HACKING FOR HUMANITYRANDOM HACKS OF KINDNESS TAKES NEW YORK |
Parsons The New School for Design and the United Nations Global Pulse Host Weekend-Long "Hackathon." Part of Global Initiative Organized by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank. NEW YORK, December 6, 2010—This weekend, Parsons The New School for Design and the United Nations Global Pulse hosted the New York event of Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), a global initiative held in over twenty locations around the world, organized by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank. RHoK brought together software developers and experts in disaster risk management for a weekend-long "hackathon" to create software solutions that can help mitigate or respond to disasters around the world and help save lives. A group of over 50 hackers, including many Parsons students, participated in RHoK New York, creating projects that tackled a range of humanitarian challenges. Some of these came directly out of the United Nations Global Pulse camp, a three-day workshop held December 1-3 to design a software platform that will help monitor the social and economic impact of global crises in real time. Other problems came from participants as well as organizations all around the world, including the UN Development Program, UN World Food Programme and the global series of Crisis Camps. "The recent series of global shocks have revealed the importance of timely information to guide government decisions on how to protect the world's poorest and most vulnerable populations. That is why the UN has established Global Pulse; to enrich its data gathering and analysis by using real-time data," said Robert Kirkpatrick, Director of the UN's Global Pulse project. Over the course of the weekend, the teams worked together to develop a software solution for their chosen issue. The resulting prototype technology platforms fused existing UN data, open source mapping and visualization tools, and new sources of information sharing such as mobile phones and social networks. "Next-generation information sharing and analysis are now linked to policy and governance in ways never before possible. This paradigm shift is reaching maturity as humanitarian concerns increasingly drive the development of Web 2.0 tools and open source software," said Joel Towers, dean of Parsons The New School for Design. "Our students and faculty constantly seek out ways to connect new technologies to questions of social justice, in order to respond to the more complex global risks we face today. The RHoK mission brings design thinking into contact with a global community interested in redeploying commonly held knowledge toward the creation of a world with less scarcity and less vulnerability." Awards were given to the teams that created the best simple, open source platforms that tackled issues of crisis response, risk reduction, recovery or development. Two projects shared the title of Best Hack: TaskMeUp, an open source platform that allows users in a crisis situation to easily organize and assign out a large number of tasks, and Incident Commander, an Android application that allows firefighters and other emergency response personnel to track incident responders and their needs in real time. OpenScribble, a simple, collaborative mapping service designed by two Parsons undergraduates, was named Best Small Hack. The first RHoK event was held in Mountain View, California in November 2009 and resulted in applications that were later used on the ground during the devastating earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. The second RHoK hackathon was held simultaneously in six countries around the world in June 2010 and one of the winning applications - a tool that allows engineers to easily visualize landslide risk to help guide urban and rural development and building planning - is already being piloted by the World Bank in the Caribbean. |
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Parsons The New School for Design is one of the most prestigious institutions for art and design education in the world. Based in New York but active around the world, the school offers undergraduate and graduate programs in the full spectrum of design disciplines. Parsons graduates are leaders in their respective fields, with a shared commitment to creatively and critically addressing the complexities of life in the 21st century. Parsons work in the area of humanitarian design is longstanding, and includes recent and current collaborations with the Red Cross, the Open Society Institute and the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR). For the latter, students are developing tools to educate policy makers, community leaders, NGOs and governments about reducing human, social, economic and environmental losses due to technological and environmental disasters. For more information, please visit www.newschool.edu/parsons. The United Nations Global Pulse initiative was launched in 2009 to provide real-time evidence to the international community of how external shocks, such as the recent fuel, food and financial crisis, are affecting the economic and social welfare of the most marginalized populations and countries. By using innovative technology, Global Pulse aims to help fill the information gap that currently exists between when the impact of global crises starts to harm local communities and when actionable information reaches decision-makers. For more information, please visit www.unglobalpulse.org. |
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