Hacks/Hackers São Paulo: The First Hackathon

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. W3C, which joined ICFJ, OKFN and Abraji to create Hacks/Hackers São Paulo, also provided a team of front-end developers who helped refine hackathon ideas and improve the overall output.

Six hack groups formed and presented the following projects:

Transpolítica

Kako Fernandes and Raphael Agnelli created a graphical interface for a large dataset about congressional cabinet spending.

University student profiles

Hacker Diego Rabatone led a project to create an application that gives graphical interpretation of data released by the University of São Paulo. The code is on GitHub.

Para onde foi voto (Where My Vote Went)

Raphael Molesin improved on a project created during a previous hackaton. This time, he aggregated new data about local politicians’ spending and personal wealth.

Senado.cc

Hacker Vitor Batista basically managed to hack all the Brazilian senate’s so-called open data and he plans to dump it into a more friendly website, Senado.cc.

São Paulo Hackdash

Rogérios Alcantara and friends proposed adapting a platform that collects ideas for future hackathons. It’s inspired by the Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires HackDash.

Esplanada Aberta

This is a project by W3C professionals who have drawn a styled map of Brasilia’s main avenue — the place where our government ministers work — and then mapped the status of Brazil’s Freedom of Information laws by each government department.