Scraping Political Data - Web Hacking Techniques

Develop the creative skills and unconventional tools to extract political data from the web.

Instructor: Paolo Cirio
Cost: $200

Saturday, June 22, 1:00-5:00pm
Sunday, June 23, 1:00-5:00pm

MATERIALS NEEDED:
Bring your own laptop (Please let us know if you cannot provide this)

Knowledge of coding is not necessary, but very welcome.

CLASS DESCRIPTION:
This two-day workshop will introduce you to the basic philosophy behind transparency activism and how to accomplish it through the use of smart hacks over web platforms. Ownership, privacy and geopolitical use of data will be introduced through case histories of ethical and legal issues as well as an introduction of the main organizations and resources about Open Data.

In this workshop, you will develop methodologies and mechanisms for exploring creative and unconventional uses of political data over the web. The workshop will introduce some practical tools, including simple software, coding, and other techniques and tricks to extract data from web servers.

Software that will be explored during the workshop:
iMacro, Fake, Scraperwiki, Beautiful Soup, Scrapy, etc.

Code that will be explored:
PHP, Phynton, Sql, JavaScript, DHTML, etc.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR:
Paolo Cirio is well known for web-hacktivism through projects such as Loophole for All, Face to Facebook, Google Will Eat Itself and Amazon Noir. He was part of the legendary Italian net-art collective Epidemic which created visionary viruses and P2P software. At the age of twenty-two he was investigated by the Department of National Defense of Canada for his innovative DDOS attacks to the NATO website though a Flash script. Recently the international press covered his hack at the Cayman Islands.