Hacks/Hackers Philadelphia participated in its first hackathon, with Random Hacks of Kindness, and learned that preparation and passionate team leaders can develop projects that continue beyond a fun, frenzied weekend.

Well before that December weekend, RHoK Philly organizer Michael Brennan reached out to Hacks/Hackers Philadelphia to see if we’d be interested in participating in the hackathon. At the November HHPHL meetup, Mike presented on RHoK and the group brainstormed some ideas. Two ideas gained traction in the discussion and had point people interested in building a team to work on the project.

Every day I make dozens of small decisions about what I think constitutes excellent nonprofit journalism. We all do. Editors, writers, readers, all of us. We decide what work we value with our time. What we ignore.

In that decision-making, we prioritize some principles over others. I prioritize journalism that is: useful, informative, and responsive. Luckily, this work can also create new fundraising opportunities.

Useful

• Do journalism that gives readers information they need. The content is offered in the format that best suits readers’ needs and best suits that type of information.
• Offer information in a way that is easy to understand and use.
• Connect readers directly with existing resources, scholarship, and reporting, rather than replicating that work.

Informative

Thanks to everyone who attended our second meetup on data tools and brainstorming for Random Hacks of Kindness.

We began with some mingling and free pizza. It was really encouraging to hear all the enthusiasm for this group as everyone introduced themselves. We also welcomed Dave Merrell of philly.com as a co-organizer of the group with me (Erika) and Dana Bauer of Azavea.

For the lightning talks we went from a tool to help you access data (ScraperWiki) to a tool to help make sense of messy data (Google Refine) to a tool to display data (Google Fusion Tables).

Thank you to everyone who came out to the first Hacks/Hackers Philly meetup! Over 30 people attended, and according to the sign-in sheet the hack/hacker distribution was roughly half/half. Great to see a mix of backgrounds and interests.

As promised, this blog post will give a recap of the meeting and describe our immediate next steps. We began the meeting with an overview of why we wanted to start a chapter, and then discussed what topics and meeting types would be of interest to everyone. Right away we even discussed a tool, Google Refine, that was new to some of us, and at least for me, was immediately useful to my work.

This Tuesday, journalists and technologists will gather at the first Hacks/Hackers Philly meetup. And, wow, as of right now 34 people are RSVPed. That’s incredible! It speaks to the need for a group to help connect the vibrant technology and journalism communities doing amazing work in Philadelphia, but largely working separately.

For the first meetup, we plan to have time for people to get to know one another, learn about Hacks/Hackers, and discuss how the group would like to see the chapter take shape. Do we want to build apps? Skillshare? Project night? There are some great existing projects like OpenDataPhilly that could serve as a starting point for collaboration.