In the last year you’ve built a bit of code that someone else needs. Buried deep in your github is a half week of work, doomed to repeat itself by newsroom developers just like you, over and over. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Dedup the world and come to the inaugural hack swap. Think of it as a flea market of code, this session is designed to encourage sharing of code bits nearly great and small.
We’ll take early submissions and organize a handful of lightning demos of open-source code ready to share today and lead a chat with other devs and journo coders about your most nearly-there project. We’ll also write up everyone’s OS code with short synopses and links for a future Source post.
Come be part of the news nerd sharing economy.
An awesome list with a sense of purpose!
Many of us work in small teams or alone in our newsrooms. All of us rely on shared code to make us faster and better at what we do.
We want to help diversify the scale and community of open source sharing in journalism. Everyone can contribute their bit. Whether it's a few lines of bash to ease a public data import to a new framework, we think sharing code, especially nearly-great and small code, adds to the overall health of journalism and, by extension, of democracy.
Seriously, we said that once.
How you can participate
Send a pull request to this repo with your awesome news hack as per our contributor guide and come to the Hack Swap session at NICAR 2017 to tell others about your awesome hack and what it do.
What kinds of projects should be here
Simply put: We're looking for code that clearly enables journalism.
What that means is open to welcome debate, but here are some ins and outs we have in mind:
In
Couple lines of bash that help process election data
JavaScript library that helps present responsive charts
Likely out
A React plugin that renders an awesome date picker
Code closely tied to a specific story that can really only be used to replicate the same story
Datakit is a pluggable command-line tool for managing the life cycle of data projects. The Associated Press Data Team uses Datakit to auto-generate project skeletons, archive and share data on Amazon S3, and other routine tasks.
A NodeJS library for reading and writing data plus some handy file system utilities. Supports csv, tsv, json, yaml, dbf as well as custom formats and delimeters.
A simple utility for SQL-like joins with Json, GeoJson or dbf data in Node, the browser and on the command line. Also creates join reports so you can know how successful a given join was.
A lightweight Python script that fetches data from a Google spreadsheet, transforms to JSON, then optionally commits a data file to a GitHub repo. Suitable for dropping into projects as a task for cron or Slackbot trigger.
Our newsroom graphics appliance. Lets us develop and tweak chart templates easily alongside reporters, publish embeddable interactive or static charts to AWS and quickly build chart types using any third party libs we like.
Jekyll-style YAML front matter offers a useful way to add arbitrary, structured metadata to text documents, regardless of type. This is a small package to load and parse files (or just text) with YAML front matter.
