This hackathon unites geeks all over the planet who are interested in creating applications that help people communicate more easily in situations where human lives are threatened.

We’ve identified some excellent free and open-source crisis-management platforms as well as group collaborative platforms (“The Platforms”), and we want to challenge developers to extend these platforms across the globe.  You can set up your own, or use one of the  ”sandbox” versions we will have running.

• Ushahidi – Ushahidi is a free and open source platform that any person or organization can use to set up their own way to collect and visualize information. The core platform allows for plug-in and extensions so that it can be customized for different locales and needs.
• Sahana - The Sahana project aims to provide an integrated set of pluggable, Web-based disaster management applications that provide solutions to large-scale humanitarian problems in the relief phase of a disaster.
• Open Atrium – Open Atrium is an Drupal-based “intranet in a box” that has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations. It comes with six features – a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all.

How to Participate

All you have to do is sign up to participate and then, during the hackathon, head to your local hacker/maker or co-working space and start coding.  Or create and develop from home –  you can participate anywhere just by signing up and developing.   If you do, you can qualify to win prizes (see below).