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Lessons from Media Party Africa

It’s almost election time in the U.S., hacks and hackers! Please join us next Wednesday as reporters catch up after Media Party Africa and batten down the hatches for the American election. The global open call will take place at 1500 UTC (find your local time here).

The week ahead:

  • The Hacks/Hackers global call takes place on Wednesday
  • Helsinki is meeting to discuss a media innovation contest
  • Miami is holding its regular OpenHack Miami
  • IRE in Missouri is holding its weekly meeting

Group spotlight:

London held its October meetup last week, inviting speakers from Bloomber, the Wall Street Journal and the BBC to talk about their latest projects. London has been a steadily moving machine for years when it comes to meetups like this, and organizer Joanna Geary said one advantage is to have the leadership in tightly organized roles.

“To make sure everything we do is ploughed back into the community Hacks/Hackers London is registered as a Community Interest Company, with our organisers (Joanna, Pete, Sarah, Cassie and Jeremy) as named directors.
Whilst this took some upfront paperwork from us, it protects us from personal liability if something goes wrong at an event and, more importantly, provides a structure that means we can move on, but Hacks/Hackers London stays to serve the community.”

Not every Hacks/Hackers group needs or wants a formalized system like this. But the London group also shared their Roles & Responsibilities template and task assignment spreadsheet, which help them manage an enormous amount of work and responsibility among five organizers.

Worth a read:

  • H/H Johannesburg member Siyabonga Africa put together a comprehensive list of the tools and presentations shared at Media Party Africa last week (SABC News)
  • Sites like Twitter and the NYT went down last week, affected by a massive DDOS attack that is noteworthy because it originated from real-world objects connected to the Internet of Things (Wired)
  • On a related note, Bloomberg is transitioning its sites to HTTPS, while a surprising number of media outlets are still using the much less secure HTTP (Bloomberg)
  • The New York Times bought a tech review site called Wirecutter, a news site that was funded not by ad revenue but Amazon affiliate links (Medium)

Job openings:

Other upcoming events:

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