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We have a lot of projects going on at DocumentCloud and to serve those goals we’re looking for others to join us! For those who may be unfamiliar with our project, we’ve included the full details below.

DocumentCloud is a web based platform allowing journalists to upload, analyze, annotate, and publish primary source documents. We want give journalists the tools to show their audience their source material, not just tell them about it. In addition to the newsrooms worldwide who use DocumentCloud, our open source software projects, such as Backbone.js, Underscore.js, Docsplit, and Jammit, are relied upon by companies such as LinkedIn, Walmart, Foursquare and more. DocumentCloud is run by Investigative Reporters & Editors.

What DocumentCloud is building

• DocumentCloud is growing fast, and we’re looking to accelerate that pace by expanding our tools into other languages beyond English. In the next year we’ll adapt our platform to accommodate multi-language OCR, search indexing, and entity extraction tools.
• DocumentCloud always looks for new ways to present documents and engage readers. We are extending DocumentCloud’s document viewer and annotation tools so that readers can make their own comments and notes on documents.

DocumentCloud is looking for someone with a combination of the following skills

Experience with Ruby and JavaScript; API driven web applications; working on and fostering FOSS; user-centered products; Experience the JVM toolchain; linux administration on Platform as a Service providers such as AWS.

Things we like and hope you like too!

Literate programming; Extracting libraries from app code; Polyglot programming; Web standards; Journalists; Natural Language Processing

Practical Details

Investigative Reporters & Editors is based in Columbia, Missouri, on the University of Missouri’s campus. DocumentCloud is comfortable operating with a distributed team.

You can email us at jobs@documentcloud.org

Chris Amico had a problem he wanted to solve: when bloggers posted a document from DocumentCloud into WordPress, switching between the Visual and HTML modes destroyed the embed code. So he created Navis DocumentCloud, a plugin designed to protect the javascript from the Visual Editor.

“That crux of it is that it makes it safe to drop a document into WordPress and be certain that it won’t be broken,” said Amico, of the plugin he authored as an application developer for NPR’s StateImpact project.

Users can post their document using a DocumentCloud button on the post’s toolbar in Visual mode, or a shortcode in HTML mode.

The plugin also allows users to configure the width and height of the document viewer in an administrative panel in the Settings menu. The “Full-width” option is designed to make the document viewer as wide as the post content.

“We wanted to give reporters the ability to make a post that is basically just the document,” Amico said.

The plugin is available on GitHub and the Project Argo site. StateImpact is a spinoff project of Project Argo, which are both run by NPR. Amico said he wanted to help bloggers use DocumentCloud because he used it as a reporter for PBS NewsHour. “At some point, my plan is to put it into WordPress’s plugin directory,” Amico said.

It may surprise some to find that Backbone.js was released just over a year and a half ago. In that time, Backbone has gained a remarkable reach, and one that stretched beyond our anticipations. As just one example (and there are many examples to be found in the Backbone documentation), last week brought us to BackboneConf in Boston where several hundred developers gathered to discuss Javascript application development.

Jeremy Ashkenas, engineer emeritus of DocumentCloud, opened the conference with the first State of the Backbone keynote. We’ve recorded it for those who weren’t able to join us at BackboneConf.

Last week, DocumentCloud received a complaint seeking the removal of a collection of emails posted by journalists with the Australian Financial Review. The emails involved a company called NDS, which hired a law firm to try and have the documents pulled from public view. This kind of thing is rare, but it happens. This case in particular has a couple of wrinkles that make it unusual, and it presents a good opportunity to remind all of our members that DocumentCloud has policies and options in place that allow you to keep all documents processed through our service available to the public for as long as you desire.

I’ll detail those below. But first, a little context.

DocumentCloud was created …