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.
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Origins
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.
RHoK 0
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
RHoK 1.0
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.
The "winning" hack at the Washington DC event was a new interface on CHASM (Combined Hydrology and Stability Model), a system to make landslide predictions. CHASM continues to be developed and is supported by groups including the World Bank.
RHoK 2.0
The third Random Hacks of Kindness was held on December 4 and 5, 2010, in 21 cities on 5 continents.
RHoK 3.0
The third Random Hacks of Kindness was held in 2011. Current sourcing more information on this hackathon.
RHoK 4.0
The third Random Hacks of Kindness was held twice in one year. On the 3-4 June 2012 and again on the 1-2 December 2012. This saw multiple cities come into play and a huge turnaround of developers from all over the world including Cape Town. The focus of the hackathon was toilets and/or sanitation.
RHoK 5.0
The fifth global hackathon was also a major success. It was held twice in 2013 (in June and in December)
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon gave the keynote speech at New York. Also speaking at NYC were NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, Google vice president for research Alfred Spector, Microsoft Director Patrick Svenburg, Parsons The New School for Design Dean Joel Towers and UN Global Pulse director, Robert Kirkpatrick.
Subsequent events
The RHoK hackathons in 2014 are believed to be held around June and December as it has become a norm over the past few years. The topics or challenges for 2014 have not yet been discussed or posted on the Random Hacks of Kindness.
Featured hacks
Each RHoK event and location chooses specific "winning" hacks done during the event. The full list can be found on the RHoK wiki. These may be new projects with code developed, or they may build on existing projects and code. Local events use a consistent judging criteria:
- creativity / innovative / unique
- utility, can it be used in the field?
- applicable, does it solve a problem
- impact, local or global
- progress (on existing work, or starting from nothing)
- usability
Open source code
The Random Hacks of Kindness specifies that all contributions and code produced during RHoK hackathons must be released under an OSI approved open source license and be released in a public code repository. RHoK maintains a GitHub repository which contains code for many of the hacks.
Relationship to other initiatives
Crisis Commons: Random Hacks of Kindness events are often conducted in close collaboration with Crisis Camp and Crisis Commons. As noted above the first RHoK (0) grew out of the first Crisis Camp in Washington DC in June 2009, and RHoK 1.0 in Washington DC was co-located with the Second Washington DC Crisis Camp. Crisis Commons members have collaborated to create and manage problem definitions for RHoK events: see for example "We Have We Need" for RHoK 1.0.