On the 18th and 19th of January, Hack The Press held its second ever hackathon. 8 of the 11 teams presented their projects (read about them all below).

There is an event photo album here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/MGJjbo6j9wfgkvvXA
Please add your own photos!

Projects

Crossing (First Place)

Tinder for Debiasing

Team: Naomi Sheridan, Will Costello, Daniel Stapleton, Bence Nagy
Presentation URL: https://underyx.gitlab.io/crossing
Demo URL: https://crossingapp.com/
Judges' Comments: Well defined idea, good implementation which delivered a really entertaining demo.

Wiki Rank (Second Place)

WikiRank is a tool to rank the reliability of news sources on a topic by using the frequency of Wikipedia citations as a proxy.

Team: Lucie-Aimée Kaffee, Reuben George Thomas, Alex Ma, Alessandro Toppetti, Erdinc Mutlu, John Cummings, Kai Landolt
Presentation URL: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pearBM6NWnI07_a2AL_a4X3xvSlhujKwD3MoKsJI514/edit?usp=sharing
Github URL: https://github.com/articlewikirank/hackthepress-wikirank
Judges' Comments: A genuine step forward in credibility online.

Accessible News (Second Place)

Enhancing accessibility for news.

Team: Jamie Brown
Presentation URL: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1wNbCHfd9E36XZuhJdwMYz64bFLMlBfUkJ-HY8n4hNIg/edit?usp=sharing
Github URL: https://github.com/jamiebrown201/accessible-news
Judges' Comments: Elegant implementation with a big impact.

Sofia Folks (Third Place)

A proposal for a new way of monetisation and an algorithm for calculating content value to support it.

Team: FT Sofia
Presentation URL: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1V8G8qA5ugfFsspAmtLtYDQsNbOU6-tR8uz6GUtUtxH4/edit?usp=sharing
Github URL: https://github.com/gerganadzhumerkova/htp-sf-2020
Judges' Comments: Tremendously thorough hack from a professional team and great presentation. Simple design with well thought through ratings system that used multiple factors.

Kudu (Third Place)

A news aggregator aimed at grading a reader's subject knowledge and systematically helping expand it.

Team: Max Gorynski, Maurice, Matt Collins, Amber Rignell
Presentation URL: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1E3uKINNR6-85hFpQPlUGrmPjFHge66hmBBUdXvw2Knc/edit?usp=sharing
Github URL: https://github.com/mjpcollins/yulokudu
Judges' Comments: Great progress on quite a novel approach to moving news consumers out of their comfortable bubble.

Liberty

Promoting the work of indenendent journalists.

Team: Jencir Lee, Molly Pipe
Judges' Comments: A useful easy tool for independent journalists

Sync Kick

Listen to audio (books and podcasts) with friends and groups. Share thoughts as you listen and learn more about yourself and the world from the time you spend listening by sharing the experience.

Team: Sam Harris, Mariia Kren, Roberto Battaglia, Sabi Ntim
Presentation URL: https://prezi.com/p/thgbcl5d6nhc/sync-kick-motivation-to-develop/
Github URL: https://github.com/samjam48/sync-kick-hack
Judges' Comments: Fun, conversational presentation and Impressive demo. We would use this product.

Alt.Tab

A chrome extension to help people shift from low-quality news to high-quality news by recommending articles on the sidebar filtered by some criteria.

Team: Jan Softa, Jerome Minney, Ivan Savin, Tom Ridd, Whitney Hung
Presentation URL: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ffw8wbe7FiuN_JWGaK6MwG5N6Cho3G8VekICfUyQiIs/edit?usp=sharing
Github URL: https://github.com/qs/hackthepress
Judges' Comments: Great presentation a tricky problem and a common sense solution.

Judges

Edward Saperia
Nathan Young
Rob Pickering
Sam Stephenson

What Next?

We have a social on 6th Feb (https://www.meetup.com/HackThePress/events/268065037/)
We'll also be running co-working and events with speakers.

Key takeaways:

Hackathons are a great way to build community around a common goal
The news industry has some awesome people who really want to engage with tech
Beer is a great way make friends

Thanks

Thanks so much to our sponsors who made the event possible: