There is a plan for a worldwide round of Aaron Hackathons, on the upcoming Nov 8-10 weekend.
http://aaronswartzhackathon.org/
Coordination: https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Worldwide_Aaron_Swartz_Memorial_Hackathon_S...
We have been invited to run a hackathon. Can we organize it? We would need to find a project and a critical mass of contributors willing to document and coordinate the hackathon.
One possibility could be to kick-off the hackathon on Friday 8 Nov in a physical location (San Francisco), and focus initially on the distribution of tasks. Then remote participants could also participate taking tasks, participating with the rest of the group on some IRC channel and occasional videoconferences.
About the project, I personally think that it should have a link with the motivation of the hackathon:
"We were part of an inchoate, ad-hoc community of collaborators who helped each other learn how to code. No, not how to write code ‒ how to write code for the purpose of changing the world." - Zooko, on memories of Aaron
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Life_and_works
On Sat, 5 Oct 2013, Noah Swartz wrote:
Hey assorted Wikimedia people, As I may have mentioned to some of you previously, we're running another round of Aaron Hackathons, on the upcoming Nov 8-10 weekend. I was wondering if WMF would be interested in providing a project for people to work on. For each event we're hoping to have one well structured project that people - both technical and non - can work on that can have some support from people who have worked on it or related projects previously, so that participants can jump right in. Would you be willing to structure something for people to work on? If not are there other WMF related things that people can do? Maybe go through a list of open bugs or feature requests? Or maybe just writing documents, or doing outreach, any project is welcome. Currently we have two tentative events in SF and ~5 more confirmed locations elsewhere around the world. We have a very basic landing page up at http://aaronswartzhackathon.org/ which might give you more of a sense of what's going on. I assume that SF is the location that works best for you but let me know if you think somewhere else would be good. I'd really love to see you all participate so let me know if there's anything I can do to help. As always feel free to pass this along to anyone else who you think might be interested, and I'm happy to answer any and all questions you have. Looking forward to hearing back soon! Noah