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Mission

To create a self-sustaining global community of innovators building practical open technology for a better world, and to ensure their work creates impact in society.

  • Create open technology solutions for the challenges facing humanity, locally and globally.
  • Generate international collaboration between individuals, communities and organizations.
  • Foster opportunities for technologists to use their professional skills to serve humanity.
  • Build the technical and collaborative capacity of people and organizations to identify and tackle challenges for social impact. 
  • People around the world have time and skills that they will dedicate to making the world a better place, given the opportunity.
  • Organic, independently organized local communities are best suited for tackling local challenges.
  • International collaboration opens doors to new ways of looking at challenges, understanding common problems, and helps create a global human community.
  • Open source software and open data are well suited to social development because it gives people the freedom to learn, use, improve and share technology.  
  • Open technology can revolutionize social development through increased participation, economic development opportunities and accelerated innovation.
  • Creating social impact is a process of defining the specific challenges, collaboratively building solutions and identifying and supporting paths to sustainable impact. 

RHoK is unique in the space of “apps competitions”, “hackathons” and “technology for social good”. RHoK’s model is to start from identifying, defining and refining problem definitions provided by subject matter experts and local stakeholders. This ensures that volunteer time is focused on solving real problems for real people.  RHoK is more than simply a weekend event.  It is a process that begins with problem definition, continues through rapid prototyping of a solution at a hackathon event, and culminates in working with the experts and technologists alike to create a sustainability plan for promising applications to ensure they make it out into the real world.

We work to build the capacity of other people and organizations. We are committed to building the capacity of subject matter experts and local stakeholders to identify problems where technology can help, and to define and refine those problems so that volunteer technologists can tackle them.  We work to build the capacity of volunteer technologists to understand these problems and create solutions, and we work to build capacity among event organizers to run events that bring these groups together for close collaboration and long-term impact.

Collaboration is at the core of everything we do. Between the RHoK global and regional partners (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA, HP and the World Bank, and our regional partner for Australia, DiUS), between subject matter experts with problems and volunteers that work to address them, and between local event organizers and over 250 local organizations that support them. RHoK is a platform for collaboration, and our results depend on the quality of those collaborations.

We are hosting our 6th global hackathon in December 2012 in 30 cities across 16 different countries.  Including this upcoming event, RHoK, in collaboration with our local partners around the world, has spearheaded over 170 hackathons, in more than 50 cities around the globe involving over 6,000 participants.  Solutions developed by the RHoK community have been used by organizations such as the World Bank, Amnesty International, Transparency International and the Red Cross, as well as governments, emergency responders, and citizens.

The RHoK community is open for anyone to join. We are always looking for new problems to work on, and partners to work with us on them. For more information, please contact us.