Meet 5 software projects making the world a better place

I was at an event two days ago where the topic was teaching programming. During this event attendees raised the problem, that there aren’t enough software developers. During the following discussion it was suggested that if you could show the positive social impact you can have through software development, it could be more attractive for people to get into. “If there were any such projects.”

There are tons of those projects and initiatives. Let’s meet five of them right now!

1. Ushahidi

A screen shot of the original Ushahidi web mashup taken form their about page.

Ushahidi means “testimony” in Swahili. It is a project that a group of programmers started in the aftermath of the 2007 presidential election in Kenia. There was a major outbreak of violence and it was simply too hard for bloggers and other people to report all the incidents of violence that eye witnesses reported to them.

Enter Ushahidi. It was an application build quickly by a group of programmers to map out reports of violence on google maps, a so called “mashup”. This way they made it easy for people to report incidents of violence and made it accessible to everyone. Well everyone with an Internet connection.

Ushahidi has since become a platform. Anyone can download Ushahidi and deploy it for their own purposes. For instance Ushahidi was used after the 2010 earth quake in Haiti to report events. Also Ushahidi is open source, so feel free to help improve this awesome project.

You can hear more about it in this highly recommended TED Talk: Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world

2. betterplace.org

The betterplace.org logo

betterplace.org is a platform where people can donate for social projects or raise funds for a social project. You may think of it as kickstarter for social projects. Betterplace.org focusses a lot on direct and transparent support of projects. The platform is free to use and they pass on 100% of all the donations. You can see a more thorough explanation of what they do and how this is more effective than conventional funding here.

So how do they finance themselves? Well short answer: Some sponsors and friends help them. Moreover donators are free to give a little extra money to support betterplace. There is also a longer answer.

On a little side note: They are based in Berlin and very nice people

3. Random hacks of Kindness (RHOK)

hacking at RHoK Berlin (Photo credit: @anked)

The motto of Random Hacks of Kindness is “Hacking for Humanity”. It is a global community building open technology to help make the world a better place. As such it is a prime example of an organization trying to improve the world through the use of software. You can find a list of projects developed in their wiki.

Random Hacks of Kindness hosts global events, also called hackathons, where people meet and work on solutions for problems together. The next global event will take place on the first and second December 2012. You can check if there is an event organized near you here. I’ll be attending the event in Berlin, so go ahead and join lots of other people and me. Let’s have fun together hacking and doing socially good.

4. Mission of Mercy

Mission of Mercy logo taken from their github page.

Mission of Mercy is a clinic management application for free dental clinics and is used in the United States. This application helps these free dental clinics tremendously by supporting the clinc flow. It was created and is mainly maintained by the awesome Jordan Byron, a co-founder of the Mendicant University.

5. Stadt Land Code

Stadt Land Code Logo taken from their home page.

A German initiative (English: “city country code”)  to support the development of more digital tools for citizens to improve social life. Fields of interest include, but are not limited to: public transport, infrastructure and politics. In general the tools should make it easier to participate and really make a difference. FixMyStreet is a good example of such a digital tool. The initiative includes a work shop and the possibility to win a project funding of 2500€.

Conclusion

See there are lots of software projects or initiatives having a social impact or aiming to have a social impact. Do you know any other social projects? Please feel free to leave a comment!

Many of the projects are open source, so go ahead and contribute or join the next Random hacks of Kindness event near you. Start your own project. Host your own event. It’s up to you.

Why is nobody #rubythankful anymore?

Do you know what #rubythankful is? It’s a hash tag, those are commonly used on Twitter to mark special things. There is even a website displaying all the recent tweets that have been marked as #rubythankful. It first came to my notice (or maybe it was even created) during the summer of 2011 when there was a little drama going on in the Ruby community, which I don’t want to blog about since enough has been said and it had a happy ending (1000s of dollars of donations). During that time someone introduced the #rubythankful hash tag and I was seeing many people tweeting about how awesome this hash tag is and how much they love it. So how about now? How many people are #rubythankful these days?

Not so many it seems (screenshot taken on the 21st of December)

At the moment of this writing there is just one tweet up there, which was tweeted by myself… and it isn’t the first time that the situation is like this.

Why does this even matter?

So people aren’t using a specific hash tag on twitter and as a result of that some home page looks pretty empty – no big deal huh? Well maybe it is, maybe it is not. I just think it’s kind of sad. Everybody seemed so excited about it, I was seriously hoping that it would be something that we, as the Ruby community, could adopt as a whole and incorporate into our culture.

At this point a little information about myself: I say “we” but I’m pretty new to the Ruby and open source community myself (in fact I just really started in the summer of 2011) so this is my point of view, the one of a newbie – so full of enthusiasm.

It’s not just about a hash tag!

And by incorporating it into our culture I don’t mean simply tweeting with the #rubythankful hash tag every now and then. It’s more the spirit that counts. In the open source community there are tons of people spending a lot of time creating software and then giving everybody full access to it. I think that this is one of the most AWESOME things out there. I mean, think about it, those people and the software they create make our lives easier every day – would it be so hard to say “thank you!” every now and then? All too often I see people ranting about open source projects for how they do things, for changes they haven’t implemented, for changes they implemented etc… these people probably use these tools regularly but instead of getting around to show some appreciation I see them criticizing the work that maybe even helps pay their bills. Of course this isn’t the rule, but it happens.

Saying “Thank you!” is just the beginning!

Saying thank you helps, as it shows a good attitude and it shows open source contributors that their work is valued (I’m always totally happy when someone thanks me for something I did, but well I’m still new). But why stop here? Why not contribute to a project you like? So far all the maintainers I’ve contacted in the Ruby world have been super helpful. Maybe you have this little helper method you use every time when you use a specific gem, maybe people would like it to be part of the gem? Why not just look in the issues on github and see if you can help make one of your favorite gems a little bit better? It’s a cool feeling plus you probably learn much about Ruby and the gem while doing so. I used to be REALLY uncomfortable with Meta-Programming until I read and reused some of _why’s code in hacketyhack!

And if that seems a bit too much, just filing an issue to make the maintainer of a project aware of a problem also helps a great deal!

It’s more general than just Ruby or open source…

I also write this post because I feel that this is a more general problem in modern societies, at least in my experience. You can do something well a hundred times and people will rarely thank you or compliment you. However, if after those many times where you did something good you do something wrong, people are way more likely to criticize you/the project than they are to compliment some good work.

So what’s the point?

I guess my point is that we should probably be a little more thankful for all the awesome things people do. When I was beginning to learn Ruby I read a saying “Matz is Nice So We Are Nice” – I loved that! Unfortunately I have failed to hear it ever again… it would be nice if the Ruby community could readopt this saying and maybe give the #rubythankful a little more love again… or maybe even more.

So will you use the #rubythankful hash tag? I know I will.