Can hackers bring about social innovation? Can a community of hackers make the world a better place? Yes, according to the corporate, governmental and NGO partners involved in the Random Hacks of Kindness project. Random Hacks of Kindness is a joint effort founded by Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, NASA, and The World Bank, dedicated to bringing software developers together to respond to real-world problems around disaster relief.
The RHoK Hackathon events are organized so that some of the smartest hackers, programmers, and software developers from around the world volunteer their time in the service of solving a myriad of crises surrounding natural disasters. Hacks developed at the last RHoK hackathon were used on the ground as part of the humanitarian efforts in Haiti and Chile following the devastating earthquakes there in early 2010
Working in collaboration with Crisis Commons to define the problems through Crisis Camps and in small groups, RHoK not only identifies problems but encourages hackers to work to solve them. Once the problems are defined as "Featured Hacks," these projects are thrown out to the hacking community at large in order to develop software solutions.
Some of the problems that have been identified for hackers to tackle include: a donation management system for responding to the ongoing crisis in Haiti, an information sharing and situational awareness application for NGOs, a registry for amputees, a people-finder tool, some way to assess the credibility of crowdsourced data gathered during crises, and a near real-time image processing and mapping tool.
As the name suggests these events are marathons of hacking, and so the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathons have winners and prizes. Each RHoK hackathon is structured as a "codejam" - a fast-paced competition where software developers have a set amount of time to solve the challnges they are given. At the end of the two-day event, a panel reviews each hack, awarding prizes to the best tools that have been coded.
The next Random Hacks of Kindness Hackathon is happening this weekend in Washington, D.C. This event will be held from June 4th through 6th, with global satellite events going on around the world in Jakarta, Sydney, Nairobi and Sao Paolo. The full agenda, as well as registration details and more information about the global satellite events are available here.
While the name "hacker" might have negative connotations for some, the types of disruption that these hackers offer are ones that they hope will bring about social innovation and make the world a better place.
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