Media Party inspires new Hacks/Hackers groups in Latin America
Welcome to another week, hacks and hackers. The Media Party last month saw the creation of several new exciting Meetup groups, like Caracas, Venezuela, and Quito, Ecuador. Spread the word to your friends in the LatAm community!
The week ahead:
- Mendoza, Argentina, is holding an open gov hackathon
- Nairobi is discussing cyber security
- Miami is holding its regular OpenHack Miami
- IRE in Missouri is holding its weekly meeting
- Colorado is hosting an afterparty for the ONA conference
- Halifax is getting together to plan their next session
- Atlanta is teaching “non-coding for hacks” at the Atlanta Press Club
Group spotlight:
Birmingham, in the UK, held an R meetup last week, inviting people to come learn new skills or get a refresher on the R programming language. Maria Crosas, who put it together, said this was the first event she’d organized.
“Looking for a place that had free Wifi, a projector, and a function room at a pub in a week was not easy.”
Next week, Birmingham is already off and running to its second rebooted event, a series of lightning talks on bots, Tableau, text mining with R and scraping with Python.
Worth a read:
- Erika Owens at Mozilla’s OpenNews published a list of tips for Hacks/Hackers organizers on her blog (Erika Owens)
- A worldwide survey of millennials found that they believed corruption and lack of transparency to be the biggest issues their countries are facing (GIJN)
- Last month, the NYT and Washington Post had larger digital audiences than BuzzFeed, for the first time in years (Politico)
- On the flip side of the print-digital divide, the Newspaper Association of America is dropping “paper” from its name (Poynter)
- One in three Americans listen to podcasts, and the NYT is upping its podcast game both in terms of production and technology (Politico)
Job openings:
- Middle East:
- Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism is seeking an experienced investigative editor
- North America:
- The Information, an outlet covering technology, is looking for a data projects engineer
- The Washington Post is seeking a full stack developer
- National Geographic is hiring a visual journalist
- Fox News is looking for a web designer
- The WSJ’s CIO Journal is looking for a digital tech reporter
- Europe:
- China Daily is hiring a graphic designer in London
Other upcoming events:
- September:
- Sept 15-17 – Denver, USA – Online News Association (ONA)’s annual conference
- Sept 17-20 – New Orleans, USA – Society of Professional Journalists Excellence in Journalism conference
- Sept 20-22 – Jakarta, Indonesia – Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD)
- Sept. 22 – New York, USA – NYC Media Lab Annual Summit, for executives, academics and startups to convene around future of media
- (Hacks/Hackers community members can register with a 25% off discount code: HACKSHACKER)
- Sept 22-25 – New Delhi, India – Y Combinator Startup Conference
- Sept 23-24 – Toronto, Canada – Hacks/Hackers Connect Toronto
- Sept 23-25 – Kathmandu, Nepal – Asian Investigative Journalism Conference
- Sept 28-29 – Chicago, USA – INN workshop on Tech and Product Design for News Leaders
- Sept 29-Oct 1 – Miami, USA – Digital Humanities + Data Journalism Symposium
- Sept 29-Oct 1 – Chicago, USA – Local indie online news publishers are gathering for the LION summit
- Sept 30-Oct 1 – Palo Alto, USA – Computation + Journalism Symposium
- October:
- Oct 7-9 – New York, USA – Future of Storytelling Festival
- Oct 14-15 – Washington, DC, USA – TransparencyCamp, the Sunlight Foundation’s unconference for open government
- Oct 17-17 – Vitoria, Brazil – Brazilian Conference of Citizen Media
- Oct 25-27 – Casablanca, Morocco – d|bootcamp, a three-day workshop on civic hacking
- November:
- Nov 7-9 – Johannesburg, South Africa – African Investigative Journalism Conference