Welcome to December, hacks and hackers! A new month means a new global open call. If you’d like to know what’s going on at Hacks/Hackers, add the event to your calendar or contribute to the agenda.

Hacks/Hackers chapters, meanwhile, are running at full speed, with meetups this week in Kenya, Ecuador, Singapore, the U.S. and the U.K. Check out these events and other news - like media development grants from the UN - below.

The week ahead:

• Quito is discussing upcoming conferences and workshops
• Nairobi is talking immersive storytelling on a budget
• Birmingham is holding a hackday with the BBC Shared Data Unit
• IRE is holdings its regular open lab
• Singapore is talking data with a Reuters graphics editor
• Philadelphia is attending SRCCON:WORK

Worth a read:

• Digital media companies have not grown in the same way startups have, which may be one reason they’ve run into rocky territory with venture capital funding (CJR)
• Chile’s first conversational news bot has been a hit during the recent elections (Knight Center)
• On the flip side of bots, Craig Silverman writes that Russian spammers turned social media, supposed to be a “level playing field” in the world of communication, against media outlets (BuzzFeed)

Job openings:

Upcoming events:

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