Idea Lab

Your PANDA Is Here, and It Demands Data! (Beta 1 Launch Details)

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're excited to, for the first time, put PANDA into users' hands! After roughly six months of development, we are releasing our first beta version. This release implements nearly all of our "must have" features. We've written several times (1, 2, 3) about specific parts of PANDA in development, but until now haven't paid much attention to the user interface of the application itself. With this release we feel we've reached a level of usability that will demonstrate exactly why you need a PANDA in your newsroom. Store your datasets ... and find them again One common problem with handling...

• February 16, 2012
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Feed Your PANDA With New APIs and Excel Import

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last time I wrote it was to solicit ideas for PANDA's API. We've since implemented those ideas, and we've just released our third alpha, which includes a complete writable API, demo scripts showing how to import from three different data sources, and the ability to import data from Excel spreadsheets. The PANDA project aims to make basic data analysis quick and easy for news organizations, and make data sharing simple. Try Alpha 3 now. Hello, Write API Our new write API is designed to be as simple and consistent as possible. We've gone to great lengths to illustrate how...

• January 5, 2012
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PANDA Project Releases Alpha 2 (and Needs Your API Ideas!)

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last Friday, we closed out our eighth iteration of PANDA Project development and published our second alpha. We've added a login/registration system, dataset search, complex query support and a variety of other improvements. You can try out the new release now by visiting our test site here. The PANDA project aims to make basic data analysis quick and easy for news organizations, and make data sharing simple. We've incorporated much of the feedback we got in response to the first release, though some significant features, such as support for alternative file formats, have been intentionally put off while we focus...

• December 8, 2011
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PANDA Project Releases a First Alpha

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

In September, the complete PANDA team met at ONA in Boston to review our survey responses, organize them into features, and plot a development road map for the year. The PANDA project aims to make basic data analysis quick and easy for news organizations, and make data sharing simple. On our wiki, you can see transcribed versions of the documents we created during that planning session: Users, needs and use cases Features, prioritized Release schedule, with features The last link is particularly important, because it documents that today is an important day: Today is Alpha 1 release day! PANDA is...

• November 4, 2011
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PANDA Survey Shows Newsrooms Swimming in Data

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The first PANDA task officially checked off our to-do list was the drafting of our Future Users Survey. We distributed a link to the survey via Twitter, the NICAR-L mailing list and email. The PANDA project aims to make basic data analysis quick and easy for news organizations, and make data sharing simple. The survey covers a range of topics that we felt were crucial to understanding our future users, including the technical aptitude of the staff in their newsrooms, the quantity of data they work with, and possible barriers to using the software. So far, we've had 77 responses...

• September 21, 2011
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