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Newsletter: Oct. 7, 2015

All around the world last week, Hacks/Hackers groups met on topics as varied as web scraping in Python to net neutrality to new storytelling techniques at Zeit Online. In New York City, a panel of four professor/journalists talked about the joys and challenges of teaching data + journalism. A couple of photos:

HacksHackersNYCOct

The week ahead for Hacks/Hackers:

  • Hacks/Hackers-IRE in Columbia, Mo., will be talking about how to create custom map styles with TileMill.
  • In Los Angeles, a group is gathering to discuss rebooting the local Hacks/Hackers group.
  • In Lima, Peru, Hacks/Hackers and Hiperderecho hold a discussion about Internet governance with the head of external relations the Internet Address Registry for Latin America and the Caribbean.
  • Members of the Johannesburg, South Africa, group will help judge a Data Quest hackathon focused on data from the Global Change and Sustainability Institute.
  • In Bogotá, Colombia, the group is holding a workshop on data visualization and structured data. This is the first in a series of workshops this group is hosting about working with data.
  • In Venice, Italy, member Carlo Felice Dalla Pasqua shares what he learned while at the Online News Association conference.
  • In Singapore, the Hacks/Hackers group is one of the organizers of a “hackathon to beat the haze.” It aims to bring together “developers, bloggers, environmental organizations and media associations in an unprecedented civic hack to enhance our media reporting and response to the haze through the use of data.”

Group spotlight: Hacks/Hackers Nairobi

Hacks/Hackers Nairobi (Kenya) recently had a great discussion of the pros and cons to the Facebook-led initiative to bring Internet to the world’s unconnected population, and how that could affect net neutrality.

Have a group or organizer who deserves some kudos? Send suggestions for who should be in the spotlight by replying to this email.

Worth a read:

Call to action:

Thanks to Jessica Chapel for responding to last week’s call to action. She first encounteredHacks/Hackers in 2010: “My first experience with Hacks/Hackers was contributing to the creation of the Survival Glossary, which I remember as fun and happening really quickly.”

For this week’s call to action, we’re asking you to help update the Survival Glossary (a lot has happened in the past 5 years). To help, go to the Google Doc version of the glossary, where you’re encouraged to comment on entries you’d like to update, and add new entry suggestions at the end.

And we’re also continuing last week’s call to action, if you’re up for sharing your story of how you got involved with Hacks/Hackers, simply reply to this email.

Have a great rest of your week!

Produced by Julia Haslanger, @JuliaJRH

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