Meetups this week in Hong Kong, Lima, and Denver.

Data editor and soccer fan Tom Meagher rounds up interesting, unusual, and beautifully executed apps and interactives.

In the days before the World Cup’s knockout stages, with their potential for games to end in shootout finishes, The Wall Street Journal unveiled an app that visualized the tendencies of the top penalty kicks takers on the teams advancing in the tournament. Chris Canipe, senior news apps developer on the Wall Street Journal’s interactive graphics desk, talked with me about the thinking behind the project and how he and his colleagues put it together. What follows are edited excerpts from our conversation.

Zoe Fraade-Blanar on why and how good interaction design thinks about users.

Last week, the New York Times published an interactive photo-mosaic of 43,634 Detroit properties at serious risk of foreclosure. As you scroll down the page, viewing neighborhood after neighborhood, the number of properties and the total amount owed on them adds up at the top of the page. We contacted Matthew Bloch and Haeyoun Park at the Times to ask about the making of the interactive and the design choices they made along the way.

Hacks/Hackers London meetup today and tomorrow kicks off Julython, a month-long event where developers around the world work on pet projects and track their progress and commits.

In part one and part two of our #owhack report-backs, we introduced four new projects that emerged from the Hack Day. Today, we introduce the final two and wrap up with our notes from the event’s closing circle.

On Tuesday, Vox Media announced that it was acquiring the technology and co-founding team of the late and much-missed collaborative writing tool Editorially. We chatted with Editorially’s Mandy Brown and Vox Media’s Trei Brundrett about the team’s next steps, the probability of open sourcing more code, and the internal Vox hack week going on at this very moment.

Over the weekend, we put on the third Knight-Mozilla-MIT Hack Day, leading into the 2014 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference. As usual, the hack day was loosely organized around the conference’s theme: this year, “The Open Internet and Everything After.” After 24 hours of hacking in the welcoming environment of the MIT Media Lab (spread over two days because we believe in sleeping), we ended up with six wonderful projects ranging from an ultra-practical redaction utility to a fake astroturf campaign againt Net Neutrality.

Open Source Bridge and Investigative Reporters and Editors conferences on the west coast of the U.S. this week, plus Hacks/Hackers round the world.

Mini hit the web, and it reached newsstands today. It was accompanied by an explainer video that demystifies 3D printing tech, and a downloadable, printable 3D model of a sales growth chart from the review itself. The combination of hardware and data was irresistable, so we chatted with Jon Keegan about the project’s origins and their physical-digital plans for future features.

The BBC News Labs team explores ways of exposing linked data in public-facing election coverage, and encounters some interesting challenges.

Ronald Campbell on using census data to find facts in a world of speculation

Melody Kramer on how a user-centered design process and attention to newsroom culture can make or break your internal tools.

“Follow the money” hackathon this weekend throughout Latin America, and get your SRCCON session proposals in by Friday.

Last week, NPR’s Visuals team released their dailygraphics rig, which offers workflow for small-scale visualizations, interactives, and graphics, along with “automated machinery for creating, deploying and embedding these mini-projects.” Their introductory blog post breaks down how to set up and use the rig, and the code is open source and ready to use. Alyson Hurt joined last week’s OpenNews community call to talk a little about the project, and we chatted with her and Christopher Groskopf afterward about how the rig came to be, what kind of skills are required to use it, and their aim to improve code quality and culture through process-improving tools.

Jacob Harris on six ways to make mistakes with data—and how to avoid them.

Hacks/Hackers meeting up in Berlin and Lima this week. Deadlines approaching for HacksLabs grants and SRCCON proposals.

A visualization story on what happens when states repeal their universal helmet laws attracted some attention last month for both its content and unusual (but well-received) design. We thought it might amuse readers to see how heavily iterated it was, and how certain decision points along the way helped us to sculpt a design that was mobile-centric without compromising fluidity in the desktop version.