Twenty-four members of Hacks/Hackers and the Online News Association community in Austin attended Cindy Royal’s workshop on Dec. 3 at Austin American-Statesman: Intro to Programming for Communicators. This 2-hour workshop was meant for people with no experience, to introduce them to the most basic concepts of programming. Royal used JavaScript as the platform, but emphasized the concepts that were common amongst most programming languages.
Topics covered included:
Why do I need to learn to program?
The September and October meetings of Hacks/Hackers ATX (in conjunction with the Online News Association local), focused on topics around important parts of Austin culture. In September, the group talked about Music Apps and Blogging, featuring Daniel Senyard and Shannon Delaney of Vivogig and Ian Morales and AJ Miranda of Red River Noise and Austin Vida. Vivogig is a photo-sharing app focused on concert experiences and Red River Noise and Austin Vida are music blogs covering important aspects of the diverse music scene.
For its second session hosted by Qunb, Hacks/Hackers Paris focused on APIs. The first presentation, by Aurélien Fache from faberNovel explained what is an API and what it will be in the years to come. Afterward, Radio France and UPIAN showed an innovative use of the Storify API for their website “Clichés de campagne.”
“Everything is API, API is everywhere” could be a good summary for Aurélien Fache’s presentation.
Developers and journalists gather for the first Hacks/Hackers São Paulo hackathon.
Hacks/Hackers São Paulo held its first hackathon on Oct. 20 during the W3C Brazil Conference, alongside the 2012 PERL international community conference. The hackathon, which drew about 50 people, happened during Web.br, an important gathering of the tech community in Brazil.
The hackathon attracted a large number of developers and a few journalists. Nevertheless the mix was right, as journalists helped different groups with their data mining skills.
UNESCO’s Amman office was home to the technical day organized by Hacks/Hackers Amman Chapter with the objective to provide technology solution to different issues Jordanian journalists face.
Participants included a wide range of ‘hackers’, organizations and figures in the Ammani vibrant and dynamic tech scene, including Hacks/Hackers members, the Jordan Open Source Association and different prominent local IT companies and programmers. On the other hand, journalists and professionals from media organizations like ARIJ, Alghad daily and the Amman-based private TV station Roya, fully participated at the day by expressing some of the IT-related challenges they face and by understanding how technology can be an important, even critical, part of any media strategy to be taken into account.
Public Journalism Club (PJC), Armenia based NGO is inviting those interested in User experience UX, User Interface UI design – representatives of Armenian media and editors of news websites, designers, students, bloggers and journalists – to take part in a discussion-meeting, entitled “Secrets of User Interface Web Design”, which will be conducted by User experience UX, User Interface UI designers, consultants Vadz Ghazaryan, Ishkhan Adamyan and Gor Vardanyan.
The meeting will take place on November ***1*, 2012 16:00, at 39 Yeznik Koghbatsi Street.
Members of Hacks/Hackers São Paulo meet to discuss MySQL and plan their first hackathon.
Hacks/Hackers São Paulo — launched in July as the first group in Brazil — will hold its first hackathon 20 October during the W3C Brazil Conference and alongside the 2012 international PERL community conference. The event will bring the most active participants from previous meetings together to present their ideas for hacking relevant datasets and building useful applications for journalism and news-related technologies.
Le meetup inaugural de Hacks/Hackers Paris a eu lieu le 28 août dans les locaux de la rédaction de StreetPress. Entre deux retours d'expériences, quelques idées et rencontres pour l'avenir.
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September’s meet-up of Hacks/Hackers Brighton heard from user-experience designer and developer Aral Balkan, who led a discussion on identity, privacy and App.net, and Joanna Geary, digital development editor at the Guardian, who proposed five questions journalists should ask when thinking about online communities.
_Adam Tinworth’s liveblog of Aral Balkan’s talk is here, and his report on Joanna Geary’s presentation is here. All photos are by Adam Tinworth.
On August 20, Hacks/Hackers ATX, along with the local ONA group, got together at the Texas Tribune to discuss innovation. Rodney Gibbs, Chief Innovation Officer, and developer Noah Seger discussed the progression of Texas Tribune since it’s inception in 2009. Over the past three years, the organization has developed some of the most popular and heavily visited data projects including the state government salaries database and most recently, the Public Schools Explorer.