What happens when you put a curious high school student, an experienced corporate executive, a savvy designer and programmer into a room?
“You get lateral thinking solutions to problems,” says Brisbane’s Random Hacks of Kindness lead Bruce Stronge.
“Hackers” will come together to do just this on Saturday, November 26, and Sunday, November 27, in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Western Sydney and Ipswich.
Read more: How a group of chance-makers are giving hackers a new face
The event brings a wide range of individuals under one roof to hack a range of humanitarian solutions—from the plight of refugees, to improving financial literacy, charity fundraising and crisis mapping in natural disaster zones.
“Everyone wants to do good innately,” Stronge tells StartupSmart.
“For technologists, [this] is a channel to give back.”
Stronge, the founder of NetEngine and Outfit, says more than double the number of people are participating in Queensland this year, compared to last year’s event.
“We had everyone from the CTO of Foxtel to students at QUT [last year],” says Stronge.
“It’s a really good opportunity for students to build real world projects with people who have [more than] 30 years of experience,” he says.
With no hierarchy and a collaborative environment for lateral thinking and learning, Stronge says the event enables people in the community and his own startup teams to put their efforts and talent to goodwill.
“We’re trying to bring together humanitarian community projects to technologists,” he says.
“It’s a fantastic way to engage our team at NetEngine and Outfit.”
Random Hacks of Kindness’ official national partners are the REA Group and DIUZ Consulting, and it supports non-profits like Oxfam and the ongoing crisis mapping project.
“We’re teaching people how to crowd curate maps to help crisis response teams,” Stronge says.
“If you’re not a programmer or technologist, we’ll be teaching people how to help people in real time [with] a piece of software and technology.”
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Dinushi Dias is a freelance journalist and a former StartupSmart reporter and multimedia content producer. She is the co-founder of Melbourne-based production house Dinushi & Power.
