Idea Lab

Try Basecamp to Organize Tools for Projects

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For the past several years I've been involved in a variety of projects ranging from education to startups. All have involved collaboration, and in most cases the people involved were not in a single location.One tool has risen above the others for helping keep projects running smoothly. It's called Basecamp, an online collaborative-organizing system, and it's gaining adherents all the time.Basecamp was created by the team at 37signals, a company that offers a suite of Web-based applications aimed at helping you get things done. 37signals is also the crew behind Ruby on Rails, an open-source Web development framework that has...

• July 2, 2008
• 1 comment

13 Ways to Talk to a Programmer

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

[With apologies to Wallace Stevens.] If you decide to venture beyond talking about how your news organization's site should work into actually changing how it does work, there's one essential skill you'll have to learn: how to talk to a programmer. Most nonprogrammers have no idea how to communicate their idea for a new feature or a whole new website in a way that's going to be useful to the person who's actually building that site. Here are thirteen tips to get you started on the road to fluency: Learn how to write a spec. One of the biggest frustrations...

• April 30, 2008
• 1 comment