Build the News
@jasmith93
Last week London Student went to #BuildTheNews, and what a lovely time we had. Rupert Murdoch put on a great platter for us and we didn’t even have to walk past the #OccupyMurdoch protesters because they kindly let us in the side door.
Once inside we formed a team of seven, so decided on an idea that was especially ambitious (something we’d been told explicitly not to do...) - a tool for foreign correspondents and journalists abroad to report instantly when they were in danger. Ross was aware of tools we could use to build it and Ed thought it would be well fun. Along with the “Interhacktives” from City Journalism, we thrashed out an idea and put it to someone from Wikileaks.
Claiming a breakout space next to some admin staff who clearly had nothing to do with any of this, we spoke on Google Hangouts and our idea was confirmed. In fact, we were encouraged to think even bigger: journalists in the field, though often told not to, bring their smartphones. This would allow us to build our idea even bigger. If a journalist can use a smartphone, they can generate GPS data to send, use their data connection and more.
We were surprised to hear that though there are processes for journalists to report to their news desks, generally reports are informal and simply given to a fixer on the ground. There is a long chain of correspondence before a report could reach the Foreign Office, or a journalists’ family member for example. We wanted to cut this down and make sure anyone in trouble could call for help almost instantaneously. After toying with the idea of a dedicated device (Ross had worked with wearable tech before) we decided simple SMS was the way to go.
SMS is widely available around the world: even in conflict zones, where there might be widespread disruption to other services. The overall plan of course would be to develop a system that could be fed into (and feed out) in many different ways, but SMS provided us the simplest implementation and the proof of concept we needed.
Ross suggested Twilio as the tool to use for SMS.
Ed set to work reading up on Twilio API documentation, I started designing a dashboard and site for SitRep users, and Ross thought about how to tie this all together. The Interhacktives mapped ideas for a community site, ways to raise the profile of journalists in trouble and drafting our presentation, which would be required of us by 3pm the next day.
After a good amount of time discussing, going over and over our idea and trying to find ways of working together on this, we didn’t have much to show by 6pm Saturday: the end of the first day. We were ushered out of the News UK building and got the bus to a pub in Liverpool Street, where we were given free food, free booze and a chance to network with both journalists and devs.
Ed left early, I left late, and Ross left later.
The next morning, everyone was feeling rough. Two out of four of our Interhacktives were out of action, Ross was throwing up and working from home, and Ed was chirpy which made everyone even more upset. As we went into the News UK building, dread began to set in.
Ed was (at the time) a fairly new developer, I could only just play around with HTML, CSS and a bit of PHP, and Ross was the only one who knew how to use Twilio. We took an office room, stared at our screens and did the very best we could, but by 1pm we had 3 quarters of a presentation and no build to speak of. It was then we got a call from Ross: he’d Git pushed everything he had, jumped on a tube and made for London Bridge.
We were astonished: Ross had built a working Alpha in the space of a morning, with a hangover, without any help. The Interhacktives went into overdrive on the presentation, and by the time we took to the stage Ross was there and ready to present.
A Twilio number went up on the presentation board and we had all the staffers and journos text it: sure enough, there on the screen, red reports started appearing. SitRep worked!
We ended the day with an honourable mention. The Times told us that it was an excellent idea and brilliant we were thinking about how to protect journalists but they didn’t think it was how things worked on their foreign desk. That was something we did account for: the smaller, less established publications were who we were aiming at, like Vice or even freelancers.
We were happy with our honourable mention, and decided it would be a great thing to follow up on. Follow our blog, here, for more updates.