Hacks & Hackers llega a Madrid

Hacks & Hackers abre nuevo capítulo europeo.  Madrid acoge el próximo jueves 27 de octubre la primera meet up en la capital española, con el título: La tecnología en el emprendimiento periodístico.
El evento tendrá lugar en Medialab- Prado a las 6.30 de la tarde y se retransmitirá también por streaming, dentro del proyecto Hybrid- days.

En este primer encuentro se presentan varios proyectos de emprendimiento periodístico y tiene como objetivo extender la cultura emprendedora que ha caracterizado Internet desde su fundación al periodismo, como un alternativa al cambio estructural en el modelo de negocio de los grupos editoriales.

Programa

Hacks & Hackers Madrid ha seleccionado para su primer encuentro tres iniciativas españolas:

• Amazings: Antonio Martínez Ron/ @aberron
•  I Wanna go There: María Martínez/ @limalimon
• Tuitráfico: Juanjo y Antonio/ @tuitrafico.

Se trata de tres proyectos innovadores por su apuesta tecnológica y periodística, y los ponentes contarán al público los retos en su trayectoria.

Las próximas ediciones abordarán oportunidades en contenidos móviles, investigación y periodismo de datos, apertura de APIs o proyectos de laboratorios internacionales comoMozilla Foundation.

Hacks/Hackers Madrid está abierto a recibir toda clase de propuestas y sugerencias de particulares, medios o instituciones que simpaticen con el proyecto.

El Hacks/Hackers MAD está organizado por Ana Ormaechea (Jefa de edición de Muy Interesante en iPad), María Feijoo (Directora de Comunicación de Antevenio), Javier Moya (Director de Internet de Harper’s Bazaar y Esquire en España), Ruben Orta (Director de Desarrollo enAntevenio) y Juan Munguía (responsable de contenidos del portal educared.org de Fundación Telefónica).

Twitter: @hackshackersMAD
hacksyhackersMAD(arroba)gmail.com

Hacks/Hackers Philly starts Oct. 18

The first meetup of the Philadelphia chapter is taking place on Tuesday. Philadelphia is home to vibrant technology and journalism communities.

A couple dozen folks have already RSVPed, with a good mix of backgrounds representing both groups. This first meetup will be focused on getting to know each other, giving a little background on why it is important for these communities to connect, and planning next steps as a group.

For more info, join the Philly Meetup page, follow HacksHackersPHL on Twitter, or follow #hhphl.

Hacks/Hackers NYC Demo Day 3 Recap

At the third Hacks/Hackers NYC Demo Day, six speakers whizzed through their presentations covering several topics, from real-time data collection to content management systems.

Here’s a rundown (in order of appearance):

HunchWorks:
Chris van der Walt kicked off the session with his project HunchWorks. The social media platform is part of the Global Pulse initiative, the United Nations effort to find new ways to collect real-time data and create platforms to connect people worldwide. The United Nations is one of the most reliable sources for data on vulnerable communities around the world but their biggest problem is that the data is 2 to 5 years old by the time it is published. Van der Walt and his colleagues are trying to solve that problem through Hunchworks.  They developed a virtual networking platform through which people can submit stories, data and anecdotes — in other words people around the globe can record ”early signals” of distress within vulnerable communities through this network. Though unstructured, this data could then assist NGOs and other organizations with their work.

Data Collective:
Ever wanted to put together a graph for your blog but don’t want to bother with Excel or Illustrator? David Joerg of Data Collective  has a tool for you. He gave Hacks/Hackers a sneak preview of his collective’s interactive chart widget which you can use to produce what they call the “next generation chart for the web.” It’s a chart that’s shareable via embed code or through social media.

Baroque:
Erik Hinton dissected the front page CMS Baroque, which he custom-built for Talking Points Memo. It was his attempt to fix what he said are “broken” content management systems. In pre-Baroque times, users had to insert text and photographs into forms and then hit publish for them to magically appear on a front page. But Baroque enables editors and reporters to drag and drop onto a preview of their front page. Hinton’s currently working on an open-source version of his WYSIWYG approach to content management systems.

PenPal News:
Using news as a conversation-starter, Michael Bernstein‘s PenPal News connects students across the globe to discuss stories in their home countries and abroad. Bernstein hopes that the social network would help young folks stay informed while making friends across the world.

WhatFailed.Us:
Through WhatFailed.Us, Ray Wu wants to offer insights from startup failure, by collecting stories from his site’s users. He wants to refine the way users access this trove of stories by allowing folks to tag stories and thereby create more customized story feeds.

ScraperWiki:
Nicola Hughes from ScraperWiki spoke about their data scraping services. ScraperWiki boasts a large online community of coders dedicated to collecting and cleaning data that is spread on the net. It’s also a portal that allows journalists to request data and pairs them up with coders who can develop screen scrapers to help extract information.

Read some of the attendee reactions to the event.

Hacks/Hackers Hacking @ ONA11 Recap

Hacks/Hackers’ first annual hack day at ONA11 brought journalists and developers together to make ideas real. We built on the success of last year’s Hacks/Hackers @ ONA hack day by bringing about 45 people together in Boston. They showed up with data sets; reporting, analysis and coding skills, and a willingness to collaborate on a wide variety of ideas. In the end, ad hoc teams hatched seven projects, of which the judges gave awards to four.

Hacks/Hackers Hacking @ ONA11 was made possible by generous support from the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, the Knight Foundation, Rovi Corp., Reuters, Github, Dotcloud and Infochimps. We hope you’ll join us the day before the ONA conference in San Francisco for Hacks/Hackers Hacking @ ONA III in September 2012.

Judges’ Favorite
Fuego Trends by Andrew Phelps
Discover trending topics on Twitter for a specific user or list.

Most Practical
Interactive Bar Chart Generator by Daigo Fujiwara, Erika Owens, Michael Pereria, Pattie Reaves, Keith Robinson and Kevin Schaul
A dead-simple Google Charts front-end for reporters who don’t know how to code but who want to make interactive bar charts.

Most Intriguing (tie)
PDF Spy by Angelica Peralta Ramos and Matt Perry
Point at a Web page full of PDFs and see if the content within the PDFs has changed even if title is the same. “Never be fooled by ‘government transparency” again’,” writes Matt Perry. Get the code on Github. Launch it from the command line with python pdfspy.py url-to-index-page path-to-archive

Arab Spring Data Visualizations by Andy Carvin, Melanie Coulson, David Karger, Seth Lewis, David Myers, Geneva Overholser, Sisi Wei and team
  Visualizations of the Arab Spring tweets collected by Andy Carvin of NPR.

Data visualization & The Guardian: Reporting big stories through small details

In an era of “show, don’t just tell,” data visualization in journalism has become an increasingly important component of news reporting.

Alastair Dant, interactive lead at The Guardian in London, joined Hacks/Hackers NYC on Sept. 19 for a presentation on his team’s work in reporting stories with big datasets.

Jeremy Caplan, Education Director at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, compiled notes from Alistair’s talk.

The Guardian first explored aggregate analysis and data visualization last year with an award-winning graphic that replays World Cup games, condensing 90 minutes of tweets into 90 seconds of interactive animation. By juxtaposing match events with surges in word popularity, viewers can relive the ripples of human reaction passing through Twitter.

Asked to apply similar techniques to Rupert Murdoch’s News International saga, The Guardian partnered with Datasift to capture and display public responses during key events in the story.

Alastair’s talk steps through the process of recording, processing and displaying a large volume of tweets which enabled a small team to build complex pieces of interactive content at newsroom speeds. It also shows the delicate balance of design, data and storytelling at the heart of interactive news content.

And finally, if you’re looking for a news developer job — or if you’re hiring news developers — check out this list.

Hacks/Hackers ATX: Wikileaks and Other Document Dumps, Sept. 6, 2011

On Sept. 6, 2011 at the Texas Tribune in downtown Austin, Hacks/Hackers ATX hosted a presentation by Gregory Foster of Consumers Union on Wikileaks and Other Document Dumps. Foster led the group through the history of documentation leaks from the Pentagon Papers to the more current release of war logs known as Wikileaks. Each example was analyzed through the lens of several criteria: spectrum of secrecy, quantity of information, quality of information and intentionality of release. There was great conversation from the group around this provocative topic. Watch the presentation below.

Stay tuned for programming announcements for the October meeting when Hacks/Hackers ATX will be celebrating it’s first anniversary!

Hacks/Hackers Brighton live streams its first meetup

Brighton, England’s Hacks/Hackers kickoff event starts today with a great lineup planned. Better yet, Hacks/Hackers Brighton will be live streaming the talks at Journalism.co.uk around 3:30 BST (10:30 a.m. ET/7:30 a.m. PT or check your local time)

You can also follow along on Twitter at #hhbtn.

Scheduled speakers include:

• Tom Hume and James Hugman from Future Platforms, showing Guardian Anywhere, an unofficial Guardian app for Android
• Robert Douglas from Ribot, who will demo a yet-to-be-released HTML5 Web app for mobile powered by the Guardian API
• Laura Oliver, community coordinator at the Guardian, who will show how Ushahidi-powered Crowdmap was used during clean up after the riots.
• Erik Hersman, Ushahidi co-founder, who will give some more examples of how the Ushahidi platform has been used.
• Andy Hume from ClearLeft, who’ll be talking about mapping and guiding attendees in something a little more hands on.
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Trip to the Land of the Automatic Extraction of Data from Documents

Post en español acá!

We finally did it! About 40 people (including journalists, software programmers, and militants from Argentine human rights organizations) disembarked last August 13th at the Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires hackathon, which took place within the mega-exhibition Tecnópolis. The idea was to work all day on Mapa76.info, a software project for the automatic extraction and visualization of data from text documents.  The software is focused on analyzing the trials of Argentina´s last military dictatorship, which ruled between 1976 and 1983.  Journalists and programmers came not only from Buenos Aires but from Rosario and Córdoba, as well, and were helped by the creators of Junar.com, a data streaming api for dashboards, who came all the way from Chile to participate in the event and demonstrate their technology.
The problem to solve: At this moment in Argentina there is a great quantity of judicial cases linked to the repressions of the last military dictatorship: more than 200 convicted persons, dozens of trials in process, hundreds of witnesses testifying every day, and possibly more than a thousand accused persons implicated in acts of State terrorism between 1976 and 1983. The question is: Can we develop a software that finds relationships that people cannot see?  It is necessary for journalists, for the courts, and for investigators to define such relationships between persons, organizations, and places, and to visualize these relationships in timelines and maps.

What the journalists worked on:  The engine of Mapa76.info – still in its alpha stage – extracts names, places, and dates.  At first, the journalists “combed” documents for sentences and allegations establishing relationships between dates and special events such as sequestrations, tortures, transfers, etc., in order to visualize those events in a timeline.  Later they thought up possible use cases:

• Who was with whom in a clandestine location?
• Following one person´s story: What happened to him or her?
• In order to write an article about a person, one can proceed by “combing” for them in all of the documents where they are mentioned;
• Compare two life stories;
• Compare versions of a story;
• Comb documents in an effort to tell a document-based story;
• Incorporate other sources, such as foreign newspapers;
• Compare two testimonies given by the same person at different times.

Led by Martín Sarsale, the programmers worked on improving the interface for loading documents and extracting data, as well the interface for data display (timelines, maps, visualization of documents) (Ruby / jQuery).  They also worked on improving data “loading” and on converting PDFs into easy-to-use text documents.

The hackathon relied on support from the National Attorney General´s Unit for the Coordination and Tracking of Human Rights Cases (Unidad de Coordinación y Seguimiento de Causas de Derechos Humanos de la Procuración General de la Nación). Later the hackathon got in touch with the coordinating team of the Federal Network of Memorial Sites (Red Federal de Sitios de Memoria) and members of the Argentine Ministry of Education who were interested in the project.  Media coverage of the hackathon can be seen at Página/12, the Tecnopolis website and YouTube.

Among other participants were Joel Matías Silva, Damian Silvani, Lucas Tolchinsky, Nahuel Baglieto, Sergio Sorin, Tania Wassaf, Manuel Milla, Ezequiel Clerici, Guillermo González, Mariano Mancuso, Mariano Zapatero, Luis Guardiola, Matias Iturburu, Javier Ciancio, Gisela Cardozo, Gabriel, Javier Pájaro, Joaquín Nuñez, Rodrigo Aza, Marcos Vanetta, Felipe Lerena, Filippo Fiorini and the organizer crew of Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires, conformed by Mariano Blejman (Página/12), Martín Sarsale (Sumavisos), Guillermo Movia (Mozilla Argentina), César Miquel (Easytech) y Mariana Berruezo. Diego Accorinti made the grafic design of Mapa76.info. Post translated to english by Michael Romano.

Web http://meetupba.hackshackers.com
blog http://www.hackshackers.com
mail ba (at) hackshackers (dot) com
twitter @HacksHackersBA

Viaje al mundo de la extracción automática de datos desde documentos

English post here!

Finalmente, ¡lo hicimos! Unas 40 personas (entre periodistas, programadores de software y militantes de organismos de Derechos Humanos de Argentina) desembarcamos el pasado 13 de agosto en el hackatón de Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires, ocurrido dentro de la megamuestra Tecnópolis. La idea fue trabajar durante todo el día sobre Mapa76.info, un proyecto de software de extracción automática de datos y visualización desde documentos de texto. El software está centrado en analizar los juicios de la última Dictadura Militar argentina, ocurrida entre 1976 y 1983. Vinieron periodistas y programadores no sólo de Buenos Aires, sino también de Rosario, Córdoba y contamos con la presencia de los creadores de Junar.com, una api de streaming de tablas, quienes viajaron especialmente desde Chile para participar y mostrar su tecnología.

El problema a resolver: Existen en estos momentos en Argentina una gran cantidad de causas judiciales vinculadas a represores de la última Dictadura Militar. Más de 200 condenados, decenas de juicios en curso, cientos de testigos que declaran cada día y posiblemente más de mil presuntos implicados en hechos de Terrorismo de Estado entre 1976-1983. La pregunta es: ¿podemos desarrollar un software que encuentre relaciones que las personas no podemos ver? Es necesario para periodistas, para la Justicia, para quienes investigan definir relaciones entre Personas, Organizaciones y Lugares para visualizar en una línea de tiempo y en un mapa.

En qué trabajaron los periodistas: el motor de Mapa76.info –todavía en estado alpha– extrae nombres, lugares y fechas. En un primer momento, los periodistas “peinaron” documentos de sentencias y alegatos estableciendo relaciones entre fechas y acontecimientos especiales como: secuestro, tortura, traslado, etc para ver esos acontecimientos en una línea de tiempo. Luego se trabajó en pensar posibles casos de uso:

• ¿Quién estuvo con quién en un centro clandestino?
• Seguir la historia de una persona. ¿Que le pasó?
• Cuando hay que escribir una nota sobre una persona, se puede partir “peinándola” en todos los documentos donde aparece mencionada.
• Comparar dos historias de vida.
• Comparar la historia según versiones.
• Peinar documentos para tratar de contar una historia a partir de documentos
• Incorporar otras fuentes como diarios extranjeros.
• Comparar dos testimonios de una misma persona realizados en momentos diferentes.

Al mando de Martín Sarsale, los programadores trabajaron en mejorar la interfaz de carga de documentos y extracción de datos y en mejorar la interfaz de consulta de los datos (líneas de tiempo, mapas, visualización de documentos) (Ruby / jQuery) También se trabajó en mejorar la “carga” de datos y en la conversión de pdf a documentos de texto manejables.

El hackatón contó con el apoyo de la Unidad de Coordinación y Seguimiento de Causas de Derechos Humanos de la Procuración General de la Nación. Luego del hackatón nos pusimos en contacto con el equipo de coordinación de la Red Federal de Sitios de Memoria, e integrantes del Ministerio de Educación de la Nación Argentina, interesados en el proyecto. La cobertura realizada por los medios sobre el hackatón puede verse en Página/12, en la web de Tecnopolis y en YouTube.

Participaron, entre otros, Joel Matías Silva, Damian Silvani, Lucas Tolchinsky, Nahuel Baglieto, Sergio Sorin, Tania Wassaf, Manuel Milla, Ezequiel Clerici, Guillermo González, Mariano Mancuso, Mariano Zapatero, Luis Guardiola, Matias Iturburu, Javier Ciancio, Gisela Cardozo, Gabriel, Javier Pájaro, Joaquín Nuñez, Rodrigo Aza, Marcos Vanetta, Felipe Lerena, Filippo Fiorini y el equipo organizador de Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires, conformado por Mariano Blejman (Página/12), Martín Sarsale (Sumavisos), Guillermo Movia (Mozilla Argentina), César Miquel (Easytech) y Mariana Berruezo. Diego Accorinti realizó el diseño gráfico de Mapa76.info.

Web http://meetupba.hackshackers.com
blog http://www.hackshackers.com
mail ba (at) hackshackers (dot) com
twitter @HacksHackersBA

Hacks/Hackers ATX – Ryan Robinson, Austin Demographer

On Aug. 2, Hacks/Hackers ATX was joined by City of Austin Demographer Ryan Robinson at the Austin American-Statesman. Robinson detailed several of the demographic shifts that have been occurring over the past decade, providing insight into ways these trends affect our social, economic and political climate. View his full presentation for more details and watch an excerpt below.

Many thanks to Annette Priest of Revel Insight for sponsoring refreshments. Stay tuned for September programming announcements and plans to celebrate our chapter’s first anniversary in October.

Prior to the meeting, Christian McDonald, the Statesman’s online projects editor as well as one of the Hacks/Hackers ATX organizers, treated my Issues in New Media class to a tour of the facilities. We were also joined by online managing editor Zach Ryall and newly appointed social media editor Maira Garcia (and a graduate of Texas State) for a discussion of their online and social media operations. Thought the Hacks/Hackers family would also enjoy some of these behind-the-scenes photos.