FRIDAY, JUNE 22
9:30am - 5:30pm: ScraperWiki Code Bootcamp
9:30 - 10:30am General overview for journalists
11:00am - 1:00pm 2 hour python work-shop/tutorial
2:00-4:00pm Liberate the data: Apply what you’ve learned
4:15-5:15pm Q&A session complex data scraping
ScraperWiki, a Knight News Challenge winner for 2011 will run a day long coding boot-camp on Friday June 22nd in the SF Chronicle building. The first hour will be suitable for Journalists who would like a high level overview of the value of scraping data to create data-driven stories and with example stories created in ScraperWiki for US & UK media organizations.
This will be followed by a 2 hour python work-shop/tutorial run by Thomas Levine (@thomaslevine) data scientist and advocate. They will cover things like identifying good targets for webscraping and navigating the complexity of different types of web pages. Attendees will create their own scrapers.
The objective will be to get the data into a structured format, and join it with data from another source. If time allows we will also try to encourage people to do further analysis. In the afternoon we will invite all participants to liberate some data which we will identify in the morning session. In the last hour, Thomas will run a Q&A session to help people with the more complex aspects of getting data including scraping PDFs.
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, JUNE 23-24 NewsHack Day Hackathon
Saturday, June 23
9:00 - 9:45am Check in, and breakfast
10:00- 11:00am Welcome and lightening talks
11:00 - 12:45 pm Teams form up, hacking starts
12:45 - 1:30pm Lunch
1:00 - 2:30pm Stanford’s d.school design session
Get a fast, easy-to-apply foundation in “design thinking” a human-centered, prototype-driven process for innovation. We’ll run through a quick design cycle that will help you: communicate with collaborators, expand your innovation potential, fail fast and cheap, and have a damn good time while doing it. Instructors: Caroline O’Connor, storyteller-in-chief at the Stanford d.school and David Hendee, Director of Design at Carbon Five, an agile dev shop.
2:00 - 6:00pm Hack!
6:00 - 7:00pm Dinner and socialize
10:00pm Doors close, but spend the night!
Sunday, June 24
8:00 - 10:00am Breakfast. Hacking commences.
1:00 - 2:00pm Lunch
3:05 Hack demonstrations begin
4:30 Judges deliberate
5:00 Winners announced
5:20 pm Go home proud!
The NewsHack Day event format is taking a “hackathon as newsroom” approach. We’ll have a digital ticker tape of ongoing projects and ideas streaming during the event allowing any team to scan the project landscape and work together. Editors will help teams work out any problems. It’s intended to quickly generate, mock up, test and share ideas over the weekend, while ensuring the maximum collaboration and exchange of ideas. The final products are intended to solve problems facing journalists while reporting, producing, curating or communicating information, or telling a story that has not been told. These proof-of-concept examples will be turned into more refined tools/stories for journalists and others to improve after the event.
The Hub SOMA
