Cheltenham School District just released a letter to the community confirming that after months of internal and external discussions, surveys of stakeholders, and feedback from the board, this fall will be an all virtual education experience for the roughly 4,500 students it serves.

This is the right decision. It’s the right decision for the students, parents, teachers, and broader community who could have been killed by a choice to re-open schools too soon. I’m proud of the district for making this recommendation, and I expect to be proud of the board for approving it on August 3rd.

But it is also a tragic decision, and I am in mourning for our nation’s kids.

To Be Five Years Old…

My daughter was so joyful about the concept of starting kindergarten. She is ready to learn, to make friends, to discover new perspectives, to solve problems, play games, navigate social adversity, and practice kindness.

I was excited for her. For the stomach butterflies of the first week of school that I can only vaguely remember. Back packs, lunch boxes, and fresh boxes of crayons. The lifelong friendships that she won’t get to to kick off yet, the connections with teachers and staff, the playground scrapes and bumps, the chance to learn and create every single day, the adventure of life away from parents.

I hope that the class of 2033 will still get some of those things in their first year, but I am confident that any ounce of meaning from remote education for elementary, special education, and frankly any student is going to rely on extensive adaptation and effort from parents.

Many families will not adapt.

An Educational Injustice

This situation will inevitably expand the chasm of inequalities — particularly racial inequality — that exist across the country and are alive and well at Cheltenham. I am left indignant about the fact that so many districts like ours are being told to figure it out on our own, and left without the resources to provide support to families that need it most.

As my wife and I think about creative solutions for our daughter’s first year of school, I recognize the deep perversion of the situation.

I am a School Director serving on a public school board. I have committed countless hours working towards a system that promises academic justice for all students. The elusive dream of an equitable public school system that meets the needs of all students without relying on private resources.

Yet I am in a position where I am forced to rely on my privilege and personal resources, creating a safety net of tools and adult supervision in order to support a virtual public school kindergarten experience. This is the opposite of educational justice.

This failure cannot be blamed on an individual school district, which is almost certainly doing the absolute best it can with the hand it was dealt. This is a failure of the United States of America.

It is a failure of the cowards who still refuse to face the pandemic and get it under control, the powerful who have refused to address systemic racism for generations, and the short sighted who consistently refuse to appropriately fund public education.

I am furious at state legislatures, our nation’s congresspeople, President Trump, and Secretary DeVos who regularly use their positions to perpetuate ignorance. I am unforgiving of the voters who have mired themselves in blatant propaganda and allowed themselves to become blind to flagrant and consistent abandonment of responsibility to the well being of our children.

I’m sure that districts will continue to do everything they can to meet needs without driving their districts and communities to bankruptcy, but public education requires a historic re-investment to succeed.

We are at the precipice of a moral failure.

What Do We Do?

Contact your local school board and demand policies that will provide a safe and effective education for families who cannot afford to stay home with their five year olds, or whose children simply are not able to learn online. Try to learn about their constraints and participate in the processes for identifying local solutions.

Contact the people who represent you in your state. Demand that they work to meet the needs of their districts without modifying the rules to allow the most vulnerable to be left behind.

Contact the people who represent you in congress. Demand that they include proper funding for public schools as part of the next COVID stimulus package.

As you look for solutions for your family, try to work with your local school district to systematize those solutions so they are available to other families.

Do not give up on public education. Do not form habits that remove you from reliance on public education.

A friend recently published a powerful essay in Esquire about COVID with young children: Why Parents Are Lying to Their Kids About COVID-19 Realities.

“The people who failed to manage this crisis demand foolhardy and dangerous plans to reopen schools, couched in language about doing what’s right “for the children.” The right thing for children has never once been on their minds. They will not do the one thing that will help: aggressively manage this crisis and this virus. And they will forget our children the moment they’re no longer a useful cudgel. The meaningful work to actually support them—to ensure that they have safe homes and are properly fed, have healthcare and good schools, that opportunity is equal and not simply the outcome of location and generational wealth—will not get done.”

This excerpt serves as a reminder that COVID was predictable and mitigable. So too are the structural inequalities that COVID exacerbates.

We are about to see a particularly devastating illustration of those structural inequalities. Another predictable item in a predictable list. We cannot let this prediction turn into fate.

This is a final request as you think about how to cast your ballot. I humbly ask that you vote for the candidates who will best represent you. Specifically: Bill England, Chris Pender, Pam Henry, and myself.

All four of us are Democrats — this is important, even if some people say to ignore party — but … ignore party for a moment.

Here’s why we rock

I want to share some of what each of us brings to the table and hopefully you can appreciate why we work so well as a team:

• Chris Pender has dedicated his life to building programs that support children. He is currently working to reshape the Girl Scouts of America in New Jersey. He has created mentoring programs, is the president of CAN (Children’s Achievement Network), coaches youth sports, the list goes on. Chris has three children, all three graduated from Cheltenham and from college. His perspective from working with kids — providing mentorship, guidance, and compassion — is exactly what this district needs. Nobody else running comes close to Chris on this front.
• Bill England has been serving on our school board for four years and has dedicated his life to social work. He brings a passion for our district unlike anything I’ve seen, and his experience as board president has taught him how to evaluate complex challenges. We can rely on Bill to stand up and defend every single one of our kids, to champion the value of education, and to make sure the board is thinking of every student when we are considering changes.
• Pam Henry brings expertise in something that every community faces: change. She is a professional change agent and has a keen eye for identifying problems, designing solutions, and making sure that execution is done in a way that respects everybody involved. She brings experience, methodology, and concrete tools to the table in addition to the genuine wisdom that comes from being the parent of three daughters and the champion of their education.
• Dan Schultz (that’s me) is a CHS graduate and I’ve dedicated my life to building tools that help people understand the actions of their government and politicians. My wife and I moved to Cheltenham so our daughter could attend the same schools we did. I am a professional problem solver — a technologist — and I bring years of experience thinking about how people might be affected by change. Accountable government and thoughtful communication are my passion, and I hope to be able to use that to serve our kids.

Each of us brings an important set of skills and ideas. We round each other out. You can read more about us over here.

And here’s why we rock the party

Now put the (D) back. This is actually important, because party affiliation reflects a set of core values.

Here are a few things we stand for:

• We believe that investment in education opens doors for our kids and makes our community stronger.
• We believe in working together to lift up our community and students in need.
• We believe in science, art, creativity, logic, critical thinking, and pragmatic decision making.
• We believe in accountable governance and effective communication.
• We believe in the power of community to solve problems together.
• We believe in thoughtful solutions that reflect the complexity of the problems faced in our schools.
• We believe the rights of employees.
• We believe in inclusion, equity, and social justice.

Endorsement is a vetting process, and there is a reason for it. If we didn’t stand for these things, we would not have received the Democratic endorsement or won the nomination of the Democratic residents of Cheltenham last May. You can learn more about our values over here.

If our experiences and skills determine how effectively we solve problems, our values root us to guiding principles while we do it. Practically this means that we will make decisions that benefit all of our children; we will strengthen the quality of our science, math, arts, and technology curriculums; we will be accountable; and we want to make sure that all voices are heard and incorporated in the decisions pursued by our district.

I hope that you will ultimately decide that all four of us deserve your vote — I believe we do. If you have any questions type them and I’ll try to reply in time.

It is 1999, you’re 13, and your mother just walked through the front door carrying a large, vibrantly colored blue and yellow bag. Based on the heft and the "Best Buy" logo on the side, you know it holds something interesting—something related to electronics—but what? A Nintendo 64? A Dell computer? 1,000 free hours of AOL?

There is only one way to find out.

Depending on your maturity and cowhand status you walk, mosey, or scamper up to take the bag. In a single, excited motion you reveal a nondescript cardboard box. It has no clear branding, just three letters: "DVR". On the opposite face, an illustrated TV depicting endless suited silhouettes.

"This is going to change everything." She says calmly, looking you in the eyes. You nod, and set it up.

A few moments later you are both sitting on the floor staring at… Al Gore. He is talking about a lock box. The screen fades, and George Bush appears. This continues for hours. Political ad after political ad. No interruptions. For days. For years.

In fact, you are still watching now.

Presenting the Political Ad Archive

Oh ***.

Witness the Internet Archive's Political Ad Archive. Our mission is to provide a free and open resource for citizens, journalists, and researchers who want to understand the paid messages from their politicians, and to archive billions of dollars worth of democracy.

We record and track political ads. Through our service you can find out when, where, and how often a given ad was played across the channels we are recording. It also tells you who the ads are about, who paid for them, what is said in them, whether they have been fact checked, and plenty of other odds and ends.

This post is about how the service works, but I'll start with the punch line: we watch tons of TV—probably literally, our servers are heavy—and filter out the noise, leaving only the political ads. Then our DVR robots (DVRRs for short) activate and count all copies of those ads, keep track of when and where they were played, toss in a little human contributed metadata, and share the DVRR results (DVRRRs) and code base with you, our DVRRR recipients.

Three key pieces

There are three pieces to the Political Ad Archive:

1. The Internet Archive collects, prepares, and serves the TV content as it comes. It’s trying to archive the entire internet too, so their infrastructure is set up to be able to store, you know, all of human knowledge.
2. The Duplitron 5000 is an open source system responsible for taking video, smooshing it all into smaller, searchable files called audio fingerprints, and then finding copies of known ads. It reports the results back to the archive.
3. The Political Ad Archive is a wordpress site that takes our data and our videos and presents it to the rest of the world.

Look, here’s a fun flow chart of the entire process:

Step 1: Recording Television

All of our artisanal grass-fed TV has been locally sourced from super-premium, organic hardware distributed around the country. We do process it though. A lot. Sorry about that.

The ad counts we publish are based on actual airings, as opposed to reported airings. Because we are working from the source, we know we aren’t being misled by anything but our own algorithms. On the flip side this means that we can only report counts for the channels we actively record.

We have a few ways to collect TV content. In some cases, like the San Francisco market, we own and manage the hardware that records local cable. In other cases, like New Hampshire and Philadelphia, the content is provided to us by third party services or academic partners.

Regardless of how we get the data, the pipeline takes it to the same place. We record in minute long chunks of video and stitch them together into programs based on what we know about the station’s schedule. This results in video segments of anywhere from 30 minutes to 12 hours. Those programs are then put into a high pressure cooker and turned into all sorts of file formats for archival purposes (mp3, mp4, MBA, PST, Apollo 13, banana).

A lot can go wrong here. Storms can affect satellite reception, packets can be lost or corrupted before they reach our servers (resulting in time shifts or missing content), small children can disappear in our server rooms. It all happens, but most of the time the data winds up sitting comfortably on our hard drives unscathed.

Step 2: Searching Television…

Illustration by Lyla Duey.

Remember that time you were watching Netflix and you blacked out because your cat sucker-punched you? Wasn’t it a huge pain the next day when you had to try to figure out where you had stopped watching? You kept clicking, waiting for it to buffer, being too early, then too late, then closer but too early, then somehow back to the first try, until you finally gave up and just started from the beginning again?

This is a great example of how terrible video is when you’re trying to look for a specific piece of it. It’s slow, it’s heavy, it is far better suited for watching than for working with.

What if you had no choice, and you really did need to search video for something. Worse, maybe you have to search millions of minutes of video for an arbitrary number of somethings. Welcome to my world.

There are a few things to try. One is transcription; if you have a transcript you can do anything. Like create a text editor for video, or search for key phrases, like “I approve this message.”

The problem is that most television is not transcribed. Closed Captions exist sometimes, but there is a shocking amount of content—especially political ads—without captions. There are a few open source tools out there for automated transcript generation, but the results usually “love match Tobey desert ire” (… leave much to be desired).

So what do we do? Our nation’s future is at stake and we don’t have time to be able to do it all manually. Say hello to audio fingerprinting.

… Using Audio Fingerprinting …

We use a free and open tool called audfprint to convert our audio files into audio fingerprints. An audio fingerprint of a file is just what it sounds like. Get it? AUDIO fingerprint… SOUNDS like? Ha!

An audio fingerprint is a summarized version of an audio file, one that has removed everything except the most interesting pieces of every few milliseconds. The trick is that the summaries are formed in a way that makes it easy to compare them, and because they are summaries they’re a lot smaller and faster to work with than the original.

“Summary” is a pretty vague term. There are lots of ways you can summarize a piece of audio. For instance, I could summarize a song in terms of its chord progression (G major -> C minor -> D major …). If I heard the same song twice it would have the same chord progressions both times, so I could flag it as a match and be correct.

But what if two different bands played the same song? Or what if you compared two pop songs? Those would also have the same chord progressions even though they are obviously different audio files. Also what about spoken word? Or long, loud, sensual recordings of fog horns. No chords in either case. This clearly isn’t going to work.

… Based on Frequency

The audio fingerprints we use are based on a thing called frequency. Sounds are made up of waves, and each wave repeats (oscillates) at different rates. Faster repetitions are linked to higher sounds, lower repetitions are lower sounds.

Don’t believe me? Go drop a small pebble in a lake and you will see a bunch of quickly repeating tiny ripples. Next drop a boulder and you will see a few larger ripples. There are also sounds generated in both cases. The boulder creates a loud and deep “KERPLUNK” — the ripples have a lot of space between them less often, which is true of the ripples through the air as well. The pebble has a lot more ripples closer together which results in a higher pitched “pleep!” How cute!

That number of waves you see can be measured in terms of frequency—as in how frequently does the wave repeat per second. Most sounds you hear are a crazy combination of thousands of waves of different frequencies. Each of the waves get turned into vibrations in your ear that travel down a magical cone covered in tiny hairs which then turns into electric signals to your brain which you then hear in your head as sound. For instance, most people hear an “A” when a wave that repeats 440 times per second (440 Hz) hits our ear drum.

Try waving your hand 440 times per second. If you do, you will hear that “A.”

Computers don’t have ears, so they just take these frequencies at face value. An audio file contains instructions that tell a computer how far to push the inside of a speaker in or out (generating a wave). Audfprint breaks those audio files into tiny chunks (around 20 chunks per second) and runs a mathematical function on each fragment to identify the most prominent waves and their corresponding frequencies.

The rest is thrown out, the summaries are stored, and the result is an audio fingerprint.

If the same sound exists across two files (not the same song, or the same words, or same voice, but literally the exact same set of frequencies), a common set of dominant frequencies will be seen in both fingerprints. Audfprint makes it possible to compare the chunks between two sound files, count how many they have in common, and how many appear in roughly the same distance from one another.

This is what we use to find copies of political ads.

Step 3: Cataloguing Political Ads

When we discover a new political ad the first thing we do is register it on the Internet Archive, kicking off the ingestion process. The person who found it types in some basic information such as who the ad mentions, who paid for it, and what topics are discussed. This is all called metadata.

The ad is then sent to the system we built to manage our fingerprinting workflow, called the Duplitron 5000—known locally as “DT5k”. This uses audfprint to generate fingerprints, organizes how the fingerprints are stored, process the comparison results, and allows us to scale to process across millions of minutes of television.

An artistic rendition of the Duplitron 5000 (by Lyla Duey).

DT5k generates a fingerprint for our new ad, stores it in the list of known political ads, and then compares that fingerprint with hundreds of thousands of existing fingerprints for the shows we have already ingested into the system. It takes a few hours for all of the results to come in. When they do, the Duplitron makes sense of the numbers and tells the archive which programs contain copies of the ad and what time the ad played.

All of these steps end up being pretty darn accurate, but not perfect. The matches are based on audio, not video, which means we face trouble when the same soundtrack is used in a political ad as has been used in, for instance, an infomercial.

We are working on improving the system to filter out these kinds of mistakes, but even with no changes these fingerprints have given us reasonable accuracy across the markets we track.

Step 4: Enjoying the Results

And so you understand the fundamentals behind the amazing futuristic technology that we used to build a system that records only political ads. You can download our data, and watch the ads, all day every day at the Political Ad Archive.

Over the coming months we are working to make the system more accurate, and exploring ways to get it so that it can automagically identify newly released political ads without any need for manual entry.

P.S. we’re also working to make it as easy as possible for random strangers to download all of our fingerprints to use in their own local copies of the Duplitron 5000. Would you like to be a random stranger? If so, contact me on Twitter at @slifty.

The reason puns are so misunderstood is because they lack the key to any good joke: a clearly defined toolset that allows audiences to meaningfully scrutinize them with rigorous objective analysis. This changes now.

Below you will find a framework for pun evaluation. It consists of three core concepts:

• Dimensionality (D), reflecting the complexity of a pun.
• Degree (º), measuring the number of isolated components of a pun.
• Level (L), expressing the number of linguistic facets used to represent all angles of a pun.

Pun Dimensionality

It’s the night before the big game and the star pitcher is at his locker when he hears clucking coming from the equipment room. Intrigued, he walks over, turns on the light, and immediately recoils: the floor is teeming with chickens! They’ve been there all day, and equipment is completely covered in chicken poop. On the wall hangs the emblem of the opposing team. He runs to the hallway to catch the attention of a patrolling umpire. The umpire comes in, looks at the shower room, and shouts “Foul Play!!!”

– “Chickenball”, a 3-Dimensional Pun by Paul Schultz

The dimensionality of a pun is the number of meaningful interpretations, minus one. If a pun has two possible interpretations, it is a one-dimensional pun. Three interpretations? two-dimensional. TEN interpretations? That’s obviously impossible.

For example, the boring phrase “I solved the garbage problem” is a zero-dimentional (0-D) pun. That is to say it is not a pun at all. Embarrassing.

Meanwhile, the phrase “I salved the garbage problem” is a 1-D pun, because “salve” is an old way of saying “salvage!” In this case the speaker didn’t just solve the garbage problem, but they did so by wandering around collecting it for meaningful reuse. Amazing!

You could add yet another layer by saying “I salved the makeup department’s garbage problem,” which uses the whole “ointment” spin to make it a 2-D pun.

This feels rewording already.

In physics dimensionality reflects complexity, with each added dimension opening powerful new ways to navigate a concept or space. This means that physics is really just the science of…

Puns are a great way to lighten the mood.

Pun Degree

Transporting young gulls across a staid lion for immoral porpoises.

– “So this guy”, a 3rd Degree Pun by Peter Schickele

In the United States, the seriousness of certain crimes and injuries (broken bones, burns, murder, Kevin Bacon, etc.) can be measured in terms of degree. The higher the degree, the more intense the affliction.

A pun’s degree is defined as the number of individual sub-puns contained in the joke. It reflects the number of “jokes” that are being coherently strung together to form a single masterpiece. Finally a situation where quality and quantity are one and the same!

Let’s consider the following pun and see what we can do to increase its degree: “When stuck on the beach you can always eat a sandwich.” This is a delicious one degree (1º) pun because beaches have sand, but also people eat sandwiches.

We can do better by shifting the scene and adding some more descriptive text, resulting in a 2º pun: “When playing golf if you’re stuck in a bunker you can always eat a sandwich, but be careful: the bread’s crust might be coarse.”

• Pun 1: Bunkers are a type of hazard in golf, often containing ample amounts of sand.
• Pun 2: You play golf on a golf course, the texture of bread crust can be coarse.

Time to go all in by playing up the golf setting and taking a swing at a 3º pun: “When playing golf, if you’re stuck in a bunker you can always eat a sandwich, but it might be hazardous: the bread’s crust will be coarse!”

• Pun 3: bunkers are a type of golf hazard, coarse bread can be really tough on your gums, man.

Clearly this could go on forever, so why stop?

“War is hell. I remember one time when ten of us were holed up in one bunker on an abandoned country club and I decided to eat a sandwich, it was sub par because the bread’s crust was coarse; I wasn’t gunning to take another bite but my commander wouldn’t lettuce fight on an empty stomach.”

Note: the dimensionality of a compound pun is the maximum dimensionality of the individual sub puns.

Pun Level

A French company was designing the look of their product’s chat system. After days of deliberation it became obvious that there is more than one way to skin a chat.

– “Skin a Chat”, a Level 2 pun by Todd Eichel

When someone says something smart and you don’t understand them, you quietly sigh, shake your head, and say “I’m obviously not on your level.” Take the inverse of everything in the previous sentence and it becomes directly applicable to puns.

A pun’s level is the number of unique linguistic facets needed to communicate the full complexity of the pun, minus one. Calculating a pun’s level takes practice. It involves going through each facet type and determining whether or not it has been invoked.

The following facets can contribute to a pun’s level:

• Hidden structure — inserting or removing components of the sentence results in a new relevant meaning. (e.g. “that amazing gargoyle (is made of) rocks”)
• Lateral manipulations — modifying key words to form other words through the shifting / replacement of letters or sounds. This includes puns grounded in rhymes and typos. (e.g. “I don’t think it’s bare that public nudity is a crime.”)
• Portmanteaus — forming (or inventing) a new word using two or more relevant words (e.g. “geochordinates let you translate a location to music.”)
• Language modulations — invoking a relevant definition of a word in another language. (e.g. “hola at me”)
• Simple heterograph — implying two distinct words that sound the same, where both have relevant meanings. (e.g. “I can’t tell weather or not it is raining.”)
• Dual definitions — using two uniquely relevant meanings of the same word. (e.g. “that NASCAR driver really raced out of here”)
• Contextual binding — unnecessarily choosing a word based on a contextual topic or domain that has been established outside of the pun itself. (e.g. most of the times when someone says “no pun intended”)
• Slant references — artificially incorporating a common or locally known phrase (colloquialism, idiomatic, etc.) into a sentence. (e.g. “I know you hate accessories, but don’t kill the messenger bag”)

Many puns are level zero. Rightfully so.

Note: the level of a compound pun is equal to the total number of unique facets used across all of its sub puns, minus one

Additional Concepts

• Stable / Unstable Facets — although all facets can stand on their own, some are more common among higher level puns. Stable facets are more likely to exist within a Level 0 pun, while unstable facets are more likely to require another facet to form a pun.
• Imaginary Puns — imaginary puns require a change to reality itself (excluding language) in order to make sense. They are measured in distance, with distance being the smallest number of required changes. (e.g. if your coworker were to say “you must have a lot of brass to say something so bold” it would probably not be a pun. But if reality were different, and you played french horn, it would be a (1-D, 1º, L0) pun).
• Unpuns — an unpun is a phrase that feels like it should be a pun, but has no valid facets. These are also known as “Level -1 Puns.” (for example: “We all know that PUN stands for Play UN words”)
• Pun Space: a pun space is the graphical representation of parsed phrases (vertices), interconnected by linguistic facets (edges) that perform translation. Pun spaces make it possible to mathematically describe the way a pun fits into its neighboring tapestry of language.

Practical Applications / Concluding Thoughts

The Puntitled Framework is being freely offered to the world for the betterment of humanity. It is my hope that you will take these concepts and apply them for social and professional gain. As a consumer you are now able to deterministically quantify the puns you are exposed to. In the age of information overload this empowers you to make better decisions about where to get your information and who to continue to publicly associate with. Most importantly, as a pun maker you can use the structure provided by this framework to dramatically increase the quality, complexity, and impact of your puns.

Aside from these obvious personal applications, this framework has the potential to redefine most industries through the optimization and automated discovery of puns. The ideas introduced here will inject new life into the fields of social computing, natural language processing, political debate, robotics, journalism, and probably even international diplomacy.

Now go spread the word and make some puns.

“Bonus” Material

I asked people to draw puns; here they are.

Pun Exquisite Corpse (by Amanda Nedham, Kyle Hittmeier, Jeremy Merrill, Michael Coreg, Ted Han, @Vwampage, Tom Bilecki, and Ben Chartoff)

And the winning illustration:

“Make America Grate Again” by Robert Maguire

Last week was full of new experiences. I got on a Caltrain for the first time, I got off of a Caltrain for the first time, I got stuck on a Caltrain for the first time, and so the list goes on. I also met my WebFWD IV cohort!

Web What What?

WebFWD is a startup accelerator program run by the world's best organization: Mozilla. I'm participating with Mark Boas to represent our new game-changing paradigm-shifting non-profit, Hyperaud.io.

Since this is a Mozilla accelerator, I wasn't quite sure what shape it would take. Would the first half of the three month program be spent learning how to use Bugzilla? Maybe we would figure out ways to get Google to fund our organizations. OK last guess: we'd be shown how to make an amazing product that gets slower and slower as we add more features over time.

I kid because I love.

Thankfully none of my theories were correct. The goal of WebFWD is to help us take our hodgepodge of visions, ideas, prototypes, and plans and convert them into something that actually has a shot at becoming a respectable venture.

You may be wondering what makes this different from other accelerators. The answer is "the cohort and the community." All of our ideas fit into Mozilla's vision of what the open web should look like. Similarly, the mentors, alumni, and facilitators are approaching our ideas with at least some appreciation of what Mozilla stands for.

In case the significance isn’t clear: this means that we are all there with the expectation that we will ultimately make the Internet a better place. And that is freakin' awesome.

What have you done so far?

The focus of the first two weeks has been learning how to tell our stories in a compelling way. In startup land they call this story a pitch, and it essentially amounts to modern day spellcasting. You use words to bend time and space so that people with spare money or attention will decide to give it to you.

Our taskmaster on this particular part of the journey is Mozilla's very own Pascal Finette. I'll just say this: anyone who tells you that perfect pitch isn't something you can learn has never sat in a room with Pascal. Huh? Those people are talking about something else? Unlikely.

I took some notes during our introductory meeting with him.

General Advice

• Never be late. If you're late, even only by one minute, you're done.
• Minimize cognitive dissonance… Anything that forces the audience to have to think is going to take them away from your presentation. "Uhhh, what is the y-axis again?"
• …except when you WANT cognitive dissonance… Creating a graph that makes people think in a way you want them to think can be very effective. "Woah, if that line keeps going, it will grow to infinity!!!"
• …but don't ever create dissonance in your branding. You can't call something the "iOS of culinary arts" and later call it the "Google Apps Engine of culinary arts." Pick one and stick with it.
• You are never trying to do something, you are actually doing something. You are all changing the world — that's the attitude you need to have. I think Jar Jar Binks said something about this in Star Trek at some point.
• Being a pioneer means being risky, and investors don't like risk. You want to talk about how others are in your space, and how you are making your space bigger. New pastures are dangerous because there is much more unknown.
• Have a slide deck for distribution Many people have two slide decks — one with the graphics that aren't text heavy, and one with more text to explain what that picture of a cat covered in spaghetti actually means.
• Have a few versions of your pitch for different contexts. Create a 30 second, 2 minute, 5 minute, and 20 minute pitch deck. This will help you identify what is most important and ultimately refine your story.
• It is dangerous to say "users like me." Building something for yourself is great, but it isn't a business. Try to talk about a third party instead of yourself when describing why your product is useful.
• Don't assume people know what you are talking about. Not everyone knows why Hacker News is so cool, or why 500 points is impressive. Always try to provide context for those who might not understand why something is impressive or important.
• Be careful not to redefine words. Terms like "web 3.0" already exist as a concept. Don't try to give it a new meaning.

Style Advice

• When presenting, don't focus on one side of the room / table / etc. Look around the room. Give yourself breathers, allow yourself to make a point and look around for visual contact.
• Show off your passion. Most SV companies are in it because they think they have a cool tool, and intellectually it's interesting but the team isn't passionate. Some people fund that idea, but many investors want to see the fire behind it.
• Get your audience emotionally connected. "Imagine what you could do if…", "Imagine if you were covered in bees and…" — You want your idea in everyone's head. You want them thinking about it.
• Wrap your motivations in positive language. "HTML5 was slow as crap so we needed third party tools to save our entire industry from falling to the might of Sauron" isn't as compelling as "lots of people are making amazing performance tools to make this platform even more awesome!"
• Don't speak too quickly. A four minute pitch is really short, but you still need to let things set in. Practice a bit without worrying about time and intonate better. After that then cut down the amount of content. Slower, deeper breaths along with theatrical pauses will keep people's attention.
• Don't try to emulate others when presenting. This isn't a public speech, this is a pitch. If you naturally have dynamic ranges in the way you speak then great, but if you are a quiet person you don't need to force yourself into being loud sometimes just because you heard that all the cool kids are doing it.

Content Advice

• Keep the association between the product and company clear. Explain the difference between the vision of the company, the specific product you are pitching, and the products you hope will come down the line.
• If you list prices in your business model, justify it. This is especially if it is a number that might trigger a "woah, that's expensive" gut reaction.
• Scrub all errors out of your slides (e.g. a phone in portrait view displaying a landscape application). You don't want people to be distracted by the slides, you want them focusing on you
• Make sure the problem you say you are solving is actually the problem you are trying to solve (and is a real problem). Your idea probably solves lots of things, so you want to be sure that the specific target of your creativity is both compelling and accurately described.
• Only use impressive success stories. If your primary anecdote is underwhelming, then your audience will sit around being underwhelmed.
• Visualize your stats. Statistics about your product are good (10,000+ users, etc) but visuals are better than text when showing off data.
• When describing your team, be sure to brag. You don't want just head shots and names, show some accolades in the slide.
• The last slide should always have a way to contact you. People shouldn't have to find you after the presentation to get in touch (especially the case when presenting to an audience).
• Explain more why your partners are behind you. Just naming names might sound impressive, but if you can illustrate what a collaboration actually means for your product that will have more impact.
• Don't include slides that you are going to blow through. Either it is part of your story or it isn't. Also be sure to highlight the important information.
• End with an ask. At the end of your presentation you want your audience to know how to help you. Don't make them guess.

And that was just our initial two-hour feedback session! Maybe I'll manage to come out of this an entrepreneur after all.

Run like the wind.

Being an Alumnus

As you approach the end of your fellowship you are going to ask yourself many questions. Will Dan Sinker still love me when I'm old? Is it true that on your last day they brand your inner thigh with a hot iron that says "PROPERTY OF MOZILLA"? Where did I leave my FitBit?

The biggest one is going to be "where the hell should I go from here?" I'll give an example of what a fellow's immediate future can be by describing my current status as a functioning adult.

It's difficult to say what I do for a living. When asked, I usually give up and declare that I am a freelancer. In reality I'm…

1: A Cofounder

I spent this week in San Francisco for the orientation of Mozilla's accelerator program, WebFWD. I'm here as one of three founders of Hyperaudio Inc., an nonprofit organization formed on behalf of my fellow fellow, Mark Boas.

Together, with a few others–including yet another 2012 Fellow, Laurian Gridnoc–we will spend the next year taking Mark's baby and turning it into a sustainable nonprofit ecosystem for remixable, transcribed video and audio.

2: A Teacher

There is a letter from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School sitting on my doorstep right now which offers a part time, remote faculty position. It is very likely that I will spend the next academic year mentoring students and creating a new set of resources to help them learn "how to make almost anything on the web."

3: An Innovator

Last month I worked with an amazing team at an OpenNews hackathon to build CivOmega. CivOmega makes it possible for people to ask questions about their government and get answers powered by open datasets and APIs. This month I'm in the running with 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellow Mike Tigas to get funding to turn it into a real, contributor-ready open source project.

4: A Greybeard

Last Friday I was in Miami to serve as a judge for the Knight Community Information Challenge. I read many applications from around the country that pitched ideas about how they want to solve a major community issue with digital tools. The month before that I spoke on a panel about newsroom innovation at the MIT-Knight Center Media Conference.

If nothing else, being a Knight-Mozilla Fellow means you can trick otherwise reputable organizations like The Knight Foundation into thinking you know what you're talking about.

5: An Architect

I work part time to help startups build out their technology. This involves spending a few hours a week managing a team of developers and playing the role of architect and tech lead. Not every startup has to do with my immediate interests, but this is a nice way to keep things fresh. For instance, last month I helped make a button that rich people can press to give themselves more money.

Usually just mentioning my relationship with Mozilla is enough to cause people to swoon and faint, but sometimes I decide to go with vague threats instead. "I know some very important people on the internet. If you don't hire us, life could get very 'difficult'."

6: A Fellow (again…?)

In addition to being a Knight-Mozilla Fellow for life, #km4lyfe, I'll be a remote 2013 RJI Fellow starting in September. My project is an effort to flesh out of my good ol' thesis project, Truth Goggles, an automated bullshit detector for the internet.

7: A Trainer

The 2012 fellows have started a collective brand organization called Shape Journalism. It's a loose group of makers who are willing to help media organizations by training, building, or just offering advice. For example last week Nicola Hughes, Mark Boas and I started laying out plans for a week long data viz training we're expecting to run in November.

8: An Advisor

Have a crazy idea related to journalism, new media, or technology? Apparently I'm the guy to talk to to get feedback! But seriously so many people have reached out to pitch ideas, and it has been wonderful to get to help out.

There are so many people getting into this space, and being a Knight-Mozilla fellow is eerily similar to being a leader.

9: A Hired Gun

Organizations reach out to me fairly regularly to help them build out a prototype, apply something I have made in the past to their mission, or otherwise write some code. It's always awesome to get to work on something you love and get paid at the same time.

10: A Hobbyist

The best part about not having a job that provides health insurance is that you can do whatever you want in between other work. This means learning new skills (like professional-level soundscaping) but it also means getting to continue to make things.

For instance I'm working on a forum that lets groups of people talk to each other in a closed community without isolating them. Basically you can share threads between forums (and be part of lots of communities), so you can have conversations spread to the most relevant places without getting inundated with the anonymous jackasses that we lovingly call “the general public.”

The Moral of the Story

Poster masterfully created by Lyla Duey.

While it is technically true I don't have a job, I am here very much by choice. Being a fellow has set me up with a network of amazing people, who I still work with closely to build awesome things and participate in some badass events.

By the time you complete your fellowship you will be an unstoppable force of raw digital power. You will be oxymoronically established as both an outsider and an insider (so your perspective is priceless), and you will have had 10 months to show off what you can do. Following your passion at that point is as easy as breathing, unless you're a fish.

If your dream is a startup, you will come out of this with mentors, collaborators, and understanding. If you want to teach, you have an impressive set of experiences to show off. If you want a full time job, my other fellows have shown that you can absolutely do that too.

But honestly, seriously, not kidding, what are you waiting for.

Twitter keeps asking me to give them money so that I can be popular. My brain tells me that this is an opportunity that they offer everyone — some kind of general campaign in a desperate attempt to validate the dumbest business model since Facebook’s digital bananas. I usually just hit delete and move on.

But that’s not what my heart says. Over the months their persistence impressed me, and I decided that my account must be special in their system. I must be up there with BP and Exxon. I started dreaming about the possibilities being as Twitter famous as Elvis would have been, if only for a day. My wit and pith would change the lives of everyone who could experience it.

This is why, on July 4th, 2013 I decided to define the national dialogue by promoting a tweet of my own. I learned that Twitter charges you when people interact (click, reply, retweet) with your promoted message.

I'll stop here and tell the rest of the story through the digital communication equivalent of interpretive dance:

You may want to skip this boring post and just check out the site.

Over the past 24 hours I worked with an amazing team to start building a Siri for government. Well, Wolfram Alpha is more like it, but you probably have a better sense of what Siri is. The site is called CivOmega and it allows you to ask any question you want about civics. The system will do its best to get you an answer.

I can’t speak for the team, but I’ll let you know why I proposed this idea at a hackathon about open data. I’ll even use big letters:

Open Data Sucks

People have talked about making government data more accessible for approximately 500 years. The hope is that if you can find data about the way your government operates, you can shed light on interesting patterns and stories. It’s all about transparency and accountability. It’s a beautiful concept. It’s wonderful for society.

But actually data is pretty crappy. It’s dirty and boring: just a bunch of numbers and rows and tables. This kind of stuff doesn’t usually tell you much without a lot of very laborious prodding and exploration. Don’t believe me? Fine. Go find out for yourself. If you managed to get anything interesting out of that link then you have too much time on your hands.

The ONLY thing that civic data has going for it is that programmers tend to build cool hacks using it. I guess every once in a while you get a groundbreaking piece of journalism out of it too but I’ll ignore that for the sake of argument.

It’s Also Elitist

Here’s another problem: programmers have awesome, special tools to access data. These tools are called “Application Programming Interfaces” (also known as an APIs). An API is just a standard way for computers to ask each other for information.

A human version of this plays out every time you go to a restaurant and order from a menu. You look at the list of what you can ask for, you ask for what you want, and eventually you either get your food or you get impatient and start throwing your silverware at other patrons.

In my analogy the food is data and you and the chef are computers. The waiter is the API and the menu is the documentation. I guess the restaurant is the Internet and the restaurant’s manager is the NSA or something. The silverware don’t really fit in.

The point is that the COOL stuff happens because of these APIs. Too bad nobody real knows what the hell an API is or how they could possibly go about using it. Don’t believe me? Go find out for yourself. If the stuff on that page gave you access to data then you’re a nerd.

If nerds and people who have too much time on their hands are the only ones who can use government data then it won’t change the world. Plus, why should those people get to decide what is and isn’t important?

Humanizing Government Data

And so we come back to CivOmega. This is an attempt to give people with normal, human questions the ability to benefit from the data that so many have worked their asses off to expose. It makes it possible for a human to interact with an API in the same way they might interact with their waiter: by asking questions. Users can type in questions about the government and it attempts to provide answers.

It is built on a programming language called Python and the way it works is pretty simple. A programmer who understands an API can write some code that knows how to answer certain question patterns. For instance I made it possible to ask the question “What bills are about [X]” where X can be any phrase you want. If you ask that, CivOmega will talk to the appropriate APIs to get you the answer you want. Then it will tell you what it learned.

The beauty of this setup is that any other programmer can spend a few minutes teaching the system to answer new kinds of questions. For instance maybe someone knows about an environmental dataset and wants you to be able to ask questions about natural disasters (how many forest fires happened in California last year?). That person could easily unlock that resource.

If you’re a developer, go take a look at the repository and consider adding a module. If you are a master of NLP please get in touch with me so we can improve the way people ask questions. If you don’t know what either of those sentences meant, please just go check out the site.

His post says, in so many words, "wah wah wah the crowd is acting like a crowd! Don't they know that they are a crowd? Won't they please stop acting like a crowd?"

Here's my response: Yes, Alexis, it is. Yes, Alexis, they do. No, Alexis, they won't. Welcome to the 21st century!

Below are the three mini-rants that his post inspired in my brain.

Rant 1: Gawker Did It Better

His isn't the first critical take on /r/findbostonbombers. The fine folks of Gawker, who are professionals when it comes to giving Reddit the often-deserved middle finger, already published one and theirs was hilarious. It pointed out all the ridiculous theories buzzing around the web that came from that crowd in language that I can get behind.

Most importantly they link to a brand new blue robe guy meme template.

See, that kind of response reflects the special unique, inappropriate complexities of the Internet.

Rant 2: Fix your own home before calling out strangers

Having worked in a newsroom for essentially a year I know first-hand that journalists are amazing. The folks at The Boston Globe are doing hard work, and they are doing it professionally. There are many others doing work with an equal level of integrity.

But boy, there are so many organizations that seem like they don't. I won't even try to list all the instances of public speculation and incorrect statements that came out of "reputable" sources since Monday.

Want to know what is more dangerous than a bunch of random people talking on a website? Media outlets with an actual audience spreading false information. Also, media outlets directing global attention to a bunch of random people talking on a website. We can let that one slide I guess.

Rant 3: You Lie!

Your post describes an angry mob with no capacity for reasoning or self reflection.

Maybe I'm just naive here but it seems to me that as far as mobs go, a reddit / 4chan mob is reasonably honest with itself. This is a point that Alexis decided to casually ignore (and then throw into a footnote in a way that somehow still misses the point).

Go look for yourself. Most contributions to that subreddit yesterday were one of the following:

1. Questions about the appropriateness of the conversation.
2. Reminders that nobody there knows anything.
3. Aggregations of relevant information put out there by the media or FBI.
4. Laughter at how stupid the media is for pointing everyone to their subreddit in their articles about how the community is a bad idea.
5. Someone pointing out things about a picture that sound like a wacky conspiracy theorist.
6. Others making fun of those people for pointing that stuff out.

There will inevitably be a few users who take themselves really seriously and act like they know what they are talking about. Those people will be instantly up-voted to the top because everyone knows the internet is serious business. OH WAIT NO THE OPPOSITE OF THAT.

The other point that was completely ignored is the fact that there are clear rules plastered on every page. These aren't just guidelines, they are rules enforced by mods and the core community. If you don't follow them, your posts get removed and your account can get banned.

Note: I said yesterday because as of today any images that aren't potential pictures of the FBI's released suspects will be immediately deleted.

My Advice

No hard feelings are intended to Alexis; he raises valid and important concerns. The problem is that his tone was not one of thoughtful dialogue, it was one of condescending aggression. Writing rants online isn’t a productive use of time… Who would do that…

…

Anyway, here's my advice to anyone who wants to be constructively critical of Internet activity. Depending on what you think it represents you should either:

1. Lurk moar.
2. Stop feeding the trolls.
3. Realize you won't stop people from communicating with one another, give up, and go play video games instead.

As for blue robe guy? Well, he's only internet famous because people on Gawker and The Atlantic keep writing posts about him. You heartless bastards.

This post is not about Quizzler, it is about my quest to answer the question “why are we building this from scratch?” It’s about observed realities regarding cross-newsroom collaboration, insights from upper management of The New York Times, and some major hurdles for open source in legacy media organizations. Prepare to explore the deep, dark, and relatively unspoken depths of technological openness in newsrooms.

We want something similar to…

I was introduced to Quizzler back in August. That first meeting was generally uneventful; we sat in a room. I listened to Miranda Mulligan skillfully duke it out with the project’s newsroom sponsor to explain that no, the first version won’t have custom “you are a 95% Vampire” sharable Facebook messages. I listened to the sponsor vocalize concern that there would never actually be a second version. I decided that both of them were probably right.

Eventually someone said something so shocking that I literally spat out my drink and fell out of my chair at the same time. It wasn’t intended to stand out—I don’t even know who said it. Ready? Brace yourself. Here it is: “Have you seen the Academy Awards tool by The New York Times? Eventually we will want something similar to that.” No wait that wasn’t it.

The New York Times is the parent company of The Boston Globe. They own the Globe in the same way humans own their children.

OK here’s the exchange.

Me: “Can we use some of their code?”

Someone: “We would have to pay them for that.”

Me:

Their response implied two things. First, that The New York Times would charge their kid for the digital equivalent of food. Second that the anticipated costs were high enough that it would be cheaper to rebuild this tool from scratch (again) than it would be to explore the possibility of reusing existing code.

Before you call child protection services, hold on. The situation is complex.

EDIT: To be clear, I quickly learned that the Times would not have charged us a dime.

Actually, this sounds completely reasonable

“Meh.” you say, “so The Boston Globe and The New York Times don’t share code, what’s the big deal?” A fair response, but trust me when I say the deal is big. If the deal was a rapper it would be notorious.

Here’s why: Starting from an existing code base instead of starting from nothing is often the difference between “having time to innovate” and “not.” If you are using technology as a core part of your business and you aren’t set up to experiment then you’re doing it wrong and you will become obsolete.

Borrowing code is kind of like being airdropped into the middle of a marathon; sure, you have to take a moment to figure out where you are and what direction to go, but now you have time to run in circles laughing like a crazy person before winning the race.

There’s more! If you borrow code then you are more likely to be familiar with what the rest of the world is doing. If you share code then you are going to build your systems with an emphasis on reuse and extensibility (i.e. correctly). If you regularly borrow AND share code then you are building a community around whatever it is you do.

What I’m trying to say is that if newspapers can buy into the mantra of openness—even just internal openness—they can kill about thirty birds with one stone.

But they usually don’t.

Why not? Are they idiots?

There are many reasons these organizations don’t trade bytes, none of which have to do with the original “we would have to pay for it” claim.

Reason 1: Wildly Different Technology Stacks

I lied to you earlier when I said the Globe was like a child to the Times–they’re more like middle-aged lovers. They didn’t grow up together or meet in college. They are two independent entities that recognized their love later in life, which means they have fundamentally different infrastructures.

One uses Java and PHP, the other uses Python, Ruby, and NodeJS. They have incompatible content management systems. They disagree on deployment policies, quality control processes, needs, and third party libraries. It’s like they come from two stubborn families that speak completely different languages and eat very different foods. They aren’t going to start casually sharing cook books.

Reason 2: Internal Politics

If a full team dedicates three months to creating a new public-facing interactive, will they want to just give it away? If you are a manager do you want to rely on favors from an external team to accomplish your goals? If you are a coder do you want to be judged for the quick last minute hacks you had to throw into the project?

The answer to these questions, and many more like them, is “hell no.”

Reason 3: Moving Costs and Learning Curves

Most technologies are dirty piles of duct tape with a shiny chrome finish. This makes them difficult to deploy and hard to understand. This is especially true among newspapers.

Packaging code in a way that strangers can use could take hours, days, or weeks depending on how much the developers cared about portability when they built it. I’m basically describing the difference between moving a campsite and a home. Newsroom developers don’t tend to have camping on the brain when rushing to meet looming deadlines.

Words from On High

Fine, so there are real reasons that code sharing between the Globe and the Times is a lost cause, but what does that mean for the industry? If financial allies with serious resources don’t share code, what are the chances that other newsrooms around the world will look outside their walls for help? Maybe this is why so many open source journalism tools are gathering dust.

I talked to Rajiv Pant (CTO) and Marc Frons (CIO) of The New York Times about code sharing and the role of open source in their company. For context: the Times is very progressive compared to other newsrooms when it comes to innovation and openness. They have a blog dedicated to their open source inititatives, there is a suite of APIs that provide civic data, and they do a good job of telling people about what they do.

Unfortunately they are also leading an industry that is forced into “deadline driven technology” and without a supportive institutional strategy, open source and reusable code are just nice-to-haves. Developers must ask themselves if they have time to meet the organization’s needs while also contributing to open source. Sometimes this means the same tools get built multiple times, but such is the nature of deadlines. Plus, as Marc was quick to point out, reinventing the wheel can be a good thing so long as the new one is slightly different.

Source: The Wheel Superstore. (Illustration by Lyla Duey)

But wouldn’t it be nice if all these new wheels could be used again and improved upon over time? Rajiv identified three factors that a project needs in order to be realistically used again by an organization like the Times.

Your code has to be…

1. Established – Is it safe to rely on your creation? How long will your project stay active, and how long after you move on will it stay useful?
2. Extensible – Your solution won’t meet all needs. How easy is it to improve? What kinds of features can be added?
3. Easy to Integrate – Will this play with existing systems and tools? Can it be skinned to look like it belongs?

In short, it doesn’t matter how powerful you think your code is: if it is difficult or risky to adopt, it will stay an orphan.

None of those points should come as a surprise, but they should probably be considered gospel to anyone developing anything—open or closed—in any newsroom. Just ask yourself “would the Times use this if they needed it?” If the answer is yes then you’ve made something that will last; otherwise you might as well get out the broom now.

Note: Since I’m sure you are worried, the Times doesn’t actually charge the Globe for code. And yes, we are writing Quizzler from scratch.