Get Busy Building Before You Get Busy Funding

I spoke at the latest HacksHackers London meetup along with three of my other OpenNews Fellows. Also speaking was John Bracken from the Knight Foundation and Bobbie Johnson who successfully started Matter on Kickstarter. Chronic blogger, Martin Belam has a good round up (see links) where he mentions my ‘rallying cry’: “You have no excuse … Continue Reading →

DataMinerUK: What I Do And How

What I Do Data journalism has sprawled into an all-encompassing term meaning new digital journalism excluding social media/community. In other words, news generated from a newsroom which doesn’t solely consist of text print. However, there is a wide variety of fields interwoven and interrelated into the term data journalism. So when asked about getting into data … Continue Reading →

Hacktivities at the Mozilla Festival 2012

Last weekend (9-11 November 2012) saw the second Mozilla Festival. Over a thousand people came through the doors of Ravensbourne College, packing 9 floors and hacking to their hearts content. Digital journalism super stars Aron Pilhofer, Brian Boyer, Scott Klein, Miranda Mulligan and the Guardian Interactive Team were in attendance. I optimistically decided to run two … Continue Reading →

Scraping Contracts, Digging Dfid

In an article on the Guardian Data Blog Claire Provost outlined how the recent furore over consultancy spending by the Department for International Development (Dfid) should not be about turning the aid tap off but about making aid work for the donor country. One way to promote development in donor countries is to untie aid, to … Continue Reading →