Mozilla Festival 2012

Second Screen Applications extend and enhance content information streams and synchronize alternative content on and via portable devices (the second screen). Join a complex and fascinating discussion and prototyping session among a diverse group of experts and interested parties, discussing and demonstrating second-screen concepts. We’ll be generating a lot of creative content together – paper [...]

Participants will work together to design a tool capable of harnessing existing services such as search engines, social media APIs and data visualization libraries to create a visual picture of how items of Creative Commons content are being viewed, shared and republished over time. Why? While established content providers seek to protect their content and [...]

Journalists and those interested in reporting will learn how to use digital journalism tools for newsgathering. We will take five news stories and use different tools to track down potential sources and verify facts. For example, we may want to find tweets originating in Benghazi the previous day, build a map of tweets sent with [...]

In this session we will start expeditions into different datasets. The data we’ll explore and cartograph will range from financial to environmental and geographical data – and possibly beyond! Participants will join an expedition and discover and map the landscape that they find. Throughout, there will be an emphasis on developing and improving data wrangling [...]

Markup and style a news article and test your media awareness by remixing web news articles to see how the style and structure of a piece can change the message: how does the medium change the message? We’re working on building a “hactivity kit” for organizers to take to use Thimble to teach HTML and [...]

In this lunchtime conversation, learn how the Knight Foundation and Mozilla are transforming their work to match the speed of disruption and innovation in media. Michael Maness (VP/Journalism & Media Innovation, Knight Foundation) and Dan Sinker (Director, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews) will discuss the shifts in thinking on how media projects get conceived, funded, built, and managed.

Help answer the question, “What does our block sound like?” and enable individuals to come together online to create and participate in the power and passion of neighborhood community radio. This digital community radio service will focus on developing a continuous listening experience for sharing local news, information and culture while building audience engagement through [...]

This Learning Lab is a practical introduction to the tools and libraries used to build standards-based interactive content at guardian.co.uk and other newsrooms around the world. Starting with an idea participants will be walked though conceptual development, wire-framing & evaluating technical feasibility before an introduction to libraries we commonly use to assemble content such as [...]

Digital tech has provided thousands of new ways to share journalism on hundreds of different screens. This workshop is for active citizens who want to build or experiment with physical platforms and digital tools for finding original stories and telling them in new and interesting ways. From Interactive Newsprint to Drone Journalism and everything in [...]

Imagine that you’re a bike enthusiast, or a reporter writing about cycling issues, and you’d like to know whenever a bike theft has been reported. You could call the police department every morning. But wouldn’t you rather just get an email about the police report? In this session, people will learn the basics of writing [...]

Remember when Intel turned your life into a museum exhibition using your Facebook data? Or when Google put your place of birth into Arcade Fire’s The Wilderness Downtown video? How about when Take This Lollipop warned you – specifically you – about the dangers of social networking? That’s ‘Perceptive Media’, and it’s coming to a [...]

Election season is the Super Bowl for news-application teams. Whether it’s capturing live data streams on election night, creating innovative new approaches to mapping, building large-scale crowdsourcing infrastructure to fact check or data-dive, capturing real-time social sentiment, or simply creating new user experiences for presenting election results, developers inside the newsroom (and passionate indies) repeatedly [...]

This session focuses on how to use multiple sources of Linked Open Data to create visualizations that later will be used in blogs, articles, etc. Using tools like SPARQL and Visualbox we will learn how to use Linked Open Data available on the Web to create visualizations. Since the tools used are Open Source, we [...]

We’ve been working hard last year and a half building the second biggest Hacks/Hackers community around the world with 1670 members, and about 15 meetups and hackathons. We’ve created the HHBA Media Party, biggest mediathon ever in Southamerica with 700 participants in three days. We’ve reached a level of “expertise” bringing these two worlds together [...]

This session is for: – Video bloggers & journalists – Translators – Designers & Techs – International bloggers & journalists An explosion in online video production has changed the nature of reporting and advocacy around the world. For civic actors, the problem has shifted from obtaining footage of important events to discovering and amplifying the [...]

The next generation of Scratch, Scratch 2.0 (vimeo.com/41683547) is going to be hosted online, as a Cloud based application. With this shift, we are adding a number of features to Scratch that allows it to “plug in” to the web, enabling young programmers using Scratch to collect and store data online, explore coding with online [...]

Participants will work with custom Popcorn Maker templates to create a narrative about a place or location. This template advances the work by Laurian Gridinoc for the BBC. Participants will record an audio clip telling a story about a place – It could be as simple as their flight to London or walk to Ravensbourne [...]

Challenge: What would it look like to combine privacy awareness tools like Mozilla Collusion with Popcorn.js into a documentary about privacy? Could we actually tell a story about tracking by tracking the audience? Make yourself visible and join documentary filmmakers, privacy advocates and hackers in a brainstorming jam that’s sure to raise some hackles. Session [...]

Learn about the toolchain of Free/Libre Open Source Software tools available to produce a digital or printed publication. We will deal with software and systems that allow and facilitate collaborative design methodologies such as version control, IRC channels, wikis and mailing lists and see how these can be integrated in a publication and design workflow. [...]

Investigative Researchers deal with vast amounts of documents in different formats looking for relationships. Together we will pursue solutions for dealing with issues such as: semantic analytics and processing documents, extracting entities (datamining), analyzing and “saving” facts in a database system, the historic problem of co-references between entities (for example, how to deal with names [...]

From Watson, to driverless cars, to Siri, artificial intelligence is beginning to show what it can do. Now it’s journalism’s turn: The emergence of text processing and machine learning toolkits and services means that it’s easier than ever to build some editorial intelligence into online journalism and media applications – producing systems that are smart, [...]

Data challenges and how hacktivism can help journalism change status quo: Data and Access to Information context Killing data skepticism by doing it yourself (if gov. doesn’t open data, do it yourself). How we believe media must help promote a movement to open data and develop applications that will empower people´s participation and government accountability. [...]