Idea Lab

Introducing Switch, A News Game About New York City's Energy Gap

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our latest (and last, for now) news game, Switch, is live. It is no Energyville but we think it is pretty awesome. Not only is it live, the source code and installation instructions are already available. With gadgets guzzling evermore energy, New York City faces a looming energy gap. New Yorkers will have to cut back on our electric use or start generating a lot more power. Our game lets people explore the options that are on the table, along with a few that aren't. Should the city ban air conditioning? Harness the tides? Go nuclear? Warning: the game is...

• September 30, 2009
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Improving Access to Information is One Way to Make Reporting Cheaper

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

When he's not toasting escapism, our tireless editor Mark Glaser has been asking why reporting costs so much. I can't tell you much about investigative reporting (a $400,000 product of which started the conversation), except to say that six figure salaries do add up. But I can tell you that when it comes to local reporting, improved access to information could make a big dent in the expense of getting a story written. If you want to take a look at distribution of discretionary funds by the New York City Council, you have to start with a 400-page PDF full...

• September 9, 2009
• 1 comment

EveryBlock, MSNBC.com and the General Public License

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

By now everyone has heard the news: EveryBlock is now part of MSNBC.com. And anyone familiar with the Knight News Challenge knows about Knight's open source requirement: projects developed with Knight funding must be released under an open source license -- it is one of the terms of funding. EveryBlock released their source code a few months ago, but Biella Coleman posed an excellent question Since the code is under a GPL3, doesn't MSNBC.com have to also keep it under the same license if modified? Or can they take the code base since Everyblock is a web-based service? We at...

• August 18, 2009
• 8 comments

Source Code for Balance

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Okay, so you haven't been waiting for this with baited breath the way everyone was waiting for the EveryBlock code. Nonetheless, after a few months of wrangling on and off with Git Hub I finally sat down and worked through a bunch of nagging authentication issues and managed to post the code for Balance! our game about balancing city budgets. Assuming we haven't made any terrible mistakes (I already spotted one little error. If you spot it too you can buy me a beer!), we'll post cleaned out versions of the other games we've developed in the next week or...

• August 10, 2009
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Crowdsourcing Keeps Coming

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

At Gotham Gazette, we're gathering our bearings and preparing work on a pretty great crowdsourcing project (though this business of talking something up before its even in beta testing does make the developer in me nervous) and I'm increasingly interested in really understanding what makes crowdsourcing work. It is everywhere these days, and it certainly is one way that we can be turning the Internet into a really effective reporting tool. Two new projects I'm watching? Adopt-a-Stimulus -- which I first caught wind of on Twitter -- asks individuals to pick one TARP project and track it. Steve Katz tried...

• July 15, 2009
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Bump: Getting on the Ballot in NYC

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gotham Gazette released our fourth game in our Knight-funded game series this week. Bump, which revisits the maze theme from our Budget Maze sends players through a whole new labyrinth: ballot access. If you can't imagine how ballot access is even remotely interesting, I suggest playing the game! Seriously: we knew we wanted to do two things: to build a game that would stay relevant through the New York City campaign season and to find a topic that would fit nicely into the existing code base for one of our earlier games. Ballot access is an important and relatively obtuse...

• July 8, 2009
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Another Budget Game

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I like to think that Gotham Gazette's Balance! inspired the folks over at the Washington Post to create an even better budget game of their own but I am open to the possibility that they came up with it all on their own. Take a look at both if you haven't already. The Post's works a lot (a lot!) like our game, but I'd say the layout that they came up with is a far more effective way to display the available information. On the other hand, I really like the way we handled revenue, by creating a menu of...

• June 29, 2009
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Stuck in a Maze

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, we were honored with an Honorable Mention in the first Knight News Game Award competition, for our (pretty excellent) budget maze. The honor was made sweeter with the knowledge that our little maze -- we estimate the budget at $65,000 -- was up against a massively multi-player multi-issue networked news game project with a budget just over tenfold ours. With competition like that, an Honorable Mention is honor a-plenty. All the finalists in the contest were invited to share their games at the Games for Change Expo where I watched a handful of people play our game for...

• June 12, 2009
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Media Cloud and Calais

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Berkman Center launched a project called Media Cloud this week, a toolkit that facilitates analysis of trends in the news. The sample visualization on the site now shows world maps that illustrate the number of mentions each country got in Talking Points Memo, the New York Times and the BBC, respectively. I, of course, immediately tried to create a visualization comparing Gotham Gazette to a few other local papers. Lo, though: no Gotham Gazette in Media Cloud. I've been hearing about Calais lately. I at least got the memo that I'm supposed to know what it is. I gather...

• March 12, 2009
• 7 comments

Ease of Use Matters

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We spend a lot of time talking about why people don't comment more on Gotham Gazette stories. By "a lot of time," I actually mean about 20 minutes every three weeks, but nonetheless as a project with a mission to improve public discourse and engage New Yorkers in public policy conversations, we gauge our impact in part by how many people are reading and responding to our reporting. When popular blogs reference our reporting we see lively and contentious conversations. But rarely do we get much discussion on our own site. This week, though, I made an interesting discovery. After...

• March 11, 2009
• 8 comments

Change Tracker

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This one is for the "wish I'd thought of that" files. Brian Boyer at ProPublica got the bright idea to write a wee widget that uses Versionista to track changes to a handful of White House websites including whitehouse.gov. Since I heard about Change Tracker on Twitter I've been following it on Twitter. They're still getting their bearings: I was surprised to see that the biography of Andrew Jackson was edited on March 4. and couldn't resist looking up the edit, which turned out to be a change to the site navigation. Not all that interesting. Luckily, ChangeTracker had a...

• March 6, 2009
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More Thoughts on TimesOpen

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I spent last Friday admiring the views of the Hudson from the 15th floor of the NY Times building, alongside Lisa Williams. Thought it was billed as a "hack day" there wasn't much actual hacking going on that I could find. There was a steady stream of presenters, most of them funny, all of them plenty worth listening to. It was a day well spent, but not a day spent hacking. Fair warning: I wasn't trying to capture the essence of the day so much as taking notes that struck me as relevant to my own work, with an emphasis...

• February 23, 2009
• 6 comments

Balance the Budget: Gotham Gazette Game 3

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

After a series of false starts on an energy consumption game we decided to skip ahead to a timely game of balancing the budget . The game is actually a reprise of a popular budget balancing game we created in 2003 -- we're regularly asked for the source code for that game, and while we do have it, it is a bear of a maze of a mess that no self-respecting programmer would want to try to wade through in search of numbers and texts to change. For this game, we did use Flash, which made it significantly easier to...

• February 12, 2009
• 1 comment

Partnerships to Watch (and a Crowdsourcing Project I'm Envying)

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A small local website from Brooklyn has partnered with NBC to build neighborhood pages for a handful of NBC markets. I haven't followed Outside.in for more than stoop sales (which is New Yorkerese for garage sales or yard sales since most New Yorkers have neither yards nor garages), but it looks like they've taken up EveryBlock's approach to local news aggregation as well, though they want posts explicitly geo-tagged for their maps. Speaking of EveryBlock, they recently announced that they're working with the New York Times to track Times reporting on political districts. Presumably they'll be taking advantage of the...

• January 29, 2009
• 1 comment

Who's Watching the Elections?

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Every election, Gotham Gazette publishes a last minute voters guide. We almost always include every local race along with a round up of our coverage of the issues in that district and the race itself. From Surrogate Court and judicial convention delegates to NYC congressional races; and sometimes we're the only publication in town that can tell you whether there's a race in your precinct. Every election, we also provide a roundup of basic information for voters: how to find your polling place, voting rights, special instructions for first time voters. And, who to call to report problems at the...

• October 24, 2008
• 1 comment

Wiki Our Next Segment

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I was pretty sad when Radio Open Source went off the air, because I thought they were tugging at the loose threads of something interesting, and they never got to properly unravel it. Breaking news and reporters getting leads from the short message service Twitter are interesting phenomena but I don't think they can create the kind of community that you need to bring an audience into reporting. Radio Open Source never quite got it -- they had great comments but the community stayed tiny. Still, they were breaking new ground. I've been keeping an eye on The Takeaway for...

• September 24, 2008
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Public Information Done Right

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I spent Tuesday in Washington DC at Websites Without Walls. A nine hour trip for a four hour meeting always makes me nervous, but we're passionately interested in seeing New York City match Washington DC's astounding wealth of open public data. Never knew that the District publishes an astounding wealth of usable public information? Me neither. I made the trip to find out more. While New York City busies itself posting PDFs of city agency documents within 10 days of their publication, the District of Columbia's Office of the Chief Technical Officer is churning out no less than 261 live...

• September 10, 2008
• 1 comment

Maps Worth Looking At

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gotham Gazette learned this week that two of our recent projects, Who's Running for What and The Garbage Game were listed among the notable Knight-Batten entries this year. Most notably, that means we aren't finalists. Some of the finalists, though, are pretty noteworthy. One I hadn't seen before is JD Land, which maps real estate development projects (proposed, completed and underway) in Washington DC's Southeast area. It is pretty smart stuff, and it reminded me that I've been looking for an excuse to point people to another mapping project that has really taken off: Habitat Map is a crowd sourcing...

• August 6, 2008
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Games with Legs

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've gotten a small handful of emails commending me for my fine work on our latest game, the NYC Voting Arcade -- the only problem is that we launched that game in 2004, long before I got here. We did link to it in a story earlier this week about state campaign filings, though, and the voting arcade games are altogether timeless (unless you happen to know that Doug Kellner left the city Board of Elections in 2005). This has gotten me thinking again about games, gaminess and complexity. Most of our voting arcade games are downright silly. Most of...

• July 17, 2008
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Using a Database to Track NY Politicians

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few weeks ago, I asked a question that I'm still chewing on: what good is all this data ? Sitting the programmers down with reporters is a great advance over abandoning them to some cold dark dungeon, but I think we've got a ways to go to come up with really smart uses of data and database driven content. So, here's one idea: what about a database that tracks local representatives and their plans once they've been pushed out by term limits: the next election will see the first term-limits enforced turnover on New York's City Council. Here's what...

• April 17, 2008
• 2 comments

What Good is All This Data?

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Imagine a website that would show you, not just how many copies of some book are available for sale from Amazon, but which libraries near you carry the book. Oh wait, that already exists . Between WorldCat and Steven's thoughts on the Sacramento Bee salary database I'm thinking a lot about what really good data driven content looks like. How could we, as news reporters, use our readers as more than passive observers in meaningful ways. WNYC has been doing some interesting work with crowdsourcing and I'd like to see some ideas for introducing the concept to public salary databases...

• March 19, 2008
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Is it a Game Without Moving Parts?

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're knee deep in our second game and I realized that I never came through with my promised recap of our last minute technical decisions on the Garbage Game. For one thing, as I mentioned, we jumped ship from OpenLaszlo in the interest of expedience. As I've noted here before, the game design field isn't exactly awash in programmers eager to work in anything but Flash. We found a local programming shop that was game for the challenge, though, and sat down with them to iron out our technical specifications. They'd never worked in OpenLaszlo before, but it looked like...

• March 3, 2008
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