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Aug. 3, 2016, 11:41 a.m.
Reporting & Production

Didn’t make it to SRCCON this year in Portland? Here’s a list of session notes and other resources

From giffable audio to pair programming, from big data to open source, from evergreen content to web VR.

SRCCON, one of the comfiest and most consciously inclusive journalism conferences I (and I suspect many others) have ever attended, is about “building better newsroom code, culture, and process,” through two days of mostly interactive discussions. In its third year, there were sessions on everything from working remotely, to building better bots, to photojournalism, to lunchtime discussions on favorite podcasts (and why), to discussions deconstructing notions of what a CMS should do.

Because of the way sessions are structured, informational tweets on the sessions themselves are not quite as plentiful as they might be at other conferences (scroll through here and you’ll also find many tweets about artisanal coffee and beer and other Portlandiana, if you are looking to stoke some FOMO).

But! Here’s the full list of sessions. There are live transcripts available for many of the sessions, and copious Etherpad notes for those looking to catch up now. (This year there was a videographer, and edited audio and a highlight video from some sessions will go up later this summer.) Transcripts for the sessions with real-time transcribers (a truly amazing thing to behold, by the way) are available here, including the welcome and farewell addresses by Dan Sinker, director of Knight-Mozilla OpenNews.

For sessions without live transcriptions, there are good Etherpad notes available. Some slides are also floating around (let us know if you just posted yours; we’ll link to it here).

— Illustrating Investigations: Creating compelling visuals for abstract stories (notes)

— OMGWTFBBQ: Breaking news without breaking your site (notes; caveat: this was an interactive session where groups talked through hiring and staffing decisions for newsrooms based on assigned scenarios)

— You want to teach a reporter to do what? (notes)

— Giffable audio and the social web (notes)

— Data analysis N ways (notes)

— I work remotely (notes)

— Platform constraints — when to fight and when to admit defeat (notes)

— Data sonification piano bar (GitHub for those who want to play around with translating a dataset to music)

— Designing brands at scale (notes)

— Balancing mental health in the newsroom (notes)

— Sometimes I sit and think about evergreen content and sometimes I just sit (notes)

— How to be a guest chef at someone’s house party, or, Being a responsible embed provider (notes)

— Let’s all be terrible at things together (notes)

— What ideas can we borrow from the design world to solve news design problems? (notes) (slides)

— Web VR and the rest of us (notes) (slides)

— Open sourcing and you (notes)

— Can we pair program the news? (notes)

— News, mobile and privacy: Where’s the line between convenient and creepy? (notes; caveat: another interactive session where groups were given specific mobile permissions and then decided what news products they could create)

— Working at the pace of breaking news (notes)

— Beyond console.log: Making the most of your developer tools (slides)

— Time savers: Avoiding boring tasks and learning productivity tips (GitHub repo) (slides)

— They don’t want you to lead: Major keys to success as an underrepresented manager (notes)

— When is big data too big? A guide to good data use (notes) (examples)

— How to craft compelling stories out of video interviews (slides)

— Who is that journalist I see, staring straight back at me? (notes) (slides)

— Expanding the team: Parenthood in the news business (notes)

— Getting more out of your newsroom experiments (notes) (slides)

There were also plenty of job listings thrown up on sticky notes on the job board (more here, if you don’t feel like zooming way in to a small iPhone photo of the jobs board).

See you all next year!

Photo of a neon Portland sign by Ian Ransley used under a Creative Commons license.

POSTED     Aug. 3, 2016, 11:41 a.m.
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