(And I was only kidding about the expletives. I can’t believe you fell for that!)

1. An intro: You get what you give — open-source journalism has to be about more than just producing code in the contact of news, it should also be about community.

2. Hard-Coding Community: Continuing with the community theme, Dan points out that there are healthy journalism communities, and some nascent programmer-journalist communities, but — largely — news organizations are still working on their code alone.

3. Are our systems for learning making the grade?: The speed of change in the academy isn’t meeting the speed of innovation on the Web. Journalism education needs to be improved, from high schools to universities and beyond. (With some commentary by Matt Waite, Derek Willis, Micheal Cory, and Greg Linch.)

4. Making a New Reality: Building on Jonthan Stray’s post “Journalism for Makers”, Dan proposes that “making” is working, but that it needs to be taken further. Specifically, he points out the need for something between one-off “hack days” and one-year fellowships.

5. The 2011/12 Knight-Mozilla Fellows: Announcing the first cohort of Knight-Mozilla fellows — Mark Boas, Cole Gillespe, Laurian Gridinoc, Nicola Hughes, and Dan Schultz. Having had the opportunity to watch these five people work towards these fellowships for the last six months, I could not be more proud. Congrats & well deserved!

Dan slipped-in a “thanks!!!” for the early work I did getting the Knight-Mozilla partnership off the ground in 2010. I’ll return the favour and say back to Dan: Starting a project is the easy part. Making it successful is hard. So, a very big thanks to you Dan for taking the wheel and driving the car in such awesome directions. :)

With the fellows announced and preparing to head to their respective newsrooms, I’m looking forward to exploring where we can take this next year.

Have ideas? Hop on the community-mojo mailing list and send us a note.

• The adventure kicked-off with a Hacks/Hackers and Mozilla run “hack day” at the Online News Association conference. There’s a great summary of the event on the Hacks/Hackers site, and I put together a 4-minute video summary for your viewing pleasure.

• Two days later, the new Knight-Mozilla program lead, Dan Sinker, kicked off a great lunch keynote session that explored “Open source in the newsroom” with Brian Boyer, Jacqui Cox, and Al Shaw. I managed to audio capture Dan’s introductory comments, which really provide a lot of insight into Dan’s vision for the program. (Unfortunately, I also managed to leave my equipment pouch at the soundboard, containing several microphones, as I rushed to pack up to head to the airport. Ug.)

• Dan and I hit the skies to Berlin that afternoon to prepare for a week-long prototype-building event that became known as “Hacktoberfest”. I managed to get a quick post up on PBS Idealab about Hacktoberfest and how it fits into the Knight-Mozilla program, which you can find here.

• There’s lots of follow-up and wrap-up work to do from Hacktoberfest — posting photos and video from the event, etc. — which will get published as time permits in the coming weeks. If you just want a quick taste of what the Hacktoberfest participants were working on, take a look at the Hacktoberfest wiki pages or at the Github organization that links to each of the participants’ repositories.

• I also suspect that there will be more posts from the participants themselves, like this one by Trina Chiasson, and ongoing tweets with the #hacktoberfest hash tag on Twitter. There are also some posts coming out from the news partners, which we’ll also try to pull together into a bigger update in the coming weeks.

Next steps

So, what are the next steps? Well, here’s a super-quick brain dump:

• The Knight-Mozilla Fellow selection is now underway and is scheduled to be concluded in October.

• Fellows will be invited to the Mozilla Festival in November. You should come too.

On my end, I’ll be heading back to the UK to run a hack day with the Association of Online Publishers UK that will focus on HTML5 in the context of multi-platform publishing. The aim is to produce some great prototypes and convince a whole bunch of UK-based publishers that they should be joining us at the Mozilla Festival and thinking about how to introduce open-source innovation into their operations.

I’ll also be working to do a thorough post-mortem on the #MozNewsLab experiment, and — in the process — trying to sketch out some ideas for improving the next series of Knight-Mozilla learning labs.

Lots to think about. I better get to it. :)

We’re just one day away from the closing registration for the Hacks/Hackers hack day at the Online News Association conference. If you’re going to be in Boston on Thursday and have not registered for the hack day yet, let this be your final reminder to go forth and register for what is sure to be one of the most exciting and wildly competitive events of the whole week.

Just to ratchet the spirit of competition up a few notches, we’ve confirmed an all-star cast of individuals who will be judging your work at the end of the day. The judging panel currently includes:

• Beth Davidz, AOL
• Mark Coatney, Tumblr
• Miranda Mulligan, Boston Globe
• Kathryn Hurley, Google
• Tyson Evans, The New York Times

And, should your team find itself in one of the top spots, you’ll also get a shout out at the Knight-Mozilla keynote lunch during the ONA conference on Saturday.

On top of great judges, and great exposure for your team, we’ve also rounded up some swag & prizes from Rovi, dotCloud, Github, Infochimps, and (of course!) Mozilla.

All are welcome

Come on out and join other hacks and hackers for this exciting day of making and building. Don’t hold back if you’re a hack, not a hacker, as there will be lots to do throughout the day for people of every skill level.

Go register now.

If that’s not enough to entice you, here are just a few of the organizations that are registered to come:

• Thompson Reuters
• The New York Times
• Ottawa Citizen
• WNYC
• Scripps Howard
• MIT
• Tableau Software
• Harvard Press
• La Nacion
• Globalnews.ca
• And many, many more…

Show us your APIs

What are your favourite APIs? Perhaps your organization has an API to offer to hack day participants? Perhaps you have your own toolbox of data feeds that you rely on every day? Either way, we’re looking for your help to compile a list of news-focused APIs that hack day participants can use to rapidly prototype their ideas.

We’ve started a public Google Doc over here. Feel free to add to it and we’ll be circulating it on Thursday morning.

Hope to see you on Thursday. It’s going to be #awesome.

This summer managed to fly right by, and this fall is lining up to be pretty darn exciting too. It’ll all get kicked off with the Hacks/Hackers Hacking @ ONA11 event. Together with our friends Chrys Wu of Hacks/Hackers and Matt Carrol of the Boston Globe (and one of the organizers behind The Boston Hack Day Challenge), Mozilla is helping to pull together a kick-ass day of hacking and making on September 22nd — the day before the annual Online News Association conference.

The ONA conference on its own is a not-to-be-missed event (I’ve heard it referred to as South-by-Southwest for journalism nerds) that brings together more than 900 people from news organizations across North America and around the world. I had the opportunity to attend the ONA conference in 2006 when it was in Toronto and managed to connect one-on-one with folks like Anil Dash and Rob Curley, and many other people doing incredible work in the field of journalism-meets-technology. That sold it for me.

However, you don’t need to be going to ONA11 to come to the Hacks/Hackers Hacking @ ONA11 event. All are welcome. Registration is just $20.

So far we have people registered from:

• Thompson Reuters
• The New York Times
• Ottawa Citizen
• WNYC
• Scripps Howard
• MIT
• Tableau Software
• Harvard Press
• La Nacion

Don’t wait until the last minute; we only have 100 spots available! Register today.

Chrys, Matt, and I are working hard to get the word out, and to bring in a fantastic line-up of sponsors and developer/advocates from platforms like Reuters Connect and Rovi. If you can help get the word out, or you’re a news-related technology vendor in the Boston area that would like to send a developer that can help with the integration of your service or API, please get in touch.

We’ve also just confirmed that my own personal favourite Platform-as-a-Service company, dotCloud, will be joining the event as a sponsor. The other event sponsors include: Microsoft, Mozilla, Knight Foundation, and Rovi. All that to say, we should have some great food and awesome prizes.

The theme for the hack day is broadly going to be about “News APIs,” and we’re about to start collecting a large list of APIs and data sources for participants to draw from (fingers crossed that Infochimps joins as a sponsor of the event!), but you can feel free to come to the hack day and work on just about anything relating to technology & news, reporting, or journalism. Non-coders are encouraged to attend, and we’ll have lots of suggestions for what you can work on too. This is as much of a “hacking on ideas” day, as it is about building software.

So, if you’re attending ONA11, please join us on Thursday, September 22nd for what is sure to be a fast-paced, idea-packed, day of MakerCulture in action. And, if you live near Boston, please consider making the trip to the rather-awesome Microsoft Nerd Center to meet newsroom developers from around the world for a day of hands-on software building.

Drop me a line if you have quesitons, suggestions, or feedback. And, get registered!

Today’s list starts off with Chris Keller’s ‘nwsmkr’ idea, because I accidentally missed it the first time around — sorry, Chris! :)

Here we go — fourteen fifteen more ideas aimed at news engagement, reporting or journalistic challenges by the 2011 #MozNewsLab:

1. Chris Keller’s nwsmkr
   

2. James Greenaway’s Open News Player
   

3. Jeremy Gilbert’s Newscaster

   Newscaster

   View another webinar from JeremyGilbert

4. Samuel Huron’s 4 small ideas to improve journalism (No video :( )

5. Dan Schultz’s ATTN-SPAN
   

   ATTN-SPAN Intro from Dan Schultz on Vimeo.

6. Travis Kriplean’s GrowUp
   

   Helping web commenting GrowUp by supporting listening from Travis Kriplean on Vimeo.

7. Jamie King’s SPARKD (No video :( )

8. Rhiannon Coppin’s Proof
   

9. Artem Dudarev’s Locovidi
   

10. Sedef Gavaz’s New News - creating connections
    

11. Bharath Channakeshavaiah’s Newstribute (No video :( )

12. Corbin Smith’s OpenCan
    

13. Maura Youngman’s Filter Bubble
    

14. Philipp Tsipman’s Datamapper
    

And, last but certainly not least:

1. Katie Zhu’s Roundtable
   

   Roundtable: A Web platform connecting people, news and ideas. from Katie Zhu on Vimeo.

That concludes the final project submissions from the 2011 #MozNewsLab participants. Twenty of these individuals will be invited to the next phase of the program — a five-day “code sprint” in Berlin. The sprint will bring together these individuals with Mozilla developers and our news partners with the aim of further developing software prototypes. It’s going to be an amazing week.

Invitations will be going out next week and we’ll have an announcement about who’s going to Berlin shortly thereafter.

Unfortunately (well, fortunately for me!), I’m heading off on vacation on Thursday, so you’ll want to keep your eye on Planet Mojo for updates.

(These second group of twenty submissions received, sorted by submission date. I’ll post the final batch tomorrow.)

1. Jason Spingarn-Koff’s CrowdCam
   

2. Cole Gillespie’s geo journalism
   

3. Seth Vincent’s story hub

4. Matt Terenzio’s Follow This
   

5. Michael Wells’ Discoverer
   

6. Mark Boas’ Hyperaudio Pad
   

7. Shaminder Dulai’s VidScribe
   

   Introducing VidScribe from Shaminder Dulai on Vimeo.

8. Andy Jenings’ Opine
   

9. Jordan Wirfs-Brock’s The Infinite Story
   

   MoJo Pitch: The Infinite Story from Jordan Wirfs-Brock on Vimeo.

10. Laurian Gridinoc’s PLESPER
    

    PLESPER 01 from Laurian Gridinoc on Vimeo.

11. Kabir Soorya’s Legend (video)

12. Mark James’ New ways for a news website to publish updated articles and opinion pieces
    

13. Lucas Cioffi’s QiQo: Quality In, Quality Out
    

14. Rhiannn Coppin’s Proof
    

15. Saleem Khan’s Investigate Net
    

    Investigate Net MozNewsLab proposal from Saleem Khan on Vimeo.

16. Dan Whaley’s Hypothes.is: The Internet, peer-reviewed.
    

17. Neil Dawson’s The News Tree
    

    The News Tree from Neil Dawson on Vimeo.

18. Julien Dorra’s MetaFragments
    

19. Tathagata Dasgupta’s REVEAL
    

20. Engin Erdogan’s LinkingNews
    

There you have it: twenty more software ideas aimed at news engagement, reporting or journalistic challenges by #MozNewsLab — use it as your inspiration for today. And stay tuned, there is still more to come.

(These are the first twenty submissions received, sorted by submission date. I’ll post more on Monday.)

1. Juan Gonzalez’s Tribal Mix
   

2. Laura Hilliger’s Newsie
   

3. Manuel Pinto’s MyStories - News Recommendation Platform
   

4. Nicholas Doiron’s FollowFrost
   

5. John Bell’s Re:Post (video)

6. Regnard Raquedan’s Wikified News Dashboard
   

7. Nicola Hughes’ The Big Picture
   

8. Nicole Cifani’s Pop! A Metric System for the Linked Economy
   

   Sellin’ it: Pop Metrics for the New Data Economy from Nicole Cifani on Vimeo.

9. John Tynan’s Nearby News (HTML5 presentation — requires Firefox, or Chrome)

10. Cody Shotwell’s IncentivEyes (cashed version)
    

11. Miguel Garcia’s People Powered News
    

    MoJo Proposal - People powered news from Miguel García on Vimeo.

12. Trina Chiasson’s Curious (video)

13. Marian Liu’s Opinionator
    

14. Amy Zerba’s News Gist
    

15. Charlie Pinder’s Multiplicity, news simplicity – a platform for aggregating, visualising and sharing news
    

16. Kersten Riechers & Tobias Reitz’s Corrigo
    

1. Chris Keller’s nwsmkr
   

2. David Bello’s NewsApp
   

3. Stijn Debrouwere’s Squire (mock-up)

4. Raynor Vliegendhart LikeLines
   

This is the tip of the iceberg — just the first twenty submissions received. There are still thirty-five to go.Stay tuned.

One week ago today, the final lecture in the #MozNewsLab series was delivered by none other than Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do, respected media critic, and Director of the new Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism in The City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism.

Two days earlier, #MozNewsLab participants heard from Evan Hansen, Editor In Chief of Wired.com.

From metrics and mobile, to the link economy and rapidly changing “atomic parts” of journalism, nothing less than the future of news and publishing itself was the focus of the fourth and final week in the lab.

In the immortal words of Internet publishing guru Gary Vaynerchuk: They crushed it.

You can find Evan’s talk here and you can find Jeff’s here.

Sadly, with those two talks delivered, the organized parts of #MozNewsLab are starting to wind down.

Fear not, followers, there’s still lots of activity on Planet MozNewsLab.

And, after the last handful of the final projects have arrived, we’ll be posting a gallery of final projects by the lab participants.

In the meantime, here are three great posts about #MozNewsLab:

• #MozNewsLab week three: Five tips on collaborating in the newsroom

• Prototypes, Visualizations Take Shape in Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab

• Transparency, iteration, standards: Knight-Mozilla’s learning lab offers journalism lessons of open source

More soon.

Week three of the #MozNewsLab is all wrapped up.

I’m almost experiencing a pang of sadness that we only have a few days to go until the lab is concluded. It really has flown by too quickly.

Of course, that sadness is offset by two things:

1. Twenty participants will be invited to the next phase of the program: a five-day event in Berlin focused on building software prototypes.

2. Having the opportunity to get out and enjoy what’s left of this amazing summer! :) My guess is that all of the people involved in #MozNewsLab — the particpants, and the faculty — are looking forward to a few days off.

First things first…

Last week we turned the corner from a focus on technology to a focus on journalism, news, and reporting. All of the guest speakers were asked to share their experiencing of where and how technology is impacting their newsrooms, or what changes are underway at news organizations today in the context of technology.

The week was kicked off by Shazna Nessa, Director of Interactive at the Associated Press in New York. Shazna shared how the AP is changing — how they are trying to break down silos and formalize technology in the newsroom, as well as introducing new skills and pushing toward new forms of interactive news presentation.

You can watch Shazna’s lecture here.

Following Shazna was Mohamed Nanabhay, Head of Online at Al Jazeera English. Mohamed delivered a mile-a-minute lecture on the speed at which Al Jazeera English has moved into our consciousness, and what that has meant for their news delivering infrastructure. Mohamed also dived into questions about sources, fact checking, verification, and the role of user-generated content in Al Jazeera English’s reporting work.

You can watch Mohamed’s lecture here.

Closing out the week’s lecture series was Oliver Reichenstein, CEO of Information Architects. Oliver delivered a 10,000 foot view of the changes underway in news organizations from the perspective of one of the world’s leading design agencies — an agency that has been responsible for some high-profile re-designs, successful software products, and innovative thinking on the future of news.

Oliver’s talk highlighted the tension between design considerations of news sites, and the business considerations that are often in contrast. You can watch Oliver’s lecture here.

We’re in the final sprint. The assignments from last week are starting to flow in to the #MozNewsLab Planet, and many of them are heading in the direction of the final project that is due on Friday.

Yesterday, we heard from Evan Hansen; Tomorrow we hear from Jeff Jarvis.

It’s been a whirlwind month. I hope you’ve enjoyed following along.

We wrapped up week two of the lab last Friday. Here’s a quick recap:

The first lecture last week was a shot-in-the-arm of open-Web goodness: The Mozilla Foundation’s Executive Director Mark Surman talked about the broader Mozilla + Journalism initiative, touched on Why Mozilla cares about news, and introduced out guest speaker, Christian Heilmann.

From there, Heilmann — a developer ‘evangelist’ at Mozilla — took participants on a whirlwind tour of the State of the Browser in 2011. HTML5, CSS3, new APIs, WebGL — you name it, he covered it. You can find the lecture online here: recording, notes, and slides.

Next up was none other than John Resig. Resig is implicated in more successful open-source software projects that you can shake a stick at. He’s been leading the jQuery project for more than five years now, and has learned a lot about the ‘Open Source Process’: the ins-and-outs of building great software and a great community that supports it. John shared those learnings with the lab — it was an incredibly insightful voyage through the history of jQuery, and John’s tips on creating successful open-source software community.

You can find the lecture online here: recording, notes, and slides.

Jesse James Garrett — the ‘Father of AJAX’ — joined us on Friday to deliver the final lecture of the week. His talk focused on the conceptual model for thinking about successful interactive experiences, what he calls the ‘Elements of User Experience’. I must admit, I was quite excited to hear Jesse speak, as I’ve been a big fan ever since reading his book many, many years ago. Jesse expanded quite a bit on the early models of user experience that he pioneered and ofter many insightful new ideas about how to approach the experience of a software project or product.

You can find the lecture online here: recording, notes, and slides.

We’ve just kicked off week three. Hope you’re following along. There’s still time to send a ‘message in a bottle’ to the lab.

Last but not least, Mozilla’s Media, Freedom and the Web festival is really starting to come together. If you’re interested in the nexus of the open Web and media production, you may want to mark your calendar.

So, in lieu of some suitably witty update, here’s a quick re-cap of the first week’s lectures:

The week kicked off with a lecture by the renowned interface designer, Aza Raskin. Aza recently held the position of Creative Lead for Firefox, and he’s now working on a start-up called Massive Health.

Aza’s lecture focused on designing in the open and rapid prototyping. You can find the slides here, or watch the recorded lecture (with synced slides) here. The #MozNewsLab participants also took great notes here.

On Wednesday, the lab heard from journalist-entrepreneur Burt Herman. Burt shared his life experiences — from his time as journalist with the Associated Press, to his current adventures as co-founder of the award-winning journalism tech start-up, Storify.com

These two lectures dovetailed perfectly together: both focused on the strategy of rapidly iterating software product ideas, being willing to kill early ideas if necessary, and incorporating user input into the development & design process.

You can find Burt’s slides here, and his recorded lecture here. (Notes here.)

We closed out the week on Friday with a mind-expanding, 1000 mile-per-hour, lecture by Amanda Cox. Amanda Cox is a graphics editor at the New York Times, where she creates charts and maps for the print and web versions of the paper.

Amanda’s lecture was the perfect finale for the week — it provided a whirlwind tour of how the New York Times graphics desk thinks about the data that it presents online. Slides here, lecture here, and notes here.

Week two is already off to a great start. John Resig is scheduled to present later today. It’s an exciting week in the #MozNewsLab.

So, we’re five days into the #MozNewsLab experiment and things are exploding (in a good way, of course).

But we’re not in the clear yet…

In the development of this entire Knight-Mozilla program, we received a lot of great feedback from people working in newsrooms — both news-app developers and editorial staff. Some voices were louder than other (coughDerek Williscough), but we heard those voices loud-and-clear and want to work to address as many of the concerns as possible, such as:

• The challenge of incremental change vs. wholesale change in established news organization;

• The idea that ‘news apps’ are not just about technology, they are pieces of journalism too (and what that means practically);

• How does a new software product or tool make its way into a newsroom? What are the entry points?

• Where are the opportunities to ‘Hack at the core’ of news.

I want to inject as many of these ideas into the thinking that is happening in the #MozNewsLab, but I need your help to make that happen (and it’s in your interest to help!).

So, I had an idea the other day about how to do this, and I would like to try it out on all of you, if you’re willing.

I wrote about the lab’s objectives earlier this week on PBS MediaShift Idealab — and in that post I referenced the idea of a “message in a bottle.”

Well, I’d like you to give it a shot. :)

The concept is simple: people working in newsrooms, or with newsrooms, or who have worked in newsrooms (you get the point), send a short video message into our learning lab. Once received, Alex and I will assign it as “homework.”

These video messages should try to communicate:

• The realities of working in a busy news environment, i.e., the hurdles that fellows might face when they arrive at Al Jazeera English, BBC, Boston.com, Guardian, or Zeit Online this year (and perhaps your news organization next year);

• The challenges that reporters are facing today, i.e., tools they really wish they had to report or present news;

• The challenges that news users are facing today, i.e., how news could be better delivered to people who read, use, and re-mix it;

• The failed state of corporate IT, and corporate CMSs, in many large newsrooms, and how to route around that;

… And so on.

Basically, these would be a reality check from those people “in the know” — like you.

So, your mission — should you choose to accept it — would be to:

1. Create a short (~3 minute) web-cam video that boils down your experience into one clear call-to-action for our lab participants, e.g.: “If you’re going to know one thing about trying to work with reporters, and editors, and technology it’s ….” and one clear question for participants, e.g.: “So, given what I’ve just told you, how will you work around that?”

2. Upload that video to YouTube and tag it with #MozNewsLab (or upload it anywhere and send me a link; YouTube just saves me a step or two.)

3. Keep your eye on your Twitter @ replies, and — as time permits — engage with the participants that respond.

This is your chance to get your idea, experience, and opinion in front of sixty-three smart people that are hurtling toward the opportunity to spend one year building software in a newsroom.

Let’s not let the #MozNewsLab particiapnts go in blind! :)

Over the next four weeks, a very interesting experiment is going to unfold. The most exciting part about it is that it’s entirely open source: You can observe it, interact with it, and improve it.

We’re calling this experiment the “learning lab.” It’s the second stage of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, which kicked off in May with an online competition that solicited 300 news innovation ideas from people around the globe.

With the competition complete, it’s time put on our mad scientist lab coats and start mixing things up. Our aim is to find an antidote to “yammering” about the future of online news — instead, we want to start building that future today.

Let the experiment begin

At its core, the first learning lab sets out to:

• Build an online “maker space”: Create a place where people can start hammering out software ideas that could be part of tomorrow’s online news experience.

• Put our foot on the accelerator: Taking a cue from Mozilla’s Web FWD initiative, we want to dramatically speed up the process of taking ideas “from concept-to-code” by bringing smart people together with other intelligent folks.

• Demonstrate how to “work open”: Actually showing how the idea of working quickly, iteratively, and in the open can lead to better ideas, improved software and collaboration.

Into the glass beakers and test tubes, we are also going to mix:

• Sixty-three lab participants who’ve made a very real commitment to learn, and to work hard;

• Eleven lectures that will set the stage for their work over the next four weeks;

• A six-person-strong lab faculty team to keep things on track;

• Three curriculum advisers who’ve helped to get us here;

• And you.

Put on your lab coat and help make something

One of the most valuable parts of the Knight-Mozilla partnership is the community that is growing around it — well over 500 people at last count. Bringing that community into the lab is something that we’re striving to do — but we could really use your help here.

Here are just a few of the ways that you can jump in:

• Compile resources, readings, and follow lists for each weeks’ topics, simply by editing one of the course Etherpads. You’ll find them listed under ‘External links’ on the P2PU course page.

• Respond to questions from the participants, by keeping an eye on #MozNewsLab on Twitter or Identi.ca.

• Comment on participants’ weekly assignment to ‘think out loud’ about the ideas they are developing

• Send a ‘message-in-a-bottle’ from your newsroom into the lab: simply shoot a short video (less than 3-minutes, please!) and post it to YouTube tagged with #MozNewsLab and we’ll make sure they see it. Here’s a great example from Jacob, one of the members of our lab faculty team.

Each week we’ll also be profiling the best thinking from the lab on Planet Mojo. We’ll also be posting the lectures — three each week — to the P2PU course page, so you can follow along at home.

We’re working hard to create a MakerCulture in the news production, reporting, and journalism space — so, why don’t you put on your mad scientist lab coat too? All you have to do is suspend your disbelief for the next four weeks, commit to put no limits on your imagination, then pick up a hammer and start hammering.

Cross-posted from the PBS MediaShift Idea Lab. Feel free to comment over on the original post.

Day one of the Knight-Mozilla learning lab is already off to a great start. Many of the participants are already hammering … putting together maps, YouTube introductions, and much more.

Given the caliber of the people involved, the hammering is only going to get louder.

So, to kick things off, let me introduce our participants. You can find them listed below, or on a map, in a Google Fusion table, or listed on Twitter.

First Name:	Last Name:	Twitter	Website	Image
Alan	Haburchak	Twitter	Website
Amy	Zerba	Twitter	Website
Andrew	Jennings	Twitter	Website
Artem	Dudarev	Twitter	Website
Bello	David	Twitter	Website
Bharath	Channakeshavaiah	Twitter	Website
brian	chirls	Twitter	Website
charlie	pinder	Twitter	Website
Chris	Keller	Twitter	Website
Cody	Shotwell	Twitter	Website
Cole	Gillespie	Twitter	Website
Corbin	Smith	Twitter	Website
Dan	Whaley	Twitter	Website
Daniel	Walmsley	Twitter	Website
Daniel	Schultz	Twitter	Website
Engin	Erdogan	Twitter	Website
Ersun	Warncke
James	Greenaway	Twitter	Website
Jamie	King	Twitter	Website
Jason	Spingarn-Koff	Twitter	Website
Jeremy	Gilbert
John	Tynan	Twitter	Website
John	Bell	Twitter	Website
Jordan	Wirfs-Brock	Twitter	Website
Juan	Gonzalez	Twitter	Website
Julien	Dorra	Twitter	Website
Kabir	Soorya
Katie	Zhu	Twitter	Website
Kersten A.	Riechers	Twitter	Website
Laura	Hilliger	Twitter	Website
Laurian	Gridinoc	Twitter	Website
Lucas	Cioffi	Twitter	Website
manuel	pinto		Website
Marian	Liu	Twitter	Website
Mark	Boas	Twitter	Website
Mark	James		Website
Matt	Terenzio	Twitter	Website
Maura	Youngman
Michael	Wells	Twitter	Website
Miguel Angel	García Ramírez		Website
Neil	Dawson	Twitter	Website
Nicholas	Doiron		Website
Nicola	Hughes	Twitter	Website
Nicole	Cifani	Twitter	Website
Noah	Echols	Twitter	Website
Philipp	Tsipman	Twitter	Website
Raynor	Vliegendhart	Twitter	Website
Regnard Kreisler	Raquedan	Twitter	Website
Rhiannon	Coppin	Twitter	Website
Saleem	Khan
Samuel	Huron	Twitter	Website
Sedef	Gavaz	Twitter	Website
Seth	Vincent	Twitter	Website
Shaminder	Dulai	Twitter	Website
Shaun	McWhinnie	Twitter	Website
Stijn	Debrouwere		Website
Tathagata	Dasgupta	Twitter	Website
Ted	Han	Twitter	Website
Tobias	Reitz	Twitter	Website
Travis	Kriplean	Twitter	Website
Trina	Chiasson	Twitter	Website
Zoltán	Varjú	Twitter	Website

Be sure to check out the first YouTube introduction from one of our lab faculty, Jacob Caggiano. That will be hard to beat.

First the great news, then the good news. (FYI: There is no bad news in MoJo-ville.)

I’m excited to let you know that we’ve confirmed that Oliver Reichenstein, CEO of iA Inc, will deliver a lecture for the lab in July.

For those who are not familiar with iA (Information Architects, Inc.), let me just say this: very few organizations have had as much impact when it comes to modern-day information design. Not only is iA “one of the best-known design agencies in the world,” but it is also an organization that is not afraid to take some risks by developing its own products — from the ubiquitous iA³ Template for WordPress, to ultra-minimalist writing software iA Writer for the Mac and iPad.

I should also note that iA worked with our news parter Zeit Online to produce the innovative HTML5, tablet-friendly, version of zeit.de — if you have a tablet (or know how to change your User Agent settings), you should take a moment to check it out.

Welcome aboard, Oliver.

Learning lab schedule

Now the good news. After months of hard work — planning, organizing, and cajoling — I’m happy to be able to unveil the (almost final) schedule for the learning lab (all times are listed in Pacific Time):

Week 1 - Design thinking and product development

July 11 - 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

Speaker: Aza Raskin is a renowned interface designer who recently held the position of Creative Lead for Firefox.

July 13 - 9:00 to 10:30 a.m.

Speaker: Burt Herman is an entrepreneurial journalist. He is the CEO of Storify and a co-founder of Hacks/Hackers.

July 15 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.

Special guest: To be announced. Topic: Data visualization.

Week 2 - New capabilities in the browser and new ways of building community

July 18 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.

Speaker: Chris Heilmann is a geek and hacker by heart. In a previous life, he was responsible for delivering Yahoo Maps Europe and Yahoo Answers. He’s currently a Mozilla Developer Evangelist, focusing on all things open web, HTML5, and working open.

July 20 - 10:00 to 11:30 a.m.

Speaker: John Resig is a programmer and entrepreneur. He’s the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library, and has had his hands in more interesting open source projects that you can shake a stick at. Until recently, John was the JavaScript Evangelist at Mozilla. He’s currently the Dean of Open Source and head of JavaScript development at Khan Academy.

July 22 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.

Special guest: Jesse James Garrett, co-founder and president of Adaptive Path, is one of the world’s most widely recognized technology product designers. Topic: Focusing on the users.

Week 3 - Technology meets news production: new challenges in the newsroom

July 25 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.

Speaker: To be announced.

July 27 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.

Speaker: Mohamed Nanabhay, is Head of Online at Al Jazeera Egnlish based in Doha, Qatar.

July 29 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.

Special guest: Oliver Reichenstein, CEO Information Architects Inc.

Week 4 - The future of journalism

August 1 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.

Speaker: Evan Hansen is the Editor In Chief of Wired.com.

August 3 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.

Speaker: Jeff Jarvis is the author of What Would Google Do? He blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com. He is associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program and the new business models for news project at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism.

August 5 - Time TBD

Speaker: You! Participants will present their final projects.

There you have it, in all it’s shining glory. Let me know if you have any questions about the speakers, the format, or the topics to be covered.

We’re in the final days leading up to the learning lab. We currently have more than fifty-five people registered and expect the last few registrations to come in today and tomorrow.

Alex is hard at work setting up the course on P2PU and putting the finishing touches on the first assignments.

If you are registered for the learning lab, keep your eye out for a welcome e-mail on Friday that will provide instructions on how to join the live lecture and your first assignment.

With roughly sixty participants attending lectures and submitting assignments, there are going to be a lots to review each week. To make sure that every participant’s work is read and to ensure that quality feedback is provided, and — generally — to help make things go smoothly, I’m excited to announce the following additions to the learning lab team:

• Kate Hudson is a Toronto graphic designer, managing editor of York University’s student newspaper, violist, and co-founder of www.openjournalism.ca. From data visualization to live studio recordings, she’s thinking big about making unlikely connections between design and other creative fields.

• Lingsha Hu is a second year business student at Schulich School of Business, York University. As a newbie to the world of journalism, she is interested in entrepreneurship, design and technology.

• Pippin Lee is making ideas click as photo editor of Excalibur Publications by day. Long distance runner, app-developer-in-training by night. Co-founder of www.openjournalism.ca (@openjo on Twitter)

I met this power trio at a local Hacks/Hakcers meet-up, and was taken with their passion for the idea of reinventing student journalism. They’re putting that passion into practice through the www.openjournalism.ca project:

“OpenJournalism.ca was created to help bridge a growing gap we saw between potential and practise in online student journalism. Most of us know that the online newsroom is changing the way people tell stories, but we’ve encountered many barriers to being able to innovate. Our goal is to create a platform that encourages discussion and idea sharing between students, professionals, and educators, so that every student journalism organization around the world will be able to work in an environment that pushes the boundaries of journalism. The first version of OpenJournalism will be launched in the coming weeks, but in the mean time, check out OpenJournalism.ca to see a little more about our vision, or tweet @OpenJo to get involved in our research.”

I’m excited that Kate, Lingsha, and Pippin have agreed to join the team as ‘lab shepherds’ — if you’re in the lab, you’ll be meeting them on P2PU, so please take a moment to say “hello.”

That’s it for today.

P.S. Please bug @benrito if you have any questions about the conclusions of the challenges, or the invitations process — both of which should be wrapped up today, or tomorrow at the latest.

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s going to happen this week:

• As of this morning, there are 55 participants registered for the learning lab. Later today Tomorrow, invitations will go out to five people who are on the waiting list to fill those spots.

• Once those last five spots are confirmed, a final list of learning lab participants will be published.

• Starting Wednesday, the preliminary course content will be uploaded onto the new P2PU.org platform, which includes a curriculum overview, lecture dates & times, assignment outline & schedule, and so on. The material will be accessible to anyone.

• Starting Thursday, we’ll be asking the P2PU team to create accounts for each of the lab participants, and registering those accounts with the course. If you’re in the lab, you should expect a password reminder e-mail that you can use to log-in to P2PU.

• On Friday, lab participants will receive the first welcome e-mail. It will include all the details for the lecture on Monday, July 11th, and a number of logistical details. If you’re in the lab, keep your eye out for that e-mail.

On Monday, July 11th, the lab will kick-off at 10AM Pacific, 1PM Eastern, 6PM British Summer Time, 7PM Central European Summer Time (if you live in another time zone, you can use this handy time-zone converter). Most lectures will be 2-hours earlier (8AM PT, 11 ET, 4 BST, 5 CEST), but we’ll start a bit later on the 11th to ease into things.

Before you ask, let me provide a few quick answers to questions that we’ve been receiving:

• Access to lecture material: All lectures will be recorded and available on P2PU publicly (to everyone on the Internet) as soon as we can get them posted. We’re hoping for video, audio, and slides, but it may just be audio with a link to the visual information that was presented. If you’re in the lab, you’ll be expected to attend the live lecture (unless you live very, very far east).

• Waiting list: If you haven’t received an invitation to the lab yet, you should keep an eye on your Inbox today. As mentioned, at some point today we’ll be inviting five more participants to the lab.

• Process: For the one or two that asked about process, it’s quite simple … there’s a process overview here. The lab is the second part of this year’s program. Twenty participants in the lab will be invited to go to Berlin in September to build working software prototypes. Five of the people that attend the Berlin event will be invited to become Knight-Mozilla fellows.

Finally, I just want to publicly thank all of the individuals and teams that submitted entries to the challenge. If you weren’t one of the people that made it through to the lab, you should know two things:

1. The competition was very stiff for the top sixty positions in the list.

2. There will be another challenge next year. Start brainstorming early.

That’s it for today. More updates to come. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: My apologies, I forgot it was a holiday in the US today. The remaining invites will go out tomorrow.

Yesterday, the first round of invitations to the Knight-Mozilla learning lab went out. The invitations went out to the sixty entrants whose submissions were ranked the highest by the panel of reviewers.

We’ve asked those invited to respond by 5PM ET on Friday, July 1st. And we’ve also asked those invited to let us know if they are not able to make the time commitment (or are simply not interested) so we can offer those spots to the next people in line.

Just to make it clear: if you didn’t receive an invitation yet — fear not — you’re automatically on the waiting list. As we hear back from people this week, we’ll be extending more invitations.

Once the lab is completely full, we’ll let everyone know. So hang tight until then.

Preliminary schedule & format

Many folks have asked about the schedule for the learning labs. While it’s still under active development, with the help of my colleague Alexandra and our curriculum advisers, here’s what I can tell you today:

• The two mandatory lectures will be on Monday and Wednesday morning, and the optional lecture will be on Friday morning. We’re trying to schedule the lectures for roughly 8AM Pacific Time, 11AM Eastern Time, 4PM British Standard Time, 5PM Central European Time. If you want to check what that is in your local time zone, you may find this site useful. Some lectures will start a bit later to accommodate speakers who live on the west coast of North America and who are not early risers.

• All lectures will be held online using the rather fantastic Big Blue Button platform — an open-source video conferencing system that will be hosted and managed for the labs by our friends at Blindside Networks Inc.. There will be local telephone dial-in numbers for every country where participants live (to ensure that it’s easy to listen), and — obviously — participants can also connect using a Web browser for the full video experience.

• The course material, assignments, and class discussions will be hosted on the new Peer-to-peer University platform. We may also use a handful of Etherpads as a course wiki of sorts.

• If I ever hear back from the folks at IRCCloud, we will try to integrate an ‘office hours’ via live chat. (Hint-hint, Wink-wink, Nudge-nudge, to the folks at IRCCloud) If that comes to fruition, the live chat drop-in time will likely be scheduled for Thursday, or Friday morning.

• Assignments will be given out each Monday, and will be due on Friday afternoon. The assignments will be thinking assignments, and can be submitted in any open-Web form: text, audio, video, images, code or a combination of them all. Participants should expect to spend 1-2 hours on the assignment each week.

• Throughout the entire four weeks, participants will be required to work on their final project. Final projects will be presented the week of August 1st. Alex and I are currently working through the requirements, but participants should expect to spend 2-3 hours a week on research and preparation for the final project presentation.

• There will likely be readings. They will likely be optional.

So, there you have it, the quick overview of the learning lab schedule and format. We’ll be finalizing everything over the coming week, and we will start posting the course outline and schedule to P2PU. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in the comments, or find us on Twitter at @asamur and @phillipadsmith.

Yes, you heard that right: I was able to corner both user-experience pioneer Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path and Mohamed Nanabhay, Head of Online for Al Jazeera English, at the Civic Media conference last week, and both have agreed to deliver a lecture for the first Knight-Mozilla learning lab.

Who’s working hard for you? :)

Okay, now that I’ve got your attention, here’s a quick update on our progress toward concluding the challenge phase of the program, and moving into the learning lab phase:

• Roughly 300 submissions were received during the challenge. It was a bit more than we were expecting. The quality of many of the submissions was quite high. Generally speaking, we wanted to ensure that each submission was reviewed thoroughly, and that each entry was seen by two pairs of eyes.

• We expanded the review team and extended the review period by several days to ensure that each reviewer had enough time to read and comment on each entry. (Not a small amount of work, I assure you.)

• That work is now complete. Ben and Jacob are going to send out invitations to the learning lab this week. I’m hoping the invitations go out tomorrow morning — fingers crossed! — but there are some remaining technical hurdles to get past before they can go out.

• If you don’t receive an invitation tomorrow — fear not — you’ll be automatically added to a waiting list. We’ll be inviting people from the waiting list as we hear back from the first group of invitees. We’re aiming to have the process completed by Friday, July 1st.

I’ll post further updates on the invitation process and progress here throughout week.

Now, on to the learning lab itself. You may be asking: What should I expect if I’m a learning lab participant? Well, here’s a preview.

• Just a reminder, the Knight-Mozilla learning lab will run from July 11th - August 5th, 2011. Those that receive an invitation will be expected to commit at least 10 hours a week to the lab.

• The lab will focus on four key themes, one each week, which will be roughly: How to work open: the secret sauce of Mozilla’s software and community; How to take an idea from concept to product; Challenges that newsrooms and news users face today; and News is evolving: What journalism might look like tomorrow.

• To explore those themes, each week will include two mandatory lectures — Monday and Wednesday at roughly 8AM Pacific Time, 11AM Eastern Time, 4PM British Standard Time, and 5PM Central European Summer Time — and one optional lecture the same time on Friday. Each lecture will be approximately 30 minutes, with 30 minutes for Q&A.

• The optional lectures will be just as amazing as the mandatory lectures, but will focus a bit more on practical skills and understanding vs. the big picture of the mandatory lectures. For example, if you arrive at the lab as a programmer with lots of product development experience, but little or no understanding of what a journalist actually does, we’ll have a lecture for you. And vice-versa: if you arrive as a tech-savvy journalist but with little experience building software, we’ll have a lecture for you too.

• Each week participants will be asked to complete an assignment that builds on the information from the lectures. Participants will submit assignments by publishing it on their own blog. So, if you don’t have one yet, get moving. ;)

• Last but not least will be your lab project. The lab project is the ‘big idea’ that you’re working on — perhaps your challenge submission; perhaps something new — throughout the four week lab. You’ll present your personal project for review at the conclusion of the lab.

The lab will be delivered entirely online. We’ll be using the Peer-to-Peer University platform for course material, assignments, and discussions. The lectures will be delivered synchronously (and attendance will be taken!) using the rather awesome Big Blue Button platform.

Your ship’s crew for the lab will be Alex and yours truly, and four excellent course shepherds that I’ll be introducing over the coming days.

I’ll be posting updates as we confirm the remaining lecture spots, and as we make progress with getting the invitations out. Stay tuned and let me know if you have any questions.

A really quick note today from the #civicmedia conference to announce the latest addition to the Knight-Mozilla learning lab team: Alexandra Samur.

Alexandra Samur is a Vancouver-based writer, editor and journalism instructor. She is the managing editor of the Canadian independent news site rabble.ca, and teaches online journalism at Vancouver’s Langara College and citizen journalism at SFU-Woodwards. Her career in independent media includes stints at Ricepaper and Adbusters magazines, and service as a media trainer at alternative media hubs in Cambodia and Palestine. Her work has appeared on The Tyee, Torontoist.com, in New York Magazine and on CBC Radio One. Alex holds an MA in Communication from York University. Follow her on Twitter: @asamur

Alex will be working with closely with me and our incredible curriculum advisers over the coming weeks to plan, produce, and deliver the upcoming learning lab.

Already, just two days into the position, she’s made some incredible suggestions that are going to make the lab a 100% better experience for the wide range of participants that we’re expecting.

Thanks Alex! And welcome to the team. :)