Why do you call part of Chinatown the Lower East Side?
How can I be Pac-Man?!
These questions are answered by the apps cranked out overnight this past weekend at The Great Urban Hack NYC. The mission for the 80 or so journalists and developers there was to design, report on, code and create projects to help New Yorkers get the information they need while strengthening a sense of community. It was open to themes around news, politics, government information, arts, culture or education — pretty much any journalism or technology project (going as far buying views on YouTube related topics) that might help residents connect to each other or the city.
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.
A group of coders and journos got together for a Saturday of programming at Austin Community College’s Eastview Campus for the first Hacks/Hackers ATX News Hackathon. The day was quite productive with a variety of news apps discussed and developed over the course of the day. It was a great meeting of technology, news and academia with representation from The University of Texas, Texas State University, The Texas Tribune and many more entities.
On October 26, Hacks/Hackers ATX welcomed Jacqui Maher of The New York Times Interactive News Technology group to discuss data-driven news interactives. The event was held at the offices of the Texas Tribune, with food sponsored by delicious Home Slice Pizza. Jacqui demonstrated projects, including the award-winning Toxic Waters, and then discussed ways in which programmers and journalists could collaborate. See her entire talk in the video below.
St. Louis is joining the Hacks/Hackers community.
The first STL Hacks/Hackers meetup will be 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Nov. 4 at The Dubliner in downtown St. Louis. RSVP at on.fb.me/STLhh. St. Louis has a large and very active programming community, and several print, broadcast and online news outlets: We have big plans and big expectations.
The STL group also can be found on Twitter, @stlhackshackers.
This is a guest post that also appeared on Oct. 15 on ProPublica’s blog at http://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-use-mechanical-turk-to-do-data-driven-reporting-and-how-you-can-too by Amanda Michel ProPublica
Of all of journalism’s recent evolutions, data-driven reporting is one of the most celebrated. But as much as we should toast data’s powers, we must acknowledge its cost: Assembling even a small dataset can require hours of tedious work, deterring even the most disciplined of journalists and their editors.
Fortunately, there’s an affordable — and amazing — tool that can make the impossible easy: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (mTurk).
Hacks/Hackers is coming to Canada.
A new Toronto chapter has been founded and its first meetup is Oct. 21 at 7 p.m. at the Press Club (850 Dundas St. W.). Those interested in attending can register at meetupTO.hackshackers.com, and anyone with questions can email toronto@hackshackers.com.
Our goals are to facilitate the connections between Toronto’s hacks and hackers and to push the boundaries of where and how news and journalism can be part of innovative collaborations.
