Recap
Last week, Paul, Nick and I met with folks from The Columbia Tribune and The Boston Globe to talk about what we’ve learned about OpenBlock so far, and to talk more about their plans for putting the OpenBlock software to use. I think their ideas are going to be great for the project — both will push things ahead in interesting and complementary ways. For the Globe, we’ll be focusing on improving APIs for using OpenBlock as a service. For the Tribune, we’ll be improving OpenBlock as a standalone site.
The demo is more of a sandbox for exploring what OpenBlock should be out-of-the-box. We’ll be updating the demo with the current state of the software every week along with a post here about what’s new, what’s fixed and generally how things are going.
Any way you use it, you need a bunch of local data to make OpenBlock do its thing. To get the ball rolling, we’ve set up a data wiki page to help document the different types of data OpenBlock needs and what works well today. We also hope to record what we (and you) learn about getting ahold of good data — we think knowing who to ask and what to ask for is a big part of the challenge.
Although things are at an early stage, if you’re willing to squint a little, I think you can already see the shape of what’s to come. When you check it out, don’t hesitate to voice what you’re seeing — What do you imagine doing with OpenBlock? What sort of data do you want to pull in?
