Recent posts in my Hacks/Hackers Category

January 23, 2013

“If we don’t understand the financial system, we aren’t doing our jobs as journalists” - Chris Taggart of OpenCorporates at Hack/Hacks London

The latest Hacks/Hackers London meet-up was crammed with talks from people at Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters and the Financial Times. Striking a rather different organisational note at the end of the evening was Chris Taggart. I’ve previously seen Chris talk about OpenlyLocal, but this talk was about another open data project — OpenCorporates. Here are my notes…

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“Data Journalism: not the job of one department” - Emily Cadman & Martin Stabe at Hacks/Hackers London

I’ve been publishing my notes from the talks at the newly revived Hacks/Hackers London meet-up. Representing the Financial Times on the evening were Emily Cadman & Martin Stabe. Here are my notes…

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January 18, 2013

“Data + Other data + People = Readable story” - Himanshu Ojha at Hacks/Hackers London

Hacks/Hackers London returned this week, with an evening of talks about financial and data journalism. Himanshu Ojha is a data journalist at Thomson Reuters, and was talking about the story behind “The Unequal State of America”. Here are my notes…

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January 17, 2013

“Financial Graphics at Thomson Reuters” - Sam Arnold-Forster at Hacks/Hackers London

Last night was the first Hacks/Hackers London after a break, and it was jam-packed with talks about financial and data journalism. The second slot was taken by people from Thomson Reuters, opening with Sam Arnold-Forster talking about “Financial graphics”. Here, as ever, are my notes…

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“All Bloomberg journalism is data journalism” - Marianne Bouchart at Hacks/Hackers London

After a lengthy hiatus, Hacks/Hackers London was back this week with a data journalism themed evening. First up was Marianne Bouchart from hosts Bloomberg, whose plush offices gave the whole evening a rather different feel to the usual dingy pub basement. Here are my notes…

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July 12, 2012

“This wretched Communications Data Bill” - Duncan Campbell at Hacks/Hackers London

Legendary journalist Duncan Campbell spoke at Hacks/Hackers London about his lifelong crusade against state surveillance techniques, and his concerns about state attempts to monitor and intercept internet traffic in the draft Communications Data Bill. Here are my notes from his talk.

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“Tight-fitting dresses and data-viz” - Anna Powell-Smith at Hacks/Hackers London

Anna Powell-Smith was talking to the Hacks/Hackers London group about her experience of having a small service she’d built gain lots of national press attention, and giving her ten tips for building great data-based interactives. Here are my notes from the talk.

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July 3, 2012

“3 tips for working with programmers and journalists” - Nicola Hughes at Hacks/Hackers Canterbury

Nicola Hughes, aka @DataMinerUK, was talking at the first meeting of the Canterbury Hacks/Hackers group, giving her ten top tips for working with journalists and “proper” programmers if you were just starting down the road of being a datajournalist. Three things struck me as particularly important, and applicable to a wider circle of activity.

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May 30, 2012

“Putting screens on bins in London” - Kaveh Memari at Hacks/Hackers London

At this month’s Hacks/Hackers London Kaveh Memari was talking about Renew’s project to create an entirely new type of media on the sides of bins in the City of London. Here are my notes from his talk...

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May 29, 2012

Hacks/Hackers London - The pitches

A hack day around election monitoring, a new media forum in Brussels, and a plea to help build a crowd-sourcing tool to improve the questions at press conferences were the pitches at this month’s Hacks/Hackers London.

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May 28, 2012

“The Miso Project: Open-source tools for interactives” - Alastair Dant & Alex Graul at Hacks/Hackers London

Last week it was time for another Hacks/Hackers London, featuring my Guardian colleagues Alex Graul & Alastair Dant talking about the Miso project, and Kaveh Memari talking about Renew, as well as a few two minute pitches. Here are my notes from Alex and Alastair’s talk about the open source interactive toolkit they’ve been working on.

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April 26, 2012

“Wannabe Hacks - finding a route into UK journalism” - Nick Petrie & Ben Whitelaw at Hacks/Hackers London

Last night was the monthly Hacks/Hackers London meet-up organised by Joanna Geary and Jonathan Richards. Here are my notes on Nick Petrie and Ben Whitelaw talking about Wannabe Hacks.

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“Supporting public interest business journalism” - Maha Rafi Atal at Hacks/Hackers London

Last night was the monthly Hacks/Hackers London meet-up organised by Joanna Geary and Jonathan Richards. Here are my notes from one of the talks, given by Maha Rafi Atal, about Public Business.

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April 3, 2012

Sunny Hundal, Adrian McShane and Paul Gesiak at Hacks/Hackers London

Last week was the monthly Hacks/Hackers London meet-up hosted by Joanna Geary and Jonathan Richards. I’ve already posted my notes from the opening talk about Hailo. Here is what I jotted down from the rest of the evening.

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March 30, 2012

“Cabbies and code: the making of Hailo” - Russell Hall and George Berkowski at Hacks/Hackers London

At this week’s Hacks/Hackers London meet-up, the first talk of the evening was about black cab application Hailo, presented by Russell Hall and George Berkowski. Here are my notes.

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February 28, 2012

“How the FT shifted from native apps to web apps” - Steve Pinches at Hacks/Hackers London

Here are my notes from Hacks/Hackers London meet-up where Steve Pinches from the FT gave a very open and frank talk about their work in the mobile space. He is product manager for that area, and was talking particularly about their move to HTML5 web apps and away from native apps.

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February 27, 2012

Hacking data to build trust - Duedil.com’s Damian Kimmelman at Hacks/Hackers London

This month’s Hacks/Hackers London meet-up had a business theme to it, and the first talk was from Damian Kimmelman about duedil.com. The site - recently shortlisted for a Guardian MEGAS award by a judging panel that I chaired - brings together a host of data sources about businesses into one aggregated service. Here are my notes from the talk.

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February 14, 2012

“Social media, investigative journalism, ethics and security” - Nicola Hughes at news:rewired

As part of news:rewired earlier this month, there were workshop sessions on skills like SEO and datajournalism. Leading one of the sessions was Nicola Hughes, aka DataMinerUK, teaching people how to use social media for search. Here are my notes from a session that raised interesting issues of ethics and security for investigative journalists using social media.

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January 17, 2012

London IA and Hacks/Hackers London on 18 January

There are two great free events going on in London tomorrow if, like me, you are interested in either UX or journalism. Or the UX of journalism.

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November 29, 2011

“Hacking the rendition flights” - Stephen Grey at Hacks/Hackers London

At last week’s Hacks/Hackers London meet-up, Stephen Grey was talking about the journalistic process behind his work to uncover the CIA’s network of rendition flights. Here are my notes from the session.

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November 28, 2011

“Hackovation” - Dan McQuillan at Hacks/Hackers London

At last week’s Hacks/Hackers London meet-up Dan McQuillan was talking about “Hackovation: how social innovation camps, crisis camps and other hacker movements are trying to go beyond the headlines”. Here are my notes.

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November 23, 2011

“Sex, lies & instant messenger” - Alec Muffet at Hacks/Hackers

Tonight is the last Hacks/Hackers London meet-up of the year, featuring Stephen Grey and Dan Mcquillan, but delving through a folder of notes the other day I find these I made on Alec Muffet’s Hacks/Hackers talk back in August but never got around to posting. So here they are.

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October 24, 2011

Chris Sumner on Twitter tracking at Hacks/Hackers London

Here are my notes from Chris Sumner’s Hacks/Hackers London talk about using tools to map social networks across the web, and what that means for information security and digital journalists.

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October 20, 2011

Journalism archaeology of the internet - Wendy Grossman on copyright, Scientology, and a world without search at Hacks/Hackers London

I wasn’t able to make last night’s Hacks/Hackers London, which is a shame, as it is always a great night, I’ve always enjoyed seeing Heather Brooke speak, and it would have been brilliant to catch up with the BBC’s George Wright who I used to work alongside in Bush House many moons ago. George has published his slides about the BBC’s R&D department. Seeing all the tweets reminded me that, for one reason or another, I never got round to posting my notes from last month’s Hacks/Hackers. So here they are...

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September 2, 2011

How digital transformed the news cycle - and what you can do about it

This is an essay version of a talk given at last week’s Hacks/Hackers meet-up in London. I presented eight things that I believe news organisations need to stop doing, start doing, or do better, in order to cope with the way that digital has transformed the news cycle.

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August 3, 2011

“Visualising big data” - Christopher Osborne at Hacks/Hackers London

On Tuesday I blogged my notes from my colleague Laura Oliver’s talk about news community management at Hacks/Hackers London. The other talk at last week’s event was from Christopher Osborne of ITO World, about visualising big data.

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August 2, 2011

“Community management in the newsroom” - The Guardian’s Laura Oliver at Hack/Hackers London

I’ve said on many occasions that I am genuinely baffled how so many news organisations seem to think they can grow an active community on their website, without investing in any community management. At the Guardian we have several people in a role called “community co-ordinator” who fulfill this remit. One of them, Laura Oliver, spoke at the last London Hacks/Hackers meet-up. Here are my notes on four of the key points that Laura made in her talk.

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June 14, 2011

Introducing the rNews metadata standard at Hacks/Hackers London

Last night I was at the Hacks/Hackers meet-up to hear Andreas Gebhart, Stuart Myles and Evan Sandhaus talk about the proposed new IPTC semantic metadata standard rNews.

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April 6, 2011

“A manifesto for transparent digital journalism” at Hacks/Hackers London

At the last Hacks/Hackers London, Martin Moore and Ben Bradshaw of the Media Standards Trust were presenting their “Manifesto for transparent digital journalism”. Here are my notes from the session.

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March 29, 2011

A peek behind the scenes at the design process of The Times' Eureka app at Hacks/Hackers London

At Hacks/Hackers London last week Design Editor Matt Curtis and Picture Editor Madeleine Penny from Eureka, the science magazine app from The Times, gave a brilliant presentation about how they had gone about developing it for the iPad.

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March 2, 2011

"Telling Stories with Data" - the BBC's Scott Byrne-Fraser at London Hacks/Hackers

Last week I was at the the latest Hacks/Hackers meet up and saw Scott Byrne-Fraser of the BBC talking about how their data visualisations and online interactives have developed.

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October 25, 2010

Alastair Dant talks 'Interactives - now and the future' at Hacks/Hackers London meet-up

Last week I went to the latest Hacks/Hackers meet-up in London, and I've already blogged about Martin Rosenbaum's "Freedom of Information tips and tricks". Over the weekend I've pulled together my notes on the other talk that night, from my Guardian colleague Alastair Dant.

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October 21, 2010

Martin Rosenbaum talks FOI at Hacks/Hackers London meet-up

At last night's Hacks/Hackers event in London, BBC journalist Martin Rosenbaum talked about what he has learned about using Freedom of Information requests as a journalistic tool.

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September 14, 2010

Notes from last night's Hacks/Hackers meet-up in London

Last night I went to my first London Hacks/Hackers meet-up. Since I'm technically neither a hack nor a hacker, I was a little worried that I would be rumbled as an imposter and blackballed, but I think I got away with it. Jonathan Richards and Julian Burgess of The Times were presenting "The dos and don'ts of starting to code", and Chewy was presenting a wide range of products and tips from Google.

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