Hacks/Hackers London is excited to announce that we have some new funding from the Google New Initiative

Google News Initiative has renewed its support to Hacks/Hackers London to continue our activities — and offer more support to our community affected by the economic uncertainty caused by Covid-19.

2020 has been a challenging year. Our lives, health, work, habits — everything has been affected by a global pandemic.

In our little world, after having to cancel our in-person March event that we were due to hold at our regular home of Twitter HQ, we quickly adapted and moved our events online. It’s been fun and rewarding to see so many members of our community participating and engaging with us digitally. In fact, we’ve expanded our reach and have been joined by people based all over the world.

But, a little step back: for anyone who doesn’t know, Hacks/Hackers London is a community of journalists (hacks) and technologists (hackers) who meet regularly — in real life and digitally — to rethink the future of journalism, with particular attention to what happens at the intersection of journalism and tech. We’ve been running monthly events since 2010 and we’re lucky to have a very loyal and engaged community.

As volunteer organisers and directors, we rely on the generosity of the venues that host us (including Twitter, Google and Facebook) and snatched time away from our busy day jobs to pull the events together.

We have had some success in bringing in beer money from our supportive sponsors and the ‘late bird’ ticket sales.

In April 2018 we received funding from the Google News Initiative, which allowed us to hire a part time event producer (hi Liz!).

We’re now really excited to say that GNI has extended its support, renewing funding to allow us to sustain our activities until spring 2021.

The renewed partnership will allow us to:

• Keep running our monthly events programme and traditional online resources, which include our social media accounts, Medium publication and YouTube channel, where you can re-watch all our talks.
• Invest in activities tied to creating opportunities for our community, especially those directly affected by the economic uncertainty caused by Covid-19.
• Expand the activities where we facilitate support and personal connections between the HHLdn members.

During these uncertain times we are even more committed to expanding our service to the community and creating more opportunities for connections, mentorship and initiatives that support “pay-it-forward” asks and offers between members of our community.

The funding will allow us to continue and expand activities we have run the past year, like the exploration of parental leave policies and workshops for parents returning to work, and our focus on career development for women, through the partnership with My So Called Career.

We’re looking forward to continuing to think about the future with all of you.

Federica, Jeremy, Sarah and Cassie

HHLdn directors

“We’re supporting the team behind Hacks/Hackers London to help them continue their work and pivot their monthly meetups to online events — securing a unique space for vital collaboration between journalists and technologists. We’re excited to see them experiment with new ways to strengthen mentoring, support parents returning to work, and keep this community connected” — Matt Cooke, Google News Initiative