daniel sinker

Data is a buzzword nowadays. Whether it’s sifting Big Data to influence business, or the promise of Open Data to transform government, or Data Analytics winning elections, data is constantly in the news. But one thing that gets glossed over in all the buzz is that data is hard. Really, really hard. One of the hardest parts is cleaning, standardizing, and formatting data in a way that journalists and others can start to work with. These are real challenges faced by newsrooms and we’re hoping to make some of that a little easier with two new Code Sprints we’re happy to announce today.

First up: Dedupe

One of the biggest problems with data sets is figuring out if information in one set of data is the same as information in another. When you have a small set of data, the work is pretty straightforward. But as your rows increase, the work becomes daunting. Derek Eder and Forest Gregg at Chicago’s DataMade have been working on an automated process for deduplification of data, and we’re happy to help get it to a state where running it through huge datasets is as simple as a few calls from the command line.

A clear early use for the tool is in deduplifying campaign finance records, which can often be a slog. We’ve recruited the help of Derek Willis and others from the New York Times—a href=”who know something about

The DataMade team have done a great deal of heavy lifting already—“we’ve solved the most of major engineering challenges of scaling up on large datasets,” DataMade’s Eder says—but getting a lower barrier to entry on the tool is time and money well spent. If you can program Python, you can fork and start running Dedupe today. If you want to wait for the simplified version, we’re expecting development to wrap up early this summer.

Next up: FMS Parser

The US Treasury releases a statement of, essentially, the Federal Government’s checkbook every day at 4pm EST. Unhelpfully, they release it as a straight-up text file or a PDF. Newsroom developers and info-hackers Cezary Podkul, Burton DeWilde, Thomas Levine, Jake Bialer, Brian Abelson, and Michael Keller started work on scraping and parsing that daily statement at the Bicostal Datafest earlier this year.

The team got far enough along at the Datafest that they approached us about helping to turn it into an open API that any newsroom developer can access. With our Code Sprint grant, the team will take this once nearly-inaccessible dataset and transforming it into an easily accessible API that returns machine-readable JSON. In this time of cutbacks and budget wrangling, the FMS Parser should offer developers and journalists a new way to dive deeply into governmental spending.

The tool should see some immediate use too, as the team of developers working on it include newsroom developers at Reuters, the Daily Beast, and the Huffington Post (along with our Knight-Mozilla Fellow at the New York Times). While it’s still being developed, you can fork and follow at the FMS Parser Github repo.

Onward

A month ago I announced a reimagined Code Sprint application process, and we’re excited to help tools like this get the funding and attention they need through it. We’re always looking for developers and newsrooms with great ideas they want to build (along with newsrooms that want to betatest them), so please drop a line. Let’s do this!

Back at the Hacks/Hackers Media Party in Buenos Aires, I announced the creation of Code Sprints—funding opportunities to build open-sourced tools for journalism. We used Code Sprints to fund a collaboration between WNYC in New York and KPCC in Southern California to build a parser for election night XML data that ended up used on well over 100 sites—it was a great collaboration to kick off the Code Sprint concept.

Originally, Code Sprints were designed to work like the XML parser project: Driven in concept and execution by newsrooms. While that proved great for working with WNYC, we heard from a lot of independent developers working on great tools that fit the intent of Code Sprints, but not the wording of the contract. And we heard from a lot of newsrooms that wanted to use code, but not drive development, so we rethought how Code Sprints work. Today we’re excited to announce refactored Code Sprints for 2013.

Now, instead of a single way to execute a Code Sprint, there are now three ways to help make Code Sprints happen:

• As an independent developer (or team) with a great idea that you think may be able to work well in the newsroom.
• As a newsroom with a great idea that wants help making it a reality.
• As a newsroom looking to betatest code that comes out of Code Sprints.

Each of these options means we can work with amazing code, news organizations, and developers and collaborate together to create lots of great open-source tools for journalism.

I always think real-world examples are better than theoreticals, so today I’m also excited to announce the first grant of our revamped Code Sprints will go to Jessica Lord to develop her great Sheetsee.js library for the newsroom. Sheetsee has been on the OpenNews radar for a while—we profiled the project in Source a number of months back, and we’re thrilled to help fund its continued development.

Sheetsee was originally designed for use in the Macon, Georgia government as part of Jessica’s Code for America fellowship, but the intent of the project—simple data visualizations using a spreadsheet for the backend—has always had implications far beyond the OpenGov space. We’re excited today to pair Jessica with Chicago Public Media (WBEZ) to collaborate on turning Sheetsee into a kick-ass and dead-simple data journalism tool.

For WBEZ’s Matt Green, Sheetsee fit the bill for a lightweight tool that could help get the reporters “around the often steep learning curve with data publishing tools.” Helping to guide Jessica’s development to meet those needs ensures that Sheetsee becomes a tool that works at WBEZ and at other news organizations as well.

We’re excited to fund Sheetsee, to work with a developer as talented as Jessica, to collaborate with a news organization like WBEZ, and to relaunch Code Sprints for 2013. Onward!

It was all the way back last summer when I first made mention of the OpenNews Learning project. The idea was to assemble some of the best minds in the journalism-code world to help create case studies around the journalistic problemsets that developers come across in the newsroom. The trick of assembling great people is that they’re in demand, and when you’re talking about journalism coders, trying to get a project going in a timeframe that included both the Olympics and the US Presidential Election, well… you’re going to want to find a new timeframe.

Which is why today, I’m absolutely ecstatic to announce that that timeframe has been found and it’s next week.

That’s right: starting next week, we’ll be launching OpenNews Learning as a new section on Source. It will be a regularly updated section of case studies that dig deep into the thinking, design, ethics and execution of code in journalism, written by the very people that know this world best.

Kio Stark, who’s heading up our learning team in part because she’s written the book on independent learning, writes more on her blog today:

OpenNews Learning works by example, through case studies written by a stellar set of journalist-developers, designers and hackers about projects they’ve worked on, describing the hairiest coding problems and hidden ethical issues they’ve come up against. You’ll find out how they solved them, and more importantly where they didn’t. You’ll see where there are opportunities to kick ass and take names to keep information free and make democracy more democratic.

Follow @source on Twitter for the final announcement of when we’re live, and get ready to learn some amazing things.

Team 2013 on the streets of Cambridge

I’m still reeling from the amazingness that was the 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellowship Onramping we held at the MIT Media Lab two weeks ago. Our fellowships are different than many because our fellows spend most of their time apart—they’re embedded in their host news organizations, working alongside reporters and newsroom developers—so we wanted to make sure that before they got swept up in the hustle of the newsroom, that they first learned more about each other and start to etch pathways of collaboration that will deepen over the course of the year.

We decided on the Media Lab because it’s a place that’s filled with the exact spirit of experimentation that we wanted to kick the year off with, and thankfully our friends at the Center for Civic Media were able to give us a great spot off the central atrium to set up camp.

Getting heads-down at the MIT media lab

In planning the week, we knew we wanted to hit a good balance gaining shared experience and knowledge and giving everyone the freedom to hack together. We had stuff we needed them to know (how to file an expense report, for instance), stuff we wanted them to learn (how to feel comfortable really diving into need finding in the newsroom), and stuff we hoped would happen (they’d realize just how valuable each one of them is to each other). And we had four days to do it.

The first two days were heavy on talking. It was “Fellowship 101” on day one, where we also had Dan Schultz and Laurian Gridinoc from our 2012 class and representatives from some of the newsrooms that hosting fellows this year on hand to be able to answer questions about the fellowships from many angles. Day two we decamped to the Boston Globe, where friends from the design firm IDEO lead sessions on the fundamentals of human-centered design. In order to start our fellows’ year off with a good grounding in how to observe need inside the newsroom, they then took what they learned and performed need-finding interviews with Globe staffers. The insights they gained through those conversations continued to resonate throughout the rest of our time together.

Annabel Church shows what she’s been up to on Saturday night

Friday and Saturday we moved from talking to making. Since a major part of the Knight-Mozilla Fellowships is for the fellows to feel free to experiment, create, and try new things, we wanted to give ample space and time for exactly that. We only had one rule for the hack weekend: No solo endeavors—the fellows had to work together on stuff. And they did, in small pairs, in larger groups, and in whole-room ideation, it was amazing to watch a group of near-strangers coalesce into a community of peers, of friends, and of collaborators.

The week ended with piles of Indian food and lots of new friends at a meet-the-Fellows get-together on the Media Lab’s fifth floor. We invite folks from the Lab, as well as from around Boston’s robust media innovation community. The fellows got to show off things they’ve been working on, and we all got to play a few robust rounds of Werewolf before heading back to our hotel rooms to collapse.

We focus a lot on community here at OpenNews—the big, sprawling, amazing community that creates the code that’s transforming journalism every day. Those four days in January at MIT was an opportunity focus on a much smaller community: the community of fellows who, over the course of the next year, will not only help journalism on the web make exciting new leaps, but will also become forever a part of each other’s lives. It was a moment to focus on the things we can build together, the ways we can change the world, and the ways we’ll change each other as well. The next year together is going to be amazing.

In November, in advance of the announcement of our amazing slate of 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellows, I wrote a pretty thorough look back at everything the OpenNews project has accomplished in 2012. Erika Owens, our community manager, recently published a great look back at a year of our hack days. And so now, on the last day of the year, writing another year-in-review post about the OpenNews project doesn’t seem necessary. It’s simple enough to sum up our 2012 in two words: fucking awesome. And a preview of 2013 really just requires a single additional word: incredibly fucking awesome.

Instead, I want to widen the focus a little bit, off our project and on to the community it’s a part of since, at the end of the day, that’s why we do what we do: to strengthen, support, and help build the journalism code community. Source, our hub for that community has been publishing year-in-reviews all week. These looks back highlighting some of the inspirational work that’s helped to push journalism on the web forward this year. I want to take a moment to add my own picks to that list:

• Snow Fall: The team of developers, designers, and interactive journalists assembeled at the New York Times is unparralleled. Outside of some of the biggest companies in tech, I’m not sure there’s a more concentrated collection of raw talent than the folks sitting in the Times building in New York right now. They’ve managed to produce a staggering number of incredible pieces this year, but none has gotten the (deserved) attention more than Snow Fall. An engrossing piece of long-form journalism made all the more immersive through smart use of CSS layering and time-based media triggers. There have been a number of “Is the future of journalism?” pieces written about Snow Fall already—to which it’s easy to answer with a resounding “no.” It is a new option for the present, a new way of thinking about presenting and engaging an audience. That they had to completely break their aging CMS to do it right is the real thing to consider closely.
• NPR Big Board: I’ve written before that major elections are the Super Bowl of news applications, and 2012 certainly proved that right. There were incredible pieces created by all the major news organizations, but the one I ended up relying on on the night of the US Presidential Election was the Big Board created by the newly-formed NPR News Apps Team. Instead of building a map like most election results, the NPR team decided to simply display numbers on the screen. As it turned out, that was exactly what a person who was obsessively checking the results (as I was) needed. It’s no surprise that the team assembled by NPR would come up with an approach that turned election result display on its head—they’re all veterans of other news apps teams. Want to see just how strong this community is getting? Read that sentence again: news organizations can now create teams from scratch comprised of veteran talent. More of this. Now.
• Tabletop.js: My single favorite codebase this year was Tabletop.js. A simple idea beautifully executed, Tabletop lets you easily use a Google Spreadsheet as the backend to run a data-driven web page. That’s all, no additional bells, no unnecessary whistles. Created in collaboration with WNYC, it’s been used by news apps developers around the world since its introduction in February. The killer feature is that you don’t have to train anyone on the backend: if they know how to use a spreadsheet, they know how to populate your app with data. Tabletop is also the secret sauce on my *second* favorite codebase of the year, Jessica Lord’s Sheetsee.js, which takes the same it’s-the-database-stupid approach to data visualizations.
• Opened Captions: For pure geeky wow-factor, I’m just as enamored by Opened Captions, built by 2012 Knight-Mozilla Fellow Dan Schultz, today as I was the day he first showed it to me. A smart hack that takes the closed-captioning data coming out of CSpan (copyright issues be damned) and turns it into a fully-functional real-time API, Opened Captions simply produces an unrelenting stream of text as fast as it’s spoken. The possibilities of something like this—from real-time data augmentation with supplementary material to real-time fact checking—is pretty amazing. That it was a hack produced in just a couple days is a great reminder that sometimes fast, cheap, and out-of-control is exactly the right way to do things.
• Data Journalism Handbook: Finally, 2012 saw the publication of the Data Journalism Handbook—an excellent guide to the basics of working with data that was started at the Mozilla Festival in 2011 and has contributions from some of the best in the business. Most notable about the Handbook to me is that it’s a creative-commons licensed project that’s actively looking for localizers and people to produce updates. That’s exactly the kind of collaboration that an engaged community can create. That it’s also quickly become a defacto standard for journalism schools and is being used to open up more newsrooms to the idea of news code is proof of just how vital collaboratively-produced documentation can be.

In putting together this list of five, I kept adding and then removing tons of other great things. 2012 brought so much amazing work that there’s too much to include. Here’s to the incredible work done in 2012, and—even more so—to the incredible work still to come in 2013. Let’s do this.

This is the second of three posts about the state of development in journalism, where we’re at with the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project, and where we’re going. It caps off on Thursday with the announcement of the 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellows, an announcement that then launches us into the Mozilla Festival in London, starting Friday

With the Mozilla Festival approaching in just two days, and the announcemnet of our 2013 Fellows happening tomorrow, it’s a nice moment to reflect on how far the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project has come in 2012 and where we’re going in 2013.

Writing this in the looming shadow of a trans-Atlantic flight to London for the Mozilla Festival, it’s actually pretty overwhelming just how far our project has transformed since I “thought out loud” about opportunites in the intersection of journalism and tech prior to last year’s Mozilla Festival. So it’s time for a little more thinking out loud, both about where we’ve been this year, and where we’re going next.

OpenNews 2012: there and back again

Back in February, we announced a new name and an “evolved” focus for the newly-christened Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project. The idea was to keep our Fellowship program intact, but to build out a much larger program dedicated to growing the community around coding and journalism. Here’s how we did:

Hack Days: We went into 2012 with a new initiative to sponsor, promote, and support hack days around the world that adopted journalistic themes. I firmly believe that if you want to grow the community around tech and journalism, you need to engage people in a way that demonstrates this is a place hackers, developers, and engineers want to play. Hack days are incredibly effective in doing that, and here as we approach the end of year, we will have helped sponsor more than 20 hack days around the world, with over 2000 participants.

Source: Throughout 2012, I’ve been incredibly lucky to work with the talented Erin Kissane and Ryan Pitts to create Source, a website designed to be a centerpoint for the journo-code community. Launched last month after being in a public beta since the Summer, we’ve been able to collect looks at how news devs reacted to Hurricane Sandy, disections of election-related visualzations, and much, much more. Source is just getting started, and it’s already become a go-to, well, source.

Code Sprints: I announced our Code Sprint initiatives from the stage at the Hacks/Hackers Media Party in Buenos Aires Argentina, and I’m excited to say that last night, the first project to recieve funding from the project successfully went live. A collaboration between the techs at WNYC in New York and KPCC in Los Angeles, they built an open-source parser and embeddible map for the XML election data stream coming out of the California Secretary of State’s office. Used by multiple news organizations big and small, it’s exactly the kind of creative, collaborative, reusable, and back-end focused project that we envisioned the Code Sprints for. That’s one down, nine to go—with a rolling application process, what’s stopping you?

Fellowships: And of course, there’s the core of the OpenNews program—our Knight-Mozilla Fellowships. We placed five incredible people into five of the best newsrooms in the world and gave them an open mandate to hack, remix, and recreate news for the open web. They’ve filled code repos, gotten bylines, attended dozens of hack events, and generally made the most of their fellowship year. As they conclude their fellowships a little later this year, I’ll be posting more about what each of them did.

OpenNews 2013: learning on the horizon

Much of our gameplan for 2013 is more, more more. We have plenty more Code Sprints and Hack Days to fund, we’re placing eight fellows—tomorrow, we’re naming names—in newsrooms around the globe, and Source will continue to crank out new content and document the vibrant community of journalism coders.

But if you look back at the original OpenNews 2012 announcement, you’ll note that there’s one promise not yet fufilled: Learning. Learning. Back in the summer, I wrote a quick post announcing a team of “Learning Avengers” made up of some of the best minds in the journo-code community. We’ve laid out some good plans together, but it wasn’t until I was watching the Avengers on a flight back from Argentina that I realized something was missing: You can’t assemble the Avengers and not have a Nick Fury helping guide the team (comics folks, if I’ve totally messed that up, apologies—I’m a DC guy).

And so I’m excited to announce that I found that Nick Fury in Kio Stark, a professor at NYU’s ITP program, and a woman who is literally writing the book on informal learning. She’s getting the Avengers together to launch OpenNews learning big in 2013. The gameplan, in short, is awesome: We’re going to educate developers about how journalists work. How they use and interact with raw data, how they use visualizations, how they use mapping, and what they need to make all three of those more efficient and more informative.

In addition to the developer-focused learning iniatives our Avengers are overseeing, we’re starting to pilot Webmaker learing projects oriented towards journalists who want to learn basic coding skills. We’ll be testing out a new “hacktivity kit” at the Mozilla Festival this weekend. If you’re there and want to learn the basics, join in.

OpenNews Learning will be another part of the ecosystem we’re building around journalism and code, and we’re all excited to kick it off starting in early 2013.

I’m excited about EVERYTHING in 2013, and can barely wait to tell you about the new Fellows we have starting—but that will have to wait until tomorrow, as I have a flight to catch.

See you in London!

Election season is the Super Bowl for news-application teams. There isn’t a single developer at a US- or global-oriented news organization that hasn’t been bringing their A-game these last months. And in just a few hours, as election day begins in the US, the big game is played.

The in-depth articles and weekly newsdev roundups we publish in Source have charted the projects news apps teams have built around the debates, around election returns, and looking at swing-state outcomes, and much more. Now, all that work comes to a head.

It’s going to be a fun night for people who want their election information visualized, streamed, plotted, mapped, or presented pretty much any other way you can imagine. These aren’t election night holograms, but instead are genuinely innovative ways to improve the user experience of news and help people to better understand the information flow in what might be a chaotic news night.

This is what news application developers do best: They take information and they make it easier to parse, navigate, and understand. Which is exactly what we’ve always turned to journalism for and is why the growing news-dev community is filled with luminaries like Jeremy Ashkenas, creator of Backbone.js and Mike Bostock, creator of the d3 visualization library. People want to set information free on the web, more and more, those people are drawn to journalism.

We’ve been able to watch that draw lead to real growth in the community of people actively building new tools in journalism over the course of the last year of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project. Helping to build and strengthen that community is job one at OpenNews, and that’s why we’re excited that this week, post-election, people from that community—people doing news dev from the New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC, Zeit Online, La Nacion, Al Jazeera, the Boston Globe, ProPublica, Bloomberg, and many, many others—will convene in London for the Mozilla Festival.

With the Festival happening so quickly after the election (and with all fingers and toes crossed that the election, you know, ends by then), it seemed like a great opportunity to bring the community together to compare notes on what we built this election season, and make big plans for building new tools. So guess what we’re going to do?

That’s right: At the Mozilla Festival, we’re going to bring together the incredible talent that’s descended on London for three hours of thinking about what we built for elections this year and—more importantly—how we build upon what we learned from it all. We’re going to bring people together to sketch, design, and hack together new ideas and tools for election coverage, from visualizations to the backend.

This is the very best of what we do at OpenNews: Get smart people in a room together and turn them loose on creating new things in journalism. So if you’re in London, be one of those people and join us at the Mozilla Festival for some election hacking. And if you’re not, follow along at #mozelect, and look for a compilation of how news orgs approached the election on Source next week.

Tomorrow we’ll continue this series with a look back at what we’ve accomplished with OpenNews this year. And Thursday: NEW FELLOWS ANNOUNCED!

I sent an e-mail from a hotel room in Berlin in September of last year, while completely blitzed out from jetlag. In it, I mentioned the idea of putting together a site that could serve as a center-point for a lot of the amazing code being written in the journalism community. The response I got from the couple people I ran the idea by was “Yeah, that sounds great, but who’s going to do it?”

Earlier this year I decided the answer was “us,” and I assembled a team to build it.

And today, after many months of building something from nothing, it’s launched: Announcing, Source

Through feature articles that dig into the specifics of the code and the motivations that behind it, through an index to open code repositories produced by the journo-code community, and an index to that community itself, Source connects the many lines of code that make up journalism today with the people that write them. We’ve built relationships between code, people, and organizations deep into the data models of Source because we know that code is always a reflection of the individuals that create it and that those individuals combine to create a thriving community.

Journalism is in a time of massive innovation and reinvention. From data journalism to building news applications, news organizations both big and small are trying things anew. Rethinking the way the world learns about itself is a huge, exciting, and inspiring task. At OpenNews, we’re assisting this lofty goal by helping to strengthen and grow the code and community that is working to build journalism’s future. We do this through our fellowship program, through our sponsorship of hack days, through our code sprint grants, and now through Source.

This wouldn’t have been anywhere near possible without the incredible work of the Source team: Erin Kissane, who I tricked into coming to a conference in Phoenix last December so I could talk her into running this project with me, and Ryan Pitts, whose coding skills and amazing insights didn’t just build a great site, but built *the right* site. Their work, along with the always-there kick-assery of Erika Owens and the steady server-side hand of Ross Bruniges, has been thrilling to be a part of.

It also wouldn’t have been possible without feedback and ideas from dozens of people in the journo-code community who, over the last ten months, saw this project as their own. We’re proud to be a part of that community and to bring something like this into it.

This blog post is already longer than it needs to be: Go view Source! Go follow us on Twitter! And, most importantly, spread the word!

2012 has been a pretty incredible year for the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project. We recieved 165 applications for our 2013 Fellowships (we were expecting around 80) and are now actively interviewing semifinalists. By the end of the year, we will have sponsored at least 20 hack days around the world. Our website, Source, a destination for information about the code being written in journalism, is almost out of development (and being updated regularly while still in dev). By every measure, it has been a hell of a year.

And today we’re adding something new to the OpenNews project: Code Sprint Grants.

What’s that?

Well, right now, the OpenNews projects helps create code that gets made in very short bursts at hack days and in very long strides by our Knight-Mozilla Fellows. These are both incredibly useful endeavors, but there’s a lot of ground between the two that is ripe for great code to be written. Code Sprint Grants are designed to fit there.

I’ve been thinking about the gulf between hack days and fellowships for a while now. Back in November I wrote:

There are a myriad of projects that need more attention than a hack day might provide, but that a year is overkill. … This kind of mid-range project—something that requires a dedicated time commitment of only a few weeks or months—how do we support that? Because I think that may be the lynchpin for some really vital making.

Code Sprints are designed to fit in that mid-range. We see Code Sprint Grants as funding small-scale tools and utilities that are focused on solving real needs of news organizations. By collaborating with news orgs to define problems and help move toward solutions, Code Sprint Grants are a way to get code written that helps to solve specific, repeatable—and real—journalistic problems.

Collaboration with more news organizations is another goal. The news partners that are vital to the Knight-Mozilla Fellowships are big, well-established news companies with global reach and impact. Code Sprint Grants allow us to forge relationships with many more news organizations of different sizes, approaches, and reach. By broadening the organizations we collaborate with, we hope to produce a diverse range of tools.

Code Sprint Grants are for $10,000 and are designed to get going quickly (our application for interested news organizations is just six questions long) and, like all of our programs, are optimized for flexibility (we want to help in ways that will be most useful to you and the code). When the code is ready for release it will be well documented, open-sourced, and available to anyone to fork, modify, and implement.

We’re excited to announce that we’re accepting applications for news organizations interested in collaborating on Code Sprints today. There is plenty more detail, and a link to the application, available on the Code Sprint Grants page on the OpenNews site. Hope to hear from many of you soon.

PS. I’m writing this from Buenos Aires, Argentina, the home of our 2013 news partner La Nacion, and was beyond thrilled to be able to first announce our Code Sprint Grants during today’s keynote at the amazing Hacks Hackers BA Media Party, which has brought 400+ developers and journalists from across South America (and around the world) to share and build together. The whole event has been an inspiration and I’m thrilled to have been involved in it.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of books. If you’re familiar with them, you’re already nodding your head enthusiastically, if you’re not, it’s pretty simple to explain:

The books were written non-linearly, had multiple endings, and every few pages the reader was faced with a choice like this one, from “The Mystery of Chimney Rock”:

If you run into the tomb to escape, turn to page 117.
If you scream for help, turn to page 118.

As a child, when your options in life are very controlled, the choices posed in the book’s pages were thrilling. Every decision, a new adventure.

As an adult, we certainly have more choices, but most of them lack the true adventure that lay inside the pages of those books. Except today.

Today, if you’re a developer, a hacker, a data geek, an open-web nerd, a technologist, a maker, or someone who defies easy categorization but builds amazing things on the web, you have exactly that kind of choice in front of you. Because today marks the final chance to apply to become a 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellow. Saturday night August 11, at midnight Eastern Time, that chance ends.

As the current Knight-Mozilla Fellows explained last week, every day as a Fellow is an adventure. You are inside some of the best newsrooms on the planet when world-changing news breaks. You fly across oceans to hack new ideas with brilliant colleagues. You spend 10 months experimenting and creating open-source solutions to all sorts of problems. You make life-changing connections. You become a thought leader in the global conversations around the future of news.

You will have 10 months of adventures. But you have to make a choice right now, and that choice is to apply.

As I outlined earlier this week, by becoming a Knight-Mozilla Fellow, your adventure is covered by an incredible compensation package that doesn’t just give a stipend but helps with healthcare, childcare, housing, and even covers some equipment and all your travel.

You will have 10 months of opportunity. But you have to make a choice right now, and that choice is to apply.

As our news partners have been saying for the last few weeks, the opportunities to have a positive impact on journalism by bringing new ideas, new perspectives, and new solutions into the mix is massive. You may be embedded in New York City with the New York Times or ProPublica, in London with the BBC or the Guardian, in Germany at Zeit Online or Spiegel Online, in Boston with the Boston Globe, or in Buenos Aires with La Nacion. Wherever you land as a Knight-Mozilla Fellow, you’ll be working closely with some of the best journalism organizations in the world. But you’ll also stay connected to your fellowship cohort, building things together and making lasting bonds as you all work together to prepare journalism for a new era.

You will spend 10 months helping to shape the future of information. But you have to make a choice right now, and that choice is to apply.

So there it is: the choice is yours. You have until Saturday August 11th at midnight Eastern Time to make that choice.

It’s up to you to choose your own adventure:

If you decide to spend 10 incredible months traveling the world and hacking the news, turn to page 117.
If you scream for help, turn to page 118.

This is it: We’re in the final countdown to apply to become a 2013 Knight-Mozilla fellow.

Our current Knight-Mozilla Fellows spent last week talking about how many incredible trips they’ve taken, how many people they’ve met, how many cool things they’ve built, and how much fun they’ve had. And some of our 2013 News Partners have explained why they’re involved in the program and what they’re hoping to build with their Fellows in 2013.

But today, I want to talk about something less exciting, but crucial: The Knight-Mozilla Fellowship benefits package. Your 10 months as a Knight-Mozilla Fellow offers good compensation as well as a comprehensive collection of supplimental benefits that range from help with housing costs to money for equipment and research purchases.

The full host of suppliments are detailed on our benefits page, but I wanted to outline some of them here as well:

• Housing and Moving: If you’re moving across the globe for a Fellowship, know that we have your back: We offer up to $4000 to help you move to the country your newsroom host is in, and suppliments to help cover your housing (ranging from $500 a month for a single fellow to $1000 a month for a fellow with three or more children).
• Healthcare: We don’t want you to get sick during your time as a Fellow, but if you do, we help to cover your health insurance costs, from $3500 for single fellows to $7000 for a family.
• Childcare: I’ve mentioned children and families in the last two items, and that’s because we believe that a Fellowship can be an amazing experience for everyone, and want to help defer the childcare costs that may arise, offering suppliments that range from $5600 to $7200, with additional suppliemnts for infants.
• Equipment: We want our Fellows to have up-to-date technology, and so we offer $3000 for equipment purchases (it can also be used for research costs).
• Travel: Starting with the Mozilla Festival in London, where we’ll announce the 2013 Fellows, we cover all costs for our fellows to travel to conferences, hack events, and opportunities to collaborate together. We even help you book your travel!

Add to all of these suppliments the $60,000 stipend each Fellow recieves for their 10 month Fellowship, and you’ll see that the Knight-Mozilla Fellowships package—like the experience itself—is pretty amazing.

There are only three days to apply to join the program in 2013. The application is quick, but if you wait just a few days you’ll miss out. So apply now.

In seven short days your chance to apply to become a 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellow will be over. Because at midnight on Saturday August 11th, the application window closes.

We are looking for the best developers, hackers, data geeks, engineers, analytics nerds, math whizzes, and technologists around the world to spend 10 incredible months hacking and experimenting in eight of the best newsrooms on the planet. You’ll also travel the globe attending conferences and hack days, to collaborate with some of the brightest minds out there, and to have an incredible amount of fun.

Don’t take my word for it. Ask our current five Knight-Mozilla Fellows, or ask some of the newsrooms that will be your host. The opportunity is incredible—don’t miss out.

The application is super short—just 450 words and some links. We want to make it easy for you to apply, so go do it—because in one week the opportunity will be over.

Mark Boas, Cole Gillespie, Nicola Hughes, Dan Schultz, and Laurian Gridinoc on the deck of the MIT Media Lab, June 2012

This week, each of the 2012 Knight-Mozilla Fellows told stories of what they’ve been up to during their time as Fellows. Each story captures both the unique experiences of each Fellow, but also captures their singular personality. And each story is a captivating reason for why you, with just a week to apply, should join their ranks as a 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellow.

For Mark Boas, who has been working with Al Jazeera English, he writes that his time as a Knight-Mozilla Fellow has meant getting his work in front of new audiences and for leaning the discipline that comes with deadline-based development:

There is great opportunity to innovate and see your experiments incarnate on websites that get very many eye-balls and of course get all that lovely feedback. And when I say lovely I don’t mean complimentary I just mean that all feedback is lovely even when it is negative and the more you get – the better. In fact, I think one of the most important things you can do when publishing to a site like AlJazeera.com is measure the usage in as much detail as possible. Certainly for me it’s not often that I will be able to collect so many stats on things that I have had a hand in making.

The unpredictable and somewhat transient nature of current affairs also presents tremendous opportunities. One of the projects I’m working on is an interactive slide-show that displays a series of slowly zoomed images to a YouTube soundtrack. I had just got a rough proof of concept together when my colleague mentioned they had some fresh photos and an audio soundtrack from Syria and that they wanted to create an audio-slide show from it to go live the next day. Frantic hacking of code and content ensued but we got it out in time. I wrote in my last post that situations like these are an opportunity to hone your shipping skills and a good exercise in delivering the minimum viable product.

Nicola Hughes, who has been embedded with the Guardian’s Interactive News team, writes of the boundaries she’s pushed and the distance she’s come as a Knight-Mozilla Fellow:

So what have I got to say? A young woman of colour, trained in broadcast journalism, who had never used the command line until this year. From the very beginning I felt I had the least to offer the OpenNews programme. I never thought I would get it. I was enticed to participate by the various rounds in the competition. As a fledgling programmer, I loved hackdays. Being able to connect with those at the edge of digital journalism and those interested in the field was reward enough.

But I did win and here I am. So what have I done? I have advanced my skills beyond what I could have done on my own. I am more comfortable with the strategies of data digging and programming. I know what skills I want to add. But most of all I know I should be here and I deserve to be here. Not as Nicola Hughes or DataMinerUK but as an OpenNews fellow. And by ‘here’ I don’t mean The Guardian or the OpenNews programme. ‘Here’ is web-making, data-digging and story-building in the open.

A big part of this resolution to create, innovate and take news beyond the written word is my fellow fellows. I feel truly blessed to know such creative, talented and forward-thinking individuals. This has been a big benefit to me and one I will take beyond the fellowship.

Cole Gillespie, who moved to Berlin from North Carolina to be a fellow at Zeit Online, punctuates his reflection with photos from “the best year of my life,” as he writes:

A question we are all often asked when we meet new people is “What do you do?”. I used to find that question annoying unless I was talking to other technical people because it meant that I had explain to them the details of a highly technical field in order for them to get it. While I love telling people about hardware virtualization and all of the details of the work I did at IBM it seems that most people get lost in that conversation and immediately switch the topic. Now I revel in such opportunity to explain what exactly it is that I spend time doing on the day to day hack with Mozilla and Zeit Online. It gives me a chance to explain how exciting working in an open way for the news room can be. Of course it comes with a unique set of challenges just like any software situation these days but Zeit has done an great job at making it easy for a developer to get access to all of the proper tools necessary to get the job done.

For Laurian Gridinoc, who has been working with the BBC to break Flash’s stranglehold on their news interactives, it was working (and playing) with the other Fellows that he’ll remember the most:

Working with the other fellows was the most rewarding experience of this fellowship. While day-to-day work at BBC was challenging, it was limited in the aspect that it was serious work and not experimental bat-shit crazy stuff that may work only on one browser. With my fellow fellows, we played with arduino, scrapers, speech recognition and video transcripts, natural language processing, seriously.js, processing.js and all the other *.js cool toys at the hack days we attended together.

Finally, Dan Schultz, who has only been a Knight-Mozilla Fellow at the Boston Globe for two months, reflects on the unique position a Knight-Mozilla Fellow finds themselves in:

We are trying to publicly understand, question, observe, and create in the context of news. There are so many chances to do all four of those things. Not a day has gone by where I haven’t been exposed to something new — a new idea, a new problem, or a new opportunity.

You are being thrown into an organization that may have a vision for you to work with, or may expect you to invent a vision of your own from scratch. Either way your time is going to be your own and you will be expected to make great use of it. This kind of freedom is difficult to cope with, especially when people have high hopes for you. People will throw you questions to ponder, ideas to critique, and problems to solve and you will need to prove yourself.

In return you get to ask anyone anything. You will get to bend the rules and do things that other people around you might have to fight hard to accomplish. If you are interested in something, you will be able to work on it. If you have a question or concern you will be able to get an audience with the CTO or the chief editor. Nobody else at your organization has your title.

These five people had the extraordinary skills to become 2012 Knight-Mozilla Fellows. In 2013, we expand that opportunity to eight and expand our host news partners to include the New York Times, ProPublica, La Nacion in Argentina, and Spiegel Online in Germany.

This is an opportunity to see the world, to hack the news and to have the time of your life. but to become a 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellow you need to apply: the application window closes on August 11th—just one week. Do not hesitate: Apply to become a 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellow today.