Over the past couple of days, I have been in discussions privately and publicly about the necessity of — or lack thereof — “advanced” content at NICAR, the Computer-Assisted Reporting annual conference put on by Investigative Reporters and Editors. It’s a loaded discussion for many reasons, some of which I will get into later.

NICAR has historically been a place where those with interest in data journalism can come and learn the skills they need. It has successfully built and fostered a community of openness, where those with experience are ready and happy to help anyone who wants to get started. I’ve only been participating in the NICAR community for about two-and-a-half years, but the impact of NICAR’s spirit on the community of news developers is clear.

This spirit has led to CAR conferences where the majority of the sessions and panels are targeted towards beginners in that particular subject area. You can spend two days building your first news app or learning Python. You can jump around to different sessions and learn a little bit about R, a little bit about Ruby, and a little bit about how to do space journalism. No matter what you do, you are just about guaranteed to learn something.

But I think there is room in the NICAR template for programming that assumes a base level of knowledge. NICAR does a great job of introducing new topics and giving primers on reporting on particular types of data stories. But there is a lack of sessions that say something like, “So, you build news applications for a living. Here’s a technical deep dive on how to optimize websites to handle extreme traffic.” Or maybe something like, “None of us know how to handle copyediting Google Spreadsheet-driven applications. Let’s talk about things we’ve tried together.”

The difference between assuming a base level of knowledge and starting from the very beginning every time is crucial. It can change the structure from one of tutelage and lecture to one of conversation and collaboration.

On Twitter, I’ve failed to qualify this statement with some disclaimers, and I’d like to do that before I begin now.

Teaching people who are interested in data journalism is the most important thing we can do. I am in no way suggesting that NICAR doesn’t need to do this anymore. It has never been more important. If I had to choose between NICAR teaching beginners and providing a place for experts to gather, I would choose the former every time. I just don’t think it’s an either/or situation.

we can do. I am in no way suggesting that NICAR doesn’t need to do this anymore. It has never been more important. If I had to choose between NICAR teaching beginners and providing a place for experts to gather, I would choose the former every time. I just don’t think it’s an either/or situation. The openness of the NICAR community means there is more I can do about this than shout into the void. And I have. I (and others who I have discussed programming at NICAR with) submitted session proposals that we thought would work towards solving this problem.

We were initially disheartened by the initial schedule, as it seemed our suggestions weren’t heard. (Not because our sessions aren’t there, but because the sessions seem like more of the same). This is not the case, and the schedule is not final. I know that IRE is thinking about the types of programming they include. This could all be a moot point by the time IRE releases the full schedule for this year.

I have all the respect in the world for IRE and those who help to put on NICAR. It is an incredible feat, and I know they work hard to make everyone happy, which is impossible. Conferences are hard, and I know nothing about putting one on. So maybe this request is unreasonable.

Anyway, here’s why I think NICAR could benefit from sessions where a base level of knowledge is assumed.

More people are more skilled

The success of the NICAR community has played a large part in the investment in data journalism and news development in newsrooms across the world. As the community grows and investment in these skills grows, the community has gotten better at what we do. And, importantly, more people are good at what we do.

Matt Waite argues that the curve of skill level at a NICAR conference looks like this:

Obviously, this is not a chart based on any kind of real data, but in the world of theoretical, I think the dropoff of the slope is much less dramatic. Don’t get me wrong—it exists—but there are a larger number of more skilled people in our profession. I haven’t been around long enough to know if it is a larger proportion of people, but regardless, I worry that as the raw number of skilled people grows, the more bored they become.

We can’t have every skilled person at NICAR teaching intro to Python or Ruby. There aren’t enough classrooms. But it is important to keep those people engaged in the community. A small amount of programming targeted towards intermediates and experts would keep them engaged.

The NICARian spirit

A common counterargument is that this spirit — one of willingness to educate beginners and generate interest in data journalism—would go away. Beginners would feel intimidated, and “experts” would be less willing to teach beginners because they would rather spend their time in “advanced” sessions. Walls would be erected.

I find the argument a little bit of a straw man. I’m not convinced that sometimes assuming knowledge in sessions would make people stop teaching and stop caring about beginners. If professional news developers and data journalists only talked to other experts and never engaged with beginner inquiries, NICAR-L (the listserv version of NICAR) would not be anywhere near the indispensable resource it is today for beginners. This community cares too much about sharing knowledge for that to happen. But again, not everyone can teach at NICAR.

In fact, I think this spirit of openness and willingness to share is why these sessions would succeed. We can share more than how to scrape your first web page. We can share how we made accurate Senate prediction models. We can share how we made even more detailed election maps. Getting into the technical details of these very complicated things can get in the weeds and lose beginners, but it is important to share the new knowledge we gained as a community.

Providing pathways for success

Learning to code or learning to report with data is hard. You have to learn new tools and new ways of thinking.

Becoming a great programmer or data reporter is even harder. And the path to getting there is much murkier. Part of that is in an unsolvable problem: you can’t follow tutorials all the way to expertise. You have to build things, try things and fail a whole lot. But you don’t have to be alone when you go down the path, and seeing what experts are doing right now—not what they did when they started—can provide inspiration and a light at the end of the tunnel.

Let’s get better together

Journalism is getting better everyday because of the NICAR community. It does amazing work and pushes forward what journalism can be on the internet. And, importantly, we have more communities beyond NICAR that can help us share, notably Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, ONA and SND.

But no community gets a larger group together more regularly than NICAR. News organizations face many of the same problems with the internet, and more and more are hiring people to try to solve them. Together, we can share solutions, brainstorm and connect. NICAR already does an admirable job of this, and has done so for longer than I’ve been alive. I just think it can do an even better job by providing forums for knowledge to be shared.