This course will become read-only in the near future. Tell us at community.p2pu.org if that is a problem.
This four-week course will facilitate a fire hose of new thinking about the nexus of software, journalism and news. Over the next few weeks, you’ll be working on your own ideas to help shape the future of the news industry that we’ll invite you to pitch.
A knowledge (and love) of the open web is helpful for this course…an interest in learning more is essential.
WEBCRAFT
Submit using this form: https://ova.wufoo.com/forms/learning-lab-final-project-submission/
Question: In the final proposal outline, it asks "how (your project) could leverage off a newsroom's existing infrastructure."
It's a conceptual infastructure, not a specific one, that we're referring to here. For example, if your proposal required an new contenent-managemet system it would not be 'leveraging off a newsroom's existing infastructure.'
So, really, we're saying: Expect that there is existing infastructure in place -- people, technology, processes, etc. -- and your project should take that into account.
Ideas that require throwing everything out and starting from scratch are unlikely to be adopted. That's the key point.
Hope that helps a bit.
Phillip.
I've been working on my proposal and from the comment left by Phillip on my blog I decided to include the slides as individual pictures at the end of the post. In that way, the 'show and sell' tops (YouTube video of screencast talking through slides) and tails (slides put in as pictures) the post. It's made it much better as the video is lost by the end due to scrolling, now the images are directly under the brief. I also think it'll be much easier for the markers to be able to zoom into the slides rather than pause the video.
So I encourage you all to do the same!
+1
I reformatted the brief as checklist for quick reference, includes various criteria and considerations noted. Sharing in case you find it useful too.
I like the way your brain works :) This is very helpful; thanks for sharing.
This is really useful. Thanks Engin! 
Yes, thanks for the work. I used it as well.
nice thx
I add my thank you to the growing lits of thank yous :-)
Not actually my final proposal, but a step in the right direction.
Spent the better part of this late, late night (or rather, early, early morning) trying to justify to myself the validity of my idea.
I'm convinced. But that's not saying much.
I'd really love for all of you -- with your amazing talent, experience and creative judgment -- to critique and give feedback on my project idea. [Thanks to Phillip for getting me to make the Disqus jump!] Summary/rant/overview can be found HERE: http://bit.ly/pcXCVk.
Much, much appreciated!
PS: It comes with pretty messy hand-drawn sketches...
I thought I'd be annoying and point out that the length of this final project description is ~775 words (~400 for the actual structure outline), leaving at best a 3:1 ratio between length of the description of things to include in the final description and the actual description itself ;-)
Good point! ;) I think we're just trying to say: BE CONCISE.
We have a small team that will be reviewing all 60+ final projects, and we're trying to get it done quickly so we can let people know whether they are moving on to the next phase or not. The longer the final projects are, the more time it requires to review.
So, try to keep it as close as you can to the limit. We're not going to be hard-asses about it, however.
Phillip. :)
I've just thought of a concept which might help the non-journalist, non-newsroom experienced Learning Lab-ers refine their proposal for the intended audience. I call it "Minimum Viable Person". Journalists have to think in terms of people (audience) as well as product (article). So when you're making a product for news organisations (be it for the end user or the journalist) think "What is the least possible thing someone could do with my software? Does that provide something innovative, exciting and useful?". If they have to do multiple things you have a high entry threshold and the answer will be nothing. You have to offer a multitude of users something, even if it's part of the product. When representatives from BBC, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Ziet Online and Boston Online look at your software proposals they're not going to see the whole package you've lovingly made. They're going to think "What's the smallest possible thing a person will get from this and will that entice them to do more with it?". So along with Minimum Viable Product think Minimum Viable Person!
Where's the +1 button? :)
That was good!
Thank you so much. This is going to come in very handy!
I had some questions about the final project. Phillip asked me to post these here so we can discuss them altogether, so here they are:
Good questions. I'm especially interested in questions 1 & 2. I'm trying to craft my final project content so that multiple audiences will see the benefit, but I'm also trying to focus on the benefits to newsrooms.
I think it would also be helpful to see how others are creating their final project pitches. Here's a sneak peek of my prototype section, in case any of you are looking for an example of how one #moznewslab student—with the generous collaborative support of others—is attacking this project. http://trina.ch/curious/
I'd also love some feedback as to whether or not I'm heading in the right direction.
Hi Trina,
Thanks for posting this - it's pretty cool to see how people are approaching the project differently. Although our ideas aren't related, seeing how you are thinking is actually pretty helpful for inspiration.
I'm especially interested to see that you went a less formal route than I'm going. Maybe that means I can loosen up!
I think you're right, we should be sharing and caring. All our pitches will be better for it. At this point, I'm trying to share what I have in my blog posts because other than a lot of words and half a mockup, I'm nowhere near where I maybe should be. I blame the fact that every lecture changes the idea a little!
I will post something soon :)
Hi Engin,
Thanks for your questions -- hopefully these answers will help you in writing your assignment.
The projects will be evaluated (in the context of your other work in the lab) over a series of meetings among the Mozilla learning lab team and Mozilla staff involved with the challenges. But your work will be shared publicly and may be discussed with our news partners which is why we ask you to consider a wider audience when discussing your project.
We'll be discussing how well your project addresses the criteria outlined in the assignment outline. Additional considerations include whether your project addresses a specific need or problem, your approach to the problem and how well you communicate your ideas . Sorry I can't be more specific here.
Details are still being finalized for the Berlin hackathon -- perhaps Phillip can weigh in here.
We definitely encourage a collaborative approach to your project -- and you should discuss the collaborative aspects of your project and/or work approach if it's material to your project. Group projects will most definitely be considered -- and are encouraged.
Do we have an official place to offer help on projects or pitch potential collaborators... After the final project is turned it's too late?
Trina, that's ace :) thanks for sharing. You've made the concept really clear (love the Bananthropists) and the flow chart also demonstrates how you've throught the concept through.
I guess I would also want to know how newsrooms might be able to tackle the issue of people using the tool to highlight PR campaigns, or issues of reputation generally - if this tool was widely adopted then there might be lots of competing stories - how might newsrooms then filter the stories?
Also, I was interested in this advantage: "More information about geographically segmented consumer interests" - does that mean that users would also be able to specify what type of news they want to know about in a specific area?
Thanks Alex.
Re: "In the final project page, it says "And, keep in mind that your project idea is solely for the purposes of this lab – to the extent that your idea is short-listed, you won’t necessarily be required to work on it in Berlin." Can you clarify this a bit further? What happens to the short-listed idea?"
While we're still working out the specifics of the Berlin event, it's safe to say that we'll probably encourage the twenty people invited to Berlin to collaborate on a smaller number of prototypes vs. having each person work on their own project (at the risk of not completing any prototypes).
For example, we might do this by having groups of two to four participants (plus the other developers that attend the event) work together on a smaller number of prototypes over the four-five day period.
The prototype itself will not be the ultimate deciding factor for who is invited to become a Knight-Mozilla fellow. Factors like ability to work in the open, think & design iteratively, practice collaboration, and so on will be a lot of what we're looking for in Berlin.
Ultimately, Berlin is not about individuals (even though it's a competitive process), it's about finding a cohort of people that can work together, across newsrooms, for the next year on Open Web + Journalism ideas.
Hope that helps a bit. Let em know if you have any quesitons.
Phillip.
Thanks for the feedback, Charlie.
For your first question, are you referring to potential abuse by commercial interests? For example, a fast food chain starts tagging Mondays as a special event because they offer a $1 discount on fries and they think that's "newsworthy." Yep, I've thought about that and I think there would need to be some sort of restriction on commercial abuse -- perhaps a wikipedia-like information checking system (although that system isn't perfect, either).
For the second question, I think that it would be pretty easy to give consumers the ability to filter by topic, as well. If there's a protest at a baseball stadium and the user is only interested in social action (not sports), that person shouldn't be notified if the Cubs won a game around the same time. It will take some creative problem solving, but I believe that we can some up with a good solution.
Todays webinar from Christian Heilmann came with some very interesting information and the realisation that my idea has already been done at some level and is a mature opensource project.
Is it ok for our projects to extend and build upon existing projects?
It's not only "okay," but encouraged. :)
Can we password-protect our final project? Releasing design prototypes to the general public raises some IP concerns.
It's certainly not encouraged.
Like the development of Firefox, we fundamentally believe that working in the open benefits everyone.
Is there a specific concern that we can address?
Phillip.
For example, could we use uservoice.com for feedback? Like P2PU! ; )
Sure, you can use something like User Voice for feedback, but... what would be more interesting, IMHO, would be asking the question "What is the equivalent of User Voice in the context of news & journalism?" Could you make something similar that lives in the browser and provides either reporters, or end-users, with new capabilities or funtionality?
Phillip.
In general, no worries, methinks. I had the same complaint as you guys did, and voiced it on the MoJo email list, after which Ben clarified exactly what the MoJo team wants: "We should clarify that Django and Rails and the like are OK. This rule is here so we stay grounded on the web."
On the other hand, we can't really expect Knight/Mozilla to get really excited about supporting our idea if people would have to use paying external services or buy commercial licenses before they can even get started using an app of ours. So I think that's where the line is.
Yep. That's roughly the line. :)
Totally agree with @Laurian Gridinoc. Please be a bit lenient on the rear end .. er, I mean backend.
I have a question related to this constrain:
"Your idea can only use web-native technologies: the HTML5 stack, CSS, Javascript, you name it -- any open standard will do. No Flash, iOS or other proprietary SDK. We want cross-platform experiences for everyone, no matter their device." (see the Constrains section at https://drumbeat.org/en-US/challenges/open-webs-killer-app/full)
on how does it apply to the backend? I understand I'll have to use an open source stack too, but can I use third party services like Thomson Reuters' OpenCalais, Zemanta, etc. for the prototype? What about infrastructure ones, like Amazon Web Services like SQS, SDB.
For most of those services, I can explain how to replace them with open source equivalents, but for the sake of the prototype it might be way faster to use commercial ones; for example for websockets communication in between browsers I could use Pusher, and point to Socket.IO as open source equivalent.
