“Mi Bogotá Verde,” or My Green Bogota, a new, crowdsourced digital map that will track solid waste disposal – the first of many urban environmental concerns – is just weeks away from going online in Bogota.

The map was developed during the first hackathon of the Bogota chapter of Hacks/Hackers, created just four months ago.

Fifty journalists, computer programmers and web designers came together for a workshop on Google Fusion Tables on Friday, July 20, at Google Argentina’s headquarters in Buenos Aires.

The gathering of professionals from different disciplines was not accidental. Bringing these two groups together is the key to maximizing the use of digital tools and applications to uncover important stories in the public interest.

Abortions are technically illegal in Mozambique. Even though the laws are no longer enforced, medical standards have yet to catch up, especially in rural areas where patients find less sterile, riskier procedures. Now with a new effort to revamp and discard the old national laws, all that is about to change.

On Monday, July 16, I launched Brazil’s first Hacks/Hackers chapter in Sao Paulo. The initiative has the support of ABRAJI (the Brazilian Investigative Journalism Association), the local offices of the Open Knowledge Foundation and W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium).