News

Boston Hackathon Focuses on OpenBlock at MIT Media Lab

About 25 people gathered at the MIT Media Lab on October 30 for a Hack/Hackers Boston co-organized event to build geolocal apps using OpenBlock, an open source hyperlocal news and data gathering system based on Django. OpenBlock is based on EveryBlock. Boston Innovation had great coverage and a video, which can be seen above, which interviews Matt Carroll, of the Boston Globe, and Nick Grossman, of OpenPlans, who did the heavy lifting to organize the event.

The areas they focused on included:

Developing new data scrapers to gather and geotag interesting Boston datasets using OpenBlock’s scraper framework and geocoder.
Developing widgets and related APIs to use OpenBlock data and functionality on existing or new sites
Adapting OpenBlock’s model to represent new data types and present data in new ways.

There were three separate groups working on apps and problems.

One example, Adam Marcus and Timothy Danford ripped the geocoder out of OpenBlock and put it up at Tim’s github repository.

Another interesting project. Mahmood Ali created a rough prototype of Amazon Machine Image for OpenBlock, which would allow users to do easy configuration in minutes.

Developers were encouraged to know Python, Javascript and HTML. Familiarity with Django will be very helpful as well. However, a good non-technical contingent showed up too (yay for drawing attention) So Matt put together a brainstorming session to exchange ideas, which quickly turned into a discussion of new media and social change.

One thought re these events, from Adam: Event hosts can provide more help in maintaining project

continuity, where a person is selected by the open source organization to follow up with the projects which look promising at the end of the hackathon to help shepherd their code into (or out of, as it our case) the project.

Many thanks to the MIT Media Lab for hosting the event, and to the Knight News Challenge, which sponsored the event with a generous budget for pizza and some free swag.

Photos by Nick Grossman under a Creative Commons license.

How Apple AI signals the decline of apps and the web itself

And what this might mean for news publishers Reflecting on Apple WWDC 2024 on Monday, my thoughts turned to the ill-fated Humane AI Pin. In bending over backwards to build a device without a screen, while also trying to ignite an entirely new platform, Humane sold a cringe-inducing gadget that

How Apple AI signals the decline of apps and the web itself

And what this might mean for news publishers Reflecting on Apple WWDC 2024 on Monday, my thoughts turned to the ill-fated Humane AI Pin. In bending over backwards to build a device without a screen, while also trying to ignite their own platform, Humane sold a cringe-inducing gadget that seemed

Building tools for journalism and civic information by prototyping with open source AI

Updates from the open source AI hackathon More than 100 journalists, coders, and product designers spent a weekend together in New York earlier in April to participate in the first of a series of hackathons convened designed to push the limits of the technology for journalism. To kick off the

Read next