Random Hacks of Kindness
Encyclopedia
Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) is a joint initiative between Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, NASA, and the World Bank. The objective is to bring together subject matter experts around disaster management and crisis response with volunteer software developers and designers in order to create solutions that have an impact in the field.
Bar Camp in Washington DC in June 2009. Panel attendees included Patrick Svenburg of Microsoft, Phil Dixon of Google and Jeremy Johnstone of Yahoo. They agreed to use their developer communities to create solutions that will have an impact on disaster response, risk reduction and recovery. The idea was for a "hackathon
" with developers producing open source solutions. The World Bank's Disaster Risk Reduction Unit and NASA's Open Government team joined the partnership and these "founding partners" (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, NASA and the World Bank) decided on the name "Random Hacks of Kindness" for their first event.
An innovation incubator in the area of sustainable development, SecondMuse acts as "operational lead" for Random Hacks of Kindness, coordinating global volunteer efforts, facilitating collaborative partnerships, and managing communications and branding.
Administrator Craig Fugate
gave the keynote and made a call to action to the developers to apply their creativity to the challenges and featured hacks. The first RHoK event is known as RHoK 0 after 0-based array indexing in computer programming.
The featured projects were
Tweak the Tweet went on to be used during the Haiti earthquake
response in January 2010
, the United States Chief Technology Officer.
While the Washington DC RHoK was the "main stage", several other locations hosted "satellite" events at the same time, including Jakarta Indonesia, Sydney Australia, Nairobi Kenya, São Paulo Brazil, and Santiago Chile.
The "winning" hack at the Washington DC event was a new interface on CHASM (Combined Hydrology and Stability Model), a system to make landslide predictions. CHASM continues to be developed and is supported by groups including the World Bank.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon
gave the keynote speech at the New York launch. Also speaking at the NYC launch were NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver
, Google Vice-President for Research and Special Projects Alfred Spector
, Microsoft Director Patrick Svenburg, Parsons The New School for Design Dean Joel Towers and UN Global Pulse director, Robert Kirkpatrick.
New York, Chicago, Aarhus, Nairobi, Bangalore
Satellite stages: Atlanta, Berlin, Birmingham, Bogota, Buenos Aires, Jakarta (Indonesia), Juarez (Mexico), Lusaka (Zambia), Mexico City, San Francisco, São Paulo (Brazil), Seattle, Singapore, Tel Aviv, Toronto.
repository which contains code for many of the hacks developed during RHoK events.
and Crisis Commons. As noted above the first RHoK (0) grew out of the first Crisis Camp in Washington DC in June 2009, and RHoK 1.0 in Washington DC was co-located with the Second Washington DC Crisis Camp. Crisis Commons members have collaborated to create and manage problem definitions for RHoK events: see for example "We Have We Need" for RHoK 1.0.
Origins
Random Hacks of Kindness grew out of an industry panel discussion at the first Crisis campCrisis camp
A crisis camp is a BarCamp gathering of IT professionals, software developers, and computer programmers to aid in the relief efforts of a major crisis such as those caused by earthquakes, floods, or hurricanes...
Bar Camp in Washington DC in June 2009. Panel attendees included Patrick Svenburg of Microsoft, Phil Dixon of Google and Jeremy Johnstone of Yahoo. They agreed to use their developer communities to create solutions that will have an impact on disaster response, risk reduction and recovery. The idea was for a "hackathon
Hackathon
A hackathon, a hacker neologism, is an event when programmers meet to do collaborative computer programming. The spirit of a hackathon is to collaboratively build programs and applications. Hackathons are typically between several days and a week in length...
" with developers producing open source solutions. The World Bank's Disaster Risk Reduction Unit and NASA's Open Government team joined the partnership and these "founding partners" (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, NASA and the World Bank) decided on the name "Random Hacks of Kindness" for their first event.
An innovation incubator in the area of sustainable development, SecondMuse acts as "operational lead" for Random Hacks of Kindness, coordinating global volunteer efforts, facilitating collaborative partnerships, and managing communications and branding.
RHoK 0
The first Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK 0) was held at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, California in November 2009. FEMAFederal Emergency Management Agency
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is an agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security, initially created by Presidential Reorganization Plan No. 1 of 1978 and implemented by two Executive Orders...
Administrator Craig Fugate
Craig Fugate
William Craig Fugate was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2009 to be the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He had been the Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management. He was appointed director by Gov. Jeb Bush in 2001 and later re-appointed by Gov...
gave the keynote and made a call to action to the developers to apply their creativity to the challenges and featured hacks. The first RHoK event is known as RHoK 0 after 0-based array indexing in computer programming.
The featured projects were
- I'm OK
- Tweak the Tweet (not a code "hack", but an edit/republish "hack")
- Break Glass
Tweak the Tweet went on to be used during the Haiti earthquake
2010 Haiti earthquake
The 2010 Haiti earthquake was a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake, with an epicentre near the town of Léogâne, approximately west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. The earthquake occurred at 16:53 local time on Tuesday, 12 January 2010.By 24 January, at least 52 aftershocks...
response in January 2010
RHoK 1.0
The second RHoK event was held at the Microsoft Chevy Chase offices in Washington DC on June 4–6, 2010. Crisis Commons hosted a Crisis Camp co-located. The reception for RHoK 1.0 was held at the US State Department, and was blogged by Aneesh ChopraAneesh Chopra
Aneesh Paul Chopra is the first Federal Chief Technology Officer of the United States .Chopra previously served as Virginia’s fourth Secretary of Technology. Prior to his government service, Chopra was Managing Director for the Advisory Board Company, a health care think tank for hospitals and...
, the United States Chief Technology Officer.
While the Washington DC RHoK was the "main stage", several other locations hosted "satellite" events at the same time, including Jakarta Indonesia, Sydney Australia, Nairobi Kenya, São Paulo Brazil, and Santiago Chile.
The "winning" hack at the Washington DC event was a new interface on CHASM (Combined Hydrology and Stability Model), a system to make landslide predictions. CHASM continues to be developed and is supported by groups including the World Bank.
RHoK 2.0
The third Random Hacks of Kindness was held on Dec 4/5 2010 in 21 cities on 5 continents.UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon
Ban Ki-moon
Ban Ki-moon is the eighth and current Secretary-General of the United Nations, after succeeding Kofi Annan in 2007. Before going on to be Secretary-General, Ban was a career diplomat in South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in the United Nations. He entered diplomatic service the year he...
gave the keynote speech at the New York launch. Also speaking at the NYC launch were NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver
Lori Garver
Lori Beth Garver is the Deputy Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration . She was nominated on May 24, 2009, by President Barack Obama, along with Charles Bolden as NASA Administrator...
, Google Vice-President for Research and Special Projects Alfred Spector
Alfred Spector
Alfred Z. Spector has been Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives at Google since November 2007. Prior to that he was a researcher and software executive at IBM...
, Microsoft Director Patrick Svenburg, Parsons The New School for Design Dean Joel Towers and UN Global Pulse director, Robert Kirkpatrick.
Locations
Main event stages were:New York, Chicago, Aarhus, Nairobi, Bangalore
Satellite stages: Atlanta, Berlin, Birmingham, Bogota, Buenos Aires, Jakarta (Indonesia), Juarez (Mexico), Lusaka (Zambia), Mexico City, San Francisco, São Paulo (Brazil), Seattle, Singapore, Tel Aviv, Toronto.
Featured Hacks at RHoK events
Each RHoK event and location chooses to feature specific "winning" hacks done during the event. The full list of hacks done at the Random Hacks of Kindness events can be found on the RHoK wiki These may be entirely new projects with code-bases developed from the ground up, or they may build on existing projects and code. Local events use a consistent judging criteria:- creativity / innovative / unique
- utility, can it be used in the field?
- applicable, does it solve a problem
- impact, local or global
- progress (on existing work, or starting from nothing)
- usability
- other...
| Event/Location | Host | Featured Hacks |
|---|---|---|
| RHoK 0 | ||
| Mountain View, CA, USA | Hacker Dojo | I'm OK, Tweak the Tweet |
| RHoK 1.0 | ||
| Washington, DC | Microsoft office, Chevy Chase, MD | CHASM |
| RHoK 2.0 | ||
| Aarhus | Aarhus University, Lasse Chor & Tobias Sonne | Connectivity Mapper |
| Atlanta | Georgia Tech Research Institute GTRI | HeightCatcher, WhoIsOk, Happens (coming soon) |
| Berlin | Betahaus | Disaster Maps |
| Boston | tie between SHP to OSM converter and HeightCatcher | |
| Jakarta | Australia Indonesia Facility for Disaster Reduction | Disaster Streaming and Earthquake Fatality Risk and SIMBA |
| Nairobi | Disaster resource allocator | |
| New York | Parsons The New School for Design | TaskMeUp , and Incident Commander. OpenScribble for best small team hack. |
| Tel Aviv | Google Tel Aviv office | IAmNotOk |
Open Source Code
The Random Hacks of Kindness specifies that all contributions and code produced during RHoK hackathons must be released under an OSI approved open source license and be released in a public code-repository. RHoK maintains a GitHubGithub
GitHub is a web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system. GitHub offers both commercial plans and free accounts for open source projects...
repository which contains code for many of the hacks developed during RHoK events.
Relationship to other Initiatives
Crisis Commons: Random Hacks of Kindness events are often conducted in close collaboration with Crisis CampCrisis camp
A crisis camp is a BarCamp gathering of IT professionals, software developers, and computer programmers to aid in the relief efforts of a major crisis such as those caused by earthquakes, floods, or hurricanes...
and Crisis Commons. As noted above the first RHoK (0) grew out of the first Crisis Camp in Washington DC in June 2009, and RHoK 1.0 in Washington DC was co-located with the Second Washington DC Crisis Camp. Crisis Commons members have collaborated to create and manage problem definitions for RHoK events: see for example "We Have We Need" for RHoK 1.0.
Impact
Several of the Random Hacks of Kindness projects have seen continued development beyond the initial "hackathon".External links
- Official website
- Official wiki
- Flickr photo pool for RHoK events worldwide