The Austin chapter of Hacks/Hackers kicked off with a social meetup on September 30 at Austin’s Pizza near The University of Texas campus. More than 40 communicators and coders got together for some pizza and beverage, with lots of promise that these initial contacts will lead to some valuable collaborations.
In addition to the socializing and snacks, there were door prizes provided by Gowalla, Texas Tribune, Austin American-Statesman and Austin’s Pizza. Many thanks to everyone who came out to make this event a success. Thanks as well to Christian McDonald, Matt Stiles, Niran Babalola and Jon Lebkowsky for their help in organizing this event.
(Photo of the Hacks/Hackers NYC meetup at OpenPlans by Dan Nguyen/Flickr)
You asked for the slides from Justin Osofsky’s Facebook for publishers presentation, and we’ve got ’em, along with statistics.
Working Together to Build Social News
We’ll have notes from the meetup in a bit…
Since time immemorial, two major knowledge management questions have bedeviled news organizations. First, when faced with a giant pile of primary source material, how does a reporter intelligently and efficiently discover the newsworthy bits? Second, how should the organization index and expose the latest news and archival material to both consumers and reporters?
To answer these questions, Lotico the New York Semantic Web and Hacks/Hackers teamed up on Sept. 30 to have speakers from ThomsonReuters, The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Aol News present on their work in Computer Assisted Reporting. Turnout was tremendous with most people showing up despite the fact that the event was free.
The lineup:
— Ken Ellis, Proposition Leader at Thomson Reuters;
— Stuart Myles, Deputy Director of Schema Standards at The Associated Press;
— Tom Torok of The New York Times;
— Maurice “Mo” Tamman of The Wall Street Journal;
— Justin Cleary, Senior Product manager at Aol News
The Hacks/Hackers NYC is throwing an open(source).athon in the OpenPlans penthouse on Oct 2 to see how much great software for news/information we can open source in 12 hours?
If you are a hacker, bring your code and get the time and some help to push it out the door (Or bring your expertise and help others). If you are a hack, we need excellent writers and editors to help with documentation.
Hacks/Hackers Chicago is getting into gear with its first Meetup on Wednesday, Sept. 15 from 6-8 p.m. at the Holiday Club (4000 N Sheridan Road). More details below
Meet up, geek out, and enjoy complimentary food and beverages with programmers, journalists and others in Chicago’s media and tech communities who want to explore and strengthen the connections between technology and journalism. In addition to refreshments and conversation, Chicago Tribune News Applications Editor Brian Boyer will talk about the Apps team’s first year, and The Media Consortium’s Tracy Van Slyke will give a special sneak preview of its upcoming Independent Media Mobile Hack-A-Thon.
At ProPublica, we make a habit of sharing. We give our biggest stories for free to news organizations, and we hand out recipes for some of our most complex investigations. We encourage other news organizations to steal our stories, and give out, free to use, clean, reliable, analyzed data that is often available nowhere else. Our mission is to have real-world impact, and we think the best path to that is not through owning an issue, but through igniting coverage of an issue everywhere.
We’re delighted to announce that the first international chapter of Hacks/Hackers got off to a fantastic start yesterday.
Having originally expected a modest turnout, we were bowled over when more than 50 journalists and coders gathered at The Shooting Star pub in Spitalfields on Wednesday evening for the first London Hacks/Hackers meetup. A big thank you to everyone who turned up!
Attendees represented a whole host of media brands including The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, BBC, CNN, MSN, Reed Business Information and Emap.
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.
