This is a brief followup on my note regarding Random Hacks of Kindness last weekend. wanted to congratulate all of the people that were involved with the Random Hacks of Kindness event last weekend. I was proud to see five people from Azavea there, including:
I think everyone ended up working on a different project, making important contributions on the following efforts:
- Cost of Freedom – Geographic visualization of the cost of getting the IDs that are increasingly required in order to vote – a group of journalists making the case that these IDs are essentially a poll tax (poll taxes are illegal based on the Voting Rights Act of 1965)
- Climate Data Aggregator – global climate change weather data lookups
- N-Vox – Neighborhood Voice – prioritization add-on for the Change-by-Us project
- Sheltr.org – a web and mobile “find near me” service for soup kitchens, shelters and food cupboards – source code is available at https://github.com/sheltr This project won best of show and has continued to develop since RHOK.
- Cuibono – coolest concept – use the microphone on your smart phone to listen to a political campaign ad, use a server natural language processing engine to determine which ad it is and then find information about the ad, in particular related to its truthiness. If you’re curious what the name means, it’s here.
- Hack2Unify – project to match skilled volunteers w/ needs
There is some more info at Technically Philly. I’m really proud of the hard work and compelling projects that came out of the Random Hacks event. I also want to give props to the sponsors: Drexel University, Technically Philly, Voxeo Labs, Azavea (yeah!), Grindcore House, and Drexel’s Math and Computer Science Society.
