Hacks/Hackers Austin Hosts News Hackathon

A group of coders and journos got together for a Saturday of programming at Austin Community College’s Eastview Campus for the first Hacks/Hackers ATX News Hackathon. The day was quite productive with a variety of news apps discussed and developed over the course of the day. It was a great meeting of technology, news and academia with representation from The University of Texas, Texas State University, The Texas Tribune and many more entities.

On the Hackathon’s Wiki, several resources were identified, including various tools and data sources. Matt Stiles of The Texas Tribune also shared some resources and examples on his Delicious page.

Austin’s first Hackathon resulted in several projects:

Austin Restaurant Inspections – Matt Stiles of The Texas Tribune led the group that tackled Google Fusion Tables in creating this helpful visualization.

Texas Musician Database (Rails app) – a repository of bands and musicians across Texas that can be searched and sorted by city or genre (or both). The database was scraped from the Texas Music Office, as that site didn’t provide much functionality for sorting or filtering bands by genre or city. Don Cruse created the procedure for scraping data, which can be found on his GitHub account, along with the resulting files for the application. Jean Vestal worked with Don on the design of the interface.

Texas Agency Expense Data (Rails app) – using data from Texas Transparency, Tom Brown and his team worked on an app that presented agency expenses in a more meaningful and searchable manner. Code can be found on Tom’s GitHub account.

Asian Population of Austin: using census data, this application was created with IBM’s ManyEyes

See more photos from News Hackathon ATX.

Many thanks to our sponsors: Lunch, courtesy of Community Impact Newspapers, EFF-Austin, GNI Strategies, Hacks/Hackers – funded by the Knight Foundation, Midas Networks, Plutopia Productions, Texas Observer, and The Texas Tribune.