There’s no better example of the global scale of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project than the dualing hack days we recently sponsored in New York City and Buenos Aires.
In New York, we gave money for travel scholarships to bring top-notch developers to town to take part in the Wall Street Journal’s Data Transparency Weekend, which brought more than 100 developers and privacy experts to town to create tools to help people see and control their personal data online. The “hackathon” grew out of the Wall Street Journal’s excellent ongoing series that looks at how your online footprint is being used by corporations.
The three-day event (documented extensively here, here, and here) resulted in code for almost 30 different projects with winners in “Scanning,” “Education,” and “Control” tracks.
Five-thousand miles to the south, we sponsored the Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires ShowTimeLine Hackathon, which brought 45 developers together to work on making new timeline-based visualization tools. The OpenNews sponsorship went to hosting the hack day, as well as a small amount of seed money to keep projects going afterward.
The team of developers and journalists in Buenos Aires took a series of different approaches to displaying data over time, from automatic data-and-date extraction from documents, to translating pre-existing timeline libraries into Spanish, and more.
These are exactly the kind of topic-driven code-based events that we’re looking to help sponsor at OpenNews. If you’ve got an idea brewing for a journalism hack day, we’d love to hear about it. Let’s work together to make this year the year of journalism code.
A version of this post first appeared here.