Welcome back, hacks and hackers! The University of Florida’s Brechner Center for Freedom of Information is giving away $3,000 prizes to pieces of journalism work published in 2019 that highlights secrecy in government or utilizes public records. The submission deadline is February 28.

Also, Hacks/Hackers DC is holding a little get-together next week to discuss future plans for the chapter. If you’re in DC, don’t miss it!

Happening this week:

• Abuja, Benin and Lagos are looking at creative visualization

Worth a read:

• Google’s Dataset Search tool added a few new features like being able to filter by data type, see maps for geographic data and see whether the dataset is free from its source or not (Google)
• Pandas’ new 1.0 release will require Python 3.6.1 or higher to run and comes with several updates such as the addition of a universal missing data-type value (Infoworld)
• Journalism’s been going thru a lot of transformation as an industry in the U.S. the past few years and is only expected to change more, so NiemanLab’s Newsonomics’ Ken Doctor outlined 20 predictions for the news business in the 2020s (NiemanLab)

Job openings:

Upcoming events:

Other opportunities: