Journalists, designers, and developers collide at Hacktoberfest in Berlin, Germany.

Last week I worked from the Betahaus, an innovation and startup center in the heart of Berlin. With multiple floors full of startups and a reputation for giving ideas and communities a place to grow, the Betahaus was a fitting location for the Mojo Hackfest, a.k.a. Hacktoberfest.

Hacktoberfest was the culmination of an entire summer of collaborative creativity aimed at producing open source solutions to newsroom challenges. The purpose of Hacktoberfest was to bring great minds together, build community, discuss the future of journalism in the digital age, and crank out some open source applications.

Curious updates

I spent most of Hacktoberfest working with Chicago developer Tathagata Dasgupta to create the input functionality of Curious. Realizing that our project shared common themes with Cole Gillespie’s Finden, we joined forces with Cole to create features that enable users to submit and find specific events based upon time and location. Cody Shotwell (creator of IncentivEyes) designed the user interface and helped us think through several usability issues.

We also received help from Laurian Gridinoc, Chris Keller, Nicola Hughes, and Saleem Khan.

We still have some bugs to fix on the input side, and some features to implement on the output side. I plan to continue working on the project in the coming weeks. I am especially interested in creating a mobile version of the application, which we believe is the most practical use case for this particular project.

To learn more, you can fork our project on Github, see our project presentation, check out our wiki, and try the original interactive prototype for Curious.

Contact us on Twitter at @trinachi, @tathagata, @theCole, and @codyshotwell.

Other projects

On Day 2, I spent most of the day helping Mark Boas with front end needs (HTML, CSS and a bit of JS) for Hyperaudio Pad, a tool for assembling media from hypertranscripts.

I also reserved a lot of time for connecting with other participants, learning about their projects, and figuring out how I can help. In the coming weeks, I plan to work with Dan Schultz and others on the Meta Meta Project, particularly around design and front end needs for the project website. I would also like to continue helping Mark with Hyperaudio Pad. If anyone else would like to request help with a #moznewslab project, just give me a shout.

Aside from the projects, I had a blast connecting with more than twenty talented journalists and developers from around the globe. I feel inspired and blessed to be a part of such a dedicated, creative, and passionate group. Together, we are building a community and building a movement for open source newsrooms.

I want to send my appreciation and gratitude to The Knight Foundation, Mozilla, the project organizers, the news partners, the open source movement, and the collection of incredible people who are bringing these projects to life.

Thank you.