Announcing Guardian Hacks SXSW

Today we're announcing Guardian Hacks SXSW, which will kick off with a two-day hack event at the Guardian's base in London on Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 February. We're inviting 100 developers from across the UK and Europe to join us and build a collaborative toolbox of hacks that help explore SXSW.

Music Hack Day's newspaper. Photo by thomasbonte on Flickr. Some rights reserved

How do you create a space for innovation? News organisations recognise that should be a priority, but it's near impossible to make time for something as amorphous and elusive as innovation in the pressurised, hard-pumping environment of a business that, almost by definition, lives in the here and now. Time to play, to explore and experiment is a rare luxury.

It's also absolutely vital if these organisations are to stand any chance of plotting an informed course through an unpredictable and risky landscape. To extend the analogy further, it's a chance to imagine the course that we want to pursue - to explore ideas and opportunities that will allow that to happen. The future's not predetermined, after all.

With that in mind, the Guardian Hacks SXSW project will give us a window of time and opportunity for experimentation and play. Our hackers will help define the challenges they want to solve, but these are some starting points:

What would a collaborative publishing platform look like?
Is there a visual way to navigate related content?
What's the best way to aggregate video and audio? Is a video form of Wordle possible?
What's the best way to aggregate and curate the best coverage of the event from across the web?
How can the tone and mood of an article be represented visually?
How can comments and backchannels for discussion be represented visually?
Can you tap the new nostalgia for print? Can you hack for print? How can the personalised, location-aware and breaking news of the web be represented in print, and how can that be combined with the best elements of long-form, deliciously tangible printed newspapers?

The developers, designers and journalists that join us in February will have their own distinct ideas about how online editorial could be deconstructed, redesigned and rebuilt. That's where the fun begins.

Hacking with cardboard at last year's Science Hack Day. Or you could even hack with the internet! Photo by adactio on Flickr. Some rights reserved

This isn't about creating hacks for the Guardian; we could have held an internal hack if we'd wanted to do that. But we've invited developers from across the UK and some of the best news organisations in Europe to come and work together on these ideas, and the results are for anyone and everyone to use and benefit from.

Before you reach for the 'filter out SXSW' switch - this isn't an obsession with SXSW. The intensity of the conference, the delegates and the subject matter - as well as the unusual mix of art, culture, tech and lite-business - certainly make for fertile playing fields. But what we really want is to leave Austin with a starter kit for some tools that work for certain types of coverage, perhaps some seeds of ideas that will inform how to cover major events differently and a better understanding of what's possible and practical when developers and journalists work together.

If you'd like to join us, sign up here.

The hack event is sponsored by Google, which means that we can offer the winning dev flights, hotel and a platinum pass for the whole SXSW festival from 11 to 20 March.

Science Hack Night. Photo by WordRidden on Flickr. Some rights reserved