We had lots of excellent submissions for our Demo Day at New Work City. Thanks for all interest. We are sure to do it again, such that all worthy projects will gain an audience.
Drumroll please. The Hacks/Hackers presenting on December 1.
Kushal Dave, FourSquare engineer, who will present an advance off-the-recordish look at the new FourSquare API. (See the current API) Dan Nguyen of ProPublica, who will review the data gathering and data structuring behind Docs for Dollars.
We’re trying to spur ideas/collaboration among Hacks/Hackers members for the Knight News Challenge, a grant program that supports news innovation that has a Dec. 1 deadline. So far more than $20 million has been granted to dozens of projects, including Spot.us, DocumentCloud, Ushahidi and MediaBugs. Who knows? Yours could be next.
The News Challenge gave support to our series of hackathons across the country. Inspired by the collaboration and the people we met, we’ve created a cross-chapter Google doc where you can leave thoughts/contact information/skills.
We’ve updated the Hacks/Hackers membership signup form on Scribd. The changes: new logo, and also knowing what kinds of volunteering we need on a chapter-by-chapter basis — photography and blogging for example. Download and use for your chapter, if you need. Make sure to keep a list of people’s email addresses, as Meetup does not allow us access to that.
Hacks/Hackers Membership Signup Form, Version 2.0
An MIT research project is looking for beta testers for its Knight News Challenge proposal for a WordPress data visualization plugin. Sign up on their blog.
As Professor David Karger writes, his team has created a WordPress plugin called Datapress that lets folks WYSIWYG author interactive visualizations of any data without any programming. Using the tool, users can drop maps, timelines, tables, charts, lists, thumbnail grids, and graphs into your article the same way images drop in an image.
The Seattle Hacks/Hackers chapter is kicking off on Thursday night at Havana on Pike Street. Reporters from The Seattle Times, Seattle Magazine, KING 5, Reuters, the Associated Press, MSNBC.com are all going to be there.
Thanks to sponsorship from Patch, the event is free, but tickets are required. There are only twenty left. So hurry.
Details are below.
Date: Thursday, Nov. 11
Time: 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Where: Havana, 1010 E.
Hacks/Hackers NYC and Eyebeam Art + Technology Center held an epic hackathon called The Great Urban Hack which led to 25 hours of hacking. Below are some pictures of the hardcore folks who stayed at the space all night. The above shot is from after midnight, but before people started falling off like flies. There was a late-night beer run. And we kept everyone really well fed. The people who stay all night were rewarded with xkcd schwag, courtesy of Breadpig.
In conjunction with the Online News Association convention, Hacks/Hackers hosted a hackathon at NPR that was sponsored by Daylife, a New York-based technology company which offered a $500 cash prize for the the best use of its API.
Surprisngly, hackathon participants hailed from as far as Portland, Miami, Los Angeles and London. They’vebeen involved in projects ranging from WordPress, ScraperWiki and GeoDjango. Two of the participants were students actually that worked at the Federal Communication Commission.
About 25 people gathered at the MIT Media Lab on October 30 for a Hack/Hackers Boston co-organized event to build geolocal apps using OpenBlock, an open source hyperlocal news and data gathering system based on Django. OpenBlock is based on EveryBlock. Boston Innovation had great coverage and a video, which can be seen above, which interviews Matt Carroll, of the Boston Globe, and Nick Grossman, of OpenPlans, who did the heavy lifting to organize the event.
Next meetup: Wednesday, August 18, at the NYC Google offices, where we will discuss the concept of “Living Stories.” Presentation starts at 7 p.m., but come early and socialize (and gawk) at 6 p.m.
Google, in a three-month experiment with The New York Times and The Washington Post, created a format called Living Stories. The site mapped a timeline of events and aggregated articles and opinion pieces, images and video, and other materials to give readers the big picture.
The latest Hacks/Hackers NYC gathering was all about photojournalism, hosted in the breathtaking Open Planspenthouse (with a wraparound balcony and a fantastic view) on July 27. Jonathan Tepper, co-founder of Demotix, talked about his crowdsourced photo wire based in London, and the team behind The New York Times’ “Moment in Time” discussed their project that mapped 14,000 user-submitted images onto an interactive globe.
Around 70 people attended with a good mix of programmers and content folk. There was a big contingent from Newsweek, which arrived together, and we even had a representative from 10gen, the company which makes MongoDB, the database that was used for the “Moment in Time” project. (He came wearing a MongoDB T-shirt, so was easy to spot)
