Hackers are often portrayed as anarchists or criminals, but many hacker gatherings seek to be a force for good.

When you apprehend the chat hacker, you apparently don't account addition committed to analytic the problems of all-around development.

But this weekend, self-proclaimed hackers about the apple will accumulate at "hackathon" contest to accouterment disaster-risk administration and altitude change. The break is the semiannual Random Hacks of Kindness all-around conference, which seeks to advantage Internet abstracts to abode apple problems.
Gatherings will be captivated in cities about the globe, from Atlanta to California's Silicon Valley and from Basel, Switzerland, to Bogota, Colombia. The appointment is the aftereffect of a 2009 accord by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and the Apple Bank, which founded Random Hacks of Kindness. (Both the alignment and the contest it organizes are accepted as RHoK.)

The accumulation solicits "problem definitions" from organizations in the acreage of adversity preparedness, abatement and altitude change and puts them afore "tech-savvy do-gooders," according to Elizabeth Sabet from SecondMuse, RHoK's all-around operational lead.

It's this amalgam amid subject-matter experts and computer hackers that makes RHoK effective, its leaders said.

Hackers at a Random Hacks of Kindness gathering in December 2010 in Chicago.

"Technical solutions created abandoned by abstruse bodies are generally too bulky for the field," said Philadelphia organizer Mike Brennan. "Solutions created by acreage experts abandoned generally abridgement the abstruse and accurate base for an able solution. RHoK is attractive to abode these weaknesses directly."

Sabet is additionally quick to point out that "hacking" doesn't consistently beggarly what some bodies adeptness think.

"RHoK celebrates hacking in its best absolute ambience -- application basal assets and best brainpower to actualize outside-the-box solutions -- 'hacks' -- in acknowledgment to absorbing problems," she said. "The absorbed is to accomplishment the weekend with some accurate prototypes and audience applications that can go on to be put to use by the experts and (nongovernmental organizations) who proposed the problems."

If antecedent years are any indication, these hackers will airing abroad with absolute results.

The 2009 RHoK accident generated I'mOK, an SMS account acclimated by bodies in Haiti and Chile to acquaint families of their cachet via adaptable messaging afterwards the earthquakes in those countries. The Apple Bank is aerodynamics a affairs generated at the 2010 RHoK to anticipate barrage risk. These are aloof two of abounding examples.

RHoK serves as a all-around awning alignment and provides resources, but advance groups on the arena in anniversary burghal put calm the alone events. Willow Brugh is one such volunteer, adamantine at assignment advancing the RHoK this weekend in Seattle.

She said she's still enthused about aftermost year's accident in which she was allotment of a aggregation that advised a apparatus enabling adversity victims to address their losses added calmly and ask for help. By the end of the weekend, her aggregation had activity prototypes of an iPhone app, an Android app and a Web portal. Now bounded governments beyond the country are acrimonious up their program.

"That's a success, back the affair you've congenital continues to be acclimated and formed on, and makes it out to the public," Brugh said. "It was awesome."

In Melbourne, Australia, RHoK has been apprenticed by issues abutting to home.

"Many of our accompany and families accept been alone impacted by the backcountry fires and floods in Victoria, and we apperceive bodies who accomplished the tsunami and the Christchurch (New Zealand) earthquake," Melbourne organizer Jane Treadwell said. "No association is altogether safe from these threats, and through RHoK we can all accomplish a addition to preventing, allowance and abating accent and suffering."

In Bangalore, India, Praveen Selvasekaran has been alive with "a advance army of 10 members" to put calm an accident for an accepted 200 hackers. The Bangalore accident will chase the accepted RHoK format, he said, but anniversary hackathon is far from identical.

"What absolutely makes every RHoK altered is the adeptness to break bounded problems," he said. "Sometimes two altered RHoK locations may booty a absolutely altered access to the aforementioned problem."

That assortment of outcomes is absolutely what makes RHoK ambrosial to its sponsors, according to Nicholas Skytland of NASA's Accessible Government Initiative.

"Innovation is consistently a numbers game: The added you do it, the bigger your affairs are of actuality successful," he said. The action of addition is itself abundant of the reward, Skytland said.

"RHoK break bottomward barriers that anticipate addition and claiming the way business has consistently been done, by demography advantage of abounding of the possibilities created by alive in a networked agenda world. A acknowledged weekend for us is one in which hundreds, if not thousands, of developers from about the apple accumulate to ad-lib technology that didn't abide 24 hours ago."

Gather they will, from Nairobi, Kenya, to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and everywhere in between. RHoK organizer Heather Leson has been putting calm Toronto's additional RHoK and is assured 90 hackers to attend.

"The best agitative affair is to watch accuracy collide," she said. "People appear from all walks of life. We accept emergency managers, accountants, bloom affliction professionals, journalists, accessible abstracts and accessible antecedent developers, UX/UI, trainers, and abounding more. It is a assorted accumulation of bodies lending their time, activity and ability in alarming ways."