Hacks/Hackers NYC gathered for Demo Day 5 at Pivotal Labs for another inspiring mashup of startups hacking the future of content. The Summer 2013 demos by the Hacks/Hackers NYC community explored technology to better visualize information and tell compelling stories. They ranged from editorial visualizations and video interactives, to query searches, to building transparency in health costs. Each presentation was limited to 5 minutes followed by a 5 minute Q&A by the audience.
Building on the excitement around data journalism at our previous hackathon, Hacks/Hackers New Delhi recently paired up with the Hindustan Times — one of India’s leading English newspapers — to host a showcase of innovative data journalism work going on in the country.
The goal was to share best practices when it comes to using data to source, tell and visualize stories.
Avinash Celestine of the Economic Times started off by explaining how he’s using open data – particularly Indian government census data – to answer big questions about socioeconomic trends on his Datastories blog.
Hacks/Hackers Rosario (HHROS) is already a reality. On Thursday, April 25, the second Argentine group of Hacks/Hackers (H/H) had its first meetup in ClubdeFun Bar, with more than 60 attendees.
Programmers, journalists, designers, entrepreneurs, technologists and IT professionals gathered at the venue to attend the talks offered by Ezequiel Clerici (Journalist and co-organizer of Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires and HHROS), Pablo Cuadrado (Mozilla Argentina ), Dart Ceballos (Bachelor of Social Communication, digital reporter and co-organizer of HHROS) and Mariano Blejman (Knight International Journalism Fellow at International Center For Journalists and co-founder of Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires).
Hacks/Hackers Miami officially launched Saturday, April 13, when Stephanie Rosenblatt, a full-stack developer with a long-standing love of journalism, led about 25 members through a 3-hour MySQL bootcamp at the University of Miami School of Communication.
The group gained hands-on experience creating tables, importing and formatting data, and performing simple queries via phpMyAdmin. Participants got a working understanding of basic syntax and data structure and saw many examples of how MySQL powers web apps, news and data projects.
The latest Hacks/Hackers event brought together the creator of Pocket and Matter, and a former Wired.com head editor to talk about ways to make money from serious journalism
Tim Lott, vice president of disruptive innovation of Cox Media Group, met with Hacks/Hackers Austin in a joint meetup with Online News Association on Jan. 28 at the Statesman to discuss the activities of his team. They are working on TwelveApp, but are also pioneering in new ways to approach innovation. During the talk, Tim discussed the lean startup process, working to develop a minimum viable product (MVP), that can be implemented and tested quickly.
At the first meetup of Hacks/Hackers Rabat in Morocco.
For the first time in Morocco, Hacks/Hackers was organized in November 2012, in Rabat, the capital, but the story did not start from that date. It started in February 2012, when some friends and I founded the first think tank in Morocco working on using media for development.
One of our reasons to establish this NGO, was to contribute in reducing the gap in the digital knowledge of journalists in Morocco.
Hacks/Hackers New Delhi, the first Hacks/Hackers group in India, launched Dec. 5. About 50 journalists, techies and supporters came by What’s Up Bharat, in Hauz Khas Village to talk about the challenges of combining media and technology in India.
Nikhil Pahwa (@nixxin), founder and publisher of digital analysis site MediaNama, said he’s looking for people to take a closer look at ways to organize big data. He also suggested creating tools that can track the evolution of stories and ideas in real-time.
For its second session hosted by Qunb, Hacks/Hackers Paris focused on APIs. The first presentation, by Aurélien Fache from faberNovel explained what is an API and what it will be in the years to come. Afterward, Radio France and UPIAN showed an innovative use of the Storify API for their website “Clichés de campagne.”
“Everything is API, API is everywhere” could be a good summary for Aurélien Fache’s presentation.
UNESCO’s Amman office was home to the technical day organized by Hacks/Hackers Amman Group with the objective to provide technology solution to different issues Jordanian journalists face.
Participants included a wide range of ‘hackers’, organizations and figures in the Ammani vibrant and dynamic tech scene, including Hacks/Hackers members, the Jordan Open Source Association and different prominent local IT companies and programmers. On the other hand, journalists and professionals from media organizations like ARIJ, Alghad daily and the Amman-based private TV station Roya, fully participated at the day by expressing some of the IT-related challenges they face and by understanding how technology can be an important, even critical, part of any media strategy to be taken into account.