How humanitarian hackathons work

Subject Matter Experts (SME) present Challenges or Problem Definitions – things they’ve seen during their experienced that could have a technological solution. Hackathon attendees then decide which of these challenges they’d like to work on over the course of the weekend. It’s up to these teams to guide their work time and objectives, with only a few check-in points late Saturday and early Sunday. These check-in points help participants all over the globe track what else is being worked on, and how teams might link together to help each other. Sunday evening, teams do a short talk about their project, and SMEs judge and award prizes.

What’s special about this RHoK

Geeks Without Bounds is now a sustainability partner with RHoK – which means those projects coming out of hackathons get a bit more structure on exit. Teams who wish to continue efforts will have guidance in field relevance, business development, and technical execution. More on that soon – we’re super excited.

Get Involved

Random Hacks of Kindness happens all over the globe – but we’ll be in San Francisco and Seattle. We hope you’ll join us!

• San Francisco
• Seattle
• All other locations

The Voyager Golden Record was an incredible thing. It’s possible to visually see patterns and differences on the surface of vinyl, and that translates to audio waves in the air. The info graph of how to play the record has nothing to do with language. The original Golden Record was sent by Carl Sagan and others, and included things such as greetings in many languages, sounds of Earth, and music (more at wikipedia). I asked the crew at San Francisco’s SpaceApps Challenge what they would send. Here’s what I got back:

(full image available here, for the zooming. Yes I know it’s not a great camera. But there you are).
And my personal double-take, lmao:

Suggestions from Twitter may have included figures from political parties and/or the person sending the tweet.

My own brain has taken me back to a book I finished recently, The Information: A Theory, A History, A Flood. I wonder about a Rosetta Stone to encase many different languages. How can we get from that to machine code? Could we send up programs to build 3D printers, and from there build replicas of our cities and our tools? Would that just be rebuilding the Primer for aliens? I’m told this is far too complicated and inaccessible.

What do you think are the points of humanity that absolutely should be expressed? How would you express it?

• OpenROV: Mechanical hardware: water sampler, bring in, capture, bring to surface to test. Tubes! Went to hardware store. Software to develop: not have to go through arduino, but how much space can we fit in instead? Joystick commands. Power regulation for on-board battery. Next 12 hours we’ll have completed design for circuit, maybe a MacGuyveneried thing. (ping @openROV)
• Rural Electrification: Website which will show various layers. Lights that have been observed by satellites. Difference in light during last 18 years. Population growth, poverty levels. How do these overlap? Where should we focus next? Where do we start with solar power? Need help with image processing with Java. (want to help? Jump on bit.ly/spaceapps_ruralelectrification)
• MathTrax. How do we “see” graphs with sound? Doesn’t work with web, electronic publishing, etc. Can we print those out in plastic? Touch the graphs. Translate SVG to SGL but there’s no library. Need developers in those. (want to get involved? jump on #benetech-mde)
• Visualization in solar system (what is actually rotating around what). Moon phases. Want to build nice portal for things. What we’re missing is what is scientifically proven text that is accessible?
• API for Kepler data. Easily searchable, retrieved rather than awful forms. Wrangled into a useable format, a query engine in front of it. (want to get involved? ping @ginader)
• Pineapple. Working with Santiago, Dominican Republic, Exeter. Half our team is going to bed, working on the handoff. Website launched, initial first pages at Grower’s Nation. Discovery on developing and developed world. Basecamp site and Skype group set up. Layers needed in dataset are being identified. Identified data we need, we have the schema laid out. Want to connect with as much of the agricultural community as possible. Have a good UI. Working with tying to SMS, how to tie into website. (want to help? mail venkatesh@solivar.com)
• Space Guidance System. Spice program, convert to Python to convert to challenge. Lots of data in there to sort out. Challenge for tomorrow is to get at least one other nationality talking to it. (want to help? Ping psi_fda on Skype)

And my own wrap up: if you could send anything out on another Voyager, to showcase what humanity *is*, what would you send? Tweet it @gwoborg and tag it #spaceapps_voyager

TechShop is providing us space and staff. We get to play with all of their amazing equipment! Zomg!

Splunk is getting us all dinner on Saturday night.

Tropo is getting us breakfast on Saturday morning. They’re also the main supported of GWOB’s greater efforts. Special <3

Egon is getting us breakfast Sunday morning.

Crowdsourcing crisis information gathered via the Internet is not new to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Since 1999, the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program has been generating Community Internet Intensity Maps (CIIMs) using geographic data submitted to the Did You Feel It? website.  This open call to the public is a notable example of how USGS facilitates the sharing of critical crisis information by members of the public not only to provide valuable data for earthquake research at USGS, but also to provide immediate situational awareness for emergency management stakeholders. CIIM is one of the early instances of “crowdsourcing,” consciously developed long before the coining of this term by Jeff Howe in 2006.

New opportunities and challenges are emerging as members of the public use pervasive information and communication technologies, including social media and social networking sites (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, and user-generated maps), to help in the immediate aftermath of major disasters. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program has already begun to investigate how to harness crisis data from the crowd via social media sites like Twitter to rapidly detect and characterize earthquake effects. However, as we increasingly have access to ever-growing streams of content online, how can crisis data from government agencies, satellite imagery companies, volunteer technical communities, disaster-affected populations, and the general public be integrated together to better facilitate emergency response, recovery, and mitigation efforts?

On Monday, April 9th, Dr. Sophia B. Liu will be discussing the opportunities and challenges with integrating official and crowdsourced crisis information based on the response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake and what has happened since this catastrophe, which was the tipping point for crowdsourcing and social media use in the crisis domain. Specifically, Dr. Liu will unpack the different interface challenges at the social, technological, organizational, and political levels. She will also discuss the meaning of “socially distributed curation” and its application to information management in the emergency domain.

This meeting is free and open to the public. Please allow time for routine security procedures. A photo ID is required for entry.

Monday, April 9, 2012 4:00 – 5:00PM

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
4th Floor Conference Room
Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
One Woodrow Wilson Plaza
1300 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20004

You must register to attend this event. To RSVP, visit:

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/rsvp?eid=23060&pid=116

The Project
A leading non-profit healthcare organization in rural India, JSS (http://www.jssbilaspur.org/), is building an open-source health information system (“Raxa”) and is seeking a few energetic, talented volunteers.  In a catchment area of about 300,000, JSS operates a multi-nodal hospital, three remote village sub-centers, and an extensive public health outreach program with 104 community health workers.

JSS’ founding doctors hail from AIIMS, the premier teaching hospital in south Asia, and a stepping stone to healthcare organizations in the US and Europe.  Instead of following that path and contributing to India’s brain drain, the doctors established JSS in one of the least developed states in the country, ten years ago.  Today, in furthering their vision of high-quality healthcare for the poor, JSS has set forth the ambitious goal of transitioning from its current paper-based recordkeeping system to a cloud-based digital Health Information System.  This project will undoubtedly benefit tens of thousands of people in the near term and many more in the long term.

Totally free & open source software
This project not only involves building a health information system for JSS, grounded in the data model of the robust and field-tested OpenMRS platform (http://www.openmrs.org/ ), but also making this system modular, extensible, freely and widely available for other organizations to implement as easily as possible in the future.

In a sense, we are making a canonical open-source point-of-care system, one that will hopefully be the seed for a large number of such developments in the future.  Already, healthcare organizations in Cambodia, Kenya, Israel, Armenia, Nepal and the United States have expressed interest in this platform, with its mixture of voice recognition technology, cutting edge design and sophisticated back-end analytics.

We need your help!
The project already has a small but dedicated group of very talented volunteer contributors in the US and India, but is looking for an additional handful of skilled designers, developers and health information specialists to round out the team. Extensive documentation about the project is available.

• Developers. Are you a JavaScript expert? We’re using Sencha Touch and ExtJs4 to build our point-of-care experience on mobile and desktop devices. Prefer Java and the server-side? We’re also extending and improving REST web services and database components in OpenMRS.

• Designers. Ready to revolutionize user-experience in healthcare? Do you have experience with UI/UX design and/or graphic / visual design?  We want your creativity and critical eye to take our usability and graphics to the next level.

• Other contributors. Want to help but don’t see yourself in one of the above roles? Please get in touch and tell us what you can bring to the project. This is very much a ‘big tent’ initiative.
  

For more information about JSS itself please see the link above and this news item about its work:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yY_JSO-Dqg

Please contact daniel.pepper@gmail.com and visit our project wiki here. (new website forthcoming)

As someone who watches Neil DeGrass Tyson and Carl Sagan videos every morning to remind myself that humanity is filled with amazing people and that continuing to work is a worthwhile purpose, I cannot possibly express how [redacted] happy I am that we’re working WITH SPACE. I am, in all honesty, muppety-arm-waving excited right now. And I don’t care if you judge me, it’s true.

So here’s what you can do:

Come. Participate. We’ll announce registration for each of the mainstage location here as soon as we can. One of those will be in SFO. I know because I’m planning it. You can also have a satellite location (see what we did there?) elsewhere. I’m totally happy to help you with that. Or you can do it on your own. I believe in you.

Want to keep up with what other people are doing in the SpaceApps challenge? Join in the conversation on Facebook or IRC freenode channel #spaceapps

During the event, enjoy your postgeographic participation by joining in on those channels with your newfound friends. Also, you should do things like take lots of pictures and stream video! We’ll be livestreaming from our location in SFO – Vidyo is sponsoring that for all locations. Ping us to find out how to sign up (or just watch this blog).

Afterwards, post the gems to youtube and flickr. Tag the videos and images with SpaceAppsChallenge.  Encourage participants to take videos of themselves with their webcams reporting on the event and the progress of their projects and then post these to YouTube with the SpaceAppsChallenge tag. The naming convention on Flickr is InternationalSpaceAppsChallenge [Location].  Encourage participants to take pictures of the event and post them on your location’s Flickr page tagged with SpaceAppsChallenge.

Geeks Without Bounds is thrilled to be working with Random Hacks of Kindness in this cycle. The hackathon model is a phenomenal spark from which to easily fan the flames of prolonged involvement. We aim for the incubation participants to become mentors in the RHoK community, showcasing what long-term dedication to these worthwhile causes can produce.

The advisory board of Geeks Without Bounds will follow the presentations at Random Hacks of Kindness to gain awareness of the teams and tools which would benefit most from an acceleration cycle. Those teams would then be invited to join the accelerator. This process involves mentorship, promotion, and exposure to the community. Each team works remotely from their origin city to maintain close ties to the problems which are most relevant to them.

GWoB Accelerator

The GWoB Incubator will operate on a timeline that moves from prototype to field development to long-term sustainability in six months. This process involves three mentorship components.

• Field Mentorship: Field Experience, Impact Assessment, Use Case Development, Prototyping and Testing.
• Technical Mentorship: Technical Mentor Skill Matching, Development Milestones, Technical Development Support.
• Business Mentorship: Business Development, Funding Models, Licensing & IP Management, Establishing Relationships with Funders.

The incubation model will not only improve the vitality of individual projects, it will help strengthen and focus a motivated community. For example, one way of focusing efforts from these events is to introduce a business model to it. This means researching the current market – is there a need? Is someone else already filling the need? How would you do it differently from them? Reaching out to see what exists, both so far as need and delivery, means a wider awareness of the global ecosystem of response. This benefits developers, subject matter experts, and, most importantly, the individuals who can be aided by technology developed through RHoK.

This model also benefits established response organizations and individuals. The curation of likely long-term contributors to the community means less burden on people who are already strapped for cognitive cycles. The teams coming from the response community are well versed in a myriad of topics, from field experience to security to determining relevance.

• Mixin’ it Up : Friday night drinks and snacks : $1000
• Get it Goin’ : Saturday breakfast and coffeeeeee : $500 Thanks, Tropo!
• Full Steam Ahead : Saturday lunch and drinks : $800
• Going Strong : Saturday dinner and drinks : $1300 Thanks, Splunk!
• Easy like Sunday morning : Sunday breakfast and coffee : $500 Thanks, Egon!
• Wrap it up : Sunday lunch and drinks : $1000
• Confetti Cake : Prizes : $1500

For each section you sponsor, you get a shoutout in person and on the internets. Each sponsor gets their logo on the event t-shirt, size corresponds to amount donated (I made an awesome sizing equation, if you want to see it).

We appreciate you. Thank you for supporting the community and encouraging amazing geeks to use their powers for good! Pass the word on, and any questions can be posted to willow dot bl00 at this URL

1. Interplanetary IT Simulator
Develop a way to simulate the user experience of common IT services (phone, email, video conferencing, IRC chat, web browsing, etc) while en route to an interplanetary destination, focusing on the time delay experienced during the trip. Such a tool could help analog mission participants more realistically engage in their mission scenario, and also apply to new and innovative ways to deal with connectivity issues of computing devices in remote areas on Earth.

2. Astronaut Status Platform
Utilize rad hardened mobile device to hold a variety of Astronaut Exploration Computation tools on a collective platform. To develop and port these applications to the mobile hardware device of choice for use in field exploration of extra-terrestrial surfaces, on-orbit operations, and potential spin-off terrestrial use with modifications. The proposed applications included in the Astronaut Status Platform are: 1) Emergency Path Planner, automatic real time safest path to target mapping tool, this has work done already. This app will plot a path from the user’s current location to any choice area, typically envisioned as home base, in case of emergency situations or just wanting to go the shortest effort path to the target. Can be integrated with rover control system wirelessly for automatic return-to-base or alternatively walked. http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6078/6107243900_df07b7cd0a.jpg 2) Rendezvous Tracker, an ephemeris tracking/timing application, this app will give up to the second locations of the space station, various satellites, earth, moon, etc and calculate relative distances from each other and communication nulls. 3) Assisted Technology Enhanced Notetaking/Logging practical for use with limited mobility enviro-suits, this app allows the explorer to enter time logged notes and pictures simply in the presence of challenging environmental conditions where the user has limited mobility either due to incapacitation or restrictive equipment/enviro-suits or both. This would also have a ‘mayday’ button that would automatically perform several emergency notification procedures, sending out location and help message every few seconds. 4) Space & Terrestrial Weather updates and alerts, including gamma/sunspot burst notice, sun terminator proximity, etc. 5) Realtime Environment Map. This app would be the front end of the platform and is a gps receiver/repeater with full topographic and thermographic maps as well as mission specific or user designated avoid/explore areas. The map can have user designated areas of interest and the thermographic map is updated every few minutes and also has local sensor display. This can integrate with the other apps dynamically. The apps are all meant to work together and function essentially as one unified app, with simplicity of use and clarity of display of extreme importance. This set of apps is a prime candidate for modification into terrestrial applicability, for emergency crews, oil field workers, scouts, campers, etc.

3. Visualize the “All-too-Common Astronomy/Solar System Misconceptions”
Help us debunk the top misconceptions about Astronomy/Solar System Science through a creative visualization. Help us debunk the top misconceptions about Astronomy/Solar System Science through a creative visualization, using the following: (the first 20 of 75 ‘misperceptions’ about the solar system)
–
1. The Sun is not a star. Extra 1: Planet orbits are highly elliptical
2. The Sun disappears at night. Extra 2: Planetary “alignments” are important
3. The Sun will never burn out. Extra 3: The Universe / Solar System is young
4. The surface of the Sun is without visible features.
5. The Sun rises exactly in the east and sets exactly in the west every day. [Some duplicate entries were removed]
6. The Sun is always directly south at 12:00 noon.
7. The tip of a shadow always moves along an east-west line.
8. The amount of daylight increases each day of summer.
9. We experience seasons because of Earth’s changing distance from the Sun–––closer in summer, farther in winter.
10. The Earth is the largest object in the solar system . It is larger than the Sun.
11. The Earth is the center of the solar system. The planets, Sun and Moon revolve around the Earth.
12. The Earth is sitting on something.
13. The Earth is round like a pancake.
14. We live on the flat middle of a sphere.
15. The Moon can only be seen during the night.
16. The Moon does not rotate on its axis as it revolves around the Earth.
17. The phases of the Moon are caused by shadows cast on its surface by other objects in the solar system.
18. The phases of the Moon are caused by the shadow of the Earth on the Moon.
19. The phases of the Moon are caused by the Moon moving into the Sun’s shadow.
20. Different countries see different phases of the Moon on the same day….

4. Online/Offline Problem
Extend an existing HTML5 hack that would allow communication when connection is unavailable. How to give voice when technology is unavailable is a huge quandary. There were a few hacks that worked with existing solutions testing to Ushahidi. The Reflab team with Francesco Ciriaci leading the charge built an HTML5 hack for reporting Offline/Online. This hack is something that Ushahidi would like to see continue. During RHoK, the DRC map was unable to receive SMS reports due to connection issues. We will be connecting with the various hackers and groups involved during the weekend on this to see how to move it forward, including Geeks without Bounds, Reflab, Mozilla, Tropo and more. The RHok Zurich team worked on Message Carrier (another offline/online communication tool). The code is listed on github.

5. Map for Making Change
Build an interactive map of people, places, and things that are out there making the world a better place. A gorgeous, interactive planetary rolodex of connectors and changers — people, places, things that help make Fragile Oasis a better place. Perhaps start with project data from Fragile Oasis, and potential partners One, WKWDYW, Acumen Fund.

6. 21st Century “Golden Record” for the Voyager Spacecrafts
Redesign the Voyager Golden Record to reflect what would have been encapsulated on it, had Voyager 1 and 2 launched in 2012.

7. Preliminary Design of a open data API
NASA has thousands of publicly available datasets, ranging from deep-space radiation readings to geospatial imaging of the earth’s surface. While an API exists at data.nasa.gov to read metadata of these datasets, there is no standard way to access the data itself.

8. Application Programming Interface (API) with examples for ISSLive and ISSLive Mobile Operations View
Help create a REST based API that ties the existing 200 Telemetry values (space station system parameters) for web based access by other developers) See (http://spacestationlive.jsc.nasa.gov/resources/spaceStationData.html) as well as XML crew timeline data (what the astronauts do onboard the station) so that it is easily usable for outside of NASA developers. In addition to the API itself, students would build and document a small, easy to create sample app that utilizes this API and present a step by step tutorial on how it was built. Build a simple mobile app that takes some of the ISSLive values and presents in them in straightforward operational perspective for use by NASA and science personal –the app would tie into existing ISSLive data and utilize mobile app web based development frameworks such as Sencha Touch or PhoneGap to work on latest devices.