The recent Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon was RHoK’s first foray into developing an international community of developers ready to “hack for humanity.” It is easy enough to excite people about the idea of bringing developers together with subject matter experts to develop software solutions to save lives and alleviate suffering. Who wouldn’t want to get in on that? It is altogether another thing, however, to organize a complex international endeavor coordinating hundreds of hackers in six countries, five time zones, and working with multiple languages into a dedicated global team, collaborating for forty-eight hours of intense
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RHoK Nairobi was lucky enough to be hosted at the brand new state-of-the-art hackspace, the iHub, and supported by Ushahidi—a Nairobi-based organization that is a pioneer in using technology to crowdsource crisis information. With that kind of support, the inaugural RHoK Nairobi really could not go wrong.
After a welcome and introduction by Ushahidi’s Erik Herseman, developers dived into the hacking, tackling problems from RHoK’s published list of previously-sourced problem definitions. The entire event was streamed live and the hackers in Nairobi had a chance to collaborate with and assist the RHoK Sydney teams on a number
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Of the sixteen impressive hacks submitted to the judges at the end of RHoK D.C.’s marathon weekend of hacking, the Chasm project stood out above all the rest. The web-interface and post-processing software for Chasm was developed entirely over the course of the hackathon weekend, and was the result of a close collaboration between a dedicated developer team and a subject matter expert from The World Bank looking for a tool that could be immediately implemented on the ground.
The Chasm program addresses landslide risk—a risk that is increasing around the world in some of its most vulnerable communities.
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RHoK Jakarta has come to an end. As the sun set, the weary hackers headed home from their marathon planning and coding sessions. We had nine hackers spending two days to produce three applications. The broad coverage of applications in even this small sample was really impressive. The groups addressed concerns ranging from immediate survival to short term reporting and information dissemination to long term recovery in the aftermath of a disaster. While the number of attendees was perhaps lower than we’d hoped for, their courage and skill in addressing these concerns was impressive.
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The RHoK Hackathon at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta has been busy. Most of the attendees are hackers, programmers and interested technical individuals local to Jakarta, but we’ve got a few visitors from other towns. Everyone has been very enthusiastic about finding ways to help solve disaster-related problems. We’ve got three projects in the works and most everyone is busy coding away.
Yesterday we conducted a couple short interviews with a couple of the teams working on their projects. You can see the rough cut of these interviews here on youtube:
The hackathon format is relatively new to
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We’ve been busy hacking away for RHOK 1.0 Sydney and we’re still going. RHOK Sydney has people from Christchurch, New Zealand, Canberra, Brisbane, Sydney, Australia, Chicago, USA, Toronto and Vancouver, Canada. One of our special guests is Gavin Treadgold of Sahana Foundation (link:http://sahanafoundation.org/). Gavin is one of three Emergency Response experts (including Tom Worthington, a professor at the Australian National University and Mauritz van der Vlugt of NGIS) helping developers create with the real world of NGOs and Emergency Response.
It is looking like an all nighter for some of the projects.
We have 6 core groups:
1. Help Stays – a
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Google, Microsoft, NASA, The World Bank and Yahoo! are partners in a progressive initiative called Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), whose mission is to mobilize a global community of technologists to solve real-world problems through technology.
The purpose of the RHoK hackathons is to develop innovative solutions that are applicable to real-life situation and problems. Although three of the biggest technology companies in the world are among RHoK’s founders, RHoK is technology agnostic. The goal is to provide communities afflicted by natural disasters with the best possible solutions regardless of delivery platform, operating system or development tools.
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Hi, we’re Team I’m OK!, one of the many teams that came together at the first Random Hacks of Kindness Hackathon in Mountain View, California. I’m OK! helps you notify friends and family that you’re okay after a disaster. You send one text message from your phone to the I’m OK! server, and it passes your status on to your list of contacts.
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We know a marathon weekend of hacking for humanity is already something to get excited about, but it just gets better: Random Hacks of Kindness has the pleasure of welcoming Vint Cerf, often nicknamed the “Father of the Internet” to open the event at a Random Hacks of Kindness reception hosted by the Department of State.
Who is Vint Cerf, you ask? Back in the early days, Cerf was a program manager for DARPA (U.S. Departement of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), involved in supporting the development of TCP/IP technology. Then, when the Internet began to open
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Random Hacks of Kindness is going global! On June 4th through 6th, 2010 RHoK, in collaboration with the Crisis Commons, is hosting its second hackathon. This event is going to be a global gathering of hackers in many locations around the world, coming together in real time for a marathon weekend of coding around problems relating to natural disaster risk and response.
The Main Stage for RHoK #1.0 will be in Washinton D.C., where events will kick off with a June 4, 2010 reception at the Department of State, followed by forty-eight hours of hacking madness at the Microsoft offices in Chevy Chase, MD. Simultaneously, hackers will be coming together on every continent for five global satellite RHoK events in Sydney, Australia; Nairobi, Kenya; London, England; Jakarta, Indonesia and Sao Paolo; Brazil.
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