Random Hacks at ICCM

Oct 10
2012
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[Cross-posted from Geeks Without Bounds. Co-written with Willow Brugh. Photos by Heather Leson]

The Random Hacks of Kindness at International Conference of Crisis Mappers took place this past weekend (October 13 – 14, 2012) at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Humanitarian hackathons are specialized in that the hacks proposed are brought by subject matter experts who fully understand the needs and impact of a tool built out during the event. While not all events curate their challenges, we did at this one, with the esteemed team comprised of The Doctor, Robbie Mackay, Jen Ziemke, Heather Leson, Kate Chapman and Willow Bl00. They examined each of the 16 proposed challenges for usefulness, if it could be accomplished over the weekend, technical specs and feasibility, as well as strong use case. Our 40 participants piled into our tiny room to work on the 7 of selected challenges. 5 presented on Sunday afternoon.

Rhok ICCM

Juhee from MIT Media Lab presenting Open IR

Many thanks to our sponsors AT&T Developer Program and John Carroll University. Thanks to you, we had essential coffee, delicious food, candy and steady internet tubes. We were also able to award prizes to each of the teams.

James with Amnesty International worked on Challenge #8: Geographic Web Data Curation Tool with Nico from InSTEDD. This collaboration made me happy for two main reasons – one was that they were able to address James’s challenge with an existing tool. The second reason is that James, who came with little coding experience, took the weekend to learn about RIff and apply it to his problem space. There is a distinct issue in the digital humanitarian community of “Wasn’t Built Here” which adds to the already massive cognitive load of the responders.Extending an existing tool means we can keep using what works while making it better.

Clay and Jorge (Challenge #13: Mapping United Nations Security Council Resolutions) implemented MapBox by porting in UN Policies and geocoding them to the areas they were based around, matching a geospatial and temporal interface to search the resolutions issued by the United Nations Security Council. A quick way to see where the UN had been focusing, along with an easy pull on the referenced documents, this creates another way for people to search and catalog.

The Taarifa team linked up to a group in England to create the hardware trigger for a data snapshot from just about any input, along with the API call which would link up to that snapshot. A continuing hack from H4D2 (and other hackathons), we were pleased as punch to see this group working hard to see their platform for civic reporting push forward and build out their contributing community.

A subtle but powerful glue was created by Josh Snider while working on Challenge 15: Extracting info into SMS reports. A user could send in a text which would port directly into a wiki and geocode. If formatted incorrectly, a text is returned to the person asking them to reformat. The potential of messaging format issues could assist in the accuracy of content collected to so support digital humanitarians in processing massive amounts of incoming texts into maps.

RHOK ICCM

HXL Team brainstorming with Andrew Turner, ESRI

Best overall hack went to the Humanitarian Markup Language (HXL) team, a challenge brought to the table by UN OCHA’s CJ Hendrix. It furthered the capabilities of this platform by doing creating an easy way to interact with maps, with special care payed to the visualization and interface – be still my linux-loving-mac-using heart. It eases the process of grabbing maps, uploading maps, and plugging them into what you need.Huge thanks again to our sponsors, and to the ICCM team Jen and Patrick for organizing the event our hackathon went hand-in-hand with. A special sparkle kittens to Heather Leson of Ushahidi for co-organizing and facilitating the event. I’ll match my blue hair to your pink hair anytime.

RHOK and ICCM share common goals of uniting the brightest minds for sprints of collaboration.

RHOK ICCM

Willow at ICCM RHOK

This was the first time that RHOK occurred at ICCM. It was amazing to have guest subject matter experts join the hackathon to share their expertise with the talented developers and challenge owners. This is a huge opportunity to keep the momentum. A number of the challenges will continue on to RHOK Global in December. Willow and Heather will work with the folks to mentor their efforts. As well, based on the success of ICCM RHOK, we recommend that ICCM in Nairobi also have a simultaneous RHOK.

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Written by Heather in: CrisisMappers, Geeks without Bounds, Humanitarian, Mappers, Ushahidi, community, crisis, hackathon | Tags: , ,

RHOK @ the International Conference of Crisis Mappers (ICCM)

Oct 01
2012
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Maps and Hacks Together!
[Cross-posted from the Crisismappers.net blog]

The first Random Hacks of Kindness (RHOK) in collaboration with the International Conference of Crisis Mappers (ICCM) will be held on October 13 – 14, 2012. We will brain on curated hacks that focus on humanitarian and crisismapper needs. These challenges can be maps, data, tools, and hardware that pertain to the emerging technology needs of Crisismappers. Challenges may be tool or organization specific, but the RHOK goal of open source solutions or prototypes remains.

This event provides a unique convergence of mappers, developers, humanitarians, NGOs, and governments in the same space. We truly cannot wait to make stuff and help merge dialogue with action. We’re delighted to have challenges from UN OCHA, MIT and Taarifa. More to come!

Who should attend
RHOK ICCM will be held in Washington, DC. As noted on the registration page, we seek developers (many flavours, front and back-end), data geeks, designers, and some support help (writers, videographers, and more)

Every effort will be made to include virtual participants via Google Hangout, Skype and IRC. Please register and make a note of your virtual participation.

Challenge Submissions

The Challenge Submission is slightly different from most RHOK events. First, we want to be sure that a Challenge Owner is available online or in person for the duration of the event to help guide the teams. As well, the challenge submission process is different from regular RHOK events. Willow and I will work with our teams to curate challenges based on the RHOK ICCM mandate. To submit a challenge, add your content to this page: Submitting Challenges. We will work with you on your proposed challenge to make it developer and hackathon ready. If you want to connect off list, I would be happy to exchange emails or calls (skype – heatherleson, irc.freenode.net #ushahidi)

We are accepting challenges until 19:00 EDT October 1, 2012.

More Details:

The International Conference of Crisis Mappers is the largest and most active international community of experts, practitioners, policymakers, technologists, researchers, journalists, scholars, hackers and skilled volunteers engaged at the intersection between humanitarian crises, technology, crowd-sourcing, and crisis mapping.

As you all know, Random Hacks of Kindness is an event and community that brings together similar minds for quick sprint-like “hacks” aimed at prototyping solutions for real world problems. The event will be held on October 13 -14, 2012 at George Washington University. The goal of RHOK ICCM is to unite the hacking (technical communities) with the humanitarian communities.

Registration
ICCM RHOK registration is separate from the main ICCM events. It is free and open for any participation. We are very thankful for our sponsor, the AT&T Developer Program, for making this possible.

Willow and Heather

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Written by Heather in: CrisisMappers, Geeks without Bounds, Mappers, community | Tags: , ,

Help Hack Open Source Software for Social Good

Oct 04
2010
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Geeks without Bounds is running a hack-a-thon on October 9/10, 2010.

geeks-without-bounds
I met up with Geeks without Bounds‘ Johnny Diggz at the International Conference of Crisis Mapping. We talked about his event and I promptly introduced him to some of the attending Open Source communities: Sahana, OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi/Crowdmap, Swift River, and Frontline SMS. These open source software tools can be used for Humanitarian and Crisis management. Some of the software can also be used for a wide range of social good /community activities.

Ushahidi and Sahana are confirmed participants in the 10.10.10 day activities. The GWB event includes amazing prizes. But to win, you need to:Register and participate.

Thanks Johnny and good luck with the event!

Help Volunteer Technical Communities:
Not available on 10.10.10? Each of these open source teams could use a geeky hand.

How you can help these communities:
Each of these open source communities have mailing lists, forums, and wikis. All their documentation and training materials are available online too. Can you help them?

Sahana:
*Sahana is a free open source disaster management system.
*It’s a web based collaboration tool that includes modules for crisis response including finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers and much more.
*How to help?: needs volunteer help with specifications, code, donations and standards

OpenStreetMap:
*OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by people like you.
*How to help?: anyone can map, code, bring your expertise, translate, create user manuals, contribute and collect data using walking-papers.org. Go ahead and add missing information to the map.

Ushahidi/Crowdmap
Ushahidi builds tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories. The tools use three main criteria: information collection, visualization, & interactive mapping.

They need:
1. Experienced Web Developers – there’s a list of awesome things to do
2. Trained teams of people ready to be activated to help
3. Ushahidi is building a community site to help and engage

Swift River
*SwiftRiver is an open source platform that helps users manage real-time data.
*How to help: Need developers who create but also document.

Frontline SMS
*FrontlineSMS allows to you to text message with large groups of people anywhere there is a mobile signal.
*How to Help: beta testing of the tools, field testing by NGOs, and most of all spread the word about Frontline.

Brief update about ICCM10
The International Conference on Crisis Mapping was a great event. Meeting fellow volunteer technical communities, NGOs, students and folks from the World Bank and UN was inspiring. I attended as a volunteer, but participated in training and was able to hear most of the Ignite presentations. It was a bit of a reunion of other dedicated volunteers whom I’ve met via my work with CrisisCommons.org.

There was even a small meet-up about Exercise24.org participants to talk over lunch about collaborating across volunteer technical communities. I was happy to give my view on this event and how our communities might participate in the future.

For more about ICCM10, see some posts from Kim Stephens and Gisli Olafsson (a number of great posts).

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Written by Heather in: Geeks without Bounds, Humanitarian, Mappers, Software Development, crisis, drumbeat, open source |