As DocumentCloud settles into our comfy, new home in Missouri, we’re quite pleased to welcome Ted Han aboard as our new lead developer. Though our prior lead developer, Jeremy Ashkenas, has moved to a full-time position at The New York Times, he continues to be an active and enthusiastic contributor to DocumentCloud’s open-source tools and platform. DocumentCloud is a catalog of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web.
Ted joins DocumentCloud from Videojuicer, an online video platform focused on open standards and software integration. He’s a computational linguist by degree, developer by trade, and Sci-Fi nerd by leisure. He was selected as a participant in the Knight Mozilla Journalism Challenge and has worked on DataMapper, Merb and a variety of data-based projects, including the CrisisCommons response to the Tohoku earthquake & tsunami.
We’ve made plenty more changes to our staffing this summer — IRE’s Resource Center director Lauren Grandestaff is fielding new account requests, and more and more support replies will be coming from IRE staff this fall. I’m still spending some of my week helping everyone get their bearings, but I’ll be retreating to an advisory role soon as well.
Ted is planning to get right to work on DocumentCloud’s planned reader annotation tools. His first task will be to identify the newsrooms that DocumentCloud will be collaborating with as we build out those tools, so if you’ve been yearning to try out calling on your readers to provide annotations on a document, now would be a good time to start talking to your editors and web producers about whether this is something your newsroom should be helping us test.
Ted (who blogs here) is new to Columbia, Mo., and I know he has some big ideas about kickstarting a Hacks/Hackers chapter, so we’re thrilled he’s agreed to join us.