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Political Widget Takes Daylife’s Top Prize at ONA Hackathon

In conjunction with the Online News Association convention, Hacks/Hackers hosted a hackathon at NPR that was sponsored by Daylife, a New York-based technology company which offered a $500 cash prize for the the best use of its API.

Surprisngly, hackathon participants hailed from as far as Portland, Miami, Los Angeles and London. They’vebeen involved in projects ranging from WordPress, ScraperWiki and GeoDjango. Two of the participants were students actually that worked at the Federal Communication Commission.

The winning project was a WordPress campaign widget that would aggregate information about political candidates using Daylife, campaign finance records, and data visualization tools. The widget was built by Benjamin Balter, Chris Barna, Alex Byers and Beth Davidz, and can be seen at http://ben.balter.com/sandbox/hacksandhackers, with source and documentation are online.

Onamagazine.org, an online magazine that auto-generated an editable news Web site around a single event, was created by Alina Barbuceanu, Andrei Stupiak, and Daniel Bachhuber. The template, which uses the Daylife API, could be slightly modified for any event or conference.

Other projects: Richard Pope of ScraperWiki created a more user-friendly listing and mapping of Coast Guard oil spill data. One team wanted to create a Crunchbase for media and news outlets.

Also, a number of WordPress developers, including one of the seven core developers, came from various parts of the country. That team worked on improving the under-utilized links feature inside WordPress.

One weird quirk of the Daylife API. When the political widget queried with the name of Daniel Webster, the Republican Congressional candidate from Florida, the Daylife API instead returned the information for the man who was a leading orator and statesman during the antebellum period.

Shoutout to Greg Linch, Burt Herman and Beth Davidz for helping to organize, the NPR team for helping to arrange the space, and Daylife’s Vineet Gupta for judging.

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