Hacks Meet Hackers
05 August 2010
Working with local company ScraperWiki, an award winning new screen scraper and data mining tool company, Open Labs hosted a Hacks meets Hackers day at Liverpool’s Art and Design Academy in LJMU on Friday 16 July.
The event was an opportunity to gather a group of hacks (journalists) with some hackers (developers/designers/coders) from a variety of backgrounds, including some from big media organisations, as well as individual online publishers and freelancers.
ScraperWiki provides the tools to build and share data 'scrapers', which journalists and programmers can utilise for research and news production. This type of event provides a unique opportunity to demonstrate to journalists how they can use programming and design techniques to create online news stories and features; and vice versa, to show programmers how to find, develop, and polish stories and features.
Aine from Scraperwiki explained: “We want to show people what Scraperwiki can do, but the main aim of today’s event was to see what could be developed when a programmer gets together with a journalist for a day.”
Delegates were encouraged to come along with ideas for ‘datasets’ that would inform the production of final projects and aid the process of putting like-minded people into teams.
The highly charged atmosphere, fuelled by competition and the drive to win some prizes, produced projects such as:
- ‘Business Light’ - a scraper that retrieved data from a variety of sources collating it into one central resource
- ‘Why aren’t libraries like Amazon?’ - a book-tracker that matched a desired library book with the nearest library
- 'Plodwatch' - a script that automatically updated a list of who the local bobbies were
- ‘World Cup Facts’ - an interesting twist on the statistics around the 2010 tournament
- An Arduino-based programme that bashed a gavel to mark live court proceedings
- An informative one-stop-shop around Liverpool's health, education and entertainment information
Towards the end of the day, each teams’ work was judged by Open Labs’ Director Lindsay Sharples, Liverpool Post & Echo’s executive editor Jane Clare and technology lawyer and author Steve Kuncewicz. ‘Business Light’ took 1st prize, with ‘Why aren’t libraries like Amazon?’ scooping 2nd prize.
"It's been fantastic working with Open Labs and Trinity Mirror for our first event outside London," said Scraperwiki Director, Aine McGuire. "We couldn't have hoped for better local support and we're very excited about today's projects, which show great potential for further development."
ScraperWiki are planning further events of this type around the country, including Edinburgh, Cardiff and Birmingham, and if you want to know more visit the ScraperWiki’s blog : http://blog.scraperwiki.com
For further information please contact Open Labs’ Director, Lindsay Sharples: l.h.sharples@ljmu.ac.uk or 0151 231 4747.
Picture by John O'Shea
