Latest Updates: Our Blog

Back in August, we announced that we’d be welcoming a new lead developer, but he’s been on the job two weeks already and we managed to forget to say anything like “Welcome aboard!”

Well, better late than never. Continue reading »

DocumentCloud is beyond delighted to announce that we’ve found a long-term home for our project. We’re merging our operation with Investigative Reporters and Editors, a nonprofit grassroots organization committed to fostering excellence in investigative journalism. This transition means that DocumentCloud will have a permanent place in a longstanding resource for investigative reporting. IRE has a long and established history of supporting investigative reporting, and we’ll be a proud part of their ongoing work to provide journalists with tools that support their reporting. It goes without saying that DocumentCloud is a natural fit for an organization that has been upholding high professional standards and instilling a passion for public service journalism for more than 35 years.

IRE will continue to honor all of the promises we have made to our users, and our staff will be working to ensure a smooth transition. The best way to get your questions answered will still be reaching out to support@documentcloud.org or contacting us through the workspace.  We’re still welcoming new users — contact us to find out more about bringing your newsroom on board.

We’ve even got some great new tools in the works. More on that soon.

All of us are committed to the continuing success of DocumentCloud. Over the next few months, we’ll be handing off day to day responsibility for managing DocumentCloud to IRE’s staff based at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Mo. I’ll stay on as program director through the summer to facilitate a smooth transition. Developer Sam Clay is moving to San Francisco to join a startup there. Our lead developer, Jeremy Ashkenas, has moved to the New York Times’s Interactive News team, but will remain actively involved with DocumentCloud on the technical side. Our founders will be here to help DocumentCloud continue to thrive — Scott Klein, Aron Pilhofer and Eric Umansky will remain on the project as advisors and advocates.

We’re already interviewing strong candidates to take over as lead developer, but will be looking for more developers, too. More on that soon as well.

DocumentCloud was first envisioned by a team of editors at ProPublica and The New York Times, and was founded in 2009 through a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to build an online catalog of primary source documents and a set of tools to help journalists get more out of source documents. We are all immensely grateful to Knight for their confidence in us. We think their investment paid off. Not only do newsrooms have a new resource that is already indispensable, but DocumentCloud helped demonstrate that 21st century newsrooms are ready to collaborate and share what were once privately held materials. The public is better informed because of it.

Since we launched in March of 2010, newsrooms and watchdog organizations have used DocumentCloud to analyze, annotate, and publish thousands of documents ranging from suspicious, if not outright spurious, expense reports filed by local authorities in Long Island, New York to hundreds of pages of correspondence released by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, and much, much more. How much more? We encourage you to search our public catalog and see for yourself.

See Also:
IRE’s announccment: DocumentCloud joins IRE, and Knight’s: News Challenge Success Story Finds a Home

Our third hire! Developer Samuel Clay joins DocumentCloud today, bringing our full time staff to a total of three.

Samuel joins us from Storybird, a collaborative storytelling startup which works with artists to give children access to high quality narrative art that they can use to publish their own original stories. He’s also the mastermind behind NewsBlur, an open source feed reader that uses artificial intelligence to suggest stories you might want to read. Think of it as an RSS reader with intelligence.

Samuel lives in Brooklyn with his dog and guinea pigs, where he photographs historic districts for New York Field Guide. Find him at samuel@documentcloud.org or on twitter.

He’ll be bringing his formidable JavaScript skills to DocumentCloud’s workspace, which should be getting more awesome twice as fast now.

update: we have what we need for now, thanks.

Have you been watching DocumentCloud roll out code releases and wishing you could be part of it all? You can! We’re looking for a couple of consultants to help us build out Document Cloud: we need a JavaScript consultant to work with us on an ongoing basis over the next few months and a Posgres expert to do some intense consulting with us.

We’re building a research tool for reporters, a semantic search engine, an index of primary source documents with our grant from the Knight Foundation. DocumentCloud will be free and open source software.

We need a JavaScript developer to help build out a rich, web-based tool that journalists will use to search and organize documents, as well as visualize the relationships between documents. A strong foundation in HTML and CSS is required, bonus points for comfort in Ruby. If you think that doing full JavaScript MVC in the browser doesn’t sound like a crazy idea, then we want to hear from you.

We also need an expert-level PostgreSQL consultant to sit down with us and review and refine our architecture plans. We’re looking someone with plenty of experience working with sharded Postgres installations, someone skilled at tuning Postgres for full text searches over very large datasets (potentially approaching hundreds of thousands of documents) and well versed in best practices for deploying Postgres on EC2.

If either of these sounds like you, send your resume, a rate quote and a short description of particularly relevant work to: jobs@documentcloud.org with “JavaScript Developer” or “Postgres Consultant” in the subject line.

Hint: the subject line matters more than you’d think. Our “jobs” inbox has a procmail filter and three folders: JavaScript, Postgres and Trash.

Here at Document Cloud we’ve finally hired ourselves a Program Director to keep Jeremy, our lead developer, company. Someone to manage our impressive and growing list of document partners and help them get the most out of Document Cloud. Someone to develop some training materials and help our beta testers get started beta testing. For her first challenge, we asked her to write a blog post in the third person.

Amanda Hickman joins us from Gotham Gazette where, as the Director of Technology, she managed development of a series of games about public policy issues, built a pretty cool database of candidates for local office and shared an ONA award for General Excellence with her colleagues there. Prior to joining Gotham Gazette, she worked as a Circuit Rider, providing technology assistance and training to low-income grassroots groups in the U.S. working on anti-poverty issues and as a consultant to foundations looking for ways to support their grantees’ use of technology in organizing work. She taught an undergraduate course at NYU’s Gallatin School on using the Internet as an organizing tool. An active local organizer, she’s got her hands in a few community composting and gardening projects, too. If you ever tire of hearing about semantic analysis of primary source documents, try asking her about the dwarf crab apple trees at Greene Acres or what she does with 1300 lbs of compost every week.

She’ll be back here answering all your questions just as soon as she can manage.

We’re excited to announce that Jeremy Ashkenas has joined the team as the lead developer for DocumentCloud. His previous job was at Zenbe Inc., a provider of online email and collaboration software. He’s the creator of the Ruby-Processing visualization toolkit, and a winner — twice — of the Sunlight Foundation’s Apps for America competition. Jeremy graduated from Brown University with a degree in Literary Systems.

Over the past few weeks, he’s been working on the central processing system for a DocumentCloud prototype. We are planning to open source this tool shortly … so stay tuned.