News
UI/UX design support provided by Azavea
May
23
Hack for Western Mass Challenges Posted
Hack for Western Mass has been busy soliciting challenges from local organizations, and we're happy to announce that the list is available on our website: http://hackforwesternmass.org/challenges
If you're joining us on June 1-2, take a look at the challenges and see what inspires you. We'll form teams on Saturday morning after hearing brief pitches, and that process will go much more smoothly if you've read these before arriving.
We're looking forward to a great weekend of problem solving on behalf of people doing great work in Western Massachusetts!
May
12
RHoK Sydney Information Night
Hi All;
Random Hacks of Kindness is the first weekend of June. As you know, RHoK is a great way for us Techies, volunteers and motivated individuals to contribute back to the world. The event will allow us to get together to find out and to begin to prepare for the weekend. All are welcome on the night. Pizza will be provided on the night.
The event will be on Thursday May 23rd at 18:00 in the Dius Office:
DiUS Computing, Level 8220 George St
Sydney, NSW
Sign up and send me a message if you plan on attending
--Steve
May
8
Sign Up for RHoK in Glasgow
Join us at RHoK in Glasgow. Sign up today at http://rhok-glasgow.eventbrite.co.uk/
May
8
GitHub Goodies
GitHub is a sponsor of the Glasgow site for Random Hacks of Kindness. We have stickers, badges, and best of all, free one year premium accounts for 5 winners at RHoK Glasgow!
Thank you GitHub!
Apr
22
DC will be working on solutions to improve local governance
Letting everyone know that this June's 1-2nd RHoK Global June 2013
will be focusing on improving District of Columbia's residences experience with it's government and community.
- Access to District laws
- Access to District Communities
- Access, Access, Access
RHoKDC has heard the call and looking forward to helping others help DC.
Have a problem set for RHoKDC to work on please contact Help Earth Foundation @ Gmail
Jan
4
RHoK Nyeri 2012 Ideas and Teams
1. mDaktari
mDaktari is an app whose primary role is bridge the wide gap between professional doctors with the unmatched number of patients/users. The app which is written in HTML5 with a PHP5 backend runs both on the web and also has its android version which is ported using phone gap.
With this app, users/patients are able to search for their symptoms and the application is able to find professional doctors near the user with the expertise in the given field. The patient/user can then make a call to the doctor or have a live chat with him/her.
Team Members: Boniface Mutinda, Kevin Komen, Joseph Ndungu, Kevin Kamau, Michael Orenge.
2. InfoPlace Kenya
InfoPlace Kenya is an Android application that is built to help simplify the process of getting information and directions of essential places in Kenya e.g. hospitals, tourists attractions, restaurants, educational facilities just to mention a few.
An sms gateway is also present that helps even users of low end feature phones harness the applications power. When not on phone, InfoPlace Kenya can be accessed by any web browser to get information. The app is also bundled with social media for quick sharing and help.
Team Members: Francis Kinuthia, Emmanuel Juma, Gideon Maina.
3. MyPal
Mypal is an app with a symbolic meaning. From its name, it is meant to be your “Friend”. Mypal app will try and address the problem of frequent batter charge depletions on most smartphones due to their multi-tasking nature.
Mypal will allow one to remotely access your phone and do virtually anything that you would normally do if physically holding it. Some tasks include Get a list of your contacts, Save contacts to your phonebook and Read and send sms.
This app can be used e.g. incase you accidentally forget your phone somewhere and what you need is only available in your phone.
Team Members: Joshua Muriuki, Law Karingithi, Areba Victor, Eric Mwangi, Nahashon Muchiri.
4. Opened
Opened is a system that helps in the recruiting of staff in corporations. It provides a rigorous recruiting application that can be used by organizations to get the best candidate for the job. It gives the user an option of creating an instance of a job and then specifying the required skills, experience and age. It also uses a class user for job recruiters that are used to abstract the basic mode of any user.
Candidates also apply for jobs, via the site when they sign in or sign up. In this way their suitability is assessed by the system and then suitably ranked using a candidate ranking algorithm. The best deserving candidate is awarded the job by the system, which forwards the details to the employer and the candidate. Regret letters are rapidly sent also to the not-so-lucky applicants.
The application is written purely in python, using the django platform.
Team Members: Kenneth Kinyanjui, Benjamin Ngigi, Cliff Kimani, Arlus Ishmael
5. R-Que
The participants from one group sought to solve a problem of cheating in the exams. It was noted that many students are caught in coping during exams. The members developed a system that generated random questions for each student’s exam paper. This would comprise of having a general structure of the exam and randomizing the exams generated by for each of the students. In the long run, each student would sit a standard paper that is unique to him/her only.
Also along with the random exams would also come a standard marking scheme in PDF format. This will help the institutions of higher learning in Kenya to uplift the standard of education quality.
The application has been developed in R, PHP and MySQL
Team Members: John Kimani, Samuel Gatu, Joshua G. Kariuki, Njihia Ken, Boniface Mwai, Caleb Jumbe.
Dec
2
RHoK Belgium created a Loneliness Test and a Game Without a Name
We started on Saturday with a headcount of 16 people. Both coders and non-coders started brainstorming about two problems presented by Movement Without a Name. A Flemish organisation helping people in need, giving them food, shelter, hope, social contacts, ... MWN will launch a new campaign on the 12th of December. With a website, tv-spots, ads in newspapers, ... and also a Loneliness Test (both accessible on desktop and mobile). The test has been developed based on the work of Martijn Engelbregt:
The group worked on both the projects, but the main focus was to get this finished so it's ready when the campaign launches on 12/12/12. The best way to explain what the app does is to show some screenshots:
Startpage
An example question[
The 'loneliness profile' you match best with tools ans solutions to help you get rid of that type of loneliness. The profile always matches with a profile of a famous Flemish person. And off course the possibility to share your results on Facebook and/or Twitter.[/caption] While this project was being worked on by several people, other people of the group were working on a game using the proverbs of MWN. The idea was to blur some words in the graphical proverbs and make the user fill it in as quickly as possible. At the moment the project looks like this:
Blurry image, fill in the blurry word.
That's correct![
With this app there are also plans to add a multiplayer mode as well and to convert it to a mobile app.
Non-Coding Stuff
We also did a few non coding stuff. Marina Cooreman was so kind to translate Bring The Food (created at RHoK Trento) in Dutch! And thanks to Chad Badiyan we were able to submit a data set with all foodbanks in Brussels to be put into a Sheltr instance. I'll update this post as soon as it is live on the internet!
Brainstorming
We've been brainstorming with other events as well. We connected with RHoK Trento to talk about extra features in Bring The Food and skyped with RHoK South Hampton to see what they were up to. We were located at the headquarters of De Persgroep, the biggest media company of Belgium so journalism couldn't be missing at our event. Rina from the European Journalism Center was here to follow up on the complete RHoK event (internationally) and see how it feels like to join an event. We might be working together to create some data mining tools to make it easier for smaller media agencies to create quality articles about emergency situation through the usage of IT. So to me it felt like a great RHoK event with an amazing crowd! I'm already looking forward to the next! See you soon!
Dec
1
Update at end of Day 1
Accountability : 01/12/2012
Technology Used:
- MySQL
- Liferay 6.1, Java 6
Tasks Done:
- Entities outlined: Donors, Receivers, Enabling Actors, Testimonials
- Database designed to insert information about entities and their relation.
- Liferay Portlet is created in order to insert transaction details for entites. This portlet enables user to select donor, receiver and amount to be inserted into db including the current timestamp.
To Do:
- Display bi-directional relation between donor and receiver so that we can see the transparency of the transaction.
- Graphics Design
Dec
1
Bangalore RHoK
On 1st December the tech enthusiasts, subject matter experts and problem statement sponsors descended upon the Center for Internet and Society in posh neighborhood of Domlur in Bangalore!
It was delayed start, but it began at 9:30 with one single problem pitch by India Hikes group pitching problem to around 10 techies as they spoke few more techies joined in and then Amnesty International Digital Campaign Director pitched his problem of Data representation, as he was talking more techies joined in and GreenPeace representative walked in, so two teams broke out in different rooms with India Hikes and Amnesty and reamining techies spoke with GreenPeace person; after that few more techies joined in, who were trying to figure out what to do; all this while a design expert from Yahoo was waiting to present his problem statement on missing children, so newcomers joined him. All this while HP team was busy with MIFOS project.
Soon we had 5 groups trying to understand the problem statement and tackle it from technology angle. around 2 PM a simple working lunch of burgers, fries & potato wedges was served, which was washed down with lots of pop soda. Then the whole group gathered for morning session recap and quickly went back to their own group for hacking, we could hear frenzy of keystrokes till late in the evening, some teams left for the day, but 2 teams stayed on hoping to code through the night and get a solution to be presented to humanity by Sunday afternoon!
Meanwhile there was a hangout between Dublin group and HP Bangalore group, the uStream was started from Bangalore, but no one else was online that time to see!
Let's see what Sunday brings us!
pictures are on flickr RHoK group.
will post some videos tomorrow!
Signing off for Day 1 from Bangalore!