I’ve often heard the saying “you know a subject well when you can teach it confidently.” So I’ve decided to put that to the test by stepping up to teach “Crunching Public Data” at Code Lesson this spring.

This is the first time that Code Lesson will be running this four-week online course, so the focus of the learning experience is really in my hands (and yours), and I’m excited to be able to package up some of “working with data” tricks I’ve learned over the last fifteen years of working with advocacy organizations and publishers, as well as some of the inspiration and ideas that have come from being involved with groups like Civic Access and the Electoral Data Consortium.

Over the next few weeks, I will be working on the course outline — starting to add more detail for each section — and drafting the first week of course material. This is where I really need your input: to help ensure that this course is valuable to people like you — people who might consider taking the course — I want to make sure that it incorporates ideas and tools that would interest you.

There are two things that I could use feedback on right away:

• The target audience for the course: Who is it?
• The title of the course: Does it speak to the audience?

Who are the people that might need this course to improve their storytelling?

My first thought is that the course will be prepared for folks who don’t have a lot of practical experience using software and programming to work with data: mostly journalists, researchers, and civic enthusiasts — that is my best guess. The course will focus on:

• A) finding publicly available data relevant to your line of investigation,
• B) exploring that data,
• and C) publishing meaningful representations of that data.

I’ve been asked to focus in a generic sense on Data.gov and similar providers, but I’m hoping that participants will work with datasets that are local to them, e.g., data that is available in their city, town, or region, or a specific area of thematic interest.

Depending on the level of technical experience that participants come to the course with, I would like to spend a fair bit of time introducing a small set of freely available tools for the exploration and publishing of data, and will ask participants to work on a project that will demonstrate their understanding of one or more of the techniques or tools introduced throughout the course.

A basic familiarity of Python is currently listed as a prerequisite on the Code Lesson site, but my sense is that the course will keep the programming-related tasks very, very light; for example, Python might be introduced in the context of using CSVkit to quickly investigate a large dataset, or using ScraperWiki to obtain some data that isn’t readily available.

So my question for you is: Who are the people that might need this kind of a course, and what specifically would they be hoping to learn? Are there aspects of “telling stories with data,” or “finding and understanding data,” that would be critical to include — even at a conceptual level — in this course?

I’m keen to hear from people who’ve been thinking about this a lot (I know there are lots of you out there!), and from those people who might actually take a course like this if it delivered practical skills that could be used every day.

Crunching public data? What does it mean?

The venerable quasi-sage guru of personal branding, Kris Krug, offered: “The title might need some help. Google has some good language around empowering new journalistic practices through programming and data. I’d read up on their scholarship and grants and morph the language a bit.” The scholarships that Kris refers to are the “The AP-Google Journalism & Technology Scholarship”

I agree that the title needs some work, and I had initially proposed “Crunching Public Data: Finding, exploring, and visualizing data to tell better stories.” However, perhaps that title doesn’t quite hit the mark either in terms of being accessible to people that might be looking for a course like this.

The question here is: In the context of finding, exploring, and presenting the stories that can be found in “data,” does the term “crunching” add anything of value? Straight up: Do you have a suggestion for a title that would have more resonance with your friends and colleagues that might be interested in a course like this?

Open Journalism, Open Web, Open Learning

Over the past year and a half, I’ve had the incredible opportunity to think about, develop, and deliver online curriculum at the nexus of journalism, software, and the open Web.

The first pilot course was the result of a mini-grant from the Knight Foundation to Hacks/Hackers and Mozilla that brought together forty participants — twenty working journalists, and twenty professional software developers — for a six week online, peer-to-peer, learning experience.

This past summer, as part of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, I ran what came to be known as the MozNewsLab, which took sixty participants through an intense four-week lecture-based program that aimed to introduce new thinking from luminaries of the journalism and software worlds.

I’m keen to keep working on the challenge of delivering practical skills to those individuals that are working to keep our communities knowable and our governments transparent and accountable, and I’m excited to have the opportunity to translate the learnings from running relatively large online courses into a learning experience that and is more intimate and hands-on.

In addition to the four-week version of this course at Code Lesson, I’ll also be delivering a two-day workshop version of the material in Vancouver in May or June (details to follow).

So, shoot me a note via Twitter, Linkedin, e-mail, or via the comments here if you have any thoughts on the audience for this course, and — given the audience — an appropriate name.

Many thanks in advance! :)

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.

Here's the 30-second summary of this post:

• Some forward-thinking newsrooms are employing software developers, and these developers are influencing the direction of their news organizations from the inside.
• At the same time, these "news application developers" often face a number of common challenges. For example, long-standing conservative approaches to information technology in print-first news organizations, and the intensely deadline-driven news cycle.
• Partly due to these challenges, they have limited time to A) work on long-term projects, or B) invest in thinking about how technology will have shaped news in a few years time.

This is another opportunity for the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership. Specifically:

1. To highlight the amazing work that is already being done -- work that is producing tangible demonstrations of what happens when the Open Web is mixed with journalism, reporting, and news production;
2. To help with some of the common challenges, which -- in turn -- could help to catalyze field-changing innovations.

If you have a few more minutes, you should check out the three-minute video report back from #NICAR11 that inspired this post. (There's also an earlier video report back from the same event here). Read on for the longer post...

(Featured in this video are Derek Willis, Andy Boyle, and Michael Corey.)

The great thing about working on this initiative is that so many news organization are already rich with "Maker Culture". For example, a growing number of newsrooms are investing in what is quickly becoming know as the field of "news application development" or "news apps" (a term that covers almost anything from interactive time-lines to searchable online databases), and others go further by putting software developers inside the sausage factory to work along side reporters and editors on new forms of online storytelling.

These teams have produced award-winning, information-rich, stories, powerful data-driven narratives, and they have also been known to produce useful open source software along the way. That open source code, on occasion, finds its way into other amazing open-source software projects, and that is exactly the type of exponential innovation that we're hoping for with MoJo too.

However, the challenges facing news innovation are not insignificant. Starting with rather mundane problems like the limitations of archaic, inflexible, corporate content-management systems or servers that are secured to the point of not being experimentation friendly, and extending all the way to the ever-present question of return on investment -- news app developers are both at the vanguard and staring over a cliff. (For more on this, read Steve Myers' excellent piece [Update: you should also read Matt Waite's excellent piece that explore many of the same themes from the viewpoint of a news app developer.])

But there's another story here too: faced with these challenges, these "of the Web" teams -- like the Internet itself -- route around the problems to get their products into news users' hands, using agile development approaches, open-source frameworks, and cloud-based hosting. More importantly, they demonstrate how to take an idea from napkin sketch to prototype, from prototype to launch, from launch to Web scale, all with limited time and resources. The "learning labs" that we're developing for MoJo will be specifically focusing on helping our participants develop these types of skills.

I hope that the MoJo community can start to think about what resources we have to collectively address some of the types of challenges that Andy and Michael talk about in the video above from the NICAR "Hack Night", challenges like finding examples of prior art, or having a rich enough set of general solutions that can address broad categories of day-to-day newsroom requirements.

Let's start experimenting with how to make exponential innovation in the news-technology space more likely. I hope you'll stick around, or -- better yet -- join in.