Fresh off last year’s successful and invigorating Collab/Space workshop in Atlanta, we’re bringing Collab/Space to New York City. This year’s event is hosted at the Ford Foundation’s beautiful headquarters on the east side, on July 8. The focus of the event is fostering innovation from within, and the workshop will hone and highlight the work of some of New York’s leading innovators.
The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism is the event’s premier sponsor. We’ve partnered with RJI for the diversity and vitality of their work within journalism, including media convergence, editorial content and methods, the evolution of advertising, innovation in management and the impact of new technologies.
Participation in Collab/Space NYC entails inclusion in the collaborative workshop and the day’s networking opportunities, as well as access to the great group of speakers we’ve assembled. For this event, we’ve coordinated a veritable “meeting of the minds” in digital media, featuring a group of industry leaders and major players in cutting-edge media across disciplines. There will be rapid-fire presentations from these nine organizational projects, and the audience will help them identify their key problems. There will be breakout groups in the afternoon, with attendees learning improv comedy techniques to collaborate better and solve the projects’ challenges.
There are still a few spots available, so please register today to join us at the workshop! Or if you can only make it to the mixer, please RSVP here. Today, MediaShift is excited to announce Collab/Space New York’s featured innovation projects, listed below in alphabetical order.
Collab/Space Innovation Projects
Analytics Dashboard, NPR
Stage: Beta
Location: Washington, D.C.
Description: “Melody Kramer and I — co-leads of NPR’s Social Media Desk — wanted to create an analytics dashboard that would help our journalists learn something about how their stories play on the Web. Our homepage team uses Chartbeat and a few people here and there use Google Analytics regularly. But our frontline editors, producers and reporters did not have an accessible view into the numbers. We were given six weeks with a multidisciplinary team to build a tool for the newsroom. We call it the Audience Intelligence Dashboard and it’s powered by a APIs from Google, NPR and Twitter. While the initial project has concluded, we have a roadmap of improvements we’d like to make over time.” — Wright Bryan
Presenter bio: Wright Bryan is one-half of NPR’s Social Media Desk, leading the organization’s charge into digital communities big and small. Before joining NPR in 2005, Bryan was a journalism instructor at Ball State University and an award-winning senior editor at CNN.com.
Audience Engine, WFMU
Stage: Prototype
Location: USA
Description: Audience Engine is a strategy and self-sustaining content engine for radio, television and online publishers who want to maximize traffic and increase audience engagement.
Audience Engine is a publishing platform interwoven with financial sustainability and audience development tools; it’s a cross-platform, network-agnostic suite of techniques that flow content into existing platforms and devices, allowing publishers to maintain their own brands while enabling migration and interaction between curator and audience. It has been designed as a mission related investment which will generate ongoing income through commercial activity to provide ongoing funding for it’s mission of providing state of the art tools for media and democracy.
Presenter bio: Ken Freedman is WFMU’s General Manager and a thought leader in the field of merging radio with social and digital media. He co-hosts the conceptual comedy program Seven Second Delay with Andy Breckman.
Stage: Live Service
Location: Washington, D.C. / New York
Description: A card stack is the single best resource on a topic users care about. Aggregating all the vital information needed to navigate complex current events & issues and presenting these facts in Vox’s highly visual, interactive format, card stacks create context for the latest news updates and guide readers in drawing their own informed conclusions on highly contested subjects.
Presenter bio: Scott Kellum is a front end designer working at Vox Media on the recently launched general news site, Vox. Scott has worked at Vox Media for over two years on other properties including SB Nation and The Verge. Previous to working at Vox Media Scott has worked at a small digital publishing startup called Treesaver as well as working at Darden Studio, a small typeface design studio.
Stage: Live Service
Location: USA
Description: Digital media is flooded with ugly charts: most typically screenshots from government PDFs or excel documents. The causes for this are not from lack of ability to make charts, they are rooted in the lack of ability to make good looking charts. We’ve come up with a solution called Chartbuilder. As a web based tool, Chartbuilder can be used by anyone who is familiar with the internet—but as a product that is deployed by an organization, it allows any person with access to make simple charts in a consistent and approved style. Chartbuilder’s output is an image file (or vector graphic)—which makes it easily used in everything from power point presentations to print publications to tweets.
Chartbuilder been used in various capacities by NPR, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, The New Yorker, and the Financial Times, among others.
Presenter bio: David Yanofsky is the project initiator. He creates data driven and visual stories for Quartz. David is a professional journalist, trained designer, self-taught programmer, and amateur printmaker living in Brooklyn, New York. He’s the product of suburban Boston, the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, and Bloomberg, where he created interactive stories for its web sites, television stations, radio broadcasts, and magazines.
Course Builder: Empathy for Educators, Ashoka + Google
Stage: Alpha
Location: Washington, D.C.
Description: Tackling today’s complex and dynamic problems requires flexible, collaborative leaders that are cultivating a skill set including empathy and innovative problem-solving. For 40 years, Ashoka has been building the largest global network of social entrepreneurs who are meeting this challenge. The life stories of these social entrepreneurs illustrate that inspiration for changemaking happens at a very young age. Building on this insight, Ashoka has launched a Changemakers Schools initiative to ignite the spread of changemaking skills in tomorrow’s leaders. This initiative has launched a growing network through a nomination and vetting process that currently includes 60 exemplary primary schools across the United States that teach changemaking skills at a high level. Partnering with Google’s Course Builder team, Ashoka is producing a massively open online course (MOOC) to leverage the knowledge and practice of these schools to help ignite a larger network and movement. This course co-creation process is an intrapreneurial initiative that is improving Google’s own Course Builder tool, while providing a powerful platform to disseminate Ashoka’s knowledge on a larger scale.
Presenter bios: Joseph Agoada (right) is a Social and Civic Intrapreneruship Specialist at Ashoka Changemakers with a history of innovative work within the digital and international development sectors. In 2006 he founded a non-profit which delivered appropriate technology and capacity building to East Africa. The nonprofit work led to employment with innovative teams within the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) from 2007 – 2013 and joined the Ashoka Changemakers team in early 2014. Joseph holds an undergraduate degree in communication arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a masters degree in international relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
Dennis Whittle is Executive Chairman of Ashoka Changemakers. He is co-founder of GlobalGiving, where he served as CEO from 2000-2010. GlobalGiving has matched over $130 million from hundreds of thousands of donors and companies to 10,000 projects in 159 countries. He recently co-founded Feedback Labs and has been a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Global Development, Professor of the Practice and Social Entrepreneur in Residence at UNC-Chapel Hill, and Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. Previously, he was an economist at the World Bank (1986-2000), where he lived and/or worked for many years in Indonesia and Russia. His team there also created the Development Marketplace in early 2000. which has been replicated over seventy times around the world. In 1984-85, Dennis worked for the Asian Development Bank and USAID in the Philippines, where he was an extra in one of Chuck Norris’s best movies, Missing in Action (1984).
Stage: Live Service
Location: Menlo Park, CA
Description: The FB Newswire discovers and highlights newsworthy content being posted by the more than 1.2 billion people who use Facebook every month — from stormchasers to politicians to regular people who witness something amazing.
The goal is to surface this content for news organizations, which have long struggled with discovery on the Facebook platform, for use in stories and TV packages. News organizations are hungry for news and content, and we’re trying to meet that need.
Presenter bio: Jason White is a Strategic Partner Manager at Facebook, and worked previously as a Senior Editor at NBC News Digital.
Stage: Beta
Location: New York
Description: “The Daily News Innovation Lab is an effort backed by the New York Daily News to engage with the thriving NY Tech scene. Launched in the Fall of 2013, the Innovation Lab’s first project was to work collaboratively with New York-based startups on projects to address media industry needs. We invited Datavisual to work in our offices, and are assisting them as they develop, iterate, and refine their product. The goal is to provide an environment where real-time feedback and testing can assist in the creation of successful products and companies. In addition to seeking new companies for the Innovation Lab program, the Lab team is launching an event series in September 2014, and is interested in exploring additional projects.” — Cyna Alderman
Presenter bios: Cyna Alderman is the Managing Director of the Daily News Innovation Lab, and Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Daily News, L.P. She conceptualized the Daily News Innovation Lab after working on multiple start-up projects for the Daily News. In addition to managing the legal department and handling day-to-day issues such as structuring business partnerships, licensing, and employment matters, Cyna is an active member of the senior management team. In this role, she is involved in strategic planning and business development. Prior to joining the Daily News and its affiliated companies, Cyna was a corporate associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP specializing in mergers & acquisitions and securities. Cyna is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and New York University Law School.
David Park is the Business Development Manager at the Daily News with a focus on forging and growing strategic, revenue-generating partnerships, and managing numerous digital products. David also founded the leading online music publication Prefixmag.com. Under his leadership, Prefix reached over one million unique visitors a month and was selected as a Small Business Success Story by Twitter. David also negotiated an exclusive partnership with the IndieClick Media Group and has been a panelist at Internet Week. David is a graduate of Boston University’s School of Management.
Stage: Beta
Location: New York
Description: Streamtools is a new, open source project by the New York Times R&D Lab which provides a general purpose, graphical tool for dealing with streams of data. It offers a vocabulary of operations that can be connected together to create live data processing systems without the need for programming or complicated infrastructure. These systems are assembled using a visual interface that affords both immediate understanding and live manipulation of the system.
Presenter bios: Matt Boggie is Director of Technology Strategy for The New York Times R&D Lab, and leads the team of Creative Technologists who develop the Lab’s many prototypes. Matt is responsible for researching and developing points of view on trends in media production and consumption, identifying phenomena worth further study, and shaping the development of the Lab to educate and inspire. In addition to his internally-facing presentations, he has also spoken at Digitale Medier in Oslo, Journalism/Interactive at the University of Florida, and the Computational Journalism Symposium at Georgia Tech.
Mike Dewar is a Data Scientist at the New York Times R&D Lab. Mike has a PhD from the University of Sheffield, UK, where he studied the modelling of complex systems using data. His work now focuses on building tools to study behaviour. Before joining the New York Times, Mike worked at the New York tech company bit.ly, and completed postdoctoral positions at Sheffield, Edinburgh and Columbia Universities. Mike is a data ambassador for the non-profit organisation DataKind, and has published widely on signal processing, machine learning and data visualisation.
Wall Street Journal’s modern CMS
Stage: Alpha
Location: New York
Description: “We want to create a nimble, digital-first way to manage our content; our challenge is that, by definition of being a huge, print-dominated company, we can’t make huge leaps overnight or simply start from scratch like so many other companies. So the challenge for us–being spearheaded by a small group of technologists and developers–is to work with the content management system we already have, improving its speed and UI, and adding features to it that make our online editors’ lives easier.
David Biderman
To get the work done, we’re going to move in small steps…we can’t just completely overhaul the system in one night, because it’s used by more than 500 people per day, all across the world. But the challenge is well worth pursuing; if we succeed, we’ll have built a new, digital-first way to manage content in a 1,800-plus, multinational, 125-year old newsroom. We’ll then control the future of our CMS, instead of leaving it to an outside vendor.” — David Biderman
Presenter Bio: David Biderman is a Newsroom Development Editor at the WSJ.
Amelia Senter is the Events Intern at MediaShift. She works in Digital Media & Communications for various film, technology, and music projects in New Orleans, where she lives.