Latin America

Hacks/Hackers Asunción Kickoff

The global network that works for the future of journalism has found its niche in Asunción, Paraguay’s capital, since May of this year. With the support and enthusiasm of Web developers, designers, journalists, communicators, and professionals from different fields, Hacks/Hackers Asunción has launched its first activities eager to build an active community of innovators ready to take journalism to the next level. In order to spread the concept of data journalism — relatively new in Paraguay — and to discuss the implications of this emerging field, a number of introductory workshops with journalists have marked the initial stages of Hacks/Hackers Asunción.

Hacks/Hackers llega a Asunción para innovar el periodismo local

La red global que trabaja por el futuro del periodismo encontró su nicho en Asunción, la capital de Paraguay, desde mayo de este año. Con el apoyo y el interés de desarrolladores Web, diseñadores, periodistas, comunicadores, y profesionales de diversas disciplinas, Hacks/Hackers Asu ha iniciado sus primeras actividades con miras a crear una comunidad activa de innovadores dispuestos a romper esquemas tradicionales y llevar el periodismo a un nuevo nivel.

Hacks/Hackers São Paulo: The First Hackathon

Developers and journalists gather for the first Hacks/Hackers São Paulo hackathon. Hacks/Hackers São Paulo held its first hackathon on Oct. 20 during the W3C Brazil Conference, alongside the 2012 PERL international community conference. The hackathon, which drew about 50 people, happened during Web.br, an important gathering of the tech community in Brazil. The hackathon attracted a large number of developers and a few journalists. Nevertheless the mix was right, as journalists helped different groups with their data mining skills.

New Hacks/Hackers group forms in Bogota

Bogota, Colombia now has a Hacks/Hackers group and we are excited to be a new addition to the Hacks/Hackers family. Our Bogota group is already up and running with plans for a hackathon on Aug. 11 to build a crowdsourced map to assess environmental issues in Colombia’s capital city. We took that decision at our second meeting at the end of May — when 40 hacks and hackers voted to make that the first group project — a proposal put forward by co-organizers Ronnie Lover, a Knight International Journalism Fellow in Colombia and Renata Cabrales, social media editor at El Tiempo newspaper.

Big data: extract and analize large volumes of data

** Working with large volumes of data lets us view events previously unimaginable. There are 900 million people connected on Facebook, hundred of taxis operating in real time, unexpected events tracked on Twitter and terabytes of e-mails moving from one continent to another. For our next meetup, Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires will go into the Big Data Studio at Globant to learn and share experiences related to a branch that is changing the way we tell stories: data visualization.

Big data: extraer y visualizar grandes volúmenes de datos

(English post coming) ****Trabajar con grandes volúmenes de datos permite ver acontecimientos que antes eran inimaginables: 900 millones de usuarios conectándose en Facebook, miles de taxis funcionando en tiempo real, eventos inesperados que se pueden medir en Twitter, terabytes de e-mails moviéndose de un continente al otro. Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires se mete en el Big Data Studio de Globant para compartir un encuentro de aprendizaje e intercambio de experiencias relacionadas con una rama que está cambiando la forma de mostrar historias.

Storify in Buenos Aires! Applications to tell stories. Pre and post hacks.

At the upcoming meeting of Hacks/Hackers of Buenos Aires, we will be joined by Xavier Damman, the co-founder of Storify.com, a site that is changing the way we tell stories in the media and through social networks. Damman is an entrepreneur based in San Francisco, passionate about new media and democracy, and the founder of HackDemocracy.org. At the meeting, we will also announce two upcoming meetings, one on Big Data and the other on Google Fusion Tables.

ShowTimeLine Complete! Hackathon on visualizing timelines with @HacksHackersBA

(Spanish post here) The sunny morning of Saturday, April 14th was ideal for jogging. But rather than exercising well-trained bodies, smart minds were warming up for a good hackathon. Forty-five people, invited by Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires, met in Buenos Aires to work on visualizing complex relationships across timelines and to learn about available tools to do so. In a very pleasant atmosphere journalists, media publishers, designers, communication managers, and programmers shared plenty of empanadas and sodas, possibly in the only space of its kind in Latin America, AreaTres Soho.

ShowTimeLine Hecho! Hackatón sobre visualizaciones de líneas de tiempo en @HacksHackersBA

(english post here) La mañana soleada del sábado 14 de abril era ideal para salir a correr. Pero en este caso no se trataba de cuerpos bien entrenados físicamente (aunque también los había) sino más bien intelectualmente preparados para un buen hackatón. Convocados por Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires cerca de 45 personas se juntaron en Buenos Aires, Argentina, en AreaTres Soho para trabajar sobre la resolución de un problema de visualización de relaciones complejas a través de líneas de tiempos y para familiarizarse con herramientas disponibles.

ShowTimeLine! Hackathon on timeline visualizations at @HacksHackersBA

We believe that software can be used to tell stories in ways unthinkable for traditional journalism. Several journalists, designers and software developers related with Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires are working on projects where they need to visualize data in time lines. We need tools to develop automatic or semi-automatic timelines that could be combined with other variables, to gather valuable insights from the data. Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires proposes to build new applications (like this one above) that can help visualize data “over time”.