Bringing hacks and hackers together in the best way: Media Party
Hacks/Hackers was founded in New York by journalists and technologists who thought it would be good to get together the worlds of hacks (slang for journalists) and hackers (slang for, well, l33t h4x0rz). The Hacks/Hackers community worldwide is in more than two dozen cities. The Buenos Aires chapter is one of the largest and most active, and its annual Media Party is a mega-event, with three days of keynotes, workshops, lightning talks, an exhibition of interesting projects, and a daylong hackathon.
This year’s Media Party was, IMHO, the biggest and best yet, with more than 1,000 people attending per day. The event is held in the Ciudad Cultural Konex, a former factory that has been retrofitted for various cultural events in the city.
So why is Buenos Aires so active? It has a lot to do with the city’s positioning as a hub of both media and technology in Latin America; the open source movement has strong roots there, and so does free culture. (Knowing this, it should come as no surprise that the controversial app Popcorn Time was developed there too, but I digress.) Media Party founder and all-around-excellent-dude Mariano Blejman has started an accelerator for media startups called HacksLabs, as well as a VC called Mediafactory, and it has funded local ideas like ElMeme, which started out as a site for sharing memes, but has grown into a large Reddit-style community of communities.
I’ve written before that serendipity is the Media Party’s great strength. It manages to bring together a lively mix of participants and speakers, both from the U.S. and elsewhere. But plenty of events on the annual calendar do that. What makes the Media Party such a great event is that it’s a lot more than slick slideshows by speakers who do the parachute-in-jet-pack-out routine; Media Party keynote speakers stick around to lead workshops and to participate in the daylong hackathon as well.
Event standouts
One of the headliners this year was Melissa Bell, a co-founder of Vox.com, who gave both a great keynote and a strong workshop on “How to find an audience and build your brand.”
I especially appreciated the presence of ProPublica senior engagement editor Amanda Zamora, who talked in detail about her organization’s work fighting first to open government data, then to find ways to process it to uncover important stories, and then to present those stories in compelling ways (her keynote is here). As Zamora said in her workshop on managing crowdsourcing efforts, “when you start a story, you have to ask yourself, ‘what can I change? Who cares? How can they help?” The fact that ProPublica has won a ton of awards, including Pulitzer Prizes in 2010 and 2011, points to the importance of the work they’re doing and the recognition they’ve received for it.
Projects that are less known but no less important also regularly appear at the Media Party. One of the most important projects I’ve heard of in a very long time is called the Library Freedom Project, led by Alison Macrina, who also gave a terrific keynote on her project. The Library Freedom Project teaches public librarians how to use encryption and privacy technology to help safeguard privacy and security. This becomes even more important when one considers that, according to one 2009 study, more than half of those living below the poverty line access the Internet from public libraries. What I especially appreciate and support is the installation of Tor exit nodes in public libraries for even greater anonymity.
Among the local projects, I was happy to see that Chequeado is flourishing. Inspired by U.S. projects like Politifact or FactCheck.org, Chequeado is a platform for verifying statements made in public, primarily by public officials. As they put it, they seek to raise the cost of telling lies.
According to Media Party organizer Blejman, the best track was devoted to storytelling with virtual reality. Following the workshop led by Martin Rabaglia, one journalist, Ariel Moyano, was inspired to create a hackathon project to re-create a clandestine torture center used by the Argentine dictatorship. And while it sounds like VR is esoteric right now, with the release of VR headsets like the Facebook-owned Oculus (scheduled for Q1 2016), Microsoft Hololens (sometime in 2016) and Google-backed Magic Leap (possibly in 2016), VR storytelling is poised to become an integral part of the media mix.
This year’s Media Party also had excellent live streaming, courtesy of the Canadian company BroadbandTV and the excellent underground online TV channel Fusor TV. Fusor VJs Gala Cacchione and Chicho Pellegrini did a ton of interviews and managed to capture some of the energy of the event. Keynotes and other interviews are also available on the Hacks Hackers Buenos Aires Youtube channel.
I was also happy to participate on data journalist rockstar Ben Welsh’s California Code Rush 2, which was devoted to cleaning up election finance data released by the U.S. state of California to make it easier to search. At first glance, going all the way to Buenos Aires to work on California data doesn’t make a lot of sense, but these data dumps are typical, and the tasks related to preparing data - and there’s a whole lot of cleaning up that has to happen - are applicable anywhere in the world. I certainly got a lot out of the process, and in the end the team was able to document the meaning of 1,400 cryptically-named database fields.
And the winner is...
As for the hackathon winner, the project that got the most votes is also the project closest to my own heart as a world music DJ. The project is called Mixtura, and it is an effort to create a repository of indigenous music in Latin America. It’s a very cool, very ambitious idea, and I do hope the team is able to carry it forward in the future.
The project that got the second most votes was led by Miguel Paz of Poderopedia, and it had a clear goal: To map media ownership in Argentina. And while it sounds simple, media owners often deliberately obscure themselves in very creative ways. Thankfully, with the help of the Poderopedia software platform, the team was able to make great headway in a single day.
The Media Party is definitely one of my favorite events on the calendar, and I’d strongly recommend it for anyone looking for an introduction to the media and tech scene in Latin America. I’m definitely looking forward to next year!
Want to meet us at an event? Take a look at our events page to see where we will be next. Hope to see you there.