As I had mentioned last week, the first-ever Random Hacks of Kindness took place this weekend in Mountain View, California. The event — which came out of discussions at the inaugural Crisis Camp held in May of 2009 in Washington, D.C. — was aimed at identifying key challenges and developing technological solutions to ‘real world’ problems related to emergency management and response here in the U.S. and around the world.
In a CNET article, Elinor Mills reported on the procedings:
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo may be tough competitors when it comes to Internet software and services, but they are putting their differences aside to build a developer community to tackle bigger picture problems like saving lives in emergencies.
The companies have joined with NASA, the World Bank, and PR agency SecondMuse to organize the first-ever Random Hacks of Kindness event, which was held at a warehouse space-cum community center called Hacker Dojo this weekend. For two days, coders worked on ways to use technology to help solve real-world problems, such as how people can get information and find each other during disasters.
The event came about after representatives from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo attended a Crisis Camp conference for emergency and disaster relief groups in Washington, D.C. in May. The technologists decided that they would join forces to create a community of developers to build tools to help emergency workers.
“We’re trying to seed the community,” said Jeffery Martin, business product manager for Google Crisis Response. “We’re saying, partner with the private sector and we can push technology forward and innovate.”
Developers worked on a dozen or so tools that could help disaster and emergency workers in times of crisis. Several tools took advantage of social media sites, like Twitter, and SMS for information sharing. One project envisioned using laptops, routers, mobile devices, USB keys and Wi-Fi to create a mesh network for times when normal networks are down.
Several projects explored the use of maps, including one group that built a widget that allows a user to click on a point in a map to have the coordinates automatically inserted into a message that can then be posted to multiple social networks at once via the HelloTXT service.
In his keynote address, FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate challenged the programmers in attendance “to produce a solution that would allow individuals to create a dynamic, cross platform family emergency communications plan.” Fugate even put his some of his budget where his mouth was by offering to fly the team that best tackled the challenge to Washington in February to speak to a gathering of state emergency management heads.
The winner (of what was dubbed the “FEMA Prize”) was a group called Break Glass which, according to the list of winners on the website, offers an “extremely simple method to build and retrieve your family communication plan. Provides a cached family plan on phones for easy access in the event of no connectivity. One button activation from your phone. Allows the broadcast of emergency message to your family circle and the update of social networks when connectivity is turned on.” One of the judges, Jaan Orvet, offered some more perspective on the event in a blog post yesterday.
The next Random Hacks of Kindness is tentatively scheduled to take place in Washington, D.C. early next year. For more information on the initiative , you can go to its website www.rhok.org.
DEVELOPERS GIVING PRESENTATIONS ON THEIR DISASTER-RELATED PROJECTS AT THE RANDOM HACKS OF KINDNESS EVENT (Photo: Elinor Mills/CNET)
