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.