Newsletter: Oct. 28, 2015

Happy Wednesday. Starting next week, we’ll include job postings as a section of this newsletter. If you’re hiring for a position that’d be of interest to Hacks/Hackers members, send it our way.

The week ahead for Hacks/Hackers:

• In Montréal tonight, they’ll be learning about Crypto 101 – Secure communication for journalists – including understanding encryption and tools to use for protection from government surveillance.
• In Zürich, the group will hear how Neue Zürcher Zeitung built this beautiful 3-D interactive about the first ascent of the Matterhorn.
• Hacks/Hackers Denmark hosts an event in Copenhagen, “Transforming Journalism Through Interactivity” with speakers from The Wall Street Journal and the Danish Broadcasting Corporation.
• The Hong Kong group meets up at Google’s offices to hear from Isao Matsunami, James Griffiths (CNN) and Pili Hu (Initium Media).
• The new Islamabad group of Hacks/Hackers Pakistan holds its very first meeting. (Always great to see new groups launching.)
• In Amsterdam, the group is holding a “Refugee Hackathon.” It aims to bring journalists, technologist and organizations together to chat about existing and potential future projects and collaborations. From the event page: “We hope this meetup will be the first in a series of meetups on this topic, where we can come together to build a better situation for what is currently a crisis.”

Spotlight: Hacks/Hackers event at Stanford

Bay Area Hacks/Hackers met up at Stanford on Tuesday to hear from folks from CIR, Vocativ and SmartNews. Gerald Rich talked about GIS and online mapping tools for data visualizations (notes are here: bit.ly/hhstanford-maps), Naoki Orii from SmartNews discussed the difference between exploration and exploitation in algorithmic recommendations, and Allison McCartney explained her work on the interface for Reveal’s The Lost and Found project to crowdsource connecting missing persons and unidentified bodies in cold cases. For tweets and photos from the event, here’s a Storify.

Worth a read:

• Five things we learnt from October’s Hacks/Hackers London (Peter Yeung, Interhacktives)
• Reuters report: Across Europe, digital news consumption and access via mobile devices is varied (Nieman Lab)
• Facebook goes slow with ‘2G Tuesdays’ for developers to help them understand the frustrations of users in emerging markets (FT)
• NarcoData is a new collaboration that aims to track and visualize the drug cartels of Mexico (Nieman Lab)
• How two local newsrooms are using photo archives to connect with readers (CJR)

Call to action:

Thanks to those of you who shared your thoughts on how to improve hackshackers.com last week.

This week, another survey for you: Pete MacRobert of Hacks/Hackers London would love to hear about your experience using Meetup (or not) for Hacks/Hackers events, as he and others think about an open-source alternative platform for communities like ours: http://bit.ly/meetupquestionnaire

And if you missed it a couple weeks ago, we’re still looking for feedback about how this newsletter works for you and how it can be improved.

That’s all for now. See you next Wednesday.

Produced by Julia Haslanger. Say hi: @JuliaJRH.

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