Write-up - HackThePress Hackathon 2019

by Joseph Reeve

On the 14th & 15th of September, I had the honor of hosting over 45 hackers and journalists who all had one goal - fix the news.
The event was a great success, and I have already scheduled some more time for the community to get together:

For pictures, see (and add your own): https://photos.app.goo.gl/Smgt7MVrEBXoJfYm6

Over the weekend, 7 projects were built and demoed - each trying to improve the creation/consumption of news content in a different way.

Projects

short.hand
Team short.hand built a Machine Learning model that transcribes shorthand to English.
Demo: https://teeline-api.herokuapp.com/
Code:
Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Xax3Ob_0w5j3UK5TSObAZ6Wd-IlEV2nLdUpRTWig3c0/edit?usp=sharing
Team: Magnus, Matt, Mohit, Kate

Commentative
A tool for collaborative reading and discussion.
The team and project is still active, and actively accepting issues and pull-requests.
Demo: https://commentative.herokuapp.com/
Code: https://github.com/commentative
Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1L_TUELyu6YCBiWmiLLeJtqVoWa0ThNz2_q1I0lc4olw/edit?usp=sharing
Team: Maurice, Jamie, Zeya, Sam, John

SyncBliss
A tool for collaborative listening - listen to audio (e.g. podcasts) in sync with your friends.
Demo: https://syncbliss.herokuapp.com
Code: https://github.com/samjam48/SyncBliss/
Slides: https://hackmd.io/t6sgp_BCSjmE6a-fzQFQyA
Team: Sam, Sarah, Lucie

Brexit Radar
A tool for viewing local sentiment (of Twitter users) on specific topics, with an example of Brexit.
Demo:
Code:
Slides:
Team: Nicu, Ciaran, Max, Yuji

Along the Same Lines
A tool for finding and categorising news articles that talk about the same thing, but from different perspectives
Demo: https://georgiamshaw.github.io/dfm/
Code: https://github.com/georgiamshaw/dfm
Slides:  
Team: Kai, Christine, Maggie, Erdinc, Georgia, Phil, Rob, Victor

Legit?
A media-literacy tool based on Glitched.News that educates users on simple checks to know if an article is legit
Code: https://github.com/ISNIT0/legit
Team: Maggie, Joe

#nomoreclickbait
But a platform that discourages clickbait with a money where your mouth is approach to reviews and a meritocratic revenue model for journalists
Team: Joe, Alfie, Abi

Special Mentions

Glitched.News
Iain Collins (a mentor at the Hackathon) made various improvements to glitched.news, one of his open-source projects, based on feedback from teams using his API.

Dataset on reference quality for Wikidata and Wikipedia
Lucie spent some time creating a dataset on multilingual references to learn what is a good reference (for now for Wikidata). Including whether it captures the data & publishing type.

What Next?

In the closing session, I polled the attendees for what types of events they would like to see from HackThePress going forwards, in order of popularity we got:

  • Workshops
  • Hackathons
  • Meetups with Talks
  • Socials

At our upcoming social (24th September), we’ll be discussing more about what types of events HTP can/should put on, and how we can help strengthen and grow the community of hackers that are passionate about the news.

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: