Today we announce Guardian Hacks SXSW, which will kick with a two-day hack event at the guardian of the base in London on Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 February. We invite 100 developers from all over the UK and Europe to join us and build a collaborative Toolbox of hacks to help explore SXSW.
Music Hack Day's newspaper. Photo by thomasbonte on Flickr. Some rights reserved
How do you create a space for innovation? News organisations recognise that should be a priority, but it is near impossible to make time for something amorphous and elusive as innovation in pressurised, hard-pumping environment of a company, which is almost by definition, are living in the here and now. Time to play, to explore and experiment is a rare luxury.
It is also absolutely crucial if these organisations require any chance to plot a course informed through an unpredictable and risky landscape. Extending the analogy further, is it a try to imagine the course we wish to pursue-exploring ideas and opportunities that will allow that to happen. The future is not predetermined.
With that in mind will guardian Hacks SXSW project gives us a window of time and the opportunity for experimentation and play. Our hackers will help define the challenges, they want to solve, but these are some starting points:
• What would a collaborative publishing platform appearance?
• Is there a visual way to navigate related content?
• What is the best way to aggregate video and audio? Is a video kind of Wordle possible?
• What is the best way to aggregate and curate the best coverage of the event from across the Internet?
• How can the tone and mood of an article represented visually?
• How can comments and backchannels for discussion be represented visually?
• You can press the new nostalgia for Print? Can you hack printed? How can the personalised, location-aware and breaking-news Web be represented in Print, and how can it be combined with the best items in long form, exquisite tangible printed newspapers?
Developers, designers and journalists, to join us in February will have their own separate ideas about how online editorial could be deconstructed, redesigned and rebuilt. This is where the fun begins.
Hacking with cardboard by last years Science Hack Day. Or you could even hack with the Internet! Photo by adactio on Flickr. Some rights reserved
This is not about creating hacks to the custodian; We could have held an internal hack, if we had wanted to do. But we've invited developers from all over the United Kingdom and some of the best news organisations in Europe to come and work together on these ideas, and the results are for any and all to use and enjoy.
Before you reach for the parameter ' filter out SXSW '-is this not an obsession with SXSW. The intensity of the Conference, delegates and subject-as well as the unusual mixture of art, culture, tech and lite-business-safe make for fruitful playing fields. But what we really want to leave Austin with a Starter Kit for some tools that work for certain types of coverage, perhaps some seeds of ideas will inform how to cover major events in different ways and a better understanding of what is possible and practical when developers and journalists work together.
If you want to join us, sign up here.
Hack event is sponsored by Google, which means that we can offer the award-winning dev flights, hotel and a platinum pass for the entire SXSW festival from 11 to 20 March.
Science Hack night. Photo by WordRidden on Flickr. Some rights reserved
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