Author: Adam Schweigert

Adam Schweigert was the founding director of the product and technology team at INN from 2012 to 2017.

Nerd Alert Issue Five: Another Year, Another Newsletter

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

We're starting off 2015 by dropping a ball of our own. It's full of links.

HOT LINKS

What we're reading this week

Adam: I love this idea from basecamp about how to foster conversations across your company and avoid the types of cliques that naturally form as a team grows. Super relevant for journalism organizations who want to keep their tech, design and product teams integrated with the rest of the organization.

Ben: Google announced in August that they had started to use HTTPS as a factor in determining where sites showed up in the search listings. It’s not a major factor yet, but at some point in the future you’ll want to start using HTTPS. WordPress-based sites can use Zack Tollman’s recently-released HTTPS Mixed Content Detector plugin to help find content that isn’t loaded over HTTPS, which readers’ browsers may be blocking. The plugin even supports WP-CLI.

Denise: What good is open government data if very few members of the public know how to access or analyze it? This post argues that the future of open data is collaborative. “Having vast stores of government data is great, but to make this data useful – powerful – takes a different type of approach. The next step in the open data movement will be about participatory data.”

Kaeti: "Put simply, nobody grows without feedback." Building a review process that isn't about ego or blame — or about grabbing credit — is one of the most important things an organization can do. This post from InVision has great ideas about how to design a healthy team and make space for productive feedback.

Meredith: Both in response to evolving technology and an appetite for the finite, it appears newsletters are making a comeback and Wired UK highlights a few. You kind reader are, as always, ahead of the curve.

Ryan: Want to see the most atrocious valid HTML class and id names in existence? Check these out. Just to be absolutely clear, I do NOT endorse using these id and class names in your markup.

Will: It’s Friday! Which means the weekend is ahead and it’s time to find something to waste your time away online. Remember those MS-DOS games you played as a kid? This week The Internet Archive put thousands of these old DOS games online, playable right in your browser! I for one will be playing hours of Pinball Magic.

Bert: It’s only a matter of time.

This week's guest contributor extraordinaire:

Jessica Plautz, Travel Editor at Mashable and lover of all things Murder, She Wrote.

Ev Williams, current CEO of Medium and former CEO of Twitter provided an insightful backstory behind his recent quote, which became simplified to him saying he didn't "give a shit" if Instagram had more users than Twitter. As is common with soundbites, that wasn't the whole story, and his explanation is actually a look inside how the biggest social media companies are approaching measuring audience. His thoughts are worth a read, though his inability to settle on one metric echoes the struggles I've heard from a lot of organizations, and reminded me that everyone is still trying to figure this all out.

Each week we ask someone from outside our team to contribute a link, tool or idea. Are you our next guest star? We think you might be. Send us a note at nerds@inn.org.

WE MADE A THING

Our work, manifest

In case you missed it before the holidays, Ryan wrote a great post demystifying test-driven development (the latest in our effort to bring more rigor to our WordPress development work) and Kaeti wrote a review of a few design feedback tools we’ve been testing.

screenshotsWe’re also excited about the launch of another couple INN member sites using the next version of Largo. Congratulations to Voice of OC and Chicago Reporter on the launch of their new sites this week!

Finally, next Wednesday is our January News Nerd Book Club, where we’ll be talking about Ida Tarbell’s All in the Day’s Work. It’s not too late to start reading and join us!

SHOUT OUT

Work we admire by our journalism peers

John Keefe (WNYC) has been making updates to his weatherbot. We're thinking about filing an issue - "enhancement: make the weather less crappy."

SOME OTHER STUFF

Gather ye rosebuds

LISTEN: Light in the Attic has released a collection of music off the grid, nearly extinct music, Native North America. Meredith recommends listening to Willy Mitchell and Desert River Band - "Kill'n Your Mind "

COOK: The dawn of a new year always makes us want to see what’s cooking in the Y2Kitchen. And while you’re eating like it’s 1999 you can drink like it’s 1899.

GIF: This weather amirite?

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We’re Hiring! Come Be Our Next News Apps Developer

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

Update: applications for this position are now closed. We encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter if you'd like to stay in the loop regarding future positions.

We've grown a lot over the last year and we're excited to start 2015 by adding another member to the team. We're looking for a new full-time developer to join the team and help out with both our internal and client projects.

This is a slightly more junior role on the team so even if you don't meet 100% of the qualifications, we'd still encourage you to apply. The most important thing is that you care about using your talents to help make a real impact in the world by supporting nonprofit journalism. If that sounds like you then we're super excited to hear from you!

Here's the full description and how to apply:

The Investigative News Network (INN), a network of 100+ nonprofit news organizations, has an opening for a full-time developer on our technology team.

As a team, we exist to support the work of our member organizations, many of which are small nonprofits with limited technology resources. We focus primarily on problems that we are uniquely suited to tackle at a network level, for example:

  • Hosting and supporting over 30 member websites using a WordPress-powered platform/framework we've built and maintain - http://largoproject.org
  • Building open source tools to support members' editorial work and presentation needs with the goal of making their work look as great as any of the largest for-profit newsrooms
  • Providing general technology consulting, training and developing resources to help increase the overall level of tech knowledge and ability across the network

You can read more about us on our team blog and check out our projects on github.

We are a small (but growing!) team of makers (presently three, soon to be four full-time employees with a handful of contractors and interns). This position would work closely with our senior developer and the rest of the team to tackle design and technology problems facing our member organizations and consulting clients.

Here are some desired skills and attributes for this position (we understand you might not meet all of these but if this roughly sounds like you, we'd love to hear more):

  • 1-2+ years professional experience in web/mobile development; degree in computer science or another relevant field preferred (but not required)
  • Strong front-end skills (HTML/CSS/JS) and design sensibility with a focus on end-user experience; experience with responsive design principles. Experience with CSS pre-compilers and front-end frameworks such as LESS/SASS, jQuery, Bootstrap, etc. would also be helpful.
  • Intermediate to expert knowledge of the full LAMP stack with a particular focus on PHP/MySQL and experience developing for WordPress including themes, plugins and working with WordPress multisite; Some exposure to and/or experience with one or more other modern server-side programming languages such as Python or Ruby would be helpful.
  • Experience with version control (we use git), automated deployment tools (we use fabric and grunt) and project management tools (we use Jira).
  • It would be great if you had some experience with one or more of the following: data visualization and mapping tools; photo, video, illustration and other visual/graphic design skills.
  • Strong communication skills including the ability to explain complex things simply and experience writing documentation for a variety of audiences; commitment to openness and showing/writing/talking about your work. We open source and write about nearly every project we do and encourage our team members to speak at industry conferences, local tech meetups, etc.
  • Curiosity and the willingness to learn, adapt and teach

This is a full-time position with benefits. Our compensation package is commensurate with experience and extremely competitive. We are also committed to giving our employees the tools they need to do their job and supporting their professional growth so you'll get an allowance for hardware, software, travel to conferences, etc.

Our team is presently distributed so remote candidates are fine as long as you're comfortable with that. Previous experience working remotely would be helpful. If you'd rather work with us (in the same room) we have team members in Columbus (OH), Chicago, Minneapolis and Kansas City (MO) or you could work out of INN's home office in Encino, CA.

INN is an equal opportunity employer and we are committed to creating a workplace where diversity is valued. Applications from women, people of color, and other under-represented groups are particularly encouraged. In addition to federal law requirements, INN complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities.

To apply, please send the following to nerds@inn.org:

  • Brief resume/CV
  • Cover letter (an email is fine) explaining why this is the perfect position for you
  • A few projects you're particular proud of (links to projects in the wild, github repos, etc.) with a brief description of the role you played in each
  • Salary expectations (ballpark is fine)

How We Build Community

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

As a remote team, we pay special attention to how we communicate and build connections within our organization. But the need for community and connection extends beyond just our team — we're keenly aware of the challenges faced by the often lone technologists working at our member organizations. Even if you have supportive colleagues, it's not easy to be the only person at your organization who does what you do.

Organizing opportunities to learn together is a core component of our team’s commitment to “Always Be Learning.” To that end we have recently announced a number of new programs that we hope will help people connect and create affinity groups, ask questions of us and one another, and form a more tight-knit community and support network.

There are a number of existing online communities for news technologists — the NICAR-L mailing list comes to mind, as well as various Twitter chats, Google groups, etc. — but we want to create more opportunities for people to casually connect with each other online and to meet “face-to-face” (even if these face-to-face interactions are mediated by technology). This is why, as a team, we have a daily standup meeting, or scrum, using Google Hangout where we can actually see each other (via video chat) and communicate via always-on chat throughout the day (using HipChat).

Since part of our role is to support a network of organizations, we’re trying a number of things to create similar experiences for the broader community of technologists at INN member organizations and beyond.

Book Club

Our News Nerd Book Club is an idea that sprang from a discussion with Ryan Nagle about how we might replicate a shared team library as a distributed team. Instead of mailing books around to each other we decided to start a book club where we pick a book each month, read it and then get together to talk about it (either via Google Hangout or, occasionally, in person if we happen to be at a conference or other team gathering in the same physical space).

We decided to open the book club to anyone because we view these get togethers as not only a time to gather and discuss the book itself, but also as a scheduled time every month to convene a community that might not otherwise have an opportunity to come together outside of conferences (and, for people at organizations without a significant travel budget, that might not meet at all).

If you’d like to join the club, we have a crowd-sourced list of potential books (we’re trying to keep the selections accessible to a general audience and not overly technical), a Twitter account you can follow and our next hangout is scheduled for December 10.

Office Hours

We now hold monthly open office hours where anyone can sign up for a slot to come talk to our entire team about projects you’re working on, questions you have or really anything you’d like to chat with us about. The aim here, again, is to set aside time each month to get people together to learn from each other and for us as a team to spend time thinking about different problems than we typically work on in our day-to-day work.

We see these office hours as part of our commitment to transparency (all of our office hours are open by default, meaning that anyone can drop by and listen in or join the conversation) and a way to give back to the community. They're also a great way to generate new project ideas and possible leads for our consulting work.

Additionally, we hope that these office hours provide students, recent grads or prospective team members a non-threatening opportunity to get to know us, other members of the news and tech community, and to see first-hand how we work.

Open Chat

Another tool that has become indispensable for our team, as for many distributed teams, is some sort of asynchronous, always-on chat (we use HipChat and Slack is another popular choice).

In addition to our private team chat room where we talk about projects, share interesting links and post the occasional animated GIF, we now have a semi-public HipChat room that is open to any news technologists (particularly from INN member organizations, but we’re not too picky) who want to come hang out with us, ask occasional questions, share projects and interesting things they’re reading, and generally feel like part of our extended team.

If you’d like an invite to this room, we need to add you to our HipChat account (HipChat is kind enough to offer free unlimited accounts to nonprofit organizations), so just send an email to nerds@inn.org and we’ll get you an invitation.

Weekly Newsletter

Finally, just last week we sent out the first edition of our new weekly newsletter, Nerd Alert. This newsletter is a collection of interesting things our team is reading, open source tools, projects we're excited about, some random fun stuff and, perhaps most importantly, an opportunity for us to highlight "guest stars" whose perspectives we value and want to share with our readers.

Our aim with this newsletter is to capture and share some of our team's collective knowledge that might otherwise be trapped within our HipChat room or relegated to Twitter or an inaccessible email thread, while also highlighting voices that are less-often heard (particularly, again, the "lone wolf" technologists at our member organizations).

You can sign up for the newsletter right here and if you believe you or anyone you know would make a good guest star for a future newsletter, shoot us an email and we'll add you to our list.

Those are a few recent things we've been trying to help build strong networks among INN members and the broader journalism and tech community. While they're not a replacement for spending time together in real life (something we're hoping to do more of in the new year) we hope they're at least a start.

If you have any ideas for other things we might want to try, feel free to leave a comment or get in touch. We'd love to hear from you!

Join Us For The December News Nerd Book Club Hangout

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

Naked StatisticsThanks to everyone who came to our hangout last week and to everyone who responded to our survey to pick the next book for our News Nerd Book Club!

The book for the December meeting will be Naked Statistics by Charles Wheelan.

The December meeting will again be held via Google Hangout on Wednesday, December 10, at 1pm ET (we're going to stick to 1pm ET on the second Wednesday of the month from now on unless we're meeting in person at a conference).

The invite and link to RSVP is here (and here's the direct link to the hangout for quick reference).

Just a reminder that you can suggest future books you'd like to read over on our reading list hackpad.

Hope to see you on December 10. Happy reading!

Welcome Our New Support Specialist: Meredith Melragon

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

As a team we believe very strongly that our mission is not just to build great products but also to focus on educating and empowering the users of these products at INN member organizations and beyond.

To that end, we've decided to invest more of our time, energy and resources in creating comprehensive documentation for the products we build, a more robust support infrastructure to help users with problems they may run into and training resources to help our members to level up their technology skills.

1930807_1052929756159_4892_nTo help us with this undertaking, today we're very excited to welcome our newest team member, Meredith Melragon.

Meredith joins INN from a variety of professional development roles focused on educational technology, including serving as the director of implementation for a software company. Across topics and settings she has designed, developed and delivered training sessions for a wide audience. Her consistent focus on customer service and developing meaningful learning experiences has enabled users to adopt tools and integrate them into their work, inspiring them to imagine new possibilities.

In her role as a contract support specialist at INN, her responsibilities will include managing our support workflow and developing documentation and training systems to help users and leaders implement the tools we build.

Her “b-side” is music. She has also served as the senior editor of a music magazine and an arts administrator for a non-profit music festival.

You can find her on Twitter @meredithm or say hi by email at meredith@inn.org.

Please help me to welcome her to the team!

Free Ideas! Announcing Our New Open Office Hours

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

IMPORTANT! We have made some changes to the schedule and format of our office hours (starting in June 2015), they are now held every Friday from 2-3 pm ET. More details here.

We're a small team juggling a lot of projects. There's not always much time to answer questions (particularly those not directly related to the products we build and support) or to give thoughtful feedback on projects that people bring to us.

But we want to be accessible, approachable and create an opportunity for INN members (and members of the journalism and tech community at large) to ask us about any tech-related issues they may have or to get feedback on their projects.

So we're going to start setting aside some dedicated time every month as a team to do just that.

Starting next month we will hold open office hours on the first Thursday of the month from 3-5 p.m. CT. For now we're going to do this once a month, but we might do them more frequently if there's sufficient demand.

Here's how it's going to work:

Anyone can sign up for a 30-minute block to meet with our entire team and get feedback on tech-related issues you might be facing (new project ideas, critique of works in progress, general tech/strategy/design questions, etc.). You can sign up for a longer block of time if you clear it with us in advance.

Here's the signup sheet.

INN members will get priority but, if space is available, we'll open the signups to any organization or individual on the Monday before each month's hangout. If we're already booked, you can put yourself on the waitlist and we'll let you know if a spot becomes available.

Since we're a remote team, these will be Zoom.us video calls (the persistent link for this call is right here). (This used to be a Google Hangout; we changed it in July 2016)

The default for these hangouts will be public because we think sharing ideas in the open helps everyone learn and improve but if you want to keep the conversation just between us, indicate that on the signup sheet and we'll set up a separate, private hangout.

If you have any questions or suggestions for us on how to make these office hours work best for you and your organization, email us anytime: nerds@inn.org.

And Our Book Club Book For November Is…

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

51oXKWrcYYLThanks to everyone who responded to our survey to pick the next book for our News Nerd Book Club!

It was a close contest but the winner, and our book for November, is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

The November meeting will be held via Google Hangout on Wednesday, November 12, at 1pm ET. The invite and link to RSVP is here (and here's the direct link to the hangout for quick reference).

Just a reminder that you can suggest future books you'd like to read over on our reading list hackpad.

Hope to see you on November 12. Happy reading!

 

Showing How We Work

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

We're excited to announce the release of a new collection of documents that show how our team works.

In putting this collection together, we wanted to go beyond a style guide (also important, and we're working on that, too) to try to explain as much as possible about the process and values that inform our work: What makes our team unique, how we recruit and hire new team members, our internal process, and how outside members or clients interface with our process.

Opening up our process has a number of benefits for us as a team and, we hope, for others, as well.

Codifying existing processes in one place makes them easier to reference and helps keep the team on the same page. It allows new hires to get up to speed faster and gives prospective employees insight into how we work, our mission and values, and whether working with us would be a good fit.

It also helps external partners, like INN members and our consulting clients, learn how to work with us most effectively.

Above all, we hope that collecting this information in one place will be useful to other organizations who are building and managing similar teams.

This is especially important for us because INN's mission includes a strong educational component and we want to do everything we can to help our members make smart technology decisions.

By showing not only our process, mission and values, but also expanding the scope of this collection to include things like job descriptions, how we run meetings and the tools we use to work effectively as a remote team, we are attempting to create a sort of "missing manual" for running a news apps and technology team.

We hope, over time, to make this manual even more comprehensive as we refine our process and our thinking. And we hope that providing this model will make it a little easier on organizations and managers traveling down this road in the future.

We're grateful to the teams that have come before us who have written and released documentation that served as a source of inspiration for various parts of our team docs, particularly:

- ProPublica's News App and Data Style Guides
- The NPR Visuals Team's app template, coding best practices and manifesto
- Guides and process docs from The Chicago Tribune's News Apps Team
- MinnPost's style guide

This is a work in progress and we plan on updating frequently so we'd really value your feedback and contributions. Feel free to contribute to the project on GitHub or send us suggestions to help us improve our existing docs (or to propose new sections you'd like to see us add).

Help Us Choose The Book For Our Next News Nerd Book Club Meeting

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

Our first book club meeting was held last week at the Online News Association Conference in Chicago. Thanks to everyone who joined us and made the first meeting such a success!

We're now onto planning our next meeting which will likely be in early November via Google Hangout and we need your input to pick the book to read and the time to hold the meeting (once we pick a day/time we'll likely stick with that for future monthly meetings).

Please help us out by filling out this quick two question survey by the end of this week so we can announce the book and date/time early next week.

Just a reminder that you can follow @newsnerdbooks on Twitter to get the latest updates and announcements.

Hope to see you at the next meeting!

The Official INN Nerds Guide To ONA14

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

We're excited to head up to Chicago next week for the 2014 Online News Association Conference.

The entire INN Nerds team will be up there all week working on some exciting election projects and then we're sticking around for the conference itself, so make sure to find us and say hello!

INN member organizations are also well represented at the conference this year so we compiled a convenient list of all the sessions featuring our members so you can turn out and support them (if we accidentally missed your session, let us know so we can add you).

We also have a Twitter list of all the speakers listed below so you can follow along with the conference at home.

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday