The Operation Kindness Hackathon 2017 will take place across the weekend of 11th-13th November to coincide with International Kindness Day on 13th November.

The idea is to use existing tools or build your own, to innovate and provide solutions that disrupt the status quo, in this case for the Common Good! This includes everything from computer programmers, to the Malawi teenager who jerry-rigged a windmill to power his family’s home. Burrell Smith, engineer of the first Mac computer, famously said ‘Hackers can do almost anything and be a hacker. You can be a hacker carpenter!’

This event will be open to everyone in software development, including developers, graphic designers, interface designers, project managers, etc. What is so cool about this event is that the online work of this hackathon will be complimented by a series of events happening simultaneously on the ground in communities across the world organised by Operation Kindness activists.

Due to the global nature of this hackathon there will be no specific event location in order to allow small teams to organise locally, or indeed virtually across countries. The teams are free to choose a project which is meaningful to them (which we hope will enhance imagination and creativity) but each project must respond to one or more of the Operation Kindness five core areas of focus:

• Environmental sustainability
• Equality of access to resources and opportunities
• Restorative and redistributive justice
• Universal access to legal rights
• Genuine participatory democracy