It brings me much excitement to announce that I’m joining Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE for short) as their primary developer on DocumentCloud in September. As it may be apparent to followers of my blog, I have spent the past couple months diving headlong into the world of journalism and tech, particularly through the Knight-Mozilla Journalism Challenge. Through that exploration, I have been astonished to find how rich and deep a technical world has grown to push forward the causes of journalism.
DocumentCloud has been in the vanguard of journalists and software developers constructing this world. It was conceived of by three news editors, Eric Umansky, senior editor at ProPublica, Scott Klein, news apps editor at ProPublica, and Aron Pilhofer, news apps editor of the New York Times, built by an small but amazing team consisting of Jeremy Ashkenas (of CoffeeScript fame), Sam Clay (of newsblur and Tastylabs) and Amanda Hickman (organizer and tech geek extraordinaire), and funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s News Challenge.
Many web developers know of DocumentCloud’s prolific open source software development, through Backbone.js, underscore.js and a number of others. What most are less familiar with are the causes for which DocumentCloud has built all of their great contributions to free and open source software. And as excited as I am about joining an organization of DocumentCloud’s technical prowess, I am even more excited to join IRE and DocumentCloud for the civic and public goods they aim to serve.
DocumentCloud’s goal of building a public online repository of primary source documents used in journalism sits happily at the juncture of great software development, computationally interesting problems, and civic good. In creating a public repository for journalistic source documents, the public can connect directly with the information that journalists cite. Journalists and the public in turn can refer to and communicate over the documents that represent the products and currencies of power in our society.
Aside from day to day work on the platform, I will be working on DocumentCloud’s 2011 News Challenge grant to build user annotations on documents. Journalists can already mark up documents (as you can see in the Guardian’s deciphering of James Murdoch’s closure announcement for the News of the World), and we want to provide a way that the people formerly known as the audience can participate in the journalistic process. I have some particular twists I want to pursue on this idea, but I will leave that for another blog post. :)
I’m also really excited to be joining IRE. IRE is a membership organization for journalists, and focuses heavily on journalism training, particularly technical training in recent years. IRE hosts two conferences a year as well, NICAR and IRE. I view software as a means to other ends, and so I am happy to join an organization that sees the importance of better digital literacy amongst journalists, and is now, through their adoption of DocumentCloud directly invested in the effort to make software tools for journalists.
I’m excited to see what we can accomplish. Interesting times lay ahead, and it’s up to us to shape them. I can’t wait to get started.
