
Sometimes I look around the room at a conference and am just awed by the intelligence and energy and generosity of everyone in the room. The annual NICAR conference, to me, is one of the embodiments of what is possible when you get smart people together to actually learn, teach, and talk with one another. Though NICAR is not focused on the news nerds community exclusively, it is one of the few events that brings a huge chunk of that group together in person. We learn and mentor one another, but don't necessarily get a lot of time to build, to do hands-on work with those colleagues at other newsrooms.
So this year, OpenNews is teaming up with the Pop Up Archive and Newseum to host a designathon the Sunday of NICAR. We'll take a brief roadtrip from Baltimore to DC to work together at the Newseum on the topic of archiving news apps. The idea was sparked by Jacob Harris and a discussion he ran at Newsfoo. On Source, Jacob laid out the archiving conundrum facing data journalists: