Random Hacks of Kindness: another random outburst of programmer kindness took place in South Africa

Can programmers do charity work? Yes they can. A vivid example of this is Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) , a project whose essence is to attract experts who understand the problems of mankind, as well as volunteer developers and designers who invent and develop solutions to these problems. The global RHoK project takes place in December 2012 in 30 cities in 16 different countries of the world. This article tells about the history of RHoK and about the last weekend RHoK event in Pretoria (South Africa).


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Definition Hackathon (hackathon) - intensive work of a group of programmers on a small topic.

Story

The idea of ​​“random outbursts of kindness” arose in a round-table discussion in Washington in June 2009, in which representatives from Microsoft, Google and Yahoo participated. They agreed to use their programming communities to create developments that would provide solutions to global crisis situations, reduce the risks of catastrophes and contribute to the restoration of society after crisis situations. This is how the idea of ​​the “hackathon” was born, which consists in the voluntary development of open source software. She was supported by the World Bank division, which specializes in disaster risk reduction, and the NASA Open Government. These “founding companies” (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, NASA and World Bank) organized the first event called “Random Hacks of Kindness”.

Rhok 0

The first “Random Outburst of Kindness” was held in November 2009 in Mountain View (California). The first RHoK event is known as RHoK 0, in accordance with the array indexing used in programming, starting with zero. As an example of the work of RHoK 0 we can cite the remarkable project “ Tweak the Tweet ”. The result of the project is a client program that uses hashtag-based syntax that allows you to efficiently retrieve the data of users' posts on Twitter, communicating with each other about certain catastrophic events. Tweak for Tweet was used for a variety of events in 2010 and 2011, such as an earthquake in Haiti, an earthquake in Chile, an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, floods and a Yasi cyclone in Queensland (Australia), hurricane Irene hurricane in the Caribbean pool etc.

Rhok today

Today, RHoK is a global initiative, a platform for cooperation, covering more than 5,500 innovators in more than 30 countries trying to improve the world by developing practical technology software to solve the most complex problems of humanity. This is achieved by identifying problems, organizing hackathons and deploying developments. According to the RHoK model, identification and description of problems is carried out by experts in specific areas and local stakeholders. This allows volunteers to concentrate directly on solving real problems for real people. The pledge of the development of the initiative is cooperation between global and regional partners of RHoK, between experts in specific areas and developer volunteers, between local organizers and sponsors.



The conditions for winning projects are determined at each RHoK event. These can be completely new projects from scratch or projects based on existing developments. Projects must meet the following conditions:

• Creativity / Innovation / Uniqueness
• The possibility of practical application
• Solving a global problem
• Usability

“Random flashes of kindness” are subject to the obligatory condition of openness of the code and all developments at the event should be placed in the public code repository. Many RHoK development codes are stored on GitHub web storage .

Rhok eyes of the witness. December 1-2, 2012, Pretoria (South Africa)

The 6th Global Hackathon RHoK 6 takes place in December 2012 in 30 cities in 16 different countries of the world. With this event, RHoK will hold more than 170 hackathons in more than 50 cities with more than 6,000 participants.

It so happened that the author of this article was lucky to have an internship at SAP Research in South Africa (Pretoria) in this 2012. Not to mention the fact that it was extremely interesting to look at the cities and nature of this exotic country, I also met many interesting “IT people”. My new friends organized RHoK in Pretoria, this is the second event organized by them.

An Innovation Hub in Pretoria was chosen for the event, which is a platform - a community of successful innovative companies. RHoK was opened with a presentation of pressing issues by representatives of sponsoring organizations, namely: Mlab Southern Africa, SAP Research, Sowertech, House 4 Hack, UNISA (University of South Africa) and CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research).

Participants were offered such project themes as developing a platform for placing micro-jobs for the unemployed and homeless, or, for example, writing an application for communication between rural teachers and parents.



After the presentations, participants shared in teams and started working on projects.



I will tell you in more detail about the winning project, in which I also participated. We decided to develop a mobile application on Android, which allows you to take a phone camera and automatically post on Twitter a description and coordinates of what is happening on the roads, especially those who have recently participated in South Africa. For reference, this happens in the following simplest way: right on the road, for example, at intersections, robbers run up to the windows, point the weapon at the driver and force him to get out of the car, after which they get behind the wheel and drive off. In the course of the project, the idea was born to supplement this application with “iron” in the form of a key-button attached to the car key. Having seen the incident or being attacked, the user can simply press this button, the “panic button”, which via Bluetooth transmits a signal to the mobile phone, which initiates the launch of the application. The project was called Spotreport, the slogan “I saw, I reported, we conquered” was coined for it (as quoted by Julius Caesar “I came - I saw - I won”). For visualization of the data obtained using the application, a project was created on the Crowdmap service from the company Ushahidi. The code was posted on github. Below in the picture on the left is my team, and I'm on the right, they gave me an additional prize for helping me with the organization.

What's next?

RHoK is more than a weekend event; it is a process that is initiated by defining a problem, continues with the prototyping of a solution on a hackathon, and is getting the highest development in its future deployment in the real world. It is assumed that the teams continue to work on projects in the future. It will be interesting to see what comes out of the winning project in Pretoria.

PS Probably, in Russia someone will undertake to organize this matter. Details of obtaining a license to organize an event under the auspices of RHoK can be found on the initiative's website .