I’m fresh back from two weeks of trouble-making for the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership project. There are lots of big and little tidbits to report. My body is telling me that I’m still exhausted from too much time crossing the Atlantic, so I’m going to keep it short-and-sweet today:

• 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!