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:

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:

Other upcoming events: