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The event Hacks 4 Democracy, with a subheading “a hackday on open data”, spread over two days. It focused on presentations, collaboration and solution finding, with a common theme being the current situation of the ruling class in today’s democracies. The purpose of the meeting was to join together developers, programmers, designers, researchers, lawyers and journalists.
It became obvious that the program was boldly based on the philosophy of open society and open source – ideas that are usually not presented with too much pomposity. We can say that they concern the whole society, from the world of art to politics. The Hacks 4 Democracy meeting only confirmed this assumption. Many inspirational projects were presented here, such as the project by Friedrich Lindenberg and Stefan Wehrmeyer entitled “parlabla, who says what in the bundestag?” (parlabla, wer sagt was im bundestag?). This work represents the authors’ visualization of the terminology used by the political parties (SPD, CDU/CSU, FDP, Bündis 90/Die Grünen and Die Linke) currently present in the German parliament. Another project, entitled “Who’s lobbying?” and conceived by an independent worker Rob McKinnon, aimed at establishing a connection between various types of information that could identify lobbyism in public administration.
What does it all have to do with the world of art? You will hear the answer from Daniel Dietrich, an organizer of the meeting and a researcher in the field of new media, at the end of the report.
