Random Hacks of Kindness 69
Elizabeth Sabet writes "Google, Microsoft, NASA, The World Bank, and Yahoo! are unlikely partners, but they are bringing together the best and brightest in disaster relief management and the ever-growing hacker community in a progressive initiative called Random Hacks of Kindness. Its mission is to mobilize a world-wide community of technologists to solve real-world problems through technology. RHoK is gearing up for its first world-wide 'hackathon for humanity' on June 4-6, 2010. Following last year's inaugural event in Mountain View, California, which produced software solutions that were used on the ground during the devastating earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, the partners have decided to take the effort global. RHoK engages volunteer software engineers, independent hackers, and students from around the world in a marathon weekend of hacking events and coding competitions to develop software solutions for problems posed by subject-matter experts. This first global Hackathon will feature sponsored events in Washington, DC, Sydney, Nairobi, Jakarta, and Sao Paulo." Here's where to go for more details or to register for the DC event.
So what? (Score:2, Interesting)
Who cares if they're using this awesome idea to make money after they help millions of people?
Just because someone is going to make money off of it doesn't mean it's suddenly an evil idea.
Haiti Earthquake and Ushahidi (Score:5, Interesting)
I was centrally involved in the Haiti earthquake relief effort. One interesting open source app we, the State Department, the UN, Red Cross, US Marines, and others used was called Ushahidi, which is a crowd-sourced news & mapping tool. Within hours of the quake the good people at Ushahidi had set up an instance to track reports and direct relief efforts at http://haiti.ushahidi.com./ [haiti.ushahidi.com]
You could watch, real-time, as reports funneled into the map of people texting from inside collapsed buildings requesting evac, and see first-responders picking up on them. Once Digicel, Haiti's cellphone company, started pushing official messages about which shortcode to text help requests to, and also to distribute the locations of medical help, food, water, etc., then it really picked up steam.
It was the first time we had all seen anything like it. The Marines told us they were using it almost like a trouble-ticket system to route their emergency teams because it was the only actionable information they could get.