What an amazing weekend the Tropo team had across the country this weekend, with Tropo representing at simultaneous events in Seattle, Philadelphia, New York City & Raleigh.  In Seattle, Tropo teamed up with Geeks Without Bounds to be the U.S. Main Stage event for Random Hacks of Kindness.  We gathered folks from NASA, Microsoft, Crisis Commons, Code for America and brought together geeks like Chris Pirillo (founder of Gnomedex), Chris Metcalf (Socrata), Mike Laine (Liftport Space Elevator) and Ed Jezierski (CTO of Instedd).

It was an unforgettable weekend, kicked off Friday night with a reception featuring awesome DJ’s Turbo & Maxx, aerial acrobatics by the magnificent Zita the Aerialist and lightning talks by VIPs from the representing organizations.  The folks from SecondMuse posted some raw video of the lightning talks.  At about 28 minutes into this video, as I was about to begin my talk, I was encouraged to throw the words I had prepared out the door and instead played an impromptu chorus of Billy Joel’s Pianoman.  Never in my life could I have imagined this particular course of events:

 

RHOK#3 Seattle Reception from Gerty on Vimeo.

 

 

But it was Saturday and Sunday when we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. Some of the hacks that were worked on that featured Tropo:

SAARAA : Situation Awareness And Rapid Assessment App, collecting data from various places via phone apps, voice, text, etc and collecting that information into a crisis map.

Open211 : A Directory of city social services. Search is live. Portland, Oakland, and San Francisco.

Tethered Towers : weather data and communications devices attached to ballons to assist when traditional communications are down and local data is needed (toxic plume detection, gun fire detection etc).

MoveFood: Matching restaurants & people with excess food to individuals who are hungry.

Sincere thanks to everyone who came and hacked. I think we’re all quite a bit blown away by the incredible synergy that was created this weekend. Extra thanks to our excellent venue hosts at Microsoft, folks from SecondMuse and especially Willow Brugh from Geeks without Bounds, who wrangled the entire weekend together with brute force and determination to make a difference.

More pics from RHok3 events all over the world this weekend are available on the Flickr Stream

Related posts:

1. Seattle 911 scanner on Tropo for the hackathon
2. Tropo joins Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA & The World Bank for Random Hacks of Kindness
3. Hacking for the Greater Good
4. Hacking Across the Country with Tropo
5. SXSW Roundup – StartupBus TV

Tags: Geeks without Bounds, GWOBorg, Hackathon, Random Hacks of Kindness, RHoK

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