I just returned from a Seattle Hacks/Hackers event at Groundwire’s office in downtown Seattle. If you aren’t familiar with Hacks/Hackers, it’s mission is to try and connect hacks (journalists) together with hackers (developers) to work on interesting problems. Because of my journalism and developer background, it’s a group where I feel right at home.

Tonight’s event was a brainstorming session for the Knight-Mozilla Challenge. The night felt just like a hack-a-thon, but without the coding part. After some inspirational demos by Vectorform and Grist we broke into small teams and tried to come up with interesting ideas in the categories of Video, User Engagement and HTML5.

I was a part of a team of four. We decided to explore all the themes at once instead of picking a single idea like the other groups and continued to exchange ideas. Lots of cool ideas were thrown around, but when our time was up we had the basic premise of a contextual video player. We also lacked any of the pretty visuals that the other teams had for mock user interfaces. As a result when it was time to decide our team name, I suggested “Free Candy” to distract from our lacking materials. It stuck.

Later, while representing Free Candy I presented our idea, the first of the 6 teams.

“…we call it living video”, I explained as I ended my 3 minute pitch. I tried to rally the audience behind an idea that would allow dynamic data to be presented along side existing videos. Essentially it would add a dynamic layer of current content to old static videos.

In the end it was an informative and fun event and I’d do it again. “Living Video” may even grow legs someday at a future hack-a-thon. So stay tuned.

This was the 3rd Seattle Hack/Hackers event so far (been to all of them), and I like the direction it’s headed. Each event adds a new element, some fresh new faces and builds a stronger community.

Thanks to Sharon Chan and Karen Johnson for organizing these great events. I’ll be at the next one and I encourage you to do the same.