Media Party Africa is hosted by the continent’s largest data journalism and civic technology federation, Code for Africa, in partnership with Hacks/Hackers Africa. Together, we’re gathering some of the world’s most exciting civic technologists, digital journalists and other social justice watchdogs from across the world for three days of workshops and talks.
We have speakers confirmed from Vox, ProPublica, ESPN, Buzzfeed Labs, Quartz, Huffington Post, Zeit Investigativ, Google, Jigsaw, First Draft News, the Gates Foundation, the Mozilla OpenNews Fellowships, and many more, talking everything from drone and sensor journalism, to how they’re pioneering 360˚and VR journalism, investigative technologies, geojournalism, verification, chat apps and the rise of the bots.
THIS SCHEDULE WILL BE UPDATED AS NEW SPEAKERS SIGN ON: PLEASE CHECK BACK FOR CHANGES.
How mobile is changing everything
Mobile phones have taken over the world, in a way perhaps that no new technology every has. Coupled with the internet and wireless broadband, they have radically disrupted news and journalism.
This mobile device is increasingly defining our new digital world. How do we keep up with the SnapChats of the world? How do we evolve journalism from the age of the newspaper to the mobile age; where the consumer is social media-savvy and likely to create their own content. Citizen journalism is just being in the right place at the wrong time ... with a smartphone camera.
The new innovateAFRICA Fund is offering media pioneers on the continent $1 million in support for leapfrog technologies or digital innovation.
The support programme offers a combination of seed funding, technology support and expert mentorship. It is open to both mainstream media organisations and individual innovators.
Project proposals that focus on strengthening audience engagement with African civic media are of particular interest, along with improved models for digital news distribution, and initiatives that explore new revenue models for African storytelling.
An African solar powered mobile cinema that fits in a box, that can screen everywhere & anywhere, taking media where it matters.
Turning solar power into social impact, we take media to diverse communities with limited access diverse content. We have screened to 6000 direct audience members since 2013, in South Africa, Zambia and Zanzibar and we are passionate about community dialogue that promotes local active citizenship - the screenings become a soapbox for networking and exchange. We focus on health, environment and political advocacy initiatives, producing and screening media content & powerful films, through partnerships with the likes of Green Peace, The Childrens' Radio Foundation, Open Society Foundations, The Right2Know Campaign & Red Bull Amaphiko to foster audience engagement whilst celebrating innovative and immersive forms of storytelling.
Why using a map to visualise data is (almost) always a bad idea.
To stay safe in a world rife with digital threats, and to be a responsible journalist, you need to change your habits. And when you do, you will protect yourself and your sources better. It's not complicated. It's not unreasonable. And please: you need to start doing it now.
In this session the attendees will learn how to enrich stories with VR experiences without the help of developers using open source tools based on web standards. This experiences can be distributed as websites or embed as widgets and are ready for headsets like the Oculus Rift and the Google Cardboard. The presented tools includes MozVR A-Frame and GuriVR (gurivr.com), developed as part of my Knight-Mozilla fellowship.
Let’s change your security settings right now.
In this workshop you'll walk through principles of mobile security, laptop and desktop computers plus protecting accounts online - how to keep resting data safe and active data protected. Bring along your digital gear (if it's portable).
Digital Censorship: Protecting yourself from DDoS attacks
DDoS attacks have emerged as a formidable threat to newsrooms around the globe. They're easy to launch, costly to defend against and can harm journalists, newspapers and readers alike. They're used as a"digital protest" targeted at newspapers and human rights organizations to stifle freedom of speech. Project Shield, a free, DDoS protection service from Jigsaw and Google, aims to stop that.
We're calling it the "Rock the Cache_ Bar" party.
We have limited room, so it's first come, first served. There are 100 tickets available, and you have to register here.
It's at the unfortunately named Biergarten, 110 Bree Street, Cape Town.
And it's from 7pm - 10pm, Friday 21.
You have to have your white MPA wristband to get in.
Featuring DJ Waxon and DJ Mighty - funk, soul, jazz, hip hop, afrobeat. All the good stuff.
Food and drink on Omidyar and Code for Africa.
In this workshop, I'll talk about how I joined Vox Media in the midst of a mission change and how we spun up the Storytelling Studio to pivot and push our storytelling further. How do you kick off a great collaboration? How do you avoid making bad internet? How do you make hard decisions together?
Learn about threat modeling (the "who, what, where, when, why, and how" of security), the metadata you leave behind as you do your work, and ways to help improve your "security hygiene" in the real world.
The role of fact checking in providing citizens with information they can use to make decisions and how the PesaCheck initiative in Kenlya has helped spark an interest in fact checking from media and citizens alike.
A presentation on the principles behind Quartz's journalism and how our editorial focus and values adapt with each platform we live in. It will also address why Africa is an important part of our global news focus.
Digital Censorship: Protecting yourself from DDoS attacks
DDoS attacks have emerged as a formidable threat to newsrooms around the globe. They're easy to launch, costly to defend against and can harm journalists, newspapers and readers alike. They're used as a"digital protest" targeted at newspapers and human rights organizations to stifle freedom of speech. Project Shield, a free, DDoS protection service from Jigsaw and Google, aims to stop that. We will do a deep dive on DDoS, the technical infrastructure of Project Shield and help publishers apply and understand how to get their site protected. Workshop will also briefly cover other security topics for journalists.
Virtual Reality is everywhere but it is a confusing space right now. This workshop will focus on 360 videos and how they can be produced quickly and relatively cheaply. It will also situate 360 video in the broader context of VR and go over some of the equipment and approaches currently available for journalists and storytellers. Finally, it will look at the challenges around distribution of VR and 360 video, particularly in Africa.
Come with your smartphone and laptop and learn how to secure your work with popular messaging and encryption tools. (Note: If you are using a corporate laptop, you must have the ability to install software to get the most out of this workshop!)
Turning problems into products.
Learn about free and open tools for enabling HTTPS on your website and allowing your readers to access your content even it they are offline or under bad connectivity conditions. These tools are free and you can use them to improve your users experience and privacy online.
Using Design Thinking to help solve daily problems. This workshop is for kids aged 6-13 years.
Data journalism projects are usually developed by multi-disciplinary teams. Journalists, designers and developers work together and build data-driven stories. But to engage larger communities and have impact, data journalism projects can be run collaboratively by multiple newsrooms and distributed teams. This session will showcase some cross-European data journalism projects – such as The Migrants' Files and Generation E – explain their methodologies and show how this could be applied to run pan-African data journalism projects.
Where's Wazi? From the fun: Find out the best place to look for partners of you are single, to the serious understand what inequality really looks like. Not enough? We'll also show you how to spot Churnalism and find out who has real power in the news.
