2019 Hackathon - 14/15th Sept

This event has now happened, for a write-up see: https://hackthepress.org/write-up-hackthepress-hackathon/

News is broken.

The current system of monetisation (advertising) dis-incentivises good quality journalism in favour of clickbait and sensationalism.

News organisations have historically existed to solve distribution (printing presses) and monetisation/marketing (town criers) problems, these are problems the internet has solved in a much more scalable way.

It’s time Journalism, and by extension society, got a new model - one that uses technology to make high quality journalism sustainable again.

Join us at the HackThePress Hackathon on 14-15th September and help build the future of digital journalism.

Slack workspace: https://bit.ly/HTPSlack

What is a "Hackathon"?

If you're new to Hackathons, take a look at this: https://hackathon.guide/

Who can come?

Everyone is welcome, as long as they follow our code-of-conduct and have signed up on Eventbrite.
Beginners are welcome! Attendees have a huge range of skill-sets, so you'll have no problem finding someone to learn from.

Themes

Production - help journalists create great content more efficiently
Consumption - help readers know the quality, biases, and reputation of content
Publishing - help journalists use new mediums to get their message across

Judging Criterion

The judges are looking for end-to-end prototypes/demos, so focus on building a really minimal, but actually working prototype.

Aims

After the hackathon, projects will have active mentorship and help with developing their prototypes further. We want to help you make positive and lasting changes in the media/press industry and will do everything we can help you turn your prototypes into sustainable businesses.

Mentors

We have experts from three different fields (developers, journalists, researchers) to help you improve and build your ideas.
Scroll down to see who they are...

Location & Agenda

We will be hosted by the amazing Newspeak House in London from 14th-15th September 2019

Saturday 14th

Sunday

Code of Conduct

For the detailed code of conduct: https://hackcodeofconduct.org/
TL;DR: Be nice

Mentor Profiles

Developers

Iain Collins @iaincollins (glitch.digital) - https://github.com/iaincollins
Iain runs a news and media company called GLITCH.DIGITAL providing digital journalism services and creating tools for journalists and the media. GLITCH.DIGITAL is currently focused on building software for broadcast journalists, supported by funds from the Google Digital News Initiative. Before starting GLITCH.DIGITAL, he worked in BBC News Labs, creating prototypes of newsroom tools, new formats of digital journalism, web-based video editing and computer-assisted video translation software. Iain has 20 years of experience across both startups and enterprise companies, and can help you with technical and product questions.

Jüha Jarvi (Charto) - https://github.com/jjrv
Jüha, all the way from Finland, is a JavaScript genius, and a cartography king. He's built and launched many open-source mapping and visualisation JavaScript tools. He'll be around to help you overcome any technical issue you have while building your projects.

Dan Sofer
Dan Sofer is the founder and executive director of Founders and Coders. Previously he has worked in a variety of technical roles for a number of clients, including The Guardian, the BBC and the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games.

Journalists

Max Gorynski & Yuji Develle from Wonk Bridge
Wonk Bridge is a technology publication that fosters discourse around the ways in which technology impacts society, culture and our daily lives. We seek to bring together different perspectives, professions and life experiences to generate insights and build solutions to problems such as political echo-chambers, data disenfranchisement, and declining media quality. Co-Founders Max and Yuji will be present at the hackathon and will be hoping to help you find the secret of "hacking or un-hacking" the future of media.

Collin Tate

Researchers

Lucie-Aimée Kaffee @frimelle - https://luciekaffee.github.io/
Lucie-Aimée Kaffee is a final year PhD student at the University of Southampton in the Web and Internet Science (WAIS) research group and research associate at TIB Hanover, Germany in the Scientific Data Management Group. Her research focus is on supporting under-resourced languages on Wikidata and Wikipedia. She has published on the multilinguality in the web of data in general and Wikidata in particular, and on combining neural text generation and Wikidata information to create Wikipedia articles with a focus on the human perception of neural text generation.

She was part of the WDAqua project, an EU H2020 training network to work with a group of international researchers on the challenges of question answering over web data.

Previously, she worked as a software developer at Wikimedia Deutschland in the Wikidata team and is still involved in Open Source projects, e.g. as a member of the code of conduct committee in Wikimedia technical spaces.

Julian Harty @julianharty - http://blog.bettersoftwaretesting.com/

Questions?

If you have any questions, get in touch:
- contact@hackthepress.org
- @jreeve0