So I’m back from Berlin and in the US. I met some amazing people at the Knight Mozilla Hacktoberfest, a 4 day hackathon with people from all over the world and from all walks of life. It was the most fun I’ve had all year and I’ve made some friends for life. The project ideas were brilliant and the discussion inspiring. To have the news partners (Al Jazeera, BBC, Guardian, BostonGlobe and Zeit) be active participants was a great move on Mozillla’s part. To have big news organisations look outside for ideas and solutions shows they realise news is out there, not solely within structured organisations.
I remember first seeing a blog post about this partnership process and thinking: “Wow, I wish I could apply. Shame I’m not a developer”. I went along to the application process out of curiosity and thankfully my creative juices got the best of me.
Even then, my scepticism told me not to expect any part of my MozNewsLab pitch, the Big Picture, to be built in 4 days and so I made a little side project, MoJoNewsBot. On the third day of the hackathon I presented my data stream connected chat bot via the Big Discussion part of Big Picture. Thanks to an amazing participant, David Bello, we got a conference with website submission, approval and iframe designed and coded in two days. I only found out before presenting that he is in management at a university in Colombia and doesn’t code for a living. I was truly blown away by how an idea; developed, designed and pitched, can be made reality owing solely to the good will of someone who “plays” with code.
You can keep track of both projects, Big Picture and MoJoNewsBot on the Mozilla wiki. I’m looking to make the first and third part of Big Picutre with further help and advice from the participants. Thanks to the magic of GitHub and DotCloud, I have a local version of Big Picture running on my computer. I’m going to learn JavaScript and add to/clean up Big Picture before I present it formally on my blog. As for my chat bot, I need to add error messages and tidy up the code a bit. Then I’ll relocate him from the #botpark to #HacksHackers on IRC. During events in the US I’m going to add more modules with interesting data for journalists to reference.
To all my viewers, whoever you are, I recommend you hop on the MoJo bandwagon next year. It’ll be the ride of your life! Almost as eventful as driving the ScraperWiki digger 😉
Data Miner UK 