Last night was my first experience of Hacks and Hackers in London - an event that grew out of Joanna Geary's "Ruby in the pub" - its purpose, in a sentence, is for journalists and technologists to discuss ways of making each others' lives easier.

There were a couple of presentations to start with.  The first by a Google Developer Advocate, Chewy Trewhella.  He gave details of how journalists can make best use of the tools that Google provides for free; Google Alerts, Adsense, real-time search, Blogger, Analytics to name a few.

This was followed by the hacker from this event, Julian Burgess and a journalist from The Times who has been doing some hacking of his own, Jonny Richards.  Jonny talked about what he has learned in his first steps in hacking, including some of the things that have been helpful to him: Google searches, StackOverflow, trying to find an existing solution to your problem, asking other developers, being patient were all important points in there.

One thing that would be helpful for the developers in this group to be able to assist more easily is to have as many examples as possible of the sort of problems that journalists need IT help to solve.  In my experience, developers tend to be best at solving well-defined problems.  The more examples that are available, the more suggestions and solutions will come.

One thing that struck me is that in general terms, journalists are not hugely different from most other IT users.  Support from application developers can make their jobs easier.  The hard part, as is the case throughout IT projects worldwide is ensuring that the communication flows smoothly between the hacks and the hackers.  Developers do want to help their users to achieve their goals - they just need to understand what their users require in their own terms as this helps them to estimate what is achieveable in the timescale available.  With this information, the journalists can decide what is going to work best.  For the Computing Science graduates out there, this is probably Computing 101.  There are lots of methodologies out there which can assist with this problem if implemented properly - Agile for example.  As in all businesses, IT facilitates business processes rather than providing anything itself.  This is the same for journalism - developers who work in the industry need to understand the business they work in to enable them to do their jobs efficiently.