How to raise an army
How to raise an army
by Tyler Fisher / @tylrfishr
Hello! My name is Tyler Fisher, and I’m a senior at the Medill School of Journalism. I also intern with the NPR Visuals Team doing news apps. I'm going to talk about how to raise an army; that is, how to get journalists invested in and building for the web from my experience at Northwestern.You and whose army?
So, what army are we talking about here? Well, my army is here.I am an undergraduate fellow at the Knight Lab at Northwestern, and we've brought 8 fellows to this year's NICAR. For many of them, it is their first NICAR and their first year building for the web. They're all amazing, and you should meet all of them.
But getting to them wasn't easy. We graduated a bunch of undergraduate fellows in 2013, and had a ton of open positions. We just had no idea who we were going to hire.
Finding talent at Northwestern should be easier.
We put out some calls for fellows, and we got a lot of interested students with no experience. They had no experience because Medill had never exposed them to the web in any meaningful way. So the question became, how can we take this interest and turn it into talent?How do we make the Knight Lab a community of webmakers?
Put another way: How do we make the Knight Lab a **community** of webmakers at Northwestern? How can we be a place that welcomes new people as well as enriches the experience of skilled journalists?Community building
Instead of focusing on building new software, as fellows typically did at the Knight Lab, we started focusing on building a new community. We came up with three major initiatives.Brown bag lunches
Informal discussions about journalism and tech
The first is our simplest: weekly brown bag lunches. They're informal discussions about journalism and technology. Anyone is welcome to stop by the lab during lunch and join us. We usually have no set agenda. We just want to get people talking.Brown bag lunches
Nerds want to feel validated in their nerdiness.
And that's important because, when you're a nerd, you want to feel validated in your nerdiness. You want to meet other people who think like you do. For example, "Oh, I really thought that map in that interactive could have been better, too! Let's talk about it! Let's talk about how we can make better maps!"Learn.knightlab.com
A self-guided curriculum for digital literacy
When we had an interested student who wanted to learn, we needed a resource to point them to. So I built this simple website called learn.knightlab.com. It's a self-guided curriculum for digital literacy. That is, it compiles some of the best tutorials and articles about journalism and the web online and presents them in a lesson-style format so that students don't have to dig around for the right next step. The path is laid out for them.
At this time, the site starts from learning how the internet works and builds skills through basic JavaScript. In that period, students learn HTML, CSS, the command line and git, and they build their own personal portfolio site.
Open Lab Hours
A physical space for makers and learners.
Finally, and perhaps most successfully, we hold Open Lab Hours once a week for three hours on a weeknight. It's a physical space for makers and learners. Anybody is welcome to come with any project they want and work on it. They can ask questions of the current Lab fellows and get assistance. The point is to come in and work on something, and realize you're not alone in working on cool projects.Open Lab Hours
Student-run, student-owned.
Importantly, the Lab is run by students, so the students own how the night goes. If everyone wants to hack together on one project, they can. If they want a fellow to give a short presentation on something cool, that can happen too. Having the Open Lab Hours gives students something to own. Even if they aren't fellows at the Lab yet, they feel like they're a part of something and keep coming back.