Mojo

The short version of what the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership has done so far is select five people gifted in technology and web thinking to work in prominent newsrooms in 2012 on projects to improve news on the open web.

The longer version is that the partnership, an effort of the John S. and James L. Knight and Mozilla foundations, has become a reference point for the larger convergence of journalism and web culture, in particular the culture associated with software’s open-source movement.

With Knight providing most of $2.5 million in direct funding and Mozilla running the partnership, a.k.a. Mojo, organizers set out in the first part of this year to talk with people in newsrooms and outside them about technology and news on the web. A series of challenges asked for ideas on some problems/ opportunities for news on the web (for instance, improving online discourse) and from there Mojo leaders picked about 50 people to develop ideas further through an online Learning Lab.

The process continued with another winnowing of the field, a two-week hackathon in Berlin and the announcement of winners in November for spots at the Boston Globe, Al Jazeera, Zeit Online, Guardian and BBC. One requirement for partners is that projects built through Mojo must be developed so that they can be widely used, through open source tools and approaches.

Beyond that, however, the Mojo process offered learning for anyone who wanted to follow along and has helped thread many more connections back and forth between news people and the Mozilla Drumbeat global innovation community that works in a variety ways to promote open learning and software development.

Anyone following the discussion learned that civic passion, as much as technology wizardry, motivated many of the Mojo participants. Among several dozen project pitches at the end of the Learning Lab (all posted publicly) were ideas aimed at providing richer context in reporting, for providing peer review or reputation management in comment systems and for helping news people do their work more easily and in better communication with users.

Find summaries of the pitches offered at the end of the Learning Lab period here, here and here.

Phillip Smith, a Toronto-based digital publishing consultant who watched over the Mojo processes for much of the spring and summer, often quotes some of the open source mantra “stop yammering and start hammering” and “forget (polite term) the ode, write the code.”

Smith thinks journalism has plenty to gain from open culture — “the free exchange of knowledge is what pushed us out of the caves and into clothes!” — especially in terms of training and learning.

“The speed at which information and education changes in a closed system does no service to the learner,” he said.

The Knight-Mozilla fellowship process and the Mojo partnership have operated more publicly than many other projects, even grant-funded efforts. If you want to catch up, you can view lectures from a series of brilliant presenters (from software, web design and journalism) and other material at the Learning Lab section of Mozilla’s P2PU.

Or follow @knightmozilla on Twitter, the Mojo home page or the Tumblr blog of Dan Sinker, who’s leading the partnership for Mozilla.