Keystrokes :.

So this post is about the EU Hackathon 2011 I participated on 8-9 Nov, 2011.
I’m not going to write too much about how cool such experience was, although it is the very first thing that comes to my mind when I think about it: having the chance to work with a kick-ass team, full focused, with limited time, on something related to an important topic, next to other ~50 guys coming from 17 different countries all over the world with the same purpose… it has been just amazing. Not to mention the whole nice context: the hackathon had its opening and closing ceremonies inside the EU Parliament in Bruxelles and the coding session in the Google’s office (kind of a Googleplex).

But let’s keep this as a story. The whole thing started for me on Twitter, when @Giuliano84 RTed something about the event and I replied something like "Are you going?", then he replied "That’s different: we are going.". It didn’t take much effort to find other potential members for the team: he shared the event through the Indigeni Digitali network (an italian group counting 3000+ heads, literally connecting digital based people in the country), and it was plenty of people willing to apply.

Luckily, some sort of "natural selection" ran its course, otherwise it’d quite difficult to choose the people to group with. I didn’t really realized how, but we ended up with a really strong team: it was Giuliano Iacobelli, myself, Matteo Collina, Claudio Squarcella and David Funaro.

I already knew Claudio because we studied together at Roma Tre university. I also knew Matteo through InnovactionLab Alumni network (InnovactionLab is the most amazing learning-by-doing program in our country for young people with entrepreneurship flowing through their veins), although I never had the chance to meet him in person. Instead I met David just once before, at one of the aperitifs organized by the Indigeni Digitali, and he totally turned out to fit well into the team. So we applied for the Global Transparency Track (GTT) and we got selected for the participation to the event! The Hackathon website changed by now, but the track was something like this:

This track focuses on the accessibility of information on the Internet. The purpose is to use the data made available by the Google Transparency Report or other sources like Twitter and research undertaken by groups like, for example, the OpenNet Initiative and Herdict to create new visualisations showing the consequences of censorship and barriers to the free flow of information online, and ensuring users and policy makers get a fuller picture how the Internet is shaped by laws and other government actions.

The other track was “Internet Quality Track (IQT)”, related to visualization of broadband measurements. Hashtag for the hackathon was ♯h4t, for “Hacking for Transparency”, since that was the topic both tracks were related to. Honestly, I was also quite excited to meet the other participants, after seeing their bio. On Nov 7th, Giuliano wrote a post (in Italian) about the Indigeni Digitali Team going to the Hackathon.

So the Nov8th came fast and at 6:30 AM we were on our way to the airport to get to Bruxelles. Probably going to sleep like three hours before was not that brilliant idea, but you know… I got stuff to do We arrived in Bruxelles few hours later where Herman from the organization was waiting for us. We had a coffee at Starbucks (it’s never too soon to start with caffeine) and after a while we were lead to the hotel. In the mean time, we started meeting some of the other participants, activity continued during the sandwich lunch at the hotel. Here is a picture of our (sill) relaxed faces.

Finally, like at 3:00 PM, people from the organization showed us the way to the EU Parliament, where we took place for the opening ceremony. Here is a picture of part of our team (left to right: David, Claudio, and myself).

Some scenes from the opening are also featured in the video made during the event, embedded at the top of this post. Other videos are available from the video gallery on the EUHackathon website.
After the opening ceremony, we were taken to the Google’s offices, were an open-space half-floor was reserved for the event. Each team had a table assigned, and there was any sort of thing we could use around: paperboards, bean-bags, table soccer, food (I mean, really, A LOT of food), coffee, and the really cool thing in the picture below . Honestly I didn’t even had a camera with me (the pictures you see are mostly taken with a smartphone), since I know I would not have much time to take pictures, but if you want to take a look to the nice environment where we had the actual coding session, you can check out the pictures made by photographers during the event, which are available on picasa.

So we started. We already had an idea about what to do and how to proceed: as specified in the application, we were going to build a tool capable to visualize some meaningful information extracted from the data. In the end we went for a graph-like representation of the countries blocking a given website through a set of Internet service Providers (ISPs) according to the reports provided by one of the data sources. We also included country-specific and website-specific aggregated information, and we had in mind to further include the option to show how such graph evolved through time, but we had only enough time to get the first thing working.

We divided the work in tasks, we self-assigned such tasks and, well, we started coding. A nice thing was that, in our team, we didn’t have many shared knowledge about the same technologies, so basically we used several different languages, libraries, tools, and online services. You can see a list below in the screencast, or in the project website in the "technologies" section, which features "We strongly believe in having fun developing applications, so we used the largest feasible set of technologies (which most of us didn’t even know about)." Still, somehow we managed to put all these things together and created a really nice result.

With our tasks assigned, we did the work in iterations (about ~40 min each). After each iteration, we had a very quick break and we synched with each other about the status of each task development, we agreed on new interfaces when required, and we helped each other if something was blocking someone. I have to say, it was really impressive how fast we got to work well together. With the rush of things ongoing (and for myself the proper music playlist in my earphones) we coded almost restless for the whole night. Truth to be told, when it was something like 4:00 or 5:00 AM of Nov 9th, someone started giving signs of exhaustion

When the daylight was almost back, all of us did take one or two hours of rest in turns. And I really mean just one or two hours. Still, our team spot was never left unattended. Smoothly, we were back to work by early morning, with little surprises at each awakening as side dish .

(AN: this is obviously a joke.. Matteo is one of the most skilled and crazy enough tech guys I had the chance to meet and didn’t really mess anything up… I just woke up and saw him dealing with something completely out of schedule )

So, while we had been focusing more on getting things done for the backend of our tool during the first part, we spent most of the time in the second part arranging and coding the frontend presentation. In the days after, someone pointed out that our tool was not really self-explanatory in terms of communication for the meaning of the displayed information, but the thing is we kind of had to choose where was best to put our effort in the given time, and we choose what we were selected for.

We presented the result to the jury in the mid afternoon of Nov 9th. Our tool was far from being complete, but the very basic skeleton was there, it was working, and online . By the time you read this post there’s the chance that it still is online! Try to check it out at SharpNod.es. In any case, you can find a screencast of the tool we developed below.

As you can see, it allows you to choose a website and a set of countries, and visualize how the website was unaccessible from such countries according to our data, through a set of their ISPs. Right from the webpage:

SharpNod.es makes easier for you to understand the underlying information about censorship, obtainable from combined data from multiple sources. Our goal is to provide a meaningful visualization capable of giving a picture of the entities of interest at a glance.

Websites can be sources of empowering information and means for people communications. SharpNod.es keeps track of websites frequently reported as unreachable with supposed cause of censorship, and is capable to show a comparison of how their condition is different among countries and their ISPs.

We aggregated data from multiple data sources to show countries’ behavior that has been fetched from the OpenNet Initiative and from the Google Transparency Report. Specific reports about unreachable websites have been retrieved from Herdict, and websites have also been categorized by topic using keywords provided by people like you on Delicious.com.

I have to say, regardless for the unreached milestones and ton of problems faced and (partially) solved, we were pretty satisfied and proud of our work. We took a long break, had some food, and a picture to our (really uniform) “technological stack” (i.e., a pile of macbooks ).

Soon, we had to leave the google office, and go back to the EU Parliament for the closing ceremony. Here we are again at the EU Parliament after the coding session.

A short panel took place about net neutrality, transparency and more: among the others, we had the pleasure to listen to Amira Yahyaoui (@Mira404), Arturo Filastò (@hellais), and a recorded speech from the Vice-Presidents of the European Commission, Neelie Kroes.

At the end of the panel, ranking for the competition was announced. You can check out the results for the Global Transparency Track here and those for the Internet Quality Track here (btw, congratulations to all the winners ). As you might notice, we hit the 3rd place . Below is a picture of the nice prize we have been given!

…and of course a group picture taken right out of the room where the closing ceremony took place!

Do you think we were tired enough to go back to the hotel and sleep for 14 hours? No way!

Long story short, we didn’t had much rest that night too, since our plane back to Rome was around 6:00 AM on Nov 10th. A special mention is definitively deserved by Giuliano, who had the promptness to catch the cab wheel when the driver almost fell asleep on the way to the airport, basically saving us from a lot of bother or worst.

…And that’s it!
Again, an amazing experience, I’m really glad I had the chance to participate, to get to know interesting people and to take part in what I hope is the first edition of an impressive event.

Cheers!

PS: I forgot to say, also the Google European Public Policy Blog commented the #h4t in a blog post.
PPS: Many of the pictures here are borrowed from David Funaro, I hope he doesn’t mind