Show Your Work

During my first and only performance review at the Chicago Tribune, Brian asked that I take responsibility for cultivating two team assets: our testing methodology and our open source presence. With notable exceptions, I never made much headway on testing, but we have released a mountain of open source code. As today is my last day with on News Applications team, I’d like to take a moment to summarize what we’ve made and why it matters.

We’ve released, or substantially contributed to, 20 projects on Github:

• appengine-autotweeter
• beeswithmachineguns
• boundaryservice
• census
• census-map-demo
• cloud-commander
• cloud-commander-recipes
• csvkit
• ctabustracker
• dcupload
• django-boundaryservice
• fakerwiki
• ffs
• hello_newsroom
• englewood
• invar
• making-maps-demo
• ogrkit
• refine-stats
• wordpress-deploy

Of these, only beeswithmachineguns broke out of the News Applications circle of friends to attain mainstream recognition–an accomplishment almost certainly due as much to its cheekiness as its utility. However, despite not reaching a wider community, many of our projects have been successful in their niches. Here are a few examples of what’s happened to some of the projects we’ve released:

• django-boundaryservice is being actively used by developers in Arizona, New York, Norway, and elsewhere. It’s also powering Sunlight Labs’ Open States boundary search API.
• The IRE census application is the first major open source project sponsored by the IRE. To build it we worked alongside developers from CNN, the New York Times, the Spokesman-Review, the University of Nebraska, and USA Today. In this quarter’s IRE magazine director Mark Horvit hails it as a new model for collaboration in journalism.
• csvkit has reached 82 followers, received commits from 10 developers, and appears to be getting traction as a key tool in the data journalist’s toolkit.
• englewood and invar provided new tools for presenting cartographic data, a technique which we’ve since seen adopted elsewhere–not least impressively by our friends at Development Seed.
• We’ve gotten feedback from journalists and hackers of all skill levels that our demos, tutorials and detailed documentary blog posts are helping them learn to do more with their data.

More important than any individual project, we’ve found ourselves in the midst of an exploding community of news-oriented developers who are hell bent on using, contributing to, and releasing new open source code. There are now more than a dozen active news nerd blogs–almost all of them producing new open source code. This works for our industry perhaps even better than it works in the mainstream web development, because, with very few exceptions, none of us are in competition with one another. We can share code with the Washington Post, ProPublica, or the New York Times at absolutely no cost to ourselves. This collaboration allows all of us to serve our readers better.

Thanks to the blessing of the Knight News Challenge, when I start work on PANDA Project on Tuesday I’ll be joining the lucky few who are paid a full-time salary to craft open source software. For me this is a dream come true. However, it won’t be the project I want it to be unless there is a community who is equally passionate about it. The PANDA project is by newsrooms, for newsrooms. I hope that you’ll join me in building a platform that, by being the sum of all our contributions, is much greater than mine.

Endnote: My job is open. It is incredible and wonderful and awesome and you totally want it. Send your resume to: newsapps@tribune.com.