I am so excited to be heading back to the Allied Media Conference this year. And not just that, but I get to facilitate a session with Knight-Mozilla Fellow alum Gabriela Rodriguez while two of our current fellows Tara Adiseshan and Francis Tseng facilitate a session of their own.

I have only been to the AMC once before, but I’ve been wanting to get back ever since. Personally, it was an experience where I built relationships with activists in Philly during a long car ride, learned about political perspectives I never encountered in college, saw amazing art in museums and on buildings throughout Detroit, and generally had my assumptions and comfortable resting places challenged. It was the first time I had been to a conference that had personal and professional significance. Since then, I’ve encountered hints of the AMC spirit, such as from events with Aspiration Tech, who are facilitating the community technology network gathering on Thursday.

At the Mozilla Foundation’s annual festival for the open web, OpenNews organizes two tracks of hands-on hacking and building focused on journalism and data. The call for proposals is open till August 29, so get pitching!

What happens at MozFest?

MozFest takes over the Ravensbourne building in London for 2.5 days on October 24-26. Ravensbourne’s nine stories become home to a physical representation of the possibilities of the open web: from teaching to music, science to journalism, 1,000 participants dig deep into the content, code, and questions that drive the open web. Rather than slide-driven lectures, MozFest sessions are collaborative, interactive, and focused on uncovering new possibilities for what it means to work online, in the open.

The application deadline for the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship is this Saturday, August 16 at midnight. You may have already read the info on the website and caught up with what fellows have experienced, what next year’s news organizations have planned, how we’ve set up the program to be welcoming to a variety of life circumstances, and how this fellowship can reshape your career.

But you might still be thinking, could that really be me?

Yes, yes it could. If you apply. We often get asked “what makes an ideal applicant?” Over the past three years, we’ve found that what sets a candidate apart is evidence that, as OpenNews Director Dan Sinker puts it, they are a “creative problem solver.” This means, you’re someone who enjoys solving problems through code–whether that be with a captivating design testing the limits of your JavaScript skills or with writing a python script to parse a giant data set or with programming an arduino to monitor what the hell is happening in the back of your fridge. :o)

Sometimes I get really, extremely excited about things and I have trouble understanding why my effusive explanations and verbal fireworks are not compelling to people. I talked a bit about this difficulty in explaining things in a brownbag at Azavea today. (Thanks for the invite!)

Recently, my difficulty in translating enthusiasm into persuasion has been highlighted in my (mostly unsuccessful) campaign for everyone I know or encounter in the world to begin watching “The Americans.” No matter how loudly or slowly I speak, most people just shrug and do not immediately begin watching the pilot on Amazon Prime.

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.

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.

October of all of the things ended with an extraordinary Mozilla Festival. We got to welcome 5 more Knight-Mozilla Fellows and had to create a whole new track to accommodate all of the excellent session ideas. Here’s a quick rundown of what happened at MozFest and some plans that have grown out of the event.

OpenNews at MozFest by the numbers:

• 2014 Fellows: 5 (joining 13 Fellows from 2012 and 2013)

• Tracks: 2 (journalism and open data)

Today the Knight Foundation announced its renewed commitment to Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, with a $4 million grant. That’s a whole lotta money. Big news. It’s an investment not in a product, but in a community.

Earlier this year, the CEO of the Knight Foundation publicly asked for feedback about the Knight News Challenge and how to help their grantmaking have more impact. If I may be so bold: this is it. OpenNews has plans to build some amazing stuff, but more than that, this project is about acting as the connective tissue in the journalism code community. It exists to meet people where they are already at and support them in deepening their engagement, their skills, and their leadership in this community. It’s rare that an organization has the chance to focus on building connections between people, institutions, and projects. But that’s how we get to spend the next three years.