Lessons from MozFest 2014
A few weeks ago Pete Haughie, Daniel James, Doug Arellanes and I attended Mozilla Festival 2014 in London. I wanted to share my perspectives, feelings and takeaways from the trip with you here.
In the session “Reinventing software for journalists”, I found that journalists are smart, creative people who like to work with beautiful, fast tools. My group worked on an idea for a software or app for interviews:
The big challenge in recording audio during an interview is to make sure that quality is good and the content of the recorded clips is sufficiently informative to be useful for storytelling. Our app will let users load questions ahead of time and set the nominal suggested length as short, medium or long. These length values can be set in app-level settings.
During the interview, the interviewer will start the interview and then tap to advance to the next question as the conversation progresses. Each question is recorded as an audio clip and then analyzed. If an audio clip fails validation (length, background noise, low levels, high levels, etc.) then the question is re-inserted into the question queue at an appropriate place and with an error message prompting the interviewer to ask again.
Read more about our plans to reinvent the tape recorder.
I’d like to follow through on this session by building a ‘drafts app’ for Newscoop, which would add text, images, videos, titles and create pending articles in a Newscoop instance.
I another session, “Three publishing platforms walk into a bar,” I learned that people know about Sourcefabric (which was really cool). They’ve heard about Newscoop, too, but they don’t love it — mainly because we are not as hip as, say, Ghost, and we haven’t introduced any new features for very long time.
Give us your feedback
The criticism is fair. Because we want to do better in the future, I’ve created this short survey to find out what Newscoop users think of the software.
As for following through on this session, you can see my idea for a journalist dashboard feature in Newscoop here.
First I want to thank for Pete and Daniel for a really great welcome to the UK (especially Pete for all his stories about buildings, bridges etc.). Additionally, thanks to Mozilla for their gift of an Alcatel Flame phone, I’m very interested in using REST APIs more often, perhaps in a Newscoop reader app.
In short, MozFest was awesome. I hope to be back next year with an even larger group.
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