News Hackathon Austin Hacks/Hackers/Hacking

Sponsors

• Community Impact Newspaper (sponsoring lunch prepared by Pick Up Stix)
• EFF-Austin
• GNI Strategies
• Hacks/Hackers, funded by Knight Foundation
• Plutopia Productions
• Texas Observer
• Texas Tribune

Tools and Sources

When is it?

• Saturday, October 16, 9am-4:30pm

Where is it?

• 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, worldchanging 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 is it?

The Hackathon is a collaboration of newsy people who understand communication and nerdy people who understand application development. Collaborative teams will conceive and define data-driven news applications, and build real, workable open source solutions that transform raw data into headline news.

What will we 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. What will you take away?
• Communicators will have a better appreciation and understanding of technology and the process of application development.
• Developers will learn much more about the news ecosystem, and how to find meaning and value in increasingly available data sets.
• Everybody will learn how to build stories and deliver news in a world of pervasive digital convergence. The ultimate deliverable is a better-informed society

Schedule

9:00am: Arrive and meet people.

9:15am: Welcome messages by Cindy Royal and Jon Lebkowsky.

9:30am: Matt Stiles and Niran Babalola will talk about their work building news applications at the Texas Tribune, giving a few examples and creating inspiration for the day’s work. As part of their presentation, they’ll review the data sets available at http://www.texastransparency.org/opendata/

10:15am: Break

10:30am: Following that presentation, we’ll ask journalists, bloggers, and other communicators to spend some time meeting, caffeinating, talking, and coming up with ideas for applications.

11:00am: Those who have specific application ideas will present them to the group, and invite application developers to work with them. Teams will form, define requirements, and build applications.

11:30am: Teams work on application development

12:30pm: Lunch (from Pick Up Stix, sponsored by Community Impact) and conversation

1:15pm: Teams work on application development

3:15pm: Teams will present their applications and get feedback. Then we’ll debrief, and have an open, informed discussion about the development process.

4:30pm: Head to happy hour (venue TBA)!

Quoting organizers of the New York OpenSourceAThon: “Our goal is to put the finishing touches on, and release as much great open source software for news/information as we can in one all-day session of coding, designing, testing, and documentation writing.”