'You can commit an act of journalism by sitting through and helping out with whatever skillset you have, because you're trying to unearth something that's important and relevant to people in your community'
Shortly after its launch last spring, the Bureau Local's small team began investigating voter power ahead of the 2017 UK election, and organised a hack day in five cities in the UK to enable people in those communities to dig into data that had previously been unavailable at a local level.
On 3 February, they held their second hack day in London, Leeds, Newcastle, Manchester and Coventry, to look into local budget proposals and planned cuts. More than 160 people from various backgrounds and with different levels of expertise participated, and almost 200 people took part in the Slack group set up to discuss the data and share findings and story leads.
In this week's podcast, we speak to Megan Lucero, director of the Bureau Local, about how the team set up and managed such a large collaboration, and some of the challenges they faced in the process.
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