Hackers gather around the globe to fight “climate change”
Technology Sunday, June 5th, 2011
By Alden Mahler Levine, CNN
When you hear the word hacker, you probably don’t picture someone dedicated to solving the problems of global development.
But this weekend, self-proclaimed hackers around the world will gather at “hackathon” events to tackle disaster-risk management and climate change. The occasion is the semiannual Random Hacks of Kindness global conference, which seeks to leverage Internet data to address world problems.
Gatherings will be held in cities around the globe, from Atlanta to California’s Silicon Valley and from Basel, Switzerland, to Bogota, Colombia. The conference is the result of a 2009 collaboration by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank, which founded Random Hacks of Kindness. (Both the organization and the events it organizes are known as RHoK.)
The group solicits “problem definitions” from organizations in the field of disaster preparedness, relief and climate change and puts them before “tech-savvy do-gooders,” according to Elizabeth Sabet from SecondMuse, RHoK’s global operational lead.
It’s this synthesis between subject-matter experts and computer hackers that makes RHoK effective, its leaders said.
To read more, visit: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/06/03/hackers.fight.climate.change/
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Posted by gadsden on Jun 5 2011. Filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
