News Hackathon Austin on Oct. 16: Hacks/Hackers/Hacking
On October 16, Hacks/Hackers ATX presents a day-long Hackathon bringing journalists, news bloggers, and government employees together with technology developers to create data-driven news applications, seeking and making sense of open data available from the State of Texas and other sources. The day will start with examples of data-driven news presented by Matt Stiles and Niran Babalola from the Texas Tribune. Then communicators and developers will form groups to define and build applications from sources such as http://www.texastransparency.org/opendata.
Lunch will be served (courtesy of Community Impact Newspaper). Other sponsors include EFF-Austin, GNI Strategies, Hacks/Hackers, funded by the Knight Foundation, Midas Networks, Plutopia Productions, Texas Observer, and Texas Tribune.
Please RSVP for this event.
More information and schedule at http://hackathonaustin.pbworks.com/Hacks-Hackers-Hacking
Contact: Jon Lebkowsky, jonl at weblogsky.com, 512 762-6547
When?
Saturday, October 16, 9am-4:30pm
Where?
Austin Community College’s terrific Eastview Campus
3401 Webberville Road, Building 8000
Who should come?
- Journalists, bloggers, and other strong writers and communicators who understand the power of technology, but don’t know where to start in taking raw data and transforming it into newsworthy information.
- Technology developers looking for an opportunity to build meaningful, world-changing solutions. We also need designers and technical writers to help design and document the applications we build.
- Government employees and officials who want to spread the word about the data they’ve already released, and learn what is necessary to provide the most useful data to the public.
What will you do?
- The plan is to identify publicly-available, readily accessible data sets – see http://www.texastransparency.org/opendata/
- Journalists and bloggers will brainstorm with technology developers, creating ideas for applications using the available data, and building those applications.
- This partnership of people who develop news and people who develop technology will produce workable applications that will be placed online for the anyone to see and use.
- At the end of the day, judges will select the best applications.
- Bring your computer, we’ll have great wifi.
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