Hacks meet Hackers – 16th July 2010
Hacks meet Hackers a joint Open Labs@LJMU, Scraperwiki, Liverpool Daily Post & Echo event.
Hacks Meet Hackers saw over 40 journalists and programmers put into the same room at the Art and Design Academy to see what they could produce in just one day’s work.
The challenge – to ‘scrape’ the web for freely available but hard to access data and use it to produce a story, feature or even a new service.
After several hours of hard work the groups came up with ideas as varied as ‘the other World Cup’, an examination of the predicted and the real impact of the World Cup in South Africa and The Gavel, featuring Judge Duino – a gavel banging robot that monitors court decisions (video here).
After pizza and beer each teams’ work was judged by Open Labs director Lindsay Sharples, Liverpool Post & Echo executive editor Jane Clare and technology lawyer and author Steve Kuncewicz.
First prize went to ‘Business Light’ – a scraper that retrieved data from a variety of sources and presented it as an online business toolkit.
Second prize went to ‘Why aren’t libraries more like Amazon?’ A book tracker that searched local libraries for a particular title.
Despite some fierce competition the day really wasn’t about who won the prizes.
Whilst each and every project idea was genuinely excellent what really shone through for us was how much can be achieved when you bring cross-disciplinary teams together.
As Aine from Scraperwiki explains:
“We want to show people what Scraperwiki can do, but the main aim for today was to see what could be developed when a programmer gets together with a journalist for a day.”
What was really amazing was just how much each team achieved in such a short space of time.
Scraperwiki and Hacks and Hackers are now on tour. If you would like further information please contact Judith Townend: judith [at] scraperwiki.com or visit http://blog.scraperwiki.com
Read more over at:
Scraperwiki http://blog.scraperwiki.com/2010/07/23/hacks-and-hackers-hack-day-liverpool-policemen-judges-and-libraries/
Mike Nolan http://blogs.edgehill.ac.uk/webservices/tag/hhhliv/
Alison Gow http://blogs.liverpoolecho.co.uk/techblog/2010/07/ive-just-had-one-of.html
A few images are up on Flickr here and here.
You can view tweets from Hacks meet Hackers by searching for the #hhhliv hashtag.
Video by The Hatch available at our youtube channel.
[...] is a short film which we did for Liverpool John Moores University’ Open Labs. The Hacks Meet Hackers event took place in July 2010 in Liverpool. Take a look at Open [...]