Hacks/Hackers Field Notes

Hacks/Hackers Field Notes is an open collection of research, interviews and everyday happenings from the mobile desk of Jeanne Brooks. The purpose of this blog is to provide the community with open documentation of research in developing strategy and business development for the grassroots network Hacks/Hackers. You are encouraged to follow, comment, reblog, contribute and share.

[hhfieldnotes]

[hhfieldnotes]

This past weekend I hung out with our friends at the Society of News Design for the second iteration of SND Makes. The event was co-hosted by Upstatement and held in their beautiful Boston office. They brought together an inspiring group of designers, developers and journalists to answer the question, "How might we improve the content creation process for news?" In one weekend we went from brainstorming new ideas to building working prototypes! Watch the video above to check out what we created and read more about the event on NiemanLab. 

[hhfieldnotes]

Today in inspirational talks, Laurenellen McCann shares her sage advice for building inclusive community participation. Her mantra, "build with, not for."

Read her full case study "So You Think You Want to Run a Hackathon, Think Again." on Medium. 

[hhfieldnotes]

The success of the Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires group

Hacks/Hackers BA leader Mariano Blegman (@blejman) shares how the group in Buenos Aires has grown to be a huge success, hosting the third consecutive year of the Media Party, putting Buenos Aires on the global media map and becoming the largest Hacks/Hackers digital community in the world. 

The secret to the success he says, stems from the fact that the gatherings do not focus exclusively on journalists, programmers or designers. Instead they strive to create links between these communities. They focus efforts on solving technological problems rather than on specific topics, supporting collaborative work and investing in highly competitive environments.  

Read the full post here (in Spanish).

[hhfieldnotes]

Visit Original Link

Hacks/Hackers Rosario

Interview: Ezequiel Clerici Interview date: 8/29/2014 Location: Media Party 2014, hosted by Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires

(Photo credit: Emiliano Panelli @epanelli)

While at the Media Party, I spoke with Ezequiel Clerici, organizer of Hacks/Hackers Rosario. We talked a lot about the issues with organizing in Meetup and how one directional the platform can be, making it difficult to get feedback from people. 

In addition to wanting to connect Hackdash to the Meetup groups, he shares a great idea for building a sort of timeline and alert system that would notify community members when people are working on similar projects and facilitate more collaborations. Hear him explain in the audio clip above. 

[hhfieldnotes]

At the Media Party 2014 Hackathon I was part of a team aiming to build a solution to better connect the Hacks/Hackers network. This video is the hackathon demo (warning: in Spanish) of "the Tamagotchi of Hacks/Hackers", GetPulse Social.

Presenters from left to right are Daniel Suárez Pérez (@DanielSuarezPer) organizer of Hacks/Hackers Bogotá, and Nacho Castro (@nachocastro) and Emiliano Panelli (@epanelli) both leaders of Hacks/Hackers Mendoza. 

Even if you don't speak Spanish, this presentation is so much fun! Nacho Castro should MC all Hacks/Hackers events forever. 

[hhfieldnotes]

In its third consecutive year, the Hacks/Hackers Media Party, a three day event held in Buenos Aires in August, brought together more than 1,200 participants from diverse backgrounds all rethinking the future of news. Leaders from around the world gathered to connect, share and build. 

The event, free for all attendees, was held at the Konex Cultural Center and helped make the Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires chapter the largest in the world. The Hacks/Hackers network prides itself on building solutions outside the box and there was something magical about connecting and collaborating with new friends in a warehouse space cloaked in graffiti and art. Language differences were no barrier as the keynotes and more than 40 workshops had Spanish-English interpreters to facilitate communication. And the hackathon on the closing day had 26 ideas submitted to the hackdash. 

I wasn't the only one blown away by the Media Party experience. Here's Douglas Arellenas of Sourcefabric (and leader of Hacks/Hackers Prague) explaining what makes this event so special in his post, "If life were only like Media Party".

While there I ran a workshop on strategy for building online communities. You can read about it in English and Spanish thanks to coverage by ICFJ. On the second night I gave a keynote presentation on my vision for the work I'll do with Hacks/Hackers. Livestream from the entire evening's talks are here and my speech starts at 22:00.  

It was inspiring to experience the power and excitement of the media party and be connected to so many innovators in the journalism space from around the world. Stay tuned for recaps from interviews with Hacks/Hackers leaders from Mendoza, Rosario, Bogotá, the African contingent and more. 

[hhfieldnotes]

Hacks/Hackers Chicago

Interview: Joe Germaska Interview date: July 24, 2014 Location: SRCCON

While at SRCCON, I interviewed Hacks/Hackers Chicago leader Joe Germuska (@JoeGermuska). In the Chicago area, Joe reports there are a saturation of evening events. With 1 or 2 local Python user groups and a lot of overlap with the Open Gov community, he finds the Meetup group is most successful now for promotions. In the early stages of the group it was hard just simply finding space.

I asked what he thought was the biggest need in the area. He felt that while there was a modest amount of tech training for journalists, it needed to be more applied than what's been happening. There should be more in person events that bring people who are not doing journalism closer to that world.

Joe shared how it's tough to keep things going on a daily basis because it's hard to be inspired –– and keep inspiring. He's looking for the sweet spot between talking and the presenter having an agenda.

[hhfieldnotes]

SRCCON was a conference held this summer for “developers, interactive designers, and other people who love to code in and near newsrooms.” Hundreds of journalism’s leading thinkers gathered in Philadelphia to collaborate, sketch, plan and build for a better journalism of tomorrow. 

It was awesome to connect  and be inspired by so many amazing people and gave me the opportunity to connect with and interview some of the local Hacks/Hackers leaders. More on that to come. 

For more on SRCCON, they’ve posted session transcripts on Github, you can check out attendees’ projects and links on the follow-up Etherpad, and read more coverage on Source. 

Photo credit: John Niedermeyer via Creative Commons on Flickr

[hhfieldnotes]

This summer, shortly after the start of my fellowship, I attended my first event as executive director of Hacks/Hackers, joining a discussion on diversity in online journalism. This pretty much sums up the root of my interest in journalism and technology. Diversity is a crucial element to truly serving public information needs and unfortunately the reality is the conditions of the journalism and technology fields are far from it. As we design new and advanced ways of communicating news to the public, we must also redesign our leadership and pipeline structures to support diversity. 

Listen to the solutions offered by esteemed panelists Michelle Johnson (@mijohn), journalism professor at the University of Boston, Zuri Berry (@zuriberry), now senior web producer for FOX25 News in Boston and formerly of boston.com, and moderator Caroline O'Donovan (@ceodonovan), Nieman Lab staff writer. We offer lots of great solutions for hiring more diverse staff in journalism and supporting more diverse leadership in the media.

I'm committed to continuing to lead conversation and action towards solutions for ensuring diversity in journalism and technology. 

[hhfieldnotes]

Where do we grow from here? Hacks/Hackers gains its first executive director

Read more about my plans to create a roadmap for sustainability and scaling impact of the network on the RJI blog.