We're going to Media Party (Karamu, fiesta, forever)
I’m getting ready for my favorite event of the year, Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires Media Party, three days of inspiring hackathons, workshops and keynotes.
Last year near 1,000 journalists, designers and technologists attended last year’s event, which Patrick Butler summarized very well over at the Knight Blog.
The current schedule for this year reads like a who’s-who of open media: Justin Arenstein, Mariano Blejman, Burt Herman, Miguel Paz, Mariana Santos, Dan Sinker, Sasa Vucinic and many more people who I’m always thrilled to listen to and hang out with.
I also love Media Party because it lets me meet tomorrow’s open media superstars while they’re still just hacker slobs like the rest of us and see so much cutting-edge stuff. I remember being blown away by Jonathan Stray presenting the AP’s Overview project at Media Party in 2012, taking part in Miranda Mulligan and Joe Germuska’s workshop on conceptualizing applications, and getting to meet design thinking rockstar Nuno Vargas.
This year’s edition of Media Party looks like to be as mind-blowing as the first two. The schedule is still in progress, but at this point I already know I can’t wait to see Syed Karim, director of innovation at MDIF, present Outernet. Funded by Digital News Ventures, Outernet aims to deliver free web access to all parts of the world through satellites in low earth orbit. Advances in miniaturization make it possible. The resurging pressure of political censorship makes it necessary. And the fact that it’s bat-shit crazy makes it awesome.
And I love the host city. The vibe in Buenos Aires now is very much like Berlin back in the day: Poor but sexy. Argentina’s recent financial crises have wrought havoc with many fortunes and forced lots of young people to explore ways to do things without a lot of money. The creative classes in Buenos Aires have a huge appetite for open source, open data, open culture and collaborative ownership.
I’ll be leading a workshop at the Media Party on citizen journalism verification, demonstrating current and upcoming tools (like our own Citizen Desk, which I wrote about recently), and leading some fun exercises. The schedule is still a work in progress, but I’ll tweet the details of my workshop as soon as I learn them.
On top of that, I’d love to talk to anyone about the open source tools you’re using in media. I’d like to start the conversation here with a brief survey: Tell me how you’re using open source tools, and then catch me in Buenos Aires (or @dougiegyro on Twitter) to learn the results.
Take the survey here.
P.S. The reference in the headline is to Lionel Richie's 'All Night Long.' Penguin Prison's cover has been in heavy rotation on my radio show most of the summer.