Hello friends, long time no communication. Our apologies.
We haven’t forgotten about you or about running Hacks/Hackers events. This year has been another doozy, as I’m sure you can appreciate.
We’re in the early stages of planning for next year and we hope to have more great meet-ups in 2022 - including many more face-to-face events! In a quick re-cap, in the past 12 months we have:
Hosted five events in total, three of those were in-person
Had gender parity with our speakers - six men and six women
Had our first Indigenous speaker
Another very big thank-you to all our speakers, and a warm embrace to all of you who either joined us online or IRL throughout the year.
It was a smaller 12 months, but there were still interesting chats and plenty of new ideas.
As part of our planning for next year, we’re keen to hear from you about how we’re doing, what you’d like to learn more about, and even what you think about our name.
We’ll be sending a survey out before the end of the year, so please let us know your thoughts!
ICYMI
(Some interesting stuff from the internet)
✋ This super-impressive Auslan interactive from SBS is among the finalists in the Walkley’s Innovation category this year
🎧 Podcasts are just for listening, right? Vox is having a go at an “immersive transcript experience”
🎓 The educational pathways of our federal members of parliament, visualised
About last month…*
(*Well, last time we met up)
In July, (after one lockdown but before we had another one?) we got together at QUT’s The Cube for a one-off recreation of Grania Kelly’s awe-inspiring visualisation, Trace, Touch, Feel The Brisbane River.
She partnered with QUT's VISER team to create the immersive experience and both Grania and Gavin Winter, who leads the VISER team, chatted to us about the work.
Here’s some of what they covered:
Grania described the work as a way of seeing the world and visualising change. It uses the landscape to tell stories, and allows people to understand their stories by studying the landscape
Gavin said his team had the technical gear but didn’t have a narrative. They knew they had a journey but needed a lens through which to explore it
He said the haptic feature was perfect for the project because it feels like water
Data was, as you might expect, the hardest thing to wrangle
What other journeys or stories might a project like this be suited to? Grania suggested the Great Barrier Reef and helping to educating people about it, and another city might be Adelaide - which doesn’t have a river, but does have landscape
What’s next? Getting people to contribute back to the story, and being able to access that data
About us
Hacks/Hackers is an international grassroots journalism organisation with dozens of chapters and thousands of members across four continents. Our mission is to create a network of journalists (“hacks”) and technologists (“hackers”) who rethink the future of news and information.
Hacks/Hackers Brisbane is run by Quants & Quills.