I have a 4 1/2-year-old who has created a very active, imaginary office/island Lego continent. A significant part of his “work” is building versions of the Midway.
Before I started working with ONA, the kid had never heard the word. So imagine his surprise when we went to Disney in June and encountered the Toy Story Midway Mania ride. (There’s plenty of POV videos of it on YouTube.)
The Midway went from being something abstract to “OMG, THE MIDWAY IS LEGIT AWESOME.”
And you know what? He’s right. The ONA17 Midway will be an amazing opportunity for attendees to interact with brilliant new tech and be trained by the companies, universities and organizations that have created cutting-edge tools, devices and programs for digital journalists.
Here are the groups that were accepted to participate in the ONA17 Midway:
- Alley Interactive
- Ball State University
- Chatfuel
- Cinamaker
- CivImpact Labs
- Data.World
- Echobox
- Hack Pack
- Hearken
- HOKO
- International Center for Journalists
- Insta360
- Luma Touch
- Maps4News
- Master of Code
- Offercraft
- Public Good
- Reynolds Journalism Institute
- Sketchfab
- Stimuli VR
- Stre.am
- Trint
- TunnelBear
- University of Maryland
- Verse
- Viar360
- Vigilant Web
- Wemap
The Midway also has a new feature this year: thematic panels to complement the rest of ONA17 programming, focused on:
- Immersive journalism
- Video
- AI/bots
- Monetization
- Analytics
- Data visualization
- Community + audience engagement
- Publishing tools
I’ll be sharing details about the programming and the nearly 30 participants in the coming weeks. But first, I need to convince the ONA executive team that a splash park will really bring the whole thing together.