Since the earthquake in Haiti, many people have organized events to aid disaster relief in their own special way.
On February 12, a group of computer programmers came together in support of Haiti relief. The event, dubbed the Crisis Camp Rochester Hackathon for Haiti, was organized by Victoria Kranchunas, a first year Game Design and Development major. The technology based relief effort at RIT was inspired by a Computer Science House alumni who participated in a Haiti programming effort in Boston.
The Crisis Camp Rochester Hackathon for Haiti was a one day event where more than 15 students volunteered their time and programming skills in the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences to give aid to those impacted in the recent Haiti quake. Hackathons like this are held on different days each week around the country to solve some of the technological problems in Haiti. RIT volunteers tackled three separate computer and information based projects.
The first of which was SAHANAPy, an online coordination system to organize relief which lists missing people and manages donated resources. The aim of this project is to convert the not so robust PHP: Hypertext Processor version of SAHANAPy to the more robust programming language, Python. “The bugs in this project are pretty big because there are a lot of dependencies in Python,” said Bryan Goldstein a second year Computer Science major and programmer in the relief effort.
The second project involves gathering information on relief organizations. “It is necessary busy work,” said Michael Finegan a graduate student in Computer Science. They compiled a database of contact information such as Twitter accounts, emails addresses and phone numbers for all the relief organizations. This database lets everyone know who is giving aid, where and to
what extent.
The final project is to provide a database for the Haiti Schools Situational Awareness group. This is an online database that characterizes the latitude and longitude of all the schools in Haiti and includes a damage report. “I wanted to get involved in any way I could help,” said Alexander Dean, a project volunteer and second year Computer Science major.
The RIT Crisis Camp Hackathon for Haiti was just one installment of a continuing effort around the United States; therefore, all of the work done by RIT volunteers will be continued by another group in a completely different city. Crisis efforts like this will ensure the most relevant data is placed into the relief databases and prevent any serious bugs from hampering future volunteer efforts.
More can be found on the Innovation Center’s blog at http://innovation.rit.edu key word Remy DeCausemaker, who is a RIT Innovation Fellow and resident Hacktivist.
