musings of an itinerant lover

I’ve had the incredible opportunity of late via SecondMuse to collaborate with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, World Bank and NASA in an initiative that brings together disaster relief experts and software engineers to work on identifying key challenges to disaster relief and developing solutions to these critical issues. These codejams are a series of Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) events that will bring the best and brightest together for a “give camp” to solve real world-problems related to Crisis/Disaster Relief.

The thrill for me is not just that this is an incredible partnership between the disaster risk community and the software engineering community, but that it involves three of the world’s largest corporations who are generally known to compete aggressively with each other. In this endeavor, however, they are not only co-sponsoring this event, but actually co-organizing it. The organizing team is composed of champions in these organizations who are looking beyond strict allegiance to the corporations they represent and instead choosing a wider allegiance. The challenges, of course, are clear in that this collaboration is happening in an environment that expects and often encourages competition between the organizations but then again…what noble effort has not met with challenge at its inception.

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Spending the last week at the Rainbow Mansion I’ve had a lot of conversations about the Choza, but also about community development in general.  Tonight we were chatting with Raven Zachary who stopped by for a few minutes and he also asked the question “What is the intersection of everybody in this house.”  Robbie and Jessy both gave far more intelligent answers than I would have, but it got me thinking about what keeps a community together and what keeps any given community alive.  Clearly it is multi-factorial and I certainly wouldn’t be able to address all the facets of this very complex question, but one thing really stood out for me.  It seems to me that one of the essential requirements for the survival of a community is the extent to which it is outward looking.

One of the main reasons that I am so excited about the Choza is the extent to which our conversations have focused on serving the needs of our local community and recognizing that to accurately understand those needs its essential that we integrate with them.  Given that we’re a community of people that are commited to pursuing our passion and life’s work it seems appropriate that we are commited to collectively contribute to the well-being and prosperity of Concepcion/Mastatal/Zapaton.

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