This weekend saw dozens of hackers converge on the Mendeley offices in New York and London for a weekend of fun, games, and changing how research is done. Hack4Knowledge arose from internal Mendeley hackdays, where our developers are released from the tyranny of Trac tickets and given free rein to build whatever crazy idea comes to mind. Some of our best ideas have come out of these events, so it only made sense to open our doors and invite in the broader developer community. On Saturday the 11th, the offices in London and New York were opened; food, beer, and entertainment were secured; and a few dozen hackers sat down for a weekend of code and camaraderie. There were 10 teams that presented their work at the end of the weekend. Some of the projects are live and linked so you can check them out, for the others I’ve included screenshots or links to the code repository.

Ronn Tan & Jun Chen built a search app called the Mendelizer.

Carles Pina made a Twistori-inspired screensaver showing API query results for papers in your library, trending tags, and readership.

Mike Cavaliere built a visual search interface to Mendeley.

Bruno Vellutini built an app called “Living Bibliography” (github), which queries Mendeley for a specific taxon name and displays a list of references, aggregating references around species.

Rod Page built a prototype of a novel interface to your Mendeley library, showing you your entire library on one page, with thumbnails and overlaid paper readership data.

Steve Ridout built a service to help you edit CSL by rendering CSL live as you edit it.

Rob Knight showed a demo of enriching a wiki using Mendeley’s data.
Just click the link, a screenshot doesn’t do it justice.

Nicolas Esteves showed the possibilities available with an extensible plugin architecture for Mendeley Desktop.

Radek Maciaszek worked on analyzing Wikipedia traffic data and he created a Mendeley widget which shows papers related to the current Wikipedia trending topics.

Jason Hoyt created a Chrome extension that shows research related to the page you’re browsing. Seyi Ogunyemi, a CS MSc at University of Queen Mary, later contributed to that Chrome extension. Here’s an interview with Jason about the extension:

Congratulations to everyone who participated. If I’ve left anyone out (and I know I missed some interesting work by some of the London folks), please email me and include a screenshot or link: william [dot] gunn [at] mendeley [dot] com