Hacks to pair up with hackers at new one-day event

Journalists are to pair up with online developers at a sold out one-day event led by ScraperWiki, the new web platform for publishing data.

A mix of some of the UK's best known developers and journalists from major media organisations will come together at a 'hackday' in London on 29 January. The event will be held at Francis House.

Richard Pope, from ScraperWiki, said he had heard lots of people talk about "data driven journalism" but hadn't seen many concrete examples.

Pope, who has run government data-related hackdays in the past, told Journalism.co.uk he thought it would be interesting "to see what would happen if we applied it to journalism".

"Plus we think ScraperWiki will be a really useful tool for journalists and developers and we want to see how they use it."

Small teams of developers and journalists are to work together on a project that they will present at the end of the day.

"This might be a story, a visualisation of data, a small web application or just a headline discovery. They can use the pre-release version of ScraperWiki or any other tools they like to achieve this," said Pope.

"Journalists understand what makes a good story, and developers understand what is possible from a given dataset - how it can be transformed or combined to tell new stories. We also want to expose each group to how the other works".

Journalism.co.uk will report from the Hacks and Hackers day on 29 January.

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