At MozFest you’ll hear the word “open” a lot – open data, open news, open knowledge, open science, open web and so on. I wondered, though, what does “open” really mean? A few years ago, I found out about open source software. My understanding at the time was that open sourcing a project was simply allowing other people to see its code. That simple understanding was enough to get by. But after hearing “open” prepended...
Ideas |
In the community of media and journalism innovators, it is commonly accepted that releasing software with an open-source license is the best way to maximize the chance that others will use your code. Yet, by any measure, the vast majority of open-source software goes nowhere. That's why we've spent some time at Knight Lab trying to understand the dynamics of software adoption — especially the factors that cause open-source software to be widely adopted. After...
Knight Lab has three major buckets of output – technology, events and editorial – all dependent on the other two for success. Immediately following the announcement of our new blog, my inbox was flooded with questions like these: Is Knight Lab making a content play? Are you all trying to be Nieman Lab? Reporters' Lab? Short answer: No. As this journalism nerd lab evolves, we have found it necessary to expand the definition of our output....
Over the weekend we released SoundCite, a tool that lets anyone easily include inline audio in their stories. We have open-sourced our code on GitHub and would encourage you to contribute in any way you wish. Fork it, send us pull requests or just let us know what you think. SoundCite helps users create short audio clips from files on SoundCloud. Users insert those clips into the text of a story with an embed code...
We wanted to take advantage of the great brains assembled at last week's News Foo event, so we proposed a panel to suss out "big questions in journalism" that the lab should tackle. As might be expected from an unconference, the conversation ranged a lot more widely than our official topic. For starters, a number of folks had general questions about how the Lab works: Who are your stakeholders? Will your tools mostly be journalist-facing...