On January 25th there will be a Meet up at Maison Notman House to discuss the hacks developed during the Random Hacks of Kindness Hackathon. This is also an opportunity for people to submit new ideas for future hacks and/or help out with the next event.
To remind those who don’t know what RHOK is:
On the weekend of December 2-4, 2011, over 1000 people gathered at Random Hacks of Kindness Hackathons (rhok.org) in 34 cities around the world. Tel Aviv kicked off the weekend, and 60 hours and thousands of tweets later, hackers in San Francisco and Portland wrapped up the event with more than 90 hacks submitted worldwide.
In Montréal, developers along with humanitarian workers, researchers, and international development specialists from Médecins Sans Frontières, McGill University, LIRNEasia, and the IDRC all assembled at Notman House to hash out hacks for humanity. Five applications were developed over the weekend, ranging from an app for water quality testing, an advocacy tool for water quality on First Nation’s reserves, a security app for humanitarian workers in Haiti, a peer networking tool for pineapple farmers in Sri Lanka, to a system to crowdsource underserved language resources.
By noon on Sunday, all the teams submitted their work, and presented it to a panel of judges from UNESCO, The Shared Reality Lab at McGill University, Montréal Ouvert, and Notman House. Although all the apps were very impressive, the Bacteria Detecto-Droid, and WaterVoices, which both focused on the winning theme of water quality, were awarded the winners of Montréal’s first RHOK hackathon.
The outstanding work completed by Montréalers put our city on the map, and was noticed across theworld, in Kenya, Sri Lanka, and San Francisco.
For anyone interested in helping out on hacks for humanity or has an idea for a new hack, come to Notman House on Jan 25th at 18:00. The address is 51 Shebrooke West (corner of Clark in Downtown Montreal).
It’s a casual meet up for anyone wanting to get involved in this unique humanitarian event.
