Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires expands around the world
Yes, we have grown. Maybe too fast. Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires has reached 470 members and continues to grow. The Buenos Aires group, founded in April of this year, and bringing together journalists and software programmers, has realized a series of activities in this city, crossing the borders of Latin America, and finally reaching Europe. Several projects generated within that space have taken shape through collaborative efforts. We held a networking meet-up for almost a hundred people, a hackathon on the Argentine elections, a web seminar for Latin America, and a conference in Prague on some of our projects; we then will arrive to London for the Mozilla Festival days before returning to Buenos Aires for a hackathon on HIV/AIDS. In order not to over-saturate the official Hacks/Hackers blog, we’ve concentrated our activities here in one post.
On October 4, along with Guillermo Movia (Mozilla Argentina), we planted the seed of curiosity through Fundación Nuevo Periodismo de Iberoamérica (the Iberoamerican New Journalism Foundation), directed by Gabriel García Márquez and including hundreds of colleagues scattered across the continent. On the way we found a good slogan: “Journalism didn’t crashed. It’s just reinstalling its operating system.” On October 18 we held a meet-up in AreaTres, attending not only by journalists and software programmers but also local non-governmental organizations such as Fundación Huesped y Greenpeace, as well as Nxtp Labs, a fund devoted to accelerating projects.
Among the products shown there was PDF Spy, created after a Hacks/Hackers hack day held before the Online News Association annual conference in Boston. Participating in that hackathon were Angélica Peralta Ramos (from the interactive and multimedia department of the newspaper La Nación) and Matt Perry, who together won the prize for “most intriguing.” PDF Spy tracks a page full of PDF files to see if they have been modified after their publication. The code is in Github. It runs with the command |python pdfspy.py url-to-index-page path-to-archive|
Later came the presentation of “Hack Electoral en tiempo real” (Electoral Hack in Real Time), based on Google Fusion Tables. This idea of Sergio Sorín’s was to cross the results of the national elections with previous votes and visualize the presidential elections in real time; it was done under the command of Martín Sarsale. A week later, on October 22, about 30 people worked with the support of the electoral cartography expert Andy Tow, and the finished product was published as http://elecciones.hhba.info. The day of the elections, October 23, the platform caused a huge stir in the Argentine press, being mentioned or commented on by the national media, international blogs, and newspapers and websites from the country, some of whom forgot to include proper credits.
While that was happening, we were invited to Prague to participate in MediaFabric, an international conference organized by SourceFabric, based in the Czech Republic, which is developing a free content manager and is growing rapidly. In addition to this writer, representatives for Latin America included Leo Prieto of Fayerwayer, Luis Manuel Botello of the Centro Internacional para Periodistas (International Center for Journalists, or ICFJ), James Breiner, currently in Beijing, David Brewer, who works with new media, and Annie Machon, a human rights activist and former British intelligence agent.
Thus two of the founders of Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires made it to the Mozilla Fest in London carrying a load of proposals generated in Argentina (Mapa76.info, an automatic data-extraction software, as well as the projects mentioned above), as a prelude to an imminent hackathon in mid-November in Buenos Aires with the Fundación Huesped. The results of that hackathon will be published initially in La Nación, but it will also be available by other means. It will focus on resolving problems surrounding the diffusion of viral and participatory content, identifying sources, teaching and training, manuals of style, and thematic visualization maps and clouds, among others.
The Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires team includes Mariano Blejman, Martín Sarsale, Guillermo Movia, Mariana Berruezo, César Miquel, Ezequiel Clerici, and Sergio Sorín. English translation: Michael Romano.
Web Http://meetupba.hackshackers.com
Blog http://www.hackshackers.com
Mail: ba@hackshackers.com
Twitter @HacksHackersBA
Recent activities have received various forms of support from Mozilla Foundation, AreaTres, Fundación Desarrollar, La Nación, 360TV, Página/12,Vurbia Technologies, Télam, Globant, Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano y Sourcefabric.
