Hacking the news again in Joburg
It’s been a quiet year for Hacks/Hackers Johannesburg so far, but we’re planning on changing that.
If you’re a journalist, a technologist, data-scientist, activist or researcher in Johannesburg and you haven’t got along to a Hacks/Hackers event yet, we’re hoping that a newly reinvigorated chapter and programme will encourage you to brave the early evening traffic over the weeks to come and help us build a stronger community for digital storytelling and civic tech in Gauteng.
We’ll be the first to admit that we’ve had a fairly sporadic year in 2017. Our meetups have been irregular and widely spaced apart, making it hard for us to attract and maintain a regular membership and keep people interested in our work.
But going into 2018, there’s several things afoot which will help us build the chapter with a more interesting programme of events that — given all that’s going on in South African politics at the moment — we think is important for Johannesburg’s tech and media community.
Firstly — and most importantly — we’ve grown our exco by another member, and I’m delighted to welcome Debbi Schultz to the team. Debbi is legendary in legal and tech journalism for her ruthless ability to organise, motivate and make stuff happen, and she’ll be working alongside Siya (Africa) and myself to make sure that when we promise an event will happen, it will.
Secondly, we’re going to be actively supporting the Code for Africa StoryLab Academy, with regular events and workshops based on newsroom training materials drawn up for the StoryLab MOOC and taught courses.
As a disclaimer, I’m a Fellow on the StoryLab programme and have helped to develop parts of it, but even if I hadn’t I’d be tremendously excited at the prospect of helping modern journalists acquire modern, digital storytelling and research skills.
And finally, we’ve just been accepted for a small grant to host an all-day event addressing the issue of fake news in South Africa which, I think you’ll agree, is one of the most pressing of our time. How can we help citizens spot the next Bell Pottinger-style propaganda before it’s too late? We’ll be confirming a date for this later this week, but ideally the event will take place ahead of the ANC’s elective conference in December (watch this space, as they say).
Personally, I can’t think of a better time for us to be doing this. Incredible works of investigative journalism, amplified via digital tools, is helping to hold leaders to South Africa to account when all other channels have failed on an unprecedented scale right now. From #GuptaGate to The President’s Keepers — and lots in between — the search for truth and honesty in SA politics is reaching a crescendo. We desperately need more journalists with digital skills and more data specialists who can help us find and tell stories than ever before.
So we’re rebooting the Joburg chapter with a new sense of purpose and, hopefully, some new members as well as old. We’ve already begun this mission — our most recent event saw the awesome Lynsey Chuttel of Quartz (the world’s best current affairs website) talk to a crowd about the Atlas for Africa toolkit for creating charts to use in stories.
And outside of the newsroom we have a pressing need for more technologists and open data enthusiasts to come together and engage in the Gauteng region. Cape Town has the amazing OpenUP, KZN has Open Data Durban, nationally there’s the Civic Tech Innovation Network, but here in the economic capital of the continent we have few bodies actively seeking to liberate public data and work to encourage our local municipality to see the potential for data transparency.
If you want to find out more, sign up for regular communications from Hacks/Hackers Johannesburg here. We’d also appreciate it if members who have been along to a meetup previously could fill in their details in that form, as we’re migrating away from Meetup for coordinating events in the future.
And if there’s an event you’d like us to put together or a subject you’d like us to address, please let us know in the comments here or join us on the Code for Africa Slack group here. Search for the Hacks-Hackers-Africa channel.
The worlds of hackers and journalists are coming together, as reporting goes digital and Internet companies become media empires.
Journalists call themselves “hacks,” someone who can churn out words in any situation. Hackers use the digital equivalent of duct tape to whip out code.
Hacker-journalists try and bridge the two worlds. Hacks/Hackers Africa aims to bring all these people together — those who are working to help people make sense of our world. It’s for hackers exploring technologies to filter and visualize information, and for journalists who use technology to find and tell stories. In the age of information overload and collapse of traditional business models for legacy media, their work has become even more crucial.
Code for Africa, the continent’s largest #OpenData and civic technology initiative, recognises this and is spearheading the establishment of a network of HacksHackers chapters across Africa to help bring together pioneers for collaborative projects and new ventures.
Follow Hacks/Hackers Africa on Twitter and Facebook and join the Hacks/Hackers Johannesburg community today.
