Hacks/Hackers London - The pitches

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. I’ve already published my notes from Alastair and Alex’s talk.

At the event there is also a regular “pitch” spot, where people get two minutes to talk about an idea they have, a service they run, or an event they are participating in or organising. Last week there were three...

“Free Elections Hackathon” - Daniel Stanley

Daniel Stanley was there to promote the Free Elections Hackathon on June 16th. The aim is to build on a suite of real-time electoral monitoring tools that have already been used in Senegal and mapping tools like Ushahidi. They are also on the look-out for people who can help if they have specific skills, and I noticed UI design and UX was amongst them.

“Crowd-sourcing questions” - Andrew Gray

Andrew Grey is a journalist on the hunt for developers. He wants to improve the questioning at press conferences. Often, he said, the journalists in the room don’t have the expertise or the time to come up with the kind of killer question that experts in the wider audience might have asked. His idea is a website where people can contribute questions in advance to be asked at press conferences. He can be contacted at andrewgray dot email at gmail dot com

“New media forum” - Richard Dixon

Richard Dixon introduced himself as “relentlessly old tech”. He was drawing our attention to an event on June 27th in Brussels, the “Pan-European Forum on Media Pluralism and New Media”. It is drawing together “politicians, traditional and new media, academics, NGOs, judges and leaders from the music, film and book industries in a pan-European dialogue”. You can find out more at mediapluralism.eu. Richard is promoting the event on Twitter as @newmediaforum

Next...

Next I’ll have my notes from Kaveh Memari’s talk about Renew. The next Hacks/Hackers London is scheduled for 27 June 2012.