Idea Lab

At Hacktoberfest, Forget the Ode, Show Your Code

by Phillip Smith

“The Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership is all about producing kick-ass open-source code, recipes, and ideas to solve real problems, in real newsrooms, with real teams. We do this by tapping into communities of journalists and developers, and getting them to design, invent, and learn with us. And also by deploying fellows into news organizations that have a culture of innovation and resonance in their space.” — Dan Sinker, Knight-Mozilla Partnership program lead Twenty #MozNewsLab graduates are arriving in Berlin this week to take part in a four-day event that we’re calling #Hacktoberfest. This is the third stage of a...

• September 28, 2011
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Stop Yammering and Start Hammering: How to Build a 'Maker Space' for News

by Phillip Smith

Over the next four weeks, a very interesting experiment is going to unfold. The most exciting part about it is that it’s entirely open source: You can observe it, interact with it, and improve it. We’re calling this experiment the “learning lab.” It’s the second stage of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, which kicked off in May with an online competition that solicited 300 news innovation ideas from people around the globe. With the competition complete, it’s time put on our mad scientist lab coats and start mixing things up. Our aim is to find an antidote to “yammering” about...

• July 12, 2011
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Comments Are Dead. We Need You to Help Reinvent Them

by Phillip Smith

Let’s face it — technically speaking, comments are broken. With few exceptions, they don’t deliver on their potential to be a force for good. Web-based discussion threads have been part of the Internet experience since the late 1990s. However, the form of user commentary has stayed fairly static, and — more importantly — few solutions have been presented that address the complaints of publishers, commenters, or those of us who actually read comments. Publishers, for the most part, want software that will stamp out trolls and outsource the policing to the community itself (or, failing that, to Winnipeg). Commenters, on...

• May 12, 2011
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