We are in the last days of October, there is still time to contribute. Join our Check developer community and help build the future of journalism + earn cool swag!
Hacktoberfest is an annual global hackathon event hosted by DigitalOcean and GitHub to bring developers together and contribute to open source software.
As part of Hacktoberfest 2020, here at Meedan we’d like to expand our developer community and we are welcoming and inviting everyone to contribute to any of the services that support the Check platform.
How to get swag?
- Hacktoberfest swag: create at least 4 pull requests in any open source project.
- Meedan swag: one valid PR accepted and merged on any of our open source projects. After your PR is merged we’ll contact you to get your address information to send you your swag.
What is Check?
Check is an open source platform for collaborative fact-checking and media annotation. Journalists, activists and organizations use Check to conduct their investigations and debunk misinformation.
It’s built in React and Rails, we strive for 100% test coverage and a 4.0 GPA on Code Climate.
And runs the following services:
- Alegre: Language identification, text similarity and others text an media analysis
- Check API: The core API and CMS
- Check Mark: A browser extension for content annotation
- Check Slack Bot: A Slack bot to interact with Check
- Check Web: Front-end web application
- Fetch: A FactCheck / Claim Review aggregation service
- Pender: Link parsing, archiving and rendering service
- Narcissus: Webpage screenshotting
Also, Check is extensible by creating custom bots and integrations that aim to facilitate the workflow of journalists and activists. We maintain a repository with bot examples and encourage developers to create bots to enrich Check’s functionality.
How to start?
Every contribution is important for us, even if it’s not merged. We may ask some questions about the issues, suggestions and pull requests you create, and we hope you accept them in a friendly way. We want your quality contribution!
- You can contribute to any of Check’s submodule repositories by opening a pull request in line with Hacktoberfest’s quality standards.
- Contributing to a new open source project can seem confusing or difficult. Check’s documentation will help you understand the software and codebase and orient you in your first steps.
How to contribute?
Are you a programmer interested in verification or fact-checking? Do you want to start contributing to an open source project that has supported some of the largest collaborative reporting initiatives on the internet?
Contributions we appreciate: We are interested in contributions for improving features, creating bots to extend Check functionality, fixing bugs, translations / localizations, technical documentation.
Contributions we like but won’t get you swag this time: During Hacktoberfest, we are not accepting PRs for small changes on documentation, like adding links or a table of contents. We hope you can find a nice issue to work on!
Our issues: We created some GitHub issues for Hacktoberfest. All the issues have labels identifying the Check component it is related to, the difficulty level and the technology knowledge needed to work with the issue. Choose one issue to work on or suggest a new issue.
More info
Check out: https://meedan.com/hacktoberfest and get in touch with us on our forum.
Happy coding!
Footnotes
- Online conversations are heavily influenced by news coverage, like the 2022 Supreme Court decision on abortion. The relationship is less clear between big breaking news and specific increases in online misinformation.
- The tweets analyzed were a random sample qualitatively coded as “misinformation” or “not misinformation” by two qualitative coders trained in public health and internet studies.
- This method used Twitter’s historical search API
- The peak was a significant outlier compared to days before it using Grubbs' test for outliers for Chemical Abortion (p<0.2 for the decision; p<0.003 for the leak) and Herbal Abortion (p<0.001 for the decision and leak).
- All our searches were case insensitive and could match substrings; so, “revers” matches “reverse”, “reversal”, etc.
References
Authors
Words by
Isabella Barroso leads Meedan’s journalism collaborations in Latin America and the Caribbean. Isabella is a Brazilian journalist, experienced technologist, digital rights activist, and specialist in intersectional feminist communities. She has a special interest in counter archives and community memory.
