Random Hacks of Kindness – Oxford – December 3rd-4th 2011
Over the weekend of December 3rd & 4th 2011 a team from IBM, Oxfam and White October organised on of the many Random Hacks of Kindness hackathons that were running around the world.
This event brought together 34 subject matter experts and technologists from across the UK to work on a number of charitable and not-for-profit projects.
Hosted by White October, an Oxford web design agency, the hackers gathered early on Saturday morning for breakfast before listening to the six problem statements. Each problem owner described the context of their challenge and what they would like to achieve. Over coffee the hackers and problem owners discussed their projects in more detail and by lunch time had formed into teams and had already started work!
Saturday afternoon was spent defining user interfaces and wrangling data, with code being written in a range of languages including Python, JavaScript and Django. In addition to hacking for humanity, the teams had a commitment to using only open source technologies to build their solutions. This means that the cost of development and support for each project is only peoples’ time. It also allows others to easily enhance what has been produced so far.
After a dinner of pizza washed down with beer and cider the hackers really got into the swing of things. Some of the hackers had homes to go to and by midnight there was a hard-core who had decided to hack through the night. The results were impressive as by the next morning they had made a huge amount of progress.
Slightly later on Sunday morning the hackers reconvened for a show-and-tell. They demonstrated what had been achieved so far and explained their plans for the rest of the day. The rest of Sunday was spent integration the various components of the solutions so that by the end of the day all of the projects were able to present some working software.
This weekend was an excellent example of people who had never met before coming together to use their skills to make the world a better place.
The six problems were:
- Visualising Programme Data – telling stories of humanitarian work around the world. The prototype is running at: rhok-iati.herokuapp.com
- Tropical Flood Prediction – Bringing together in an easily accessible form records of past floods and the weather that preceded the flood so that others can design and trial flood forecast models.
- BluePrint CERT – customising the Sahana platform for emergency response in cities.
- NGO Clarity – assessing the quality of NGO organisational data extracted from public/governmental open data websites.
- Real World Likes – applying the online “Like” function to the real world to improve the effectiveness of campaigns
- Fairtrade Finder – to improve consumers’ access to Fair Trade products and promote their use
The event organisers were:
- Stewart Marshall @sjm7919
- Wystan Palm @wystanp
- Kevin Carmody @skinofstars
- Danny Williams @willidh
It’s important to again thank our hosts: White October, without whom we would not not have been able to run the event; and our sponsors:
- White October – http://www.whiteoctober.co.uk/
- Incuna – http://incuna.com/
- Practical Participation – http://www.practicalparticipation.co.uk/
- Guardian Open Platform – http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform
- One Ltd – http://oneltd.co.uk/
