Geeks Without Bounds is a nonprofit organization that supports humanitarian open source projects through a combination of hackathons and an accelerator program. In this talk, I’ll be explaining how you can get involved, whether you want to support existing humanitarian projects in your spare time or make humanitarian open source technology your full time gig.
I’ll talk about Random Hacks of Kindness, and I’ll explain why we see hackathons as weekend volunteer opportunities rather than competitive coding marathons. Then I’ll explain what comes next: How do projects started over a weekend continue life, and how do good ideas become deployable technology? I’ll throw in some examples of what NOT to do along with some success stories.
The talk will cover GWOB programs such as the Friday Challenges, our internship program for novice developers, Accelerator Weekends, and the six month accelerator program that takes prototype projects and helps them work towards sustainability. I’ll touch on what it means to be a sustainable project when your product serves the poorest people or people in crisis situations. From there, we’ll look at how GWOB fits into the ecosystem of the Digital Humanitarian Network We are only one of many organization providing opportunities for those with programming, systems, or data crunching skills, so I’ll touch on a few of the other great organizations out there.