The great thing about Corrigo is that there are so many people encouraging us to carry on with it. You probably would not expect two guys bothering to set up a whole website, a facebook and twitter account, publish their thesis online, take part in a Mozilla contest – without a real plan. I mean: a strategy.

The truth is: We gave up the whole project more than once. There has never been a real plan – just a vision, or rather a wish. But people kept asking us questions about Corrigo and how it developed. They invited us to great conferences to have the opportunity to get to know even greater people!

So if not for ourselves, we had to carry on at least for all those nice and cooperative people. So let’s do it, or as it read in several of our presentations:

Let’s make it hacken!

And this time be assured: We do have a plan! Ladies and Gentlemen, dear Coders, please save the date:
February 22nd / 23rd 2013
ZEIT Online, Berlin

We are so happy and humbled to present you the renowned ZEIT to be our host!

We are planning a hackathon, so to develop a first protoype and will provide you with more details later.

If you are interested (you do not necessarily have to be a programmer!) in joining this special event, please register here (the corner on the righthand side) with our newsletter so that we can keep you updated.

So, who is in?

Hacks usually fear to dive into the world of hackers. So it was good to have Christian Heilman, a Mozilla Developer Evangelist, focusing on HTML5 and John Resig, the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library, in the boat. They pushed us into the ocean and showed us what’s under the surface of the water: the fascinating world of the open web.

John Resig gave us some interesting insights in the conception and realization of an open-source software project, which is first and foremost organizing communication and documentation in a smart way. Concerning Corrigo this is going to be a real challenge.

Corrigo is planned to be a tool to control quality in journalism. It’s our democratic conviction that such a tool mustn’t be in the hands of the state or the economy. Since the media as the “fourth force” control the government forces, the state in turn and in the sense of “checks and balances” may have no means of controlling the media. And as quality control of media is too important to be run by enterprises with economic interests it has to be run by the public, which is – going back to the philospher of the Enlightenment John Locke the supervisory of a balanced political system.

This means that while building and coding Corrigo as a non-profit and open-source project it’s important to find a balance between the liberty of the open-source community and the goal of creating a tool which empowers the public to take part in controlling the quality of the media without giving them any chance to abuse this power.

As John Resig made me think about the development of open-source software and let’s say some political or economical aspects of Corrigo, Christian Heilman inspired me to rethink the technical realization of Corrigo. Heilman told us what’s possible with today’s and tomorrow’s browsers. He’s a big fan of applications run by the browser because you don’t have to install software or to update a plugin. At the current state of conception we think that a browser add-on is the only way to realize what we have in mind.

Corrigo shall enable its users to flag and correct errors, missing links and typos in online news sources, so that other users see errors and corrections right in context (to get a better imagination of our intent we recommend to check our presentation on slideshare including some first mock-ups). We think that web annotation is the right technology for that. But is a browser add-on based on web annotation technology the only possibility? After having puzzled a playing music video in my browser we’re not sure anymore. There must be ways we haven’t thought about. So let’s go diving! Share your thoughts with us.

And that’s where Burt Herman steps into our virtual #MozNewsLab classroom. He is a journalist and entrepreneur, he co-founded Storify as well as Hacks/Hackers, an organization and network that brings together journalism and technology. Taking Storify as an example, Burt gave us advice on how to realize our ideas.

By the way: As I already had the chance to work with Storify, I have to say that it’s a smart tool for the kind of journalism, Jeff Jarvis once named process journalism. Due to the fact that “online, the story, the reporting, the knowledge are never done and never perfect” building a tool which helps journalists picking up tweets, blogposts, videos and photos, to rearrange and to comment on them is a great idea.

But as Jeff Jarvis’ lecture will come soon enough, let’s get back to Burt Herman’s advices. Let’s focus on these: Build a community, build a team and hey, just build it! So far our team consists of two hacks. Now it’s time to find some hackers and Burt Herman encouraged us to do so.

To pick up on Kersten’s thoughts on Aza’s lecture about prototyping, a maker space or a hackathon could be a good start.