The lobby of the Marriott in downtown Baltimore is already crowded with news nerds and the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting annual conference has only just begun. A bunch of OpenNews staff and Fellows are in town and we've got a lot of exciting stuff to share with the NICAR community this year. This is your cheat sheet to where to find OpenNews and what you'll want to chat with us about.
Sessions
OpenNews staff and Knight-Mozilla Fellow alumni are participating in several sessions:
- Thursday, 3pm - Mike Tigas will be on panel entitled Docs! Docs! Docs!
- Friday, 9am - Ryan Pitts will co-lead a demo entitled A tour of the new Census Reporter
- Friday, 10am - Mike will co-lead a hands-on training entitled Liberate data from PDFs with Tabula
- Friday, 11am - Noah Veltman will be on a panel entitled Creating maps: Principles, mistakes and potential
- Friday, 3pm - Ryan Pitts will be on a panel entitled DataViz for everyone: A practical guide to going responsive
- Saturday, 3pm - Noah Veltman and Erika Owens will be on a panel entitled Crossing the language boundaries across your newsroom: journo to dev and back
- Sunday, 10am - Brian Abelson will co-lead a demo entitled Build your bot army
OpenNews News
We've got a lot to talk with you about:
- Last week, we launched Source Jobs, a listing of journalism code job postings. During NICAR, talk to any OpenNews staff person about how to get your organization signed up to list jobs.
- We have the date and location picked for the first ever SRCCON (Source Conference, an event specifically for the news nerds community focused on making and thinking together). We'll see you in Philadelphia on July 24 and 25.
- You're excited about the lightning talks on Friday and so are we. Enjoy the energy in the ballroom, and then check Source over the next two weeks for articles expanding on the ideas covered in the talks.
- As NICAR closes, we're going to launch yet another feature on Source: Guides. You’re going to be heading back to your job, and guides will offer some context for putting the new things you learned this weekend into practice.
- News partners are central to our work, from our Fellowships and Hack Days to a new program we're developing this year to be more engaged with teams in smaller newsrooms. Wherever you're based, we want to talk with you about opportunities for collaboration.
OpenNews Event
We're also organizing our own event during NICAR, in partnership with the Pop Up Archive. On Sunday, join us at the Newseum for a design day around the topic of archiving news apps. We've arranged for a van to transport people from the conference hotel in Baltimore to DC on Sunday morning. Join the road trip and then spend the day working with archivists, educators, coders, and journalists to sketch out some ways to handle the conundrum of keeping news applications accessible over time.
Say Hello!
Many OpenNews staff, plus current and alumni Knight-Mozilla Fellows are in town. OpenNews staff in the crowd include me, Erin Kissane, Ryan Pitts, and Kio Stark. Fellows at the event include 2014 Fellows Ben Chartoff, Harlo Holmes, Brian Jacobs, Aurelia Moser, Gabriela Rodriguez, Marcos Vanetta; 2013 Fellows Brian Abelson, Annabel Church, Sonya Song, Mike Tigas, Noah Veltman. And, if you'd like to say hi but cannot locate a person or are attending NICAR virtually, you can always ping us @opennews or @source.