A more than fully booked Hackathon started with a breakfast at the Infomaker office kitchen. Participants from media companies, journalists, Infomaker, Newscycle, wire provider, and image providers from all over the world joined us in Kalmar and the Grävseminariet. Preparations had been made by the Infomaker team making sure that the hackers had access to relevant environments and API’s to use during the Hackathon. On-site was one of the providers of Acta Publica API, a service that provides a public access document archive, hoping to support hacks to make journalists doing research in a more efficient way.
People were teaming up and we filled the Gota Media house with 12 teams shaping up their ideas and started to discuss, making sketches. It was a comfortable feeling in Gota Media lunch and lecture area. The coffee machine provided us with 238 cups of coffee and that is on top of the coffee we got from the prepared coffee in thermoses.
Grävseminariet
The second day we were in the conference venue Kalmarsalen and now we were among all the journalists in the conference Grävseminariet. The place gets full of new questions of what a Hackathon is. The Grävseminarium is a conference for investigative journalism and for two days there are seminars, workshops in investigative data journalism, collaborative work on investigative projects, meetings for journalism lecturers and added to that was the Hackathon.
A hackathon is in general an event where developers meet to program and explore ideas, concepts or test a prototype by programming. In this Hackathon in Kalmar, the focus is mainly on journalism and investigative journalism. To increase the possibility for collaboration and sharing of experiences with investigative journalists and media actors we had an email channel open for posting of ideas. You could have your own idea you want to develop or get inspiration from an investigative idea posted to us. When the Hackathon started we had a couple of journalists participating in the Hackathon. One important thing to have on a Hackathon is a sticker. We had the "investigative hat"-sticker 2019, posted on the windows as a very nice removable sticker.
Preparations and time for the demo
The preparations of the demo, which Peter Månsson held together with the teams, started off Friday at noon with tech test at the conference hall. Eleven teams were preparing demos and photos of all the teams were taken in the very busy Hackathon programming room, where the last things were added to the hacks and the demos.
Links to the presentation and the demos
Links to the demos:
Grävseminariet and Infomaker introduction
Infomaker and TV4 Nyheterna - A grävmaskin (a kind of power shovel) for the Acta Publica API
Text analysis of judgments
Infomaker - PowerTools for the Dashboard
Stampen Group - Simplifying the creation of long reads
Ritzau and Ritzau Scanpix - Search and use Ritzau content in the Infomaker Writer
North Media AS - FotoStation PhotoDrop to the Infomaker Writer
Gota Media - Person Finder
Infomaker backend - Real-time visualization of article data
FotoWare - Use of reverse image search to verify the source and usage
iMatrics - Predict the impact of an article, before it’s published
Knowing company- Talk and chat with your content!
(videos are hopefully added to all presentations and are coming up soon)
Download links
Download the Grävmaskin here.