#knight-mozilla

Sonya Song, Knight-Mozilla Fellow at the Boston Globe, has been analyzing how users interact with news posted by the Boston Globe on Facebook. She's just released new findings, which are detailed in a post on Nieman Lab.

She writes:  

"I’ve been digging into psychology literature for inspirations. Overjoyed, I’ve discovered some theories and findings that are portable to the social media environment:

Two modes of thinking, fast and slow, attract different types of attention.

Sharing on social media is

Charged with emotions,

Bounded by self-image management, and also

By concerns over relationship with others."

By Justin Ellis

Knight Foundation and Mozilla have announced a new class of fellows who will take their hacker skills into newsrooms around the US and across the globe.

The new class of five Knight-Mozilla Fellows has just been announced at the Mozilla Festival in London, and their bios include some of the sort of descriptions you might expect: media scholar, activist, interactive developer, code monkey. This third class of fellows will be embedded in top news organizations in the U.S. and abroad and work to connect their code-driven backgrounds to journalistic goals.

The fellows, who are part of the broader Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project, will work inside newsrooms for 10 months, assisting the organization with established projects, building new ones, or performing research. While the original idea for the fellowship was to have coders help shepherd newsrooms into the digital era by extolling the virtues of new technology, the program has become more dynamic, said Dan Sinker, the head of OpenNews.

By Jeff Moriarty, VP of Product

The Globe is pleased to that through its partnership with the Knight Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation, we will have a developer joining our team next year to help build out future projects at Boston.com and Bostonglobe.com.

Dan Schultz is currently a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab studying in the Information Ecology group. At the Lab, he is also a Research Associate at the Center for Civic Media and says he has learned how to make almost anything. Before coming to MIT Dan received a B.S. in Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University, and was awarded a Knight News Challenge grant in 2007 to write about “Connecting People, Content, and Community.”

Here's a photo of all five new fellows being announced today in London.

Thank you, #MozNewsLab and #ONA11, for testing out Roundtable.

It was a great conversation on G+ for journos. And really interesting to see how my theory of "discussion phases" played out. 

In a preliminary attempt of cultivating Roundtable's after value, I've used Storify to craft a summary of the hour-long Twitter chat.

[ This text is reposted from the original version at the Technovica Lab blog, which is offline due to a DNS-related problem. Some links that would be broken have been removed and graphical elements are not included in this repost. I hope to have it fully restored early this week. This was originally reposted at my personal Tumblog when posting here failed.]

"Few developers understand the non-technical issues that go into an open-source project."

— JOHN RESIG  |  jQuery . Khan Academy

A common theme has emerged among the Knight-Mozilla Lab lecturers: Culture, its dynamics and how we approach it will be the most difficult aspect of building our projects.

Every one of the lectures so far has either had culture as a key focus, or mentioned culture and issues related to it as a key point. Among the latest ones, John Resig spoke about open source project development, management, and community, and his lessons from developing jQuery.

As he talked about the challenges he and his team faced, I couldn't help but reflect on how starkly the open source development approach contrasts with newsroom or news media culture. The former is an open, accessible framework with a bottom-up, grassroots structure. The latter is a closed, restricted framework with a top-down, hierarchical structure.

Although news organizations are now starting to collaborate with their communities in a more open manner, even large ones may take a token approach, asking people to submit a photo or to follow social media accounts.  I have little doubt that substantive collaboration and implementation  will be an issue for many — especially those who have not experienced or don't understand news and journalist culture. I saw and experienced it where I worked. In particular, developers were the strange, mysterious wizards who made things work but journalists didn't know how and were suspicious or indifferent to their ideas.

However, adding Resig's principles will strengthen my project — a collaboration tool for journalists that bridges the industrialized and developing worlds — and could help it foster a more open, connected, community-driven culture by first extending the trust journalists have for professional peers.

LESSONS

Resig raised important points, some of which are already elements of my project:

Understand what your users are trying to achieve. It will help you to create a better product. I talk to journalists all the time about their needs.

Make sign-up as painless as possible. It would require little more than a phone or fax number, or an e-mail address.

Treat every user as a potential contributor. The concept behind the tool is contribution, so it would be easy to migrate that behavour to bug reports, documentation, feature requests, etc., per Resig.

Other points will require further thought:  

Make documentation as accessible as possible. I initially thought the tool would roll out to English-speakers first but now see that may limit uptake and introduce cultural bias into the tool's design. Full documentation will have to be in multiple formats and languages.

Provide places for people to ask questions. My focus was so tight on my archetypal user, I didn't consider all of the channels by which users might contact me. Set-up is underway. 

Answer questions every day. You can't be lazy about it. Now planned: Answering support questions.

Have an open process. Make decisions with public input from the community. I already take community input privately. This will expand as the project unfolds.

[ This text is reposted from the original version at the Technovica Lab blog, which is offline due to a DNS-related problem. Some links that would be broken have been removed and graphical elements are not included in this repost. I hope to have it fully restored early this week.]

"Few developers understand the non-technical issues that go into an open-source project."

John Resig

jQuery,  Khan Academy

A common theme has emerged among the Knight-Mozilla Lab lecturers: Culture, its dynamics and how we approach it will be the most difficult aspect of building our projects.

Every one of the lectures so far has either had culture as a key focus, or mentioned culture and issues related to it as a key point. Among the latest ones, John Resig spoke about open source project development, management, and community, and his lessons from developing jQuery.

As he talked about the challenges he and his team faced, I couldn't help but reflect on how starkly the open source development approach contrasts with newsroom or news media culture. The former is an open, accessible framework with a bottom-up, grassroots structure. The latter is a closed, restricted framework with a top-down, hierarchical structure.

Although news organizations are now starting to collaborate with their communities in a more open manner, even large ones may take a token approach, asking people to submit a photo or to follow social media accounts.  I have little doubt that substantive collaboration and implementation  will be an issue for many — especially those who have not experienced or don't understand news and journalist culture. I saw and experienced it where I worked. In particular, developers were the strange, mysterious wizards who made things work but journalists didn't know how and were suspicious or indifferent to their ideas.

However, adding Resig's principles will strengthen my project — a collaboration tool for journalists that bridges the industrialized and developing worlds — and could help it foster a more open, connected, community-driven culture by first extending the trust journalists have for professional peers.

LESSONS

Resig raised important points, some of which are already elements of my project:

Understand what your users are trying to achieve. It will help you to create a better product. I talk to journalists all the time about their needs.

Make sign-up as painless as possible. It would require little more than a phone or fax number, or an e-mail address.

Treat every user as a potential contributor. The concept behind the tool is contribution, so it would be easy to migrate that behavour to bug reports, documentation, feature requests, etc., per Resig.

Other points will require further thought:  

Make documentation as accessible as possible. I initially thought the tool would roll out to English-speakers first but now see that may limit uptake and introduce cultural bias into the tool's design. Full documentation will have to be in multiple formats and languages.

Provide places for people to ask questions. My focus was so tight on my archetypal user, I didn't consider all of the channels by which users might contact me. Set-up is underway. 

Answer questions every day. You can't be lazy about it. Now planned: Answering support questions.

Have an open process. Make decisions with public input from the community. I already take community input privately. This will expand as the project unfolds.

Wow, MozNewsLab is flying by. Already halfway done? My goodness.

This week, we heard from International Developer Evangelist Chris Heilmann, jQuery creator John Resig and UX designer Jesse James Garrett. The focus was on the open Web platform, open-source projects and user experience design in the context of both information and technology products.

Some takeaways from this week's lectures: 

The open Web should be OS-independent. Even browser-independent. The Web's UI should actually be just like Iron Man's.

We've witnessed a shift in technology -- towards HTML5 and native browser functionality -- but this needs to be mirrored by a shift in people's habits. Down with all plugins!

jQuery makes the complex simple. It's a simple API for manipulating webpages cross-browser. Find an element (by CSS selector), then do something with it. Boom. Action.

Any open-source project boils down to creating a community of users: lower barriers to entry, get them hooked and give them room to grow.

UX: design with human experience as an explicit outcome; design with human engagement as an explicit goal. Simple enough, right? Oh, and don't forget the Elements.

Design tells a story, but you have to switch between the lens of information products and technology products.

Designed correctly, products create a conceptual space for the user, facilitating engagement.

There exists a social relationship between a user and a complex product that exhibits behavior. Product personalities engage with user emotions and psychology (i.e. Playing with my iPad makes me feel all hip and cool and Apple). Srsly. Look how happy these guys are: