You may have read about how Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) will be spreading to different world locations in the upcoming days of early December. In this post I would like to shine a little light on how the idea of organizing Random Hacks of Kindndess Warsaw (to happen this weekend) came to life. This initiative constitutes a very interesting, geo-specific example of how a community of practice can develop and grow organically.  Read about how open initiatives and collaborative projects take social change far beyond what have been planned and how inclusive participatory models can be!

There Was Something In The Air That Time

In early October, Polish Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, specifically the team responsible for the Watch Docs Human Rights Film Festival, came to meet me and other organizers of the Warsaw NetSquared Local (NetWtorek -- the site is in Polish only) to talk about the possibility of organizing a Social Innovation Camp during the Festival, in early December 2011. Because the festival team was looking for technical support, among other things, the NetWtorek team pointed them to BRAMA. BRAMA is a Mobile Technologies Laboratory at the Warsaw Polytechnics University. It serves as a meeting point for the Warsaw community of Linux programmers, and is run and managed by one of the founders of the Polish Free and Open Source Foundation (website in Polish only).

Interestingly, BRAMA was already involved in conversations with a few people from the very dynamic Warsaw Startups community, and thinking about organizing the Warsaw edition (the very first one!) of the Random Hacks of Kindness event on December 3 and 4. On top of that, Centrum Cyfrowe (a think-and-do tank whose mission is to build a digital society in Poland) planned an Open Data Day -- a meetup dedicated to writing applications, liberating data, creating visualizations and publishing analyses using open public data -- for the very same time.

Two Heads Are Better Than One. What About Seven?

We all wanted to do something around technology for social change. So we reckoned it is better to do it together.  

After realizing how big the Polish nptech potential really is, an open initiative of Warsaw NGOs and friends has decided to do more than just organize the event. The group contains of various Polish organizations:

• Free and Open Source Foundation
• Centrum Cyfrowe
• Fundacja TechSoup
• CiviCRM Polska(the website is in Polish only, to read more about CiviCRM tool go here)  
• Watch Docs Film Festival
• Mobile Technology Laboratory BRAMA
• The Unit for Social Innovation and Research Shipyard

Our first step was to launch an online platform dedicated to all Social Hacking Initiatives in Poland -- sohack.pl. SocHack is an aggregation platform, branded with its own, independent brand dedicated to gather information on all social hackathons in Poland. The landing site displays banners or clickable images of upcoming events, and takes you to the specific event’s subpage. Creating such a page for your event comes easy -- you are more than invited to use the technology tools donated by CiviCRM Polska, and the graphic design, as well as a layout concept that came from Fundacja TechSoup. Our site is (y)our site.

Let’s say you want to run a hackathon dedicated to social issues and you need an online space for your event -- we have a free tool in place that will help you do that! Do you have questions of how to navigate through the site, add and modify content? We have people passionate about tech for change that are willing to help -- just give us a shout!

Random Hacks of Kindness Warsaw

For the time being, the site (and specifically the /rhok2011 subpage) is the main online space dedicated to the Random Hacks of Kindness and the Open Data Day events to happen on Dec 3 and 4 at Warsaw Polytechnics University.  Open Data Day will act as one of the RHoK projects -- everyone who feels passionate about pulling out the Polish monuments data, clearing it, and pushing it back to Wikipedia, can join the group. However, there we have more projects already in the line.

The November NetWtorek meetup was dedicated to the topic of hackathons, and the social impact they could have. We have also organized two additional meetings: one for the NGO/ social activists participants, and the other for technologists who expressed their interest in participating in the event. We have worked together on the formulating the problems and ideas in an actionable way, and working out the structure for potential projects. I personally feel very passionate about guerrilla gardening and biking project (mapping bike lanes and peaceful city parts). We also heard from people willing to build a learning barter platform, and some who’d like to prove links between physics inspired theories and the social logic of why people act kind (it might not be as random as you think!).

Everything Is Still To Happen

Interested in how will it all turn out and what Polish people define as the most appealing social and tech driven initiatives? Learn more!

Follow the #rhokwarsaw hashtag, and check out the SocHack Facebook Fanpage.

Also: stay tuned to the Netsquared blog, we will be sharing more and introducing the winners after the weekend!