Melbourne… you got RHoK’ed

Melbourne… you got RHoK’ed

Jun 10
Melbourne… you got RHoK’ed

Somewhere in amongst the abyss of the internet – someone linked me to www.rhok.org

I was instantly sold by its concept – hacking for humanity – it has a nice ring to it don’t you think?

So I signed up for the Melbourne event, read a few of the problem’s they were proposing for us to solve and as the day came, I headed down to Swimburne University where I would spend the majority of my weekend in a lecture theater with a bunch of randoms – overdosed on caffeine and frantically coding.

After some pondering, I landed in the Quake Felt Report project.

Our basic understanding of what needed to be done was to deliever a mobile based solution to allow users who experienced an earthquake to report their experience to Geoscience Australia.
This data is later used by scientists and researchers to help improve future predictions on earthquake effects.

We seeked to improve the existing process Geoscience Australia have in place – this webform.
Amazingly our team had plenty of designers – so we heavily focused on the user interface and how to provide a meaningful experience to the user which extends further than just “filling in a form”
One concept we came up with to help improve the usability of this webform, was to think of it not as a webform, but as a story.

Each webform submission is essentially the user sharing a story about their experiences.

By lunch we had managed to cram in a ton of brain storming, designing, wire-framing and general setup of the application framework using boilerplate and jQuery Mobile.

I also had Michael whip me up an API so I could interact directly with the data when I came about building my app.

By about 3PM – I kick started my Android development as most of the team were working on the mobile web application. However due to my limited knowledge on web application development – I stuck with my comfort zone for this hack.

I worked off these designs developed by Kai which look brilliant and really gave our application an edge - http://d.pr/3qqG

The red bulls and coffees were flowing strong for the next ~22 hours (had to stop at ~1PM Sunday) while my mind was deep within the realms of Eclipse.

So what was the result of my hack?

This project will be on my GitHub soon :)

And lastly - congratulations to VicAlerts/VicSafe for taking home the grand prize. You guys had a rocking concept!

Because hacking wasn’t enough… I created a time lapse video of day 1 as an excuse to use my new GoPro.

Final thanks to all the organisers for putting together this awesome event! Looking forward to the next one!

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