Random Hacks of Kindness

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.

Comments

in other words

[mxh83]

They're gonna take the use the event as a front to get ideas...

Re:in other words

[davester666]

Like what? Hack all the Window's XP boxes attached to an ISP, and install Ubuntu on them instead?

Re:in other words

[thatskinnyguy]

How the hell is this modded Flaimbait?! They did it under a non AC name and the poster just after this one said the same thing only posed as a question and was modded +4 Insightful.

Aside from the housekeeping, it's a coder's prerogative to add to their own library.

Re:in other words

[commonchaos]

Ideas are cheap, it's execution that matters: http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

I can assure that these organizations are rife with ideas, bringing the ideas "to market" is the problem.

Re:in other words

[grcumb]

They're gonna take the use the event as a front to get ideas...

Who fucking cares?

If they're good ideas, and they enable people to act quickly and efficiently in times of crisis, who cares about attribution?

I've spent the last 7 years living and working in what the UN classifies as a Least Developed Country. I've read through the specific challenges being presented to hackers at these events and, truth be told, I'd be hard pressed to come up with a better list.

There are shortcomings, to be sure. One of the biggest is that communications is one of the first things to suffer when (most) disasters strike. Where I live, most of the country only just got mobile service in the last year or two, and the service is flaky, to say the least. Bad weather affects out most of the microwave hops between communities, so right when we need it most (i.e. hurricane season), it's at its least reliable.

I'd love to see more attention paid to groups like Telecom Sans Frontières, who arrive on short notice and set up emergency communications. Ironically, I'm not eligible to work for them, as my residence in a developing country makes rapid deployment difficult. It would be nice, though, to see an international volunteer registry that would allow NGOs such as this to react rapidly and efficiently to problems.

The other major liability I see in a project like this is the Hollywood Effect. Everyone wants to be the firefighter saving the baby from the burning building. Not many want to be the volunteer who builds the house in the first place, or the contractor who simply makes sure the house remains up to spec and therefore never burns.

Most development work is tedious, repetitive and endlessly frustrating. It consists largely of continually fighting ignorance, inadequacy and petty corruption in order to take tiny steps in the right direction. All the important changes happen from one generation to the next. So where, I would like to know, are the software and the volunteers for that kind of work?

And how is it used?

[Darkness404]

How is the code used though? Do you still own the code? Is it licensed under the GPL? BSD? Apache? Or is it just given to the companies or placed in the public domain?

Re:And how is it used?

[dwarfsoft]

Couldn't find any reference to it on their site. I hope they are going to cover that at the actual event.

Re:And how is it used?

[PipsqueakOnAP133]

See http://github.com/RHoK/

I don't know what the other teams did, but the team I was on intended to release under this license: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/nasa1.3.php

Re:And how is it used?

[commonchaos]

(I helped plan this event)

The code you write is your own. We encourage people to license their code under an OSI approved license.

Just make sure

[fustakrakich]

that none of these people can claim copyright on your work.. or any patents...

Re:Just make sure

[fustakrakich]

Jeeze! First three comments... effectively saying, "Don't feed the bears"

Re:Just make sure

[deniable]

Exactly, from the site linked:

At a RHoK Hackathon, benevolently-inclined hackers will listen to a keynote speech presenting the challenges we are facing. Then they’ll churn out some of the most important open source code on the planet

Emphasis mine. I'd love to see someone try to close-source this stuff with the major players. Let's see a four-way fight between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and the US Government. Popcorn anyone.

Re:Just make sure

[Errol backfiring]

Well, it does make some sense. If either Microsoft or Google are trying to be nice, I check what I am being robbed of or forced to now. So it is more of a "Don't trust the bears."

Re:Just make sure

[Bakkster]

Not everything the US puts into space is owned by NASA. NASA gets the unclassified science stuff, but pretty much all of the rest will be classified and owned by the military.

In other words, there is nothing in the intersection of the Venn diagram between 'classified space stuff' and 'NASA space stuff'. The X-37 is a good example, since it was NASA until they wanted to put classified equipment on it.

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:So what?

[TheMeuge]

It is if you're a socialist.

I think you mean "it is if you're a Bolshevik".

Re:So what?

[T Murphy]

Uhm.. it's good versus evil- you're supposed to fight the evil. Why would anyone care about something as mundane as helping millions when you can fight evil?

Re:So what?

[fustakrakich]

No, the problem is they could conceivably stop you from using it... Making money is not the issue...

Re:So what?

[Ceriel Nosforit]

TFA:

Random Hacks of Kindness

Clueless:

Is it licensed under the GPL? BSD? Apache?

Anonymous:

Who cares...?

A voice of reason, thankfully.

"The very first Crisis Camp bar camp was held in Washington, D.C. in May 2009. During one of the opening sessions of the camp an industry panel spoke, and clearly stated that some issues of global importance take precedence over competitive business concerns."
- RHoK.Org

Haiti Earthquake and Ushahidi

[Phoenix666]

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./

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.

Re:Haiti Earthquake and Ushahidi

[TooMuchToDo]

How do you get involved with efforts such as disaster relief at that sort of level? Not "centrally involved" such as yourself, as I'm sure that entails working for the State Dept. or a branch of the military (the Marines in this case), but still doing something useful if the skills are there.

Re:Haiti Earthquake and Ushahidi

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

I thought it was called Mosaic. //I just watched SE01E21 ... FF, we are going to miss you.

Re:Haiti Earthquake and Ushahidi

[Anonymous Coward]

Both Sahana and Ushahidi are Free and Open Source projects, and like any non-profit org are always in desperate need of qualified helpers. Join the mailing lists, introduce yourself & explain what programming or other help you can bring, and I'm sure they'll point you to a list of 1000 waiting tickets in a bug tracker somewhere! It's a lot more productive use of your hobby time organizing resources & solving puzzles for real instead of sinking it into a video game ... !

2010 Summer of Code ideas links given as those are immediate needs the communities have prioritized.

http://www.sahanafoundation.org/
http://wiki.sahanafoundation.org/doku.php/foundation:sahana_gsoc10

http://www.ushahidi.com/
http://www.ushahidi.com/dev_team
http://wiki.ushahididev.com/
http://swift.ushahidi.com/extend/ideas/

fix a bug, save someone's life (or maybe 70 or 300.. it scales!) who wouldn't otherwise've made it... no joke. how often do you get that opportunity in your day to day? maybe we can't do f.all about leaking oil wells, but we do have the ability to do something here. which is pretty neat if you think about it.

Re:Haiti Earthquake and Ushahidi

[Anonymous Coward]

oh yeah, and of course there is OpenStreetMap & co.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Haiti/Earthquake_map_resources
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/2010_Chile_earthquake/Maps_and_data
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/2010_Yushu_earthquake

Africa’s Gift to Sil Valley: How to Track a

[SpzToid]

NY Times:

...an important force behind this upheaval is a small Kenyan-born organization called Ushahidi, which has become a hero of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes and which may have something larger to tell us about the future of humanitarianism, innovation and the nature of what we label as truth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/weekinreview/14giridharadas.html

Licensing aside....

[joeslice]

Regardless of how they'll license the code that comes out, this is the type of thing that is worth applauding. I'm a fan of big business(es) trying to do the right thing and give back to those in need.

Re:Licensing aside....

[hughbar]

Yes, exactly, one right thing doesn't compensate for a wrong thing. It's more useful just to stop doing the wrong thing, a nettle that so-called corporate social responsibility hasn't even started to grasp...

As for the event itself, I now call these things generically 'open season' where large organisations and corporations try and suck stuff from the naive in the name of 'good' and 'open source'. It's why there aren't any of we hippies left now, same thing happened...

Hack for Life

[oldhack]

I most heartily approve.

And I hope there are many interesting results, other than buncha nerdy half-assed bullshit software projects. There are a lot more out there in life in need and want.

Build a better water pump. Build a better wiring harness. Things people in need can use.

And for god's sake, stop wasting your good brains cooking up another social network bullshit. You young people can do way way better than that.

Re:Hack for Life

[commonchaos]

other than buncha nerdy half-assed bullshit software projects. There are a lot more out there in life in need and want.

That's the idea. Check out this list of problem definitions: http://www.rhok.org/problem-definitions/full-list/ - these aren't pie-in-the-sky ideas that we came up with, these are real needs as described by real crisis responders.

Re:This smells of greenwashing, and carpetbagging,

[qwerty8ytrewq]

Just to clarify, I work in a remote Indigenous community in central Australia. I have experienced this stuff repeatedly applying directly to me and this community. Yes, I am ranting apologies...

Re:If You Build It

[value_added]

And I hope there are many interesting results, other than buncha nerdy half-assed bullshit software projects. There are a lot more out there in life in need and want. Build a better water pump. Build a better wiring harness. Things people in need can use.

Like this pump?

Here's an excerpt:

For 15 years, Kevin Costner has been overseeing the construction of oil separation machines to prepare for the possibility of another disaster of the magnitude of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.

Disturbed by the effects of the Valdez spill in Alaska, Mr. Costner bought the nascent technology from the government in 1995 and put $24 million of his own money into developing it for the private sector.

Kevin saw the Exxon Valdez spill, and as a fisherman and an environmentalist, it just stuck in his craw, the fact that we didn't have separation technology, said John Houghtaling, Mr. Costner's lawyer and business partner as chief executive with Ocean Therapy Solutions, which developed the technology.

On Wednesday, BP's chief operating officer, Doug Suttles, said that the company had approved six of Ocean Therapy's 32 machines for testing. All boast centrifuge processing technology giant vacuum-like machines that suck oil from water, separate the oil, store it in a tanker and send the water, 99.9 percent purified, back into the gulf.

The technology was available for use 10 years ago, Mr. Houghtaling said. "These machines have been very robust, but nobody's been interested in them until now," he added.

He said that the largest four machines have the capability of separating 210,000 gallons of oil from water a day, 200 gallons a minute.

Sounds like the quintessential hacker.

And for god's sake, stop wasting your good brains cooking up another social network bullshit. You young people can do way way better than that.

Kostner's efforts are the product of fifteen years work and $24 spare cash. And on a somewhat related note, the special submarines that James Cameron wants to contribute, those were financed courtesy of the movie studios. The point here is that it's hard to avoid the fact that the alternative (working on some possibly useless social networking thing) looks a lot more attractive. And do-able.

Like RHoS?

[w0mprat]

Random Hacks of Sedition. RHoS is so masterful I see they've hacked most printing companies that make labels for consumer electronics!

Re:If You Build It - Mod Parent UP

[popeyethesailor]

Nice hack. And that's $24 large, as in millions. Heals the world, and somebody makes money out of it - win/win.

Unlikely Partners?

[Comboman]

Google, Microsoft, NASA, The World Bank, and Yahoo! are unlikely partners...

Not at all, especially if you believe in the Illuminati-Bilderberg-FakeMoonLanding-YahooGoogleSoftMonopoly Conspiracy Theory. What's perplexing is why they left out the Rand Corporation, the Mafia and the CIA/NSA/FBI/JPL/DEA/EPA/NRA/FDA (AKA the TLA Group).

Re:Unlikely Partners?

[Fantastic Lad]

Ha ha ha!

Yes, corruption doesn't exist, especially if you laugh at it and include genuine bits of silliness nobody really thinks is true in your broad stroke accusations.

Do you feel content once more?

Good for you. The world, however, doesn't share your delusion of fluffy happy safety from people who want make sure you work all of your good hours in some idiotic slave job while you let your mind and spirit atrophy, while of course, preventing you from ever sharing in any of the real power which IS highly coveted in this world and for which people regularly manipulate and kill.

As long as you're laughing to keep yourself feeling safe, you're out of the contest and are in fact part of the prize package.

So do go back to sleep. You are very funny. All is well.

-FL

Re:Unlikely Partners?

[phaggood]

Aaah! They might be evil! I should keep doing nothing! Yes, back in my happy place. Now to click on XKCD and feel even more accomplished in my inaction.

Re:Unlikely Partners?

[Fantastic Lad]

Yet, I for one, am able to recognize the existence of real world corruption and abuses of power without necessarily subscribing to paranoid conspiracy theories of a incredibly baroque or byzantine nature.

Really? Good for you. I feel similarly, (although I am not nearly so confident as to be able to declare that I always know the nature of what I am looking at, and I hold a dim view of anybody who claims they do).

What annoys me are those who write off any corruption which cuts too close to their comfort zone as "Paranoid Conspiracy Theory" rather than think about it further to find out if there is any validity to a "Wild Claim" being suggested. I can't count the number of times I've heard what I considered to be a "Wildly unlikely claim" only to have incontrovertible evidence put before me. And I'm not talking about big things. I'm talking about general reality in bland day-to-day phenomena, objects and activities. I've learned that I can't trust my initial reactions, that I can't write off any idea simply because it seems wrong until I've investigated the source material.

After a thorough investigation, you see the reality of a situation. Sometimes its another dumb Fake Moon Landing. Sometimes its a crop circle with microwave damage on every second stalk node and genuine unmarked black helicopters buzzing the field. Sometimes wild ideas become perfectly clear realities, and people resisting them seem perfectly ridiculous because they refuse to look at the evidence. That happens far more frequently than you might think.

Even more peculiar (and telling) is when people DO look at the evidence, become alarmed and confused, glaze over, reboot and continue on as though they'd seen nothing at all. I've seen THAT happen more than once, and I'll tell you, nothing makes me feel more like I'm living among pod-people!

-FL

Thanks. I almost walked away from this.

[Fantastic Lad]

Well said.

I looked at this story and thought, "Ugh. What utter bullshit. But to explain why and do it in a way which was engaging and readable will take more effort than I currently have to spend. My words are still mushy because the coffee hasn't kicked in yet."

I'm not saying that all altruism is false; it's not. And I bet you anything that there are many people involved in this current project who honestly mean well. But the whole thing is so contrived from the top that this effort is impossible to take seriously. MS? NASA? The World Fucking Bank??? Jeezuz. Those companies have long track records of creepy. (Though NASA has infinitely better PR than the others.) But for goodness sake. If I was a promising young hacker involved in that project, I'd be scared to go to sleep at night for fear of what they'd try to do to my head while I wasn't conscious. I wonder how many of those space-camp kids suffer from missing time. . ?

But whatever. That's too far for most people to deal with and you summed up the preliminaries very well, so we'll just leave it at that.

-FL

Re:Really?

[mxh83]

k. But that's the way life is, usually.

Random Hack of Kindness?

[EkriirkE]

I don't know if this counts as a hacking, but internet kiosks in airports; sometimes I can kill the metering program and leave it open for free use to anyone who passes by w/o having to have it activated by a merchant or inserting cash

And

[mahadiga]

850 million people in India do not have any bank a/c
Are you interested in starting a no-frills net-bank in India.