Random Hacks of Kindness Sydney Summer Hackerthon

Greetings from the Random Hacks of Kindness - Summer Hackathon at the Blue Chilli start-up incubator in Sydney. There are five not-for-profit projects which have been worked on over the weekend and now being pitched. There is a judging process (I am one of the judges) but there are no large cash prizes, just some t-shirts and your name on a perpetual trophy. The projects are, in alphabetical order:

• Egg Donation Australia
• Responsible Cafes
• Thirty-three Cooks
• Youth Health
• Watch Me Grow
• BenJam

There will be RHoK Parramatta, and RHoK Melbourne, next Saturday, 5 December 2015. Go along and join in.

Random Hacks of Kindness - Info Night

Greetings from the Random Hacks of Kindness - Info Night at the Blue Chilli in Sydney. There are five not-for-profit projects being pitched to hackers, for the Random Hacks of Kindness - Summer Hackathon, being held 28 November. The idea is that volunteers form teams to work on projects which have a social, rather than financial, outcome. There are two phases: those who want something built first have to pitch to the hackers  and then the hackers work on the projects. There is a judging process (I am one of the judges) but there are no large cash prizes, just some t-shirts and your name on a perpetual trophy. Also, unlike other such competitions, some projects are on-going, building on what teams built previously. In the past I have seen some interesting mixes of team members from marketing, user interface design and coding. There is no fee for taking part and no prior experience is required.

Blue Chilli is a start-up incubator, with a six stage process:

1. Getting Started
2. Validate Idea
3. Build Tech
4. Get Sales
5. Raise Capital
6. Scale Globally 

BlueChilli came to national attention when it hosted a Policy Hack, with Wyatt Roy MP, Assistant Minister for Innovation. It is located behind the Queen Victoria Building in the Sydney CBD in an old brick building (as start-up incubators usually are).

Judging a Hackathon

Greetings from day 2 of Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) Sydney winter hackathon, in the Commonwealth Bank headquarters at Darling Harbor. There four teams which have spent the weekend working on projects. They are presenting their results and I am one of three judges who are to award a prize (which is a cheap looking perpetual trophy to make the point it is not about winning).

We are listening to the people with the six projects, who are pitching to the hackers, who then decide what to work on for the rest of the weekend.

One thing I have learned is "user journey" also one team used catchable HTML5 (which did not work on one demo machine). Two teams merged to work together.

Hacking for Humanity in Sydney

Greetings from the Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) Sydney winter hackathon, in the Commonwealth Bank headquarters at Darling Harbor. There are about fifty people who will spend the weekend working on one of six projects designed to help the world.

We are listening to the people with the six projects, who are pitching to the hackers, who then decide what to work on for the rest of the weekend.

The projects

The first project is Communiteer to manage skilled volunteers for not for profit organizations. The second project is iDiversity to provide information on community services which were previously allocated by government but now will be provided competitively. BenJam is to help kids with autistic spectrum disorder (this was a project last year as well. There is a prototype tablet app for kids to communicate with their carers. The Hive  wants to provide a guide to the services available to residents of Mt Druitt in Sydney. The Beauty of Tech aims to encourage women to consider technology careers.

The event is about cooperation, rather than competition. In that spirit, two of the teams have decided to combine their resources. A combined back-end group is building a database system while another group designs the front end. They will then split up to build the specifics of their applications. It will be interesting to see how they have done tomorrow.

Judging

I am one of the judges for RHOK Sydney, who will be using five criteria:

1. Applicable
2. Approach
3. Progress
4. Usable
5. Problem solving.

One thing which strikes me is how much the not-for-profit community projects are adopting for-profit business techniques. One example of this is marketing techniques which personalize the message, so rather than saying your organization provides services to a group, one individual gives their story. Another is to treat volunteers as contract staff, giving them small specific tasks.

On the other hand there are lessons from the not for profit sector for business. One is to have very easy to understand messages and interfaces, where your clients have disabilities and very stressful lives. One example given was how complex the multi-touch interface of a tablet computer can be to use for someone who can only point and click and cannot understand why there is a delay between clicking and something happening.

Solving these problems have considerable commercial applicability. As an example I am trying to work out how to get from Guangzhou Airport in China to the Open University of Hong Kong (OUHK) overland. This involves (as far as I can tell) three subway systems, a high speed train, a shuttle bus and two customs posts. While services such as Google Maps help with the route, problems such as how to get a subway ticket are very complex. The organization which can solve this problem could earn billions of dollars, as well as reduce billions of tons of carbon emissions.

ps: At the moment I am designing a course to help university students who enter start-up competitions (and will get the credit).

Hacked for Humanity in Sydney This Weekend

Greeting from the Commonwealth Bank headquarters at Darling Harbor in Sydney, where Random Hacks of Kindness Sydney (RHoK) has been holding their RHoK November Hackathon. Four teams have been working on four projects with a social purpose. This afternoon presented their results. In order of presentation:

First Stop are building a system for registering survivors after a disaster, so they do not need providing the same details to every agency. This is intended to not add to an already stressful situation and allow more time for helping the survivors. Already First Stop had a barcode printing application using vcard, from a previous RHOK (used for participants at this RHoK). This weekend the team added the capability of adding extra data fields to suit different agencies.


OCIUS: Are providing a website for analysis of data from a   BlueBottle USV . This is a uncrewed solar and wind powered vessel which collects oceanographic data. The problem is explaining to potential users and the general public what the USV can provide and how it can be used. The team looked at needs of the media, environmental groups and researchers. The aim is to demonstrate the system sailing autonomously around Lord Howe Island, transmitting data via SkyWave . I suggested activities for children be built into the website, such as where they carry out calculations from the data and identify and count animals seen by the on-board camera. This reminds me of the Australian developed Aerosonde Robotic Aircraft. which was the first to cross the North Atlantic Ocean (3,200 kilometres in 26 hours). While the system is intended for environmental monitoring, it also has obvious military applications. The Australian shipbuilding industry could do with a boost, having come in for criticism from the Minister for Defence, who said he did not trust the government owned shipbuilder"build a canoe".

First Robotics: This is an Australian offshoot of the US First STEM Project, to interest children in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). First Robotics provide activities for Australian school children using robots (including Lego robot kits). The RHoK exercise this weekend was to look at how to market the activities to parents and teachers. The team produced style guides, wire-frames and surveys for the website.

Benjam: Is a project for the " Woodbury Autism Education and Research" to build an App which al lows children with autism to communicate with their carers. This would use off-the-shelf networked mobile devices and have a user expandable vocabulary. An example given was a new type of biscuit . The team presented a series of use case diagrams, showing the user journey. The concept is that the device would respond to gestures , such as nodding and pointing. While there has been considerable Human Computer Interface (HCI) research on gesture interfaces and some real products (mostly games) these are too compl ex for this use. Suc h an interface might be of use for adults where their attention is limited, such as when driving . Also Australia has an Autism Cooperative Research Centre, which may find this project of interest.

I was one of the three judges and we were unanimous in awarding Benjam a trophy , but all the projects were good.

Venue

The Commonwealth Bank building  in Sydney provided an excellent venue. RHoK u sed a meeting room with a n outdoor area with views o ver Darling Harbor . The building has an atrium letting light down into all levels of the building and an open plan layou t, with no walls at all onto the atrium.

ps: From 19 January 2015 teaching a "New Technology Alignment" (NTA) on-line course at the ACS Virtual College (register now ).

Hacking for Humanity in Sydney This Weekend

Greeting from the Commonwealth Bank headquarters at Darling Harbor in Sydney, where Random Hacks of Kindness Sydney (RHoK) is holding their RHoK November Hackathon. About thirty people have volunteered their time to work on computer applications with a social purpose. The weekend starts with presentations by those with an idea, or problem, teams then select an application to work on work on. On Sunday afternoon the teams present what they have produced. There is a trophy for the best implementation, but as the organizers emphasize, this is about participating, not winning. I am one of the judges and this should be good experience for when I am teaching New Technology Alignment in January.

One of the problems t work on is analysis of data from the BlueBottle USV. This is a uncrewed solar and wind powered vessel which collects oceanographic data. The problem is the analysis of the large amounts of data the drones collect. 

A second problem owner is "Woodbury Autism Education and Research".  They would like an App which allows children with autism to communicate with their carers.

Random Hacks of Kindness Sydney Judging

Greetings from  Random Hacks of Kindness Global Hackathon in Sydney. Three teams having been working on community computer applications (RHoK Sydney problems) for the last two days. Myself and two other judges will be looking at the team presentations shortly, then scoring using the standard RHoK Judging Criteria: 

1. creativity / innovative / unique
2. utility, can it be used in the field?
3. applicable, does it solve a problem
4. impact, local or global
5. progress (on existing work, or starting from nothing)
6. usability

The first team is developing a system to help with donations for the Bagong Barrio Education Fund. (BBEF). The Bagong Barrio Education Fund is a not-for-profit program for education of children in the village of Bagong Barrio, Manila, in the Philippines.

The second team was Zspaces  who aim to match up people who have empty office, retail or warehouse space with those having a short term need. This is conceptually similar to Renew Newcastle, which makes use of vacant shop-fronts for artists to sell their works.  An example of a use of space in Sydney is the Leichhardt Pop In Space. But Zspaces would allow for much more short term use of just a few days. This could be popular with councils who don't like to see empty shops in their streets.

The third team is adding extra features to Open Development Cambodia (ODC), to help about Cambodia's economic and social development. They interface to a MySQL database, to extract and visualize data about Cambodia.

The range of applications and approaches were very interesting.

Humanitarian Computing Completion in Sydney

Greetings from  Random Hacks of Kindness Global Hackathon at the offices of Ninefold in Sydney. This is an application development competition, where teams hear about a problem effecting a community group and then develop an application to help. At the moment Inês Almeida is giving a presentation on her work presenting a positive image for girls via social media. I have volunteered to be one of the judges for RHoK, given my past work on free open source disaster management.

Inês suggested that the typical startup process used with for-profit ventures does not suit social enterprises. Small ventures could use crowd funding, but need to keep coming up with new attention getting ("disruptive") ideas. But she cautioned about using some of the less ethical tactics of commercial ventures.

It is a cool sunny day and Ninefold's office has a panoramic view of Darling Harbor and the Blue Mountains.

Humanitarian Open Source Software Meeting at Linux Conference

Tim McNamara arranged a well attended meeting of those interested in humanitarian uses of open source software (and hardware) at Linux Conference 2013 in Canberra on Wednesday. The HFOSS BoF (Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Birds of a Feather) was held at the Purple Pickle Cafe on the Australian National University campus (just opposite the College of Engineering and Computer Science: CECS). Topics discussed included: CrisisCommons, mailing list, Random Hacks of Kindness (RHOK), Sahana Software Foundation, Ushahidi, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), OpenMRS, RapidSMS, and the Serval Project.

Tim suggested one way organizations could assist is to provide a venue for volunteers to work on projects, especially during a crisis. It occurred to me that perhaps more work needs to be done to address on-line disasters. As we become more dependent on the Internet and telecommunication and as these come under threat from cyber-attack, as well as natural disasters, some form of crisis response is needed. This would provide a surge capacity in a crisis, beyond the resources provided by organizations such as AusCert.

Hacking for humanity in Sydney

Greetings from Random Hacks of Kindness 1.0 in Sydney. This is part of an international activity over the next two days working on software and systems for disaster relief in Nairobi, Jakarta, Washington, Sao Paolo, Porto Alegre, Santiago and VirtualRhok. There are about 30 people in the Australian School of Business Lounge, on the 6th floor of the UNSW business school. The venue has a 260 degree view. There are teams working on projects including: Money Tracker Project, Near Real-Time UAV Imagery Processing Project, BushFire Connect Project, Person Finder Project, Task Turking Project and HelpStays Project.

I am one of the "expert" helpers, providing advice to the teams (I teach emergency web design to students at the Australian National University).

Hacking for humanity in Sydney this weekend

Hackathon on "Wanna Save the World?" is being held at the University of New South Wales this weekend, 5 to 6 June 2010. It is free and anyone interested in using computers, mobile phones, the web and the Internet to save lives and speed recovery after disasters is welcome. I will be helping out in the Incubator room with ideas and discussions on Emergency Planning and Response.

Event Details

Wanna Save the World?

Random Hacks of Kindness is all about "hacking for humanity"

Here's how: Attend the Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) hackathon and build technology that saves lives, alleviates suffering, and speeds recovery after disasters strike. These hackathons are also competitive codejams. Winning hacks are selected by a panel at the end of the event, and the winning teams are recognized on the RHoK website, and claim the right to call themselves "RHoKstars" for ever after.

From June 5-6, 2010, RHoK is hosting its second hackathon—a global gathering of hackers in Washington D.C., Sydney, Nairobi, Jakarta, Sao Paolo and London, coming together in real time for a weekend of coding around problems relating to natural disaster risk and response. This global hackathon will take place at the conclusion of the World Bank’s “Understanding Risk” conference, a gathering of hundreds of experts from around the world who will be discussing some of the very challenges we hackers are seeking to provide solutions for.

Get involved!

RHoK is looking for enthusiastic hackers, programers, students and anyone interested in technology that makes a difference in the world in Sydney to support this inaugural global hackathon by taking part in this incredible opportunity to “hack for humanity.”

Food, drinks and plenty of RHoK swag will be provided! Join us and spend a weekend meeting new people, networking and hacking to making a difference in the world!

Please bring your own RJ-45 / cat-5 / network patch cords. Otherwise UNSW IT will be happy to loan you one for $5/each.

RHoK is generously sponsored by a partnership between Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, NASA and the World Bank.