> Finally, this is a project that has the opportunity not only to improve community engagement in journalism, but to strengthen the web itself. Technologies like Backbone.js, D3, and Django have all been forged and tested in the demanding environment of the newsroom, and then gone on to transform the way people build on the web. We don’t know that there’s a Backbone lurking inside this project, but we’re sure as hell going to find out.
IMO, these libraries succeeded because they grew organically and iteratively, from the needs of closely-knit developers (or sole developer). Moreover, they are agnostic...Django is not just a MVC framework suited for the news, but suited for all kinds of data applications. Similarly, D3js doesn't care if the data visualization is for a news story or some business app.
It's a different scenario to create something big...in this case, basically a social network for media company users...and to create it for the news business. I'm not sure that having big dreams and a news-focused mission is necessarily a harbinger of success.
http://dansinker.com/post/89256288060/opennews-building-new-...
> Finally, this is a project that has the opportunity not only to improve community engagement in journalism, but to strengthen the web itself. Technologies like Backbone.js, D3, and Django have all been forged and tested in the demanding environment of the newsroom, and then gone on to transform the way people build on the web. We don’t know that there’s a Backbone lurking inside this project, but we’re sure as hell going to find out.
The most successful from-journalism projects don't seem to be "projects", per se, but libraries built to "scratch" a major itch: Backbone (and UnderscoreJS) were abstracted from the front-end patterns of the DocumentCloud project (http://blog.documentcloud.org/blog/2010/10/code-drop-backbon...)...Django was created after developers at the Lawrence, KS newspaper got tired of building structured-data apps from scratch (http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/chapter01.html#django-s-his...)...
IMO, these libraries succeeded because they grew organically and iteratively, from the needs of closely-knit developers (or sole developer). Moreover, they are agnostic...Django is not just a MVC framework suited for the news, but suited for all kinds of data applications. Similarly, D3js doesn't care if the data visualization is for a news story or some business app.
It's a different scenario to create something big...in this case, basically a social network for media company users...and to create it for the news business. I'm not sure that having big dreams and a news-focused mission is necessarily a harbinger of success.