Weird techno hippies from Eastern Europe invade ONA14
Flight tickets are bought and the hotel is booked. The only thing left to do is to pack the headphones and eyemask and get ready for the long flight to Chicago for the Online News Association 2014 Conference & Awards.
At the conference we’ll be speaking about real-time reporting and verification and about tools for sustainable newsrooms. We’ve been working on some pretty far-out stuff and we can’t wait to show it off to North American journalists at ONA14.
ONA13 last year in Atlanta was my first, and it was massive. We honestly don’t have a lot of take-up in the U.S., partly perhaps because we do everything open source. (Weird techno hippies from Eastern Europe! Yeah!) But Atlanta was great, we didn’t freak anyone out too badly, and we made a lot of new contacts.
ONA is very big with people from the U.S. and Canada. It draws a mix of key players in the industry, with a lot of non-profits, like ProPublica and DocumentCloud. There’s plenty of innovative stuff going, and since the event is concerned with online journalism, the crowd is young — definitely more hackers than hacks!
The most unique thing about ONA is the Midway, which showcases interesting startups and non-profits side-by-side with big industry players. Probably the biggest eye-opener last year was SparkFun. Even though their products are not directly connected to journalism, they showed people how to use technology in a creative and playful way.
Last year I gave a short lightning talk about visual live blogs. It got quite a response and I believe it helped to raise awareness about what live blogs can do. But more important is, that we were showing our then-fresh Live Blog. We even commissioned the creation of visual Live Blog prototype, which used a completely different design that what we normally have for Live Blog.
This year I’ll touch on updates to Live Blog and peel back the curtain a bit on Citizen Desk; you can get a glimpse of that process in my blog post here.
We plan to reach out more to like-minded organizations interested in the sharing economy, open source and creative development. There are so many people I want to talk to — and my dance card is filling up fast.
I can’t wait to speak to Steve Buttry, one the of the smartest guys when it comes to applying technology to journalism. He’s full of amazing energy and is constantly helping journalists develop their tech skills.
I also want to speak with Dan Sinker about Knight-Mozilla OpenNews; with ONA Executive Director Jane McDonnell; with Ryan Mark, senior editorial engineer at Vox Media, and with Jeff Jarvis, journalism professor at the City University of New York and a really sharp and smart guy.
As always, I’d love to talk to anyone about the open source tools you’re using in media. Give @dougiegyro a shout on Twitter and let me know if you’ll be in Chicago.
See you in Chicago!