[danso]

This is a great exchange program...Newspapers are strapped for resources and mired in bureaucracy that makes it hard to produce digital-age news products...but give some techies more domain-knowledge about civic data and they may be able to overcome the constraints of the average newsroom developer.

I say this as a former newsroom developer...One of the major impediments is the lack of digital literacy by the non-developer journalists. That is, before you can build a cool app based on their reporting and notes, you are going to spend a lot of time writing software that converts their reporting/notes into usable, parsable data...a problem that could be avoided if more reporters knew basic concepts of delimitation and data types...one workaround I've suggested is to take notes in a spreadsheet, instead of creating a folder of variably-named text files, i.e. "INTERVIEW WITH J.SMITH 9/5/12-Tuesday.doc"