We did it! 40 hack presentations fitted into 2 hours. And now it’s time for a drink. Bye!
This year the participation team in Dig Dev gave an extra award for the hack they liked the most. The exciting thing about this award (other than the replacement of a trophy with a bottle of Pimms) is that it’s a commitment to get the hack into production. This prize goes to Paul and Mario with ‘Smash the trolls,’ so watch this space for a happier, more inclusive commenting experience on theguardian.com.
Finally - the BEST OVERALL HACK goes to James Pamplin with ‘The Guardian - instant’ - never be defeated from reading the guardian by a train tunnel ever again!
And the most ambitious failure award went to Alex Hern with ‘The Take Machine’.
Best Conceptual Hack went to ‘What a community needs most is trust, sweet trust’ by Simon Hildrew, Becky Gardiner and Robert Kenny.
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And the winner of most entertaining hack....GIF blocker by Stephen Wells!
And finally, Roberto Tyley has an idea to fleece the trolls. Before you comment on women’s rights, racisim, or refugees - donate to them! The trolls might still get through, but at least they’ve donated to charity!
Sam Desborough is talking us through a live demo of “Paywall Smash”. A literal brick wall in front of an article that individuals knock down to read the words behind it - complete with a fiscal model.
Mariot Chauvin and Luke Taylor help us track traffic to Apple News, adding tracking beacons to our content!
The next hack is “All equal in the eyes of the troll”. Phil McMahon and Amy Hughes have been doing some data mining over comment data from the last few days. Their hypothetical model of troll behaviour didn’t fit the actual commenting activity.
Max has been using D3 in order to create a “Map Hack” showing commuter trends across England and Wales.
Simon Hildrew is up with his hack Setting the Tone. First Comment allows authors to kick off the comment thread with a comment posted at the time of publish.
Our decisions are mostly based on spreadsheets, but they have no trace... Ken and Natalie let us share our data sources along with the data with their hack Show me the Workings!
Anton brings us custom segments in ophan - the Guardian’s analytics tool. He has added the ability to filter using custom advertising segments and therefore see their reading habits.
Swells again with Audio Commenting, literally putting user voices back into the conversation.
Chris Birchall presents some Good News... Using Google’s TensorFlow to predict how happy or sad a given article is, letting users select the experience they want and advertisers pay to appear next to the right content. Training his data set on us, it successfully predicted... Nothing! Most ambitious failure?
“Data Democratisation - Part II” continues on from Part I last hackday. Robert Chilvers wants to make it easier for the business to drill through live viewing data, analyse our successful stories and understand what users want to read.
Ever productive James presents a second hack Exploit the Fan club. James is a passionate, knowledgeable user who LOVES Roberto. He’s read 9,999,999 articles by him, and has told our editors why he’s obsessed with the author through a survey.
Presenting “6PM Video Time” is James Gorrie. Our audience data shows a big spike of video views at 6PM onwards.
He wants to capitalise on this with a “day in video” feature to see all of the - complete with interstitial advertising and skip-ability.
Chris Lloyd takes inspiration from Periscope with his hack Instant Feedback, which allows us to express our emotions on articles (love, hate, aubergine...).
Gwyn Lockett is up next with his hack: “Production flags”. The week an Oz friend of his mistook the flooding in Surrey UK for the flooding in Australia and didn’t realise until halfway through an article. This hack would make the production location of an article clearer to avoid such misunderstanding.
Paul Brown introduces his hack Comments on the Membership Event Pages, linking our content and comments relating to our events to event pages and opening discussion to attendees.
The next hack is “Jungle Matrix” by Will Franklin, Nikolaus Kommenda and Kate Saunders.
They are visualising comments, replies and trolls with a graph to make it easier for moderators to identify poor behaviour and block users.
How do we get our in-depth analysis to work in the age of social media? The answer: auto-generated analysis of socially trending content! Shaun, Jon and Jorge make automated maps and other animated visualisations which take trending material as their subject.
Simon Adcock, Kate Whalen, Paul Roberts were looking at the idea of verified commenters that have extra privileges and a badge on the site - with the aim of reducing the number of robots and trolls on the site.
They did a live demo of a SMS verification which integrates with the existing identity system.
Alex Hern has built “The Take Machine”. Using machine learning on Guardian editorial content - the take machine completes sentences. Although it’s only been learning for six hours rather than the plan of 44 hours. Which makes it hilarious and entertaining - and leads into a great pitch for the most ambitious failure award.
Alex W entertains us with cat gifs, and also turns our fronts into gifs which can be posted to messaging apps and social networks.
Regis, Joe, David and John help us focus discussion on liveblogs by giving each block it’s own thread.
The next hack is Comment Notifications. Gideon Goldberg is using AWS Lambdas, SES and SNS to send e-mails to users when their comments get replies.
Who said a hack had to be technical? Team React Hack demonstrate their idea through the art of theatre. Commenter Zac is allowed more emotions than report and recommend, and slays a troll with a cardboard sword.
The web swells wants is one that is free of enormous, juvenile GIF files. He’s made a chrome extension to only show the first frame of an animated GIF unless you click on it.
He enthusiastically tells us that the de-animator is in about 20 lines of Go Lang and sarcastically implores people to pronounce GIF with a soft G.
I’m overhearing comments that swells has secretly spent the last two days looking at cat gifs.
Pat & Zofia demonstrate their highlighter tool, tweeting, searching, reporting and commenting on highlighted phrases. Interacting with text can be done in two clicks!
Jamie and Iona are taking the web we want theme to the world of online adverts. They’ve added feedback buttons to the advertising to say whether you like or dislike a particular advert.
As a bonus the “Ad Feedback” hack tells you more about Guardian Membership.
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Mick announces himself winner of best conceptual hack before he begins... But will the voters concur? Using insight from his Membership Discovery work, it’s a conceptual hack to help users better form opinions on topics important to them.
Next up is Maria Livia Chiorean with a feature that we need and most people already think we have: shareable comments. Brilliantly simple hack - social media sharing buttons on comments as well as articles.
Emma, Fabio and Reetta hope we will all start to use our fantastic content API with their hack Beautiful Capi Query. CAPI search results are returned on a front rather than as nasty looking json.
James Pamplin has been thinking about his own reading habits and what annoys him about the Guardian website. One of those annoyances is being unable to browse it on a train in a tunnel.
Our apps do it and now with Guardian-Instant the main website can too. But we don’t know how because his two minutes of time are up.
Robert hopes that his hack Better, Faster, will serve our users better and faster... A new user helpdesk system could roll our existing systems into one.
Number five is Emmanuelle is now talking us through enabling ‘Two-Factor Authentication for SSH’. She’s built some scripts to make it super easy to enable on any given server and use those secure little six digit codes when logging into our infrastructure.
Paul and Mario present their hack Smash the Trolls. Can we encourage better discussions by setting questions upfront? Can we change commenting behaviour by offering tips on how to avoid being moderated again?
Lydia, Rich and Gareth up now up on stage presenting their hack: Guardian4Real(time).
They are asking the audience to connect to test out their real time poll participation with live feedback on screen - asking how many coffees they have consumed, find the ball on a photo and an impromptu EU referendum (remain wins! - so Guardian).
Phil presents Guardian Discover. Spotify Discover, but for stuff from the Guardian! I think we can all agree, it looks fantastic.
And we are off with the hack day presentations!
First up is the multiple award winning Stephan Fowler to get us off to a running start.
He’s taking on the challenge of introducing a paywall whilst also creating brand affinity. His approach is to make the first two thirds of an article free whilst charging regular visitors for the last third.
It is of course called “Two Thirds Free”.
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As day one draws to a close, things are getting serious...
We’ve got a crispyfi set up on a raspberry pi to control the hack day playlist via slack. A fun distraction...
So, was it a circle?
And hacking has begun!
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After an introductory talk about the theme of the two days - ‘the web we want’ from Mary Hamilton, we kicked things off with a game of human bingo. It’s been a fun way to get attendees, who come from lots of different parts of the guardian (including editorial, commercial, enterprise tech and of course Dig Dev), talking to each other about their skills and ideas.
Hack Day is Go!
The theme for this summers event is the web we want, more updates to come.
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