We want to touch it

See these many buttons up there? We probably did the worst thing you can do about buttons: We printed them on paper.

Of course we also put them into our presentation, being the essence of our thesis, which explains its functionality by telling a little case scenario. But eventually this is not satisfying anymore. We want to click these buttons!

Or like Aza Raskin stated in our first lecture on Monday: The value of an idea is zero unless it can be communicated. And a great way of communicating is to make people touch it. Aza illustrated (well, not he himself actually) his credo by providing a nice little cartoon which led him and other participants to the conclusion: Prototypes are like the tits of software design.

Well. As we are virgins in terms of software design this really is a challenge. During the whole course of writing our thesis we were kind of sad about not having the possibilty to easily code a rudimental prototype. It is nice to sit together brainstorming and dreaming about a certain idea that you believe in. But it is nothing you can really touch. And when you cannot touch, it is hard to get others involved or simply get some feedback about your theoretical construct. It is okay that the outcome of three months’ work is “just” some mock-ups as we did know that prototyping would have gone beyond the limits of our study.

But hey, study is over! Now is the time to make it real. With the motivation from our first week  at #MozNewsLab we are now thinking about how to get Corrigo clickable.

We will certainly talk to the few coders we already know. At the same time we like the idea of a “maker space” where people can start hammering on sofware ideas. It is our job to inspire participation now. So if you want to share your tool box – we are happy to provide the work bench.

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Corrigo – download the whole thesis

We are done.

No, don’t worry – we are still kind of pre-seed in terms of Corrigo, the product. But we are done with our studies. And to proof that we are officially through we proudly present you our diploma thesis! As some of you had asked how things went we like to humbly add that we achieved a “1,0″ for the whole thesis as well as for our “defence”.

As we graduated from German University of Applied Sciences h_da the whole thesis is written in German. So if you don’t bother or just want to enjoy the shiny pictures (pp. 107 ff!) you’re welcome to download the

full version of “Corrigo – Conception of a Crowdsourced Media Accountability Service” (pdf!)

P.S.: After having researched the great universe of errors we are completeley convinced that there has to be at least one error among these many pages. So if you find one, please tell us – so that we can correct our mistake :)

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Approved. Twice!

One hundred sixty-two pages – that’s our final output of four years of online journalism at h_da University of Applied Sciences. And it’s also all about our visions and whishes that constitute Corrigo.

We already passed our oral exams and are now looking forward to our graduation (party!). By Friday you can call us Diplom-Online-Journalisten.

And there’s even more we can celebrate: We actually made it and can advance to the next stage within the Knight-Mozilla challenge “Beyond Comment Threads”!

We are really proud to be chosen to join 60 other participants attending a four-week learning lab. There will be two mandatory lectures (entirely online) each week – including speakers like John Resig and Jeff Jarvis. Awesome!

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How corrigo works: Submission for Mozilla + Journalism

Yeah, yeah, yeah! We finally did it and put our presentation together so we could upload it to the Mozilla Drumbeat platform as a submission for the MoJo competition Beyond Comment Threads. That’s how we pitched:

It all began with that sticky idea: Geek comedian Tom Scott couldn’t stand “dodgy” journalism anymore. So he created some “warning labels” to put them on free papers he found on the London Tube.
It’s clear: If you can put stickers on newspapers, it should be possible online more than ever. Studying online journalism, we made this the subject of our diploma thesis. For three months, we analysed quality (control) in German and American journalism. We learned a lot about fact checking, accuracy and (failed) attempts to involve the public in media accountability.
Now we put all these learnings together and conceived a proper service: corrigo
It helps you flag and correct factual errors in online media – directly at the article.

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