OpenNews/hackdays/archive

Ongoing work on archiving news apps

Thanks to all the participants at the Newseum on March 2. That event was just the start. The teams on that day committed to a few concrete outcomes to continue work in this area.

Commitments

• Blog post documenting best practices that teams can adopt right now - team lead by Brian Boyer, to be written by?
• Blog post describing news apps framework developed by Scott Klein's team - to be written by?
• Analyze a few existing news apps to document their dependencies - team led by Ted Han, to be done by?
• Develop a questionnaire to figure out best formats to address/recommend - team led by Aurelia Moser
• Develop strategies for incentivizing buy-in, including supporting development of a platform for tracking quantitative measures and events - team led by Ira Chinoy

Ongoing work

There's a lot of work happening in this area. A couple relevant opportunities that arose since the designathon:

• Newspaper Research Journal edition on digital preservation (possible place to publish a white paper coming out of these discussions)
• Digital Preservation Meeting at the Library of Congress
• [please add other resources and events]

Communications channels

We've created a Google Group so folks can keep in touch. The #apparchive hashtag can also be used to flag links and topics of interest.

Check in

We'll share the results of the designathon and follow-up work during the April 2 OpenNews community call and discuss how to continue involvement for people not at the designathon.

NICAR/Newseum News Apps Archiving Designathon

With news nerds from around the country visiting Baltimore for NICAR, we thought it'd be a great chance to gather folks for some hands-on work after the conference. The Newseum in DC was kind enough to offer to host this event.

Our goal is to create an end-to-end approach for archiving data journalism projects. This day will serve as a planning day for a fuller hackathon at the Newseum in March 2014. Before the event: contribute ideas of projects to archive and archival technology to explore. At the event: Split into groups to further assess projects and tech. End goal: identify three projects or design challenges to focus on.

This event is co-sponsored by Knight-Mozilla OpenNews @opennews, the Newseum (@newseum), and Pop Up Archive (@popuparchive).

Please RSVP for the event.

Logistics

• Where: Newseum 555 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20001 USA
  • For folks in Baltimore for NICAR, we will have a van leaving the conference hotel Sunday morning that will transport us to the Newseum in DC.
• When: 10am - 5pm Sunday, March 2
• Will there be food? Yes, there will be food.
• What to bring You will need to bring your own laptop and power supply. Also, bring any ideas about news apps to archive or archiving technology tips.
• We'll supply the WiFi, the plugs, and collaboration and brainstorming materials like post-its, sharpies, etc.

Project needs/wants

In advance of this planning day, we're brainstorming some project needs and questions to tackle during the event.

• What are some news apps you'd like to see archived? Can you send us the relevant background and files before the event?
  • Some example projects:
    • ONA winners
    • HomicideWatch
  • Sample works and technical architectures (from Data Journalism Awards)
    • ConnectedPRC
      • TSV/JSON invoked by JavaScript libraries (difficulty: difficult)
    • Great British Class Calculator
      • Almost entirely HTML5 (difficulty: probably easy)
  • Other possibilities: https://source.opennews.org/en-US/code/
• What are some topics we could brainstorm on for the day?
  • Pick a design/architecture challenge and have small groups work through different approaches (i.e. preserve a site for 5, 25, 50 years)
  • Pick three representative projects (i.e. easy, medium, hard) and actually start archiving them at designathon w/ ample documentation
  • "How would experts solve this problem" + "Here are some things anyone can do"
• What role can the Internet Archive play?

• Who do we want to invite/make sure is in the room?
  • Related NICAR session: "Save the data: going from zip (drive) to news by rescuing, analyzing old data" http://ire.org/events-and-training/event/973/1164/.
• Potential outlets once work is completed:
  • Take a page from the Media Archaeology Lab at UC-Boulder: http://mediaarchaeologylab.com/catalogue/software/productivity/.
  • Newspaper Research Journal, "Capturing and Preserving the 'First Draft of History' in the Digital Environment." Submissions due August 2014: https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/capturing-and-preserving-the-first-draft-of-history-in-the-digital-environment/

Schedule

Sunday 3/2

• 10am Opening Circle and team formation
• 11am Work begins
• 1pm Lunch
• 4:30pm Close, plan next steps

Two days for building

• Details to come

Communications

Want to get in touch with other hack day participants?

• Join the #opennews channel on irc.mozilla.org
• Tweet questions/ideas with #apparchive hashtag. Tag @opennews with any questions about the event
• Email OpenNews if there are any questions/concerns/ideas that should be emailed to the group on off hours.

Tools & APIs

Have tools or APIs that would be helpful for this news app archiving? List them here.

Your Blogs

If you're blogging about the event, please link to it here.

Here are the notes from the group discussing context and metadata.

Some background on how this event came about.