add 2015 roadmap doc

2015_roadmap.md

@@ -0,0 +1,100 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: OpenNews 2015 Roadmap
+permalink: /2015/roadmap/index.html
+---
+
+OpenNews is dedicated to creating an ecosystem to support and strengthen the community around open technology in newsrooms—in service of journalism and of the wider open internet.
+
+###Where we’re going
+The Mozilla goal of “growing deep relationships and reach” is central to our programs, this year and every year. In 2015, we're systematizing our outreach to more deeply connect with underrepresented groups in the journalism code community and extend our reach to smaller and less advanced newsroom technology teams. As we operationalize this work, we will collaborate with other teams at Mozilla to share methodologies, and potentially to share the benefits of external expertise.
+How our programs and events will change in 2015
+2015 is an opportunity to build on our successes in events and community connection by expanding our work with small news organizations and diversity efforts. We look forward to producing our second SRCCON, working with our 2015 fellows, launching our newest venture, the Coral Project, and continuing to act responsively to our community's needs.
+
+###SRCCON—our summer conference for newsroom coders
+Build on last year’s successful inaugural event by refining session length/composition and culture implications of evening activities. Rethink registration, proposal, and outreach plans based on last year's three-minute sell-out.
+
+###Source—our community hub for technology & interactive design in journalism
+Editorial rethink and structural redesign. Adjust contractor staffing and work to better integrate into other programs, and to incorporate overall OpenNews priorities, with special emphasis on non-elite news organizations.
+
+###Knight-Mozilla Fellowships—our flagship fellowship program, in its fourth year in 2015
+Achieve greater clarity re: staff roles and relationships to fellows. Improve consistency of fellow communication. Continue building outreach and strengthen relationships with fellow partners (hosting organizations).
+
+###Events (Hack Days and External Events)—our participation in dozens of international events
+Reevaluate event sponsorship parameters. Define criteria for external event participation and make participation more strategic and less reactive. Step down our participation where it makes sense to do so based on our community's evolving needs.
+
+###MozFest—our participation in the Foundation’s creative whirlwind of a festival
+Consider how to better involve European journalism community in our work at MozFest. Evaluate our participation in relation to fellowship program and our other flagship events and refine our plans to be more strategic and targeted. Improve outreach.
+
+###Code Convening—a new event series dedicated to last-mile work in open sourcing newsroom code
+Integrate into our wider community while keeping our work streamlined. Make our output more widely accessible via gentle tinkering. Keep kicking ass.
+
+###Community Calls—our biweekly touchpoint with tech practitioners in and around newsrooms
+Continue evolving as a communications tool and relationship-building program, while integrating more tightly and clearly with other OpenNews programs and wider community.
+
+###Coral Project—a new collaboration between Mozilla, the New York Times, and the Washington Post
+Play a leadership role as the project staffs up, conducts research, establishes immediate and long-term goals, and begins to create tools to strengthen online communities around journalism. 
+
+###Mozilla-wide collaboration in 2015
+In addition to the diversity and inclusion work noted above, we need to work closely with teams across Mozilla to develop a vision for Mozilla Fellows, share recruitment and program lessons with nascent fellowship programs, keep the Coral Project connected with Mozilla's resources and principles throughout the year, collaborate more extensively with other groups at MozFest, and communicate out the work we're doing, both within Mozilla and externally.
+
+
+##Quarterly Milestones
+**In Q1,** we launch the Coral Project, onboard the 2015 fellows, kick off the search for our 2016 fellowship news organizations, and produce our first Code Convening of the year. We'll also rework our comms strategy and relaunch the OpenNews site, and prepare for SRCCON and the 2016 fellowship search. This quarter lays the foundation for our year as we lead hiring for Coral Project staff, re-order our internal systems, and prepare more extensive outreach plans for all our major programs of the year.
+
+**In Q2,** we produce SRCCON 2015 and select our 2016 fellowship news organizations, and kick off the fellowship search for 2016. We'll be looking forward to interviewing a lot of fellowship applicants! This quarter combines our biggest event of the year with deep fellowship outreach work, and is one of the two programmatic sprints of our year.
+
+**In Q3,** we interview and select the 2016 Knight-Mozilla Fellows and produce our second Code Convening. This quarter is our second programmatic sprint, as we debrief from SRCCON, interview a huge quantity of highly qualified applicants for the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship, and prep for MozFest while also hosting a Code Convening. The success of this work rests heavily on prep and outreach conducted in Q1 and Q2.
+
+**In Q4,** we welcome the 2016 Fellows and produce journalism events at MozFest, hold our final Code Convening of the year, and produce our 2016 plan. This quarter kicks off with our last major events of the year, and includes a work week and formal debriefing for our 2015 programs and exit interviews for the 2015 fellows. We also prepare for 2016 fellow onboarding at the end of the year, and do our year-end reporting.
+
+It's also important to note the work that changes very little from quarter to quarter, but is required to sustain our momentum and serve our communities: regular successes and ongoing improvements at Source, our community site/magazine; bi-weekly open community calls that provide a platform for a range of voices to share new projects and learn from one another; support for fellows at all stages of their involvement with the program; relationship-building and outreach across the journalism and technology communities; travel to and participation in a broad range of international events in open technology and journalism; and disciplined evaluation and improvement of our internal systems, particularly as our work continues to scale up while our team remains constant.
+
+##2015 priorities
+In addition to unchanging principles like “support the community” and “do good work, in the open” we have defined OpenNews priorities for 2015 that affect our approach to all of our programs. They may not show up in the same way or to the same degree in all programs, but they help us shape our understanding of the year as whole.
+
+Areas of central focus in 2015 across OpenNews activities:
+
+* Community facet: Non-elite news organizations 
+* Cross-program effort: Diversity and inclusion
+* Cross-program effort: Telling our story/comms strategy
+* Internal: Staff role clarity
+* Internal: Internal systems, documentation, and evaluation
+
+Areas of ongoing focus:
+
+* Community facet: People and organizations we don't know
+* Community facet: Core newsroom coders 
+* Community facet: Knight-Mozilla fellows
+* Community facet: Our fellowship partners
+* Cross-program effort: Mozilla-wide collaboration
+* Cross-program effort: Better understanding our community's needs (listening)
+* Internal: Better connection between our programs
+
+Areas of secondary focus:
+
+* Community facet: Local community near our events
+* Community facet: Organizations outside journalism/wider technology industry
+* Community facet: International organizations (setting this up to be a P1 in 2016)
+* Community facet: Fellow alums
+* Community facet: Fellow applicants not selected for the program
+* Cross-program effort: Documenting others' work/archives from ephemeral events
+
+##Measures of success
+We're focused more on qualitative measures than quantitative ones, and our targets include:
+
+Recruiting a diverse and highly qualified pool of fellowship applicants
+Producing events with diverse participation—demographically and across the spectrum of news organizations—at which attendees feel welcome, productive, safe, and inspired
+Guiding the Coral Project through its initial staff growth, research, and goal-setting, and seeing it begin producing open-source code
+Relaunching our flagship websites and telling our story clearly for multiple audiences 
+Ending the year with a healthy, happy OpenNews team
+
+##2015 goals
+Many of our programs are intentionally not designed for rapid growth. SRCCON, for example, is a success because it meets specific needs in a focused way for core community members. Still, there are areas within some of our programs in which quantitative growth is a good measure of success, and we're noting them for closer evaluation throughout 2015.
+
+* High-quality applicants for Knight-Mozilla Fellowships: 175, a 33% increase from 2014 (on a target of 500 total applications in 2015, up from 419 in 2014)
+* Source readership: 350K annual users (doubling our 2014 numbers)
+* Participants on the OpenNews community call: 650 (a new metric, but we estimate that this is a modest but significant increase from 2014)
+* Percentage of our staff outreach aimed at underrepresented groups: 50%
+* Percentage of our work that requires all hands on deck: less than 50%
+* People touched by code we helped create or open source: 1 million. (Our goal is to start estimating how many people are affected by journalism built with open code that we helped make possible. That's a big number—quite possibly much bigger than 1 million, based on the organizations we work with—but we are in the early phases of tracking it. Most importantly, it's a reminder that supporting this developer community has an outsized effect on the way human beings understand the news, and the world they live in. We'll continue to think through this measure over the course of 2015.)