Slashdot Mirror

Sounds like maybe what you're looking for is Johnny Long's Hackers for Charity. http://www.hackersforcharity.o...

I am a huge fan of the Heifer Project. Feeds people and provides sustainable lifestyles for them. Geeky in a maker-type, back to basics sort of way.

And Johnny deserves a plug, too, though he's a fairly small-scale charity. But he sets the standard for going and doing for others: Hackers for Charity.

It's kinda sad what a few Google searches can turn up. http://www.hackersforcharity.org/ghdb/ Of course, searching from his own computer wasn't exactly bright.

• We recently did a mapping party in Uganda. That was in Kampala. Uganda is much bigger, so you can travel around and show people a bit about GPS & Openstreetmap.
• If you want to code, there is no CDN targetted for Africa, though bandwidth here is insanely expensive. If you want to help us build a trial, you are more than welcome.
• If networking is your thing, check out http://www.hackersforcharity.org/ ran by Johnny Long (he is in Uganda & in Wikipedia)
• And you can always find a computer with a virus that needs to be removed.

By all means, do come to Africa. It's an experience that will change your life. It did change mine. Am stuck here for 6 years and enjoying every single day of it.

And drop me a line when you want to join us for hacking or a beer.

Hackersforcharity.org

I highly recommend reading the blog, and maybe contacting Johnny. Reading their blog gives a good feel about what tech charity work in Africa can and cannot do, from someone who gave up their career to do it.

For those who want to volunteer closer to home, http://www.nten.org/ has national and local resources. Their local affiliated NCtech4good group seems to be doing good things in my area, I've only found them recently myself.

There is Hackers for Charity I think.

A great meaning for a 'hack', one often undermentioned in the media, is to investigate, learn, and then use something in a way that it was not intended to be used. This does not even require exploiting the system or changing it in any way. Its the result of lateral thinking and curiosity.

You may enjoy hacking Google searches, it gives great insight into how their search engine operates, and you end up using these techniques to pinpoint your searches amazingly well sometimes!

Check it out: http://www.hackersforcharity.org/ghdb/

How about a link to a database of the same and more ... Google Hacking Database

And there's lots of other things you can find. Here are some lists: http://www.hackersforcharity.org/ghdb/

They're not being evil now, are they?

Collecting data isn't (necessarily) evil. Abusing it is.

For example, google's well known for finding web pages that were intended to be private, but never properly locked down -- phpmyadmin installations, router admin pages with no passwords, etc.

Finding those things isn't evil. Were google to, say, forcibly install software on every unsecured router their crawlers found, *that* would be evil.

Are they being evil? Maybe. But data collection itself isn't necessarily evil.

You laugh, but there is a Hackers for Charity, and it's an awesome organization.

Apart from Free Geek, there's also Hackers For Charity.

They might be really interested not only in your old hardware, but also old software such as encyclopedias (Encarta, etc) and swags. BTW, if you're interested in donating some skills as well, there are nice projects available too (programming, web-design, drawing, etc.)

All of it might end up helping some kids in Africa (not the Spam-sending kind), and you can follow up with it through their website.