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