Recent posts in my Hacks/Hackers Category

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.