From information activism to data journalism and visualisations at Hacks/Hackers Berlin
This past Monday Sourcefabric hosted over 50 journalists (hacks) and developers (hackers) at our office in Berlin. Hacks/Hackers Berlin has been going for one year now and on Monday we were happy to host the anniversary special and another evening of inspiring talks.
The night kicked off with a presentation by Julius Tröger of the Berliner Mogenpost as he discussed his data-driven journalistic project, Flugrouten Radar. This was followed up by Samir Nassar from the Tactical Technology Collective who offered some important ideas on how to protect yourself and your information online as a journalist in the age of PRISM. Our third presentation came from Stefan Plantikow of Neo4j, an open source project working on graph databases and visualisations. The night was rounded out by Micz Flor of Sourcefabric who unveiled a one year birthday present, DataVizKit. The prototyped tool instantly converts CSV data into visual treats and will eventually be incorporated into Newscoop as a plugin.
For the past year every meetup has attracted a diverse and varied group of technologists who have presented projects as far reaching as a Q&A with Data Journalist Steve Doig to a World Radio Day special, a tour of the Zeit Online newsroom with several Knight Mozilla Fellows and a regular influx of prototyped tools for journalism. You can read a review of the first Hacks/Hackers Berlin meetup here.
As part and parcel of the first birthday special we decided to broadcast to visitors who were not able to join us in person. Using Airtime, we live broadcasted and recorded all the presentations. You can take a listen here. As well, we took the opportunity to test drive Live Blog on our site for the first time and this provided a great real-time virtual experience for listeners and readers from afar. You can read the Live Blog post here.
- Stay tuned for future Hacks/Hackers Berlin meetups.