": 2355291, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T14:21:32.860Z", + "title": "Calling All Media Diversity Avengers: Now’s the time to act.", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "In the modern political landscape truth is a challenging concept to fully grasp but one that is heard about from all angles. What is considered truthful, what is considered falsehoods, and how to tell one from the other, is discussed ad infinitum on TV, in op-eds, journalism schools and the halls of power. Since 2016 the words “fact checking” have been thrown about as a panacea to all of our woes, but the reality of fact checking, its actual process, and how technology is coming up to assist with it, is, mostly, fundamentally misunderstood.\n\nI want to shed light on this vaguely opaque and still nascent form of journalism. How does it differ from the fact checkers that newspapers and magazines have employed for decades? How are these decisions reached? How, and if, technology and modern concepts such as artificial intelligence and machine learning can play a role in holding politicians and public figures to account. This will be the place to ask questions, figure out where different expertises can assist in the problem, and maybe even get a bit of hope for the future.", + "facilitator": "Christopher Guess", + "facilitator_twitter": "Cguess", + "id": 2355717, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T20:43:01.275Z", + "title": "Can Computers be Fact Checkers?", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "In the thick of relentless news cycles, it’s easy to forget to take the time to celebrate and acknowledge the truly great work that we are doing to serve our communities on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. In this session, we’ll focus on the need to celebrate wins – both large and small – as individuals and members of a team. We’ll examine different styles of celebrating and recognizing each other, and we’ll look at examples of how workplaces emphasize joy and gratitude as well as collective celebration. Participants will work with each other to craft a plan for how they want to mark important milestones in their own work. In the immortal words of Kool and the Gang, “Bring your good times, and your laughter too.”", + "facilitator": "Amy L. Kovac-Ashley", + "facilitator_twitter": "terabithia4", + "id": 2355677, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:19:24.890Z", + "title": "Celebrate good times, come on!", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Being a journalist is hard these days and awards aren't a bad thing. But data I've compiled shows that the best work of the year is often backloaded into November and December, when most contest deadlines come due. But this is also likely the least ideal time for big impactful work to come out as regular people and those with power to effectuate change leave work for the holidays. Let's have a discussion about how we can change that, to be able to fete our peers while also remaining true to our mission.", + "facilitator": "Stephen Stirling", + "facilitator_twitter": "sstirling", + "id": 2345683, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-12T18:13:02.088Z", + "title": "Changing journalism's awards culture", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "What if your audience could give you data on the issues you’re reporting on? Whether it’s investigating pollution levels in a community by using air quality monitors, or figuring out how stressed out we feel about politics by doing saliva tests, or tracking the urban heat island effect using temperature and humidity sensors. \n\nA research partner is indispensable, and the results are somewhere between journalism and science. But the experience can reveal the inner workings of scientific research. It’s engagement where you — usually along with your audience — explore in a hands-on way the ideas you’re covering in your stories. \n\nI’ll dig into the challenges and joys of partnering with researchers, and the thrills and frustrations in reporting on data from an activity you organized. \n\nI'd also guide them through a brainstorming on a scientific or research collaboration they might do. Everyone will then share their projects and get some feedback.", + "facilitator": "Elaine Chen", + "facilitator_twitter": "elainejchen", + "id": 2355024, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T14:48:42.547Z", + "title": "Citizen Science As Engagement", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Nozlee Samadzadeh", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "So much career advice revolves around mentorship, but many of us struggle to build mentorship relationships. How do you even find a mentor? And what do you do once you get one? It can feel intimidating and overwhelming to even get started, especially if you’re the only person with your title in the newsroom. Enter peer mentorship. As coworkers from different disciplines, we’ve found that peer mentorship has helped us grow in our careers, navigate the day-to-day challenges of life at work, and get shit done. We’ll talk about how you can identify potential peer mentors in your midst, what the peer mentorship relationship is and isn’t, and share some tips for structuring that relationship successfully. As a bonus, you might even leave the session with a potential peer mentor from the SRCCON community!", + "facilitator": "Marie Connelly", + "facilitator_twitter": "eyemadequiet", + "id": 2355895, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:00:04.172Z", + "title": "Conversations with friends: developing strong peer mentorship relationships", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Many of us work for organizations focused on the production and distribution of news and information via printed and digital formats. One thing we don't often consider is the space this work is consumed within or the impact our work could have on the physical world. This session would focus on a deeper conversation about the role the physical world should play in how we approach the development of and distribution of news.", + "facilitator": "André Natta", + "facilitator_twitter": "acnatta", + "id": 2351927, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T14:30:54.737Z", + "title": "Creating the Space for Journalism", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Jaimi Dowdell", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Teaching data journalism in newsrooms and at universities has forced us to come up with creative techniques. We wrote The SQL Song to help one group of boot camp attendees understand the order of commands. In an attempt to help students fine-tune their programs, we did a game show called Query Cash. To make string functions make more sense, we’ve created silly, but useful performances. To make this session interactive, we propose inviting attendees to bring their ideas. We also will pose some problems and have teams work out creative solutions.", + "facilitator": "Jennifer LaFleur", + "facilitator_twitter": "@j_la28", + "id": 2355574, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T16:28:15.813Z", + "title": "Creative ways to teach complex issues", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Will automated journalism compete with human journalists? Is it a way to cut costs and replace human journalists? or would it complement quotidian journalism and journalists? These are the questions this practical and conversational session seeks to answer. In the past few years, algorithms have been used to automatically generate news from structured data. In 2014 Associated Press, started automating the production of its quarterly corporate earnings reports. \n\nOnce developed, not only can algorithms create thousands of news stories for a particular topic, they also do it more quickly, cheaply, and potentially with fewer errors than any human journalist. Unsurprisingly, this efficiency has fueled journalists’ fears that automated content production will eventually eliminate newsroom jobs, however some experts see the technology’s potential to improve news quality with a human-machine alliance.", + "facilitator": "Blaise Aboh", + "facilitator_twitter": "@aimlegend_", + "id": 2343491, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-12T07:28:52.141Z", + "title": "DATA AND THE NEXT REPORTING REVOLUTION", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Leza Zaman", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Two women working at The New York Times in digital innovation share their recommendations, and facilitate conversations, rooted in their lived experience in corporate culture. Through discussion and exercises we hope the session gives you a starting point and a few tips and ticks to start designing a culture of diversity and inclusion. We plan to facilitate conversations around three core pillars to help employees at their company, whether big or small, no matter what industry: Structure, Conversation, and Assessing Success when designing culture and cultural change.\n\n“Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.” - Jacqueline Woodson", + "facilitator": "Angelica Hill", + "facilitator_twitter": "Angelica_Hill", + "id": 2354678, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T21:38:21.573Z", + "title": "Designing a Culture of Inclusivity and Diversity", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Brittany Mayes", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Over the past few decades, newsroom technologists have pushed the field of journalism forward in countless ways. As we approach a new decade, and arguably a new era of digital journalism, how must newsroom technologists evolve to meet new needs? And how do we center technology in a newsroom while also fixing the problems news organizations have long had regarding diversity, representing their communities, speaking to their audiences, etc.?\n\nIn this session, we will start with a set of hypotheses to seed discussion.\n\nFor journalism to succeed in the next decade:\n- Newsroom technologists must have real power in their organizations.\n- Experimentation and product development must be central to how a newsroom operates.\n- News organizations must be radically inclusive of their communities.\n- Cultivating positive culture and interpersonal relationships is key to developing sustainable newsrooms.\n\nGiven these hypotheses, what skills do we need to grow in newsroom technologists? What must we think about more deeply in our daily work? What tools do we need to develop? How must this community evolve? Together, let’s brainstorm these questions and leave with ideas to explore and deepen newsroom technology and culture beyond SRCCON.", + "facilitator": "Tyler Fisher", + "facilitator_twitter": "tylrfishr", + "id": 2349146, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T19:24:16.957Z", + "title": "Designing the next phase for newsroom technologists", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Journalism is a tougher job mentally than most people realize. Deadlines and the high-pressure to achieve perfection are part of it. But we are often on the front lines in experiencing the worst of humanity. Lately, we're targets simply for doing our job. Now, more than ever, we need each other.\n\nWe can take a moment to lean on each other to discuss tips for taking care of our mental health, from simple ideas such as developing good habits in our self-care to deeper situations which may involve medical help. What are the signs to be aware of? What safety nets exist for us to turn to? How can we be a good colleague in making sure those struggling around us are not being ignored? \n\nIn this off-the-record session, let's share our shoulders for crying and our personal stories for inspiration.", + "facilitator": "Erin Brown", + "facilitator_twitter": "embrown", + "id": 2355346, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T18:32:04.044Z", + "title": "Developing good habits in our self-care", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Democracy is a word that gets thrown around a lot as a by-product of journalism. But when was the last time you took a moment to really interrogate what democracy is and how to measure it? What is our relationship to democracy and how do we cultivate more of it? \n\nThis session follows a session from SRCCON:POWER where participants developed consensus definitions for democracy and brainstormed ways to cultivate a more thoughtful democratic practice in their work. (Read more about it here: https://medium.com/@simongalp/5-ways-to-make-your-workplace-more-democratic-730aa1fdc87f). We'll work with those definitions and your own to develop metrics for measuring how your work cultivates democracy. This will be a highly participatory session. Participants will leave the session with an understanding of democracy as a practice and approaches to measuring and articulating their own democratic impact.", + "facilitator": "Simon Galperin", + "facilitator_twitter": "thensim0nsaid", + "id": 2353506, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T19:00:38.626Z", + "title": "Developing your democracy metrics", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "How would you tackle a 100 million pages of PDFs? That's a question we've been thinking a lot about ever since DocumentCloud and MuckRock merged last year and we get increasingly close to that milestone. We're working on finding new ways to help analyze, categorize, search, sort, and otherwise help journalism tackle larger and larger documents sets in a way that supports the journalism we want to do. Come learn about our new crowdsourcing and machine learning efforts. More importantly, share your hairiest document analysis problems as we explore where the future of collaborating, analyzing, and reporting on massive document sets needs to go.", + "facilitator": "Michael Morisy", + "facilitator_twitter": "morisy", + "id": 2355715, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:19:42.184Z", + "title": "Document Dumpster Diving: Using Crowdsourcing and ML to Turn PDFs into ~Data~", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Maxine Whitely (Rebecca Halleck and Umi Syam would be great additions, if possible)", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Writing good documentation is hard, so let’s write some together in a low-pressure environment! This session isn’t just about writing documentation to go with SRCCON; it’s an opportunity to learn how to improve documentation at your organization and perhaps take-away a prototype install of Library, too.\n\nWe’ll start by collaborating on successful approaches to writing and sharing documentation in a newsroom, then use Library to collect useful documentation for all SRCCON attendees.\n\nLibrary is an open-source documentation tool released by the New York Times in collaboration with Northwestern University’s Knight Lab earlier this year. Because every page in Library is a Google Doc, you already know how to use it!", + "facilitator": "Isaac White", + "facilitator_twitter": "TweetAtIsaac", + "id": 2355283, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T23:09:53.353Z", + "title": "Document this conference! An introduction to Library.", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "[cue Star Wars scroll ...]\n\nHeading into 2019, Chicago faced a historic election. For the first time in decades, the mayor's office was up for grabs with no incumbent and no heir apparent to the 5th floor of City Hall. Meanwhile, the clerk, treasurer and entire 50-seat City Council were up for election. Competition was fierce.\n\nSmall newsrooms faced the daunting task of covering all of these races. More than 200 candidates were running for local office -- including more than a dozen for mayor -- from complete unknowns to career pols. All of this was taking place in a news environment where media often struggles to engage voters and help them make informed decisions.\n\nWith these challenges in mind, a group of five local independent newsrooms decided to pool their resources and work together to create a one-stop resource to serve voters. In a matter of days, the Chi.vote Collaborative was founded, launching a website with candidate profiles, articles, voter resources and other information. The collaborative grew to 10 partners and traffic to the website surged heading into the February election and eventual April runoff. We literally built the car as we drove it, rolling out new features as fast as we could develop them. All while publishing new stories and information daily. \n\nWe quickly learned a lot about collaborating, building on each other's strengths and overcoming challenges. Here are our takeaways, what worked and what didn't, along with tips, insights and all the key technical details that could help you and your collaborators cover the next election.", + "facilitator": "Matt Kiefer", + "facilitator_twitter": "@matt_kiefer", + "id": 2355759, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T22:40:05.072Z", + "title": "Don't compete, collaborate: Lessons learned from covering the 2019 Chicago municipal elections", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Vinessa Wan", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "(Subtitle: How The New York Times is Moving Towards a Culture of Growth and Accountability Through Blamelessness.)\n\nCo-facilitator: Vinessa Wan (who will be submitting her own form today, too.)\n\nIncidents and outages are a normal part of any complex system. In recent years The New York Times adopted a collaborative method for discussing these events called Learning Reviews. We'd like to give a brief introduction to Learning Reviews—where they originated, why they're called Learning Reviews, what they are—followed by a few exercises with the attendees. Some of these group exercises would focus on communicating the idea of complexity and how that impacts our ability to predict the future. In doing so, we'd also communicate how complex systems have a degree of impermanence and how this contributes to outages. This segues into the theme of the discussion, how do we look back on an event in a way that prioritizes learning more about our systems and less about finding fault with a human? We'll go over the importance of language and facilitation in this process.", + "facilitator": "Joe Hart", + "facilitator_twitter": null, + "id": 2355136, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T15:20:40.448Z", + "title": "Engineering Beyond Blame", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Journalism can feel like a bit much in this social media age, but it doesn't have to be. How can you promote meaningful, ethical, public powered journalism in a sea of noise? What needs to change about focus and culture in journalism? This session will attempt to answer those questions and exchange ideas.", + "facilitator": "Alex Veeneman", + "facilitator_twitter": "alex_veeneman", + "id": 2355068, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T15:10:38.870Z", + "title": "Ethical journalism in an information overload age", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "At most organizations, different departments all work on different timelines. News may think 36 hours is a long time, video features may think of a month as a short turnaround, and fundraising or ad sales needs to know NOW what is happening.\n\nHow do you balance the interests of a news team that makes last-minute decisions and works with a quick turnaround? How do you keep everyone in the know without compromising programming deadlines and managing time and resources? \n\nLearn how public radio's Science Friday successfully implemented an organization-wide editorial calendar and discover new tools to implement your own.", + "facilitator": "Christian Skotte", + "facilitator_twitter": "el_skootro", + "id": 2355091, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T15:41:33.378Z", + "title": "Everyone Together to the Calendar Table", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Shady Grove Oliver", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "In a 2013 survey of doctors, researchers found that 88.3% of doctors wish to “forego high-intensity treatments” and decline resuscitation, choosing different end-of-life care for themselves than their patients. The study states “it is likely that doctors recurrently witness the tremendous suffering their terminally ill patients experience as they undergo ineffective, high intensity treatments at the end of life and they (the doctors) consequentially wish to forego such treatments for themselves.” What does journalism look like under such a lens? How would we cover the next shooting? The next devastating natural disaster? A personal tragedy? A public embarrassment? When it is us, our families, our lives, how do we want our colleagues to conduct themselves? How do we want our stories told?\n\nWe’ve combined our backgrounds in narrative medicine, local journalism, ethics and access research into a project examining the parallels in how health care and journalism have evolved in the U.S. Across both fields, practitioners often cite the appeal of service to others as why they do the work, but are communities truly being served? The very practices of health care and journalism are shaped, challenged, and even threatened by the compromises created by the conflict between delivering a service and seeking revenue. They both have become industries that suffer from lack of access for local or rural communities, are distorted by the drive for profit or financial influence (like insurance companies and hedge-fund owners), deeply ingrained problems with diversity and representation and questions of agency, ethics, autonomy and participation from the people on the other side of the pen and stethoscope.\n\nJoin us for a frank group discussion and brainstorming session around the parallels between medicine and journalism and to push toward solutions that make our communities healthier—physically, emotionally and intellectually.", + "facilitator": "Heather Bryant", + "facilitator_twitter": "HBCompass", + "id": 2355782, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:31:12.885Z", + "title": "Extraordinary Measures: Learning from the parallels of journalism and health care to improve both", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Screenwriters use many techniques to distribute information throughout a film: building context to create goals and desires, withholding knowledge to create intrigue, planting clues to create suspense, and revealing discoveries to create surprise. By establishing rhythms of expectation, anticipation, disappointment, and fulfillment, a well-written screenplay keeps us captivated as it directs us through all the plot points and to the heart of the story.\n\nData journalism shares a similar goal. Are there lessons from screenwriting we can use to write engaging, data-driven stories, so we don’t end up with an info dump? Let’s find out together.\n\nIn this session, we’ll participate in a writers’ room to discuss how screenwriters use different strategies to jam-pack information into scenes while building a narrative and keeping pace. Then we’ll try out different screenwriting approaches to see how we can best break down complex data sets in our reporting, guide readers to the story, and keep their attention. Wipe down the whiteboards, grab some Post-its, and let’s “break” a story!", + "facilitator": "Phi Do", + "facilitator_twitter": "phihado", + "id": 2353008, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:23:12.759Z", + "title": "Fade In: What Data Journalism Can Learn from Screenwriting", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Kika Gilbert", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Feed-based architectures have long been the primary drivers of engagement for social media companies and online-first publishers. On the other hand, the digital offerings of older more mature publishers still mirror their print counterpart: Content is ordered by section and readers have no control over what they see. In this session, we want to explore if and how customizable feeds can work within a more traditional news website or app. \n\nHere are some questions we want to discuss: How does one build a feed to begin with? How can users personalize it to their interests? By adopting the feed concept, are we just one step closer to trapping our readers inside their own filter bubbles? How may we responsibly use algorithms to improve the relevance of a news feed? How, if at all, can we involve editors in the process? What is good data to collect in order to power a valuable feed for readers\n\nIn this session, we’ll share how we’ve started to answer some of these questions at The New York Times and how organizations can begin to program the most relevant journalism for their readers.", + "facilitator": "Anna Coenen", + "facilitator_twitter": null, + "id": 2355693, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T19:35:56.196Z", + "title": "Feed your readers’ curiosity: building a customizable (news) feed for publishers", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "As contributors, we walk a fine line with feedback. Often we want constructive criticism but don't know how to ask the right people to invest in our work. Alternatively, when asked for feedback, we only celebrate the strong parts and ignore critical issues. Occasionally even compliment sandwiches lose their border bread and become toxic. We're left just wanting to turn off the comments.\n\nIn this session, we'll identify how to frame feedback- both when soliciting and giving. We'll explore how to build healthy systems of feedback within organizations, communities, and as a freelancer. Optionally, come with something you are working on- design, code, text, concepts, or anything in between- and we will practice our feedback superpowers. Join us as we learn to more meaningfully communicate and build!", + "facilitator": "Kevin Huber", + "facilitator_twitter": "kevinahuber", + "id": 2355935, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:02:38.769Z", + "title": "Feedback Loop: How to separate from the noise and build healthy communities of feedback", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": '"Audience growth" optimizes for engagement, but who is advocating for the wellbeing of news audiences? As more and more people in the U.S. are exposed to trauma, how can the journalism we produce meet audiences where they are and help them not only stay informed but process and heal? How can we establish a relationship with news audiences built on empathy and listening? How can we make room for complexity and nuance, even when there is no succinct nutgraf or sweepy headline?', + "facilitator": "Kelly Chen", + "facilitator_twitter": "chenkx", + "id": 2356123, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T05:33:59.902Z", + "title": "Feel your feelings", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "In many newsrooms, analytics are a reactive tool. We propose a more proactive method: treating analytics as real-time results of intentional editorial experiments. That takes a mindset shift, from waiting for answers to actively searching for them. \n\nIn this session, we’ll start with a short presentation on some of the innovative ways newsrooms have used data for experimentation. Then we’ll break into small groups to build out our newsroom experiments using Mad Libs-style brainstorming. The more unusual the ideas, the better; we want this discussion to throw out any constraints you’ve felt in the role analytics *should* play and think about other ways you *can* use analytics to improve your newsroom processes.", + "facilitator": "Shirley Qiu", + "facilitator_twitter": "callmeshirleyq", + "id": 2355102, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T18:40:22.790Z", + "title": "Fill in the blanks: Designing newsroom experiments using analytics", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Stephanie Snyder and/or Bridget Thoreson of Hearken", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "We are all too aware that the 2020 election is coming up. But do our community members feel empowered by the coverage we’re producing? Unlikely. Typically it starts with the candidates and what they have to do to win, rather than the voters and what they need to participate. We should flip that. \n\nIf we let the needs of community members drive the design of our election coverage, it would look dramatically different – and be dramatically better for our democratic process and social cohesion, we think. Bonus: those community members will be pretty grateful to you for unsexy coverage like explaining what a circuit court judge does. At a time when we’re pivoting to reader revenue, this public service journalism model is not just good karma – it should be seen as mission critical. \n\nWe’ll explore the “jobs to be done” in election reporting, how to ask questions that will give you a deeper understanding of voters’ information needs, the tools at our disposal to do that, and the ways that newsrooms can ensure they have enough feedback from actual voters to resist the siren call of the latest campaign gaffe or poll results.", + "facilitator": "Ariel Zirulnick", + "facilitator_twitter": "azirulnick", + "id": 2355770, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:38:40.976Z", + "title": "Fix your feedback loop: Letting people, not polls, drive your election coverage", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "You've acquired the skills you came to learn, now what? Brown bag it? Demo? Lecture...? In this interactive session, you'll learn how to use techniques from the classroom to teach and engage your team or workshop participants. This session will give you the tools to teach anyone, anything, anywhere.", + "facilitator": "Kathy Trieu", + "facilitator_twitter": null, + "id": 2355661, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T19:02:59.261Z", + "title": "From the Classroom to the Newsroom", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Joseph Lichterman", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Too often, tips and suggestions for email newsletters at newsrooms can take a “one size fits all” approach. We’ve seen that the way a newsletter is made at a newsroom can enormously vary based on the size, resources and purpose of any given newsroom. \n\nIn this session, we’ll create a card-based strategy game that will guide small groups of participants through the process of creating a new newsletter product that meets an outlet’s editorial and business outcomes. Groups will have to develop a strategy that meets specific goals and will have to overcome hurdles and challenges that we throw in their way. \n\nThroughout the simulation, we’ll present then guide the room through a series of discussion topics and exercises based around the key worksteams of an email newsletter at a newsroom: user research, content creation, workflows, acquiring new email readers, and converting readers to members or donors.", + "facilitator": "Emily Roseman", + "facilitator_twitter": "emilyroseman1", + "id": 2355937, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:04:46.363Z", + "title": "Game of Newsletters: A song of inboxes and subject lines", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Nobody goes into journalism for the money, but sometimes we have to leave the industry because of it. :( Many of us have shifted from a certain beat, moved up the corporate ladder or left completely. And yet we still long for the experiences which made us love the business in the first place.\n\nThomas Wolfe was wrong. You *can* go home again!\n\nLet's discuss strategies for identifying and finding outlets for our skills and expertise; managing time to pursue our passion projects; and plan for the catches that often come with a side-gig.", + "facilitator": "Erin Brown", + "facilitator_twitter": "embrown", + "id": 2354652, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-22T16:17:18.922Z", + "title": "Getting Back in the Game: Journalism as a Side Project", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Technology intersects with nearly every aspect of our lives, and based on the number of digital sabbath services and \"I'm leaving social media for good this time (probably!)\" posts that have been published, our relationship to technology feels out of control. \n\nBut our brains aren't what's broken, they're working exactly as they evolved to work. Technology has just evolved much, much faster. And that tech is affecting our emotional and physiological well being. Media companies and platforms have capitalized on our innate psychological and neurological vulnerabilities to make money and keep us hooked. But there have to be better ways to build community and share information on the web. Let's dig into the systemic issues (cough, capitalism) that have led to tech that makes us miserable and then design/brainstorm what humane platforms could look like.", + "facilitator": "Kaeti Hinck", + "facilitator_twitter": "kaeti", + "id": 2355551, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T16:28:29.461Z", + "title": "Ghosts in the Machine: How technology is shaping our lives and how we can build a better way", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": 'As an industry, we''ve struggled to get beyond "Save journalism! And democracy!" when it comes to helping readers understand the merits of supporting our work financially. Learn how to write timely, topical appeals that rally support around your newsroom’s most impactful work. The work featured may have had an impact on a particular reporting subject or community, or it may simply be something that your team is really proud of. During this session, you’ll draft concise language that may be used to promote membership or subscriptions across your website, social media and email.', + "facilitator": "Rebecca Quarls", + "facilitator_twitter": null, + "id": 2355096, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:29:59.906Z", + "title": "Go beyond “Save journalism!” when making the case for membership", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "What happens when you post your code to GitHub and people actually start using it?\n\nWhat makes for success in open source? How can you get your code noticed? Encourage contributions? Develop process? Reap the rewards of thousands of users using, testing and PR-ing to your work?\n\nBut also: what happens when it goes too far? How do you manage the chaos? Set expectations? Ensure you \"code\" responsibly (oh, and leave enough time for your day job)?", + "facilitator": "Jared Novack", + "facilitator_twitter": "jarednova", + "id": 2354624, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-22T15:20:33.960Z", + "title": "Great/Terrible News! Everyone's Using Your Open Source Library!", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Amanda Hicks", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "The Washington Post’s Research, Experimentation and Development (RED) team was established four years ago with the mission to build better ad tech. RED took its baby steps operating as a startup within a large media organization but has undergone a transformation to triple in size. This session will follow the team’s progress from a ragtag group of engineers through its awkward teenage phase when growing pains made project prioritization difficult to current day when the group is hitting its stride as an adult member of the Post. \n\nThe two presenters, both of whom joined the team in its early phases, will talk about the types of projects they developed early on, the challenges they encountered and what made them switch from individual solutions to more sustainable platforms. They will track the adoption of an agile development mindset and discuss when it does and does not work. Finally, they will showcase the Post’s user testing lab and how the results from periodic qualitative feedback have shaped the development roadmap. This is a session for attendees who want a peek inside the Post’s research advertising arm and those who want to know how to manage a development team through significant growth. We also will discuss how R&D groups at other publications can partner with RED in the ad tech and journalism space.", + "facilitator": "Aram Zucker-Scharff", + "facilitator_twitter": "Chronotope", + "id": 2343173, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T20:22:26.474Z", + "title": "Growing a team from scrappy startup to software powerhouse", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Karissa Cummings", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Ever worked on a horrible team? Same. Teams are the atomic unit of many organizations, and while we often consider how best to work, we don’t necessarily think about how to work together. We talk about team success as an outcome of psychological safety, team culture, or synergy, but what do those things actually mean and how do you cultivate them? \n\nJoin us to talk about building collaborative and cross-disciplinary teams that are actually fun to work on. We’ll use Tuckman’s Model for Group Development as a framework to understand how teams grow and share some of our best practices. We’d also love to hear how you help your teams build mutual respect, establish a shared mission, and continuously improve.", + "facilitator": "Caroline Cox-Orrell", + "facilitator_twitter": null, + "id": 2355261, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T21:39:25.604Z", + "title": "Herding Cats: Strategies to build and nurture successful teams", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "A meetup for those who are new to the world of journalism. For those just starting their career or for people who have shifted from a different industry. A casual time to discuss observations of the industry and trying to fit in with our seasoned newsroom colleagues.", + "facilitator": "Christopher Schwing", + "facilitator_twitter": null, + "id": 2343104, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-11T16:57:41.287Z", + "title": "Hi! I'm new(s) here.", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "It's been amazing to see how the news nerd community has grown and evolved over the decades, and as we've gotten to meet in person over the last 5 years of SRCCONs. We have data about who is part of the news nerd community, and through various Slacks and events like this one, we've seen how members of this community support and care for one another. Let's take a moment to reflect on this community (with the support of an outside facilitator): who is a part of this community? Who is not (or is not yet) included? What are our responsibilities to each other? What does our collective future hold? We'll explore what we need to create that future, together.", + "facilitator": "erika owens", + "facilitator_twitter": "erika_owens", + "id": 2338033, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T22:57:55.747Z", + "title": "How are we in community together?", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Kayla Christopherson", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "While journalists talk a lot about having an impact, we're not as forthcoming on how we can be more deliberate and active in informing structural change in our communities. Our work is often geared to spark surface-level outcomes (a law was passed, an official was held accountable, etc.), but even when media organizations are equipped to do deeper investigative work, they often don’t invest in longer-term strategies that can illuminate pathways for citizens to create more equitable, healthy systems.\n\nUsing a practice called systems thinking – a holistic approach to grappling with complex issues – journalists can develop more collaborative frameworks that help people build power and resiliency to address some of our most deeply rooted problems. Through the lens of systems thinking, we'll open a discussion about some of the big ideas and questions that a change-oriented approach holds for journalists: What new roles can journalists play to help evaluate and facilitate opportunities for social change? How do we negotiate traditional journalistic principles and standards while working to actively dismantle oppressive systems? How can we better communicate and act on our values?\n\nWe'll offer ideas from the systems thinking playbook, discuss examples of journalists who are actively rooting their practice in systems change and lead a visioning exercise to imagine new possibilities.", + "facilitator": "Cole Goins", + "facilitator_twitter": "@colegoins", + "id": 2342800, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T22:11:21.723Z", + "title": "How can newsrooms be more active catalysts for change?", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "In this session will open up the conversation to knowledge share successful open source strategies, drawing on participants questions and experience. \n\nAt BBC News Labs we recently open sourced a transcript editor component (https://github.com/bbc/react-transcript-editor) using a “code in the open” / “open source from the start” approach we engaged a community around the project. This has helped us to improve the project beyond what we had initially anticipated. \n\nBiggest discovery was that a lot of the key to a successful open source strategy was around the so called “soft skills”. Curating the project and communication within the contributors, drafting\ndocumentation, guides, ADR (architecture decision record), as well as talking to contributors and learn more about their use cases, online and offline.\n\nWe also discovered that it was instrumental in transferring our project to a production team to scale it to the rest of the organization.\n\nWill discuss what has worked, and what hasn’t worked for participants, and divide into groups to knowledge share potential open sourcing strategies.\n\nThis session welcomes both people who have no open source experience and are curious about how to get started as well as seasoned open source contributors/maintainers and anything in between.", + "facilitator": "Pietro Passarelli", + "facilitator_twitter": "pietropassarell", + "id": 2355743, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:16:25.179Z", + "title": "How open sourcing your project can help scale it to the the rest of the organisation", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Heather Chin", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "In this session, I’ll provide a comprehensive review of how you can bring a community together to build a podcast and why audio content can be valuable to local communities. \n\nWe’ll discuss how to focus on the news impacting your communities. You want to build trust with your listeners through respectful collaboration and give mis/underrepresented voices in the city a place where they can be heard. We’ll go over the methodologies that can build this mission into your organizational structure. Participants will learn how to create a mission statement and begin a series of task force meetings, along with how to:\n-Create a listener advisory board\n-Hold monthly meetings throughout neighborhoods in settings relevant to the discussion \n-Welcome locals to attend these meetings to come and share their ideas and insights for stories that the podcast should tell about their community\n-Invite locals to contribute their expertise and share their experience \n\nIt’s important to research how your community digests news. Really think about the neighborhoods you want to cover: Who is the audience you want to build? And who is reporting it? It helps if reporters are living in that area and/or reflect the identities of that area. \n\nThis session will also explore how you can incorporate your listeners into the storytelling.", + "facilitator": "Jordan Gass-Poore'", + "facilitator_twitter": "jgasspoore", + "id": 2356005, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T02:21:04.758Z", + "title": "How to Bring a Community Together to Build a Podcast", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Kate Rabinowitz", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Your newsroom has a rigorous process for editing words and traditional reporting. How can data journalists ensure that we’re editing data analysis with the same rigor? How can we take lessons from research and other fields and apply them to a fast-paced newsroom? \n\nIn this session, we’ll talk about how newsrooms are already doing this work—and how we can up our game. What are some of the challenges in adding new steps to existing workflows? How can you do this work if you don’t have a dedicated data editor? And how do you get the rest of the newsroom on board? We’ll share among participants the successes and challenges we’ve had, and try to find the ideal data editing process together.", + "facilitator": "Hannah Recht", + "facilitator_twitter": "hannah_recht", + "id": 2355655, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T19:39:25.514Z", + "title": "How to edit data as seriously as we edit words", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Carolyn Gearig (and potentially another person from another newsletter)", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "We’ve made dozens of iterations on our daily e-mail newsletters because of user feedback and resource constraints, business considerations and technological and design efficiency. To get smarter about what our users want and how we can work more efficiently to give it to them, we’ve used the “Jobs To Be Done” framework to define what each newsletter section does for our users. We asked several other newsletter writers we admire how they would use the Jobs To Be Done framework for their newsletters, and here’s what we learned.", + "facilitator": "Anika Anand", + "facilitator_twitter": "anikaanand00", + "id": 2355173, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T19:43:51.519Z", + "title": 'How to iterate on a newsletter product with a "Jobs To Be Done" framework', + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "In newsrooms, as in other workplaces, most are given power leadership through title and job description. But many of us operate in spaces where there is no one above you who can edit you. Let's explore how to lead your newsroom without the title and exert power over the things you care deeply about. And let's explore the ways you can acquire power by playing within the system.", + "facilitator": "Steven Rich", + "facilitator_twitter": "dataeditor", + "id": 2355671, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T00:32:02.064Z", + "title": "How to lead without power", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": 'In the last two years, I have organized conferences and have been invited at several others to speak and lead sessions. I have often been invited last minute to give a "female" perspective on issues and panels. I have been told how it has been very hard to find women data journalists. I have also reported about diversity in technology companies and have heard about how there is deficiency in the pipeline for hiring women of color. I''d like to share my approach to planning and organizing a diverse conference. This workshop will talk about strategies to find and recruit diverse speakers, creating a safe and inviting space for bringing perspectives from different backgrounds and walking through the process and challenges of building a diverse community.', + "facilitator": "Sinduja Rangarajan", + "facilitator_twitter": "cynduja", + "id": 2351500, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T02:26:20.305Z", + "title": "How to plan a kickass, diverse conference", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Amanda Yarnell", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "At SRCCON:WORK, I talked about re-building our newsroom org charts to reflect the work we’re doing today and to prepare us for where we’re going. Joined now with C&EN’s editorial director, Amanda Yarnell, we’ll show you how we built a product team and re-structured our newsroom around it in one year. \n\nIf you’re interested in building a newsroom-wide roadmap, streamlining and prioritizing newsroom ideas, creating and managing a sprint-based product team, and growing stakeholder alignment across business units, join us. In this session, we’ll share our blueprint, our successes, and our challenges, so you can do it faster.", + "facilitator": "Jessica Morrison", + "facilitator_twitter": "ihearttheroad", + "id": 2355555, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T16:39:02.638Z", + "title": "How to re-org your newsroom around product without breaking it", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "From photo inundation in stories about social media, to seemingly “visual-less” financial reporting, how do you spot a visual story? We’re interested in everything from photo/illustration, graphics, interactives, and online audio productions. We’ll share a few examples for inspiration to kick off discussion, but we’re mainly interested in hearing from everyone how they keep generate ideas and how they read drafts for potential. How do you think about the visual purpose? E.g. visuals as evidence, for empathy, or an emotional journey? We also want to hear everyone’s favorite tactics for visual research: how to get the visuals or the information to make them, from crowd-sourcing, open datasets, records requests, Google Earth, to interview tips. Finally, as we all know, visual stories tend to take more time than standard stories. What’s your process? How does your newsroom think about planning, setting expectations, and scoping (and the fact that it’s possible to rush edit a half-finished text into publishable form in a day if needed but not possible to hack a half-finished code project into functional form in a day)?", + "facilitator": "agnes chang", + "facilitator_twitter": null, + "id": 2355071, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T15:03:58.229Z", + "title": "How to spot and ship visual stories", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Swetha Kannan", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Technology is constantly changing the way we tell stories. But is it always for the best? Let’s take a look at how virtual reality and augmented reality tools have evolved, discuss when and how they can improve our stories, and learn some tricks to start using this technology.", + "facilitator": "Andrea Roberson", + "facilitator_twitter": "andyroberson22", + "id": 2355228, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T20:34:34.129Z", + "title": "How to use VR / AR to tell a story", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Let's enter the Data Team Time Machine and go back to our old graphics and long-ago code. Even the biggest superstars have a first project or an outdated framework that seems quaint now. In this session, we'll unearth some ancient work and talk about how we'd approach it differently with our current-day toolbox, whether that's refactoring some code, building with some modern-day software or scrapping it and starting again. Come to this session if you want to feel better about how far you've come and if you want some inspiration to look at your projects in a new light.", + "facilitator": "Erin Petenko", + "facilitator_twitter": "EPetenko", + "id": 2345883, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-12T19:23:37.566Z", + "title": "If I knew then what I know now", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Technology is a primary focus of innovation in data visualization and visual storytelling. So, what happens if we step away from our screens and instead create interactive visualizations without computers? Examples of non-digital interactive visualizations exist in many disciplines, from scale models used to get feedback about architectural plans to activist bake sales where women pay a different price than men to draw attention to pay disparities, as well as data art and installations. In this session, we’ll think about how to use objects, conversations and the built environment to show a visual story in an unexpected way, and then make physical interfaces in small groups to test interactions and identify principles that can translate back to digital spaces.", + "facilitator": "Lisa Waananen Jones", + "facilitator_twitter": "lisawaananen", + "id": 2356046, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:58:38.717Z", + "title": "Interactivity IRL: Creating interactive visualizations without computers", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "News organizations large and small are focused on the conversion of audiences to subscribers as a primary source of revenue in order to remain sustainable. It may already be time for them to think about what happens when this approach is no longer viable as a primary one. It may help to do so while approaching the issue by thinking about how your community is consuming and receiving their news and information.", + "facilitator": "Brent Hargrave", + "facilitator_twitter": "brenthargrave", + "id": 2355753, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T22:18:30.447Z", + "title": "Journalism post-subscriptions: What’s next?", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "What are the common traits among newsrooms with strong membership programs? How can your newsroom watch—and react to—metrics that move the needle for membership? The News Revenue Hub has built a first-of-its-kind Key Performance Indicator (KPI) report and benchmarking system for the 35-plus newsrooms it serves. We'd love to share what we've learned so far; but, moreover, we'd love for participants to contribute their own ideas for refining these tools and advancing the digital news industry’s membership model for fundraising.", + "facilitator": "Rebecca Quarls", + "facilitator_twitter": null, + "id": 2355630, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T20:24:30.170Z", + "title": "Key Performance Indi-what? How to watch—and react to—metrics that move the needle for membership", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Anyone who writes code has been here before: you know the code you want to write, you know you've written it before, but you've been searching your library for nearly 30 minutes now and you're ready to just give up and write the damn thing all over again.\n\nAnd you've probably been here before too: you processed the data by hand the first time around because it was just quicker to pivot table than it was to pandas. But it's a year later now and your editor wants you to update the story because new data were released but you cannot for the life of you remember what you did because you are always overworked and you can't even remember what you had for breakfast yesterday.\n\nLet's talk about writing and organizing reusable code so that we can avoid ever being in either one of those situations ever again.", + "facilitator": "Alexandra Kanik", + "facilitator_twitter": "act_rational", + "id": 2351366, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-29T16:58:42.916Z", + "title": "Lather, Rinse, Repeat: How to write and sustain reusable code in the wild", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "It can feel as though you have to have a journalism degree in order to be taken seriously in a newsroom. However, it’s long been a common practice for people to enter the profession from another one, often bringing new approaches and mindsets to it. Join journalists who’ve entered the profession from all walks of life as we navigate a wide-ranging conversation about what these hyphenates bring to the table and how they can help shape the future of the profession.", + "facilitator": "Faye Teng", + "facilitator_twitter": "FayeTeng3", + "id": 2355680, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:11:51.964Z", + "title": "Lessons from outside of journalism", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": 'Let''s sketch out the boundaries of our collective newsroom practices in working with documents. One document or many, many, _many_ documents – there is much to talk about in how we help with the work. Our expectations may touch on vocabulary, degrees of technological sophistication, project scale, evergreen collections, learning curves, workflows, etc. I''d love to discuss supporting shared tools, custom approaches and the inherent challenge that unites any doc-rich project: "wow, that''s a lot of documents, where do we start?" (Are we looking for ammo to help guide own newsroom? Yes, we are. And we could really use your help!)', + "facilitator": "Tiff Fehr", + "facilitator_twitter": "tiffeh", + "id": 2353982, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-20T03:22:23.997Z", + "title": "Let's Find the Boundaries of our Documents Practices", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "The dream of the 90s is alive with static sites! The JAM stack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) is a new twist on an old idea. Making static webpages has many benefits for newsrooms in terms of cost and long term maintainability. In this session, we will go through the basics of the static site generation landscape and participants will deploy their own custom static site, like GeoCities never died but with a data driven twist.", + "facilitator": "Carl Johnson", + "facilitator_twitter": "carlmjohnson", + "id": 2345204, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-12T14:58:30.506Z", + "title": "Let's JAMstack! How to Make Data-driven Static Sites", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "The world of online advertising has been under a lot of fire. Online advertising has been used to target disenfranchised groups, those deemed manipulatable, and to push political disinformation. The economies of scale, having the many different types and origins of advertising, has made it even more difficult to prevent bad actors on different platforms. The question then arises, what makes an ethical ad? What can we do on our publications and platforms to help promote more ethical advertising?", + "facilitator": "Ian Carrico", + "facilitator_twitter": "iamcarrico", + "id": 2355189, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T13:30:25.313Z", + "title": "Let's build some ethical advertising", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism has been engaged in a multi-faceted Local News Initiative for the last year, looking for opportunities to help local news organizations find ways to thrive. We've conducted big data analysis of the web reading behavior of paying subscribers, and we're exploring ways to introduce students to media product development methods and seeing how we can boost their work with Knight Lab's development staff. We have some other projects starting to take shape, and we'll be seeking more funding to continue the work and extend it to new partners and different environments.\n\n In this session, we'll talk about what we've done so far, but, more importantly, we want to talk with people working in local news to get direct perspectives on the challenges and opportunities they are experiencing. After a brief presentation about the project, we'll use some structured conversation methods to learn about what's needed and identify interesting opportunities for us to help.", + "facilitator": "Joe Germuska", + "facilitator_twitter": "JoeGermuska", + "id": 2355339, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T02:23:24.565Z", + "title": "Local News Initiative Road Show and Listening Tour", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Daily Bruin's data journalism blog, The Stack, started in 2015. It's gone through many ups and downs since its founder, Neil Bedi (a Pulitzer finalist this year) started it. The Stack is the one-stop shop for students interested in the intersection of data insights, coding and storytelling at UCLA. When I joined as a contributor in Fall 2017, the section had lost some of its best contributors and struggled in leadership and productivity for a whole academic year. There was a lack of camaraderie and need for collaboration which hindered the ability to produce much output as well, which took a long time to rework. Ensuring that data sections still work well and are adapting to the world around them is a tough deal.\n\nI hope to discuss not only the challenges of starting a student-run data journalism section, but ensuring its continuity and sustaining the content it produces for the community it serves. I'm interested in talking about how to engage with the local data journalism community (having LAT Data Desk employees who used to work at Daily Bruin to train students, for example) was crucial for boosting morale. Pushing to hire diverse students with varied skill sets and different backgrounds allowed for sensitive stories and working with data and sourcing in a more human-centered way. Working with senior leaders to incorporate data literacy and accessibility in small ways, as well as working with sensitive data (for example an interactive map allowing students to document their personal experiences with sexual violence anonymously) helps push boundaries and is worth investing in, in student newsrooms.", + "facilitator": "Henna Dialani", + "facilitator_twitter": "hennadialani", + "id": 2354124, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T22:34:07.600Z", + "title": "Longevity of a student-run data journalism section", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "There are many resources out there for managers leading remote teams. Similarly, there are plenty of resources for the people on those teams to work, communicate and collaborate effectively. There are also plenty of arguments that have been made for how remote work improves employee effectiveness and satisfaction, why it has economic benefits for employers, and on and on. \n\nAnd yet, national news organizations concentrate their staff in the most expensive cities in the country. Let's try to figure out why that is and help make the case for supporting a more remote-friendly workforce.\n\nIn this session we'll try to come up with as many of the common objections raised by hiring managers when they insist that a given position be based in a particular location and then come up with a playbook of effective arguments to overcome those objections.\n\nAdditionally, we'll come up with some high level talking points regarding how supporting remote work can improve the fundamental economics of journalism while improving the lives of employees and the communities they serve.", + "facilitator": "Adam Schweigert", + "facilitator_twitter": "aschweig", + "id": 2351494, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T23:58:59.036Z", + "title": "Making The Case For Remote Work", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Art vs Science. Creativity vs Deadlines. Leading a team at a news organization requires a lot of switching between left and right brain to get meetings scheduled but to coax the best ideas out of the team. But what happens if you get a boss who trends more to one side than the other? \n\nIt's more common than you think. Especially as newsrooms create more roles that straddle technical and editorial lines. So sometimes you may need a boss to get in there and wrestle with the material with you, but they’re busy overseeing a team of 20 people. Or you want someone who will go up the chain to argue that workflow changes are needed, but they would rather code review and tweak wording. \n\nIf any of this sounds familiar, let’s uncover the patterns in the way we interact with our higher-ups in order to have a strategy going forward. Without judgement, let’s take stock of ourselves and the people we report to in order to find ways that lead to better work relationships.", + "facilitator": "Lauren Flannery", + "facilitator_twitter": "LaurenFlannery3", + "id": 2355891, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T00:09:52.486Z", + "title": "Manager vs Editor: Navigating your boss’s management style to get you both where you need to go", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Bach Bui", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Marking up is the process of adding editorial context to content. Anyone who works with content does this, in ways both intuitive (like making notes in a margin) and unintuitive (like writing html). Because we do this constantly it’s easy to overlook how unintuitive our digital markup systems can be. How can we markup content in a way that both we and our digital systems can understand, while preserving our editorial intent for the future?\n\nIn this session, you’ll work in groups using arts and crafts to add an editorial voice to stories. You can bring your own story (please print it out!) or we’ll provide one for you. After, we'll discuss how the choices made by technology might limit what you can express and how long your markup will last in an archival state. We have some ideas of how to balance these needs, but would like to hear your ideas as well!", + "facilitator": "Tim Evans", + "facilitator_twitter": "@timmyce", + "id": 2352364, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:42:23.113Z", + "title": "Mark(er)ing up stories", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Sarah Shenker", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "At the BBC, we’re now focussing on how to best present our storytelling to younger audiences aged 16-35. So our big question is ‘what is the metric for reading experience?’\n\nHow do we judge whether a feature is successful? How do we compare two features to prioritise which to build next? How do we know that users are getting any value from us continuing to develop the product? Are the product and the storytelling able to be separated in terms of measuring the effectiveness of the output?\n\nAn interactive session exploring ideas for metrics, how they can help and how they can be misused - with a hope that we can take the first steps to finding a meaningful way to measure our storytelling ability.", + "facilitator": "Jim Johnson-Rollings", + "facilitator_twitter": null, + "id": 2355721, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T20:37:22.353Z", + "title": "Measuring the quality of the reading experience", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Heather Bryant (Project Facet)", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "This will be an interactive and honest conversation about how management can be improved in local newsrooms. We’ll break the subject into a few key conversation starters -- the factors that lead to promotion of non-transferable skill sets, the dramatic industry disruptions that lead to a chaotic situation for management, and how we tackle those big issues through human resource development. \n\nOne of the keys early on in the session will be to have people identify themselves as managers and former managers, versus our typical worker-bee reporters. We’ll encourage dialogue between the managers who are willing to talk about their fears and shortcomings, and worker bees who are willing to talk about how they want to be managed. We want to embrace this vulnerability, allowing managers and worker bees to speak with each other and come to better understandings of their counterparts.", + "facilitator": "Erin Mansfield", + "facilitator_twitter": "_erinmansfield", + "id": 2356004, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T02:32:50.301Z", + "title": "Meeting management challenges in local newsrooms", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Ariel Zirulnick and Simon Galperin", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Let's work together to build a membership model that is inclusive (meaning all the things you think that means and also accounts for things like skills as an entry point). Membership should be more than a monetary transaction and early access to Wait Wait tickets. It should be a gateway to the communities we serve. \n\nImportant: There will be LEGO’s in this session!", + "facilitator": "Candice Fortman", + "facilitator_twitter": "cande313", + "id": 2355063, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T15:29:43.726Z", + "title": "Membership Has its Privileges (and They Are Not Just for the Privileged)", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Launching a membership program is like eating an elephant. How do you do it? One bite at a time. From launch campaign planning to pressing send on your first email, learn how newsrooms are launching membership programs with fanfare. You’ll walk away from this session with an action item list, member level framework, launch campaign copywriting template and tips for assessing campaign performance.", + "facilitator": "Rebecca Quarls", + "facilitator_twitter": null, + "id": 2351814, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:28:30.418Z", + "title": "Membership launch 101: How to launch a membership program with fanfare", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Anna Smith, Amy Sweeney, Norel Hassan", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "We all have innovative ideas, but how do we effectively leverage them to bring creative solutions and unique perspectives to light in order to solve our business and user problems? Enter the mini design sprint. In this session, we’ll leverage an abridged (read: 2 hours or less) design sprint format to promote rapid idea generation through problem alignment and sketching.\n\nWe’ll go over the goals, ground rules and best practices for planning and facilitating mini design sprints, including the use of How Might We statements and personas. We’ll also introduce different methodologies and exercises you can use to support ideation, including effective ways to sketch individually and in groups. Finally, we’ll do a mini design sprint of our own so you can see it all in action, and touch on the best methods for synthesis and sharing post-sprint. Walk away with the confidence to plan and run your own design sprints.", + "facilitator": "Ranu Rajkarnikar", + "facilitator_twitter": "lanuchan", + "id": 2354668, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T18:09:15.891Z", + "title": "Mini Design Sprints: Generating Lots of Ideas in a Little Time", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Chances are you may be one of a handful of people in your newsroom tasked with creating and moderating an online community—maybe it’s a Facebook group, a subReddit, a chatroom (are those still a thing?), or creating conversation in the comments section of a specific beat/story. Maybe you’ve run a Facebook page or a social account before, but how do you foster a meaningful community, set appropriate guidelines, and moderate sensitive conversations?\n\nLet’s have a conversation about how to build a community from scratch, create support systems for yourself and your team (moderating is emotionally exhausting!), and run through some moderation scenarios and workshop ways to respond. Moderating discussion online isn’t just about making sure there’s no profanity in a posts—it’s become a tricky landscape that involves recognizing misinformation and disinformation tactics and checking your own biases. We hope you’ll come away from the session armed with tips on how to create strong community guidelines and ways to tackle tough conversations.", + "facilitator": "Kanyakrit Vongkiatkajorn", + "facilitator_twitter": "yukvon", + "id": 2355310, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T00:03:35.606Z", + "title": "Moderating An Online Community For the First Time? Here’s How to Dive In (And Stay Sane)", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Maya Miller", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "People are dying and it’s up to you to figure out why. In Queens, New York the percentage of people who die after suffering a heart attack is on the rise. Join our collaborative investigative team to solve the mystery and enact change.\n\nA la a murder mystery party or the world’s shortest LARP, you’ll play a character—perhaps a journalist, data analyst, EMS first responder, public housing resident, graphic designer, professor, city council member, hospital administrator, or community activist. Like any good mystery, you won’t be able to solve it alone.\n\nAt the end we’ll return to our everyday selves and discuss what we learned about working collaboratively, in and outside of journalism.", + "facilitator": "Laura Laderman", + "facilitator_twitter": "Liladerm", + "id": 2355398, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T14:32:31.653Z", + "title": "Murder Mystery: Collaborative Journalism Edition", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Let's all show each other our CMSes and workflows! A lineup of people involved in the development or operation of their CMS demos several key workflows and how different newsroom users accomplish the same tasks. Each demo will follow the same structure and show the same tasks for easy comparability.", + "facilitator": "Albert Sun", + "facilitator_twitter": "@albertsun", + "id": 2355631, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T17:41:35.936Z", + "title": "Mutual CMS Demos", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Kai Teoh... I think he's applied but if he hasn't maybe we can pull him in anyway because he's really responsible for a lot of this idea", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Many of us are overworked, lonely coders. How do we accomplish every day editorial projects and also dedicated time to learning new technologies and documenting workflows that we spend so much time implementing and testing? With all this newfangled tech, what’s noise and what’s signal?\n\nLet's talk about devising coping and filtering mechanisms for the onslaught of newness so we can all actually benefit from it.", + "facilitator": "Alexandra Kanik", + "facilitator_twitter": "act_rational", + "id": 2355911, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:06:25.896Z", + "title": "Noise & Signal: Knowing when to adopt new tech, and when to ignore it", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Journalists can learn so much from other practices, industries and fields. Approaches to public health, art, community organizing, critical theory, science and more can all carry valuable lessons for our work. Let's talk about the ideas we've gathered from texts, experiences and sources outside media and how they've affected the way we do journalism.\n\nBring one example of a reading, artwork, speech, event, interaction or anything that has deeply inspired your journalism practice and had nothing to do with journalism. We'll share our examples with each other and generate a list of sources that we can continue to build for others to draw from.", + "facilitator": "Cole Goins", + "facilitator_twitter": "colegoins", + "id": 2355367, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T14:22:57.191Z", + "title": "Outside Sources: Sharing inspiration from beyond journalism", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": '"Parachute journalism" is the practice of national outlets or freelancers flying into local communities they''re not a part of to report a story, then leaving again. It''s a part of our journalistic economy, as the money and power in journalism is focused in just a few geographic locations--but it can also be damaging to local communities, and it can lead to misrepresentation, distrust and resentment. Often, national journalists appear in a community in times of trauma and elections, and report stories with insufficient context, while local journalists struggle to access equivalent resources for necessary ongoing reporting. This session will explore our collective experiences with parachute journalism as both insiders and outsiders to a community, in order to produce good ideas about how to do harm reduction, increase accountability, and shift power dynamics. We''ll ask: Are there situations where it''s better if this story just doesn''t get told? How do we evaluate that? What can national media outlets and freelancers do to connect and collaborate with local journalists and local communities? What are the ethics of accountable partnerships? In what ways do local and regional/national media needs differ, and how can journalists collaborate to produce stories that better address the needs of all involved? All of this will be driving at a larger question: What does justice and accountability look like in the practice of journalism?', + "facilitator": "Lewis Raven Wallace", + "facilitator_twitter": "lewispants", + "id": 2355308, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T00:22:42.837Z", + "title": "Parachute Journalism: Can outsiders report accountably on other people's communities?", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "News organizations produce massive amounts of content every single day. The current political climate means relentless breaking news about the government. Newsrooms are also producing short novels' worth of non political news, cultural criticism and other feature pieces that are not only great journalism but also important counter programming to the political coverage. At The Times, all this journalism exists online and in the paper but promoting a story on the web home page or on social really boosts a story's reach. For many readers, the articles chosen to appear on those platforms become their main understanding of our report.\n\nHow do news organizations best surface content to readers? How can we use technology to aid what is ultimately an editorial decision about what stories go on the limited real estate that exists in those platforms (the home page, Twitter and FB)? As we retool our home page programming tools at The Times (and other platform programming tools soon too!), personalization and machine learning/AI to suggest content for promotion are things that have been talked about and experimented with. We want to make sure new readers get new news every time they visit our site but we also don't want new people to miss big news. We want a good balance of politics and feature writing. And we want all of this to look and feel consistent across mobile, tablet and desktop despite the vast differences in those device displays. Mindful use of technology can help reduce the amount of friction required to keep platforms up to date and curated. But what does that look like in practice? And what are some things to be cautious about in this space?\n\nIn this session, we'll walk through some simple examples of using technologies like machine learning to classify news tonally and surface content intelligently as both a technical exercise and a thought experiment. Then we'll have a conversation. What excited you about the potentials of these technologies? What concerns do you have about applying these technologies to programming the news?", + "facilitator": "Angela Guo", + "facilitator_twitter": null, + "id": 2354906, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:58:32.935Z", + "title": "Programming The News: What Content Do We Surface Where, and Why?", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "As newsrooms and product teams, we face some important organizational challenges: Create time and space to report on an exponentially more chaotic 24-hour news cycle, make our organizations more representative of the communities around us, find new ways to sustain our craft and businesses. These problems require radical change, but change is scary, so we often make that change in incremental ways. But incremental change tends to yield negligible benefits.\n\nInstead of picking the low hanging fruit, what if we assumed there was no cost to taking immediate, decisive, and thorough action—what would we do? What if we dropped everything? In this session, we’ll air the most radical possible solutions to the problems we face and use a mental framework to pull slightly back from the impossible to the merely audacious (instead of slightly forward from the status quo). We’ll talk about how to find real opportunities to turn a corner in organizational work, create actionable plans for proposing it, and find allies and license to try it.\n\nWe will walk away with a conversational framework for evaluating audacious changes, a shared willingness to propose it, and—hopefully—a few radical and compelling solutions to tricky problems.", + "facilitator": "David Yee", + "facilitator_twitter": "tangentialism", + "id": 2355502, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T14:35:52.739Z", + "title": "Proposing the impossible: Approaches for advancing real change", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Hannah Birch", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "One of the most frequently cited reasons (https://medium.com/jsk-class-of-2018/news-nerd-salaries-2017-2c83466b994e) journalists in digital roles leave their jobs is lack of promotion and career advancement opportunities. At the same time, journalists with a nontraditional mix of skills, who sit at the intersection of roles, departments or teams — we call them platypuses — are proving to be pivotal to the future of news. So how can newsrooms use the people they have to push their digital initiatives forward? \n\nThis session brings together digital journalists and managers to discuss career growth within the newsroom, especially for people with a nontraditional blend of skills. A lot of growth in digital careers is uncharted territory, but through our empathy interviews we will bring together tips and frameworks for how digital journalists can fit into forward-thinking newsrooms.\n\nWe’ll share success stories and lessons learned, and we’ll workshop tactics that could work in participants’ newsrooms. This session is meant to be a launchpad for conversations and plans to better empower and grow newsroom digital talent — and not lose them to other newsrooms and industries.", + "facilitator": "Vignesh Ramachandran", + "facilitator_twitter": "VigneshR", + "id": 2353502, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-18T23:21:24.705Z", + "title": "Proud to be a Platypus: Finding Your Own Innovative Role in News", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Engagement, public powered journalism can make an impact - not only in informing and engaging audiences, but also restoring trust. But where does an individual reporter start with a project like this and navigate the challenges of an ingrained media culture? This session is designed to help answer those questions and be a guide to help with any new projects, thanks to insight from reporters who have done these projects and the editors that support them.\n\nHave an idea? Share it! Wanting to integrate a project into a beat or subject? Ask about it! When this session is done, you'll not only have a better understanding of where to start in beginning engagement journalism projects, but have ideas in the works to help make journalism better.", + "facilitator": "Alex Veeneman", + "facilitator_twitter": "alex_veeneman", + "id": 2351787, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T18:40:24.728Z", + "title": "Seek Truth, Report and Engage", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Karissa Cummings", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Many members of underrepresented groups in engineering — women, people of color, LGBTQ individuals, and others — find themselves on agile teams where they are the only member of their or, indeed, any minority group. \n\nEfforts to recruit, retain, and advance more underrepresented people in engineering are critical, as are ongoing unconscious bias and psychological safety trainings. But in the meantime, there are some straightforward practices engineering teams can adopt immediately that, on the surface, have more to do with building a strong, healthy engineering culture than encouraging underrepresented engineers to thrive — but whose result is just that. One of us, an engineer, learned this through observing and reflecting on the practices of the all-male team where she made meaningful contributions and grew from a junior to a mid-level engineer. The other of us, a program manager and a leader of an interest group for Women in Tech, has experienced both teams that did and didn’t do this well. We’ll share our experience and engage in exercises and conversation to exchange ideas on what others have seen that works and doesn’t. You’ll leave this workshop with actionable ideas to bring back to your team.", + "facilitator": "Jacquelyn Wax", + "facilitator_twitter": null, + "id": 2355129, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T16:49:57.365Z", + "title": "So you’re the minority on your team: Building an agile team where anyone can thrive", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Last year, The New York Times tech org launched a Sponsorship program with the specific goal of promoting underrepresented groups into leadership positions. Those are both management and individual contributors positions. \n\nEach Sponsee is matched with an executive sponsor (Executive Director to CTO) specifically tasked to help them get larger positions. \n\nIn the first year we've already had 80% of the participants promoted, while retaining our rigorous promotions process. No free rides! Each promotion is well earned. \n\nThere was a ton of discussion, planning, and hard decisions that went into building this program. The goal of this session is to provide you with everything that we learned in making is successful, and give you all the tool you need to bring a nearly fully-baked proposal back to you your company. \n\nThis session will take you through:\n\n- How we determined the scope of the program\n- Who was ultimately brought in, and promoted\n- The structures that we invested in to make it work (trainings, facilitators, executive outreach, and internal Sponsor recruitment)\n- Q&A on the challenges faced and what we needed to make it work", + "facilitator": "James Rooney", + "facilitator_twitter": "jamesrooney", + "id": 2355897, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T00:25:02.302Z", + "title": "Sponsorship: Promoting Underrepresented Groups into Leadership.", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "jesikah maria ross", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "A lot of data journalism takes place in front of a computer, but there is a lot to be gained by creating data together with your community. As part of a documentary project about a culturally diverse, low-income community, we recently invited residents to map their neighborhood — not online, but with paper and pens at in-person gatherings. We not only generated unique data, but also stories and context we never would have heard if we hadn’t met people where they lived. \n\nMore and more, journalists are experimenting with community engagement practices to accurately reflect and represent people’s lived experiences. We can do the same by taking an analog approach to creating data, including our community in the stories we tell about them. This helps verify the data by collecting it ourselves and having subject matter experts (your community!) vet it along the way. It also makes our reporting process more transparent and creates a group of people invested in our work. \n\nWe’ll share what we did and what we learned in our neighborhood mapping experiments, and invite a discussion on other ways to weave community engagement into data reporting. Our goal: draft a starter kit of ideas for doing data journalism IRL that you can take back to your newsroom.", + "facilitator": "Christopher Hagan", + "facilitator_twitter": "chrishagan", + "id": 2354731, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T23:03:19.743Z", + "title": "Spreadsheets IRL: The How and Why of Making Data With Your Community", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Disha Raychaudhuri", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "Disha_RC", + "description": "In recent years, many news organizations have published their diversity reports to educate folks in the industry about their challenges with diversity and to indicate that they are taking newsroom diversity seriously. This has also led to a number of conversations in the Journalists of Color slack and at other in-person settings about diversity committees at news organizations trying to figure out what their diversity report should cover and how they can convince management to publish effective indicators of diversity.\n\nIn this session we would like to facilitate a conversation around the topic of diversity reports. We will start with a quick survey of recent diversity reports published by prominent journalism outlets and then move to a discussion/group activity to work out what measures should be included in diversity reports to further the actual goals of increasing diversity in newsrooms.", + "facilitator": "Moiz Syed", + "facilitator_twitter": "moizsyed", + "id": 2355357, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T18:24:32.225Z", + "title": "State of Newsroom Diversity Reports", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "It seems everyone is talking about ethics in technology these days. Examples abound of poor decisions leading to unintended harm, of planned exploitation and avoidance of consent, of prioritization of financial gain over literally everything else. What’s the ethically-minded technologist to do? This session will be an open, off the record conversation among designers, developers, and journalists about the things that keep us up at night: the ways our work can cause harm, the systems driving us to do the wrong thing, the incentives that make it hard to even know what’s right. We’ll work from a vantage point that assumes good intentions, recognizes that impacts matter more than plans, and acknowledges the impossibility of perfect solutions: no matter what we do, we are all complicit. But we are not alone, and we are not without the ability to effect change.", + "facilitator": "Mandy Brown", + "facilitator_twitter": "aworkinglibrary", + "id": 2355070, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:39:31.876Z", + "title": "Staying with the trouble: Doing good work in terrible times", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Subscriptions and memberships are doom to save our industry, our jobs, democracy, and more. Ok, maybe that’s a bit much, but let’s be real. How much do we actually know about subscriptions? In this session, we will explore together the subscriptions and retentions business model. We will share and discuss different subscriptions options. We will look into the ones that our industry is offering. We will explore success and failure stories, and we will try to build the perfect subscription.\nThe idea of this session is to understand what is suppose to save our industry, explore its variances, recognize flaws and limitations, and discuss what could the industry be doing better.", + "facilitator": "Marcos Vanetta", + "facilitator_twitter": "malev", + "id": 2355941, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:44:29.684Z", + "title": "Subscriptions, a new hope", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Step 1: Learn a bunch of time[read: sanity] saving shortcuts in your text editor. Step 2: Profit. I've been using Sublime for 5+ years, and only have begun to really understand its power. Whether its batch editing like a boss, using regex's to find exactly what you're looking for in source code, or quickly tabbing to the line of code you want, modern text editors are chock-full of Easter eggs and hidden tricks to enhance your workflow. \n\nBring your favorite text editor and hacks, and share them with your fellow SRCCONster. We'll walk through some monstrous source-code puzzles and discuss clever ways to tackle them.", + "facilitator": "Daniel Wood", + "facilitator_twitter": "danielpwwood", + "id": 2351349, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-29T17:13:18.582Z", + "title": "Supercharge your text editor with a few time saving commands", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "A guide to supporting journalism in a journalism adjacent capacity. Everyone can help improve and solidify journalism even if they aren't a journalist. Actually, we NEED people outside of newsrooms to enrich journalism. This session will explore how you can support the journalism world and why it's crucial for these support structures to exist in order to make journalism better. Some examples: promoting open data and transparency, building tools, technically supporting solo developers in newsrooms, build opportunities for collaborations, provide resources to smaller newsrooms, writing guides, and so much more!", + "facilitator": "Lo Bénichou", + "facilitator_twitter": "lobenichou", + "id": 2338064, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-10T19:22:59.663Z", + "title": "Supporting Journalism from the outside", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "We don't talk about it a lot in the newsroom, the fact that we see and hear things all the time in our jobs that likely affect us in ways it's hard to describe to someone else. One of the first roles for most reporters and photographers is covering breaking news - chasing the police scanner from one traumatic event to the next. Our newsroom might have to cover a traumatic event on a larger scale - a mass shooting, a devastating brush fire, hurricane or tornado. We take care to tell the stories of those affected, to make sure their voices and their grief are heard. But we also need to take care of ourselves and our colleagues in these moments. What should you be looking for to make sure you're protected and feel empowered to speak up for yourself when you don't feel comfortable or need help? What are some things you could do if you are the editor to take care of your staff? What types of services could news organizations offer that would help in these situations?", + "facilitator": "Kristyn Wellesley", + "facilitator_twitter": "kriswellesley", + "id": 2355666, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T19:34:30.680Z", + "title": "Take care: The Importance of Self-Care in the Newsroom", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Diversity initiatives are popping up in most companies these days. Newsrooms are talking about gender and race representation, re-examining how we cover stories and how we create space for employees of all genders and races. We laud ourselves for being aware and being inclusive. However, noticeably missing from the conversation, at least for those who identify as such, are people with disabilities. \n\nThe New York Times has employee lead initiatives to help correct that. From the tech task force that turned into a team designated with making our site more accessible, to the internal panel on employees with disabilities that turned into an employee resource group the disabled community and their allies at the times are standing up and taking space. \n\nDuring this session we will examine how the disability community is represented in newsrooms and institutions, discuss what has been done, and set a framework for how to take action now. We will work together to figure out what ally-ship looks like and what it means for diversity initiatives to include people with disabilities, and how they miss the mark when they don’t -- both for employees and our coverage.", + "facilitator": "Katherine McMahan", + "facilitator_twitter": "katieannmcmahan", + "id": 2353768, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T16:06:37.651Z", + "title": "Taking Up Space: Making Room for People with Disabilities at The Times", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Natasha Khan", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Our unique skillsets as data journalists and developers can sometimes earn us more money, but they also earn us more responsibility. Especially when it comes to communicating what we do to managers and other reporters. \n\nLet's brainstorm ways we can better communicate with our newsrooms in order to get the respect and support we need to write data-driven stories and build awesome tools.", + "facilitator": "Alexandra Kanik", + "facilitator_twitter": "act_rational", + "id": 2352051, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-29T17:05:00.894Z", + "title": "Talking In Code: How to help non-technical coworkers understand you", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "In broad terms web page performance can be thought of as the time it takes from entering a web address in the browser to when the reader thinks the page is ready.\n\nIt really should be that simple but there is so much to disagree on that its hard to know where to start. \n\nHow do we even measure performance? How do you measure that? When you account for all the different ways that people access the same articles and news sites with different hardware, browsers, and connection speeds, internet congestion, and from different parts of the globe - the question and answer get thornier. We'll go deep on that.\n\nSetting that aside, why should you care? What are the user-experience implications and the business implications between slow and fast pages? What are the consequences to the reader? Short answer: Lots of good reasons. \n\nWe'll give you a broader understanding of the issues and guidance on common issues. Also relevant for those who built interactives and standalone pages and have data-heavy visualizations.", + "facilitator": "Michael Donohoe", + "facilitator_twitter": "donohoe", + "id": 2355690, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T20:27:53.094Z", + "title": "The Evils of Web Page Performance", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "News nerds came of age in newsrooms that were hostile to their efforts. But now, the geeks are running the show. There are few holdouts left. Winning was easy. Governing is harder.\n\nWhat should the agenda of the nerds be in newsrooms where they are finally winning territory and mindshare? How will we use our positions to further our agenda?", + "facilitator": "Jeremy Bowers", + "facilitator_twitter": "jeremybowers", + "id": 2353430, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-18T19:38:56.833Z", + "title": "The Geeks Won: Now What?", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Kevin O'Gorman", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "SecureDrop is an open source whistleblowing platform under the stewardship of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. It’s designed for the most extreme Internet surveillance conditions imaginable, to protect the privacy and anonymity of whistleblowers who use it. Source protection, however, is dependent on several factors before and after a document is leaked to the press. In this session, we discuss what some of those factors are, and the challenge of creating a guide for potential sources to using SecureDrop with these external factors in mind.", + "facilitator": "David Huerta", + "facilitator_twitter": "huertanix", + "id": 2354829, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-22T22:49:46.448Z", + "title": "The Impossible Task of Creating a SecureDrop Whistleblower Guide in 2019", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "The work of journalists, therapists and clergy can look very similar: \n- Listening intently \n- Suspending judgment or at least trying to remain objective\n- Searching for truth\n- Being fair-minded\n- Synthesizing complex information to find meaning\n- Encouraging people to right wrongs and move forward\n\nWe don't of course talk about our jobs as being in a continuum of healing alongside these other professions. But what might we learn if we did? Also: what might we learn from how we bring our spiritual practices to work, or transform our work into a spiritual practice. At this session, bring on the woo-woo and the heart.", + "facilitator": "Jennifer Brandel", + "facilitator_twitter": "@JenniferBrandel", + "id": 2355195, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T19:14:45.608Z", + "title": "The Spiritual Dimensions of Journalism", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "The New York Times Crossword is serious business. With over 450,000 paying subscribers, the Games Team at The Times works tirelessly to keep our solvers happy while driving significant revenue to support great journalism. With serious solvers comes the need for serious technology. See how the Games Team drives innovation at The Times with the most cutting edge tools and infrastructure.", + "facilitator": "Darren McCleary", + "facilitator_twitter": "darren_out", + "id": 2348654, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-14T17:39:52.013Z", + "title": "The Technology Behind The New York Times Crossword", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "A conversation about incident management in a cloud centric world. Why it's important, how to be prepared, all while having fun and learning new things (like knots).\n\nHow leveraging experience as a volunteer firefighter, along with years of service within technology led to the blending of both worlds. Inspired by the National Incident Management System (NIMS), we created an Incident Management Process for The New York Times and fun ways to learn about it.", + "facilitator": "David Porsche", + "facilitator_twitter": null, + "id": 2355548, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T15:50:27.901Z", + "title": "The Website is Knot Down: An interactive, hands-on approach to Incident Management readiness @ NYT", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "CALLING ALL ENGLISH MAJORS & ENGINEERS, YOU’RE COLLABORATIVE EFFORTS ARE NEEDED! Behind the hype of AR,VR & XR, a spatial c̶o̶m̶p̶u̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ communications revolution is coming. \n\nWith this revolution will come: new ways to document our world; a new visual language for expressing narrative and non-narrative data; questions about ownership of public space, privacy, data overlay; opportunities for disruption and most importantly AN OPPORTUNITY TO ASSERT JOURNALISTIC VALUES!\n\nIn an effort to create some common ground for the session, we'll quickly share what we've learned about XR so far, what we hope for and what we worry about. \n\nNext we'll break out into topic groups. We're specifically leaving room for groups to spontaneously coalesce, but some of the areas we’d love to mind-meld on are: a glossary of XR Journalism terms; a set of ethical guidelines for 6DoF journalism; a list of open-source (or otherwise accessible) tools & resources; a reference list of influential XR journalism pieces, hot-topics for spatial computing as a beat.\n\nWe’ll finish up with lightning-style report backs to the bigger group, and we’ll leave enriched with a public document that should help guide XR journalism newcomers, inform future conversations and maybe even inspire our newsrooms!", + "facilitator": "Ben Connors", + "facilitator_twitter": "BCatDC", + "id": 2355833, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:08:32.737Z", + "title": "The ‘cyber’ is leaking into the ‘space,’ Journalists assemble! Let’s crowdsource a guide to XR for journalists.", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "How has science fiction helped you understand the world? Yourself? Justice? Let's talk about the role of SF, and how it's taught us to be better makers, teammates and people. ***Bring a book to swap!***", + "facilitator": "Brian Boyer", + "facilitator_twitter": "brianboyer", + "id": 2353714, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T14:04:14.075Z", + "title": "Things the future taught us", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "There's a joke I often hear journalists make: Our job is to clearly communicate information to our audience, and yet we're terrible at communicating with each other in our newsrooms. That's partly because we don't use the right tools or frameworks to encourage clear and consistent communication. At WhereBy.Us we've used three tools– user manuals, weekly team health checks and personal OKRs– that help every person in our organization share with their colleagues how they work best with others, how they're feeling at the end of a week, and what personal goals they want to work toward. This session will help attendees learn more about these tools and potentially adapt them for their own workplaces. I would also love to learn from others who have used tools like these to help their colleagues feel more heard and satisfied in their newsrooms.", + "facilitator": "Anika Anand", + "facilitator_twitter": "anikaanand00", + "id": 2351418, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-29T17:17:06.363Z", + "title": "Three tools we use to help our team feel heard", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Bo Morin", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Attempts to increase representation in news organizations often come from the bottom-up. Sometimes it can be an individual, sometimes it can be several people. That’s how things happened where we work. Scattered efforts led to mixed degrees of success. But coalescing these efforts into a more formal grassroots team has been a game-changer. Our group — the Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (DIB) team — started with just a few employees. Since last summer, it has grown to include volunteers from most departments, representatives from HR and recruiting, and support from the company founders. With this session we’ll share lessons from our experience, but primarily hear from others what has worked well and what hasn’t.\n\nOur goal is for participants to leave this session energized with actionable ideas and plans to increase diversity, inclusion, belonging and equity within their own organizations. If they want to, we hope this will give them the foundation to launch their own DIB initiative or take their current DIB efforts to the next level. We will also compile everyone’s lessons into a short guide that can be shared widely.", + "facilitator": "Greg Linch", + "facilitator_twitter": "greglinch", + "id": 2343016, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:50:45.717Z", + "title": "Transforming grassroots diversity/inclusion/belonging efforts into a sustainable, organized team", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Ranu Rajkarnikar and Amy Sweeney", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "You’ve filed the story, finished the project, or launched the latest iteration of your feature, so your work is done, right? Not so fast! Consider the retrospective, an agile tool that helps you and your team celebrate what went well, troubleshoot what didn’t, and identify and commit to changes you’d like to make for your next adventure together.\n\nWe’ll discuss the different frameworks, tools, tips, and tricks that you can use to facilitate a productive discussion with your cross-functional team, regardless of the type of project you’ve worked on, and we’ll stress test them by running a mini-retrospective in real time. Emerge from this session with the resources you need to ensure that each of your projects is better than the last.", + "facilitator": "Anna Smith", + "facilitator_twitter": null, + "id": 2355590, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T20:58:40.885Z", + "title": "Using Retrospectives to Learn From Your Past Mistakes. No, Really This Time.", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "From the folks who brought you “how to do a double-opt in introduction” and “please stop asking busy people to pick their brain, what are you, a zombie?” This interactive session will equip you with some specific tips, recommendations, and strategies to help you stand out for all the right reasons.", + "facilitator": "Stacy-Marie Ishmael", + "facilitator_twitter": "@s_m_i", + "id": 2351370, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-29T17:30:11.565Z", + "title": "We can’t fix your life, but we can fix your [CV, LinkedIn, cover letter, interview approach, negotiating tactic]", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "We often come across percentages in journalism, simple numbers that convey a powerful amount of information. But a percentage can obscure crucial information. If one ZIP code has 30 homeless individuals out of 100, and another has 30,000 homeless out of 100,000, the percentages indicates similarity, but the two geographies will have vastly different times dealing with the homeless population. When looking at a list of percentages, we should endeavor to find those that are distinct. Tools from statistical theory can help us tease out what's unusual and what isn't. It doesn't require much complicated math, just a little algebra.", + "facilitator": "Ryan Menezes", + "facilitator_twitter": "ryanvmenezes", + "id": 2353889, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T21:42:57.842Z", + "title": "We should rethink the way we think about percentages", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Alex Tilsley", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Finding the right data can be a big hurdle for journalists who are on deadline. Meanwhile, think tanks and academics have the time and money to agonize over research and data collection. At the Urban Institute, we've spent the last few months building (what we hope is) a simple tool for extracting custom snippets from massive (and often inscrutable) education databases. We think its extremely powerful, but does it meet your needs?\n \nIn this session, we will explore ways to democratize data together. We'll brainstorm tools and partnerships, and pull apart existing examples. You'll design your ideal data tool. By the end, we hope to move toward an understanding of how journalists and researchers can work together to ensure that the best research and data is informing fast, high-quality reporting that holds institutions accountable and drives change.", + "facilitator": "Daniel Wood", + "facilitator_twitter": "danielpwwood", + "id": 2355561, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:12:44.376Z", + "title": "We've got a crapload of high quality data...is anyone going to use it?", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Starting a new job is sort of like the first day of school, if everyone else had already been at school together for a long time without you. Whether you thrive on the social and logistical challenge of navigating a new workplace, or are driven to anxiety just thinking about it, we can all agree that a lot of workplaces throw new folks into the deep end of the pool without much structure or forethought.\n\nThis session is about bringing more intentionality to new team member onboarding, integration, and inclusion. Even if we're not in a position of official hiring authority at work, we almost all have some part in the experience of newcomers to our teams and organizations.\n\nFirst, we'll share as a large group some of our own experiences and ideas about how to best facilitate the integration of new members of our own teams.\n\nThen, we'll break up into a few fictional \"companies\" -- each with its own norms, culture, and inside jokes -- and a develop proactive program to onboard our new people. Finally, we'll see how our ideas work by switching tables and going through another \"company's\" process.", + "facilitator": "Matt Johnson", + "facilitator_twitter": "xmatt", + "id": 2353519, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T22:16:47.695Z", + "title": "Welcome aboard! First impressions matter and we can all make a better one", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Ajay Chainani", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "ajayjapan", + "description": "Many news organizations are investigating how to apply artificial intelligence to the practice of journalism. Meanwhile many individuals and organizations are funding advancements in the field of news and AI. Do we take into consideration unconscious bias when developing algorithms and methods to build these new digital tools? How can they be best applied? What does the application of AI mean for newsrooms and the public they serve?", + "facilitator": "Sarah Schmalbach", + "facilitator_twitter": "schmalie", + "id": 2355772, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T22:10:54.019Z", + "title": "What happens to journalism, when AI eats the world?", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "During the 2018 election, micro-financing of campaigns up-and-down the ticket exploded. Small dollar donations have been a dominant force in politics since the Obama campaign in 2008, but in 2018, that finally reached the local level (from congressional races to district attorney races and everything in-between) in a real way. Powered by grassroots groups, candidates began to draw a high volume of donations of $50 and less from people that live nowhere near the areas they represent.\n\nJournalism has lessons to learn from the 2018 election. Principally, in the hunt for new revenue, identifying small dollar donors that care about your mission can be a potential outlet for financing journalism in markets around the country. Is there a way for locally-focused organizations to build up an audience of revenue-generating customers that live outside of the areas they serve? If so, what can we learn from how political organizations and campaigns have operated?", + "facilitator": "Charlie Rybak", + "facilitator_twitter": "charlierybak", + "id": 2355909, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:06:37.395Z", + "title": "What the 2018 Election Can Teach Us About Funding Journalism", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Companies often lament that they are trying to hire a more diverse community of engineers, but that they struggle to find strong candidates. But if companies want to hire more diverse candidates, they need to be open to the idea of hiring people with diverse educational backgrounds: people without college degrees, people who are self-taught, and people who went to a boot camp.\n \nNewsrooms and product organizations that are reluctant to hire candidates from non-traditional educational backgrounds eliminate a host of candidates right off the bat. How can teams and managers become more confident in non-traditionally educated engineers? If employers were better aware of what knowledge these engineers may not have, they could prepare both these new engineers and their current team, fostering an environment more easily able to absorb this kind of talent.\n \nI want to talk with engineers from non-traditional educational backgrounds about the things they encountered that “everyone seemed to know”. What did they get stuck on starting their first job but were too embarrassed to ask? I want to talk with hirers about their experiences hiring first time professional engineers, and some of the things that have held them back from doing so. What support did they think they needed to have in place to take them on? I hope for people to leave with a greater understanding of each other’s fears and new ideas for how to onboard more diverse groups of engineers.", + "facilitator": "Sierra Saitta", + "facilitator_twitter": null, + "id": 2353716, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T02:18:30.290Z", + "title": "What to expect when you're expecting a new engineer.", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "With continuous evolution in newsrooms comes the periodic introduction of new roles that involve new technologies and ways of working. Many of us have probably been the first person to hold a position within our organizations - or will be that person at some point in our careers. For example: An editor who once focused on text may now be involved in audience development or audio. A product manager working on a traditional CMS now may start overseeing strategy for voice-activated devices or AI. \n\nSo when you’re breaking new ground in a newsroom or starting something that’s new to you, how do you best get your head around the new technologies, frameworks for decision-making or ways of working that become central to the new role you’re taking on? How do you do so quickly and thoroughly enough to have a good understanding without spending too much time going down rabbit holes or making yourself crazy in the pursuit of a ‘complete’ body of knowledge? \n\nLet's brainstorm about ways to self-educate for new work situations that might help with these beginnings -- and what kinds of support we might ask for from the people we work with and the organizations we work in. Come with any examples of what's helped you -- or what hasn't -- when taking on something new.", + "facilitator": "Sasha Koren", + "facilitator_twitter": "sashak", + "id": 2355958, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:03:22.910Z", + "title": "What's better than cramming? Self-educating with intention for a new job or focus.", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Have you ever heard the saying that you're the average of the five people that you spend the most time with? Well, that may or may not be true, but it does prompt some useful reflection. Who do you spend the most time with while at work (in person, or remotely), and do they support you? Also what if you thought really hard and couldn't even come up with a list of five people? Well, you pitch a SRCCON session of course, and ask people to help you and others discuss ways to find (and keep) your work crew.\n\nIn this session we'll discuss:\n\n* If you don't already have \"your people\", what can you do about it? Where are they and how can you find them?\n* What if you do have a network, but you don't reach out to them enough because you're worried about \"bothering\" them? Are they really your people then?\n* If you don't already have people, who do you vent to? Who do you learn from? Who do you take cues from?\n* And further, should you ever strong-arm your way into an existing group? How does that go? Is it even a good idea? \n* What if you've recently moved, switched jobs or taken on a new role inside your company? Do you find new people, keep your old crew, or maintain both?\n\nThese topics and more will be discussed, and people can share their experiences, best (and worst!) practices for finding their network and finally realizing that everyone belongs somewhere (phew!)", + "facilitator": "Sarah Schmalbach", + "facilitator_twitter": "schmalie", + "id": 2355589, + "submitted_at": "2019-05-01T16:06:32.411Z", + "title": "Where the sidewalk starts: How to find your people in a sea of well-meaning, super busy news nerds.", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Joe Germuska", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "More than a decade ago, much of the web world was infatuated by the promise of the “semantic web,” a vision of seamless connections between data on independent systems. But before long, that vision seemed caught up in overly-complex abstractions and doomed to obscurity.\nMeanwhile, a combination of technology growth and recalibrated expectations may have set the stage for a new approach to achieving these goals. Wikipedia, better known for its collaborative, volunteer-written articles, has also incorporated its sister project Wikidata for structuring data in its pages and disambiguating names with stable identifiers. And, the Schema.org standards group has come up with simpler ways for web publishers to make their intentions explicit, empowering application developers to work with that information without needing Google-scale resources.\nIn this session, we’ll look at these two developments. We’ll provide a practical introduction to working with Wikidata and its related APIs and datasets, and, we’ll discuss what might be possible if structured data was more completely baked into our research, articles, or web applications.", + "facilitator": "Isaac Johnson", + "facilitator_twitter": "_isaaclj", + "id": 2353057, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T17:09:41.711Z", + "title": "Why do people look at me funny when I say “semantic web?”", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Jun-Kai Teoh", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "How would we do journalism differently if we were to think about impact — real-world change — at the brainstorming stage, before we started to write or shoot? If we knew something needed to happen to make things better, could we identify a few levers to pull that’d make that something more likely? Would we frame the story differently? Share the data openly? Talk to different sources? And how do we do all of this without going too far, without crossing into advocacy journalism? Now more than ever, with more nonprofit newsrooms forming, more for-profit newsrooms turning to consumer revenue (on the sales pitch that journalism matters) and trust at a crisis point, we need to measure and show why our work matters. This session will cover published examples and studies but is meant to be a discussion about what we can do — and what’s going too far — to make a difference. We might also, using design thinking strategies, prototype a project designed for impact.", + "facilitator": "Anjanette Delgado", + "facilitator_twitter": "anjdelgado", + "id": 2355593, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:42:02.486Z", + "title": "Why it matters — Designing stories for impact", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": 'Work/life balance is impossible - most of us "work" more than we "life," and a lot of us are lucky enough to love that work. Trying to balance it all leads to burnout, resentment and ideals and expectations that never get met. There''s a better metaphor, one that takes into account all the elements of your life, helps you figure out what drives you and come up with strategies to protect it. It''s called work/life chemistry.', + "facilitator": "Kristen Hare", + "facilitator_twitter": "@kristenhare", + "id": 2354629, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-22T15:46:12.489Z", + "title": "Work/Life Balance is a myth. Try this instead.", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Jonathan Stray", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Workbench is an open source tool that puts all stages of the data journalism process in one workspace, including scraping, cleaning, monitoring, and visualization -- all without coding, and all reproducible. \nIn this hands-on tutorial, you'll learn how to use Workbench for several different newsroom tasks. Clean and explore data, monitor sources, create live embeddable charts that update when new data is released, or automate useful queries and workflows that other journalists can use to report. Workbench is built to help make data tasks accessible to more people in the newsroom.\nThis session is good for journalists of all skill levels.", + "facilitator": "Pierre Conti", + "facilitator_twitter": "pierreconti", + "id": 2356045, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T03:36:09.983Z", + "title": "Workbench: Reproducible data work without coding", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Cheryl Phillips", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Come join Big Local News for a discussion on how newsrooms can work together to grow regional and national datasets from local reporting. We are in the midst of building out a platform for newsrooms to share not only data, but story recipes and methodologies. We want to use the great work being done in data-driven, accountability journalism to inspire others in small and large newsrooms throughout the country.\n\nWe’ve already begun. Earlier this year Big Local News released an update to a database of police traffic stops, collected and standardized from dozens of different police agencies around the country. The release was the result of a partnership with the Stanford Computational Policy Lab and timed to around a pre-NICAR workshop where we taught journalists how to analyze the data to uncover patterns in racial disparity.\n\nWe also started a conversation at NICAR centered around a coordinated effort to collect more police data. We want to expand on that conversation now. What other datasets can we be collecting in health care, education and other important local topics? How can we help local newsrooms not only collect data, but analyze and archive it for others to work with? And how do we incentivize such efforts? What obstacles are there to building a cooperative environment where data is shared freely between newsrooms and how do we overcome them? And lastly, what features would you like to see in a platform that would facilitate this effort?\n\nCome help us answer these questions and build a network to collect and sharing data for use in accountability journalism. And if you have data to share, bring that too.", + "facilitator": "Eric Sagara", + "facilitator_twitter": null, + "id": 2338035, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-10T18:33:35.447Z", + "title": "Working together to grow local data into big data", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Akil Harris", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "There are a few examples of web development, design, non-profit and advocacy organizations that have non-traditional organizational structures but almost all digital newsrooms have adopted organizational structures that mimic the traditional top-down structures of old. These structures mimic the problems of old media organizations, problems that come from when people in power thrive on telling as little as possible to their employees before making significant editorial or business choices.\n\nIn this session, we want to have a conversation with SRCCON participants about what other organizational structures should be explored that could encourage the decision-making power to be shared equally amongst the members of the organization. \n\nWe want to talk about the pros and cons of building a newsroom co-op where every member could have an equal-voting power to make editorial and financial decisions. Such an organization would also have its own limitations and we want this discussion to be a frank conversation about what those could be and how we could work around them.\n\nFor a part of the session, we want to break into small groups to think about how they would organize their ideal organization. How will they be structured, what their goals and missions be, how will they be funded and what topics would they cover. We want the participants of this session to leave with a sense of hope that another world is possible.", + "facilitator": "Moiz Syed", + "facilitator_twitter": "moizsyed", + "id": 2355095, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T21:23:06.415Z", + "title": "You work in a newsroom; but what if you ran one? Let’s talk about Newsroom Co-ops.", + }, +] diff --git a/_data/schedule.yaml b/_data/schedule.yaml index 639e1bfe..ecb21b35 100644 --- a/_data/schedule.yaml +++ b/_data/schedule.yaml @@ -1,1097 +1,1097 @@ [ - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Get your badges and grab some caffeine as you gear up for the first day of SRCCON! (We'll put out some awesome morning snacks a little later into our conference day.)", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-breakfast", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "8am", - "timeblock": "thursday-morning", - "title": "Registration + Coffee & Tea at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "We'll kick things off with a welcome, some scene-setting, and some suggestions for getting the most out of SRCCON.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-welcome", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "9am", - "timeblock": "thursday-morning", - "title": "Welcome to SRCCON", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Sometimes the well of ideas runs dry and we find ourselves stuck in a creative rut. If we can't move past it, let's try thinking sideways. Drawing inspiration from Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, a card-based system that offers pithy prompts for creative thinking, we'll discuss ways to shift our perspective in the process of brainstorming, designing and problem-solving. Some of Schmidt and Eno's one-line strategies include:\n\n\"Not building a wall but making a brick.\"\n\"Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place.\"\n\"You can only make one dot at a time.\"\n\nAs a group, we'll look at projects that emerged from unconventional sources of inspiration, share our favorite methods of breaking creative block and then develop our own list of \"oblique strategies\" that we'll publish online after the session.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Katie Park, Alex Tatusian", - "facilitators_twitter": "katiepark", - "id": "creative-strategies", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "9:30-10:45am", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", - "title": "\"Abandon normal instruments\": Sideways strategies for defeating creative block", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Your newsroom has a rigorous process for editing words and traditional reporting. How can data journalists ensure that we’re editing data analysis with the same rigor? How can we take lessons from research and other fields and apply them to a fast-paced newsroom? \n\nIn this session, we’ll talk about how newsrooms are already doing this work—and how we can up our game. What are some of the challenges in adding new steps to existing workflows? How can you do this work if you don’t have a dedicated data editor? And how do you get the rest of the newsroom on board? We’ll share among participants the successes and challenges we’ve had, and try to find the ideal data editing process together.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Hannah Recht, Kate Rabinowitz", - "facilitators_twitter": "hannah_recht, datakater", - "id": "editing-data", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "9:30-10:45am", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", - "title": "How to edit data as seriously as we edit words", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Technology intersects with nearly every aspect of our lives, and based on the number of digital sabbath services and \"I'm leaving social media for good this time (probably!)\" posts that have been published, our relationship to technology feels out of control. \n\nBut our brains aren't what's broken, they're working exactly as they evolved to work. Technology has just evolved much, much faster. And that tech is affecting our emotional and physiological well being. Media companies and platforms have capitalized on our innate psychological and neurological vulnerabilities to make money and keep us hooked. But there have to be better ways to build community and share information on the web. Let's dig into the systemic issues (cough, capitalism) that have led to tech that makes us miserable and then design/brainstorm what humane platforms could look like. ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Kaeti Hinck, Stacy-Marie Ishmael", - "facilitators_twitter": "kaeti, s_m_i", - "id": "ghosts-in-the-machine", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "9:30-10:45am", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", - "title": "Ghosts in the Machine: How technology is shaping our lives and how we can build a better way", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Writing good documentation is hard, so let’s write some together in a low-pressure environment! This session isn’t just about writing documentation to go with SRCCON; it’s an opportunity to learn how to improve documentation at your organization and perhaps take-away a prototype install of Library, too.\n\nWe’ll start by collaborating on successful approaches to writing and sharing documentation in a newsroom, then use Library to collect useful documentation for all SRCCON attendees.\n\nLibrary is an open-source documentation tool released by the New York Times in collaboration with Northwestern University’s Knight Lab earlier this year. Because every page in Library is a Google Doc, you already know how to use it!\n\nYou won’t need an online device to participate, but it will be helpful for part of the session when we collaborate on Google Docs.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Isaac White, Maxine Whitely, Umi Syam", - "facilitators_twitter": "TweetAtIsaac, maxine_whitely, umay", - "id": "document-library", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Minnesota", - "time": "9:30-10:45am", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", - "title": "Document this conference! An introduction to Library.", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "\"Parachute journalism\" is the practice of national outlets or freelancers flying into local communities they're not a part of to report a story, then leaving again. It's a part of our journalistic economy, as the money and power in journalism is focused in just a few geographic locations--but it can also be damaging to local communities, and it can lead to misrepresentation, distrust and resentment. Often, national journalists appear in a community in times of trauma and elections, and report stories with insufficient context, while local journalists struggle to access equivalent resources for necessary ongoing reporting. This session will explore our collective experiences with parachute journalism as both insiders and outsiders to a community, in order to produce good ideas about how to do harm reduction, increase accountability, and shift power dynamics. We'll ask: Are there situations where it's better if this story just doesn't get told? How do we evaluate that? What can national media outlets and freelancers do to connect and collaborate with local journalists and local communities? What are the ethics of accountable partnerships? In what ways do local and regional/national media needs differ, and how can journalists collaborate to produce stories that better address the needs of all involved? All of this will be driving at a larger question: What does justice and accountability look like in the practice of journalism? ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Lewis Raven Wallace", - "facilitators_twitter": "lewispants", - "id": "parachute-journalism", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "9:30-10:45am", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", - "title": "Parachute Journalism: Can outsiders report accountably on other people's communities?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "News nerds came of age in newsrooms that were hostile to their efforts. But now, the geeks are running the show. There are few holdouts left. Winning was easy. Governing is harder.\n\nWhat should the agenda of the nerds be in newsrooms where they are finally winning territory and mindshare? How will we use our positions to further our agenda?", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Jeremy Bowers, Becca Aaronson", - "facilitators_twitter": "jeremybowers, becca_aa", - "id": "geeks-won-now-what", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "11:15am-12:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", - "title": "The Geeks Won: Now What?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "We are all too aware that the 2020 election is coming up. But do our community members feel empowered by the coverage we’re producing? Unlikely. Typically it starts with the candidates and what they have to do to win, rather than the voters and what they need to participate. We should flip that. \n\nIf we let the needs of community members drive the design of our election coverage, it would look dramatically different – and be dramatically better for our democratic process and social cohesion, we think. Bonus: those community members will be pretty grateful to you for unsexy coverage like explaining what a circuit court judge does. At a time when we’re pivoting to reader revenue, this public service journalism model is not just good karma – it should be seen as mission critical. \n\nWe’ll explore the “jobs to be done” in election reporting, how to ask questions that will give you a deeper understanding of voters’ information needs, the tools at our disposal to do that, and the ways that newsrooms can ensure they have enough feedback from actual voters to resist the siren call of the latest campaign gaffe or poll results.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Ariel Zirulnick, Bridget Thoreson", - "facilitators_twitter": "azirulnick, bridgetthoreson", - "id": "people-polls-elections", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "11:15am-12:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", - "title": "Fix your feedback loop: Letting people, not polls, drive your election coverage", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "The world of online advertising has been under a lot of fire. Online advertising has been used to target disenfranchised groups, those deemed manipulatable, and to push political disinformation. The economies of scale, having the many different types and origins of advertising, has made it even more difficult to prevent bad actors on different platforms. The question then arises, what makes an ethical ad? What can we do on our publications and platforms to help promote more ethical advertising? ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Ian Carrico, Amanda Hicks", - "facilitators_twitter": "iamcarrico, amandahi", - "id": "ethical-advertising", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "11:15am-12:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", - "title": "Let's build some ethical advertising", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "In recent years, some organizations have published their diversity reports to educate folks in the industry about their challenges with diversity and to indicate that they are taking newsroom diversity seriously. This has also led to a number of conversations about diversity committees at news organizations trying to figure out what their diversity report should cover and how they can convince management to publish effective indicators of diversity.\n\nIn this session we would like to facilitate a conversation around the topic of diversity reports. We will start with a quick survey of recent diversity reports published by prominent journalism outlets and then move to a discussion/group activity discussing the following topics:\n\n* Why is it beneficial for organizations and our industry in general\n* How should you convince your management to collect and publish diversity data publicly\n* What should be covered in the reports", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Moiz Syed, Disha Raychaudhuri", - "facilitators_twitter": "moizsyed, Disha_RC", - "id": "newsroom-diversity-reports", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "11:15am-12:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", - "title": "State of Newsroom Diversity Reports", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "It seems everyone is talking about ethics in technology these days. Examples abound of poor decisions leading to unintended harm, of planned exploitation and avoidance of consent, of prioritization of financial gain over literally everything else. What’s the ethically-minded technologist to do? This session will be an open, off the record conversation among designers, developers, and journalists about the things that keep us up at night: the ways our work can cause harm, the systems driving us to do the wrong thing, the incentives that make it hard to even know what’s right. We’ll work from a vantage point that assumes good intentions, recognizes that impacts matter more than plans, and acknowledges the impossibility of perfect solutions: no matter what we do, we are all complicit. But we are not alone, and we are not without the ability to effect change. ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Mandy Brown", - "facilitators_twitter": "aworkinglibrary", - "id": "good-work-troubling-times", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Minnesota", - "time": "11:15am-12:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", - "title": "Staying with the trouble: Doing good work in terrible times", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Incidents and outages are a normal part of any complex system. In recent years The New York Times adopted a collaborative method for discussing these events called Learning Reviews. We'd like to give a brief introduction to Learning Reviews—where they originated, why they're called Learning Reviews, what they are—followed by a few exercises with the attendees. Some of these group exercises would focus on communicating the idea of complexity and how that impacts our ability to predict the future. In doing so, we'd also communicate how complex systems have a degree of impermanence and how this contributes to outages. This segues into the theme of the discussion, how do we look back on an event in a way that prioritizes learning more about our systems and less about finding fault with a human? We'll go over the importance of language and facilitation in this process.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Joe Hart, Vinessa Wan", - "facilitators_twitter": "vnessawithaneye", - "id": "engineering-beyond-blame", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "11:15am-12:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", - "title": "Engineering Beyond Blame", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-lunch", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "12:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", - "title": "Lunch at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Session rooms are available for informal get-togethers over lunch, so pick up some food and join fellow attendees to talk. If you have an idea for a lunch conversation, we'll have a signup board available in our common space throughout SRCCON.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-lunch-conversations", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "", - "time": "12:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", - "title": "Lunch conversations - sign up at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "The SRCCON Science Fair is an informal way for you to connect with journalism tools and resources you can use in your work back home. Explore demos, ask lots of questions, and share feedback with these seven awesome projects:\n\n**The Accountability Project** \n[Project info](https://www.publicaccountability.org/) \nThis project brings together national and state data from a variety of sources – including campaign finance, nonprofits and voter registration – to help journalists search across multiple datasets from one search. [Register for a free account here](https://www.publicaccountability.org/account/signup/?code=SRCCON).\n\n**Associated Press Data Distributions & Datakit** \n[Project info](https://www.ap.org/en-us/formats/data-journalism) \nThe Data Distributions program provides clean, documented, and analyzed data to help tell local stories on topics ranging from census tract-level life expectancy to segregation in local schools to farm subsidies offsetting the impacts of Chinese tariffs. Distributions are available to all AP members for a small annual fee and are available to non-AP members—and even research groups at times—through commercial arrangements. The AP will also provide a sneak peek into a data project management tool we’ll be fully open-sourcing in September: Datakit creates a templated project structure in either R or Python, syncs data to S3, and pushes code to Github or Gitlab.\n\n**The Coral Project** \n[Project info](https://coral.voxmedia.com) \nThe Coral Project brings journalists and the communities they serve closer together through open-source tools and strategies. Our goals are: to increase public trust in journalism, to improve the diversity of voices and experiences in reporting, to make journalism stronger by making it more relevant to people’s lives, and to create safer, more productive online dialog. Because journalism needs everyone. For SRCCON, we'll be showing an exclusive preview of v5 – our complete rewrite of the Coral code and UX – out later this year.\n\n**Big Local News** \nBig Local News collects local data to uncover regional or national patterns for accountability stories with big impact. We pursue hard-to-obtain data kept in disparate formats by multiple jurisdictions. Big Local News also works with newsrooms to archive their data. We are building a platform to help journalists collaborate and share data. It will be integrated with specialized tools and connect with the Stanford Digital Repository so data and methodologies can be archived for others to use and expand upon. \n\n**Immersive storytelling with AR/VR** \nImmersive storytelling is a way to engage readers in a story. Using VR, AR, and gaming technologies we will show you how we’ve used it at the Los Angeles Times and how you can bring it to your newsroom - even if you don’t know how to code.\n\n**Medill Local News Initiative** \n[Project info](https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu) \nWith local journalism in crisis, Northwestern University has assembled a team of experts in digital innovation, audience understanding and business strategy. The goal: reinvent the relationship between news organizations and audiences to elevate enterprises that empower citizens.\n\n**MuckRock Assignments** \n[Project info](https://www.muckrock.com/assignment/) \nWant to turn endless PDFs into beautiful spreadsheets? Looking for a new way to get your audience to help scale your reporting capacity? MuckRock's Assignments tool lets you crowdsource analysis of PDFs, social media posts, and other data types, while offering new ways to engage and follow up with your readers.\n\n**Workbench** \n[Project info](https://workbenchdata.com/) \nWorkbench brings all your data tools into one simple place, in your browser. It makes it easy to collect, scrape, transform and analyze data without code, automate and monitor tasks, and share reproducible step-by-step workflows along with dashboards and APIs.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-science-fair", - "length": "60 minutes", - "notepad": "", - "room": "", - "time": "1:45pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-science-fair", - "title": "SRCCON Science Fair!", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "There's a joke we often hear journalists make: Our job is to clearly communicate information to our audience, and yet we're terrible at communicating with each other in our newsrooms. That's partly because we don't use the right tools or frameworks to facilitate clear and consistent communication that leads to cultural change. In this session, we’ll hear what kinds of communication and culture problems you’ve identified in your newsrooms, dig into tools– like OKRs, team health checks and user manuals– that can provide a shared vocabulary in and across teams, and help you and your colleagues feel more heard and satisfied in your newsrooms, whether it’s a large organization like the BBC (where Eimi works!) or a startup like WhereBy.Us (where Anika most recently worked!).", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Anika Anand, Eimi Okuno", - "facilitators_twitter": "anikaanand00, emettely", - "id": "structured-communication", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "3-4:15pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "Structured communication: Tools you can use to change culture and help your team feel heard", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "At SRCCON:WORK, I talked about re-building our newsroom org charts to reflect the work we’re doing today and to prepare us for where we’re going. Joined now with C&EN’s editorial director, Amanda Yarnell, we’ll show you how we built a product team and re-structured our newsroom around it in one year. \n\nIf you’re interested in building a newsroom-wide roadmap, streamlining and prioritizing newsroom ideas, creating and managing a sprint-based product team, and growing stakeholder alignment across business units, join us. In this session, we’ll share our blueprint, our successes, and our challenges, so you can do it faster. ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Jessica Morrison, Amanda Yarnell", - "facilitators_twitter": "ihearttheroad, amandayarnell", - "id": "newsroom-reorg-product", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "3-4:15pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "How to re-org your newsroom around product without breaking it", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "In this session, we’ll discuss ways to help folks from historically privileged backgrounds be better allies to their colleagues from minority and marginalized backgrounds. The goal is to advocate for fair, comprehensive and diverse journalism and a more inclusive newsroom culture. The method by which we get that done is up to us, but we will aim to create a community that continues beyond SRCCON.\n\nIt’s time for the people with privilege to do the hard work of making things right. This might be a messy and awkward process, but our work, our workplaces, and our lives will be better for it.\n\n**Who is this for:** \nAnyone in a position of privilege who wants to take a bigger role in making our industry more inclusive and diverse. Anyone from a historically marginalized background is welcome to support this effort by sharing their experiences and requests for new allies.\n\n**What this is not:** \nAn “ask me anything” session where journalists of color and from other marginalized backgrounds are put on the spot and expected to educate their peers and colleagues.\n\n**What you should expect:** \nTo listen to, share and develop approaches and strategies that can make a difference for a more inclusive newsroom and industry. This may be an uncomfortable discussion for some in the room. We ask that participants come ready to be vulnerable and prepared to be wrong about their assumptions. We hope to arm our allies by giving them the vocabulary and script to respond more fluently to everyday injustices and develop effective allyship. ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Hannah Wise, Emma Carew Grovum", - "facilitators_twitter": "hannahjwise, Emmacarew", - "id": "media-diversity-allies", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "3-4:15pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "Calling All Media Diversity Avengers: Now’s the time to act.", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "The dream of the 90s is alive with static sites! The JAM stack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) is a new twist on an old idea. Making static webpages has many benefits for newsrooms in terms of cost and long term maintainability. In this session, we will go through the basics of the static site generation landscape and participants will deploy their own custom static site, like GeoCities never died but with a data-driven twist.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Carl Johnson", - "facilitators_twitter": "carlmjohnson", - "id": "data-driven-static-sites", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Minnesota", - "time": "3-4:15pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "Let's JAMstack! How to Make Data-driven Static Sites", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "This will be an interactive and honest conversation about how management can be improved in local newsrooms. We know that the industry has a tendency to promote non-transferable skill sets, and that there are dramatic industry disruptions that lead to chaotic situations for management. We’ll talk about how we can tackle those big issues through human resource development.\n\nThe program will involve large-group interaction, small-group discussion, one-on-one interactions, and brainstorming work with notecards, all designed to use our communication skills to solve problems. Most importantly, we’ll have interaction between traditional managers and worker-bee direct reports so we can better understand our counterparts and practice interacting with each other.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Erin Mansfield", - "facilitators_twitter": "_erinmansfield", - "id": "local-newsroom-management", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "3-4:15pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "Meeting management challenges in local newsrooms", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Many news organizations are actively thinking about how to integrate artificial intelligence into the practice of journalism, but it’s very early days. Meanwhile large multinational corporations are funding the major AI developments. However in response to a few very public failures of the technology, they’ve started publishing ethical frameworks that focus on social benefits and public safety. Given news organizations role in society, it’s an important time to understand this new technology and think critically about how to use it. Join us to evaluate the way large companies are starting to build ethical guardrails around the use of AI, and help us start drafting a set that’s unique to news.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Sarah Schmalbach, Ajay Chainani", - "facilitators_twitter": "schmalie, ajayjapan", - "id": "ai-eats-the-world", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Boardroom (5th floor)", - "time": "3-4:15pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", - "title": "What happens to journalism, when AI eats the world?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Too often, tips and suggestions for email newsletters at newsrooms can take a “one size fits all” approach. We’ve seen that the way a newsletter is made at a newsroom can enormously vary based on the size, resources and purpose of any given newsroom. \n\nIn this session, we’ll create a card-based strategy game that will guide small groups of participants through the process of creating a new newsletter product that meets an outlet’s editorial and business outcomes. Groups will have to develop a strategy that meets specific goals and will have to overcome hurdles and challenges that we throw in their way. \n\nThroughout the simulation, we’ll present then guide the room through a series of discussion topics and exercises based around the key worksteams of an email newsletter at a newsroom: user research, content creation, workflows, acquiring new email readers, and converting readers to members or donors. ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Emily Roseman, Joseph Lichterman", - "facilitators_twitter": "emilyroseman1, ylichterman", - "id": "newsletter-strategy", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "4:45-6pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "title": "Game of Newsletters: A song of inboxes and subject lines", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Diversity initiatives are popping up in most companies these days. Newsrooms are talking about gender and race representation, re-examining how we cover stories and how we create space for employees of all genders and races. We laud ourselves for being aware and being inclusive. However, noticeably missing from the conversation, at least for those who identify as such, are people with disabilities. \n\nThe New York Times has employee lead initiatives to help correct that. From the tech task force that turned into a team designated with making our site more accessible, to the internal panel on employees with disabilities that turned into an employee resource group the disabled community and their allies at the times are standing up and taking space. \n\nDuring this session we will examine how the disability community is represented in newsrooms and institutions, discuss what has been done, and set a framework for how to take action now. We will work together to figure out what ally-ship looks like and what it means for diversity initiatives to include people with disabilities, and how they miss the mark when they don’t -- both for employees and our coverage. ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Katherine McMahan", - "facilitators_twitter": "katieannmcmahan", - "id": "disabilities-in-the-newsroom", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "4:45-6pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "title": "Taking Up Space: Making Room for People with Disabilities at The Times", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "A lot of data journalism takes place in front of a computer, but there is a lot to be gained by creating data together with your community. As part of a documentary project about a culturally diverse, low-income community, we recently invited residents to map their neighborhood — not online, but with paper and pens at in-person gatherings. We not only generated unique data, but also stories and context we never would have heard if we hadn’t met people where they lived. \n\nMore and more, journalists are experimenting with community engagement practices to accurately reflect and represent people’s lived experiences. We can do the same by taking an analog approach to creating data, including our community in the stories we tell about them. This helps verify the data by collecting it ourselves and having subject matter experts (your community!) vet it along the way. It also makes our reporting process more transparent and creates a group of people invested in our work. \n\nWe’ll share what we did and what we learned in our neighborhood mapping experiments, and invite a discussion on other ways to weave community engagement into data reporting. Our goal: draft a starter kit of ideas for doing data journalism IRL that you can take back to your newsroom.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Christopher Hagan, jesikah maria ross", - "facilitators_twitter": "chrishagan, jmr_MediaSpark", - "id": "making-data-with-community", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "4:45-6pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "title": "Spreadsheets IRL: The How and Why of Making Data With Your Community", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "We have an obligation to our teams and our companies to bring great new people into our work who can help push our teams forward, and yet interviewing candidates can feel extracurricular and rote. We need to discuss what we might be doing wrong, what the consequences are, and how to better focus our efforts when we are interviewing the people who want to work alongside us. \n\nLet’s talk about how to create safe and respectful spaces in a job interview. Let’s think deeply and critically about how we spend the thirty to sixty minutes we have in the company of potential colleagues to ensure we’re learning the right things, in the right ways, for the right reasons. Let’s discuss different approaches to advocating for a candidate you believe in, finding the person behind the candidate, questioning unconscious bias as you observe it, and teaching others how to do likewise.\n\nThis session is designed for both for seasoned interviewers and folks who have never done it before. Using actual interviews as a practice space and group discussion about foibles and tactics, we hope to walk away from this session with renewed focus and better, more respectful tools for getting to know a potential colleague and doing the hard work of bringing them into our newsrooms.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "David Yee", - "facilitators_twitter": "tangentialism", - "id": "interview-based-hiring", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Minnesota", - "time": "4:45-6pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "title": "Being in the room: the hard work of interview-based hiring", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "People are dying and it’s up to you to figure out why. You’ve gotten a tip that there is a cluster of people dying in a New York neighborhood. Join our collaborative investigative team to solve the mystery and enact change.\n\nA la a murder mystery party or the world’s shortest LARP, you’ll play a character—perhaps a journalist, data analyst, EMS first responder, public records officer, city council member, or community activist. Like any good mystery, you won’t be able to solve it alone.\n\nAt the end we’ll return to our everyday selves and discuss what we learned about working collaboratively, in and outside of journalism.\n\nWe’ve interviewed experts in collaborative journalism, and will share their tips for best practices (and pitfalls to avoid).", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Laura Laderman, Maya Miller", - "facilitators_twitter": "Liladerm, mayatmiller", - "id": "murder-mystery-collaborative-journalism", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "4:45-6pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "title": "Murder Mystery: Collaborative Journalism Edition", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "We really love journalism. We really love tech, and what it can do. We’re not so sure it’s sustainable for us in the long term or maybe even the short. We want to brainstorm ways to stay help connected and useful, even if /when that means running for the hills.\n\nHow can we support this necessity of a good world and not sacrifice ourselves.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Sydette Harry, B Cordelia Yu", - "facilitators_twitter": "Blackamazon, thebestsophist", - "id": "leaving-industry-not-journalism", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Boardroom (5th floor)", - "time": "4:45-6pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", - "title": "Before I Let Go: Leaving The Business without Leaving the Work", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Dinner on Thursday night is provided at SRCCON—mmmm, tacos—and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-dinner", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "6pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening", - "title": "Dinner at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Board games, card games, story games—we’ll have plenty to choose from. Bring your own to share and play. Community member David Montgomery is coordinating game night this year, and he set up [this Etherpad to help people plan](https://etherpad.opennews.org/p/2019-game-night). If you can bring a favorite game, share it there; if you see someone bringing a game you want to play, let them know you're interested!", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "David Montgomery", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-evening-1-games", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "All evening", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", - "title": "Games Room", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "In the thick of relentless news cycles, it’s easy to forget to take the time to celebrate and acknowledge the truly great work that we are doing to serve our communities on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. During the lightning talks, we'll explore how can we celebrate in ways that are meaningful to us as individuals but also as a member of a team.\n\nWe'll hear from fellow attendees, in just five minutes each, about their personal and professional wins - both large and small - and how they have approached celebration. We want you to cheer them on as well as learn from them about what different kinds of celebration can look like. In the immortal words of Kool and the Gang, \"Bring your good times, and your laughter, too.\"", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Amy Kovac-Ashley", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-evening-1-lightning-talks", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "7pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", - "title": "Lightning talks: Celebrate good times, come on!", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Step away from the screens, pick up a needle and thread and transport yourself back to a simpler time. Learn basic embroidery stitches from the American Hannah Wise, the stitching maven behind @SewManyComments. You'll leave this session with a hand-stitched SRCCON logo and the know-how to join the fiber arts movement. ", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Hannah Wise", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-evening-1-embroidery", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "7pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", - "title": "Hobby workshop: Learn to embroider!", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Knitting is kind of like walking in that once you master going forward (knitting) and backward (purling), in that you can get a lot of places easily with those two moves alone. But, instead of starting a scarf you will never see the end of or a hat that will easily be the ugliest gift you ever give to another human, join me for the fine art of learning to knit on a washcloth! You will learn both knit and purl stitches and be sent home with a very simple pattern so you can easily finish the washcloth after SRCCON. (Also if you already know how to knit and want to bring something you are working on to show off and gain many compliments, please join us!)", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Emma Carew Grovum", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-evening-1-knitting", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "7pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", - "title": "Hobby workshop: Learn to knit!", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Dealing with student debt and being a journalist seems like a particular challenge in an industry that's shrinking, relying more on freelancers, and unequal pay. To those who are willing to talk about the burden of student debt, how do you manage it? We could also talk about the social stresses and perceptions of student debt, classism in the industry, etc. It's a polarizing issue that impacts people's day-to-day lives, and I hope it will be helpful to connect with others about what it's like to be living with student debt. ", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Helga Salinas", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-evening-1-student-debt", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "7pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", - "title": "Conversation: Dealing with student debt", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "In 1953, Elizabeth II was crowned the Queen of England - and it was the first ever pan-European live broadcast on television. That made a French TV executive think: What if we bring the whole continent together live, one night, over music? He came up with a plan and in 1956, only eleven years after WWII with its deadly conflicts and dozens of millions of victims, the very first Eurovision Song Contest took place in Lugano, Switzerland. It is running up to this day and with more than 150 million people watching on that one night in May, it is the biggest TV show in entertainment on the planet. Nowadays, more than 40 countries send theirs singers and songs. You may have seen some of it and remember the bearded act of Conchita Wurst or Finish metal band Lordi in their monster costumes, or you may now that this was how Abba first got started.\n\nBut apart from that, there is also a secret history of the show: Spanish dictator Franco bribed the Luxemburg jury in 1968 to win hosting rights for the upcoming year and in the early 2000s, countries like Estonia and Latvia made an expensive push to win the competition, so that they could present themselves as reliable international partners ready for the European Union, when hosting the following year, following their informal motto: \"Through EBU into EU\" (EBU being the European Broadcasting Union, the entity organizing Eurovision)\n\nI've been to the event live four times and I visited several of the national preselections. I love to convene people over the idea and discuss the feeling of connection that comes from being in a bar in which Albanian Post-Socialism Rockers jam with Icelandic Punkpop bands - and why I think it is one of the most charming ways to make Europe visible. So let's have a chat about this, I'm happy to introduce the concept to newbies and talk about why I think that entertainment is a great way to make people wonder about abstract issues they usually have a tougher time relating to.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Christian Fahrenbach", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-evening-1-eurovision", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "7pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", - "title": "Conversation: The Secret History of the Biggest Entertainment Show in the World: The Eurovision Song Contest", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "An unfacilitated space to hang out and chat with the people you meet during SRCCON.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-evening-2-memorial", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "7pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", - "title": "Open Conversation Area", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Board games, card games, story games—we’ll have plenty to choose from. Bring your own to share and play. Community member David Montgomery is coordinating game night this year, and he set up [this Etherpad to help people plan](https://etherpad.opennews.org/p/2019-game-night). If you can bring a favorite game, share it there; if you see someone bringing a game you want to play, let them know you're interested!", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "David Montgomery", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-evening-2-games", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "All evening", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", - "title": "Games Room", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Take a walk through the University of Minnesota campus to the Mississippi River gorge, a U.S. National Park nestled in the heart of the city. Join Will Lager, of Minnesota Public Radio News, to learn a bit about the history of the region, the Mississippi River, St. Anthony Falls (The reason Minneapolis is where it is) and the people who came before the city. We will stay on paved trails and sidewalks, but comfortable walking shoes are suggested. The walk will be around 2.5 miles. We will depart from the main hall.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Will Lager", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-evening-2-walking-tour", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "8pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", - "title": "Mississippi Gorge Walking Tour", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "After dinner on Thursday, let's get a group together for a short tour of the nearby West River Parkway Trail. We'll roll about 5 miles at a leisurely pace, stopping to see the natural, industrial and cultural sights along the Mississippi River near downtown Minneapolis. There's a niceride bikeshare dock right outside the conference; day passes are $6.\nhttps://www.traillink.com/trail/west-river-parkway-trail-/\nhttps://www.niceridemn.com/", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Matt Kiefer", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-evening-2-bikes", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "8pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", - "title": "Let's ride bikes!", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "How has science fiction helped you understand the world? Yourself? Justice? Let’s talk about the role of SF, and how it’s taught us to be better makers, teammates and people. **Bring a book to swap!**", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Brian Boyer, Jayme Fraser", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-evening-2-sci-fi", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "8pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", - "title": "Conversation: Things the future taught us + sci-fi book share", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "SRCCON can be a chance to connect with your community, or even find one for the first time. If you're part of a small team, or work as the only coder in your newsroom, you're not alone! The Lonely Coders Club is a network for folks in journalism and tech who don't have a ton of support (technical or otherwise) inside their own organizations. Come chat about what _you're_ working on, and how we can all have each other's backs.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Alexandra Kanik, Natasha Khan, Erin Mansfield", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-evening-2-lonely-coders-meetup", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "8pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", - "title": "Lonely coders / local coders meetup", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "SRCCON can be a chance to connect with your community, or even find one for the first time. This is an informal space for journalists of color to meet up, catch up, and build a stronger network of support inside of journalism and tech. Come for the conversations, and make plans about what comes next—whether that's later Thursday night or looking down the road.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "Moiz Syed, Disha Raychaudhuri", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-evening-2-joc-meetup", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "8pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", - "title": "Journalists of color meetup", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "An unfacilitated space to hang out and chat with the people you meet during SRCCON.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-evening-2-memorial-2", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "8pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", - "title": "Open Conversation Area", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Thursday", - "description": "Our evening program has local tours, lightning talks, games, hobby workshops, and hosted conversations—stick around, have fun, and get to know the folks you meet at SRCCON! Activities are posted on the schedule, and we'll be here until 9:30 with plenty of space to hang out and keep talking.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "thursday-evening-program", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "", - "time": "7-9:30pm", - "timeblock": "thursday-evening-3", - "title": "Thursday Night at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Ease into the second morning at SRCCON with coffee, tea, and conversations before the sessions get started.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "friday-breakfast", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "9am", - "timeblock": "friday-morning", - "title": "Coffee & Tea at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "friday-welcome", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "9:30am", - "timeblock": "friday-morning", - "title": "SRCCON morning welcome", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Conferences may be educational and inspirational for you, but also expanding value to your team and organization should be at the top of your mind. Having a process to help in preparing, attending, and post-event knowledge sharing can help focus your attention to maximize the time you spend at conferences. In this session, we will define the common types of conference attendees and map to activities before, during, and after conferences to provide a solid framework for making conferences a must-fund part of your team’s budget. If you’ve ever come back from an event inspired and excited, but unsure how to take the next step, this session is for you. ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Emma Carew Grovum, Dave Stanton", - "facilitators_twitter": "Emmacarew, gotoplanb", - "id": "events-teaching-toolkit", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "10-11:15am", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "Bang for your buck: how to help your newsroom get the most out of SRCCON (or any journalism event)", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Over the past few decades, newsroom technologists have pushed the field of journalism forward in countless ways. As we approach a new decade, and arguably a new era of digital journalism, how must newsroom technologists evolve to meet new needs? And how do we center technology in a newsroom while also fixing the problems news organizations have long had regarding diversity, representing their communities, speaking to their audiences, etc.?\n\nIn this session, we will start with a set of hypotheses to seed discussion.\n\nFor journalism to succeed in the next decade:\n- Newsroom technologists must have real power in their organizations.\n- Experimentation and product development must be central to how a newsroom operates.\n- News organizations must be radically inclusive of their communities.\n- Cultivating positive culture and interpersonal relationships is key to developing sustainable newsrooms.\n\nGiven these hypotheses, what skills do we need to grow in newsroom technologists? What must we think about more deeply in our daily work? What tools do we need to develop? How must this community evolve? Together, let’s brainstorm these questions and leave with ideas to explore and deepen newsroom technology and culture beyond SRCCON.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Tyler Fisher, Brittany Mayes", - "facilitators_twitter": "tylrfishr, BritRenee_", - "id": "next-phase-news-nerds", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "10-11:15am", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "Designing the next phase for newsroom technologists", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "It’s often assumed there’s a difference between being part of an innovation team and working a beat in a traditional newsroom setting. There is much that is transferable between the two jobs. This session would explore similarities between two seemingly different functions in the modern newsroom and try to answer the following questions: How do you bring the level of exploration and experimentation to your beat? What lessons might folks with a product manager/design background be able to share with fellow journalists to make the return easier?", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "André Natta", - "facilitators_twitter": "acnatta", - "id": "beat-as-product", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "10-11:15am", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "Beat as a product: Lessons from product innovation for the newsroom", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "With more than 200 candidates on the ballot for dozens of local offices, small newsrooms faced the daunting challenge of effectively covering an historic municipal election in Chicago earlier this year. Instead of competing for eyeballs or scoops, 10 organizations came together to build Chi.Vote, a one-stop shop election guide. We learned a lot about what it takes to make collaborations work, how to build on each other’s strengths, overcome challenges and address common pain points.\n\nIn this session, we’ll brainstorm how to break the mold of election coverage and give voters what they actually need to get to the polls. You'll talk through fostering effective collaboration in your newsroom and in your market. Bring your ideas and be prepared to develop collaborative election coverage strategies.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Matt Kiefer, Asraa Mustufa", - "facilitators_twitter": "matt_kiefer, asraareports", - "id": "lessons-collaboration-election-coverage", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Minnesota", - "time": "10-11:15am", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "Don't compete, collaborate: Lessons learned from covering the 2019 Chicago municipal elections", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Let's work together to build a membership model that is inclusive (meaning all the things you think that means and also accounts for things like skills as an entry point). Membership should be more than a monetary transaction and early access to Wait Wait tickets. It should be a gateway to the communities we serve. \n\nImportant: There will be LEGO’s in this session!", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Candice Fortman, Simon Galperin", - "facilitators_twitter": "cande313, thensim0nsaid", - "id": "membership-privileges", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "10-11:15am", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "Membership Has its Privileges (and They Are Not Just for the Privileged)", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Let's enter the Data Team Time Machine and go back to our old graphics and long-ago code. Even the biggest superstars have a first project or an outdated framework that seems quaint now. In this session, we'll unearth some ancient work and talk about how we'd approach it differently with our current-day toolbox, whether that's refactoring some code, building with some modern-day software or scrapping it and starting again. Come to this session if you want to feel better about how far you've come and if you want some inspiration to look at your projects in a new light.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Erin Petenko, Yan Wu", - "facilitators_twitter": "EPetenko, codingyan", - "id": "if-i-knew-then", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Boardroom (5th floor)", - "time": "10-11:15am", - "timeblock": "friday-am-1", - "title": "If I knew then what I know now", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "The 2020 census is a year away, but chances are you’ve already heard about it. The census is making headlines because several states are suing the Trump administration over its plans to include a citizenship question. But much of the news glosses over why the census is important and how it affects everyone’s lives. Congressional representation is at stake, along with $800 billion in federal funds that will get disbursed for state, county, and community programs over the next decade.\n\nWhen KPCC conducted human-centered design research into the census and the opportunities for public service journalism, one finding stood out: We can’t assume educated news consumers know the stakes or the mechanics of the census. There was a very low level of census knowledge among the people we interviewed, including current NPR listeners. How can we address this knowledge gap? We have some ideas. Let's talk. ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Ashley Alvarado, Megan Garvey, Dana Amihere", - "facilitators_twitter": "ashleyalvarado, garveymcvg, write_this_way", - "id": "census-coverage-playbook", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "11:45am-1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-2", - "title": "A playbook for reporters interested in reaching people at risk of being undercounted", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "In a post-Gamergate world, how should we think about personal data in our reporting and our research? What responsibilities do we have to the privacy of the communities we report on? While many journalists have [struggled with this question](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T71OE4fm4ns0ugEOmKOY4xF4H9ikbebmikv96sgi16A/edit), few newsrooms have an explicit ethics policy on how they retain, release, and redact personally-identifiable information. Let's change that, by drafting a sample PII ethics policy that can be adopted by organizations both large and small.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Thomas Wilburn, Kelly Chen", - "facilitators_twitter": "thomaswilburn, chenkx", - "id": "ethics-data-stories", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "11:45am-1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-2", - "title": "The Scramble Suit: Creating harm prevention guidelines for newsroom data", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Teaching data journalism in newsrooms and at universities has forced us to come up with creative techniques. We wrote The SQL Song to help one group of boot camp attendees understand the order of commands. In an attempt to help students fine-tune their programs, we did a game show called Query Cash. To make string functions make more sense, we’ve created silly, but useful performances. To make this session interactive, we propose inviting attendees to bring their ideas. We also will pose some problems and have teams work out creative solutions. ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Jennifer LaFleur, Aaron Kessler, Eric Sagara", - "facilitators_twitter": "j_la28, akesslerdc", - "id": "creative-teaching", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "11:45am-1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-2", - "title": "Creative ways to teach complex issues", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "We often come across percentages in journalism, simple numbers that convey a powerful amount of information. But a percentage can obscure crucial information. If one ZIP code has 30 homeless individuals out of 100, and another has 30,000 homeless out of 100,000, the percentages indicates similarity, but the two geographies will have vastly different times dealing with the homeless population. When looking at a list of percentages, we should endeavor to find those that are distinct. Tools from statistical theory can help us tease out what's unusual and what isn't. It doesn't require much complicated math, just a little algebra.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Ryan Menezes, Amelia McNamara", - "facilitators_twitter": "ryanvmenezes, AmeliaMN", - "id": "rethinking-percentages", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Minnesota", - "time": "11:45am-1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-2", - "title": "We should rethink the way we think about percentages", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "While journalists talk a lot about having an impact, we're not as forthcoming on how we can be more deliberate and active in informing structural change in our communities. Our work is often geared to spark surface-level outcomes (a law was passed, an official was held accountable, etc.), but even when media organizations are equipped to do deeper investigative work, they often don’t invest in longer-term strategies that can illuminate pathways for citizens to create more equitable, healthy systems.\n\nUsing a practice called systems thinking – a holistic approach to grappling with complex issues – journalists can develop more collaborative frameworks that help people build power and resiliency to address some of our most deeply rooted problems. Through the lens of systems thinking, we'll open a discussion about some of the big ideas and questions that a change-oriented approach holds for journalists: What new roles can journalists play to help evaluate and facilitate opportunities for social change? How do we negotiate traditional journalistic principles and standards while working to actively dismantle oppressive systems? How can we better communicate and act on our values?\n\nWe'll offer ideas from the systems thinking playbook, discuss examples of journalists who are actively rooting their practice in systems change and lead a visioning exercise to imagine new possibilities.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Cole Goins, Kayla Christopherson", - "facilitators_twitter": "colegoins, KaylaChristoph", - "id": "catalysts-for-change", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "11:45am-1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-2", - "title": "How can newsrooms be more active catalysts for change?", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "We don't talk about it a lot in the newsroom, the fact that we see and hear things all the time in our jobs that likely affect us in ways it's hard to describe to someone else. One of the first roles for most reporters and photographers is covering breaking news - chasing the police scanner from one traumatic event to the next. Our newsroom might have to cover a traumatic event on a larger scale - a mass shooting, a devastating brush fire, hurricane or tornado. We take care to tell the stories of those affected, to make sure their voices and their grief are heard. But we also need to take care of ourselves and our colleagues in these moments. What should you be looking for to make sure you're protected and feel empowered to speak up for yourself when you don't feel comfortable or need help? What are some things you could do if you are the editor to take care of your staff? What types of services could news organizations offer that would help in these situations?", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Kristyn Wellesley", - "facilitators_twitter": "kriswellesley", - "id": "self-care-in-newsrooms", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Boardroom (5th floor)", - "time": "11:45am-1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-am-2", - "title": "Take care: The Importance of Self-Care in the Newsroom", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "friday-lunch", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-lunch", - "title": "Lunch at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Session rooms are available for informal get-togethers over lunch, so pick up some food and join fellow attendees to talk. If you have an idea for a lunch conversation, we'll have a signup board available in our common space throughout SRCCON.", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "friday-lunch-conversations", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "", - "time": "1pm", - "timeblock": "friday-lunch", - "title": "Lunch conversations - sign up at SRCCON", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Many of us are overworked, lonely coders. How do we accomplish every day editorial projects and also dedicated time to learning new technologies and documenting workflows that we spend so much time implementing and testing? With all this newfangled tech, what’s noise and what’s signal?\n\nLet's talk about devising coping and filtering mechanisms for the onslaught of newness so we can all actually benefit from it.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Alexandra Kanik, Natasha Vicens", - "facilitators_twitter": "act_rational, khantasha", - "id": "adopting-new-tech", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "2:30-3:45pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "Noise & Signal: Knowing when to adopt new tech, and when to ignore it", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "How would we do journalism differently if we were to think about impact — real-world change — at the brainstorming stage, before we started to write or shoot? If we knew something needed to happen to make things better, could we identify a few levers to pull that’d make that something more likely? Would we frame the story differently? Share the data openly? Talk to different sources? And how do we do all of this without going too far, without crossing into advocacy journalism? Now more than ever, with more nonprofit newsrooms forming, more for-profit newsrooms turning to consumer revenue (on the sales pitch that journalism matters) and trust at a crisis point, we need to measure and show why our work matters. This session will cover published examples and studies but is meant to be a discussion about what we can do — and what’s going too far — to make a difference. We might also, using design thinking strategies, prototype a project designed for impact.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Anjanette Delgado, Jun-Kai Teoh", - "facilitators_twitter": "anjdelgado, jkteoh", - "id": "designing-stories-impact", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "2:30-3:45pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "Why it matters — Designing stories for impact", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "In newsrooms, as in other workplaces, most are given power leadership through title and job description. But many of us operate in spaces where there is no one above you who can edit you. Let's explore how to lead your newsroom without the title and exert power over the things you care deeply about. And let's explore the ways you can acquire power by playing within the system.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Steven Rich, Shannan Bowen", - "facilitators_twitter": "dataeditor, shanbow", - "id": "lead-without-power", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "2:30-3:45pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "How to lead without power", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "There are many resources out there for managers leading remote teams. Similarly, there are plenty of resources for the people on those teams to work, communicate and collaborate effectively. There are also plenty of arguments that have been made for how remote work improves employee effectiveness and satisfaction, why it has economic benefits for employers, and on and on. \n\nAnd yet, national news organizations concentrate their staff in the most expensive cities in the country. Let's try to figure out why that is and help make the case for supporting a more remote-friendly workforce.\n\nIn this session we'll try to come up with as many of the common objections raised by hiring managers when they insist that a given position be based in a particular location and then come up with a playbook of effective arguments to overcome those objections.\n\nAdditionally, we'll come up with some high level talking points regarding how supporting remote work can improve the fundamental economics of journalism while improving the lives of employees and the communities they serve.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Adam Schweigert, Alison Jones", - "facilitators_twitter": "aschweig", - "id": "case-for-remote-work", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Minnesota", - "time": "2:30-3:45pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "Making The Case For Remote Work", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Screenwriters use many techniques to distribute information throughout a film: building context to create goals and desires, withholding knowledge to create intrigue, planting clues to create suspense, and revealing discoveries to create surprise. By establishing rhythms of expectation, anticipation, disappointment, and fulfillment, a well-written screenplay keeps us captivated as it directs us through all the plot points and to the heart of the story.\n\nData journalism shares a similar goal. Are there lessons from screenwriting we can use to write engaging, data-driven stories, so we don’t end up with an info dump? Let’s find out together.\n\nIn this session, we’ll participate in a writers’ room to discuss how screenwriters use different strategies to jam-pack information into scenes while building a narrative and keeping pace. Then we’ll try out different screenwriting approaches to see how we can best break down complex data sets in our reporting, guide readers to the story, and keep their attention. Wipe down the whiteboards, grab some Post-its, and let’s break some stories!", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Phi Do", - "facilitators_twitter": "phihado", - "id": "learning-from-screenwriting", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "2:30-3:45pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "Fade In: What Data Journalism Can Learn from Screenwriting", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "We've all had the experience of digging into new data for the first time, and wondering how many stories we could have reported if we'd only known about that dataset sooner. In this training, we'll talk about getting the most out of a handful of free tools that can help you find new story ideas, visualization projects, and opportunities for data analysis in your newsroom:\n\n* Google Dataset Search: a search engine for researchers, scientists, and data journalists launched just last year\n* Google Trends: a tool for comparing the popularity of search queries over time\n* Google Public Data Explorer: raw data from U.S., international, and academic organizations\n\nThis is a hands-on workshop, so bring your laptop!", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Mike Reilley", - "facilitators_twitter": "journtoolbox", - "id": "training-data-sources", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Boardroom (5th floor)", - "time": "2:30-3:45pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", - "title": "Training: Finding new data sources with search and exploration tools", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Most newsrooms need their CMS to do the same basic things, but there are so many ways to do it. Let’s see what it looks like to publish a news story in a lineup of different CMSes. To show how different newsrooms accomplish the same tasks, a lineup of people involved in developing CMSes will demo their favorite CMS features, including how to write, edit and publish a news story, rank it on a homepage and promote it to an audience.\n\nThe CMSes to be demo-ed will be:\n\n* The New York Times's Scoop\n* Washington Post's Arc\n* Vox's Chorus\n* Condé Nast's Copilot\n* Industry Dive's Divesite", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Albert Sun", - "facilitators_twitter": "albertsun", - "id": "cms-demos", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Johnson", - "time": "4:15-5:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", - "title": "CMS Demos: Approaches to Helping Our Newsrooms Do Their Best Work", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "It's been amazing to see how the news nerd community has grown and evolved over the decades, and as we've gotten to meet in person over the last 5 years of SRCCONs. We have data about who is part of the news nerd community, and through various Slacks and events like this one, we've seen how members of this community support and care for one another. Let's take a moment to reflect on this community (with the support of an outside facilitator): who is a part of this community? Who is not (or is not yet) included? What are our responsibilities to each other? What does our collective future hold? We'll explore what we need to create that future, together.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Erika Owens, Brittany Campese", - "facilitators_twitter": "erika_owens", - "id": "how-are-we-in-community", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Ski-U-Mah", - "time": "4:15-5:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", - "title": "How are we in community together?", - "transcription": "y" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Developing sources is standard practice, but what about developing collaborators? Community members have so much more to offer than choice quotes and timely expertise. What if we developed the capacity of our audience and created ways for them to participate by pitching stories, designing distribution strategies, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating the news?\n\nLet’s identify the resources that exist among our audience & within our communities, and the possibilities to invest in those resources so that the community invests in our journalism.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Madeleine Bair, Cirien Saadeh", - "facilitators_twitter": "madbair, cmiriam", - "id": "expertise-outside-newsroom", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Heritage", - "time": "4:15-5:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", - "title": "Building capacity, impact, and trust by tapping into expertise outside the newsroom", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "One of the most frequently cited reasons (https://medium.com/jsk-class-of-2018/news-nerd-salaries-2017-2c83466b994e) journalists in digital roles leave their jobs is lack of promotion and career advancement opportunities. At the same time, journalists with a nontraditional mix of skills, who sit at the intersection of roles, departments or teams — we call them platypuses — are proving to be pivotal to the future of news. So how can newsrooms use the people they have to push their digital initiatives forward? \n\nThis session brings together digital journalists and managers to discuss career growth within the newsroom, especially for people with a nontraditional blend of skills. A lot of growth in digital careers is uncharted territory, but through our empathy interviews we will bring together tips and frameworks for how digital journalists can fit into forward-thinking newsrooms.\n\nWe’ll share success stories and lessons learned, and we’ll workshop tactics that could work in participants’ newsrooms. This session is meant to be a launchpad for conversations and plans to better empower and grow newsroom digital talent — and not lose them to other newsrooms and industries.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Vignesh Ramachandran, Hannah Birch", - "facilitators_twitter": "VigneshR, hannahsbirch", - "id": "proud-platypus", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Minnesota", - "time": "4:15-5:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", - "title": "Proud to be a Platypus: Finding Your Own Innovative Role in News", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Being a journalist is hard these days and awards aren't a bad thing. But data I've compiled shows that the best work of the year is often backloaded into November and December, when most contest deadlines come due. But this is also likely the least ideal time for big impactful work to come out as regular people and those with power to effectuate change leave work for the holidays. Let's have a discussion about how we can change that, to be able to fete our peers while also remaining true to our mission. ", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Stephen Stirling", - "facilitators_twitter": "sstirling", - "id": "changing-awards-culture", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Thomas Swain", - "time": "4:15-5:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", - "title": "Changing journalism's awards culture", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "Have you ever thought about starting your own news venture? Are you chomping at the bit to bring quality journalism to a community, region, or cause close to your heart? If so, come join us. We’re going to help you get a head start on your bootstrapping, entrepreneurial dreams!\n\nIn this session, you'll play the role of a startup team for an emerging news venture. We’ve got a playbook with the steps that will help you establish sustainable operations, and we’ll work through it together.", - "everyone": "", - "facilitators": "Adam Giorgi, Rebecca Quarls", - "facilitators_twitter": "adamgiorgi", - "id": "local-news-startups", - "length": "75 minutes", - "notepad": "y", - "room": "Boardroom (5th floor)", - "time": "4:15-5:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", - "title": "Steps to getting a local news startup off the ground", - "transcription": "" - }, - { - "day": "Friday", - "description": "", - "everyone": "y", - "facilitators": "", - "facilitators_twitter": "", - "id": "friday-closing", - "length": "", - "notepad": "", - "room": "Memorial", - "time": "5:30pm", - "timeblock": "friday-evening", - "title": "SRCCON Closing", - "transcription": "y" - } -] \ No newline at end of file + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Get your badges and grab some caffeine as you gear up for the first day of SRCCON! (We'll put out some awesome morning snacks a little later into our conference day.)", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-breakfast", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "8am", + "timeblock": "thursday-morning", + "title": "Registration + Coffee & Tea at SRCCON", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "We'll kick things off with a welcome, some scene-setting, and some suggestions for getting the most out of SRCCON.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-welcome", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "9am", + "timeblock": "thursday-morning", + "title": "Welcome to SRCCON", + "transcription": "y", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Sometimes the well of ideas runs dry and we find ourselves stuck in a creative rut. If we can't move past it, let's try thinking sideways. Drawing inspiration from Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, a card-based system that offers pithy prompts for creative thinking, we'll discuss ways to shift our perspective in the process of brainstorming, designing and problem-solving. Some of Schmidt and Eno's one-line strategies include:\n\n\"Not building a wall but making a brick.\"\n\"Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place.\"\n\"You can only make one dot at a time.\"\n\nAs a group, we'll look at projects that emerged from unconventional sources of inspiration, share our favorite methods of breaking creative block and then develop our own list of \"oblique strategies\" that we'll publish online after the session.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Katie Park, Alex Tatusian", + "facilitators_twitter": "katiepark", + "id": "creative-strategies", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "9:30-10:45am", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", + "title": '"Abandon normal instruments": Sideways strategies for defeating creative block', + "transcription": "y", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Your newsroom has a rigorous process for editing words and traditional reporting. How can data journalists ensure that we’re editing data analysis with the same rigor? How can we take lessons from research and other fields and apply them to a fast-paced newsroom? \n\nIn this session, we’ll talk about how newsrooms are already doing this work—and how we can up our game. What are some of the challenges in adding new steps to existing workflows? How can you do this work if you don’t have a dedicated data editor? And how do you get the rest of the newsroom on board? We’ll share among participants the successes and challenges we’ve had, and try to find the ideal data editing process together.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Hannah Recht, Kate Rabinowitz", + "facilitators_twitter": "hannah_recht, datakater", + "id": "editing-data", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "9:30-10:45am", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", + "title": "How to edit data as seriously as we edit words", + "transcription": "y", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Technology intersects with nearly every aspect of our lives, and based on the number of digital sabbath services and \"I'm leaving social media for good this time (probably!)\" posts that have been published, our relationship to technology feels out of control. \n\nBut our brains aren't what's broken, they're working exactly as they evolved to work. Technology has just evolved much, much faster. And that tech is affecting our emotional and physiological well being. Media companies and platforms have capitalized on our innate psychological and neurological vulnerabilities to make money and keep us hooked. But there have to be better ways to build community and share information on the web. Let's dig into the systemic issues (cough, capitalism) that have led to tech that makes us miserable and then design/brainstorm what humane platforms could look like. ", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Kaeti Hinck, Stacy-Marie Ishmael", + "facilitators_twitter": "kaeti, s_m_i", + "id": "ghosts-in-the-machine", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "9:30-10:45am", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", + "title": "Ghosts in the Machine: How technology is shaping our lives and how we can build a better way", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Writing good documentation is hard, so let’s write some together in a low-pressure environment! This session isn’t just about writing documentation to go with SRCCON; it’s an opportunity to learn how to improve documentation at your organization and perhaps take-away a prototype install of Library, too.\n\nWe’ll start by collaborating on successful approaches to writing and sharing documentation in a newsroom, then use Library to collect useful documentation for all SRCCON attendees.\n\nLibrary is an open-source documentation tool released by the New York Times in collaboration with Northwestern University’s Knight Lab earlier this year. Because every page in Library is a Google Doc, you already know how to use it!\n\nYou won’t need an online device to participate, but it will be helpful for part of the session when we collaborate on Google Docs.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Isaac White, Maxine Whitely, Umi Syam", + "facilitators_twitter": "TweetAtIsaac, maxine_whitely, umay", + "id": "document-library", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Minnesota", + "time": "9:30-10:45am", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", + "title": "Document this conference! An introduction to Library.", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": '"Parachute journalism" is the practice of national outlets or freelancers flying into local communities they''re not a part of to report a story, then leaving again. It''s a part of our journalistic economy, as the money and power in journalism is focused in just a few geographic locations--but it can also be damaging to local communities, and it can lead to misrepresentation, distrust and resentment. Often, national journalists appear in a community in times of trauma and elections, and report stories with insufficient context, while local journalists struggle to access equivalent resources for necessary ongoing reporting. This session will explore our collective experiences with parachute journalism as both insiders and outsiders to a community, in order to produce good ideas about how to do harm reduction, increase accountability, and shift power dynamics. We''ll ask: Are there situations where it''s better if this story just doesn''t get told? How do we evaluate that? What can national media outlets and freelancers do to connect and collaborate with local journalists and local communities? What are the ethics of accountable partnerships? In what ways do local and regional/national media needs differ, and how can journalists collaborate to produce stories that better address the needs of all involved? All of this will be driving at a larger question: What does justice and accountability look like in the practice of journalism? ', + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Lewis Raven Wallace", + "facilitators_twitter": "lewispants", + "id": "parachute-journalism", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "9:30-10:45am", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-1", + "title": "Parachute Journalism: Can outsiders report accountably on other people's communities?", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "News nerds came of age in newsrooms that were hostile to their efforts. But now, the geeks are running the show. There are few holdouts left. Winning was easy. Governing is harder.\n\nWhat should the agenda of the nerds be in newsrooms where they are finally winning territory and mindshare? How will we use our positions to further our agenda?", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Jeremy Bowers, Becca Aaronson", + "facilitators_twitter": "jeremybowers, becca_aa", + "id": "geeks-won-now-what", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "11:15am-12:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", + "title": "The Geeks Won: Now What?", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "We are all too aware that the 2020 election is coming up. But do our community members feel empowered by the coverage we’re producing? Unlikely. Typically it starts with the candidates and what they have to do to win, rather than the voters and what they need to participate. We should flip that. \n\nIf we let the needs of community members drive the design of our election coverage, it would look dramatically different – and be dramatically better for our democratic process and social cohesion, we think. Bonus: those community members will be pretty grateful to you for unsexy coverage like explaining what a circuit court judge does. At a time when we’re pivoting to reader revenue, this public service journalism model is not just good karma – it should be seen as mission critical. \n\nWe’ll explore the “jobs to be done” in election reporting, how to ask questions that will give you a deeper understanding of voters’ information needs, the tools at our disposal to do that, and the ways that newsrooms can ensure they have enough feedback from actual voters to resist the siren call of the latest campaign gaffe or poll results.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Ariel Zirulnick, Bridget Thoreson", + "facilitators_twitter": "azirulnick, bridgetthoreson", + "id": "people-polls-elections", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "11:15am-12:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", + "title": "Fix your feedback loop: Letting people, not polls, drive your election coverage", + "transcription": "y", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "The world of online advertising has been under a lot of fire. Online advertising has been used to target disenfranchised groups, those deemed manipulatable, and to push political disinformation. The economies of scale, having the many different types and origins of advertising, has made it even more difficult to prevent bad actors on different platforms. The question then arises, what makes an ethical ad? What can we do on our publications and platforms to help promote more ethical advertising? ", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Ian Carrico, Amanda Hicks", + "facilitators_twitter": "iamcarrico, amandahi", + "id": "ethical-advertising", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "11:15am-12:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", + "title": "Let's build some ethical advertising", + "transcription": "y", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "In recent years, some organizations have published their diversity reports to educate folks in the industry about their challenges with diversity and to indicate that they are taking newsroom diversity seriously. This has also led to a number of conversations about diversity committees at news organizations trying to figure out what their diversity report should cover and how they can convince management to publish effective indicators of diversity.\n\nIn this session we would like to facilitate a conversation around the topic of diversity reports. We will start with a quick survey of recent diversity reports published by prominent journalism outlets and then move to a discussion/group activity discussing the following topics:\n\n* Why is it beneficial for organizations and our industry in general\n* How should you convince your management to collect and publish diversity data publicly\n* What should be covered in the reports", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Moiz Syed, Disha Raychaudhuri", + "facilitators_twitter": "moizsyed, Disha_RC", + "id": "newsroom-diversity-reports", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "11:15am-12:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", + "title": "State of Newsroom Diversity Reports", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "It seems everyone is talking about ethics in technology these days. Examples abound of poor decisions leading to unintended harm, of planned exploitation and avoidance of consent, of prioritization of financial gain over literally everything else. What’s the ethically-minded technologist to do? This session will be an open, off the record conversation among designers, developers, and journalists about the things that keep us up at night: the ways our work can cause harm, the systems driving us to do the wrong thing, the incentives that make it hard to even know what’s right. We’ll work from a vantage point that assumes good intentions, recognizes that impacts matter more than plans, and acknowledges the impossibility of perfect solutions: no matter what we do, we are all complicit. But we are not alone, and we are not without the ability to effect change. ", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Mandy Brown", + "facilitators_twitter": "aworkinglibrary", + "id": "good-work-troubling-times", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Minnesota", + "time": "11:15am-12:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", + "title": "Staying with the trouble: Doing good work in terrible times", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Incidents and outages are a normal part of any complex system. In recent years The New York Times adopted a collaborative method for discussing these events called Learning Reviews. We'd like to give a brief introduction to Learning Reviews—where they originated, why they're called Learning Reviews, what they are—followed by a few exercises with the attendees. Some of these group exercises would focus on communicating the idea of complexity and how that impacts our ability to predict the future. In doing so, we'd also communicate how complex systems have a degree of impermanence and how this contributes to outages. This segues into the theme of the discussion, how do we look back on an event in a way that prioritizes learning more about our systems and less about finding fault with a human? We'll go over the importance of language and facilitation in this process.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Joe Hart, Vinessa Wan", + "facilitators_twitter": "vnessawithaneye", + "id": "engineering-beyond-blame", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "11:15am-12:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-am-2", + "title": "Engineering Beyond Blame", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-lunch", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "12:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", + "title": "Lunch at SRCCON", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Session rooms are available for informal get-togethers over lunch, so pick up some food and join fellow attendees to talk. If you have an idea for a lunch conversation, we'll have a signup board available in our common space throughout SRCCON.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-lunch-conversations", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "", + "time": "12:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-lunch", + "title": "Lunch conversations - sign up at SRCCON", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "The SRCCON Science Fair is an informal way for you to connect with journalism tools and resources you can use in your work back home. Explore demos, ask lots of questions, and share feedback with these seven awesome projects:\n\n**The Accountability Project** \n[Project info](https://www.publicaccountability.org/) \nThis project brings together national and state data from a variety of sources – including campaign finance, nonprofits and voter registration – to help journalists search across multiple datasets from one search. [Register for a free account here](https://www.publicaccountability.org/account/signup/?code=SRCCON).\n\n**Associated Press Data Distributions & Datakit** \n[Project info](https://www.ap.org/en-us/formats/data-journalism) \nThe Data Distributions program provides clean, documented, and analyzed data to help tell local stories on topics ranging from census tract-level life expectancy to segregation in local schools to farm subsidies offsetting the impacts of Chinese tariffs. Distributions are available to all AP members for a small annual fee and are available to non-AP members—and even research groups at times—through commercial arrangements. The AP will also provide a sneak peek into a data project management tool we’ll be fully open-sourcing in September: Datakit creates a templated project structure in either R or Python, syncs data to S3, and pushes code to Github or Gitlab.\n\n**The Coral Project** \n[Project info](https://coral.voxmedia.com) \nThe Coral Project brings journalists and the communities they serve closer together through open-source tools and strategies. Our goals are: to increase public trust in journalism, to improve the diversity of voices and experiences in reporting, to make journalism stronger by making it more relevant to people’s lives, and to create safer, more productive online dialog. Because journalism needs everyone. For SRCCON, we'll be showing an exclusive preview of v5 – our complete rewrite of the Coral code and UX – out later this year.\n\n**Big Local News** \nBig Local News collects local data to uncover regional or national patterns for accountability stories with big impact. We pursue hard-to-obtain data kept in disparate formats by multiple jurisdictions. Big Local News also works with newsrooms to archive their data. We are building a platform to help journalists collaborate and share data. It will be integrated with specialized tools and connect with the Stanford Digital Repository so data and methodologies can be archived for others to use and expand upon. \n\n**Immersive storytelling with AR/VR** \nImmersive storytelling is a way to engage readers in a story. Using VR, AR, and gaming technologies we will show you how we’ve used it at the Los Angeles Times and how you can bring it to your newsroom - even if you don’t know how to code.\n\n**Medill Local News Initiative** \n[Project info](https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu) \nWith local journalism in crisis, Northwestern University has assembled a team of experts in digital innovation, audience understanding and business strategy. The goal: reinvent the relationship between news organizations and audiences to elevate enterprises that empower citizens.\n\n**MuckRock Assignments** \n[Project info](https://www.muckrock.com/assignment/) \nWant to turn endless PDFs into beautiful spreadsheets? Looking for a new way to get your audience to help scale your reporting capacity? MuckRock's Assignments tool lets you crowdsource analysis of PDFs, social media posts, and other data types, while offering new ways to engage and follow up with your readers.\n\n**Workbench** \n[Project info](https://workbenchdata.com/) \nWorkbench brings all your data tools into one simple place, in your browser. It makes it easy to collect, scrape, transform and analyze data without code, automate and monitor tasks, and share reproducible step-by-step workflows along with dashboards and APIs.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-science-fair", + "length": "60 minutes", + "notepad": "", + "room": "", + "time": "1:45pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-science-fair", + "title": "SRCCON Science Fair!", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "There's a joke we often hear journalists make: Our job is to clearly communicate information to our audience, and yet we're terrible at communicating with each other in our newsrooms. That's partly because we don't use the right tools or frameworks to facilitate clear and consistent communication that leads to cultural change. In this session, we’ll hear what kinds of communication and culture problems you’ve identified in your newsrooms, dig into tools– like OKRs, team health checks and user manuals– that can provide a shared vocabulary in and across teams, and help you and your colleagues feel more heard and satisfied in your newsrooms, whether it’s a large organization like the BBC (where Eimi works!) or a startup like WhereBy.Us (where Anika most recently worked!).", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Anika Anand, Eimi Okuno", + "facilitators_twitter": "anikaanand00, emettely", + "id": "structured-communication", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "3-4:15pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "Structured communication: Tools you can use to change culture and help your team feel heard", + "transcription": "y", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "At SRCCON:WORK, I talked about re-building our newsroom org charts to reflect the work we’re doing today and to prepare us for where we’re going. Joined now with C&EN’s editorial director, Amanda Yarnell, we’ll show you how we built a product team and re-structured our newsroom around it in one year. \n\nIf you’re interested in building a newsroom-wide roadmap, streamlining and prioritizing newsroom ideas, creating and managing a sprint-based product team, and growing stakeholder alignment across business units, join us. In this session, we’ll share our blueprint, our successes, and our challenges, so you can do it faster. ", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Jessica Morrison, Amanda Yarnell", + "facilitators_twitter": "ihearttheroad, amandayarnell", + "id": "newsroom-reorg-product", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "3-4:15pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "How to re-org your newsroom around product without breaking it", + "transcription": "y", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "In this session, we’ll discuss ways to help folks from historically privileged backgrounds be better allies to their colleagues from minority and marginalized backgrounds. The goal is to advocate for fair, comprehensive and diverse journalism and a more inclusive newsroom culture. The method by which we get that done is up to us, but we will aim to create a community that continues beyond SRCCON.\n\nIt’s time for the people with privilege to do the hard work of making things right. This might be a messy and awkward process, but our work, our workplaces, and our lives will be better for it.\n\n**Who is this for:** \nAnyone in a position of privilege who wants to take a bigger role in making our industry more inclusive and diverse. Anyone from a historically marginalized background is welcome to support this effort by sharing their experiences and requests for new allies.\n\n**What this is not:** \nAn “ask me anything” session where journalists of color and from other marginalized backgrounds are put on the spot and expected to educate their peers and colleagues.\n\n**What you should expect:** \nTo listen to, share and develop approaches and strategies that can make a difference for a more inclusive newsroom and industry. This may be an uncomfortable discussion for some in the room. We ask that participants come ready to be vulnerable and prepared to be wrong about their assumptions. We hope to arm our allies by giving them the vocabulary and script to respond more fluently to everyday injustices and develop effective allyship. ", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Hannah Wise, Emma Carew Grovum", + "facilitators_twitter": "hannahjwise, Emmacarew", + "id": "media-diversity-allies", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "3-4:15pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "Calling All Media Diversity Avengers: Now’s the time to act.", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "The dream of the 90s is alive with static sites! The JAM stack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) is a new twist on an old idea. Making static webpages has many benefits for newsrooms in terms of cost and long term maintainability. In this session, we will go through the basics of the static site generation landscape and participants will deploy their own custom static site, like GeoCities never died but with a data-driven twist.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Carl Johnson", + "facilitators_twitter": "carlmjohnson", + "id": "data-driven-static-sites", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Minnesota", + "time": "3-4:15pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "Let's JAMstack! How to Make Data-driven Static Sites", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "This will be an interactive and honest conversation about how management can be improved in local newsrooms. We know that the industry has a tendency to promote non-transferable skill sets, and that there are dramatic industry disruptions that lead to chaotic situations for management. We’ll talk about how we can tackle those big issues through human resource development.\n\nThe program will involve large-group interaction, small-group discussion, one-on-one interactions, and brainstorming work with notecards, all designed to use our communication skills to solve problems. Most importantly, we’ll have interaction between traditional managers and worker-bee direct reports so we can better understand our counterparts and practice interacting with each other.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Erin Mansfield", + "facilitators_twitter": "_erinmansfield", + "id": "local-newsroom-management", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "3-4:15pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "Meeting management challenges in local newsrooms", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Many news organizations are actively thinking about how to integrate artificial intelligence into the practice of journalism, but it’s very early days. Meanwhile large multinational corporations are funding the major AI developments. However in response to a few very public failures of the technology, they’ve started publishing ethical frameworks that focus on social benefits and public safety. Given news organizations role in society, it’s an important time to understand this new technology and think critically about how to use it. Join us to evaluate the way large companies are starting to build ethical guardrails around the use of AI, and help us start drafting a set that’s unique to news.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Sarah Schmalbach, Ajay Chainani", + "facilitators_twitter": "schmalie, ajayjapan", + "id": "ai-eats-the-world", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Boardroom (5th floor)", + "time": "3-4:15pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-1", + "title": "What happens to journalism, when AI eats the world?", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Too often, tips and suggestions for email newsletters at newsrooms can take a “one size fits all” approach. We’ve seen that the way a newsletter is made at a newsroom can enormously vary based on the size, resources and purpose of any given newsroom. \n\nIn this session, we’ll create a card-based strategy game that will guide small groups of participants through the process of creating a new newsletter product that meets an outlet’s editorial and business outcomes. Groups will have to develop a strategy that meets specific goals and will have to overcome hurdles and challenges that we throw in their way. \n\nThroughout the simulation, we’ll present then guide the room through a series of discussion topics and exercises based around the key worksteams of an email newsletter at a newsroom: user research, content creation, workflows, acquiring new email readers, and converting readers to members or donors. ", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Emily Roseman, Joseph Lichterman", + "facilitators_twitter": "emilyroseman1, ylichterman", + "id": "newsletter-strategy", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "4:45-6pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "title": "Game of Newsletters: A song of inboxes and subject lines", + "transcription": "y", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Diversity initiatives are popping up in most companies these days. Newsrooms are talking about gender and race representation, re-examining how we cover stories and how we create space for employees of all genders and races. We laud ourselves for being aware and being inclusive. However, noticeably missing from the conversation, at least for those who identify as such, are people with disabilities. \n\nThe New York Times has employee lead initiatives to help correct that. From the tech task force that turned into a team designated with making our site more accessible, to the internal panel on employees with disabilities that turned into an employee resource group the disabled community and their allies at the times are standing up and taking space. \n\nDuring this session we will examine how the disability community is represented in newsrooms and institutions, discuss what has been done, and set a framework for how to take action now. We will work together to figure out what ally-ship looks like and what it means for diversity initiatives to include people with disabilities, and how they miss the mark when they don’t -- both for employees and our coverage. ", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Katherine McMahan", + "facilitators_twitter": "katieannmcmahan", + "id": "disabilities-in-the-newsroom", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "4:45-6pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "title": "Taking Up Space: Making Room for People with Disabilities at The Times", + "transcription": "y", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "A lot of data journalism takes place in front of a computer, but there is a lot to be gained by creating data together with your community. As part of a documentary project about a culturally diverse, low-income community, we recently invited residents to map their neighborhood — not online, but with paper and pens at in-person gatherings. We not only generated unique data, but also stories and context we never would have heard if we hadn’t met people where they lived. \n\nMore and more, journalists are experimenting with community engagement practices to accurately reflect and represent people’s lived experiences. We can do the same by taking an analog approach to creating data, including our community in the stories we tell about them. This helps verify the data by collecting it ourselves and having subject matter experts (your community!) vet it along the way. It also makes our reporting process more transparent and creates a group of people invested in our work. \n\nWe’ll share what we did and what we learned in our neighborhood mapping experiments, and invite a discussion on other ways to weave community engagement into data reporting. Our goal: draft a starter kit of ideas for doing data journalism IRL that you can take back to your newsroom.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Christopher Hagan, jesikah maria ross", + "facilitators_twitter": "chrishagan, jmr_MediaSpark", + "id": "making-data-with-community", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "4:45-6pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "title": "Spreadsheets IRL: The How and Why of Making Data With Your Community", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "We have an obligation to our teams and our companies to bring great new people into our work who can help push our teams forward, and yet interviewing candidates can feel extracurricular and rote. We need to discuss what we might be doing wrong, what the consequences are, and how to better focus our efforts when we are interviewing the people who want to work alongside us. \n\nLet’s talk about how to create safe and respectful spaces in a job interview. Let’s think deeply and critically about how we spend the thirty to sixty minutes we have in the company of potential colleagues to ensure we’re learning the right things, in the right ways, for the right reasons. Let’s discuss different approaches to advocating for a candidate you believe in, finding the person behind the candidate, questioning unconscious bias as you observe it, and teaching others how to do likewise.\n\nThis session is designed for both for seasoned interviewers and folks who have never done it before. Using actual interviews as a practice space and group discussion about foibles and tactics, we hope to walk away from this session with renewed focus and better, more respectful tools for getting to know a potential colleague and doing the hard work of bringing them into our newsrooms.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "David Yee", + "facilitators_twitter": "tangentialism", + "id": "interview-based-hiring", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Minnesota", + "time": "4:45-6pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "title": "Being in the room: the hard work of interview-based hiring", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "People are dying and it’s up to you to figure out why. You’ve gotten a tip that there is a cluster of people dying in a New York neighborhood. Join our collaborative investigative team to solve the mystery and enact change.\n\nA la a murder mystery party or the world’s shortest LARP, you’ll play a character—perhaps a journalist, data analyst, EMS first responder, public records officer, city council member, or community activist. Like any good mystery, you won’t be able to solve it alone.\n\nAt the end we’ll return to our everyday selves and discuss what we learned about working collaboratively, in and outside of journalism.\n\nWe’ve interviewed experts in collaborative journalism, and will share their tips for best practices (and pitfalls to avoid).", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Laura Laderman, Maya Miller", + "facilitators_twitter": "Liladerm, mayatmiller", + "id": "murder-mystery-collaborative-journalism", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "4:45-6pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "title": "Murder Mystery: Collaborative Journalism Edition", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "We really love journalism. We really love tech, and what it can do. We’re not so sure it’s sustainable for us in the long term or maybe even the short. We want to brainstorm ways to stay help connected and useful, even if /when that means running for the hills.\n\nHow can we support this necessity of a good world and not sacrifice ourselves.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Sydette Harry, B Cordelia Yu", + "facilitators_twitter": "Blackamazon, thebestsophist", + "id": "leaving-industry-not-journalism", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Boardroom (5th floor)", + "time": "4:45-6pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-pm-2", + "title": "Before I Let Go: Leaving The Business without Leaving the Work", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Dinner on Thursday night is provided at SRCCON—mmmm, tacos—and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-dinner", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "6pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening", + "title": "Dinner at SRCCON", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Board games, card games, story games—we’ll have plenty to choose from. Bring your own to share and play. Community member David Montgomery is coordinating game night this year, and he set up [this Etherpad to help people plan](https://etherpad.opennews.org/p/2019-game-night). If you can bring a favorite game, share it there; if you see someone bringing a game you want to play, let them know you're interested!", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "David Montgomery", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-evening-1-games", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "All evening", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", + "title": "Games Room", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "In the thick of relentless news cycles, it’s easy to forget to take the time to celebrate and acknowledge the truly great work that we are doing to serve our communities on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. During the lightning talks, we'll explore how can we celebrate in ways that are meaningful to us as individuals but also as a member of a team.\n\nWe'll hear from fellow attendees, in just five minutes each, about their personal and professional wins - both large and small - and how they have approached celebration. We want you to cheer them on as well as learn from them about what different kinds of celebration can look like. In the immortal words of Kool and the Gang, \"Bring your good times, and your laughter, too.\"", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Amy Kovac-Ashley", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-evening-1-lightning-talks", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "7pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", + "title": "Lightning talks: Celebrate good times, come on!", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Step away from the screens, pick up a needle and thread and transport yourself back to a simpler time. Learn basic embroidery stitches from the American Hannah Wise, the stitching maven behind @SewManyComments. You'll leave this session with a hand-stitched SRCCON logo and the know-how to join the fiber arts movement. ", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Hannah Wise", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-evening-1-embroidery", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "7pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", + "title": "Hobby workshop: Learn to embroider!", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Knitting is kind of like walking in that once you master going forward (knitting) and backward (purling), in that you can get a lot of places easily with those two moves alone. But, instead of starting a scarf you will never see the end of or a hat that will easily be the ugliest gift you ever give to another human, join me for the fine art of learning to knit on a washcloth! You will learn both knit and purl stitches and be sent home with a very simple pattern so you can easily finish the washcloth after SRCCON. (Also if you already know how to knit and want to bring something you are working on to show off and gain many compliments, please join us!)", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Emma Carew Grovum", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-evening-1-knitting", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "7pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", + "title": "Hobby workshop: Learn to knit!", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Dealing with student debt and being a journalist seems like a particular challenge in an industry that's shrinking, relying more on freelancers, and unequal pay. To those who are willing to talk about the burden of student debt, how do you manage it? We could also talk about the social stresses and perceptions of student debt, classism in the industry, etc. It's a polarizing issue that impacts people's day-to-day lives, and I hope it will be helpful to connect with others about what it's like to be living with student debt. ", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Helga Salinas", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-evening-1-student-debt", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "7pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", + "title": "Conversation: Dealing with student debt", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "In 1953, Elizabeth II was crowned the Queen of England - and it was the first ever pan-European live broadcast on television. That made a French TV executive think: What if we bring the whole continent together live, one night, over music? He came up with a plan and in 1956, only eleven years after WWII with its deadly conflicts and dozens of millions of victims, the very first Eurovision Song Contest took place in Lugano, Switzerland. It is running up to this day and with more than 150 million people watching on that one night in May, it is the biggest TV show in entertainment on the planet. Nowadays, more than 40 countries send theirs singers and songs. You may have seen some of it and remember the bearded act of Conchita Wurst or Finish metal band Lordi in their monster costumes, or you may now that this was how Abba first got started.\n\nBut apart from that, there is also a secret history of the show: Spanish dictator Franco bribed the Luxemburg jury in 1968 to win hosting rights for the upcoming year and in the early 2000s, countries like Estonia and Latvia made an expensive push to win the competition, so that they could present themselves as reliable international partners ready for the European Union, when hosting the following year, following their informal motto: \"Through EBU into EU\" (EBU being the European Broadcasting Union, the entity organizing Eurovision)\n\nI've been to the event live four times and I visited several of the national preselections. I love to convene people over the idea and discuss the feeling of connection that comes from being in a bar in which Albanian Post-Socialism Rockers jam with Icelandic Punkpop bands - and why I think it is one of the most charming ways to make Europe visible. So let's have a chat about this, I'm happy to introduce the concept to newbies and talk about why I think that entertainment is a great way to make people wonder about abstract issues they usually have a tougher time relating to.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Christian Fahrenbach", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-evening-1-eurovision", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "7pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", + "title": "Conversation: The Secret History of the Biggest Entertainment Show in the World: The Eurovision Song Contest", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "An unfacilitated space to hang out and chat with the people you meet during SRCCON.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-evening-2-memorial", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "7pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-1", + "title": "Open Conversation Area", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Board games, card games, story games—we’ll have plenty to choose from. Bring your own to share and play. Community member David Montgomery is coordinating game night this year, and he set up [this Etherpad to help people plan](https://etherpad.opennews.org/p/2019-game-night). If you can bring a favorite game, share it there; if you see someone bringing a game you want to play, let them know you're interested!", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "David Montgomery", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-evening-2-games", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "All evening", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", + "title": "Games Room", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Take a walk through the University of Minnesota campus to the Mississippi River gorge, a U.S. National Park nestled in the heart of the city. Join Will Lager, of Minnesota Public Radio News, to learn a bit about the history of the region, the Mississippi River, St. Anthony Falls (The reason Minneapolis is where it is) and the people who came before the city. We will stay on paved trails and sidewalks, but comfortable walking shoes are suggested. The walk will be around 2.5 miles. We will depart from the main hall.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Will Lager", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-evening-2-walking-tour", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "8pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", + "title": "Mississippi Gorge Walking Tour", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "After dinner on Thursday, let's get a group together for a short tour of the nearby West River Parkway Trail. We'll roll about 5 miles at a leisurely pace, stopping to see the natural, industrial and cultural sights along the Mississippi River near downtown Minneapolis. There's a niceride bikeshare dock right outside the conference; day passes are $6.\nhttps://www.traillink.com/trail/west-river-parkway-trail-/\nhttps://www.niceridemn.com/", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Matt Kiefer", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-evening-2-bikes", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "8pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", + "title": "Let's ride bikes!", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "How has science fiction helped you understand the world? Yourself? Justice? Let’s talk about the role of SF, and how it’s taught us to be better makers, teammates and people. **Bring a book to swap!**", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Brian Boyer, Jayme Fraser", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-evening-2-sci-fi", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "8pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", + "title": "Conversation: Things the future taught us + sci-fi book share", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "SRCCON can be a chance to connect with your community, or even find one for the first time. If you're part of a small team, or work as the only coder in your newsroom, you're not alone! The Lonely Coders Club is a network for folks in journalism and tech who don't have a ton of support (technical or otherwise) inside their own organizations. Come chat about what _you're_ working on, and how we can all have each other's backs.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Alexandra Kanik, Natasha Khan, Erin Mansfield", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-evening-2-lonely-coders-meetup", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "8pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", + "title": "Lonely coders / local coders meetup", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "SRCCON can be a chance to connect with your community, or even find one for the first time. This is an informal space for journalists of color to meet up, catch up, and build a stronger network of support inside of journalism and tech. Come for the conversations, and make plans about what comes next—whether that's later Thursday night or looking down the road.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "Moiz Syed, Disha Raychaudhuri", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-evening-2-joc-meetup", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "8pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", + "title": "Journalists of color meetup", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "An unfacilitated space to hang out and chat with the people you meet during SRCCON.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-evening-2-memorial-2", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "8pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-2", + "title": "Open Conversation Area", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Thursday", + "description": "Our evening program has local tours, lightning talks, games, hobby workshops, and hosted conversations—stick around, have fun, and get to know the folks you meet at SRCCON! Activities are posted on the schedule, and we'll be here until 9:30 with plenty of space to hang out and keep talking.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "thursday-evening-program", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "", + "time": "7-9:30pm", + "timeblock": "thursday-evening-3", + "title": "Thursday Night at SRCCON", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Ease into the second morning at SRCCON with coffee, tea, and conversations before the sessions get started.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "friday-breakfast", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "9am", + "timeblock": "friday-morning", + "title": "Coffee & Tea at SRCCON", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "friday-welcome", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "9:30am", + "timeblock": "friday-morning", + "title": "SRCCON morning welcome", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Conferences may be educational and inspirational for you, but also expanding value to your team and organization should be at the top of your mind. Having a process to help in preparing, attending, and post-event knowledge sharing can help focus your attention to maximize the time you spend at conferences. In this session, we will define the common types of conference attendees and map to activities before, during, and after conferences to provide a solid framework for making conferences a must-fund part of your team’s budget. If you’ve ever come back from an event inspired and excited, but unsure how to take the next step, this session is for you. ", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Emma Carew Grovum, Dave Stanton", + "facilitators_twitter": "Emmacarew, gotoplanb", + "id": "events-teaching-toolkit", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "10-11:15am", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "Bang for your buck: how to help your newsroom get the most out of SRCCON (or any journalism event)", + "transcription": "y", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Over the past few decades, newsroom technologists have pushed the field of journalism forward in countless ways. As we approach a new decade, and arguably a new era of digital journalism, how must newsroom technologists evolve to meet new needs? And how do we center technology in a newsroom while also fixing the problems news organizations have long had regarding diversity, representing their communities, speaking to their audiences, etc.?\n\nIn this session, we will start with a set of hypotheses to seed discussion.\n\nFor journalism to succeed in the next decade:\n- Newsroom technologists must have real power in their organizations.\n- Experimentation and product development must be central to how a newsroom operates.\n- News organizations must be radically inclusive of their communities.\n- Cultivating positive culture and interpersonal relationships is key to developing sustainable newsrooms.\n\nGiven these hypotheses, what skills do we need to grow in newsroom technologists? What must we think about more deeply in our daily work? What tools do we need to develop? How must this community evolve? Together, let’s brainstorm these questions and leave with ideas to explore and deepen newsroom technology and culture beyond SRCCON.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Tyler Fisher, Brittany Mayes", + "facilitators_twitter": "tylrfishr, BritRenee_", + "id": "next-phase-news-nerds", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "10-11:15am", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "Designing the next phase for newsroom technologists", + "transcription": "y", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "It’s often assumed there’s a difference between being part of an innovation team and working a beat in a traditional newsroom setting. There is much that is transferable between the two jobs. This session would explore similarities between two seemingly different functions in the modern newsroom and try to answer the following questions: How do you bring the level of exploration and experimentation to your beat? What lessons might folks with a product manager/design background be able to share with fellow journalists to make the return easier?", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "André Natta", + "facilitators_twitter": "acnatta", + "id": "beat-as-product", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "10-11:15am", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "Beat as a product: Lessons from product innovation for the newsroom", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "With more than 200 candidates on the ballot for dozens of local offices, small newsrooms faced the daunting challenge of effectively covering an historic municipal election in Chicago earlier this year. Instead of competing for eyeballs or scoops, 10 organizations came together to build Chi.Vote, a one-stop shop election guide. We learned a lot about what it takes to make collaborations work, how to build on each other’s strengths, overcome challenges and address common pain points.\n\nIn this session, we’ll brainstorm how to break the mold of election coverage and give voters what they actually need to get to the polls. You'll talk through fostering effective collaboration in your newsroom and in your market. Bring your ideas and be prepared to develop collaborative election coverage strategies.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Matt Kiefer, Asraa Mustufa", + "facilitators_twitter": "matt_kiefer, asraareports", + "id": "lessons-collaboration-election-coverage", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Minnesota", + "time": "10-11:15am", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "Don't compete, collaborate: Lessons learned from covering the 2019 Chicago municipal elections", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Let's work together to build a membership model that is inclusive (meaning all the things you think that means and also accounts for things like skills as an entry point). Membership should be more than a monetary transaction and early access to Wait Wait tickets. It should be a gateway to the communities we serve. \n\nImportant: There will be LEGO’s in this session!", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Candice Fortman, Simon Galperin", + "facilitators_twitter": "cande313, thensim0nsaid", + "id": "membership-privileges", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "10-11:15am", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "Membership Has its Privileges (and They Are Not Just for the Privileged)", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Let's enter the Data Team Time Machine and go back to our old graphics and long-ago code. Even the biggest superstars have a first project or an outdated framework that seems quaint now. In this session, we'll unearth some ancient work and talk about how we'd approach it differently with our current-day toolbox, whether that's refactoring some code, building with some modern-day software or scrapping it and starting again. Come to this session if you want to feel better about how far you've come and if you want some inspiration to look at your projects in a new light.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Erin Petenko, Yan Wu", + "facilitators_twitter": "EPetenko, codingyan", + "id": "if-i-knew-then", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Boardroom (5th floor)", + "time": "10-11:15am", + "timeblock": "friday-am-1", + "title": "If I knew then what I know now", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "The 2020 census is a year away, but chances are you’ve already heard about it. The census is making headlines because several states are suing the Trump administration over its plans to include a citizenship question. But much of the news glosses over why the census is important and how it affects everyone’s lives. Congressional representation is at stake, along with $800 billion in federal funds that will get disbursed for state, county, and community programs over the next decade.\n\nWhen KPCC conducted human-centered design research into the census and the opportunities for public service journalism, one finding stood out: We can’t assume educated news consumers know the stakes or the mechanics of the census. There was a very low level of census knowledge among the people we interviewed, including current NPR listeners. How can we address this knowledge gap? We have some ideas. Let's talk. ", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Ashley Alvarado, Megan Garvey, Dana Amihere", + "facilitators_twitter": "ashleyalvarado, garveymcvg, write_this_way", + "id": "census-coverage-playbook", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "11:45am-1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-2", + "title": "A playbook for reporters interested in reaching people at risk of being undercounted", + "transcription": "y", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "In a post-Gamergate world, how should we think about personal data in our reporting and our research? What responsibilities do we have to the privacy of the communities we report on? While many journalists have [struggled with this question](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T71OE4fm4ns0ugEOmKOY4xF4H9ikbebmikv96sgi16A/edit), few newsrooms have an explicit ethics policy on how they retain, release, and redact personally-identifiable information. Let's change that, by drafting a sample PII ethics policy that can be adopted by organizations both large and small.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Thomas Wilburn, Kelly Chen", + "facilitators_twitter": "thomaswilburn, chenkx", + "id": "ethics-data-stories", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "11:45am-1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-2", + "title": "The Scramble Suit: Creating harm prevention guidelines for newsroom data", + "transcription": "y", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Teaching data journalism in newsrooms and at universities has forced us to come up with creative techniques. We wrote The SQL Song to help one group of boot camp attendees understand the order of commands. In an attempt to help students fine-tune their programs, we did a game show called Query Cash. To make string functions make more sense, we’ve created silly, but useful performances. To make this session interactive, we propose inviting attendees to bring their ideas. We also will pose some problems and have teams work out creative solutions. ", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Jennifer LaFleur, Aaron Kessler, Eric Sagara", + "facilitators_twitter": "j_la28, akesslerdc", + "id": "creative-teaching", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "11:45am-1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-2", + "title": "Creative ways to teach complex issues", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "We often come across percentages in journalism, simple numbers that convey a powerful amount of information. But a percentage can obscure crucial information. If one ZIP code has 30 homeless individuals out of 100, and another has 30,000 homeless out of 100,000, the percentages indicates similarity, but the two geographies will have vastly different times dealing with the homeless population. When looking at a list of percentages, we should endeavor to find those that are distinct. Tools from statistical theory can help us tease out what's unusual and what isn't. It doesn't require much complicated math, just a little algebra.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Ryan Menezes, Amelia McNamara", + "facilitators_twitter": "ryanvmenezes, AmeliaMN", + "id": "rethinking-percentages", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Minnesota", + "time": "11:45am-1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-2", + "title": "We should rethink the way we think about percentages", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "While journalists talk a lot about having an impact, we're not as forthcoming on how we can be more deliberate and active in informing structural change in our communities. Our work is often geared to spark surface-level outcomes (a law was passed, an official was held accountable, etc.), but even when media organizations are equipped to do deeper investigative work, they often don’t invest in longer-term strategies that can illuminate pathways for citizens to create more equitable, healthy systems.\n\nUsing a practice called systems thinking – a holistic approach to grappling with complex issues – journalists can develop more collaborative frameworks that help people build power and resiliency to address some of our most deeply rooted problems. Through the lens of systems thinking, we'll open a discussion about some of the big ideas and questions that a change-oriented approach holds for journalists: What new roles can journalists play to help evaluate and facilitate opportunities for social change? How do we negotiate traditional journalistic principles and standards while working to actively dismantle oppressive systems? How can we better communicate and act on our values?\n\nWe'll offer ideas from the systems thinking playbook, discuss examples of journalists who are actively rooting their practice in systems change and lead a visioning exercise to imagine new possibilities.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Cole Goins, Kayla Christopherson", + "facilitators_twitter": "colegoins, KaylaChristoph", + "id": "catalysts-for-change", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "11:45am-1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-2", + "title": "How can newsrooms be more active catalysts for change?", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "We don't talk about it a lot in the newsroom, the fact that we see and hear things all the time in our jobs that likely affect us in ways it's hard to describe to someone else. One of the first roles for most reporters and photographers is covering breaking news - chasing the police scanner from one traumatic event to the next. Our newsroom might have to cover a traumatic event on a larger scale - a mass shooting, a devastating brush fire, hurricane or tornado. We take care to tell the stories of those affected, to make sure their voices and their grief are heard. But we also need to take care of ourselves and our colleagues in these moments. What should you be looking for to make sure you're protected and feel empowered to speak up for yourself when you don't feel comfortable or need help? What are some things you could do if you are the editor to take care of your staff? What types of services could news organizations offer that would help in these situations?", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Kristyn Wellesley", + "facilitators_twitter": "kriswellesley", + "id": "self-care-in-newsrooms", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Boardroom (5th floor)", + "time": "11:45am-1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-am-2", + "title": "Take care: The Importance of Self-Care in the Newsroom", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Let's eat together as a group. Meals are provided when you attend SRCCON, and our local caterer will have tasty options for all dietary needs.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "friday-lunch", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-lunch", + "title": "Lunch at SRCCON", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Session rooms are available for informal get-togethers over lunch, so pick up some food and join fellow attendees to talk. If you have an idea for a lunch conversation, we'll have a signup board available in our common space throughout SRCCON.", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "friday-lunch-conversations", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "", + "time": "1pm", + "timeblock": "friday-lunch", + "title": "Lunch conversations - sign up at SRCCON", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Many of us are overworked, lonely coders. How do we accomplish every day editorial projects and also dedicated time to learning new technologies and documenting workflows that we spend so much time implementing and testing? With all this newfangled tech, what’s noise and what’s signal?\n\nLet's talk about devising coping and filtering mechanisms for the onslaught of newness so we can all actually benefit from it.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Alexandra Kanik, Natasha Vicens", + "facilitators_twitter": "act_rational, khantasha", + "id": "adopting-new-tech", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "2:30-3:45pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "Noise & Signal: Knowing when to adopt new tech, and when to ignore it", + "transcription": "y", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "How would we do journalism differently if we were to think about impact — real-world change — at the brainstorming stage, before we started to write or shoot? If we knew something needed to happen to make things better, could we identify a few levers to pull that’d make that something more likely? Would we frame the story differently? Share the data openly? Talk to different sources? And how do we do all of this without going too far, without crossing into advocacy journalism? Now more than ever, with more nonprofit newsrooms forming, more for-profit newsrooms turning to consumer revenue (on the sales pitch that journalism matters) and trust at a crisis point, we need to measure and show why our work matters. This session will cover published examples and studies but is meant to be a discussion about what we can do — and what’s going too far — to make a difference. We might also, using design thinking strategies, prototype a project designed for impact.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Anjanette Delgado, Jun-Kai Teoh", + "facilitators_twitter": "anjdelgado, jkteoh", + "id": "designing-stories-impact", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "2:30-3:45pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "Why it matters — Designing stories for impact", + "transcription": "y", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "In newsrooms, as in other workplaces, most are given power leadership through title and job description. But many of us operate in spaces where there is no one above you who can edit you. Let's explore how to lead your newsroom without the title and exert power over the things you care deeply about. And let's explore the ways you can acquire power by playing within the system.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Steven Rich, Shannan Bowen", + "facilitators_twitter": "dataeditor, shanbow", + "id": "lead-without-power", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "2:30-3:45pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "How to lead without power", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "There are many resources out there for managers leading remote teams. Similarly, there are plenty of resources for the people on those teams to work, communicate and collaborate effectively. There are also plenty of arguments that have been made for how remote work improves employee effectiveness and satisfaction, why it has economic benefits for employers, and on and on. \n\nAnd yet, national news organizations concentrate their staff in the most expensive cities in the country. Let's try to figure out why that is and help make the case for supporting a more remote-friendly workforce.\n\nIn this session we'll try to come up with as many of the common objections raised by hiring managers when they insist that a given position be based in a particular location and then come up with a playbook of effective arguments to overcome those objections.\n\nAdditionally, we'll come up with some high level talking points regarding how supporting remote work can improve the fundamental economics of journalism while improving the lives of employees and the communities they serve.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Adam Schweigert, Alison Jones", + "facilitators_twitter": "aschweig", + "id": "case-for-remote-work", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Minnesota", + "time": "2:30-3:45pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "Making The Case For Remote Work", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Screenwriters use many techniques to distribute information throughout a film: building context to create goals and desires, withholding knowledge to create intrigue, planting clues to create suspense, and revealing discoveries to create surprise. By establishing rhythms of expectation, anticipation, disappointment, and fulfillment, a well-written screenplay keeps us captivated as it directs us through all the plot points and to the heart of the story.\n\nData journalism shares a similar goal. Are there lessons from screenwriting we can use to write engaging, data-driven stories, so we don’t end up with an info dump? Let’s find out together.\n\nIn this session, we’ll participate in a writers’ room to discuss how screenwriters use different strategies to jam-pack information into scenes while building a narrative and keeping pace. Then we’ll try out different screenwriting approaches to see how we can best break down complex data sets in our reporting, guide readers to the story, and keep their attention. Wipe down the whiteboards, grab some Post-its, and let’s break some stories!", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Phi Do", + "facilitators_twitter": "phihado", + "id": "learning-from-screenwriting", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "2:30-3:45pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "Fade In: What Data Journalism Can Learn from Screenwriting", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "We've all had the experience of digging into new data for the first time, and wondering how many stories we could have reported if we'd only known about that dataset sooner. In this training, we'll talk about getting the most out of a handful of free tools that can help you find new story ideas, visualization projects, and opportunities for data analysis in your newsroom:\n\n* Google Dataset Search: a search engine for researchers, scientists, and data journalists launched just last year\n* Google Trends: a tool for comparing the popularity of search queries over time\n* Google Public Data Explorer: raw data from U.S., international, and academic organizations\n\nThis is a hands-on workshop, so bring your laptop!", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Mike Reilley", + "facilitators_twitter": "journtoolbox", + "id": "training-data-sources", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Boardroom (5th floor)", + "time": "2:30-3:45pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-1", + "title": "Training: Finding new data sources with search and exploration tools", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Most newsrooms need their CMS to do the same basic things, but there are so many ways to do it. Let’s see what it looks like to publish a news story in a lineup of different CMSes. To show how different newsrooms accomplish the same tasks, a lineup of people involved in developing CMSes will demo their favorite CMS features, including how to write, edit and publish a news story, rank it on a homepage and promote it to an audience.\n\nThe CMSes to be demo-ed will be:\n\n* The New York Times's Scoop\n* Washington Post's Arc\n* Vox's Chorus\n* Condé Nast's Copilot\n* Industry Dive's Divesite", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Albert Sun", + "facilitators_twitter": "albertsun", + "id": "cms-demos", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Johnson", + "time": "4:15-5:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", + "title": "CMS Demos: Approaches to Helping Our Newsrooms Do Their Best Work", + "transcription": "y", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "It's been amazing to see how the news nerd community has grown and evolved over the decades, and as we've gotten to meet in person over the last 5 years of SRCCONs. We have data about who is part of the news nerd community, and through various Slacks and events like this one, we've seen how members of this community support and care for one another. Let's take a moment to reflect on this community (with the support of an outside facilitator): who is a part of this community? Who is not (or is not yet) included? What are our responsibilities to each other? What does our collective future hold? We'll explore what we need to create that future, together.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Erika Owens, Brittany Campese", + "facilitators_twitter": "erika_owens", + "id": "how-are-we-in-community", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Ski-U-Mah", + "time": "4:15-5:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", + "title": "How are we in community together?", + "transcription": "y", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Developing sources is standard practice, but what about developing collaborators? Community members have so much more to offer than choice quotes and timely expertise. What if we developed the capacity of our audience and created ways for them to participate by pitching stories, designing distribution strategies, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating the news?\n\nLet’s identify the resources that exist among our audience & within our communities, and the possibilities to invest in those resources so that the community invests in our journalism.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Madeleine Bair, Cirien Saadeh", + "facilitators_twitter": "madbair, cmiriam", + "id": "expertise-outside-newsroom", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Heritage", + "time": "4:15-5:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", + "title": "Building capacity, impact, and trust by tapping into expertise outside the newsroom", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "One of the most frequently cited reasons (https://medium.com/jsk-class-of-2018/news-nerd-salaries-2017-2c83466b994e) journalists in digital roles leave their jobs is lack of promotion and career advancement opportunities. At the same time, journalists with a nontraditional mix of skills, who sit at the intersection of roles, departments or teams — we call them platypuses — are proving to be pivotal to the future of news. So how can newsrooms use the people they have to push their digital initiatives forward? \n\nThis session brings together digital journalists and managers to discuss career growth within the newsroom, especially for people with a nontraditional blend of skills. A lot of growth in digital careers is uncharted territory, but through our empathy interviews we will bring together tips and frameworks for how digital journalists can fit into forward-thinking newsrooms.\n\nWe’ll share success stories and lessons learned, and we’ll workshop tactics that could work in participants’ newsrooms. This session is meant to be a launchpad for conversations and plans to better empower and grow newsroom digital talent — and not lose them to other newsrooms and industries.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Vignesh Ramachandran, Hannah Birch", + "facilitators_twitter": "VigneshR, hannahsbirch", + "id": "proud-platypus", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Minnesota", + "time": "4:15-5:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", + "title": "Proud to be a Platypus: Finding Your Own Innovative Role in News", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Being a journalist is hard these days and awards aren't a bad thing. But data I've compiled shows that the best work of the year is often backloaded into November and December, when most contest deadlines come due. But this is also likely the least ideal time for big impactful work to come out as regular people and those with power to effectuate change leave work for the holidays. Let's have a discussion about how we can change that, to be able to fete our peers while also remaining true to our mission. ", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Stephen Stirling", + "facilitators_twitter": "sstirling", + "id": "changing-awards-culture", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Thomas Swain", + "time": "4:15-5:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", + "title": "Changing journalism's awards culture", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "Have you ever thought about starting your own news venture? Are you chomping at the bit to bring quality journalism to a community, region, or cause close to your heart? If so, come join us. We’re going to help you get a head start on your bootstrapping, entrepreneurial dreams!\n\nIn this session, you'll play the role of a startup team for an emerging news venture. We’ve got a playbook with the steps that will help you establish sustainable operations, and we’ll work through it together.", + "everyone": "", + "facilitators": "Adam Giorgi, Rebecca Quarls", + "facilitators_twitter": "adamgiorgi", + "id": "local-news-startups", + "length": "75 minutes", + "notepad": "y", + "room": "Boardroom (5th floor)", + "time": "4:15-5:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-pm-2", + "title": "Steps to getting a local news startup off the ground", + "transcription": "", + }, + { + "day": "Friday", + "description": "", + "everyone": "y", + "facilitators": "", + "facilitators_twitter": "", + "id": "friday-closing", + "length": "", + "notepad": "", + "room": "Memorial", + "time": "5:30pm", + "timeblock": "friday-evening", + "title": "SRCCON Closing", + "transcription": "y", + }, +] diff --git a/_data/sessions.yml b/_data/sessions.yml index d682de59..fb535362 100644 --- a/_data/sessions.yml +++ b/_data/sessions.yml @@ -1,452 +1,452 @@ -[ - { - "cofacilitator": "Alex Tatusian", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Sometimes the well of ideas runs dry and we find ourselves stuck in a creative rut. If we can't move past it, let's try thinking sideways. Drawing inspiration from Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, a card-based system that offers pithy prompts for creative thinking, we'll discuss ways to shift our perspective in the process of brainstorming, designing and problem-solving. Some of Schmidt and Eno's one-line strategies include:\n\n\"Not building a wall but making a brick.\"\n\"Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place.\"\n\"You can only make one dot at a time.\"\n\nAs a group, we'll look at projects that emerged from unconventional sources of inspiration, share our favorite methods of breaking creative block and then develop our own list of \"oblique strategies\" that we'll publish online after the session.", - "facilitator": "Katie Park", - "facilitator_twitter": "katiepark", - "id": 2355668, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T19:17:08.293Z", - "title": "\"Abandon normal instruments\": Sideways strategies for defeating creative block" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Megan Garvey", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "garveymcvg", - "description": "The 2020 census is a year away, but chances are you’ve already heard about it. The census is making headlines because several states are suing the Trump administration over its plans to include a citizenship question. But much of the news glosses over why the census is important and how it affects everyone’s lives. Congressional representation is at stake, along with $800 billion in federal funds that will get disbursed for state, county, and community programs over the next decade.\n\nWhen KPCC conducted human-centered design research into the census and the opportunities for public service journalism, one finding stood out: We can’t assume educated news consumers know the stakes or the mechanics of the census. There was a very low level of census knowledge among the people we interviewed, including current NPR listeners. How can we address this knowledge gap? We have some ideas. Let's talk.", - "facilitator": "Ashley Alvarado", - "facilitator_twitter": "ashleyalvarado", - "id": 2338108, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-10T20:34:54.842Z", - "title": "A playbook for reporters interested in reaching people at risk of being undercounted" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Kelly Chen", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "chenkx", - "description": "In a post-Gamergate world, how should we think about personal data in our reporting and our research? What responsibilities do we have to the privacy of the communities we report on? While many journalists have [struggled with this question](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T71OE4fm4ns0ugEOmKOY4xF4H9ikbebmikv96sgi16A/edit), few newsrooms have an explicit ethics policy on how they retain, release, and redact personally-identifiable information. Let's change that, by drafting a sample PII ethics policy that can be adopted by organizations both large and small.", - "facilitator": "Thomas Wilburn", - "facilitator_twitter": "thomaswilburn", - "id": 2351440, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-15T17:27:09.359Z", - "title": "Assembling the Scramble Suit" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Dave Stanton", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "gotoplanb", - "description": "Conferences may be educational and inspirational for you, but also expanding value to your team and organization should be at the top of your mind. Having a process to help in preparing, attending, and post-event knowledge sharing can help focus your attention to maximize the time you spend at conferences. In this session, we will define the common types of conference attendees and map to activities before, during, and after conferences to provide a solid framework for making conferences a must-fund part of your team’s budget. If you’ve ever come back from an event inspired and excited, but unsure how to take the next step, this session is for you.", - "facilitator": "Emma Carew Grovum", - "facilitator_twitter": "Emmacarew", - "id": 2353845, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T19:25:31.582Z", - "title": "Bang for your buck: how to help your newsroom get the most out of SRCCON (or any journalism event)" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "It’s often assumed there’s a difference between being part of an innovation team and working a beat in a traditional newsroom setting. There is much that is transferable between the two jobs. This session would explore similarities between two seemingly different functions in the modern newsroom and try to answer the following questions: How do you bring the level of exploration and experimentation to your beat? What lessons might folks with a product manager/design background be able to share with fellow journalists to make the return easier?", - "facilitator": "André Natta", - "facilitator_twitter": "acnatta", - "id": 2351499, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:31:23.131Z", - "title": "Beat as a product: Lessons from product innovation for the newsroom" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "B Cordelia Yu", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "thebestsophist", - "description": "We really love journalism. We really love tech, and what it can do. We’re not so sure it’s sustainable for us in the long term or maybe even the short. We want to brainstorm ways to stay help connected and useful, even if/when that means running for the hills.\n\nHow can we support this necessity of a good world and not sacrifice ourselves.", - "facilitator": "Sydette Harry", - "facilitator_twitter": "Blackamazon", - "id": 2353723, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T14:04:01.964Z", - "title": "Before I Let Go: Leaving The Business without Leaving the Work" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "We have an obligation to our teams and our companies to bring great new people into our work who can help push our teams forward, and yet interviewing candidates can feel extracurricular and rote. We need to discuss what we might be doing wrong, what the consequences are, and how to better focus our efforts when we are interviewing the people who want to work alongside us. \n\nLet’s talk about how to create safe and respectful spaces in a job interview. Let’s think deeply and critically about how we spend the thirty to sixty minutes we have in the company of potential colleagues to ensure we’re learning the right things, in the right ways, for the right reasons. Let’s discuss different approaches to advocating for a candidate you believe in, finding the person behind the candidate, questioning unconscious bias as you observe it, and teaching others how to do likewise.\n\nThis session is designed for both for seasoned interviewers and folks who have never done it before. Using actual interviews as a practice space and group discussion about foibles and tactics, we hope to walk away from this session with renewed focus and better, more respectful tools for getting to know a potential colleague and doing the hard work of bringing them into our newsrooms.", - "facilitator": "David Yee", - "facilitator_twitter": "tangentialism", - "id": 2355903, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T00:25:02.103Z", - "title": "Being in the room: the hard work of interview-based hiring" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Cirien Saadeh", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "cmiriam", - "description": "Developing sources is standard practice, but what about developing collaborators? Community members have so much more to offer than choice quotes and timely expertise. What if we developed the capacity of our audience to pitch stories, design distribution strategies, report, analyze, and disseminate the news?\n\nLet’s flesh out the resources that exist among our audience & within our communities, and the possibilities to invest in those resources so that the community invests in our journalism.", - "facilitator": "Madeleine Bair", - "facilitator_twitter": "madbair", - "id": 2355594, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-29T17:43:37.160Z", - "title": "Building newsroom capacity by tapping into expertise outside the newsroom" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Emma Carew Grovum", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "Emmacarew", - "description": "In this session, we’ll collaboratively create ways to help folks from historically privileged backgrounds be better allies to their colleagues from minority and marginalized backgrounds. The goal is to advocate for fair and comprehensive coverage and a more inclusive newsroom culture. The method by which we get that done is up to us, but will aim to result in a community that continues beyond SRCCON.\n\nIt’s time for the people with privilege to do the hard work of making things right. This might be a messy and awkward process, but our work, our workplaces and our lives will be better for it.", - "facilitator": "Hannah Wise", - "facilitator_twitter": "hannahjwise", - "id": 2355291, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T14:21:32.860Z", - "title": "Calling All Media Diversity Avengers: Now’s the time to act." - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Being a journalist is hard these days and awards aren't a bad thing. But data I've compiled shows that the best work of the year is often backloaded into November and December, when most contest deadlines come due. But this is also likely the least ideal time for big impactful work to come out as regular people and those with power to effectuate change leave work for the holidays. Let's have a discussion about how we can change that, to be able to fete our peers while also remaining true to our mission.", - "facilitator": "Stephen Stirling", - "facilitator_twitter": "sstirling", - "id": 2345683, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-12T18:13:02.088Z", - "title": "Changing journalism's awards culture" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "Teaching data journalism in newsrooms and at universities has forced us to come up with creative techniques. We wrote The SQL Song to help one group of boot camp attendees understand the order of commands. In an attempt to help students fine-tune their programs, we did a game show called Query Cash. To make string functions make more sense, we’ve created silly, but useful performances. To make this session interactive, we propose inviting attendees to bring their ideas. We also will pose some problems and have teams work out creative solutions.", - "facilitator": "Jennifer LaFleur", - "facilitator_twitter": "j_la28", - "id": 2355574, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T16:28:15.813Z", - "title": "Creative ways to teach complex issues" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Brittany Mayes", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "BritRenee_", - "description": "Over the past few decades, newsroom technologists have pushed the field of journalism forward in countless ways. As we approach a new decade, and arguably a new era of digital journalism, how must newsroom technologists evolve to meet new needs? And how do we center technology in a newsroom while also fixing the problems news organizations have long had regarding diversity, representing their communities, speaking to their audiences, etc.?\n\nIn this session, we will start with a set of hypotheses to seed discussion.\n\nFor journalism to succeed in the next decade:\n- Newsroom technologists must have real power in their organizations.\n- Experimentation and product development must be central to how a newsroom operates.\n- News organizations must be radically inclusive of their communities.\n- Cultivating positive culture and interpersonal relationships is key to developing sustainable newsrooms.\n\nGiven these hypotheses, what skills do we need to grow in newsroom technologists? What must we think about more deeply in our daily work? What tools do we need to develop? How must this community evolve? Together, let’s brainstorm these questions and leave with ideas to explore and deepen newsroom technology and culture beyond SRCCON.", - "facilitator": "Tyler Fisher", - "facilitator_twitter": "tylrfishr", - "id": 2349146, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T19:24:16.957Z", - "title": "Designing the next phase for newsroom technologists" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Maxine Whitely", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "maxine_whitely", - "cofacilitator_two": "Umi Syam", - "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "umay", - "description": "Writing good documentation is hard, so let’s write some together in a low-pressure environment! This session isn’t just about writing documentation to go with SRCCON; it’s an opportunity to learn how to improve documentation at your organization and perhaps take-away a prototype install of Library, too.\n\nWe’ll start by collaborating on successful approaches to writing and sharing documentation in a newsroom, then use Library to collect useful documentation for all SRCCON attendees.\n\nLibrary is an open-source documentation tool released by the New York Times in collaboration with Northwestern University’s Knight Lab earlier this year. Because every page in Library is a Google Doc, you already know how to use it!", - "facilitator": "Isaac White", - "facilitator_twitter": "TweetAtIsaac", - "id": 2355283, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T23:09:53.353Z", - "title": "Document this conference! An introduction to Library." - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Asraa Mustufa", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "asraareports", - "description": "[cue Star Wars scroll ...]\n\nHeading into 2019, Chicago faced a historic election. For the first time in decades, the mayor's office was up for grabs with no incumbent and no heir apparent to the 5th floor of City Hall. Meanwhile, the clerk, treasurer and entire 50-seat City Council were up for election. Competition was fierce.\n\nSmall newsrooms faced the daunting task of covering all of these races. More than 200 candidates were running for local office -- including more than a dozen for mayor -- from complete unknowns to career pols. All of this was taking place in a news environment where media often struggles to engage voters and help them make informed decisions.\n\nWith these challenges in mind, a group of five local independent newsrooms decided to pool their resources and work together to create a one-stop resource to serve voters. In a matter of days, the Chi.vote Collaborative was founded, launching a website with candidate profiles, articles, voter resources and other information. The collaborative grew to 10 partners and traffic to the website surged heading into the February election and eventual April runoff. We literally built the car as we drove it, rolling out new features as fast as we could develop them. All while publishing new stories and information daily. \n\nWe quickly learned a lot about collaborating, building on each other's strengths and overcoming challenges. Here are our takeaways, what worked and what didn't, along with tips, insights and all the key technical details that could help you and your collaborators cover the next election.", - "facilitator": "Matt Kiefer", - "facilitator_twitter": "matt_kiefer", - "id": 2355759, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T22:40:05.072Z", - "title": "Don't compete, collaborate: Lessons learned from covering the 2019 Chicago municipal elections" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Vinessa Wan", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "vnessawithaneye", - "description": "Incidents and outages are a normal part of any complex system. In recent years The New York Times adopted a collaborative method for discussing these events called Learning Reviews. We'd like to give a brief introduction to Learning Reviews—where they originated, why they're called Learning Reviews, what they are—followed by a few exercises with the attendees. Some of these group exercises would focus on communicating the idea of complexity and how that impacts our ability to predict the future. In doing so, we'd also communicate how complex systems have a degree of impermanence and how this contributes to outages. This segues into the theme of the discussion, how do we look back on an event in a way that prioritizes learning more about our systems and less about finding fault with a human? We'll go over the importance of language and facilitation in this process.", - "facilitator": "Joe Hart", - "facilitator_twitter": null, - "id": 2355136, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T15:20:40.448Z", - "title": "Engineering Beyond Blame" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Screenwriters use many techniques to distribute information throughout a film: building context to create goals and desires, withholding knowledge to create intrigue, planting clues to create suspense, and revealing discoveries to create surprise. By establishing rhythms of expectation, anticipation, disappointment, and fulfillment, a well-written screenplay keeps us captivated as it directs us through all the plot points and to the heart of the story.\n\nData journalism shares a similar goal. Are there lessons from screenwriting we can use to write engaging, data-driven stories, so we don’t end up with an info dump? Let’s find out together.\n\nIn this session, we’ll participate in a writers’ room to discuss how screenwriters use different strategies to jam-pack information into scenes while building a narrative and keeping pace. Then we’ll try out different screenwriting approaches to see how we can best break down complex data sets in our reporting, guide readers to the story, and keep their attention. Wipe down the whiteboards, grab some Post-its, and let’s break some stories!", - "facilitator": "Phi Do", - "facilitator_twitter": "phihado", - "id": 2353008, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:23:12.759Z", - "title": "Fade In: What Data Journalism Can Learn from Screenwriting" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Bridget Thoreson", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "bridgetthoreson", - "description": "We are all too aware that the 2020 election is coming up. But do our community members feel empowered by the coverage we’re producing? Unlikely. Typically it starts with the candidates and what they have to do to win, rather than the voters and what they need to participate. We should flip that. \n\nIf we let the needs of community members drive the design of our election coverage, it would look dramatically different – and be dramatically better for our democratic process and social cohesion, we think. Bonus: those community members will be pretty grateful to you for unsexy coverage like explaining what a circuit court judge does. At a time when we’re pivoting to reader revenue, this public service journalism model is not just good karma – it should be seen as mission critical. \n\nWe’ll explore the “jobs to be done” in election reporting, how to ask questions that will give you a deeper understanding of voters’ information needs, the tools at our disposal to do that, and the ways that newsrooms can ensure they have enough feedback from actual voters to resist the siren call of the latest campaign gaffe or poll results.", - "facilitator": "Ariel Zirulnick", - "facilitator_twitter": "azirulnick", - "id": 2355770, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:38:40.976Z", - "title": "Fix your feedback loop: Letting people, not polls, drive your election coverage" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Joseph Lichterman", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "ylichterman", - "description": "Too often, tips and suggestions for email newsletters at newsrooms can take a “one size fits all” approach. We’ve seen that the way a newsletter is made at a newsroom can enormously vary based on the size, resources and purpose of any given newsroom. \n\nIn this session, we’ll create a card-based strategy game that will guide small groups of participants through the process of creating a new newsletter product that meets an outlet’s editorial and business outcomes. Groups will have to develop a strategy that meets specific goals and will have to overcome hurdles and challenges that we throw in their way. \n\nThroughout the simulation, we’ll present then guide the room through a series of discussion topics and exercises based around the key worksteams of an email newsletter at a newsroom: user research, content creation, workflows, acquiring new email readers, and converting readers to members or donors.", - "facilitator": "Emily Roseman", - "facilitator_twitter": "emilyroseman1", - "id": 2355937, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:04:46.363Z", - "title": "Game of Newsletters: A song of inboxes and subject lines" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Stacy-Marie Ishmael", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "s_m_i", - "description": "Technology intersects with nearly every aspect of our lives, and based on the number of digital sabbath services and \"I'm leaving social media for good this time (probably!)\" posts that have been published, our relationship to technology feels out of control. \n\nBut our brains aren't what's broken, they're working exactly as they evolved to work. Technology has just evolved much, much faster. And that tech is affecting our emotional and physiological well being. Media companies and platforms have capitalized on our innate psychological and neurological vulnerabilities to make money and keep us hooked. But there have to be better ways to build community and share information on the web. Let's dig into the systemic issues (cough, capitalism) that have led to tech that makes us miserable and then design/brainstorm what humane platforms could look like.", - "facilitator": "Kaeti Hinck", - "facilitator_twitter": "kaeti", - "id": 2355551, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T16:28:29.461Z", - "title": "Ghosts in the Machine: How technology is shaping our lives and how we can build a better way" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Brittany Campese", - "description": "It's been amazing to see how the news nerd community has grown and evolved over the decades, and as we've gotten to meet in person over the last 5 years of SRCCONs. We have data about who is part of the news nerd community, and through various Slacks and events like this one, we've seen how members of this community support and care for one another. Let's take a moment to reflect on this community (with the support of an outside facilitator): who is a part of this community? Who is not (or is not yet) included? What are our responsibilities to each other? What does our collective future hold? We'll explore what we need to create that future, together.", - "facilitator": "Erika Owens", - "facilitator_twitter": "erika_owens", - "id": 2338033, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T22:57:55.747Z", - "title": "How are we in community together?" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Kayla Christopherson", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "KaylaChristoph", - "description": "While journalists talk a lot about having an impact, we're not as forthcoming on how we can be more deliberate and active in informing structural change in our communities. Our work is often geared to spark surface-level outcomes (a law was passed, an official was held accountable, etc.), but even when media organizations are equipped to do deeper investigative work, they often don’t invest in longer-term strategies that can illuminate pathways for citizens to create more equitable, healthy systems.\n\nUsing a practice called systems thinking – a holistic approach to grappling with complex issues – journalists can develop more collaborative frameworks that help people build power and resiliency to address some of our most deeply rooted problems. Through the lens of systems thinking, we'll open a discussion about some of the big ideas and questions that a change-oriented approach holds for journalists: What new roles can journalists play to help evaluate and facilitate opportunities for social change? How do we negotiate traditional journalistic principles and standards while working to actively dismantle oppressive systems? How can we better communicate and act on our values?\n\nWe'll offer ideas from the systems thinking playbook, discuss examples of journalists who are actively rooting their practice in systems change and lead a visioning exercise to imagine new possibilities.", - "facilitator": "Cole Goins", - "facilitator_twitter": "colegoins", - "id": 2342800, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T22:11:21.723Z", - "title": "How can newsrooms be more active catalysts for change?" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Kate Rabinowitz", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "datakater", - "description": "Your newsroom has a rigorous process for editing words and traditional reporting. How can data journalists ensure that we’re editing data analysis with the same rigor? How can we take lessons from research and other fields and apply them to a fast-paced newsroom? \n\nIn this session, we’ll talk about how newsrooms are already doing this work—and how we can up our game. What are some of the challenges in adding new steps to existing workflows? How can you do this work if you don’t have a dedicated data editor? And how do you get the rest of the newsroom on board? We’ll share among participants the successes and challenges we’ve had, and try to find the ideal data editing process together.", - "facilitator": "Hannah Recht", - "facilitator_twitter": "hannah_recht", - "id": 2355655, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T19:39:25.514Z", - "title": "How to edit data as seriously as we edit words" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Shannan Bowen", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "shanbow", - "description": "In newsrooms, as in other workplaces, most are given power leadership through title and job description. But many of us operate in spaces where there is no one above you who can edit you. Let's explore how to lead your newsroom without the title and exert power over the things you care deeply about. And let's explore the ways you can acquire power by playing within the system.", - "facilitator": "Steven Rich", - "facilitator_twitter": "dataeditor", - "id": 2355671, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T00:32:02.064Z", - "title": "How to lead without power" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Amanda Yarnell", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "amandayarnell", - "description": "At SRCCON:WORK, I talked about re-building our newsroom org charts to reflect the work we’re doing today and to prepare us for where we’re going. Joined now with C&EN’s editorial director, Amanda Yarnell, we’ll show you how we built a product team and re-structured our newsroom around it in one year. \n\nIf you’re interested in building a newsroom-wide roadmap, streamlining and prioritizing newsroom ideas, creating and managing a sprint-based product team, and growing stakeholder alignment across business units, join us. In this session, we’ll share our blueprint, our successes, and our challenges, so you can do it faster.", - "facilitator": "Jessica Morrison", - "facilitator_twitter": "ihearttheroad", - "id": 2355555, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T16:39:02.638Z", - "title": "How to re-org your newsroom around product without breaking it" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Yan Wu", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "codingyan", - "description": "Let's enter the Data Team Time Machine and go back to our old graphics and long-ago code. Even the biggest superstars have a first project or an outdated framework that seems quaint now. In this session, we'll unearth some ancient work and talk about how we'd approach it differently with our current-day toolbox, whether that's refactoring some code, building with some modern-day software or scrapping it and starting again. Come to this session if you want to feel better about how far you've come and if you want some inspiration to look at your projects in a new light.", - "facilitator": "Erin Petenko", - "facilitator_twitter": "EPetenko", - "id": 2345883, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-12T19:23:37.566Z", - "title": "If I knew then what I know now" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "The dream of the 90s is alive with static sites! The JAM stack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) is a new twist on an old idea. Making static webpages has many benefits for newsrooms in terms of cost and long term maintainability. In this session, we will go through the basics of the static site generation landscape and participants will deploy their own custom static site, like GeoCities never died but with a data driven twist.", - "facilitator": "Carl Johnson", - "facilitator_twitter": "carlmjohnson", - "id": 2345204, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-12T14:58:30.506Z", - "title": "Let's JAMstack! How to Make Data-driven Static Sites" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "The world of online advertising has been under a lot of fire. Online advertising has been used to target disenfranchised groups, those deemed manipulatable, and to push political disinformation. The economies of scale, having the many different types and origins of advertising, has made it even more difficult to prevent bad actors on different platforms. The question then arises, what makes an ethical ad? What can we do on our publications and platforms to help promote more ethical advertising?", - "facilitator": "Ian Carrico", - "facilitator_twitter": "iamcarrico", - "id": 2355189, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T13:30:25.313Z", - "title": "Let's build some ethical advertising" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Alison Jones", - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "There are many resources out there for managers leading remote teams. Similarly, there are plenty of resources for the people on those teams to work, communicate and collaborate effectively. There are also plenty of arguments that have been made for how remote work improves employee effectiveness and satisfaction, why it has economic benefits for employers, and on and on. \n\nAnd yet, national news organizations concentrate their staff in the most expensive cities in the country. Let's try to figure out why that is and help make the case for supporting a more remote-friendly workforce.\n\nIn this session we'll try to come up with as many of the common objections raised by hiring managers when they insist that a given position be based in a particular location and then come up with a playbook of effective arguments to overcome those objections.\n\nAdditionally, we'll come up with some high level talking points regarding how supporting remote work can improve the fundamental economics of journalism while improving the lives of employees and the communities they serve.", - "facilitator": "Adam Schweigert", - "facilitator_twitter": "aschweig", - "id": 2351494, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T23:58:59.036Z", - "title": "Making The Case For Remote Work" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "cofacilitator_twitter": null, - "description": "This will be an interactive and honest conversation about how management can be improved in local newsrooms. We’ll break the subject into a few key conversation starters -- the factors that lead to promotion of non-transferable skill sets, the dramatic industry disruptions that lead to a chaotic situation for management, and how we tackle those big issues through human resource development. \n\nOne of the keys early on in the session will be to have people identify themselves as managers and former managers, versus our typical worker-bee reporters. We’ll encourage dialogue between the managers who are willing to talk about their fears and shortcomings, and worker bees who are willing to talk about how they want to be managed. We want to embrace this vulnerability, allowing managers and worker bees to speak with each other and come to better understandings of their counterparts.", - "facilitator": "Erin Mansfield", - "facilitator_twitter": "_erinmansfield", - "id": 2356004, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T02:32:50.301Z", - "title": "Meeting management challenges in local newsrooms" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Simon Galperin", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "thensim0nsaid", - "description": "Let's work together to build a membership model that is inclusive (meaning all the things you think that means and also accounts for things like skills as an entry point). Membership should be more than a monetary transaction and early access to Wait Wait tickets. It should be a gateway to the communities we serve. \n\nImportant: There will be LEGO’s in this session!", - "facilitator": "Candice Fortman", - "facilitator_twitter": "cande313", - "id": 2355063, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T15:29:43.726Z", - "title": "Membership Has its Privileges (and They Are Not Just for the Privileged)" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Maya Miller", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "mayatmiller", - "description": "People are dying and it’s up to you to figure out why. In Queens, New York the percentage of people who die after suffering a heart attack is on the rise. Join our collaborative investigative team to solve the mystery and enact change.\n\nA la a murder mystery party or the world’s shortest LARP, you’ll play a character—perhaps a journalist, data analyst, EMS first responder, public housing resident, graphic designer, professor, city council member, hospital administrator, or community activist. Like any good mystery, you won’t be able to solve it alone.\n\nAt the end we’ll return to our everyday selves and discuss what we learned about working collaboratively, in and outside of journalism.", - "facilitator": "Laura Laderman", - "facilitator_twitter": "Liladerm", - "id": 2355398, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T14:32:31.653Z", - "title": "Murder Mystery: Collaborative Journalism Edition" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Most newsrooms need their CMS to do the same basic things, but there are so many ways to do it. Let’s see what it looks like to publish a news story in a lineup of different CMSes. To show how different newsrooms accomplish the same tasks, a lineup of people involved in developing CMSes will follow the same demo script showing how to write, edit and publish a news story, rank it on a homepage and promote it to an audience. Each presenter will also talk about their favorite feature of their CMS and how to get journalists excited about their CMS.", - "facilitator": "Albert Sun", - "facilitator_twitter": "albertsun", - "id": 2355631, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T17:41:35.936Z", - "title": "CMS Demos: Approaches to Helping Our Newsrooms Do Their Best Work" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Natasha Vicens", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "khantasha", - "description": "Many of us are overworked, lonely coders. How do we accomplish every day editorial projects and also dedicated time to learning new technologies and documenting workflows that we spend so much time implementing and testing? With all this newfangled tech, what’s noise and what’s signal?\n\nLet's talk about devising coping and filtering mechanisms for the onslaught of newness so we can all actually benefit from it.", - "facilitator": "Alexandra Kanik", - "facilitator_twitter": "act_rational", - "id": 2355911, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:06:25.896Z", - "title": "Noise & Signal: Knowing when to adopt new tech, and when to ignore it" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "\"Parachute journalism\" is the practice of national outlets or freelancers flying into local communities they're not a part of to report a story, then leaving again. It's a part of our journalistic economy, as the money and power in journalism is focused in just a few geographic locations--but it can also be damaging to local communities, and it can lead to misrepresentation, distrust and resentment. Often, national journalists appear in a community in times of trauma and elections, and report stories with insufficient context, while local journalists struggle to access equivalent resources for necessary ongoing reporting. This session will explore our collective experiences with parachute journalism as both insiders and outsiders to a community, in order to produce good ideas about how to do harm reduction, increase accountability, and shift power dynamics. We'll ask: Are there situations where it's better if this story just doesn't get told? How do we evaluate that? What can national media outlets and freelancers do to connect and collaborate with local journalists and local communities? What are the ethics of accountable partnerships? In what ways do local and regional/national media needs differ, and how can journalists collaborate to produce stories that better address the needs of all involved? All of this will be driving at a larger question: What does justice and accountability look like in the practice of journalism?", - "facilitator": "Lewis Raven Wallace", - "facilitator_twitter": "lewispants", - "id": 2355308, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T00:22:42.837Z", - "title": "Parachute Journalism: Can outsiders report accountably on other people's communities?" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Hannah Birch", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "hannahsbirch", - "description": "One of the [most frequently cited reasons](https://medium.com/jsk-class-of-2018/news-nerd-salaries-2017-2c83466b994e) journalists in digital roles leave their jobs is lack of promotion and career advancement opportunities. At the same time, journalists with a nontraditional mix of skills, who sit at the intersection of roles, departments or teams — we call them platypuses — are proving to be pivotal to the future of news. So how can newsrooms use the people they have to push their digital initiatives forward? \n\nThis session brings together digital journalists and managers to discuss career growth within the newsroom, especially for people with a nontraditional blend of skills. A lot of growth in digital careers is uncharted territory, but through our empathy interviews we will bring together tips and frameworks for how digital journalists can fit into forward-thinking newsrooms.\n\nWe’ll share success stories and lessons learned, and we’ll workshop tactics that could work in participants’ newsrooms. This session is meant to be a launchpad for conversations and plans to better empower and grow newsroom digital talent — and not lose them to other newsrooms and industries.", - "facilitator": "Vignesh Ramachandran", - "facilitator_twitter": "VigneshR", - "id": 2353502, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-18T23:21:24.705Z", - "title": "Proud to be a Platypus: Finding Your Own Innovative Role in News" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Jesikah Maria Ross", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "jmr_MediaSpark", - "description": "A lot of data journalism takes place in front of a computer, but there is a lot to be gained by creating data together with your community. As part of a documentary project about a culturally diverse, low-income community, we recently invited residents to map their neighborhood — not online, but with paper and pens at in-person gatherings. We not only generated unique data, but also stories and context we never would have heard if we hadn’t met people where they lived. \n\nMore and more, journalists are experimenting with community engagement practices to accurately reflect and represent people’s lived experiences. We can do the same by taking an analog approach to creating data, including our community in the stories we tell about them. This helps verify the data by collecting it ourselves and having subject matter experts (your community!) vet it along the way. It also makes our reporting process more transparent and creates a group of people invested in our work. \n\nWe’ll share what we did and what we learned in our neighborhood mapping experiments, and invite a discussion on other ways to weave community engagement into data reporting. Our goal: draft a starter kit of ideas for doing data journalism IRL that you can take back to your newsroom.", - "facilitator": "Christopher Hagan", - "facilitator_twitter": "chrishagan", - "id": 2354731, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T23:03:19.743Z", - "title": "Spreadsheets IRL: The How and Why of Making Data With Your Community" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Disha Raychaudhuri", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "Disha_RC", - "description": "In recent years, many news organizations have published their diversity reports to educate folks in the industry about their challenges with diversity and to indicate that they are taking newsroom diversity seriously. This has also led to a number of conversations in the Journalists of Color slack and at other in-person settings about diversity committees at news organizations trying to figure out what their diversity report should cover and how they can convince management to publish effective indicators of diversity.\n\nIn this session we would like to facilitate a conversation around the topic of diversity reports. We will start with a quick survey of recent diversity reports published by prominent journalism outlets and then move to a discussion/group activity to work out what measures should be included in diversity reports to further the actual goals of increasing diversity in newsrooms.", - "facilitator": "Moiz Syed", - "facilitator_twitter": "moizsyed", - "id": 2355357, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T18:24:32.225Z", - "title": "State of Newsroom Diversity Reports" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "It seems everyone is talking about ethics in technology these days. Examples abound of poor decisions leading to unintended harm, of planned exploitation and avoidance of consent, of prioritization of financial gain over literally everything else. What’s the ethically-minded technologist to do? This session will be an open, off the record conversation among designers, developers, and journalists about the things that keep us up at night: the ways our work can cause harm, the systems driving us to do the wrong thing, the incentives that make it hard to even know what’s right. We’ll work from a vantage point that assumes good intentions, recognizes that impacts matter more than plans, and acknowledges the impossibility of perfect solutions: no matter what we do, we are all complicit. But we are not alone, and we are not without the ability to effect change.", - "facilitator": "Mandy Brown", - "facilitator_twitter": "aworkinglibrary", - "id": 2355070, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:39:31.876Z", - "title": "Staying with the trouble: Doing good work in terrible times" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Eimi Okuno", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "emettely", - "description": "There's a joke we often hear journalists make: Our job is to clearly communicate information to our audience, and yet we're terrible at communicating with each other in our newsrooms. That's partly because we don't use the right tools or frameworks to facilitate clear and consistent communication that leads to cultural change. In this session, we’ll hear what kinds of communication and culture problems you’ve identified in your newsrooms, dig into tools– like OKRs, team health checks and user manuals– that can provide a shared vocabulary in and across teams, and help you and your colleagues feel more heard and satisfied in your newsrooms, whether it’s a large organization like the BBC (where Eimi works!) or a startup like WhereBy.Us (where Anika works!).", - "facilitator": "Anika Anand", - "facilitator_twitter": "anikaanand00", - "id": 2351418, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:39:31.876Z", - "title": "Structured communication: Tools you can use to change culture and help your team feel heard" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "We don't talk about it a lot in the newsroom, the fact that we see and hear things all the time in our jobs that likely affect us in ways it's hard to describe to someone else. One of the first roles for most reporters and photographers is covering breaking news - chasing the police scanner from one traumatic event to the next. Our newsroom might have to cover a traumatic event on a larger scale - a mass shooting, a devastating brush fire, hurricane or tornado. We take care to tell the stories of those affected, to make sure their voices and their grief are heard. But we also need to take care of ourselves and our colleagues in these moments. What should you be looking for to make sure you're protected and feel empowered to speak up for yourself when you don't feel comfortable or need help? What are some things you could do if you are the editor to take care of your staff? What types of services could news organizations offer that would help in these situations?", - "facilitator": "Kristyn Wellesley", - "facilitator_twitter": "kriswellesley", - "id": 2355666, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T19:34:30.680Z", - "title": "Take care: The Importance of Self-Care in the Newsroom" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": null, - "description": "Diversity initiatives are popping up in most companies these days. Newsrooms are talking about gender and race representation, re-examining how we cover stories and how we create space for employees of all genders and races. We laud ourselves for being aware and being inclusive. However, noticeably missing from the conversation, at least for those who identify as such, are people with disabilities. \n\nThe New York Times has employee lead initiatives to help correct that. From the tech task force that turned into a team designated with making our site more accessible, to the internal panel on employees with disabilities that turned into an employee resource group the disabled community and their allies at the times are standing up and taking space. \n\nDuring this session we will examine how the disability community is represented in newsrooms and institutions, discuss what has been done, and set a framework for how to take action now. We will work together to figure out what ally-ship looks like and what it means for diversity initiatives to include people with disabilities, and how they miss the mark when they don’t -- both for employees and our coverage.", - "facilitator": "Katherine McMahan", - "facilitator_twitter": "katieannmcmahan", - "id": 2353768, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T16:06:37.651Z", - "title": "Taking Up Space: Making Room for People with Disabilities at The Times" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Becca Aaronson", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "becca_aa", - "description": "News nerds came of age in newsrooms that were hostile to their efforts. But now, the geeks are running the show. There are few holdouts left. Winning was easy. Governing is harder.\n\nWhat should the agenda of the nerds be in newsrooms where they are finally winning territory and mindshare? How will we use our positions to further our agenda?", - "facilitator": "Jeremy Bowers", - "facilitator_twitter": "jeremybowers", - "id": 2353430, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-18T19:38:56.833Z", - "title": "The Geeks Won: Now What?" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Jayme Fraser", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "JaymeKFraser", - "description": "How has science fiction helped you understand the world? Yourself? Justice? Let's talk about the role of SF, and how it's taught us to be better makers, teammates and people. ***Bring a book to swap!***", - "facilitator": "Brian Boyer", - "facilitator_twitter": "brianboyer", - "id": 2353714, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-18T19:38:56.833Z", - "title": "Things the future taught us" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Amelia McNamara", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "AmeliaMN", - "description": "We often come across percentages in journalism, simple numbers that convey a powerful amount of information. But a percentage can obscure crucial information. If one ZIP code has 30 homeless individuals out of 100, and another has 30,000 homeless out of 100,000, the percentages indicates similarity, but the two geographies will have vastly different times dealing with the homeless population. When looking at a list of percentages, we should endeavor to find those that are distinct. Tools from statistical theory can help us tease out what's unusual and what isn't. It doesn't require much complicated math, just a little algebra.", - "facilitator": "Ryan Menezes", - "facilitator_twitter": "ryanvmenezes", - "id": 2353889, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T21:42:57.842Z", - "title": "We should rethink the way we think about percentages" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Ajay Chainani", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "ajayjapan", - "description": "Many news organizations are investigating how to apply artificial intelligence to the practice of journalism. Meanwhile many individuals and organizations are funding advancements in the field of news and AI. Do we take into consideration unconscious bias when developing algorithms and methods to build these new digital tools? How can they be best applied? What does the application of AI mean for newsrooms and the public they serve?", - "facilitator": "Sarah Schmalbach", - "facilitator_twitter": "schmalie", - "id": 2355772, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T22:10:54.019Z", - "title": "What happens to journalism, when AI eats the world?" - }, - { - "cofacilitator": "Jun-Kai Teoh", - "cofacilitator_twitter": "jkteoh", - "description": "How would we do journalism differently if we were to think about impact — real-world change — at the brainstorming stage, before we started to write or shoot? If we knew something needed to happen to make things better, could we identify a few levers to pull that’d make that something more likely? Would we frame the story differently? Share the data openly? Talk to different sources? And how do we do all of this without going too far, without crossing into advocacy journalism? Now more than ever, with more nonprofit newsrooms forming, more for-profit newsrooms turning to consumer revenue (on the sales pitch that journalism matters) and trust at a crisis point, we need to measure and show why our work matters. This session will cover published examples and studies but is meant to be a discussion about what we can do — and what’s going too far — to make a difference. We might also, using design thinking strategies, prototype a project designed for impact.", - "facilitator": "Anjanette Delgado", - "facilitator_twitter": "anjdelgado", - "id": 2355593, - "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:42:02.486Z", - "title": "Why it matters — Designing stories for impact" - } -] \ No newline at end of file +[ + { + "cofacilitator": "Alex Tatusian", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Sometimes the well of ideas runs dry and we find ourselves stuck in a creative rut. If we can't move past it, let's try thinking sideways. Drawing inspiration from Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, a card-based system that offers pithy prompts for creative thinking, we'll discuss ways to shift our perspective in the process of brainstorming, designing and problem-solving. Some of Schmidt and Eno's one-line strategies include:\n\n\"Not building a wall but making a brick.\"\n\"Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place.\"\n\"You can only make one dot at a time.\"\n\nAs a group, we'll look at projects that emerged from unconventional sources of inspiration, share our favorite methods of breaking creative block and then develop our own list of \"oblique strategies\" that we'll publish online after the session.", + "facilitator": "Katie Park", + "facilitator_twitter": "katiepark", + "id": 2355668, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T19:17:08.293Z", + "title": '"Abandon normal instruments": Sideways strategies for defeating creative block', + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Megan Garvey", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "garveymcvg", + "description": "The 2020 census is a year away, but chances are you’ve already heard about it. The census is making headlines because several states are suing the Trump administration over its plans to include a citizenship question. But much of the news glosses over why the census is important and how it affects everyone’s lives. Congressional representation is at stake, along with $800 billion in federal funds that will get disbursed for state, county, and community programs over the next decade.\n\nWhen KPCC conducted human-centered design research into the census and the opportunities for public service journalism, one finding stood out: We can’t assume educated news consumers know the stakes or the mechanics of the census. There was a very low level of census knowledge among the people we interviewed, including current NPR listeners. How can we address this knowledge gap? We have some ideas. Let's talk.", + "facilitator": "Ashley Alvarado", + "facilitator_twitter": "ashleyalvarado", + "id": 2338108, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-10T20:34:54.842Z", + "title": "A playbook for reporters interested in reaching people at risk of being undercounted", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Kelly Chen", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "chenkx", + "description": "In a post-Gamergate world, how should we think about personal data in our reporting and our research? What responsibilities do we have to the privacy of the communities we report on? While many journalists have [struggled with this question](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T71OE4fm4ns0ugEOmKOY4xF4H9ikbebmikv96sgi16A/edit), few newsrooms have an explicit ethics policy on how they retain, release, and redact personally-identifiable information. Let's change that, by drafting a sample PII ethics policy that can be adopted by organizations both large and small.", + "facilitator": "Thomas Wilburn", + "facilitator_twitter": "thomaswilburn", + "id": 2351440, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-15T17:27:09.359Z", + "title": "Assembling the Scramble Suit", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Dave Stanton", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "gotoplanb", + "description": "Conferences may be educational and inspirational for you, but also expanding value to your team and organization should be at the top of your mind. Having a process to help in preparing, attending, and post-event knowledge sharing can help focus your attention to maximize the time you spend at conferences. In this session, we will define the common types of conference attendees and map to activities before, during, and after conferences to provide a solid framework for making conferences a must-fund part of your team’s budget. If you’ve ever come back from an event inspired and excited, but unsure how to take the next step, this session is for you.", + "facilitator": "Emma Carew Grovum", + "facilitator_twitter": "Emmacarew", + "id": 2353845, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T19:25:31.582Z", + "title": "Bang for your buck: how to help your newsroom get the most out of SRCCON (or any journalism event)", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "It’s often assumed there’s a difference between being part of an innovation team and working a beat in a traditional newsroom setting. There is much that is transferable between the two jobs. This session would explore similarities between two seemingly different functions in the modern newsroom and try to answer the following questions: How do you bring the level of exploration and experimentation to your beat? What lessons might folks with a product manager/design background be able to share with fellow journalists to make the return easier?", + "facilitator": "André Natta", + "facilitator_twitter": "acnatta", + "id": 2351499, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:31:23.131Z", + "title": "Beat as a product: Lessons from product innovation for the newsroom", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "B Cordelia Yu", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "thebestsophist", + "description": "We really love journalism. We really love tech, and what it can do. We’re not so sure it’s sustainable for us in the long term or maybe even the short. We want to brainstorm ways to stay help connected and useful, even if/when that means running for the hills.\n\nHow can we support this necessity of a good world and not sacrifice ourselves.", + "facilitator": "Sydette Harry", + "facilitator_twitter": "Blackamazon", + "id": 2353723, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T14:04:01.964Z", + "title": "Before I Let Go: Leaving The Business without Leaving the Work", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "We have an obligation to our teams and our companies to bring great new people into our work who can help push our teams forward, and yet interviewing candidates can feel extracurricular and rote. We need to discuss what we might be doing wrong, what the consequences are, and how to better focus our efforts when we are interviewing the people who want to work alongside us. \n\nLet’s talk about how to create safe and respectful spaces in a job interview. Let’s think deeply and critically about how we spend the thirty to sixty minutes we have in the company of potential colleagues to ensure we’re learning the right things, in the right ways, for the right reasons. Let’s discuss different approaches to advocating for a candidate you believe in, finding the person behind the candidate, questioning unconscious bias as you observe it, and teaching others how to do likewise.\n\nThis session is designed for both for seasoned interviewers and folks who have never done it before. Using actual interviews as a practice space and group discussion about foibles and tactics, we hope to walk away from this session with renewed focus and better, more respectful tools for getting to know a potential colleague and doing the hard work of bringing them into our newsrooms.", + "facilitator": "David Yee", + "facilitator_twitter": "tangentialism", + "id": 2355903, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T00:25:02.103Z", + "title": "Being in the room: the hard work of interview-based hiring", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Cirien Saadeh", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "cmiriam", + "description": "Developing sources is standard practice, but what about developing collaborators? Community members have so much more to offer than choice quotes and timely expertise. What if we developed the capacity of our audience to pitch stories, design distribution strategies, report, analyze, and disseminate the news?\n\nLet’s flesh out the resources that exist among our audience & within our communities, and the possibilities to invest in those resources so that the community invests in our journalism.", + "facilitator": "Madeleine Bair", + "facilitator_twitter": "madbair", + "id": 2355594, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-29T17:43:37.160Z", + "title": "Building newsroom capacity by tapping into expertise outside the newsroom", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Emma Carew Grovum", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "Emmacarew", + "description": "In this session, we’ll collaboratively create ways to help folks from historically privileged backgrounds be better allies to their colleagues from minority and marginalized backgrounds. The goal is to advocate for fair and comprehensive coverage and a more inclusive newsroom culture. The method by which we get that done is up to us, but will aim to result in a community that continues beyond SRCCON.\n\nIt’s time for the people with privilege to do the hard work of making things right. This might be a messy and awkward process, but our work, our workplaces and our lives will be better for it.", + "facilitator": "Hannah Wise", + "facilitator_twitter": "hannahjwise", + "id": 2355291, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T14:21:32.860Z", + "title": "Calling All Media Diversity Avengers: Now’s the time to act.", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Being a journalist is hard these days and awards aren't a bad thing. But data I've compiled shows that the best work of the year is often backloaded into November and December, when most contest deadlines come due. But this is also likely the least ideal time for big impactful work to come out as regular people and those with power to effectuate change leave work for the holidays. Let's have a discussion about how we can change that, to be able to fete our peers while also remaining true to our mission.", + "facilitator": "Stephen Stirling", + "facilitator_twitter": "sstirling", + "id": 2345683, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-12T18:13:02.088Z", + "title": "Changing journalism's awards culture", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "Teaching data journalism in newsrooms and at universities has forced us to come up with creative techniques. We wrote The SQL Song to help one group of boot camp attendees understand the order of commands. In an attempt to help students fine-tune their programs, we did a game show called Query Cash. To make string functions make more sense, we’ve created silly, but useful performances. To make this session interactive, we propose inviting attendees to bring their ideas. We also will pose some problems and have teams work out creative solutions.", + "facilitator": "Jennifer LaFleur", + "facilitator_twitter": "j_la28", + "id": 2355574, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T16:28:15.813Z", + "title": "Creative ways to teach complex issues", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Brittany Mayes", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "BritRenee_", + "description": "Over the past few decades, newsroom technologists have pushed the field of journalism forward in countless ways. As we approach a new decade, and arguably a new era of digital journalism, how must newsroom technologists evolve to meet new needs? And how do we center technology in a newsroom while also fixing the problems news organizations have long had regarding diversity, representing their communities, speaking to their audiences, etc.?\n\nIn this session, we will start with a set of hypotheses to seed discussion.\n\nFor journalism to succeed in the next decade:\n- Newsroom technologists must have real power in their organizations.\n- Experimentation and product development must be central to how a newsroom operates.\n- News organizations must be radically inclusive of their communities.\n- Cultivating positive culture and interpersonal relationships is key to developing sustainable newsrooms.\n\nGiven these hypotheses, what skills do we need to grow in newsroom technologists? What must we think about more deeply in our daily work? What tools do we need to develop? How must this community evolve? Together, let’s brainstorm these questions and leave with ideas to explore and deepen newsroom technology and culture beyond SRCCON.", + "facilitator": "Tyler Fisher", + "facilitator_twitter": "tylrfishr", + "id": 2349146, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T19:24:16.957Z", + "title": "Designing the next phase for newsroom technologists", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Maxine Whitely", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "maxine_whitely", + "cofacilitator_two": "Umi Syam", + "cofacilitator_two_twitter": "umay", + "description": "Writing good documentation is hard, so let’s write some together in a low-pressure environment! This session isn’t just about writing documentation to go with SRCCON; it’s an opportunity to learn how to improve documentation at your organization and perhaps take-away a prototype install of Library, too.\n\nWe’ll start by collaborating on successful approaches to writing and sharing documentation in a newsroom, then use Library to collect useful documentation for all SRCCON attendees.\n\nLibrary is an open-source documentation tool released by the New York Times in collaboration with Northwestern University’s Knight Lab earlier this year. Because every page in Library is a Google Doc, you already know how to use it!", + "facilitator": "Isaac White", + "facilitator_twitter": "TweetAtIsaac", + "id": 2355283, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T23:09:53.353Z", + "title": "Document this conference! An introduction to Library.", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Asraa Mustufa", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "asraareports", + "description": "[cue Star Wars scroll ...]\n\nHeading into 2019, Chicago faced a historic election. For the first time in decades, the mayor's office was up for grabs with no incumbent and no heir apparent to the 5th floor of City Hall. Meanwhile, the clerk, treasurer and entire 50-seat City Council were up for election. Competition was fierce.\n\nSmall newsrooms faced the daunting task of covering all of these races. More than 200 candidates were running for local office -- including more than a dozen for mayor -- from complete unknowns to career pols. All of this was taking place in a news environment where media often struggles to engage voters and help them make informed decisions.\n\nWith these challenges in mind, a group of five local independent newsrooms decided to pool their resources and work together to create a one-stop resource to serve voters. In a matter of days, the Chi.vote Collaborative was founded, launching a website with candidate profiles, articles, voter resources and other information. The collaborative grew to 10 partners and traffic to the website surged heading into the February election and eventual April runoff. We literally built the car as we drove it, rolling out new features as fast as we could develop them. All while publishing new stories and information daily. \n\nWe quickly learned a lot about collaborating, building on each other's strengths and overcoming challenges. Here are our takeaways, what worked and what didn't, along with tips, insights and all the key technical details that could help you and your collaborators cover the next election.", + "facilitator": "Matt Kiefer", + "facilitator_twitter": "matt_kiefer", + "id": 2355759, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T22:40:05.072Z", + "title": "Don't compete, collaborate: Lessons learned from covering the 2019 Chicago municipal elections", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Vinessa Wan", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "vnessawithaneye", + "description": "Incidents and outages are a normal part of any complex system. In recent years The New York Times adopted a collaborative method for discussing these events called Learning Reviews. We'd like to give a brief introduction to Learning Reviews—where they originated, why they're called Learning Reviews, what they are—followed by a few exercises with the attendees. Some of these group exercises would focus on communicating the idea of complexity and how that impacts our ability to predict the future. In doing so, we'd also communicate how complex systems have a degree of impermanence and how this contributes to outages. This segues into the theme of the discussion, how do we look back on an event in a way that prioritizes learning more about our systems and less about finding fault with a human? We'll go over the importance of language and facilitation in this process.", + "facilitator": "Joe Hart", + "facilitator_twitter": null, + "id": 2355136, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T15:20:40.448Z", + "title": "Engineering Beyond Blame", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Screenwriters use many techniques to distribute information throughout a film: building context to create goals and desires, withholding knowledge to create intrigue, planting clues to create suspense, and revealing discoveries to create surprise. By establishing rhythms of expectation, anticipation, disappointment, and fulfillment, a well-written screenplay keeps us captivated as it directs us through all the plot points and to the heart of the story.\n\nData journalism shares a similar goal. Are there lessons from screenwriting we can use to write engaging, data-driven stories, so we don’t end up with an info dump? Let’s find out together.\n\nIn this session, we’ll participate in a writers’ room to discuss how screenwriters use different strategies to jam-pack information into scenes while building a narrative and keeping pace. Then we’ll try out different screenwriting approaches to see how we can best break down complex data sets in our reporting, guide readers to the story, and keep their attention. Wipe down the whiteboards, grab some Post-its, and let’s break some stories!", + "facilitator": "Phi Do", + "facilitator_twitter": "phihado", + "id": 2353008, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:23:12.759Z", + "title": "Fade In: What Data Journalism Can Learn from Screenwriting", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Bridget Thoreson", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "bridgetthoreson", + "description": "We are all too aware that the 2020 election is coming up. But do our community members feel empowered by the coverage we’re producing? Unlikely. Typically it starts with the candidates and what they have to do to win, rather than the voters and what they need to participate. We should flip that. \n\nIf we let the needs of community members drive the design of our election coverage, it would look dramatically different – and be dramatically better for our democratic process and social cohesion, we think. Bonus: those community members will be pretty grateful to you for unsexy coverage like explaining what a circuit court judge does. At a time when we’re pivoting to reader revenue, this public service journalism model is not just good karma – it should be seen as mission critical. \n\nWe’ll explore the “jobs to be done” in election reporting, how to ask questions that will give you a deeper understanding of voters’ information needs, the tools at our disposal to do that, and the ways that newsrooms can ensure they have enough feedback from actual voters to resist the siren call of the latest campaign gaffe or poll results.", + "facilitator": "Ariel Zirulnick", + "facilitator_twitter": "azirulnick", + "id": 2355770, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:38:40.976Z", + "title": "Fix your feedback loop: Letting people, not polls, drive your election coverage", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Joseph Lichterman", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "ylichterman", + "description": "Too often, tips and suggestions for email newsletters at newsrooms can take a “one size fits all” approach. We’ve seen that the way a newsletter is made at a newsroom can enormously vary based on the size, resources and purpose of any given newsroom. \n\nIn this session, we’ll create a card-based strategy game that will guide small groups of participants through the process of creating a new newsletter product that meets an outlet’s editorial and business outcomes. Groups will have to develop a strategy that meets specific goals and will have to overcome hurdles and challenges that we throw in their way. \n\nThroughout the simulation, we’ll present then guide the room through a series of discussion topics and exercises based around the key worksteams of an email newsletter at a newsroom: user research, content creation, workflows, acquiring new email readers, and converting readers to members or donors.", + "facilitator": "Emily Roseman", + "facilitator_twitter": "emilyroseman1", + "id": 2355937, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:04:46.363Z", + "title": "Game of Newsletters: A song of inboxes and subject lines", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Stacy-Marie Ishmael", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "s_m_i", + "description": "Technology intersects with nearly every aspect of our lives, and based on the number of digital sabbath services and \"I'm leaving social media for good this time (probably!)\" posts that have been published, our relationship to technology feels out of control. \n\nBut our brains aren't what's broken, they're working exactly as they evolved to work. Technology has just evolved much, much faster. And that tech is affecting our emotional and physiological well being. Media companies and platforms have capitalized on our innate psychological and neurological vulnerabilities to make money and keep us hooked. But there have to be better ways to build community and share information on the web. Let's dig into the systemic issues (cough, capitalism) that have led to tech that makes us miserable and then design/brainstorm what humane platforms could look like.", + "facilitator": "Kaeti Hinck", + "facilitator_twitter": "kaeti", + "id": 2355551, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T16:28:29.461Z", + "title": "Ghosts in the Machine: How technology is shaping our lives and how we can build a better way", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Brittany Campese", + "description": "It's been amazing to see how the news nerd community has grown and evolved over the decades, and as we've gotten to meet in person over the last 5 years of SRCCONs. We have data about who is part of the news nerd community, and through various Slacks and events like this one, we've seen how members of this community support and care for one another. Let's take a moment to reflect on this community (with the support of an outside facilitator): who is a part of this community? Who is not (or is not yet) included? What are our responsibilities to each other? What does our collective future hold? We'll explore what we need to create that future, together.", + "facilitator": "Erika Owens", + "facilitator_twitter": "erika_owens", + "id": 2338033, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T22:57:55.747Z", + "title": "How are we in community together?", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Kayla Christopherson", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "KaylaChristoph", + "description": "While journalists talk a lot about having an impact, we're not as forthcoming on how we can be more deliberate and active in informing structural change in our communities. Our work is often geared to spark surface-level outcomes (a law was passed, an official was held accountable, etc.), but even when media organizations are equipped to do deeper investigative work, they often don’t invest in longer-term strategies that can illuminate pathways for citizens to create more equitable, healthy systems.\n\nUsing a practice called systems thinking – a holistic approach to grappling with complex issues – journalists can develop more collaborative frameworks that help people build power and resiliency to address some of our most deeply rooted problems. Through the lens of systems thinking, we'll open a discussion about some of the big ideas and questions that a change-oriented approach holds for journalists: What new roles can journalists play to help evaluate and facilitate opportunities for social change? How do we negotiate traditional journalistic principles and standards while working to actively dismantle oppressive systems? How can we better communicate and act on our values?\n\nWe'll offer ideas from the systems thinking playbook, discuss examples of journalists who are actively rooting their practice in systems change and lead a visioning exercise to imagine new possibilities.", + "facilitator": "Cole Goins", + "facilitator_twitter": "colegoins", + "id": 2342800, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T22:11:21.723Z", + "title": "How can newsrooms be more active catalysts for change?", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Kate Rabinowitz", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "datakater", + "description": "Your newsroom has a rigorous process for editing words and traditional reporting. How can data journalists ensure that we’re editing data analysis with the same rigor? How can we take lessons from research and other fields and apply them to a fast-paced newsroom? \n\nIn this session, we’ll talk about how newsrooms are already doing this work—and how we can up our game. What are some of the challenges in adding new steps to existing workflows? How can you do this work if you don’t have a dedicated data editor? And how do you get the rest of the newsroom on board? We’ll share among participants the successes and challenges we’ve had, and try to find the ideal data editing process together.", + "facilitator": "Hannah Recht", + "facilitator_twitter": "hannah_recht", + "id": 2355655, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T19:39:25.514Z", + "title": "How to edit data as seriously as we edit words", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Shannan Bowen", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "shanbow", + "description": "In newsrooms, as in other workplaces, most are given power leadership through title and job description. But many of us operate in spaces where there is no one above you who can edit you. Let's explore how to lead your newsroom without the title and exert power over the things you care deeply about. And let's explore the ways you can acquire power by playing within the system.", + "facilitator": "Steven Rich", + "facilitator_twitter": "dataeditor", + "id": 2355671, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T00:32:02.064Z", + "title": "How to lead without power", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Amanda Yarnell", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "amandayarnell", + "description": "At SRCCON:WORK, I talked about re-building our newsroom org charts to reflect the work we’re doing today and to prepare us for where we’re going. Joined now with C&EN’s editorial director, Amanda Yarnell, we’ll show you how we built a product team and re-structured our newsroom around it in one year. \n\nIf you’re interested in building a newsroom-wide roadmap, streamlining and prioritizing newsroom ideas, creating and managing a sprint-based product team, and growing stakeholder alignment across business units, join us. In this session, we’ll share our blueprint, our successes, and our challenges, so you can do it faster.", + "facilitator": "Jessica Morrison", + "facilitator_twitter": "ihearttheroad", + "id": 2355555, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T16:39:02.638Z", + "title": "How to re-org your newsroom around product without breaking it", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Yan Wu", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "codingyan", + "description": "Let's enter the Data Team Time Machine and go back to our old graphics and long-ago code. Even the biggest superstars have a first project or an outdated framework that seems quaint now. In this session, we'll unearth some ancient work and talk about how we'd approach it differently with our current-day toolbox, whether that's refactoring some code, building with some modern-day software or scrapping it and starting again. Come to this session if you want to feel better about how far you've come and if you want some inspiration to look at your projects in a new light.", + "facilitator": "Erin Petenko", + "facilitator_twitter": "EPetenko", + "id": 2345883, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-12T19:23:37.566Z", + "title": "If I knew then what I know now", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "The dream of the 90s is alive with static sites! The JAM stack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) is a new twist on an old idea. Making static webpages has many benefits for newsrooms in terms of cost and long term maintainability. In this session, we will go through the basics of the static site generation landscape and participants will deploy their own custom static site, like GeoCities never died but with a data driven twist.", + "facilitator": "Carl Johnson", + "facilitator_twitter": "carlmjohnson", + "id": 2345204, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-12T14:58:30.506Z", + "title": "Let's JAMstack! How to Make Data-driven Static Sites", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "The world of online advertising has been under a lot of fire. Online advertising has been used to target disenfranchised groups, those deemed manipulatable, and to push political disinformation. The economies of scale, having the many different types and origins of advertising, has made it even more difficult to prevent bad actors on different platforms. The question then arises, what makes an ethical ad? What can we do on our publications and platforms to help promote more ethical advertising?", + "facilitator": "Ian Carrico", + "facilitator_twitter": "iamcarrico", + "id": 2355189, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T13:30:25.313Z", + "title": "Let's build some ethical advertising", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Alison Jones", + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "There are many resources out there for managers leading remote teams. Similarly, there are plenty of resources for the people on those teams to work, communicate and collaborate effectively. There are also plenty of arguments that have been made for how remote work improves employee effectiveness and satisfaction, why it has economic benefits for employers, and on and on. \n\nAnd yet, national news organizations concentrate their staff in the most expensive cities in the country. Let's try to figure out why that is and help make the case for supporting a more remote-friendly workforce.\n\nIn this session we'll try to come up with as many of the common objections raised by hiring managers when they insist that a given position be based in a particular location and then come up with a playbook of effective arguments to overcome those objections.\n\nAdditionally, we'll come up with some high level talking points regarding how supporting remote work can improve the fundamental economics of journalism while improving the lives of employees and the communities they serve.", + "facilitator": "Adam Schweigert", + "facilitator_twitter": "aschweig", + "id": 2351494, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T23:58:59.036Z", + "title": "Making The Case For Remote Work", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "cofacilitator_twitter": null, + "description": "This will be an interactive and honest conversation about how management can be improved in local newsrooms. We’ll break the subject into a few key conversation starters -- the factors that lead to promotion of non-transferable skill sets, the dramatic industry disruptions that lead to a chaotic situation for management, and how we tackle those big issues through human resource development. \n\nOne of the keys early on in the session will be to have people identify themselves as managers and former managers, versus our typical worker-bee reporters. We’ll encourage dialogue between the managers who are willing to talk about their fears and shortcomings, and worker bees who are willing to talk about how they want to be managed. We want to embrace this vulnerability, allowing managers and worker bees to speak with each other and come to better understandings of their counterparts.", + "facilitator": "Erin Mansfield", + "facilitator_twitter": "_erinmansfield", + "id": 2356004, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T02:32:50.301Z", + "title": "Meeting management challenges in local newsrooms", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Simon Galperin", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "thensim0nsaid", + "description": "Let's work together to build a membership model that is inclusive (meaning all the things you think that means and also accounts for things like skills as an entry point). Membership should be more than a monetary transaction and early access to Wait Wait tickets. It should be a gateway to the communities we serve. \n\nImportant: There will be LEGO’s in this session!", + "facilitator": "Candice Fortman", + "facilitator_twitter": "cande313", + "id": 2355063, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-23T15:29:43.726Z", + "title": "Membership Has its Privileges (and They Are Not Just for the Privileged)", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Maya Miller", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "mayatmiller", + "description": "People are dying and it’s up to you to figure out why. In Queens, New York the percentage of people who die after suffering a heart attack is on the rise. Join our collaborative investigative team to solve the mystery and enact change.\n\nA la a murder mystery party or the world’s shortest LARP, you’ll play a character—perhaps a journalist, data analyst, EMS first responder, public housing resident, graphic designer, professor, city council member, hospital administrator, or community activist. Like any good mystery, you won’t be able to solve it alone.\n\nAt the end we’ll return to our everyday selves and discuss what we learned about working collaboratively, in and outside of journalism.", + "facilitator": "Laura Laderman", + "facilitator_twitter": "Liladerm", + "id": 2355398, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T14:32:31.653Z", + "title": "Murder Mystery: Collaborative Journalism Edition", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Most newsrooms need their CMS to do the same basic things, but there are so many ways to do it. Let’s see what it looks like to publish a news story in a lineup of different CMSes. To show how different newsrooms accomplish the same tasks, a lineup of people involved in developing CMSes will follow the same demo script showing how to write, edit and publish a news story, rank it on a homepage and promote it to an audience. Each presenter will also talk about their favorite feature of their CMS and how to get journalists excited about their CMS.", + "facilitator": "Albert Sun", + "facilitator_twitter": "albertsun", + "id": 2355631, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T17:41:35.936Z", + "title": "CMS Demos: Approaches to Helping Our Newsrooms Do Their Best Work", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Natasha Vicens", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "khantasha", + "description": "Many of us are overworked, lonely coders. How do we accomplish every day editorial projects and also dedicated time to learning new technologies and documenting workflows that we spend so much time implementing and testing? With all this newfangled tech, what’s noise and what’s signal?\n\nLet's talk about devising coping and filtering mechanisms for the onslaught of newness so we can all actually benefit from it.", + "facilitator": "Alexandra Kanik", + "facilitator_twitter": "act_rational", + "id": 2355911, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:06:25.896Z", + "title": "Noise & Signal: Knowing when to adopt new tech, and when to ignore it", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": '"Parachute journalism" is the practice of national outlets or freelancers flying into local communities they''re not a part of to report a story, then leaving again. It''s a part of our journalistic economy, as the money and power in journalism is focused in just a few geographic locations--but it can also be damaging to local communities, and it can lead to misrepresentation, distrust and resentment. Often, national journalists appear in a community in times of trauma and elections, and report stories with insufficient context, while local journalists struggle to access equivalent resources for necessary ongoing reporting. This session will explore our collective experiences with parachute journalism as both insiders and outsiders to a community, in order to produce good ideas about how to do harm reduction, increase accountability, and shift power dynamics. We''ll ask: Are there situations where it''s better if this story just doesn''t get told? How do we evaluate that? What can national media outlets and freelancers do to connect and collaborate with local journalists and local communities? What are the ethics of accountable partnerships? In what ways do local and regional/national media needs differ, and how can journalists collaborate to produce stories that better address the needs of all involved? All of this will be driving at a larger question: What does justice and accountability look like in the practice of journalism?', + "facilitator": "Lewis Raven Wallace", + "facilitator_twitter": "lewispants", + "id": 2355308, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T00:22:42.837Z", + "title": "Parachute Journalism: Can outsiders report accountably on other people's communities?", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Hannah Birch", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "hannahsbirch", + "description": "One of the [most frequently cited reasons](https://medium.com/jsk-class-of-2018/news-nerd-salaries-2017-2c83466b994e) journalists in digital roles leave their jobs is lack of promotion and career advancement opportunities. At the same time, journalists with a nontraditional mix of skills, who sit at the intersection of roles, departments or teams — we call them platypuses — are proving to be pivotal to the future of news. So how can newsrooms use the people they have to push their digital initiatives forward? \n\nThis session brings together digital journalists and managers to discuss career growth within the newsroom, especially for people with a nontraditional blend of skills. A lot of growth in digital careers is uncharted territory, but through our empathy interviews we will bring together tips and frameworks for how digital journalists can fit into forward-thinking newsrooms.\n\nWe’ll share success stories and lessons learned, and we’ll workshop tactics that could work in participants’ newsrooms. This session is meant to be a launchpad for conversations and plans to better empower and grow newsroom digital talent — and not lose them to other newsrooms and industries.", + "facilitator": "Vignesh Ramachandran", + "facilitator_twitter": "VigneshR", + "id": 2353502, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-18T23:21:24.705Z", + "title": "Proud to be a Platypus: Finding Your Own Innovative Role in News", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Jesikah Maria Ross", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "jmr_MediaSpark", + "description": "A lot of data journalism takes place in front of a computer, but there is a lot to be gained by creating data together with your community. As part of a documentary project about a culturally diverse, low-income community, we recently invited residents to map their neighborhood — not online, but with paper and pens at in-person gatherings. We not only generated unique data, but also stories and context we never would have heard if we hadn’t met people where they lived. \n\nMore and more, journalists are experimenting with community engagement practices to accurately reflect and represent people’s lived experiences. We can do the same by taking an analog approach to creating data, including our community in the stories we tell about them. This helps verify the data by collecting it ourselves and having subject matter experts (your community!) vet it along the way. It also makes our reporting process more transparent and creates a group of people invested in our work. \n\nWe’ll share what we did and what we learned in our neighborhood mapping experiments, and invite a discussion on other ways to weave community engagement into data reporting. Our goal: draft a starter kit of ideas for doing data journalism IRL that you can take back to your newsroom.", + "facilitator": "Christopher Hagan", + "facilitator_twitter": "chrishagan", + "id": 2354731, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T23:03:19.743Z", + "title": "Spreadsheets IRL: The How and Why of Making Data With Your Community", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Disha Raychaudhuri", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "Disha_RC", + "description": "In recent years, many news organizations have published their diversity reports to educate folks in the industry about their challenges with diversity and to indicate that they are taking newsroom diversity seriously. This has also led to a number of conversations in the Journalists of Color slack and at other in-person settings about diversity committees at news organizations trying to figure out what their diversity report should cover and how they can convince management to publish effective indicators of diversity.\n\nIn this session we would like to facilitate a conversation around the topic of diversity reports. We will start with a quick survey of recent diversity reports published by prominent journalism outlets and then move to a discussion/group activity to work out what measures should be included in diversity reports to further the actual goals of increasing diversity in newsrooms.", + "facilitator": "Moiz Syed", + "facilitator_twitter": "moizsyed", + "id": 2355357, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T18:24:32.225Z", + "title": "State of Newsroom Diversity Reports", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "It seems everyone is talking about ethics in technology these days. Examples abound of poor decisions leading to unintended harm, of planned exploitation and avoidance of consent, of prioritization of financial gain over literally everything else. What’s the ethically-minded technologist to do? This session will be an open, off the record conversation among designers, developers, and journalists about the things that keep us up at night: the ways our work can cause harm, the systems driving us to do the wrong thing, the incentives that make it hard to even know what’s right. We’ll work from a vantage point that assumes good intentions, recognizes that impacts matter more than plans, and acknowledges the impossibility of perfect solutions: no matter what we do, we are all complicit. But we are not alone, and we are not without the ability to effect change.", + "facilitator": "Mandy Brown", + "facilitator_twitter": "aworkinglibrary", + "id": 2355070, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:39:31.876Z", + "title": "Staying with the trouble: Doing good work in terrible times", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Eimi Okuno", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "emettely", + "description": "There's a joke we often hear journalists make: Our job is to clearly communicate information to our audience, and yet we're terrible at communicating with each other in our newsrooms. That's partly because we don't use the right tools or frameworks to facilitate clear and consistent communication that leads to cultural change. In this session, we’ll hear what kinds of communication and culture problems you’ve identified in your newsrooms, dig into tools– like OKRs, team health checks and user manuals– that can provide a shared vocabulary in and across teams, and help you and your colleagues feel more heard and satisfied in your newsrooms, whether it’s a large organization like the BBC (where Eimi works!) or a startup like WhereBy.Us (where Anika works!).", + "facilitator": "Anika Anand", + "facilitator_twitter": "anikaanand00", + "id": 2351418, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-25T01:39:31.876Z", + "title": "Structured communication: Tools you can use to change culture and help your team feel heard", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "We don't talk about it a lot in the newsroom, the fact that we see and hear things all the time in our jobs that likely affect us in ways it's hard to describe to someone else. One of the first roles for most reporters and photographers is covering breaking news - chasing the police scanner from one traumatic event to the next. Our newsroom might have to cover a traumatic event on a larger scale - a mass shooting, a devastating brush fire, hurricane or tornado. We take care to tell the stories of those affected, to make sure their voices and their grief are heard. But we also need to take care of ourselves and our colleagues in these moments. What should you be looking for to make sure you're protected and feel empowered to speak up for yourself when you don't feel comfortable or need help? What are some things you could do if you are the editor to take care of your staff? What types of services could news organizations offer that would help in these situations?", + "facilitator": "Kristyn Wellesley", + "facilitator_twitter": "kriswellesley", + "id": 2355666, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T19:34:30.680Z", + "title": "Take care: The Importance of Self-Care in the Newsroom", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": null, + "description": "Diversity initiatives are popping up in most companies these days. Newsrooms are talking about gender and race representation, re-examining how we cover stories and how we create space for employees of all genders and races. We laud ourselves for being aware and being inclusive. However, noticeably missing from the conversation, at least for those who identify as such, are people with disabilities. \n\nThe New York Times has employee lead initiatives to help correct that. From the tech task force that turned into a team designated with making our site more accessible, to the internal panel on employees with disabilities that turned into an employee resource group the disabled community and their allies at the times are standing up and taking space. \n\nDuring this session we will examine how the disability community is represented in newsrooms and institutions, discuss what has been done, and set a framework for how to take action now. We will work together to figure out what ally-ship looks like and what it means for diversity initiatives to include people with disabilities, and how they miss the mark when they don’t -- both for employees and our coverage.", + "facilitator": "Katherine McMahan", + "facilitator_twitter": "katieannmcmahan", + "id": 2353768, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T16:06:37.651Z", + "title": "Taking Up Space: Making Room for People with Disabilities at The Times", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Becca Aaronson", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "becca_aa", + "description": "News nerds came of age in newsrooms that were hostile to their efforts. But now, the geeks are running the show. There are few holdouts left. Winning was easy. Governing is harder.\n\nWhat should the agenda of the nerds be in newsrooms where they are finally winning territory and mindshare? How will we use our positions to further our agenda?", + "facilitator": "Jeremy Bowers", + "facilitator_twitter": "jeremybowers", + "id": 2353430, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-18T19:38:56.833Z", + "title": "The Geeks Won: Now What?", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Jayme Fraser", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "JaymeKFraser", + "description": "How has science fiction helped you understand the world? Yourself? Justice? Let's talk about the role of SF, and how it's taught us to be better makers, teammates and people. ***Bring a book to swap!***", + "facilitator": "Brian Boyer", + "facilitator_twitter": "brianboyer", + "id": 2353714, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-18T19:38:56.833Z", + "title": "Things the future taught us", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Amelia McNamara", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "AmeliaMN", + "description": "We often come across percentages in journalism, simple numbers that convey a powerful amount of information. But a percentage can obscure crucial information. If one ZIP code has 30 homeless individuals out of 100, and another has 30,000 homeless out of 100,000, the percentages indicates similarity, but the two geographies will have vastly different times dealing with the homeless population. When looking at a list of percentages, we should endeavor to find those that are distinct. Tools from statistical theory can help us tease out what's unusual and what isn't. It doesn't require much complicated math, just a little algebra.", + "facilitator": "Ryan Menezes", + "facilitator_twitter": "ryanvmenezes", + "id": 2353889, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-19T21:42:57.842Z", + "title": "We should rethink the way we think about percentages", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Ajay Chainani", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "ajayjapan", + "description": "Many news organizations are investigating how to apply artificial intelligence to the practice of journalism. Meanwhile many individuals and organizations are funding advancements in the field of news and AI. Do we take into consideration unconscious bias when developing algorithms and methods to build these new digital tools? How can they be best applied? What does the application of AI mean for newsrooms and the public they serve?", + "facilitator": "Sarah Schmalbach", + "facilitator_twitter": "schmalie", + "id": 2355772, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T22:10:54.019Z", + "title": "What happens to journalism, when AI eats the world?", + }, + { + "cofacilitator": "Jun-Kai Teoh", + "cofacilitator_twitter": "jkteoh", + "description": "How would we do journalism differently if we were to think about impact — real-world change — at the brainstorming stage, before we started to write or shoot? If we knew something needed to happen to make things better, could we identify a few levers to pull that’d make that something more likely? Would we frame the story differently? Share the data openly? Talk to different sources? And how do we do all of this without going too far, without crossing into advocacy journalism? Now more than ever, with more nonprofit newsrooms forming, more for-profit newsrooms turning to consumer revenue (on the sales pitch that journalism matters) and trust at a crisis point, we need to measure and show why our work matters. This session will cover published examples and studies but is meant to be a discussion about what we can do — and what’s going too far — to make a difference. We might also, using design thinking strategies, prototype a project designed for impact.", + "facilitator": "Anjanette Delgado", + "facilitator_twitter": "anjdelgado", + "id": 2355593, + "submitted_at": "2019-04-24T21:42:02.486Z", + "title": "Why it matters — Designing stories for impact", + }, +] diff --git a/_data/sessions_care_2022.yml b/_data/sessions_care_2022.yml index 93d98a8c..6f1d5739 100644 --- a/_data/sessions_care_2022.yml +++ b/_data/sessions_care_2022.yml @@ -1,92 +1,92 @@ [ - { - "id": "culture-of-caring", - "title": "A culture of caring: Building intergenerational relationships in the workplace", - "description": "Like each generation before it, Gen-Z is bringing a new take to the role work plays in our lives—are our workplaces ready for it?\n\nEach generation faces challenges that shape their perspectives, relationships, and ways of showing up in and outside of work: stock market crashes, economic uncertainties, global conflict. The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception, and many following events like the Great Resignation, Return to Office debates, and mass layoffs have further shaped an attitude that questions the role work plays in our daily lives.\n\nIn a climate of difference, how can we create bridges between our generational divides where we can pass lessons both up and down to build a culture of caring and respect? How can we collectively shape the future that we all want to be a part of and build intergenerational relationships upon healthy foundations?", - "facilitators": "Vanessa Gregorchik, Abby Blachman, Jane Elizabeth" - }, - { - "id": "safety-diverse-team", - "title": "Building and maintaining psychological safety on a diverse team", - "description": "One of the most important gifts we can give one another is the ability to show up as our authentic selves. Let's talk about psychological safety, how to build it on diverse teams, and more importantly: how to maintain it and work through if it breaks down.", - "facilitators": "Emma Carew Grovum, Hannah Wise" - }, - { - "id": "restorative-justice-techniques", - "title": "Building healthier conversations with restorative justice techniques", - "description": "We all want to have deep, meaningful conversations as we report our stories. Yet despite our best intentions, people often leave interviews with journalists feeling like we've not understood them at best or harmed them further at worst. But now, journalists can learn from restorative justice, a discipline that grounds difficult (but healthy) conversations in safety, trust, and transparency.\n\nIn a new resource from Free Press, \"The Moment Is Magic,\" seven RJ practitioners offer transformative, actionable tips journalists can use before, during, and after interviews. Allen Arthur and Diamond Hardiman build on their experiences working in both criminal justice and journalism spaces to adapt these tools to help journalists establish mutual trust and keep people safe during vulnerable moments. In this session, Arthur and Hardiman will be joined by some of the guide's participants for a discussion of the principles and a Q&A.", - "facilitators": "Allen Arthur, Diamond Hardiman" - }, - { - "id": "culture-builder", - "title": "Call in the culture builder: Let’s formalize the work of connection and care", - "description": "Those of us who consider ourselves cultural tentpoles within and beyond our organizations know that building culture goes beyond party planning and flashy perks—it’s the prerequisite to creating connection, building community, and driving inclusion and belonging. And as hybrid and remote configurations make distributed work ever more common, the effort in building culture has never been more important or more tricky.\n\nAt the same time, culture-building work—including participating in diversity committees, mentoring, and team programming—often means too many non-promotable tasks, a term coined by authors of ‘The No Club,’ which disproportionately falls on women and employees of color. In this session, we’ll cover how to make this invisible labor not just visible, but celebrated and rewarded.", - "facilitators": "Michelle Peng, Emily Goligoski " - }, - { - "id": "commitments-necessity", - "title": "Commitments instead of necessity: How to avoid dread on a consistent basis", - "description": "As we continue to move through a period of chaotic change in journalism, it may be time to remind ourselves we have to be good to ourselves. This session allows participants to explore the difference between doing things because we think we have to versus allowing ourselves to commit to those things we know we have the capacity to tackle.\n\nHow do we establish what meets the criteria of a commitment? How do we decide what projects and career choices make the most sense? We'll explore personal statements and how they can help us determine how to commit to ourselves and our goals on a daily basis.", - "facilitators": "André Natta, Diana López" - }, - { - "id": "covering-safety", - "title": "Covering community safety", - "description": "What is \"safety\" and why is it such a catch phrase for politicians and police? What questions and perspectives can journalists take into our work from the work of the movements to defund and abolish police and prisons?\n\nIn this session, we will use the scholarship of Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie (among other abolitionist leaders) to break down our assumptions about what \"safety\" means in our day-to-day lives and in news reporting. We will explore strategies for covering \"safety\" that don't depend on faulty assumptions or crude statistics such as \"crime\" stats reported by government entities. We will reflect collectively on what it means for journalists to re-imagine safety, and what kinds of stories and media projects can facilitate re-imagining toward a more just world.", - "facilitators": "Lewis Raven Wallace" - }, - { - "id": "curiosity-as-care", - "title": "Curiosity as care", - "description": "Curiosity is a form of attention and telling someone: you matter. The ways in which we express our curiosity matters a lot: our tone, body language, agendas (or lack thereof) and desired outcomes. They all add up to helping the person on the other end understand if the questions are coming from a place of genuine care, or not.\n\nIn this session, I plan to bring together folks doing incredible work at the intersection of journalism, depolarization and mediation to share tactical approaches and get practiced in a few methods of better question-asking experiences.\n\nThis session can not only help in the acts of creating journalism, but also in any relationship - family, friends, colleagues and strangers.", - "facilitators": "Jennifer Brandel, Mónica Guzmán" - }, - { - "id": "personal-ecology", - "title": "Exploring our Personal Ecology", - "description": "In this session we will explore our Personal Ecology, which is a systemic approach to managing work life and consists of four main elements. We will share the four main elements and have an interactive discussion on the impacts of burnout. Participants will have an opportunity to reflect individually and collectively on the connection between burnout and urgency. A sense of urgency is one of the White Supremacy Culture Characteristics that we will explore. We hope participants leave the session feeling curious, reflective and connected.", - "facilitators": "Cristina Salgado, Nora Bryne" - }, - { - "id": "managers-only", - "title": "For managers only: Promoting a healthier work culture", - "description": "Directors, team leads or editors play a key role in starting conversations around well-being and mental health in their newsrooms. They have more power to affect change and have a responsibility to support their staff. However, at the same time, it’s also these leaders that should prevent their teams from being exhausted, the first ones to be hyper-connected and suffering dangerous levels of stress.\n\nIn this session, The Self-Investigation wants to facilitate a discussion about the learnings and strategies of media leaders as they strive to change things up in order to build a healthier environment for their teams. We will share techniques that have been successfully tried and tested. We will also offer the inspiration and knowledge we have accumulated from the many leaders we have trained in our tailor-made courses and through the Knight Center’s MOOCs we designed and ran in three languages, reaching more than 2.500 people from 120 countries and territories.", - "facilitators": "Mar Cabra, Kim Brice" - }, - { - "id": "herding-cats", - "title": "Herding cats: How and why animals can be critical for self-care", - "description": "Humans have depended on animals for comfort and care for centuries. Of course, there's lots of research about the benefits of having an animal companion. Animals help people with disabilities navigate society, they can help reduce blood pressure, help a person cope with depression and so much more. So during this session, we're going to celebrate and share stories about our companion animals! Round up your cats, dogs, guinea pigs, fish and more and come ready to introduce them, tell their stories and share how they help you care for yourself.", - "facilitators": "Stefanie Murray, Kat Duncan" - }, - { - "id": "reducing-harm", - "title": "How reducing harm in your journalism helps reduce the harm to yourself", - "description": "In this session we will discuss ideas to change the pace of the news cycles that are burning audiences and journalists out. We will analyze journalism as a system, and talk about the structures, power dynamics and beliefs that are fueling news fatigue and fear within the public, and hopelessness in newsrooms. We will share community engagement strategies that can help us to slow down our journalism, and make it sustainable -not just for business but for the mental health of all.\n\nAs a conversation starter, I’d like to draw from my personal experience covering low-income Latino immigrant communities in the US: from producing news in the verge of burnout that often left Latino viewers afraid and disempowered, to the challenge of building new mediums and practices to deliver actionable information that helps them navigate the daily demands of a bicultural life.", - "facilitators": "Maye Primera, Kate Travis" - }, - { - "id": "heal-workplace-trauma", - "title": "How to heal when your workplace is the trauma", - "description": "Most journalists are now well aware of how the news and events we cover can lead to significant stress and other trauma reactions, though rarely do we discuss the impact of trauma that can occur within the bounds of the newsroom itself. What happens to workers stuck in the middle of nasty union talks? How does it feel when diversity committee members realize none of their work will be implemented? What does the brain do when a manager has no understanding of the community you’re covering and their ideas are in fact hurting that very community?\n\nCome join a discussion to better understand how traumatic experiences in the workplace impact your brain and body while learning some strategies that can help allow for healing along the way. Breakout rooms will provide an opportunity to discuss how to notice one’s emotional experiences and provide validation to oneself and others. There will also be an opportunity to practice identifying strategies using vignettes and developing one’s own stress response plan.", - "facilitators": "Ashleigh Graf, Lisa Carlin" - }, - { - "id": "leading-with-care", - "title": "Leading with care: Policies, programs, and managerial practices", - "description": "How might journalism leaders invest in community care for our organizations and teams? Join Jen Mizgata and Ana (An Xiao) Mina, two consultants and coaches who've supported journalism leaders in a variety of organizations, in exploring this key question. We’ll offer an initial framework to help facilitate a conversation amongst participants, with the goal of collecting feedback and ideas on community care opportunities through the lenses of sustainability, mental health, DEI and holistic support.\n\nAs an outcome, we hope to share a set of resources from the conversation with the broader SRCCON community. This will outline specific opportunities for structural, community care that leaders in the field of journalism can apply to their internal work with their organizations. This workshop will be designed to support both introverted and extroverted communications styles.", - "facilitators": "Ana Mina, Jen Mizgata" - }, - { - "id": "radical-gardening", - "title": "Radical gardening", - "description": "Learn how to use gardening to bring digital resilience and energy back into your work. #FairyGardenMama shows you the parallels between gardening and journalism work and how to strengthen your green thumb!", - "facilitators": "Michelle Ferrier" - }, - { - "id": "thrive-hives", - "title": "Suffer in silos or thrive in a hive: Creating our own communities of care in journalism", - "description": "While many of us find ways to connect at events or on projects, too often we’re left on our own to solve problems facing our organizations and our industry. This workshop will explore what it takes to break out of our constraints to cross-pollinate ideas and create critical mass for change within journalism.\n\nInformed by our experience creating a support group for journalism support professionals, we’ll guide participants on identifying your personal goals for connecting with others, establishing objectives and expectations for these conversations, and how to build on these connections over time. You’ll come away with tangible takeaways generated from our collective expertise (and possibly some new co-conspirators).", - "facilitators": "Bridget Thoreson, John Hernandez" - } + { + "id": "culture-of-caring", + "title": "A culture of caring: Building intergenerational relationships in the workplace", + "description": "Like each generation before it, Gen-Z is bringing a new take to the role work plays in our lives—are our workplaces ready for it?\n\nEach generation faces challenges that shape their perspectives, relationships, and ways of showing up in and outside of work: stock market crashes, economic uncertainties, global conflict. The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception, and many following events like the Great Resignation, Return to Office debates, and mass layoffs have further shaped an attitude that questions the role work plays in our daily lives.\n\nIn a climate of difference, how can we create bridges between our generational divides where we can pass lessons both up and down to build a culture of caring and respect? How can we collectively shape the future that we all want to be a part of and build intergenerational relationships upon healthy foundations?", + "facilitators": "Vanessa Gregorchik, Abby Blachman, Jane Elizabeth", + }, + { + "id": "safety-diverse-team", + "title": "Building and maintaining psychological safety on a diverse team", + "description": "One of the most important gifts we can give one another is the ability to show up as our authentic selves. Let's talk about psychological safety, how to build it on diverse teams, and more importantly: how to maintain it and work through if it breaks down.", + "facilitators": "Emma Carew Grovum, Hannah Wise", + }, + { + "id": "restorative-justice-techniques", + "title": "Building healthier conversations with restorative justice techniques", + "description": "We all want to have deep, meaningful conversations as we report our stories. Yet despite our best intentions, people often leave interviews with journalists feeling like we've not understood them at best or harmed them further at worst. But now, journalists can learn from restorative justice, a discipline that grounds difficult (but healthy) conversations in safety, trust, and transparency.\n\nIn a new resource from Free Press, \"The Moment Is Magic,\" seven RJ practitioners offer transformative, actionable tips journalists can use before, during, and after interviews. Allen Arthur and Diamond Hardiman build on their experiences working in both criminal justice and journalism spaces to adapt these tools to help journalists establish mutual trust and keep people safe during vulnerable moments. In this session, Arthur and Hardiman will be joined by some of the guide's participants for a discussion of the principles and a Q&A.", + "facilitators": "Allen Arthur, Diamond Hardiman", + }, + { + "id": "culture-builder", + "title": "Call in the culture builder: Let’s formalize the work of connection and care", + "description": "Those of us who consider ourselves cultural tentpoles within and beyond our organizations know that building culture goes beyond party planning and flashy perks—it’s the prerequisite to creating connection, building community, and driving inclusion and belonging. And as hybrid and remote configurations make distributed work ever more common, the effort in building culture has never been more important or more tricky.\n\nAt the same time, culture-building work—including participating in diversity committees, mentoring, and team programming—often means too many non-promotable tasks, a term coined by authors of ‘The No Club,’ which disproportionately falls on women and employees of color. In this session, we’ll cover how to make this invisible labor not just visible, but celebrated and rewarded.", + "facilitators": "Michelle Peng, Emily Goligoski ", + }, + { + "id": "commitments-necessity", + "title": "Commitments instead of necessity: How to avoid dread on a consistent basis", + "description": "As we continue to move through a period of chaotic change in journalism, it may be time to remind ourselves we have to be good to ourselves. This session allows participants to explore the difference between doing things because we think we have to versus allowing ourselves to commit to those things we know we have the capacity to tackle.\n\nHow do we establish what meets the criteria of a commitment? How do we decide what projects and career choices make the most sense? We'll explore personal statements and how they can help us determine how to commit to ourselves and our goals on a daily basis.", + "facilitators": "André Natta, Diana López", + }, + { + "id": "covering-safety", + "title": "Covering community safety", + "description": "What is \"safety\" and why is it such a catch phrase for politicians and police? What questions and perspectives can journalists take into our work from the work of the movements to defund and abolish police and prisons?\n\nIn this session, we will use the scholarship of Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie (among other abolitionist leaders) to break down our assumptions about what \"safety\" means in our day-to-day lives and in news reporting. We will explore strategies for covering \"safety\" that don't depend on faulty assumptions or crude statistics such as \"crime\" stats reported by government entities. We will reflect collectively on what it means for journalists to re-imagine safety, and what kinds of stories and media projects can facilitate re-imagining toward a more just world.", + "facilitators": "Lewis Raven Wallace", + }, + { + "id": "curiosity-as-care", + "title": "Curiosity as care", + "description": "Curiosity is a form of attention and telling someone: you matter. The ways in which we express our curiosity matters a lot: our tone, body language, agendas (or lack thereof) and desired outcomes. They all add up to helping the person on the other end understand if the questions are coming from a place of genuine care, or not.\n\nIn this session, I plan to bring together folks doing incredible work at the intersection of journalism, depolarization and mediation to share tactical approaches and get practiced in a few methods of better question-asking experiences.\n\nThis session can not only help in the acts of creating journalism, but also in any relationship - family, friends, colleagues and strangers.", + "facilitators": "Jennifer Brandel, Mónica Guzmán", + }, + { + "id": "personal-ecology", + "title": "Exploring our Personal Ecology", + "description": "In this session we will explore our Personal Ecology, which is a systemic approach to managing work life and consists of four main elements. We will share the four main elements and have an interactive discussion on the impacts of burnout. Participants will have an opportunity to reflect individually and collectively on the connection between burnout and urgency. A sense of urgency is one of the White Supremacy Culture Characteristics that we will explore. We hope participants leave the session feeling curious, reflective and connected.", + "facilitators": "Cristina Salgado, Nora Bryne", + }, + { + "id": "managers-only", + "title": "For managers only: Promoting a healthier work culture", + "description": "Directors, team leads or editors play a key role in starting conversations around well-being and mental health in their newsrooms. They have more power to affect change and have a responsibility to support their staff. However, at the same time, it’s also these leaders that should prevent their teams from being exhausted, the first ones to be hyper-connected and suffering dangerous levels of stress.\n\nIn this session, The Self-Investigation wants to facilitate a discussion about the learnings and strategies of media leaders as they strive to change things up in order to build a healthier environment for their teams. We will share techniques that have been successfully tried and tested. We will also offer the inspiration and knowledge we have accumulated from the many leaders we have trained in our tailor-made courses and through the Knight Center’s MOOCs we designed and ran in three languages, reaching more than 2.500 people from 120 countries and territories.", + "facilitators": "Mar Cabra, Kim Brice", + }, + { + "id": "herding-cats", + "title": "Herding cats: How and why animals can be critical for self-care", + "description": "Humans have depended on animals for comfort and care for centuries. Of course, there's lots of research about the benefits of having an animal companion. Animals help people with disabilities navigate society, they can help reduce blood pressure, help a person cope with depression and so much more. So during this session, we're going to celebrate and share stories about our companion animals! Round up your cats, dogs, guinea pigs, fish and more and come ready to introduce them, tell their stories and share how they help you care for yourself.", + "facilitators": "Stefanie Murray, Kat Duncan", + }, + { + "id": "reducing-harm", + "title": "How reducing harm in your journalism helps reduce the harm to yourself", + "description": "In this session we will discuss ideas to change the pace of the news cycles that are burning audiences and journalists out. We will analyze journalism as a system, and talk about the structures, power dynamics and beliefs that are fueling news fatigue and fear within the public, and hopelessness in newsrooms. We will share community engagement strategies that can help us to slow down our journalism, and make it sustainable -not just for business but for the mental health of all.\n\nAs a conversation starter, I’d like to draw from my personal experience covering low-income Latino immigrant communities in the US: from producing news in the verge of burnout that often left Latino viewers afraid and disempowered, to the challenge of building new mediums and practices to deliver actionable information that helps them navigate the daily demands of a bicultural life.", + "facilitators": "Maye Primera, Kate Travis", + }, + { + "id": "heal-workplace-trauma", + "title": "How to heal when your workplace is the trauma", + "description": "Most journalists are now well aware of how the news and events we cover can lead to significant stress and other trauma reactions, though rarely do we discuss the impact of trauma that can occur within the bounds of the newsroom itself. What happens to workers stuck in the middle of nasty union talks? How does it feel when diversity committee members realize none of their work will be implemented? What does the brain do when a manager has no understanding of the community you’re covering and their ideas are in fact hurting that very community?\n\nCome join a discussion to better understand how traumatic experiences in the workplace impact your brain and body while learning some strategies that can help allow for healing along the way. Breakout rooms will provide an opportunity to discuss how to notice one’s emotional experiences and provide validation to oneself and others. There will also be an opportunity to practice identifying strategies using vignettes and developing one’s own stress response plan.", + "facilitators": "Ashleigh Graf, Lisa Carlin", + }, + { + "id": "leading-with-care", + "title": "Leading with care: Policies, programs, and managerial practices", + "description": "How might journalism leaders invest in community care for our organizations and teams? Join Jen Mizgata and Ana (An Xiao) Mina, two consultants and coaches who've supported journalism leaders in a variety of organizations, in exploring this key question. We’ll offer an initial framework to help facilitate a conversation amongst participants, with the goal of collecting feedback and ideas on community care opportunities through the lenses of sustainability, mental health, DEI and holistic support.\n\nAs an outcome, we hope to share a set of resources from the conversation with the broader SRCCON community. This will outline specific opportunities for structural, community care that leaders in the field of journalism can apply to their internal work with their organizations. This workshop will be designed to support both introverted and extroverted communications styles.", + "facilitators": "Ana Mina, Jen Mizgata", + }, + { + "id": "radical-gardening", + "title": "Radical gardening", + "description": "Learn how to use gardening to bring digital resilience and energy back into your work. #FairyGardenMama shows you the parallels between gardening and journalism work and how to strengthen your green thumb!", + "facilitators": "Michelle Ferrier", + }, + { + "id": "thrive-hives", + "title": "Suffer in silos or thrive in a hive: Creating our own communities of care in journalism", + "description": "While many of us find ways to connect at events or on projects, too often we’re left on our own to solve problems facing our organizations and our industry. This workshop will explore what it takes to break out of our constraints to cross-pollinate ideas and create critical mass for change within journalism.\n\nInformed by our experience creating a support group for journalism support professionals, we’ll guide participants on identifying your personal goals for connecting with others, establishing objectives and expectations for these conversations, and how to build on these connections over time. You’ll come away with tangible takeaways generated from our collective expertise (and possibly some new co-conspirators).", + "facilitators": "Bridget Thoreson, John Hernandez", + }, ] diff --git a/_includes/footer.html b/_includes/footer.html deleted file mode 100644 index c8c9f779..00000000 --- a/_includes/footer.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,63 +0,0 @@ -{% if page.section != 'sponsors' %} -{% endif %} - - - - diff --git a/_includes/headmeta.html b/_includes/headmeta.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..37d269f7 --- /dev/null +++ b/_includes/headmeta.html @@ -0,0 +1,61 @@ + + + +{{ page.title }} + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +{% if page.google_analytics_id and page.google_analytics_id != "" %} + + + +{% endif %} diff --git a/_includes/hub_footer.html b/_includes/hub_footer.html deleted file mode 100644 index 10aa8775..00000000 --- a/_includes/hub_footer.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ -
- {% if page.main_footer != true %} - {% if page.section != 'conduct' %} -

Read our code of conduct

{% endif %} - -

Keep in touch: Twitter / Email / Newsletter

- -

We say it “Source con”—SRC as in source code, CON as in conference. You can say it however you want!

- {% endif %} -
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_includes/live_sessions_js.html b/_includes/live_sessions_js.html index c3f5542e..a2c65e56 100644 --- a/_includes/live_sessions_js.html +++ b/_includes/live_sessions_js.html @@ -1,109 +1,111 @@ \ No newline at end of file + }; + showLive(); + diff --git a/_includes/live_sessions_table.html b/_includes/live_sessions_table.html index e9f2019a..25030ccd 100644 --- a/_includes/live_sessions_table.html +++ b/_includes/live_sessions_table.html @@ -1,12 +1,21 @@ diff --git a/_includes/navigation.html b/_includes/navigation.html deleted file mode 100644 index d427d408..00000000 --- a/_includes/navigation.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,5 +0,0 @@ - diff --git a/_includes/srccon_care_2022_footer.html b/_includes/srccon_care_2022_footer.html index fe5e3142..70dbd462 100644 --- a/_includes/srccon_care_2022_footer.html +++ b/_includes/srccon_care_2022_footer.html @@ -1,36 +1,61 @@
+
+

+ We say it “Source con.” You can say it however you want! +

+
+ \ No newline at end of file +
+
diff --git a/_includes/srccon_heart_2020_footer.html b/_includes/srccon_heart_2020_footer.html index 76a37d58..bb54b057 100644 --- a/_includes/srccon_heart_2020_footer.html +++ b/_includes/srccon_heart_2020_footer.html @@ -1,42 +1,65 @@
- {% if page.section != 'sponsors' %} - diff --git a/_layouts/layout.html b/_layouts/layout.html index 4e44cf57..c0a8a581 100644 --- a/_layouts/layout.html +++ b/_layouts/layout.html @@ -1,69 +1,164 @@ - - - - - - - {% if page.title %} - {{ page.title }} - {% else %} - SRCCON 2019 — July 11 & 12 in Minneapolis - {% endif %} - - - {% if page.title %} - - {% endif %} - - + + + + {% include headmeta.html %} + - - + +
+ - - - +
+ {% if page.photocredit != null %} + Photo: {{ page.photocredit }} + {% endif %} +
- - +
+
{{ content }}
+
- -
- - -
{% if page.photocredit != null %} - Photo: {{ page.photocredit }}

- {% endif %}
- -
-
- SRCCON 2019 • July 11 & 12 in MPLS Support the SRCCON team + {% endif %} {% if page.section != 'scholarships' %} +
+

Scholarship sponsor

+ + Knight Foundation +
+ {% endif %} +
+ Meet the sponsors that help make SRCCON happen
-
- -
+
+ {% endif %} + + - - - + diff --git a/_layouts/layout_hub.html b/_layouts/layout_hub.html index d5c83c59..f80f1fed 100644 --- a/_layouts/layout_hub.html +++ b/_layouts/layout_hub.html @@ -1,61 +1,64 @@ - - - - - - - {{ page.title }} - - - - - - - + + + + {% include headmeta.html %} + - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - +
- -
- -
+ + + +
+
{{ content }}
- {% include hub_footer.html %} +
+ {% if page.main_footer != true %} {% if page.section != 'conduct' %} +

+ Read our code of conduct +

+ {% endif %} + +

+ Keep in touch: + + @srccon on BlueSky / + Email / + Newsletter + +

+ + {% endif %} + +

+ We say it “Source con”—SRC as in source code, CON as in conference. + You can say it however you want! +

+
- + diff --git a/_share/brown-bag-session.md b/_share/brown-bag-session.md index b003d74a..db5887b8 100644 --- a/_share/brown-bag-session.md +++ b/_share/brown-bag-session.md @@ -6,30 +6,29 @@ back_link_text: Open News After Party toolkit # How to host a brown-bag session -Brown bag sessions are traditionally held over a shared lunch hour and participants are encouraged to bring their own lunch. You may want to incentivize participation by asking your bosses to let you order pizza or dessert or even just try bringing candy. Remember journalists will eat that week-old corner slice of birthday cake leftover in the breakroom: the bar here is pretty low. +Brown bag sessions are traditionally held over a shared lunch hour and participants are encouraged to bring their own lunch. You may want to incentivize participation by asking your bosses to let you order pizza or dessert or even just try bringing candy. Remember journalists will eat that week-old corner slice of birthday cake leftover in the breakroom: the bar here is pretty low. -* That being said, you should ask around and make sure your order is inclusive of folks’ food restrictions and preferences. Some common dietary preferences or restrictions include gluten-free, vegetarian and/or vegan, pork-free, nut-free and dairy-free (obviously not a comprehensive list, but these are some common ones to check for). +- That being said, you should ask around and make sure your order is inclusive of folks’ food restrictions and preferences. Some common dietary preferences or restrictions include gluten-free, vegetarian and/or vegan, pork-free, nut-free and dairy-free (obviously not a comprehensive list, but these are some common ones to check for). -There are several ways you can decide your topic for your brown bag lunch session. You may want to simply give a more public version of the memo you wrote for your leadership team: reviewing the top themes and takeaways then sharing your suggestions. You may want to do a deeper dive on a narrow topic. You may want to team up with others who attended the same event and do a quick round of 5-minute Lightning-style talks. +There are several ways you can decide your topic for your brown bag lunch session. You may want to simply give a more public version of the memo you wrote for your leadership team: reviewing the top themes and takeaways then sharing your suggestions. You may want to do a deeper dive on a narrow topic. You may want to team up with others who attended the same event and do a quick round of 5-minute Lightning-style talks. -* Try to think in terms of goals for your colleagues: should they be trying a new skill immediately? Should they be ready to collaborate with a new team? Should they be ready to change their workflow over the coming weeks? +- Try to think in terms of goals for your colleagues: should they be trying a new skill immediately? Should they be ready to collaborate with a new team? Should they be ready to change their workflow over the coming weeks? -Consider who you are targeting with this session: is this meant to be a summary of what you learned with everyone across the newsroom in mind? Is it meant to help two teams better work together on projects moving forward? Is it meant to share story ideas with editors and reporters? +Consider who you are targeting with this session: is this meant to be a summary of what you learned with everyone across the newsroom in mind? Is it meant to help two teams better work together on projects moving forward? Is it meant to share story ideas with editors and reporters? -Create an agenda for your session and send it out at least 1 week in advance. Send an email or Slack reminder 1 day before your session and about 30 minutes before. This helps people plan and see in advance what they might miss if they skip your session! +Create an agenda for your session and send it out at least 1 week in advance. Send an email or Slack reminder 1 day before your session and about 30 minutes before. This helps people plan and see in advance what they might miss if they skip your session! -* Also be very clear with folks about whether lunch will be provided or whether they are expected/invited to bring their own. (It’s a little chaotic when there is confusion over this! You don’t want to distract from the message and takeaways from your session) +- Also be very clear with folks about whether lunch will be provided or whether they are expected/invited to bring their own. (It’s a little chaotic when there is confusion over this! You don’t want to distract from the message and takeaways from your session) -Decide how you want to make the session available to folks who are not in the office that day or who get deterred at the last minute by breaking news: will you record the session? send your slides and handouts around after via email? Can remote staff dial in to hear and see your screenshare? Will there be a repeat session later in the day or week for the night and weekend teams? +Decide how you want to make the session available to folks who are not in the office that day or who get deterred at the last minute by breaking news: will you record the session? send your slides and handouts around after via email? Can remote staff dial in to hear and see your screenshare? Will there be a repeat session later in the day or week for the night and weekend teams? Remember to book a conference room and set the reservation for 15 minutes before your session is going to start (11:45 for a 12 meeting, etc) if at all possible. This will give you the opportunity to get set up if you are bringing in food, test your slides or visuals, etc. If you can’t get that 15 minute window, find another time to test your AV needs. Basically do anything you can to avoid losing 5-10 minutes of your actual session time to finding a dongle or figuring out how to get your slides on screen. -Make handouts (see the next section of this guide for more tips!) and have them printed. If you’re trying to save the planet, just email the handouts or slides around to your team at the start of your session. +Make handouts (see the next section of this guide for more tips!) and have them printed. If you’re trying to save the planet, just email the handouts or slides around to your team at the start of your session. Follow up immediately after your session. Make your materials available via email, Slack, and any shared drives like Dropbox or Google. Make sure your materials are available to the night shift, the weekend team, and any remote folks. - -_This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by [Emma Carew Grovum](https://twitter.com/emmacarew). It's meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization. The toolkit is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we'd love to see you use or adapt it for your own event—all we need is a link back here._ +_This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by [Emma Carew Grovum](https://emmacarewgrovum.com/). It's meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization. The toolkit is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we'd love to see you use or adapt it for your own event—all we need is a link back here._ _We'd also be thrilled to hear how you put what you learn into practice, so please tweet us at #OpenNewsAfterParty, or if you have any questions, [let us know](mailto:info@opennews.org)!_ diff --git a/_share/case-for-change.md b/_share/case-for-change.md index 2789533f..0afa2eca 100644 --- a/_share/case-for-change.md +++ b/_share/case-for-change.md @@ -6,35 +6,33 @@ back_link_text: Open News After Party toolkit # How to build your case for change -There are four key steps to putting together the case for your new idea. This could really apply to any kinds of ideas, but it’s especially meant to give you a framework to help you advocate for change, whether to workflow, culture or something else. +There are four key steps to putting together the case for your new idea. This could really apply to any kinds of ideas, but it’s especially meant to give you a framework to help you advocate for change, whether to workflow, culture or something else. -**Step One:** Gather your evidence. +**Step One:** Gather your evidence. -* Pull together a list of examples of how this idea has been implemented in other news organizations. This could include slides from speaker at your conference, or a handout from the workshop you attended. -* Follow up with other attendees or speakers from your event. If someone gave a talk on this subject, offer to take them out to coffee so you can ask them more about their work or research. +- Pull together a list of examples of how this idea has been implemented in other news organizations. This could include slides from speaker at your conference, or a handout from the workshop you attended. +- Follow up with other attendees or speakers from your event. If someone gave a talk on this subject, offer to take them out to coffee so you can ask them more about their work or research. **Step Two:** Build your team. -* Identify people who could be key allies to supporting this idea. Who needs to be on your side in order for this change to happen the most smoothly? Other reporters? The photo desk? The legal team? Someone in technology or ad/ops? -* Reach out to those folks and validate your idea for change with them. +- Identify people who could be key allies to supporting this idea. Who needs to be on your side in order for this change to happen the most smoothly? Other reporters? The photo desk? The legal team? Someone in technology or ad/ops? +- Reach out to those folks and validate your idea for change with them. **Step Three:** Tell your data story -* This step won’t always be necessary or possible, depending on what kind of change you are advocating for within your news organization. -* BUT if it makes sense to do so, pull out any analytics or other data reporting that can help support your pitch. +- This step won’t always be necessary or possible, depending on what kind of change you are advocating for within your news organization. +- BUT if it makes sense to do so, pull out any analytics or other data reporting that can help support your pitch. **Step Four:** Don’t bury the lede -* Oddly, journalists are really good at getting to the point in our stories, but can easily fall into the trap of backing into an idea, especially if making a large ask to management or leadership. -* Be clear about: - * What you are proposing (changing from XYZ current reality to YXZ ideal state) - * What decisions need to be made - * What resources need to be moved/changed/acquired -* Allow your leadership or management team to ask questions and interrogate your idea +- Oddly, journalists are really good at getting to the point in our stories, but can easily fall into the trap of backing into an idea, especially if making a large ask to management or leadership. +- Be clear about: + - What you are proposing (changing from XYZ current reality to YXZ ideal state) + - What decisions need to be made + - What resources need to be moved/changed/acquired +- Allow your leadership or management team to ask questions and interrogate your idea - - -_This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by [Emma Carew Grovum](https://twitter.com/emmacarew). It's meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization. The toolkit is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we'd love to see you use or adapt it for your own event—all we need is a link back here._ +_This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by [Emma Carew Grovum](https://emmacarewgrovum.com/). It's meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization. The toolkit is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we'd love to see you use or adapt it for your own event—all we need is a link back here._ _We'd also be thrilled to hear how you put what you learn into practice, so please tweet us at #OpenNewsAfterParty, or if you have any questions, [let us know](mailto:info@opennews.org)!_ diff --git a/_share/get-organized.md b/_share/get-organized.md index 7cd8e25f..551571d8 100644 --- a/_share/get-organized.md +++ b/_share/get-organized.md @@ -6,44 +6,43 @@ back_link_text: Open News After Party toolkit # Get organized (tips for the flight or train ride home) -**Who this exercise is for:** anyone who just closed out a conference or training event and has tons of ideas, resources, tipsheets, toolkits, tweets and notes to make sense of before returning to the office. +**Who this exercise is for:** anyone who just closed out a conference or training event and has tons of ideas, resources, tipsheets, toolkits, tweets and notes to make sense of before returning to the office. -**What you need:** all of your physical and digital artifacts from the event. Did you tweet about the event or post about it online somewhere? Did you take notes, either digitally or physically? Collect all of your materials that may be useful in the future like tipsheets from panels or links from speakers. +**What you need:** all of your physical and digital artifacts from the event. Did you tweet about the event or post about it online somewhere? Did you take notes, either digitally or physically? Collect all of your materials that may be useful in the future like tipsheets from panels or links from speakers. -There’s no right or wrong way to organize your ideas. Here’s a few methods to get you started: +There’s no right or wrong way to organize your ideas. Here’s a few methods to get you started: -1) Take 10 minutes to skim through everything you’ve got and just see what jumps out at you and crosses your mind as you review your notes and thought. If you took physical notes, you can take a highlighter and circle key ideas or themes that you want to bring back to work with you. If you took notes digitally, use a colored text or bolded font to track these ideas. +1. Take 10 minutes to skim through everything you’ve got and just see what jumps out at you and crosses your mind as you review your notes and thought. If you took physical notes, you can take a highlighter and circle key ideas or themes that you want to bring back to work with you. If you took notes digitally, use a colored text or bolded font to track these ideas. -* Make a list of 3-5 key themes or big ideas that stood out to you from the event that you think would be valuable in your newsroom. -* Under each item consider: - * Why is this idea or theme valuable to your newsroom’s goals? - * What would be needed to bring this idea/theme/skill, etc into your workplace in terms of staffing, time, other resources? - * What’s a next step you can take this week to get the ball rolling? +- Make a list of 3-5 key themes or big ideas that stood out to you from the event that you think would be valuable in your newsroom. +- Under each item consider: + - Why is this idea or theme valuable to your newsroom’s goals? + - What would be needed to bring this idea/theme/skill, etc into your workplace in terms of staffing, time, other resources? + - What’s a next step you can take this week to get the ball rolling? -2) Another option would be to use a list of questions as prompts to help you dig through your notes and artifacts. For example try to answer as many of these as you can: +2. Another option would be to use a list of questions as prompts to help you dig through your notes and artifacts. For example try to answer as many of these as you can: -* What was the best session you attended? -* What was the most interesting thing that you learned? -* What did you learn that was surprising? -* Name 5 new story ideas you thought of during the event -* Who did you meet at your event? What did they say? -* What did you see or hear about from another newsroom that you think you can try in your newsroom? -* What cool projects inspired you? -* What do you still have questions about? -* What do you still want to learn more about? -* Which of your projects did you talk most about? -* Was there any aspect of your newsroom that you felt like you were bragging about during the event? -* How do you think your day to day work will change as a result of attending this event? -* What’s the singlemost important idea, tool, resource or practice you would like to see in your newsroom in a month, in a year? +- What was the best session you attended? +- What was the most interesting thing that you learned? +- What did you learn that was surprising? +- Name 5 new story ideas you thought of during the event +- Who did you meet at your event? What did they say? +- What did you see or hear about from another newsroom that you think you can try in your newsroom? +- What cool projects inspired you? +- What do you still have questions about? +- What do you still want to learn more about? +- Which of your projects did you talk most about? +- Was there any aspect of your newsroom that you felt like you were bragging about during the event? +- How do you think your day to day work will change as a result of attending this event? +- What’s the singlemost important idea, tool, resource or practice you would like to see in your newsroom in a month, in a year? -3) Did you attend the event with other colleagues? Try collaborating in a Google doc so that you can all be on the same page when you return to the newsroom. +3. Did you attend the event with other colleagues? Try collaborating in a Google doc so that you can all be on the same page when you return to the newsroom. -* Use the big ideas/themes framework to see where your notes and learning overlapped. -* Brainstorm ways together that you can share this knowledge with each other and with others in your organization: maybe you’ll host a skillsharing session for a small group, or just sit with someone 1:1 for a tool or resource demo, maybe you’ll send a list of resources and links around that you curate together, maybe you’ll host a series of brownbags based on the skills and ideas you all acquired. -* Pitch new ideas and internal changes to management leadership. Maybe you all fell in love with a new tool, or you saw a cool project you’d like to try in house. Rally together and prioritize your asks and pitches so you can maximize support. +- Use the big ideas/themes framework to see where your notes and learning overlapped. +- Brainstorm ways together that you can share this knowledge with each other and with others in your organization: maybe you’ll host a skillsharing session for a small group, or just sit with someone 1:1 for a tool or resource demo, maybe you’ll send a list of resources and links around that you curate together, maybe you’ll host a series of brownbags based on the skills and ideas you all acquired. +- Pitch new ideas and internal changes to management leadership. Maybe you all fell in love with a new tool, or you saw a cool project you’d like to try in house. Rally together and prioritize your asks and pitches so you can maximize support. - -_This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by [Emma Carew Grovum](https://twitter.com/emmacarew). It's meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization. The toolkit is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we'd love to see you use or adapt it for your own event—all we need is a link back here._ +_This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by [Emma Carew Grovum](https://emmacarewgrovum.com/). It's meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization. The toolkit is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we'd love to see you use or adapt it for your own event—all we need is a link back here._ _We'd also be thrilled to hear how you put what you learn into practice, so please tweet us at #OpenNewsAfterParty, or if you have any questions, [let us know](mailto:info@opennews.org)!_ diff --git a/_share/handouts-tipsheets.md b/_share/handouts-tipsheets.md index f9e92d84..924f2c8f 100644 --- a/_share/handouts-tipsheets.md +++ b/_share/handouts-tipsheets.md @@ -6,17 +6,16 @@ back_link_text: Open News After Party toolkit # How to make handouts and tipsheets -Is this a little too meta? Maybe. But not everyone has put together training materials for their colleagues before, and we’re trying to be as helpful as possible here. So here are a few tips for making effective handouts and tipsheets: +Is this a little too meta? Maybe. But not everyone has put together training materials for their colleagues before, and we’re trying to be as helpful as possible here. So here are a few tips for making effective handouts and tipsheets: -* Name your files the way you would write an SEO headline, which is to say, name your files the way you would search for them if you had a question. This document is called Tipsheet: How to Make Handouts -* If you are explaining something technical, consider using step-by-step screenshots. You can use the tool called Skitch to easily make screenshots from the web and add arrows or text to them. For example, if someone needs to click somewhere, circle that area on the image. -* If you’re going to share a large number of examples from other newsrooms, be sure to include links in addition to screenshots so that your team can explore the examples on their own. -* Think about how people will primarily be accessing your handouts or tipsheets: are they going to be out in the field and looking on their phones? Do slides make more sense for certain topics? Are you developing more of a guide (lengthy, many pages) or a tipsheet (concise, one page)? -* Consider how you will make this resource available to people on your staff: saved to a Trello board, saved to a shared computer drive, uploaded to a company intranet/shared Google Drive or Dropbox, emailed, pinned in a key Slack channel, etc. -* At the end of each tipsheet or handout, add your name and the date that you most recently updated the document. This will help remind people that you did this work, and that you can be consulted further regarding this topic. It also helps people to know whether the document is out of date and needs to be updated. +- Name your files the way you would write an SEO headline, which is to say, name your files the way you would search for them if you had a question. This document is called Tipsheet: How to Make Handouts +- If you are explaining something technical, consider using step-by-step screenshots. You can use the tool called Skitch to easily make screenshots from the web and add arrows or text to them. For example, if someone needs to click somewhere, circle that area on the image. +- If you’re going to share a large number of examples from other newsrooms, be sure to include links in addition to screenshots so that your team can explore the examples on their own. +- Think about how people will primarily be accessing your handouts or tipsheets: are they going to be out in the field and looking on their phones? Do slides make more sense for certain topics? Are you developing more of a guide (lengthy, many pages) or a tipsheet (concise, one page)? +- Consider how you will make this resource available to people on your staff: saved to a Trello board, saved to a shared computer drive, uploaded to a company intranet/shared Google Drive or Dropbox, emailed, pinned in a key Slack channel, etc. +- At the end of each tipsheet or handout, add your name and the date that you most recently updated the document. This will help remind people that you did this work, and that you can be consulted further regarding this topic. It also helps people to know whether the document is out of date and needs to be updated. - -_This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by [Emma Carew Grovum](https://twitter.com/emmacarew). It's meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization. The toolkit is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we'd love to see you use or adapt it for your own event—all we need is a link back here._ +_This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by [Emma Carew Grovum](https://emmacarewgrovum.com/). It's meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization. The toolkit is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we'd love to see you use or adapt it for your own event—all we need is a link back here._ _We'd also be thrilled to hear how you put what you learn into practice, so please tweet us at #OpenNewsAfterParty, or if you have any questions, [let us know](mailto:info@opennews.org)!_ diff --git a/_share/introduction.md b/_share/introduction.md index dd3d5e26..1e5f65fe 100644 --- a/_share/introduction.md +++ b/_share/introduction.md @@ -6,34 +6,33 @@ back_link_text: Open News After Party toolkit # How to get the most out of this toolkit -Welcome to the after-party. +Welcome to the after-party. -You go to a great event, probably hosted by OpenNews in some way, and spent the week or weekend surrounded by excitement and passion and innovation and ideas and you’re ready to bring it back to your newsroom. So now what? +You go to a great event, probably hosted by OpenNews in some way, and spent the week or weekend surrounded by excitement and passion and innovation and ideas and you’re ready to bring it back to your newsroom. So now what? -This set of resources is designed to help journalists bring three types of learning back to their newsrooms after a big event. There is no single, correct way to use this toolkit. Some people will want to use all of the resources we’ve developed, others may need just one or two exercises. +This set of resources is designed to help journalists bring three types of learning back to their newsrooms after a big event. There is no single, correct way to use this toolkit. Some people will want to use all of the resources we’ve developed, others may need just one or two exercises. -The three main areas are: +The three main areas are: -* **Personal practice:** or how do you inform your everyday work with what you learned? This could be as simple as a few story ideas you scribbled down on a napkin or as complex as acquiring a totally new skillset. -* **Skillsharing:** how do you expand beyond your own practice and spread this knowledge throughout your entire news organization? These resources will focus on how to host trainings and skillsharing sessions with your team. -* **Tough conversations:** how to pitch a significant change to your executive or leadership team. Maybe you came back and realized your company’s hiring practices are more exclusionary than they should be. Or maybe you learned a cool new workflow that you’d like to try and implement. Either way, you will need to structure your pitch and make it persuasive. +- **Personal practice:** or how do you inform your everyday work with what you learned? This could be as simple as a few story ideas you scribbled down on a napkin or as complex as acquiring a totally new skillset. +- **Skillsharing:** how do you expand beyond your own practice and spread this knowledge throughout your entire news organization? These resources will focus on how to host trainings and skillsharing sessions with your team. +- **Tough conversations:** how to pitch a significant change to your executive or leadership team. Maybe you came back and realized your company’s hiring practices are more exclusionary than they should be. Or maybe you learned a cool new workflow that you’d like to try and implement. Either way, you will need to structure your pitch and make it persuasive. -Conferences and journalism events can have a huge impact on a newsroom, even from sending a single employee! Chances are, if your company sent you to such an event, they’re looking to maximize on their returns. The resources that follow are meant to help you organize your thoughts and notes, share what you’ve learned, and help create meaningful change and innovation. +Conferences and journalism events can have a huge impact on a newsroom, even from sending a single employee! Chances are, if your company sent you to such an event, they’re looking to maximize on their returns. The resources that follow are meant to help you organize your thoughts and notes, share what you’ve learned, and help create meaningful change and innovation. -Who is this guide for? +Who is this guide for? -* This guide is for anyone working in a newsroom who has attended a community event (like a conference, workshop or other type of convening or training). -* This set of resources is intended for journalists and technologists at any stage in their career, with any level of seniority in their organization. -* This package is for reporters, editors, photographers, product managers, videographers, engineers, coders, and more, who can all work to make use of the exercises and articles that follow to improve their own work as well as the work of their colleagues and organization. +- This guide is for anyone working in a newsroom who has attended a community event (like a conference, workshop or other type of convening or training). +- This set of resources is intended for journalists and technologists at any stage in their career, with any level of seniority in their organization. +- This package is for reporters, editors, photographers, product managers, videographers, engineers, coders, and more, who can all work to make use of the exercises and articles that follow to improve their own work as well as the work of their colleagues and organization. -What should I do next? +What should I do next? -* Assuming you know what your next big event is, take a few minutes and set some goals for yourself based on the schedule of sessions. -* Enjoy your event! Take good notes (sketchnotes, digital notes, even pen and paper notes!), save tweets with great resources you want to come back to, collect business cards, and so on. -* After your event, decide whether you want to work on improving your own work, sharing with your colleagues, or pushing for a larger institutional change. Then dive in! +- Assuming you know what your next big event is, take a few minutes and set some goals for yourself based on the schedule of sessions. +- Enjoy your event! Take good notes (sketchnotes, digital notes, even pen and paper notes!), save tweets with great resources you want to come back to, collect business cards, and so on. +- After your event, decide whether you want to work on improving your own work, sharing with your colleagues, or pushing for a larger institutional change. Then dive in! - -_This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by [Emma Carew Grovum](https://twitter.com/emmacarew). It's meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization. The toolkit is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we'd love to see you use or adapt it for your own event—all we need is a link back here._ +_This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by [Emma Carew Grovum](https://emmacarewgrovum.com/). It's meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization. The toolkit is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we'd love to see you use or adapt it for your own event—all we need is a link back here._ _We'd also be thrilled to hear how you put what you learn into practice, so please tweet us at #OpenNewsAfterParty, or if you have any questions, [let us know](mailto:info@opennews.org)!_ diff --git a/_share/one-pager.md b/_share/one-pager.md index ee01b028..b1a935a8 100644 --- a/_share/one-pager.md +++ b/_share/one-pager.md @@ -6,68 +6,69 @@ back_link_text: Open News After Party toolkit # Write a 1-pager for your boss -Okay, so it’s Monday morning after your conference or event and you’re finally caught up on email! So what’s the first big new idea you want to cross off your to-do list? +Okay, so it’s Monday morning after your conference or event and you’re finally caught up on email! So what’s the first big new idea you want to cross off your to-do list? -Back up first. You’re going to want to write a quick one-pager for your boss and their boss, summarizing what you learned, thanking them for letting you go to the event, and suggesting next steps. You want to send this as soon as you possibly can on your first day back in the office. It’s straight up just good manners and helps remind your boss that there was real value to the company for sending you to the event or training. +Back up first. You’re going to want to write a quick one-pager for your boss and their boss, summarizing what you learned, thanking them for letting you go to the event, and suggesting next steps. You want to send this as soon as you possibly can on your first day back in the office. It’s straight up just good manners and helps remind your boss that there was real value to the company for sending you to the event or training. -If you’ve already completed the exercise to organize and review your notes, then you’re mostly done! You’ve already identified several key takeaways and thought about how they could be directly applicable to your new organization. +If you’ve already completed the exercise to organize and review your notes, then you’re mostly done! You’ve already identified several key takeaways and thought about how they could be directly applicable to your new organization. -The formula for a simple but effective memo looks like this: +The formula for a simple but effective memo looks like this: -____ -Dear Boss and Their Boss, - -Thanks so much for supporting my attendance at [conference name] this year. +--- -I wanted to share a few big ideas that stuck out to me: -* ONE -* TWO -* THREE -* FOUR (it doesn’t have to be four, but it probably shouldn’t be more than four) +Dear Boss and Their Boss, -I THINK this is how we can take one of those big themes and apply it directly to our news organization both in the near and longer term. _(see below for some suggested ways to do this)_ - -ALSO: +Thanks so much for supporting my attendance at [conference name] this year. -* include a short summary of any **interesting job candidates** you met - * E.g.: “I know we’re hiring for a new social media director and I met a really interesting potential candidate. Here’s her resume and a link to her portfolio.” -* pass along any **praise or positive feedback** you heard about your shop - * E.g.: “I kept hearing really nice things from other attendees about our new newsletter style.” Or “Our membership program got a shoutout by XYZ Speaker during their session.” -* mention any **mutual contacts** you met or spoke with - * E.g.: “I ran into XYZ Important Person and they said you all went to college together and they say hello!” -* if you gave a talk or led a session, let them know how it went. - * E.g.: “Great, I got a lot of questions and people seemed really engaged with the topic.” - * If you’re not sure how it went, go with the observable facts: “Lots more people than I expected showed up,” or “I got some really kind feedback.” +I wanted to share a few big ideas that stuck out to me: -NEXT STEPS: This is how I think we should move forward / this is how I’d like to share what I learned with my team and my colleagues across the newsroom. +- ONE +- TWO +- THREE +- FOUR (it doesn’t have to be four, but it probably shouldn’t be more than four) -Thank you again, -Your Name Here -____ +I THINK this is how we can take one of those big themes and apply it directly to our news organization both in the near and longer term. _(see below for some suggested ways to do this)_ -If you aren’t sure what your big themes are, try answering one or more of these questions to help you boil it down: +ALSO: -* What topic kept coming up in discussion but there wasn’t a session for it? -* What questions do you still have about what you learned? -* What surprised you to learn about how other newsrooms do things? -* What do you think your team is doing better at or worse at, compared to the methods and techniques you saw/learned about? -* Based on what I learned, what is my new goal for myself or my team or my newsroom? -* What do I want to try first? -* What seems like low-hanging fruit that our newsroom can try or experiment with? +- include a short summary of any **interesting job candidates** you met + - E.g.: “I know we’re hiring for a new social media director and I met a really interesting potential candidate. Here’s her resume and a link to her portfolio.” +- pass along any **praise or positive feedback** you heard about your shop + - E.g.: “I kept hearing really nice things from other attendees about our new newsletter style.” Or “Our membership program got a shoutout by XYZ Speaker during their session.” +- mention any **mutual contacts** you met or spoke with + - E.g.: “I ran into XYZ Important Person and they said you all went to college together and they say hello!” +- if you gave a talk or led a session, let them know how it went. + - E.g.: “Great, I got a lot of questions and people seemed really engaged with the topic.” + - If you’re not sure how it went, go with the observable facts: “Lots more people than I expected showed up,” or “I got some really kind feedback.” -If you aren’t sure how to make those themes actionable, try suggestions such as: +NEXT STEPS: This is how I think we should move forward / this is how I’d like to share what I learned with my team and my colleagues across the newsroom. -* Host a brown bag lunch with the staff to give a high-level overview of what you learned -* Host a small, focused, deep-dive skillsharing session with staff based on role (all reporters, everyone on the science desk, all social/audience staff, etc) -* Send a list of resources and ideas around as a newsroom memo -* Upload a list of resources to a newsroom Slack channel -* Put together a brainstorming session around a particular topic -* Call for a working group with members from different teams to study a particular idea or topic -* Approach a single staffer from another department to try collaborating on a new idea +Thank you again, +Your Name Here +--- +If you aren’t sure what your big themes are, try answering one or more of these questions to help you boil it down: -_This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by [Emma Carew Grovum](https://twitter.com/emmacarew). It's meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization. The toolkit is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we'd love to see you use or adapt it for your own event—all we need is a link back here._ +- What topic kept coming up in discussion but there wasn’t a session for it? +- What questions do you still have about what you learned? +- What surprised you to learn about how other newsrooms do things? +- What do you think your team is doing better at or worse at, compared to the methods and techniques you saw/learned about? +- Based on what I learned, what is my new goal for myself or my team or my newsroom? +- What do I want to try first? +- What seems like low-hanging fruit that our newsroom can try or experiment with? + +If you aren’t sure how to make those themes actionable, try suggestions such as: + +- Host a brown bag lunch with the staff to give a high-level overview of what you learned +- Host a small, focused, deep-dive skillsharing session with staff based on role (all reporters, everyone on the science desk, all social/audience staff, etc) +- Send a list of resources and ideas around as a newsroom memo +- Upload a list of resources to a newsroom Slack channel +- Put together a brainstorming session around a particular topic +- Call for a working group with members from different teams to study a particular idea or topic +- Approach a single staffer from another department to try collaborating on a new idea + +_This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by [Emma Carew Grovum](https://emmacarewgrovum.com/). It's meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization. The toolkit is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we'd love to see you use or adapt it for your own event—all we need is a link back here._ _We'd also be thrilled to hear how you put what you learn into practice, so please tweet us at #OpenNewsAfterParty, or if you have any questions, [let us know](mailto:info@opennews.org)!_ diff --git a/_share/planning-exercise.md b/_share/planning-exercise.md index ab7874c3..c0fe321f 100644 --- a/_share/planning-exercise.md +++ b/_share/planning-exercise.md @@ -8,55 +8,55 @@ back_link_text: Open News After Party toolkit _**Summary:** before you head to your next big journalism or community event, spend 15-30 minutes preparing. This will set you up to make best use of the resources that follow for after your event._ -**Who is this for?** Anyone heading to a conference, training, workshop or event where they intend to learn something and/or be inundated or overloaded with new ideas and information. This may especially be helpful for a journalist who is a first time attendee of said event. +**Who is this for?** Anyone heading to a conference, training, workshop or event where they intend to learn something and/or be inundated or overloaded with new ideas and information. This may especially be helpful for a journalist who is a first time attendee of said event. **What you’ll need:** a copy of the event schedule (often online, in a physical program or via a Guidebook app or similar), a notebook or online document where you will be organizing all of your thoughts for the event. -* Start by sending a copy of the schedule to your manager or someone in the leadership team of your organization. If it’s a conference where you’ll get to make choices about which sessions to attend, it’s worth finding out what catches the eye of your boss or boss’s boss. You don’t have to attend every single session that he highlights or that she finds interesting, but it should help you orient yourself to the event, its programming, and the priorities of your news organization. - * Give this person a day or two or even a weekend to review the schedule and give you their thoughts. - * Try to frame it as “is there any single session you want to make sure I attend?” Or “is there anyone from the speaker list you’d like me to meet with?” This makes it easier for your boss to skim the program and look for highlights, rather than asking him or her to set your agenda for you. -* Set some goals for yourself! Ask yourself, and even write out your answers if you want to hold yourself accountable: - * What are you hoping to learn at this event? - * Who are you hoping to meet? - * Which speaker are you most excited to hear from? - * Why did you want to attend this particular event, and how do you think it will affect your future work? - * What are you most hoping to bring back? - * New skills to practice - * Story ideas - * Presentation ideas (how to package a story across different mediums: social, off-platform, newsletters, etc) - * Workflow practices - * Get organized! Spend 5 minutes considering how you are going to collect all of this new information: - * Are you going to live tweet during sessions you attend? If so, how will you take those tweets and turn them into something actionable after the conference? - * For example: you may choose to use Twitter’s “favorite” function to save Tweets linking to resources or quotes from a panel discussion or workshop. Are you going to save them via bitly and make a link collection? Are you going to save them in a spreadsheet? Do you have a folder or link-saving protocol already (clipping to Evernote, saving to Pocket, etc) - * Are you going to take digital notes? - * Where will you store them? Google Drive? Apple Notes? Evernote? Somewhere else…. - * Will there be a new document for each session or will you collect all of your thoughts in a single notebook or document? - * Are you going to take physical notes in a notebook? - * Sketchnotes can be very effective to help you retain big ideas and themes. Not sure what a sketchnote is? You can learn more here: http://rohdesign.com/sketchnotes/ - * You may want to consider bringing a highlighter or contrasting color pen to help you identify ideas or resources you want to remember. - * Do you have any special icons that you use in notetaking to specify “New story idea” or “workflow inspiration” or other categories of ideas. (Need inspiration? Check out a tool like the Noun Project) - * Business cards! - * Do you have yours? - * How are you going to keep track of ones you receive as you meet people? (I always stuff mine into the plastic nametag holder) - * How will you follow up with folks after the conference? - * Email follow up? - * Do you enter all of your business cards into a rolodex or digital contacts list? - * Do you look up all of your new contacts on LinkedIn or Twitter? - * Consider sending a physical thank you to anyone who mentored you or spent significant time helping/teaching you in some way. (_**Pro-tip:** buy these cards and a set of stamps ahead of time so you are all ready to write and send them when you get back from the event._) - * Work backwards from your post-conference deliverables (see later section on writing your first-day-back memo). - * Is your company hiring, and are you scouting potential job candidates? - * Has your organization launched anything new or shiny lately and are you listening to hear how people talk about it? - * Are you looking to expand your network or catch up with your boss or boss’s boss’s contacts? - * And if you’re hosting a session or giving a talk, remember that the first thing everyone will ask you is, “How did it go?” Be thinking about how you want to answer. You could go simple, like, “Great, thanks for asking.” You could also just stick to the facts: “Lots of people showed up,” or “I got some really nice feedback.” - -Okay, that’s enough planning for now. Hopefully at this point you have: - -* A targeted list of sessions to attend and topics you want to discuss -* A shortlist of folks you want to meet -* A method for organizing new information -* An idea of how you will present this information when you get back - -_This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by [Emma Carew Grovum](https://twitter.com/emmacarew). It's meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization. The toolkit is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we'd love to see you use or adapt it for your own event—all we need is a link back here._ +- Start by sending a copy of the schedule to your manager or someone in the leadership team of your organization. If it’s a conference where you’ll get to make choices about which sessions to attend, it’s worth finding out what catches the eye of your boss or boss’s boss. You don’t have to attend every single session that he highlights or that she finds interesting, but it should help you orient yourself to the event, its programming, and the priorities of your news organization. + - Give this person a day or two or even a weekend to review the schedule and give you their thoughts. + - Try to frame it as “is there any single session you want to make sure I attend?” Or “is there anyone from the speaker list you’d like me to meet with?” This makes it easier for your boss to skim the program and look for highlights, rather than asking him or her to set your agenda for you. +- Set some goals for yourself! Ask yourself, and even write out your answers if you want to hold yourself accountable: + - What are you hoping to learn at this event? + - Who are you hoping to meet? + - Which speaker are you most excited to hear from? + - Why did you want to attend this particular event, and how do you think it will affect your future work? + - What are you most hoping to bring back? + - New skills to practice + - Story ideas + - Presentation ideas (how to package a story across different mediums: social, off-platform, newsletters, etc) + - Workflow practices + - Get organized! Spend 5 minutes considering how you are going to collect all of this new information: + - Are you going to live tweet during sessions you attend? If so, how will you take those tweets and turn them into something actionable after the conference? + - For example: you may choose to use Twitter’s “favorite” function to save Tweets linking to resources or quotes from a panel discussion or workshop. Are you going to save them via bitly and make a link collection? Are you going to save them in a spreadsheet? Do you have a folder or link-saving protocol already (clipping to Evernote, saving to Pocket, etc) + - Are you going to take digital notes? + - Where will you store them? Google Drive? Apple Notes? Evernote? Somewhere else…. + - Will there be a new document for each session or will you collect all of your thoughts in a single notebook or document? + - Are you going to take physical notes in a notebook? + - Sketchnotes can be very effective to help you retain big ideas and themes. Not sure what a sketchnote is? You can learn more here: https://rohdesign.com/sketchnotes/ + - You may want to consider bringing a highlighter or contrasting color pen to help you identify ideas or resources you want to remember. + - Do you have any special icons that you use in notetaking to specify “New story idea” or “workflow inspiration” or other categories of ideas. (Need inspiration? Check out a tool like the Noun Project) + - Business cards! + - Do you have yours? + - How are you going to keep track of ones you receive as you meet people? (I always stuff mine into the plastic nametag holder) + - How will you follow up with folks after the conference? + - Email follow up? + - Do you enter all of your business cards into a rolodex or digital contacts list? + - Do you look up all of your new contacts on LinkedIn or Twitter? + - Consider sending a physical thank you to anyone who mentored you or spent significant time helping/teaching you in some way. (_**Pro-tip:** buy these cards and a set of stamps ahead of time so you are all ready to write and send them when you get back from the event._) + - Work backwards from your post-conference deliverables (see later section on writing your first-day-back memo). + - Is your company hiring, and are you scouting potential job candidates? + - Has your organization launched anything new or shiny lately and are you listening to hear how people talk about it? + - Are you looking to expand your network or catch up with your boss or boss’s boss’s contacts? + - And if you’re hosting a session or giving a talk, remember that the first thing everyone will ask you is, “How did it go?” Be thinking about how you want to answer. You could go simple, like, “Great, thanks for asking.” You could also just stick to the facts: “Lots of people showed up,” or “I got some really nice feedback.” + +Okay, that’s enough planning for now. Hopefully at this point you have: + +- A targeted list of sessions to attend and topics you want to discuss +- A shortlist of folks you want to meet +- A method for organizing new information +- An idea of how you will present this information when you get back + +_This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by [Emma Carew Grovum](https://emmacarewgrovum.com/). It's meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization. The toolkit is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we'd love to see you use or adapt it for your own event—all we need is a link back here._ _We'd also be thrilled to hear how you put what you learn into practice, so please tweet us at #OpenNewsAfterParty, or if you have any questions, [let us know](mailto:info@opennews.org)!_ diff --git a/_share/smart-goals.md b/_share/smart-goals.md index 362c4779..55e61765 100644 --- a/_share/smart-goals.md +++ b/_share/smart-goals.md @@ -6,61 +6,59 @@ back_link_text: Open News After Party toolkit # Setting SMART goals -The exercises that follow are meant to help you define your vision then create SMART goals to help you achieve that vision. +The exercises that follow are meant to help you define your vision then create SMART goals to help you achieve that vision. You may want to use these exercises if: -* You learned a new skill and you want to make sure you keep using it, and continuing to apply it over time -* You see potential for change in your team’s work and you want to hold yourselves accountable toward that growth -* You want to make a cultural shift in your organization and you need some tangible milestones to help get the ball rolling +- You learned a new skill and you want to make sure you keep using it, and continuing to apply it over time +- You see potential for change in your team’s work and you want to hold yourselves accountable toward that growth +- You want to make a cultural shift in your organization and you need some tangible milestones to help get the ball rolling SMART goals is a framework often used to help folks gain clarity in their vision, then make an actionable plan to help them get on their way toward realizing that vision. -The S stands for **specific**. This means you want to be specific in naming your goal and what you want to achieve. An example could be: “I want to save more of my paycheck to build up a rainy day fund.” +The S stands for **specific**. This means you want to be specific in naming your goal and what you want to achieve. An example could be: “I want to save more of my paycheck to build up a rainy day fund.” -The M stands for **measurable**. This means you will identify your key metrics to help you understand whether or not you have been successful. An example could be: “I want to save enough of my paycheck to build up a rainy day fund that would cover my rent, utilities, and living expenses for six months.” +The M stands for **measurable**. This means you will identify your key metrics to help you understand whether or not you have been successful. An example could be: “I want to save enough of my paycheck to build up a rainy day fund that would cover my rent, utilities, and living expenses for six months.” -The A stands for **achievable**. This means you are being realistic about the current conditions under which you exist and will continue to exist while working toward your goal. An example of this could be: “Given my monthly budget, I believe I can set aside an additional 4% of my paycheck each month toward the goal of building up a six-months rainy day fund.” +The A stands for **achievable**. This means you are being realistic about the current conditions under which you exist and will continue to exist while working toward your goal. An example of this could be: “Given my monthly budget, I believe I can set aside an additional 4% of my paycheck each month toward the goal of building up a six-months rainy day fund.” The R stands for **relevant**. This means that you clearly understand how your goals support your overall vision. An example could be: “Because I work in journalism, where employment conditions are volatile, if I build up my six-months rainy day fund, then I won’t have to worry as much about money if I lose my job.” -Finally, the T stands for **timebound**. This means that you are setting a deadline for yourself by using this model. An example of this could be: “If I follow the plan of setting aside 4% of my paycheck for 12 months, I will have saved enough to cover six months of my rent, utilities, and living expenses.” +Finally, the T stands for **timebound**. This means that you are setting a deadline for yourself by using this model. An example of this could be: “If I follow the plan of setting aside 4% of my paycheck for 12 months, I will have saved enough to cover six months of my rent, utilities, and living expenses.” ## Visioning and Goal Setting 1. What big, blue sky goals do you have? Write down several ideas and circle the one that speaks most clearly to you. (Don’t worry about those other goals — you can always repeat this exercise again later to build out a SMART goals plan for those too). -2. Describe your starting point with respect to your goal. List as much information as possible, so you know where you are starting from. Ask yourself questions like: +2. Describe your starting point with respect to your goal. List as much information as possible, so you know where you are starting from. Ask yourself questions like: -* What resources are available to me? -* What constraints and challenges do I face? -* How will I know if I have been successful? -* Who can help support me? +- What resources are available to me? +- What constraints and challenges do I face? +- How will I know if I have been successful? +- Who can help support me? -3. What is your vision of success? Describe what the future would be like if you were successful with your goal. Be as specific as possible. Ask yourself questions like: +3. What is your vision of success? Describe what the future would be like if you were successful with your goal. Be as specific as possible. Ask yourself questions like: -* What is different on success day compared to today? -* How will I celebrate? -* How will I feel? -* What challenges that you currently face will have been defeated? +- What is different on success day compared to today? +- How will I celebrate? +- How will I feel? +- What challenges that you currently face will have been defeated? 4. What obstacles do you anticipate in trying to reach this goal? List all potential blockers. (These could include your own fears, perceptions) -5. What SMART goal(s) can you set to achieve that vision? +5. What SMART goal(s) can you set to achieve that vision? S - Specific, M - Measurable, A - Achievable, R - Relevant, T - Timebound -6. What milestones do you need to reach in order to achieve your SMART goal? And how will you hold yourself accountable as you reach those targets? +6. What milestones do you need to reach in order to achieve your SMART goal? And how will you hold yourself accountable as you reach those targets? -7. Make a list of 100 actions you can take to make progress toward your goal. Yes, you read that correctly: 100 steps you can take. For example: +7. Make a list of 100 actions you can take to make progress toward your goal. Yes, you read that correctly: 100 steps you can take. For example: -* Items 1-5 could be “research 5 financial advisors on LinkedIn” -* Items 6-10 could be “email those 5 financial advisors and ask for their rates.” -* It also helps if you assign a timebox to each task: 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 1 hour, etc. If your list is organized by timed tasks, you will always be able to find something to do to make progress toward your goal, no matter how little time you have. +- Items 1-5 could be “research 5 financial advisors on LinkedIn” +- Items 6-10 could be “email those 5 financial advisors and ask for their rates.” +- It also helps if you assign a timebox to each task: 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 1 hour, etc. If your list is organized by timed tasks, you will always be able to find something to do to make progress toward your goal, no matter how little time you have. - - -_This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by [Emma Carew Grovum](https://twitter.com/emmacarew). It's meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization. The toolkit is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we'd love to see you use or adapt it for your own event—all we need is a link back here._ +_This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by [Emma Carew Grovum](https://emmacarewgrovum.com/). It's meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization. The toolkit is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we'd love to see you use or adapt it for your own event—all we need is a link back here._ _We'd also be thrilled to hear how you put what you learn into practice, so please tweet us at #OpenNewsAfterParty, or if you have any questions, [let us know](mailto:info@opennews.org)!_ diff --git a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-adopting-new-tech.md b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-adopting-new-tech.md index b9c8948e..ba25d34e 100644 --- a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-adopting-new-tech.md +++ b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-adopting-new-tech.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ title: "SRCCON 2019 Session Transcript — Noise & Signal: Knowing when to adopt new tech, and when to ignore it" --- -#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](/documentation/#session-transcripts) +#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/#session-transcripts) # Noise & Signal: Knowing when to adopt new tech, and when to ignore it @@ -149,7 +149,6 @@ ALEXANDRA: Yeah, so take some time and try to put some sticky notes under some o [ Group Work ] - So we're going to be sharing as a bigger group now. Does everybody feel good about their Post-Its? Natasha was mentioning earlier, I think everybody has Post-It fatigue... NATASHA: We've probably moved on from the Post-Its. @@ -204,11 +203,11 @@ ALEXANDRA: That's actually perfectly on topic, actually. So that's what we're do AUDIENCE: Hi, this is Tim. So not necessarily related to what we were talking about. But we recently did an evaluation of at least, like, eight text editors to choose. And we did heavy, like, technical analysis of the stuff. And there's a bunch of things like, "Does it support the actual copy things that we want?" We didn't want to put a lot of support into it and we weren't sure the duration of using this. We just wanted editors not editing code basically. So we evaluated, like, language support and we had scripts to run — more like verbal or text scripts like try writing these words in Japanese, in Pin-Ying, in Spanish. And try to develop some operations for it. And then of a that try to develop small bits — actually do experiments with the technology to see how it works and to see what sort of robust — and so we tested against ProseMirror, CK Editor, and Slate were some of them. A lot of it was looking at it holistically, doing the exact same tests with everything, being consistent and then comparing them against with each other and determining what's the best match for us. And this was like a bunch of time but we limited the tests to be something very simple like... -ALEXANDRA: That sounds like it took a lot of time. +ALEXANDRA: That sounds like it took a lot of time. TIM: It took, like, two weeks for our team which was about too much time. -ALEXANDRA: That's a huge thing: a text editor. +ALEXANDRA: That's a huge thing: a text editor. TIM: That's a huge thing. Something that's an example is a blockquote. We implemented something for that. That seems like something very easy and straightforward. But if you're neck deep in implementing your product and you're OBD this, and you realize that is a complicated thing that might be impossible, then you got in trouble. @@ -234,11 +233,11 @@ ALEXANDRA: It's an interesting way to think about it. AUDIENCE: One small add-on to that. I got some advice a while back that said: don't just rely on the stars on GitHub. What you really want to look at at least if you're on npm and all the other package managers, as well, are how many other things are relying on this, and what you can do in npm is search and see how popular it is and how many dependents does this package have. It's not just how often it's downloaded but how many other packages directly use this thing and that's a really simple thing that I use sometimes. -ALEXANDRA: Really quickly because we're going to jump to something because we only have ten minutes. +ALEXANDRA: Really quickly because we're going to jump to something because we only have ten minutes. TIM: So the other thing that I specifically look at is diversity of contributor. I look at all the commits in a GitHub repository. I do this a lot. I want to make sure that the commits are regular and if it's not regular, that it's stable software and that they respond quickly to issues. If they don't respond quickly to issues or they're rude to issues, or they don't have a code of conduct to this. There's also, is this owned by a single company or person. Is it a single person? If it's one company like React, or Go, it's one company that owns it. If there's risk attached to one company that is not associated with the economics of the company being successful then that's better. -AUDIENCE: I have one quick anecdote about that. I used to use this visualization language called pyturk to use it, and the research company wasn't licensed to use it, so it got pulled. +AUDIENCE: I have one quick anecdote about that. I used to use this visualization language called pyturk to use it, and the research company wasn't licensed to use it, so it got pulled. TIM: That sucks. @@ -250,7 +249,7 @@ ALEXANDRA: We're going to analogue this whole... so kind of like a master checkl AUDIENCE: Community adoption. -ALEXANDRA: Community adoption and the nuance of it would be... +ALEXANDRA: Community adoption and the nuance of it would be... TIM: Consistency. @@ -262,7 +261,7 @@ ALEXANDRA: Something that somebody brought up was security. How does that factor AUDIENCE: We had a conversation about using Google Docs or Google technology and we got some pushback from higher up in the organization from Legal about are those secure if we have sensitive reporting could that be moved over to the majority? -NATASHA: I'm interested: how many people use Slack? Does anybody use Matter Most? +NATASHA: I'm interested: how many people use Slack? Does anybody use Matter Most? TIM: I've heard of it. @@ -302,4 +301,4 @@ ALEXANDRA: Awesome, guys! AUDIENCE: What did you use instead of Data Wrap? -NATASHA: Ways and means of democratizing news and graphics. \ No newline at end of file +NATASHA: Ways and means of democratizing news and graphics. diff --git a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-census-coverage-playbook.md b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-census-coverage-playbook.md index 83e87317..99999a8f 100644 --- a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-census-coverage-playbook.md +++ b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-census-coverage-playbook.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ title: "SRCCON 2019 Session Transcript — A playbook for reporters interested in reaching people at risk of being undercounted" --- -#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](/documentation/#session-transcripts) +#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/#session-transcripts) # A playbook for reporters interested in reaching people at risk of being undercounted @@ -263,8 +263,8 @@ But we had some writing that asked why did mosquitoes get so much worse last yea ASHLEY: Human Voter Guide. -MEGAN: So they did an early concept of this several years ago. And what they found was that actually — people want to know who to vote for. But we don't do that. We're a public company, we don't do endorsements. But the problem was that people didn't even know. But as a part of that, our program put out, and that's a pretty big repository of the typical questions that you get but every once in a while you get a very different question, and you find a problem, or and that becomes a story and so we were very early on the DMV registration questions in California because people were contacting our voting guide saying that they were having problem with registration and by following that string we were able to report early on more systemic problems that were happening. And I think as the reporters start to see the tangible results of stories that other people don't have because our emphasis is on original reporting. That's a big shift but we have made over the last year. We've had to clear out a lot of stuff first to make that space. So I've asked for 75% of their work to be original. And the gold standard has been something that we've never seen anywhere else. But the goal — and I said to them, like, one of the fastest ways to make sure that you're meeting the goal is to actually listen to the audience because they're going to tell you things that you wouldn't otherwise know and they're going to tell you the things that the sources go into could meet a journalist in LA, you're going to have different sources. Sorry. Aaron? +MEGAN: So they did an early concept of this several years ago. And what they found was that actually — people want to know who to vote for. But we don't do that. We're a public company, we don't do endorsements. But the problem was that people didn't even know. But as a part of that, our program put out, and that's a pretty big repository of the typical questions that you get but every once in a while you get a very different question, and you find a problem, or and that becomes a story and so we were very early on the DMV registration questions in California because people were contacting our voting guide saying that they were having problem with registration and by following that string we were able to report early on more systemic problems that were happening. And I think as the reporters start to see the tangible results of stories that other people don't have because our emphasis is on original reporting. That's a big shift but we have made over the last year. We've had to clear out a lot of stuff first to make that space. So I've asked for 75% of their work to be original. And the gold standard has been something that we've never seen anywhere else. But the goal — and I said to them, like, one of the fastest ways to make sure that you're meeting the goal is to actually listen to the audience because they're going to tell you things that you wouldn't otherwise know and they're going to tell you the things that the sources go into could meet a journalist in LA, you're going to have different sources. Sorry. Aaron? AARON: I was just gonna ask because you touched on this a little bit, it sounded you had competing issues. How do you reach out to communities that you don't necessarily have listeners in and listening to your audience. I'm curious especially, like, in this human-centric design thing, how do you identify and how do you specifically identify and reach out to... -[ Fire Alarm ] \ No newline at end of file +[ Fire Alarm ] diff --git a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-cms-demos.md b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-cms-demos.md index 0cbe3de1..1d43545a 100644 --- a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-cms-demos.md +++ b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-cms-demos.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ title: "SRCCON 2019 Session Transcript — CMS Demos: Approaches to Helping Our Newsrooms Do Their Best Work" --- -#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](/documentation/#session-transcripts) +#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/#session-transcripts) # CMS Demos: Approaches to Helping Our Newsrooms Do Their Best Work @@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ Going back to WebSked, you can add that to Slack or email. So everything is conn They have this tool called PageBuilder and, again, this is totally configurable for your organization, and it's a very developer focused product as well as a developer focused problem. We have three main administrators, developers, editors, and content creators. So everything has to be developer friendly as well as content creator friendly. So we have interesting things like features. We have a thing called feature and the reason why it's called that back in the day, and probably still, like, on a newspaper, it's a feature. So the concept is that you can basically customize the features that you want for your home page. And the Washington Post home page is, for example, driven by PageBuilder so our hub will use PageBuilder so build their it own custom features and you can plug in your own custom engines into that, and plug that into WebSked and whatever you like, and it's really extensible for your workflow, and you can curate things, and you can quickly add things, edit things, run headlines, and over time, look for the video content but also an article after, like, one article or video starts to catch fire then that will continually be promoted to users over time. So there's a lot of things that you can do with Arc. I have Arc stickers and I'm happy to talk in-depth about use cases. But overall it's a tool that's equally friendly to your developers and content creators, that you can use out of the box for your startup or newsroom. Thanks. -[ Applause ] +[ Applause ] SAM: All right. You got me? Okay. I'm Sam Baldwin. I'm the PM on Copilot which is Condé Nast's CMS. And before I really get started, I just adopt to know that we're hiring a product role for this tool and we're remote friendly. So please come find me afterwards if you are interested. To talk about the history of Copilot for a second, about four years ago, folks at con day decided five weeks ago, ten weeks ago, that we needed a centralized solution. I think we've got 25 brands in the U.S., and 75 internationally and we decided we needed one tool to reign them all. And the roadmap has really been about onboarding brands. It was an endless log of onboarding brand after brand after brand. I got to inherit product after all that work was done. @@ -48,23 +48,23 @@ Prints is still doing some of them. And low-hanging things for us like strategy And I'm just going to go through it field-by-field because that's the nitty-gritty that y'all want to see and that's so much of what CMS work is — just mundane field work stuff. So when I pasted that text in Google, all the formatting was preserved which is probably the single best thing we've done in terms of improving editorial efficiency over the last couple of years. We've had this metric of how could we take an article to stage in Copilot and then we added that feature... -AUDIENCE: No! +AUDIENCE: No! SAM: Improved by about 10%. So that was a big deal. The other thing we have is a lot of our brands set print workflows. And they have this kick-file format some of you might know prism XML. So this is a random GQ product on my desktop and that can also be ingested but I can leave it as the — let's go back to this. So what else? A lot of our fields, we've got this magic-wand thing that really helps efficiency. I'm just going to add a photo quickly. This is one I took of my garden last week. Is he set content sources to false. And there are a lot of sources that are dependent on the content source. So if you select magazine, or something, you're going to have various canonical sources and all that. -AUDIENCE: What did the magic wand do? +AUDIENCE: What did the magic wand do? SAM: Sorry? -AUDIENCE: What did the magic wand do? +AUDIENCE: What did the magic wand do? SAM: So the magic wand pre-fills — so here's a good example. Here's a social headline field. I don't want to retype in the social headline field. If I click on the magic wand, it pulls in the social header field. Here I'm in the SEO area. Here, I'm going to say this is a newsy story about the Chicago Cubs, my team. And, well, look, there we are. Categories and taxonomies. Like, anybody else, let's put this one just in the culture section broadly. And tags are moved away from a free-form tag field for all the reasons that you don't want free-form tag fields and built tools for editors to consolidate those. And why they went from 15,000 tags to 3,000 tags. And for videos, let's add one from CNE, Condé Nast Entertainment, it's another weird arm that we work in. I have this tab. I'm not the product manager around it. I'm not going to demo it. But we have pipelines between it and Copilot and so here are all these videos. So I'm just going to add one. Here's how we do slugs. -You also have a manually wand there but we allow people to see it and control it. And I'm going to save. And let's preview. +You also have a manually wand there but we allow people to see it and control it. And I'm going to save. And let's preview. -TIM: Log out of WordPress. +TIM: Log out of WordPress. SAM: Preview was working earlier. I'll preview an international one. But one thing nice about preview is you can toggle through the front-end layouts here instead of having to see the change in story again. We've had recently had to do a lot of Apple News publishing. So Wired does not have an Apple News publish here. But we have the concept of distribution channels, and Apple News. That was all pursuant to the texture deal. I imagine we will add more things of that nature as more platforms become a big deal. @@ -77,7 +77,7 @@ So this stuff is fancier and we aspired to get this working for our U.S. brands. But that's basically Copilot. The way that home pages work is we've got the notion of a home page hole spots, and these can be stones in the river. So here, Wired is named things and these cards are manually curated but also you can define the parameters of the river with all these filters down here. So that's how our editors put stones in the river. It mostly works. All right! I think my time is up. -[ Applause ] +[ Applause ] BO: Cool. My name is Bo, and I work at Dive. It's an industry-based media company based in DC. So we cover a bunch of construction very easily like waste, construction, education. A bunch of different things and our — this is what our home page looks like on Supply Chain Dive. Our CMS is built in Django and it was built by our CTO, and one of our senior in I think 2013. I believe they chose Django because it was kind of a startup time frame. They could get things up quickly and do everything in-house and it took very little customization and tweaking to get it doing the things that we needed it to do pretty quickly. And so that's where it still lives and so far it's worked out pretty well for us. Another big advantage is that we could really minutely control things like stories getting published for specific Dive sites only being shown to the editors of those Dive sites, keeping it all in one database. So on the backend, for us, it's pretty easy to maintain. So I'll go ahead and quickly run through how editors might use the news-post publishing features. @@ -89,7 +89,7 @@ Once it is published, those warnings would go away — oh! Do you want to sign u Again, I would just go back, and edit things. We don't have track changes in our CMS but we do have — you could use the Django admin stuff to go in and see edits from previous versions. We also have railblocking feature. So if you have one story open and somebody elsing opens one, it'll say they can't save because this has autolock open. And we also have background check, it'll warn you just in case you walk away and — -ALBERT: Just keep going. +ALBERT: Just keep going. BO: So it's relaying out the home page. There's a little bit of a process to that. So as I mentioned, once a story's published, it's not necessarily discoverable on the site yet. And so that is what Administrator Dashboard does. And this also again is version controlled so people can go back to differently saved versions of it but what you would do to get a new story on is once you've published a site, you click this little guy to say it's ready to go. And the reason we have it limited by that star feature is 'cause there's so much content at this point that loading a page like this and allowing everything to be there is kind of too much and we really just want to keep the freshest and most relevant content at once on the page. So editors can go in and drag and drop things off and we'll make this the front story now. We'll set this one over here. This one needs to come down because it's not a top five anymore. So I'm going to save it, and publish it live. And then, over on our demo live site, it should be updated with our new front page story and our Data Dot Five stories. And pretend there's a picture there of Amazon. So that's what that's like. Our other main feature is that our editors send out daily newsletters from most of the sites. And there's also a Weekender newsletter that's sent automatically and they do this, again, through our CMS. @@ -99,7 +99,7 @@ The good thing about this is that our CMS is pretty integrated in SaleThrough wi That should show up on the preview. Et cetera, et cetera. And, yeah, I think those are the pretty much the main functions that editors would use for it. We also have some functions that sales people could use. They could go into this ad generator and paste in stuff they need for their clients and it would spit out HTML for like. And... they can use — we've got an image models thing for them to use images. Taxonomies to — to link sites together, to add topics. They can add library items in the library section of our site. Job posts, as well. And they can do everything from scheduling ads to scheduling editors' notes to go into issues. Previewing what the Weekenderish is going to be, making press releases, all primarily with basic Django, baked-in functionality. The stuff like the dashboard and the workflows, obviously, is custom logic but I would definitely recommend Django if you need to get something up fast and you need to be able to have that kind of minute control for it. But I think that's all I got for you. -AUDIENCE: Did you use the Django templating? +AUDIENCE: Did you use the Django templating? Bo: Yes, yeah. The front-end is Django templating. And the newsletter is Salesthrough Sapphire. @@ -125,7 +125,7 @@ And then you can switch into different layouts here. And then you could, if you Like, grouping images and things like that. I'm going to just keep going so I can show y'all all the cool features. By the way, this story has this really crazy quote in it that I forgot I was going to make a blockquote that I'm just going to have to read out to y'all. It's this crazy Lindor quote about how balls are round but they go into square boxes. I'm sorry for my life that I can't find it. So you can see one of the things we do is we actually show you, hey, if I hadn't have changed the permalink or the editorial we would have given you a warning. We're telling you that if you use some custom styles which may break in the future, proceed with caution. There's some workflow capabilities submitted for approval, or I can just publish it now. I can switch things to embargo mode. I can ensure, control where it's distributed. I'm just going to go ahead and publish it. -And then, confirmed. I want to publish it now. So I'll show y'all... what happens from here is that in Layout, I'll reload this... so now I have the story here that I can put into layout and so I just can drag and drop that here, and I can push those changes live. The pink things are ones that are pinned into layout. The white ones will just flow through as things are published to the home page so you have kind of like a combination of river and pinned things. I can change the different — I can change the layout of my home page from here. So this is what the home page looks like right now. So I just put that story here into the second position. One of the things that I have turned on here is our multiarmed bandit headline and photo and deck testing capability that we call Optimize that allows you to add different headline variations and see which one's when. There's a fast algorithm for that. Let's see how much time I have left? Zero! I'm done! +And then, confirmed. I want to publish it now. So I'll show y'all... what happens from here is that in Layout, I'll reload this... so now I have the story here that I can put into layout and so I just can drag and drop that here, and I can push those changes live. The pink things are ones that are pinned into layout. The white ones will just flow through as things are published to the home page so you have kind of like a combination of river and pinned things. I can change the different — I can change the layout of my home page from here. So this is what the home page looks like right now. So I just put that story here into the second position. One of the things that I have turned on here is our multiarmed bandit headline and photo and deck testing capability that we call Optimize that allows you to add different headline variations and see which one's when. There's a fast algorithm for that. Let's see how much time I have left? Zero! I'm done! MARILYN: The vortex! Live demos, right? Okay. Hi, everyone, I'm Sharilyn Hufford and I work on the news platform teams the the New York Times. So I'm one of the many, many people ≈ who have worked on our CMS called Scoop over the years. It's about a decade old now at this point, I think. It replaced KNews as our digital publishing system. Erika is laughing over in the back. Would everybody in the room who has worked on Scoop in the past, or works on Scoop in some capacity would you now just raise your hand and say hi to everyone. So these are the people who are the true experts on this. So I'm going to do my best to represent here and show off all of the good work that they do. So this is our main dashboard when you log in to Scoop. I'm set up now as a reporter. So this would be a reporter's view when you log in. We've got some stories that you created, some things that have been assigned to you. You can budget some articles and some of your recent things. @@ -157,15 +157,15 @@ ALBERT: Okay. Thank you to everyone who presented. That was really awesome. We h AUDIENCE: Can everyone just describe their tech stacks? I'm not sure everybody heard that. Could all the presenters quickly describe your tech stacks? So Python, Node, Java, whatever? -TREI: I'm the wrong person to answer this question. Take it over, Noz! +TREI: I'm the wrong person to answer this question. Take it over, Noz! -SAM: I think two people are sitting next to each other. +SAM: I think two people are sitting next to each other. -NOZLEE: We've got a Node app and a series of microservices. Oh, you don't know that I work at Chorus! +NOZLEE: We've got a Node app and a series of microservices. Oh, you don't know that I work at Chorus! -TIM: I work on Copilot CMS. It's and ember front-end, it's a Node.js service and it's a distributed set of individual services per brand that are deployed individually that are connected through a centralized API. +TIM: I work on Copilot CMS. It's and ember front-end, it's a Node.js service and it's a distributed set of individual services per brand that are deployed individually that are connected through a centralized API. -SHARILYN: I was gonna say, hand it to Joe. +SHARILYN: I was gonna say, hand it to Joe. JOE: I'm sorry if this is not really accurate. So it's JavaScript in the front,. So it's actually built on top of ProseMirror. And the backend is Java and it's mostly Backbone and React. @@ -177,7 +177,7 @@ ANAÏS: So ours is built on a variety. We're moving from Angular to React on the AUDIENCE: So this is first for the — when Poet was a standalone project one of the neat things was let people edit at once. Is that still thing that something you can do. And for the other folks. For multiple people editing the story, yes, no, later? Yes, no, or later, being like, we're working on it but it doesn't do it now. -ALBERT: I think we saw for Scoop and Chorus, yes. +ALBERT: I think we saw for Scoop and Chorus, yes. TIM: Collaboratively editing for Chorus? @@ -191,19 +191,19 @@ ANAÏS: So, like, everything. ALBERT: And the other question is about collaborative editing. -ANAÏS: So collaborative editing. So currently, we have a logging feature because that's kind of where our clients are. One person at a time. But I think we're kind of considering making that configurable and so we're looking at different use cases around editing at the same time, and doing some usability testing there to kind of decide how to best handle that, and then from there, we'll make it configurable by organization. +ANAÏS: So collaborative editing. So currently, we have a logging feature because that's kind of where our clients are. One person at a time. But I think we're kind of considering making that configurable and so we're looking at different use cases around editing at the same time, and doing some usability testing there to kind of decide how to best handle that, and then from there, we'll make it configurable by organization. BO: And so we log ours to one person at a time. People want to track but the priority of that is currently unknown to me. -ALBERT: Okay. +ALBERT: Okay. AARON: I'm wondering how many people are on the teams that built all of this. -ANAÏS: Uh... so the other day, I heard 500 engineers but I'm not sure that's true. I don't know for sure. But the average — the average team size is, like, five to six people. And then, like, the team handles the product. So they, like, handle their backend database and their microservices and each product within Arc has, like, six engineers on it. +ANAÏS: Uh... so the other day, I heard 500 engineers but I'm not sure that's true. I don't know for sure. But the average — the average team size is, like, five to six people. And then, like, the team handles the product. So they, like, handle their backend database and their microservices and each product within Arc has, like, six engineers on it. -SAM: We have a mission system. So an editorial tools mission are five engineering teams. I think each, an EM, and four devs, and a PM, and historically one of those has been for the Copilot UI. You saw that one owns Kata APIs, and the other three, the other products we demoed today, but the Syndication product, and the video product and the... +SAM: We have a mission system. So an editorial tools mission are five engineering teams. I think each, an EM, and four devs, and a PM, and historically one of those has been for the Copilot UI. You saw that one owns Kata APIs, and the other three, the other products we demoed today, but the Syndication product, and the video product and the... -SHARILYN: I'm deferring this to Maddy. +SHARILYN: I'm deferring this to Maddy. BO: At Industry Dive for the better part of building the CMS, it was a smaller team for four to seven. We certainly got to two starter teams of five to six people. @@ -215,24 +215,24 @@ AUDIENCE: How do all of your different systems work with and I guess make space [ Laughter ] -ALBERT: Coming over to this side again. +ALBERT: Coming over to this side again. SAM: Me? Non-standard stories? -ANAÏS: Oh, yeah, so I'm building a product right now called Home. So instead of disaggregating activity across the home page we're creating a configurable dashboard that basically lets you create your own workflow tan individual level so I think that would probably be how we're going to address that by basically creating a marketplace of tools where third-party tools can be implemented there and you can download them onto your dashboard. And then, our first proof of concept of that is we are trying to get ChartBeat data through basically connect analytics to in-the-moment actions like adding to a collection on the home page and pitching it. So I think we'll continue to aggregate data across our third-party tools and add it to the system to see what might make happy or encourage our users. +ANAÏS: Oh, yeah, so I'm building a product right now called Home. So instead of disaggregating activity across the home page we're creating a configurable dashboard that basically lets you create your own workflow tan individual level so I think that would probably be how we're going to address that by basically creating a marketplace of tools where third-party tools can be implemented there and you can download them onto your dashboard. And then, our first proof of concept of that is we are trying to get ChartBeat data through basically connect analytics to in-the-moment actions like adding to a collection on the home page and pitching it. So I think we'll continue to aggregate data across our third-party tools and add it to the system to see what might make happy or encourage our users. -SAM: We have it interactive in our — which lets people — I didn't show it, but we also did a lot of branding content for that so that's where that's, to me, that stuff most often. +SAM: We have it interactive in our — which lets people — I didn't show it, but we also did a lot of branding content for that so that's where that's, to me, that stuff most often. -SHARILYN: All those who know about interactive news or graphics. Because you're the people that have to do this. One of the promises of Oak is that it's going to be easier to do that and hopefully that's coming sooner or later but, you know, it's always a challenge and I don't know if one of you want to talk about that. +SHARILYN: All those who know about interactive news or graphics. Because you're the people that have to do this. One of the promises of Oak is that it's going to be easier to do that and hopefully that's coming sooner or later but, you know, it's always a challenge and I don't know if one of you want to talk about that. TREI: You should talk to Keaty and Nozlee but we have something called Custom Storytelling Kit which allows to you tell your story all in Chorus and version history and there's an API that you can access via CLI and basically build out a little scaffold of an app and build out those things there so those things can talk to each other. Is that right? Yeah, I used to know how to write code... AUDIENCE: Around, above, through, and beside. There's a fields throughout different asset types all throughout Scoop that has escape hashes that you can put markup API points to get all that in there. It depends on what kinds of story or content types and page types. -ALBERT: Thanks I should have made you all sit... +ALBERT: Thanks I should have made you all sit... BO: We have a graphics department and design team that's separate from the software team that handles all the graphics and front-end stuff that editors request and then in our editor, something we didn't show is you can flip over to the raw HTML of the WYSIWYG and our front-end designers will help input whatever HTML they're coding into it and you can look at it and they've collaborated very well that way so far is an advantage of having a little bit of a smaller company right now. ALBERT: I think we're out of time but thank you all for coming and I hope... -[ Applause ] \ No newline at end of file +[ Applause ] diff --git a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-creative-strategies.md b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-creative-strategies.md index 0f9e9573..adca8f94 100644 --- a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-creative-strategies.md +++ b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-creative-strategies.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ title: "SRCCON 2019 Session Transcript — “Abandon normal instruments”: Sideways strategies for defeating creative block" --- -#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](/documentation/#session-transcripts) +#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/#session-transcripts) # “Abandon normal instruments”: Sideways strategies for defeating creative block @@ -122,7 +122,7 @@ ALEX: Thanks, guys. You over here? I'm Allison. We talked about what to do when you're creatively stuck. Collaborating with others other than being alone in your head. Again, walking away from the project, and doing something else, or just going for a work. Rubber-ducking. Or, like, if you're kind of by yourself, you know, as you were saying, as you're writing a story and you're stuck about where to go, kind of be meta about it and say, I'm stuck, this is an interesting idea and the answer to this question was this, this and this, and something meta like that might eventually lead you to where you might go to next and delete the stuff that was meta part of it. Doodling. Kind of changing the format. Maybe do something on your computer, or doing it by hand or sketching it out might just tap into a different part of your brain. There's always the sort of waiting for the deadline pressure. I like the idea somebody else said setting timers like pomodoros, like, in this bucket of time I will do this. Yeah... -KATIE: A lot of people mentioned rubber ducking. Is there anyone who isn't familiar with that term? Cool. Would somebody maybe... Ally, would you mind sharing what rubber-ducking is? +KATIE: A lot of people mentioned rubber ducking. Is there anyone who isn't familiar with that term? Cool. Would somebody maybe... Ally, would you mind sharing what rubber-ducking is? ALLY: I think rubber-ducking is something you use in the programming world is you go up to somebody and you just talk to somebody about what you're doing, and their job is to basically nod at you and you will eventually come to the consideration on your own for some kind of an inspirational trick. @@ -130,7 +130,7 @@ AUDIENCE: Do they know they're rubber-ducking? [ Laughter ] -KATIE: I do have a coworker who I will go to and say, "Hey, I need a rubber duck." And so there's a mix of those things. +KATIE: I do have a coworker who I will go to and say, "Hey, I need a rubber duck." And so there's a mix of those things. NOZLEE: And sometimes you say, be a rubber duck for me @@ -164,4 +164,4 @@ KATIE: All right. So we are at 10:44, which is the last minute of our session. S [ Applause ] -This goes to the etherpad so it has the links to the slides to the projects that we shared and fun other things. And if you want to keep the other little cards, feel free. \ No newline at end of file +This goes to the etherpad so it has the links to the slides to the projects that we shared and fun other things. And if you want to keep the other little cards, feel free. diff --git a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-designing-stories-impact.md b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-designing-stories-impact.md index 4932120c..a1e45922 100644 --- a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-designing-stories-impact.md +++ b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-designing-stories-impact.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ title: "SRCCON 2019 Session Transcript — Why it matters — Designing stories for impact" --- -#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](/documentation/#session-transcripts) +#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/#session-transcripts) # Why it matters — Designing stories for impact @@ -26,7 +26,7 @@ ANJANETTE: I think we're frozen. KAI: Oh, this is a really fun start. Hold on. Hold on. We can do this. Ah-ha! All right. -ANJANETTE: There we go. So we're talking today about designing for impact, and I'm Anjanette Delgado. Right now I'm the senior news director for digital at the Detroit Free Press. And I've been there for about a year. Yay for Detroit. Fantastic. I've been with Gannett since '99, so quite a long time in different markets through that. I'm also a contributor to the Media Impact Project at the Norman Lear Center. If you haven't checked it out, please do. It's a fascinating project. And built an impact tracker with my team. +ANJANETTE: There we go. So we're talking today about designing for impact, and I'm Anjanette Delgado. Right now I'm the senior news director for digital at the Detroit Free Press. And I've been there for about a year. Yay for Detroit. Fantastic. I've been with Gannett since '99, so quite a long time in different markets through that. I'm also a contributor to the Media Impact Project at the Norman Lear Center. If you haven't checked it out, please do. It's a fascinating project. And built an impact tracker with my team. KAI: I'm Kai. Anjanette and I talked about this recently and why impact matters more for me. So I'm at a project within Newsday, and we're funded by a non-profit grant. So they don't care much about page views or time on site, but they care about impact. We have to show we pulled something off. So we started talking about this and this is how this came to be. @@ -166,7 +166,7 @@ AUDIENCE: So our starting point was: America has never gone this long without hi ANJANETTE: So you took a challenge. Great solution. And then discovered all the additional challenges that you would have in that. Yeah. Which happens. -KAI: And back here, correct? My Google Fit app is gonna be happy with me. +KAI: And back here, correct? My Google Fit app is gonna be happy with me. AUDIENCE: Our group... Maybe we're just that curmudgeonly. We generally had a question about: What do you do if there's no clear offramp? There's no solution, there's no villain. There's no hero. Just... Bad... Stuff. @@ -240,4 +240,4 @@ AUDIENCE: Our story was affordable housing. I think we ended up with more of a g ANJANETTE: And on that note... Yes. All right. Thank you. Thank you. That's us again. If you want to talk further, please get in touch. Both of us would be very excited about that. When we put up the slides, we're also gonna have some links to some of the things that we've talked about today. So thank you all very much. -(applause) \ No newline at end of file +(applause) diff --git a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-disabilities-in-the-newsroom.md b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-disabilities-in-the-newsroom.md index 34ffc7ba..61326f72 100644 --- a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-disabilities-in-the-newsroom.md +++ b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-disabilities-in-the-newsroom.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ title: "SRCCON 2019 Session Transcript — Taking Up Space: Making Room for People with Disabilities at The Times" --- -#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](/documentation/#session-transcripts) +#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/#session-transcripts) # Taking Up Space: Making Room for People with Disabilities at The Times @@ -155,4 +155,3 @@ KATHERINE: Oh, the screen went off! Oh, it logged me out. There we go. Okay. Tha But thank you for coming, and I think we're done for the day now! So now it's just fun times. (applause) - diff --git a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-editing-data.md b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-editing-data.md index ea03ff01..3c806314 100644 --- a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-editing-data.md +++ b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-editing-data.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ title: "SRCCON 2019 Session Transcript — How to edit data as seriously as we edit words" --- -#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](/documentation/#session-transcripts) +#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/#session-transcripts) # How to edit data as seriously as we edit words @@ -50,7 +50,7 @@ KATE: Split screen is very hard. But you'll be using, amongst your groups, as a HANNAH: Yeah, so some of the guiding questions -- and you'll take these questions in whatever direction you want, but some of the things to think about is: What does that editing process look like? If you have a process, if you're one of the 20% of people who said you had a process for editing numbers in your newsroom for data editing, what does that process look like? If you're an editor, how do you approach a story that is really data-heavy, where the point of the story is: We did this data analysis. Here's what we found. How do you approach a story like that? Do you have any concerns about it? Any fears? If you're a reporter, do you have someone to turn to, with data skills? Is that your editor? Is it a peer? Maybe you're in a local newsroom that's within a network who has somebody else who maybe is also here, who you could meet, who you could turn to. Could you be that peer for someone else? Maybe you're not an editor. Neither of us are. But maybe you could do that review of somebody else's work. And do you see any challenges? So we're just gonna take ten minutes to talk. So we'll finish at 9:52. So get to know the people at your table. And when we're done, we're gonna ask each table to share something that they learned. So if you want to have somebody figure out one or two or a couple of the things you said, we're gonna write that down just in general terms, to see as a group where are we with data editing. Okay. -Hello. Sorry, again. This is the two-minute warning. So in two minutes, we're gonna go around and ask for each table to give a little baby synopsis on the state of data editing based on what you've talked about, and any challenges. Two minutes. +Hello. Sorry, again. This is the two-minute warning. So in two minutes, we're gonna go around and ask for each table to give a little baby synopsis on the state of data editing based on what you've talked about, and any challenges. Two minutes. HANNAH: Hello! We're wrapping up our time now. Hello, room. Yes, thank you. We're gonna go around and ask each table to share something. And I'm sure there's gonna be some overlap. So just say briefly what are some of the situations you discussed at your tables. We'll start from that back corner. If you want to have somebody -- please stand up. And it's a big room, so speak as loudly as you can, please. Just for a second. @@ -74,7 +74,7 @@ AUDIENCE: I took some notes, so I can summarize, I think. So two things stood ou HANNAH: The next table? -AUDIENCE: We talked mainly about how... The ideal world would be that an assignment editor and copy editor would be reviewing the findings in the story at the same time as they're reviewing the words, and how could we better do that process? And I talked a little bit about... I'm trying to work on that in my newsroom. And I've come up with a series of questions that -- and I realize as I wrote the questions out -- that I'm treating it a lot like I would an anonymous source. Like, an editor is talking to the reporter about: Is this source reliable? What does this source know and not know? And what questions did you ask? What questions could you not ask? So things like that. That might help the editor suss out any potential problems in the findings. Some editors have talked about a data team backstopping the reporter and their findings, and we need that, but we also need editors questioning what they're actually saying in the story and how they're saying it and things like that. +AUDIENCE: We talked mainly about how... The ideal world would be that an assignment editor and copy editor would be reviewing the findings in the story at the same time as they're reviewing the words, and how could we better do that process? And I talked a little bit about... I'm trying to work on that in my newsroom. And I've come up with a series of questions that -- and I realize as I wrote the questions out -- that I'm treating it a lot like I would an anonymous source. Like, an editor is talking to the reporter about: Is this source reliable? What does this source know and not know? And what questions did you ask? What questions could you not ask? So things like that. That might help the editor suss out any potential problems in the findings. Some editors have talked about a data team backstopping the reporter and their findings, and we need that, but we also need editors questioning what they're actually saying in the story and how they're saying it and things like that. AUDIENCE: None of us at this table had ever been part of a team with a rigorous data editing process, and pretty much none of us had a coworker or editor capable of doing that. Just to focus on one thing -- because I think a lot of repetition is gonna come up -- we had differing responses, two very opposite responses, in terms of how the editors handled a data-based or code-based story you provide them. Some editors will assume you did it right and say great. This looks good. And just copy edit your prose and send it in. And then there's another group of editors who are extremely skeptical of it, because they don't understand it, and they don't trust it. Laura talked about how one editor killed one of her stories because it was too close to deadline and they didn't have time to satisfy their suspicions about the numbers. @@ -156,7 +156,7 @@ AUDIENCE: Sort of. KATE: We have... We have... Wait. Okay. We have traveling mics. But so... For this table, it was about unit testing, and using more up-front ways to check your own code, as well as documentation. And if you're working in something like Excel, where there are these -- lots of nested formulas, all in a single row, that you can't necessarily see, breaking that up through tabs and using things like Google Spreadsheets, which tend to be more non-data journalist friendly, than something like R. -And the second table spoke about formalizing the time spent on data editing. So a lot of times it can be a very informal process, where you do it for a friend, you do it for a coworker, but that's not really a part of your job. So what if that was something that was formalized in terms of something like 5%, 10% of your time went towards checking someone else's work. And now I'm gonna hand this off to the speaker at this table. You spoke last time? No! I'm sorry. You can't talk. One of you three. Rosie, you have no choice. +And the second table spoke about formalizing the time spent on data editing. So a lot of times it can be a very informal process, where you do it for a friend, you do it for a coworker, but that's not really a part of your job. So what if that was something that was formalized in terms of something like 5%, 10% of your time went towards checking someone else's work. And now I'm gonna hand this off to the speaker at this table. You spoke last time? No! I'm sorry. You can't talk. One of you three. Rosie, you have no choice. AUDIENCE: Oh, one thing that we talked about -- we also talked about formalizing time and getting the team to... Knowing when to put multiple people on a story and get them to pair. Was contracting things out. Like, if you're asking somebody outside the newsroom to do work for you, your newsroom should be paying for it. I know that that involves management, and might not always go well. But it's apparently a thing that has been done successfully and has developed some data editorial skills. And resulted in better processes. @@ -228,4 +228,4 @@ AUDIENCE: So when you asked for that, I started to hear my CTO's voice in my hea KATE: Thank you. I think we are at... We're past time. So there is food now! I think! I think? Oh, but there's a 30 minute break. Okay. There's a 30-minute break. So please enjoy your break. Thank you for coming. If you have questions, comments, you want to come cry to us, or give us really good tips, we would enjoy those things. Thank you. -(applause) \ No newline at end of file +(applause) diff --git a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-ethical-advertising.md b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-ethical-advertising.md index 33eb953d..828f3b49 100644 --- a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-ethical-advertising.md +++ b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-ethical-advertising.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ title: "SRCCON 2019 Session Transcript — Let’s build some ethical advertising" --- -#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](/documentation/#session-transcripts) +#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/#session-transcripts) # Let’s build some ethical advertising @@ -264,4 +264,4 @@ AMANDA: We've got to wrap up, because we're three minutes over. Thank you all. IAN: Thank you all so much. -(applause) \ No newline at end of file +(applause) diff --git a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-ethics-data-stories.md b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-ethics-data-stories.md index 75b048e7..e080a0a0 100644 --- a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-ethics-data-stories.md +++ b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-ethics-data-stories.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ title: "SRCCON 2019 Session Transcript — The Scramble Suit: Creating harm prevention guidelines for newsroom data" --- -#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](/documentation/#session-transcripts) +#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/#session-transcripts) # The Scramble Suit: Creating harm prevention guidelines for newsroom data @@ -196,4 +196,4 @@ AUDIENCE: Is it a public trash can? Private trash can? THOMAS: I think our OpSec is okay, but I'm open to suggestions. -KELLY: We're gonna eat the paper! \ No newline at end of file +KELLY: We're gonna eat the paper! diff --git a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-events-teaching-toolkit.md b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-events-teaching-toolkit.md index 8fba0510..e647dbc8 100644 --- a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-events-teaching-toolkit.md +++ b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-events-teaching-toolkit.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ title: "SRCCON 2019 Session Transcript — Bang for your buck: how to help your newsroom get the most out of SRCCON (or any journalism event)" --- -#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](/documentation/#session-transcripts) +#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/#session-transcripts) # Bang for your buck: how to help your newsroom get the most out of SRCCON (or any journalism event) @@ -161,4 +161,4 @@ DAVE: And you have a few minutes before you have to go and the energy begins aga EMMA: What are your next steps? what you're going to do on your plane ride home. When you meet with your boss. Plan ahead. You're welcome to share it with anybody. You're welcome to share it with us. Thank you so much for coming. -[ Applause ] \ No newline at end of file +[ Applause ] diff --git a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-friday-closing.md b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-friday-closing.md index fdb9dd67..157d60bd 100644 --- a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-friday-closing.md +++ b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-friday-closing.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ title: "SRCCON 2019 Session Transcript — SRCCON Closing" --- -#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](/documentation/#session-transcripts) +#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/#session-transcripts) # SRCCON Closing @@ -51,4 +51,4 @@ So thank you, again, for these two days. We will be in touch with a lot more inf [ Cheers & Applause ] -AUDIENCE: Thank you, Erika! \ No newline at end of file +AUDIENCE: Thank you, Erika! diff --git a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-how-are-we-in-community.md b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-how-are-we-in-community.md index 331023ea..26243ce2 100644 --- a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-how-are-we-in-community.md +++ b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-how-are-we-in-community.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ title: "SRCCON 2019 Session Transcript — How are we in community together?" --- -#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](/documentation/#session-transcripts) +#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/#session-transcripts) # How are we in community together? @@ -52,8 +52,6 @@ ERIKA: Just that there was a person who entered a newsroom and their cultural ba AUDIENCE: It's a woman who was at the New Jersey Advance. And she's a newsroom developer. She comes from a relatively rural part of China, and she was just completely unable to celebrate herself. And hadn't been raised that way, and was uncomfortable with it. And then won some extremely major awards. And the newsroom was like... Champagne. She was like... Uh... But she celebrated herself and it gave her the confidence to assert herself in other contexts with her family afterwards, and it was an adorable story. - - BRITTANY: So let's celebrate ourselves. Go ahead and gently give yourselves a pat on the back. Good work for staying awake and being present and contributing so much information. This is something I do with my son to help him understand consent. Ask the person next to you if they want a hug or a high five or a handshake or a wave. And just give something to your partner across from you. AUDIENCE: Elbow! @@ -80,7 +78,7 @@ AUDIENCE: The guiding statement is the same. We know a lot already. We have a lo BRITTANY: Perfect. Thank you. So we're sort of working from the same information, really thinking about honing in and creating something bigger. -AUDIENCE: The guiding statement is: We know who is here and that we show up in a lot of networks. The question is: Who is missing? Who should be here? And how do we get them here? Who should not be here? +AUDIENCE: The guiding statement is: We know who is here and that we show up in a lot of networks. The question is: Who is missing? Who should be here? And how do we get them here? Who should not be here? AUDIENCE: Ooh, juicy! Yeah! @@ -88,11 +86,11 @@ AUDIENCE: Vote them off the island. BRITTANY: So some of that you know just viscerally, visually, and emotionally. But if you want more prompts, the Community Board is up there for you to look at. All right. Table number four. -AUDIENCE: The guiding statement is: Open News does a lot to support community building in journalism technology. The question is: What else should Open News do? What shouldn't Open News do? +AUDIENCE: The guiding statement is: Open News does a lot to support community building in journalism technology. The question is: What else should Open News do? What shouldn't Open News do? BRITTANY: So again, these are some of the programs, some of the things that Open News has done historically, but we're really thinking a lot about: What is our lane and what is outside of our lane as we're starting to think about more programming. -AUDIENCE: As individuals who make up the journalism community, what are our responsibilities? +AUDIENCE: As individuals who make up the journalism community, what are our responsibilities? BRITTANY: You might know this stuff intrinsically. We've spent so much time collecting the data and now we need to move to what's next. So we need to take the bulk of the time to do this and report out on some of the things that have come up. We need to talk about the metalevel. We don't want you to question the data. That's not what we're doing. We're asking you to put the main ideas and shared concepts on the paper. Not an idea dump, but in conversation, here's what came out, that we think is the most valuable thing to pass on. And you can do that with the sticky notes on the paper. Any questions? Feel free to check out the information and move about the cabin.He @@ -110,7 +108,7 @@ AUDIENCE: Our guiding statement. We know a lot already. What do we do with the t AUDIENCE: Can I just slow you down a little bit? -AUDIENCE: Sorry. Do outreach to the wider journalism community, the people who aren't here, and the more bolder idea I think we had here was maybe having local meetups, and community hubs, so people who can't travel to SRCCON or whatever could come and discuss these goals as a community. Step one point five we realized would be to... Once we've got those goals, prioritize them as a community. So we could design a system online that allows people to say... Hey, I'm interested in this one. I'm interested in this one. And from there, we can see what the community as a whole is interested in. Step two, design around that. We could have a call for proposals that have to meet one of the community goals. Could be new and existing groups around those goals. Search for affinity groups that are guaranteed to be other places that are working on this stuff, and then we go and do it. And I think all of us have a predisposition to test this on a small-scale, see if it's working, measure success, test, and we should do that in this case as well. And a great thing that Open News already does, is support and guide initiatives -- because we're all gonna want to take the ball and run, so how can Open News support that. And measure and test both qualitatively and quantitatively, and start at the beginning. Start all over again. +AUDIENCE: Sorry. Do outreach to the wider journalism community, the people who aren't here, and the more bolder idea I think we had here was maybe having local meetups, and community hubs, so people who can't travel to SRCCON or whatever could come and discuss these goals as a community. Step one point five we realized would be to... Once we've got those goals, prioritize them as a community. So we could design a system online that allows people to say... Hey, I'm interested in this one. I'm interested in this one. And from there, we can see what the community as a whole is interested in. Step two, design around that. We could have a call for proposals that have to meet one of the community goals. Could be new and existing groups around those goals. Search for affinity groups that are guaranteed to be other places that are working on this stuff, and then we go and do it. And I think all of us have a predisposition to test this on a small-scale, see if it's working, measure success, test, and we should do that in this case as well. And a great thing that Open News already does, is support and guide initiatives -- because we're all gonna want to take the ball and run, so how can Open News support that. And measure and test both qualitatively and quantitatively, and start at the beginning. Start all over again. AUDIENCE: Done and done. Okay. Can someone share the... @@ -196,4 +194,4 @@ Thank you so much. You've given us a lot of great information. A lot of encourag (applause) -AUDIENCE: All right. Thanks, everyone. \ No newline at end of file +AUDIENCE: All right. Thanks, everyone. diff --git a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-newsletter-strategy.md b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-newsletter-strategy.md index f00fd37b..c0854b7f 100644 --- a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-newsletter-strategy.md +++ b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-newsletter-strategy.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ title: "SRCCON 2019 Session Transcript — Game of Newsletters: A song of inboxes and subject lines" --- -#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](/documentation/#session-transcripts) +#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/#session-transcripts) # Game of Newsletters: A song of inboxes and subject lines @@ -40,7 +40,6 @@ JOSEPH: Hi, everybody; we have about five minutes left! [ Group Work ] - All right. We have two more minutes. Hey, everyone. We're going to go on to stop two of our newsletter. Hello, hello, hello, hey everybody. All right! Time for step two. If you're still trying to finish up the descriptions, you can keep doing that after I walk through what the next step is or Emily explains but we want to get started on the game part — EMILY: Yes,. So right now, you've all launched these beautiful newsletters. Congratulations. Now pretend a few months have gone by. Business as usual for a few months. We're going to throw a few with reference into your plans and see how you all adapt as a team. And so I'm going to ask one person from each group to come up to the panels again and pick up — next these fake candles — pick up one of the blue cards, and read the next two. So pick it up and respond on the worksheet number two. @@ -49,7 +48,6 @@ JOSEPH: So you'll 20 minutes for this part of the game. So we'll let you know fo [ Group Work ] - So you have about one more minute in theory for this process. But you can go up and get a second one. In about a minute we'll switch but you can keep working on it. AUDIENCE: We're on our second newsletter. @@ -98,7 +96,7 @@ AUDIENCE: So we're the Seven Kingdoms Post. We're a staff of seven in Kingslandi And we have to write some marketing copy. So one of the other ones that came up was how do we promote our subscriptions and so we came up with subscribe posts to get one month free of throw and watch pro, your custom source of random and broken. -JOSEPH: Awesome, thank you. Up here? +JOSEPH: Awesome, thank you. Up here? ALEX: We're all day the Winterfell Free Press. And, actually, we are a legacy metro newsletter for profit located in Winterfell. Staff size is 250. Our existing products are daily print paper, regularly updated website and two podcasts and our model is 25% advertising, and 25% audience, and 50% other. And our plan was we wanted to be kind of like alt weekly new digital publication-ish? @@ -106,16 +104,16 @@ JOSEPH: What was your challenge? AUDIENCE: Also... -AUDIENCE: Underserved. +AUDIENCE: Underserved. ALEX: Yeah, it's an underserved. We've been sending it for more than six months. Wait, is that what you mean? Not that challenge. Sorry — sorry. No, this is wrong, too! Wait. -AUDIENCE: There's an underserved population, especially. +AUDIENCE: There's an underserved population, especially. ALEX: You'll want you think this audience is currently underserved by the more mainstream coverage. So we wanted to be, like, conversational, more diverse, casual, meme-y, sort of have a community vibe to the newsletter but sort of time-baked to the news issues. Things going on in the main campus. Our target campus is Wild Links, and our newsletter is called WoW the Now. We said that it would take — we were saying about ten to 15 hours because we wanted to produce ten to two things that were original content, not totally aggregating especially because we don't cover this group of people yet. We intend to grow our newsletter with content that reflects their perspectives and issues like bringing, of course, paid advertising, like, against those plays and trying to incorporate Wild Link influencers in interviews and Q&As in every newsletter. Our metrics were open rates, the list size, and clickthrough rates. Location analytics if we can get them. That would be helpful for our particular case. Or if anyone is sharing them or linking to it on social media. You don't want this, right? -JOSEPH: No. That looks great, though. +JOSEPH: No. That looks great, though. ALEX: And then our challenge... I'm sorry, so many cards. So we had a large portion of our list that never opened the newsletter after sign-up and it's been six months and we've been trying to figure out how to deal with it and what did we say? Yeah... huh. Oh, yeah, we had a lot of fun subject ones. We realized really the problem was we couldn't put anything in email because if they're not really opening it, they're not getting past the first subject. And so we came up with some subject lines, "You up?" Come back from the dead, we miss you." "And you don't need us; we don't need you either." And just sort of a list of things they missed so they can catch up. @@ -127,7 +125,7 @@ Let's see... we expect that it — what did we decide? 5%...? In large part beca [ Laughter ] -... so our first challenge was to do a survey of our readers so we can learn more about our audience. Uh, let's see. We ask basic demographic questions, reading frequency, favorite content. What you'd like to see covered — those kinds of things but we would segment our survey based on loyalty and low engagement. The other challenge because we have a high unsubscribe rate even though the rest of our metrics around newsletters look pretty good, 40,000 subscribers, 30% open rate and things like that. And the other challenge was around A/B testing. So we decided we would test send time along sender name. We added the same subject line as you guys but since our newsletter is about killing people, we decided we wouldn't change much except for put, "Livestock and grains" in quotation marks to imply some sort of killing joke and add some emojis in the subject line. +... so our first challenge was to do a survey of our readers so we can learn more about our audience. Uh, let's see. We ask basic demographic questions, reading frequency, favorite content. What you'd like to see covered — those kinds of things but we would segment our survey based on loyalty and low engagement. The other challenge because we have a high unsubscribe rate even though the rest of our metrics around newsletters look pretty good, 40,000 subscribers, 30% open rate and things like that. And the other challenge was around A/B testing. So we decided we would test send time along sender name. We added the same subject line as you guys but since our newsletter is about killing people, we decided we wouldn't change much except for put, "Livestock and grains" in quotation marks to imply some sort of killing joke and add some emojis in the subject line. EMILY: Well done, yeah. @@ -149,4 +147,4 @@ EMILY: But yeah, so if you have any questions or if you have any feedback for us [ Applause ] -JOSEPH: We'll be around for a little bit. We're not going anywhere. But we're happy to chat. \ No newline at end of file +JOSEPH: We'll be around for a little bit. We're not going anywhere. But we're happy to chat. diff --git a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-newsroom-reorg-product.md b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-newsroom-reorg-product.md index 0a93c541..00af07f5 100644 --- a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-newsroom-reorg-product.md +++ b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-newsroom-reorg-product.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ title: "SRCCON 2019 Session Transcript — How to re-org your newsroom around product without breaking it" --- -#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](/documentation/#session-transcripts) +#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/#session-transcripts) # How to re-org your newsroom around product without breaking it @@ -176,7 +176,7 @@ AMANDA: So everyone has access to the road map. In fact, everyone on the team, m JESSICA: Not just the product team. The whole staff. -AMANDA: Sorry, the whole staff can make a request that goes onto the road map. Jessica had mentioned that we get together for an all-hands meeting. All the international staff come in to DC for a week and part of that activity is we do road map planning for the following year. And so that's the process. So there's input that they have in the process. And then it's staff-wide. It's always available. Jessica and I do quarterly road map updates, memos to staff. Reviewing... What have we checked off the box? What's coming up in the next quarter? And I think having that at the highest level -- and we reported out, I reported out upwards, as well. It's part of our reporting into our editorial board. Governing board. Corporate boards for the non-profit that we work for. +AMANDA: Sorry, the whole staff can make a request that goes onto the road map. Jessica had mentioned that we get together for an all-hands meeting. All the international staff come in to DC for a week and part of that activity is we do road map planning for the following year. And so that's the process. So there's input that they have in the process. And then it's staff-wide. It's always available. Jessica and I do quarterly road map updates, memos to staff. Reviewing... What have we checked off the box? What's coming up in the next quarter? And I think having that at the highest level -- and we reported out, I reported out upwards, as well. It's part of our reporting into our editorial board. Governing board. Corporate boards for the non-profit that we work for. AUDIENCE: I was wondering how analytics played into this. I don't know if that fell under the product part of the team... @@ -226,4 +226,4 @@ JESSICA: And scale, when I'm thinking about scale with this, I'm already thinkin AMANDA: How would you scale it for 55 journals that publish 10,000 PDF payments in HTML a month? It's like... Sort of an astonishing scale problem. And then how would you scale it for a database and information systems product that's on every researcher's desktop? So those are other kinds of products that our parent company works on. And I think that's -- when I was making that face -- that's the scale challenge to me. They're very different. Their road maps are different. They don't have road maps. Their priorities are different. Their stakeholders are different. Their road maps are different. So I think that's a scaling issue that would lie ahead. -JESSICA: So... We are basically at time. Thank you all for coming. If you have other detailed questions, you want to get in the weeds, you want to see our road map, say hi and we'll talk about that. Thanks for participating in the activity. Also, one of our analog products is on the table. Those are Chemoji stickers. Those are chemistry emoji. So those are yours. Take them. \ No newline at end of file +JESSICA: So... We are basically at time. Thank you all for coming. If you have other detailed questions, you want to get in the weeds, you want to see our road map, say hi and we'll talk about that. Thanks for participating in the activity. Also, one of our analog products is on the table. Those are Chemoji stickers. Those are chemistry emoji. So those are yours. Take them. diff --git a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-next-phase-news-nerds.md b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-next-phase-news-nerds.md index 620366fd..dc326bfc 100644 --- a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-next-phase-news-nerds.md +++ b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-next-phase-news-nerds.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ title: "SRCCON 2019 Session Transcript — Designing the next phase for newsroom technologists" --- -#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](/documentation/#session-transcripts) +#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/#session-transcripts) # Designing the next phase for newsroom technologists @@ -188,7 +188,7 @@ AUDIENCE: Well, I mean... BRITTANY: I actually do have thoughts. -AUDIENCE: I don't have an answer. I'm the director of Nightlab at Northwestern, and one of the reasons I pause at that term is because the lab was created as a technology center, science and and so on, but we're finding that as an inappropriate jacket to wear, and really pushing towards more like product thinking, which is all in the air here. There's not a simple word for it. But I feel like putting technology first has turned out not in our interests. For lots of reasons. And so finding a way around it, not necessarily side tracking the session to do it, would be good for us. +AUDIENCE: I don't have an answer. I'm the director of Nightlab at Northwestern, and one of the reasons I pause at that term is because the lab was created as a technology center, science and and so on, but we're finding that as an inappropriate jacket to wear, and really pushing towards more like product thinking, which is all in the air here. There's not a simple word for it. But I feel like putting technology first has turned out not in our interests. For lots of reasons. And so finding a way around it, not necessarily side tracking the session to do it, would be good for us. AUDIENCE: I don't know exactly what the definition of a technologist is either, but I think one criterion for it is someone who isn't just concerned about feasibility and putting technology first, but is also very concerned about culture and the downstream effects of that, and how the relationship between culture and technology -- how one is encoded into the other. @@ -198,7 +198,7 @@ AUDIENCE: Just something that's based off a very recent personal experience of m AUDIENCE: A lot of our conversations were kind of centered around how people feel about our jobs, or how other technologists feel about their own jobs and how that's communicated across the newsroom, and one of the things I mentioned is that... I get a lot of respect in my organization for being a technologist, but I think the other people in my team feel a little powerless when there's a technical problem and they don't know how to handle it. So finding ways to help people feel like we are actually collaborating on a task, even if they don't necessarily know all the details of completing that task, would be a good way of helping people work together. -AUDIENCE: Just a quick addition to what Cece just said, which is... I've spent most of my career working for people who usually respond or react to something that me or my team does as "magic". +AUDIENCE: Just a quick addition to what Cece just said, which is... I've spent most of my career working for people who usually respond or react to something that me or my team does as "magic". (laughter) @@ -280,4 +280,4 @@ AUDIENCE: I think regarding moving up through the ranks as a technologist or wha BRITTANY: Thank you, everyone, for coming. We hope you got some goals and some things that you can take away, and use in your own newsroom, to make journalism better. -(applause) \ No newline at end of file +(applause) diff --git a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-people-polls-elections.md b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-people-polls-elections.md index d4e71c34..c6e41ab3 100644 --- a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-people-polls-elections.md +++ b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-people-polls-elections.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ title: "SRCCON 2019 Session Transcript — Fix your feedback loop: Letting people, not polls, drive your election coverage" --- -#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](/documentation/#session-transcripts) +#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/#session-transcripts) # Fix your feedback loop: Letting people, not polls, drive your election coverage @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ BRIDGET: Of course, you're free to ask questions. We're looking specifically at Ooh, a lot of hands for that, too. We're going to do a quick breakout session. I'm going to give you two minutes and I'm going to ask each table to come up with five emotion words when you think about covering journalism, or as a citizen participating in an election, how does that make you feel, what are five words that make you feel during the next election. I'll take five minutes and I'll call on some people to talk to us. -BRIDGET: And five, four, three, two, one... thank you, everybody. I need quick volunteers and think about emotions about elections. Yes, Bobby? +BRIDGET: And five, four, three, two, one... thank you, everybody. I need quick volunteers and think about emotions about elections. Yes, Bobby? BOBBY: We had more than five but I picked five. Exhausted, elation, anxiety, patience, anticipation, and camaraderie. @@ -44,7 +44,7 @@ ARIEL: So one of the things that we know that's going to come up this election a You'll turn that agenda, then, into basically a playbook into things that will change. These are the things that you should be asking yourself. How can we help? Help members figure out this information that they've told me they want. Chances are, each of these candidates have their own platform. And chances are, the things that the community members most want to hear from them about do not have that platform. And another thing you can do is let the voters know when they've done that, and also when they don't. This candidate refused to answer your question about affordable housing. This candidate's platform does not have information about how might they react with federal immigration policy. So this is really an opportunity for us to really serve as a conduit and get them to vote on the values that they really want to be voting on when they reach election day. -Any questions about any of this before I move on? Next up, we have an opportunity to sort of look at Minneapolis is in what its agenda would be. When Regina and I were looking at this, we came up with sort of a fictitious agenda, but we grounded it in reality because we're a roomful of journalists. We like to deal with facts. So what would a citizen's agenda look like for Minneapolis. There was a county reporter, and founder of Sahan Journal, which is a non-profit newsroom that serve the immigrant communities in Minneapolis. And at the end of Muchtar's spiel, we'll give you an opportunity to ask questions of him to craft a better understanding of election coverage. +Any questions about any of this before I move on? Next up, we have an opportunity to sort of look at Minneapolis is in what its agenda would be. When Regina and I were looking at this, we came up with sort of a fictitious agenda, but we grounded it in reality because we're a roomful of journalists. We like to deal with facts. So what would a citizen's agenda look like for Minneapolis. There was a county reporter, and founder of Sahan Journal, which is a non-profit newsroom that serve the immigrant communities in Minneapolis. And at the end of Muchtar's spiel, we'll give you an opportunity to ask questions of him to craft a better understanding of election coverage. MUCHTAR: My name is Mukhtar and I'm a part of Sahan Journal, which serves immigrant communities in Minneapolis. In Minneapolis, where we are right now, we have 16% of the citizen population are immigrants. And 40% of the population are people of color. And one of the good things about Minneapolis in general is it's one of the, I think, one of the only states in the country, or one that has the highest voter turnout across the country. In the last election, 2018, almost 80% of voters casted their ballot. So I came up with top-level issues that most people care about, and the things that we usually focus on in news coverage and what we hear about from presidents and the number one issue that we hear about is the ridings cost in housing. People cannot afford the rising costs as the public housing affordability is also going down. So there is a vision where the multiple public housing is going to change its housing stock into a private ownership. So I don't know if you are familiar of the Eventual Assistance Administration, it's where the housing will be privatized. So people are fearful that might lead to displacement and rent might increase if you have low income. And there's a fear that this will be implemented in Minneapolis and in the Twin Cities in general. As we know, we have very brutal winters almost six months. And after that, you know, when you are driving around, you will see a lot of closures on the roads and trying to, you know — the Transportation Department trying to fix the holes that were kind of messed up by the winter and the snowstorms and all that. @@ -56,27 +56,27 @@ ARIEL: Anyone want to put their reporter hats on and dig into any one of these? AUDIENCE: So how do you solicit feedback in a way that makes you feel comfortable that you don't have other politicians or campaign workers sort of trying to affect your agenda? -ARIEL: That's a good question. We can — right after we close out here, we can go into more into the logistics of the citizen's agenda. We just want to give everybody an opportunity if anyone has questions about this Minneapolis attitudes exercise. You told me a little bit about more about how this split happened in the last democratic primary that I thought was really interesting when we talked yesterday about how Minnesota voted in the democratic primary in 2016. +ARIEL: That's a good question. We can — right after we close out here, we can go into more into the logistics of the citizen's agenda. We just want to give everybody an opportunity if anyone has questions about this Minneapolis attitudes exercise. You told me a little bit about more about how this split happened in the last democratic primary that I thought was really interesting when we talked yesterday about how Minnesota voted in the democratic primary in 2016. MUKHTAR: So the local governments, the party in Minnesota they've nominated Bernie Sanders. And the Twin Cities in general is a solid democratic space. But it's probably different if you go outside the metro area. In 2016, the gap between Hillary Clinton and Trump was very close, I think around 4,000, 5,000 votes which is kind of, like, pretty shocking because we thought that Minnesota was a pretty blue state but it was one of the only blue states that remained blue if you look at all the marks around Minnesota. But, yeah, a solidly democratic state. And one of the candidates was trying to bid in the election. -AUDIENCE: I had a quick question about the voter turnout. Is the voter turnout in the Twin Cities equally as high for the all the elections, or just the generals? +AUDIENCE: I had a quick question about the voter turnout. Is the voter turnout in the Twin Cities equally as high for the all the elections, or just the generals? MUKHTAR: So it's not just limited to the general elections. It's also to the primary local elections. AUDIENCE: I'm speaking from Dallas which has one of the lowest turnouts, 6% — we got up to 9% this year! I know! -AUDIENCE: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you're thinking about, obviously,, like, a lot of these issues as you were saying is mostly for, like, immigrant communities that you're trying to serve and how their voter demographics are impacted. +AUDIENCE: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you're thinking about, obviously,, like, a lot of these issues as you were saying is mostly for, like, immigrant communities that you're trying to serve and how their voter demographics are impacted. MUKHTAR: These are issues that I think most people care about. -AUDIENCE: But along those lines, is it one particular type of person turning out to vote, or kind of similar across how people identify ethnically and even along political lines? +AUDIENCE: But along those lines, is it one particular type of person turning out to vote, or kind of similar across how people identify ethnically and even along political lines? MUKHTAR: I think the local population are really hit by the local politics. In Minneapolis, it's very versed. We have one councilmember who's Somali and the district that he had represented has a lot of immigrant population. So they are really involved in politics especially during the elections. BRIDGET: One more question. Sorry, yeah? -AUDIENCE: What do you think it's about Minneapolis, and especially immigrants that moves here that makes them participate at higher levels than other places in America? +AUDIENCE: What do you think it's about Minneapolis, and especially immigrants that moves here that makes them participate at higher levels than other places in America? MUKHTAR: I don't think I have a concrete answer for that but most of these people didn't have the opportunity to participate in elections in their liberal movements and they feel — they feel empowered to cast their vote and elect who they want. And, I mean, the election time here is just, like, really, there's a lot of movement, there's a lot of excitement during elections. So and it's not just limited to immigrants; it's across the board. @@ -187,6 +187,7 @@ ARIEL: Amongst yourselves, what you want. We also have a, "How do we pay for it" BRIDGET: Please assign an ambassador and we'll give you a two-minute warning before time is about to be up. And we'll be floating around. ARIEL: And these cards, you're not meant to adhere to super strictly. Feel free to hold them up and mess with them a little bit. + - We're actually going to extend it a little bit because we have a little bit more time and they're kind of long — we just heard someone talk about. ARIEL: One question that we got was at the issues that Mukhtar's presented at the beginning, you should treat those as a citizen's agenda for what you're designing for. People were asking if those are something that we should approach. And those are certainly something that you would want to talk about in your agenda. @@ -212,7 +213,7 @@ ARIEL: Two minutes. One minute. -BRIDGET: Everybody, gets the deadline. Put the project to bed! Printing. It's done! Well, we have ten minutes left and we have five groups which means that each group gets two minutes, which plan, and why they chose their plan, and answer any questions about why they group came up with that plan, and how it went. So who's your first ambassador? Bobby is still switching it up. We'd like to hear who you decided to serve whether it was a specific persona or a group. +BRIDGET: Everybody, gets the deadline. Put the project to bed! Printing. It's done! Well, we have ten minutes left and we have five groups which means that each group gets two minutes, which plan, and why they chose their plan, and answer any questions about why they group came up with that plan, and how it went. So who's your first ambassador? Bobby is still switching it up. We'd like to hear who you decided to serve whether it was a specific persona or a group. BOBBY: So we focused on Julia who's a local barowner. She also doesn't really vote at all and she's very kind of — she doesn't trust what the news does, and to be honest, it feels like it doesn't matter very much. So she is very jaded. She's very meh about everything and we want to make her hospital, optimistic, and be more involved. So for methods of doing that, we've picked a three different things. More live events. More in-person, high-engagement, opportunities to talk about issues, and hopefully get others to explain things. We picked gamify. Gamify how polling can pick, and embattle and make a difference. And we chose SMS text as kind of an idea of democracy therapy. Because if you feel jaded, and you feel nothing's helpful, you need some democracy therapy as an idea. For funding we picked any kind of support and journals. We found ways to focused down on what if. If people are way too focused on money in politics, are there ways to step away from that in perception. Our outcome or goal was a cultural shift in the way in which we choose engagement in voting. And how to to change a few people view voting and hopefully that creates a group and hopefully that spirals on and goes on from that but then there's always a plot twist. The plot twist was a nasty rumor. That was a nasty one was if you're jaded, and you have a rumor, that's going to be a nasty one. And so we wanted to collaborate on SMS basically. Chat with them and ask them what are you thinking about? What's going on in your mind as you're thinking and this is spreading. And really think about that through collaborative texting. @@ -267,4 +268,4 @@ BRIDGET: Wonderful. Well, thank you all so much and I thank you... notice as we ARIEL: I'll put the link — so ahead of the session, we've put a few helpful citizen's agenda documents on the etherpad that's there. I know we glossed overcitizens. And implementation because there's only so much you can do in fictitious situations and I'll also put the link to the Dot Connector cards. Thank you guys so much for being down for the game. Thank you. -[ Applause ] \ No newline at end of file +[ Applause ] diff --git a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-structured-communication.md b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-structured-communication.md index 93085837..832236d8 100644 --- a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-structured-communication.md +++ b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-structured-communication.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ title: "SRCCON 2019 Session Transcript — Structured communication: Tools you can use to change culture and help your team feel heard" --- -#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](/documentation/#session-transcripts) +#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/#session-transcripts) # Structured communication: Tools you can use to change culture and help your team feel heard @@ -12,11 +12,11 @@ title: "SRCCON 2019 Session Transcript — Structured communication: Tools you c ### Room: Johnson -ANIKA: Oftentimes, reporters will tell you, man, I think this is therapeutic. I think this is good to do that. I think it's good to get feedback that you're doing your job well. So thank you for doing that. So we are going to do a few different things Todd and Eimi is going to be talking about it. +ANIKA: Oftentimes, reporters will tell you, man, I think this is therapeutic. I think this is good to do that. I think it's good to get feedback that you're doing your job well. So thank you for doing that. So we are going to do a few different things Todd and Eimi is going to be talking about it. EIMI: So the first ones are team-level OKRs. And by a quick show of hands. Are you aware of OKRs. Do you do them at work? -AUDIENCE: Can you explain what that is? +AUDIENCE: Can you explain what that is? EIMI: So they're objective key results. So I'll talk about them later. So I was just trying to gauge, like, how much do we actually need to cover. Okay. So this is really good. All right. Turning on. The OKRs, the what, why, and how. What is it? It's a goal-setting framework per reporter and it's been popularized by Google and it stands for Object Key Results. And it really means aligning the team with a shared vision. And using the change you want to see by using activities and tactics. The key result is kind of how you want to measure that. So, yeah, why do we want to do this? It sounds like another framework. So as I said before. It sets a shared vision objectives for a team and it sets OKRs for quarterly progress. And this really helps breaking workflows and silos in teams. Like, in my team, we very rarely have any rare communication issues because of the way our work is so we go away for our corners frantically building some amazing project and then we come back together and realize that nothing really works together. @@ -34,7 +34,7 @@ And then what we would do after that all hands meeting is just the team get toge AUDIENCE: Have you found that scales? Is there a point at which the team is too big to work? -ANIKA: It's a great question. Our team was about 30 people total. So we're a very small startup. I think at the very least, though, it's something that you can do on a team-by-team basis. It just seems totally worthwhile for any sort of team to be doing it even if you can't be doing it company-wide. It was really helpful because it ensured that everybody felt they got a voice rather than the loudest voice in the room which is what often happens in team dynamics and it also ensured that everybody could talk about what was maybe stressing them out and, again, the structure/communication environment. +ANIKA: It's a great question. Our team was about 30 people total. So we're a very small startup. I think at the very least, though, it's something that you can do on a team-by-team basis. It just seems totally worthwhile for any sort of team to be doing it even if you can't be doing it company-wide. It was really helpful because it ensured that everybody felt they got a voice rather than the loudest voice in the room which is what often happens in team dynamics and it also ensured that everybody could talk about what was maybe stressing them out and, again, the structure/communication environment. EIMI: Just to add to that. For the check-ins, I felt they were quite similar in the way that I kind of made it scale was by using surveys and kind of doing, like, an aggregation or, like, you know, just saying what's going well, what's not gone so well. And if there's anything that's very kind of urgent that it's like a red flag to me then I'll kind of raise it directly with that person or, you know, so you can use surveys, you can use other tools to do other analysis and stuff like that. @@ -60,15 +60,15 @@ ANIKA: We would basically go through and say, business team, you were red, was t AUDIENCE: How do you get these practices started on teams where about 80% of the check-in meetings are canceled? -AUDIENCE: Sh... that sucks. +AUDIENCE: Sh... that sucks. EIMI: I'm not sure I have a great answer but I think basically on my team, everyone is adamant to pick up the OKRs. Like, Tom would say, have you seen our retros? This is our problem. And this is a problem that could be solved by doing this by showing up to team meetings. So I think a little bit of pressure here and there kind of helps. Maybe that's not the best answer. -ANIKA: Like, I would ask people why they were canceling the meeting? Is it a time issue? Do they feel like they're not productive? Could you give them better questions in the check-ins so that they feel they're getting something better out of it? If it's a time thing. We've had so many conversations about the number of meetings we have. Whether we need to scale one down, how we need to change them and we're always trying to solve that problem so that people are not trying to feel overwhelmed but we say that the one-on-ones are the most important meetings that you have every week. So I think it's partially a culture thing. +ANIKA: Like, I would ask people why they were canceling the meeting? Is it a time issue? Do they feel like they're not productive? Could you give them better questions in the check-ins so that they feel they're getting something better out of it? If it's a time thing. We've had so many conversations about the number of meetings we have. Whether we need to scale one down, how we need to change them and we're always trying to solve that problem so that people are not trying to feel overwhelmed but we say that the one-on-ones are the most important meetings that you have every week. So I think it's partially a culture thing. EIMI: I remember seeing a talk by some person... this is a really bad reference but he basically said that the worst behavior that you can see from your team is from the top. So basically if your boss behaves in a certain way, if he's willing to behave in this certain bad way, you can see that trickling down to the team. So I think one thing could be talking to the person at the top and talking about that, as well. -ANIKA: We're going to talk about one more tool real quick and have you guys break into groups again. Here's user manuals. Have you guys heard of this? We borrowed this idea from this post that Abbi Fayelich wrote about and it's basically a template that everybody on your team or company fills out and it's a guide for how people can work best with you. It is so obvious that we should have something like this. When I first heard about this ≈ I was like, of course, I should give people a rundown of values and how to communicate with me. It's super THOEFL clarify what you value. I actually just did this exercise of writing out all this stuff to be helpful and reminding me why the work I do I find fulfilling and where my trigger points are. And it also addresses moments of pressure — you don't think they're such an asshole. They told me about this particular thing and it gives you more context about that person and that behavior. It's also a really effective way to onboard new team members. I think onboarding is one of the things that we get so wrong in HR in journalism and this is a way for a team to get to know people by reading their user manuals and also being able to write their own and it's also an opportunity to get honest feedback from your teammates. So this is you do it. You can create a template with your team. What kinds of questions you want everybody to be answering. You fill it out, and you share it with people, and I feel it's really important to revisit it, and make updates to it. So this is a sample template that we use at, what my style is, what I value is, what I don't have patience for. How best to communicate with me. How to help me. What people misunderstand about me. What energizes you and what drains you. We gave a sample for how you guys would answer these things. We'll drop a link to it in the etherpad. But this definitely takes another culture moment where people need to feel like they can be really transparent and honest about who they are. And how they work. And I think, you know, if you don't have that off the bat I can see why this is often difficult to ask people. But more often than not I see people I work with light up when given the opportunity to bear their soul and tell them exactly who they are and what they care about. +ANIKA: We're going to talk about one more tool real quick and have you guys break into groups again. Here's user manuals. Have you guys heard of this? We borrowed this idea from this post that Abbi Fayelich wrote about and it's basically a template that everybody on your team or company fills out and it's a guide for how people can work best with you. It is so obvious that we should have something like this. When I first heard about this ≈ I was like, of course, I should give people a rundown of values and how to communicate with me. It's super THOEFL clarify what you value. I actually just did this exercise of writing out all this stuff to be helpful and reminding me why the work I do I find fulfilling and where my trigger points are. And it also addresses moments of pressure — you don't think they're such an asshole. They told me about this particular thing and it gives you more context about that person and that behavior. It's also a really effective way to onboard new team members. I think onboarding is one of the things that we get so wrong in HR in journalism and this is a way for a team to get to know people by reading their user manuals and also being able to write their own and it's also an opportunity to get honest feedback from your teammates. So this is you do it. You can create a template with your team. What kinds of questions you want everybody to be answering. You fill it out, and you share it with people, and I feel it's really important to revisit it, and make updates to it. So this is a sample template that we use at, what my style is, what I value is, what I don't have patience for. How best to communicate with me. How to help me. What people misunderstand about me. What energizes you and what drains you. We gave a sample for how you guys would answer these things. We'll drop a link to it in the etherpad. But this definitely takes another culture moment where people need to feel like they can be really transparent and honest about who they are. And how they work. And I think, you know, if you don't have that off the bat I can see why this is often difficult to ask people. But more often than not I see people I work with light up when given the opportunity to bear their soul and tell them exactly who they are and what they care about. EIMI: So I guess remember these are just tools. So remember these individuals and interactions over processes and tools, that's from the Agile Manifesto that's used over and over in the tech industry. You want to make sure that it's adapted to your team. @@ -77,25 +77,25 @@ And that's kind of what we we want to do next. So we have an activity here — I AUDIENCE: What if like, someone wants to edit their user manual. Is that a heavy process? I could imagine a more junior person wanting to be more cavity in a different way than when they have more experience. -ANIKA: I can see the part where people want to make edits and people are regularly having conversations about this. What we did is when we first introduced this was we had everybody write their user manuals and we came together, and then we had everybody reach each other's. And then we came together as a team and have the team leader facilitate a conversation, who wants to talk about what they value? Who wants to talk about what drives them nuts? Okay, that's good to know. Maybe we should do it this way as a result. So I think that facilitation conversation is important. I would say it's probably useful to have that conversation twice a year for people and maybe that gives people an opportunity to edit based on how things their work style's changed. +ANIKA: I can see the part where people want to make edits and people are regularly having conversations about this. What we did is when we first introduced this was we had everybody write their user manuals and we came together, and then we had everybody reach each other's. And then we came together as a team and have the team leader facilitate a conversation, who wants to talk about what they value? Who wants to talk about what drives them nuts? Okay, that's good to know. Maybe we should do it this way as a result. So I think that facilitation conversation is important. I would say it's probably useful to have that conversation twice a year for people and maybe that gives people an opportunity to edit based on how things their work style's changed. NOZLEE: I had a follow-up. I love those questions. What is it like if the team is working on something and something has to happen and it's not the way someone prefers to work. What's that conversation is like? Even disclose what you like, but on the basis of capitalism, you sometimes have to disclose what you don't like. -ANIKA: This is true. In my personal opinion, I don't think there's a right answer to this. In my personal opinion, I prefer everything to be out in the open. So at least there's an acknowledgment, I know this is not how you like to work. I get this is going to be hard for you. Here's the reality of where we're at. Tell me how we can make this as painless for you as possible while still getting the thing done. I think just being as thoughtful and empathic and really that's what these user manuals are about: cultivating empathy for users on your team. +ANIKA: This is true. In my personal opinion, I don't think there's a right answer to this. In my personal opinion, I prefer everything to be out in the open. So at least there's an acknowledgment, I know this is not how you like to work. I get this is going to be hard for you. Here's the reality of where we're at. Tell me how we can make this as painless for you as possible while still getting the thing done. I think just being as thoughtful and empathic and really that's what these user manuals are about: cultivating empathy for users on your team. -TIM: So there are some information sponges at some organizations and sometimes it feels very invasive when people who are information sponges and basically knows everything that's happening in the company and know something very personal about yourself, how do you structure your user manuals and provide prompts so that it doesn't feel like there's possibility of harassment or abuse from them. +TIM: So there are some information sponges at some organizations and sometimes it feels very invasive when people who are information sponges and basically knows everything that's happening in the company and know something very personal about yourself, how do you structure your user manuals and provide prompts so that it doesn't feel like there's possibility of harassment or abuse from them. -NOZLEE: Or boundary setting. +NOZLEE: Or boundary setting. TIM: So how do you both provide this as a way to be you, available for everybody, but also carefully constructed so that it forms a safe environment for the team? ANIKA: Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, there are so many questions around how to just prevent against workplace harassment in general. My personal opinion, again, comes down to the culture and the conversation that you're building around it, and really emphasizing that this personal information is not to be used in any other way other than just to understand each other better and if you have someone using it in another way, maybe they shouldn't be working for your company... that's... that would be by my harsher answer, I guess. But I totally hear you. It's a challenge and to really encourage people to open up because of challenges like that can be difficult. Cool. So what we were hoping to do was have you guys break up into groups of four to six and choose one of these tools to talk about a little more. So, again, going back to the three tools we talked about here. And these are the prompts that we wanted to give for each. -So on the company and personal OKRs, you can take one thing that you learned so far at SRCCON that you might want to bring back to your newsroom and try writing it out in that OKR format that Eimi was talking about... +So on the company and personal OKRs, you can take one thing that you learned so far at SRCCON that you might want to bring back to your newsroom and try writing it out in that OKR format that Eimi was talking about... EIMI: Good luck... just kidding. I'm sure you'll be fine. -ANIKA: Yeah, and just write — if you decide to work on that OKR, just raise your hand and Eimi can come and coach you on what kind of structure that needs to take. And I also mentioned that the slide deck is in the etherpad. So for team health. If you want to talk about how you can take a team health check and apply that concept to your team. It might not be green/yellow/red, it could be numerical, or something else. When would you have someone on your team do it. Or what are the right kind of metrics for your team. And for the user manual if you want to get together with some folks. Try writing out your own user manual with that template that we provided or come up with other prompts that you would think would make sense for you to have at your company and, again, talk a little bit about how you might take this back to your team. Cool. Any questions? All right. We'll give you guys ten to 15 minutes to get in groups and kind of take a stab at this and then we'll give you guys some time to work on this individually and come together as a group and then we'll do a quick shareout at the end. +ANIKA: Yeah, and just write — if you decide to work on that OKR, just raise your hand and Eimi can come and coach you on what kind of structure that needs to take. And I also mentioned that the slide deck is in the etherpad. So for team health. If you want to talk about how you can take a team health check and apply that concept to your team. It might not be green/yellow/red, it could be numerical, or something else. When would you have someone on your team do it. Or what are the right kind of metrics for your team. And for the user manual if you want to get together with some folks. Try writing out your own user manual with that template that we provided or come up with other prompts that you would think would make sense for you to have at your company and, again, talk a little bit about how you might take this back to your team. Cool. Any questions? All right. We'll give you guys ten to 15 minutes to get in groups and kind of take a stab at this and then we'll give you guys some time to work on this individually and come together as a group and then we'll do a quick shareout at the end. EIMI: Just to add to the team OKRs, and company OKRs, it doesn't have to be something you learned, it could be something you want to learn, as well. @@ -119,7 +119,7 @@ ANIKA: Cool. Anyone else? AUDIENCE: Um, we talked about talked about, like, team health checks and one of the things that came up was for reluctancy for people to say how they're feeling. And at the end of the day it's pretty much a culture change for this to be effective. So we were talking about setting up that culture of it's both a managerial responsibility for managers to be open and transparent about how they're feeling but also setting up the environment for their direct reports and other people on their team to be open and honest ≈ and making it intimate and virtual that you have this space. This is like a — whether it's like a team health check or a whatever else, this is a thing that we're doing every week. We'll hopefully create, like, a comfortable atmosphere so that people feel like they can share and be it yellow or red, and adjusting that to teams. So whether that's, like, you do numbers, and, like, everybody's a three or whatever else. Scaling it to your team. But it's starting with an entire culture change. -ANIKA: Yeah, one more thing I'll add to that that someone was asking earlier about incentivizing earlier about people being honest about things. I think one thing is team lead showing that they're trying to solve a problem when they're yellow or red. When a deep member is being open and honest with you when they're not completely 100%, that's really important, as well. +ANIKA: Yeah, one more thing I'll add to that that someone was asking earlier about incentivizing earlier about people being honest about things. I think one thing is team lead showing that they're trying to solve a problem when they're yellow or red. When a deep member is being open and honest with you when they're not completely 100%, that's really important, as well. TIM: So we were talking about how the culture of the company, what an acceptable emotional range sort of impacts what — actually, everything. Like, all these exercises. Is it acceptable for people to be grumpy and angry at your company? We can have people who are actively unhappy with products at our company. That is great to hear. It's good to know that people are that. So there is a large emotional range that is acceptable. There's less happiness that is displayed and, like, in other companies, it's like well, this person, I need to be on for them and, like, your job depends on you proving that you're happy and satisfied with your job and your happiness. So you might not be as able to be as expressive. So I think there's a lot of less with trying to to do things within your organization and the power dynamics and the like. @@ -134,4 +134,4 @@ AUDIENCE: So one of the tools that came up when we were talking about team healt ANIKA: Cool. I loved that. Thank you guys so much for coming here. And talking about this stuff. Like, I said, check out the etherpad and add to the resources and have a great conference. -[ Applause ] \ No newline at end of file +[ Applause ] diff --git a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-thursday-welcome.md b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-thursday-welcome.md index df467b9b..e3ba854c 100644 --- a/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-thursday-welcome.md +++ b/_transcripts/SRCCON2019-thursday-welcome.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ title: "SRCCON 2019 Session Transcript — Welcome to SRCCON 2019!" --- -#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](/documentation/#session-transcripts) +#### [← SRCCON 2019 Session Transcripts](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/#session-transcripts) # Welcome to SRCCON 2019! @@ -58,4 +58,4 @@ So thanks to the Knight Foundation for attendee scholarship support and to the L So that was just a minute and just an introduction to your time for the next two days. Because that is SRCCON in a nutshell! You don't want your conversations to end! You have 15 minutes to wrap up these conversations, and move to the first sessions that start at 9:30 this morning. Thanks, everyone! -(applause) \ No newline at end of file +(applause) diff --git a/care-2022-program.md b/care-2022-program.md index 8754646c..5efa4624 100644 --- a/care-2022-program.md +++ b/care-2022-program.md @@ -6,20 +6,22 @@ logo_link: /srccon-care-2022/ share_image: /media/img/srccon_care_logo_share.png title: SRCCON:CARE — Our Program main_footer: true +section: care ---
Stay in touch: - Twitter + @srccon on BlueSky • Email • - Newsletter + Newsletter - Support our work! + Support our work!
+
# Our program @@ -64,9 +66,9 @@ Some details may evolve as we approach the event, so check back for updates. Tha #### Additional events on the SRCCON:CARE program -* Attendees can sign up for one-on-one coaching sessions with community members and leadership coaches Mandy Brown or David Yee. You bring the topic—anything that’s got you stuck or that you want to reflect on more deeply. -* We're helping community members organize small-group, in-person meetups for coffee or a meal with other attendees who live nearby -* Have an idea for another activity to share or organize? [Let us know!](mailto:srccon@opennews.org) +- Attendees can sign up for one-on-one coaching sessions with community members and leadership coaches Mandy Brown or David Yee. You bring the topic—anything that’s got you stuck or that you want to reflect on more deeply. +- We're helping community members organize small-group, in-person meetups for coffee or a meal with other attendees who live nearby +- Have an idea for another activity to share or organize? [Let us know!](mailto:srccon@opennews.org)

 

@@ -79,7 +81,6 @@ Some details may evolve as we approach the event, so check back for updates. Tha
-
1-2pm ET
@@ -107,9 +108,9 @@ Some details may evolve as we approach the event, so check back for updates. Tha

Facilitated by Mar Cabra, Kim Brice

Directors, team leads or editors play a key role in starting conversations around well-being and mental health in their newsrooms. They have more power to affect change and have a responsibility to support their staff. However, at the same time, it’s also these leaders that should prevent their teams from being exhausted, the first ones to be hyper-connected and suffering dangerous levels of stress.

In this session, The Self-Investigation wants to facilitate a discussion about the learnings and strategies of media leaders as they strive to change things up in order to build a healthier environment for their teams. We will share techniques that have been successfully tried and tested. We will also offer the inspiration and knowledge we have accumulated from the many leaders we have trained in our tailor-made courses and through the Knight Center’s MOOCs we designed and ran in three languages, reaching more than 2.500 people from 120 countries and territories.

-
-
+
+
2-2:30pm ET
@@ -118,7 +119,6 @@ Some details may evolve as we approach the event, so check back for updates. Tha
-
2:30-3:30pm ET
@@ -142,8 +142,8 @@ Some details may evolve as we approach the event, so check back for updates. Tha

How might journalism leaders invest in community care for our organizations and teams? Join Jen Mizgata and Ana (An Xiao) Mina, two consultants and coaches who’ve supported journalism leaders in a variety of organizations, in exploring this key question. We’ll offer an initial framework to help facilitate a conversation amongst participants, with the goal of collecting feedback and ideas on community care opportunities through the lenses of sustainability, mental health, DEI and holistic support.

As an outcome, we hope to share a set of resources from the conversation with the broader SRCCON community. This will outline specific opportunities for structural, community care that leaders in the field of journalism can apply to their internal work with their organizations. This workshop will be designed to support both introverted and extroverted communications styles.

-
+
### Friday, December 9 @@ -181,6 +181,7 @@ Some details may evolve as we approach the event, so check back for updates. Tha

We will share the four main elements and have an interactive discussion on the impacts of burnout. Participants will have an opportunity to reflect individually and collectively on the connection between burnout and urgency. A sense of urgency is one of the White Supremacy Culture Characteristics that we will explore. We hope participants leave the session feeling curious, reflective and connected.

+
Friday 1-1:30pm ET
@@ -220,6 +221,7 @@ Some details may evolve as we approach the event, so check back for updates. Tha

While many of us find ways to connect at events or on projects, too often we’re left on our own to solve problems facing our organizations and our industry. This workshop will explore what it takes to break out of our constraints to cross-pollinate ideas and create critical mass for change within journalism.

Informed by our experience creating a support group for journalism support professionals, we’ll guide participants on identifying your personal goals for connecting with others, establishing objectives and expectations for these conversations, and how to build on these connections over time. You’ll come away with tangible takeaways generated from our collective expertise (and possibly some new co-conspirators).

+
Friday 2:30-3:15pm ET
@@ -229,5 +231,4 @@ Some details may evolve as we approach the event, so check back for updates. Tha - {% include srccon_care_2022_footer.html %} diff --git a/care-2022-signin.md b/care-2022-signin.md deleted file mode 100644 index 4cb2ed01..00000000 --- a/care-2022-signin.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,5 +0,0 @@ ---- -permalink: /srccon-care-2022/signin/ -redirect_to: - - https://www.eventbrite.com/x/465091269507/ ---- diff --git a/care-2022-sponsors.md b/care-2022-sponsors.md index f729af58..3ce7ab66 100644 --- a/care-2022-sponsors.md +++ b/care-2022-sponsors.md @@ -6,6 +6,7 @@ logo_link: /srccon-care-2022/ share_image: /media/img/srccon_care_logo_share.png title: SRCCON:CARE — Our Sponsors main_footer: true +section: care ---
@@ -16,13 +17,12 @@ main_footer: true • Email • - Newsletter + Newsletter - Support our work! + Support our work!
- - + # Our sponsors @@ -31,7 +31,7 @@ Interested in having your company or organization get involved? [Find out more a - {% include srccon_care_2022_footer.html %} diff --git a/care-2022.md b/care-2022.md index 0ce8d083..b8980adf 100644 --- a/care-2022.md +++ b/care-2022.md @@ -7,6 +7,7 @@ share_image: /media/img/srccon_care_logo_share.png title: SRCCON:CARE — December 8-9, 2022 — Online description: Join us for two days of hands-on sessions and emergent conversations to reflect on caring as a practice in journalism. main_footer: true +section: care ---
@@ -15,14 +16,15 @@ main_footer: true
Stay in touch: - Twitter + @srccon on BlueSky • Email • - Newsletter + Newsletter - Support our work! + Support our work!
+
### Thank you, SRCCON:CARE @@ -33,10 +35,9 @@ We've wrapped up this event, but you can still [check out our program, all about #### The Program (Thursday-Friday, December 8-9) -* **Sessions:** Each day we'll host two, one-hour long participatory sessions that explore the practice of care in journalism. Community members will facilitate peer conversations and hands-on workshops that draw on the experience of every attendee in the (Zoom) room. -* **Social space:** We'll have half hour social breaks each day to continue the conversation in the session or head into the conference Slack to catch up. -* **Group gatherings:** We'll open the conference on Thursday and close on Friday with activities for the whole audience to help guide our time together and identify our collective next steps. - +- **Sessions:** Each day we'll host two, one-hour long participatory sessions that explore the practice of care in journalism. Community members will facilitate peer conversations and hands-on workshops that draw on the experience of every attendee in the (Zoom) room. +- **Social space:** We'll have half hour social breaks each day to continue the conversation in the session or head into the conference Slack to catch up. +- **Group gatherings:** We'll open the conference on Thursday and close on Friday with activities for the whole audience to help guide our time together and identify our collective next steps. #### The SRCCON Slack (Tuesday-Tuesday, December 6-13) @@ -46,46 +47,44 @@ Every SRCCON is a community. Our weeklong event Slack is a space to meet other a Join us for a chance to slow down and reflect on caring as a practice. Through two days of [hands-on sessions and emergent conversations](/srccon-care-2022/program/), we'll delve into how that practice shows up in caring for each other as journalists and caring for our communities through the ways in which we create and disseminate journalism. We'll discuss what we can learn from other fields and how we can set up our organizations to live out values of care. -Our hope is that creating a space for rest and care will also open up room for joy, imagination, inspiration, and transformative ideas for journalism. In closing, we'll aim for every participant to walk away with a plan to build from these conversations, whether it be implementing an aspect of caring practice or making more space for joy or rest. [Let us know how you'd like to participate](/care/participation/form). +Our hope is that creating a space for rest and care will also open up room for joy, imagination, inspiration, and transformative ideas for journalism. In closing, we'll aim for every participant to walk away with a plan to build from these conversations, whether it be implementing an aspect of caring practice or making more space for joy or rest. [Let us know how you'd like to participate](mailto:srccon@opennews.org). Check out the [list of accepted sessions and schedule for December 8-9](/srccon-care-2022/program/).
Tickets & attending
-Ticket prices will start at $75, plus ticketing fees. We'll also offer a limited number of need-based, free scholarship tickets as well as $200 stipends for attendees whose time to attend would otherwise be uncompensated. To purchase a ticket, you'll first need to [fill out the call for participation](/care/participation/form), and then we'll send a link to pick up your ticket. +Ticket prices will start at $75, plus ticketing fees. We'll also offer a limited number of need-based, free scholarship tickets as well as $200 stipends for attendees whose time to attend would otherwise be uncompensated. To purchase a ticket, you'll first need to [fill out the call for participation](/srccon-care-2022/program/), and then we'll send a link to pick up your ticket. This event will take place largely on Zoom, and we're exploring other ways to help participants connect as well. The entire event will be [covered under our code of conduct](/conduct). During SRCCON:CARE you can expect to: -* Be part of hands-on workshops that reimagine care as a practice in journalism—not panels where you sit back and listen, but sessions where you participate and learn from the wisdom of everyone in the room. -* Connect with people who share your hopes and dreams for journalism—not just making professional acquaintances, but creating personal relationships that last. -* Bring who you are into a conference that thinks about the program, the schedule—even hobbies & meals—as ways to celebrate everything you have to share. +- Be part of hands-on workshops that reimagine care as a practice in journalism—not panels where you sit back and listen, but sessions where you participate and learn from the wisdom of everyone in the room. +- Connect with people who share your hopes and dreams for journalism—not just making professional acquaintances, but creating personal relationships that last. +- Bring who you are into a conference that thinks about the program, the schedule—even hobbies & meals—as ways to celebrate everything you have to share. We're really excited about this chance to spend two days immersed in thinking and doing of care. If you have any questions about what to expect, please [reach out to us](mailto:srccon@opennews.org). -
Appreciations
-The idea for this event grew from a community conversation. Special thanks to the folks and organizations who have been in conversation on this topic of care in journalism and brought it to SRCCON for consideration! +The idea for this event grew from a community conversation. Special thanks to the folks and organizations who have been in conversation on this topic of care in journalism and brought it to SRCCON for consideration! -Here's the full list: +Here's the full list: -* Jennifer Brandel - Hearken, Civic Exchange Chicago -* Sarah Alvarez & Candice Fortman - Outlier Media -* Venneikia Williams, Diamond Hardiman, Vanessa Maria Graber - Free Press -* James Samimi Farr - Baha'i Office of Public Affairs -* Roxann Stafford & Diana Lu - Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund -* Alicia Bell - Borealis, and Media 2070 -* Darryl Holliday & Cristina Salgado - City Bureau +- Jennifer Brandel - Hearken, Civic Exchange Chicago +- Sarah Alvarez & Candice Fortman - Outlier Media +- Venneikia Williams, Diamond Hardiman, Vanessa Maria Graber - Free Press +- James Samimi Farr - Baha'i Office of Public Affairs +- Roxann Stafford & Diana Lu - Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund +- Alicia Bell - Borealis, and Media 2070 +- Darryl Holliday & Cristina Salgado - City Bureau
About us
-SRCCON events are produced by [OpenNews](https://opennews.org/). We connect a network of developers, designers, journalists, and editors to collaborate on open technologies and processes within journalism. OpenNews believes that a community of peers working, learning and solving problems together can create a stronger, more responsive, and inclusive journalism ecosystem. Incubated at the [Mozilla Foundation](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/) from 2011-2016, OpenNews is now a project of [Community Partners](http://communitypartners.org/). +SRCCON events are produced by [OpenNews](https://opennews.org/). We connect a network of developers, designers, journalists, and editors to collaborate on open technologies and processes within journalism. OpenNews believes that a community of peers working, learning and solving problems together can create a stronger, more responsive, and inclusive journalism ecosystem. Incubated at the [Mozilla Foundation](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/) from 2011-2016, OpenNews is now a project of [Community Partners](https://communitypartners.org/).
Help make SRCCON:CARE happen
We're looking for sponsorship support to help make this inclusive, accessible event possible. If you or your company might be able to help, please [check out our sponsorship details](/sponsors/) and [email Erika Owens](mailto:erika@opennews.org) to talk options. Thanks! - {% include srccon_care_2022_footer.html %} diff --git a/conduct.md b/conduct.md index 30705d33..28bb44fd 100644 --- a/conduct.md +++ b/conduct.md @@ -7,20 +7,18 @@ description: SRCCON and OpenNews are committed to providing a welcoming and hara ## Code of Conduct -**SRCCON EVENT SAFETY CONTACT:** If you would like to make any reports, please email us at [safety@opennews.org](mailto:safety@opennews.org). +SRCCON and OpenNews are committed to providing a welcoming and harassment-free environment for participants of all races, gender and trans statuses, sexual orientations, physical abilities, physical appearances, and beliefs. We've written this code of conduct not because we expect bad behavior from our community—which, in our experience, is overwhelmingly kind and civil—but because we believe a clear code of conduct is one necessary part of building a respectful community space. -SRCCON and OpenNews are committed to providing a welcoming and harassment-free environment for participants of all races, gender and trans statuses, sexual orientations, physical abilities, physical appearances, and beliefs. We've written this code of conduct not because we expect bad behavior from our community—which, in our experience, is overwhelmingly kind and civil—but because we believe a clear code of conduct is one necessary part of building a respectful community space. +Participants at SRCCON events agree to: -SRCCON participants agree to: +- Be considerate in speech and actions, and actively seek to acknowledge and respect the boundaries of fellow attendees. +- Refrain from demeaning, discriminatory, or harassing behavior and speech. Harassment includes, but is not limited to: deliberate intimidation; stalking; unwanted photography or recording; sustained or willful disruption of talks or other events; inappropriate physical contact; use of sexual or discriminatory imagery, comments, or jokes; and unwelcome sexual attention. If you feel that someone has harassed you or otherwise treated you inappropriately, please alert any member of the conference team in person, via the team phone/text line, or via email. +- Take care of each other. Alert a member of the conference team if you notice a dangerous situation, someone in distress, or violations of this code of conduct, even if they seem inconsequential. -* Be considerate in speech and actions, and actively seek to acknowledge and respect the boundaries of fellow attendees. -* Refrain from demeaning, discriminatory, or harassing behavior and speech. Harassment includes, but is not limited to: deliberate intimidation; stalking; unwanted photography or recording; sustained or willful disruption of talks or other events; inappropriate physical contact; use of sexual or discriminatory imagery, comments, or jokes; and unwelcome sexual attention. If you feel that someone has harassed you or otherwise treated you inappropriately, please alert any member of the event team. Reports can be made in person or via the team phone/text line during in-person events, or via Slack or email at any time. -* Take care of each other. Alert a member of the conference team if you notice a dangerous situation, someone in distress, or violations of this code of conduct, even if they seem inconsequential. +If any attendee engages in harassing behavior, the conference organizers may take any lawful action we deem appropriate, including but not limited to warning the offender or asking the offender to leave the conference. (If you feel you have been unfairly accused of violating this code of conduct, you should contact the conference team with a concise description of your grievance; any grievances filed will be considered by the entire OpenNews team.) -If any attendee engages in harassing behavior, the event organizers may take any lawful action we deem appropriate, including but not limited to warning the offender or asking the offender to leave the conference. (If you feel you have been unfairly accused of violating this code of conduct, you should contact the event team with a concise description of your grievance; any grievances filed will be considered by the entire OpenNews team.) - -This code of conduct covers the entirety of any SRCCON event. Before, during, and after SRCCON events, the OpenNews staff is available at [safety@opennews.org](mailto:safety@opennews.org) if you see or experience an issue. In addition, during a virtual event, you can DM any staff member on Slack. During in-person SRCCON events, we will also publicize a contact email and phone number, and point out event staff in matching T-shirts so you know who to contact if you see or experience an issue. +This code of conduct covers the entirety of the event, including evening programs. During the event, we will publicize a contact email and phone number, in addition to pointing out staff members in event T-shirts so you know who to contact if you see or experience an issue. We welcome your feedback on this and every other aspect of our events, and we thank you for working with us to make it a safe, enjoyable, and friendly experience for everyone who participates. -Above text is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Credit to [Citizen Code of Conduct](http://citizencodeofconduct.org/), [the Django Project’s code of conduct](https://www.djangoproject.com/conduct/) and [Theorizing the Web code of conduct](http://theorizingtheweb.tumblr.com/post/79357700249/anti-harassment-statement) from which we’ve extensively borrowed, with general thanks to [the Ada Initiative’s “how to design a code of conduct for your community.”](https://adainitiative.org/2014/02/howto-design-a-code-of-conduct-for-your-community/) +The text above is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Credit to [Citizen Code of Conduct](https://web.archive.org/web/20191127125628/citizencodeofconduct.org/), [the Django Project's Code of Conduct](https://www.djangoproject.com/conduct/), and the [Theorizing the Web Code of Conduct](https://theorizingtheweb.tumblr.com/post/79357700249/anti-harassment-statement) from which we've extensively borrowed, with general thanks to [the Ada Initiative's "how to design a code of conduct for your community."](https://web.archive.org/web/20141219123901/https://adainitiative.org/2014/02/howto-design-a-code-of-conduct-for-your-community/) diff --git a/donate.md b/donate.md deleted file mode 100644 index 06c5d66c..00000000 --- a/donate.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,5 +0,0 @@ ---- -permalink: /donate/ -redirect_to: - - https://opennews.networkforgood.com/ ---- diff --git a/heart-2020-sponsors.md b/heart-2020-sponsors.md index a325e771..41b3aaab 100644 --- a/heart-2020-sponsors.md +++ b/heart-2020-sponsors.md @@ -20,10 +20,9 @@ Interested in having your company or organization get involved? [Find out more a

Craig Newmark Philanthropies was created by craigslist founder Craig Newmark to support and connect people and drive broad civic engagement. It works to advance people and grassroots organizations that are getting stuff done in areas that include trustworthy journalism & the information ecosystem, voter protection, gender diversity in technology, and veterans & military families. For more information, please visit: CraigNewmarkPhilanthropies.org.

-
Event sponsors
- -{% include srccon_heart_2020_footer.html %} \ No newline at end of file +{% include srccon_heart_2020_footer.html %} diff --git a/heart-2020.md b/heart-2020.md index 4d6bed6a..7f06d861 100644 --- a/heart-2020.md +++ b/heart-2020.md @@ -19,57 +19,50 @@ main_footer: true • Email - Become a sustainer! + Become a sustainer! - - +
About SRCCON:❤️
-Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who came together for a little bit of celebration and a little bit of restoration at the end of such a hard year. It's so good to just [_be_ in each other's company](https://opennews.org/blog/less-alone-srccon/), and from the very beginnings of this event, you showed up to share your joy, sadness, power, possibility, and love. You created a space to party, relax, and reflect. +Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who came together for a little bit of celebration and a little bit of restoration at the end of such a hard year. It's so good to just [_be_ in each other's company](https://opennews.org/blog/less-alone-srccon/), and from the very beginnings of this event, you showed up to share your joy, sadness, power, possibility, and love. You created a space to party, relax, and reflect. YOU are the community of people who lead and sustain this work. To those who could join us this time, and to those we'll hope to see next time, there's nowhere we'd rather be than hanging out together. -
When & where
Thursday, December 17, 2020, online -
Our program
Sessions at SRCCON:❤️ are super casual with lots of ways to participate, from jumping into conversations about things you love to sitting back and watching other folks show you how to do something cool. We want them to be a refreshing chance to connect. Community members are hosting informal sessions on: -* Cooking (with a pickling demo!) -* Books and reading lists -* Nature in your own back yard (gardening, bird feeders, and more) -* Getting out into the great outdoors (on location!) -* Making art together (with mini workshops on a few different things) -* Making a practice of intentional connection with others -* Parenting and family life during quarantine -* What we're leaving behind in 2020 + what we're building on in 2021 - +- Cooking (with a pickling demo!) +- Books and reading lists +- Nature in your own back yard (gardening, bird feeders, and more) +- Getting out into the great outdoors (on location!) +- Making art together (with mini workshops on a few different things) +- Making a practice of intentional connection with others +- Parenting and family life during quarantine +- What we're leaving behind in 2020 + what we're building on in 2021
Tickets & attending
-Tickets for SRCCON:❤️ are free for [OpenNews sustainers](https://opennews.networkforgood.com/), or name your own price. If you aren't a sustainer, we'd love for you to [become one](opennews.org/donate)—and if you aren't able to sign up at this time, five community members have pledged to support new sustainers in joining. [Reach out to us](mailto:srccon@opennews.org) and we'll take care of the rest. +Tickets for SRCCON:❤️ are free for [OpenNews sustainers](https://opennews.networkforgood.com/), or name your own price. If you aren't a sustainer, we'd love for you to [become one](https://opennews.networkforgood.com/)—and if you aren't able to sign up at this time, five community members have pledged to support new sustainers in joining. [Reach out to us](mailto:srccon@opennews.org) and we'll take care of the rest. ↪ [Find out more about becoming an OpenNews sustainer](https://opennews.org/blog/lead-launch-sustainer/), the incredible group of supporters who have made a recurring donation to this work. -
What you can expect
This event is a moment for rest, in recognition of the year we've been through, what we've learned about ourselves and about being there for each other. A little community retreat! With snacks and drinks (and maybe even crafts?) encouraged! At SRCCON:❤️ you'll: -* find small groups to laugh and talk with about hobbies, arts, and other things that sustain you outside of work, plus join everyone in sharing some shine for the people who keep inspiring us -* reconnect with old friends and run into new ones, strengthening the personal relationships that knit together a network that's reimagining journalism -* bring who you are into an event designed to celebrate all of it, along with everyone ready to take on 2021 alongside you - +- find small groups to laugh and talk with about hobbies, arts, and other things that sustain you outside of work, plus join everyone in sharing some shine for the people who keep inspiring us +- reconnect with old friends and run into new ones, strengthening the personal relationships that knit together a network that's reimagining journalism +- bring who you are into an event designed to celebrate all of it, along with everyone ready to take on 2021 alongside you
About us
-SRCCON events are produced by [OpenNews](https://opennews.org/). We connect a network of developers, designers, journalists, and editors to collaborate on open technologies and processes within journalism. OpenNews believes that a community of peers working, learning and solving problems together can create a stronger, more responsive, and inclusive journalism ecosystem. Incubated at the [Mozilla Foundation](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/) from 2011-2016, OpenNews is now a project of [Community Partners](http://communitypartners.org/). - +SRCCON events are produced by [OpenNews](https://opennews.org/). We connect a network of developers, designers, journalists, and editors to collaborate on open technologies and processes within journalism. OpenNews believes that a community of peers working, learning and solving problems together can create a stronger, more responsive, and inclusive journalism ecosystem. Incubated at the [Mozilla Foundation](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/) from 2011-2016, OpenNews is now a project of [Community Partners](https://communitypartners.org/). -{% include srccon_heart_2020_footer.html %} \ No newline at end of file +{% include srccon_heart_2020_footer.html %} diff --git a/homepage.md b/homepage.md index 6601f203..22446ffe 100644 --- a/homepage.md +++ b/homepage.md @@ -16,10 +16,11 @@ permalink: / • Email • - Newsletter + Newsletter - Support our work! + Support our work! +
This Year!
@@ -30,7 +31,7 @@ permalink: /
July 8-9 2026, in Minneapolis
Keep an eye on our newsletter for updates

The biggest SRCCON of the year, where 300 people who care deeply about journalism and their communities come together to talk about the technical and cultural changes that can transform our work.

- +
↪ Our call for participation is open! Pitch a session or apply for travel support by March 8.
@@ -119,9 +120,8 @@ SRCCON events are highly participatory and inclusive, where participants come fi Session topics come from the community, with OpenNews providing the intentional space that takes care of participants and allows them to develop open, interdependent relationships with each other. [More about how we build SRCCON events →](/our-resources) -[How to share what you learn after you get back home →](/share) - +[How to share what you learn after you get back home →](/share)
About us & our work
-SRCCON events are produced by [OpenNews](https://opennews.org). We connect a network of developers, designers, journalists, and editors to collaborate on open technologies and processes within journalism. OpenNews believes that a community of peers working, learning and solving problems together can create a stronger, more responsive, and inclusive journalism ecosystem. Incubated at the [Mozilla Foundation](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/) from 2011-2016, OpenNews is now a project of [Community Partners](http://communitypartners.org/). +SRCCON events are produced by [OpenNews](https://opennews.org). We connect a network of developers, designers, journalists, and editors to collaborate on open technologies and processes within journalism. OpenNews believes that a community of peers working, learning and solving problems together can create a stronger, more responsive, and inclusive journalism ecosystem. Incubated at the [Mozilla Foundation](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/) from 2011-2016, OpenNews is now a project of [Community Partners](https://communitypartners.org/). diff --git a/humans.txt b/humans.txt index c6d2ac6c..fafca978 100644 --- a/humans.txt +++ b/humans.txt @@ -1,3 +1,4 @@ -SRCCON is the site for the SRCCON conference, August 3 & 4 2017 in Minneapolis, MN. +SRCCON is the site for the annual SRCCON conference series, run by OpenNews (https://github.com/OpenNews). -This site was built by Dan Sinker, Ryan Pitts, Erika Owens, and Erin Kissane. We are TEAM OPENNEWS. +This OpenNews and this site were originally built by Dan Sinker, Ryan Pitts, Erika Owens, and Erin Kissane. +It is now maintained by the folks listed in our GitHub contributors page: https://github.com/OpenNews/srccon/graphs/contributors \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/media/css/style.css b/media/css/style.css index 7307f166..6c53d64d 100644 --- a/media/css/style.css +++ b/media/css/style.css @@ -1,919 +1,942 @@ html { - box-sizing: border-box; - overflow-x: hidden; - font-family: sans-serif; - -ms-text-size-adjust:100%; - -webkit-text-size-adjust:100% + box-sizing: border-box; + overflow-x: hidden; + font-family: sans-serif; + -ms-text-size-adjust: 100%; + -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; } -*, *:before, *:after { - box-sizing: inherit; +*, +*:before, +*:after { + box-sizing: inherit; } body { - margin: 0; - color: #404040; - overflow-x: hidden; - font-size: 1.6em; - min-height: 100vh; - font-family: freight-text-pro, serif; -} -header, footer, h1, h2, h3, h4, .button, .main-footer { - font-family: sofia-pro, sans-serif; -} -header, footer, .main-footer { - line-height: 1.4em; -} -header, main, .page-block { - margin-bottom: 2em; + margin: 0; + color: #404040; + overflow-x: hidden; + font-size: 1.6em; + min-height: 100vh; + font-family: freight-text-pro, serif; +} +header, +footer, +h1, +h2, +h3, +h4, +.button, +.main-footer { + font-family: sofia-pro, sans-serif; +} +header, +footer, +.main-footer { + line-height: 1.4em; +} +header, +main, +.page-block { + margin-bottom: 2em; } .page-container { - max-width: 800px; - margin: 0 auto; + max-width: 800px; + margin: 0 auto; } a { - color: #232D44; + color: #232d44; } -h1, h2, h3, h4 { - line-height: 1.3; - margin: 0 0 .33em; +h1, +h2, +h3, +h4 { + line-height: 1.3; + margin: 0 0 0.33em; } .button { - border: 0; - border-radius: .25em; - background-color: #fc6e1f; - color: #fff; - text-decoration: none; - font-size: 21px; - padding: .67em 1em; - line-height: 1; - display: inline-block; + border: 0; + border-radius: 0.25em; + background-color: #fc6e1f; + color: #fff; + text-decoration: none; + font-size: 21px; + padding: 0.67em 1em; + line-height: 1; + display: inline-block; } - .hub header { - margin-bottom: 1em; + margin-bottom: 1em; } .hub #hub-nav .top-bar { - text-align: left; - font-size: .8em; - margin-bottom: 1em; + text-align: left; + font-size: 0.8em; + margin-bottom: 1em; } .hub #hub-nav { - text-align: center; + text-align: center; } .hub #hub-nav img { - max-width: 800px; + max-width: 800px; } .hub .page-intro { - text-align: center; - margin: 0 -4em 1em; - line-height: 1.3; + text-align: center; + margin: 0 -4em 1em; + line-height: 1.3; } .hub .page-intro .big-type { - font-weight: bold; - font-size: 1.8em; + font-weight: bold; + font-size: 1.8em; } .hub .page-intro .contact-options { - margin-left: .67em; + margin-left: 0.67em; } .hub .page-intro .line-splitter { - font-size: .67em; - margin: 0 .5em; - vertical-align: 10%; + font-size: 0.67em; + margin: 0 0.5em; + vertical-align: 10%; } .hub .page-intro .sub-nav { - font-family: sofia-pro, sans-serif; - margin-top: 1em; - font-size: .83em; + font-family: sofia-pro, sans-serif; + margin-top: 1em; + font-size: 0.83em; } .hub .page-intro .button { - margin: 0 1em; + margin: 0 1em; } .page-divider { - font-family: sofia-pro, sans-serif; - position: relative; - font-weight: 400; - text-transform: uppercase; - border-bottom: 1px solid; - margin: 2rem 0 2rem 0; - padding-top: 2rem; - z-index: 1; - clear: both; - color: silver; - color: #fc6e1f; + font-family: sofia-pro, sans-serif; + position: relative; + font-weight: 400; + text-transform: uppercase; + border-bottom: 1px solid; + margin: 2rem 0 2rem 0; + padding-top: 2rem; + z-index: 1; + clear: both; + color: silver; + color: #fc6e1f; } .page-divider span { - background-color: #fff; - font-size: 1.2rem; - margin-top: -1.4rem; - padding-right: 1rem; - float: left; + background-color: #fff; + font-size: 1.2rem; + margin-top: -1.4rem; + padding-right: 1rem; + float: left; } .hub ul.upcoming-events { - list-style: none; - padding: 0; + list-style: none; + padding: 0; } .hub .upcoming-event { - margin-bottom: 2em; + margin-bottom: 2em; } -.hub .upcoming-event h3 {} +.hub .upcoming-event h3 { +} .hub .upcoming-event div { - font-family: sofia-pro, sans-serif; - font-size: .9em; + font-family: sofia-pro, sans-serif; + font-size: 0.9em; } .hub .upcoming-event div, .hub .upcoming-event p { - margin: 0 0 .4em; - line-height: 1.5; + margin: 0 0 0.4em; + line-height: 1.5; } .hub .upcoming-event .when-where { } .hub .upcoming-event .next-thing { - font-size: .7em; + font-size: 0.7em; } .hub ul.previous-events { - list-style: none; - padding: 0; + list-style: none; + padding: 0; } .hub .previous-event { - font-size: .8em; - margin-bottom: .8em; + font-size: 0.8em; + margin-bottom: 0.8em; } .hub .previous-event h3, .hub .previous-event div { - font-family: sofia-pro, sans-serif; - line-height: 1.5; + font-family: sofia-pro, sans-serif; + line-height: 1.5; } .hub .previous-event h3, .hub .previous-event .when-where { - display: inline-block; + display: inline-block; } .hub .previous-event .when-where { - margin-left: .5em; + margin-left: 0.5em; } .hub footer { - font-size: .8em; - text-align: center; - padding-bottom: 2em; + font-size: 0.8em; + text-align: center; + padding-bottom: 2em; } .hub footer .trailer { - font-family: freight-text-pro, serif; - font-size: .9em; + font-family: freight-text-pro, serif; + font-size: 0.9em; } .main-footer .trailer { - font-family: freight-text-pro, serif; - font-size: 1em; - text-align: center; - padding-top: 2em; - color: #00000082; + font-family: freight-text-pro, serif; + font-size: 1em; + text-align: center; + padding-top: 2em; + color: #00000082; } - /* HEADER IMAGES */ -header #header-image { /* default to MPLS skyline homepage background */ - background-size: cover; - background-repeat: no-repeat; - background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/minneapolis.jpg); - background-position: 0 -180px; - height: 320px; +header #header-image { + /* default to MPLS skyline homepage background */ + background-size: cover; + background-repeat: no-repeat; + background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/minneapolis.jpg); + background-position: 0 -180px; + height: 320px; } .sponsors #header-image { - background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/sponsors.jpg); - background-position: 0 -150px; + background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/sponsors.jpg); + background-position: 0 -150px; } .conduct #header-image { - background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/lifevests.jpg); - background-position: 0 0; + background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/lifevests.jpg); + background-position: 0 0; } .volunteer #header-image { - background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/volunteer.jpg); - background-position: 0 -225px; + background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/volunteer.jpg); + background-position: 0 -225px; } .sessions #header-image { - background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/sessions.jpg); - background-position: 0 -200px; + background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/sessions.jpg); + background-position: 0 -200px; } .participation #header-image { - background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/participation.jpg); - background-position: 0 -220px; + background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/participation.jpg); + background-position: 0 -220px; } .scholarships #header-image { - background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/scholarships.jpg); - background-position: 0 0; + background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/scholarships.jpg); + background-position: 0 0; } .childcare #header-image { - background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/childcare.jpg); - background-position: 0 0; + background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/childcare.jpg); + background-position: 0 0; } .logistics #header-image { - background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/logistics.jpg); - background-position: 0 0; + background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/logistics.jpg); + background-position: 0 0; } .program #header-image { - background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/program.jpg); - background-position: 0 0; + background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/program.jpg); + background-position: 0 0; } .localguide #header-image { - background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/localguide.jpg); - background-position: 0 0; + background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/localguide.jpg); + background-position: 0 0; } .volunteer #header-image { - background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/facilitators.jpg); - background-position: 0 -225px; + background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/facilitators.jpg); + background-position: 0 -225px; } .documentation #header-image { - background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/documentation.jpg); - background-position: 0 0; + background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/documentation.jpg); + background-position: 0 0; } .remote #header-image { - background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/remote.jpg); - background-position: 0 0; + background-image: url(/media/img/backgrounds/remote.jpg); + background-position: 0 0; } /* HEADER STYLES */ header #corner-logo { - position: absolute; - z-index: 100; - margin: .33em 1em -150px 0; + position: absolute; + z-index: 100; + margin: 0.33em 1em -150px 0; } header #corner-logo img { - width: 240px; + width: 240px; } header nav { - background-color: #fff; + background-color: #fff; } header nav ul { - font-size: .67em; - margin: 0 0 0 120px; - padding: 0; - line-height: 1; - display: flex; - align-items: center; - justify-content: flex-end; - height: inherit; + font-size: 0.67em; + margin: 0 0 0 120px; + padding: 0; + line-height: 1; + display: flex; + align-items: center; + justify-content: flex-end; + height: inherit; } header nav li { - list-style: none; - padding-left: 0; + list-style: none; + padding-left: 0; } header nav li a { - display: block; - padding: 1em; - text-transform: uppercase; - text-decoration: none; - color: #111; + display: block; + padding: 1em; + text-transform: uppercase; + text-decoration: none; + color: #111; } header nav a:hover { - text-decoration: underline; + text-decoration: underline; } #header-callout { - background-color: #232D44; - color: #fff; - text-align: center; - line-height: 1; + background-color: #232d44; + color: #fff; + text-align: center; + line-height: 1; } #header-callout span { - padding: .5em 0; - display: inline-block; + padding: 0.5em 0; + display: inline-block; } #header-callout .button { - margin: .5em 0 .5em 1em; + margin: 0.5em 0 0.5em 1em; } #header-image { - height: 300px; - background-size: cover; - background-repeat: no-repeat; - border: 0px solid #fff; - border-left: 0; - border-right: 0; - position: relative; + height: 300px; + background-size: cover; + background-repeat: no-repeat; + border: 0px solid #fff; + border-left: 0; + border-right: 0; + position: relative; } #header-image .photo-credit { - font-size: .5em; - line-height: 1; - position: absolute; - right: 1em; - bottom: 0; - opacity: .75; + font-size: 0.5em; + line-height: 1; + position: absolute; + right: 1em; + bottom: 0; + opacity: 0.75; } -#header-image .photo-credit, #header-image .photo-credit a { - color: #fff; - text-shadow: 0 0 1px rgba(0,0,0,.7); +#header-image .photo-credit, +#header-image .photo-credit a { + color: #fff; + text-shadow: 0 0 1px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7); } /* MAIN CONTENT AREA STYLES */ main { - padding: 0 1em 1em; - line-height: 1.6em; + padding: 0 1em 1em; + line-height: 1.6em; } -main ul, main p { - margin: 0 0 1em; +main ul, +main p { + margin: 0 0 1em; } main input { - font-size: .75em; - padding: .25em; - margin: 0 0 .5em; + font-size: 0.75em; + padding: 0.25em; + margin: 0 0 0.5em; } .homepage #latest-news { - margin-left: 0; - padding-left: 0; + margin-left: 0; + padding-left: 0; } .homepage #latest-news li { - list-style: none; - padding-left: 0; + list-style: none; + padding-left: 0; } .homepage h2 { - margin-top: 1.2em; + margin-top: 1.2em; } .big-lead { - font-size: 1.5em; - line-height: 1.3; - margin: 0 -1em 1.2em; + font-size: 1.5em; + line-height: 1.3; + margin: 0 -1em 1.2em; } .sponsor-block { - margin: 0 0 2.5em; + margin: 0 0 2.5em; } .sponsor-block img { - width: 75%; - display: block; - margin: 0 auto .5em; + width: 75%; + display: block; + margin: 0 auto 0.5em; } .sponsor-block .narrow-logo img, .sponsor-block.secondary img { - width: 50%; + width: 50%; } .sponsor-block h1, .sponsor-block h2, .sponsor-block h3 { - text-align: center; + text-align: center; } /* FOOTER STYLES */ footer p, .main-footer p { - margin: 0 0 1em; + margin: 0 0 1em; } footer #footer-nav { - background-color: #232D44; - margin-bottom: 1em; - font-size: .6em; + background-color: #232d44; + margin-bottom: 1em; + font-size: 0.6em; } footer ul, .main-footer ul { - margin: 0 0 2em; - padding: 0; + margin: 0 0 2em; + padding: 0; } footer li, .main-footer li { - list-style: none; - padding-left: 0; + list-style: none; + padding-left: 0; } footer #footer-nav ul { - line-height: 1; - display: flex; - align-items: center; - height: inherit; - padding: 0 2em; - margin: 0; + line-height: 1; + display: flex; + align-items: center; + height: inherit; + padding: 0 2em; + margin: 0; } footer #footer-nav li { - flex-grow: 1; + flex-grow: 1; } footer #footer-nav li a { - display: block; - text-align: center; - padding: 1em; - text-transform: uppercase; - text-decoration: none; - color: #fff; + display: block; + text-align: center; + padding: 1em; + text-transform: uppercase; + text-decoration: none; + color: #fff; } footer #footer-nav a:hover { - text-decoration: underline; + text-decoration: underline; } #footer-details .page-container { - display: grid; - grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(300px, 1fr)); + display: grid; + grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(300px, 1fr)); } #footer-sponsors .page-container:first-child { - margin-bottom: 1em; + margin-bottom: 1em; } .main-footer #footer-sponsors { - margin-top: 3em; + margin-top: 3em; } .sponsor-list a { - display: inline-block; - margin: 0 4% .67em 0; - width: 35%; + display: inline-block; + margin: 0 4% 0.67em 0; + width: 35%; } .sponsor-list a.narrow-logo { - width: 15%; + width: 15%; } .sponsor-list a.wide-logo { - width: 45%; - vertical-align: top; + width: 45%; + vertical-align: top; } .sponsor-list a img { - width: 100%; - vertical-align: middle; + width: 100%; + vertical-align: middle; } .sponsor-list div { - display: block; - margin: 0 0 .67em 0; - text-align: center; + display: block; + margin: 0 0 0.67em 0; + text-align: center; } .sponsor-list h3 + a { - width: 90%; - display: inline-block; + width: 90%; + display: inline-block; } .sponsor-list h3 + a.narrow-logo { - width: 50%; + width: 50%; } .sponsor-list-secondary { - display: grid; - grid-template-columns: 250px 250px 220px; - column-gap: 35px; + display: grid; + grid-template-columns: 250px 250px 220px; + column-gap: 35px; } .sponsor-list-secondary div { - text-align: left; + text-align: left; } .sponsor-tag { - font-size: 1em; - font-style: italic; - margin-top: 3em; + font-size: 1em; + font-style: italic; + margin-top: 3em; } .sponsor-tag img { - width: 25%; - position: relative; - vertical-align: middle; + width: 25%; + position: relative; + vertical-align: middle; } #footer-details, #footer-sponsors { - padding: 1em 0; - font-size: .67em; - text-align: left; + padding: 1em 0; + font-size: 0.67em; + text-align: left; } table { - border-collapse: collapse; - border-spacing: 0; - font-size: .83em; - margin-bottom: 3em; + border-collapse: collapse; + border-spacing: 0; + font-size: 0.83em; + margin-bottom: 3em; } td { - padding: 0 1em 1em 0; - vertical-align: top; - line-height: 1.3; + padding: 0 1em 1em 0; + vertical-align: top; + line-height: 1.3; } .live { - margin-bottom: 2em; + margin-bottom: 2em; } .live table { - width: 100%; - margin-bottom: 0; + width: 100%; + margin-bottom: 0; } table .session-time { - max-width: 130px; + max-width: 130px; } table a.session-title { - font-weight: bold; + font-weight: bold; } table a.session-transcript { - font-family: sofia-pro,sans-serif; - display: inline-block; - line-height: 1; - font-size: .67em; - color: #fff; - background-color: #a6b3d1; - padding: 3px 6px 4px; - border-radius: 3px; - margin-top: .4em; - text-decoration: none; + font-family: sofia-pro, sans-serif; + display: inline-block; + line-height: 1; + font-size: 0.67em; + color: #fff; + background-color: #a6b3d1; + padding: 3px 6px 4px; + border-radius: 3px; + margin-top: 0.4em; + text-decoration: none; } .hub table.time-blocks { - font-family: sofia-pro, sans-serif; - text-align: left; - width: 100%; - max-width: 500px; - margin-bottom: 1em; + font-family: sofia-pro, sans-serif; + text-align: left; + width: 100%; + max-width: 500px; + margin-bottom: 1em; } .hub table.time-blocks thead { } .hub table.time-blocks ul { - margin: 0 0 0 0; - padding: 0 0 10px 25px; + margin: 0 0 0 0; + padding: 0 0 10px 25px; } -.hub table.time-blocks th, .hub table.time-blocks td { - padding: 10px 15px; - border-bottom: 4px solid white; - font-size: 0.9em; +.hub table.time-blocks th, +.hub table.time-blocks td { + padding: 10px 15px; + border-bottom: 4px solid white; + font-size: 0.9em; } .hub table.time-blocks td { - border-bottom: 2px solid white; - line-height: 1.5; + border-bottom: 2px solid white; + line-height: 1.5; } -.hub table.time-blocks th:nth-child(1), .hub table.time-blocks tr td:nth-child(1){ - background-color: #ffa50061; - width: 170px; +.hub table.time-blocks th:nth-child(1), +.hub table.time-blocks tr td:nth-child(1) { + background-color: #ffa50061; + width: 170px; } -.hub table.time-blocks th:nth-child(even), .hub table.time-blocks tr td:nth-child(even){ - background-color: #ffa5002e; - padding-right: 30px; +.hub table.time-blocks th:nth-child(even), +.hub table.time-blocks tr td:nth-child(even) { + background-color: #ffa5002e; + padding-right: 30px; } .hidden { - display: none; + display: none; } .context-link { - font-size: .83em; + font-size: 0.83em; } /* SESSION LIST STYLES */ .session-proposal-list { - margin-top: 3em; + margin-top: 3em; } .session-proposal-list .session-proposal, .session-list .session { - margin-bottom: 2em; + margin-bottom: 2em; } .session-proposal-list .facilitator, .session-list .facilitator { - font-size: .8em; - font-style: italic; - margin-bottom: .33em; + font-size: 0.8em; + font-style: italic; + margin-bottom: 0.33em; } - /* FORM STYLES */ .fr_description { - font-size: .8em; - font-style: italic; - line-height: 1.2; - padding: .25em 0 .5em; + font-size: 0.8em; + font-style: italic; + line-height: 1.2; + padding: 0.25em 0 0.5em; } .fr_form h3, .fr_form h4 { - margin-top: 2em; + margin-top: 2em; } .fr_form hr { - border: 0; - border-bottom: 1px solid #aaa; + border: 0; + border-bottom: 1px solid #aaa; } .fr_text.size_large { - font-family: sofia-pro, sans-serif; - font-weight: bold; + font-family: sofia-pro, sans-serif; + font-weight: bold; } .fr_min_max { - font-family: sofia-pro, sans-serif; - font-size: .7em; + font-family: sofia-pro, sans-serif; + font-size: 0.7em; } .fr_text.size_medium, .fr_text.size_small, .fr_response_field label { - line-height: 1.2; + line-height: 1.2; } .fr_response_field label { - padding-bottom: .33em; + padding-bottom: 0.33em; } .fr_response_field_paragraph textarea.size_medium { - width: 100% !important;/* override screendoor import later on */ - padding: .25em .5em; + width: 100% !important; /* override screendoor import later on */ + padding: 0.25em 0.5em; } .fr_response_field_text input#c22, .fr_response_field_text input#c24, .fr_response_field_text input#c26, .fr_response_field_text input#c28, -.fr_response_field_text input#c50 {/* not ideal, but only way to target session fields */ - width: 100%; +.fr_response_field_text input#c50 { + /* not ideal, but only way to target session fields */ + width: 100%; } .fr_response_field_paragraph textarea, .fr_response_field_text input { - font-family: sofia-pro, sans-serif; - font-size: .8em; + font-family: sofia-pro, sans-serif; + font-size: 0.8em; } - @media screen and (min-width: 1200px) { - .participation #header-image { - background-position: 0 -290px; - } + .participation #header-image { + background-position: 0 -290px; + } } @media screen and (min-width: 1400px) { - .homepage #header-image { - background-position: 0 -250px; - } - .sessions #header-image { - background-position: 0 -230px; - } - .participation #header-image { - background-position: 0 -350px; - } + .homepage #header-image { + background-position: 0 -250px; + } + .sessions #header-image { + background-position: 0 -230px; + } + .participation #header-image { + background-position: 0 -350px; + } } @media screen and (min-width: 1600px) { - .sessions #header-image { - background-position: 0 -280px; - } - .participation #header-image { - background-position: 0 -450px; - } + .sessions #header-image { + background-position: 0 -280px; + } + .participation #header-image { + background-position: 0 -450px; + } } @media screen and (min-width: 1800px) { - .participation #header-image { - background-position: 0 -500px; - } + .participation #header-image { + background-position: 0 -500px; + } } @media screen and (max-width: 960px) { - .big-lead { - margin: 0 0 1.2em; - } - header #header-image { - height: 240px; - } - #header-image .photo-credit { - font-size: .4em; - } - .homepage #header-image { - background-position: 0 -90px; - } - .volunteer #header-image { - background-position: 0 -150px; - } - .sessions #header-image { - background-position: 0 -150px; - } - .participation #header-image { - background-position: 0 -200px; - } - - .hub .page-intro { - margin: 0 -1em 1em; - } + .big-lead { + margin: 0 0 1.2em; + } + header #header-image { + height: 240px; + } + #header-image .photo-credit { + font-size: 0.4em; + } + .homepage #header-image { + background-position: 0 -90px; + } + .volunteer #header-image { + background-position: 0 -150px; + } + .sessions #header-image { + background-position: 0 -150px; + } + .participation #header-image { + background-position: 0 -200px; + } + + .hub .page-intro { + margin: 0 -1em 1em; + } } @media screen and (max-width: 800px) { - body { - font-size: 1.5em; - } - header, main, .page-block { - margin-bottom: 1.3em; - } - header #corner-logo { - margin: .5em; - } - header #corner-logo img { - width: 210px; - } - #header-image .photo-credit { - bottom: auto; - top: 1em; - } - #header-callout { - line-height: 1.6; - padding: .25em; - } - #header-callout span { - display: block; - padding: 0; - } - #header-callout .button { - margin: .5em; - } - .big-lead { - font-size: 1.4em; - } - .sponsors #header-image { - background-position: 0 -80px; - } - .volunteer #header-image { - background-position: 0 -100px; - } - .sessions #header-image { - background-position: 0 -120px; - } - .participation #header-image { - background-position: 0 -150px; - } - .sponsor-list, - .sponsor-list h3 + a { - display: inherit; - } - .sponsor-list a, - .sponsor-list h3 + a { - display: block; - width: 50%; - text-align: left; - margin: 1em 0 .5em; - } - .sponsor-list h3 + a { - width: 45%; - } - .sponsor-list a.narrow-logo { - width: 20%; - margin: 1.5em 0; - } - .sponsor-list h3 + a.narrow-logo { - width: 25%; - margin: 1.5em 0; - } - .sponsor-list a.wide-logo { - width: 65%; - } - .sponsor-list h3 + a.wide-logo { - width: 60%; - } - .sponsor-list h3 + a { - margin-bottom: 2em; - } - .sponsor-list a img { - width: 100%; - vertical-align: middle; - } - .sponsor-block.secondary img { - width: 67%; - } - - .hub #hub-nav img { - max-width: 90%; - } - .hub .page-intro { - margin: 0 0 1em; - } - .hub .page-intro .contact-options { - white-space: nowrap; - } - .hub .page-intro .button { - margin-top: 1em; - display: inline-block; - } + body { + font-size: 1.5em; + } + header, + main, + .page-block { + margin-bottom: 1.3em; + } + header #corner-logo { + margin: 0.5em; + } + header #corner-logo img { + width: 210px; + } + #header-image .photo-credit { + bottom: auto; + top: 1em; + } + #header-callout { + line-height: 1.6; + padding: 0.25em; + } + #header-callout span { + display: block; + padding: 0; + } + #header-callout .button { + margin: 0.5em; + } + .big-lead { + font-size: 1.4em; + } + .sponsors #header-image { + background-position: 0 -80px; + } + .volunteer #header-image { + background-position: 0 -100px; + } + .sessions #header-image { + background-position: 0 -120px; + } + .participation #header-image { + background-position: 0 -150px; + } + .sponsor-list, + .sponsor-list h3 + a { + display: inherit; + } + .sponsor-list a, + .sponsor-list h3 + a { + display: block; + width: 50%; + text-align: left; + margin: 1em 0 0.5em; + } + .sponsor-list h3 + a { + width: 45%; + } + .sponsor-list a.narrow-logo { + width: 20%; + margin: 1.5em 0; + } + .sponsor-list h3 + a.narrow-logo { + width: 25%; + margin: 1.5em 0; + } + .sponsor-list a.wide-logo { + width: 65%; + } + .sponsor-list h3 + a.wide-logo { + width: 60%; + } + .sponsor-list h3 + a { + margin-bottom: 2em; + } + .sponsor-list a img { + width: 100%; + vertical-align: middle; + } + .sponsor-block.secondary img { + width: 67%; + } + + .hub #hub-nav img { + max-width: 90%; + } + .hub .page-intro { + margin: 0 0 1em; + } + .hub .page-intro .contact-options { + white-space: nowrap; + } + .hub .page-intro .button { + margin-top: 1em; + display: inline-block; + } } @media screen and (max-width: 640px) { - header #corner-logo img { - width: 180px; - } - header nav ul { - font-size: .6em; - } - .homepage #header-image { - background-position: 0 -40px; - } - .sponsors #header-image { - background-position: 0 0; - } - .volunteer #header-image { - background-position: 0 -60px; - } - .sessions #header-image { - background-position: 0 -80px; - } - .participation #header-image { - background-position: 0 -80px; - } - footer #footer-nav ul { - display: inherit; - padding: .5em 0; - } - footer #footer-nav li a { - text-align: left; - } - .sponsor-tag img { - width: 40%; - position: relative; - vertical-align: middle; - } - - .hub .page-intro .big-type { - font-size: 1.6em; - } + header #corner-logo img { + width: 180px; + } + header nav ul { + font-size: 0.6em; + } + .homepage #header-image { + background-position: 0 -40px; + } + .sponsors #header-image { + background-position: 0 0; + } + .volunteer #header-image { + background-position: 0 -60px; + } + .sessions #header-image { + background-position: 0 -80px; + } + .participation #header-image { + background-position: 0 -80px; + } + footer #footer-nav ul { + display: inherit; + padding: 0.5em 0; + } + footer #footer-nav li a { + text-align: left; + } + .sponsor-tag img { + width: 40%; + position: relative; + vertical-align: middle; + } + + .hub .page-intro .big-type { + font-size: 1.6em; + } } @media screen and (max-width: 540px) { - .sponsor-tag img { - width: 50%; - display: block; - } - .hub .page-intro .big-type { - font-size: 1.5em; - } - .hub #hub-nav img { - width: 90%; - } + .sponsor-tag img { + width: 50%; + display: block; + } + .hub .page-intro .big-type { + font-size: 1.5em; + } + .hub #hub-nav img { + width: 90%; + } } @media screen and (max-width: 480px) { - body { - font-size: 1.4em; - } - header #corner-logo { - margin: 1.3em .5em .5em .5em; - } - header #corner-logo img { - width: 150px; - } - header nav ul { - align-items: center; - padding: 0 1em; - margin: 0; - } - header nav ul li { - flex-grow: 1; - } - .homepage #header-image { - background-position: 0 0; - } - .volunteer #header-image { - background-position: 0 0; - } - .sessions #header-image { - background-position: 0 0; - } - .participation #header-image { - background-position: 0 0; - } - #footer-details .page-container, - #footer-sponsors .page-container { - display: inherit; - } - .sponsor-list { - display: inherit; - text-align: center; - margin-bottom: 2em; - } - #footer-sponsors h3 { - display: inherit; - text-align: center; - font-size: 1.3em; - } - .sponsor-list a, - .sponsor-list a.narrow-logo, - .sponsor-list h3 + a { - display: block; - width: 67%; - margin: 1em auto 0; - } - .sponsor-list h3 + a { - width: 55%; - } - .sponsor-list a.narrow-logo { - width: 25%; - } - .sponsor-list h3 + a.narrow-logo { - width: 30%; - } - .sponsor-list a.wide-logo { - width: 75%; - } - .sponsor-list h3 + a.wide-logo { - width: 65%; - } - .sponsor-list h3 + a, - .sponsor-list h3 + a.narrow-logo { - margin: 1em auto 2em; - } - - .sponsor-block img { - width: 100%; - } - .sponsor-tag { - text-align: center; - } - .sponsor-tag img { - width: 67%; - margin: .5em auto; - } - - .hub .page-intro .big-type { - font-size: 1.4em; - } - .hub table.time-blocks th:nth-child(1), .hub table.time-blocks tr td:nth-child(1){ - width: 100px; - } + body { + font-size: 1.4em; + } + header #corner-logo { + margin: 1.3em 0.5em 0.5em 0.5em; + } + header #corner-logo img { + width: 150px; + } + header nav ul { + align-items: center; + padding: 0 1em; + margin: 0; + } + header nav ul li { + flex-grow: 1; + } + .homepage #header-image { + background-position: 0 0; + } + .volunteer #header-image { + background-position: 0 0; + } + .sessions #header-image { + background-position: 0 0; + } + .participation #header-image { + background-position: 0 0; + } + #footer-details .page-container, + #footer-sponsors .page-container { + display: inherit; + } + .sponsor-list { + display: inherit; + text-align: center; + margin-bottom: 2em; + } + #footer-sponsors h3 { + display: inherit; + text-align: center; + font-size: 1.3em; + } + .sponsor-list a, + .sponsor-list a.narrow-logo, + .sponsor-list h3 + a { + display: block; + width: 67%; + margin: 1em auto 0; + } + .sponsor-list h3 + a { + width: 55%; + } + .sponsor-list a.narrow-logo { + width: 25%; + } + .sponsor-list h3 + a.narrow-logo { + width: 30%; + } + .sponsor-list a.wide-logo { + width: 75%; + } + .sponsor-list h3 + a.wide-logo { + width: 65%; + } + .sponsor-list h3 + a, + .sponsor-list h3 + a.narrow-logo { + margin: 1em auto 2em; + } + + .sponsor-block img { + width: 100%; + } + .sponsor-tag { + text-align: center; + } + .sponsor-tag img { + width: 67%; + margin: 0.5em auto; + } + + .hub .page-intro .big-type { + font-size: 1.4em; + } + .hub table.time-blocks th:nth-child(1), + .hub table.time-blocks tr td:nth-child(1) { + width: 100px; + } } @media screen and (max-width: 320px) { - header nav ul { - font-size: .5em; - } + header nav ul { + font-size: 0.5em; + } } diff --git a/media/js/moment.min.js b/media/js/moment.min.js index 49f17554..64c1edaa 100644 --- a/media/js/moment.min.js +++ b/media/js/moment.min.js @@ -3,5 +3,5 @@ //! authors : Tim Wood, Iskren Chernev, Moment.js contributors //! license : MIT //! momentjs.com -!function(e,t){"object"==typeof exports&&"undefined"!=typeof module?module.exports=t():"function"==typeof define&&define.amd?define(t):e.moment=t()}(this,function(){"use 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You are using Moment.js "+i.version+"."),i.defaultZone=t?M(t):null,i};var F=i.momentProperties;return"[object Array]"===Object.prototype.toString.call(F)?(F.push("_z"),F.push("_a")):F&&(F._z=null),i}); \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/package-lock.json b/package-lock.json new file mode 100644 index 00000000..8ea3ca13 --- /dev/null +++ b/package-lock.json @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +{ + "name": "srccon-2026", + "version": "1.0.0", + "lockfileVersion": 3, + "requires": true, + "packages": { + "": { + "name": "srccon-2026", + "version": "1.0.0", + "devDependencies": { + "@prettier/plugin-ruby": "^4.0.4", + "prettier": "^3.2.5" + } + }, + "node_modules/@prettier/plugin-ruby": { + "version": "4.0.4", + "resolved": "https://registry.npmjs.org/@prettier/plugin-ruby/-/plugin-ruby-4.0.4.tgz", + "integrity": "sha512-lCpvfS/dQU5WrwN3AQ5vR8qrvj2h5gE41X08NNzAAXvHdM4zwwGRcP2sHSxfu6n6No+ljWCVx95NvJPFTTjCTg==", + "dev": true, + "license": "MIT", + "peerDependencies": { + "prettier": "^3.0.0" + } + }, + "node_modules/prettier": { + "version": "3.8.1", + "resolved": "https://registry.npmjs.org/prettier/-/prettier-3.8.1.tgz", + "integrity": "sha512-UOnG6LftzbdaHZcKoPFtOcCKztrQ57WkHDeRD9t/PTQtmT0NHSeWWepj6pS0z/N7+08BHFDQVUrfmfMRcZwbMg==", + "dev": true, + "license": "MIT", + "bin": { + "prettier": "bin/prettier.cjs" + }, + "engines": { + "node": ">=14" + }, + "funding": { + "url": "https://github.com/prettier/prettier?sponsor=1" + } + } + } +} diff --git a/package.json b/package.json new file mode 100644 index 00000000..012bd7ba --- /dev/null +++ b/package.json @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +{ + "name": "srccon-2026", + "version": "1.0.0", + "description": "SRCCON 2026 conference site", + "private": true, + "scripts": { + "format": "prettier --write '**/*.{html,css,js,json,yml,yaml,md,rb,rake}'", + "format:check": "prettier --check '**/*.{html,css,js,json,yml,yaml,md,rb,rake}'", + "format:ruby": "prettier --write '**/*.{rb,rake}'", + "lint": "prettier --check '**/*.{html,css,js,json,yml,yaml,md,rb,rake}'" + }, + "devDependencies": { + "@prettier/plugin-ruby": "^4.0.4", + "prettier": "^3.2.5" + }, + "keywords": [ + "jekyll", + "srccon" + ] +} diff --git a/resources.md b/resources.md index 41d30fbd..a095af1b 100644 --- a/resources.md +++ b/resources.md @@ -13,46 +13,46 @@ Here, we've gathered some writing about how we create these inclusive, participa ## Participant Experience -* [Why You Want a Code of Conduct & How We Made One](http://incisive.nu/2014/codes-of-conduct) -* [Why We Think Childcare is So Important at SRCCON Events](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-childcare/) -* [How We Planned & Ran the SRCCON Travel Scholarships](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-scholarship-process-admin/) -* [Why We Expanded Our Scholarship Program](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-scholarships-update/) -* [Captioning a Multi-Track Conference - How SRCCON Did It](http://opennews.org/blog/srccon-transcription) -* [Making SRCCON Good for Humans](http://opennews.org/blog/srccon-human-stuff) -* [Thursday Nights at SRCCON](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-thursday/) +- [Why You Want a Code of Conduct & How We Made One](https://incisive.nu/2014/codes-of-conduct) +- [Why We Think Childcare is So Important at SRCCON Events](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-childcare/) +- [How We Planned & Ran the SRCCON Travel Scholarships](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-scholarship-process-admin/) +- [Why We Expanded Our Scholarship Program](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-scholarships-update/) +- [Captioning a Multi-Track Conference - How SRCCON Did It](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-transcription) +- [Making SRCCON Good for Humans](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-human-stuff) +- [Thursday Nights at SRCCON](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-thursday/) ## Logistics & Tickets -* [How to Answer the SRCCON Call for Participation](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-participation-howto/) -* [SRCCON Ticketing: What We Did and Why](http://opennews.org/blog/srccon-tickets) -* [The SRCCON Ticket Lottery: What We Learned](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-lottery/) +- [How to Answer the SRCCON Call for Participation](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-participation-howto/) +- [SRCCON Ticketing: What We Did and Why](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-tickets) +- [The SRCCON Ticket Lottery: What We Learned](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-lottery/) ## Sessions & Proposals -* [Great Conference Sessions, the SRCCON Way](https://source.opennews.org/articles/srccon-great-conference-sessions/) -* [How We Facilitated A Huge, Participatory, Highly Charged SRCCON Session](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-two/) -* [3 Ways to Facilitate a Great Conference Session](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-one/) -* [Great Conference Sessions, the SRCCON Way](https://source.opennews.org/articles/srccon-great-conference-sessions/) -* [Five Things We've Learned About Sessions](http://opennews.org/blog/srccon-top5) -* [How to Plan a Great SRCCON Session](http://opennews.org/blog/srccon-session-planning) -* [Why We Wrote Our SRCCON Proposals Guide](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-proposal-guide/) +- [Great Conference Sessions, the SRCCON Way](https://source.opennews.org/articles/srccon-great-conference-sessions/) +- [How We Facilitated A Huge, Participatory, Highly Charged SRCCON Session](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-two/) +- [3 Ways to Facilitate a Great Conference Session](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-facilitator-recs-one/) +- [Great Conference Sessions, the SRCCON Way](https://source.opennews.org/articles/srccon-great-conference-sessions/) +- [Five Things We've Learned About Sessions](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-top5) +- [How to Plan a Great SRCCON Session](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-session-planning) +- [Why We Wrote Our SRCCON Proposals Guide](https://opennews.org/blog/srccon-proposal-guide/) ## Session Transcripts & Documentation -* SRCCON [2019](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/), [2018](https://2018.srccon.org/documentation/), [2017](https://2017.srccon.org/transcription/), [2016](https://2016.srccon.org/transcription/), [2015](https://2015.srccon.org/transcription/), [2014](https://github.com/OpenNews/srccon/tree/master/_archive/transcripts/2014) -* Topical SRCCONs [SRCCON:POWER](https://power.srccon.org/transcription/), [SRCCON:WORK](https://work.srccon.org/transcription/) +- SRCCON [2019](https://2019.srccon.org/documentation/), [2018](https://2018.srccon.org/documentation/), [2017](https://2017.srccon.org/transcription/), [2016](https://2016.srccon.org/transcription/), [2015](https://2015.srccon.org/transcription/), [2014](https://2014.srccon.org/live/) +- Topical SRCCONs [SRCCON:POWER](https://power.srccon.org/transcription/), [SRCCON:WORK](https://work.srccon.org/transcription/) ## Other Resources & Inspiration -* [2015 Will Be the Year You Pitch a NICAR Lightning Talk](https://medium.com/@sisiwei/2015-will-be-the-year-you-pitch-a-nicar-lightning-talk-dd293e5d78ca) by Sisi Wei -* [Alcohol and Inclusivity: Planning Tech Events with Non-Alcoholic Options](https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/alcohol-and-inclusivity-planning-tech-events-with-non-alcoholic-options) by Kara Sowles -* [Anti-Harassment Policies](https://adainitiative.org/what-we-do/conference-policies/) from the Ada Initiative -* [Convention Tension](https://friendshipping.simplecast.fm/episodes/8885-convention-tension) by Jenn Bane & Trin Garritano -* [Help People Afford to Attend Your Conference](http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/help-more-people-attend-your-conference) by Ashe Dryden -* [Hire More Women in Tech](http://www.hiremorewomenintech.com/) by Karen Schoellkopf -* [How Much It Cost Us to Make More Attendees Feel Safe and Welcome at .concat() 2015](https://medium.com/@boennemann/how-much-it-cost-us-to-make-more-attendees-feel-safe-and-welcome-at-concat-2015-2bc51d4df656) by Stephan Bönnemann -* [HOWTO Design a Code of Conduct for Your Community](https://adainitiative.org/2014/02/howto-design-a-code-of-conduct-for-your-community/) from the Ada Initiative -* [Increasing Diversity at Your Conference](http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/increasing-diversity-at-your-conference) by Ashe Dryden -* [We Are All Awesome](http://weareallaweso.me/) by Tiffany Conroy -* [You Can Choose Who Submits Talks to Your Conference](http://jvns.ca/blog/2015/03/06/you-can-choose-who-submits-talks-to-your-conference/) by Julia Evans -* [Your Next Conference Should Have Real-Time Captioning](http://composition.al/blog/2014/05/31/your-next-conference-should-have-real-time-captioning/) by Lindsey Kuper +- [2015 Will Be the Year You Pitch a NICAR Lightning Talk](https://medium.com/@sisiwei/dd293e5d78ca) by Sisi Wei +- [Alcohol and Inclusivity: Planning Tech Events with Non-Alcoholic Options](https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/alcohol-and-inclusivity-planning-tech-events-with-non-alcoholic-options) by Kara Sowles +- [Anti-Harassment Policies](https://adainitiative.org/what-we-do/conference-policies/) from the Ada Initiative +- [Convention Tension](https://friendshipping.simplecast.fm/episodes/8885-convention-tension) by Jenn Bane & Trin Garritano +- [Help People Afford to Attend Your Conference](https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/help-more-people-attend-your-conference) by Ashe Dryden +- [Hire More Women in Tech](https://www.hiremorewomenintech.com/) by Karen Schoellkopf +- [How Much It Cost Us to Make More Attendees Feel Safe and Welcome at .concat() 2015](https://medium.com/@boennemann/2bc51d4df656) by Stephan Bönnemann +- [HOWTO Design a Code of Conduct for Your Community](https://web.archive.org/web/20141219123901/https://adainitiative.org/2014/02/howto-design-a-code-of-conduct-for-your-community/) from the Ada Initiative +- [Increasing Diversity at Your Conference](https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/increasing-diversity-at-your-conference) by Ashe Dryden +- [We Are All Awesome](http://weareallaweso.me/) by Tiffany Conroy +- [You Can Choose Who Submits Talks to Your Conference](https://jvns.ca/blog/2015/03/06/you-can-choose-who-submits-talks-to-your-conference/) by Julia Evans +- [Your Next Conference Should Have Real-Time Captioning](https://composition.al/blog/2014/05/31/your-next-conference-should-have-real-time-captioning/) by Lindsey Kuper diff --git a/schedule.md b/schedule.md deleted file mode 100644 index b1655e67..00000000 --- a/schedule.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,6 +0,0 @@ ---- -layout: layout -permalink: /schedule/index.html -redirect_to: - - https://schedule.srccon.org ---- diff --git a/share.md b/share.md index 0eea6a4b..5261383b 100644 --- a/share.md +++ b/share.md @@ -15,27 +15,35 @@ These resources are here to help.
The toolkit
### [How to get the most out of this toolkit](/share/introduction) + Personal practice, skillsharing, tough conversations ... how can we help? ### [Planning exercise (what to do _before_ you go)](/share/planning-exercise) + How a few minutes of prep work can set you up for success. ### [Get organized (tips for the flight or train ride home)](/share/get-organized) + Three ways to collect your thoughts for effective sharing. ### [Write a 1-pager for your boss](/share/one-pager) + How to identify key takeaways and suggestions and share them with a manager. ### [How to host a brown-bag session](/share/brown-bag-session) + An effective, informal way to share information with peers. ### [How to make handouts and tipsheets](/share/handouts-tipsheets) + Good takeaway materials are clear and memorable. ### [Setting SMART goals](/share/smart-goals) + A framework for figuring out your vision, then making a plan to act on it. ### [How to build your case for change](/share/case-for-change) + Four key steps to putting together the case for your new idea.
How to use these resources
@@ -46,43 +54,43 @@ But if you're looking for a bit more structure, we've included the following per **I didn't do any prep, but this seems like a great idea. Where should I start?** -* Start with ["Get organized (tips for the flight or train ride home)"](/share/get-organized) -* Next dive deeper with ["Write a 1-pager for your boss"](/share/one-pager) -* Finally, use the ["SMART goals" exercise](/share/smart-goals) to create your vision +- Start with ["Get organized (tips for the flight or train ride home)"](/share/get-organized) +- Next dive deeper with ["Write a 1-pager for your boss"](/share/one-pager) +- Finally, use the ["SMART goals" exercise](/share/smart-goals) to create your vision **I go this event every year but my boss wants more out of me this time.** -* Start with the ["Planning exercise"](/share/planning-exercise) before you go to the event -* Next dive deeper with ["Write a 1-pager for your boss"](/share/one-pager) -* Then, share what you learned by checking out ["How to host a brown-bag session"](/share/brown-bag-session) and ["How to make handouts and tipsheets"](/share/handouts-tipsheets) +- Start with the ["Planning exercise"](/share/planning-exercise) before you go to the event +- Next dive deeper with ["Write a 1-pager for your boss"](/share/one-pager) +- Then, share what you learned by checking out ["How to host a brown-bag session"](/share/brown-bag-session) and ["How to make handouts and tipsheets"](/share/handouts-tipsheets) **I'm a manager of a team and I want my team to learn a new skill or workflow.** -* Start with ["Get organized (tips for the flight or train ride home)"](/share/get-organized) -* Next use the ["SMART goals" exercise](/share/smart-goals) to create your vision and plan -* Learn ["How to build your case for change"](/share/case-for-change) -* Use the resources on ["How to host a brown-bag session"](/share/brown-bag-session) and ["How to make handouts and tipsheets"](/share/handouts-tipsheets) to arm your team for success +- Start with ["Get organized (tips for the flight or train ride home)"](/share/get-organized) +- Next use the ["SMART goals" exercise](/share/smart-goals) to create your vision and plan +- Learn ["How to build your case for change"](/share/case-for-change) +- Use the resources on ["How to host a brown-bag session"](/share/brown-bag-session) and ["How to make handouts and tipsheets"](/share/handouts-tipsheets) to arm your team for success **I'm a newsroom leader who wants to make a significant change in how we operate.** -* Start with the ["SMART goals" exercise](/share/smart-goals) -* Next, use the ["Planning exercise"](/share/planning-exercise) to get the most out of your event -* Finally, use the ["Get organized (tips for the flight or train ride home)"](/share/get-organized) and ["Write a 1-pager for your boss"](/share/one-pager) activities to make a plan for change -* You may also want to check out ["How to build your case for change"](/share/case-for-change) to learn how to message your plan to the team +- Start with the ["SMART goals" exercise](/share/smart-goals) +- Next, use the ["Planning exercise"](/share/planning-exercise) to get the most out of your event +- Finally, use the ["Get organized (tips for the flight or train ride home)"](/share/get-organized) and ["Write a 1-pager for your boss"](/share/one-pager) activities to make a plan for change +- You may also want to check out ["How to build your case for change"](/share/case-for-change) to learn how to message your plan to the team **I'm new or young in my newsroom and still getting established. How can I still contribute?** -* Start with the ["Planning exercise"](/share/planning-exercise) before you attend your event -* After your event ["Get organized"](/share/get-organized) as quickly as possible -* Next ["Write a 1-pager for your boss"](/share/one-pager) and see how they would like you to contribute -* Maybe even offer to ["Host a brown bag session"](/share/brown-bag-session) and check out the resources there +- Start with the ["Planning exercise"](/share/planning-exercise) before you attend your event +- After your event ["Get organized"](/share/get-organized) as quickly as possible +- Next ["Write a 1-pager for your boss"](/share/one-pager) and see how they would like you to contribute +- Maybe even offer to ["Host a brown bag session"](/share/brown-bag-session) and check out the resources there **I'm an only-lonely in my news organization, I have no one to share with!** -* Start with the ["Planning exercise"](/share/planning-exercise) before you attend your event. -* Try setting some ["SMART goals"](/share/smart-goals) to make a longer-term plan for how you want to make the event valuable -* After the event, use the ["Get organized"](/share/get-organized) exercise to see what you learned and how you want to apply it to your work +- Start with the ["Planning exercise"](/share/planning-exercise) before you attend your event. +- Try setting some ["SMART goals"](/share/smart-goals) to make a longer-term plan for how you want to make the event valuable +- After the event, use the ["Get organized"](/share/get-organized) exercise to see what you learned and how you want to apply it to your work -_This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by [Emma Carew Grovum](https://twitter.com/emmacarew). It's meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization._ +_This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by [Emma Carew Grovum](https://emmacarewgrovum.com/). It's meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization._ _The toolkit is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we'd love to see you use or adapt it for your own event—all we need is a link back here. We'd also be thrilled to hear how you put what you learn into practice, so please tweet us at #OpenNewsAfterParty!_ diff --git a/sponsors.md b/sponsors.md index 00c20fce..ab7cc9c2 100644 --- a/sponsors.md +++ b/sponsors.md @@ -1,70 +1,74 @@ ---- -layout: layout_hub -section: sponsors -permalink: /sponsors/ -title: Become a SRCCON Sponsor ---- - -### Become a SRCCON Sponsor - -SRCCON events are journalism conferences people love. This reaction comes from the approach SRCCON takes: highly participatory, extraordinarily inclusive, and incredibly embracing of the toughest conversations. The support of sponsors helps make all of that possible. As one attendee put it, “The structure of the program and the attention to detail and people’s needs is what makes this an exceptional and special event.” Sponsors are what make the detail, intentional design, and accessibility all possible. - -SRCCON events have adapted to be fully online and in the midst of both a global crisis and a reckoning within journalism. They are unlike other journalism events, and as a sponsor, you'll be helping us create unique, accessible, and inclusive events to host the frank, challenging, and creative conversations that need to be had in journalism right now. - -### Ways to sponsor SRCCON and help make it possible - -We're seeking sponsors for SRCCON events, which host hundreds of participants from news and technology organizations of all sizes. Available sponsorships include: - -## 👏 Partnership sponsors -Support all aspects of the conference planning and program. Partnership sponsors have maximum visibility — your support makes SRCCON possible. - -## 👉 Accessibility sponsors -You're directly supporting our accessibility offerings including things like scholarship tickets, attendance and caregiving stipends, and live transcription. Accessibility is one of our most visible sponsorships across the entire program — because you are literally helping us make SRCCON available to as many people as possible. - -## 🙌 Break sponsors -Create spaces for attendees to connect in virtual hallways and hangout spaces. We know that these spaces have created lifelong connections between participants, and extremely meaningful. - -## 👌 Event sponsors -Help us with all the finishing touches on the event. Show your support by helping us put on what our participants frequently say is "the best conference I've ever been to." - -Each sponsorship includes at least 1 free ticket and different types of visibility and recognition throughout the event (we also offer the chance to sign up for a sponsorship package across several events). [Contact Erika Owens](mailto:erika@opennews.org) for a full kit with pricing and further details. We love chatting with folks to find the best way we can collaborate to welcome your team to our events and make them inclusive for all attendees! - -### What is SRCCON? - -OpenNews has been hosting SRCCON annually since 2014, and added a series of smaller, topical conferences starting in 2017. At SRCCON events, participants come first so they can focus on collaborating on the work at hand. Over this time SRCCON has: - -- Welcomed more than 1,500 participants, with a healthy mix of new and returning attendees each time. -- Hosted over 300 interactive, collaborative sessions on topics ranging from archiving and algorithms to management and self-care. -- Provided scholarship support to help 250 participants and facilitators attend these events. -- Operated with inclusion and accessibility as core design features, providing live transcription, childcare, tasty food and drink for all dietary needs, and a schedule with space to refresh and connect. This year, we're planning to offer digital accessibility across international timezones, and intentional programming for how attendees can digitally connect based on their needs. -- Created a code of conduct and incident response plan that supports attendees and has influenced the journalism community, including ONA and IRE conferences. -- Led to countless job connections, innovative project ideas and collaborations, and new organizational policies on hiring, inclusion, mentorship, workflow, development processes, and more. - -### Who attends and why - -People come first at SRCCON. Each event is set up to allow participants to focus on getting to know each other and learn from the wisdom in the room. About a third of participants also facilitate sessions, leading conversations and skillshares that help people bring new ideas and experience back to their newsrooms. - -
- -*The SRCCON 2019 audience and program included:* - -- Half of attendees identify as women and almost a quarter as people of color. -- A quarter of participants are in leadership roles. -- About a third are developers or engineers. -- Other roles include data journalists, designers, product managers, and reporters. -- The diversity of attendees also includes the size and nature of the organizations attendees represent, including staff from large and small companies that are, or work with news organizations—including attendees from tech companies, universities and colleges and more. -- Sessions digging into best practices for all kinds of teams and so many techniques, including developing product teams, editing data, ethical advertising, managing in local news, and more. -- A schedule designed around our facilitated session format that enables attendees to engage deeply in a purposeful way. - -### SRCCON 2019 participants attended because: - -- They wanted to discuss challenges facing their teams every day. The [entire SRCCON schedule](https://2019.srccon.org/schedule) was built from session pitches from attendees, including topics like: technical communication, collaboration, engagement, algorithms, news nerd career paths, security, accessibility, supporting journalists of color, data viz, management, and more. -- They wanted to (and reported being able to!) build stronger network connections, to find new strategies to take back to their newsroom, and to learn more about new tools and tactics to improve their journalism. - -_"You all are leading the way on how to have a great conference that is welcoming for everyone, and someday the tech industry will be so much better off when it adopts what you've done."_ - -_"This was the first conference I've been a part of where I felt I belonged on every level."_ - -_“My job very much straddles the line between technology and the newsroom and in 20 years of being in the newspaper (media) business, this is the first conference I've been to that I felt like was specifically for me. I could contribute meaningfully to every session I went to.”_ - -**Interested in having your company or organization become a sponsor of SRCCON events?** [Get in touch with OpenNews Executive Director Erika Owens today.](mailto:erika@opennews.org) +--- +layout: layout_hub +section: sponsors +permalink: /sponsors/ +title: Become a SRCCON Sponsor +--- + +### Become a SRCCON Sponsor + +SRCCON events are journalism conferences people love. This reaction comes from the approach SRCCON takes: highly participatory, extraordinarily inclusive, and incredibly embracing of the toughest conversations. The support of sponsors helps make all of that possible. As one attendee put it, “The structure of the program and the attention to detail and people’s needs is what makes this an exceptional and special event.” Sponsors are what make the detail, intentional design, and accessibility all possible. + +SRCCON events have adapted to be fully online and in the midst of both a global crisis and a reckoning within journalism. They are unlike other journalism events, and as a sponsor, you'll be helping us create unique, accessible, and inclusive events to host the frank, challenging, and creative conversations that need to be had in journalism right now. + +### Ways to sponsor SRCCON and help make it possible + +We're seeking sponsors for SRCCON events, which host hundreds of participants from news and technology organizations of all sizes. Available sponsorships include: + +## 👏 Partnership sponsors + +Support all aspects of the conference planning and program. Partnership sponsors have maximum visibility — your support makes SRCCON possible. + +## 👉 Accessibility sponsors + +You're directly supporting our accessibility offerings including things like scholarship tickets, attendance and caregiving stipends, and live transcription. Accessibility is one of our most visible sponsorships across the entire program — because you are literally helping us make SRCCON available to as many people as possible. + +## 🙌 Break sponsors + +Create spaces for attendees to connect in virtual hallways and hangout spaces. We know that these spaces have created lifelong connections between participants, and extremely meaningful. + +## 👌 Event sponsors + +Help us with all the finishing touches on the event. Show your support by helping us put on what our participants frequently say is "the best conference I've ever been to." + +Each sponsorship includes at least 1 free ticket and different types of visibility and recognition throughout the event (we also offer the chance to sign up for a sponsorship package across several events). [Contact Erika Owens](mailto:erika@opennews.org) for a full kit with pricing and further details. We love chatting with folks to find the best way we can collaborate to welcome your team to our events and make them inclusive for all attendees! + +### What is SRCCON? + +OpenNews has been hosting SRCCON annually since 2014, and added a series of smaller, topical conferences starting in 2017. At SRCCON events, participants come first so they can focus on collaborating on the work at hand. Over this time SRCCON has: + +- Welcomed more than 1,500 participants, with a healthy mix of new and returning attendees each time. +- Hosted over 300 interactive, collaborative sessions on topics ranging from archiving and algorithms to management and self-care. +- Provided scholarship support to help 250 participants and facilitators attend these events. +- Operated with inclusion and accessibility as core design features, providing live transcription, childcare, tasty food and drink for all dietary needs, and a schedule with space to refresh and connect. This year, we're planning to offer digital accessibility across international timezones, and intentional programming for how attendees can digitally connect based on their needs. +- Created a code of conduct and incident response plan that supports attendees and has influenced the journalism community, including ONA and IRE conferences. +- Led to countless job connections, innovative project ideas and collaborations, and new organizational policies on hiring, inclusion, mentorship, workflow, development processes, and more. + +### Who attends and why + +People come first at SRCCON. Each event is set up to allow participants to focus on getting to know each other and learn from the wisdom in the room. About a third of participants also facilitate sessions, leading conversations and skillshares that help people bring new ideas and experience back to their newsrooms. + +
+ +_The SRCCON 2019 audience and program included:_ + +- Half of attendees identify as women and almost a quarter as people of color. +- A quarter of participants are in leadership roles. +- About a third are developers or engineers. +- Other roles include data journalists, designers, product managers, and reporters. +- The diversity of attendees also includes the size and nature of the organizations attendees represent, including staff from large and small companies that are, or work with news organizations—including attendees from tech companies, universities and colleges and more. +- Sessions digging into best practices for all kinds of teams and so many techniques, including developing product teams, editing data, ethical advertising, managing in local news, and more. +- A schedule designed around our facilitated session format that enables attendees to engage deeply in a purposeful way. + +### SRCCON 2019 participants attended because: + +- They wanted to discuss challenges facing their teams every day. The [entire SRCCON schedule](https://2019.srccon.org/schedule) was built from session pitches from attendees, including topics like: technical communication, collaboration, engagement, algorithms, news nerd career paths, security, accessibility, supporting journalists of color, data viz, management, and more. +- They wanted to (and reported being able to!) build stronger network connections, to find new strategies to take back to their newsroom, and to learn more about new tools and tactics to improve their journalism. + +_"You all are leading the way on how to have a great conference that is welcoming for everyone, and someday the tech industry will be so much better off when it adopts what you've done."_ + +_"This was the first conference I've been a part of where I felt I belonged on every level."_ + +_“My job very much straddles the line between technology and the newsroom and in 20 years of being in the newspaper (media) business, this is the first conference I've been to that I felt like was specifically for me. I could contribute meaningfully to every session I went to.”_ + +**Interested in having your company or organization become a sponsor of SRCCON events?** [Get in touch with OpenNews Executive Director Erika Owens today.](mailto:erika@opennews.org) diff --git a/support.md b/support.md index 75cfd96e..38c258db 100644 --- a/support.md +++ b/support.md @@ -7,9 +7,9 @@ share_image: /media/img/srccon_care_logo_share.png title: Care and support description: How we support each other at SRCCON events. main_footer: true +section: support --- - # Care & support at SRCCON events **SRCCON SAFETY HELPLINE:** If you would like to make any reports, please call (267) 540-3177 or email us at [safety@opennews.org](mailto:safety@opennews.org). @@ -18,29 +18,28 @@ The spirit of generosity that animates this community is a big part of what led Here we've adapted a guide for care and support we've used for recent in-person events to work in a virtual setting too. - ## Inviting others into your conversation When telling us why you wanted to come to this event, many of you told us you wanted to meet others who were also working on making change in your newsrooms and teams. -* **Say hi! We are here to meet and learn from one another.** It's a little different jumping into conversation online than in person, but we've setup the conference Slack to help make it easier to meet people interested in similar things as you. -* **Keep space open for others to join.** In-person, we like to follow the [pac man rule](https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2017/aug/2/pacman-rule-conferences/). Digitally, we can support each other by following the same spirit. Especially with a video chat setup, it can be hard to get a word in. If you see someone else trying to get a word in, help make sure they get a chance to speak. If you see someone looking for help in Slack, chime in if you know the answer. -* **If you want to lead, lead!** There's so many ways to start conversations at SRCCON, from spinning up a Slack channel to putting a call out about doing a Netflix party together. If you want to do something (or adjust something—our settings default to adjustable), please do. -* **Lurking is also welcome.** We all have busy phases when we can’t participate actively, or when we just feel shy. That’s ok. It's totally ok to read docs or catch up on the Slack chat without chiming in. There's many modes of participation at SRCCON, do what works for you at the moment. +- **Say hi! We are here to meet and learn from one another.** It's a little different jumping into conversation online than in person, but we've setup the conference Slack to help make it easier to meet people interested in similar things as you. +- **Keep space open for others to join.** In-person, we like to follow the [pac man rule](https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2017/aug/2/pacman-rule-conferences/). Digitally, we can support each other by following the same spirit. Especially with a video chat setup, it can be hard to get a word in. If you see someone else trying to get a word in, help make sure they get a chance to speak. If you see someone looking for help in Slack, chime in if you know the answer. +- **If you want to lead, lead!** There's so many ways to start conversations at SRCCON, from spinning up a Slack channel to putting a call out about doing a Netflix party together. If you want to do something (or adjust something—our settings default to adjustable), please do. +- **Lurking is also welcome.** We all have busy phases when we can’t participate actively, or when we just feel shy. That’s ok. It's totally ok to read docs or catch up on the Slack chat without chiming in. There's many modes of participation at SRCCON, do what works for you at the moment. ## Taking care of yourself -* **"Put on your mask first before assisting others."** It's advice many of us may set aside in our daily life. At SRCCON, we want you to be able to put yourself and your needs first. -* **Listen to yourself.** We've created a schedule with room for breaks and to step away if you need to. If you're body is telling you something, you can find that sustenance, breath mint, or more. We encourage you to listen to other needs you may have, too. Feeling an urge to stretch? Feeling your neck tense up? Want to go for an impromptu walk? Do it. You can mute your video on a Zoom call and go get some water, no problem! -* **You have support, we are here for you.** You're likely to find folks who are facing similar challenges and are available to strategize or distract, if that's what you need. You can lean on this community and network. You are not in this work alone. If you need someone to talk to, the support team is here for anyone who—for any reason—would like to take a moment to process something that comes up anytime during our program. +- **"Put on your mask first before assisting others."** It's advice many of us may set aside in our daily life. At SRCCON, we want you to be able to put yourself and your needs first. +- **Listen to yourself.** We've created a schedule with room for breaks and to step away if you need to. If you're body is telling you something, you can find that sustenance, breath mint, or more. We encourage you to listen to other needs you may have, too. Feeling an urge to stretch? Feeling your neck tense up? Want to go for an impromptu walk? Do it. You can mute your video on a Zoom call and go get some water, no problem! +- **You have support, we are here for you.** You're likely to find folks who are facing similar challenges and are available to strategize or distract, if that's what you need. You can lean on this community and network. You are not in this work alone. If you need someone to talk to, the support team is here for anyone who—for any reason—would like to take a moment to process something that comes up anytime during our program. ## Taking care of each other We hope you're feeling an openness to taking care of your own needs as the priority here. We hope with your own feeling of care and nourishment, that will also open up space for us to take care of each other as well. -* **Hear others.** None of us knows everything, but together we know a lot. We've got a wonderful opportunity over these days to listen and learn from one another. Listen for what other participants are expressing within what they are saying. Listening is a chance to hear invitations and boundaries that allow us to better connect with one another. -* **Respect boundaries.** We may be dealing with difficult topics, and that means we need to be more intentional than ever to make sure everyone is safe and comfortable so we may all bring out our true and best selves. If someone wants or needs to stop a line of conversation, respect their wishes. -* **Working toward justice, together.** Part of how we will make the changes necessary in our news organizations is by changing how we relate to each other, being intentional and actively anti-racist. That happens in a variety of ways, from respecting pronouns to interrogating stereotypes. -* **We all have support.** The entire event is backed by [our code of conduct and safety plan](/conduct). It helps us take care of each other and respond when necessary. +- **Hear others.** None of us knows everything, but together we know a lot. We've got a wonderful opportunity over these days to listen and learn from one another. Listen for what other participants are expressing within what they are saying. Listening is a chance to hear invitations and boundaries that allow us to better connect with one another. +- **Respect boundaries.** We may be dealing with difficult topics, and that means we need to be more intentional than ever to make sure everyone is safe and comfortable so we may all bring out our true and best selves. If someone wants or needs to stop a line of conversation, respect their wishes. +- **Working toward justice, together.** Part of how we will make the changes necessary in our news organizations is by changing how we relate to each other, being intentional and actively anti-racist. That happens in a variety of ways, from respecting pronouns to interrogating stereotypes. +- **We all have support.** The entire event is backed by [our code of conduct and safety plan](/conduct). It helps us take care of each other and respond when necessary. -

Thank you to the AdaCampToolkit for conference self-care, the Open Heroines Slack Rules of Engagement, and to the Facilitation for Liberation Network Gathering for inspiration and resources for this page.

+

Thank you to the AdaCampToolkit for conference self-care, the Open Heroines Slack Rules of Engagement, and to the Facilitation for Liberation Network Gathering for inspiration and resources for this page.

diff --git a/tasks/README.md b/tasks/README.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..8e166b3a --- /dev/null +++ b/tasks/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +# Rake Tasks (Ruby) + +This directory contains Rake tasks that are automatically loaded by the main `Rakefile`. + +## Available Task Files + +### `format.rake` - Code Formatting & Linting + +Format and lint Ruby and non-Ruby files to maintain consistent code style. + +- `rake lint` - Check all code formatting (Ruby with StandardRB + HTML/CSS/JS/YAML/Markdown with Prettier) +- `rake format` - Auto-fix all formatting issues +- `rake format:ruby` - Check Ruby code style with StandardRB +- `rake format:ruby_fix` - Auto-fix Ruby formatting +- `rake format:prettier` - Check non-Ruby files with Prettier npm via NodeJS +- `rake format:prettier_fix` - Auto-fix non-Ruby files + +### `test.rake` - Site Validation Tests + +Comprehensive testing suite for the built site. + +- `rake test` - Run all tests +- `rake test:html_proofer` - Test built site with html-proofer (checks links, images, etc.) +- `rake test:templates` - Check for Liquid template issues +- `rake test:page_config` - Validate page frontmatter configuration +- `rake test:placeholders` - Check for placeholder content (TODO, YYYY, etc.) +- `rake test:a11y` - Test for common accessibility issues +- `rake test:performance` - Check for performance issues +- `rake test:sessions` - Validate session page structure + +### `review.rake` - Post-Deployment Review & Audits + +Review tasks that are intentionally separate from `rake test`. + +- `rake review:external_links` - Validate public/external URLs (slower, network required; useful before launch and periodic link audits) +- `rake review:compare_deployed_sites` - Compare staging vs production HTML output (useful for post-deployment review and release audit) + +`review:compare_deployed_sites` supports extra URL paths that are not in local `_site/`: + +- `EXTRA_PATHS="/legacy-url-1/,/legacy-url-2/"` (comma-separated) +- `EXTRA_PATHS_FILE=path/to/paths.txt` (one path per line, `#` comments allowed) + +Notes: + +- `rake test` intentionally excludes `review:*` tasks. +- Use `review:compare_deployed_sites` after staging/production deploys to audit whether content differences are expected. + +### `outdated.rake` - Dependency Updates + +Check for outdated Ruby gems. + +- `rake outdated` - Check directly used outdated dependencies +- `rake outdated:direct` - Check only direct dependencies from Gemfile +- `rake outdated:all` - Check all outdated dependencies (including transitive) + +### `Rakefile` (root) - Build, Deploy, and Config Validation + +Core project tasks are defined in the root `Rakefile`, including: + +- `rake validate_yaml`, `rake check`, `rake build`, `rake clean`, `rake serve` +- `rake deploy:precheck` +- `rake deploy:staging:dryrun`, `rake deploy:staging:real` +- `rake deploy:production:dryrun`, `rake deploy:production:real` diff --git a/tasks/format.rake b/tasks/format.rake new file mode 100644 index 00000000..7e34a7be --- /dev/null +++ b/tasks/format.rake @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +namespace :format do + desc "Run StandardRB linter to check Ruby code style" + task :ruby do + puts "Checking Ruby code style with StandardRB..." + sh "bundle exec standardrb" + end + + desc "Auto-fix Ruby code formatting issues with StandardRB" + task :ruby_fix do + puts "Auto-fixing Ruby code formatting with StandardRB..." + sh "bundle exec standardrb --fix" + end + + desc "Check non-Ruby files with Prettier (HTML, CSS, JS, YAML, Markdown)" + task :prettier do + puts "Checking file formatting with Prettier..." + sh "npm run format:check" + end + + desc "Auto-fix non-Ruby files with Prettier" + task :prettier_fix do + puts "Auto-fixing file formatting with Prettier..." + sh "npm run format" + end +end + +desc "Check all code formatting (Ruby + other files)" +task lint: %w[format:ruby format:prettier] do + puts "✅ All formatting checks passed!" +end + +desc "Auto-fix all code formatting issues (Ruby + other files)" +task format: %w[format:ruby_fix format:prettier_fix] do + puts "✅ All files formatted!" +end diff --git a/tasks/outdated.rake b/tasks/outdated.rake new file mode 100644 index 00000000..85350df4 --- /dev/null +++ b/tasks/outdated.rake @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +require "yaml" + +namespace :outdated do + desc "Check for directly used outdated dependencies" + task :direct do + puts "Checking outdated direct dependencies from Gemfile..." + sh "bundle outdated --only-explicit || true" + end + + desc "Check for indirectly used outdated dependencies (we can't address these)" + task :all do + puts "Checking _all_ outdated dependencies, including those in gems we're using" + sh "bundle outdated || true" + end +end + +# Default outdated only shows direct dependencies +desc "Check for directly used outdated dependencies" +task outdated: ["outdated:direct"] diff --git a/tasks/paths.txt b/tasks/paths.txt new file mode 100644 index 00000000..1fb41eab --- /dev/null +++ b/tasks/paths.txt @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +/srccon-care-2022/ +/srccon-care-2022/program/ +/srccon-care-2022/sponsors/ +/srccon-heart-2020/ +/srccon-heart-2020/sponsors/ +/share/ +/share/introduction/ +/share/one-pager/ +/share/planning-exercise/ +/share/get-organized/ +/share/case-for-change/ +/share/handouts-tipsheets/ +/share/smart-goals/ \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/tasks/review.rake b/tasks/review.rake new file mode 100644 index 00000000..feeadf42 --- /dev/null +++ b/tasks/review.rake @@ -0,0 +1,252 @@ +require "html-proofer" +require "yaml" + +# Helper module for review tasks to avoid polluting global scope +module ReviewHelpers + def self.fetch_url(url) + uri = URI.parse(url) + + Net::HTTP.start( + uri.host, + uri.port, + use_ssl: uri.scheme == "https", + open_timeout: 10, + read_timeout: 30, + ) do |http| + request = Net::HTTP::Get.new(uri.request_uri) + response = http.request(request) + + raise "HTTP #{response.code}: #{response.message}" unless response.is_a?(Net::HTTPSuccess) + + response.body + end + rescue => e + raise "Failed to fetch #{url}: #{e.message}" + end + + def self.normalize_html(content) + # Remove dynamic content that's expected to differ + normalized = content.dup + + # Remove timestamps and date strings (various formats) + normalized.gsub!(/\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}[T\s]\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}/, "TIMESTAMP") + normalized.gsub!(/\d{1,2}\/\d{1,2}\/\d{4}/, "DATE") + + # Remove session IDs and tracking codes + normalized.gsub!(/session[-_]?id["\s:=]+[a-zA-Z0-9]+/i, "SESSION_ID") + normalized.gsub!(/[?&]utm_[a-z]+=[^&"'\s]+/, "") + + # Remove cache-busting query strings + normalized.gsub!(/\.(css|js|png|jpg|gif|svg)\?v=[a-zA-Z0-9]+/, '.\1') + + # Normalize whitespace + normalized.gsub!(/\s+/, " ") + normalized.strip! + + normalized + end +end + +namespace :review do + desc "Check external/public URLs in the built site (slower, requires network access)" + task :external_links do + # if no _site/, remind user to run bundle exec rake build first + unless Dir.exist?("./_site") + abort "❌ No _site/ directory found. Please run 'bundle exec rake build' first." + end + + # Suppress Ruby warnings from html-proofer dependencies + original_verbose = $VERBOSE + $VERBOSE = nil + + begin + HTMLProofer.check_directory( + "./_site", + { + disable_external: false, + enforce_https: false, + ignore_urls: [ + "http://localhost", + "http://127.0.0.1", + %r{^https://medium\.com/}, # 403s with Typhoeus but checked manually + %r{^https://www\.facebookjournalismproject\.com}, # redirected to meta + ], + allow_hash_href: true, + log_level: :info, + # Add some reasonable defaults for external checking + typhoeus: { + followlocation: true, + maxredirs: 5, + connecttimeout: 10, + timeout: 30, + }, + hydra: { + max_concurrency: 2, # Be gentle with external sites + }, + # optional + # cache: { + # timeframe: { + # external: "1d", # Cache external link checks for 1 day + # }, + # }, + }, + ).run + puts "✅ External link validation passed!" + rescue => e + puts "❌ External link validation failed: #{e.message}" + raise + ensure + $VERBOSE = original_verbose + end + end + + desc "Compare staging vs production site content (requires both sites to be deployed)" + task :compare_deployed_sites do + require "net/http" + require "uri" + + # Load deployment config + unless File.exist?("_config.yml") + abort "❌ _config.yml not found. Are you in the project root directory?" + end + + begin + config = YAML.safe_load_file("_config.yml") + deployment = config["deployment"] || {} + staging_bucket = deployment["staging_bucket"] + prod_bucket = deployment["bucket"] + rescue => e + abort "❌ Error loading _config.yml: #{e.message}" + end + + abort "❌ Staging bucket not configured in _config.yml" unless staging_bucket + abort "❌ Production bucket not configured in _config.yml" unless prod_bucket + + staging_url = "http://#{staging_bucket}" + prod_url = "https://#{prod_bucket}" + + staging_url = staging_url.chomp("/") + prod_url = prod_url.chomp("/") + + puts "🔍 Comparing deployed sites:" + puts " Staging: #{staging_url}" + puts " Production: #{prod_url}" + puts "" + + # Collect paths from built site + html_files = Dir.glob("_site/**/*.html").map { |f| f.sub("_site", "") } + + # Optionally include additional paths that are not present in local _site + # (e.g., legacy/archive URLs still live on deployed environments). + extra_paths = [] + + if ENV["EXTRA_PATHS"] + extra_paths.concat(ENV["EXTRA_PATHS"].split(",").map(&:strip).reject(&:empty?)) + end + + if ENV["EXTRA_PATHS_FILE"] + unless File.exist?(ENV["EXTRA_PATHS_FILE"]) + abort "❌ EXTRA_PATHS_FILE not found: #{ENV["EXTRA_PATHS_FILE"]}" + end + + file_paths = + File + .readlines(ENV["EXTRA_PATHS_FILE"]) + .map(&:strip) + .reject { |line| line.empty? || line.start_with?("#") } + extra_paths.concat(file_paths) + end + + unless extra_paths.empty? + extra_paths.map! { |path| path.start_with?("/") ? path : "/#{path}" } + html_files = (html_files + extra_paths).uniq + puts "➕ Added #{extra_paths.size} extra path(s) from EXTRA_PATHS/EXTRA_PATHS_FILE" + end + + if html_files.empty? + abort "❌ No HTML files found in _site/. Please run 'bundle exec rake build' first." + end + + puts "📄 Found #{html_files.size} pages to compare" + puts "" + + differences = [] + errors = [] + checked = 0 + + html_files.each do |path| + checked += 1 + print "\rChecking #{checked}/#{html_files.size}..." if checked % 10 == 0 + + staging_full_url = "#{staging_url}#{path}" + prod_full_url = "#{prod_url}#{path}" + + begin + staging_content = ReviewHelpers.fetch_url(staging_full_url) + prod_content = ReviewHelpers.fetch_url(prod_full_url) + + # Normalize content for comparison (remove timestamps, session IDs, etc.) + staging_normalized = ReviewHelpers.normalize_html(staging_content) + prod_normalized = ReviewHelpers.normalize_html(prod_content) + + if staging_normalized != prod_normalized + # Calculate similarity + staging_size = staging_normalized.length + prod_size = prod_normalized.length + size_diff_pct = + ((staging_size - prod_size).abs.to_f / [staging_size, prod_size].max * 100).round(1) + + differences << { + path: path, + staging_size: staging_size, + prod_size: prod_size, + size_diff_pct: size_diff_pct, + } + end + rescue => e + errors << "#{path}: #{e.message}" + end + end + + puts "\n✓ Checked #{checked} pages" + + # Report results + if errors.any? + puts "⚠️ Errors encountered (#{errors.size}):" + errors.first(10).each { |e| puts " - #{e}" } + puts " ... and #{errors.size - 10} more" if errors.size > 10 + end + + if differences.any? + puts "\n 📊 Content differences found (#{differences.size} pages):" + + # Show significant differences (>10% size change) + significant = differences.select { |d| d[:size_diff_pct] > 10 } + if significant.any? + puts "⚠️ SIGNIFICANT differences (>10% size change):" + significant + .first(20) + .each do |diff| + puts " - #{diff[:path]}" + puts " Staging: #{diff[:staging_size]} chars | Production: #{diff[:prod_size]} chars | Diff: #{diff[:size_diff_pct]}%" + end + puts " ... and #{significant.size - 20} more" if significant.size > 20 + puts "" + end + + # Show minor differences + minor = differences.select { |d| d[:size_diff_pct] <= 10 } + if minor.any? + puts "ℹ️ Minor differences (≤10% size change): #{minor.size} pages" + if minor.size <= 10 + minor.each { |diff| puts " - #{diff[:path]} (#{diff[:size_diff_pct]}% diff)" } + end + puts "" + end + + puts "\n💡 Review these differences to ensure staging changes are intentional before promoting to production." + else + puts "✅ No content differences detected between staging and production!" + end + end +end diff --git a/tasks/test.rake b/tasks/test.rake new file mode 100644 index 00000000..6962f401 --- /dev/null +++ b/tasks/test.rake @@ -0,0 +1,288 @@ +require "html-proofer" +require "yaml" + +namespace :test do + desc "Check the built site with html-proofer (internal links only)" + task :html_proofer do + # if no _site/, remind user to run bundle exec rake build first + unless Dir.exist?("./_site") + abort "❌ No _site/ directory found. Please run 'bundle exec rake build' first." + end + + # Suppress Ruby warnings from html-proofer dependencies + original_verbose = $VERBOSE + $VERBOSE = nil + + begin + HTMLProofer.check_directory( + "./_site", + { + disable_external: true, + enforce_https: true, + ignore_urls: [ + %r{^http://(localhost|127\.0\.0\.1)}, + %r{^http://weareallaweso\.me}, # zombie https site + ], + allow_hash_href: true, + log_level: :error, + }, + ).run + ensure + $VERBOSE = original_verbose + end + end + + desc "Check common Liquid template issues" + task :templates do + errors = [] + warnings = [] + + # Find files with potentially broken Liquid templating + Dir + .glob("**/*.{html,md}", File::FNM_DOTMATCH) + .each do |file| + if file.start_with?( + "_site/", + ".git/", + ".github/", + ".vscode/", + "node_modules/", + "TROUBLE", + "READ", + ) + next + end + + content = File.read(file) + lines = content.split("\n") + + # Check each line for issues + lines.each_with_index do |line, idx| + line_num = idx + 1 + + # Check for potentially unescaped {{ }} in href (without proper Liquid quotes) + # This catches: href="{{variable}}" but NOT href="{{ page.url }}" + if line =~ /href="\{\{[^}]+\}\}"/ && line !~ /href="\{\{\s*\w+\.\w+.*\}\}"/ + warnings << "#{file}:#{line_num}: Possibly unescaped Liquid in href:\n #{line.strip}" + end + + # Check for site.root_url that should be page.root_url (common mistake) + if line.include?("site.root_url") && !file.include?("_includes/prior_events.html") + errors << "#{file}:#{line_num}: Using site.root_url (should be page.root_url):\n #{line.strip}" + end + end + + # Check for missing endif/endfor + if_count = content.scan(/\{%\s*if\s+/).size + endif_count = content.scan(/\{%\s*endif\s*%\}/).size + if if_count != endif_count + errors << "#{file}: Mismatched if/endif (#{if_count} if vs #{endif_count} endif)" + end + + for_count = content.scan(/\{%\s*for\s+/).size + endfor_count = content.scan(/\{%\s*endfor\s*%\}/).size + if for_count != endfor_count + errors << "#{file}: Mismatched for/endfor (#{for_count} for vs #{endfor_count} endfor)" + end + end + + if errors.any? + puts "❌ Template errors:" + errors.each { |e| puts " - #{e}" } + exit 1 + elsif warnings.any? + puts "⚠️ Template warnings (may be false positives):" + warnings.each { |w| puts " - #{w}" } + puts "\n💡 Review these to ensure Liquid syntax is correct" + else + puts "✅ Templates look good" + end + end + + desc "Check page-configuration props (section/permalink/title) in markdown" + task :page_config do + errors = [] + warnings = [] + + Dir + .glob("*.md") + .each do |file| + next if /^[A-Z]+\.md$/.match?(file) + next if file == "AWS_authentication.md" || file == "SITE_README.md" + + content = File.read(file) + if content =~ /\A---\s*\n(.*?)\n---\s*\n/m + fm = YAML.safe_load($1) + warnings << "#{file}: Missing 'section' field" unless fm["section"] + warnings << "#{file}: Missing 'permalink' field" unless fm["permalink"] + # warnings << "#{file}: Missing 'title' field" unless fm['title'] + else + errors << "#{file}: No page-config args found" + end + end + + if errors.any? + puts "❌ Page-config errors:" + errors.each { |e| puts " - #{e}" } + exit 1 + elsif warnings.any? + puts "⚠️ Page-config warnings:" + warnings.each { |w| puts " - #{w}" } + else + puts "✅ Page-config valid" + end + end + + desc "Check for placeholder content in built site" + task :placeholders do + placeholders = [] + + Dir + .glob("_site/**/*.html") + .each do |file| + content = File.read(file) + + # Common placeholders + %w[TODO YYYY DATES PLACE VENUE CITY].each do |placeholder| + if content.include?(placeholder) + # Count occurrences + count = content.scan(/#{Regexp.escape(placeholder)}/).size + placeholders << "#{file}: Contains '#{placeholder}' (#{count}x)" + end + end + end + + if placeholders.any? + puts "⚠️ Found placeholder content:" + placeholders.uniq.each { |p| puts " - #{p}" } + else + puts "✅ No placeholder content found" + end + end + + desc "test for common accessibility issues" + task :a11y do + issues = [] + + Dir + .glob("_site/**/*.html") + .each do |file| + content = File.read(file) + + # test images have alt text + content + .scan(/]+>/) + .each do |img| + unless img.include?("alt=") + issues << "#{file}: Image without alt attribute: #{img[0..50]}..." + end + end + + # test for empty headings + if %r{]*>\s*}.match?(content) + issues << "#{file}: Empty heading tag found" + end + + # test lang attribute exists + unless /]+lang=/.match?(content) + issues << "#{file}: Missing lang attribute on " + end + + # test for form inputs without labels + content + .scan(/]+>/) + .each do |input| + next if input.include?('type="hidden"') + unless input.include?("aria-label=") || input.include?("id=") + issues << "#{file}: Input without label or aria-label: #{input[0..50]}..." + end + end + end + + if issues.any? + puts "⚠️ Accessibility issues (#{issues.size}):" + issues.first(15).each { |i| puts " - #{i}" } + puts " ... and #{issues.size - 15} more" if issues.size > 15 + else + puts "✅ Basic accessibility tests passed" + end + end + + desc "test for performance issues" + task :performance do + warnings = [] + + Dir + .glob("_site/**/*.html") + .each do |file| + size = File.size(file) + warnings << "#{file}: Large HTML file (#{size / 1024}KB)" if size > 200_000 + + content = File.read(file) + + # test for excessive inline styles + inline_styles = content.scan(/<[^>]+style=/).size + if inline_styles > 10 + warnings << "#{file}: #{inline_styles} inline style attributes (consider external CSS)" + end + + # test for large base64 images + if content.include?("data:image") + warnings << "#{file}: Contains base64-encoded image data (hurts performance)" + end + end + + # test CSS file sizes + Dir + .glob("_site/**/*.css") + .each do |file| + size = File.size(file) + warnings << "#{file}: Large CSS file (#{size / 1024}KB)" if size > 100_000 + end + + if warnings.any? + puts "⚠️ Performance warnings:" + warnings.each { |w| puts " - #{w}" } + else + puts "✅ Performance tests passed" + end + end + + desc "Validate per-Session page structure" + task :sessions do + errors = [] + warnings = [] + + # Implement session-specific tests here + # e.g., check for required frontmatter fields, URL structure, etc. + # (Left as an exercise for future implementation) + puts "✅ Session page structure tests not yet implemented." + + if errors.any? + puts "❌ Session page structure errors:" + errors.each { |e| puts " - #{e}" } + exit 1 + elsif warnings.any? + puts "⚠️ Session page structure warnings:" + warnings.each { |w| puts " - #{w}" } + else + puts "✅ Session page structure tests passed" + end + end +end + +# Make `bundle exec rake test` run all tests +desc "Run all tests" +task test: [ + "test:html_proofer", + "test:templates", + "test:page_config", + "test:placeholders", + "test:a11y", + "test:performance", + # 'test:layouts' + ] do + puts "\n" + "=" * 60 + puts "✅ All validation tests passed!" + puts "=" * 60 +end