In 2007, a small group of people began an intentional, collaborative experiment in open, transparent, and direct communication about your space program. Our goal was to enable your direct participation in exploring and contributing to NASA’s mission.

Many of us have since begun new adventures. This site will remain as an archive of the accomplishments of the openNASA experiment.

Changing the world. Status: in progress

By Nick Skytland, 01 December 2012
 Nick Skytland

Is it possible to change the world in 48 hours?  We think so!  

Random Hacks of Kindness is a rapidly growing global initiative encompassing a community of over 5,500 innovators in over 30 countries making the world a better place by developing practical, open source technology solutions to respond to some of the most complex challenges facing humanity. This is done by defining problems, organizing hackathons, and ensuring the solutions are effectively deployed. This weekend, we are hosting another two-day RHoK event in 30 cities and we have big expectations for what will be accomplished.

This is our 6th global RHoK hackathon and the impact of past RHoK events can not be understated.  RHoK has an impressive and influential history.  The effort, which is only three years old, has already resulted in 177 hackathons in 37 different countries producing thousands of solutions.  There are a number of past RHoK projects that serve as guiding examples of what’s possible in just 48 hours, from those developed in the early days and still in use like CHASM, Open Street Map Tasking Manager, Risk-in-a-Box (now InaSAFE), First Responder and Caritas Disaster Mapping, as well as [Bushfire Connect ][], to more recent RHoK projects like PhillySNAP, Sheltr, WaterVoices, AdHawk, Bring the Food, Yo! Philly Votes, Councilmatic,FourTeachersProject and Taarifa.

New RHoK Challenges

This weekend, hundreds of new challenges will be tackled, including problems presented by hackers at each of the 30 events as well as a diverse set of Featured Problems coming from the Peace Corps, Code for America and the World Bank’s Sanitation Hackathon.  You can see all the feature problems here and all the problems here.  At NASA, we are particularly excited about the opportunity presented by the Peace Corps Innovation Challenge to positively impact the developing world by developing innovative solutions for the real challenges faced by Peace Corps Volunteers. We have included an overview of the 10 challenges here and encourage you to use your time this weekend at RHoK to“hack for peace”.

The [Peace Corps Innovation Challenge][] is based on a simple yet powerful idea:
  • Use the on-the-ground knowledge of the over 9,000 Peace Corps Volunteers who live and work in some of the most remote areas of the developing world to identify and articulate the day-to-day challenges.
  • Then, empower talented and concerned citizens from around the world to work together to deliver innovative, meaningful, and practical solutions.
  • Finally, make these tools easily available to all those living and working in the developing world on open-source technology platforms.

RHoK Accelerator

If you are one of the teams participating in RHoK and you are interested in taking your solution farther, check out the Geeks Without Bounds accelerator program.  GWOB will help take teams through a six month mentorship cycle to bring good intentions to a state of deployment. The way it works is that if you are selected, you will be connected with other developers from the global community who can aid in tool learning, maintenance, and further development. The goal is to improve your solution and transition it into operation.  You can now apply for our next round of acceleration, but make sure to get your applications inby December 15th.

Follow Along Online

If you are not able to physically participate in a RHoK event this weekend, you can still follow along online!  Our team will be attending events in DC, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Rochester and will be providing live updates of the experience. Here is a video capturing the opening remarks at the Atlanta location.

You can also check out the official twitter stream.

There are a number of articles written about the event and I’ve included links to a few from Huffington Post, Examiner, TechVib.

[Random Hacks of Kindness hack-a-thon comes to Philadelphia December 1 – 2]: %20http://www.examiner.com/article/random-hacks-of-kindness-hack-a-thon-comes-to-philadelphia-december-1-2