Random Hacks of Kindness: A Community of Innovation At Work
Hackers working at RHoK in Berlin. From Flickr user Jan Michael Ihi.
Over the weekend, software developers and engineers gathered at sites around the world to participate in the third Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK). The event, sponsored by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and The World Bank, "brings software engineers together with disaster risk management experts to identify critical global challenges, and develop software to respond to them."
Prior to the event, the team behind RHoK crafted problem definitions, known as “Featured Hacks,” to clearly identify challenges and needs directly related to crisis response, risk reduction, recovery or development. The hackers then took part in marathon work sessions (called "hackathons") to create software solutions in response to these problems. Hackathons were held in 23 cities around the world, including New York City, Jakarta, Boston, Mexico City, Santiago and Nairobi. Software developers in each city were given a set amount of time to tackle the challenges and come up with open-source code solutions.
Over the course of the weekend, 20 projects were developed, including:
Humanitarian GIS Data Cleaning for Crowdsourcing Data Capture
Crisis & Recovery Mapping and Analysis Toolkit
MadPub.org - Mobile Assessment Damage for the Public
As an added incentive, prizes were awarded to the creators of the "best hack" in each city. The list of winners are slowly trickling in on the RHoK wiki, but the winning projects announced so far demonstrate innovative ways that technology can be used in the event of a disaster. For example, in Jakarta, the winning team developed a disaster streaming tool that can put SMS, photos, YouTube clips or live webcam streaming onto a web map. In New York, there were two winners: Incident Commander, an application that tracks the location of critical resources and points-of-interest during a disaster, and TaskMeUp, which allows for “the quick creation of a collaboration space by defining a custom form where volunteers can transform unstructured data into structured data.” The winning team in Berlin developed an API for an internet-based map system to support emergency operations.
So what happens with all of the work done at RHoK? While the hacks are owned by their developers, they must be made available through an OSI-approved open source license. Then, depending on what stage a project is in, it can be developed into a working demo by an organization or be incorporated into future hackathons for further development. In this video from RHoK Aarhus, Denmark, hear staff from UNICEF explain what they plan to do with outcomes from RHoK.
Did you participate in a hackathon this weekend? Share your experience in the comments section below!
