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Isn’t that symbolic?

__We didn’t used traditional media to bring the 140 or so people to the inaugural meeting of Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires, which took place in AreaTres – Hollywood this 4/28.

Editors and journalists from Argentina publications like Página/12, La Nación, Apertura; NGOs such as Fundación Huesped; and a vast number of digital developers and entrepreneurs, accepted the proposal to meet to consider new ways thinking and doing journalism. The meeting lasted over three hours, and had a moment of “trending topic” on Twitter Buenos Aires.

It took place in the Palermo Hollywood neighborhood, an area of tremendous growth in recent years as a center of new technology and audiovisual production companies. Here’s a summary of each presentation, which included the presence for a few minutes via Skype from Burt Herman, co-founder of  Hacks/Hackers… and a bizarre plastic cow in the middle of the room.

**Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires: Rebooting Journalism

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Murphy’s Law was inevitablel: the projector failed for the first 15 minutes. When it returned, we were able to discuss the goals of the organization, digital tools for journalists and the programmers’ point of view. I analyzed large samples of digital journalism from around the world (The New York Times, ProPublica, The Guardian, Zeit On Line) and the tools available to journalists and programmers can work together (Storify, AudioBoo, Stroome, and Google apps). We also discussed about digital sources, tools and new business models. ****

**Data mapping and Human Wrights

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The developer Martin Sarsale (CTO Sumavisos) gave an example of  data in world of journalism. He showed a prototype of data mapping using a single court case from the trials of the last Argentinian military dictatorship  that took place between 1976 and 1983. The objective of the prototype was to extract geo-information to understand the dynamics of the kidnappings and arrests of military rule, from the allegation of a prosecutor in a case of Human Rights. Sarsale explained how search algorithms are used, how they validated the information and the chances of growth in this area.

**Drupal’s World

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César Miquel (EasyTech) has extensive experience in the world of CMS (Content Management Systems) for large local media sites like Clarín. He related his experience in choosing types of CMS, including Drupal, and highlighted the benefits of being open, modular and easy to install.

WikiLeaks @ Argentina

Argentine journalist Santiago O’Donnell recounted his experience in working with WikiLeaks cables for Argentina at Página/12, as he was the first journalist in this country to have access to this material. He detailed the negotiations within Julian Assange and technically described the methodology to communicate with the site. Also, showed off all the software developed in Argentina to filter the documents and to organize it. He announced his intention to create a WikiLeaks in Argentina. “They can go down to WikiLeaks, but can not kill the idea behind WikiLeaks”, he said. ****

Gasto Público Bahiense

Manuel Aristarain, a programmer of Bahía Blanca, a city 800 kilometers from Buenos Aires, traveled especially to Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires to show his work tracking data from local government of Bahía Blanca. It also showed the government’s efforts to “complicate” access to digital data to avoid work. Techniques shown included screen scraping — taking human-readable information posted on websites and then turning them into machine-readable data. The  data can then be reassembled  to show, for example, how the government budget is beeing spent. Language: Python Framework: Django Library: Scraper Database: PostgreSQL

Burt Herman by Skype!

From somewhere in the world, Burt Herman, one of the founders of Hacks/Hackers, greeted the journalists, communicators and developers, and was interviewed on the future of Hacks/Hackers and invited to attend an upcoming meeting in Buenos Aires.

Mozilla-Knight Challenge

Guillermo Movia from Mozilla Argentina took the last minutes of Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires to discuss the Challenge organized by Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership. The idea of Knight-Mozilla is launching the first challenge of innovation, which aims to accelerate innovation in the media, resolving technological challenges, develop new products and services news and embed the technologies in news organizations such as Mozilla News Knight Fellows.

Finally. Thanks to the Mozilla Foundation for the sponsorship which allowed us to buy beer and snacks and pizza after the meeting. And we also thanks to Jason Rocks, who offered open-mesh technology to expand the wifi.

Meanwhile, everyone could follow along on Twitter with the hashtag #hhba, which — according to the company  The Real Time — was used 300 times during the presentation along. We’re all waiting for the next meeting.

PS: We have posted about Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires at @Storify