In June 2010, Google, Microsoft, NASA, The World Bank and Yahoo! joined forces for the second time under their progressive initiative Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) to host seven global hackathons, calling on a global community of hackers to solve issues related to natural disaster risk and humanitarian relief.

SecondMuse was hired by RHoK’s founding partners to be the Operational Lead for the June event, coordinating a marathon weekend of competitive coding by hundreds of software developers in Washington, D.C.; Nairobi, Kenya; Sao Paolo, Brazil; Sydney, Australia; Santiago, Chile; Jakarta, Indonesia; or Porto Alegre, Brazil.

After a June 4 reception at the U.S. State Department, keynoted by Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf, often called the “Father of the Internet,” hackers around the world undertook to spend 48 hours intensively coding to develop software solutions to problems posed by subject matter experts.  Eleven winning hacks came from all over the world and addressed disaster-related problems such as landslide risk, situation management and triage, emergency messaging, person location and bushfire alerts.

“Random Hacks of Kindness goes to the heart of what we believe at Google,” said Vint Cerf following the successful Random Hacks of Kindness event. “That the creative and cooperative use of technology can help make the world a better place, collective intelligence is strength, and if you supply free food, developers will come.”

RHoK used video-conferencing, live webstreaming, Internet chat channels, wiki pages and every other means possible to ensure that over 500 technologists around the world were able to work together on software solutions, collaborating across time-zones, international boundaries, oceans and language barriers to create innovative, life-saving technology solutions for the world’s most vulnerable populations.

The chosen winning hacks from many of the global locations, have already received interest and support from governments, NGOs and international organizations and some will be implemented on the ground to contribute to critical disaster risk assessment and response needs as early as this summer.

RHoK’s first Hackathon was held in November 2009 in Mountain View, California, and resulted in software solutions that were later implemented in Haiti and Chile following the devastating earthquakes there in early 2010.

To learn more about Random Hacks of Kindness and to get involved, visit www.rhok.org.

Over the past six months, SecondMuse has been working with the World Bank to develop a collaborative online community dedicated to better understanding natural disaster risk and harnessing new technological innovations to address risk in the world’s most vulnerable communities.  The online community, www.understandrisk.org, has engaged thousands of technical experts and practitioners from over 130 countries around the world in sharing their experiences and knowledge in preparing for, and responding to, natural disasters.  The collaborative online global community served as a forum to harness the energy and expertise of practitioners with many diverse backgrounds in disaster risk management, enable them to share ideas across disciplines and national borders, and to spur the development and use of new innovations and technologies in the field of disaster risk.

The online discussions on the Understanding Risk Community site formed the basis of the recent Understanding Risk Forum, held at the World Bank in June 2010, where over 400 experts and practitioners from around the world traveled to Washington, D.C. to share their work and learn from one another. Sessions covered topics as diverse as using state-of-the-art satellite imagery to model risk, to crowdsourcing for risk assessment, to the challenges of perceiving and communicating risk.

The Understanding Risk Forum was far from your traditional conference.  From the user-generated content to the opening night Ignite talks about each session topic, to the integration of Twitter and live webstreaming to engage the global online community, the Understanding Risk Forum was innovative in its model as well as its content.  In addition to participating in the conceptual and content development of the Understanding Risk Forum, Todd Khozein, SecondMuse, also presented on the impact of new media on disaster risk as part of the Perceiving and Communicating Risk panel.

The Understanding Risk Forum has come to a close, but the online community continues to grow and develop as a virtual gathering place for experts worldwide to communicate, connect and enhance their own work through discussion and collaboration with other practitioners.

In March 2010 a very unique group of scientists, activists, entrepreneurs and inventors came together at the Kennedy Space Center, in the shadow of the Space Shuttle Discovery, with the goal of moving humanity one step closer towards water sustainability.  The gathering was part of LAUNCH—a groundbreaking collaboration among NASA, USAID, Nike and the U.S. State Department with the ambitious goal of identifying and supporting the progress of disruptive innovations with the potential to have a broad impact on humanity.

LAUNCH: Water was the first LAUNCH forum to take place.  In late 2009, SecondMuse was fortunate to be chosen to help conceive and execute LAUNCH: Water.  SecondMuse supported the LAUNCH founding partners in designing a collaborative process that allowed them, through consultation with experts in water sustainability and the use of cutting edge technology, to search the globe for pioneering innovations in the water sector—innovations that, if successful, could revolutionize water use around the world.

The resulting ten innovations chosen for the LAUNCH: Water forum included brand-new techniques of hydroponic farming, a bacterial water test that can be done in a simple plastic bag under the meanest of conditions, a technology capable of removing microscopic arsenic particles from contaminated water throughout Bangladesh, water pipes made from an incredible material that can transform highly saline or contaminated water into water viable for agriculture and mobile sensors capable of traveling river systems and transmitting vital data.

SecondMuse worked closely with the chosen innovators to hone their messages for delivery at the LAUNCH forum, where each innovator had the opportunity to undergo multiple impact sessions with a council of experts in every relevant field from engineering to manufacturing, marketing to design, from venture capital financing to international development.  The collective energy and brainpower marshaled by the LAUNCH council members led the innovators in new directions, forged important networks and refined developing business models.

The LAUNCH commitment to moving these innovations forward does not end with the forum, but is a continuous process of accelerating each innovation’s development.  In the past months SecondMuse has worked with each innovator in building on suggestions the rose from the LAUNCH forum, in moving those innovations further down the path towards success, and in giving humanity some desperately-needed hope for progress in the field of water sustainability

We’ve had the incredible opportunity of late to collaborate with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, World Bank and NASA in an initiative that brings together disaster relief experts and software engineers to work on identifying key challenges to disaster relief and developing solutions to these critical issues.  These codejams are a series of Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) events that will bring the best and brightest together for a “give camp” to solve real world-problems related to Crisis/Disaster Relief.

The thrill for us is not just that this is an incredible partnership between the disaster risk community and the software engineering community, but that it involves three of the world’s largest corporations who are generally known to compete aggressively with each other.  In this endeavor, however, they are not only co-sponsoring this event, but actually co-organizing it.  The organizing team is composed of champions in these organizations who are looking beyond strict allegiance to the corporations they represent and instead choosing a wider allegiance.  The challenges, of course, are clear in that this collaboration is happening in an environment that expects and often encourages competition between the organizations but then again…what noble effort has not met with challenge at its inception?

We say this is a fantastic example of what we believe to be a manifestation of a world becoming increasingly conscious of its oneness and that fact that ultimately we are all citizens of one homeland.

We are thrilled and proud to be one of the founding sponsors of RHoK!

More information for Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) is available at http://pressroom.rhok.org

So I’ve been thinking a little about how we are often expected to trace the origin of an idea…especially in academic thinking. This idea seems umm….ridiculous perhaps? insane maybe? Its as if an idea were a pillar of a number of neatly stacked bricks creating a nicely defined, clean cut, very traceable origin where each brick built upon the previous. That seems totally delusional to me. What makes up my ideas? Pieces of conversations, the memory of something I read long ago that shaped my thinking whose origin is now long forgotten, an eavesdropped coffee shop comment by the overly pierced leather wearing dude to my left…and that’s only what I am AWARE of! We are constantly being informed by sources we’re not even consciously aware of that our mental models sift and order. Yet despite all we have this notion of property…intellectual property.

Well…if the origin of an idea truly is as nebulous as what I have suggested, and I have yet to hear a compelling argument to the contrary, then how can we own it? The answer for me is simple…we don’t. It should be called intellectual squatting. There is no such thing as a truly original idea, because we add a small piece onto years of borrowed information, squat on it for awhile and call it our own. Academic procedure states that we should trace that idea to its source…I say impossible/delusional. But beyond that…why? Why do we feel that we need to put our name and claim on what is a synthesis of a hundred different sources?

Industry says that IP is necessary to motivate innovation…I question that. To be brash and to go a little to the extreme (though not really), it motivates innovation in a fragmented world where we believe that ideas are neatly stacked bricks proposed by individuals whose nature is to be self-maximizing greedy ego-driven cogs whose primary (sole?) incentive is recognition and the pursuit of power. That represents a world view that, IMHO, has long outlived any value it once possessed. It reflects a particular assumption of human nature that, IMHO, has sat on the throne of truth for far too long without being questioned. It underlies our societal constructs that, IMHO, are crumbling all around us and tearing at their seams.

I’m not saying there should be no reward or financial incentive that is linked to effort or achievement as there is clearly a place for external incentives. It just seems to me that if our motivation as humans shifted from what amounts to a childish and self-centered one towards a mature recognition that we are part of a unified whole, progress that would previously have been undreamt of would now actually be within reach (e.g. use my idea freely because surely you can build upon it, build something from it/off of it, and we can see progress at an exponential rate…like…ummm…what’s that little experiment they ran…oh ya…opensource). I don’t think this evolution in human motivation is a vain or idealistic hope. I think its the next inevitable (unless we want to commit collective Seppuku) stage in societal development.

IP motivates innovation if the ultimate incentive of the innovators is self-centered much like competition drives progress in an economy of self-centered players. Sure…but if said players evolve (not unlike 13 colonies evolved their collective thinking to form a nation not too long ago), IP and competition become giant restraints.

We put a baby in a crib so that they don’t fall off the bed and training wheels on a bike when the kid is learning to ride, but there comes a point where the cage of the crib and the extra wheels become a constraint instead of a protection. So instead of fighting to keep the training wheels and the cage on our crib…maybe its time for us to grow up…have we reached that point?

It is incredible how within the micro we can discern truths and patterns that help us make sense of the macro. Within the atom we can behold the universe and within the maturation of an individual we can clearly witness unfolding patterns of the evolution of human society. Do we not see in the individual how we begin as a single celled organism and begin to grow into a morass of undifferentiated cells subsequently evolving into organs that themselves create a higher level of organization in the form of organ systems? These organ systems, of course, then interact at a higher level of complexity and integration in the form of our bodies. What is remarkable is that at one level of organization it is virtually impossible to see the higher level if viewed from the perspective of that level alone. From the perspective of the lungs, the existence of a cardio-pulmonary system would not be easily apparent unless view that from a higher level of order. Is it really, then, that much of a stretch to imagine that there may be even higher orders of complexity? Is it possible to think that, just as the various organs form a larger collective with abilities that could far surpass any given organ in isolation, that as a human society we could actually form this sort of a higher level of functioning far surpassing the capacity of one individual? And that perhaps the magnitude of order that separates the functioning of one individual organ from the functioning of a human body could be mirrored with the functioning of the collective human organism?

As such…when we look at the evolution of a human from the selfishness of childhood into the impetuousness of adolescence and eventually into the maturity of adulthood, is it possible that human civilization follows a similar pattern? When we carry the selfishness of our childhood into our relationships as adults those relationships tend to be damaging and hurtful. As a human society, can it be said that we now need to shed ourselves from the selfishness of childhood, from the impetuousness of adolescence, and evolve into the maturity of the coming of age of human society? Can it be said that the parallel to the harmful selfish relationship of an individual adult can find its parallel in the relationship human society now has between nations and with the environment? I would say that our collective body has matured into an adult and it is now time to evolve emotionally as a human society. To transcend the limitations of narrow-minded nationalism and to break free from the shackles of conflict and competition as a means of progress. Competition is essentially a redundant method and yet virtually all of our systems are based on it! We create systems that ensure the inevitability of conflict and competition, but who is to say that this current system that was conceived in an era with completely antiquated assumptions has any value for our future civilization? Competition does not help the with the growth of society any more than our organs would help with the progress of our body by sequestering and hoarding plasma. This only makes sense if you really do believe that you are an island unto yourself…a belief that this little blogger clearly does not hold.