Being a Knight-Mozilla Fellow ruined my life. My fellowship ended three months ago; I still don't have a job, my wife and I haven't spoken in days, and none of my friends take me seriously. There is only one piece of advice that I have for anybody considering applying: ignore all the obvious reasons why […]
Over the past 24 hours I worked with an amazing team to start building a Siri for government. Well, Wolfram Alpha is more like it, but you probably have a better sense of what Siri is. The site is called CivOmega and it allows you to ask any question™ you want about civics. The system […]
This post is about my quest to answer the question “why are we building this from scratch?” It’s about observed realities regarding cross-newsroom collaboration, insights from upper management of The New York Times, and some major hurdles for open source in legacy media organizations. Prepare to explore the deep, dark, and relatively unspoken depths of […]
I made something awesome last week: Opened Captions. At face value it just looks like a live feed of C-SPAN’s Closed Captions. This alone is actually pretty cool if you think about it, especially if you are a deaf political junkie who sits far away from the TV and can’t read the closed captions. Of […]
Tor is a program that makes you anonymous. This means that, for better or for worse, the big brothers, neighborhood hackers, and ad agencies of the world can’t tell what you are doing on the Internet without going through a lot of effort and expense.
Uh oh… I need to write a post about the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship and Chris Marstall already masterfully captured all my points last week! Thank goodness there are still a million reasons why OpenNews is awesome. By now you may have read four different accounts of my program, but if you make it through this one […]
I may have graduated, but I still get very good advice from my mentors. The most recent came from Ethan Zuckerman: “Dan, please try not to get fired in your first month. That would be really embarrassing for everyone.” His delivery reflected a hint of genuine concern. There are many reasons why he might have […]
I just finished the second week of my fellowship at The Boston Globe, so at this point I have a stronger sense of how things are done and where I might fit in. Having just come from an academic program like the MIT Media Lab there is a tinge of culture shock (for instance, everyone […]
This was my first week at my brand new job as a Knight-Mozilla Fellow and I can tell you already that it is going to be an awesome time. I’ve worked in a newsroom once before, as an intern in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette back during my undergraduate years, but I have a lot to learn […]
With my thesis complete I’m about to embark on the next phase in life, and in true Millennial fashion it will last about 10 months because job security is for chumps. I’m going to be a Knight-Mozilla Fellow (feel free to call me “Mr. Fellow”) working in The Boston Globe as part of the Open […]