Computer Hackers in White Hats
Washington - Vint Cerf, the computer scientist often called the father of the Internet, looked out at the audience gathered beneath the chandeliers of the Benjamin Franklin Room and observed, "This is probably the geekiest gathering ever in the history of the State Department."
The words - which recall President John F. Kennedy's quip that the Nobel Prize winners he had invited to the White House were the most extraordinary collection of talent ever gathered there, "with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone" - were a tribute to an assemblage of 150 software developers and computer-code writers who were giving up their weekends to trade ideas and design applications for disaster response and relief.
They proudly call themselves hackers, but not the kind who break into computer systems and networks to cause harm. These are the hackers who work together to write free public software and computer programs, and keep "hacking" it to get all the bugs out.
The weekend push in Washington and in several other cities around the world - Jakarta, Indonesia; Nairobi, Kenya; Porto Alegre and S=E3o Paulo, Brazil; Santiago, Chile; and Sydney, Australia - was the latest effort by a movement that calls itself Random Hacks of Kindness and boasts a heavyweight lineup of corporate and government sponsors - Google Inc., Microsoft Corporation, NASA, the World Bank and Yahoo Inc.
Ambassador Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, the State Department's special representative for global partnerships, hosted the reception on the eve of the code-writing marathon, held at a Microsoft facility in the Washington suburbs. "You truly are building a global community dedicated to serving disaster relief challenges through technology," Bagley told the programmers.
Another speaker, Pamela Cox, World Bank vice president for Latin America and the Caribbean, extolled the programmers for a mobile phone application called "I'm OK," which they produced at their first gathering in Mountain View, California, last year. The application, downloadable from http://imokapp.appspot.com ( http://imokapp.appspot.com/ ), allows anyone to register on the "I'm OK" website, then, after disaster strikes, send a single text message notifying family and friends they are safe. Cox said it proved useful in both the Haiti and Chile earthquakes. It is "on my phone and on the phone of each of the World Bank staff working in Haiti," she said.
For this technology-minded crowd, the 66-year-old, nattily dressed Cerf - in three-piece suit with "CTRL" and "ESC" on his cuff links - clearly was a star. He acknowledged the work that tech volunteers did after an earthquake destroyed much of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, January 12, but said what is really needed are innovations prepared and rolled out in advance that have everyday applications, not just for crises.
"The best ideas are the ones that get used by everybody all the time," said Cerf. He exhorted the volunteers to think up and design sustainable applications "so we know they work when we need them and we don't have to scramble to put them together in an emergency."
Cerf is a former program manager for the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) who, with Robert Kahn in the early 1970s, designed the software code used to transmit data over the Internet. Their breakthrough communication protocols (TCP/IP) allowed computers to "speak" to each other.
Later, he led the creation of the first commercial e-mail service for MCI Communications. Since 2005, he's worked for Google, the technology and search-engine giant, as a vice president and "chief Internet evangelist."
"It's kind of surreal to be here," said Jordan Breighner, 24, who said Cerf was one of his idols growing up. Breighner, who has done technology work for the government on emergency response and now works in the private sector, said he did not know how much he could contribute to the weekend programming marathon, "but that's kind of the fun of it. You just go and see what you can learn and contribute."
Trey Smith, a Carnegie Mellon University systems scientist who works at the NASA Ames Research Center in California on robotics and linking photos to specific geographic locations (geotagging) for emergency responders, was on the team at the first Random Hacks of Kindness gathering in California last fall. He is a strong believer in these group efforts. "It really helps to have other coders around you," he said.
Microsoft Vice President Curt Kolcun, who runs the company's U.S. public sector business unit, said, "We all love technology in our community, but sometimes we produce solutions for solutions' sake." Partnering with such organizations as NASA, the World Bank and emergency responders helps the technical community to understand a problem and make meaningful contributions to solving it, he said.
At the end of the code-writing marathon, judges chose one project as the best of the Random Hacks of Kindness. It was a computer application, based on a numerical formula, with graphics to help engineers visualize the risks of landslides.
The weekend event was organized by SecondMuse, a consulting firm, and Crisis Commons, a community of technology workers and emergency responders that organized the Crisis Camp Haiti meetings last January to answer cries for help from Haiti.
