Hacks/Hackers #35 – Post-election special

In October, we’ll meet at https://correctiv.org to look back at the German election. We’ll talk data journalism, fact-checking, and civic tech.

Fiona Krakenbürger (Code for Germany (https://codefor.de/)) organized the event format Wahlsalons (https://codefor.de/wahlsalons/), where the civic tech community teamed up with journalists, political scientists and the federal returning officer to build tools around the election. She will present some of the projects from a wide range of civic tech initiatives, that accompanied this year’s election with specific approaches to politics, information, election data and participation.

Karolin Schwarz and Jacques Pezet (CORRECTIV (https://correctiv.org/)) will talk about their experience with fact-checking the German elections. In their role as members of CORRECTIV's fact-checking team Echtjetzt (https://correctiv.org/echtjetzt/), they set up a pop-up newsroom together with FirstDraft and Google. In the weeks leading up to the election, they published a daily newsletter rounding up all the fake stories circulating online. They will share what they learned in the process and will talk about what happens next.

Sakander Zirai (Journocode (http://journocode.com/)) is a Computer Science student, last year’s Google News Fellow and a new member of the Berliner Morgenpost data team. He will talk about ecological fallacies, especially Simpson’s paradox, which occurred when some newsrooms published debatable correlations of voting data. When split into Western and Eastern Germany, many of these correlations disappeared.

Adam Shiervani and Jacob Kastl (Civey (https://civey.com/)) will give us insights about what opinion tech is. Civey is a Berlin based startup provides high-quality representative surveys in real time. With more than 500,000 registered users, the company has Germany’s largest panel for opinion research. Together with Spiegel Online Civey analyzed Germany’s intent to vote based on 4 million votes 24/7 over the past months.