Humanitarian Toolbox's mission is to create opportunities for volunteers of all skill levels and abilities to engage in open source. This allows the volunteers to build their skills & ‘online resume’ while creating highly valued and impactful technology solutions for organizations supporting communities impacted by disaster worldwide. These common solutions, built and maintained as ready to be deployed, always-on, open source projects, support ongoing nonprofit community work, resiliency preparation, and disaster response and relief efforts.

Project: CrisisCheckin

CrisisCheckin coordinates the “checking in” of volunteers and organizations both physically and virtually in response to natural disasters. There will be new requirements for expanded use of the solution in support of a new partnership with national and international volunteer organizations.

Technologies/Skills Used: HTML/JavaScript/CSS & cross platform and native mobile client development for iOS, Android, and Windows, as well as web design, user experience design, and .NET, C#, ASP.NET web services

Project: HelpBridge and Local Impact Map

HelpBridge allows rapid communication of “I am safe” or “I need help” to loved ones during everyday emergencies and after disasters through text, email, and social media. The project allow individuals to connect with local communities and nonprofit organizations to find opportunities to give time, money, or goods to support others.

Local Impact Map provides an online storytelling portal that allow nonprofits and communities to share stories about how they are responding to disasters and to everyday situations around the world.

Technologies/Skills Used: HTML/JavaScript/CSS & native mobile client development for iOS, Android, and Windows, as well as web design, user experience design, .NET, C#, ASP.NET, and SQL Server

Founded in 1987, Systers is Anita Borg Institute’s community and the heart of the ABI family. Syster's mission is to increase the number of women in computer science and make the environments in which women work more conducive to their continued participation in the field. Systers provides women with a private space to seek advice from their peers, and discuss the challenges they share as women technologists.

Mobile Project: Malaria

The Malaria project is a gaming reminder mobile application designed to help Peace Corps volunteers with malarial prevention tactics. The application features a reminder system, an ability to indicate that medication was taken on time or missed, features to track usage history, a trip indicator to remind volunteers to pack supplies, and informational resource malaria and preventative medication.

Skills Needed: Android and iOS (Swift)

Mobile Project: PowerUp

PowerUp is a female empowerment application, an educational choose-your-own-adventure game that allows young girls to learn about reproductive health and self-esteem by navigating the life of their avatar. The goal of this application is to minimize the negative influence of peer and media pressure on self-esteem.

Skills Needed: Android and iOS (Swift)

Web Project: Ushahidi Guyana for the Deaf Community

This application identifies homes that can potentially provide need for deaf services or homes that can be occupied by a deaf person so that future Peace Corp volunteers can continue their work, determine type of services needed, and report those needs back to the Peace Corps. Peace Corps volunteers onsite will gather data via GPS device, record information on each location housing a deaf occupant, display information collection on a web page, and make sure all the data is uploaded easily.

Skills Needed: Kohana PhP, RESTful API, PHP, Python, or Ruby

Web Project: Portal

The portal project is a Systers community portal created to help Systers community leaders organize, inform, and engage their communities. The application was built on a Python/Django framework. We are in the process of adding integrated Volunteer Management and meetup features so that leaders can manage volunteers, organize meetups, and engage their members through social media.

Skills Needed: Python3, Django, HTML, CSS

uProxy is a project facilitated by the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering research teams, and is currently seeded by Google Ideas, the think tank of Google. uProxy is an ongoing Privacy and Censorship project.

Project: Expanding Internet Access

uProxy exists to help people with restricted or insecure access to the Internet get to the content they care about safely. By allowing users to share their route to the Internet with each other, uProxy can make one person’s safe, open Internet connection available to many of their friends. uProxy does this by creating an encrypted connection between two people, making it hard for third parties to monitor or interfere with the traffic of the user who is getting access. uProxy is like a personalized VPN service that provides secure access to friends and family, or yourself when you travel.

Skills Needed: Basic programming and JavaScript experience

OpenHatch seeks to make free, open source software communities more vibrant, friendly, and diverse. OpenHatch runs education events and maintains free, web-based learning tools, to help people get involved in collaborative software development. OpenHatch also hosts computer programming meetup groups that are newcomer-friendly and gender-diverse. These meetup groups are educational and free of cost to educate the public on computer software programming topics.

Project: Open Source Comes to Campus

OpenHatch and its Open Source Comes to Campus workshops cover the practical skills students need to contribute to open source projects, such as using version control, issue trackers, and IRC. The OpenHatch website and workshop curriculum create connections between students and open source professionals who can explain how the community and culture works. During this OSD, participants may work on improving the OpenHatch website and curriculum materials that will help more students learn how to make contributions to open source projects.

Open Hatch's volunteers will teach the basics of version control (using git and GitHub), open source project management tools (such as IRC communications, issue tracking, continuous integration, and documentation), and open source community management.

Skills Needed: Willingness to learn and contribute to open source projects

OpenStack is open source software for creating private and public clouds. OpenStack software controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, managed through a dashboard or via the OpenStack API. OpenStack works with popular enterprise and open source technologies, making it ideal for heterogeneous infrastructure.

Project: Overview Workshop

This hands-on workshop will give participants an overview of the cloud, OpenStack (the open source IaaS for the cloud), and how it can be used to deploy highly scalable humanitarian applications.

Skills Needed: Basic familiarity using SSH client, Github, Python

Mozilla's mission is to promote openness, innovation, and opportunity on the web. Mozilla is a global community of technologists, thinkers, and builders working together to keep the internet alive and accessible, so people worldwide can be informed contributors and creators of the web. This act of human collaboration across an open platform is essential to individual growth and our collective future.

Project: WebMaker and #teachtheweb

Mozilla WebMaker and #teachtheweb projects and developer resources serve to educate and empower independent webmakers of all ages and all over the world to build the internet that the world needs, together. Participants will learn the basics of the webmaker tools to become web literacy educators, and then work together to improve the toolset.

Skills Needed: None required; experience with Javascript, HTML/CSS, or MySQL/MongoDB/ElasticSearch will be helpful

Cloudera is revolutionizing enterprise data management by offering the first unified platform for big data, an enterprise data hub built on Apache Hadoop. Cloudera offers enterprises one place to store, access, process, secure, and analyze all their data, empowering them to extend the value of existing investments while allowing them to derive new value from their data. Cloudera’s open-source platform is the most widely adopted in the world, and Cloudera is the most prolific contributor to the Hadoop ecosystem.

Project: Developing Cloudera for Humanitarian Assistance

With data growing so rapidly and the rise of unstructured data accounting for 90% of the data today, there are many humanitarian issues that can be aided by the ability to access data. Cloudera's humanitarian projects look to use data that is readily available in the public domain to build real-time analytical models that can be used to solve large problems on events happening around the world.

Skills Needed: Willingness to learn; basic programming skills will be helpful

Women's P2P is a diverse, global community creating by-women, for-women communication tools that support women in developing countries. P2P, bridges the technology gender gap due to illiteracy, access, and privacy concerns. The long-term vision is to create a network that connects every woman on earth, irrespective of computer access, language differences, and other traditional barriers.

Project: Kenyan Female Candidate Toolkit

P2P is partnering with organizations in Kenya to develop a media toolkit to help women more successfully run for office in the upcoming 2017 election. Women candidates face unique issues, including harassment and threats of violence, difficulty connecting to constituents, and access to campaign funding. This project will help women send SMS messages to constituents, report threats of violence, enable crowdfunding, and more.

Project: Haitian Marketwomen and Micro-entrepreneurs

P2P has a longstanding partnership with Fonkoze, a Haitian microfinance organization, to help build a closed network for their 56,000 members. P2P is also working with other micro-entrepreneur organizations in Haiti.

Project: Ending Violence Against Women

P2P has several projects that enable conversations between women who connect using different tools and languages. Our first meetup will take place between technical women in the U.S. and mothers of the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls in Northern Nigeria. The project will focus on creating a landing page, designing a voice-and-SMS Android app, and compilation of global apps active in this space.

Project: Movement Building

P2P also has several key projects available for women without technical skills, or with very specific skillsets. Projects include transcribing videos to support subtitle creation, improving the website, improving the newsletter database, setting up auto-response, and building a connecting map for women around the world.

Skills Needed: basic familiarity with Java, Python, FrontlineSMS, VoiceXML, and PHP; experience with Android development a plus