Random Hacks of Kindness

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.

Random Hacks of Kindness grew out of an industry panel discussion at the first Crisis camp Bar Camp in Washington, DC in June 2009. Panel attendees included Patrick Svenburg of Microsoft, Phil Dixon and Jeff Martin of Google and Jeremy Johnstone of Yahoo. They agreed to use their developer communities to create solutions that will affect 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.

The first Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK 0) was held at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, California in November 2009.FEMA 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.

Featured projects were

Tweak the Tweet was used during the Haiti earthquake response in January 2010

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 Chopra, 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 Oxford England, Jakarta Indonesia, Sydney Australia, Nairobi Kenya, São Paulo Brazil, and Santiago Chile.

...
Wikipedia