Julian Burgess‘s game, Whose Headline, won the News+Gaming Hackathon held at CUNY Journalism school over April 22 and 23 in New York City. The game presents headlines drawn from various publications, using RSS feeds, and asks the players to identify which publication it comes from. The original publications included The New York Times, ESPN, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, The New York Daily News, Mashable, and Forbes. Cody Brown also won a prize for suggesting that The Onion‘s satirical headlines be added to the list.
At the Hacks/Hackers NYC News+Gaming Hackathon, BigDoor introduced the basic concepts of gaming economy and their gamification Application Programming Interface (API).
Brian Immel and Roy Schmidt, of BigDoor, distilled the essential elements of a game economy. For those who are new to gaming concepts, it helps to think of frequent flier programs as one of the original large scale game economies.
Brian and Roy defined some of the key elements of a gaming economy, which are address in some elements of their API.
A Bay Area Hacks/Hackers demo night at Stanford previewed some of the journalistic innovations Knight Fellows are pursuing this year.
Knight Fellows are 20 journalists from around the world who spend an academic year at Stanford, exploring and testing their ideas for rethinking news and information. Five of the fellows gave demos of their work – which ranged from a mobile news tip and verification system to developing augmented reality news experiences.
Public Radio International and Minne* are joining forces to launch the Twin Cities Chapter of Hacks/Hackers. We are excited to have our fledgling chapter join the good company of chapters spreading from the Bay Area to NYC, to Buenos Aires.
We’ll have a kick-off happy hour at PRI’s new headquarters on Friday, April 22 at 5:30 p.m. and we’ve invited Matt Thompson, formerly of the Star Tribune and now at NPR, to talk about data overload, the twilight of news brands and more.
Journalists, developers and designers:
Join Hacks/Hackers for Hacks/Hackers Hacking @ ONA11 in Boston on Sept. 22!
We’re holding a hack day sponsored by Knight-Mozilla News Tech Partnership and additional partners (to be announced) the day before Online News Association annual conference general sessions.
Meet new people, make new friends and prototype projects with code, wireframes and websites at the Microsoft NERD Center. What we produce together at the all-day hackathon will help shape the future of news and civic information.
_This post is also available in English (we’ve gone bilingual!)
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Llega el primer encuentro de Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires, Argentina, entre periodistas y programadores, el próximo 28 de abril. Aquí, hablaremos sobre los objetivos de la organización fundada por Burt Herman de Storify, Rich Gordon de Northwestern y Aron Pilhofer de The New York Times. Intercambiaremos información sobre herramientas digitales para periodistas y estudiaremos la visión de los programadores y sus aportes en su capacidad para manejar grandes volúmenes de datos.
You can also read this post in Spanish. (We’ve gone bilingual!)
The first meeting of Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires, Argentina will be on April 28, 2011 at 6.30 p.m. at AreaTres Workplace, Humboldt 2036 Buenos Aires.
The meeting will serve as an introduction to Hacks/Hackers, whose mission is to bring together journalists and technologists. It was originally founded in late 2009 by Burt Herman of Storify (and formerly the Associated Press), Rich Gordon of Northwestern, Aron Pilhofer of The New York Times.
Hacks/Hackers NYC Demo Day 2, held at New Work City, covered a lot of ground. A crowd gathered for dinner from 4food followed by six entertaining and informative presentations covering the spectrum of news and hacking, from content generation to mapping, with a dose of security and a hardware demo too.
Each demo was strictly limited to 5 minutes. Here’s a brief overview of each one, with highlights from the presentations and Q&A.
BlogWorld & New Media Expo will be in New York from May 24 to May 26, and Hacks/Hackers is offering members 20% off registration.
tl;dr, Updated:
Register for BlogWorldExpo with discount code HHVIP20 to get 20% off all registration rates. Register by April 14 to get the lowest price. Full details about the conference and exhibitors can be found on the BlogWorld & New Media Expo website.
The longer version:
The Chicago Tribune News Applications team wants to introduce hacks to hackers, thus hosting the April meeting of the Chicago Python Users Group (ChiPy, http://chipy.org) and planning an agenda that should be of crossover interest to journalists and coders alike.
Time: Thursday, April 14, 2011 7 pm
Place: Tribune Tower, 435 N Michigan Avenue Chicago, IL
The main event will be a reprise of Christopher Groskopf‘s PyCon 2011 talk, “Best Practices for Impossible Deadlines,” where he provides a general overview of how the Tribune NewsApps team has developed its methodology for building applications at the speed of news.