Hackastory

Cape Town hacks: Why should I care?

Why should I care? will be a webpage made for young people and others who are short on time and even shorter on attention spans, but are interested in news. We take complex stories and turn them into easily digestible, interactive pieces that will explain why it’s important for them to understand difficult to read, boring, or long pieces of news. We want more people to read the important news stories, no matter how complex they seem.

>>Try it out (works best on mobile)<<
>>Check out the screencast<<

Hackastory’s first all women hackathon group
All women hackathon group

Technologies
The webapp is build on HTML/CSS and Javascript so it works on every webbrowser. We choose to develop it for mobile because we found out most people check the news on their phone. That descision enabled us to insert some playful interactive elements like tapping, swipe-ing and dragging. In the development we used Zepto.js and Interact.js to make this possible.

– HTML/CSS (Sass)
– Google Developer Tools for local mobile testing
– Javascript and JS libraries (zepto.js, interact.js and jquery)

BIGGEST INSIGHT:

It’s difficult to always understand why it’s important for people to read certain stories as well as the effect of the stories are not always clear. It was also interesting to realise that the way in which we tell stories today don’t seem to have the basic understanding of audience need before being written. Today news is written to bring news, but no thought has been given to the way it’s given to the audience. This could be why so few young people read the news: it’s not relevant to them. A lot of small bits and pieces are forgotten along the way, and we realise we need to fill them in as the project continues.

CHALLENGES:

Reaching consensus on decisions, deciding what ideas to leave out as we wanted to have as many details as we wanted. Trying to think of new ways to make a too simple concept into something more interactive with more levels.

COOLEST MOMENT

Learning how many good ideas we have, combing and drawing our best options, coming up with the idea to make it better, more interactive and deeper with levels.

FUTURE PLANS?

Hopefully implement the webpage into the website of AmaBhungane, a centre for investigating journalism in South Africa, and create stories this way.

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