Update

by Angela Woodall Posted on May 6, 2013

The past few months have been feverishly busy. We’re close to launching SNAPMapper and I’m writing up a proposal for SHOPHere, “the Foursquare for local shoppers.” But the project that has been taking up most of my time since December is an app for disaster preparation and recovery. It started out as an idea from OpenBudgetOakland‘s Adam Stiles at the Open Code hackathon a few months ago. We called it Recover2Gether. The center point was allowing the community to help itself by providing a way for people to communicate with each other about their needs in a disaster. 

What I learned in the meantime is that to create an app for disaster recovery and preparation that people will use, you have to design for everything else but the disaster mission. That is, you have to create an app that people will use daily and can repurpose in an emergency. CARD has plenty to say about that. Anyway, good design is a tall enough order. Real usability and centrality to everyday life is huge. I often imagine all the well-intentioned but abandoned apps floating through space like cyberjunk. So the Tribune is planning to set off in the new MoJo van for four community round-up sessions that will help me design the right app that people can use. I’m modeling the venture on what the Red Hook Initiative did and they are what I’d call a passive partner in this project. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to check out their work in person this summer.
In the meantime, I took some paper and crayons to the Alameda County hackathon last Saturday to launch the community design effort. I didn’t compete but did announce the idea and invited everyone to contribute their ideas. One hacker group ran with the idea and came up with an app that people would use to see what was trending on social media outlets.
I’m working to get Alameda County, the sheriff, local disaster response teams and others involved in the outreach effort. We’ll pull up in the van to a farmers market or flea market in Alameda, Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties, set up shop and start talking to people about what need do they have that can be met by technology. Then we’ll iterate, iterate, iterate. (I also wanted to mention SF72, which we’ll definitely leverage…

Posted in Alameda County, Gov 2.0, Hackathon, Hackers, Journo-Apps, Oakland, Open data, SNAPMapper | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Get up off of that thing newspapers: mobile is the future…

by Angela Woodall Posted on December 7, 2012

So say the experts. Here is the rundown –

1. Mobile is capturing a “significant and growing share” of visits to websites. Translation: Make your websites mobile friendly.  A picture is worth a thousands words

2. Buried at No. 4 on the list is really interesting: App revenue exceeds advertising. Another curve ball for advertising but a good indicator that Civic Playground is on the right track.

Read the rest of the Poynter summary here.

Posted in Gov 2.0, Journalism, Journo-Apps | Tagged | Leave a comment

Random Hacks of Kindness: SNAPmapper

by Angela Woodall Posted on December 3, 2012

Friday night the 2012 Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon kicked off and with it the development of the food stamp (now called SNAP) store finder in the works for nearly a year. Think of it as the Yelp for food stamp users.

It was the first app idea for the DFM ideaLab, originally piggybacking on the SMS and mobile based SNAPFresh app. But I started noticing how many liquor stores showed up in SNAPFresh results. The fantastic team that developed the app back in Oct. 2011 used a database of stores authorized to take accept SNAP.  After visiting a few stores on the list, it didn’t take long to figure out that the government wasn’t enforcing the standards set for stores to participate in the program. So gas station convenience stores were showing up in search results. My first impulse was to sanitize the list. That entailed surveying the stores, which was unrealistic. The answer was crowdsourcing. Who better to call out stores than the people affected by them?

SNAPMapper operates similarly to Yelp in that it lets users find the best food at the best price and the closest store to shop at. They can review and score stores – the liquor stores that gouge customers for milk and the neighborhood grocers trying to offer better options than dusty bags of frozen corn and boxes of over-priced cereal. A map interface provides instructions and AC Transit routes show users how to get to the store or farmers market of their choice.

RHoKgave us the chance to build out the app and create what became SNAPMapper. Brandon Istenes and Kevin Nennig, as well as guest coder Igor Kofman, hacked the back end while Dan Turner crafted the user interface with JQuery Mobile.

The next step is the Alameda County code challenge on Dec. 8.

 

 

Posted in Alameda County, Hackathon, Hackers, Journalism, Journo-Apps, Open data, SNAPMapper, Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Proto of CreditCalx

by Angela Woodall Posted on November 9, 2012

There is work to be done for sure but here is a proto of the first app in the Civic Playground series. It’s at www.twoangstroms.com/CreditCalx.

IMAGE of an early version of CreditCalx

Type in the URL in the browser of your iPhone or Android but READ THIS FIRST before you test: Enter CreditCalx – upper case C. The calculators are operational but we’re still working on the YouTube and Twitter feed there to provide financial literacy advice. Optimally, they would be from the personal finance desk of a news organization, which can upload videos along the lines of design maven Lynda.com’s YouTube channel.

Here is the CreditCalx YouTube channel.

The Twitter feed is complicated by the fact that Twitter stopped supporting RSS (here’s the CreditCalx Twitter page but it’s bare). At least that’s what I’m hearing. We thought we could work around by using something like Twitter Tools to feed tweets into a blog entry and get that into the app. Again, this really should be an RSS feed straight from a news organization. Maybe I’ll try that route instead. I wanted to take the question to Tech Liminal’s Word Press Friday afternoon support group but the Port of Oakland commissioners meeting is way over schedule so I’m stuck here in the board meeting listening to TV reporters gossip.

In the meantime, I’m working on incentivizing, reading Bunchball’s white paper, Gamification 101. I’ll report back soon about some gamification ideas suggested by my colleague @allaboutgeorge. I would be grateful for feedback about the calculators and what would compliment the app. I’d be grateful for whatever feedback. I’m working on other apps to add to the umbrella Civic Playground Journo-App series. That’s what I’m calling it for now. If you have other ideas send them my way.

Posted in CreditCalx, Journalism, Journo-Apps, Open data | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The anthropology of innovation

by Angela Woodall Posted on November 9, 2012

Anthropology is not one of the most practical studies unless you commit to a doctorate. But it’s a really useful skill: my B.A. in anthropology and sociology prepared me for reporting and, it turns out as I am listening to The Anthropology of Innovation, Civic Playground.

I’m completely inspired by the discussion on KQED Radio right now. It’s really more interesting than the blurb implies –

The 21st century world is marked by a profound paradox. On one hand we are more interconnected than ever before, in the sense that we now live and operate in systems that are tightly entwined. But on the other, we also live at a time of great intellectual and social polarization — and social media is making some of this fracture worse, by encouraging the development of intellectual echo chambers. This phenomenon inside organizations can often be deadly. The financial industry is a case in point. But groups or people who can jump across boundaries and categories are often extremely innovative. What do anthropologists have to say about these intellectual echo chambers, or “silos” today? How can organizations silo-bust effectively? Moderator, award-winning journalist and anthropologist Gillian Tett talks with panelists including Intel’s Genevieve Bell and Laura D Tyson and George Kembel of the Stanford d.school.

Posted in Hackers, Journalism, Open data | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

by Angela Woodall Posted on August 27, 2012

Here you have it: BENJI LANYADO IS A JOURNALIST, CODER – AND A GLIMPSE OF THE FUTURE? News Burger poses the question that, at least in the Bay Area, is increasingly answered with an emphatic “Yes.”
That’s how I got started.

The interview with Lanyado is a good read. It’s almost an aside when he mentions how he pestered developer friends to help him with the coding. But the point is a significant one because if you don’t have a pool of people you can turn to when you hit the wall, you will get a concussion from banging your head against that wall — over and over. Which is why NewsHack Study Group exists. There are now 79 members. We’ve had three Meetups. The first time 20 people RSVDd I freaked out. But I have learned from other Meetups that less than half of everyone who says they will attend actually shows up. Most of the members are working, former or aspiring journalists with various levels of tech experience. But they all recognize the role of tech and data in journalism. NHSG helps them learn the skills they need, or at least the steps they need to take to get them. We already have developed several JavaScript mini projects that made it into the BANG newsroom to enhance our site. Timeline JS, Deck.JS, Twitter Bootstrap. I’ll add some links in a folo up post.

So what about those apps? The point of my project was not to teach journalists code but to develop apps.

To learn JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS, the NewsHack Study Group is developing a game that helps people learn how to save for retirement. I am drawing up designs right now and doing some user feedback surveys before we start coding. Meanwhile, I developing another project that I want to move forward a bit before describing. We are going to use a program to develop the app and rip apart the code to learn how it works. Everyone is learning JavaScript on their own and applying what they learn to the project. That gives us the backup needed when we run into an error message and cannot figure out how to make it work.

I am also working with the county on the food stamp project. I might blow the Sept. 1 deadline but that’s okay. I’m backing it to October. An Oakland Voices correspondent is collaborating with me on the reporting side of the project. She found a nice little side story that highlights the recession in a really unusual way. And several reports and a poll came out last week showing how food insecurity is on the rise. So everything is moving along. It’s more of an obstacle course than a path. But we’re going to get there.

Posted in Alameda County, Hackers, Journalism, Open data, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Life after app

by Angela Woodall Posted on July 30, 2012

Here’s my proposal for making those apps live after the hackathons where they are born: Civic hackers are producing innovative technological solutions for cities and their residents, stepping in where city governments and elected leaders are failing. But the technology fails to reach the people who need it and apps linger unused on websites.

People need to know the tools exist and learn how to use them.

The Oakland Tribune will be the first newspaper to feature a “community app of the month” and fulfill both needs. Featuring the technology and demonstrating its use will also make the Tribune more central to civic life.

1. The Tribune will host a monthly demo night to highlight the app, introduce it to the public in a hands-on way. Coders, designers and developers will be invited to demo nights. Attendees will be asked to vote on which app should be chosen. They will also be asked for advice about find-tuning the app to make it optimally useful to the public. The winning app will featured prominently on the IBA website.

2. The app will displayed on the IBA home page and center pieced on an East Bay Tech Scene page being developed.

This is part of Angela Woodall’s ideaLab project and the projects will be reflected in Angela Woodall’s East Bay Tech Scene coverage (we are creating a page for this on IBA).  Angela Woodall will be responsible for the program and will work with the Community Engagement and East Bay Online editors.

This creates a loop that brings more people to the website and improves the stature of the company as innovative and focused on the needs of the community.

We will promote this on Twitter, FB and other social media sites, as well as the front page of the IBA website.

To be considered the technology has to meet the following criteria:

•            Solve a public need in one or more East Bay community – ForageCity.com for example helps residents of Oakland find and/or share free fresh food
•            Be open source
•            Capacity to expand to other cities or issues – Adoptahydrant.org, a smartphone app, enabled individuals, small businesses, and community organizations volunteer to be responsible for shoveling out specific hydrants in Boston. Honolulu used the idea to launch Adopt-a-Siren. Residents signed up to monitor their local tsunami alert siren and report back when there’s a problem.
•            The app should be ready to use when you submit it for consideration
•            Be non-commercial
•            A team or individual (including at least one coder) willing to continue to development

Posted in Alameda County, Hackers, Journalism, Oakland, Open data, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

NewsHack study group gets official

by Angela Woodall Posted on July 29, 2012

NewsHack study group is now the NewsHack Study Group Meetup. Officialdom. Our motto: “Less memo, More demo.”

The group was inspired by the “Liberate the data” NewsHack back in June. We are learning the tools to do that. Coding is the focus first. You can’t build without code (although designers, project managers, writers, etc. also are critical.)

To tell you the truth, I decided to go the Meetup route because I was having so much trouble juggling emails.

Aug. 8 will be our third meeting. The first week we grappled with Timelime JS to get started. I say grappled because the documentation did not make clear that you have to use one of the templates provided. But we got a basic timeline up and running with John Osborn’s persistence.

Week 2 we were on a Twitter tangent. We constructed a query for the Twitter API, which is to say we told Twitter to search tweets with a keyword, within a time frame and radius. We chose #unwelcomeobama (the protests Monday in Oakland during his visit) from July 21-25, within five miles of the Fox Theater. It looked like this:

but with the lat,long and radius added.

We could have used Umapper but QGIS was on the board. Journalistically it’s more powerful. The learning curve, however, is steeper. The Q stands for Quantum…

Notice the JSON in that query.  I will let SkillCrush explain in more detail here about why JSON is used. But here is the basic for this exercise: We ran the query, copied the code to TextWrangler (use any text editor you like) and, in TextWrangler, saved it as in JSON format (as opposed to HTML or Javascript among other possibilities). That whipped the code into shape.

On Aug. 8 we’ll take up the Twitter geocoding again and either embed the QGIS map in Twitter Bootstrap — an HTML, CSS, Javascript heavy site — or create one with UMapper ahead of time and use that. In any case, we’ll be focusing on JavaScript.

(BTW, thanks John and Anca for recommending the HeadFirst series. I’ve been working through Code Academy and traditional O’Reilly and this book is most welcome for its simplicity!)

 

 

 

Posted in Hackers, Journalism, Oakland, Open data | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Farm it, Milk it, Feed it: What’s next for newspapers?

by Angela Woodall Posted on July 12, 2012

In his latest missive, Newsosaurus Alan Mutter, writes that, “Sooner, rather than later, every newspaper operator will have to pay her money and take her chances on an array of strategies that run the gamut from hope to capitulation.”

That includes publishers, new and old, Warren Buffett, the Newhouse family and Rupert Murdoch. Mutter, ever the Chesire cat, poses the question ”Who will be right?” Here is his take on what’s next for newspapers.

Posted in Journalism, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Video on the fly

by Angela Woodall Posted on June 29, 2012

Are pervasive videos shot on smartphones, Flip cameras and other portables dumbing down our visual expectations? That was one of the questions posed last night during the video on the fly workshop I taught with Tom Murphy. He is a madman and the the only person I know who has more projects in the air than I do.

My job was to teach the group of about a dozen journalists and others gathered on the third floor of the San Francisco Chronicle how to use their iPhone or Android to shoot and edit a video.

There was more talk than action but one man downloaded an app, loaded the video he shot on the spot and turned around a slick little  video using VidTrim. And that was the point: it’s so easy, there is no reason to be intimidated. Another man roamed the room shooting with an iPhone.

For androids, I prefer AndroMedia. The other day, I downloaded the app and within about 15 minutes shot and edited this video while waiting for a staff meeting to begin.

I haven’t explored very far from home on the iPhone and still use iMovie for now. This is the first video I edited on the iPhone. I was sitting in the back seat of a car on the way to from Oakland to Healdsburg (the video is a little keepsake of a National Press Foundation fellowship about retirement issues, although the clips are mostly during the downtime between seminars. In other words, you had to have been there…).

The videos are not great but if you can do this in 15 minutes starting from scratch and in between stories and meetings imagine what you can do with a little more time.

To answer the question about our visual imagination being dumbed down, I think video on the fly is to video what Twitter is to a good piece of journalism. They’re easy to digest, engaging but they don’t fill you up. There will always be a place for well-crafted work.

Posted in Journalism, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment