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Greetings from Buenos Aires! I’ve spent the last few days at the Media Party that Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires has put on for the fourth year in a row, bringing hundreds of people to be inspired, collaborate and hack together. It’s an amazing event that shows the potential of what we can do if we work together on a broader level. With Hacks/Hackers organizers from around the world present, we held a workshop to talk about how we as the global Hacks/Hackers movement can collaborate more across geographic boundaries.
[View the story “Hacks/Hackers launches Connect series in Berlin” on Storify] Hacks/Hackers launches Connect series in Berlin Around 100 journalists and technologists passionate about the future of media joined the weekend event in the German capital Storified by Burt Herman· Sun, Jun 28 2015 22:04:05 We kicked off Hacks/Hackers' first-ever global event series with a packed room of more than 100 participants at the Berlin Factory, bringing together members of the grassroots movement along with entrepreneurs, journalists and developers passionate about the intersection of media and technology.
A few weeks ago, we launched an exciting initiative (in partnership with Google) to support media entrepreneurship, an event series we call Connect. As part of the launch, we decided to replace the main Hacks/Hackers site with an information and signup page for Connect. At the time, that seemed to make sense. The old site was years out of date, filled with months-old content and daily traffic had fallen to the single-digits.
Tyler Fisher of NPR Visuals joined us on Nov. 11 at the Statesman to talk about his team and their election coverage. Tyler is a recent graduate from Northwestern University with a major in Journalism. But Tyler has directed his career toward Web development and news applications. In his talk, Tyler provided background on his team and the history of their election coverage. He provided a good dose of tech for the developers in the crowd, but handled the “how” and “why” questions for those who were interested in concepts and strategy.
The Hacks/Hackers Austin chapter was pleased to host a meetup featuring Google News. On October 20, Stacie Chan, a community manager at Google News, dropped by the Statesman to discuss various tools that journalists and journalism students can use. She also talked about the role of the Google News platform and how publishers can participate. Chan was in town wearing led shades for Texas State University’s Mass Comm Week.
More than 150 hacks and hackers gathered Wednesday at Twitter’s main headquarters in San Francisco to hear the company’s Data Editor Simon Rogers talk about data’s increasingly important role in journalism and how Twitter makes sense of the hundreds of millions of tweets passing through its platform every day. From mapping the patterns of disadvantage that contributed to the UK riots, to data visualizations of Oscars tweets, Rogers helped demystify the collection strategies and tools required for top-class data analysis and visualization.
While we were organizing the latest Media Party, the media gathering that we created three years ago, Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires became the world’s largest chapter of the Hacks/Hackers network. With over 3800 members, about 40 events in three years and a strong community of volunteers, we beat New York, London, San Francisco, and many other chapters. #Hhba has had a big impact on media, civil society organizations, the government, the startup and the developer community.
On July 28, Jewel Loree, senior data analyst for Tableau, demonstrated the new Tableau for Mac. Tableau continues to make their tools more accessible and available, so that all journalists can add data visualization to their storytelling. Participants were able to check out new features and ask questions.
Get ideas, code and presentations from the eight projects developed at the Media Hack Days.