Chewing on the #MozNewsLab Project Ideas

Reading the (50, when I last checked) 256-character descriptions of the projects the #MozNewsLab participants are working on was...
  intimidating
    inspirational
          thought-provoking
       reassuring
                daunting
      invigorating
               fun

One of the best things about reading them was how many connections and correlations there were between the ideas. So naturally, being the pattern-finding human that I am, as I read them I started describing them, tagging the, putting them into types.

This isn't a perfect system. Many of them overlap. And that's the best part.

The three strongest themes I saw were: content curation, social reading and beyond the article:

• Content curation - These ideas wrestle with questions of how we take a mess of information (whether it comes from news outlets, citizens, social media, any source, really) and turn it into a digestible flow. Examples: Manual Pinto, Charlie Pinder, Regnard Raquedan
• Social reading - These ideas try to make the reading of news more conversational. Or, to put it another way, more like how we actually talk/share/think about information with each other. Examples: Andy Jennings, Lucas Cioffi, Katie Zhu
• Beyond the article - The article as we know it is an artifact of the 20th century. These ideas try to take a "story" and turn it into the living, breathing, organic thing that it truly is. Examples: Engin Erdogan, Corbin Smith, Sedef Gavaz (also...me!)

There were about 25 themes I saw, including: adding context, annotation, data, visualization, mapping networks, reporting tools and semantic news. I put all the theme tags on a Google spreadsheet so you can view them (and change them, update them, do as you will).

This isn't a perfect way to organize these ideas...it's just a start. Next, I want to create a mindmap to visualize how all the different ideas and themes overlap and intersect. That's probably too ambitious for the time I have at the moment but...maybe one of the other #MozNewsLab participants will do it! (Ah, the perks of working with such a motivated group.)