This Friday June 22nd the ScraperWiki truck will roll across the Golden Gate bridge as part of its ‘Liberate the Data’ quest.  It is with the fabulous support of @MJ_Coren www.majorplanetstudios.org. It’s a big deal as it’s our first co-hosted event and the first time we’ve parked in sunny California.  It is also the precursor to the much anticipated NEWS HACK DAY SF happening over the Saturday and Sunday in the SOMA building at the same address 901 Mission Street.

The Liberate the Data code camp is taking place at the swish offices of the San Francisco Chronicle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Chronicle)  and a big thanks to Frank Mina, Assistant Managing Editor for giving us the space.  We have about 80 people signed up for the workshop and we continue to release more tickets.

We want to try to give journalists an idea of the possibilities that are out there for mining data.  We will be coaching coders in the art of scraping data, collection, aggregation and visualisation.  In the afternoon we have invited participants to hack some public data and we hope that they will be adventurous! An informal Q&A to help answer some of the hard questions around collecting data and scraping PDFs will happen in the late afternoon.

We also hope that you have signed up for the reception that will take place in the evening – beers and bar food. (yummie!)

@thomaslevine, data advocate and scientist, and easily identifiable in his signature pink bobble hat will manage the workshop.  He’s supported by @brnahhh Brittney Tillet and @mikejcorey Michael Cory, Centre for Investigative Reporting, and who has volunteered his valuable time.  ScraperWiki’s creator & chief data scientist Julian Todd will be online from the UK to support Thomas, for Q&A and do some mentoring.

We still have a few tickets if you would like to come along…..

Additional kudos to the #newshackday committee Burt Herman (Storify), Julia Scott  journalist (KQED/NPR), Sam King (Stanford University PhD candidate), David Harris     co-organizer Science Hack Day, Matt Scharpnick (Elifant design).