Check-ins with a purpose: Ushahidi speaks at Hacks/Hackers
Hacks/Hackers Austin will hold its first meetup Thursday, September 30 from 6-8 p.m. at Austin’s Pizza on the Drag (2324 Guadalupe, Austin 78705). Join us upstairs in the bar for free pizza and drinks (while drink tickets last/cash bar thereafter) and great conversation. It’s a very cool room with windows all around overlooking UT. Stay tuned for more details and surprises. Please RSVP for this event! The Austin chapter is the seventh group, after San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, London, Boston and Chicago.
The following is a guest post by Corey Takahashi, who attended a Poynter seminar for journalists and programming through a scholarship provided with Hacks/Hackers. The key lesson I learned at Poynter’s first seminar on programming and journalism is how much overlap there already is between these two worlds, and the extent to which old-school reporting is at the heart of some of the industry’s most successful and innovative news apps and online features.
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.
Source code for Living Stories (including a WordPress plugin) can be downloaded from Google Code.
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.