Who We Are

Conceived of over beers and sandwiches by journalists working at ProPublica and The New York Times, DocumentCloud is an independent nonprofit funded in 2009 by a two-year grant from the Knight News Challenge.

Co-founders (and Board of Directors)

Aron Pilhofer is editor of Interactive News Technologies at The New York Times, overseeing a news-focused team of journalist/developers who build dynamic, data-driven applications to enhance The Times' reporting online. He joined The Times in 2005. Previously, he was at the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, and before that at Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Eric Umansky is a senior editor at ProPublica, where he oversees daily reporting. Previously, Eric wrote Slate’s “Today’s Papers” He also written, mostly on national security issues for The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, The New Republic, and elsewhere. Earlier in his career, Eric was editor of MotherJones.com.

Scott Klein is the Editor of News Applications at ProPublica, directing news application development and production. He previously worked at The Nation, directing editorial and business application development for the TheNation.com. Earlier in his career, Scott worked at The New York Times.

DocumentCloud Staff

Jeremy Ashkenas is the lead developer at DocumentCloud. His previous job was at Zenbe, a provider of online email and collaboration software. He created the Ruby-Processing visualization toolkit, the CoffeeScript programming language and is a two-time winner of the Sunlight Foundation’s Apps for America competition, for Know Thy Congressman and Quakespotter.

Samuel Clay, Developer, joins us from Storybird, a collaborative storytelling startup which works with artists to give children access to high quality narrative art that they can use to publish their own original stories. He’s also the mastermind behind NewsBlur, an open source feed reader that uses artificial intelligence to suggest stories you might want to read. Samuel lives in Brooklyn with his dog and guinea pigs, where he photographs historic districts for New York Field Guide. Find him at samuel@documentcloud.org or on twitter.

Amanda Hickman, Program Director, joined DocumentCloud from Gotham Gazette where, as the Director of Technology, she managed development of a series of games about public policy issues, built a pretty cool database of candidates for local office and shared an ONA award for General Excellence with her colleagues there. Prior to joining Gotham Gazette, she worked as a Circuit Rider, providing technology assistance and training to low-income grassroots groups in the U.S. working on anti-poverty issues and as a consultant to foundations looking for ways to support their grantees’ use of technology in organizing work. She taught an undergraduate course at NYU’s Gallatin School on using the Internet as an organizing tool. An active local organizer, she’s got her hands in a few community composting and gardening projects, too. You can find her at amanda AT documentcloud.org.