Hacking for Humanity around the world
By
Christiaan Adams, Google.org Crisis Response TeamEvery
year, coders and designers have been gathering to meet with experts in disaster response and
international development, to spend a weekend designing tools and hacking code for the public
good. This weekend, December 3-4, 2011, the next
Random
Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) hackathons will be taking place in cities around the world,
with the simple idea that technology can and should be used for good.
Led by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Hewlett-Packard,
NASA, and the World Bank, RHoK brings together hackers of all stripes to create open source
software solutions that address issues of global interest and assist the organizations working
on those issues.
The
fourth round of global RHoK events will be taking place in more than 30 cities on
December 3-4, 2011, and you are invited and encouraged to attend.
Some
of the interesting solutions that have been developed at past events include
I’mOK, a mobile app that was used after the
Haiti and Chile earthquakes,
CHASM,
a visualization tool for mapping landslide risk which is being used by the World Bank around
the Caribbean, and
Bushfire Connect, an
online service for real-time information on fires in Australia. Hackers have also helped
develop features for
Person Finder, a tool
created by the
Google.org Crisis
Response Team to help people find friends and loved ones after disasters.
We’re inviting all developers, designers, and anyone else who wants to help
“hack for humanity” to attend one of the
local events this
weekend, December 3-4. You’ll have a chance to meet other open source developers, work with
experts in disasters and international development, and contribute code to exciting projects
that make a difference. Googlers will be attending several events, including those in San
Francisco, New York, London, and others. We look forward to meeting you there!
And if you’re part of an organization that works in the fields of crisis
response, climate change, or international development, you can
submit a problem definition online, so that
developers and volunteers can work on technology to address the challenge.
Visit
http://www.rhok.org/ for more
information and to sign up for your local event, and get set to put your hacking skills to
good use.
Christiaan Adams is a developer
advocate with the Google Earth Outreach Team and Google.org’s Crisis Response Team, where he
helps nonprofits and disaster response organizations to use online mapping tools. When he’s
not at work, he likes to go hiking or mountain biking, using Google Maps, of
course.Posted by Scott Knaster,
Editor
