In Silicon Valley, where the latest tech innovations are celebrated, a group of hackers is creating new purposes for old technology.
The nascent movement, Random Hacks of Kindness, has, like many smart things born in the region, quickly spread around the globe. The idea sprang from a community of hackers — unlike criminals who aim to disrupt governments or steal data, these engineers work on code for the good of humanity — who met for a weekend hackathon two years ago to work on various projects. The concept is to deploy existing technology in new ways that address various challenges facing the world, such as locating missing people during a natural disaster.
“The mission is hacking for humanity,” said Jeremy Johnstone, co-founder of Random Hacks of Kindness, or RHoK. “What we are trying to do is improve the world in incremental steps, using technology solutions to address needs.”
On Saturday and Sunday, hundreds of engineers gathered around the world to code for good. In Silicon Valley, the event was held at Google’s (GOOG) Mountain View campus. Similar gatherings occurred at 17 other locations, from Toronto to Bangalore.
The movement, which aims to hold two hackathons a year, is supported by Google, Yahoo (YHOO), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Microsoft, the National Aeronautic and Space Administration and the World Bank. And it has drawn the interest from the highest reaches of the State Department to Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon, who attended one earlier hacking event.
It’s not about reinventing the wheel, but using the wheel for new purposes, said Chris Messina, a Google employee whose title is open web advocate and who participated in the third official RHoK held this past weekend. “When the Internet goes down or when you lose the resources you depend on, we need to create new solutions,” he said.
Messina pointed to one idea kicked around this weekend at the Googleplex: figuring out ways to use ham radio systems that truckers rely on every day during disasters, as well. “You wouldn’t think of the ham radio as bleeding-edge technology,” he said. “But it will work when other (technology) won’t when infrastructures go down. It’s sort of like Twitter for truckers. Using it for disasters”š that’s the hack. It’s very cheap and can be massively deployed if necessary.”
Much like the open source software development, which encourages input from volunteer experts from around the world to perfect a program, RHoK projects are worked on by engineers huddled together for a weekend at a time as well as by a global community during other times of the year.
“It’s a way of distributing the workload,” Messina said. “If you’ve got one weekend to spend building something, someone else can come along later and take your project and improve it.”
This informal global hacker community has worked on a number of applications for disaster response that have been used around the world, including I’mOK, a mobile messaging program used on the ground in Haiti and Chile, and a visual tool dubbed CHASM that maps landslide risks. Person Finder, a tool created by Google’s crisis response team to help people find friends and loved ones after a natural disaster, was refined by RHoK volunteers and deployed during natural disasters in Haiti, Chile and Japan.
While hackathons are part of the valley culture, events organized around a common good are even more appealing, participants said. On Sunday, hackers with laptops, who were provided with a spread of fresh food courtesy of Google, clustered around long tables. Large screens on the wall provided live video feeds of other hackathons, from Kenya to Chile.
For the code writers, hanging out with fellow hackers on a rainy weekend is as good as it gets.
“It’s one of the things you love doing,” said Ted Lee, a data engineer. He was part of a team creating a program that will allow people to access Person Finder with simple-feature cellphones, which are common in the developing world. Some of the hackers stayed until 1 a.m. Sunday before returning later in the morning to resume work.
“We are launching today,” Lee said of the new Person Finder SMS service. “It’s ready to go. It shows you what you can do when you have a lot of passionate people.”
Contact John Boudreau at 408-278-3496.
