It was a sunny Saturday in February when the SXTXState team and friends got together to work on our Ushahidi project SXTXStories. Getting together at the fantastic meeting space of Capital Factory on the top of the Omni downtown, we had a great view and a great time.

A little background on the project: The Texas State graduate program in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication has arranged for the past six years for students to attend and cover SXSW Interactive. You can see the result of our coverage throughout this site, previewing panels, interviewing speakers and generally providing broad coverage of this huge event. It’s been a great way for students and professionals to interact.

This year, we received a grant from AEJMC and the Knight Foundation to add a mobile component to the project. We are using the Ushahidi platform to make application that will allow us to post photos and map our locations throughout SXSW. And, we can have others join us.

We’ve been planning for the application all semester, meeting mostly in Google Hangouts on a weekly basis. You can view our class site and syllabus at sxproject.cindyroyal.net. But we set aside this one Saturday, most of the day from 10am to 6pm, so we could spend the time hacking away. We were very happy to be joined by Brandon Rosage of Ushahidi and Blair Mundy of Catch Marketing who were our consultants and guides. TXST faculty Jacie Yang, Jon Zmikly and Ryan Stewart also assisted. And, we invited other members of the Hacks/Hackers and Online News Association communities in Austin to stop by and observe what we were doing.

We had a list of things we hoped to accomplish, and we completed just about all of them. Our plan was to create a responsive Web application that could capture location. We had some additional content to add to new pages and we had some new fields to add to the Tell a Story form. We still have some design elements to tweak, but you can see where we are by visiting SXTXStories.com.

We had lots of refreshments to keep us nourished throughout the day. I’m very pleased with the result, and I hope we can have more events of this type in the future. Take a look at the photos below. It’s great to see communication majors, particularly young women, exercising their tech muscles and making things work!