Code convenings have been regular events on the OpenNews calendar for a little more than two years now, each of them bringing a small group of designers and developers together to work on projects that fit a particular theme. Given a chance to step away from normal routines and daily deadlines, participants spend a couple days writing code and documentation before releasing fresh open-source projects and updates into the journalism community. The Austin event earlier this month definitely was our largest so far, with nine projects. It was a fantastic mix of people, with developers and designers from all sizes of news organizations, and fields like education, finance, and civic tech. Here’s what everyone is working on.

At Vox Media, data science and data engineering are working together to build products with editors’ and journalists’ needs in mind. One such experimental product is a Slackbot that enables editors to discover relevant content on demand.

The best PunditBot can do is imitate cable-news pundits or sports commentators filling airtime with useless predictions, largely because it lacks a human’s domain knowledge and ethical drive to use journalism to inform democracy and craft a fairer society. My experiment with PunditBot makes me bearish on independent robotic journalists (and bearish on human TV pundits) but I’m optimistic for a future of human-robot journalism teams.

Bots encapsulate how data and computing can work together, in journalism. And when we use bots to teach concepts and skills in computational journalism, we’re actually teaching two kinds of thinking: editorial and computational.

Chances are, you probably think your mind works pretty well. But, in reality, our brains fool us all the time with blind spots and biases. So what can we do about it? Let’s examine how graphics, including charts, interactives and other visual tools, can help show us the shortcomings of our own minds.

The Coral Project hosts its first hackathon, plus SRCCON call for proposals deadline this Wednesday.

As part of my research with the Tow Center, I investigated the geographical and demographic data around how Uber works in D.C., to find out if its wait times varied by neighborhood (and, as a result, by demographic). Here’s how I did it.

As the ICIJ-led consortium prepares for the second major wave of reporting on the Panama Papers, we spoke with Mar Cabra, editor of ICIJ’s Data & Research unit and lead coordinator of the data analysis and infrastructure work behind the leak. In our conversation, Cabra reveals ICIJ’s years-long effort to build a series of secure communication and analysis platforms in support of genuinely global investigative reporting collaborations.

Introducing The Record, the Marshall Project’s compendium of reporter-curated criminal justice links.

From a pure reading of Ohio Revised Code 149.43 (B) (2), it would seem that anyone who walks into a public office should run into public employees who are prepared to handle record requests and able to turn them around quickly, if not immediately. Though I had not tried before, my past experiences with email record requests made a speedy, question-free response from an OU office seem like a fantasy. We wanted to test the results.

The International Journalism Festival kicks off this week, while we’re looking for your pitches for SRCCON this July.

Our third annual Source #Botweek will kick off April 25, 2016, bringing another batch of automation-related project teardowns and walkthroughs, bot-centric how-tos, and considerations of the challenges and implications of bots in newsrooms.

I’ve been exploring how to tell complex stories on the web for quite a long time. When presenting a complex story to an audience, the goal is often to simplify the complexity without sacrificing so much detail that important elements are lost. XKCD’s movie narrative charts do this in a novel and effective way. On one hand, they provide the ability to see the shape of the story in one easily digested image. While at the same time they allow you to drill deeper, getting into the structure and detail of the story.

Here’s a handful of inspiring projects that we especially loved and appreciated, these past few weeks.

It’s deadline day for submissions to the Knight News Challenge on libraries and the Ford-Mozilla fellowships. Plus, OpenNews wants your code convening pitches, as do many other upcoming events.

NICAR will bring hundreds of news nerds to Denver this week, plus bunch of conferences and fellowships looking for your applications.

Here’s a handful of our favorite pieces from the past few weeks, created within the newsroom-code universe.