As Resident Hacktivist at Rochester Institute of Technology (http://www.rit.edu), on behalf of the FOSS@RIT Campaign (http://foss.rit.edu), I would like to know, from the journalists' perspective, how we can mold the tools of our CIVX platform (http://civx.us) to best meet the needs of the Media, and how our students, fellows, and faculty, can bridge the gap for an industry in the midst of major paradigm shift.

Our project specializes in data ingestion and scraping; finding the data, and making it available, accessible, and transparent through free and open API's, in free and open formats. This may be a crucial step, but it is only the base- line. Once we have the data, the next step is making sense of it all; graphically, interactively, and temporally.

We want to make our datasets, dashboards, and widgets as useful to academic and journalistic researchers as possible. The best way we figure to do that is to lower the technological barrier-to-entry as low as possible to an already complicated and very complex data ecosystem. Using free and open tools, and teaching others to use--as well as improve upon--those tools, we can facilitate collaboration between end-users at top of "the stack", all the way down to the library and utility authors providing the technological foundation at the bottom.

We have already built so much into this platform:

• Bit-level accountability, of the data itself, as well as the medium it is provided through revision control systems (git)
• Real-time communication (web 3.0 actual real-time, not web 2.0 ajax real-time)
• Scalable, decentralized, enterprise class systems architecture (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, WSGI servers, nginx proxies, AMQP message brokers)
• Access to local NY government upstreams (not just data, but people)
• Ample amounts of student and academic support (courses, co-ops, internships)
• Top-to-bottom transparency of our source-code (from the database schemas at the bottom, to our index.html front-page at the top)

What this project needs to build outside of widgets or bits of code is momentum. We want to build into our community a sense of validation, a sense of purpose, a sense of direction. The kind that comes only from having the most public, visible, and prestigious stakeholders paying attention and participating.

Lasting relationships, meaningful alliances, and a common understanding of the short-term capabilities, as well as long-term implications of such technology are what needs building. Finding the best use-cases and applications of such tools is our challenge: building the tools is the easy part.

What are the toughest problems you want to solve?

What are the biggest questions you have?

What datasets do you most want to see scraped and indexed?

What widgets do you want to see built?

What file formats are most accessible for your backends?

What visualizations would your readers find most useful?

What visualizations would your editors find most useful?

What has worked best in the past?

What do you think will work in the future?

We want to build the tools YOU need--not make you NEED the tools we build.