Random Hacks of Kindness: Drop2Drink

I have always been intrigued by the idea of programming for good, and tried many times to contribute to open source projects. Finally I got my acts together and attended Random Hacks of Kindness this weekend.

As my newbie, my goal was simple: observe how a charity hackathon is run, contribute whatever I can. Random Hacks of Kindess maintains a list of project proposals at the website, and we could use that as a starting point. However, the site was down during the day. Fortunately some people came with project ideas, and we heard 6 people explain their projects. We then split into groups, essentially interviewing the different projects to figure out which one was want to spend time on.

I ended up working on the project proposed by Sarah Filley, Drop2Drink. Apparently San Francisco uses potable water for fire fighting, so to ensure that there is enough drinking water during an emergency, the City of San Francisco has designated 67 Emergency Drinking Water Fire Hydrants, marked with a blue water drop. Sarah would like to use them as anchors to spread awareness for diaster preparation. 

Hydrant #33. Photo by Sarah Filley

We gathered around and brainstormed. Since the group was quite large, it took a while to hear everybody. While all the talking was happening, Christiaan was typing furiously. He was grabbing the address of the hydrants from a PDF and populating a Fusion Table with it. By the time we wrote all our ideas on the white board, he had a Google Map showing all the hydrants! Awesome. Initially I was a bit worried since there was a lot more talking than doing, but seeing the map made me feel much better.

Lunch came and went, and we split into a few subteams: website, foursquare, tropo and QR code. I was in charge of the dynamic part of the website, generating one page per hydrant. Finally I got to code! I set up an appengine instance, fetched the data from Fusion Table, and populate each page with a row. This serves as the landing page when people click on a map marker, or scan the QR code we were putting on the hydrants themselves.

It didn't take me that much time to set up the base site, but the iterations were a bit slow, mostly because I had a sore throat and I couldn't talk. That turned out to be a huge problem. Since I was there to help with a problem defined by others, communication was really important. I would say the split is 80/20 - 80% talking, 20% coding. And since I couldn't talk, I couldn't contribute as much as I'd like to. By the end of Saturday I actually lost my voice, so I stayed home on Sunday to rest. I really wished I didn't have a sore throat!

All told I had a great experience, and I would probably attend more charity hackathons, knowing that the most important aspect is co-ordination. In a way it's leadership bootcamp: you meet tons of new people, try to figure each person's skill and passion, and align everything to the project goal. It's an interesting challenge.

I'm happy to report that Team Drop2Drink has risen to the challenge beautifully: we were selected as first place winner of RHoK SF! Check us out at http://www.drop2drink.org.