When immigrating to a new place, one of the best things to do in face of uncertainty about the future that such a move brings, is to look for the company of like-minded people. I was glad to learn about this event happening the weekend after my arrival in Switzerland, one I already wanted to take part in last year. Random Hacks of Kindness has over one thousand people around the world participating in a hackathon for disaster relief and climate change organizations, to see if we can generate new solutions to old problems in a weekend. @RHoKch is the first time the event was also located here.

The night before I looked through the list of documented problems, and put a few thoughts down on a wiki page. Early on Saturday morning I found myself in Basel again for the first time in years - previously it was here that my wife and I observed the deviously creative and jubilant Fasnacht. I made my way to unternehmen mitte more or less just following my nose, where a sizeable crowd of guys and gals of all ages and backgrounds had already gathered, having coffee and waiting for the start.

After short introductions from sponsors Trivadis (prizes also came from bbv Software Services AG and Microsoft), representatives from several well known organizations, including Caritas Foundation, //ch/open and Humanity Road, presented several challenges and reminded us why we were here in a series of short, inspirational talks. Afterwards, teams formed over nibbles of croissants and swigs of orange juice by putting our name down underneath one of four problems on the board.

I ended up working with a young chap from Zürich by the name of Philipp Küng (@philippkueng) who has very similar technology interests, and with whom I conversed on Twitter about a week prior to the event. A developer by the name of Max Mullinger also joined our team, and we were consulted by Frank (event organizer), who had prior experience in the problem area.

Our solution - Batch Uploader for People Finder (also see Upload Tool for People Finder for a problem description), is a Web application based on Node.js and Express, which retrieves information about mission persons from a remote site and transmits it into Person Finder, a tool developed by a few Google employees to aid distraught frands and families in the Haiti disaster and has since been used during earthquakes in Chile, Yushu, and Japan.

We got along splendidly, and after several hours of focused effort got most parts of the working solution together. Overnight, we received feedback from fellow RHoKers in New York and Hertford, USA, who tested our solution and contributed code, and we continued conversations over IRC and Skype. By Sunday the project was deployed into the cloud on Amazon EC2 and made widely available:

Please visit our Github site if you'd like to have a look and contribute: https://github.com/loleg/batch-people-finder

Other projects developed at RHoK basel included:

I had some family commitments that made it necessary for me to travel back early, however Philipp did a great job presenting our work on Sunday. A video with all the projects was made:

It was a pleasure to get to know all the teams, exchange ideas and motivate each other to achieve stellar results: kudos to everyone who was in Basel for the first Swiss RHoK, and to all the participants around the world :) And thanks so much to Frank Werner-Krippendorf for organizing a very successful event, hopefully the start of many RHoK weekends to come!

More coverage:

• http://blog.ivanjovanovic.com/2011/06/06/random-hacks-of-kindness-building-better-world-commit-by-commit/
• http://www.inside-it.ch/frontend/insideit?_d=_article&site=ii&news.id=25290 (German)
• http://www.scribd.com/doc/54832946/Uber-Rhok-3-in-Basel-DE (German)
• http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/06/08/hacks.kindness.followup/

Parting thoughts: for my part, I feel better on arrival and more confident about starting back on the high ground in Switzerland. At this gathering I was fortunate to make new friends, refocus on my role as a contributor to a small, fragile and connected world, and be enriched with stronger values and new directions. The best thing I can do now is continue on this path and encourage others: look out for more posts after a short break, while we have ourselves a baby ;)