JAKARTA — On 6-8 April 2017, The Global Editors Network and The Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), with the support of Google News Lab, gathered some of the best Indonesian media innovators in Jakarta to develop innovative data journalism prototypes. Special thanks to The British Council Indonesia for their partnership in this hackathon.
The Jakarta Editors Lab is part of GEN's series of journalism hackathons which also includes events in Seoul, Taipei, Manila and Sydney.
The hackathon started with a full day of presentations by a great line up of speakers: Irene Jay Liu from the Google News Lab, Khairil Yusof from Sinar Project, Robertus Theodore from Satu Data Indonesia, Wahyu Dhyatmika from Tempo Magazine. They presented their tips and insights into great tools and practices to inspire the participants into defining their concepts and building their prototypes.
A two-day hackathon followed, with the thirteen teams competing to create the best innovative data journalism tools.
The winning team was from Independen.id with their prototype Traffic Accidents Area.
Their data journalism prototype compiles online news stories about individual road accidents and visualises them on a map to raise public awareness on road safety and allow journalists to do more comprehensive reporting over time.
Independen.id team members Y. Hesthi Murthi, Iyan Kusherdiansyah and Muhammadi Irham said of their win: "We are super surprised and delighted to win first place! Wahyu Dhyatmika gave five tips on how to win the competition on first day of event - and based on that, what we really wanted to focus on was 'Benchmark' - we want to have a strong theme, to create something others have not thought of. But then in such a short time limit we didn't have the time to research on what sort of things similar to ours exist in other countries. Also, we spent hours contemplating whether we should try create a game - since we notice past winners seem to succeed by creating a game. In the end, we decided to simply focus on making something that we feel can truly be useful for the public. News about accidents are always taken in a grave, serious tone - what we want is to make them more informative, so that they can have more value. We are certainly glad that this is considered a good idea."
Jury member Jason Tedjasukmana said of his experience at the Jakarta Editors Lab:
"This is my first opportunity as jury in a hackathon such as Jakarta Editors Lab, and I am admittedly very happy, very impressed with the ideas and moreover the presentations. What impresses me the most is how the teams, given such a short amount of time, still succeed in compiling the relevant data to support their idea, then process and use those data independently and convincingly. Well done and congratulations to all participants. It was a tough one trying to pick out the winners this time."
Jury member Stanley Adi Prasetyo added :
"What we want to see in the results: where lies the editorial quality, the design, the development, and the implementation; these are shown clearly in a lot of the ideas presented. The winners I notice though, are the ones who really stress on their result being able to work in two ways - to give benefit for both users and developer. Also, it needs to have the factor of growth or being upgrade-friendly."
The winning team from Independen.id will join other winning teams from the countries taking part in the fifth Editors Lab season and compete for the title at the Editors Lab Final in Vienna during the seventh annual GEN Summit, 21-23 June 2017.
 | The winning team from Independen.id with members of the jury |
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Special mentions were awarded to the runner-up teams from Universitas Multimedia Nusantara for their prototype Indonesia Maju and to Kompas for Go Home.
All the projects developed during the Editors Lab in Jakarta are listed here. |
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