INN Labs – News Apps And Technology Team Docs

Table of Contents

What’s in here (so far):

• A manifesto outlining our team’s mission and values
• Staffing and Hiring including how we recruit and hire new team members, plus:
  • Some information on our application/interview process
  • Sample job descriptions from our team and from INN member organizations
  • Interview questions for screening candidates
  • Our onboarding process
• How we work including:
  • Our internal process we follow for most of our projects
  • What we’ve learned about working as a remote team
  • The tools we use
  • Notes on how we conduct meetings
  • How we give feedback to other team members
  • How we use GitHub and Git for version control
• How to work with us including:
  • General guidelines for how to work with us effectively
  • Services we offer to INN members
  • Details of our paid consulting program
  • Intake documents for new projects
  • A code of conduct for contributing to our open source projects
  • How to contribute to our projects using GitHub
  • Guidelines for submitting great pull requests
• Style guides for:
  • Code
  • Design/ui elements
  • Data projects
• Projects we work on with descriptions of each project and relevant resources.
• Checklists to help keep us organized.
• Our Communications Strategy including:
  • External communications
    • Our weekly newsletter
    • Twitter accounts
  • Internal communications.

What is not (and will not) be in here:

• Documentation for Largo and some of our other large projects which will typically be kept with their respective project repos as well as on Read the Docs.
• Documentation for our other apps/tools/etc. (e.g. our deployment tools or our responsive tables rig) that are on the smaller side will typically reside within those repos directly as a readme file at the root of the repository.

Important Note: Nothing in these docs supercedes what you’ll find in the INN employee manual. Always refer to that for any personnel, hiring, payroll, etc. issues.

Thanks!

These docs draw on (and sometimes straight up steal) excellent work from teams that have come before us. Here are a few of our sources of inspiration:

• ProPublica’s News App and Data Style Guides
• The NPR Visuals Team’s app template, coding best practices and manifesto
• Guides and Process Docs from The Chicago Tribune’s News Apps Team
• MinnPost’s UI Style Guide

The INN Nerds use BrowserStack to test our apps for cross-browser compatibility on real browsers.

License

All of these documents are licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 license. You are free to share and to remix them (as long as you credit us) but please don’t use them commercially without permission.

Contributing

We welcome contributions and suggestions to help us improve any of these documents. Please start by reading our contribution guidelines and then review the specifics for this project to get started.

Who Wrote This?

The INN news apps and technology team is:

• Kay Lima (@kayleen_lima), Director
• Ben Keith (@benlkeith), Lead Developer
• Joshua Darby, Senior Developer
• Miranda Krapf, Project Manager
• Paola Baradello, Account Manager

Head Nerd emeritus: Adam Schweigert (@aschweig)

Nerds emeriti: Nick Bennett, Jack Brighton, Will Haynes, Kaeti Hinck, Gabriel Hongsdusit, Dani Litovsky Alcalá, Denise Malan, Meredith Melragon, Ryan Nagle, Sinduja Rangarajan, David Ryan, RC Lations, Julia Smith (@julia67), Tyler Machado (@tylermachado)

Additional contributions from: @chriszs and @brentajones