It was slightly weird to be in the Guardian’s King Place office at the weekend as a guest at an event rather than as a member of staff, but that was the position I found myself in on Saturday for the Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Jam, one of 15 similar meet-ups planned for this year.
The Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership is running a programme to enable web developers and designers to collaborate in order to invent the future of news. There are three specific challenges they are looking at: unlocking video, going beyond comment threads, and producing “people-powered news”. The meet-ups involve a series of talks about news innovation, and then some idea generation sessions as groups of developers, designers and journalists work together to try and solve some of the issues with digital news delivery.
Talking on Saturday were the Guardian’s special projects editor Paul Lewis, who looked at the role of social media in investigative journalism, and our lead interactive technologist Alastair Dant. He was talking about how news sites use interactives, and how the future of using HTML5 instead of Flash might play out. Also talking were Jonathan Austin of the BBC, and Joanna Geary of The Times, who explained how the London chapter of Hacks/Hackers came about.
At the end of the afternoon teams had to pitch their ideas to a judging panel that included Mozilla’s Mark Surman and Michelle Thorne, Jennifer Lee and Guardian software developer Daithi Ó Crualaoich. Ideas included an app that helped people through the story-telling techniques of shooting video, having contextual comment threads on news sites open at paragraph rather than article level, and a process to sift through social media trying to find significant information that had been missed by journalists.
Perhaps the most bizarre presentation came from “Project Badger”, who used the badger mask pictured above as part of their pitch. Their idea was that when you spotted a conversation that could do with a contribution from an expert, you could easily message or “badger” them to come and join in. Quite why they used Voldermort as their example expert remains a mystery to me…
The Mozilla team had held a similar event the day before in Dundee, and one of the outputs of that was this entertaining video by some students describing the anatomy of a typical internet comment thread.
For all the fun and silliness, the day has a serious purpose at heart. As part of the programme, Knight-Mozilla will be funding 15 fellowships during 2011 and 2012, which will place people into a host of newsrooms including the Guardian, BBC, Boston Globe and Zeit Online. The idea is that these people will work alongside existing teams in those businesses to drive digital news innovation. There are still a few days to take part in the challenges and enter into the running for one of those awards.