Hacking for your digital rights
The day was all about planning and prototyping hacks to help defend digital rights directly, raise awareness of ORG’s issues, support our campaigns with evidence and make ORG more accessible to everyone. It was also a great way to bring together and celebrate our technical community, which has gone from strength to strength this year.
Here’s a run-down of the hacks, ideas and prototypes people came up with on the day:
- A game that raises awareness of digital-rights issues, extended at the hack day to include live data from our events calendar project
- A prototype system for automating Subject Access Requests under the Data Protection Act
- A javascript feature to display results live as they come in on blocked.org.uk
- A kickstarter style site for voters to indicate their interest in voting for a candidate, inspired by a Cory Doctorow article.
- A HTML5 app for the Firefox OS browser that checks the site you’re visiting using blocked.org.uk
- An investigation into serverless sharing in situations where comms infrastructure is restricted or unavailable
- Evaluating MySociety’s SayIt for helping voters to explore what election candidates have said about digital rights issues
- Ideas for apps to make surveillance tangible in urban environments
You can also check out a few photos of the day on Flickr.
We’re really excited about the creativity and viability of all these ideas – and we want to support the community to bring as many of them to fruition as we can. If you’re inspired by any of these projects and would like to help take them further, please introduce yourself on the technical volunteers mailing list, or drop by our IRC channel to say hello. You can also find us on github.
If you fancy joining us in person, grab a ticket for ORGCon (15-16 November), where on day two we’ll be holding another day-long hack-fest as well as workshops and other sessions on digital-rights activism. We will also be running a session at the Mozilla Festival (24-26 October) looking at how to build on blocked.org.uk – please come and say hello if you get the chance.
Happy hacking!
Updated on 31/10/14 to include a link to the github page for the “kickstarter for election candidates” hack.