Montreal

How can CBC Montreal use tech to help cover the news?

When we decided to work on a hackathon, we wanted to make the news more open, accessible and interactive.

We asked developers for suggestions. Now we want to hear yours.

CBC Montreal is holding its first hackathon the weekend of March 13, 2015. (CBC)

When CBC Montreal decided to host a hackathon, we did so with the goal of making the news more open, accessible and interactive.

We also wanted all ideas to have the audience in mind, with a focus on how we can serve the public better in 2015 and beyond.

So with those criteria in mind, we asked developers what they'd do to help us come up with ideas.

Here’s a sampling of what they came up with:

  • Creating a product for CBC that would allow journalists to be able to access the newsroom's data without an internet connection.
  • Looking through data to measure women’s employment situations at CBC to determine whether or not they're equally represented in the newsroom. 
  • Creating an online monitoring tool to help journalists discover and track breaking stories.
  • Creating a tool to recommend programs based on a viewer’s history.
  • Creating a crowdsourcing model of news where people could submit their own news, which would be ‘upvoted’ by other users.
  • Mapping news in different neighbourhoods to look at things like which neighbourhoods we cover most, where the most crime happens, or where we do entertainment stories.
  • Creating a map of traffic accidents and heavy road circulation to determine traffic trends. For instance, are there correlations between traffic accidents and certain intersections?
  • Creating a tool to personalize news based on user data and location.

Do you have your own idea? Submit it to us!