On 1-2 June 2013, the EJC and De Persgroep, the leading media company in the Flemish/Dutch media landscape, will be hacking with the coders and programmers at the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon in Belgium.

In the past years, we were confronted with a various kinds of natural/man-made disasters in the world. While a number of digital tools support the newsgathering process, a big challenge remains for journalists to quickly mine the relevant crowdsourced contents when unexpected events such as shootings and extreme weather conditions threaten peoples’ lives.

Better communication ecosystem would lead into more effective process of disaster mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. Information is a commodity that is needed in order to sustain human lives when crises and disasters occur. Needless to mention, journalists play an important role in providing accurate information to the public and disaster-affected communities.

At the hackathon, the organisers would like to create the foundation for a sustainable, open framework where news journalists can find the relevant news and social media contents in real-time. It will be a first step forward to establish a newsgathering/ content-mining tool that can be used by various newsrooms, including small/medium-sized ones with limited resources.

Want to be part of this? Register now!

We started on Saturday with a headcount of 16 people. Both coders and non-coders started brainstorming about two problems presented by Movement Without a Name. A Flemish organisation helping people in need, giving them food, shelter, hope, social contacts, …

MWN will launch a new campaign on the 12th of December. With a website, tv-spots, ads in newspapers, … and also a Loneliness Test (both accessible on desktop and mobile). The test has been developed based on the work of Martijn Engelbregt:

The group worked on both the projects, but the main focus was to get this finished so it’s ready when the campaign launches on 12/12/12. The best way to explain what the app does is to show some screenshots:

Startpage

An example question

The ‘loneliness profile’ you match best with tools ans solutions to help you get rid of that type of loneliness. The profile always matches with a profile of a famous Flemish person. And off course the possibility to share your results on Facebook and/or Twitter.

While this project was being worked on by several people, other people of the group were working on a game using the proverbs of MWN. The idea was to blur some words in the graphical proverbs and make the user fill it in as quickly as possible. At the moment the project looks like this:

Blurry image, fill in the blurry word.

That’s correct!

With this app there are also plans to add a multiplayer mode as well and to convert it to a mobile app.

Non-Coding Stuff

We also did a few non coding stuff. Marina Cooreman was so kind to translate Bring The Food (created at RHoK Trento) in Dutch!

And thanks to Chad Badiyan we were able to submit a data set with all foodbanks in Brussels to be put into a Sheltr instance. I’ll update this post as soon as it is live on the internet!

Brainstorming

We’ve been brainstorming with other events as well. We connected with RHoK Trento to talk about extra features in Bring The Food and skyped with RHoK South Hampton to see what they were up to. We were located at the headquarters of De Persgroep, the biggest media company of Belgium so journalism couldn’t be missing at our event. Rina from the European Journalism Center was here to follow up on the complete RHoK event (internationally) and see how it feels like to join an event. We might be working together to create some data mining tools to make it easier for smaller media agencies to create quality articles about emergency situation through the usage of IT.

So to me it felt like a great RHoK event with an amazing crowd! I’m already looking forward to the next! See you soon!

If you want to know what a weekend (or one day) looks like:

Schedule

Saturday:
9:00 a.m.     Registration and Breakfast
9:30 a.m.     Schedule and logistics announcements
9:45 a.m.     Bond Zonder Naam Problem Presentation
10:15 a.m.    Brainstorming (Ideas are being created)
11:00 a.m.    Begin coding
12:30 p.m.    Lunch
1:30 p.m.     Coding continued
6:30 p.m.     Dinner (Probably Pizza)
8:00 p.m.     More coding

Sunday:
9:00 a.m.    Breakfast
9:30 a.m.    Begin coding
1:30 p.m.    Lunch
4:00 p.m.    Submission Deadline
4:15 p.m.    Presentations
5:30 p.m.    Post event social

About a week ago I joined the RHoK Working Group around Problem Refinement. And I must say some exciting problem sets will come to us in December.

While we had some time zone issues during the last event in June. Those problems will be resolved thanks to Michael Brennan (RHoK Coordinator) joining RHoK Bangalore (India). But in case the international problem definitions don’t challenge you enough we also have some ideas ourselves.

First of all we are working closely together with Bond Zonder Naam, an organisation who focusses its initiatives on people on the edge of society. They have several ideas to help them with their organisation. BZN is well known from their sayings and one of their ideas will do something fun with those. But the main idea they have will be something that’ll aid their campaign around ‘loneliness’ which they’ll launch on December 12th.

Bond Zonder Naam

• Campaing ‘Loneliness’: Create a (mobile/responsive) questionaire to discover the user’s ‘loneliness’-profile.
• A mobile sayings-calendar (mobile version of the paper version) with some extras like a game based on the sayings
• An errand system for disabled people: http://www.rhok.org/problems/errand-system-old-people

Other ideas

• Where2Trash: Using OpenData, create an app to find the closest trashcan.
• Mobile Doctors Practice: More info soon! (Mostly Brainstorming)
• An application to help people recycle. Get information about specific types of trash, fe. in what garbage can? Possibly add a calendar with the dates the trash is being picked up with the possibility to get notified the day before.
• Many more are being worked on atm. More info will be released as soon as it is available!

We’re happy to announce that we have found a location for the next RHoK event, December 1st and 2nd. We’ve always pointed out that we wanted to move towards Brussels. We want to reach as many people as possible and we think a location near the center of Belgium, Brussels, will help us reach the people we missed with our previous events (hosted in Antwerp and Kontich).

To be more precise the event will take place at the Headquarters of De Persgroep:
De Persgroep Belgium
Brusselsesteenweg 347
1730 Kobbegem

They made a lot of space available to us. We have a working space with desks and office chairs (minimum requirement off course). A seperate place where we can eat. Coffeemachines (with free coffee). An auditorium to do the intro and present all hacks and a meeting rooms with white boards to brainstorm in silence.

More info on the schedule will be released soon.

On September 14th, the Open Knowledge Foundation, together with IBBT, Flemish Government, iRail, iDrops and Multimedia Lab, organize Apps For Flanders, a hackathon for students and other enthousiasts. All results will be pitched in front of a jury, who will divide a pricepool worth 2000 euro.

The Open Knowledge Foundation previously introduced the use of Open Data during the second RHoK Belgium event. This led into a project called City Battle. City Battle later on won a price during the Open Data Day of the Flemish Government.

Are you interested in building cool applications, visualizations and/or mashups using Open Data? Join us on September 14th in Gent at the Apps for Flanders:
www.appsforflanders.be

Today a new blog post appeared on the global website: www.rhok.org. Amnesty International proposes a global problem definition and they will be speaking to us at the beginning of our RHoK-weekend! We’re very excited to see what they’ve got ready for us. As soon as we have more details we’ll bring you up to speed.

We could only make this cooperation with Amnesty possible thanks to Philipp from RHoK Berlin!

For the second Random Hacks of Kindness in Belgium, we’ll be working closely together with the Belgian Open Knowledge Foundation. We will try to encourage you to use Open Data in your applications.
The best solutions using Open Data will get a chance on stage at the Apps For Flanders event, 15th of June.

Moreover, we would also like to ask, if you have any ideas or if you could think about possible problem definitions. If you do have an idea we ask you to get in touch with us so we can make sure we are prepared for your proposal!

That’s it for now! Blog you soon!

RHoK Belgium Crew