Interested in starting or upping the use of open source resources in your newsroom? Melody Kramer offers a list of some journalism-related open source resources and projects that are helpful to both novices and the more experienced in building toolkits. 

She encourages journalists to understand the basics of coding and her list includes GitHub, “the largest repository of social code in the world,” as well as other how-tos and examples of open resources useful to newsrooms and startups.

Tutorials to learn about the basics: 

• In March, Kramer co-wrote with Greg Boone a tutorial for how to use GitHub that assumes you have absolutely no knowledge of GitHub. 
• Now where to begin with GitHub? "Sara Carothers of The Washington Post made this great presentation on how she learned a ton of new skills by adapting a Twitter bot that surfaced links posted by her coworkers," Kramer writes.
• Scraping a website allows you to extract data that can then be analyzed in Excel, or through writing a different program. It automates an activity that would take a lot of time to do otherwise. Learn how to write a web scraper in Python in this tutorial written for a bootcamp for Investigative Reporters and Editors. "It’s clear, easy-to-understand and doesn’t assume that you have a lot of experience with Python," she said. 
• For the past five years, Chrys Wu has attended NICAR, the computer-assisted reporting conference and made a master list of the software, tools, presentations, and tutorials from the annual conference. Among Kramer’s favorites are a tutorial for learning how to publish your first news interactive from a structured dataset and a step-by-step guide for how to make an animated gif from two images. 
• This etherpad contains a slew of projects that were started at SRCCON, a data journalism conference. SRCCON also puts transcripts up from every session for later viewing. 

When it comes to enhancing projects by using open source tools, Kramer recommends the following:

• Quartz created Chartbuilder that allows anyone to make an exportable chart after uploading data. The chart tool is used by a number of different newsrooms, some of which have customized the code.
• The Knight Lab has published a suite of tools for newsrooms, including a timeline maker, a way to add sound citations to a story, and a way to compare two photographs easily. A new tool that students released in spring 2015 tracks influencers behind a Twitter hashtag. Kramer describes the new tool as "It’s smart, easy-to-use, and you don’t have to know how to code to use it."
• To get data out of PDFs, Tabula makes it easy to extract data into a csv format, which can then be analyzed in Excel or Sheets. (You can then use Mr. Data Converter to convert the csv files into JSON or another web-friendly format.) Pandoc allows you to convert documents in many different formats to other formats.
• Tarbell allows you to publish projects to the web while using Google spreadsheets as a content management system (tutorial here). Projects made using Tarbell include this feature on a Heisman trophy winner by The Register-Guard and this investigative piece by the Chicago Tribune on youth in residential care facilities.  (Another great project is Sheetsee.js, which connected Google Spreadsheets to a website and allows for many different types of visualizations.)
• Need to search multiple social networks at once? You can use an open source Google Chrome browser extension developed by Storyful to quickly analyze multiple social networks at the same time.
• Annotator is an open source annotation tool that allows anyone to add annotation to text or images.